POSTMODERN CULTURE

Month: September 2013

  • Grown-Ups and Fanboys

    Kevin Harley

    Norwich, England
    P280@CPCMB.EAST-ANGLIA.AC.UK

     

    Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

     

    It’s a long and sordid tale, the history of adult comics. This particular hotbed of intrigue has everything for the perfect television mini-series; suspense, prejudice, passion, censorship, homophobia, Anglo-American cultural relations, exploitation of creative individuals by massive and all-powerful media industries–even, gasp, communism. One wonders why the TV version has yet to be made. In its absence, Roger Sabin’s Adult Comics sets itself the formidable task of presenting this largely untold tale.

     

    Sometime in the mid-1980s, the British media suddenly became aggitated over the phenomenon of so-called ‘adult comics.’ Many argued that comics were laying claim to a hitherto absent literary legitimacy, largely through the use of the term “graphic novel” to denote the departure these “new comics” made from the supposedly childish orientations of their predecessors. The media response to this ostensible trend was divided between approval and outrage, but nearly everyone adhered to a suitably comic-book language of wild hyperbole.

     

    Among enthusiasts, the general attitude was one of terrific excitement about comics that–wow!–used cats and mice to tell the story of the Holocaust, or–gasp!– looked closely at both the politics and psychoses of superheroes, when the industry was presumed to have hitherto kept its heroes’ reputations untarnished. What’s more, these things called “graphic novels” were full-color, fully painted works of art which–hey!–you did not need to feel ashamed to read in a public place, even if you did look as if you were scouring the porn shelf to get to them (Sabin 72). It was finally safe for comics’ fans to come out and admit to their unspoken love.

     

    Others, however, were more hostile. David Lister set the resurgence of comic book popularity in the context of The Novel’s imminent death.1 Given the supposedly three minute culture in which “we” live, a visually based narrative media (as if television weren’t bad enough!) could only signal a turn for the worse. Lister refused to allow comics to hide behind the cloak of the term “graphic novel,” since this was of course an attempt to disguise the fact that the things were still “merely . . . a diverting entertainment for children.”

     

    One can readily set this whole debate over adult comics during the mid-80s in the general context of a series of debates over what constitutes culture. As Sabin notes, the growing popularity of Cultural Studies within British universities, and the faddishness of applying the term “postmodern” to anything that might be seen as challenging high/low culture boundaries, provided a perfect context for the adult comics hype to generate both excitement and outrage amongst its many commentators. Add to this the widely circulating arguments about whether visual literacy could be considered equal to textual literacy, and it is easy to see why the spark over comics briefly became a fire.

     

    Stepping in before the embers get cold, Sabin offers Adult Comics primarily as a “primer-textbook” for university teachers who know little about the medium and its histories, but might consider including comics on their syllabi. After all, as a medium it lends itself to all manner of disciplines, perfect fodder for the interdisciplinary age. Media studies, popular culture studies, literature, art history, and even history itself, could all be suitable disciplinary venues for the teaching of comics. Many comics offer themselves as history texts, and many flaunt such a high level of aesthetic-theoretical sophistication that their gradual assimilation into the hallowed halls of academia should not really surprise anybody.

     

    In his effort to seize on the moment of comics’ potential legitimization, Sabin casts himself in the role of demythologiser, trampling all over the rubbish that the mainstream British press has been churning out ever since comics became an issue. The death of the novel? Well, popular novels still sell pretty well. The first adult comics? They’ve been going strong since the nineteenth-century, mate, and other countries accepted them long before the English and American press leapt on the bandwagon. The collapse of high/low culture boundaries? A story as old as culture itself. Graphic novels? Been around since the 1940s, and besides they’re called albums in Europe. Etc etc etc. . . .

     

    So why, according to Sabin, did the mid-80s see such an explosion of interest in adult comics? There were, he says, basically three groups whose interests converged to produce a dramatic, if short-lived comics boom. Firstly, publishers saw the opportunity for a period of more aggressive production and distribution. Secondly, the media sniffed out a suitably scandalous decline-of-civilization story and got terribly excited about it for a while. Thirdly, creators (as they are known) were able to push the comic book institutions they worked in for better deals than before, now that their names were on the covers and people were actually buying the damn things. All these groups sought to benefit from a public who, as Sabin argues, knew nothing about what they were being sold. “This void made it easy for those with a vested interest in rewriting history: for them, other peoples’ ignorance was bliss. Adult comics had no history, which is why an invented one was so powerful.”

     

    Which, of course, leaves a space for Sabin to step in and reveal the truth about the history of a medium much-maligned and under-studied. Appropriately, his demythologising begins with the title of his own book. What is meant by this rather ambiguous term, “adult comics”? It is a term that, as Sabin notes, teases at the ambivalence, in British society at least, over the fault-line that divides most people’s childhood from their adulthood. But is this really a very secure or stable boundary? Obviously many “adults” read comics that are marketed for children, and many children would probably not have too much difficulty getting their hands on so-called adult comics.

     

    Whilst Sabin usefully raises this as a problem, his book is not up to the challenge of dealing with it. Given the fact that he has such an enormous history to recover, it’s true that one really cannot expect a lengthy treatise on adult/child distinctions in British society. But it is galling when Sabin tries to tidy up the ambivalences by recasting the adult/child distinction in such terms as “mature” and “adolescent,” as though these were somehow more helpful. Discussing similarities and differences between various types of so-called adult comics, Sabin comments that the “only thing . . . all the comics had in common was their adult nature,” which, he says, distinguishes them from the “traditional adolescent fare.” To depend on such undefined terms for one’s evaluative criteria creates all manner of anomalies, and reinforces some unjustified prejudices. A comment on Tim Burton’s Batman movie is typical. According to Sabin, the film’s release with a “12” certificate rather than a “15” could rightly have been read as a disappointing signal by audiences hoping for something more sophisticated. But why should the age of the viewers at which a work is pitched be taken as an index of its sophistication?

     

    This is not the only example of a lack of terminological and conceptual clarity in Adult Comics. Similar instances arise from Sabin’s obvious contempt for ‘fandom’ and for superhero comics. In his view, the latter pander to the “adolescent,” “male-power fantasies” of the former; the entire genre of superhero comics is dismissed as juvenile fodder either for those in their early teens or for older men who don’t want to leave their early teens behind. All these “fanboys” are to Sabin suspect persons, “anal-retentive, adolescent, and emotionally arrested.” The whole account depends on our accepting “adolescent” as a pejorative term: superhero fans are largely adolescent, therefore superhero comics are bad and their adult readers must be stunted.

     

    Indeed, Sabin’s approach in general avoids an engagement with fandom, offering a narrative not so much of specific patterns of reception and appropriation as of sweeping “historical and cultural imperatives.” At the same time, however, his own chapter on “Fandom and Direct Sales” makes clear that it was to some considerable degree the strategic activities and choices of fans that drove the emergence of the graphic novel and opened doorways into the industry for new and more ambitious creators. In view of his own research, it seems odd that Sabin would resist viewing “fanboys” and their strategies of reception as anything less than imperative cultural and historical phenomena where the development of comics is concerned.

     

    This blind spot in Sabin’s analysis is particularly unfortunate given that fandom and fan cultures are areas that have generated much critical literature recently. The essayists in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media2 seek to clear a cultural space for the respectful analysis of popular culture fans with many different generic interests. Jensen’s essay, for example, argues that media commentaries or critical writing on fans is frequently marred by a “them” and “us” mentality, in which critics regard themselves as intrinsically superior to fans. This is probably because the genre to which the fans in question attach themselves has been perceived as an inferior one anyway, and possibly because it is presumed that fan-affiliations are singular: one fan, one genre. Sabin makes exactly this assumption when he suggests that a fan of Daredevil is unlikely to get very excited about Raw! (a collection of avant-garde comic strip work, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly), or vice versa. Sabin quotes no ethnographic evidence for this, and I could cite myself and many others as contradictions to the supposed rule. The superhero fanboys are not, I suspect, as discrete or as homogeneously imbecilic a group as Sabin is determined to make them out.

     

    Nor, it seems to me, are the superhero comics deserving of such a cursory and dismissive analysis. Unless we accept Sabin’s view that all the adults who read these texts are dull-witted, then there must be something other than self- reflexivity and lots of violence that earned the 1980s superheroes the label “adult.” Until Sabin’s claim to have looked “in detail” at the big three sellers in Britain during this period (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus) is lived up to–and his one paragraph on each hardly accomplishes that–then we won’t know.

     

    But what of the comics that don’t buy into the mainstream superhero agenda? On these, Sabin’s book is superb. The attention he devotes to the underground comics and the relationship between women and comics far exceeds his sweeping judgements on superhero texts. While showing that the comic book medium and the specialist shop culture generated around it has tended effectively to exclude women, Sabin makes it clear that there are women’s comics, even if they are not part of the perceived mainstream. Like most comics, they have of course suffered at the hands of somewhat over-zealous customs officials and censors, particularly if they are so bold as to deal with such a taboo subject matter as sex in a medium which everyone knows is really only a diversion for children. “So far as the British authorities generally were concerned, men dealing with sex in comics was bad enough: women dealing with sex was beyond the pale. The worst example of censorship occurred in 1985, when Melinda Gebbie’s solo comic Frezca Zisis was declared obscene by the courts and destroyed” (289). Even recently, an erotic graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Gebbie (Lost Girls) had trouble getting through customs in its serialized format as part of the quarterly collection of comic strip material in graphic novel format titled Taboo.

     

    It is obviously true, however, that where “women’s comics” are concerned censors probably have less to answer for than the comics industry itself. Sabin notes that when the underground comics went into decline with the rest of the counter culture in the early 1970s, women’s comics were considered expendable and were “the first to go.” The specialist shops that subsequently emerged in Britain conveyed, says Sabin, a “locker-room atmosphere” that, aside from being intimidating to anyone less literate in comics than the fanboys, was far from welcoming to women. And even if comics became in some sense more “adult” by the mid to late 1980s, this rarely translated into more progressive attitudes towards women on the part of male comics writers. Indeed, as Sabin sees it, “some of the worst cases of negative representations of women in the history of comics can be identified in this period.”

     

    Nevertheless, despite their marginalization by the “mainstream” writers and marketers, women’s comics make up an important part of the history of comics. And it is in recovering this and other marginalized histories that Sabin excels. He shows that whilst women have served as a primary satiric butt for comics at least since the late nineteenth century (in, for example, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday), they were always “recognised as an audience” and, in fact, have always constituted at least a small fraction of the creators of adult comics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an “underground” women’s comics movement emerged in force as a critical reaction against the macho and misogynist work of creators like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. By the mid 1970s even the comics mainstream showed some signs of feeling the impact of the women’s movement, and a number of established male writers (including Alan Moore) took to writing pro-feminist narratives. Whilst women creators themselves still do not hold very prominent positions in this mainstream, Sabin lets us see their work as extending a crucial counter-tradition.

     

    Sabin is also quite good at tracing the concrete histories of comic book production and distribution. Take, for example, the characteristically “convoluted” history of Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. This comic first appeared in the 1972 underground comic Mixed Bunch, moving from there to Near Myths in 1978, then onto Pssst! in 1982. Soon thereafter it was published in its first collected-volume format by Never Ltd., and then in 1988 as a nine-issue comic book series by Valkyrie Press. Valkyrie then republished the second volume, while volumes one and three were reprinted by Proutt, and, in 1991, the whole lot was republished, with all new covers, by Dark Horse Comics. Sabin can be commended for the thoroughness with which he has retraced these sorts of strange trajectories, but at times the minutiae can be overwhelming. Moreover, such publishing-centered approach to comics history can have the effect of submerging the cultural specificity of a text under the mere facts of its publication. Sabin describes both Dark Knight and Watchmen as “American in origin,” which is true enough as concerns their publication histories. But while Frank Miller’s Dark Knight certainly derives from an American perspective on superheroes, Moore’s Watchmen seems just as certainly to derive from a British one. Something of the cultural and ideological resonance of both texts is lost when the origins of their production are understood entirely in terms of the sites of their initial publication.

     

    But even allowing for this and other shortcomings, Sabin’s book is a valuable one. Sabin has succeeded in mapping out an extensive cultural terrain on which new analysis and research might find room to develop. He has opened a host of avenues for inquiry, even if some of the most promising of these may lead readers away from his own positions. Hopefully, Adult Comics will be taken up as the “primer-textbook” of comics studies, and provide the point of departure for much future work.

     

    Notes

     

    1. David Lister, “Traditional novel ‘in danger’ as teenagers turn to comics”, The Independent, 9/9/1989, p. 3.

     

    2. Lisa A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992).

     

  • Exaggerated History

    Susan Schultz

    Department of English
    University of Hawaii
    schultz@uhccvm

     

    Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

     

    Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial. New York: New Directions, 1993.

     

     

    Somewhere Thoreau says that exaggerated history is poetry.

     

    — Susan Howe,

    “The Captivity And Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”

    (Birth-mark 96)

     

     

    The recent publication of two books by Susan Howe marks a further climb in the upward curve of her reputation as one of the most serious, and important, poets of our time. The nearly simultaneous publication of her latest books of poems and essays displays her ambition to change not only our way of writing poetry, but also our reading of it–although one is at times hard pressed in reading Howe’s work to decide what is “poem,” what “essay.” Howe, more than most poets, combines and confuses genres; she also experiments with typography, writing books that have to be turned over and side-ways, in order that they be read both as pictures and as texts. Despite her distinctly avant-garde surfaces, however, Howe straddles the lines between modern and postmodern poetries; she may be postmodernist in her method, but her intentions often appear to be those of a last modernist. Her fragments are every bit as artful as Eliot’s, and her desire to make them cohere (in literary and religious terms) is equal to that of Eliot, Pound, or Hart Crane.

     

    Howe’s poems are puzzles, in other words, but they are puzzles with answers. The acts of nonconformity that form the substance of Howe’s books stretch our assumptions about what texts are, and how they operate. Yet the more I read and teach her work, the more forcefully I am struck by the essential conservatism of her poetics, evident again in these new books. Howe believes in history (what she terms in Singularities “narrative in non-narrative”) and furthermore she believes, unfashionably, in the possibility that history (and gender) can be transcended through art. Unlike her colleague Charles Bernstein, also on the faculty of SUNY-Buffalo, she has faith that poems exist in order to communicate meaning; the radical nature of her texts reflect nothing so much as the difficulty of communicating new meanings, new histories.

     

    Howe adopts the mask of an editor, reviser, or “redactor” (a fine word that combines “reading” with “acting,” in both its senses). That is, she takes as given that our histories and literature have already been written, and makes it her task to alter rather than reinvent the record. As editor, however, she does not seek to purify her source texts, but to recom- plicate them, implicate them in the “wilderness” that was overrun by European immigrants, as by white male editors. Like her fore-fathers, Howe writes a frankly backward-looking prophecy, revising texts by stripping them of their rhetorical histories, and so giving voice to women and others silenced by previous editors and historians. As she tells Edward Foster:

     

         There you have Charles Olson at his
wisest.  "The 
          stutter is the plot."  It's the stutter in 
          American literature that interests me.  I hear the 
          stutter as a sounding of uncertainty.  What is 
          silence or not quite silenced [as in Billy Budd]. 
          . . . A return is necessary, a way for women to 
          go.  Because we are in the stutter.  We were 
          expelled from the Garden of the Mythology of the 
          American Frontier.  The  drama's done.  We are the 
          wilderness.  We have come on to the stage 
          stuttering. (181)

     

    Howe does not create a new meaning for “wilderness,” but adopts the old meaning (the wilderness as woman in Hart Crane’s The Bridge, for example) and translates it, feminizes it. She disrupts old narratives not because she has no faith in narratives, but because she means for the reader to see in her gaps and verbal impasses the opening for new narratives. The danger is that the new language is too close to the old; by using the old words, she threatens to reinscribe old forms. Howe makes of these risks both revelation and paradox–the oppositions that Howe so often attempts to transcend threaten to undermine her historical (and so untranscendental) project.

     

    One of the central paradoxes in Howe’s work involves the function of silence in poetry, especially poetry by and about women. Howe’s revision of literary history problematically reproduces women’s silences in the text even as it permits their voices to speak through the agency of the reader, who transforms Howe’s compressed “narrative in non-narrative” into story. (This is something that can happen to marvelous effect in the classroom.) Silence is at once a negative social fact for women and a positive religious state; silence, like so much in Howe’s work, straddles the line between history and transcendence, thereby calling both of them into question. As she states the problem in her brilliant book My Emily Dickinson, “Identity and memory are crucial for anyone writing poetry. For women the field is still dauntingly empty. How do I, choosing messages from the code of others in order to participate in the universal theme of Language, pull SHE from all the myriad symbols and sightings of HE” (17-18). That she does pull the “she” from the “he” by taking advantage of the language’s frequent material self-betrayal only makes her thinking more complex; in her previous book Singularities, for instance, she literally un-mans the Puritan Hope Atherton, whose wanderings in the wilderness become the history behind her poem “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” She does so by commenting that “Hope” is now considered a woman’s name. As if by fiat, she begins an American epic of reduction and reconstruction through a simple linguistic sex-change operation. “Hope” for the American poet (or, as she puts it, for “the artist in America”) becomes a feminine aspiration.

     

    Howe’s view of Dickinson’s silence is both enabling and disturbing because it values that silence over publication: “I think,” she tells Ed Foster, “she may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap” (170). The difficulty of Howe’s work may, in part, stem from the fact that she herself uses language to aspire to the condition of silence and the immateriality to which her books cannot aspire. As she writes in the “Silence Wager Stories” section of The Nonconformist’s Manual:

     

         Words are an illusion 
          are vibrations of air 
          Fabricating senselessness 
          He has shattered gates 
          thrown open to himself  (38)

     

    These are lines that no Language poet would set upon the page; given a more complete syntax, the passage might be claimed by that American metaphysician, Wallace Stevens. The illusions of words often work through Howe’s manipulation of puns, as in her use of the word “word” in the following lines: “Language a wood for thought / over the pantomime of thought / Words words night unto night” (39). So language can be considered a “word” for thought; or the word may pertain to the wilderness that engenders thinking like Howe’s own; or language may (in an older sense of the wood-word) participate in madness’ meaning. “Much madness is divinest sense,” we recall from Dickinson. Dickinson’s poem, too, sets the social against the visionary world; categories are human inventions, but the states that they circumscribe approximate the divine.

     

    The illusive word is purposely allusive; Howe depends on the aura of words more than most poets (the example of Hart Crane comes to mind again). Like Crane, and like St. John the Divine, and despite her own claim not to believe in origins, she tries to wend her way through words (or woods) back to the Word. The fields of words that cover pages of Singularities, for example, contain not just the European words that helped to tame the wilderness, but also native American words that can now be used to re-claim it. Prophecy, in Howe’s lexicon, is re-vision in the sense that it both reaches forward and back; her quotation from John Cotton in Singularities is appropriate: “Prophesie is Historie antedated; / and History is Postdated Prophesie” (4). Of the Word, she writes in a more direct address from poet to reader than she is usually wont to make, in a section of the “The Nonconformist’s Manual” that begins with the poet’s address to her reader as a “confessor” (23):

     

         Reader I do not wish to hide 
          in you to hide from you 
          It is the Word to whom she turns 
          True submission and subjection  (NCM 30)

     

    The “she” who is pulled from the “he” of tradition here refers to any and all women who have chosen not to conform–from the Puritans to Howe herself.

     

    That this operation is not necessarily “true” to history does not bother Howe, who rather cannily asserts in an interview with Edward Foster (editor of Talisman ) reprinted in the new Wesleyan book, that “Poets aren’t reliable. But poetry may be. I don’t think you can divorce poetry from history and culture. The photographs of children during the war in Europe . . . prevented me from ever being able to believe history is only a series of justifications or that tragedy and savagery can be theorized away” (163-4). But Howe, who here insists that poetry and culture cannot be divorced, elsewhere makes pronouncements to the contrary. In My Emily Dickinson, for example, while defending Dickinson’s “illogical” syntax against the normalizing force of the “two feminist scholars,” Gilbert and Gubar, Howe asserts that “there is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology” (13). I am reminded, perhaps in spite of myself, of the words of one of the members of Run DMC quoted recently in The New York Times; rap, he claimed, is poetry, and therefore has no effect on the world. Howe’s transcendent claim, along with another anti-worldly statement against the power of “Mammon,” where she (and/or Dickinson) asserts that she must “renounce attachment to friends and worldly accomplishment” (49), resemble similar polemics by Gertrude Stein. Yet Stein was no advocate of poems “including history,” as was another of Howe’s forerunners, Ezra Pound. Rather, Stein more resembles John Ashbery or Charles Bernstein, poets for whom history (in their poems, at least) is more immediately a sequence of syllables than of political events.

     

    Thus, even as she attempts to give voices to those who were silenced by official histories, she claims also to get to a point past gender and past politics. It seems to me that, while each of these goals is admirable in and of itself, her conflation of them undermines each ambition. Despite her brilliant operation on Hope Atherton, and her vociferous attempts to reclaim Dickinson from the clutches of what she sees as a male-dominated editorial conspiracy, Howe thinks of poetry as an art that breaks beyond the confines of gender politics. As she writes toward the end of her book on Dickinson: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night’s frame” (138). In these amazing sentences Howe succeeds in troping no one so much as herself; where she had argued that Dickinson’s “gun” (from the poem that begins, “My Life it Had stood–a Loaded Gun”) rightly belonged in the history of the American frontier, a claim that historicizes Dickinson’s work in a valuable and provocative way, she now claims for the gun a part in the allegory of a pilgrimage into the capitalized “Night” that no longer seems especially American, or especially historical. The “allegorical pilgrim” is not history, but history’s idea of itself.

     

    For better or for worse, then, Howe is less a historical poet than a religious one; like the Puritans with whom she identifies, she sees American history running parallel to a religious text. The Puritans give Howe historical force, though one wonders if their metaphors haven’t lost some of their currency in our secular age. It seems telling that the best purveyors of these metaphors in the last decade have been Ronald Reagan and Mario Cuomo, hardly our finest spiritual guides. Howe is that curious combination, a deeply spiritual iconoclast, one who seeks to replace a set of icons not with a heap of broken images, but with a new set of icons, inaugurated through her use of the page of words as a visual artifact. Thus, writing of Mary Magdalene and the poet in “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”:

     

    I wander about as an exile 
          as a body does a shadow 
          A notion of split reference 
          if in silence hidden by darkness 
          there must be a Ghost 
          Iconic theory of metaphor 
          a sound and perfect voice 
          Its hiding is understood 
          Reader I do not wish to hide 
          in you to hide from you

     
    It is the Word to whom she turns True submission and subjection.
     
    Her vision of writing (and editing) is of a spiritual and loving act. “If history is a record of survivors,” she writes in “Incloser” (previously published in PMC), “Poetry [with a capital P] shelters other voices” (Birth-mark 47). Or, again allegorizing poetry as “Poetry”: “In the precinct of Poetry, a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark, silence, or sound volatizes an inner law of form–moves on a rigorous line” (145). This sentence sounds suspiciously old formalist; the other sheltered voices may obey nothing more than “an inner law of form” that is purely poetic. Parts of words and phenomena of prosody “form a ladder to an outside state outside of States. Rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling” (46). Thus the work of an editor is to get past (or before) the words themselves, a task that one might see as dangerously close to the editorial farce featured so prominently in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In her introduction to the second section of The Nonconformist’s Manual, “A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike,” she writes:

     

         A bibliography is "the history,
identification or 
          analytical and systematic description or 
          classification of writings or publications 
          considered as material objects."  Can we ever 
          really discover the original text?  Was there ever 
          an original poem?  What is a pure text invented by 
          an author?  Is such a conception possible?  Only 
          by going back to the pre-scriptive level of 
          thought process can "authorial intention" finally 
          be located, and then the material object has 
          become immaterial.  (50)

     

    In this long poem, Howe obviates the issue by writing about–and off of–a text whose authenticity is in doubt: “The Eikon Basilike is a puzzle. It may be a collection of meditations written by a ghostly king; it may be a forged collection of meditations gathered by a ghostwriter who was a Presbyterian, a bishop, a plagiarizer, and a forger” (49). In other words, the answers to her seemingly rhetorical questions, above, are all pronounced in the negative. And yet, in a move typical of Howe and characteristic of her risk-taking as a writer, one senses the desire that there BE an original text, an original poem, and that she–as editor and reviser–be permitted access to “authorial intention,” hence the pre-scriptive level of thought, a level that precedes proscription. Her work on Dickinson is full testimony to this desire on her part; as she tells Foster, “That’s what I wanted to do in My Emily Dickinson. . . Not just to write a tribute but to meet her in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion.”

     

    Howe’s central figures in the new book of poems are not silenced women, as they were in Singularities, but male writers who have been either silenced or marginalized. In her newest essays and poems Howe attempts to rewrite the American renaissance by adapting marginal texts by male writers; Melville’s marginalia form an ironic centerpiece to her book. Melville is celebrated as the author of that most silent of American heroes, Bartleby the scrivener, who was himself something of an editor of texts, if only in his refusal to copy them. That this renovation is at once personal and historical becomes clear in Howe’s autobiographical introduction to the essays, and in the discussion with Foster that forms a kind of postlude to the book. The American renaissance, it seems, was a personal concern of Howe’s family, one of whose friends was F.O. Matthiesson–whose famous book might be retitled, following Howe, as My American Renaissance.

     

    Not only is she taking on her literary fathers in her ongoing poetic and editorial project, but also her own father, who was at once her scout and her “encloser.” Her father, who wrote a history of American law entitled The Garden and the Wilderness, “said it would be trespassing” if his daughter Susan entered the stacks of Widener Library (the name of which comes to resemble a Howe pun) at Harvard, where he was a professor. So books became her wilderness; “Thoreau said, in an essay called ‘Walking,’ that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. What is forbidden is wild. The stacks of Widener Library and of all great libraries in the world are still the wild to me” (18). In becoming what she calls a “library cormorant,” she is at once her father’s imitator and his reviser. The texts that were for him authentic appear to her to be tissued with silences, gaps; Harvard was, in her view, a false community of scholars. “I don’t want to be so hard on it because these were honorable scholars, careful researchers, and this was their profession, and they felt it was a calling. But you see, it was false if you were a girl or a woman who was not content to be considered second-rate” (159). So she becomes her father’s mother, assumes like “Hope,” a formerly masculine role that has been rewritten in the “feminine” mode.

     

    The baroque complexities of her literary relationship to her father (and by extension her fathers) are reproduced in “Melville’s Marginalia,” a “poem” probably better described as a combination of criticism and poetry, one that covers almost 70 pages. In this work Howe attempts not just to make Melville more central to her project, by making him less central to the American Renaissance as it was understood by F.O. Matthiesson; she also juxtaposes the Melville material with a chronology of the life of the Irish writer James Clarence Mangan, only to reach a rather forced conclusion that Mangan was the source for Bartleby.

     

    Howe furthermore investigates Melville’s attitude toward women as shown through his marginalia, and its erasures. Her method resembles that found in her long work of criticism and poetry, My Emily Dickinson, where she argues by juxtaposing texts. This mode of argument, like her mode of writing poetry, trusts the reader to do the work of narrating connections; it also suggests as yet untapped links between American and British literature. (Howe’s sections on Bronte’s and George Eliot’s influences on Dickinson are especially fine.) Both the arguments and the ways of working them out strike me as less necessary and hence less effective in the work on Melville. Howe’s passion for Melville and for Mangan are less evident than her passion for Dickinson, perhaps because they seem so much more purely academic, despite the personal investment we learn about in her interview. And, where Howe carried her work on Dickinson over into her book Singularities, which is almost a work of poetic ventriloquism (Dickinson writing through Howe), her work on Melville has more the aura of exercise than passion. She writes of Melville without writing as Melville, in other words.

     

    Howe writes of her purpose and her method: “Names who are strangers out of bounds of the bound margin: I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others” (92). This she does, using Melville’s margins as she used Dickinson’s alternate words as a site for her own work. She may hope, with this new foray into American literature, to achieve the “genderlessness” that is at once a promise and a problem in her work. But if that is, indeed, what she does, she does it better in writing from a gendered perspective such as Dickinson’s. Gender, like place, is for Howe a strength; as she tells Foster: “Trust the place to form the voice,” as she remarks on the fact that the differences between Dickinson and Melville may spring from their origins on opposite sides of the Connecticut River. In this instance, she has not trusted the gender (as a placeless place) to form the voice. She has tried too hard to achieve the “transcendence” that is the problematic aim of her work; as a result, “Melville’s Marginalia” is a better example of Howe’s technique than of her vision.

     

    The strongest poem in the book, and the one that argues most passionately for the kind of poetry Howe writes, is “The Nonconformist’s Memorial,” part Biblical rewrite, part examination of the relationship between typology and typography, and partial autobiography. Here Howe takes on “The Gospel According to St. John,” arguing against its narrative cohesion and all that that means ideologically; hence the following quotation, which obliges the reader to perform manual labor:

     

           As if all history were a progress 

          She was coming to anoint him [this is written 
               upside-down] 

                         A single thread of narrative 

          headstrong anarchy thoughts [again upside-down] 

            Actual world nothing ideal 

            In Peter she is nameless [upside-down] 

          The nets were not torn 

          The Gospel did not grasp    (7)

     

    Thus is the feminine rendered upside-down–as the threatening “headstrong anarchy thoughts”–as if to counter the “single” and coherent “thread of narrative” found in the Gospels. The poetic net is torn here, but the ensuing chaos is not an evil but a good, in the sense that informational entropy is good. That is, the woman’s voice, upside-down as it is, does appear, and shows up (quite literally) the masculine voice, for all its typographical certainty about itself. Woman is figured as an impasse to narrative, but this impasse does not create incoherence so much as re-coherence. Many of Howe’s most interesting pages mimic chaos, while achieving a rigorous coherence of their own. I do not entirely believe her assertion that “If it [The Bibliography of the King’s Book] was impossible to print, that didn’t matter. Because it’s about impossibility anyway. About the impossibility of putting in print what the mind really sees and the impossibility of finding the original in a bibliography” (175). A page like this one–hardly her most radical in this vein–forces an old impossibility, that of woman’s speech, into possibility. That she pushes her reading of this impossibility into metaphysics is, as I’ve been indicating, typical of her ambition. It may also undermine her historical claims by reinvesting the poem and the poet in an old metaphysics, one that keeps everyone–but especially women–silent. While I can envision a new history, as I read Howe, I cannot so easily see a new transcendence.

     

    But metaphysics or not, Howe incorporates the Puritan background that is her historical strength into the poem. As an example of the way she combines history and textuality, consider the following lines:

     

         The act of Uniformity 
          ejected her 
          and informers at her heels 
          Citations remain abbreviated 
          Often a shortcut 
          stands for Chapter.

     

    The Act of Uniformity, which forced “nonconformists” to leave England for America, was passed by the Church of England in 1662. In a manner reminiscent of Language poetry, Howe writes as if the act itself is actor, not those who wrote it. But her puns are nothing if not controlled, and hence unlike the spontaneous, manic puns of Charles Bernstein, for example. She plays on the double-meanings of “citation” and “chapter,” words that refer not simply to books, but also to legal and religious matters. (What appears in books, in other words, becomes our way of thinking, our syntax.) Thus politics and language are fused, and the nonconformist must choose exile not only in fact, but also in print–hence Howe’s nonconformist setting of type so that the visual shape of the page is as important as the words’ meaning. The lines, “Often a shortcut / stands for Chapter,” provide a micropoetics to Howe’s work, in which she provides the shortcut, the reader Chapter–and verse.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985.
    • —. Singularities. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

     

  • Virtual Light

    Lance Olsen

    English Department
    University of Idaho
    olsen@idui1.csrv.uidaho.edu

     

    Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam, 1993.

     

    I. Cyberpunk 101, or: The Luminous Flesh of Giants

     

    Until now, and for no particular reason, PMC hasn’t reviewed a novel. And it seems appropriate that the first novel to be reviewed in these electronic pages should be one by none other than the godfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson. A cultural impulse birthed in the mid-eighties, and disowned as a concerted movement by its creators fewer than four years later, cyberpunk is still very much a cultural phenomenon–as a quick skim through the hallucinatory and info-dense pages of the Berkeley-based magazine Mondo 2000, or its how-to book, A User’s Guide to the New Edge (1992), will tell you. The very name cyberpunk fuses and confuses the techno-sphere of cybernetics, cybernauts, and, most of all, computer hacking, with the countercultural socio-sphere of punk, the embodiment of anarchic violence, fringe mentality, and a sincere (even naive) attempt to return to the raw roots of rock n’roll. Cyberpunk was, and is, in some very spooky and some very exhilarating ways, a whole heck of a lot more than merely a short-lived trend, some simulacrous eighties echo of Poundian Imagism or Boccionian Futurism.

     

    For a whole bunch of people it’s a way of life–a phenomenon that far exceeds the discourse of its shrill self-proclaimed mouthpiece, Bruce Sterling (whose cyberpunk manifesto appeared in his 1986 cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades), as well as that of Marc Laidlaw, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, K. W. Jeter, Lewis Shiner, and the other writers originally associated with the term.

     

    Just modem into a couple of underground bulletin boards around the country–The Temple of the Screaming Electron (510-935-5845) with Jeff Hunter’s BBS Review, a comprehensive listing of international fringe BBS’s; or maybe Private Idaho (208-338-9227) with its deep-seated information-wants-to-be-free message; or perhaps Burn This Flag (408-363-9766) with its cybersex scenarios involving, I kid you not, everything from nose fetishes to water sports–and you will find a lot of people who want, like Andy Warhol, to be a machine. The plethora of electronic subcultures, each with its own codes, languages, and styles, can make you feel old at twenty-five, already past the point of ever being able to keep up with it all.

     

    Little cults embrace Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, with its speedy surreal images, thickly textured information, and techno-sleaze ambiance. Sonic Youth dedicates a song called “The Sprawl” to Gibson on the 1988 album, Daydream Nation. Kathy Acker openly pla(y)giarizes whole parts of her 1988 novel, Empire of the Senseless, from Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. A cover story in Time (February 8, 1993, there goes the neighborhood) focusing on the cyberpunk moment is laid out like a series of pages from, what else, Mondo 2000. Billy Idol’s really bad 1993 album Cyberpunk comes replete with its video about the LA riots, “Shock to the System,” featuring a Terminator-esque Idol transmogrifying into a cyborg with a TV camera protruding from his eye-socket. Scott Bukatman’s fascinating Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, out just months ago from prestigious Duke University Press, nips hot at the heels of the excellent 1991 Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery and containing pieces by everyone from J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs to Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida.

     

    Idol’s, Bukatman’s, and McCaffery’s projects of course also suggest that appropriation and commodification– academic and otherwise–have set in. So what else is new? But in many ways, William Gibson continues to stand at the center of this cultural firestorm as the guy whose seminal Matrix Trilogy–composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1990), and foreshadowed by some of the stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986)–explored, among other things, computer-generated reality, information as the new power base, and a grungy near-future universe that looked way too much like our own present one for comfort. In these works Gibson did nothing less than help shape the way a large part of the population perceives the world. We now unselfconsciously use the words and concepts he gave us (cyberspace, jacking in, computer cowboys) almost as though they’d had no flesh-and-blood origin.

     

    II. A Piece of God Resides in Every Old Movie

     

    Gibson, meanwhile, has been forging ahead. His last work, Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992), was a $2000 sweet autobiographical prose poem on a disk created in collaboration with the abstract expressionist painter Dennis Ashbaugh, which was designed to self-destruct after a single reading. Virtual Light is more conventionally packaged. Nevertheless, it bears Gibson’s unmistakable signature.

     

    Much conventional science fiction is set in the distant future, peopled with aliens, and enacted on a galactic and heroic scale. Gibson’s SF, on the other hand, extrapolates an all-too-real near-future world set increasingly close to ours (Virtual Light takes place in 2005, more than fifty years before the events in his first three novels), peopled with those at the margins of society, and enacted on a (usually) global and (always) antiheroic scale. “It’s kind of a tragic artifact of science fiction that some people are naive enough to think that science fiction writers are predicting the future,” Gibson recently told the San Francisco Bay Guardian (18 August, 1993). Fredric Jameson put it more academically when he pointed out in his interview for Andrew Ross’s collection Universal Abandon? that SF achieves “a distinctive historical consciousness by way of the future rather than the past” and thus becomes “conscious of our present as the past of some unexpected future, rather than as the future of a heroic national past.” The plain point: SF isn’t about the future; it’s about the present. In SF, tomorrow is a metaphor for today.

     

    In Virtual Light the future-present has lost the mystical aspects of cyberspace which dominated Gibson’s earlier trilogy. In its place appears a universe almost completely rooted in the meat world. The effect doesn’t challenge our imagination so much as our sense of political realities, particularly West Coast political realities. Set in a dingy California divided into two states, NoCal and SoCal, Gibson’s novel explores a narrative space in which the manufacture of cigarettes has been declared illegal throughout the US, and the Surgeon General is trying to outlaw convertibles because their use contributes to the high incidence of skin-cancer. An African-American woman is president, there’s massive inflation, and a privatized law-enforcement company cruises LA in tanks designed by Ralph Lauren. Countries like Canada and Brazil have exploded into nation-states, and TV is everywhere, even at the center of a Christian fundamentalist sect whose followers believe that a piece of God resides in every old movie.

     

    It’s a radically dystopian vision–or at least it might seem that way to you if, as Gibson underscores in that Guardian interview, “you are a very comfortable middle-class citizen.” Otherwise, it goes without saying, things actually look pretty good in his world. After all, “there’s stuff happening to people, lots of people, right now, all over the planet, that’s incredibly worse and so much more depressing than anything I’ve ever written about.” At least through one optic, then, Virtual Light, a book of profound contradictions if ever there was one, can be read as an optimistic novel. Two key metaphors reinforce this. First is a San Francisco bike-messenger service, one of whose employees, Chevette Washington, steals a pair of virtual light glasses (which produce images in the brain by stimulating your optic nerves without employing photons) from a gross guy at a party on a pissed-off whim. Second is the Oakland Bay Bridge, abandoned by the city after a megalithic earthquake, slowly taken over by the homeless, and currently the topic of research by a young Japanese scholar named Yamasaki, who’s attempting to use the bridge to understand American culture.

     

    Through the course of the novel, the bikes and the bridge become important pomo icons. Gibson’s use of the former nods in a gesture of appreciation and appropriation toward the major means of transportation in his friend Lewis Shiner’s excellent 1991 novel, Slam, about the anarchistic world of skateboarding, underground economies, and computer networks. The bikes, like Shiner’s skateboards, are emblematic of environmentally conscious no-fuel freedom, intense energy, exhilarating speed, and sexy fashion. They are the embodiment of the techno-hip, an attitude to which almost all the amoral characters in Gibson’s text subscribe. Skirting society’s periphery, they are out for themselves in a posthuman cosmos that has moved beyond a sense of compassion–or even hope. What counts to these people is the next hit of money or designer drugs, or the next ingot of information.

     

    The patchwork dwellings on the brilliantly described broken bridge, from bars to tattoo parlors, sushi shops to rag-tag shelters, inhabited by those living on the edges of our culture, indicate something a little different. They “had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, [the bridge] possessed a queer medieval energy.” Or, elsewhere: the dwellings “had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched into the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been used for.”

     

    The streets find uses for things, Gibson’s narrator notes in Neuromancer, and the result in Virtual Light is an urban crazy-quilt, an emblem of contemporary America. The bridge is also an icon appropriate to the particular novelistic practice of Virtual Light. As in Count Zero, the novel’s chapters are mostly no more than five or ten pages long and, also like those in Count Zero, they form a structure of intersecting plots that moves inexorably toward a jazzy unifying climax. Both bridge and text, then, are examples of Termite Art, a term Gibson lifted from a 1962 essay (“White Elephant Art and Termite Art” in Negative Space) by the iconoclastic film critic Manny Farber. If White Elephant Art embraces the idea of a “well-regulated area, both logical and magical,” as in the films of Francois Truffaut, Farber argues, then Termite Art embraces freedom and multiplicity, as in the films of Laurel and Hardy, going “always forward eating [its] own boundaries, and, likely as not, leav[ing] nothing in [its] path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Rubin, the artist-protagonist of Gibson’s 1986 short story “The Wintermarket,” describes himself as a gomi no sensei, Japanese for a “master of junk.” The same is true of Gibson himself. A literary bricoleur, more techno-hickster than techno-hipster (not even on e-mail, he’s the first to admit just how little he really knows about the computers and other glitzy gadgets that surface in his texts), he shops for his ideas among the aisles of the late-twentieth-century cultural hypermart.

     

    Maybe the most surprising result of his latest shopping spree is the often matte-black humor that continually emerges. It’s the antithesis of the bleak flat tone of the books that comprise the Matrix Trilogy. If Neuromancer has all the comic hoopla of the dark prophet himself administering late rites to late capitalist culture, then Virtual Light, virtually light, frequently evinces the bright cartoonish mischief of Pynchon. Characters sport handles like Lucius Warbaby. A surveillance and command satellite is fondly nicknamed the Death Star by those it watches over. A wind-surfing boutique is called, dead-pan, Just Blow Me. There’s a pscyho-killer with the Last Supper tattooed on his chest, a guy who believes TV is the “Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush,” and a woman who’s in San Francisco to get her husband’s cryogenically frozen brain removed from a tank with a whole bunch of others so it doesn’t have to feel so crowded in the afterlife, such as it is. The complex and deeply spiritual exploration of cyberspace that pervaded the Matrix Trilogy here gives way to very funny, if perhaps too easy, parody.

     

    III. Miracle Mile, or: It Could be Anybody

     

    The presence of such parody flags the essential narrative problem Gibson, now forty-five and a pomo icon himself, has had to wrestle with since the publication of Neuromancer almost a decade ago. Is it possible to keep the news new, the action vigorous and mind-bogglingly hot without skidding off the novel novelistic road into the ditch of self-replication, the slough of self-parody? In part the answer is surely yes, and the way Gibson goes about it is by dosing his text with a powerful hit of comic vision that seems to take nothing (including itself) very seriously. The fresh infusion of humor into his writing takes down the seriousness of his own textuality and grim futurist ideas before someone else has a chance to, destabilizes them in a flourish typical of Termite Art.

     

    But in part the answer is also no. Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson’s last solo effort, is set in the Hollywoodish world of Sense/Net. It focuses on the manipulation of young stars by various financial concerns and is shot through with the theme of commercial sellout. Clearly when writing it Gibson was simultaneously beguiled by the glamour and goods associated with that dimension, and bent on satirizing its commodifying impulse. The consequence was a Janus-text that looks to accessibility and tameness on the one hand (its conclusion involves an idyllic after-death marriage of its protagonists in a kind of futuristic restaging of Wuthering Heights), and toward disruptive innovation on the other (the scene can be read as a sharp self-reflexive parody of traditional happy endings). It was a move that prompted Paul Kincaid, in his review of the novel for TLS (12 August 1988), to glance back nostalgically to Neuromancer and observe that “Gibson wrote one book of stunning originality which caught the mood of the time so successfully that he has been condemned to repeat it. By this third volume he is showing clear and dramatic improvement as a writer, but is doing nothing fresh with his talent.”

     

    Something along the same lines could be argued with respect to Virtual Light. For all its flash and burn, there’s nothing particularly trailblazing about it. Chevette Washington, the bike-messenger who stole the VL glasses (which provide only a pale simulacra of the cyberspace we find in the trilogy) from a guy who turns out to be a gopher for, what else, a major corporation with some fairly depressing plans for San Francisco’s skyline, as in rebuilding it from the ground up, thereby, in a tactic that’s the antithesis of what the bridge suggests, dispossessing the already dispossessed. Throw in one Berry Rydell, a good-cop-gone-(accidentally)-bad, attach him to Chevette, and you have a variation of the Molly-Case team from Neuromancer, the Angie-Turner one from Count Zero, and the Angie-Bobby one from Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are all edge-dwellers of one kind or another, all caught in the complex workings of megacorporations uninterested in the human or humane, and all situated in a hard-boiled slightly stereotypical naturalist narrative universe, a universe at least as indebted to Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange–despite its being stacked with really rad techno-weapons, grubby urban landscapes, delightfully grotesque characters, and ultra-hip fashion statements. The break-in plot of Neuromancer devolves into a backwards break-in, or familiar heist plot. The scope shrinks from global to local. The computer shrinks from gateway to surreality into subversive instrument. And the structure tightens (many reviewers, you can bet, will tell you it “matures”), becoming more conventional and more predictable. The happy ending provides a literal deus ex machina to tidy up the loose narrative threads.

     

    And yet things aren’t as easy as that, either. After all, most people don’t read Gibson for plot. Most read him for those great gadgets (nanotech birth-control devices, fetal tissue injections that build muscle and make workouts obsolete), which shock you into reconceptualizing your present and reevaluating your future; for those hip fashion statements (Chevette’s bike is a piece of assemblage art), which, like MTV logos, are just pure plain guilty pleasure to view; and for his holographically detailed sentences, frequently more poetry than prose, with more information packed into each one of them than into whole chapters by less energetic writers: “The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic,” Virtual Light launches. “He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod. Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb: seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed.” No one does action like Gibson. The pace of his sentences, his sheer speed of inventiveness, are astonishing. And finally, of course, we read Gibson for his engaged imagination, his breadth and intensity of vision, his ability to shift us onto and across a terrain of crucial cultural issues that most other contemporary fiction (and even some cyberpunk fiction) just doesn’t care about, let alone explore. Gibson’s vision takes in everything from the anarchist hacker underground networks to the rise of religious fundamentalism, from cryogenics to surveillance satellites, from genetic engineering to nanotechnology, from multinational control of information to techno-angst, from the Japanization of Western culture to the decentralization of governments around the world. This is what keeps us coming back to Gibson’s books, and this is why he remains one of the most significant and influential writers on the fin-de- millennium scene.

     

  • A Postmodern Foundation For Political Practice?

    Linda Ray Pratt

    Department of English
    University of Nebraska, Lincoln
    lpratt@unlinfo.unl.edu

     

    McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

     
    John McGowan’s “postliberal democracy” sometimes sounds just like the place we’d like to be, and sometimes more like the place we’ve already been. To get there, we must dispose of the negative freedom he assigns to most of the major postmodern theorists and abandon the fantasy of the autonomous self. McGowan’s starting point is that postmodernism’s goal of disrupting hierarchical totality by empowering suppressed components circles back politically to “an underlying commitment to democracy.” Our political and moral task is to construct a society in which a social consensus protects the egalitarian procedures through which a tolerant, humanist society can make decisions in the absence of truth. The problem for McGowan is that most contemporary theorists are unable to legitimate the social authority necessary to make democracy work or to use power positively.

     

    Describing his critique as “resolutely antifoundationalist,” McGowan also notes that his definition of postmodernism will not satisfy all readers. Later in the book he observes, rightly I suspect, that for disciples of Lyotard, “my discussion of postmodernism . . . will seem to have missed all the important points . . .” (181). McGowan does not miss the important points, but he redefines them into a positive postmodernism that may sound too much like a defense of Western liberal democratic values for many readers to be comfortable labeling it “postmodern.” With keen intelligence and unrelenting logic McGowan tells us what’s wrong with the postmodernism of three major schools: the poststructuralism of Derrida and Foucault; the contemporary Marxism of Jameson, Eagleton, and Said; and the neopragmatism of Lyotard and Rorty. But the most influential figure in the book is not under examination. That is Jurgen Habermas, to whom McGowan acknowledges his debt while distinguishing his own greater willingness to weave key postmodernist characteristics into the model for a postliberal democracy which he proposes at the end of his study.

     

    In order to legitimate a postliberal model that can produce democratic political decisions in a non-repressive consensual society without the guarantees of truth, McGowan must expose the trap of “negative freedom” that most postmodernist thought replicates. Most postmodern theorists allow too little freedom to choose and too little consciousness to define a positive social self. Their emphasis on the ways power operates within the Cerberean forces of language/history/capitalism provides too little “play” in the space allowed for thinking and acting. For the postmodernist, the community is associated with tyranny, not freedom, and the postmodernist strategy is to disrupt and diminish power, not legitimate its use as a positive force. McGowan argues that this kind of postmodernist thinking leaves us no foundation for political action because it makes the self incommensurable and autonomous in its social relations. For him the immersion of the self in the social is how we realize its integral social and thus “semiautonomous” nature.

     

    McGowan’s postmodernism embraces antifoundationalism and pluralistic democracy, but rejects in the critics under discussion the tragic sense of human life, the tyranny implicit in power, the limited space in which self or language can freely act, and the problematic nature of democracy itself within Western capitalism. One wonders if the postmodern baby has not been tossed out with the bath water. Instead of a positive postmodernism, are we not left instead with a refurbished modernism? Regardless of which label is more accurate, the real issue is the substance of the alternative model McGowan poses for a positive postmodernism.

     

    McGowan’s social vision is attractive, and it is hard to counter it with a political stance as hopeful or potentially effectual. The list of principles which constitutes his “summary and a final appeal” is as sound a set of assumptions as we are likely to find in anything resembling a rationale for the feasibility of social action. He notes, among other things, that “the principle of democratic egalitarianism” is culturally and historically specific, which means that civil liberties are an historical creation and not a transcendent right, but that the social consensus in Western democracies “has proved remarkably durable in the absence of fundamental guarantees” (264). The “existence of a social consensus by no means ends social conflicts” (265); on the contrary, agreement on the legitimate social norms “is precisely what makes conflict possible [i.e., comprehensible as conflict]” (266). The “procedures of decision making that currently embody the community’s sense of how best to ensure its norms” provide the “consensual grounds,” the “conditions” which “enable politics, which is understood as the negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps taken to reach and to implement collective decisions” (267). Such collective decisions, in which philosophy is submitted to the political through democratic procedures, “return us to positive power” which can combat the tyrannical exercise of power or the domination of decision making by elite groups (269). Reform of procedures within the norms safeguards a society from violence, and “freedom from violence” secures “the freedom of participation” (270). In a participatory democracy, politics calls on “the various semiautonomous spheres” to foster the “normative goods” of the social totality in which the self has its integral relation (271).

     

    In this “appeal” to accept a more positive social model in the name of postmodernism, McGowan has submitted postmodern theory to political practice. Or rather, to theoretical political practice. What is lacking is a history of political practice whose record would inspire the confidence that McGowan’s model can be trusted to work better than other hopeful visions of democracy. “Postmodernism” itself is borne out of the tragic skepticism that replaced the failed optimism of Modernism. The history of practice which embodied twentieth century political ideas–whether utopian or despotic–teaches postmodernism its distrust of the claims of power and idealistic possibility. Although I am moved by McGowan’s vision, I find myself reaching out to Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Said, and Rorty on just those points which McGowan wants to dispose of in their thought.

     

    Like Nietzsche’s, Derrida’s thought is “marked everywhere by the tragic revelation of irresolvable contradictions” (91) and his belief that language is too embedded in a repressive Western metaphysics to affirm differences. Derrida’s “perpetual uneasiness” with political action and theory leaves in doubt whether differance offers anything better than the violence or oppression of the existing hierarchies. Given his “proclivity for tragic impasse” (113), Derrida can only anchor his ethics and his politics in some “mystical” hope; his theory can only register “a protest against a certain order without being abe to effect the transformation of that order” (119).

     

    From McGowan’s perspective, Foucault’s limitation for a postmodern politics lies in his preoccupation with power as the dominant social bond and his anarchistic tendency to locate freedom in resistance. Edward Said seeks “a community of tolerance and interdependence” (172), but his insistence on keeping his distance opens him to “a residual and foundational individualism” (174) that can be a form of complicity. In short, McGowan’s dismissive “point” is “that the half-baked anarchism of the literary left is necessarily accompanied by a version of individualism that is . . . theoretically unsound and politically counterproductive” (176-77).

     

    The neopragmatists generally fare worse under McGowan’s critical eye than the deconstructionists and Marxists. McGowan finds Lyotard’s rejection of “any generalizing explanation or purpose (telos) to which local action must be answerable . . . a conclusion . . . scandalous to most humanistic intellectuals . . .” (183). Lyotard’s concept of language games, his rejection of metanarratives, and his valorizing of conflict in the differend are irresolvably hostile to dialectical syntheses and any potential discourse of a holistic society. Rorty is praised for acknowledging the question of ethics, but his division of self and actions into public and private spheres leads back to the social dead-end of the autonomous individual.

     

    One need not even quarrel with McGowan’s critique that postmodernism’s “inability” to endorse a positive model of society is its chief failing to be uncomfortable with the use he makes of it as prelude to his own proposed alternative. Indeed, it is just at the moment I accept his vision of how a consensual democratic procedure may legitimate authority so that power becomes a positive force that I want to recapture its negatives: the sense of tragedy and the limits of play in Derrida; the resistance to power in Foucault; the distrust of the metanarratives and the use of word games in Lyotard; and “the gentle virtue of tolerance needed to keep the conversation going” (200) espoused in Rorty. “Consensus,” “totality,” “positive power” and “normative goods” ring little alarm bells for those whom history has taught to be skeptical of political discourse. These words arrive bearing covert genealogies that need deconstructing, the specifics of which should unsettle and disrupt the ease with which we use them.

     

    McGowan is no naive optimist, but his discussion of power and democracy is insufficiently problematized. He illustrates the nature of a semiautonomous self which negotiates relations between its different social spheres with the hypothetical case of the American Catholic who participates in other economic, political, and cultural domains. His point is that relations between beliefs and activities in other spheres must be, and therefore can be, we must assume, negotiated at every turn. Negotiation as procedure does not guarantee accommodation, however, and authority confident of its legitimation is less inclined to negotiate than to exercise power. The American Catholic who wants to “negotiate” between her political self and her religious self may find her church unwilling to recognize her right to do so on grounds outside the absolutes of doctrine or even local interpreters of it. Like “negotiation,” “consensus” implies the negative that is not unanimity. Political consensus may properly refuse to negotiate with its fringes. It may be used to mask or repress dissent, just as tolerance may be used to contain rather than to embrace the other. McGowan observes that non-acknowledgement is power’s best threat, but he underestimates the extent to which democracy’s processes of negotiation and consensus are themselves complicit in the exercise of negative power.

     

    McGowan too readily accepts that Western democracy is basically a pluralistic tradition with great social durability. Is that Greek democracy he means? Jeffersonian democracy? Jacksonian? Paine’s or Marat’s? Clinton’s? Was it in place during Reconstruction? The Gilded Age, or World War I? All of these times embody some form of Western democracy. They are not all bad dreams with nothing to teach us; indeed, what they teach is that models are specific to history where they, too, are subject to corruption, to limits, to tragic error, to excesses of violence, to irrationality and mysticism, to rigidities and laxities of procedures for decision making. To say so is not to countenance the irresponsible withdrawal from these flawed systems or to deny that they are the ground on which the creation of an ethical society must nevertheless take place. My discomfort is that McGowan tacitly gives them more performative potential than most postmodern critics can readily accept, including those of us who lean in his direction.

     

    If not McGowan’s model, then what? Can one not balance the “cheerful acceptance” of Habermasian possibilities with the resistance to power of Foucault or the cautionary sense of the tragic in Derrida? Perhaps McGowan would answer that such a balancing act results in the violent frustration of impasse, or the disabling confusion of hopeless contradictions, or the irrational resorting to a mystical hope for the social good. Perhaps sometimes he would be right, but postmodernism and its critics level the playing field of history on which the best of players on both sides have already made so many fatal errors. Even on this democratic “site of possible political action” (280), postmodern citizens may need just those characteristics that McGowan thinks are in our way.


  • Queer Bodies of Knowledge: Constructing Lesbian and Gay Studies

    Lynda Goldstein

    Department of English
    Pennsylvania State University
    lrg4@psuvm.psu.edu

     

    Abelove, Henry, Michele Anna Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993.

     

    Gever, Martha, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, eds. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 1993.

     

    As the newest kid on the interdisciplinary block looking for legitimation (with not a little attitude), Lesbian/Gay or Queer Studies (depending upon one’s political affiliations) poses a number of obvious challenges to academia and publishers. One of these, of course, has to do with the strategic, if not essential, reliance of lesbian and gay studies on a particular kind of identity politics that parallels the institutional maneuvering of other “minority studies” programs. Indeed, lesbian and gay studies can be charted along much the same trajectory as Women’s, African-American, Asian-American or Latino/a Ethnic Studies, all of which were institutionalized (however tenuously in these times of “down-sizing” colleges) at historically specific moments at the conjuncture of their respective (and overlapping) political activism, cultural production, and scholarship. Indeed, lesbian/gay studies shares more with these other emergent subdisciplines than a certain path toward discursive legitimation within the academy (though this is not to suggest that the struggles of every field of study have all been identical). It also often shares theoretical frameworks, and even some specific objects of study. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, has been a recurring area of focus, as queer studies has sought to rethink cultural history in terms of the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, and race.

     

    Begun as an inclusion of queer contributions to history here, a special topics course on lesbian and gay “coming out” literature there, and a rigorous theoretical interrogation of sexuality as a constitutive category of subject formation elsewhere, queer studies has reached critical mass in the “gay nineties.” This is evident in the increasing number of gay and lesbian studies undergraduate programs in and across the various humanistic disciplines; the special collections at university and large public libraries from coast to coast; and the critical/theoretical work on the cultural inscriptions of sexuality, much of which would be far more difficult to assemble without the explosive production of identifiably, often “in your face,” queer culture, most especially in literature/comics, theater/performance, music, the visual arts, film/video, and popular style/fashion. My emphasis here on popular cultural productions should not indicate that queer studies traffics exclusively in the popular (though the intersection of queer and popular is an intriguing one), as any study of homoclassics or anthrodrag surely indicates.

     

    Perhaps nothing suggests the critical materiality of lesbian and gay studies more substantially than the queer line of critical and theoretical work coordinated by Routledge, cagey publisher to the stars of queer theory. Indeed, as hefty as Routledge’s two anthologies delineating the field of Cultural Studies, and with much the same cutting-edge rationale guiding its journey through the contestatory fields of academic discourse, the compendium anthology, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, establishes itself as an indispensable introduction to the field, at least as it is determined within the (inter)disciplinary boundaries of the arts and humanities. Published just two years after Inside/Out (a collection of essays theorizing lesbian and gay sexual politics and culture edited by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge in 1991), How Do I Look? (the conference proceedings from “How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video” organized and edited by Bad Object Choices) and the “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” issue of the journal differences (edited by Teresa de Lauretis), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader collects forty-two contemporary essays from a variety of disciplines, many of them no doubt known to readers from their previously published incarnations in journals. I mention the earlier collections because they were all distinguished by a theoretical approach that might be broadly defined as that of “cultural studies,” an approach that The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader has not merely adopted but sought to extend by encompassing an even wider range of disciplines and sites of investigation.

     

    Indeed, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader is in many ways a continuation of the work begun by Inside/Out. In her introduction, editor Diana Fuss asks, “how can we work [the hetero/homo opposition] to the point of critical exhaustion, and what effects–material, political, social –can such a sustained effort to erode and to reorganize the conceptual grounds of identity be expected to have on our sexual practices and politics?” (1). Certainly one might argue that The Reader represents one effect of working the binary opposition of sexuality, if not to exhaustion, then to a fatigue productive of a visibility of gay and lesbian sexualities. That is, it embodies an attempt to “reorganize” sexuality studies from an oppositional stance that comes dangerously close to solidifying the epistemology of polarity. For those who believe that Gay and Lesbian Studies may only exist, however visibly, in contestation with the (supposedly hetero) core curricula, The Reader proposes a more troubling and independent existence while acknowledging its relational positioning. If as Fuss writes, “any outside is formulated as a consequence of a lack internal to the system it supplements” (3), then we might suppose that the outside status of lesbian and gay studies has everything to do with the constitutive lack of sexuality studies within the academy. In bringing queer studies in from the cold outside, does The Reader make it all too easy for interrogations of sexuality to operate as a “queer thing”? Moreover, in its bid to legitimate an emergent field does it do so at the expense of the political leverage discursive marginalization can accord? These are most difficult negotiations, as both Fuss and the editors of The Reader acknowledge, though Abelove, Barale, and Halperin more decisively throw their lot in with legitimation. It is their intention, after all, that this collection serve as a primary textbook for courses in Gay/Lesbian Studies 101.

     

    The volume’s usefulness in the classroom is admirably indicated by its categorical grouping of contents, its Users’ Guide, its alternative organization by disciplines, its essay header notes establishing the authority of the essayist and summarizing the essay’s arguments, and its briefly annotated but extensive bibliography. What all of these together provide is a map with which to navigate the territory of gay and lesbian studies, not only for the undergraduate (though some of these essays may be too difficult for students who are not already conversant with the theoretical debates that animate recent battles over humanities curricula) but for the instructor as well, who may have a thorough knowledge of queer studies in her own field but a lesser acquaintance with work in related disciplines. Fortunately, The Reader collects essays that are theoretically and literally conversant, if not always in agreement, making for a coherent and provocative approach to delineating lesbian and gay studies as a discipline of knowledge. Further, in its organizational structure along lines of thematic interest (for instance, “Politics and Representation” and “The Evidence of Experience”), The Reader suggests the extent to which queer theorists are, indeed, reorganizing the ontological grounds of sexual identity within historically specific cultural contexts. (The editors of The Reader, by the way, choose “lesbian and gay” over “queer” for reasons of institutional efficacy given some already established programs. While suggesting “lesbian and gay” retains a queer reverberation, signalled by The Reader’s inclusion of activist concerns and transgendering phenomena, it is not one that includes bisexuality. This omission poses rather interesting questions to be left for a review of the several recently published anthologies on bisexuality.)

     

    Just what does one find in The Reader? Gayle Rubin’s still extraordinary (and revised) “Thinking Sex” initiates the volume, deftly moving feminist theory in the direction of queer theory, an expansive move that others, such as Barbara Smith in her feminist and African-Americanist grounded essay, “Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?,” similarly make in this first section on “Politics and Representation.” In part, essays such as Rubin’s and Smith’s address the limitations of theory that is singularly invested in an identity politics; they pose a kind of coalition politics of theory which would (re)present the problematics of representation of our selves (however that might be defined) within politicized and intersecting cultural fields. For Rubin, this means, in part, tracing the history of “sex panic[s]” in Anglo-American culture since the nineteenth century, a history that reveals moments of repressive police action against populations designated “deviant” or “obscene” within a hierarchized system of sexuality and sexual practices, especially around sado-masochistic images and pedophilia. To fully comprehend how these practices are policed by the state, Rubin argues “that it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence” (33). Such a move is not to be confused with separating feminism (whose primary concern is gender) from queer theory, however; each has much to contribute to the other. It does mean being very careful not to collapse terms so that differences of social life, and their attendant politicization, are elided. It also operates as a cautionary tale to assimilationist lesbians and gays whose “we’re just like you” liberal politics demonizes non-vanilla (in both the erotic and racial senses) sexual practices.

     

    Such a warning is also evident in Smith’s short essay, in which she explicitly works against the hierarchizing of oppression all too evident among some activists and theorists who are willing to further their own political or pedagogical agenda by sacrificing the queers to the oppressive actions of our culture. “What happened at Blues [a police raid against a working-class bar for gays and lesbians of color] perfectly illustrates the ways in which the major ‘isms’ including homophobia are intimately and violently intertwined” (100). What Smith’s and Rubin’s essays both demonstrate in their very different ways are the inextricability of theory and praxis, the necessity to carefully analyze the multitudinous forms of social and cultural oppression, and the responsibility of all activists and theorists (not that these are so easily separated) to work at the intersections and along the fluid boundaries of identity categories. These are concerns shared by a number of essays included in this anthology: Kobena Mercer’s investigation of race, sexuality, and eroticism in Mapplethorpe’s work (a site also privileged by Richard Meyer’s “Mapplethorpe/ The Discipline of Photography”), Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s reading of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, and Deborah McDowell’s uncovering of Nella Larsen’s lesbian passing masquerading as racial passing under the burden of the morally upright Harlem Renaissance. And Phillip Brian Harper’s wonderfully rich analysis of the place of eloquence in African-American discourse–of the tensions between speech and silence, hetero and homosexualities, Black Nationalism and assimilation–in the face of newscaster Max Robinson’s death by AIDS, serves as a model for disentangling the complexities of cultural identity formation.

     

    Another major theoretical paradigm threading its way through the collection is initiated by the second essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet.” Like Rubin, Sedgwick looks to the nineteenth century, firmly establishing it as the historical moment for the political and cultural parameters of modern lesbian and gay identity. Here she outlines the contradictory status of the closet, arguing that it “has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout this century” by mapping a double-bound system of secrecy and disclosure onto identity formation such that “the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization, in this case the node at which any gender is discriminated” (59). What concerns Sedgwick is the systemic incoherence of thinking about sexuality and gender in Euro-American culture dating from the late nineteenth century, an incoherence that ought not to be stabilized by queer theorists but continuously and productively interrogated. In large part, this is precisely the project adopted by The Reader: each wrangles with the epistemological incoherences of identity, representation, and social practices, often with brilliant results.

     

    For example, Lee Edelman takes up the visibility/ invisibility nexus of gay male sexuality in “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” Obviously punning on Sedgwick’s title, as well as on the stage play and film, Tea and Sympathy (a sense of humor also refreshingly evident in Marjorie Garber’s “Spare Parts,” excerpted from her book Vested Interests, in which she examines surgical transsexualism as a privileged site of the constitutional instabilities of gender and sexuality), Edelman considers Walter Jenkins’s arrest in 1964 for undisclosed sexual activity in the men’s washroom of a Washington, DC YMCA as “a signal moment in which to examine the shifting ideological frameworks within which homosexuality could be read in relation to American national identity” (555). The collision of public and private indicated by the police surveillance of this urinal tryst, like the closet/coming out oscillation of Sedgwick’s essay, raises questions about the stability of the homo/hetero binary, especially as the precise sexual act was unobservable from the vantage point of the police. The unresolvable tensions of sexual/gender border patrolling are further investigated by Stuart Hall in “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” while the visibility/invisibility binary figures in Teresa de Lauretis’ “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” as well as in Sasha Torres’ essay on prime time television and Danae Clark’s “Commodity Lesbianism,” all of which demonstrate that lesbians as social subjects are rigorously situated on the invisibility side of the fence.

     

    The Reader‘s reliance on cultural-studies paradigms is most evident in the several essays that foreground cultural/historical specificity, as well as the immediacy of political activism, to combat early lesbian and gay studies tendencies toward universalizing experience. To this end, John D’Emilio argues that lesbian and gay identities are the result of capitalist economies. Anthropologists Alonso and Koreck deconstruct the catch-all term “hispanics” and its debilitating effects upon AIDS education among various Latino/a populations whose sexual practices are not necessarily commensurate with Anglo-determined sexual identities, while Tomas Almaguer maps identity and behavior among Chicano men. Cindy Patton documents the imposition of idealized bourgeois family values onto a demonized “Africa” without borders that is read as having bred a peculiar and distinct strain of AIDS. In one of the few excursions out of the “modern” period of lesbian/gay identity (along with David Halperin’s and John Winkler’s respective work on the constructions of homosexuality in classical Greece and Sappho’s lyric poetry), Charlotte Furth considers the fluidity of gender boundaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century China. And Serena Nanda explores the indeterminacy of the Hijira in Hindu mythology and contemporary social practice, while Harriet Whitehead surveys the body of work on the Native American berdache to demonstrate the efficacy of a methodology of comparative cultural analysis, a kind of destablized theoretical crossing that works to carefully maintain differences of specific systems of gender meaning in each culture under investigation.

     

    Yet the experiences of populations within specific historical and cultural contexts ought not to be the project of gay and lesbian history, argues Joan Scott, in her rigorously explicated essay, “The Evidence of Experience.” Arguing that experience too often serves as the ontological foundation for identity, politics, and history, Scott recommends that we not focus on “the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but [focus on] the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself” (412), the narratives of knowledge that constitute that which we call experience. Such a shift in focus has repercussions not only for considerations of autobiography (to which all coming-out literature is indebted) as Biddy Martin’s work on lesbian autobiography acknowledges, but for activist politics and production as well, a consideration which is less consistently realized in Queer Looks. Where The Reader works toward a theoretical and thematic coherence while maintaining a queer commitment to analyzing incoherences, Queer Looks works toward incoherence, a queering of the body of knowledge (re)produced by the more academically integrated Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

     

    Less interdisciplinary in its approach, concentrating on lesbian and gay film and video (all of which is “independent” in its production and distribution histories), Queer Looks expands upon the territory mapped by the aforementioned How Do I Look anthology. More playful in its collection of essays, screenplays/stills, and interactive lampshades (the latter a “Take Back the Light: Lesbian Visibility Lampshade” by Donna Evans and Jean Carlomusto which combines the rigor of theory with the pleasure of popular culture and activism in this year of lesbian chic: think of it as Teresa de Lauretis lite), Queer Looks has no aspirations for legitimacy in academe. Rather, its project is to give its intersecting activists, theorists, and film/video makers the space to work out the possibilities of representational practices by, for and about lesbian, gay, and queer subjects. To an academic, this anthology may seem terribly uneven. While many of the essays consider the ways that queerness is inextricably bound to other categories of identity, most notably race (those of Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Jackie Goldsby and Kobena Mercer are obvious examples), some of these (Goldsby) and several of the others (e.g. Barbara Hammer’s “The Politics of Abstraction”) rely upon “experience” in ways that Joan Smith warns are not as productive as thinking about how we structure that experience as identity. Yet the strengths of Queer Looks lies less in its rigorous analyses (though there are these, most especially John Greyson’s “Security Blankets”) than in its proliferation of contending viewpoints that provoke thought, agreement, and dissension for the reader. In their often brief formats these 38 contributors generate queer perspectives on work that remains unavailable to most audiences outside large gay/lesbian film festivals.

     

    Neither of these collections is exhaustive. Race continues to be a category most often examined in conjunction with queers of color, “lesbians” appear as theoretical specters or social subjects with narrowly defined experiences, pornography is distanced to the AIDS education category, and the work of a Sadie Benning (legit as her Whitney Biennial inclusion has made her) is overlooked for multiple analyses of Isaac Julien’s and Marlon Riggs’s works (fine as they are). What is obvious in both of these collections is the queer bent that cultural studies has so productively taken. Each provides a wealth of analytical material with which to engage the cultural productions of lesbians and gay men, thereby suggesting ways of thinking about other work not specifically approached within these volumes. For any instructor who has faced a colleague’s snide “but there’s no such thing as lesbian and gay studies,” or any budding film maker who just doesn’t see herself in Hollywood, The Reader and Queer Looks respectively and together provide just the kind of coherent critical and activist incoherence that is needed. These anthologies mark the moment when “queer”–both as a productive knowledge of bodies and as a set of (re)productive bodies of knowledge, is at last finding a place of rest and motion in an institution near you.

     

  • Anna Deveare Smith’s Voices at Twilight

    Gayle Wald

    Princeton University
    gwald@pucc.princeton.edu

     

    The Mark Taper Forum Production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a work-in-progress that is part of the “On the Road: A Search for American Character” series conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Emily Mann. Set design by Robert Brill. Costume design by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Allen Lee Hughes. Original music by Lucia Hwong.

     

    I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman performance “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” on a cool November evening at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey–more than three thousand miles and worlds away from the site of the first multiracial urban uprising in U.S. history. McCarter was home to the East Coast premiere of Smith’s performance, which had played to near-universal critical acclaim at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and which was directed by McCarter’s Artistic Director, Emily Mann. Though the people in the theater that evening had each paid twenty-five dollars to see “Twilight,” I suspect that many of them had long forgotten (if they had ever acknowledged) the social and economic despair that gave rise to what urban theorist Mike Davis has called “the most violent American civil disturbance since the Irish poor burned Manhattan in 1863.” Indeed, by last November, the trial of the L.A. Four for the near-fatal beating of truck driver Reginald Denny–played in many press accounts as a racial counterbalance to the near-fatal beating of Rodney King–had taken center stage in the white public imagination.

     

    When Smith’s performance had ended and the audience had offered its respectful, though not impassioned, applause, a friend of mine overheard a white woman sitting in the row behind us. Turning to her companion, she said in a polite If-you-can’t-say-anything-good-don’t-say-anything-at-all tone of voice, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it entertaining, but…” The woman never completed the sentence, never said what she would have called “Twilight.” Nor did she explain to her companion what she meant by “entertaining,” though clearly the term carried political, as well as aesthetic, value. Her gloss on “Twilight” also contained an unintended irony: Entertainment, or the production of glossy self-representations, is, after all, the dominant business of Los Angeles. In one sense, I could understand how the woman’s expectations could have felt somewhat let down if by “entertaining” she also meant diversionary; though “Twilight” is at times highly amusing, its effect is to memorialize the voices of L.A. In another sense, “entertainment” is one of the many challenges posed by “Twilight,” a work which seeks to generate theatrical compassion through Smith’s hallmark technique of literal impersonation.

     

    The mood on Princeton University’s campus was unusually tense the morning after the verdicts were announced in the first trial of police officers Koon, Powell, Wind and Briseno. After a dreary night spent watching CNN’s live aerial television footage of fires that burned through a twenty-five-block area of central L.A., a group of Princeton’s African American and Latino students–joined by some Asian Americans and whites–staged a midday rally in front of Firestone Library (named after the rubber magnate). The students spoke of their rage at the verdicts and at the beating, their sorrow at the loss of life and the damage to neighborhoods, and of their alienation from some of their white friends, many of whom viewed the trial in Simi Valley as an anomalous miscarriage of justice. An Asian-American student implored the assembly to work together to combat racism and discrimination on campus. Some students voiced concern about friends and relatives living in Los Angeles; others spoke of their apprehension about family sixty miles away in New York, where the possibility of rioting still loomed large.

     

    Ironically, April 29, 1992 was also the date set for the New York premiere of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities,” her award-winning one-woman show about the conflict between Hasidic Jews and African- and Caribbean-Americans spurred by the death of a seven-year-old black child, Gavin Cato. (When her opening was canceled, Smith joined demonstrators protesting the King verdict in Times Square.) “Fires,” a play which enacts the relatively clear-cut dispute between visibly distinct minority communities who share the same New York City neighborhood, is the spiritual and aesthetic forebear of “Twilight,” a work which takes on the considerably more complex task of documenting the multiracial, multilingual and geographically dispersed communities of Los Angeles. Both draw upon a rigorous performance technique that Smith has been developing for over a decade, in which she interviews people and then “performs” them verbatim.

     

    For Smith, who is also Associate Professor of Drama at Stanford, the performance of real people’s real words originally functioned as a theatrical exercise, a way of investigating how different characters embody or inhabit language differently. Smith used linguistic and performative “found objects”–clips from often baroque late-night talk shows, for example–to investigate the possibility of “entering” character through the meticulous repetition of that character’s language, including body language. In rehearsal for “Twilight,” Smith listened repeatedly to tapes of her interviewees, then practiced until she had incorporated the voices well enough to “wear” the characters’ words. The technique, she contends, entails both theft–the appropriation of others’ voices–and gift–a mode of re-presenting or returning others’ voices to them. (Sister Souljah once refused Smith an interview, claiming that Smith was “the sister who wants to take my words.”) As her work in “Fires” and “Twilight” demonstrates, such impersonation, or “re-iteration,” as Smith prefers to call it, lends itself particularly well to highly charged media spectacles such as the Crown Heights conflict and the L.A. uprisings, precisely because these are wars of image and voice. A crucial part of the public spectacle that was “L.A.” entailed the struggle of voices speaking on behalf of besieged communities to broadcast their beliefs over the steady din of talking heads reporting official estimates of property damage. In newspaper and television accounts, the rioting itself was often portrayed as what happens when words do not suffice.

     

    For the Mark Taper Forum production of “Twilight,” Smith interviewed more than 175 people, including movie stars (Angelica Houston) and politicians (Maxine Waters). With help from four dramaturges–one black, one Latino, one white and one Asian–she later selected twenty-odd characters to be included in the work. Smith’s performances are, by definition, always works-in-progress, since she adds or subtracts characters to suit the needs of particular audiences or her own evolving ideas. The twenty-one people that she performed at McCarter ranged from the well known (Reginald Denny and former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates) to the lesser known (Angela King, Rodney’s aunt, and Maria, Juror #7 in the federal King trial, whose character was added two weeks into the L.A. performance of “Twilight”). John Lahr’s review of “Twilight” in The New Yorker describes a performance in which Smith did her show for seven hundred L.A. high school students. In the middle of performing Julio Menjivar–a lumber salesman and driver who was arrested for no apparent reason as part of the police round-ups during the riots–Smith interrupted her description (in Spanish) of the police abuse. “I don’t think I should say what the police said,” she told the audience. “Your teachers will mind.” When the kids shouted back their encouragement, Smith continued: “Get up, motherfucker! Get up!”

     

    On stage Smith, a light-skinned African American woman, performs barefoot, wearing a plain white shirt and loose, dark pants; in addition to changes in voice, posture and affect, she signifies the “feel” of characters with simple costume changes: a hat taken on or off, the addition of earrings or a string of pearls, a cigarette hanging loosely from the side of the mouth, a man’s striped tie and blazer. Brief blackouts demarcate the shifts between characters, shifts which are left intentionally ragged so that Smith’s audience can witness the uneven process of metamorphosis between, for example, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, a Korean-American and former owner of a liquor store, and Twilight Bey, a young African American male and an organizer of the gang truce between the Cripps and the Bloods.

     

    Bey’s self-consciously oracular voice, distinct from the bureaucratese of some characters and the informal, conversational expression of others, literally has the last word in “Twilight.” Bey steals the show, but not in the conventional sense; though his is not the most arresting or profound voice of the performance, it is the one that lends “Twilight” its title and serves as its coda, a surrogate voice for Smith’s voice. In a brief essay about the development of “Twilight,” Smith explains that she was inspired both by Bey’s words and by the rich metaphorical potential of his name. Twilight is a time of danger, when objects ordinarily visible in broad daylight are obscured, and the time of day when much of the first rioting occurred. Twilight is also a time of liminality and, more importantly, creativity–a time, Smith writes, that “asks more of our vision.” Here are Bey’s words, spoken by and through Smith, as he analyzes the relation between “twilight” and the growth of a prophetic voice:

     

      
               So twilight
               is
               that time
               between night and day
               limbo
               I call it limbo
               so a lot of times when I've brought up
                    ideas to my homeboys
               they say
               Twilight
               that's before your time
               that's something you can't do now
               when I talked about the truce back in
                    1988
               that was something they considered
                    before its time
               yet
               in 1992
               we made it
               realistic
               so to me it's like I'm stuck in limbo
               like the sun between night and day

     

    Shaman, prophet and intermediary (in the gang wars), ever attentive to the disruptive power of his language, Bey’s character is a stand-in for Smith’s own (absent) voice as performer. Watching her perform each of the twenty-one characters in “Twilight” with obvious care and generosity — even a bewildered Daryl Gates, who seems genuinely mystified at how he became a national symbol of police oppression following “the Rodney thing” (a telling slip)– I had the sense that Smith, too, wants to be a peacemaker of sorts, a multilingual interlocutor who constructs her own unique theatrical voice from the select fragments of others’ voices. Bey’s is the privileged voice of “Twilight” because, in his role as leader of the gang truce, he exemplifies an analogous spirit of Smith’s performance, which is communication across seemingly insurmountable lines of hierarchy and difference.

     

    Through Smith, who embodies in her performance the very tape recorder that she uses to conduct interviews, “Twilight” brings to audiences such as the one in Princeton voices that would not normally get a public hearing. People from South L.A. and Koreatown are magically transported to a stage in New Jersey–not through conventional media such as TV, but through “real” physical proximity and presence. With the effect of a verbal patchwork quilt, the pieces sewn together by her own constant bodily presence, Smith’s performance constructs an imaginary–and highly intimate –conversation among twenty-one people who will never share the same room together, then presents this conversation to an audience that has paid twenty-five dollars a piece to listen. In contrast to the “outside” social realities that furnish white voices their immediacy and authority, the defining power of the soundbite, in the safe space of the theater, Smith gives all the voices in “Twilight” equal representation. Everyone has his or her five minutes before the footlights, from the director of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front to the Korean storeowner whose brain was partially blown out by a stray bullet.

     

    Moreover, the voices Smith performs are not homogenized through journalistic “smoothing out” (a technique applied liberally to the frequent slips of tongue and verbal lapses committed by heads of state, for example); neither are they necessarily translated for their audience. In one remarkable sequence, Smith performs Chung Lee, president of the Korean America Victim’s Association, speaking in Korean as English subtitles are projected on screens at either side of the theater. While selecting performance material from the archives of her interviews, Smith says she generally looks for the “bumps” in the flow of a speaker’s words and phrases. Her interests lie, paradoxically, in the moments when language “fails” rather than when it succeeds too well, when she believes it speaks us most thoroughly. Her monologues communicate as often through stammering and hesitation, when speakers are tongue-tied, as through moments of linguistic and tonal clarity. Like the woman overheard by my friend during the Princeton performance of “Twilight,” Smith’s characters speak through ellipses, innuendo, intonation and accent.

     

    “Twilight” harbors an implicitly populist agenda of breaking down the conventional binary between the “high” — and obviously highly stylized–language of the stage and the “low,” and no less stylized, language of everyday speech. Smith does not construct a multicultural national literature merely by introducing “real” voices into a highly charged aesthetic arena (though in and of itself, this would perhaps constitute a progressive political act); rather, she subtly shifts the contours of this arena by finding the “poetry,” as she calls it, in ordinary language. “Everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry,” Smith writes in the introduction to the recently published book version of Fires in the Mirror. “The process of getting to that poetic moment is where character lives” (xxxi). Later in the same essay, she notes that “character” lives in the digressions, the ways (of universally “bad” grammar, of “ums” and “uhs”) through which we get to the “point.” By mimetically reproducing the details of various characters’ fissures in speech, Smith makes it possible for people to talk–not only to say the sorts of things that are sometimes forbidden or veiled in public discourse, but also to say things in ways that are not usually allowed in the theater.

     

    Yet it’s at the precarious line between mimicry and parody that Smith’s work potentially backfires, or at least loses its political potency. While parody promises pleasure for its audience, mimicry seems the more difficult–and possibly the more radical–of the two modes. Closely related to parody, satire depends upon a cultural community that speaks, to a greater or lesser degree, a common language. Mimicry, in contrast, requires that the subject “become” the object of her imitation. Unlike parody, which effects a distance from the thing being mocked in order to provoke a self-conscious laughter, mimicry diminishes critical detachment and compels one to a more direct — though not necessarily less discriminating–engagement with the “other.” Smith sees mimicry as a way of facilitating a radical empathy, of enabling a transformative slippage across socially produced identities of race, nation, gender, and class. “The spirit of acting,” she writes, “is the travel from the self to the other” (xxxvi).

     

    Perfect mimicry of the other is, of course, a utopian desire, an impossible fantasy exemplified by Madonna, who in “Vogue” sings that it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, a boy or a girl. As Homi Bhabha has written in the context of colonial subjects, the very precondition for mimicry is the residue of difference–the “almost the same, but not quite“–that distinguishes self from other. Mimicry has the potential to de-naturalize dominant voices, as when Smith’s performances (of an anonymous talent agent, the former president of the L.A. Police Commission, the legal counsel for Officer Briseno, or even Reginald Denny) dramatize, and thus unmask, the privilege of white speakers. The implicit challenge of Smith’s performance style lies in inhabiting these kinds of voices while keeping mimicry and parody in tension. Of the characters she performs, Smith writes: “I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness” (xxxviii).

     

    It might seem strange, therefore, that “Anna Deavere Smith” is absent from “Twilight.” Or rather, she’s everywhere present, in the form of a desire which is the structuring absence of the performance. Moments in the performance when characters call attention to Smith’s (invisible) presence are disruptive in this regard, making explicit the ways in which “Smith” mediates our experience of them, as well as the ways in which their own self-representations are shaped by her presence. Elvira Evers, a Panamanian-American cashier whose life was saved when a stray bullet penetrated her back and lodged in the elbow of her unborn baby, speaks to an invisible Smith, asking her midway through the monologue whether it’s alright to bring out her little girl. It’s a crucial moment, not just for transforming monologue into dialogue, but for foregrounding the ways in which Smith’s own voice may have a legitimizing, or hindering, effect upon others’ expression.

     

    Ever since “Fires in the Mirror” catapulted her to the pages of People magazine and the couch on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show, Smith’s work has been almost universally acclaimed. (According to one account, now that Smith has become a commodity in her own right, she signs a waiver that guarantees that after a certain threshold she will share profits with her interviewees.) The obvious political merit of “Twilight”–appreciated equally by critics from both the “mainstream” and “alternative” presses –lies in its portrayal of the irreducibility of voices in the noisy public discourse of “L.A.” Whereas the television news pitted riotous “black rage” against indignant white propriety, or black rage against Korean-American cupidity (the role formerly assigned Jewish inner-city merchants), or black rage against Korean-American industriousness (the divisive “model minority” image), “Twilight” offers a more complex rendering. As Gloria Naylor writes in Mama Day, there’s not just two sides to the story in L.A.–my side and your side–but four sides, including “an outside, and an inside. All of it is truth” (230).

     

    “Twilight” is a great leveler, a fact which may be simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While Smith aspires to burst through the limitations of a narrow ethnocentrism, the democratic impulse that guides “Twilight” can tend to obscure the ways in which these voices are in violent struggle with one another. Like all of us, Smith herself is part of this process. When the Mark Taper Forum originally commissioned her to create “Twilight,” some local artists protested that the theater was importing a commercially and critically successful “outsider” to speak their voices. Crusades for cultural justice are often figured in such terms, as conflicts over the ownership of voices and representations. This is not to impugn Smith’s voice; indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of “Twilight” is Smith herself–in particular, the obvious respect and care she demonstrates for the voices entrusted to her. At its best, however, “Twilight” embodies a dialectic: not only does Smith speak for and as “others”; these others also infuse and speak for her.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133.
    • Lahr, John. “Under the Skin.” The New Yorker 69, 19 (June 28, 1993): 90-94.
    • Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1988.
    • Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.

     

  • From: PMC-Talk THREAD: Silber, Strauss, and Post-Democratic Politics in the Academy (11/30/93 – 1/6/94)

     
     
     

    (Excerpted from the Discussion Group PMC-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92)

     

    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 11-30-93. PMC-TALK is the discussion group for the electronic journal _Postmodern Culture_ (PMC-LIST). Subscription to PMC-TALK is independent of subscription to PMC-LIST; if you are not subscribed to the journal itself, and would like to be, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to PMC@UNITY.NCSU.EDU (internet).

     

    Today’s Topics: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

     

     

    Sender: “Joseph H. Hesse”

    Subject: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

     

    Hello. I am new to this list (to e-mail as well) and I feel a responsibility to produce some text for this list, rather than just sit in my room consuming the text of others.

     

    Has anyone else been reading about Pres. Silber’s recent letter to the faculty of Boston University. There was an article today in THE BOSTON GLOBE. They quote his letter as saying:

     

    “Boston University has resisted the imposition of doctrines that would curtail intellectual and academic freedom. It is plain that some versions of critical theory, radical feminism and multiculturism, among other intellectual positions, are ideological in character and inhospitable to free intellectual inquiry.”

     

    “Marxism, structuralism, feminism, etc., do not, in and of themselves, threaten academic freedom, but each of these views is highly susceptible to being formulated as dogma, impervious to any arguments or evidence not already in conformance with the basic tenets of the dogma.”

     
    “Any university that takes academic and intellectual freedom seriously has an obligation to spot these epistemologies and head them off.”

     
    The Globe reports that areas of study that Silber mentioned in an earlier report to the trustees were:

     
    “Critical legal studies, revisionist history, Afro-centrism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, structuralism and deconstructionism, dance therapy, gay and lesbian liberation and animal liberation.”

     
    I found so much of this article troubling, on so many different points, that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber’s statements. And so, I will wait and see if anyone is interested in this subject before I clutter up this list with my text.

     
    Any Comments or additional information on Silber?

     
    Joseph Hesse

    jhhes.mvax.cc.conncoll.edu

     

     

    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-2-93.

     

    [ . . . . ]

     

    Today’s Topics: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

    CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO NOBODADDIES

    CALL FOR PAPERS: Meeting of Society for Literature and Science

     

     

    Sender:

    Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

     

    As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance therapy a threat to the powers that be?

     

     

    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-4-93.

     

    [ . . . . ]

     

    Today’s Topics: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks Re: Silber

     

     

    Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

     

    >As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am

    >profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for

    >another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance

    >therapy a threat to the powers that be?

     

    Don’t you know that dancing leads to sex?

     

    From: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu (Bart Simon)
Subject: Re: Silber
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 93 8:40:58 PST

Forwarded message:
> From Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk Thu Dec  2 11:40:10 1993
> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1993 19:39:20
> From: Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk (hsstmel)
> To: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: Silber file
> Message-Id: 
> In-Reply-To: 
> 
> 
> 
> I'm writing this in response to Joseph H. Hesse's message about
> Boston Univ. President John Silber.  Hesse quotes from an article
> in the Boston Globe, regarding Silber's response to a Faculty
> Council inquiry about academic freedom.  Hesse states: "I found
> so much of this article troubling, on so many different points,
> that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber's
> statements."  I too found this troubling.   I spent six years at
> Boston University, and left two months ago after a very bitter
> battle with the BU central administration over my tenure case.
> I would be happy to discuss my case further with anyone who is
> interested.  However, in this message, I would like to elaborate
> on Hesse's message, and suggest that anyone who finds Silber's
> remarks ominous (and believe me, he substantiates his words with
> deeds) should write to Silber to give him a piece of your mind. 
> I recommend it highly; it is a rare opportunity to engage a
> genuine tyrant in dialogue:
> 
> John Silber, President
> Boston University
> 147 Bay State Road
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
> Be sure to cc. the following parties:
> 
> James Iffland, Chair
> Faculty Council
> Department of Modern Foreign Languages
> Boston University
> 718 Commonwealth Ave.
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
 [ .... ]
> 
> Alice Dembner
> Higher Education Correspondent
> Boston Globe
> 135 Morrissey Blvd.
> P.O. Box 2378
> Boston, MA 02107-2378
> 
  [ .... ] 
> There is a genuine chance that if the academic community
> supports Iffland and Faculty Council against Silber, that we will
> see the end to 23 years of demoralization at BU.  Among the
> reasons for getting involved in this battle are that BU, in the
> aftermath of a faculty strike in the late '70s offers a model of
> a university with a weakened faculty and an administration that
> micromanages the faculty's academic affairs.  Administrators at
> other universities may get ideas from this model.  Silber is not
> the only problem at BU.  His Provost, a fellow named Jon
> Westling, is a particularly nasty piece of work, as is the Dean
> of the College of Liberal Arts, Dennis Berkey.  Silber and his
> gang oversee all appointments and promotions, and consequently
> they have built a substantial base of support among faculty (and
> especially department chairs).  Nevertheless, there are very many
> faculty at BU who would rejoice if Silber's reign came to an end,
> but they rarely speak up for fear of getting their salaries
> frozen, suffering departmental budget cuts, or being denied
> tenure.    
> 
> The following is a series of quotations from the Silber report
> that gave rise to the current flap about academic freedom.  The
> administration's response to a very mild Faculty Council request
> gives some indication of the Orwellian atmosphere of the place.
>


    > 
> Excerpt from John Silber, President's Report to the Trustees,
> Boston University, April 15, 1993, pp. 93-95.  (The Report was
> delivered as a slide show, and then published for distribution
> to parents and others at the time of Boston University's
> graduation ceremonies.  It was not distributed to the faculty.)
  [though it was subsequently reprinted in the Boston Globe --ML].)


    > 
> ". . . let me speak of another way in which the stewardship of
> the Board [of Trustees] can be judged.  Beyond anything you've
> seen so far, but just as important, this University has remained
> unapologetically dedicated to the search for truth and highly
> resistant to political correctness and to ideological fads.  In
> my view, it is not too much to say that among this country's
> major research universities we are one of the very few that still
> deserve to be called a university in the true meaning of the
> term. . . .
>  
>      We have resisted relativism as an official intellectual
> dogma, believing that there is such a thing as truth, and if you
> can't achieve it, at least you can approach it.  We have resisted
> the fad toward critical legal studies, which I've mentioned
> [earlier].  In the English Department and the departments of
> literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the
> deconstructionists to take over.  We have refused to take on
> dance therapy because we don't understand the theory of it.  We
> have resisted revisionist history.  We've resisted the fad of
> allowing every student to do his own thing by determining his own
> curriculum, thereby turning the University into a buffet in which
> the student has whatever kind of mis-education he, in the midst
> of his ignorance, decides he wants.  In the Philosophy Department
> we have resisted the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
> 
>      Across the board we have refused to accept hiring quotas,
> either of females or of minorities believing that we should
> recruit faculty on the basis of talent and accomplishment rather
> than any other consideration.  We have resisted the official
> dogmas of radical feminism.  We have done the same thing with
> regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal liberation.  We
> have refused to introduce condom machines into University
> buildings and thereby compete with drugstores.  We refuse to
> believe that students at Boston University need a college
> education in how to perform the sex act.  We believe that
> students in America who haven't figured that out before they get
> to college are too dumb to come to college.  And we have no wish
> to share any responsibility whatsoever for what they do with
> their knowledge.  We will not serve as procurers or facilitators
> of sexual liaisons.
> 
>      We have resisted the fad of Afro-centrism.  We have not
> fallen into the clutches of the multi-culturists.  We recognize
> that Western culture, so-called, is in fact a universal culture. 
> Western mathematics is the mathematics of the world; Western
> science is the science of the world; and the Western culture has
> been philosophically oriented from the start toward finding the
> truth, and starting to approach it as closely as possible.  It
> was in the Western cultural tradition that people began to
> develop courses in anthropology, in the history of foreign
> countries and in comparative religions.  Buddhism, for example,
> was brought into German Universities by Kant and by Hegel.  This
> is a part of the very meaning of Western culture and
> civilization~not to be parochial, but to be universal in one's
> concern."
>


     
> The Boston University Faculty Council got hold of this report,
> and in recent weeks the Council's Committee on Academic Freedom
> requested of Silber that he "clarify" what he meant by "resisted"
> in the above remarks.  Silber did not respond for a few weeks,
> and Faculty Council Chairman James Iffland discussed Silber's
> report in the BU student newspaper (The Daily Free Press).

  [....]

 [In response, Silber's Assistant General Council wrote a letter 
  to the student newspaper, in which he objected, incredibly, that
  Silber's academic freedom was violated by the Faculty
  Council's questioning of Silber's statement to the trustees. --ML]


    > Another BU official was quoted in the Boston Globe (November 25,
> 1993:  'BU official denies curbs on academic freedom' by Alice
> Dembner):
> "'No credible claims of violations of academic freedom have ever
> been made against the university administration,' Carol Hillman,
> vice president for university relations said in a statement. 
> 'Prof. iffland's reported statements are nothing more than a form
> of acadmic McCarthyism:  innuendo based on secret 'evidence' that
> does not in fact exist.'"


    > 
> Silber finally did respond to the Faculty Council's request, but
> as the quotations in Joseph Hesse's e-mail message indicate, he
> dug in his heels.  I am told that during a recent Faculty
> Assembly meeting Silber accused Prof. Iffland of being a liar and
> a coward.  Clearly, the BU Administration believes that a vicious
> offense is the best defense against criticism.  Iffland and the
> Faculty Council are being pilloried by Silber's propaganda
> machine.  They need support. 
> 
 [The Faculty Council Committee on Academic Freedom
 and the AAUP are currently looking into questions about
 academic freedom at BU, including tenure and promotion
 cases, intrusive efforts by BU administrators to edit
 dissertations and dissertation abstracts, and numerous other
 complaints. --ML]


    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-7-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: [anti-ideology politics]
     [ .... ]


     
Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Re: Digest ending 11-30-94

Regarding the anti-ideology politics of Dr. Silber:

My deepest sympathy to the faculty of BU to find the intellectual
leadership (*is* that what Presidents do in our universities?) of
their institution entrusted to a political demagogue whose audience
is clearly not the serious intellectuals of the BU faculty, but
the media and the mass-market for fear-based, anti-intellectual
politics.

The specific targets mentioned by Dr Silber are exactly the intellectual
movements of our time that challenge establishment orthodoxies and
social and cultural privilege. His claim that they lend themselves
to dogmatic formulations could be made about almost *any* belief
system, including scientific rationalism (have a look at how science
is taught at BU, or almost anywhere, for the evidence).

The best defense of critical intellectual movements is their offense
against established views. Use the tools of these perspectives to
demonstrate the ideological character of modernism, patriarchy,
science, rationalism, and all the historically specific and still
politically dominant intellectual formations which had their origins
in the interests and values of a very small segment of humanity, who
continue to be privileged by them. Demonstrate exactly how these
values, discourses, and practices do in fact favor the interests of
one social caste over those of others. Demonstrate the fallacies of
its claims to universal validity independent of history and culture.
And take the demonstrations beyond the academy to the same media,
and wider political constituencies to which Silber appeals.

If he believes ideology has no place in the academy, convict him
of his own ideology./

I recently had occasion to reply strongly to an editorial in a
professional journal warning of the "slippery slopes of postmodernism".
I am now on the editorial board of that journal. And I received
a lot of support reaction from other professionals in the field,
especially younger, more vulnerable ones, who confirmed my claim
that such statements are not just statements of editorial opinion,b
but, because of existing power relations, create a chilling effect
on intellectual freedom. Silber is apparently using his own position
in a somewhat similarly irresponsible manner. It is actions like
his which constitute the threat to academic freedom, not ideas that
challenge the established wisdom.

I think we have a responsibility to say so, publicly.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU


    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-14-93.

[ . . . . ] 
Today's Topics:
     [Re: BU demagoguery]
     leo strauss

     

    Sender: KESSLER

    Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-7-93

     

    I am working backwards, up the e-mail in my files, but re Lemke’s remarks about BU: What is a “political” demagogue, in distinction from a demagogue? 2) Who are the “serious intellectual faculty” at BU, as distinct from the mere faculty? 3) Name, please, the “social castes” we have in the USA, and I mean as “caste”? What journal is Lemke helping to edit? he doesnt say? and pardon me if the answers are to be found in previous emails that I will work up the list to look at? And, while I am clear about the note from Lemke, 4) how are faculty nowadays to be distinguished from the mass media, the politicos, etc.?

     

    They were not different in the Borking of Thomas, and the Borking of Bork, or the Borking of Guinier, etc. One cannot be a tenured mandarin and ride the rails of hardnosed politics to DC too, can one? ONe never know, nowadays, do one? as FW used to ask. Jascha Kessler, living in this post-Kantian, if not post-Cantian day of ours.

     

     

    Sender: kv10@cornell.edu (Kazys Varnelis)

    Subject: leo strauss

     

    The recent discussion of Boston University President John Silber on this list led me to wonder about his possible connection with the academic/political cult/conspiracy/movement around conservative academician Leo Strauss. While I didn’t find any connection, I would like to bring up the question of Leo Strauss, who is a fascinating – and terrifying – ((post) modern) figure for me and I would like to know what other members of the list think about him and his work.

     

    For anyone who doesn’t know who Leo Strauss is, the following article, ought to be a start. (I should mention that I have explicit permission from the Nation to reproduce this article on pmc-list).

     

    For further reading I would probably start with:

     

    Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952)

     

    and

     

    Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

     

    Kazys Varnelis

    Ph.D candidate, History and Theory of Architecture

    Cornell University

     

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

     

    [Because the permission granted by _The Nation_ covered only one posting in PMC-Talk, most of the article has been deleted in this republication. Anyone wishing to retrieve the original logs from PMC-Talk can do so by anonymous ftp to ftp.ncsu.edu, cd pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-talk, and get 9312. Or, of course, you could get the magazine… –Ed.]

     

    The Nation magazine,

    Copyright (c) 1992, The Nation Company Inc.

     

    November 2, 1992

     

    SECTION: Vol. 255 ; No. 14 ; Pg. 494

    Minority report; Leo Strauss Column

    by Christopher Hitchens,

     

    [ …. ]

     

    The votaries of Leo Strauss form a sort of cult movement that is crucially ambiguous about the idea of elitism. The core belief of Strauss himself, and the mantra of his many rather odd followers, most of them located in the academy and in the “think tank” culture, was:

     

    Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within mass society.

     

    The key word here is probably “within”; Strauss made a special study of the esoteric and the cabalistic, and believed that since ancient times authentic philosophers had occluded their true meaning so as to make it clear only to a class of adepts.

     

    [ ….. ]

     

    Subscriptions:

    The Nation, PO Box 10763, Des Moines IA 50340-0763. 1-800-333-8536.

     

    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-17-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Leo Strauss
     BU Demagoguery
     re: THE NATION piece


     
Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Leo Strauss

The posting about Leo Strauss did indeed push me to think further
about the relation of the academy to democratic ideals. One can
read there an invitation to an elitism with the rather serious
modernist weakness that it imagines that one caste, narrow in its
experience and view of the world, should project its own perspec-
tives as universal and itself as fit to lead the whole of
society. Mistaking the part for the whole does not seem a very
sound foundation for policy-making.

But... Just how realistic is it to imagine instead that someday
everyone is society will take the time, have the interest, ac-
quire the skills, to relate their own perspectives on policy to
*any* model of the social system as a whole? Some policies are
purely local; for them a stakeholder model of participatory demo-
cracy seems reasonable. But other policies necessarily must be
grounded in overviews that encompass relations among many social
groups, agendas, activities. Such overviews will always, in the
division of labor, the specialization of perspective and inter-
est, be the speciality of *some* groups in society. They need not
be monolithically masculine, middle-aged, middle-class,
heterosexual, Christian, Eurocentric, etc. But neither are they
likely to encompass most members of a large, diverse society.
They need not necessarily be allowed the power to impose their
policy choices on the rest of us, but they will be in some sense
in a better position to consider such matters. A lot of the time,
a lot of us just won't care.

And ... Plato, at least, often sounds the theme that people in
general need to believe in certain values, or gods, (or
ideologies) for a social order to operate at all, and that there
is a considerable danger to the social order (*any* social order,
not just the ones we are critical of) when intellectual start to
undermine general confidence in established beliefs. Intellec-
tuals are specialists in critique. We are not supposed to stop at
anything (cf. Descartes, Nietzsche, Postmodernism) in our criti-
cal inquiries. But there is a danger that we could (if we were
listened to, which usually we are not) disturb the social order
in ways that would lead to conditions far worse than those we are
critical of. It seems very plausible to me that Plato wrote with
such notions in mind, and that his works do somewhat cloak his
most dangerous ideas (in the indirectness of the Socratic
dialogues, in the famous allegories and "religious" passages,
etc.). Given the conditions under which many scholars and philos-
ophers have written, even in modern times, not only a moral con-
cern for the danger of their ideas to society as a whole, but a
defensive concern for the danger of repercussions on themselves,
may have led to a certain intertextual "encoding" of their mes-
sages.

We are the intellectual descendants of an elitist tradition. We
know that democratic ideals are the product of a bourgeois (and
masculine, and middle-aged, and modernist, etc.) culture, which
we pride ourselves on criticizing and deconstructing in every
other way. So what exactly might a post-democratic politics be?

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU


    Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      BU Demagoguery

Jascha Kessler asks a few questions about my remarks in the Sil-
ber discussion. The first two seem miss the distinction between
qualifiers and classifiers in English semantics. Social "caste"
is a rather useful idea for postmodernists, I think, since it al-
lows us to refine the matrix of categorial social differences and
name its smallest cells: class by gender by age by cultural back-
ground by .... The term may be less familiar, but the notion is a
useful one, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and many feminist
theorists. Only one such caste has traditionally been politically
dominant in our society. ... The journal I co-edit is
_Linguistics and Education_ (thanks for the opportunity to ad-
vertise).

As for what really seems to be bothering our correspondent, I'd
say it is the touchy relationship between the political and the
academic. Personally, I'd be happy to see more intellectuals (and
not many academics today are, I think) enter electoral politics,
or even just the arenas of public opinion-making. What is being
objected to in the case of Dr. Silber is an attempt, not within
the context of civil politics but within that of an academic in-
stitution, to control opinion rather than to lead it. And I take
it some are suggesting that he is motivated as much or more by
the approval of such a move by those outside his university than
by his responsibilities to the university itself.

I am not, I hope, naive about the inevitable political dimensions
of all institutions and indeed of all intellectual inquiry. But
direct politically motivated efforts to control what are or are
not acceptable theoretical perspectives within the academy should
be resisted. The result of such efforts tends to intellectual
monoculture, and extinction.

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

     

    Sender: KESSLER

    Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-14-93

     

    re: THE NATION piece. Why, one may ask, the phrase “CYNICAL briefing”? Why the use of the term briefing, and why the adjective. If one must not put one’s trust in princes, neither should one put one’s trust in “Nations(s).” Let us not forget where that journal is coming from, and who is the cynical editor of it, an unreconstructed Stalinist, to say the best and the least of him, who assumes that his view of the world is a true one. Talk about simpletons in the PM parish. Str.is one thing; Quayle is another. And William Kristol is a lad with a rather superior education and IQ, as indeed is his father. Please don’t start conflating Strauss, Straussians, Kristol and Quayle. It would be rather shoddy argumentation, about anything. Thinking, it is not. Kessler

     

    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-19-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Plato's ideas]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Avoiding bad faith]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [evil geniuses of poststructuralism]

     

    Sender: KESSLER

    Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

     

    One suggestion may be to ask, What is dangerous about Plato’s ideas? And to whom are they dangerous? And why are they dangerous? What is meant by “post-democratic”? Alpha Beta Delta Gamma, out of bottles? as Huxley suggested in BRAVENEW WORLD? What is a caste? Where are the intellectuals J Lemke speaks of? What makes them intellectuals? Professors are intellectuals? Intellectuals are professors? Such a glibness and fluency of talk is rather worrisome, as it assumes a complaisant audience, knowingness and agreement on categories as defining the world we live in according to this sort of academic argot. Sentimental, suicidal, canting, and bullying in the extreme. As if the folks quoting a Christopher Hitchens did not realize that he publishes in journals supported by megabucks in foundations that are based upon extraordinary wealth. IN Italy years ago, this talk emanated from the “mink coat Communists.” IN the States, today, it is the limousine liberals and their academic janissaries, who know not what they say or do. In a word, it is sheer bad faith. Pontificating bad faith. Kessler here, not even breathing hard, but waiting for a sign, give us a sign.

     

    Sender: CYWB000 
Subject: Digest ending 12-17-93

I was distressed but not shocked by Kazys
Varnelis' message to pmc-talk about Strauss.
The first two paragraphs of _The Nation_
article seem to demonstrate well enough that
the article is confusing, not very interesting,
boring, probably easy to take apart. But who
wants to comment? I was going to wait to
hear other PMCers reactions, but would like to
address this message by K. Varnelis as a show
of some kind of dissatisfaction with the ideas
of, what I see as the L. Strauss club, and show
my support for those who counteract the LS
club (perhaps by adding a "D" to the end of
"LS").

A question in my own mind seems to be, "If I
only had the force of A.R. Stone or A. Kroker--
featured in the most recent Mondo 2000-- I
could clear up my own confusion, and perhaps
push this issue over the edge?" What little
force I have is the wish to see A.R. Stone,
Kroker, H. Giroux, C. Penley, and D. Haraway
(there are others) placed in the same room
with these folks (the LS club). Perhaps other
PMCers can tell me if this Leo Strauss crowd
would be an easy target.

My reaction is central to the problem of
epistemological battles that go on in
individuals' lives everyday. By
epistemological battle I mean the frustrations
of everyday life-- where proof and burden of
proof are too overwhelming to accumulate
against some wrong that is being committed
to you or to anyone else. The aggression of
silence is a good example. Silence does not
seem to be a discourse, and as Marika Finley-
de Monchy says, the "(silence of) death is not
a discourse". An academic elite, or whatever is
being referenced (I am not familiar with the
texts being discussed; although I know that
Henri Giroux has a major contention with
Bloom, and I side with Giroux), seems to be a
community of silence. It's hard to pin these
kinds of opinions down, not simply because
they are not available but because they are so
unpleasurable. [It is obvious that they are
available, K. Varnelis was given permission to
distribute the article in question.]

The discussion on PMC has been a difficult
one. The reason people and individuals arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with theories, words,
texts, languages, codes, intellectual tools, etc.,
is specifically so individuals and people can,
as Bourdieu advocates, avoid bad faith, and
get on with the business of creating. I suppose
people and individuals might also arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with good vocal
skills, good writing skills, and a bit of time to
address all these potential threats to the
creations and creativities many would like to
see and do-- not just an intellectual elite.

I am dissatisfied with the issue at hand. It
gets nasty but not nasty enough. Perhaps
Alphonso Lingis is monitoring PMC-talk and
could respond. Perhaps J. Bigras could
respond from the grave. I feel lucky that
Lemke is around; the BU situation is very
gray. I hope we are living something post-
Kantian. Lemke, as for ""post-Cantian"",
well responded to.

Brennan Murray Wauters,
cywb@musica.mcgill.ca


    Sender: AYEAMAN@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

Seems to me that there are some worthwhile points of view being
discussed here beyond the slurs against what Spivak ironically calls
the evil geniuses of poststructural and postmodern inquiry. (See
Spivak's chapter in Reading & Writing Differently.)

I wonder, with a smile, if President Silber took lessons in Resistqnce
from Henry Giroux? 

        --Andrew
Internet: ayeaman@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu

Dr. Andrew R. J. Yeaman
7152 West Eightyfourth Way #707
Arvada, CO 80003
(303) 456-1592


    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-4-94.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     RE: democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century 
     Post-democratic politics

     

    Sender: Peter Stupples, University of Otago, New Zealand

    pstupples@gandalf.otago.ac.nz

     

    I was struck by the importance of the issues raised by Jay Lemke in response to the Leo Strauss exchanges. Is seems to me that the recent and current events in the former Soviet Union illustrate the problems involved in democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century. The Communist system, as it had evolved under Lenin and Stalin, was clearly non-democratic and had also lost the support of the majority of Russian intellectuals. Communism, in the form it had genetically assumed, has been destroyed and replaced by a swiftly changing array of models that have the appearance of being democratic in the Western tradition. These changes have been accompanied by an almost complete economic collapse. Where stakeholders have had the opportunity to voice an opinion over the past few years they have tended to favour either 1. a return to a form of Communism (better the devil you know – we were better off under Brezhnev – there was a class system in operation in which everyone had a stake and knew the rules) or 2. an inchoate, archaic nationalism (Russia for the Russians, we need a slavonic solution to a slavonic problem, we are the only ones who know how to deal with our historical development). The academy, which was enthusiastically behind forms of socialism in 1917, no longer has a voice – certainly not a voice that is listened to. However I was impressed on a visit to the Russia provinces in May 1992 how well local governments were capable of running their own affairs, able to coordinate local groups of stakeholders into purposeful activity. There seems to be something that can be learnt from this, such as – you cannot interfere with the genetic development of historical processes – Russia is going back to 1916 and rerunning the issues that are pertinent to it – the power of *modern* central governments must be anti-democratic because of the distance from the stakeholders and the self-interests of a vast bureaucracy that is not answerable to those stakeholders. Centralised government is a *modern* idea, it is paternalistic, at best the state looking after the less privileged, who remain without privileges, hope, education, a stake, but are kept fed, clothed and housed to stop them being a social nuisance – post-modernist debates point to the break up of centralising tendencies in the interests of giving stakeholders and stakeholder groups a greater voice and giving room for a diversity of living-choices within communities.

     

    The Platonic idea that people in general need to subscribe to a set of beliefs for social order to be possible is one of those leaps of faith that we no longer need to make. When all *beliefs* are undermined then we can all start looking at the construction of the real world, at the hopes and aspirations of real people and try to find the obviously very complex mechanisms that will allow them to flourish. This is not *post*-democratic politics but, perhaps for the first time, real democracy, the voice of the people, all the people, not simply being listened to by the political-class-patriachy representatives. We do not need beliefs but knowledge. Beliefs distort any objective view of the world. Knowledge leads to respect for the views and aspirations of others. Government structures need to be deconstructed in a physical sense until they are responsive to local interests. Policy-making should be local policy-making with pacts between localities to cover equity issues such as the funding of health and education.

     

    Silber’s comments are part of the defensive response of the patriarchy concerned about critical ideas that break down belief and reveal a real world and real issues that might be uncomfortable for the elite. Leo Strauss gives such ideas an intellectual gloss but are promted, it seems to me by a disrepect for the views of others, a quest for modernist simplicity at the expense of real-life diversity.

     

    Sorry to go on at length and in such prolix randomness. But Jay Lemke posed a question on the nature of post-democratic politics and I thought it wortha response, even one hurriedly and badly put together.

     

    Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Post-democratic politics

Maybe PMC is more flame-proof than other lists, but KESSLER's ef-
fort to foreground critical perspectives and lament complaisance
seemed somewhere between negative and incendiary in its tone. I
certainly think it unwise to reply in kind. I also suspect that
his specific questions were rhetorical (What makes someone an in-
tellectual? Why are/aren't professors intellectual? etc.) and his
point that we should not take it so much for granted that the
common wisdom of the moment on such matters is enough for our
discussions. But we all know that every assumption, every few
words of every discourse, presents an opportunity for endless
critical re-examinations, none of which ever lead to definite
conclusions, though they are certainly essential to the process
of coming up with newer discourses that serve us in some practi-
cal ways. On PMC I assume that we are not in search of "truth" or
old Believers that somewhere there is one such true and flawless-
ly reasoned discourse which must then prove to be, if not the
only useful one, then the most useful one. All the practices of
life are carried on, often quite well, with discourses in which
any of us could "find" numberless flaws.

I read in Kessler's message (Digest 12-17-93) a certain im-
patience with political superficiality, suggesting someone who,
like me much of time, is more satisfied by analyses of how power
sustains privilege and wraps itself in pseudo-intellectual
mystification and misdirection. But these are old discourses.
They have been around and widely circulated in our communities
for more than a couple of generations now. They feel old,
modernist, not-ours. They seem wonderfully satisfying as critique
and totally useless as a guide to constructive action. Their
political heart, which I largely share, needs a new voice, and
their theoretical assumptions need a good post-modernist updat-
ing.

What would a post-democratic politics be indeed? How can there be
a democracy of equals when we have no idea how in practice to
make a society of equals? when this ideal assumes a privileging
of the isolated individual as the ultimate political unit, and we
know that this assumption is itself a specifically bourgeois
ideological creation? What is the context in which we pose the
problem of politics but that of the bourgeois State, a creation,
like many before it, for the imposition of control by some upon
all. Is there a solution to the paradox of scale in politics that
what works in small communities does not generalize to extremely
large ones? Can an entity like a nation-state operate as a com-
munity except by illusion and artificial manipulation? How can
there be a single ideal of politics in the absence of a coercive-
ly dominant ideology? If political ideals are inseparable from
cultural systems as wholes, what other domains of cultural prac-
tice and belief most influence them? If all political critique is
situated and positioned, then how is the modernist critique of
capitalism, and the subsequent critical obsession with coercive
power relationships itself limited, itself a product of masculine
perspectives, of middle-class perspectives, of middle-aged per-
spectives, of European and Judaeo-Christian perspectives, and of
their specific interests?

I think that postmodernism has largely held back from critical
confrontation with modernist political ideals (and I do not mean
classical liberal representative democracy, I mean neo-Marxist
post-revolutionary participatory democracy) because we would also
indict the political status quo and have not had any alternative
to offer. It may also be because p-m is just crossing over from
the humanities to the social sciences (by dissolving the
modernist boundary between them).

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU


    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-6-94.

[ . . . . ] 

Today's Topics:
     Postmodern politics


     

Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Postmodern politics

Most of the replies I have had, on and off the list, to my
queries about postmodernist, if not post-democratic, politics,
have been seriously thoughtful and I am grateful for their per-
spectives. They all, as well as responses I have had to this
question from others lately, point toward localism as the key.

I am as much in favor of localism as anyone, for dealing with lo-
cal issues, and in earlier posting I pointed out that the
participatory democracy ideal seems workable locally, on the
scale of relatively small human communities.

Many people also noted that the idea of nationwide (much less
worldwide) political ideals or systems is a modernist, centralist
one. And at least one person believed that they were not neces-
sary to large-scale communities.

But I do not think that these answers are good enough. Even the
premise of "Think globally, act locally" assumes that local ac-
tions must take account of a larger view of needs and conse-
quences. Local actions interact. They contribute to emergent ef-
fects on higher scales of organization of self-organizing
ecological-social systems. They produce conflicts which are not
resolvable except by appeal to the interests of some larger sys-
tem. Some forms of action require trans-local cooperation,
whether on the scale of large cities, nation states, world
regions, or globally.

Our present political solution to these problems is an unstable
compromise between the older nation-state system (treaties, EEC-
like confederations, wars, economic power-leveraging, etc.) and
the emerging global economic-communication order (multi-
nationals, economic interdependence, global information
networks). The older system was already shifting from an owners-
decide model to an experts-and-managers-decide model as the scale
and complexity of the systems to be controlled grew; that has now
been accelerated by the transnational developments. This is not a
system that entirely works; it is still biased by the dis-
proportiate representation in it of elite caste interests, but it
has the capacity in principle to take mass popular interests and
perceptions into account, insofar as those trained to do so can
in fact appreciate them. At least this is a model, however
flawed, which has evolved naturally within the social system, and
which faces up to the fact that many decisions require a degree
of global knowledgeability that is not possessed locally.

This basically technocratic political model is thoroughly
modernist. It has a horrendous ideology that buries values issues
under "expert-knowledge" issues. It regards its knowledge as ob-
jective rather than viewpoint-limited. It is still an elite suc-
cessor to the previous elite, making common cause with it against
the rest of us at the same time that it is displacing it. Its
worst failures result from the unrecognized subcultural bias of
its perspectives. But at least it faces global issues realisti-
cally. Localist politics seems to me to be romanticist and
utopian by comparison.

Postmodernism, I believe, is itself a consequence of the
strengthening of global integration, the second stage following
colonialist-imperialist domination, when the exchanges across
cultures (and to some extent genders and classes) have started to
become more reciprocal as power differentials have leveled out
somewhat. It is in that climate that the voice of the Other could
effectively challenge orthodoxies, even among the dominated. I do
not really believe that localism is postmodernist. But neither do
I believe in the modernist ideal of global homogenization to the
culture of the presently dominant elite. Diversity is good, we
want it, and no one could have succeeded in getting rid of it in
a viable world social order anyway. Diversity implies a mosaic of
differences, with coherence on local scales, and global integra-
tion based on horizontal interdependence rather than vertically
imposed control. It is the world social-political order as
ecosystem rather than as organism-writ-large, or as the patriar-
chal family-writ-large.

How is this system going to deal with global issues? The very
distinction between local and global is disappearing as the sys-
tem becomes more integrated! It's getting harder and harder to
find a strictly "local" issue, in terms of impact, means for ef-
fective action, causes, stakeholders .... Granted that there are
going to be many diverse local ways of coming to grips with these
kinds of problems, each of those local communities will find it-
self already embedded in something larger, and limited in per-
spective within it.

One can say, Let's just go local and see what happens -- let the
system self-organize. Perhaps we CANNOT get the kind of global
perspectives on these systems needed to make better local deci-
sions. Certainly we cannot hope to control the systems from
within them (or from the individual-level of organization), but
we are still going to have to make decisions. Those decisions are
part of the activity of the system. If they are made strictly lo-
cally, I suspect the system will re-organize away from global in-
tegration, back toward greater local autonomy, and back toward
the kinds of ideologies and political practices characteristic of
that kind of system (neo-feudalism, anyone?). Such a political
alternative is not going to compete effectively with the present
trend toward greater technocracy. What can? what should? (and if
English had a plural interrogative pronoun, Whats, I would have
used it!)  JAY.

PS. Perhaps we have no choice but to evolve through technocracy
to something else, something we couldn't envision until we're al-
ready living in the new postmodern global system. Maybe that
presumption releases us from moral responsibility for political
vision. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

     

  • “‘To He, I Am for Evva True’”: Krazy Kat’s Indeterminate Gender

    Elisabeth Crocker

    Department of English
    University of Virginia
    libby@virginia.edu

     

    (IMAGE)

     

    Like the landscape of Coconino County where he lives, the character Krazy Kat’s gender and race shift, sometimes at random, but more often as a result of his social situation. George Herriman couched his assertions about the socially constructed nature of categories like race and gender, in addition to categories like class, ethnicity, age, and occupation, so deeply in the sophisticated allegory of his comic strip, however, that few readers recognized them. Those who have written on Krazy Kat in the past have confined their comments to Herriman’s drawing style and literary allusions, and to the more poignant but less puzzling aspects of the love relationship between Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.

     

    The situation of the characters remains unchanged over the course of the strip’s run from 1913 to 1944: Ignatz Mouse hates Krazy Kat with a violent obsession that causes him to throw bricks at Krazy’s head; Krazy loves Ignatz with a singleminded passion that causes him to interpret the projectiles as signs of Ignatz’ love; Offissa Bull Pupp loves Krazy Kat and hates Ignatz Mouse, and uses his lawful authority–as well as his billy club–to protect Krazy from the bricks. Ignatz detests the “Kop,” and Krazy does not return Bull Pupp’s affection, but he does not resent the intervention in his relationship with Ignatz. Krazy seems to understand that others cannot see the brick as a token of affection, and he ignores even Ignatz’ own protestations to the contrary, always utterly confident in his perception of the brick as a signifier of love.

     

    The love-triangle plot has allowed critics to dismiss the problem of Krazy’s largely indeterminate gender. In the introduction to a Krazy Kat collection assembled shortly after Herriman’s death, e. e. cummings enumerated a number of tropes for Krazy to figure, including free will, democracy, and romance heroine (vii). Because Krazy is so often caught between the hero Bull Pupp and the villain Ignatz Mouse, and is fairly passive as the object of the Pupp’s love and as the object of the Mouse’s hatred, cummings gendered the Kat female. Nearly all critics and comics historians have since referred to Krazy as “she”; even novelist Jay Cantor, who used the Krazy Kat cast and setting for a postmodern psychoanalytic novel of the same name, unequivocally identified the Kat as a Dora-like female. While cummings himself understood that it was Krazy’s role in the romance-plot that was feminine, and not anything inherent in the character, others have since followed cummings’ use of “she,” relying upon his authority to avoid examining a complex issue.

     

    When questioned about Krazy’s sex, however, even Herriman would respond that he did not know, and the Kat did not seem sure either (Capra, 40). “I don’t know if I should take a husband or a wife,” Krazy complains in an October, 1915 daily. “Take care,” Ignatz responds, hurling a brick. The narrator nearly always refers to Krazy as “he,” resolving awkward, ambiguous, or gender-neutral moments to the pronoun “him,” rather than to the pronoun “it.” Most of Krazy’s activity is not gender-specific, but in scenarios involving some complication of his normal relationship with Ignatz, Krazy adopts whichever gender role will restore the usual balance. Cases of disguise or mistaken identity in either Ignatz or Krazy, and of rivalry with a party outside of the Kat/Mouse/Pupp triangle, invariably produce gender-bending confusion in the strip.

     

    • Full page:
       

      Sunday, April 15, 1923

       

      This episode combines the classic chase scene with the love-triangle plot, further complicated by the intervention of an outside party, Pauline Pullet. Krazy’s behavior here seems to be governed by his innocence and his absent-mindedness, but he actually performs complex maneuvers in order to maintain the most options within the social structures at hand — love and the law.

     

    • Full page:
       

      Sunday, July 14, 1918

       

      Roles in love play do not define the only parameters of gender construction in Krazy Kat. Krazy is a black cat only in general, just as he is generally male. When the Kat’s fur changes color, however, his gender categorically changes with it. Krazy, upon emerging bleached white in Madame Kamouflage beauty parlor, ceases not only to be male but ceases even to be a Kat in the dazzled eyes of the Mouse. Ignatz cannot recognize Krazy when Krazy is white, because whiteness in itself is for Ignatz an appropriate object of erotic desire, which then in turn must be feminine.

     

     

    This Krazy Kat hypermedia project began as a ToolBook application compiled for a graduate course in computing and literary study, taught by Hoyt Duggan and Peter Baker. John Price-Wilkin encouraged me to seek platform-independence when expanding it into a dissertation, of which this article is a part. When the dissertation is finished, with the direction of Eric Lott and John Unsworth, and the technical support of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, it will be published on the World Wide Web.

     

    Click an image to view a comic.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: MacMillan Co., 1971.
    • cummings, e.e. Introduction. Krazy Kat by George Herriman. By George Herriman. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1946.
    • Herriman, George. Sunday pages July 14, 1918, and April 15, 1923, from George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz, vols. 1-9, Bill Blackbeard, editor. Forestville, California: Eclipse Books/Turtle Island Foundation, 1989.

     

  • Four Poems: “Ode To Woody Strode”, “Removing The Obelisk”, “Parental Guidance”, and “The Permanence Of Whim To Providence”

    Michael Gizzi

     

    Ode to Woody Strode

     

    Veteran Actor Woody Strode will appear at the 8 p.m. Saturday screening of John Ford’s “Sergeant Rutledge” at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum’s Wells Fargo Theater.

     

    –Los Angeles Times

     

    Brother Ebon Noggin, Survival Bubba, persona non grata
    In the peckerwood’s head, a midden of bushwah shoe-tree’d
    Into a montage mob of Queeg fits. Can’t beat it
    For sheer eidetic distress of 30 shitkickers with 10 toothpicks recidivism
    A runaway braille trimming tremors to the quick
    Gimme some skulls, man! not these
    Chiropodists down with the croup, Jack, in Drumstick
    Gigging like locust on the corn, humming memory loves company
    Per Idaho beanfire with chili obligations as
    Bronco Nagurski makes the conversion with broken horns

     

    As at a theatre corpses calling curtain calls
    With their entire cast of improprieties, Errol Flynn
    Pinned if only for a second between a crumpet and a scone
    The peak of his powers at the end of his rope
    The one-eyed King Radio with a mumbling jag on –
    This is the chorus of the Caresser’s song
    Canoeer than Velveeta were her thighs
    I thought I was standing in a movie with a leg wound
    An open book of alluvial text approximating flesh
    A ceiling dispensary pulled down to reveal
    Halfmoons claire de luneing at the world

     

    No one has a straight job, wheat snobs rule the waves
    Waterbury sidles to his cardspout
    Tuberculosis got the camellias. Family trees
    May insert any name one chooses for the pedigree of love
    Let the foreign woman come ashore, what as the talkers say
    You’ll never see at home lost in the delicate rays of folklore
    Its minutes recorded with his feet by the Armless Wonder
    Thuggees with allergies film greenhouses, hold shining steam
    To treebuds, prehensile eyes out stalking vim as if vision
    Were a concubine, a rinse cycle lashed to the belly of a Raj
    With buckle of swash, Flora Danica waiting in the wings

     

    Professor Pretzel Wolf buttons the suit on his portrait
    Of trees, an ornamental hombre in a speculum of preen
    Asks, “Who’s the forest of them all?”
    Why – Woody Strode! spiked with summer drone
    His dome chapeau made of breeze, accent grave
    Over the trees tight as a coat of Gliddens
    Not without ribands or the great socko of Kilimanjaro

     

    All these yahoos headed West, have they got names to be blessed?
    Bring me the ho-hum, fly it up here verbatim
    An eggshell carbon 12 writ in a foreign tongue
    As though Johnny Vast had no idea where his howl came from
    And fetch us the cretin who et my heart
    That’s what makes it green, does it not?
    We live in a factory of the future on the edge of a lip
    With miniature cowboys banished forever
    The precision of faraway herbalists spilling the beans
    “Our desires expectorate dutifully” slobbers Crow Bob

     

    An ol’ Yakima stuntjockey son of Cannut uproots the tree
    Of reason roost, wraith of the treeshirt twinges
    Until and when courage is inflated to pressure sufficiently
    Pigeon balloon per square inch chest looking comical enough
    To glance, getting by the smoketrees you reckon it’s only Gene
    Our ofay Autry slit-eyed slimewinder triggering his getaway
    Lately ghosted into Christmas while all the leaves go blind

     

    Only the shine inside perception lights the street
    Yours the campfire that mocks the sun
    Never met anyone outside your head who didn’t shimmer fragile timber
    What I mean Woody is you look swell
    Like them Indian lakes in summer
    Air kisses on a nudist clipboard, offbeat green tops o’ trees
    Everything Ritz crackers in the polluted lake wrappers
    Blue Moon mobile homes for the executive cornhuskers shimmering a song
    Cigarette snorkel on fishlip puffing dawn

     

     

    Removing the Obelisk

     

    From immediate dictation
    and against my will

     

    “I”s the most embarrassing
    character in the world
    a deflector from antiquity
    pretending to be italic

     

    Just another mook on Hungry Hill

     

    “I wanna got to collage
    I want sun on the phone
    to talk me down from here
    Nice embalmer. Easy Boy!”

     

    Fucks it have to do with me?
    This crown ain’t small enough
    for the both of us?
    Gets so downright overused jellyglass
    one has to laugh

     

    Another thing those bones do
    — make your bed

     

    Lump back in on the jungle chaise
    Apache horsefly
    — Hi little soon to be dead buzz!

     

    Later silence
    the only visitor from another

     

    Parental Guidance

     

    Amnesia sweat the emptiness

     

    composed of sponges Darryl
    Adam Ahab DeGroot
    petroglyphs of gringotude
    a near myth childhood hovercraft
    near a 16 foot insect

     
    Die Meistersingerpouts so

     

    stream of air might partly stroke
    goldfish theories of Cliquot

     
    Jugglers with a ducking movement

     

    limberdemain over fruit floors
    lip an osculation on the glass kisser
    from the suicidal kissery, a squeegee
    mops any loss of face

     
    Out bunkers in addition to the standard

     

    facilities provided for comfort have
    cuspidors for the use of psychiatrists
    strategically sick at heart, nowadays sick

     
    A boy’s own wax among his bees

     

    and shrapnell blowing salve
    on the conjured static, spangled
    auras clocked on the draw

     
    Out Padres of the dormitory

     

    contagion on the hour

     

    The Permanence of Whim to Providence

     

    Begin in Purgatory where Lamb rassles Chasm
    and faults shoot halter of their fanfaronade
    nixing any Vita Nuova dynamo nictate deal

     

    Then rent a capsicum and travel nonpareil
    through the Baboon Lancet
    the equipage of a whoop anticipating sinkers
    of a low-rent wagonette in a Dexter diluvium

     

    Cocoon-steaming the small tales of croupiers
    and piazzas yawned at the local salutation
    where Brad Bibbler sucks his Beggar’s Double
    quick as lily over the paddy in a strabismus off Pulp Space

     

    Young Orchards of heartburn licking the salt misogamist
    as you turn spangle and motor
    towards Sutton, sunburn and snail
    thievish as a gospel lottery heard on the racket outside Lack

     

    The low rider ruin of Chickasaw Chepachets
    turbo charging browsers through the ghetto streaks
    damsons lit up like hooves of despite in twaddle
    blue denim brooks across their chests

     

    Or right here in Blackstone your everlastings
    ignoring the dry bones of that stranded drench
    where rain actuaries begin their lament

     

  • “The Geographics: Step Five” and “The Geographics: Step Six”

    Albert Mobilio

     

    The Geographics: Step Five

     

    Antennae lie buried beneath the floor because the reception is better that way. The airwaves brought us crumbs & pocket change but nothing worth diving in for. We learned whoever pounds the rock makes fire, and whoever plows the flame grows their own flaw. Instinct rode us down, looted our conversation, kept us in our seats. That’s why we cannot listen to these unwrapped winds and murmurs.

     

    It’s dark now. It was dark when we started out. The moon is a crooked tooth buried in the sky’s smoke stained roof. Over time you changed my system and now I feel like something northern has happened to us.

     

    They’ve left me some taste of mental health. Up in the old hat factory a miniature horse circles a track. Final exams are held between laps; that’s when they test our spoiled grey faces for muscular decisions. We learn how to hold our ass in place, to shake nickels into dimes. A routine physical disclosed how I had been screwed up by savage cooking, the kind done with pencils and safety pins.

     

    I titled her the same way she authored me — with bitten facts dealt like marked cards. She raked back her hair so she could bend to her task, and that’s when I felt left out. The forecast called for black ice and dark coughs. An army of starlings broke ranks when some dust blew down from the hills. She was waving from the porch but I stayed clean in a rented van.

     

    The paper that cut me was white bond. The fair and chiseled marble remains visible in the way she conjugates her nerves like Henry James. Behind the gas tanks, underneath the carnival tent, or any place where temperature accumulates, a gorgeous pinch of cypress leaves can be hidden. I am summoned by their scent. Out there in the blood thick mist, a cicada drones. Or is it the arrival of my gift of mourning tongues?

     

    The Geographics: Step Six

     

    Where does the world leave its dying heat? On the Lido, in the stone and stucco courtyards? Does it create mechanic pressures among the city’s darkened swirls? One day the gifts we bought will remind us of arriving in an early morning rain, of that balcony, and of an argument we had behind its beveled glass doors. If we had acted like we belonged, no one would have asked us for our tickets.

     

    Some call it a station but he knows it’s a terminal. The train falters in another state, so he swallows and waits until the new pills are proved upon his pulse. He believes his watch is about to burst. The platform is crowded with petals, the tracks hum with a distant approach, and welding sparks lift a small awning of yellow light above two workmen in the tunnel’s gloom. He saw this and knew he had become the ticket-of-leave apostle.

     

    I unwrapped a new thesaurus and looked up a synonym for the word desicate but I ended up feeling sad because every word was chained to another. The toxin bled through the old school halls; neon stained snow fell forever in the streets outside.

     

    Meeting in rooms. Look at my sofa, listen to my lamp. I live here in an ice-age marriage to my open floor. No one prepares you for this. You get booklets, brochures, and hints from other tourists, but nothing helps. When I turned the dial to the left, there was a rumba; when I turned right, it was cha-cha-cha, but your purple-heart treason has worn my footwork down to a walk.

     

    Covered in smoke, buried beneath a painted cowboy-sky, the sun roars through your hair. You once lived a magazine life, then you entered the pedestrian crosswalk that stilled you. Come to me, speak through my microphone scars and soon we will be such lovers I will be able to hear you tanning on the roof. You will smuggle my complaint across your border and we will finally begin to burn where it counts.

     

  • Buffalo and Marshmallows

    John Yau

     

    Buffalo and Marshmallows

     

    It’s an old glory when a toenail crocodile
    named Greta Gabo

     

    boasts that any tall
    thumb tucking

     

    pimple popper
    still in touch

     

    with the bottom of his atavistic roots
    will soon be rented out

     

    to the King of pencil Toads
    and his last iron caravan

     

    Dairy wolves howl
    at empty spoon

     

    while I sleep in black mall
    lily padded trailer park

     

    answer the second
    second

     

    I’m stalled in a parallel stupor
    squeezed between

     

    red hurt of a fall potato
    and blue stones of a part-time seed shifter

     

    I’m one of the jilted
    eager to bite the crust

     

    I plead with what’s left of the steam engine
    because I know it’s soft pajamas

     

    being one of the flies
    A free sample sniffing around

     

    the tattered drums of the effluvial honey
    You get to count creamy blots and carpet burns

     

    transmit grains of junked passion
    to the weekend handwarmers

     

    west of Sandusky, Ohio
    adopted home of tormented petal pushers

     

    one charm boxers and retired log nuts
    the whole glad parking lot of idle fun seekers

     

    You even score the church fire
    and pray to the invisible camera

     

    You get down on your full grown knees
    and you begin to stay

     

    In better times, I lived on a bingo farm
    ate off a checkerboard

     

    Each morning, I baked out the stains
    and flicked drivel into the yard

     

  • “Hauntings,” “Temples and Follies,” and “A Reading”

    Virginia Hooper

     

    Hauntings

     

    The hauntings laced themselves into another year,
    Grew into miracles and fertilized the grass.
    Spinning absent-mindedly,

     

    A thump and a rattle intercepting my dream,
    I clutched in fury to my story,
    And, uncertain on which side of the glass I had landed,

     

    I turned the page to the first window and climbed through.
    A cord by which a weight is suspended
    To test the perpendicularity or depth of a thought.

     

    Anything resembling a plume or feather. To adorn, dress,
    Or furnish with plumes. The thread had vanished
    Through the maze lined with brilliant blue, an opulence

     

    Amazing as the strutting peacock crossing my path.
    The hauntings came more frequently,
    Settled across the lawn, warmed the eaves. Is this the lesson

     

    We were destined to create, tracing sweet edges onto everything,
    Legibly exchanging all the fettered excuses
    With a lovelier version dangling off into the clear deep pool?

     

    A division or boundary marked or conceived
    Between adjoining areas. The cord plumbed my ignorance.
    The plot stretched endlessly, they reported, endlessly

     

    Repeating what came to me one evening
    Persuading the windows to cloud,
    the stars to brighten, the moon to retreat demurely behind

     

    A dark sense of urgency. As though the mist itself were a mirth
    Yet grounded into body. Demanded in haste,
    Given under duress, a rattled mention remained for dinner

     

    Clearing the table until the chairs were neatly arranged
    For company. We invited only those missing
    All sense of propriety. All cleverness concealed. All desserts aflame

     

    With sweetened promises wrapped in tinsel foil
    Tucked under the waiting pillow. The room was elsewhere.
    The explanation unravelled beyond my understanding,

     

    Hedged the border with a wait and see attitude.
    Every applicant was scrutinized as a potential messenger.
    But me, that was the problem. Me. Trespasser

     

    Pressed into service by an aimless habit, a nagging
    Obsession drawing me back to the entrance. Relentlessly crippling
    My desire to move on. Relentlessly sending me on

     

    An errand that folded me back upon myself.
    Was this the curse of my preoccupation?
    Or merely my blessing. To mingle and combine

     

    So as to obscure or harmonize the varying components,
    The concerns, they called them, compulsions pushing through
    The soil until a garden emerged, organized

     

    And flowered new responsibilities — life, they said —
    Kept me awake all night. The river remained the same.
    But more and more, so did I. Looking the part,

     

    Aimless but energized by a new vision
    Acquired in darkness, stuffed into my pockets and taken home.
    A fortified watchtower, squinting against the light,

     

    Caught in the middle of the sacred chamber
    Whose floors were laid with marble,
    Whose walls held special insight into a vision

     

    Pared for comfort, shaved and scaled to match the era,
    Chimed the hours. Measured in the stone
    Of an old extravagance, a mystery reverberating the present

     

    Until lights sing, darkness speaks the spell
    Lingering in the confusion, as though the hauntings
    Were Enlightenment itself. The distance to be travelled

     

    At any cost, its systems and roads mapping vast
    Expanses of mind over matter — a mere restoration
    Supporting the vaulted roof. These copies

     

    And originals identical. Looking for some way in,
    Circling the distance to be travelled,
    I thumbed through these illustrations of the profound.

     

    The cord weighed heavily upon me, sunk deeper
    Than my memory allowed. Than my mother allowed.
    The cord pulled me back to the old intersection,

     

    Laid me bare to be dressed in the plumes of her intrigue.
    But was I the trespasser? Lured back again
    With the knowledge gleaned from experience, the old promise

     

    Made by us both. To encircle by winding or weaving,
    Endlessly revolving back to the place of origin.
    The logic and elegance of the interior carried me

     

    Through its argument, an alphabet building
    Its own structure to house an idea hidden
    In these secret vaults. I wandered aimlessly.

     

    Here was design trimmed to fit
    The particular niches of the puzzle, a maze of concentration
    Broken only by generations turning the soil.

     

    The thought stood perpendicular as a stave
    Beside me, a mechanism assigning me greater responsibility,
    A trick played well, posted as sentry.

     

    They say crusaders were killed endlessly flitting and filing away
    The various pieces of the puzzle, sited upon
    An inhospitable terrain, just inside the encircling logic

     

    Nature obeys. The temple had been filled with sand,
    A castle subject to erosion. These were visions
    We had to learn, to leave, to stand outside the threshold

     

    And peer through. A story half as old as time
    Traced back to a source, then broken off.
    As much for the onlooker as the maker.

     

    A buried circular staircase, circling toward the obscure
    But recorded section of a vision sketched into stone.
    The fortune lay scrolled inward toward the reader,

     

    Its clear message left as a last minute impulse
    To render clear the clouded window
    Parted for that breath of air, the first glimpse.

     

    Temples and Follies

     

    Small temples and follies in the woods,
    The feeling soon passes
    Into extinction, or was it merely the fact

     

    We reconsidered the labor of love — the rapture
    Of reaching journey’s end when respite
    Can’t be sought through an intricate network
    Of hedged corridors, or on summer nights it took us through,

     

    Sudden views of the vanished lake.
    Houses should be lived in again and the landscape
    Returned, which we discovered

     

    Had been designed to rival Hope’s End serene romance.
    The residents are always free to roam.
    The feeling soon passes,
    But respite can be sought as a labor of love

     

    As all rooms share a graded vista
    Restoring journey’s end when the guests arrive,
    The original owners of the house.

     

    A Reading

     

    You are impatient, says the oracle.
    The weather has arrived cloudy, another’s day’s conclusion
    Shot with unraveling paths set back

     

    From the shore. An ocean’s breeze reshuffles the cards
    Across the deck, disorder restored to pattern,
    A chance you pattern yourself toward.

     

    Prompted to rethink your question,
    Which might, with grace, lift you above the determined
    Arrangement currents have washed you against,

     

    You play another hand. A chance you pattern yourself
    Against lifts back through selves
    You have assumed, fools sprung from oracle

     

    Beginnings, framed inside the gold-leaf border
    Of the cards played in patience
    When it wasn’t in the cards to share the evening

     

    With another. And what of crossed destiny?
    Teased out of solitaire, prompted by impatience,
    You think you have been courted by the cards.

     

    Strange, how this pattern unravels
    Inside the tale arranged for the oracle’s pleasure,
    A link, after all, you think.

     

  • One or Two Ghosts for One or Two Lines

    tall blank zebras appear

     

                     A

    To care. The aerogramme made a lily of necessity,
    stumped box, redolence ribboned far off in the glass
    cities I opened and closed to the dandy
    drawers. A colt emerged on a clotted pansy. A pan
    required fanning. This repose a thread files.
    Inside the spitting rope sweeps
    like a foppish knot or lighthouse,
    a beam where the sun withers like snow
    in its box of jewels. Like a towel-like now.

     

    tiny broom zippers boxed

     

                     Z

    Light as a ruler, I knitted the whiffing train to coverlet.
    Dark, I had my lips. They travel apart when I kiss.
    Exonerated groove. The captioned stock box
    waved to the master’s bedroom.
    Clacked suds. All flaking tide and shout
    was music walking out a headlamp.
    Engined isthmus, emerged track of levels, it could be
    nice. The pubescent birdie sleeps
    in a closed head. So,
    it knows or it knows.
    A crumb held out a mighty
    citron in a beak, screwed backwards.
    But no ox sniffled to an owl
    or stockinged box strum through bedroom.

  • Two Poems

     

     

    One And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
    A “generation and transition” company make the
    water muddy. Transitional generation in company
    of a muddy mere formality: or was it going Dutch,
    in transmission to transition? A mere formality of Dutch,
    a merely formal vocabulary, to be used “in company”
    of Dutch transmissions. My mission was to dutch
    a trans-generation, to formulate transitions.
    Or was it going muddy in the company?
    I threw mud at mimesis, a mere Dutch formality.
    And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
    Formerly, the Dutch kept company without vocabulary.
    My former mission was a mere formality,
    but I doubled my Dutch on the company’s transmission.

     

     
    Two Primitive haze or composite rejection?
    Such training requires persistence–
    a fateful hour, a stupid wheel, praiseworthy
    annals–the main term “reaction” would be
    retained, though searching for innocuous
    phenomena. It was not enough to have
    a patternbook, a dictatorship, or to claw walls
    looking for paint. Returning to the decoding end:
    you make it more cryptic. I’ll pant effectively.
    Roughly, in the rough, we are roughing it.
    This happens when I forget to differentiate–
    a false proposition of the first order.
    Or say: “When you hate maps, you hate the future.”
    Our lines are at stake in the border.

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         ESSAYS IN POSTMODERN CULTURE:

     

     . . . Now Cordless

     

    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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         Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology

     

    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 it 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.

     

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    •      The publisher’s need to develop an economic and a user model for electronic dissemination of scholarly journals.

     

    Ground-Breaking:

     

    •      Published by an established journals publisher, the MIT Press, working with the MIT Libraries to guarantee library concerns are addressed; 
    •      Committed to publishing a level of quality equivalent to standard print journals with the goal of increasing acceptance of electronic publication in the tenure review process; 
    •      Committed to fast turnaround in the peer review process in order to attract high-quality manuscripts and communicate research results more quickly to the scholarly community; 
    •      Sold on a subscription basis for fees comparable to standard print journals to both libraries and individuals in an effort to develop an economic model that will encourage publishers to develop electronic journals (initial subscription prices of $125/year for institutions and $30/year for individuals); 
    •      Published on the basis of trust in libraries and scholars to pay for what they use and to follow established copyright and fair use guidelines; 
    •      Archived at MIT Libraries and University of Chicago with commitment to keep text compatible with latest standards, and assurance of authoritative version of text.

     

    What a Subscriber Gets:

     

    •      Article-by-article publication, beginning with approximately 15 articles in 1994 (equivalent to a triannual standard paper journal) and including possible paper delivery if demanded by customers; 
    •      Notification by e-mail of article title, author, and abstract when articles are ready, and the ability to retrieve them from the Press’s WAIS server via FTP or gopher, in either LaTex source file or Postscript form; 
    •      Articles published with an associated file of forward pointers for referral to subsequent papers, results, and improvements that are relevant to the published article; 
    •      Advertisements and notices available upon request from file server at MIT; 
    •      Access to continually updated archive located at MIT.

     

    As a Library Subscriber you have permission to:

     

    •      Store the Journal on any file server under your control, and make it available online to the local community to print or download copies; 
    •      Print out individual articles and other items for inclusion in your periodical collection; 
    •      Place the Journal on the campus network for access by local users or post article listings and notices on the network to inform your users of what is available; 
    •      Print out individual articles and other items from the Journal for the personal scholarly use of readers; 
    •      Print out articles and other items for storage on reserve if requested by professor, student, or university staff; 
    •      Share print or electronic copy of the Journal with other libraries under standard inter-library loan procedures; 
    •      Convert material from the Journal to another medium (i.e. microfilm/fiche/CD) for storage.

    For subscription information please contact:

     

    journals-orders@mit.edu
     
     

    Back

     

    •      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.

     

    “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

     

    “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

     

    Back

     

    •      CONTENTION: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

     

    Contention is:

     

    “…simply a triumph from cover to cover.”
    Fredrick Crews

     

    “…the most exciting new journal that I have ever read.”
    Lynn Hunt

     

    “…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

     

    Back

     

    •      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

     

    Back

     

    •      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

     

    Back

     

    •      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 1,850 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
     
     

    Back

     

    •      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.

     

    Edited by Chuck Welch, an active mail artist since 1978, “Eternal Network” makes an important first step towards introducing mail art to non-artists, artists, and academic scholars. For more information send e-mail to

     

    Cathryn.L.Welch@dartmouth.edu
     

    or write to

     

    “Eternal Network” PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755
     

    Back

     

    •      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
     

    Back

     

    •      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
     

    Back

     

    •      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

    Back

     

    •      Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts

     

    ISEA is the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. ISEA coordinates the continued occurence of the International Symposia on Electronic Art (the ISEA Symposia).

     

    1988: Utrecht, Holland

    1990: Groningen, Holland

    1992: Sydney, Australia

    1993: Minneapolis, USA

    1994: Helsinki, Finland

    1995: Montreal, Canada

     

    ISEA publishes a monthly Newsletter, both electronically and as a hard copy. Associate membership is free of charge for one year.

     

    Anyone interrested in membership info, aims and a sample Newsletter, contact

     

    ISEA@SARA.NL

     

    Greetings,
    Wim van der Plas
    ISEA Board

    Back

     

    •      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

     

    •      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

    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

    Back

     

    •      MTV Killed Kurt Cobain

     

    Announcing the publication of a mini-multimedia ‘zine, MTV Killed Kurt Cobain, with text, graphic, and sound resource. MTV Killed KC was written and directed by Mark Amerika and produced by Bobby Rabyd for Alternative-X, an electronic publishing enterprise at marketplace.com as Alternative-X

     

    MTV Killed Kurt Cobain can be ftp’d from:

     

    ftp.brown.edu

    in the directory:

    /pub/bobby_rabyd

     

    It is in Storyspace Reader format, a standalone hypermedia template for the Macintosh.

     

    Send queries to

    st001747@brownvm.brown.edu

    Bobby Rabyd

     

    Back

     

    •      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.”

    Back

     

    •      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 / journals-orders@mit.edu

    Back

     

    •      R H E T N E T: A CyberJournal for Rhetoric and Writing

     

    RHETNET Philosophy:

     

    There are numerous places to talk on the Internet, and scholars in all fields are there (and there and there and there) pouring forth rivers of words. Amid the inevitable and voluptuous mundanity of those conversations reside moments of discovery, the fiery and spontaneous generation of knowledge, and even wisdom. These conversations, or parts of them, are worth saving and savoring. If we look at all of literature, including scholarly publication, as being one long, vast, intricate and diverse conversation, then the discussion online can be seen as part of the same discourse. The conversation is migrating to a new media, but the means of (attempting to) provide coherence are still developing.

     

    RHETNET is an effort to adapt the functions of academic print journals to the new environment. Journals simultaneously serve as the medium of conversation and the repository for knowledge. RHETNET serves those purposes, but takes the shape of its native environment: cyberspace.

     

    The project is both radical and conservative. RHETNET provides rhetoric and Internet students and scholars with the means of capturing, contextualizing, searching, and retrieving some of the intriguing and valuable conversations that occur on various parts of the Net, but which currently lie scattered and forgotten in dusty corners of the virtual world. It provides a repository of netscholarship on rhetoric and writing. We envision it as a decentered, organic repository for all the stuff of the Net that is of interest to the rhetoric and writing community, while also including space for various traditional types of scholarly discourse.

     

    RHETNET Purpose:

     

    1.      To act as an archive for Net conversations
        relating to rhetoric and writing.  Few existing
        places of discourse (mailing lists, newsgroups,
        chat systems, MU*s), make an effort to capture
        those conversations in a form that would allow
        them to be reviewed reflectively and commented
        upon in the future.  They lack the archival intent
        that RHETNET provides.

2.      To offer a place for original publication of
        articles and essays.  We're interested in
        retaining some aspects of traditional scholarly
        publishing, or at least exploring the
        possibilities for the co-existence of network and
        print-oriented forms and sensibilities.

3.      To create appropriate help sheets, conference
        tutorials, or workshops on accessing the journal
        and advice that will help new members of the Net.

4.      To promote netscholarship and community.

    RHETNET Editorial Intent

     

    The editorial management group is responsible for coordinating regular publication of refereed articles on rhetoric and writing, particularly as they are constituted in the network environments of a developing cyberspace. As the journal evolves, this traditional structure may meld with the forms of scholarship more native to the Net, the forms that other aspects of the journal discover through exploratory approaches to network publication.

     

    Anyone who is interested in being actively involved in the editorial or technological aspects of the journal is invited to join the editorial management group. Like the various scholarly communities on the Net, the main qualification for joining this effort is interest in writing, rhetoric, poetics, composition and critical theory, pedagogy, and online publication. Institutional credentials are not relevant.

     

    A Listserv list, RHETNT-L@mizzou1.bitnet, has been created to serve this effort, initially as a place to conduct asynchronous discussions about the project. The list is managed by Eric Crump.

     

    To subscribe, send email to

     
    LISTSERV@mizzou1.bitnet
     

    or

     

    LISTSERV@mizzou1.missouri.edu
     

    Leave the subject line blank and in the first line of the note, put:
    sub RHETNT-L Your Name

     

    Anyone who has trouble subscribing should write to Eric at

     
    LCERIC@mizzou1.bitnet

    or

    LCERIC@mizzou1.missouri.edu

     

    Back

     

    •      RIF/T

     

    RIF/T, the electronic poetics journal, is interested in receiving proposals and/or submissions for a forthcoming special issue on Charles Olson.

     

    Inquiries may be sent to:

     

    E-POETRY@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
     

    RIF/T is edited by Kenneth Sherwood and Loss Pequen~o Glazier

    Back

     

    •      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

     

    Back

     

    •      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.

    Back

     

    •      The Journal of Performance Studies

     

               ______   ______     ______
           ######|  ######\    ######\
             ##|    ##|  ##\   ##|__##|
             ##|    ##|   ##|  ######/
             ##|    ##|__##/   ##|  ##\
____________ ##|    ######/    ##|  ##\___________

     

    The Journal of Performance StudiesT141 (Spring 1994)

     

    TDR is a journal that explores the diverse world of performance. How does this relate to you? The journal emphasizes the intercultural, and the inter-disciplinary and spans numerous geographical areas and historical periods. TDR addresses performance issues of every kind: theatre, music, dance, entertainment, media, sports, politics, aesthetics of everyday life, games, play, and ritual. TDR is for people in the performing arts, the social sciences, academics, activists and theorists–anyone interested thinking about the “performance” paradigm. The journal, is edited by Richard Schechner of the Department of Performance Studies, New York University, and is published quarterly by MIT Press.

     

    Although TDR is not yet an electronic journal, you can browse through sample articles online and subscribe via e-mail from the Electronic Newsstand or directly from MIT, the publisher (see directions below).

     

    Check out our table of contents:

     

    In This Issue (T141 Spring 1994)

     

    Comments
    TDR & NEA: The Continuing Saga – TDR Comment by Richard

     

    Schechner (editor)
    In Memory of Utpal Dutt – by Sudipto Chatterjee
    In Memory of Robert W. Corrigan – by Richard Schechner

     

    Letters
    Free Giveaway of His Plays – by Richard Foreman
    Marxism, Melodrama, and Theatre Historiography – Dan Gerould responds
    Eelka Lampe Responds to Masakuni Kitazawa
    Native Earth and Jennifer Preston – a letter from Alan Filewood
    Retiring or Recharging? – a letter from Richard E. Kramer

     

    Articles
    Muhammed and the Virgin: Folk Dramatization of Battles Between Moors and Christians – by Max Harris

     

    “A Radiant Smile from the Lovely Lady”: Overdetermined Femininity in “Ladies” Figure Skating – by Abigail M. Feder

     

    Tomas Schmit: A Fluxus Farewell to Perfection – interview by Gunther Berghaus

     

    Going Going Gone: Theatre and American Culture(s) – by Bradley Boney

     

    Whatever Happened to the Sleepy Mexican?: One Way to be a Contemporary Mexican in a Changing World Order – by Yareli Arizmendi

     

    The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century – by Guillermo Gomez-Pena

     

    The Other History of Intercultural Performance – by Coco Fusco

     

    Book Reviews
    Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (by Susan Carlson) – reviewed by Lizbeth Goodman

     

    Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (edited by Laurence Senelick) – reviewed by Kim Marra

     

    The National Stage: Theatre and Culture Legitimation in England, France and American (by Loren Kruger) – reviewed by Susan Manning

     

    Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (by Natalie Crohn Schmitt), The Actor’s Instrument: Body, Theory, State (by Hollis Huston), The End of Acting a Radical View (by Richard Hornby), Acting (by John Harrop) – all reviewed by Phillip B. Zarrilli

     

    Each TDR issue is filled with photographs, artwork, and scripts that illustrate every article. The journal, founded in 1955, is 7 x 10, and a 184 pages per issue.

     

    Come browse and subscribe

     

    1. MIT Press Online
    To access MIT Press Online Catalogs and subscription information:
    telnet techinfo.mit.edu /Around MIT/MIT Press/journals/arts/

     

    You can also access MIT via Gopher in USA/massachusetts/MIT/

     

    To subscribe to TDR through MIT Press, send e-mail to:
    journals-orders@mit.eduMIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA
    02142-1399 USA.
    Tel: (617) 253-2889 Fax: (617)258-6779

     

    2. The Electronic Newsstand
    You can browse through an article from our latest issue and
    obtain subscription information on the Electronic
    Newsstand.On Gopher, go to: massachusetts/MIT/Interesting Sites to
    Explore/Electronic Newsstand/all titles/TDR:The Dram
    Review/

     

    To subscribe to TDR through the Electronic Newsstand, send your name and address to:

     

    tdr@enews.com. Or call: 1-800-40-ENEWS.

    Back

     

    •      TONGUING THE ZEITGEIST
      A NEW NOVEL BY LANCE OLSEN

     

    So you want to be a rock’n’roll star? In a tomorrow that isn’t distant enough, you’ll have to sell your soul to MTV to pick up a guitar. And then they’ll start carving you up, making you over in the mega-media image of glitter and bone….

     

    LANCE OLSEN’S many other books include the novel Live from Earth and the first full-length study of the godfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson. His work has appeared in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, among them Mondo 2000, VLS, and Fiction International.

     

    To Order:

     

    Permeable Press 4
    7 Noe Street, Suite 4
    San Francisco, CA 94114
    bcclark@igc.apc.org
     

    ISBN 1-882633-04-0, $11.95

     

    Back

     

    •      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

    Back

     

    •      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

    Back

     

    •      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

    Back

     

    •      Postmodern Culture’s PMC-MOO

     

    PMC-MOO is a 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 has its own mailing lists on postmodern literature and theory. 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

     

    hero.village.virginia.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. PMC-MOO is based on the LambdaMOO program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.

     

    Back

     

    •      Representations

     

    New ventures in humanities scholarship

    Published by the University of California Press

     

    ". . . widely recognized as among the most innovative outlets for work
in literary criticism, art history, and cultural history."
--Ludmilla Jordanova, Social History of Medicine

    Representations is a quarterly interdisciplinary forum offering imaginative and challenging approaches to the study of culture. Since 1983, Representations has devoted its pages to ground-breaking critical thought.

     

    RECENT SPECIAL ISSUES:

     

    Number 29:  "Entertaining History: American Cinema and Popular
             Culture," edited by Carol J. Clover and Michael Rogin

Number 30:  "Law and the Order of Culture," edited by Rober Post

Number 31:  "The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century
             England"

Number 33:  "The New World," edited by Stephen Greenblatt

Number 37: "Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories"

Number 42:  "Future Libraries," edited by R. Howard Bloch and Carla
             Hesse

    FORTHCOMING SPECIAL ISSUES IN 1994:

     

    Number 47: Eighteenth-Century Culture

     

    Number 48: New Understandings of Eastern Europe

     

    SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

     

    $33 Individuals
    $23 Students (with copy of ID)
    $62 Institutions
    (add $9.00 for foreign surface postage)

     

    Send orders to:
    Representations
    University of California Press
    2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley
    CA 94720

     

    Order by Phone (510/642-4191)
    Fax (510/642-9917)

     

    journals@garnet.berkeley.edu
     

    Prices subject to change

     

    Back

     

    •      UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
      HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LABORATORY
      11th ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM & OPEN HOUSE

     

    June 13, 1994
    Laying the Foundation for the Information Super Highway:
    Human-Computer Interaction Research

June 14, 1994
    Superteaching in the Electronic Classroom:
    Concepts, Design and Evaluation

June 14, 1994
    Interfaces to Imagination:
    Art, Music, and Poetry in the Digital Village

Sponsored by
    Center for Automation Research University of Maryland

with additional support from
        Computer Science Center
        Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
        Institute for Systems Research
    
Registration


    June 13, 1994

    Laying the Foundation for the Information Super Highway
    (   ) $150 Industry - Full fee includes videotape,       
    technical reports, handouts, demo disk and lunch buffet

    (   ) $110 Faculty/Staff - University faculty & staff fee
    includes videotape, technical reports, handouts, demo    
    disk and lunch buffet

    (   ) Student - Free registrations without materials or  
    lunch will be granted to full-time undergraduate and     
    graduate students space permitting

June 14, 1994
    Superteaching in the Electronic Classroom

    (   ) $80 Industry
    (   ) $50 Faculty/Staff
    (   ) Student

June 14, 1994
    Interfaces to Imagination

    (   ) $60 Industry
    (   ) $40 Educator/Art Practitioner
    (   ) Student
    
Directions and Parking Info:

     

    Please enclose a self addressed stamped envelope with your registration by May 27, 1994 to receive ___ a map and/or ____ a parking permit (indicate what you need). After May 27, permits cannot be requested, so plan to bring lots of quarters for parking meters.

     

    There is a 10% reduction for group of 4 or more from the same organization and registering together. Contact Teresa Casey (see below) for details.

     

    Since we CANNOT accept charge cards or cash, please enclose with your registration your check made payable to The University of Maryland, or a purchase order with the reference CFAR/HCIL-OH94.

     

    Mail to:
        Teresa Casey
        HCIL
        AV Williams Building
        University of Maryland
        College Park, MD 20742-3255
        e-mail:  tcasey@cs.umd.edu

    Back

    •      Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist

     

    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
    KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA
     

    Back

     

    •      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
     

    Back

     

    •      WRITING AND ELECTRONIC SPACE
      CYBORG PERFORMANCE AND POETICS

     

    THE LITTLE MAGAZINE is looking for writing and visual artwork which exists in the imagination of media still uncreated.

     

    For all of its power and fascination, electronic media are still limited by metaphors clumsily imported from print. James Joyce and Ezra Pound were making hypertexts sixty years before the appropriate technology was created. We are looking for work which can be reproduced in the pages of THE LITTLE MAGAZINE but will inspire the engineers of the third millennium.

     

    Although we are interested in adventuresome uses of the technology, it is not technology but vision which is lacking. We do not need virtual reality machines cranking out the same kind of misinformation that we get from television in even more addictive forms, but we are sick also of the polite, conventional thing literature has become. It is so comfortably contained in print. It is mediated and re-mediated (already); it is the subject of schools. We are not interested in work which exemplifies the theories of the past or even the hottest, most engaging theory of the present. We are interested in work which will call forth the media of the future.

     

    CYBERPUNK GROW UP!

     

    The deadline for the issue is December 15, 1994, but get in touch with us as soon as possible. We will try to find a way to publish important work even if it does not fit neatly into the usual literary magazine format. Tell us about your writing, visual art, sound pieces, videos, multimedia performances, network art, and investigations of genres still unnamed.

     

    The Editors
    THE LITTLE MAGAZINE
    Department of English
    State University of New York at Albany
    Albany, NY 12222

     

    DJB85@csc.albany.edu

     

    Back

     

    •      Call for Participation:
      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

    Back

     

    •      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
     

    Back

     

    •      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

    Back

     

    •      RESEARCH ON VIRTUAL RELATIONSHIPS

     

    *******************************************************
*                                                     *
*        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

     

    •      Call for papers:SIXTIES GENERATIONS:
      FROM MONTGOMERY TO VIET NAM
      AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MEETING OF SCHOLARS, ARTISTS & ACTIVISTS

     

    Second Annual Conference

    November 4-6, 1994

     

    Sponsored by _Viet Nam Generation_ and hosted by Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT

     

    Call for papers, session proposals, readings, performance art pieces, and workshops.

     

    Deadline for proposals: July 15, 1994.

     

    The First Annual Sixties Generations conference was held March 4-6, 1993,in Fairfax, Virginia. It was sponsored by _Viet Nam Generation_ and the American Studies, Film Studies and African American Studies Programs of George Mason University. Sixty academic paper presentations, eight poetry and prose readings, one play reading and a concert filled three days. We also held a full-day roundtable discussion, “On the Sixties in the Nineties,” featuring participants who were activists in the Sixties and continue to be so today, including activists in SNCC, SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Yippies, various racial/ethnic formation, antiwar formations, political formations, women’s groups and cultural workers.

     

    The event was such a success that _Viet Nam Generation_ decided to do it again this year. [Last year’s program is appended to this Call for Papers.] We welcome submissions in all disciplines, in all topic areas related to the 1960s in the U.S. and internationally.

     

    SCHOLARLY PRESENTATIONS

     

    Please send abstracts (250-500 words) describing your individual presentations, or collections of abstracts describing your panel proposals.

     

    Panel sessions will be 90 minutes. Folks interested in putting together whole panels should limit the number of presenters to three, and hold the length of individual presentations down to 20 minutes each, so that sufficient time will be left for audience responses.

     

    We welcome individual paper submissions on any topic related to the 1960s. Individual presenters should also limit their presentations to 20 minutes. We will assemble individual presenters into panels.

     

    LITERARY READINGS, VIDEO, FILM, AND PERFORMANCE ART

     

    If you are interested in reading prose or poetry, submit samples of your work (and tapes of previous of readings, if available). Readings will be limited to 25 minutes per reader.

     

    We will consider videos, films, and performance art pieces of up to 45 minutes in length. Please send samples, tapes, video clips, or whatever documentation is most suitable for your medium.

     

    WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

     

    Activists interested in putting on workshops at the conference can propose either 40 minute or 90 minute sessions. Please send a description of the workshop and related materials or publications.

     

    We welcome innovative ideas, so if you have an idea that doesn’t seem to fit into one of the categories described above, write and tell us about it.

     

    Submit proposals either in hard-copy or over email to:

     

    Viet Nam Generation
    18 Center Road, Woodbridge, CT 06525
    Fax: 203/389-6104

     

    kalital@minerva.cis.yale.edu
     

    _______________________

     

    The morning session will focus on recollections and reflections on people’s involvement in movement work in the 60’s. The afternoon session will focus on the value of the lessons and the continuing agendas and methods of the 60’s movements as they affect the work of social justice in the 90’s.

     

    We encourage conference participants to drop in on the Roundtable and join the ongoing discussion. Roundtable participants are also urged to visit other conference events and to join us for a cash bar, reception, and concert at the conclusion of the discussion.

     

    Conference Panels

     

    9:00-10:30am

     

    Panel 9: Viet Nam War Film I
    “Viet Nam War Film,” Cynthia Fuchs; “The Heart of Darkness Motif in Vietnam War Texts,” David L. Erben, Univ of South Florida; “Warren Beatty and the Draft,” Katherine Kinney, UC Riverside

     

    10:45am-12:15pm

     

    Panel 10: Sixties Popular Culture
    “Folk Songs and Allusions to Folks Songs in the Repertoire of the Grateful Dead,” Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Tech Univ; “Beatles, Beach Boys, Leave It To Beaver, Mustangs, GTO’s Freedom Marches, a sexual revolution, a war and PTSD,” John Ketwig; “Talking about the Beatles,” Bernie Sanders

     

    1:30-3:00pm

     

    Panel 11: Performing Arts
    “Planet Shakespeare: The Bard in Cold War America” Susan Fox, Washington, DC; “Shakespeare, Kerouac & Hedrick,” Donald K. Hedrick, Kansas State Univ; “West African Dance and Race/Culture and Gender Identity in Los Angeles African American Communities,” Phylise Smith, UCLA

     

    Panel 12: Reinterpreting the Sixties V
    “Peace Through Law: John Seiberling’s Vision of World Order,” Miriam Jackson, Kent, OH; “Reverend Malcolm Boyd and Bishop Paul Moore, Jr.,” Michael B. Friedland, Boston College; Eros on the New Frontier: The Limits of Liberal Tolerance,” Louis J. Kern, Hofstra Univ

     

    3:15-4:45pm

     

    Panel 13: The Viet Nam War
    “The National Liberation Front in South Viet Nam,” Ton That Manh Tuong; “The Tet Offensive and Middletown: A Study in Contradiction,” Anthony O. Edmonds;”The Impact of the American Antiwar Movement on the South Vietnamese Urban Youth Struggle Movement,” Nguyen Huu Thai

     

    Panel 14: Viet Nam War Film/Drama II
    “Decentering Genre: Vietnam War Films and Portrayal of Reality,” Catherine E. Richardson, Chattanooga, TN; “The Death of the Sixties: Easy Rider & and Deliverance,” Margie Burns, Cheverly, MD;”Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino,” Dave DeRose, Yale Univ

     

    5:00-6:30pm

     

    Panel 15: Music
    “Folkore of the Viet Nam War,” Lydia Fish, SUNY-Buffalo; “In Country Songs,” Chuck Rosenberg; “Pilot Songs of the Viet Nam War,” Chip Dockery

     

    7:30pm Concert & Reception
    O.V. Hirsch
    Chip Dockery
    Chuck Rosenberg

    Back

     

    •      splinter

     

    splinter is a new electronic publication that seeks texts in various states of unfinish prose poetry neither both your scraps your scrytch your fragments your language doodles unfinished stories unfinished scenes unfinished sentences experiments freewriting drafts of drafts outlines bits of dialogue directionless musings stanzas that never found their way into poems flashes that dead-ended scribbled down and never became

     

    no length guidelines / authors keep all rights

     

    rolling submission, no deadlines

     

    the contact address at this point is

     

    dave1@gibbs.oit.unc.edu
     

    send your submissions, subscription requests, questions, and comments (put SPLINTER somewhere in the subject line) e-mail subscriptions are free and encouraged

     

    thanks

     

    Back

     

    •      Special issue of Style on
      Possible Worlds, Virtual Reality, and Postmodern Fiction

     

    Deadline for submission: November 30, 1994.

     

    To be published in 1995

     

    Contributions are solicited on the following topics:

     

    1. The centrality of ontological questions in postmodernist fiction and the contribution of the theory of possibleworlds in capturing and formulating the ontological issue. Inparticular: the stacking/embedding of realities, the transgression of ontological boundaries, the uses of recursive structures and their ontological implications.

     

    2. Virtual reality (VR) as a technological implementation of the philosophical concept of possible world.

     

    3. Challenges to the notion of actual world and alternatives to the “modal structure” in narrative universes. Hypertext and the decentralization of semantic universes. The theme of the disappearance of reality in fiction and theory.

     

    4. Hyperrealism as parody of realism in postmodern culture. The philosophical basis of the concept of realism and its connection to virtual reality.

     

    5. The thematization (especially in science fiction) of the concepts of virtual reality, parallel universes, alternative possible worlds, immersion in game-worlds, and interplanetary travel as a metaphor for movement across possible worlds.

     

    6. Game-theory and the concept of immersion in virtual worlds–as either thematized or implemented in postmodernist fiction or popular fiction.

     

    7. The myth of virtual reality in contemporary culture and media.

     

    8. Virtual reality as a simulacrum. The role of simulacra (imitations, images, copies) in postmodern culture and fiction. The problematics of the relation between image and reality, sign and referent, original and copy and its implementation in postmodernist fiction.

     

    Papers must be original contributions and will be refereed. Length should be between 20 and 40 pages, double spaced. Before submitting a paper, please contact the guest editor:

     

    Marie-Laure Ryan
    6207 Red Ridge Trail
    Bellvue, Colorado 80512

     

    mmryan@vines.colostate.edu
     

    Back

     

    •      U N D E R C U R R E N T

     

    Call for Manuscripts

     

    UNDERCURRENT is a free journal available on the Internet through e-mail subscriptions. (See end of this message for how to subscribe for free.) We are seeking article submissions or queries with abstracts providing an analysis of the present in terms of discourses, events, representations, classes, or cultures. We seek to publish analysis of the present from diverse intellectual perspectives–feminist, historical, ethnological, sociological, literary, political, semiotic, philosophical, cultural studies, and so forth. We seek applied analysis rather than theory. Any theoretical orientation ought instead to be apparent and immanent in your particular focus on the present. We especially encourage interdisciplinary work. Article length varies according to your needs, anywhere from “short-takes” of 500-1000 words to “feature” of up to 7500 words.

     

    As its audience is potentially much broader than that of academic journals held only in university libraries, the style must account for an educated audience which is not necessarily familiar with either the jargon or the debates in a special field. UNDERCURRENT wishes to publish articles that address this broader audience while also conveying a vivid sense of how current academic scholarship can contribute to our understanding of the present. We are attempting to bridge the gulf between academia and the general reading public, a gulf which has allowed various misperceptions about academia to become politically overcharged in the popular media.

     

    All submissions will receive a reply, however no copies can be returned. Any major citation format is acceptable, although endnotes must be used rather than footnotes due to the contingencies of various platforms for viewing electronic text. Submissions and queries can be sent in any of the following ways, in order of preference:

     

    1.> e-mail to

     

    heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu
     
     and note in the
subject field that this is a submission to UNDERCURRENT

     

    2.> Mail a floppy diskette with your text in ASCII or WordPerfect (address below).

     

    3.> Mail two copies of your essay by traditional post to:

     

    UNDERCURRENT
    Erick Heroux
    Dept. of English
    University of Oregon
    Eugene, OR 97403

     

    ABOUT FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS: You can subscribe yourself to UNDERCURRENT by sending a one-line e-mail message:

     

    SUBSCRIBE UNDERCURRENT YOURNAME@DOMAIN.WHERE

     

    Address it to:

     

    mailserv@oregon.uoregon.edu

     

    Problems or questions can be e-mailed to

     

    heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu
     

    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

     

    •      NII-TEACH

     

    Scholastic Network, Scholastic Inc. is pleased to announce a new list dedicated to the discussion of the National Information Infrastructure and its role in education.

     

    As you know, policy decisions made about the NII will affect how teachers and students use online services, how they will be accessed, how they will be paid for, and who will be able to get these services first.

     

    We are encouraging you to share your views on the NII and what it should offer teachers. Moderators of this list are Bonnie Bracey, the Arlington, VA classroom teacher appointed to the NII Advisory panel, Leni Donlan of CoSN (the Consortium for School Networking) and Jane Coffey, a teacher-member of the Scholastic Network.

     

    This unmoderated list will only be on-line from March through June 1994. All classroom teachers and others interested in sharing feedback about education for the NII advisory group are invited to participate.

     

    To subscribe to NII-TEACH, send email to:

     

    NII-Teach-request@scholastic.com
     

    Leave the subject line blank.

    The text of the message should say:

    subscribe NII-Teach yourfirstname yourlastname

     

    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.

     

    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
     

    Back

     

    •      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 &
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(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
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1 May 1995

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1 September 1995

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1 May 1995

Summer Seminars for College Teachers
(Joel Schwartz; 606-8463)
   Participants                          1 March 1994            
Summer 1994

   Directors                             1 March 1994            
Summer 1995

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(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
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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)
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1 April 1995

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1 October 1994

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1 July 1995

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1 July 1995

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December 1994

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1 October 1994

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  Centers for Advanced Study            1 October 1994           
1 July 1995

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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.

     

    Back

     

    •      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.ca
    or
    Christian Allegre
    allegre@ere.umontreal.ca
    Universite de Montreal
    Departement d’etudes francaises
     

    Back

     

    •      AMERICAN LITERATURE SUBLIST

     

    AMERICAN LIT ANTHOLOGY #1 (upgraded April 1994)
  one disk, 1.1 Mbyte
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Our Mr. Wrenn -- Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man by
   Sinclair Lewis
Renascence & other poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
  one disk, 1.1 Mbytes
Little Women

HORATIO ALGER
  one disk, 900 Kbytes
Cast Upon the Breakers
Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York
Struggling Upward

AMBROSE BIERCE
  one disk, 800 Kbytes
Can Such Things Be, The Devil's Dictionary

WILLA CATHER
  two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (1.2 Mbytes) -- O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark
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JAMES FENIMORE COOPER #1
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The Last of the Mohicans

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JACK LONDON
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Disk #2 (690 Kbytes) -- Moby Dick #2

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
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FRANK NORRIS #1
  one disk, 800 Kbytes
The Pit

EDGAR ALLAN POE
  28 tales on one disk, 1 Mbyte
These include The Gold-Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
The Fall of the House of Usher, etc.

MARK TWAIN
  four disks, $10 each, $40 for the set
Disk #1 (1 Mbyte) -- Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Disk #2 (1.1 Mbyte) -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
  Court, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective, Extracts
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  Ghost Story, Niagara, My Watch, Political Economy, A New
  Crime
Disk #3 (900 Kbytes) -- What Is Man? and Other Essays,
  The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (upgraded Dec. 1993)
Disk #4 (1 Mbyte) -- A Tramp Abroad

     

    Back

     

    •      ENGLISH LITERATURE SUBLIST, April 2, 1994

     

    BEOWULF TO 1800

CANTERBURY /BEOWULF/GAWAYNE
  one disk, 1.1 Mbytes
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Beowulf translated by Francis Gummere
Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knyght (SGML)
Gammer Gurton's Needle (SGML)

SHAKESPEARE
  five disks, each of which  includes a glossary in addition
  to the Shakespeare texts, $10 each, $50 for the set
Disk #1 (1.1 Mbytes)  -- Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello,
  Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar,  Romeo and Juliet
Disk #2 (1 Mbyte)  -- All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like
  It, Love's Labor's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream , Much
  Ado About Nothing ,Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night
Disk #3 (1.3 Mbytes) -- Henry IV Parts 1 and 2,  Henry V,
  Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3,, Richard II,  Richard III
Disk #4 (1 Mbyte) -- Tempest, Winter's Tale, Cymbeline,
  Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of
  Verona, Comedy of Errors, Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint,
  Other Poems
Disk #5 (1.3 Mbytes) -- Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida,
  Henry VIII, King John, Pericles, Timon of Athens, Titus
  Andronicus, Merry Wives of Windsor, Rape of Lucrece, Venus
  and Adonis

BEN JONSON #1
  one disk, 600 Kbytes
Bartholomew Fair
Volpone

JOHN MILTON
  one disk, 600 Kbytes
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained

MOORE/BACON/DRYDEN/MARVELL
  one disk, 1.2 Mbytes
Utopia by Thomas Moore
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon
John Dryden's translation of The Aeneid
Poems by Andrew Marvell (SGML)

JOHN GAY/JOHN BUNYAN
  one disk 500 Kbytes
The Beggar's Opera
Pilgrim's Progress

***1800-1918

JANE AUSTEN #1
  one disk, 1 Mbyte
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey

EMILY BRONTE
  one disk, 675 Kbytes
Wuthering Heights

WILKIE COLLINS
  two disks, SGML, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (800 Kbytes) -- Woman in White #1
Disk #2 (800 Kbytes) -- Woman in White #2

JOSEPH CONRAD
  two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (1.1 Mbytes) -- Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer,
  The Heart of Darkness
Disk #2 (400 Kbytes) -- The Nigger of the Narcissus (SGML)

CHARLES DICKENS
  three disks, $10 each, $30 for the set
Disk #1 (600 Kbytes) -- A Christmas Carol, The Chimes,
  The Cricket on the Hearth
Disk #2 (900 Kbytes) -- A Tale of Two Cities
Disk #3 (1.1 Mbytes)  SGML -- Great Expectations

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
  four disks, $10 each, $40 for the set
Disk #1 (1.1 Mbytes) --The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
  The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
Disk #2 (1.1 Mbytes) -- The Return of Sherlock Holmes, A
  Study in Scarlet, The Poison Belt
Disk #3 (1.1 Mbytes) -- Through the Magic Door, The Memoirs
  of Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four
Disk #4 (1 Mbyte) -- His Last Bow, The Hound of the
  Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear

ELIZABETH GASKELL #1
  one disk, 300 Kbytes, SGML
Some Passages from the History of the Chomley Family

H. RYDER HAGGARD #1
  one disk, 500 Kbytes
King Solomon's Mines

THOMAS HARDY
  three disks, $10 each, $30 for the set
Disk #1 (800 Kbytes) -- Far from the Madding Crowd
Disk #2 (1 Mbyte)  -- Tess of the D'Urbervilles
     this disk is available in either SGML or plain ASCII, please
specify
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ANTHONY HOPE
  one disk, 400 Kbytes
The Prisoner of Zenda

SOMERSET MAUGHAM
  two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (700 Kbytes) -- Of Human Bondage chapters 1-59
Disk #2 (800 Kbytes) -- Of Human Bondage chapters 60-end

WILLIAM MORRIS
  one disk, 500 Kbytes, SGML
News from Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest, Being Some
  Chapters from a Utopian Romance

BARONESS ORCZY
  one disk, 600 Kbytes
The Scarlet Pimpernel

SIR WALTER SCOTT
  two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (1.2 Mbytes) -- Ivanhoe
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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
  two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set
Disk #1 (1 Mbyte) -- Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Treasure
Island
Disk #2 (600 Kbytes) -- New Arabian Nights
Disk  #3 (900 Kbytes) -- The Wrecker

ANTHONY TROLLOPE
  eleven disks, SGML,  $10 each, $110 for the set
Ayala's Angel, one disk, 1.3 Mbytes
Rachel Ray, one disk, 900 Kbytes
Wortle's School, Lady Anna, one disk, 1.3 Mbytes
Phineas Finn, two disks, 900 and 800 Kbytes
Redux, two disks, 800 Kbytes each
The Eustace Diamonds, Volume 1, two disks, 800 Kbytes each
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    Please let us know if you would like to receive by email other
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or information on how to order.

     

    NON-FICTION
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   Beowulf to 1800
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    Back

     

    •      Spelunk with International Artist

     

    Explore the urban unknown. Spelunk under bridges in Chicago with international artist. Call Keith at 313.995-3490.

     

    Back

     

     

    Back.

     

     

    END OF NOTICES

     

  • Laurie Anderson and the Politics of Performance

    Woodrow B. Hood

    University of Missouri–Columbia
    c562611@mizzou1.missouri.edu

     

    Anderson, Laurie. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992. Performed at the Lied Arts Center, Lawrence Kansas, March 29, 1994.

     

    Performance theorist Philip Auslander has argued that whatever theoretical or empirical value finally attaches to the term “postmodernism,” the contemporary performance artists that we call postmodern share a certain critical distance from modernism and are able to historicize the contemporary “in the Brechtian sense of getting some distance on the world we live in and thus gaining a better understanding of it.” 1 Gaining distance from the world of late capitalistic America seems indeed to be the focus of Laurie Anderson’s new performance piece currently touring the United States and Canada. The work is ostensibly to promote Anderson’s book Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992, but it more importantly offers a contextualization of Anderson’s art from the early 1970s up to current day. The event details the growth of Anderson as an artist from her rougher beginnings like the song “Walk the Dog” to her more polished performance pieces from Empty Places.

     

    The show is a work in progress and it may change from venue to venue as it tours the country over the next few months. This review is being based on the March 29th performance at the Lied Center in Lawrence, Kansas. Though Lawrence seems an unlikely venue for an Anderson performance (she generally sticks to larger, more urban areas), she frequents this small, Midwestern town for the sake of her friend and artistic mentor William S. Burroughs, a local resident who was in attendance at the Lawrence show.

     

    The evening is rather brief–a little over one hour. The performance consists of Anderson sitting in front of a keyboard with two microphones (one is processed and the other isn’t) and a large sound board to her right. Underneath the sound board lies a DAT machine which plays the underscoring of Anderson’s readings from a collection of pages in front of her.

     

    This is the most intimate Anderson to date. The mise-en-scene has been stripped to its bare technical bones. The videoscreens, lasers, techno-gadgetry, and spectacle wizardry are gone. Lighting effects consist mainly of gel changes and primarily only light her well enough to be seen. What one sees is Anderson reflecting back on her career with an eye towards her future. She even says that the show is a retrospective about the future; by looking at where you’ve come from, you see where you’re going.

     

    The stories and talk-songs that comprise the performance are arranged by the series of associations based upon the “Nerve Bible”–by which she means the body. 2 What the audience gets is an apparently free association of juxtaposed images and ideas; the responsibility of finding meaning in the juxtapositions is placed solely upon the audience. The arrangement of the pieces may vary from night to night as Anderson creates new material or deletes old, establishing a whole new arena in which meanings can be created.

     

    Anderson performs a sampling of performance pieces from all periods of her work. Several of the pieces come from her recent notes, and will presumably go onto her upcoming album, Bright Red (produced by Brian Eno), and eventually the album’s multi-media promotional tour next year. She begins with the end of the Nerve Bible book, by talking about the future in “My Grandmother’s Hats,” a story about her Bible-thumping grandmother who kept waiting for the end of the world to arrive:

     

    . . . I remember the day she died, she was very excited. She was sitting in her hospital room waiting to die and she was very excited. She was like a small bird perched on the edge of her bed near the window and she was wearing this pink nightgown and combing her hair so that she would look pretty when I came to get her. And she wasn’t afraid but then something happened that changed everything.

     

    After years of preaching and predicting the future, suddenly, she panicked. Because she couldn’t decide on whether or not to wear a hat.

     

    And so when she died she went into the future in a rush, in a panic, with no idea of what would come next.3

     

    From this point, Anderson meanders around in her book, retelling earlier songs and monologues like “White Lily,” bits of “Coolsville,” and other previously presented material. Other stories surface as Anderson wanders back to the front of the Nerve Bible book where she tells of being offered roasted dog by the chief of a tiny Pacific island, Panope, in 1980 and watching the cremation tapes of the father of the Prince of Ubud in 1984.

     

    The most pronounced through-line one discerns in these scattered materials is that of Anderson’s emergence as an explicitly political artist. Despite some marginal elements of political critique in her early periods, Anderson primarily focused on examining American identity and myths; her early work contained no discernible political positioning. But a shift began with the 1989 performance of Empty Places. By then, Anderson had come to feel that her work was too mainstream, part of the establishment; it had been institutionalized. As she told John Howell, “I was tired of being “Laurie Anderson.” I wanted to start over. 4 Using the same performance style and methodology she had mastered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she began to place a new emphasis on socio-political commentary. By the late 1980s, she had shifted away from the exploration of form to a new, subversive attack directed at the American status quo.

     

    In this regard, Anderson’s career is consistent with the broader trajectory of American performance art from the 1970s to the present. Other well-known artists such as Diamanda Galas, Karen Finley, and Orlon have made Marxism and cultural feminism standard elements of contemporary performance art. As Auslander has remarked (here paraphrasing New York Times art critic Andy Grundberg):

     

    in place of the detached, often opaque ironies of postmodernism, young artists are displaying renewed interest in art that addresses spiritual values, on the one hand, and overtly polemical, political art addressed to the AIDS and censorship crises on the other.5

     

    Anderson herself is fully conscious of this turn or transition in her work. “Like many people,” she says, “I slept through the Reagan Era politically.”

     

    When I woke up, everything looked really different. Homeless men and women were living on the streets of New York, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dead or dying of AIDS, and the national mood was characterized by fear, intolerance, and straight-ahead greed. Suddenly everything seemed deeply unfamiliar. Was this really my country? I decided to write about this new place, not because I had any solutions, but because I needed to understand how and why things had changed.6

     

    In Empty Places Anderson continued to employ her usual artistic practice of juxtaposing disparate images and objects, but there was a decisive change in her mode of operation. If Anderson’s early performances could have been called subversive at all, it was only in the broadest sense of the term: they questioned the established framework of American identity in an abstract way. But beginning with Empty Places her work became subversive in the narrow sense: it mounted a direct and confrontational attack on the American political system. And in the five years since, Anderson’s work has become ever denser with political references and ever more aggressively counter-hegemonic. Her Voices from the Beyond tour, which resembled the current one in its lack of spectacle, was also read from notebooks and dealt with the contemporary political atmosphere of America as the events of the Gulf War unfolded. She also did a piece on the 1992 presidential election for National Public Radio and a “Rock the Vote” PSA for VH-1.

     

    Much of the newer work centers on more global political concerns. She describes an encounter with an Israeli explosives expert which teaches her of the seductive power of bombs: “Here I am, a citizen of the world’s largest arms supplier, setting bombs off with the world’s second largest arms customer, and I’m having a great time.” 7 The earlier Anderson might have simply capitulated to this pleasure, rather than calling it into question. The question for her now is no longer that of the beauty of the image, but that of the articulation between particular political stances and particular ideas of beauty. “Night in Baghdad,” for example, examines the implicit aesthetics of media coverage of the Gulf War, which enabled this hideous event to be represented as a sort of cross “between grand opera and the Superbowl.” 8

     

    I do not mean to suggest that all of Anderson’s pieces now thematize national and international politics. There are moments in Nerve Bible when she explores the relation between aesthetics and politics on more local or personal registers. She tells some interesting stories, for example, about her relationship with the early 1980s comedian Andy Kaufman. She recalls the confusions of art and life that Kaufman sought to effect through his strange performances, and her own confusion when she served as one of the staged “victims” of his wrestling act. Kaufman would dare women to come up on stage and wrestle him, and Anderson was one of the women he hired to take him up on the challenge. She was not eager to participate in this seemingly sophomoric routine, she says, and only agreed to do it after she had consumed a few whiskeys and Kaufman had goaded her with his offensive behavior. But once on stage she found that Kaufman’s aim was really to wrestle. He sought to unravel any distinction between the performance of violence and the reality, and this was a project with which Anderson was simply not comfortable.

     

    Yet Anderson was clearly drawn to Kaufman and his attempts to break down the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life. She tells another story, about going to an amusement park with Kaufman and doing the ride on which people enter a large drum and lie against a wall. The drum spins and the bottom drops out after the people have been anchored to the wall by centrifugal force. Kaufman would wait until the ride was about to begin its spinning and the crew was checking the bindings to make sure everything was safe, and then he would start screaming, “We’re all going to die!” What struck me as most significant in this part of Anderson’s show is that in telling this story she broke with her familiar, carefully controlled speaking rhythm and began screaming in the manner of Kaufman himself. Here, for the first time that I am aware of, Anderson collapsed somewhat the always carefully judged distance between her performing and her personal life. The cool, controlled performance artist is perhaps giving way to a more personal, emotional storyteller.

     

    The more personal Anderson is on display after the performance as well, when, after leaving the stage for a few moments, she returns to take questions. Anderson moves out of the performance mode at this point and seems to speak directly and candidly to the audience–about her creative practices, the relation of her stories to her actual life, and so forth. On this particular night, her most interesting remarks concerned the place of her art in a market economy. She argues that she tries to make a performance that does not rely on pop-star identification, on the desire to emulate and consume. She wants to avoid becoming a product for sale and wants to create a more resistant and viable art, an art that is not simply subsumed within institutions of power.

     

    This kind of rhetoric comes somewhat uneasily from Anderson, who after all maintains contracts with Warner Brothers Records and Harper/Perennial Books, and is arguably the most successful individual–the closest thing to a pop star–in the performance art genre. But Anderson’s ambigous stance is consistent with that of other politicized performance artists today. As Auslander has remarked, postmodern political art has found that it “must position itself within postmodern culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them.” 9 Such a stance leaves us with many paradoxes and problems still to be worked out. But we are fortunate to have Anderson among those who are performing such work.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 6.

     

    2. Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 6.

     

    3. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 281.

     

    4. John Howell, Laurie Anderson (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 12.

     

    5. Auslander, 1.

     

    6. Laurie Anderson, Empty Places: A Performance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), back cover.

     

    7. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 273.

     

    8. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 276.

     

    9. Auslander, 23.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Anderson, Laurie. Empty Places: A Performance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
    • —. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
    • Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
    • Howell, John. Laurie Anderson. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992.

     

  • Coalitions and Coterie

    Ira Lightman

    University of Norwich
    I.Lightman@uea.Ac.Uk

     

    Edwards, Tim. Erotics and Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity, and Feminism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994.

     
    This book doesn’t quarrel too much with anyone, but then it doesn’t leave itself much room for polemic, so thorough is its survey of essays and books about and by gay men and feminists. It listens, which can’t be a bad thing. Tim Edwards’s procedure is to quote most of the writers he discusses at some length, and nearly always to show them in a favorable light, even when they clash with each other. Edwards is trying to settle an existing feud rather than to start a new one, and to establish the common ground on which more productively cross-disciplinary approaches to sexuality might emerge.

     

    The feud at issue here is that between feminists who have written critically about pederasty, pornography, and sexist attitudes among gay men, and gay men who have responded to these attacks by writing critically about feminists’ too-sweeping (and hence homophobic, heterosexist) generalizations about gay sexuality. A good example of the latter is Craig Owens, who, in a marvellous essay from Men in Feminism cited by Edwards, argues that feminists accept Freud’s theory that anti-gay bigotry stems from repressed gay desire in straight-identified men because this theory piques the bigoted straight-identified men who are implicitly these women’s target.1 But, says Owens, this approach fails to acknowledge genuine homoerotic feeling that hasn’t passed through a self-hating, gay-hating denial stage, i.e. it fails to acknowledge the very areas of feeling that mean most to many gay-identified men. Thus, Owens is arguing, feminist application of this “homophobia equals homoerotic” equation draws on straight experience rather than gay experience, and is in fact marginalizing of the latter. Similarly, other gay male critics of feminism cited by Edwards point out that feminist critiques of pornography begin by postulating the essence of the practice, then proceed to demonize it, and, by extension, to demonize all gay manifestations of it. This kind of feminist critique locates the abusive dimension, the insult, of a sexual practice within a straight sexual relationship, in terms of the institutionalized misogyny and oppression of women within patriarchy, and then extends the analysis without pausing to consider the quite different forms of oppression patriarchy exercises over gay men.

     

    The stakes of these critiques and counter-critiques are high, for they lead feminists to associate gay men, and gay men to associate feminists, with patriarchy rather than with its active resistance. Indeed, gay men end up accusing straight feminist women not only of naively collaborating with the patriarchal enemy but of supplying that enemy with the academically legitimized weapons he needs to police the terrain of sexual difference.

     

    Edwards does a good job of describing this situation. He calls particular attention to the curious protocols of the whole debate, which reflect the demographics of feminist and gay sympathizers. The former, being the larger group, offer broad generalizations and critiques of the latter, while the smaller group for the most part merely defends its own turf from unfriendly critical incursions. While feminist writers have presented wholesale critiques of the theory and strategy of gay male activism, it is almost unheard of for a gay male writer to attack the theoretical positions and institutional practices of feminist women except where these touch upon gay politics itself. This creates a fundamental and limiting asymmetry in the debate which Edwards does well to highlight, though it has nothing to do with the substance of the arguments advanced.

     

    But for all its usefulness as an overview of the current state of gay and feminist politics–and the book ranges widely across such topics as pederasty, pornography, visibility, AIDS, and postmodernism–this volume seems somehow too narrow in its conception. Reading it I found myself trying to imagine a more boldly interdisciplinary or multi-voiced version of the project: a broader dialogue. It’s not so much that I wanted a more ethnographic approach. True, this book lacks the kind of oral-historical dimension that would incorporate the views of people who can’t write or can’t get published; but ethnographic work can itself produce the lack of theoretical, or simply cordial, engagement between disparate parties that Edwards laments. No, it’s Edwards’s asides–against the men’s movement, against straight men in general–and his cursory treatment of child abuse literature (which contrasts with his thoroughness on most everything else), that mark the limits to his apparent inclusiveness. Edwards addresses himself to an audience which he envisions as sharing with him a very specific and finite hierarchy of approaches and texts; he covers this material and excludes everything else. It is possible that if he had gone further afield he would have alienated some of the gay men and feminists whose solidarity the book is meant to promote. His aim, after all, is to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics of a patriarchal order. But in my view his omissions are a real weakness; there is a danger that the coalition he promotes will be too static and comfortable, too much of a closed establishment in its own right.

     

    My most general objection to the book has to do with what might be seen as a kind of residual Freudianism, or at least scientism, in its tone. Freud has always seemed to me the archetypal distrustful outsider, the sort of commentator on gay sexuality who is handled in today’s gay press with amused indifference or mocking disbelief. He sits in his office, sees someone for an hour, sums him up with reference to his own tiny range of models of peoples’ lives, and comes to a conclusion, finishes the day, locks up the office, and goes home to dinner party functions and relations only with heterosexuals. He offers sweeping scientific theories on the basis of very brief and shallow acquaintance with his objects of study–and this makes him a figure of some amusement to writers of the gay press, who speak from detailed knowledge of lives led differently. It seems that Tim Edwards can’t, except in occasional brief anecdotes, draw on this latter, indigenous tradition of writing about gay sexuality, but must instead locate his work in the tradition that’s home to Freud. Perhaps this is academically required of him. And perhaps his publishers, Routledge, encourage his use of the voice of the distrustful outsider as well, as a voice of greater authority or at least greater appeal to a straight readership. In any case, the book seems closer in this respect to the community of straight “experts” on homosexuality than to the gay community on the streets.

     

    Aside from from this general question of tone and positionality, I would also raise some more specific questions about the book’s arguments, arguments in which a residual Freudianism is again discernable. Edwards cites the work of Sheila Jeffreys, who has battled to deny any comradeship, as a lesbian, with advocates of sado-masochism. Her argument is that S/M glorifies heterosexist and misogynist oppression as well as child abuse, by eroticising them. Her opponents argue that, on the contrary, eroticizing power destabilizes and dethrones it. This debate strikes right to the heart of the struggle to build a coalition of the sort Edwards advocates. A coalition between S/M practitioners, both gay and straight, and gay non-S/M practitioners would need, as Edwards indicates, to be based on shared values of some sort. But what Edwards and most other commentators seem not to recognize is that these values can be detached from a specifically sexual agenda and cast in terms of the radical reform of the structure of society; it is a matter of shared social values, not shared sexualities or sexual attitudes. To return to Craig Owens’s essay in Men in Feminism, it is divisive to define homoerotica as always filtered through homophobic repression, because this doesn’t recognize, and indeed therefore marginalizes, the majority of homoerotic experiences (which are oppressed, not repressed). But it does not therefore follow that the remedy for this situation is more detailed analysis of gay men’s sexual experiences, S/M sexual experiences, or any other sexual experiences. Freud thought that he could cure mental unease by providing a way of talking exhaustively about sex abstracted from love. It seems to me that the disputants in debates about the common ground amongst sexualities still proceed from the assumption that one must seek “cures” for certain sexual problems–that the way to fix what is wrong with the social order is to fix what is wrong with people’s sexuality.

     

    I can suggest more clearly what I mean by considering the way Edwards handles childhood. For Edwards, the key–indeed the only–question for gay men to ask about childhood remains the Freudian question of when and how sexuality is formed there. Under the subheadings “Definitions of Childhood” and “Constructions of Childhood Sexuality,” he provides a rather one-dimensional analysis of a very problematic and contentious area, in order to get quickly to the debate over sexual relationships between young gay adolescents and their older lovers–relationships which Edwards is eager to destigmatize. This approach bypasses what seems to me the most crucial set of questions. What really takes place, in social terms, during childhood? What lessons do children learn about social relations, relations of power? How and in what way are children silenced, stopped from asking difficult or awkward questions? What interventions might be made into the institutional practices that produce childhood as we know it? These are not questions that can be adequately addressed through case histories in childhood sexuality, yet they should be of fundamental interest to anyone interested in effecting social change of a sort sufficiently radical to dehegemonize patriarchy.

     

    It may well be that there is no market for gay writers who would take up the analysis of childhood in a more thoroughgoing way. Gay publishing has its hands full already. But more gay arguments need to be brought against the rather uncomplicated picture presented by advocates of pederasty here. More gay writers need to undertake a radical rethinking of childhood such that, instead of simply defending themselves against the charge (by feminists and others) that they advocate abusive behavior, they can work in tandem with the feminist and children’s rights movements to envision new, more enabling familial and educational environments for children to inhabit. The sort of thing Edwards calls for–the creation of more lesbian and gay youth movement groups, where a young gay teenager can find understanding and companionship without the potentially unwanted sexual attentions that come when this understanding is sought among older men–is probably a good step. But it does not go much distance toward addressing the way childhood as such is constructed in our society, nor does it locate the common value out of which to forge an alliance between child-rights and gay-rights advocates.

     

    I am not suggesting that other recent writers on childhood and sexuality have done much better. The child-rights books, such as Susan Forward’s Betrayal of Innocence, 2 are compelling in their indictment of child-abuse crimes by parents and relatives, but their treatment of gay sexuality is crude at best, often explaining male-male abuse as a failure in the abuser’s heterosexual marriage, without considering the ways that patriarchy encourages and sustains such “failures.” By ignoring the pressures of patriarchy, Forward leaves no room for the gay victim of incestuous rape who wants to denounce the rape but not the fact of being gay. Edwards’s fellow queer theorists have not succeeded very well, either. In her new collection of essays, Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes that we regard all gay adults as “survivors,” since they have survived the relentless homophobia that hounds a great many gay teenagers literally to death. 3 Given that two thirds of all teenage suicides are committed by gay teens, one is sympathetic to this terminological move. But Sedgwick is here appropriating the language of child-rights campaigners in a way that is bound to antagonize them. For in this latter parlance, “survivor” is the name taken by those who were physically abused in childhood but who reject the media name for them: victim. By eliminating the distinction between survivors of childhood physical abuse and gays in general, Sedgwick is in effect delegitimating the whole approach of the anti-abuse movement.

     

    All such commentators will continue to play a zero-sum game, moving no closer toward any sort of practicable coalition, until new and more far-reaching arenas of dialogue are opened up. Interestingly, one of the places where the most advanced work on the construction of childhood is being done is the men’s movement. But this movement’s anti-gay and anti-feminist tendencies are sufficiently notorious to keep almost anyone outside the movement–Forward, Sedgwick, Edwards–from engaging its discourse on childhood seriously. Even a critic as generous and inclusive in his approach as Edwards leaves these sorts of impasses largely uncontested. The best he can do is to suggest that gay men might in fact learn something from feminist critiques–that being gay does not necessarily preclude one’s collaborative relation to patriarchy–and that feminist critics might in fact learn something from gay writers who question the range of applicability of feminist theory.

     

    This is not a new point; it doesn’t shift the ground of debate in any significant way. But it is given a new intensity by the occasional passages of personal and autobiographical comment that Edwards introduces to his argument. Because so much of the book is written in a removed cool prose, the moments of autobiography make Edwards seem vulnerable and prepared to admit to being flummoxed sometimes. In this way he perhaps acknowledges the limits of his particular scholarly procedures, of his capacity as an “expert,” and produces evidence of a life lived mutually and fruitfully between a gay men and his women friends–a life that doesn’t seem to be reflected anywhere in the public debate he surveys, but which might be the starting point for a new approach. One returns from these autobiographical excursions to the cool prose with a sense of going from an exciting present to a stuffy past. The cool prose remains diplomatic and patient with its authors, but Edwards’s unwillingness to sustain it without interruption perhaps implies a kind of exasperation with all the disputants and even with his readership. I myself would have liked to see this exasperation made more explicit and central to the whole project, but what Edwards has given us is certainly worth having. His is a book that shows us how much important work remains to be done before we will truly succeed in opening the diverse fields of sexual and social activism to each other.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Craig Owens, “Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” in A. Jardine and P. Smith, eds. Men in Feminism (London: Methuen, 1987).

     

    2. Susan Forward, Betrayal of Innocence (London: Penguin, 1988).

     

    3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994).

     

  • Unthinkable Writing

    Gregory Ulmer

    English Department
    University of Florida at Gainesville
    glulmer@nervm.Nerdc.Ufl.Edu

     

    Perforations 5 (1994): “Bodies, Dreams, Technologies.” Public Domain, Inc., POB 8899, Atlanta, GA. 31106-0899. INFO@PD.ORG

     

    Described as a media-kit journal of theory, technology, and art, Perforations is just one facet of Public Domain’s activities. Jim Demmers, Robert Cheatham, and Chea Prince (PD’s coordinating committee) also sponsor “Working Papers”–“a series of presentations devoted to the various crises of legitimation, representation, and communication.” Held at various venues around Atlanta, recent sessions addressed “the new alien in science fiction,” “Madonna, Paglia, Camp, Queer Theory, and PoMo Feminism,” “mirror, myopia, modesty, weakness, failure, scandal.” Their Kiosk project-in-progress (demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 93) will be a series of interactive hypermedia stations as alternative public sites for displaying electronic arts. PD also engages in video and public access cable television production, and provides internet access for arts organizations.

     

    In short, PD has learned one of the fundamental lessons of the information age: the goal is not to design only a product–a tape, a form, a performance–but also the institutional frame capable of receiving that product. They approach the electronic as an “apparatus” consisting not only of technology but also of institutional practices and individual behaviors (ideological subject formation). Functioning as a relay site (a booster switching node operating as an information wild card), PD represents a new kind of creative activity that challenges the old subject/object divisions separating criticism from art: you cannot study PD without having them study you back. For now, though, I am going to consider one of their products–number 5 in their series of media kits.

     

    Perforations 5 is a collector’s item not only because it is a limited edition but because it constitutes an exhibition of the status of multimedia in this brief transitional moment of the convergence of media between the book and the computer: after the desire to write with sound, image and text together has spread to the general citizenry but before the technology capable of democratizing such writing is widely available. The kit comes in a large box, the receipt of which is better than getting a crate of Florida citrus and almost as good as Christmas. The contents: an oversize “adult comic” (black drawing on yellow paper)– “Brain-Dead Dog,” by Tom Zummer; a book-length loose-leaf anthology of writings by a diverse group of contributors, including PD members; an equally diverse tape anthology of video works; an audio cassette of music by Dick Robinson (side one) and Michael Century (side two); a computer disk with a hypertext (“Genetis”) authored in Story Space by Richard Smyth. The kit is a snapshot of this moment when the media are suspended in their separate technologies, yet brought into virtual contact with one another under the theme that heads the issue: “bodies, dreams, technologies.”

     

    In the same way that some people watch “television” rather than any one particular program, one way to read Perforations is to scan or surf it as a whole: browse through the colored pages of the anthology with the cassette playing in the boombox, the tape going in the vcr, while flipping the screens of “Genetis” on your Mac. The natural medium for Perforations, in other words, might be cd-rom, with all the pieces hyperlinked to bring out the pattern that emerges from the wholistic reading. The title suggests the nature of this pattern (the interface of bodies-dreams- technologies) but not the specific quality–the feel or effect–of the collection. Rather than trying to name that effect, I want to follow a personal thread that forms the whole into a constellation for me.

     

    My point of entry is Richard Smyth’s “Genetis.” Smyth, who just completed his Ph.D. in the cultural studies program at the University of Florida, has been testing the genre of mystory that I introduced in Teletheory as a support for electronic reasoning. To see how Smyth adapts mystory to his own purposes and how it looks in the context of Perforations clarified for me some of the outstanding questions about electronic style. “Genetis” (self-described as a “rhizography”) is arranged in five “plateaus” (alluding to Deleuze and Guattari)–myth, parable, allegory, legend, theory. The “legend” plateau refers to the “Florida School” experimental approach to cultural studies–the search for the institutional practices of schooling appropriate for an electronic apparatus. The shorthand code for these new practices is “dream logic,” extracted from psychoanalysis.

     

    Smyth conceptualizes his dream logic with the help of Deleuze/Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, the vehicle of which is any kind of swarming animal or vegetable system (rat dens or crab grass). The basic point of the rhizome as an interface metaphor, however, is best seen in Deleuze’s use of the orchid/wasp relationship as an example for conceptualizing an alternative to representation. Instead of the semiotic idea of signs as icons, indexes, or symbols, the rhizographic notion of signifying relationships is that of the symbiotic interaction of two different species systems (orchids and wasps). Meaning circulates in the manner of the exchange between two systems which has to do with fertility and not with signs. The part of the vehicle activated in this metaphor is that of the passage from one system to another. Smyth organizes “Genetis” in terms of the co-presence in different dimensions of his experience of the psycho-dream theme. These dimensions include the major discourses of the “popcycle”–family, school, academic discipline, and entertainment or popular culture.

     

    The dream-body-technology theme recurs throughout the kit, beginning with “Brain-Dead Dog,” which, having been brained by a flying brick, somehow obtains access to the electro-magnetic spectrum, where it fuses with a virtual robot. Descriptions of dreams appear in many of the texts, as in Chea Prince’s introduction (dumped like a tangled parachute into a tree by a pink cloud of energy, he finds many other people there discussing a similar experience). As in “Genetis,” the texts move freely through the different discourses of the popcycle. The legitimated theories of the academic disciplines are well represented throughout, but the peculiar quality of this kit is the emphasis it gives to various kinds of denigrated knowledge — pseudo-knowledge from the scientific point of view — such as everything having to do with para-psychology, the para-normal. Thus there is a piece by Mark Macy, “When Dimensions Cross,” about the astral body and making contact with the spirit world. The crucial element in this piece is the role that electronic technologies play in attempts to make contact with the dead. The spirit world makes use of the physics of radio, television, computers, to send messages into the world of the living. Another way this theme recurs is in the figure of the Golem, introduced in Michael Century’s “Quartet for a Solo Piano,” entitled “The Chela of Golem.” The program note refers to the ancient tales in Jewish mysticism about an “artificial person” (a kind of automaton) created by chanting various combinations of letters. Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a variant of this story.

     

    At one level, the juxtaposition of academic theory with the discourses of denigrated knowledge has the effect (recalling surrealism) of separating out “research” as a formal activity, to feature “research” in terms of its own artistic properties. E. K. Huckaby, for example, authors “Two False Studies,’” concerning “some relationships B-tween Semen & Ectoplasm.” The cumulative result of the many readings dealing with the paranormal, linking technology with various spiritualisms, fantasies, legends, and dreams, is to establish an allegorical commentary effect. The allegory suggests that electronic equipment is the prosthesis not of the analytical mentality, in the way that print turned out to be, but of this wild desire for knowledge outside the logical, rational, empirical restrictions of the legitimate disciplines. The computer is the prosthesis of the body, capable of harnessing, managing, organizing, manipulating into a dream logic the desires that have sustained a fascination with the bodily mysteries of life, death, and the after-life. The implication of the electronic apparatus, with hypermedia writing, is that we now have equipment capable of fusing the analytical resources of print culture with the emotional resources of audio-visual entertainments.

     

    Foregrounding the denigrated knowledge of mystical matters is a symptom of a boundary crisis (in this case, the boundary dividing what discourses and objects are “proper” for study). This territory of the boundary is in fact the one staked out for exploration and experimentation by this journal. The significance of the name for the journal– “Perforations“–is clarified in the interview with Prince and Cheatham about the PD project on “the Doll Universe.” “It is with the proliferation of ostensible boundary conditions that a condition of perforation sets in,” Cheatham observes. “Sort of like a hyper-dimensional cluster of interpenetrating soap bubbles. In Deleuze and Guattari’s term, more ‘lines of flight’ begin to appear just as a (virtual) function of these intersecting boundaries.” The doll universe concerns those two most problematic boundaries–the one separating the living and the dead (animate and inanimate) and identity (separating the inside from the outside of the person). “Technology seems to be developing certain chiasmatic qualities here.” The apparatus is a “social machine,” and this kit evokes the emerging cyborgization of experience, approached from the side of arts, letters, imagination, fantasy, desire.

     

    The problematics of death and identity engage that part of the apparatus concerned with subject formation (subjectivation). To return to “Genetis,” Smyth structures the relationships or boundary crossings of the popcycle by analogy with the twin spirals of DNA. The fertilizing crossing that interests him in particular is between his disciplinary knowledge of poststructural psychoanalysis and his personal experience of a dysfunctional family that led to his breakdown. The structuralist principle embodied in Smyth’s use of the DNA spiral is that any two systems when juxtaposed create a commentary effect in which each explains the other. The effect is generative rather than representational: it is not that sound explains color, but that their correspondences create a pattern that produces intelligibility. Smyth helps clarify what is at stake in the kit as a whole–how to write the unconscious.

     

    According to the theory there is such a thing as thinking with the unconscious, but by definition this thinking is not accessible to the thinker. Freud himself had no analyst, but through a process of self-analysis he devised a method for moving between dreams and theory. The mystorical genre that Smyth employs is more closely related to Freud’s self-analysis than to the institutionalized method that resulted from it. In “Genetis” Smyth shows something to himself, using not the talking cure but a written one. Nor is “cure” an appropriate term, since there is nothing clinical about this practice. Rather, this kit evokes what it is to write with the emerging “middle voice” theorized by the French, neither active nor passive (it is the boundary crisis of this distinction) but in which the writer receives what is addressed elsewhere. This boundary writing makes possible a new level of experience (just as alphabetic literacy made possible the experience of selfhood, as Eric Havelock has argued)–an experience that is not without risks.

     

    The effect of the mystory is to set in motion a flow across boundaries (perforations), to write across the division separating inside from outside (personal from collective, private from public)–to bring into visibility the situation of the person within the social order (the imbrication of the imaginary in the symbolic). Gilles Deleuze theorized this interface zone between the heights of propositional discourse and the depths of the body in terms of the logic of sense. Deleuze learned from Nietzsche not to be “satisfied with either biography or bibliography; we must reach a secret point where the anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing” (The Logic of Sense 128). Later Deleuze phrases this convergence in terms of limit experiences, thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, with reference to the impossible experience of death:

     

    Are we to speak about Fitzgerald’s and Lowry’s alcoholism, Nietzsche’s and Artaud’s madness while remaining on the shore? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla–just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? (157)

     

    Here is the challenge of the new writing emerging in the electronic apparatus, somewhere between knowing and doing (the opposition and dilemma of creativity ever since the ancients split theory and practice into separate concepts). The destruction of the body and its social consequences, as in alcoholism, resonates with the dysfunctional family in Smyth’s mystory. This resonance in turn brings to mind perhaps the single most brilliant piece in the kit, “The Hidden World of the Visual Analogue,” an excerpt from The Iconography of Abuse, by Stevens Seaberg (Seaberg’s book is distributed as a Fort?/Da! book by Public Domain). The complete book is described as “over 100 pages of text and 200 illustrations showing the transformation of feelings resulting from child abuse into emblematic, metaphoric and allegorical forms as they appear in the works of artists like Michelangelo, Durer, Hogarth [etc] . . . .” Using the analogy of how the puppeteer’s gestures are repeated in the movements of the puppet, Seaberg traces a pattern linking the striking arm of the abuser and the defending arms of the abused to a series of images, scenes, designs, and works of all kinds.

     

    What interests me in this thread that I have been following through the kit is the way it brings into focus something reported to me by several people who have experimented with mystory, which is that the experience can be very disturbing. The nature of the form/method is that it allows one to write without thinking–to write things that are precisely not thinkable. Each part of the whole is written separately (each plateau of the popcycle is entered into the data base). When the parts are arranged into a pattern (lining up the perforations, the way Alan Turing cracked the code of the Nazi enigma engine during the World War by lining up the holes punched in the tapes) the experience of the middle voice begins, for the authors recognize themselves in a portrait-without-resemblance (the wasp finds its orchid). Public Domain approaches this risk at a more collective level, having in mind the work of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s General Economy was designed to teach the capitalist world to shift from the individual point of view from which it made sense to accumulate wealth, to the general point of view of death (of being already dead) from which vantage point the waste of life could be appreciated, and the uselessness of accumulation.

     

    At the core of “bodies, dreams, technologies,” then, is an ancient bit of wisdom, and an age-old desire. The shaman’s power, after all, was the ability to cross over into the realm of the dead (which anyone could do, of course); but the shaman could return again to the living and make use in this world of what had been learned from the dead. Perforations 5 suggests that this shamanistic method is still operative in the forces producing the electronic apparatus. What is the computer really for? For going into this zone between, this perforated region of crossings, which until now only a few special individuals were able to negotiate–shamans and artists and crackpots. The promise of the emerging electronic equipment–presuming the invention of the enabling institutionalpractices and individual behaviors and attitudes–is the massification, popularization, general availability to the ordinary citizen of writing death. The prosthetic shaman–that is one purpose, one possibility, of the computer.

     

    Meanwhile, the “call for stuff” for Perforations 6 has been issued, under the title “the Uncanny Refutation of the Apocalyptic: Ghosts, Leaks, Stains.” The latter part of the title refers to that which may be overturning the traditional “human/nature/divinity” as we move to the technological era’s version of a millennium. Contact Public Domain for further information.

     

  • From Technology to Machinism

    Brent Wood

    Methodologies for the Study of Western
    History and Culture
    Trent University
    bwood@trentu.ca

     

    Conley, Verena Andermatt, ed., on behalf of Miami Theory Collective. Rethinking Technologies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

     

    Rethinking Technologies is a collection of twelve essays inspired (at least nominally so) by Miami University’s 1990 colloquium “Questioning Technologies.” The volume is dedicated in memoriam to Felix Guattari, whose writings on technology and ecology the editors single out as specifically inspirational for much of the work it contains. Guattari’s thought is represented by his essay “Machine Heterogenesis,” perhaps the most difficult in the volume, in which he seeks to go beyond Heidegger by showing how machines manifest not Being but “multitudes of ontological components” (26). We humans, according to Guattari, participate in this “ontological reconversion” merely by accepting what it is that the machines offer us.

     

    The majority of the essays in the volume relate directly or indirectly to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”; some refer also to other of his works. Ingrid Scheibler’s “Heidegger and the Rhetoric of Submission” focuses almost exclusively on a defense of Heidegger’s work against criticism it has endured from Jurgen Habermas. Heidegger’s major contribution to the discourse of technology was to ask that we think of technology not in terms of applied science but instead in terms of a representational “enframing” that prevents us from encountering the Being of beings; editor Conley suggests that “it may be possible to rethink technologies in terms other than enframing” (xi). Conley sees the collection of essays that make up Rethinking Technologies as an attempt to go both “through” and “beyond” Heidegger, a move required primarily by two late twentieth-century developments: global ecological crisis and the “transformation of subjectivities” (xiii) brought about by the proliferation of communication technologies.

     

    The essays are nominally organized into four groups: “Questioning Technologies,” “Technology and the Environment,” “Technology and the Arts,” and “Technology and Cyberspace.” These groupings, intended as “markers for the reader” (x) are largely specious. Francoise Gaillard’s essay “Technical Performance: Postmodernism, Angst or Agony of Modernism” seeks the roots of the apparent political anemia of the arts under late capitalism, all but ignoring technology in the process. Three other essays, Scott Durham’s “The Technology of Death and Its Limits: The Problem of the Simulation Model,” Alberto Moreiras’s “The Leap and the Lapse: Hacking a Private Site in Cyberspace,” and Avital Ronell’s “Our Narcotic Modernity,” look to literature for advice on the problems posed by the clash of the human and the technological, yet only Durham’s is grouped under the banner of “Arts.” The only case in which there is a productive dialogue between the grouping and the interior of the essay is that of Teresa Brennan’s “Age of Paranoia.” Brennan’s essay traces a metaphorical connection between the urge, in the infant, for control of the mother’s breast and modernity’s overstress of the visual and tendency to commodify (and, implicitly, degrade) the earth as a source of life.

     

    Presented with such a motley collection of ideas, one can proceed in either of two ways: take only what is useful to one’s own field of study and dismiss the rest, or labour to make connections between the pieces that (hopefully) result in further insight, which may be still more heterogeneous with regard to the original collection. There is also the possibility that the latter approach may result in nothing but a headache and a subsequent recoiling to the safety of a good novel. At the risk of sounding disrespectfully flip, I suggest that this state of affairs may have been the founding moment of the three “appeals to literature” described above. It ought to go without saying that there is nothing dishonourable about such a move, in which art ceases to be mere illustration for theory and begins also to motivate and to define it.

     

    In terms of the hard-core theory exemplified by contributors Guattari and Virilio, the three “appeals to literature” may appear marginal. I prefer to see them as the epitome of the “interplay” which Conley feels we ought to find within Rethinking Technologies. I take the bold step of forming my own provisional groupings for the purposes of “making sense” of the heterogeneity of the collection. I would wish to imply all the standard logocentric disclaimers applicable to the previous statement were I not, in highlighting these three essays, making words the sort-of-center of my critique. Perhaps I might venture to call it a “blind spot” as opposed to a “sort-of-center” in order to point out the absence of “words” as an explicit subject of discourse in the volume, for it appears that they are always lurking just over the authors’ and editors’ shoulders.

     

    Ronell focuses her essay around a meta-fictional passage linking Flaubert’s Madame Bovary with America’s contemporary “war on drugs.” Ronell equates the writer with the addict, and literature with drugs. She begins with a reference to the presence of drugs in Heidegger’s Gestell (enframing) and Dasein (Being). Addiction, in Ronell’s reading of Heidegger, is a response to a vital urge, but in the end an inauthentic one: “addicted, Dasein goes nowhere fast” (60). Ronell provisionally accepts Heidegger’s assimilation of addiction under technology–“a certain type of ‘being-on-drugs’” (62)–in order to deconstruct it. Derrida’s supplement pokes its head into the picture as an explanation of the literature-drugs analogy; each is an attempt to compensate for an absence that seems to have always been there. Ronell argues that the two share a common and parallel history contemporaneous with modernity. Moreover, literature itself has always worked to tell us about the very strictures of law with which both it and its intimate, drugs, have had an ambiguous love-hate relationship: “Flaubert’s book went to court: it was denounced as a poison” (64).

     

    It is through the figure of Emma Bovary that Ronell demonstrates her thesis: that the “structure of addiction” is “metaphysically at the basis of our culture” (64).

     

    As I read the documents I realized that [Emma] was the body on which these urges started showing almost naturally, prior to the time the technological prosthesis became available on the streets. . . . She declared a war on the real, this unknown horror, she put out a call for a drug culture. She worked out of her own abysses, hunting down the imaginary phallic supplement. (68-69)

     

    Ronell’s open-ended essay allows one to conclude that it is not contradictory to see literature and drugs both in terms of Heidegger’s enframing and in terms of Derrida’s supplement–if one sees modernity itself as in some sense a product of the enframing. The word, in cybernetic terms, as commandis in an ambiguous position in its literary function, part of a control system that is nonetheless Other to the Law.

     

    From modern literary control system we move to Scott Durham’s postmodern simulation model. Durham’s essay is inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, one of the original harbingers of cyberpunk. Durham contrasts Siegfried Giedion’s illustration of the hog slaughterhouse as a paradigmatic encounter between technology and organic life with Ballard’s use of crash-test dummies to alter that very opposition. Giedion’s vision is a modern one that is fated to “untimeliness”: it can only appear in a retrospective in which the organic appears as an “irreducible living presence” precisely at the moment of its death in the mechanized slaughterhouse of a technologized modernity. Ballard’s is a postmodern one in which Baudrillard’s reversal of the dependence of simulation on actuality is presaged. By implication, Durham’s use of Ballard to replace Giedion also means a bracketing of Heidegger.

     

    In Ballard’s novel the power of the word as an effective cog in a technological apparatus reaches new heights when viewed as an analog of the simulation model. That the model is of human death prevents us from appealing to mortality to highlight human “life” as unique from technological “life.” Our deaths are now just as much a product of social engineering as our day-to-day routines. Durham argues that Baudrillard’s hyperbole–“a certain phantasy of postmodernity as a totally operational system”–is most important not for its own truth or falsehood, but rather for “the effects of truth it exerts on those who entertain it” (161). Crash‘s protagonist, as a believer, dreams “of a fatal collision with Elizabeth Taylor that would launch him into a permanent afterlife on the far side of the screen” (163). Durham recalls J. L. Austin as he characterizes the ensuing accident as a “misfire”: Ballard’s hero’s planned “accident” is interrupted by a “real” accident in which he crashes (ironically) into a busload of tourists. In Durham’s eyes, the attempted enactment of Baudrillard’s hyperreality results merely in the displacement of the real/simulation opposition it might have sought to resolve. For Durham this implies that in postmodernity the “real” is lived not merely as “that which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction” but also as that which “withdraws absolutely from reproduction” (166). This echo of Heidegger is analogously ironic.

     

    Alberto Moreiras takes Durham and Ronell one step further, gathering together Heidegger and Derrida, the word and the letter, analogy and cybernetics, and extrapolating them into the world of virtual reality through Jorge Luis Borges’s story “El Aleph.” The “Aleph” in Borges’s tale is a mysterious site of revelation which Moreiras uses as an analog of cyberspace. It is “one of the points in space containing all points” and also “the site of encounter where ‘modern man’ meets robotic control of reality” (195). In this scheme, the Aleph is “a radical place of disjunction, where language breaks down” (195). Since the Aleph can never be expressed but merely indicated, and since it contains every point and therefore must contain itself, it is the place where the “ground of analogy breaks in excess” (196). Moreiras likens this crisis of analogy to what occurs when virtual reality, as the evolutionary end-product of a “calculative-representational enframing of the world” (194) –an utterly enveloping representation–throws representation itself into question. Once again we are presented with the “real” as “withdrawing excess.” The place where this withdrawal is experienced is the “private site” of the essay’s title.

     

    An Aleph is also, Moreiras notes, “the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language” (198). We must then, by analogy, deal with cyberspace in terms of the the Derridean concept of writing as both excess and lack. As one attempts to “hack” one’s way into cyberspace, encountering only the concurrent withdrawal of the real, one finds oneself, as Moreiras puts it, “engag[ing] cyberware as a writing machine” (198). Here Moreiras’s own sloppiness with cyberlingo comes back to haunt him. In the proliferation of “cybertech,” “cyberexperience,” “cyberexcess” and “cyberware” in addition to “cyberspace,” “cybernetic” and “cyborg,” a consistent meaning for the object of his analogy is lost. His traditional recourse to kybernetes (“pilot or governor of a ship”) as the root of “cybernetics” does not help; the “control” function is alluded to once and never again, giving way to discussion of the “lapse” and the “leap” of writing.

     

    The role played by control in critiques of technology, and especially of “cybertech,” cannot be overstated. N. Katherine Hayles’s excellent essay “The Seductions of Cyberspace” appeals to the “cybernetic literature” of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs and Vernon Vinge, but in the end its principal source of motivation is another kind of science fiction: Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Wiener, in fact, occupies a place in Rethinking Technologies not so very far from Heidegger’s. One is tempted to see the two thinkers as fraternal twins: complementary interpretations of an original union between humanity and technology. Hayles highlights the “fetishistic drive for control” that is at the base of cybernetics and, though it is not as often admitted, at the base of cyberspace. This latter is evident in a reading of Gibson, the originator of the term “cyberspace.” Hayles quotes from Autodesk’s John Walker, who, inspired by Gibson, defines a cyberspace system as “a three-dimensional domain in which cybernetic feedback and communication occur” (176). Hayles makes the implicit connection between the drive for control over the physical world and the desire to escape the results of this drive by occupying virtual space.

     

    Here we must examine the multiple meanings of the word “virtual,” which are the source both of the term’s appeal and of its contradictory implications. In English, “virtual” has two connotations: one optical and one mechanical. A virtual world is one that exists, from the user’s perspective, on the other side of the mirror: the illusory “place” which Ballard’s hero seeks. At the same time, it is thought of as “virtual” reality; that is, the illusion is so strong that we can behave as if it were “reality.” The French virtuel, however, often translated simply as “virtual,” offers yet another angle. The “virtual” in this case is contrasted with the “actual”: virtuality is potentiality. The gathering together of these meanings in a single term guarantees that it will be slippery and not admitting of a univocal conclusion when put into question. As Hayles notes, it is fallacy to believe that by entering a virtual “space” we will be able to escape the problems that will continue to plague our physical surroundings. Nevertheless, she is unable to resist the temptation to interpret cyberspace as “opening up new vistas for exploration” (188), even while she warns us of the power of the cybernetic system over human behaviour. This, it seems to me, is the most important “seduction” of cyberspace. Hayles suggests we (dominant Westerners) take the opening up of cyberspace as an opportunity to “extend lessons learned from postcolonialism” (188). We ought at the same time to bear in mind the lesson Ronell learns from literature: “drugs, as it turns out, are not so much about seeking an exterior, transcendental dimension . . . as they are about exploring fractal interiorities” (62). If “cyberware” constitutes, as Moreiras suggests, “a writing machine,” or even if, as it seems to me, it puts the Derridean distinction between writing and speech into question, then it is vital that the option of silence be left open for us, and not dismissed as a technophobic desire to return to a pre-technological world.

     

    Silence is in fact the theme of Scheibler’s defense of Heidegger. Scheibler seeks to rescue “silence” from the connotation of submission or resignation, especially in light of Heidegger’s acquiescence to National Socialism. Making reference to several of Heidegger’s works, she reinterprets silence as meditation, a way of being and thinking that frees us from the objectification of the world (and ourselves) that is the result of representational thinking. Meditative thinking, writes Scheibler, “is the way in which human beings are involved directly and immediately in Being” (126). She quotes from John Anderson, who suggests that “meditative thinking begins with an awareness of the field . . . an awareness of the horizon rather than of the objects of ordinary understanding” (127). This type of silence is not submissive to authority but rather outside of authority; it is outside word and outside writing. It is interesting that while “putting on cyberspace” appears to be an opening up of the horizon, it is only accomplished by a shrinking-in of our awareness. It is an inverse relation of the sublime that we feel here: to comprehend the function of “cyberspace systems” within our own minds is an impossible task. The Aleph, the point in space that contains all points, it turns out, is within us, and it expels our contemplation with all the force of a magnetic field. The contemplation of the function of the word within results in a flurry of exteriorized words in ecstasy and defense.

     

    In the end, it appears that only Felix Guattari himself is capable of what Conley advocates as the mission of Rethinking Technologies: to go through and beyond Heidegger. Guattari begins by invoking both Heidegger and Wiener; he proposes that both these perspectives be avoided in an attempt to “discern the thresholds of ontological intensity that will allow us to grasp ‘machinism’” (13). Machinism is Guattari’s “object of fascination,” not technology as it is defined by Heidegger, by Wiener, by Derrida, or by Baudrillard. Guattari raises the all-important question of machinic autopoiesis, but insists that this not be thought of in terms of “vital autonomy according to an animal model,” but rather in terms of “enunciative consistency” (14). Neither are machines to be related to their material manifestations. For Guattari the machine is a complex apparatus of enunciation that does not obey the structure of the Signifier. Echoing Austin once again, he asserts that machinic autopoiesis is characterized not by signification but by “effects, products . . . [and] particular services” (14). Echoing Wiener, Guattari suggests that this autopoiesis is demonstrated through a seeking of disequilibrium. Following Francisco Varela, Guattari notes that one function of autopoietic machines is to reproduce themselves; breaking with Varela, he suggests that autopoiesis ought to be thought of as a kind of life “specific to a mecanosphere that superimposes itself on the biosphere” (17). In this vision, machines exist co-extensively with their biological components.

     

    The machinic in Guattari’s essay seems to occupy a position similar to that occupied by schizoanalysis in his other work. Here he is able to trace machinic orderings through dimensions of asignifying semiotics (related to cybernetics but also surpassing it), technological, biological and even human components. The machine is a figure of heterogenesis which challenges our habit of thinking in terms of ontological homogeneity. This is the underlying thrust of Guattari’s analysis of machines. It is even a seduction to call these heterogeneric orderings “machines”; this verbal component, following the intuition that Guattari is seeking to access the heterogeneity of which he writes, is itself part of a functioning machine whose access to our thought is through the word “machine” itself. Guattari’s article does not tell us anything about technology. Its function is to instruct our thought about its own structures by forcing it to strain against them. As an enunciation Guattari’s work is neither writing nor speech, but a sinister attempt to reorient the belongingness of our own enunciations to a system of control.

     

    I have focused only on half the essays that comprise Rethinking Technologies not through a prior process of choosing but merely because they fell this way as I attempted to “make sense” of the heterogeneity which with they presented me. In this respect I am guilty of attempting to unify difference through recourse to the essential unit of control–the word. Mea culpa. This is my own cross to bear. Other contributors include, in addition to the aforementioned Brennan, Virilio, and Gaillard, Patrick Clancy (“Telefigures and Cyberspace”), editor Conley herself (“Eco-Subjects”), and Jean-Luc Nancy (“War, Law, Sovereignty–Techne“). In utterly pragmatic terms, I recommend the book as useful reading for Graduate students as well as senior undergraduates preparing for Graduate school. It is also useful for any philosopher or cultural theorist pursuing questions posed by the clash between technological proliferation and either ecology or shifts in our conception of subjectivity.

     

  • Late Soviet Culture: A Parallax for Postmodernism

    Vitaly Chernetsky

    Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program
    University of Pennsylvania
    vchernet@mail.sas.upenn.edu

     

    Lahusen, Thomas, and Gene Kuperman, eds. Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

     

    In an essay recently published in October (no. 63, Winter 1993), Hal Foster uses a suggestive metaphor for the study of contemporary artistic production–he speaks of “postmodernism in parallax.” Foster’s astronomical metaphor (“parallax” [from Greek para-, “beside, beyond,” and allassein, “to change”], in astronomy, means “the difference in [position and] direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth”) furnishes a possibility of salvaging the discourse on postmodernism from becoming a passing fad (a danger Foster highlights in his essay) by reaching beyond the spatial coordinates in which it has been primarily operating (the industrialized West), that is, by effecting a shift in the position from which it is contemplated.

     

    This agenda seems to have been on the mind of the editors of Duke University Press’s Post-Contemporary Interventions series, which over the course of its five years has brought out such titles as Postmodernism and Japan and The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Late Soviet Culture is the series’ first volume to focus on the former Soviet Union–a territory which for various reasons has been conspicuously absent from many

     

    If for many observers postmodernism itself is still a very contradictory and “fuzzy” concept, this is even more true in the case of Russian, or Soviet postmodernism: is it really possible to speak of a postmodern cultural condition–which, if we follow most of the theorists of the postmodern, is defined as a product of commodity culture, new electronic technologies (computers, video, etc.), new “geopolitical aesthetics”–in the former Soviet Union, a totalitarian empire that has disintegrated into medieval style micro-states in which the most basic commodities are in shortage? It is admittedly problematic to apply to late Soviet culture those theories of postmodernism that view it primarily as the cultural condition of the developed Western societies, characterized by the ecstasy of consumerism and commodity culture, and the proliferation of new technologies (video, cyberspace, etc.). However, the striking similarity between certain cultural products emerging in recent decades from both the Western world and the late Soviet Union suggests that the putative “postmodernism” of the latter is more than merely a symptom of Western myopia. Such theories of postmodernism as develop Georges Bataille’s notions of general economy of expenditure, excess and waste, for example (theories usefully discussed in Arkady Plotnitsky’s recent study Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy [Gainesville, 1993]), would seem to indicate legitimate moments of linkage and overlap. Postmodern Culture itself has been a pioneer in the discussion of Russian postmodernism, publishing a symposium on the topic in the January 1993 issue.

     

    The editors of Late Soviet Culture chose not to enter the debate headlong. To be exact, only two out of the fifteen essays included in it directly discuss the notion of a Russian postmodernism. However, the book in its entirety (being as it is a very heterogeneous collection–which is typical of the genre of post-conference volumes to which it belongs) is an excellent contribution to cultural studies: it offers a “slice” across the many aspects of late Soviet culture (to be exact, Russian Soviet, for the cultural condition of other former Soviet republics is never addressed, with the one possible exception of Evgeny Dobrenko’s essay). For the expert, the book has many insights and provocations to offer; a Slavic scholar would find it worth reading cover-to-cover. But the collection could also serve as a very good introduction for a non-Slavicist to Soviet culture at the times of perestroika and glasnost, grounded in the context of some crucial precursory phenomena. Soviet postmodernism has many dissimilarities from its Western cousin; and the essays in this volume both analyze its emergence in terms of the inner logic of the development of Russian culture and contrast it with that of the West.

     

    In their introduction, the editors of the volume note that “it appears today that positions, theories, and ideas become obsolete almost at the moment of their utterance” (v). Indeed, the contributions to Late Soviet Culture have all been written from the position of Soviet Union still intact, if about to collapse. A new, different “Russian postmodernism” is emerging today, and some of the pieces in the collection now have primarily the value of documents for an archeologist of the “Soviet postmodern” of the last years of the old empire. This is especially true of the two opening texts, an optimistic account by the novelist Mikhail Kuraev of the changes brought about by glasnost, and a comment by Boris Kagarlitsky–a rare example of a Russian politician whose program is rooted primarily in the writings of the contemporary Western left–on the re-emergence of the categories of political right and left under perestroika and the particular twists this binarism has taken.

     

    The essays that follow contextualize the discussion of late Soviet culture through a backward glance. Sidney Monas explores a parallel between the Gorbachev era and Russia’s “Great Reforms” of the 1860s, which launched the society’s rapid modernization, and which, incidentally, brought the terms “glasnost” and “perestroika” into wide circulation for the first time. Monas briefly draws attention to the paradoxical statement of one of Russia’s most fascinating and controversial nineteenth-century intellectuals–Petr Chaadaev–that Russia “has no history” and “has contributed nothing but the occupation of space” (37-38), implying that Russia is totally extraneous to the teleological narrative of Western European history. It is left to the reader, though, to speculate on the possibilities of tying Chaadaev’s maxims with Russia’s present cultural situation, where, as Mikhail Epstein notes in his contribution to the volume, the temporal sequencing has broken down and cultural artifacts from at least the past two millennia entertain a peculiarly synchronous and spatialized coexistence. Paul Debreczeny’s contribution offers an analysis of the formation and functioning of one of Russia’s key national myths–that of Pushkin, the nation’s poet–up to the outcry caused by the “blasphemous” act of opening the country’s first McDonald’s on Moscow’s Pushkin Square; he avoids, though, discussing the recent literary battles surrounding the Pushkin myth, mostly connected with Andrei Sinyavsky’s irreverent book Strolls with Pushkin (the English translation of which was published in 1993 as well).

     

    The next cluster of essays in the volume deals with the totalitarian culture and mindset of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Renata Gal’tseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya consider it in the light of the twentieth century’s great dystopian texts (Russian as well as foreign)–which also reached Russia post factum, in the 1980s, and propose the individual human being as the obstacle that triggers the breakdown of utopian/totalitarian projects, consistently engaged in attempts at effacing the individual. Maya Turovskaya analyzes the role of cinema as a cultural institution under Stalin. Her focus is not as much on the dramatic history of the regime’s brutal control over the cinematic production, but on moviegoing as a practice “within the context of a general shortage of entertainment” (95, Turovskaya’s emphasis). She compares the situation in the Soviet Union to the similar, but much more shrewd cultural policy of Nazi Germany: while in the Soviet Union the regime adopted “a homogeneous model of a propagandistic (didactic), quasi-popular cinema” (105), in Germany it combined the production of ideologized blockbusters with more or less mindless entertainment. One of the fascinating facts not much known in the West is that the German-made films of the latter category fulfilled their “safety valve” function in both regimes: the Soviet “generation of victors” throughout the 1940s was actively consuming “trophy” films like the German 1944 musical Die Frau meine Traume, whose star Marika Roekk became a cult figure. Turovskaya ends her essay with a coda on the stratification of cultural tastes in the late empire, with the state, the masses, and the intellectuals favoring completely different products. She stops short, though, from considering the “perverse” practices of the younger generation, when totalitarian classics are consumed as the material for simulacric “remakes.”

     

    The next two essays in the book focus on the production end of the stalinist cultural machine. Evgeny Dobrenko offers a generic study of the literature of “the Zhdanov era” (1945-1953)–an era which “classic” literary histories refer to as a “desolate scene” and a “monotonous plain,” and which the more recent revisionist texts, such as Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), view as a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon avant la lettre. Dobrenko turns his attention away from judgments of taste to the study of the cultural (more narrowly–literary) model itself. This period of socialist realism’s “established existence” is, he underscores, the primary target of the subversive projects of the Soviet postmodern (which he refers to as “the Russian post-avant-garde” 109), and as such it requires close scrutiny. It is situated, he postulates, in the “zero time” of catastrophe, when there is something before the event (in this case, the regime’s violent suppression of independent thinking) and something after the event, while the event itself seems to be missing. What we face in this case, according to Dobrenko, is a “system of mytho-production and recoding of reality in the direction necessary for power” (110), a static system which “by its nature is incapable of self-development and reacts only to external impulses” (111-12), conducted through criticism which “did not serve as a self-regulator, but rather as both the means and the object of various external manipulations” (112). An analysis of this cultural machine, Dobrenko believes, can enable us to discern the “fundamental lexicon” of totalitarianism. He offers insightful and witty readings of samples of its formulaic products, especially its quasi-utopian idylls of collective farm prosperity and workers’ consciencious attitude, populated not with human beings but with functions, with “cogs and wheels” of the totalitarian system–whose crumbling monuments are still with us. Dobrenko’s general analysis is supplemented by Thomas Lahusen’s case study of a particular Zhdanovite novel–Vasily Azhaev’s Far from Moscow, a powerful illustration of the functioning of this cultural machine. This text showcases the construction of an oil pipeline in the Russian Far East shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, presented as an example of everyday heroism and devotion to the nation. The amazing “secret lining” of the book is that its author was an ex-labor camp prisoner, and that it contains clues by which the pipeline can be identified as an actual construction project of 1941-42, but one which was carried out by prison labor. The history of the text itself is also peculiar, for it underwent continuous rewriting and retouching through its many editions during the author’s lifetime, adjusting to the current ideological demand, while clandestinely Azhaev was writing another novel, The Boxcar, in which he was trying candidly to portray the tragedy of stalinist terror: a macabre, Orwellian example of “doublethink.”

     

    In the next contribution to the volume, Michael Holquist draws attention to a survivor of stalinism who has became particularly influential in literary and cultural studies–Mikhail Bakhtin. Holquist begins by cautioning against the tendency of treating Bakhtin “as if his utterances were a mere writing, as if he were simply one more name in the deracinated ecriture of current metacriticism,” of treating him as “a stateless thinker” (155). Holquist situates Bakhtin within the Russian critical tradition, providing a lucid summary account of Russian nineteenth-century debates on aesthetics and the nature and social role of literature and of their evolutionary connection with the work of Bakhtin’s contemporaries, the Formalists. In dwelling on Bakhtin’s critical dialogue with the Formalists in his 1920s writings, Holquist notes that while the latter insisted on literature’s autonomy and on the study of its inner logic, Bakhtin, “like the radical critics of the 1860s, [was] obsessed by the problem of how art can be related to life” (166). He believes that for Bakhtin, there exists “a connection between the two in a material poetics that takes a form of a body-based systematics” (166). Holquist further explores the role of the body in Bakhtin’s texts, noting his interest in biology (which, among others, provided him the term “chronotope”). He disagrees with Ken Hirschkop, who sees “mechanical physics” as a major influence on Bakhtin. “What matters about bodies for Bakhtin,” writes Holquist, “is not only that they are there, but that they are alive” (170). It is not a particular biological model that attracts Bakhtin: his work is pervaded with what Holquist calls “biological thinking” (171). The body is important for Bakhtin’s work, as Holquist notes, also because of his acute realization of his own corporeality: his suffering from osteomyelitis, which led to an amputation of one of his legs, and his arrest and exile in the 1930s (167). This emphasis connects Holquist’s essay with another recent work on Bakhtin and the body, Mikhail Ryklin’s brilliant “Bodies of Terror” (published in English in New Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1 [Winter 1993]), in which he dubs the Rabelais book an “autotherapeutic text,” a “codified drama of a representative of Russian intelligentsia who found himself in the ‘unthinkable’ situation of terror and expansion of the collective corporeality that assumed a dominating function” (Ryklin, Terrorologiki [1992], p. 34, my translation).

     

    The contribution by Valery Leibin is an excursus into the brief history of psychoanalytic study in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and its later brutal suppression. By contrast, Valery Podoroga’s essay is a post-Deleuzian reading of the key texts of one of the leading Russian modernists, Andrei Platonov (whose major works were published only recently, first abroad and then in Russia, and who is still relatively unknown in the West, partly because of the difficulty of translating his peculiar language). Podoroga begins by drawing attention to a peculiar statement from Platonov’s novel Chevengur (written 1927-1930): “within the person there lives a little spectator: he participates in neither actions nor suffering–he is always cool and unchanging. His function is to see and to be a witness, yet he is without the right of voice in the person’s life, and it is not known why this solitary presence exists. This corner of the person’s consciousness is lit day and night, like the porter’s room in a large building.” Platonov names this spectator/ observer “the dead brother” and “the eunuch of the human soul” (187-188). This observer, writes Podoroga, guides the reader through Platonov’s texts, creating “a special field of textual meanings–of negative bodily signs” (190). It registers only the external signs of events (which fact can be interpreted with the help of the opposition between the seeing eye and the knowing eye, advanced by the Russian avant-garde artist Pavel Filonov [199]). Podoroga quotes another startling passage from Chevengur, in which the protagonist feels that the material objects surrounding him suddenly start penetrating his body, even to the point that he fears his skin will burst open: a depiction of the clinical experience of schizophrenia, the result of the loss of the connection between subjectivity and the bodily image itself. To read Platonov, he postulates, is to feel this shift of the boundary between the inner and the outer, and desire in this externalized form is indissolubly connected with death. The relationship of time and space is also transformed: the text expresses the “beginning of the end of time”; “freed from human time (history), space acquires maximal dynamics–its grows through the defiguration of the world” (196). Podoroga draws parallels between the role of the eye in Platonov and in Gogol and Vertov, developing the notion of a “disembodied eye” (201-208). He asserts again that the “eunuch of the soul” is “a schizo-eye: he sees in this way for he is unable to see in any other way–and what he sees is monstrous precisely because his vision is natural, lacking elements of coercion or rationality” (210). Podoroga’s insightful analysis of Platonov’s texts offers another entry into the system of coordinates of the Soviet postmodern: there is something acutely contemporary in his narratives of schizophrenic disjunction, aggressive spatiality, and transformative language.

     

    The next essay, by Helena Goscilo, sheds light on another important aspect of the Soviet postmodern–the renewed importance of underrepresented social groups, most especially women. She addresses the paradoxical situation of the unprecedented prominence of women in all spheres of Russian culture and their unabashed critical depictions of their situation, combined with frequent hostility to Western feminist theory and essentialist conflation of socially constructed gender roles with biological sex. Goscilo provides an informative summary of the institutionalized concepts of gender in Soviet society (the area where, perhaps more than anywhere else, Stalinist propaganda has been truly successful) and the status of feminism within that structure. She stresses the reemergence of the women’s movement in the years of glasnost, and then considers in some detail the work of three influential contemporary women writers, Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, and Valeriya Narbikova, “the subversive trio” (244). These three women’s texts are very different from one other: Petrushevskaya’s works, frequently first-person narratives, are powerful explorations of human vulnerability in contemporary society, and impart a flavor reminiscent of gloomy naturalism; Tolstaya is a master stylist with a keen eye for “tasty” tropes who constantly engages in language play, parody, and subversion of stereotypes; finally, Narbikova produces texts that meditate on the nature of language itself, playing with cliches, producing sequences of paradoxical associations and ambivalent references, and employing a wordy, repetitive, fragile style reminiscent, in certain respects, of Gertrude Stein. Narbikova’s texts also extensively–if euphemistically–depict bodily experiences (including sexual acts, which prompted Russian critics to quickly–and wrongly–name her a writer of erotica). One is invited to conclude that the critique of established paradigms of representation that is marshalled in these women’s texts also enables a critique of the institutions of gender and sexuality, which serves as yet another point of contact with Western postmodernist cultural practices.

     

    The next two essays in the volume directly engage the notion of a Soviet postmodernism. Mikhail Epstein’s contribution, “After the Future,” is one of the key paratexts of Soviet postmodernism, one of the most significant attempts to date to theorize the late Soviet cultural situation, a part manifesto, part analysis. In the first part of the essay he perceptively registers the symptoms of a paradigmatic shift in cultural consciousness effected by the end of the 1980s. “Suddenly it became evident that communism had been accomplished in our country,” writes Epstein, “the end has already arrived” (257). The metanarrative of “progressive development of the mature socialism” was no more. The cultural practices of the epoch are realized in the “post-,” rather than “anti-” genre: “post-utopia, post-communism, post-history” (259). This is the “last” literature, “not because of the moment of its appearance, but because of its . . . essential ‘beyondness’” (258); it is the literature which, “like Proteus . . . is capable of almost anything; like Narcissus, it desires only itself” (259). The character of a “superfluous man” of the Russian nineteenth-century classics is supplanted by an entire world that has become superfluous. The writers of the younger generation stand outside the polarization of “city” vs. “village” literature, of “Westernizers” and “liberals” vs. “populists” and “men of the soil.” “While they are personally committed to liberal values,” writes Epstein, they “nonetheless see almost nothing in those values that could inspire them and which they could serve with their work” (268). Instead of ideological divisions Epstein registers differentiations of style. One group, whom he calls “meta-realists,” focuses on the intensity of perceptive emotion or metaphysical transcendence. Another, the conceptualists, engages in a demonstration of the essential emptiness of linguistic signs by exploring the language itself in their simulacric reproductions of socialist realist and nineteenth-century “realist” classics, or of the linguistic environment of a Soviet “everyman.” Between the extremes of these two groups stand the writers engaged in ironic games of allusions in the polymorphous chronotopes of their texts, where “the vulgar stereotypes of Soviet everyday life suddenly become the depths and merge with projections of other epochs into an ample mythopoetic polyglossia” (267).

     

    The middle part of Epstein’s essay is the most disputable and is strangely dissonant with his other arguments. In it, he moves to argue that “nothing is new under the sun,” and attempts to construct “a periodic table of the elements of Russian literature” (268; the table itself is on pp. 276-277). He singles out three cycles that Russian literature has undergone since the eighteenth century, each consisting of four phases, the “social,” the “moral,” the “religious,” and the “aesthetic.” Within this table, contemporary writers just occupy the final phases of the third cycle, to be succeeded by a fourth. The entire model is crudely reductionist, with each writer or movement assigned a set of tags carrying one-word definitions; and the sequencing is forced as well, often at odds with actual chronology. Paradoxically, Epstein then proceeds, in the final part of the essay, to stress the breakdown of temporal sequencing within the contemporary Russian cultural situation, where the postmodernists operate simultaneously with Solzhenitsyn, Joyce, Chaadaev, and the four evangelists (275). He emphasizes the retrospective orientation of contemporary writing, which he dubs “rear-guard” (278). The post-apocalyptically oriented literature is frequently nothing but a flow of writing, a stream that can be entered at any random point. Epstein notes that metonymy is the privileged principle of organization in the syntagmatic chains of associations of these texts, the primary examples coming from Valeriya Narbikova’s writings. Metonymy, though, seems merely to stand for simplicity for Epstein, while it might be productive to consider these texts in the light of theories of feminine writing, in which, as Luce Irigaray has suggested, metonymy is the leading structuring trope.

     

    Epstein concludes his essay with reflections on the relationship between the Russian “post-future” and Western postmodernism. He emphatically asserts the legitimacy of talking about a Russian postmodernism (even taking into consideration the aborted history of modernism in Russia), noting the domination of simulacra, the “propensity for quotation,” and the deconstructive impulse as the defining features of contemporary Russian texts (284-285). Late capitalism, he believes, is only one possible ground for emergence of a postmodern culture. The difference between the Russian/Soviet and Western civilizations, according to Epstein, is that the first is “logocentric” (“linguacentric” would, I believe, be more correct here), while the latter privileges “the silent values of gold and [iconic] representation” (287). The Soviet Union was a society of voracious consumption of utopian narratives and ideological signs, and its “post-future” is for Epstein “perhaps the most radical of all existing variants of postmodernism” (287).

     

    The essay by Katerina Clark that comes next in the volume problematizes Epstein’s model of the history of Russian literature. The focus of Clark’s argument is the Russians’ propensity for tripartite historical paradigms, where the current situation is interpreted through analogies with two previous ones (e.g. Hellenic Greece, French Revolution, 1917). This is the cause for Clark’s skepticism: “while we can see no lack of evidence,” she writes, “of the ways in the late eighties writers began deconstructing the long-standing official genealogies for 1917, we should be wary of seizing upon even the most radical versions of this as an evidence that Soviet literary sensibility had at long last become ‘postmodernist.’” Although “gestures in this direction have been made,” contemporary Russian writers, for Clark, “are not postmodernists,” for “in their texts, not all narratives are equal; inter alia, the Hegelian story of the progress of Geist is privileged” (304, Clark’s emphasis). Epstein’s “periodic table” can serve as supporting evidence for Clark’s claim “what we saw in the late eighties was business conducted largely as usual” (304): the Hegelian underpinnings of his model are obvious. However, his arguments in the other parts of his essay offer a challenge to Clark’s “de-postmodernizing” of contemporary Russian literature, especially since the writers Clark reads in her essay operate within more traditional aesthetic paradigms than does someone like Narbikova or the conceptualists.

     

    Late Soviet Culture ends with a coda in the form of Donald Raleigh’s eyewitness account of the active breakdown of the Soviet machine during and immediately after the August 1991 events. Raleigh is optimistic; he sees a potential for Russia to break the chains tying it to the past. The sincere optimism of his and Kuraev’s contributions may seem at odds with the situation of deepening crisis the post-Soviet states have been experiencing, in culture no less than in economy. But behind the troubled picture of today’s former Soviet Union it is possible to perceive the first sprouts of a new society. Does it mean that a new coil of the Hegelian spiral, envisioned by Epstein and Clark, is about to begin? Perhaps so. We should recall that even in Lyotard’s rather bleak Postmodern Condition, the postmodern crisis of metanarratives serves as a ground to “sketch the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown.”

     

  • Forward Into The Past

    Jim Hicks

    English Department
    University of Massachusetts, Boston
    hicks@umbsky.cc.umb.edu

     

    Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

     

    Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text. A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1993.

     

    In his 1985 recension of the debate on postmodernism, Gianni Vattimo suggests that the arguments of each then major figure (Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty) are determined (and undermined) by an illegimate appeal to “the state of things”–some version or other of the postmodern present (Vattimo 105). Whether or not metanarratives have been invalidated, whether the project of modernism is down but not yet out, and whether or not philosophy has lost its role as the unifier and arbiter of knowledge, the question is in some sense the same: where are we now and where do we go from here? Although Vattimo’s own attempt to respond to such questions (which suggests “piety,” “weakness,” and “mourning” as key elements to a truly pomo stance) seems either intentionally perverse or downright funny, his reminder that “condition,” “project,” and “consensus” are each present-tense nouns remains a good place to begin, even in a now much-widened debate. Two recent books which should be of particular interest to readers of Postmodern Culture deliver additional stories about the state of things at present. Clearly not your common or garden variety contributions to this field, both works suggest that the present and future of Western civilization ought to be found in recalling our premodern past.

     

    As an intervention into the contemporary critical fray, the book by Bruno Latour is the more direct. His title, We Have Never Been Modern, would seem to suggest his basic rhetorical strategy: “Stop all the bickering, whining and posturing . . . modernism, postmodernism, modernity, it never happened, it’s all a joke, it never happened.” Such an unfriendly tone, such an obvious attempt to grab the spotlight (and to foreclose the careers of so many, in so many fields), coming from someone other than a sociologist and historian of technoscience, from someone less beloved by those postmodern critics who have already made his acquaintance, from someone who wasn’t speaking, after all, in the name of Science, would no doubt cause only a ripple, passing through the critical pool as an instant of uncomfortable silence, a few heavy, disturbing seconds before the subject is changed. But when Science talks, people listen. When Science talks, we wait for an explanation.

     

    It is, of course, precisely such expectations in regard to science that Bruno Latour has long opposed. In a marvelous series of books, including Laboratory Life (with Steven Woolgar, 1979), Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), Latour argues that neither science nor society can be studied in isolation, that both are determined by means of the complex web of translations which join them together. Thus, science, when it does speak, is heard only by subscribers to its network: a favorite analogy of Latour’s is to the termite, whose existence is impossible outside of its tunnels. We Have Never Been Modern is explicitly a work which elaborates such translations (between “the emerging field of science studies” and “the literate public” [ix]), thus marking at most a new deviation in his work. Latour justifies this turn, in part, by telling a story about the present.

     

    That story begins with Latour himself, engaging in the act which he characterizes as “modern man’s form of prayer” (2), i.e. reading our daily paper. The stories that he finds there are familiar: the ozone hole, Professor Gallo’s laboratory, frozen embryos, and others. (If Latour had picked up an American paper, he might have pointed to stories about big business, condoms, guns and bible studies in our public schools, animal rights, pornography and sexual harassment, etc.) Diverse as they are, such stories have in common the manner in which they knot together nature and culture:

     

    A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections . . . . The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors–none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story. (1)

     

    Not that there’s anything wrong with such stories; on the contrary, according to Latour the imbroglio’s the thing. As he tells it, such “hybrid articles” are the best evidence of where we are–of the current crisis.

     

    Implicated in this crisis is, among other things, the most essential characteristic of modernity: that critical stance which divides and conquers hybrids, purifying them of their monstrous quality through disciplinary ghettoization. Given the chance, “the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will slice the delicate network . . . into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex . . . . By all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power” (3). Hybrids themselves are nothing new; Latour credits premodern cultures with the rigorous, even obsessive, thinking through of hybrids (a focus, he suggests, which explains why their production in such cultures is limited successfully). On the other hand, the will to purify–which of course cannot operate or develop without a constant fresh supply of hybrids–is for Latour the mark of the moderns; their most fundamental purification is the dichotomy between nature and culture. This separation, a refusal to acknowledge networks of mediation, both creates new hybrid objects and makes them available for purification. (Latour’s key example, borrowed from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, is Boyle’s air pump; the first “nonhuman witness” in modern science’s “theater of proof,” the air pump is for Latour “the hero of the story” which created a new experimental community–one independent of both God and the Republic–at the time of the Emglish civil wars.) The nature/culture dichotomy also allows a modern to believe that the production of new hybrids, because they belong to the natural order, is without consequence for that of society–a dream from which to be modern is never to wake up.

     

    Once again, it would seem that the tone of Latour’s title, as well as that of his book, is clear. “Reason has been sleeping, and breeding monsters, for three or four centuries now. Wake up! Wake up!” The author himself assures us otherwise:

     

    There is no false consciousness involved, since the moderns are quite explicit about the two tasks [of purification and hybridization]. . . . The only thing I add is the relation between those different sets of practices. (40)

     

    To do otherwise, Latour is well aware, would be to participate in the logic of accusation, denunciation and revolution–discourses that are familiar by now, and extremely productive, but also quintessentially modern. Instead, he proposes that we investigate the modern period with an anthropologist’s eye, to write about ourselves with the ethnographic habit of “dealing calmly with the seamless fabric of . . . ‘nature-culture’” (7). Latour notes that “in works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated” (7). Again it is the present state of affairs that enables this writerly position, this anthropology of the modern; modernism has become a “victim of its own success” (49), saturated by the hybrids that it has caused to proliferate.

     

    Such an anthropology, Latour argues, would elaborate rather than anatomize relations between nonhumans and humans, between people, words and things. To be collected, sorted and followed rather than ghettoized and covered, the world would be seen as populated with “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects,” the former as well as the latter viewed as actants in the networks of nature-culture. On the one hand, since nature and culture are not now, and never have been, separate, we have “never been modern” (at least not in the way the moderns would have it). But on the other hand, we must still learn to stop being modern, i.e. to stop trying to be, since “we have never really begun to enter the modern era” (47). In the place of such efforts is a new form of democracy, or perhaps its only real form, a “nonmodern Constitution” in which “we have committed ourselves to providing representation for quasi-objects” (139). Nonmodern, Latour makes very clear, has nothing to do with the antimoderns:

     

    Always on the defensive, they consistently believed what the moderns said about themselves and proceeded to affix the opposite sign to each declaration. . . . The values they defended were never anything but the residue left by their enemies. (134)

     

    Indeed, when, in concluding, Latour sketches out such a Constitution, premoderns, moderns, and postmoderns all contribute–only the antimoderns get left out. This section, the most praiseworthy (but also the most hurried) in this short, dense book, will likely be elaborated in response to the polemics Latour’s essay will assuredly incite.

     

    In my attempt to present somewhat carefully both the premises and the conclusions of We Have Never Been Modern, what has been left out is most of its contents. Awaiting its readers, in addition, are an explanation of modern productivity, a sorting through of continental philosophy from Hobbes to Habermas and Lyotard, a defense of “relative relativism” vis-a-vis nature-cultures, and a salutation of co-travelers as diverse as Michel Serres, Charles Peguy, and Donna Haraway. I should also add a warning-label for the disciplinarily over-identified: Latour reserves some of his best barbs–full of language that sounds nothing if not denunciatory–for postmodern theorists; he considers postmodernism “a symptom, not a fresh solution” (46), one which mistakenly takes the moderns at their word, and is characterized at best by “intellectual immobility” (61). But equally important, and nearly as numerous, are the occasions on which Latour attributes positive effects to postmodern practice (a practice to which, I imagine, some have even accused him of contributing).

     

    In any case, the real strength of Latour’s analysis in this book, and a substantially new elaboration of his thought (also see, however, Irreductions), is his emphasis on the determining, as opposed to determined, nature of the object during the modern period–particularly his demonstration of the hybrid character of that object. Latour’s analysis also displays the vices of its virtues; on occasion he retains the metalanguage of modern science as a ground for his investigations (e.g., “[modernity] is much more than an illusion and much less than an essence. It is a force . . .” [40]). A thinker such as Latour, who in Science in Action gives a powerful display of the network which connects the military-industrial complex to life in the laboratory, must at times feel constrained by that language which links science, war and the movement of capital. Outside of science studies–i.e. through the door to women’s studies and transnational studies that Donna Haraway, Ashis Nandy, and others have wedged open, there is of course a myriad of other documentation of the effects of modernist hybridization. It may be that both the angels in the house and the barbarians at the gate (i.e., humans seen as nonhumans) have other words to add to the nonmodern Constitution, representations that they will provide themselves, given a place at the table. Having read Latour, and finding ourselves somewhat less reverent before the glow of modern technoscience, we may finally be ready to tune in.

     

    It would also be possible, although parochial, to fault Latour for beginning his analysis of the moderns with Boyle and Hobbes, thus granting them too quickly that forefather status which is already an old story within the annals of modernism. Having never been modern, the West would be better revealed by focusing on a period where it didn’t believe that it was. The second book under review here, an extended essay by the medieval historian, contemporary social critic, and all-around visionary Ivan Illich, does just that, with a twist. Illich offers a meditation on the history of the book, conceived as an investigation into the symbolic gathering that shapes both reading practices and textual technologies. The twist is that he does so as an intervention into the current push toward computer literacy. The specific object of his analysis is Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (c. 1128), a work which Illich calls “the first book written on the art of reading” (5). Directed at what Illich sees as a watershed moment for Western thought, the shift from a culture of the book to that of the information-based “bookish text,” his commentary is also rich in insight into that historical moment. Illich offers this meditation “in the hope that the transition from monastic to scholastic reading may . . . throw some light on a very different transition now” (4).

     

    An earlier book by Illich, Shadow Work, also contains an essay on Hugh–entitled “Research by People” (76-95). There Illich argues that Hugh provides a historical precedent for an alternative to “research for people” (i.e. “R & D . . . conducted by large institutions–governments, industry, universities, clinics, the military, foundations” [77]). Unlike Bacon (a key precedessor of “research for people”), Hugh envisions science as a remedy for our fallen nature, not as a means to subjugate Nature; Hugh also includes the mechanical arts within his understanding of science, thus in some measure making him a precursor to the technoscience studies of Latour. Illich’s commentary on the Didascalicon, by focusing on the text as “object par excellence” (116), also parallels that of Latour; both in fact demonstrate that “by centering our analysis on the object we turn this object into a mirror reflecting significant transformations in the mental shape of western societies” (Vineyard, 5).

     

    One of the most fascinating aspects of Hugh’s writings as discussed by Illich is the medieval theologian’s concept of the role of memory training in pedagogy. Distinct from its later popularization in the Renaissance, Illich suggests that “Hugh seems to have been the first one to seriously revive classical memory training, and was then the last major figure to propose memory as the sole or principal means of retrieving information” (45). Not merely an eccentric or unusually skilled disciplinarian, Hugh was also unique in his application of such training: the De arca Noe, his memory book for experts, taught the construction of a complex, multicolored, almost monstrous, three-dimensional ark–“a space-time matrix built within the mind of the student and modeled on Noah’s ark” (37). The layout of this “moral and mystical ark,” according to one scholar, would require 220 square feet of paper for a still readable blueprint (37-8). Unlike the classical memory palaces, this mnemonic aid was not simply architectural–its function was to embody historia–and to provide a “mental home” for the student, thus become an intellectual pilgrim. According to Illich, “The Ark stands for a social entity, a process that begins with creation and continues to the end of time, what Hugh calls ‘the Church’” (46-7). In effect, it is a virtual cathedral; for “the construction of cathedrals,” no less than that of Hugh’s Ark, “can be understood as a public creation of a symbolic universe of memoria: the solemnly celebrated reminiscence of historia” (38, n.30). Latour would no doubt note the seamless fabric of nature-culture in such an achievement (as well as the rigorous, almost obsessive, thinking through of hybrids).

     

    For Illich, Hugh’s arca also marks a liminal moment in the history of the text. With his construction of a “mental home” for the scholar, Hugh has begun to sever the text from the page, creating, in effect, a treasure chest which is also a floating signifier, a coffin from which the modern concepts of person and text will arise. In his Didascalicon, Hugh also makes evident the tremendous distance between his experience of the book and that form of studium which immediately followed him, created within the sanctuaries of the modern university. Monastic reading was a “strenuous exercise” proscribed for the “frail or infirm” (57), a dictated and mumbled rehearsal of those voces paginarum which commanded each of the interior senses as well: “When Hugh reads, he harvests; he picks the berries from the lines” (57); “For Hugh, . . . the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood, his eyes must pick out the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables” (58); not merely an activity, for Hugh reading is “a way of life” insofar as recitation both accompanies daily toils and organizes the day according to its various incarnations (59); the book was “swallowed and digested” by Hugh “through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned” (60). This sensurround experience of the book passes away along with Hugh, rooted out in the development of a bookish text. As for Illich’s intention in retelling this story, it is difficult not to see an uneven parallel with a comment he makes about Hugh: “At the last moment of the old regime of the book, he proposes the studium legendi as a new ideal, a civic duty, and universal learning as a gratuitous, celebratory, leisurely intercourse with the book” (84). As readers of Illich are aware, he has frequently written on the devastating effects of literacy on those outside the schools; the “threat of computer literacy” (5) is clearly more than a new and improved version of the same (see also Mirror 159-81 and 182-201). On the other hand, it seems to me that if today, “outside the educational system . . .there might be something like houses of reading . . . where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship” (3), subscribers to Postmodern Culture, if anyone, must know where to find them.

     

    The story of the development of the bookish text also contains Illich’s principal thesis: that, in the hundred or so years after Hugh’s death, the book as object underwent a fundamental transformation and that “the effect of this reformatting of the page and book on the ethology and semantics of reading and, hence, on thought, was more fundamental than that of print” (114). “The principal effect of the latter invention,” according to Illich, “was to mechanize the procedure by which the twelfth- or thirteenth-century page is still reproduced today” (114). Among these innovations, a “set of about two dozen new graphic conventions” (119), Illich describes the invention of alphabetical indexing, the recording of vernacular tongues alongside of Latin script, the shift towards silent reading and self-penned texts, various changes in layout (which made distinct the various contribution to book-making by author, editor, and critic), and the development of the portable book. Illich makes a strong case against either the technodetermination or the sociodetermination of this “scribal revolution” (116), arguing instead that “an eminently suitable and complex device already available within a society will be turned into a tool only at that historic moment when this task acquires symbolic significance” (72). (That he is here speaking of the circumstances surrounding the emergence, in Latour’s terms, of a new hybrid or nature-culture, is made clear by an earlier gloss on the “symbol”: for Hugh, “a symbol is a collecting of visible forms for the demonstration of invisible things” [32]; citing Gerhart Ladner, Illich emphasizes an opposition between symbols and mere psychoanalytic or cultural “myths.” On the contrary, for Hugh symbols are “facts and events, phenomena in and beyond nature and history” [Ladner, as cited by Illich 32]).

     

    The import of this thesis is startling, and worth emphasizing. Applied to the present, it would suggest, for example, that the invention of comic books and Baedekers might well have marked a more fundamental change than, say, that of the Macintosh or cable TV. Like Latour, Illich’s purpose is to deflate easy, and disciplinarily safe, explanations by both constructivists and realists in the writing of history. For those that are familiar with Illich’s other writings, it is this emphasis which makes clear the connection between his work as medieval historian and that as radical social critic. To provoke a perspectival shift, one which challenges the most naturalized assumptions of a given field, is a longstanding, self-described role for his interventions: Ivan Illich, intellectual samurai and heretic for hire (see, for example, his comments in Mirror 10).

     

    At the risk of letting this essay devolve from a book review into that most hated of primary school assignments, the book report, I have presented the above material from In the Vineyard of the Text rather directly, without what is perhaps the usual degree of critical intervention. My intention in doing so has been twofold. First, to advance, without unnecessary injury, the seduction of Illich’s endeavor; whereas Latour attempts to dismantle the modern mindset, Illich lures his reader towards another. My second motive, less laudable, was more influential; not born even into the era of the bookish text, not to mention that of the culture of the book, I also wished to conceal my ignorance.

     

    I will turn, by way of conclusion, to an important point which my quasi-neutral presentation of Illich’s arguments has enabled me to sidestep. There exists an obvious opposition between the two books which I have thus far presented together: Latour wants to put an end to talk of our radical isolation, to appeals based on our unique difference as moderns; he doesn’t believe in historical revolutions any more than in those of epistemology. Illich, on the other hand, appears to offer just such an appeal; epistemological breaks are part and parcel of his sense of history. In fact, by reading these books together, I suggest my own sense of the present: I/we live in a moment where both positions are relevant (and revealing). If, as both Latour and Illich argue, the present is indeed a moment of crisis, Latour’s sense of possible futures is nearly as important as Illich’s search for precedents in our past. In the end, though, I side with Illich, with that wondrous vocation which has called him to intervene, not just in studies of technology and society, but in the history of education, gender, art history and architecture, policy making, philosophy, and more, always with the intention of shaping the future by “lampoon[ing] the shibboleths of the year” (Mirror 10). In any case, if Latour’s most recent book, and today’s newspapers, are any indication, the future–both ours and Latour’s–may ultimately be found in our premodern past.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Illich, Ivan. In the Mirror of the Past. New York: Marion Boyars, 1992.
    • —. Shadow Work. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1986.
    • —. In the Vineyard of the Text. A Commentary to Hugh’s %Didascalicon%. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1993.
    • Latour, Bruno. The Pasterization of France and Irreductions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.
    • —. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.
    • —. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.
    • Latour, Bruno and Steven Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986.
    • Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air- Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985.
    • Vattimo, Gianni. “Postmodernita e fine della storia.” Moderno postmoderno. Ed. Giovanni Mari. Milano:

     

  • Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality

    Gregory Ulmer

    English Department
    University of Florida, Gainesville
    glulmer@nervm.Nerdc.Ufl.Edu

     

    An earlier version of this work was published in The Florida Landscape: Revisited, a catalog for an exhibition curated by Christoph Gerozissis, Lakeland, Florida: The Polk Museum, 1992. An electronic predecessor was included, with the assistance of Anthony Rue, in a cultural studies World-Wide Web project at the University of Florida called Re:WIRED.

     

    “Tradition is like spring-water that wells forth from the ground, flowing on forever. It is no abstract doctrine”

    Mysteries of the Dream-Time

     

    Project for a New Consultancy

     

    The State of Florida has asked for advice. Debilitated by the recession, embarrassed by its ranking as 43rd most livable state in America (based on categories such as income, crime rate, graduation rate, suicide and taxes), Florida is giving renewed attention to its leading industry–tourism. The 1991 Legislature created the Florida Tourism Commission charged with devising a strategy for promoting tourism. One of the first acts of the Commission was to hire the New York consulting firm of Penn & Schoen which, for a fee of $250,000, will assess what role the state should play in tourism promotion.

     

    The Florida Research Ensemble (FRE–a faculty group at the University of Florida that practices an experimental approach to arts and letters) took this situation as a good test for its new consultancy project. What knowledge resources are available for dealing with a state problem? If there is an agricultural problem the Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida is called on for advice. But when there is a cultural problem, why does no one ask the experts in culture at the University for advice? Why is the expertise of a public relations firm, and a New York firm at that, thought to be relevant to the issue of tourism in Florida, while the expertise of professors in the liberal and fine arts is not considered relevant? This question is addressed as much to the professors as to the state agency, of course, since the arts and humanities disciplines traditionally have not thought of the culture industry as the applied dimension of their specializations.

     

    A review of newspaper reports of planning thus far indicate that the “improvement of tourism” is being framed as a matter of advertising. The local tourism boards formed in response to the legislative initiative have been most concerned with “how and when to advertise and how to get the attention we need.” Perhaps because Florida already attracts over 40 million visitors a year, less attention has been given to “what facilities and resources may be magnets for visitors.” An early example of what to expect is the campaign commissioned by the State Commerce Department. During the winter of 1992-1993, an agency monitored bad weather in northern cities, placing full-page ads in newspapers following a blizzard: a photograph of a piece of toast with the words, “just a reminder that it’s nice and toasty in Florida.” To this reminder we might add the rider: “safer than Egypt.”

     

    Assuming that these efforts did indeed focus touristic attention on Florida, FRE offers to consult with the Tourism Commission about how to improve the experience itself of the visitors to our landscape. FRE’s first step is to challenge the assumptions about cognitive jurisdiction, about what knowledge is relevant to which problems (Star Wars belonged to physics, tourism to public relations). The fact is that when it is a matter of invention, history shows that innovation almost always comes from outside a specialization. One definition of invention could be “a process by which the status of an idea is transformed from irrelevant to relevant.” FRE is not “competing” with Penn & Schoen for the PR job; we offer a different expertise, which until now has not been applied to tourism except in the negative mode of critique. Our disciplines have said a great deal against tourism; the challenge for FRE is to apply our knowledge to the design of an improved tourism.

     

    From Tourism to Solonism

     

    There are many significant points of overlap between the arts and tourism. Take for example the case of Solon, one of the wisest of the Ancient Greeks, who is said to be both the first theorist and the first tourist. “The Greeks,” Wlad Godzich explains,”designated certain individuals to act as legates on certain formal occasions in other city states or in matters of considerable political importance. These individuals bore the title of theoros and collectively constituted a theoria. They were summoned on special occasions to attest the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance, and to then verbally certify its having taken place” (Godzich). Others could see and make claims, but these would have merely the status of “perceptions”; only the report of the theoria provided certainty, certifying the attested event such that it could be treated as fact. “What it certified as having been seen could become the object of public discourse.”

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 1]

     

    Travel was an essential element of archaic theoria. Herodotus noted that theoria was the reason for Solon’s visit to the ruler of Lydia. “Originally theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview,” E.V. Walter comments. “The first theorists were ‘tourists’–the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. Solon, the Greek sage whose political reforms around 590 B.C. renewed the city of Athens, is the first ‘theorist’ in Western history” (Walter). This theoria “did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight. The term implied a complex but organic mode of active observation–a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. It encouraged an open reception to every kind of emotional, cognitive, symbolic, imaginative, and sensory experience.” Nor was the travel of a theoros always a response; it could also be a probe. The motive for Solon’s visit to Lydia, where he went “to see what could be seen,” was “curiosity”: “and it was just this great gift of curiosity, and the desire to see all the wonderful things–pyramids, inundations, and so forth–that were to be seen that enabled the Ionians to pick up and turn to their own use such scraps of knowledge as they could come by among the barbarians” (Burnet).

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 2]

     

    Let us take Solon, then, as the emblem of the FRE consultancy on tourism: in an improved tourism, the tourist will be a theoros, whose collective practice will constitute a theoria. It might be useful to coin a neologism to name this new vacationing–“soloning”–and its practitioners–“solonists.” The solonist is a tourist functioning as “witness.”

     

    Tourism as Invention

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 3]

     

    A “nation” is an idea–an idea with a history. There was a time before nations, and there may come a time after and without nations. Meanwhile, the idea of “the United States” is undergoing a change, as evidenced by the confusion about how to commemorate the Columbus quincentennial. The arrival in St. Augustine from Spain of the replica Columbian flotilla in April, 1992, was a magnet not only for tourists but for protesters. It could have been an occasion to test the special gaze of the solonists, supporting an alternative to the opposition between unity and separatism. At this post-colonial moment, American national identity is being revised, in a process whose difficulties may be traced in the debates surrounding multiculturalism, political correctness, and hate crimes. The tourist as solonist will travel to see what is to be seen in order to reinvent our national identity. But what will be the nature of this site seeing?

     

    Tourism has already played an important role in the creation of representations that have shaped American national identity. A review of the history of two of the most important embodiments of American identity shows why the Florida Tourism Commission turned to a public relations firm for advice, since PR played a crucial role in these symbolic inventions. Both originated with booster groups as ways to increase and improve tourism in a specific place.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 4]

     

    The first vacation spots in America were spas where people went to “take the waters.” This custom, borrowed from Europe, led eventually to the discovery of sea-bathing as a leisure activity. Atlantic City, New Jersey, is one of the sites where this new recreation evolved. There were only seven houses there when the railroad arrived in the 1850s (Sutton). By 1900 over ten million dollars had been invested in hotels. In 1920, looking for a way to keep tourists at the beach through Labor Day, the Business Men’s League decided to sponsor a Fall Frolic, which in 1921 introduced a beauty pageant. The first such contest had been held at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in the 1880s, but was not repeated. Herb Test, a reporter hired to handle publicity for the Atlantic City version, decided to call the winner “Miss America.” “It was decided in committee that newspapers in the Atlantic City trading area would be approached with the suggestion that they use the beauty contest at Atlantic City as a gimmick to increase circulation” (Deford). The association with national identity was established from the beginning, with the first winner (a fifteen year old named Margaret Gorman) setting the pattern of a preference for the “civic beauty” of the “amateur” over the “brazen femininity” of professional models and actresses. It may be worth noting in the context of solonism that the early pageants were presided over by the figure of King Neptune, the god who was the protector of Atlantis.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 5]

     

    Mount Rushmore, also known as the “shrine of democracy,” offers a second example of booster inventiveness serving national identity. If “Miss America” was meant to be the embodiment of our national ideal of womanhood, the Rushmore monument “signifies the achievements of the United States as symbolized by the four great national leaders. Washington represents the founding of the Union; Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase; Lincoln, the preservation of the Union; and [Teddy] Roosevelt, the expansion of the country and the conservation of its natural resources” (Tour Book: North Central, American Automobile Association).

     

    In the early 1920s, Doane Robinson, State Historian for South Dakota, began thinking of ways to lure tourists to his state. Having read of the work of Guzton Borglum (carving a monument to the Confederacy on the face of Stone Mountain, Georgia), Robinson was giving a speech to a tourist promotion group when it struck him that a monument could be carved in the granite of the Black Hills. He proposed the idea on the spot, suggesting that the principal figure be Chief Red Cloud, supported by other heroes of the Old West such as General Custer (Smith). Booster clubs in the area were enthusiastic, although they considered the idea impossible. Borglum was recruited to the project, and changed its theme to the “Founding Fathers,” to better realize his aim of “a monument dedicated to the meaning of America.” After some twenty years the carving was completed, and today it attracts over two million visitors annually.

     

    The Monument as Rhizome

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 6]

     

    The FRE consultancy concerns the design of the “magnet of attraction” for solonists. The lesson of Atlantic City and Mount Rushmore is that there exists a “monumental” tourism–an activity whose motivation is economic but whose effect is symbolic, involving a visit to a place marked by a thing or an event that represents a collective value. It might be helpful to generalize from these examples, in order to discover their relevance to our own situation.

     

    Rushmore and Miss America are products of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call an “abstract machine”–a generative or inventive idea. To convey how such machines operate, the theorists use the metaphor of the rhizome, of which one of their favorite examples is the relationship between the wasp and the orchid. The relationship that plants form with insects, animals, people, the wind, in order to propagate, is a rhizome. Joseph Beuys used a similar example to express his understanding of creative thinking, stating that people make thought the way bees make honey.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 7]

     

    Let us continue the analogy, to say that tourism is rhizomatic–that it makes national identity the way bees make honey (the social function of the WASP, extended now to include all ethnicities).

     

    Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce a tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. . . . the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways. (Deleuze and Guattari, 12)

     

    If tourists use maps, solonists are maps, or map-makers. Tourism,then, becomes a “map” to post-columbian America.

    Solonism as Social Sculpture

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 8]

     

    The purpose of “Florida Rushmore” is to introduce the tourist to solonism. This introduction should include some further suggestions for solonistic activities. To accomodate this need,there might be established at the site of the electronic monument a Museum of Cultural Inventions, with displays tracing the contribution of Arts and Letters to American traditions, such as Washington Irving’s invention of the myth of “Columbus,” or Owen Wister and Frederick Remington’s invention of the “Cowboy.” The museum will sponsor exhibits from the history of the liberal and fine arts that might serve as models showing solonists how to become inventors themselves.

     

    A series of projects by the German performance artist, Joseph Beuys, exemplify the nature of such exhibits. Beuys developed the strategy of a politically therapeutic “social sculpture” in environmental works such as Show Your Wound, in which he set up an installation in an ugly, dangerous place–selected as representative of a sick spot in the urban environment–the underground pedestrian area between two streets in Munich (Tisdall). In Tallow he selected a similar site in Munster, which he used as a cast for a giant sculpture using twenty tons of mutton and beef fat. This line of work led to his proposal for a Free International University to be established in Belfast, to function as an arts consultancy for resolving the dilemma of Ireland.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 19]

     

    It is typical of Beuys to seek out a wound, a sore spot, which is also a very concrete representation of the wider context of social failure. It is equally typical that the artist does not simply use this sore spot for a denunciation, but applies to it his own kind of dialectic. He attempts to heal the place (Laszlo Gloser, in Tisdall).

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 20]

     

    The more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas–although they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such. (Chtcheglov)

     

    The situationist inventors of psychogeography wanted chance to play a part in the creation of situations, as the “tourist” wandered aimlessly or drifted through the urban landscape. One experimenter in this vein used a map of London to explore an area of Germany with which he was unfamiliar. In conventional tourism, getting lost is at best inconvenient, and at worst dangerous. The Museum of Cultural Invention will have a “Tourist Hall of Fame” commemorating tourist sacrifices to chance, such as the Dutch tourist who happened to be in Paris when the Commune took over the city at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. Because of his resemblance to one of the leaders of the rebellion, this tourist was executed on suspicion of being a communard (Mercer).

     

    When tourists add theoria (witnessing) to their itinerary, they expose a problematic dimension of the environment to a new kind of attention whose function would not be “spectacle” but “healing.” The solonists might not rely only on chance to bring them to a sorespot. They would take advantage of maps, such as the one suggested by an Alachua County Commissioner, “alerting residents to crime-ridden areas that need to be avoided.” The Commissioner explained her proposal, motivated by the recovery of a murder victim’s body in Gainesville, “that certain wooded areas are havens for prostitution, selling drugs and other criminal activity.” Ordinary citizens use these same woods “to walk and meditate.”

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 21]

     

    The point of solonism is that such places–all the forgotten and denied places, the leftovers (the unconscious)–must be put on the map and even visited if the landscape is to become a rhizome for national self-knowledge. We already have a place in Florida that advertises itself as “an adventure without risk.” Solonism is an alternative to, a supplement of, this conventional tourism, and the solonist who tours places like those sore woods in Gainesville is working more in the tradition of adventurers who accepted the risks of travel into the unknown. What might be the effect of this gaze, or of the circulation of this testimony preserved in home videos, snap-shots, and anecdotes? A post-columbian America cannot forget that adventurers are responsible for its existence, for better and for worse.

     

    The solonists in their theoria might constitute a Columbus 500 years the wiser, knowing something about the karstification of culture. In their visit to Florida they learn that the idea of “America” is not “granite” (not igneous, however ingenious), but limestone, soluble in water, and with the rains becoming more acidic every year.

     

    Florida Rushmore

     

    It is possible to formulate a specific proposal for the FTC, based on the above discussion. The proposal is based on the following steps of reasoning:

     

    1. the state desires not only to promote tourism, but to improve it.
    2. monumental practices (including events and celebrations as well as memorials) are magnets attracting tourists to specific sites.
    3. tourism and monuments form a rhizome that in practice “constructs the unconscious” of a culture.
    4. the state issue after 1992 concerns the revision of American national identity in the new post-colonial era of multiculturalism.
    5. solonism names a new style of tourism as theoria, in which the process of cultural invention through tourism becomes self-conscious, reflective, and hence “critical.”
    6. critical tourism would allow citizens to participate directly in the continuing invention of “America.”
    7. conclusion: FRE could improve tourism by designing a monument that exposes tourists to the experience of solonism.

     

    Our proposal is to build an electronic version of Mount Rushmore in Florida, a version that will be in effect a revision and supplement of the original. The theoretical rationale for this choice is based on the psychological function of monuments, known as “mourning.” The rhizomatic nature of tourism and monuments is due to the reciprocal relationship between the formation of individual and collective identity. The entry points to the network of American identity are marked by monuments.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 9]

     

    In psychoanalytic terms, “mourning” refers to the process by which the self is constituted as a distinctly separate person yet part of the larger whole of society. The “loss” of unity with the mother’s body is mourned by internalizing (introjecting) an image of the parents in the unconscious (and eventually other figures with whom the self identifies, forming what is known as the “superego”). The loss is compensated for by the symbolizing power (language) associated with such introjections. Collective entities such as nations maintain their identity through a similar process of symbolization, mourning the loss of one generation of citizens after the other, back to the Founding Fathers. As the following citation suggests, monuments are to a nation what the superego is to an individual.

     

    The oedipal resolution also governs the creation of a superego:

     

    And here too we find an important relation to the work of mourning and the elegy. At the most obvious level, we recall Freud’s suggestion that the superego is made up of the “illustrious dead,” a sort of cultural reservoir, or rather cemetery, in which one may also inter one’s renounced love-objects, and in which the ruling monument is the internalized figure of the father. (Sacks)

     

    An electronic Rushmore produces a mourning identification that is flexible and diverse rather than one that is “carved in stone.” A Holographic Monument “Florida Rushmore” uses the technology of holography and computers to create a continuously changing image of a face, projected in 3-D at the same scale as the Rushmore heads (60 feet high).

     

    Technology

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 10]

     

    Holography is a method of lensless photography in which the wave field of light scattered by an object is recorded on a plate as an interference pattern. When the photographic record–the hologram–is placed in a coherent light beam like a laser, the original wave pattern is regenerated. A three-dimensional image appears. Because there is no focusing lens, the plate appears as a meaningless pattern of swirls. Any piece of the hologram will reconstruct the entire image (Wilber).

     

    Composite Photography

     

    Nancy Burson’s computer-generated portraits are the model for the faces represented in “Florida Rushmore.”

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 11]

     

    Burson has extended the technique of composite photography, invented by Francis Galton in 1877, to the medium of digital computer graphics. Using software developed by Richard Carling and David Kramlich, Burson essentially reinvented photography. Her technique of amalgamating and manipulating images has been used by the FBI to update photographs of missing children, and by PEOPLE magazine to project the effect of age on celebrities. Composites of everything from a lion/lamb through the heads of state of the nuclear powers to an oriental/caucasian/black (with features weighted according to current world population statistics) are said “to explore themes as universal as sexuality and race and concerns as common as beauty, celebrity, and political power.”

     

    That her technique is especially suited to psychogeography has to do with the historical affinity between psychoanalysis and photography. Walter Benjamin said that photography is to the visible world what psychoanalysis is to the mind. Freud himself drew upon Galton’s composite technique to describe the logic of dreams. “What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits,” Freud wrote, explaining the effect of condensation in one of his own dreams. “Namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred; incidentally, the beard further involved an allusion to my father and myself through the intermediate idea of growing grey” (Freud).

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 12]

     

    A Mystorical Questionnaire

     

    Tourists visiting the monument would have an opportunity to fill out a questionnaire designed to elicit information indicative of the figures with whom they identify–figures that represent their “personalized” or internal Rushmores. The questionnaire uses the formula of a genre called “mystory” (a neologism derived from “history”), that is a discursive equivalent of a composite photograph. A mystory condenses into one account information from the four main discourses used by Americans: family anecdotes, school history textbooks, popular media, and disciplinary expertise. The computer uses the tourist’s responses to the questions to identify four figures–one from each discourse area (family history, public history, entertainment, and career field)–as a representation of the individual’s superego. In my own case, for example, a paper version of the mystory suggested that the heads on my personal Rushmore are Walter Ulmer (my father), George Armstrong Custer, Gary Cooper, and Jacques Derrida.

     

    The computer collects in its memory the composite face of each tourist’s personal Rushmore, randomly selecting a new one every fifteen minutes to be projected as the face of “Florida Rushmore.” As Andy Warhol said, in media America, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Thus the Rushmore of an electronic, post-colonial America will be as diverse as the population of the nation itself. The tourist may purchase a graphic printout of his/her composite as a souvenir. A tourist whose superego is projected as the national monument is awarded a commemorative hologram. Burson’s work has been praised for creating utterly believable faces “like the faces in our dreams, struck from life but recast by our concerns. It is an instrumental imagination, manifesting human inner vision.” “Florida Rushmore” puts this imagination to work on the task of representing the continuing dream of a democratic, free America. Part of its purpose is to remind citizens that “America” is precisely a “dream.” A nation, like an individual, can come to know itself better by learning how to remember its dreams. The externalization of the psychological process of identification (mourning) demonstrated in the monument will make “Florida Rushmore” the founding site of solonism.

     

    Location: The Devil’s Millhopper Sinkhole. Doane Robinson’s idea for a monument on Mount Rushmore was inspired in part by his love for the landscape of the Black Hills, especially the granite cliffs protruding above the forested hills. The geology of South Dakota, in fact, was suited to the fixed concept of the nation common in the America of Robinson’s era. But the psychogeography of America has changed in the postmodern era, for which the limestone aquifer of Florida is a better metaphor than is the bedrock of the plains and foothills of the North. As children sometimes write in their social studies reports, “we should not take our freedom for granite.”

     

    An excellent location for “Florida Rushmore,” then, is the sinkhole known as “The Devil’s Millhopper,” where the flux of the electronic portraits figures the instability of the land itself.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 13]

     

    Two miles northwest of Gainesville is the State Geological Site (the only one in Florida), “The Devil’s Millhopper,” exemplifying one of the most unusual features of the Florida landscape–the sinkhole. Formed nearly 20,000 years ago, the sink is nearly 120 feet deep and 500 feet across at the top. Since 1976 a 221-step wooden stairway takes the visitor to the bottom of the hole. “The sink got its name after fossilized bones and teeth were found there, and visitors termed the hole the lair of the devil” (Marth).

     

    “In general, sinkholes are the result of the action of water on the porous limestone substrate underlying northern Florida, which is characterized by countryside riddled with shallow, interweaving networks of caves. When the ceiling of an underground cave has worn too thin from dissolution, it simply cannot support its own weight and collapses” (Stubbs). Sinkhole formation continues today, accelerated by human activity such as the heavy pumping of ground water. In the Gulf coast city of Dunedin, just since 1990 more than 172 homeowners reported structural damage because of sinkholes, causing an insurance company to discontinue homeowner insurance for the entire city. In 1981 a hole opened in Winter Park, Florida, developing within a few hours into the size of a football field and as deep as an eight-story building, causing two million dollars in damages to swallowed and sunken property. Within days the hole ranked as a major tourist attraction, and many people were seen wearing “Sinkhole 1981” T-shirts.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 14]

     

    A sinkhole is just one of several features of karst topography, which includes poljes, dolines, caverns, lapies, and the variety of plants, animals, and human habitation associated with such formations. The term “karst” originated as the proper name of the northwestern part of Yugoslavia, including Croatia, and was then generalized to refer to any area similarly rich in soluble limestone rock. The ethnic warfare underway in that region since the collapse of the Soviet Union represents a warning, of which karst may serve as a reminder, of one possible alternative to national identity. The value of locating “Florida Rushmore” at a sinkhole is that the karst geology may serve as a good analogy in a psychogeographical metaphor–the underground movement of water, “following the line of least resistance (greatest permeability) through fractures and cavities,” creates the surface features of the landscape, analogous to the way the workings of the unconscious are manifested in symptoms. Symptoms, in turn, are said to be personal monuments to forgotten traumas.

     

    The geology itself, in other words, could be used to help tourists become solonists, by using landscape displays as allegories for social and psychological processes. Freud himself used landscape as an explanation of his “structural” model of the psyche–divided into ego, superego, and id.

     

    Let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true, decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home. I am imagining a country with a landscape of varying configuration–hill-country, plains, and chains of lakes–, and with a mixed population: it is inhabited by Germans, Magyars, and Slovaks, who carry on different activities. . . . A few things are naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the mountains and wine does not grow in the water. Indeed, the picture of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the details. (Freud, in Erdelyi.)

     

    The analogy is picked up in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “faciality,” having to do with the effects of power in the relationship of a state to its citizens. In terms of signification–as an abstract machine–a “face” is a system created by the relationship of black holes to white walls (Deleuze and Guattari). Power circulates in this system through such facial rhizomes as the mother/child, two lovers, the celebrity/fan, the politician/voter. What the face is to the body, the landscape is to the environment (a system of surfaces and holes organized into significance, expressing relations of power).

     

    Although the original plans for Mount Rushmore called for the sculpting of the whole bodies of the figures, the final embodiment of the idea in the four heads relates the monument to the talking heads of the electronic era (anticipated by the “close-up” shot in cinema). “The face is produced only when the head ceases to be apart of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body.” Identification with this “face,” that is, makes one not the member of a family, but the subject of a state. The karst topography of Florida, with its multitude of flooded sinks, is a setting ideally suited to teaching the facial implications of landscape.

     

    Metaphoric Rocks

     

    For our monument we will modify Freud’s analogy to fit our case: let “Florida” represent the American psyche. It remains to be worked out how to fit the tenor to the vehicle in this metaphor, how to assign the divisions of the population (Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American, Native American) and the economic activities (agriculture, mining, tourism) to the divisions of the structural model of the mind. But as Freud said, there is a certain disorderly mixing among all these components, whether as nation or psyche.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 15]

     

    We might begin with the old bones found at Millhopper that could be associated with the themes of mourning (the bones found in a grave or tomb). For tourists to perform theoria does not require their full awareness of the method of metaphors from which are composed the myths holding together a nation. They do not need to be “experts” or “linguists” of national identity in order to become monumentally inventive. Rather, monumentality is a kind of writing whose school is tourism. The matrix of geology, technology, and culture existing in the Millhopper landscape make it an ideal location for bringing this symbolic practice (written mourning) into visibility.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 16]

     

    Freud compared psychoanalysis to archaeology, with the analyst sifting through the products of the unconscious the way an archaeologist penetrated the surface of the landscape to reconstruct the facts of a buried city, like Schleimann at Troy. Contemporary archaeology includes the use of satellites and remote sensing technology, as in the discovery of the city of Ubar, “a major hub of the frankincense trade that vanished beneath the desert sands of southern Oman two millenia ago.” The city perished in a disaster around A.D. 100. “Evidence at the Oman site indicates that much of the settlement fell into a sinhole created by the collapse of an underground limestone cavern” (Bower). Indeed, Florida is in the same latitudinal belt as great deserts such as the Sahara and the Arabian Desert, but being a peninsula and the proximity of warm ocean currents makes it one of the nation’s wettest states.

     

    The link between Florida and Ubar rests on more than the shared karst topography. Researchers found the city by tracing ancient desert roads detected beneath the sand in pictures taken by the radar and optical cameras carried by the space shuttle Challenger in 1984. The shuttles, of course, are launched from Florida (including the spectacular, catastrophic explosion of Challenger in 1986). This link suggests that a second version of “Florida Rushmore” could be added to the Astronauts Memorial located at Spaceport USA, Cape Canaveral.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 17]

     

    Lawrence of Arabia referred to Ubar as “the Atlantis of the Sands,” thus associating the destruction of Atlantis with a sinkhole collapse. As the part of the continent to emerge most recently from the ocean, Florida might be thought of as a natural Atlantis (which was expected to rise again). Some of the early maps of the New World, in any case, identified as “Atlantis” the place Columbus discovered. This allusion returns us to Solon, who told the story of Atlantis in Plato’s Timaeus.

     

    Plato used a karst feature–a cave–as the setting for his famous allegory of enlightenment. Many commentators on this allegory have observed that if Plato were writing today, he would use the popular institutions of cinema and television instead of the fire and shadows to represent the world of the cave. In Florida we might associate this allegory with our own “Sunshine Law,” thus mapping a matrix of public access to information, sun bathing, and the representative of “the Good” in the physical world (old Sol).

     

    Project Pleasure-Dome

     

    Another association between Florida karst and electronic technology involves the writings of the first and most famous “tourist” visitor to Florida (one who came sheerly out of curiosity). William Bartram travelled to the Alachua Savanna in 1773, a karst polje now called “Payne’s Prairie,” that is part of the same local formation in Alachua County that includes the Devil’s Millhopper. “It is a level green plain, above fifteen miles over,” Bartram wrote, “and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. It is encircled with high sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant Orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil. The towering Magnolia grandiflora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst them” (Bartram). The indigenes called the Prairie “Alachua,” meaning “big jug,” referring to the stream that disappeared into a sinkhole, “into which the Indians saw the waters continually flow without filling it.”

     

    It is said that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reading of Bartram’s Travels (one of the most popular books of its day) influenced the dream that led to the writing of the poem, “Kubla Kahn,” about the place “Xanadu,” in which “did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. / So twice five miles of fertile ground / with walls and towers were girdled round” (Coleridge).

     

    Ted Nelson, credited with coining the term “hypertext,” named his plans for an “electronic literature” “Project Xanadu.” Both the network of underground rivers of Florida Karst, and the on-line computer network designed by Ted Nelson, may be recognized as “rhizomes.” “The Xanadu system,designed to address many forms of text structure, has grown into a design for the universal storage of all interactive media, and, indeed, all data; and for a growing network of storage stations which can, in principle, safely preserve much of the human heritage and at the same time make it far more accessible than it could have been before” (Nelson).

     

    What is the metaphoric lesson available at Devil’s Millhopper? The limestone of Florida–the aquifers, with their underground rivers, sinkholes, and springs–provide an immense reservoir for storing the groundwater essential to physical life in the region. The monuments of America similarly store the mythologies (the invented traditions) that are essential to the spiritual life of the nation. But don’t forget the fates of Atlantis and of Ubar, which resonate with the story of the empire evoked in “Kubla Khan,” subtitled, “A Vision in a Dream.”

     

    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river . . . And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

     

    Heeding this prophesy, associated in the poem with a classic feature of karst topography (a river that appears and disappears, as does the Santa Fe River at O’Leno State Park, in Alachua County), FRE proposes to add a school of monumentality to the pleasure-dome of Florida tourism.

     

    (IMAGE)
    [Figure 18]

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bartram, William. Travels of William Bartram. Ed. Francis Harper. New Haven: Yale, 1958.
    • Bower, B. “Desert Sands Yield Ancient Trading Center.” Science News 141 (Feb.15, 1992): 100-101.
    • Burnet, John. Early Greek Philosophy. London: A. and C. Black, 1963.
    • Burson, Nancy, Richard Carling, and David Kramlich. Composites: Computer-generated Portraits. New York: Beach Tree, 1986.
    • Chtcheglov, Ivan. Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.
    • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Portable Coleridge. Ed. I. A. Richards. New York: Viking, 1950.
    • Deford, Frank. There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America. New York: Viking, 1971.
    • Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.
    • Erdelyi, Matthew Hugh. Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. New York: Freeman, 1985.
    • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1955.
    • Godzich, Wlad. “Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat.” The Resistance to Theory. Ed. Paul de Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.
    • Marth, Del and Martha J., Eds. Florida Almanac: 1992-1993. Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1992.
    • Mercer, Charles. Legion of Strangers. New York: Holt, 1964.
    • Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu. Edition 87.1. Published by author, 1987.
    • Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985.
    • Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca: Cornell, 1990.
    • Smith, Rex Alan. The Carving of Mount Rushmore. New York: Abbeville, 1985.
    • Stubbs, Tom. “Devil’s Millhopper.” Florida Wildlife (Feb, 1972).
    • Sutton, Horace. Travelers: The American Tourist from Stagecoach to Space Shuttle. New York: Morrow, 1980.
    • Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979.
    • Walter, E.V. Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988.
    • Wilber, Ken, Ed. The Holographic Paradigm. Boulder: Shambhala, 1982.

     

    Illustration Acknowledgements

     

    • Figure 1 J. V. Luce, The End of Atlantis.
    • Figure 2 TW Recreational Services, Inc.
    • Figure 3 Paul Herrmann, The Great Age of Discovery.
    • Figure 4 Frank Deford, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America.
    • Figure 5 National Park Service.
    • Figure 6 South Dakota School of Mining and Technology.
    • Figure 7 Hammond Nature Atlas of America.
    • Figure 8 Kathleen Ulmer.
    • Figure 9 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
    • Figure 10 Pierre Mion, National Geographic 165 (1984).
    • Figure 11 Nancy Burson, Richard Carling, David Kramlich, Composites.
    • Figure 12 Composites.
    • Figure 13 State of Florida Department of Natural Resources.
    • Figure 14 State of Florida Department of Natural Resources.
    • Figure 15 Andrew Ortony, Ed, Metaphor and Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
    • Figure 16 R.C. Benson and R.A. Glaccum, Radar Surveys for Geotechnical Site Assessment, (1979).
    • Figure 17 Amedeo Gigli, in Giovanni Caprara, Space Satellites, (New York: Portland House, 1986).
    • Figure 18 Ken Marsh, The Way the New Technology Works, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
    • Figure 19 Ute Klophaus, Wuppertal.
    • Figure 20 Ute Klophaus.
    • Figure 21 Benson and Glaccum.

     

  • Important Pleasures and Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson

    Eric Selinger

    Department of English
    George Washington University
    SELINGER@gwis.circ.gwu.edu

     

    Are the pleasures of experimental poetry important? 1 William Wordsworth certainly thought so. The “experiment” of Lyrical Ballads was published, he tells his readers in the “Preface,” in the hope that it “might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quality of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart” (153). Such pleasure is not, he hastens to add, “a matter of amusement” or mere “taste.” Rather, the “immediate pleasure” that the Poet is to supply is an “homage” to “the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.” The pleasure of poetry testifies to the beauty of the universe and the dignity of man; it inculcates the linked Romantic values of social comradeship and natural inquiry. “We have no sympathy,” the poet tells us, even with those in pain, “but what is propagated by pleasure”; likewise “we have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn up from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” (166-7).

     

    It’s hard for me not to play Oscar Wilde to these earnest pronouncements. How are you, my dear William? What brings you to experimental poetry? Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? It’s still harder not to read them as historical artifacts, relics of an aesthetic and a psychology that Poe, Dostoevsky, Lautreamont, and Freud, among so many others, have debunked, and which research into the brain’s endorphin reward-system has yet to revise and reinscribe into general repute. But if his talk of pleasure sounds a little out of date, Wordsworth’s insistence on the social and political importance of “experimental” poetry still echoes in academic accounts of such verse (and prose) in the last decade. 2 Peter Quartermain thus speaks of the “moral imperative” that underwrites a tradition of “disjunctive poetics” from Stein and Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and he quotes William Carlos Williams’s warning that while “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” people “die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there” (20). Jerome J. McGann, in a polemical moment, declares that the variety of experimental verse called Language poetry “does not propose for its immediate object pleasure,” but rather exposes the “illusions of pleasure” that capitalist culture has “constructed,” thus allowing readers to “gain a certain freedom from their power” (“Response,” 312). 3 Even the cheery and skeptical Marjorie Perloff, who opens her volume Poetic License by describing postmodern “poe(t)heory” as “a very pleasurable activity,” closes it with a stern reminder of the task at hand: “What [Susan] Howe calls the ‘Occult ferocity of origin’ is an obstacle only a persistent ‘edging and dodging’ will displace,” she tells her readers, “if we are serious about ‘Taking the Forest’” (5; 310). 4

     

    There’s something suspect about pleasure, after all. The “text of pleasure,” in Barthes’ terms, “contents” us; it “comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” (14). Comfortable? The shame of it. Such a comfortable practice reduces poetry to what Wordsworth called “a matter of amusement . . . as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry” (166), and what Michael Palmer has more recently disparaged as “a kind of decor in one’s life . . . the kind of thing for hammock and lemonade” (127). In an “age of Media” (Perloff) when pleasure has become a “cultural commodity” (Gilbert 249), in a period when “no writing,” so it’s said, “can offer a comfortable place to be” (Reinfeld 152), how much more important seems Barthes’ “text of jouissance, the text that imposes a state of loss . . . that discomforts . . . [and] brings to a crisis [one’s] relation with language” (14, my emphasis). 5 The pleasure one takes in such loss, discomfort, and crisis–such threat, anxiety, and terror, to borrow three terms from Palmer’s “Conversation”–seems less to be stressed than the “profound human risk” it involves, the way reading and writing return to sublime status as confrontations with “the mysteries of reference” (126-7). These are the pleasures of what’s difficult, a struggler’s just rewards.

     

    I have a certain sympathy for this rhetoric of risk and mystery. But since Wordsworth justified the difficulties of Romantic experimental poetry by invoking the political and epistemological importance of pleasure, it seems oddly incomplete to justify the difficulty of postmodern experimental work through invocations of disruption, subversion, and mystery–threats to, overwhelmings of, our knowledge and our power–while leaving the matter of pleasure to languish, all-but unaddressed. 6 (Even Burke, after all, calls the test of the sublime delightful horror.) Not all experimental poetry gives the same pleasures, of course. Not all pleases, or even aims to please. But it seems time to reopen the question of pleasure, and not simply in the terms that the poets themselves have articulated. In this essay, therefore, I explore two texts, Michael Palmer’s Sun (1988) and Ronald Johnson’s long poem ARK (c. 1970-1990), which have not only given me pleasure, but also brought me to reflect on the sources and the implications of that enjoyment, the degree to which it comes from reading against the poet’s grain. Like Wordsworth’s “experiment,” with its violation of the “formal engagements” expected by the public, both texts require readers to “experience an evacuation and failure of their customary reading privileges,” at least those connected to straightforward syntax, narrative structure, and a coherent speaking subject (McGann, “Response,” 312). But I find that both also restore me, eventually, to a sense of my readerly capacity, though they do so in the names of very different, even opposed, aesthetic and ethical traditions. Palmer is a poet of the sublime, if of that limited sublimity of shock which Lyotard finds at the heart of the postmodern. Johnson, by contrast, is a poet of the beautiful. A rare vocation in experimental verse, at least in the last twenty years. And, perhaps, an important one as well.

     

    What are the pleasures of Michael Palmer’s work? According to Mr. William Logan in his New York Times review of Sun, “reading Mr. Palmer’s poetry is like listening to serial music or slamming your head against a street-light stanchion. Somewhere, you’re sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing, but for most people the only pleasure it can possibly have is the pleasure of its being over.” 7 Four years earlier, in the same publication, Palmer had found a more insightful and more sympathetic critic: perhaps one of the “masochists” that Logan has in mind. For while Rosemarie Waldrop found Palmer’s First Figure to be “a meditation on language that will not stay within the range of comfort,” she still finds that the poems there “seduce us immediately,” in part because of the way the poet attends to “the wounds inflicted by consciousness,” and to “the fault within our perception, our language, our mind.” The “acute intelligence” of his investigations gives pleasure, apparently, as does the poet’s willingness to confess and explore the way that language fails us. She quotes two lines from “French for April Fools”: “Once I could not tell of it / and now I cannot speak at all” (14).

     

    In Sun the poet continues to seduce through his attention to faults and wounds and incapacities. But the unspeakable and dumbstriking “it” of the earlier book takes on a political cast, as Palmer moves to write a poetry as responsive, in some sense, to Adorno’s stern dictum about art after Auschwitz as it is to the horrors of war. This was, in retrospect, perhaps to be expected. Like the work of so many other poets in the 1980s, Sun evinces a “return to history, politics, and the social as vital concerns” for American verse after the well-mannered domestic epiphanies of the Ford and Carter years (Gilbert 247-8). And, like other poems written in the decade’s disjunctive “period style . . . with all its exaggerated dislocations and shifts of reference,” it displays an “urge to make the pleasures of poetry somehow answerable to the intransigent realities of the social and political world” (243). But unlike most of the poetry of “textured information” that Gilbert describes, Sun does not range a plethora of skittery local pleasures against a nagging political conscience, with pleasure “given the decided advantage” (265). The balance swings decisively in favor of concience, making the pleasure one takes in the resulting moral double-binds more nervous, more thoughtful, more significant.

     

    Palmer has long been interested in the way politics might inhabit poetry as something more than subject matter, particularly when by “politics” we mean something like “atrocity.” In an interview from the mid-eighties, for example, Palmer disdains the “poets’ shuttle down to Nicaragua and so on to get material, everyone acting like La Pasionaria or something–which seems to me ultimately a complete betrayal of what is to be meant by the political,” since in such work the poets “appropriate” their material and are “more than anything else, announcing in stale poetic language, ‘Look how much human feeling and fellow feeling I have’–self-congratulatory in that regard” (“Dear Lexicon” 12; 26). We might think of Sun as a counterpoint to efforts like Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, which however shocking in its subject matter may be said to soothe us in its familiar grammar, forms of reference, and moral compass; enough so, in fact, for the book to appear as a telling allusion on the series thirtysomething. 8 “There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs,” Palmer writes (84). Too easy, too descriptive a movement from the first to the second would seem, for him, to belie them both; too great a distance, as when the artist keeps his eye only on aesthetic reflexivites, “closing Mr. Circle with a single stroke,” and the project is equally worthless (83).

     

    The book thus aches. It’s torn between the desire to “leave the initiative to words,” in Mallarme’s lovely phrase, and a sense that words are “dumb,” now, and “mangled by use,” although somehow, somewhere else they might yet find their power again (37; see Yenser 296). “What matters is elsewhere,” a voice here says: “is other fires, with words streaming from faces before those fires. Actual words elsewhere. Objects elsewhere and the words to revive them” (33). The reader often catches references to a horrific, political world “elsewhere”: “a necklace burning” (44); “a woman bent double in the street / screaming Money Money” (69). We read of what seem to be African famine victims– “the dead” who are “amid sand the few fragments / / bowl bread violet / curve swollen outward / / of flies gathered / at lips and eyes” (20)–and that desolate nature morte returns in a later horrific simile, where the pages of a book are, we’re told, “spread out / before you in the sun / curled like leaves / black as tongues” (43). But the relationship of tongues to pages spread out in Sun, the fragments of lives to the fragments of verse, is deeply vexed, both because of the way that such horrors are experienced by the poet, and because of what he has called “a certain level of violence in all areas of address”: that is, I take it, a certain guilty and appropriative aspect to naming and represenation itself (“Dear Lexicon,” 12).

     

    Let me begin with the first of these vexations, the poet’s experience of “the political.” In many poems of the last decade, as Gilbert observes, “the world of social and political struggle presents itself . . . in a heavily mediated, prepackaged form, as information in a news broadcast” (268). While the primal scene of watching TV is rarely as visible in Palmer as in Gilbert’s example, Robert Hass’s “Berkeley Eclogue,” and while Palmer will not deploy Hass’s lyrical or self-critical “I,” the two Bay Area poets share a keen moral consciousness of the distance between their private lives and poetic work and those “other fires” and “actual words elsewhere” (Sun 33). Wanting not to “mis-appropriate” the political pain of others, Palmer has said, he tries instead “to allow them a presence that’s more reflective of the way they do occur in our–I don’t know if you’d call it image-bank or simply day to day experience, which is not an experience of those things but which is an experience of the images of those things” (“Dear Lexicon,” 13). The dead who “multiply / far from here” are piled “(as words this high)” (20); or they flicker into our lives through “the glass box” of TV, on whose screen “everything is named difference, and is always the same for that reason, since you’ve watched it many times before, counting the limbs” (35).

     

    And the media’s mediation goes yet deeper, if one may use metaphors of psychological depth in this flattened postmodern context. For while Carolyn Forche can and will insist on a clear distinction between what Williams called “the news from poems,” in which the “stress on close reading, irony, and the fiction of textual depth” will “open up more complex visions of historical circumstance” than the “degenerate form of art, neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction, never true to objective truth or subjective reality” that is “the news” broadly speaking, Palmer cannot (12). Any would-be “poetry of witness” in Sun finds itself already infected by political and cultural cliches, the “words that come from within” inflected by, drawn from, entangled in a social and linguistic world that refuses to be held at a safe and critical distance (Bernstein, 39). The “impure poetry” of our messy media age must confront, not the sweat and smoke, urine and lillies, stains and shames that Neruda describes in his essay of that name (128), but a more troublesome impurity of self. In “the image-base / where first glyphs are stored,” Palmer observes, “Lucy and Ethel, the Kingfish / Beaver and Pinky Lee / are spoken, die and undie / for you”; and this linguistic and vampiric resurrection for our sakes is immediately compared to “a war viewed from poolside / by philosophers and sheiks, / / senators and dialectician-priests” (74)–a series of targets drawn, I find, from the entry for “Superior, Unaffected Observers” in a dictionary of images recues.

     

    When we look into our hearts and write, what we see there was broadcast before. Indeed, part of the disdain that Palmer feels for the “Anglo-American empirical tradition” of poetry–that tradition where “a poem is a place in which you tell a little story” that “easily mirrors a shared emotional experience” in “a sort of consumer verse . . . where the function of the work and the mechanisms of the poem do not admit a certain level of mystery” (“Conversation,” 126)–may stem from the way that such “little stories” construct and constrict our emotional lives by invoking a series of “conventional affective signs” we no longer recognize as, in fact, conventional (“Dear Lexicon,” 27). 9 Those stories that surface in Sun are therefore quickly interrupted, often in order to draw the reader’s attention to the shared language and imagery that does not so much produce as replace “experience” when one tunes in to the externalized common consciousness of television (see Birkerts 61). “A word is coming up on the screen,” one poem in Sun begins:

     

    In the meantime let me tell you a little something about myself. I was born in Passaic in a small box flying over Dresden one night, lovely figurines. Things mushroomed after that. My cat has twelve toes, like poets in Boston. Upon the microwave she sits, hairless. The children they say, you are not father but a frame, waiting for a painting. Like, who dreamed you up? Like, gag me with a spoon. Snow falls–winter. Things are aglow. One hobby is Southeast Asia, nature another. As a child I slept beneath the bed, fists balled. A face appeared at the window, then another, the same face. We skated and dropped, covering our heads as instructed. Then the music began again, its certainty intact. . . . (31)

     

    What I learn about this speaker tells me mostly about my own familiarity with the skittering, flash-cut movement, not just of “channel surfing,” but of any televised discourse. “Flying over Dresden? Wait– I thought it was Passaic… What? Oh, yes, look at those lovely figurines.” The very eagerness with which I seize on “mushroomed,” as in mushroom clouds, “twelve toes,” as in mutations, “winter” and “aglow,” as in a nuclear winter, “Southeast Asia” and “dropped, covering,” a childhood in the sixties, suggests how pre-processed my ideas of what a baby-boomer autobiography would look and sound like have become. Later mentions of “the Union dead,” of Freud, of a Levi-Straussian “discourse in the tropics,” prompt the same unsettling response, as I note both the literary and critical references and my glad response at their discovery. “Does the central motif stand out clearly enough?” the speaker demands. Impatient for the restoration of certainty, for the music to begin again, one succumbs to the lure of words already on “the screen”: perhaps the same one through which, elsewhere in Sun, “words / pass unrecognized, thinking us” (73).

     

    Facing the “34,000 words spread out before me / words like incarnadine, tide and cheer,” Palmer watches, as his readers do, the language of Shakespeare slip into the language of advertising (65). But unlike Eliot or Mallarme, he has no hope to purify the language of the tribe; and unlike Ashbery or Bernstein he will not revel in the “Klupzy” possibilities of cliche and mediate discourse. A poet who changed his own name after college, Palmer is instead haunted by the “mysteries of reference,” the problem of naming-as-such (see Reinfeld 96-7). Words in this book will say things on their own, as when “lace” whispers out of “necklace” (15), but words never say Things, in a Rilkean, Orphic sense of the phrase, and the fact that they do not is frequently remarked on and deeply felt. (Indeed, Rilke’s Dinggedichte, Thing-poem “The Panther” shows up in a quick, sad, snapshot address: “Panther, You are nothing but a page / torn from a book”; while the first imprecation “Don’t say things / (You can’t say things)” comes from Eurydice, who thus admonishes Orpheus in Palmer’s version of the Rilke poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” [12; 24].)

     

    Palmer’s exploration of “the sign itself” is, in part, political. In its exploration of “the mystery of how words refer and how they can empty out of conventional meanings and acquire meanings that threaten the very way that we talk to each other,” he has said, poetry can expose a deep and conflicted level of language, thus “giv[ing] the lie to political rhetoric” and enacting a form of liberation, “even when [the poem] is not thematically a ‘Workers, throw off your chains’ poem” (“Conversation” 127; 136). One might argue with the logic here: a scrupulous, demanding, naive faith in reference gives the lie to political rhetoric far more quickly and effectively than this deconstructive strategy, although it pays for that efficacy with risks of its own (see Argyros 81). But in his concern Palmer exposes one of the central shames of contemporary poetry: a sense that the old Romantic ideal of authentic naming, like that of Wordsworth’s “real language of men,” has become the facile lingua franca of the talk show; or, worse, that it simply reinforces the old master narratives and their “discourse of power” (“Interview” 6). 10 As he worked on the “Baudelaire Series” which makes up the second part of Sun, Palmer observed a growing “recognition of a certain level of violence in all areas of address . . . whether that be erotic address or a more discursive form of address and so on . . .” (“Dear Lexicon,” 12). Against Rilke’s hope that “perhaps we are here in order to say: house / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window,” to “say them more intensely than the Things themselves / ever dreamed of existing” and thereby display “how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours” (“The Ninth Elegy,” 201), Palmer might thus be said to pose the familiar qualms of Foucault. “We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things,” Foucault writes in “The Discourse on Language,” “or, at all events, as a practice we impose on them” (229). We may make Things “ours” through words, as Rilke says, only in the guilty mode of appropriation (229).

     

    Palmer locks horns with this dilemma in a number of ways, but most notably by insisting on the incorrigible arbitrariness of the sign, of “words / the opposite of names” (“Sign,” First Figure, 43). In the place of Rilke’s intimate, authentic naming here we find an ungrounded “calling.” What “we” have written is “something called the Human Poems” (5); “clouds” are “called crescent birds” (9); “This is a hazardous bed / called perilous night” (14). The long penultimate poem called “Sun” begins with insistant and slippery callings, and closes with equally pluralized signatures:

     

         Day One is called Tongues (62)

     Day One is called Trace (63)

     Call it Alpha in Lyre
     Call it Ceterae or Last Nights,

     The Blue Guide, Grid, The Private
     Experience of the Blinking Man

     Call it Ones (split open)
     Call it A Scratch Band from Duluth (63-4)

     ................................

     because the words disgusted me why write?
     signed Schelling, signed An Arm or A Door, signed
          The Desert to the West

     ________

     This is how one pictures the angel of history
     signed Series B, signed A or letter of A, signed
              Bakhtin's Names

     ...............

     This was the trouble with the sun-dial or saint
           dial
     signed Writing Itself  [77]

     

    The poem that follows, also called “Sun,” may thus begin with stark commands to name one’s acts: “Write this. We have burned all their villages / Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them” (83). But within a few lines what Palmer calls the “mysteries of reference” reassert themselves, complicating both the act of writing and our sense of what is to be named.

     

         Write this.  We have adopted their customs and their manner
               of dress

     Write this.  A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of
               tears or an X

     In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations,
     laughter at jokes, secrets beyond the boundaries of speech

     I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing 
     Mr. Circle with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its
     wall, joined to her, experiencing the same thoughts at the
     same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf (83).

     

    The poem cannot simply indict, or witness to, American actions in southeast Asia–a location signaled by the loquat leaf, the burning villages, and later references to a “Plain or Jars of Plain of Reeds” and “Neak Luong”–for to do so, to name them, would be both to “mis-appropriate” them for the poet’s purposes and to collaborate in a mode of representation in which naming and power are uncomfortably allied. Yet the text cannot interrogate writing itself, the very shapes of words, without risking mere evasiveness, its linguistic turn from the burnt villages to the use of suffixes revealed as a form of escape. The trace of self-loathing in that reference to “closing Mr. Circle” echoes similar moments from elsewhere in the text, as when, in the previous poem called “Sun,” a speaker’s direction “Let’s call this The Quiet City / where screams are felt as waves” soon turns to smug self-congratulation: “My speech explaining the layers went very well” (61).

     

    To name the damage, to “Say Things,” is perforce to speak the language of the Fathers. To be silent, or simply aesthetical, would prove just as complicitous (see “Dear Lexicon” 13). The affective appeal of Sun, at least to me, lies in its teasing-out of this uneasy double-bind. I find the heart of the volume in a short poem, the tenth section of the “Baudelaire Series,” that takes the ambivalence of Palmer’s project as its subject. The poet calls it, in an interview, “the Adorno poem” (“Dear Lexicon,” 31), but I read it as his “Mozart, 1935”: a poem written to investigate his deep suspicion of beauty, for which his recurrent trope is music. You’ll recall Wallace Stevens’s original: “Poet, be seated at the piano. / Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cacchination.” But where Stevens implores the poet to “Be thou . . ./ The voice of this besieging pain” (131-2), Palmer sees no such option:

     

         A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
     knowing thousands will die while he is playing

     He has two thoughts about this
     If he should stop they would be free of pain

     If he could get the notes right he would be free
         of pain
     In the second case the first thought would be
          erased

     causing pain

     It is this instance of playing

     he would say to himself
     my eyes have grown hollow like yours

     my head is enlarged
     though empty of thought . . .

     

    Do the “enlarged” head and “hollow” eyes mirror the swollen bellies and hollow eyes of the suffering, or simply display a vapidity “empty of thought” because the notes have been gotten right at last? Would an end to the performance not negate the pianist himself? Would a halting, stumbling performance, which would end no pain at all, somehow redistribute it, perhaps more justly? “Such thoughts destroy music,” the poem concludes; “and this at least is good” (19).

     

    Palmer’s mistrust of music, of beauty, allies him with a broad range of postmodern aesthetic theory, for which Jean-Francois Lyotard is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman. For Lyotard beauty lapses into kitch, while all true art is known by shock and contradiction, by its limping imperfection. “Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping,” he writes in Heidegger and “the jews” (34). Adorno, too, according to Lyotard, “understands well that to make beautiful art today is to make kitsch; that even authenticity is precluded. . . . It is important, very important, to remember that no one can–by writing, by painting, by anything–pretend to be witness and true reporter of, be ‘equal’ to the sublime affection, without being rendered guilty of falsification and imposture through this very pretension” (34; 45). 11 What we have, in effect, is a sad sublimity, an art boiled down to that simmer of deprivations from which we “do not experience a simple pleasure,” but rather at best “an ambivalent enjoyment” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 206). Palmer’s repeated references to jazz, especially to pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk, suggest the bluesy, sweet and sour pleasure to be had. If Sun features divided characters called “A-against-Herself” and “G for Gramsci or Geobbels,” after all, it also claims a character called “T. Sphere” who “speak[s] in the dark with [his] hands,” perhaps playing the tune that Palmer cites whose “name is Let’s Call This” (85).

     

    The broken beauty of Monk’s playing is an apt model for Palmer’s acheivement. And yet my pleasure in catching this musical allusion, like that I have taken in pointing out his references to Rilke, to the “Human Poems” of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and, in a faltering allusion to someone “by the name of Ceran / or Anlschel,” to the Jewish poet Paul Celan (whose “Death-Fugue” appears in a later reference to “black milk, golden hair /. . . / and a grave in the air” [21; 78-9])–all this pleasure in context is remarkably unmixed, which suggests that, as a reader, I’m at home here after all. 12 This is, perhaps, a problem. If the “text of jouissance” that Barthes describes “unsettles the consistency of our tastes, values, and memories” (14), Sun, for me, does nothing of the sort. Instead of “that other music, sort of gasped out now by the synthetron” (35) I hear the myth of Orpheus, broken but replayed throughout the text; I hear the saving humor, get the jokes, I thematize discontinuities. The “we” that confesses “Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them” doesn’t really implicate the poet or his readers, I can’t help but feel, but rather people like the “Senator . . . proud and erect” who “want[s] desperately to read” certain moaning poems, but will not let himself (32), or like the speaker who objects to Palmer’s gestures at the unpresentable in a condescending tone: “How lovely the unspeakable must be. You have only to say it and it tells a story” (37). 13 And as Rosemarie Waldrop intimated of the poems in First Figure, even Palmer’s sense of the failures of language, of poetry, give pleasure. There’s a pathos to them, as though he were the rightful ruler of some troubled land, who tells us how he’d love to help, just with a word– but can’t.

     

    My reading of Sun is admittedly partial. I have made little of the two central sections, the poems called “C,” and, more important, I have hemmed in much of the possibility that Palmer’s poetic struggles to maintain, collapsing the expansive and mysterious wave of significations here into a single and quite limited performance of the text. In so doing I have, in effect, transformed Sun from a resistant, disjunctive text, one that offers a sublime intensification of the sense of being through its elements of shock, into a source of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultivated pleasure,” which “feeds on . . . intertwined references, which reinforce and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art,” including, in this case, works of art which ostensibly unseat cultivation and intellectual privilege (499). I have, more than likely, displayed that “paradoxical relationship to culture made up of self-confidence amid (relative) ignorance and of casualness amid familiarity, which,” as Bourdieu remarks, “bourgeois families hand down to their offspring as if it were an heirloom” (66). Be that as it may, my reading has also, I hope, revealed something else. In addition to the pleasures of Palmer’s diction–the way, for example, he plays off a resonant (not to say portentous) hoard of words like “house” and “sky” and “rain” and “sun” and “words” against unexpected addresses to “King Empty,” “Mr. Duck and Mr. Mouse,” and “Fred who fell from the trapeze / / into the sawdust / and wasn’t hurt at all” (6)–and alongside the pleasures of aesthetic liberation that are so great a part of any experimental art’s appeal–the sense that restraints on one’s own conceivable new work have been lifted, including restraints one had not known were there; the pleasures of “permission given,” as Grenier says of Stein (204)–Sun offers a pleasure that even William Logan might appreciate: that of inventing coherence and assigning value, of exercising those mental faculties that allow one to build and inhabit a meaningful world.

     

    This stress on explicatory and contextualizing readings, on matters and pleasures of “meaning,” may seem to go against Palmer’s experimental grain. (Somewhere at my back I hear Ed Dorn’s laughing Gunslinger: “Mean? / Questioner, you got some strange / obsessions, you want to know / what something means after you’ve / seen it, after you’ve been there…. / … / How fast are you / by the way? [28-9].) On the one hand, Palmer seems to call for such a reading, so long as it does not aspire to closure or absolute authority. “When that structural rigidity of a closed form begins to tremble and we begin to feel the anxiety of losing structure,” he says in his “Conversation” with Lee Bartlett, “it can be a terrifying experience. To be resolved, it calls for a dwelling in the poem. You have to decide what your relationship to the poem is. It is a kind of poetry that insists the reader is part of the meaning, that the reader completes the circuit” (127-8). I take it that he means, therefore, that the terror is to be resolved, the circuit thus completed, though not closed. Sun itself, on the other hand, takes a more critical stance toward my (admittedly) traditional and academic reading: my picking out of references; my efforts at explication; my displacement of local language events in the name of “central” themes. As I savor the final lines about a “village . . . known as These Letters–humid, sunless,” I may quickly note in the margin one last evasion of Rilkean naming (“known as”) and a bit of wordplay that reinforces the distance between signs and signifieds (even those villages known as “These Letters” are “sunless,” unreached by Sun itself). But such marginalia, and the critical ease they suggest, sit poorly with the evident longing and unhappiness of the text. The resonant Biblical allusion that closes out the book weighs this sort of “relationship” between reader and text, this sort of resolution, and finds it wanting. I am judged for my very ability to know that I am judged, and certainly for any pleasure I may take in that recognition. Is it only such worry and unsettlement that proves one’s readerly “dwelling”? “The villages are known as These Letters,” Palmer writes. “The writing occurs on their walls” (86).

     

    I’ve said that Sun aspires to the sublime–at least to that sublimity described by Lyotard, which “does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it” (Heidegger 47). Yet how fallen, how changed a sublimity this is! Lyotard’s definition gives no sense, as in Longinus, that sublimity “is a kind of height and conspicuous excellence in speeches and writings,” and that emotions like “lamentation, pain, and fright” stand far below it (8; 50). For Longinus, a sublime passage shows its author’s greatness, and rather than passing judgment on listeners might lead them to greatness as well. Asyndeton, hyperbaton, abundance, breaking off in the middle of a statement–all of these rhetorical techniques, familiar from Sun, have their place in this older conception, but angst is not their object, however much it may lead to a chastened, desirable “dwelling.” We need not look back as far as Longinus for examples of this older and encouraging sense of the sublime, in which terror leads to a resurgent and invigorated, rather than chastened, brio of being. In this strain Emerson writes of the sublime poet Milton that “The Fall of Man was the subject of his Muse, only as a means whereby he might help to raise man again to the height of his divine nature and proportion” (“Ethical Writers,” Early Lectures 362). That lift would be a rather different pleasure from the sorts I’ve explored so far, its importance clearly different as well. And we may find it in the work of Ronald Johnson.

     

    I introduce Johnson through Milton because in the last twenty years he has written an epic called ARK over which his poem Radi Os, a rewriting-by-excision of Paradise Lost, rests like a cathedral’s dome. In Radi Os and the Foundations, the Spires, and the Ramparts of ARK we find an experimental poet still committed, for all his difficulties, to coherence, completion, a blend of sublime “too-muchness” and a beauty of resolution. Where Palmer is a “versionary” poet, uneasy with naming and reference as they take part in the discourse of power, Johnson is an unabashed visionary: one who finds that language and art do not impose on human or even inhuman nature, but rather grow out of the world of “things” themselves, since “lawful utterance is a natural as well as human phenomenon” (Finkelstein, Utopian Moment, 92). “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Johnson explains in one “Beam” of ARK: The Foundations (Beam 7). Or, as he plucks his theme out of Milton in Radi Os: “O / Tree / into the World, / Man / the chosen / Rose out of Chaos: / Song.”

     

    Johnson is only eight years Palmer’s senior, but his epic strikes one as something closer to a generation older, a fine example of the “immanentist” postmodernism of the 1960s. It shares that older faith in a Wordsworthian “high argument” for the exquisite fit between the mind and external world; it remains untroubled by the “urgent and deeply anxious desire” to reconcile pleasure and politics characteristic of the 1980s (see Altieri 29-49; Gilbert 243). Indeed, its most urgent and axious desire seems to be to answer to the world that Johnson sees described by contemporary science: a world as occluded as that of politics by the “scenic mode” of the later 1970s. As he wrote Radi Os, the poet explains, “I was taken over by Blake, but with my vision of the physical universe and . . . able to try to figure out how we order the universe now. Blake couldn’t even look at Newton. I felt if I were to do this I would have to be a Blake who could also look at what we know of modern cosmology.” The results, which I have explored at length elsewhere, bear out the poet’s sense that “instead of being a rather flippant work of just simply putting lines and cutting out words,” it is “a cosmology of the mind”; but it is in ARK: The Foundations that the poet most clearly brings together his passions for the natural and the human sciences (“Interview,” 84).

     

    Beam 1 of the Foundations thus begins with this sunrise:

     

                            Over the rim

     body of earth                      rays exit sun
rest to full velocity to eastward pinwheeled in a sparrow's

                             eye
          --Jupiter compressed west to the other--

    wake waves on wave in wave striped White Throat song

               ...............................

                   as if a several silver
                       backlit in gust

     

    The centering of these lines, their evident poise, their less-evident numerical balancing (three lines of three words, one of ten, one of one, one of six, then ten once more), enact a world of more than just bilateral symmetries. They invite, also, those basic questions of meaning that Dorn’s Gunslinger mocks one for. Why the paradox of rays that “rest to full velocity”? Well, photons will “rest” at the speed of light, and must be hindered or slowed to keep them from doing so; and the sun will fire out photons when electrons in its constituent atoms, raised to a higher quantum level by the impact of one photon, “rest” to a lower energy level as the atom sends out another. Some sunrays are “Pinwheeled” because they enter the pinwheel-shaped iris of the bird’s eye, while others, reflected back to Earth from Jupiter, are “compressed” or refracted by the earth’s atmosphere as the other planet sinks below the horizon. (Since a sparrow’s eyes are on the opposite sides of its head, “able to see the seed beneath its bill–and at the same instant the hawk descending,” as Beam 4 explains, the bird may see both eastward and westward sights at the same time.) The “wake” of those rays, which are themselves waves, or wavicles, wakes an answer in the sound waves of the White Throat song, so that as each bird joins in separately–“several” meaning “relating separately to each individual involved”–it is as though spots of silver “backlit,” or reflected, lit-back the sunlight. They do so “in gust,” or keen delight, as well as in gusts, or surges of melody; and human song, poetry, which sings from the electrically sparkling “nervetree,” is by extension an equally natural and reflective pleasure, since “out of a stuff of rays, particles, and pulses” comes the poet who notes down and writes up the scene, himself “the artificer of reality” (Beam 12). 14

     

    It’s from such links and correspondences, sometimes direct, sometimes a poet’s licenced stretch, that Johnson builds his ARK. They are not new connections. His little rhyme, “Perceive, perceive! Reality is ‘make’ believe” (Beam 8) puts “make” in quotes to remind us that the real is what makes us believe in it, as well as what we make through our belief; but that’s a thought we find in Coleridge. Though the biology and physics he invokes will mark him as of our time, this invocation is itself predicted by Wordsworth’s “Preface,” with its insistence that the Poet “converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, though labour and length of time, the Man of Science has raised up in himself” (168). Finkelstein calls Johnson an “unquestionably traditional, even derivative” poet (Utopian Moment 91); and indeed, he finds he can draw on other visionary poets and mystics with only minor revisions, as when his vision of a holy fire “where the inner regions, tangled along polarized / garland, run faster than the outer” (Beam 3) gives a Copernican and atomic cast to Dante’s cosmology, revising with a quick, corrective twist.

     

    Like Palmer, Johnson eschews both the grand, Romantic “I” and the oral, organic forms Romanticism sponsors. But where Palmer dwells on, or in, the “mysteries of reference,” moving through threat, anxiety, and terror on his way to the ambivalent enjoyments I have already discussed, Johnson turns to such modes as concrete poetry, quilt, and collage in order to celebrate a different mystery: the way that “things” may be “said” or sung or troped into being. In ARK: The Foundations we find any number of shattered words and squared off blocks of print, that is to say, but none prompt much threat or fret. In Beam 5, paradoxically entitled “The Voices,” we find

     

                          o
                     moon

                %in%m%in%d%in%

            a e a e a e a e a e
           w v w v w v w v w v

     

    while in Beam 13 we find a vision of creation-as-division, of flux transfigured by the efflux of a fiat lux, embodied in the luxurious and luminescent square–

     

         f lux f lux f lux f
     lux f lux f lux f l
     ux f lux f lux f lu
     x f lux f lux f lux

     

    –and in Beam 24 we warm ourselves at the comforting strobe of

     

         earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth

     

    where the eye picks out “hearth” and “heart” and “ear the art” in what the curmudgeonly William Harmon calls “a harmlessly moralizing telegram of values” (221). I’ve already mentioned Radi Os, in which Johnson writes a poem by erasing, or etching away, in an “infernal reading,” most of the first four books of Paradise Lost. In “Beams 21, 22, 23” of ARK: The Foundations, subtitled “The Song of Orpheus” and opening with seven lines from Radi Os, Johnson similarly ventilates the Book of Psalms in order to discover an Orphic tale hidden within. 15 In Beam 25, subtitled “A Bicentennial Hymn,” Johnson plays Charles Ives, stitching snippets from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” into “I have seen Him in the watchfires / full sail, the Ruffles and Flourishes / sifting out a glory / loosed lightning to answer / arching on.” To match a Spire of Prospero’s songs to Ariel, “snipped from Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds” (ARK 37) there is an answering “invisible spire” of Ariel’s songs in response, which “consists of a tape recording” of spliced and altered birdsongs, including “a nocturne for loon and full orchestra” and an “adagio for thrushes and woodpecker quartet” (ARK 38). Despite the poet’s desire to build “a poem which needs no reference except itself,” other “invisible” elements to be found outside the poem include surprisingly relevant illustrative quotes in the OED (“Planting,” 2). Look up “caryatid,” for example–since light’s angels are in Beam 1 named as “caryatid / to the tides of day”–and you’ll find a quote from Tennyson: “Two great statues, Art and Science, / Caryatids, lifted up / A weight of emblem”: a fit figure for Johnson’s work. Look up daimon (from Beam 10’s Kabbalistic cum Leibnitzian couplet “daimondaimond Monad I / Adam Kadmon in the sky”), and you’ll find Thoreau: “It is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid.”

     

    At a somewhat lower level than its announced architectural design, ARK is structured, like Palmer’s Sun, along a highly decentralized network of connections. The hand-print that forms Beam 18 displays the whorls of fingerprints, a “rhyme” for earlier references to the whorl of galaxies and to a snail’s spiralled shell. The first stage of a cell-division diagram, found in Beam 25, the “Bicentennial Hymn,” looks like a sunrise, and ends with twin cells pressed against each other like two hemipheres of the brain, or like the “balanced dissent” of the United States, of matter and anti-matter, and of other divided, procreative pairs mentioned elsewhere in the text. “Prosper / O / cell,” that Bicentennial Beam begins: a bit of wordplay that reminds one of, among other things, the many lions in the text, each one an Ari-el, or Lion of God. These are linked to the initial figure of the sun–the lion’s mane recalls the sun’s corona–and they are linked to the many flowers here as well, both because “where the bee sucks, there suck I,” and because many flowers have a corona of petals which unfold in answer to sunlight, so that the “answering chrystanthemum” of Beam 12 is as much a reflection as birdsong and the poet’s verse. The “Beast” of “SPLENDOR” is “mil- / lion-hued” (Beam 14); and near the end of the poem Johnson mentions the Leonids, a shower of shooting stars that fall in mid-November from the constellation Leo: a reference that looks back to and glosses lines from the start of the book, where falling stars were said to “comb out” the moon’s “lumen / horizon / in a gone-to-seed dandelion” (Beam 1).

     

    I could run a riff like this from Sun as well. Stephen Yenser all but does so in his review for Poetry. But it wouldn’t be as satisfying, since, while Palmer’s net is set to trap the Fathers, Johnson’s threads out past the bounds of his text, connecting with the “link and bobolink” of the world at large (Yenser 298, 300). 16 Even when it is not a comfortable read–and many passages, especially in the later or “higher” sections, still keep me at a distance, at least when I read to trace connections and work up “meanings” ARK is nonetheless an unabashedly comforting one. This self-described “darkling Lion” of a poet, like Thomas Hardy’s “darkling thrush,” gives “Carolings of such ecstatic sound” that we may well think there “trembles through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knows” and Palmer’s unaware. That hope seems less specifically religious than it is a faith in the coherence and complexity of the world described by the physical sciences, where “trees, coastlines, and clouds” share their fractal structure with our lungs, bowel-linings, and neural networks, where “the golden mean appears to describe bronchial architecture as well as it does the proportions of the Parthenon,” and where other biological forms are built from the pattern of a Fibonacci series (Argyros 341-2). The threat and anxiety one may confront when faced with the mystery of reference are matched here–overmatched–by a possibility more “truly deserving of our awe and terror”: “the possibility,” as Alexander Argyros observes, “that beauty may be a perfectly natural occurence,” and that the perceiving and reflective mind may itself be a “real, emergent feature of a resourceful universe” (287; 352, note 2).

     

    Argyros speaks of awe and terror, both elements of the sublime. Yet “what we gain from such an understanding,” he goes on, “is a deeply satisfying sense of connectedness with the rest of the natural world” (287): a sense more properly associated with the beautiful. It is just this vision of nature as a Cosmos, of a world where beauty and complexity bootstraps its way out of chaos, that overwhelms and (in a crash of thunder and flash of lightning) spurs the poet, mid-life, into song:

     

               The circumambient!

          in balanced dissent:
     enlightenment -- on abysm bent.

              Angels caged

             in what I see,
           externity in gauged
               antiphony.

     (Mid-age.  Brought to my knee.)
                 1935-70

              The altitude
                 unglued

            A god in a cloud,

                  aloud

          Exactitude the flood.
                 (Beam 2)

     

    The lawfulness and “exactitude” of lightning, and our ability to know and describe it, is as dazzling as the bolt itself. And such lines implicitly promise that our experience of the poem to come will be a similar interweaving of shock and comprehension, of brilliant and even excessive immediate impressions that will answer to reflection and systematic inquiry. But such rational activity, such successful efforts to know and to describe, do not pluck us out of the transient material world into a supersensible realm, or show the supersensible to be our final destination, as Kant tells us that sublimity will do. Rather, the sublime here seems not opposed to, but a constituent part of the experience of beauty: a conjunction that, of classic theorists, only Wordsworth will allow.

     

    So far I have dwelt on the Foundations of ARK, for in them the poet sets out “all themes necessary to the work ahead, to have room to turn around in over the years” (“Planting,” 3). As ARK goes on, its movement seems increasingly self-referential, with less space given to reflecting on specific matters of perception and more to publishing the banns of this engaging spousal verse, with its “Strains / legion and ingenious / put to the uses of blessing” in which “s h / a p e / s / abound enobled” (ARK 46, Fountain I). The earlier concern with cosmic and evolutionary detail has hardly been abandoned–we are, are we not, the ennobled “a p e / s” who abound near the fountain–but as we ascend through the Spires to the Ramparts we also find a number of poems in the imperative mode, instructions to us and to the poet himself compressed into such elegant depictions of the project as the Herm of ARK 40:

     

             Man-
        oeuvre
       artillery:

     (hand-work &
      art-skill)
       askance

       full act,
         exact
       as skull.

         Dance
        howbeit
       about us,

          ply
       'nocount'
         Abyss

         plumb
         crazy
         core

     

    Such moments help keep ARK from foundering on its own Romanticism, if only by reminding one of Johnson’s commitment to the poem as object: a pattern of sound to which what I have called “meaning” is, if not irrelevant (that does the poet a disservice), then certainly only a partial experience of the “hand-work & / art-skill” at hand. (Johnson’s teacher in this is Zukofsky, rather than Wordsworth.) Their frequent vernacular humor reminds us that linguistic self-reference need not be at the service of disruption or anomie, but may rather be a form of self-creation, a fractal flowering.

     

    Like few other contemporary poets, Johnson seems to me what Robert Duncan called an “artist of abundancies.” He has built a poem in which “every particular is an immediate happening of meaning at large,” and in which “the old doctrine of correspondences is enlarged and furthered in a new process of responses, parts belonging to the architecture not only by the fittings . . . but by the resonances in the time of the whole in the reader’s mind, each part as it is conceived as a member of every other part.” Certainly Johnson “delites in puns, interlocking and separating figures, plays of things missing or things appearing ‘out of order’”; and as Duncan would lead us to expect, he does so not because these throw us back on the enforced mediation of language or force us to confront the mysteries of reference per se, but because such strategies “remind us that all orders have their justification in an order of orders” beyond the poetic work (ix). What Johnson adds to Duncan’s vision, drawing his faith from the world of physics, is that this “order of orders” has its own methods of self-reference, which the poet’s most self-conscious and reflexive work may thereby faithfully address. Palmer’s Sun is still invested in a version of the Fall, in which consciousness and nature, language and being, are at odds. This is a lasting myth, one that answers to an evident and ineluctable psychological fact that we may call alienation, nausea, or melancholia, depending on our theoretical bias. But as ontology it may have run its course. Nature, far from being mute and mournful (see Benjamin 329-30), may be more-than-metaphorically linguistic, as self-organizing and self-referential, as woven from airy nothing, as we are.

     

    I have been, I recognize, essentially uncritical regarding Johnson’s use of science. The poet’s tone invites such naivete. Johnson can be corny as Kansas in August, as when he builds an Arch of the names for groups of animals, “a tribe of goats / a sculk of foxes, a sett / of badgers, riches of martens,” and so on, and then in a charming and inevitable gesture ushers them into his ARK: “a shrewdness / of apes, labour of moles / all in the same boat” (ARK 83, Arches XVII in ARK: The Ramparts, 185). He can’t resist a pun, it sometimes seems, or the way one word can turn to another with a flip of vowel or consonant. “No mapped puddle skipped a pebble,” he writes in ARK 47, and we watch the doubled “p” of “mapped” turn a series of playful cartwheels. I suspect that these two immediately recognizable features of his work are linked, and that what joins them is a willingness to embrace both a shameful, infantine joy in rhymes and tongue-twisters, and the equally somatic pleasure children find in having their expectations, including their expectations of order and coherence in the world, raised and answered, even surfeited. In the same issue of Acts as Palmer’s “Dear Lexicon” interview, after all, appears a little poem called “My Cat,” taken from Johnson’s “The Imaginary Menagerie”: “I have a cat named Chaos / I teach to dance / crisscross, toss, and loss / across expanse. / / Chaos in the corner, / Chaos on its head. / / Order out of Chaos — / hanging by a thread” (106). This is not one of Johnson’s major works. But it exemplifies the older poet’s lack of embarassment over both nursery-rhyme simplicity and a child-like love of the enticingly coherent.

     

    Johnson’s ability to make the sublime serve the purposes of Beauty, rather than standing as an end in itself, may have something to do with this embrace of the embarassing or shameful, as opposed to the abject (see Turner, Beauty, 1-2; 17-32). It certainly puts him at odds with much modern experimental verse. “Beauty is difficult,” says Beardsley to Yeats at several points in the Cantos (see 74 and 80). “Beauty is easy,” Johnson reponds. “It is the Beast that is the secret” (Beam 14). He can have a hard time with that Beast, with making his poem, as he himself puts it, “a mirror held / to the horror.” If he gives us Prospero and Ariel, there’s no Caliban or Sycorax in sight, and the monsters that Thoreau says we must dare to suckle–this in Beam 15, a quoted “Cornerstone”–seem to me rather few and far between. Guy Davenport finds a “brave innocence” in the poet’s willingness to avoid the roles of “conscience,” “political guide,” and adviser on “contemporary and fashionable anxieties.” “Mr. Johnson might just as well be writing in any century you might arbitrarily name,” he observes,” for all the mention he makes of his times” (“Geography” 194). Other critics have been less approving. 17 In either case, here too he is unusual. We need to look beyond Anglo-American poetry to find his spiritual kin, since the modernist he most calls to mind, as Palmer recalls Rene Char, is the Spanish poet Jorge Guillen, whose Cantico (Canticle) is, like ARK, at once a hymn to light and to the triumphant pleasures of finding oneself “invented” by a world that makes us its “legend,” a “well-made” world that calls us to its praise (see “M_s all_” [“Beyond”] and “Beato sill_n” [“Blessed Armchair”], respectively). Cantico and ARK have both been accused of a tendency to slight the social, to sidestep history–a charge that Guillen responded to in poems and essays for much of his later career (see the “Introduction” to Affirmation, 22), and one that Johnson steadies himself for when he explains that “unlike other long American poems of the century, ARK was conceived to be a poem without history. A dangerous undertaking . . .” (“Planting” 2). Dangerous, at least in part, because without personal or social history for ballast, the poem may seem merely aesthetic, not important, a pleasure with nothing at stake, since by and large we no longer trust with Whitman that “passionate friendship” mirrors a “harmonic universe” (Davenport, “Whitman” 15) or with Coleridge that “‘Tis the sublime of man, / Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves / Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!” and that “This fraternises man, this constitutes / Our charities and bearings” (“Religious Musings,” 107; ll. 44-48).

     

    We may be wrong in this mistrust–it may yet prove, as Frederick Turner claims, that “what William James called ‘the will to believe’ is written in our genes,” that “teleology is the best policy,” and that, “paradoxically, it is utopian to attempt to do battle against our natural idealism,” the instinctive itch that leads us “to expect more order and meaning in the world than it can deliver,” and therefore to change the world to meet our expectations (100). With its faith in the order and beauty of the world Johnson’s poem leads the reader to expect more coherence and meaning in it than the poem often allows at first glance, and as the text is “changed” through annotations and efforts at close reading it more than requites one’s patient, puzzling scrutiny. I doubt that this aesthetic exchange has much of a social effect, just as I doubt Palmer’s meditations on the mystery of reference have; but ARK rewards, rather than judges, a reader’s effort to make it cohere, leaving the mouth and ear satisfied in its music, and the intellect, also, new and tender and quick. Two stanzas from Guillen’s “Mas alla” capture this surge of narcisstic satisfaction:

     

         Todo me comunica,
     Vencedor, hecho mundo,
     Su brio para ser
     De veras real, en triunfo.
     Soy, mas, estoy.  Respiro.
     Lo profundo es el aire.
     La realidad me inventa,
     Soy su leyenda.  -Salve!18

     

    Such pleasures are certainly utopian, as Finkelstein explains, offering a critical purchase on the world (98-101). But I suspect that breathing in that “brio para ser” is its own reward, that it corresponds to a movement through a crisis when the world felt as inalterably other and abject, a crisis Palmer and Lyotard help us envision, into the exaltation and confirmation of self that Longinus describes, where one feels that “nature did not decide that man would be a low or ignoble animal; but leading us into life and into the whole cosmos as if into a kind of world’s fair to be, in a way, its observers, and to be lovers of the esteem which comes to those who compete” (177)–in this case who compete by “wrestling the old ineffable” into experimental verse (Johnson, Beam 30).

     

    Palmer and Johnson often seem to me halves of a single, greater poet: one who would unite, not Innocence and Experience, that old Mutt and Jeff, but Emerson’s duo: Experience and Intellect. “Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth,” Emerson writes in “Love.” “But all is sour, if seen as experience. . . . In the actual world–the painful kingdom of time and place–dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy” (328). Dante wrote from in both worlds, as did Eliot, Pound, and Guillen. Chartres to Johnson’s Watts Towers, James Merrill’s epic of love and science, The Changing Light at Sandover, is the nearest that contemporary poetry comes to this inclusiveness. (I suspect that its use of narrative is central to that accomplishment, although it would take another essay to make the argument.)

     

    But we need not push for such a synthesis. If there’s little of Johnson’s holy light in Sun or Palmer’s sweet, Hebraic ache in ARK, the aesthetics of the second book suggest that we may yet have an experimental poetry that aspires to Beauty, to the reader’s satisfaction–a poetry that starts from something remarkably close to the world-view of the Natural Classicists, that is to say, without yielding their New Formalist results. This seems to me, whatever its ethical import, an important aspiration, for it gives a ringing answer to Barthes’ sense that we are kept at a distance from the “keen” pleasures of reading “the work,” as opposed to those of playing out “the text,” by the “rather depressing knowledge” that “today, one can no longer write ‘like that’” (80). In its assurance of a link between the self-referential construction of the poem and the mathematical coherence of the natural world, Johnson’s work reminds us that the stochastic, “shit happens” poetics of what Gilbert calls “textured information” may be at least as much of an imposition on the ordering impulse of the human mind as linguistic structure and closure are a human imposition on the buzzing, booming chaos of events. And in its restoration of pleasure as a “grand and elementary principle” nearly thirty years after Lionel Trilling declared that “the ideal of pleasure has exhausted itself, almost as if it had been actually realized and had issued in satiety and ennui,” leaving an ideal of experiences that lie beyond the pleasure principle in its wake, ARK nags us with the thought that the pursuit of sensations of self-awareness, though they lie in pain, may be as specialized and privileged a pursuit as the one it disdains, the Enlightened, echt American pursuit of happiness.

     

    On the news this early evening, after all, I will hear about villages burning. Out my window, by nothing but an accident of birth, I will see a scene far closer to Johnson’s Spire on the Death of L.Z. (ARK 34):

     

               bees purring a
              cappella
     in utter emerald cornfield
         till the cows come
             purple home
          this is paradise

     

    The “mysteries of reference” in Palmer’s poetic can better accomodate my experience of imaged awfulness than the revelatory epiphanies of Johnson. Yet somehow the mysteries of construction invoked throughout ARK offer a way through my not-uncommon sense of shame at such juxtapositions, into a response equally proper to the world I inhabit, to the work I have at hand, and to the life and work those burned-out villagers ought also by rights to enjoy. Perhaps we need not, like the proverbial Englishman, mistake discomfort for morality, as though only through guilt and struggle could our pleasures be excused (85). To say at death that “head wedded nail and hammer to the / work of vision / of the word / at hand,” the L.Z.elegy goes on, “that is paradise.” There is still work–beautiful, wild work–to be done.

     

    Notes

     

    1. This essay grows out of my discussion of Johnson and Palmer at the 1992 MLA Poetry Division panel, chaired by Robert van Hallberg, on the question, “Are the Pleasures of Experimental Poetry Important, and When?”

     

    2. I will leave aside, for now, the history of this anhedonism. But it is worthy noting that in 1965 two essayists remarked on its importance. “Our contemporary aesthetic culture does not set great store by the principle of pleasure,” Lionel Trilling writes in “The Fate of Pleasure,” “and it may even be said to maintain an antagonism to the principle of pleasure.” Susan Sontag, thinking of a slightly different set of artists, observes that “in one sense, the new art and the new sensibility take a rather dim view of pleasure,” since “the seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense–the pleasures of a melody that one can hum after leaving the concert hall, of characters in a novel or play whom one can recognize, identify with, and disset in terms of realistic psychological motives,” and so on. She hastens to add, however, that in another sense “the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever,” since it “demands less ‘content’ in art, and is more open to the pleasures of ‘form’ and style” (302-3).

     

    3. The key tension in McGann’s “Response to Altieri” seems to me not that between capitalism and Language work, but rather between pleasure and freedom: a distinction that places him in a broad tradition of thinkers for whom, as Trilling says of Dostoevsky, “disgust with the specious good of pleasure serves as the ground for the affirmation of spiritual freedom” (76).

     

    4. To be fair, I should mention Perloff’s essay on “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” which stresses the aural enjoyment of “Language” work: “Words, that is to say, are not dependable when it comes to signification, but the play of their sounds is endlessly pleasurable” (The Dance of the Intellect, 232). In her most recent book, Perloff returns to the discourse of pleasure, since if we are willing to “‘go with it’” we may be “amused” by Language work, and find such poems “elaborately sounded . . . appealing in their music” (Radical Artifice, 205). Yet I am struck, once again, by the way Perloff feels impelled to close out Radical Artifice on a horatorical note, describing John Cage as “preoccupied with . . . ultimately political topics.” As her clinching comment on his work this observation anticipates an audience for whom the “aural,” “visual,” “dialectic,” “semantic,” “or for that matter, literary” paths through Cage’s work are less important than his underlying political concern.

     

    5. “Pleasure / Bliss,” writes Barthes: “terminologically, there is always a vacillation I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete” (4). That said, however, Barthes makes good use of his perpetually faltering paradigm; and handled with all due lightness, the pair prove a useful heuristic.

     

    6. This inattention to pleasure is hardly limited to those who write about experimental verse. As Barbara Packer has argued, “the analysis of mechanisms of delight, which used to be as important a part of the old rhetorical education as moral improvement, has been pushed to the margins of critical discourse,” so that professors of English lack a sophisticated and respectable language for deliberating the pleasures of Chaucer, as well as Charles Bernstein (26). When pleasure is mentioned, as when Roger Gilbert finds that the sentences of Ron Silliman’s What “give pleasure . . . through their wit, their allusiveness, their visuality, their phonetic texture, their descriptive precision, or their sheer unlikeliness,” delight is still writ small, a matter of local “fun” rather than a “grand elementary principle” (261).

     

    7. I quote this in the knowledge that Palmer can give as good as he gets. In 1987, when Sulfur published a review by Sven Birkerts critical of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, then invited masthead members to respond, Palmer called the article “diffuse and pointless,” and wrote that he heard in its accusations of an Ashberian “nihilism” “the all-too-familiar whine of the bourgeois subject, threatened with the loss of its delights, its constituted meanings and its empty identity” (154).

     

    8. The fact that Michael Steadman had been too busy with his job at the advertising firm DAA to read Forche’s collection was meant to reinforce our sense that he was being drawn inexorably away from the political concern of his youth in the 1960s–and also from his emblematically named wife, Hope.

     

    9. Palmer’s distrust of telling a little story–his distrust, it is safe to say, of narrative–may also be illuminated by McGann’s comments on the non- and anti-narrative impulse in Language poets. “Narrativity is an especially problematic feature of discourse, to these writers, because its structures lay down ‘stories’ which serve to limit and order the field of experience, in particular the field of social and historical experience. Narrativity is, in this view, an inherently conservative feature of discourse, and hence it is undermined at every point” (“Contemporary Poetry” 267). For a convincing counter-argument in favor of narrative, however, see Argyros’ chapter “Narrative and Chaos” (307-322).

     

    10. Perloff’s chapter “The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing” (Radical Artifice 29-53) is perhaps the best available exposition of the first of these embarrassments, especially in her withering reading of Philip Levine’s poem “To Cipriano, in the Wind.” I am not sure, however, that a poetry of moderate artifice–say a poetry that embraces the traditional artificialities of meter, rhyme, and theatrical or performative selfhood, of the sort we find in Merrill or Pinsky–would prove less cogent a response than Perloff’s radical poetics to this “changing face.”

     

    11. In the “Acts” interview, it is worth noting, Palmer calls “A man undergoes pain . . .” the “Adorno poem” (“Dear Lexicon” 31).

     

    12. Palmer has written and spoken of Vallejo and Celan as poets who evince “a politics that inheres” (“The Flower of Capital,” 164). They are vital proof that “political significance can manifest itself in the most deeply privatized–apparently–work,” and that one can write a poetry in which the political world does not become “decor” and which is itself not “ultimately self-congratulatory, in that you get to say you’re on the right side, and then sell it” (“Dear Lexicon” 14, 12). Although I attribute these “Human Poems” to Vallejo, since a collection by that name was translated by Clayton Eshleman and published by Grove Press in 1968, according to Eshleman’s 1978 retranslation of the same posthumous texts “there is no evidence that Vallejo himself even contemplated such a title as Poemas humanos” (xx): a buried slipperiness of naming that echoes a key theme in Palmer’s text. In Celan, it is also worth noting, Palmer finds “a kind of . . . rebuke to Adorno” (“Dear Lexicon” 14). The poet discusses his work as a “network of quotation” in the “Dear Lexicon” interview: “I don’t go around expecting everyone to have a footnoted edition of my works. On the contrary, I could footnote it myself if that were the intent. I’m not just setting up an industry of ‘seeking out,’ though I’m delighted by the surprise of someone . . . finding out where I’ve stolen this or that” (18).

     

    13. While I’m tempted to add that Senator to my earlier list of easy targets, Palmer has been subject to absurd objections from those in power, his poetry “officially condemned by a committee of Texas congressmen as pornographic” (Reinfeld 99).

     

    14. Johnson does not segregate his literary and scientific ranges of reference. The line “All night the golden fruit fell softly to the air” interweaves Yeats’s “golden apples of the sun” and the fall of photons into the gravity well of the earth, and takes note of the fact that the silver apples of the moon are the golden ones, reflected. In this “reeled world” (Beam 1) all things pun one another, and poets, who get to know and articulate their correspondences, are themselves shaped from “Linkings, inklings, / around the stem & branches of the nervetree–/ shudder and shutterings, sensings,” beings for whom “SENSE sings” (Beam 8).

     

    15. This ventilation, called “PALMS,” composed from at least one word from each psalm, quoted in order, retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice as it recapitulates a number of key images and passages from the rest of the Foundations. For example, the opening imprecation to “Be / the man that walk in the way of day and night / like a tree of water . . .” helps us gloss an otherwise obscure reference to “one” who is “water to touch, all knowledge” in Beam 1. Since the brain’s “wrinkled lobes of flesh are more sensitive than the surface of water” (Beam 12), it seems we are that aqua-tocatta. Johnson’s Bible, like “Orpheus’ Sermon” in Dickinson’s poem 1545, has “a Warbling teller” in more ways than one.

     

    16. I take this phrase from John Shade, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for whom “It sufficed that I in life could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of Correlated pattern in the game, / Plexed artistry, and something of the same / Pleasure as they who played it found” (ll. 811-15; 36-7). In the last beam of Ark: the Foundations, we find a “bobolink / sphericling the hereabouts” (Beam 33).

     

    17. Norman Finkelstein notes that Johnson’s work can “seem too naively exalted, lacking in an awareness of specifically social conflicts” (Utopian Moment 94). Harmon, too, comments that “given Johnson’s cosmic scale, the human race . . . hardly registers in any historical, political, social, or psychological details” and “shows up only as the inventor of language” (219). Wordsworth once more: “The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure,” we read in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads; “but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings” (168).

     

    18. Julian Palley translates these lines as “Everything yields / to me — victor, made world — / its determination / to be triumphantly real. / / I am; I am here and now. / I breathe the deepest air. / Reality invents me. / I am its legend. Hail!” (31).

    Works Cited

     

    • Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979.
    • Argyros, Alexander. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos. Michigan UP, 1991.
    • Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Josue V. Harari, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979: 73-81.
    • —. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller, trans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
    • Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Reflections. Peter Demetz, ed. Edmund Jephcott, trans. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978: 314-332.
    • Bernstein, Charles. “Stray Straws and Straw Men” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.
    • Birkerts, Sven. The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry. New York: William and Morrow, 1989.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
    • Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon, 1981.
    • —. “Whitman a Century after His Death.” Yale Review 80 (4), October 1992: 1-15.
    • Dorn, Edward. Gunslinger. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1989.
    • Duncan, Robert. Bending the Bow. New York: New Directions, 1968.
    • Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
    • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 1. Stephen Whicher and Robert Spiller, eds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959.
    • —. Essays and Lectures. Joel Porte, ed. New York: Library of America, 1983.
    • Finkelstein, Norman. “The Case of Michael Palmer.” Contemporary Literature 29 (4), Winter, 1988: 518-537.
    • —. The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry. Revised Edition. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993.
    • Forche, Carolyn. “Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.” American Poetry Review, March / April 1993: 9-16.
    • Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archeology of Knowledge. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, trans. Irvington, 1972.
    • Gilbert, Roger. “Textured Information: Politics, Pleasure, and Poetry in the Eighties.” Contemporary Literature 33 (2), Summer 1992: 243-274.
    • Grenier, Robert. “Tender Buttons.” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984: 204-207.
    • Guillen, Jorge. Affirmation: A Bilingual Anthology, 1919-1966. Julian Palley, trans. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1968.
    • Harmon, William. “The Poetry of a Journal at the End of an Arbor in a Watch.” Parnassus 9.1 (1981): 217-232.
    • Johnson, Ronald. Ark: The Foundations. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980. N.P.
    • —. ARK 50: Spires 34-50. New York: Dutton, 1984.
    • —. ARK: The Ramparts (Arches I-XVIII). Conjunctions 15, Spring / Fall 1990: 148-189.
    • —. “Interview.” Conducted by Barry Alpert. Vort 9, 1976 (Johnson / Davenport issue): 76-85.
    • —. “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron.” Northern Lights: Studies in Creativity. 2, 1985-86: 1-13.
    • —. Radi Os. Berkeley: Sand Dollar Press, 1977. N.P.
    • Logan, William. “Ancient Angers.” Review of Blood and Poetry, by Thomas Kinsella and Sun, by Michael Palmer. The New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1989: 24.
    • Longinus, Dionysus. On the Sublime. James A. Arieti and John M. Corssett, trans. New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985.
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Heidegger and “the jews”. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, trans. Minneapolis: Minnesotta UP, 1990.
    • —. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.” L. Liebmann, G. Bennington and M. Hobson, trans. The Lyotard Reader. Andrew Benjamin, ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989: 196-211.
    • McGann, Jerome J. “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes.” Politics and Poetic Value. Robert von Hallberg, ed. U of Chicago P, 1987: 253-276.
    • —. “Response to Charles Altieri.” Politics and Poetic Value. Robert von Hallberg, ed. U of Chicago P, 1987: 309-313.
    • Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Berkeley Books, 1968.
    • Neruda, Pablo. “Some Thoughts on Impure Poetry.” Passions and Impressions. Margaret Sayers Peden, trans. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983: 128-129.
    • Packer, Barbara. “Browsing Happiness.” ADE Bulletin 100, Winter 1991: 26-30.
    • Palmer, Michael. “Conversation.” Interview by Lee Bartlett. Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets. Lee Bartlett, ed. New Mexico UP, 1987: 126-143.
    • —. “Counter-Poetics and Current Practice,” Pavement, VII (1987), 1-21.
    • —. “‘Dear Lexicon’: An Interview by Benjamin Hollander and David Levi Strauss.” Acts 5, vol. 2 (1), 1986: 8-36.
    • —. First Figure. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.
    • —. “Interview with Michael Palmer.” Conducted by Keith Tuma. Contemporary Literature 30 (1), Spring 1989: 1-12.
    • —. “Response to Birkerts.” Sulfur 19 (Spring 1987), 153-4.
    • —. Sun. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
    • —. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990.
    • —. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.
    • Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge UP, 1992.
    • Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State UP, 1992. Selinger, Eric. “I Composed the Holes: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os.” Contemporary Literature 33 (1), Spring 1992: 46-73.
    • Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
    • Turner, Frederick. Beauty: The Value of Values. Charlottesville and London: Virginia UP, 1991.
    • —. Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science. New York: Paragon House, 1985.
    • Vallejo, Cesar. The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia, trans. Berkeley: California UP, 1978.
    • Waldrop, Rosmarie. “Calling All Ants.” Review of First Figure, by Michael Palmer. The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 1, 1985: 36.
    • Yenser, Stephen. “Open House.” Review of Sun, by Michael Palmer. Poetry. Aug. 1989: 295-301.

     

  • Historicizing Derrida

     

    Steven Helmling

    Department of English
    University of Deleware
    helmling@brahms.udel.edu

     

    Always historicize!

     

    –Fredric Jameson

     

    Accounts of Derrida stress his work’s diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions–in short, a history–of its own. I want in this essay to initiate such an account, and my gambit will be to confront early Derrida with late (or later), which, for my purposes here, means Derrida before 1968 and after. Such a consideration of the whole Derrida phenomenon seems to me long overdue. Apart from the difficulty of Derrida’s work itself, various cultural circumstances have combined to frustrate or discourage such an account: in America, notoriously, we pay little attention to history generally, but a historically informed awareness of Derrida has been further hindered for us because Derrida’s work became available in translation here only in the late ’70s, so pre-’68 work mingled with post- in ways that blurred the differences between them. I want here to “historicize” not only Derrida’s oeuvre and career, but also its reception, its success and influence. If Derrida is some sort of sign of the (postmodern) times, what does that say not only about him, but about the times?

     

    One of Derrida’s latest books, Given Time, interrogates a problem that has been a chronic anthropological preoccupation in the West, “the gift”; and it devotes a chapter to Marcel Mauss’s classic “Essai sur le don.” Mauss was attracted to this theme, Derrida notes, because the gift seems to promise an exception to, or a suspension of, the normally inflexible laws of “economy.” In a system of exchange, the gift, the free offering made with no expectation of return, seems to gesture outside the system. Predictably, Derrida deconstructs Mauss’s construction of “economy,” and the binaries of “inside/outside” and “gift/sale” (or “/purchase”) sustaining it; his point is to force on Mauss a question Mauss evades: can the gift actually ever be a gift? For on Mauss’s own showing, gift-giving always implies obligations and paybacks (Mauss’s own preferred phrase, “gift-exchange,” says it all) that thus reinscribe “economy” itself–and only the more forcibly for its terms being implicit, internalized by the participants (here Derrida even deploys a quasi-Lacanian vocabulary), rather than rendered explicitly in the alienated workings of a cold cash nexus. Against the tendency of his own analysis, Mauss idealizes the “potlatch” of savages as a humane and generous alternative to the iron laws by which “economy” reigns over the human condition. (In thus apotheosizing “economy,” Mauss wistfully observes, capitalism and Marxism are one.)

     

    Mauss’s desire for an escape from “economy,” a transit “beyond” the structures that constrain the way we live, act, think, and feel, a break-out from the (to him) Hobson’s choice between Marxism and capitalism is a version of the central problematic of not only Derrida’s work, but of much “theory” generally (pragmatism, hermeneutics, Ideologiekritik, the foundationalist-antifoundationalist argument, and so on): if our language, our belief systems, our very subjectivities, are constructed by social forces, is it possible to get outside them, outside their system (or “economy”), to escape their constraints, to glimpse possibilities they exclude, foreclose, repress?

     

    Much “theory” (though by no means all) answers this question in the negative, especially since the disillusion following the late ’60s generally, and in France, mai, soixante-huit in particular. Despair is obligatory, a sign of political vigilance, when hope is constructed as “ideological”, a false and politically pernicious consolation–“an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Derrida himself is one of the most potent enforcers of this (postmodern) sense of entrapment in a “system” or “economy” of semantemes enforced by the “logocentrism” of “Western metaphysics” since Plato. (For many devotees of Derrida, this sense of a “system” we cannot escape is eclipsed by his potent thematic of that ineradicable differance no system can master; the politics of this reading of Derrida is another thing I will try to “historicize” at this paper’s close.) Constrained and conditioned by the “closures” of “system,” we find ourselves “inside” a vast social-historical-sexual-economic construct we cannot escape, cannot get “outside” of. There are variations on this theme, as when the “outside” is not the interdicted place we long for in vain, but rather the exile into which our “ideology” has cast some excluded “other”; then, Derrida more righteously “deconstructs” the values or valorizations (the good/bad binaries) sustaining the exclusion, to suggest that the “outside” does not exist, that “the other” is only by way of ideological distortion projected as “other,” and denied the status of “the same.” This is, politically, a more hopeful operation, but its bottom line remains that there is no “outside,” or if there were, it would only prove to be “the inside” again, more of “the same.” The “outside” remains a construction, perhaps a delusion, but in any case inaccessible. If theory were a prison-break movie, Derrida would be the guy who dopes out the architecture of the Big House in search of possible escape routes– the ventilation ducts, the sewer tunnels, the depth of the foundation walls, etc.–but since the early ’70s, the point of Derrida’s blueprint has been less to assist escape, than to demonstrate that escape is impossible. We’re all lifers here in the prison-house of language: we may deconstruct, but we can never escape, its determinations, its reason(s), its meanings.

     

    This is, of course, a thematic or problematic quite specific to our postmodern historical moment. A generation ago, in the time of Sartre and Beckett, “meaning” was the object of the existential hero’s quest (so was “identity”), rather than (as today) exactly what the quester is fleeing. (And yesterday’s quest was an affair of action rather than, as is the case today, of intellection–“critique,” “deconstruction,” “theory,” etc.–of making tracks, rather than assaying “traces.”) The “meaningless,” a.k.a. “the absurd,” was the donnee, the point de depart of any such quest; today, the “escape” from “meaning” is the point, the destination–and as impossible of attainment, usually, as the Holy Grail itself. (Derrida himself declares that “absurdity has always been in solidarity with metaphysical meaning” [Positions, 14].) In writers as otherwise diverse as Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, Jean-Francios Lyotard, Harold Bloom, as well as Derrida, yesterday’s “absurd” tends to become today’s “sublime,” a transport (variously a jouissance, as in Barthes, or a terror, as in Jameson) “beyond” representation into unrepresentabilty, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. (A recent collection of papers on deconstruction elevates Derridean differance–what always “escapes” or “exceeds,” defers and makes [self-] different, the mere “letter” of the text–to nothing less than [the volume’s title] The Textual Sublime.) 1

     

    There is a pathos to this distinctively “postmodern” predicament, and Derrida’s encounter with Mauss underlines its historicity. Mauss’s contradiction, and the ease with which he holds it, exemplifies an intellectual economy more elastic in his generation than is ours today. (Mauss’s dates: 1872-1950; “Essai sur le don” appeared in 1925.) For that matter, Derrida’s own career enacts a transit from a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility to the steady-state pathos, the “frozen dialectic,” of his maturer writing: before ’68, Derrida’s “free play” and “infinite interpretation” were projects of liberation; and the excited (and exciting) prose of De la grammatologie (1967) conjured an imminent Aufhebung of writing over speech, implicitly (despite floridly elaborated reservations about Hegel) on the model of Hegel’s master and slave; the book’s program chapter bore the breathless title “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” The point: whereas Derrida has staged deconstruction for a couple of decades now as an “impossible” or “intransitive” project whose critique of logocentrism, since it is obliged to use logocentrism’s language, can only reinscribe logocentric closures, he initially proposed it (and many still take it) as something very different: a new and uniquely potent instrument for rending the veils of various kinds of (false) metaphysics, and hence, false consciousness–Derrida even acknowledged the lineage of Heideggerian Abbau and Destruktion–all of which sustained the early excitement about Derrida, and still sustains those who would use deconstruction “politically,” in the service of Ideologiekritik. 2

     

    I will shortly contrast these pre-’68 excitements with Derrida’s differently inflected projection of “writing” in later, post-’68 texts. But I pause here for some necessary caveats on procedure. As any reader of Derrida knows, there can never be any question of calculating Derrida’s “position” in a given text (or moment in or passage of a text), and its distance from the “position” assumed in some other (text, moment, passage). The preceding paragraph, for example, discerns a political prospect, a quasi-prophecy of imminent cultural and social change, in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and I am about to argue that this promise is cancelled or reduced or sharply qualified in Derrida’s later writing, after 1968. But already, in a 1967 interview, Derrida advises, as if to prevent just the sort of reading I am proposing here, that

     

    one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing.(Positions, 13)

     

    One notes here how “end/beginning” shift to “death/birth” and back again; remembers, again, how silly one might have been, confronted with a locution like “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” to have read “simply” (die a thousand deaths!), and thereby to have missed that “it announces precisely that there is no end of the book,” etc. (there are moments when the pleasures of Derrida’s text can make you feel like William Bennett); and one reflects, again, that it would take a Borges to imagine the sort of alternative universe in which an interviewer asks Derrida a question in the form, “So, then, you are saying X, Y, and Z?” and Derrida replies, “Yes; exactly; quite so.”

     

    But let’s take Derrida’s hint, and reread the “Exergue” that precedes “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; a quotation in extenso will illustrate the difficulties as well as the allure facing the reader of, and a fortiori the commentator on, Derrida:

     

    this exergue must not only announce that the science of writing–grammatology–shows signs of liberation all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts. These efforts are necessarily discreet, dispersed, almost imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu within which they produce their operation. I would like to suggest above all that, however fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if, given the most favorable hypothesis, it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field. For essential reasons: the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing, is, in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure. I do not say the end. The idea of science and the idea of writing– therefore also of the science of writing–is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned. A most determined relationship, in spite of its privilege, its necessity, and the field of vision that it has controlled for a few millenia, especially in the West, to the point of being now able to produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits. (Grammatology, 4)

     

    Granted that the bulk of the passage emphasizes the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of a “science of writing”; still, its opening move is to “announce” that this nascent grammatological science “shows signs of liberation all over the world”–and not merely as a Zeitgeist-effect, a mere epiphenomenon of some “historico-metaphysical” political unconscious, but “as a result of decisive efforts.” Nowhere does the passage take this back; rather it orchestrates a powerful rhythm, a sort of ideational surf, of breakers in and riptide out, between phrases whose implication is to hold open prospects of such a “liberation” (“fecund,” “necessary,” “overcome”) and others whose motion acknowledges the “technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto.” Midway through, grammatology cannot “describe the limits of its field”; at the close, it can “itself proclaim its own limits”: from pathos to paean in under two hundred words. This is a prose concerned with largeness of effect, not precision of statement. The passage opens with “liberation all over the world,” and it closes with an affirmation, despite all the difficulties, of having arrived at a point where the speech/writing binary can at last, “now,” after so much history (“a few millenia”), “produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits.”

     

    Between these two cathexes comes the distinction Derrida insists on in the interview, between “closure” and “end.” The motif is by now a familiar one: “closure” as a (spatial) domain that is finite but unbounded (however fissured and ruptured), as against a temporality in which change can occur, and ends and beginnings are possible. Beginnings and ends, Derrida implies here (for the moment), occur only within a closure; and a closure is that for which, again, there can be no beyond–even if this paragraph ends by affirming the possibility of proclaiming, within this closure, phonocentrism’s “limits.” In the following paragraph Derrida goes on to reaffirm his project as

     

    a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge[my italics].

     

    “The ineluctable world of the future” sounds positively anthem-like; but Derrida goes on (I cite the passage to its finish) to end on, again, a suitably dark and ominous note:

     

    The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (Grammatology, 4-5)

     

    As I hope these lengthy quotations illustrate, Derrida’s prose does not occupy “positions” so much as it surges between them, toward and away from them, in a ceaseless agitation of assertion and qualification, saying and unsaying.

     

    So for the commentator on Derrida, it is less pertinent to speak of “positions” than of emphases, or effects–or, to borrow a phrase from a very uncharacteristic piece of Derrida’s (“The Ends of Man,” Margins, 109-36), “dominant motifs”–a phrase Derrida resorts to in an argument requiring broad-brush summarizations of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. 3 But to conclude this (I hope not overlong) digression: in speaking of Derrida before and after 1968, I must seem to speak of “effects” as if they had “thetic” force or substance, and the inevitable binaries that will present themselves will overflow the temporal bar (1968) supposed to separate them. My predicament will precisely illustrate Derrida’s “sublation” of Hegel, according to which stress falls less on what Aufhebung “cancels” than on what it “preserves,” what persists, and thus qualifies the passage, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. I cannot, in short, state my case without overstating it–less because Derrida’s “statement” is inevitably more subtle than mine, than because Derrida invests so much (and so effectively) in problematizing, sometimes altogether evading, the logic of “statement.” Even to characterize his work as a protracted campaign against “the thetic” risks making it seem too single-minded, too serious, risks missing the play Derrida can make of his ingenious and interminable game of “Fort!” and “Da!,” with the thetic.

     

    So, to resume: I was speaking of Derrida before 1968, of his vigorous talk of “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” of “liberation all over the world,” etc. These “apocalyptic” pre-’68 excitements (to call them that), and their damping-down, a displacement of emphasis elsewhere–a shift in the “dominant motif,” indeed, from “end” to “closure”–is discernible in the essays (which date from both before ’68 and after) collected in 1972 in Marges de la philosophie. The richest example is the left-hand column (i.e., the part written by Derrida) of the volume’s opening meditation on the ambitions of deconstruction, “Tympan,” in which Derrida obliquely announces that his project henceforth must be conducted “obliquely,” as the hammer-bone of the inner ear beats obliquely on the eardrum (the “tympan”), both transmitting to it, but also protecting it against, the violences of sound. Deconstruction “on the oblique” must take care

     

    to avoid frontal and symmetrical protest, opposition in all forms of anti-, or in any case to inscribe antism and overturning, domestic denegation, in an entirely other form of ambush, of lokhos, of textual maneuvers. (Margins, xv; Between the Blinds, 153-4)

     

    A footnote here quotes a lyric of Artaud, but the prose of “Tympan” itself, full of puns, word-plays, paradoxes, etc., will already have advised the reader expecting the expository panache of Grammatology, or Writing and Difference, that here “an entirely other form of ambush, of lokhos, of textual maneuvers” prevails. (Lokhos is Greek for “ambush”; it puns, of course, on logos; also on another term at play here, Greek loxos, whence “luxation,” a “dislocation,” as of a bone out of its socket, a figure for the deconstructive aspiration to “dislocate” the joints or junctures, the articulations of philosophy as usual, to “displace philosophy’s alignment of its own types.”) One phrase in “Tympan,” a sentence fragment, summed up the point of this verbal play and quickly became a kind of slogan among devotees of deconstruction: “To write otherwise” (Margins, xxiv; Between the Blinds, 164).

     

    I have called “Tympan” a “meditation” on deconstruction’s ambitions, but “conjuration” might be a better word. Even more than our pre-’68 examples above, prose like “Tympan”‘s–Derrida invites us to call it “perverformative” (Post Card, 136)–less articulates an argument than it floats, and agitates, an array of motifs. Derrida’s practice of metaphor is calculated to maximize, as he often enough tells us, a multiplicity or dissemination of “meanings” that defeats “constative” habits of reading and writing. It is an index of Derrida’s uncanny success that so many of his readers are ready to grant that “to write otherwise,” Derrida-wise, is a large ambition, and one with “political” force. (There are dissenters, of course: Marxists like Jameson and Eagleton who consider that making “critique” simply a “kind of writing” reduces it, rather than specifying its uses relevantly; or Christopher Norris, who has been working for years to rescue Derrida from such merely “aestheticizing” or “pragmatist,” Richard-Rortyesque readings of him, arguing doggedly that this is not how Derrida asks to be read. 4)

     

    But the ambition “to write otherwise” incurs the infinite regress (mise en abime) always imposed by the question of the “other”: can any writing ever be written other-wise? Can any writing, however ingenious, ever exempt itself from the force of social (and other) constructionisms that dictate, that have “always already” dictated, the reinscription of “the same” in every effort at “otherwise-ness”? In the years to follow, Derrida’s writing will suffer the pathos of the inevitably negative answer to these questions. Increasingly, “writing” will appear as not merely another arena of, but as Derrida’s own inevitable and recurrent figure for, the fatedness of “repetition.”

     

    So whereas Derrida first proposed “writing” as a vehicle, or agent (not, of course, a “subject”), of liberation from the ideological programs inscribed in “speech,” he has for a couple of decades now, even while continuing to dissolve speech into writing, proceeded on (or toward) the sadder-but-wiser premise that those ideological programs had “always already” been “inscribed” in “writing,” too: a sort of dialectical backfire of Grammatology‘s critique of “phonocentrism,” for if speech is “always already” writing, then writing can neither supervene upon speech from “outside” it, nor operate a “sublation” of it from “the inside.” On the contrary, in the course of Derrida’s career from the middle ’60s to the present, “writing” has passed from at least potentially an agent (or figure) of change, revolution, ends-and-beginnings, to another figure or enforcer, another inscription, of the ideological closure in which we languish. It seems to me peculiar, and telling, that this massive ideological shift has gone unremarked by expositors of Derrida.

     

    Early and late, Derrida projects our condition as a vast text governed, indeed, constituted by an extensive network of tropes, figures, meanings–a “system,” or “economy,” to invoke two of Derrida’s usual figures for it. He sympathizes with the desire to escape this “economy,” and in his early work, he entertains a variety of hopeful possibilities for doing so. But after 1968, intellectual scruple compels him to renounce any such hope, for increasingly his every “deconstruction” of the “system” or “economy” of meanings within which we are constrained sees through the constraints only to reinforce them. It is as if Derrida’s way of honoring the desire to escape the ideological closures of logocentrism is to magnify the power, the totality, of those closures; as if the measure of deconstruction’s ambition can only be the impossibility of what it attempts. Derrida explains the matter quotably, and relates it to our question here of inside/outside, other/same, in a recent (or late) text, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” (1987):

     

    the most rigorous deconstruction has never claimed . . . to be possible. . . . For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be the danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is . . . of the other–the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention. (Between the Blinds, 209)

     

    The one thing “impossible”–impossibility itself, as Derrida might say, with the knowing smirk at the problematic of “the itself”–is to utter the meaningless, to achieve the “outside” or “other” of that vast intellectual and ideological network (or “prison-house”) of semiosis, Derrida’s usual synecdoche for the entrapments of culture generally.

     

    That is why Derrida’s standard operating procedure requires a rigorous enforcement of this “economy” of meaning. No less than Freud does Derrida insist on meaning; no more than Freud does he permit anything not to “mean,” not to signify, and to signify everything that he, with all his formidable ingenuity, can coerce it into signifying. No figure of speech however casual, no idiom of expression however conventional, is allowed not to mean as much as he can make it mean. (In Given Time, he goes on for pages when Mauss writes, in an aside, “Je m’excuse” rather than “Excusez-moi,” and with no acknowledgement that in writing, as distinct from speech–and who more than Derrida has insisted on this distinction?–the imperative, “Excusez-moi,” would be anomalous.) The meaningless is, has “always already” been, ruled out ex (or ante) hypothesi, persisting spectrally only as “non-sense,” a sort of utopian, and therefore impossible possibility, a mirage projected by a noble but vain, and therefore pathos-laden desire. 5 Language is a game with rules, and Derrida makes himself a virtuoso of enforcing them with a “rigor” intended to shake the whole structure. Compare Habermas, for whom “the rules,” the self-normativizations of “language games,” are a last hope for (“communicative”) reason; for Derrida they figure the fatality of reason as such. Habermas makes reason a good, but difficult of attainment; Derrida makes it an evil, and impossible to escape. Derrida enacts the entrapments of “economy” only to protest them, of course. What a dance!–but dancing in chains, the spectacle our postmodern (i.e., post-’68) “libidinal economy” demands.

     

    I have so far “historicized” Derrida by positing a divide in his work, before and after 1968. As an enforcer of semantic “rigor,” though, as a meaning-cop, holding every text strictly to the letter of its letter (so to speak), Derrida could be as strict before 1968 as after. But whereas Derrida now blows the whistle on all “ideological” hope as such, back in his own more hopeful days he would enforce this operation much more selectively. Compare, for example, his 1963 essay on Foucault, “Cogito and the History of Madness” (Writing and Difference, 31-63) with his 1967 essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve” (Writing and Difference, 251-77). At stake in both is the question whether and how “escape” from a historically given “system” or “economy” of meanings might be possible. Foucault’s audacity, staking virtually all on the sheer force of an impassioned, lyrical and poetic prose, provokes Derrida to a wildly conflicted critique of Folie et deraison that aspires, both in argumentative sweep and as fancy writing, to out-Foucault Foucault–with questionable consequences: to me, at least, Derrida’s appropriation of Foucault’s points against Foucault seem rather to confirm than contest them (see especially Writing and Difference, 55-7).

     

    The essay on Bataille, by contrast, is much more sedate, a celebration, not a “deconstruction,” of Bataille’s notion of useless, non- (or anti-) utilitarian “expenditure.” (We Anglophones, with Oscar Wilde in our kit, might think Bataille a couple of generations out of date on this.) Derrida doesn’t remark that Bataille’s recommendation of “expenditure” as a deliverance from “restricted economy” to what Bataille calls “general economy” reinscribes “economy” in just the way that Derrida’s “rigor” disallowed with Mauss. For Bataille, all it takes to escape “economy” is a little sex and violence. Today, we’re likelier to regard sex and violence as “part of the problem,” to the extent that “the system” has routinized its co-optation or commodification of violence, sex, and deviance generally, marketing the high-gloss simulacrum even while making political capital out of moralizing against “the real thing”–hence, again, our “postmodern” despair: the potentially subversive is reinscribed within what it would subvert. But my point here is that the pre-’68 Derrida does not blow this particular whistle on Bataille. (Nor does Derrida bother noticing that the essays in question, in which Bataille conjures with war, blood, mutilation, and killing–all the Sadean virtues–appeared in print almost exactly contemporaneously with the advent of Hitler to power in 1933.) He credits Bataille’s originality–another version of getting “outside” the closures erected by precursors–as a “simulated repetition,” a sort of parodic exorcism of “the same” rather than (what Derrida later insists is all seeming originality can ever amount to) “repetition” pure and simple. (And doesn’t the word “simulated” reinscribe the issue of authorial intent, and thus the whole phenomenology of self-consciousness?–reinscribes them, furthermore, as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.) 6

     

    How to account for these so-different responses to Foucault and Bataille? Derrida himself seems to invite an “anxiety of influence” speculation in his opening to “Cogito and the History of Madness,” paying fulsome homage, as “disciple,” to his “master” Foucault in preparation for the onslaught to follow. Granted, Foucault makes a fiercer Covering Cherub than Bataille, who, both as intellect and as writer, is a much smaller figure than either Foucault or Derrida (a fuller discussion would need to take up Foucault’s own homage to Bataille, and Derrida’s relation to it). But the “death of the author” motif in contemporary “theory,” and the bias against “subject-centered” paradigms generally, discourage any such psychologizing approach to “intertextuality” (even when the occasional exception can be as impressive as Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida”), 7 and I propose no such “anxiety of influence” reading here, if that must mean a lit-crit psychoanalysis that puts Derrida himself on the couch–though the taboo against authors on couches has recently been flouted by Derrida himself, in what I think his most extraordinary text to date, the autobiographical and confessional “Circumfession.” 8 Rather, I want to “historicize” Derrida’s creative anxieties, by inquiring into how the ambitions they power and betray are implicated in the larger, transindividual, historically determined “libidinal apparatuses” operative in our historical period–an approach that brings into play a tangle of questions sortable (loosely) as follows:

     

    1) “genre,” the “kind(s) of writing” in which Derrida invests or masks, cathects or decathects, the energies and anxieties of his ambition,

    2) underwriting these genre distinctions, the philosophy/literature binary that Derrida recurrently deconstructs and(thus) reaffirms, and so

    3) in place of Bloom’s one-on-one “agon” between Titanic individuals, that Streit der Fakultaten announced by Kant, the “contest of faculties” among whose current manifestations is “the emergence of that new type of discourse called theory” that Fredric Jameson takes as itself an important sign of “the postmodern,” 9 and in which Derrida is, on anyone’s account, so central a figure.

     

    The first “historicizing” index to note here is that Foucault is Derrida’s near-contemporary, whereas Bataille (1897-1962), five years dead by the time Derrida writes his essay, had long been in eclipse as a relic of a bygone era, a footnote to surrealism, a minor figure of the entre deux guerres. In Harold Bloom’s account of the “anxiety of influence,” the anxiety is about the past; Bloom ignores, and in places actually rules out, the anxiety generated by contemporaries. But Derrida’s most “anxious” responses are to contemporaries: Foucault, as we’ve seen; Lacan (whose construction of “system” Derrida challenges in Lacan’s axiom that “a letter always arrives at its destination”; Derrida’s quarrel with this seems to maintain the possibility of transit “beyond” or “outside” the system, but the “dead letter office” of La Carte postalecloses that aperture); Levinas (whose construction of the “other” as by definition “beyond” the closure of “our” paradigms, and incorporable within them only through a “violence of the concept,” poses the “beyond” or the “outside” not as a vain projection, but as a sacred mystery that is, alas, inaccessible–another way of putting the “outside” beyond reach).

     

    Why is Derrida’s creative anxiety stirred by contemporaries rather than, as in Bloom’s model, by precursors? Why does Derrida sweat bullets confronting a mere Foucault when he can be so cocky stepping into the ring with Hegel?

     

    One “historicizing” answer involves philosophy’s status in our current historical moment in the West. Here the “contest of faculties” motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition, to the extent that Bloom’s construction applies to poetry (i.e., “literature”), whereas Derrida’s territory is “philosophy.” For two centuries and more, Western culture has worried that poetry, or “imaginative” literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. The fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled, but philosophy, at least the tradition of it Derrida belongs to, has in our time found a potent new theme, the critique of “presence,” that permits a Derrida to challenge giants of the past like Hegel or Heidegger with all the sangfroid of a man shooting fish in a barrel. Not so with a Foucault, who not only shares the anti-“presence” ambition, but was one of its pioneers.

     

    The attack on “presence” is usually staged–less by Derrida than by those he has influenced (itself a telling symptom)–as a repudiation of the “enlightenment project.” From the point of view just elaborated, though, it can equally appear, quite contrary to its usual “postmodern” self-description, as the latest chapter in the story of the “enlightenment project” rather than a repudiation of that story and (as in Lyotard) of “story” itself: another version (or repetition) of the secularizing, antitheologizing drive from Voltaire’s “ecrasez l’infame” through Nietzsche’s “God is dead” to the proliferating terminalities or terminations (end of narrative, end of the author, end of the self, of “man,” of history, of philosophy, of ideology, totality, literature, ontotheology, etc.) variously announced, pronounced, denounced by so many “postmodern” voices. The later, post-’68 Derrida has treated this “end of” motif with mild sarcasm, as another symptom of the vain hope or expectation of a closure giving way to an aperture, a break or rupture out of the old into something new–though precisely this had been the, shall we say, “narrateme” encoded in Of Grammatology‘s opening formula, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; earlier still, in the 1964 essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida not only evoked the “death of philosophy” motif, but gave it a Messianic inflection, with philosophy not merely dead or dying, but suffering its hour on the cross. In later Derrida, the closure of the old cannot be closed (ended)–“What is held within the demarcated closure,” as we have seen, “may continue indefinitely” (Positions, 13)–but remains perpetually, fatally, open, and thus tainting, compromising, “always already” assimilating or having assimilated the potentially new to its paradigms, its syntagms, its readings, its “reason(s).” And on this reading the contemporary chapter of the history of philosophy narrates not (its own official theme) the late twentieth-century “death” or “end” of philosophy, but rather its triumph among the disciplines–a narrative eventuality which philosophy must deny, for reasons that are themselves best understood historically; Derrida’s own condescension to the “death of philosophy” motif notably eschews any suggestion of philosophy’s triumph. 10

     

    But to resume what I have staged above as the “Foucault/Hegel,” problem, i.e., Derrida’s anxiety about contemporaries versus his composure about precursors: it is not merely that the author of “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) was a 33 year-old unknown, whereas the writing on Hegel, in Marges de la philosophie (1972; trans. 1981) and preeminently in Glas (1974; trans. 1986), was the work of the newest and most brilliant star, a man already widely proclaimed as a culture-hero. More pertinent, for Derrida’s continuing and changing ambitions, is that “Hegel” means “philosophy,” “Foucault” means “literature”; in Glas itself, for example, the left-hand column, on Hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-“perverformative” right-hand column on Genet. Such “inter”-effects, effects between philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when Derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book–in The Truth in Painting, for example, between the material on Kant and Hegel in “Colossus” on the one hand, and the diary or postcard (“Envoi”-like) format of “Cartouches” and the dialogue of “Restitutions” on the other; or in Margins itself, the contrast between “Tympan” and such pieces as “White Mythology.”

     

    Here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the “apocalyptic” Derrida of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology and the later “perverformer” whose deconstruction-from-within increasingly works to confirm rather than to rupture the closure of logocentrism. I have already associated this break with “writing” in two different senses, and it is necessary here to discriminate them sharply:

     

    1) “writing” as Derrida’s figure, first for the historical antagonist of “speech” and phonocentrism, later for the fated “reinscription” of phonocentric logocentrism itself;

    2) “writing” as a foregrounded feature of Derrida’s own prose, the sort of prose that results from the ambition “to write otherwise”–the ambition, in short, to write in what is ordinarily taken to be a “literary” rather than a “philosophical” way.

     

    These two very different senses of Derridean “writing”–“writing” as grammatological theme, “writing” as “perverformative” practice–encode the philosophy/literature binary as it is enacted in the course of Derrida’s career, in his passage from a writing that is philosophical and about philosophy (“against” philosophy, of course, but in critical, i.e., philosophical ways), to a writing that calls a “literary” kind of attention to itself, and thus both stylistically and thematically, even (almost) “thetically,” announces the dissolution of “philosophemes” into their textual determinants–of “philosophy,” that is to say, into “literature.” More paradoxically, this “writing” also offers–though without quite claiming–to dissolve “the thetic” itself into stylistic “textual effect,” what Derrida variously calls the “tone” and/or demarche of a text (“what [the text] does as much as what [it] says, in [its] ‘acts,’ if you will, no less than in [its] objects” [translation altered]). 11

     

    It is “writing” in this second sense, the kind of “perverformativity” we have glanced at it in “Tympan,” that I want to turn to now, interrogating and, where possible, “historicizing” its motivations and its success–the work it does not only for Derrida, but also for us, to the extent that “we” subscribe to (or for that matter, reject) what Derrida makes it entail.

     

    And I’m afraid my first answer can’t help sounding a bit moralistic: “perverformativity” diffuses the political application, or ambition, of Derrida’s work. Recall the metaphorics of “Tympan”: to “stick it” in philosophy’s ear, to rupture philosophy’s eardrums, to deafen it, or at least leave its ears ringing, to put its bones out of joint, even to put it to sleep with excurses on obsolete printing technology–these wittily sadistic-sounding proposals stop well short of murdering their victim wholesale, or even attempting to convert (or “reeducate”?) him. (Him? Yes.) “Tympan” lowers, or registers a lowering, of the stakes for philosophy, and for “critique” at large, from the high ambitions projected in Of Grammatology; in it, writing is an act of resistance against the prevailing cultural surround, but only of resistance; there is no longer any promise, as in Of Grammatology, of writing as (at the very least) a sign of revolution, of change, of “the end of the book,” or of metaphysics, logocentrism, phonocentrism, or anything else, let alone for “the beginning” of something new, different, “other.” More crucially: in “Tympan,” the “writing” in question is Derrida’s own writing, or Derrida-esque writing (if there is such a thing)– writing that is written “otherwise.” A special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing, a writing whose whole point is to be different from (or “other” to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as- usual–precisely not, in short, a gramme about which a “grammatology” would be possible. (Compare the cognate wobble in the axiomatics of Paul de Man between “language as such” and specifically “literary language” as distinct from other kinds.)

     

    It seems a version of a thematic as old, in Western Culture, as the book of Job, if not of the Iliad, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. In Derrida, this shift between two senses of writing has, as “textual effect,” consequences encoding a politics. The Aufhebung of speech/writing proposed in Derrida’s early work was projected as belonging to the future (or at minimum, a future). By contrast, the point of “perverformativity” is its immanence in the “letter,” ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the “present” of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of “the thetic” or any “thematization” importing anything for, or importable into, a future. The future, the hyphenated Heideggerian Zu-Kunft becomes, as we have already seen anticipated in the “Exergue” of Grammatology, the future anterior, a “will have been,” a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of “event” and of “outcome”–a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, “the same” as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it “different” from or “other” to the present. (Even in Derrida’s pre-’68 work, though, a similar continuity or “same”-ness obtains between past and present. In the early work the word “history” and its cognates– “historicity,” etc.–appear much more frequently than later, but with curiously unhistorical import, seeming to figure, rather like T.S. Eliot’s “ideal order,” as a gigantic spectre the closure of whose seamless simultaneity–its contemporary weight or force, not to say its transtemporal “presence”–is much more to the point than the narrative courses of its changes, developments, contradictions, ends-and-beginnings. Hence in any exercise at “historicizing Derrida,” Derrida must generally be the object, almost never the subject, of that participle.)

     

    Later Derrida’s foreclosure of the future (“perverformative” and “thetic” at once) is also a foreclosure of history and of “dialectic” itself–which prompts such politically committed critics as Eagleton and Jameson to dismiss Derrida as apolitical, or depoliticizing. Derrida’s post-’68 ecriture makes the verb of deconstruction, deconstruire, no less than ecrire itself, a verbe intransitif; and the flamboyant jouissance of Derrida’s writing adds insult (for Marxists, bourgeois insult!) to the injury of its antidialectical Weltanshauung. 12 Politically oriented critics can only regard such “perverformativity” as a (false) compensation for the no-exit condition it deconstructs–an “imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” and thus “ideological” in the classic “false consciousness” sense. Many others, though, experience Derrida’s post- ’68 writing as political, because (or to the extent that) they hear in its tone a clear protest against this steady-state world. To recur to the prison-house metaphor, the argument here is between those who think Derrida has settled too complacently into a deluxe, V.I.P.-prisoner suite, and those who hear in his work an insistent rattle of the tin cup against the bars. 13

     

    There are some cross-purposes to untangle in this difference over Derrida. The later Derrida’s diminution or renunciation of political ambitions has indeed, I think, been masked or compensated by the manifest enlargement of his ambitions as writer: the darkening of the theme of writing has been obscured (as well as compensated) by Derrida’s prose style, by his practice of writing. This, together with the tone of protest, continuous between early Derrida and late, has on the one hand kept Derrida’s fans from seeing how Derrida’s political import has been displaced after 1968, and on the other blinded his politically-minded critics to such politics as his pre-’68 work did actually entertain. But even granting that Derrida himself shies away from putting deconstruction to political use, it seems churlish not to acknowledge that his method, in other hands, has proved enormously useful for a variety of oppositional criticisms–feminist, gay/lesbian/queer, minority, postcolonialist, etc. 14

     

    But I would grant that “perverformativity” is indeed “ideological” to the extent that it functions as a response, and implicitly a kind of solution, to the confining “economy” of meaning that Derrida so compulsively elaborates and protests. Earlier avant- gardes–the “ideal type” here would be Dada–sought to escape the oppression of semiosis by assaying a direct lunge out of it, into non-sense; Derrida’s effort is to “shake” or “make tremble” (sollicitare) the structure of meaning from within, exploiting its own differance, or “dissemination,” to multiply meanings, to invoke every possible sense of a word against (or “on the oblique” to) the others, to make these possibilities stymie (if not altogether cancel) each other, thus short-circuiting the regulating mechanisms of “context” whereby we ordinarily collaborate in meaning’s tyranny over us by recognizing which of a word’s senses to admit and which to reject. Wayne Booth once summarized interpretive tact in the formula “knowing when to stop”; Derrida’s game is to refuse to “know” any such thing. (One thing there is no “end of” in Derrida’s purview is deconstruction itelf: in principle, at least, deconstruction never stops.)

     

    What I want to adduce here is the link (antithetical, if not dialectical) between this “shaking” of meaning and the “rigorous” enforcement of it that we have seen Derrida operating on Mauss. “Perverformativity” exempts Derrida from the penalty Derrida enforces on Mauss. To put it another way, the “economy” of meaning is something Derrida may enforce against a particular writer, or against “meaning” itself. As meaning-cop, Derrida holds a Mauss, or a Foucault, to the letter of their letter, but enacts his “perverformative” style of ecriture, of “writing otherwise,” to liberate itself/himself (as well as a few personal idols of his for whom he cuts slack, e.g., Nietzsche, and some of Heidegger) from the letter. I am trying to specify a signal contradiction in Derrida: if “meaning” is something we want to evade, we cannot, because “meaning” is inevitable; if on the other hand, it is something we want to achieve (either to state some “meaning” of our own with precision, or to ascribe, via interpretation, some “meaning” to a text), we cannot, because “meaning” is impossible. You can neither say what you mean (or mean what you say), nor can you speak (or remain silent) without “meaning” something. I regret any implication here of the expose, of ideological unmasking; my purpose is not to hoist Derrida with the petard of this “contradiction,” but to point out (by way of “historicizing” Derrida) that Derrida is very much in the style of our postmodern period in conducting himself on the premise that a critic’s job is not to resolve or mediate contradictions, but to dramatize them–which, in practice, often means enlarging, even exaggerating them.

     

    However–and this next point does take on something of the ideological expose–it seems to me that this contradiction, and such political force as it registers, is too easily lost on many devotees of Derrida and of deconstruction. Derrida’s warmest admirers too often prize his “perverformativity” as enacting that “free play” (“infinite interpretation” as the end of definitive or authoritative control of language) proposed programmatically in Derrida’s pre-’68 work, without seeing Derrida’s decisively different construction, after ’68, of the constraints (the closure) within which that “free play” prolongs itself. Such connoisseurs of Derrida’s “perverformativity,” such celebrants of Derrida’s ingenious dancing in chains, see the dance, but fail to see the chains. They foreground the motifs of differance and “dissemination” triumphally, to eclipse the obdurate “prison-house” closures of metaphysics against which Derrida protests–as if to “deconstruct” the illusions of semiosis and identity thinking were to anull them as well in one fell (deconstructive) swoop; as if abolishing ideological closure were as simple as calling false consciousness “false.” Ravished by the pleasures, even les jouissances, of the encounter with Derrida’s writing, such readings mean to honor the hopes of ’60s counter-culture politics, that revolution and the pleasure principle might join forces in a permanently liberating coalition. But it is not simple “Left puritanism” to reject such a valorization of Derrida as making everything, and politics especially, too easy.

     

    Whether Derrida’s own practice makes it too easy is a judgment for the eye of the beholder. For myself, the later Derrida’s “perverformativity” does often seem facile–not “easy,” exactly (not in prose like that!), but complacent, even insouciant, and, often, arrogantly so. (Nobody takes it as a form of critical modesty.) For some people, I am here merely confessing that my literary/intellectual palate is too coarse for any fine and discriminating apprehension of the exquisitely subtle and nuanced velleities of Angst agitating Derrida’s writing. Perhaps so: the texts of Derrida’s that have moved me most–“Envois” and “Circumfession”– are those in which such anxieties are rather manifest than latent. As to politics, Derrida’s work seems to me always to be at least allegorically political–not merely susceptible of, but quite soliciting, a political reading; this, indeed, is my chief, almost my only, way of being interested in it. And (to put it in language that revives phenomenologies deconstruction proscribes), I take this political allegorizing as entirely conscious on Derrida’s part: it seems the better part of valor to be circumspect in diagnosing in Derrida’s work the symptoms of any particular unconscious, but of “the political unconscious” most (almost) of all.

     

    Manifestly, Derrida’s work delivers the questions, conflicts, contradictions of aesthetics and/against politics to an impasse. This impasse–our need for it, our “compulsion to repeat” it in our reading and writing of “critique,” our imperative to enlarge, augment, amplify it, ratchet it up to the highest possible pitch of contradiction and paradox, cathect it, in short, to the max–all this, too, is very much a “period” phenomenon, a sign of the postmodern times generally, and of the “emergence of that new type of discourse called theory” in particular. Derrida evokes the force of that impasse most acutely in the conflict between what seems to me the genuine, even if “aesthetic,” politics of his work, and the still-potent political moralism exemplified by, say, a Terry Eagleton. But here, to “historicize” a hard contemporary question can only be to acknowledge, not to answer it.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Hugh J. Silverman and Gary E. Aylesworth, eds., The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

     

    2. “Metaphysics” as analogy of or synecdoche for “ideology” seems to me the self-evident premise of any “political” deconstruction, though only Michael Ryan, so far as I know, has made this premise explicit, in Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, “The Metaphysics of Everyday Life”: “The deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology” (117). For more bibliography on the politics of deconstruction, see note 4 below.

     

    3. “The Ends of Man,” originally a lecture, is pointedly dated “May 12, 1968”; in the course of its printed version Derrida specifies that the lecture was written in April, 1968 (“the weeks of the opening of the Vietnam peace talks and the assassination of Martin Luther King” [Margins, 114]), as the crisis that would culminate in May was developing. The piece has an interest simply for having been written right at the moment that I have evoked as a sort of temporal hinge or fulcrum for thinking of Derrida’s work in before-and-after terms. “The Ends of Man” seems to me “uncharacteristic” because (at least in its opening sections [Margins, 111-23]) it is one of the very few texts in which Derrida himself mounts a historical (or historicizing) argument. His point is to correct or reproach Sartre (without naming Sartre) and others for their “mistinterpretation” of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” as a kind of “humanism”; but he also accounts for this “misinterpretation” historically, as a “first reading” (since which “some progress has been made” [Margins, 119]), in terms of Heidegger’s reception in France, the dates at which his various books were translated, and the development of Heidegger’s own career (Derrida here subscribes to the notion of the Heideggerian “Kehre”), as well as the reception in France of phenomenology generally–the influence of Kojeve’s introduction of Hegel, the accessibility or not, and the state of understanding, of various works of Husserl’s, the discovery of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, etc. It is a kind of argument Derrida usually takes pains to avoid making: trafficking in “dominant motifs,” or “the empiricism of [taking a] cross-section” (Margins, 117)–as opposed to his famously “rigorous” practice of “close reading”– offends his intellectual conscience (to put it in terms Derrida would discountenance).

     

    4. Jameson wrote respectfully, or warily, about Derrida in The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), but has since sounded dismissive, treating Derrida only in glancing asides. Eagleton lumps Derrida together with Barthes as a bourgeois hedonist luxuriating in a bath (or wetdream) of jouissance; see, e.g., “Frere Jacques: the Politics of Deconstruction” (1984), rept. in Against the Grain (London and New York: Verso, 1986), 77-87. As for Norris, see Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), or any of his books with the word “deconstruction” in the title; but he has argued his anti-anti-foundationalist view of Derrida elsewhere as well, e.g., What’s Wrong With Postmodernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Rorty’s best-known essay on Derrida is “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” (1978; rpt. in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], 90-109); but see also “From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122-37; and “Deconstruction and Circumvention” (1984), in Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2:85-106, “Two Meanings of ‘Logocentrism’: A Reply to [Christopher] Norris” (1989), ibid., 107-18; and “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” (1989), ibid., 119-128. Also to be noted in such a summary as this: Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (see note 2 above) and “The Marxism-Deconstruction Debate in Literary Theory, New Orleans Review 11, 1 (Spring 1984), 29-6; Frank Lentricchia, “History and the Abyss,” in After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-210 (especially 164-88); Gayatri C. Spivak, “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model,” in Diacritics 10, 4 (Winter, 1980), 29-49; Stanley Aronowitz, “Towards a New Strategy of Liberation,” in The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory (South Hadley: J.F. Bergin, 1981), 123-36; Edward W. Said, “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 158-77; Barbara Foley, “The Politics of Deconstruction,” in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 113-34; Jonathan Arac, Critical Geneologies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia Universty Press, 1987), 299-305.

     

    5. John D. Caputo finds the inverse of the structure I indicate here: “meaning” as a boon cruelly denied to certain bits of excluded language that have been denigrated as “nonsense,” and which Derrida appoints himself to dignify with meaning, even to “liberate” into meaning. See “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida: From Uselessness to Full Employment,” in John Sallis, ed., Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 99-113; the protopolitics of Caputo’s argument (“Liberation is what I think Derrida is all about . . .” [108]) are clear in his title. Apropos of the pre-’68/post-’68 divide, however, I’ll note that Caputo argues from Derrida’s pre-’68 La Voix et le phenomene, the passage in which Derrida finds sense in phrases (“green is or,” “abracadabra”) that Husserl had cited as “nonsense.” When Caputo read his paper at a 1985 conference with Derrida in attendance, Derrida objected to the word “liberation” from the floor, “to the extent,” Caputo explains, “that it implied optimism, utopianism, some kind of metaphysics of the future in which all will be free” (112n10).

     

    6. For some later “problematizations” of these matters, see Derrida on “iterability” in “Signature Event Context” (1971) and “Limited Inc a b c…” (1977) in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), especially 70-7. (“Signature Event Context” also appears in Margins, 307-30.) Also cf. remarks on “parody” in the sections of Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978; trans. Barbara Harlow, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979]), called “Simulation” (66-71) and “Positions” (95-101).

     

    7. (Yale French Studies 55/56 [1977], 457-505; rpt. in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], 213-51).

     

    8. “Circumfession” is Derrida’s contribution to Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1993). My review of this and a few other Derrida books–Given Time, Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, and Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (Routledge: New York and London, 1992)–is forthcoming in Kritikon. I will add here that I read Derrida’s “Interpreting Signatures Nietzsche/Heidegger” (in Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter [Albany: SUNY Press, 1989], 58-71) as, in part, an “anxiety of influence” speculation.

     

    9. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 68; see also Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 391-9.

     

    10. One of the more interesting things I’ve read on these questions–“historicizing” the “end of philosophy” motif as an affair of Hegel-and-after, i.e., as “modern,” not “postmodern”–is Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

     

    11. On “tone,” see “Of an Apcalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6, 2 (1984), 3-37; for “demarche,” see “Freud’s Legacy” in The Post Card, 295. In the passage I’ve quoted on “demarche,” the translation (by Alan Bass) has the pronouns referring to Freud, but they can also refer to “the text,” as in my altered translation. Note that “tone” and “demarche” are issues raised in nearly contemporaneous texts: “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” began as a lecture in 1980, the same year that saw the publication of the writings on Freud in La Carte postale; elsewhere, both before and after, Derrida largely avoids discussion of such issues, perhaps because they complicate, or imperil, his procedural adherence to “the letter” of whatever text he is considering. There is also, of course, a problem of theorizing “tone” without raising (phonocentric) issues of “voice.” Another text of this period, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), affects to foreground “the question of style,” but only, it turns out, to provide, via etymology (“stylus,” pen), an access to the metaphorics of the phallus, sexual difference, “the woman,” etc.

     

    12. For more on this dilemma of “Left puritanism,” see my “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton,” in Postmodern Culture, v. 3, n. 3 (May 1993). A slightly expanded version, adding some pages on the issue of postmodernism, appears in Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds., Essays in Postmodern Culture (Oxford university Press: New York, 1993), 239-63.

     

    13. Michael Ryan notes Derrida’s increasing hospitality to Marxism over the course of his career: having first dismissed it as a “closed” and “totalizing” dogmatic “system” of official Soviet ideology (Ryan’s villain here is less the PCF than Lenin himself), Derrida later welcomes the possibility of an “open” or “critical” Marxism with aims and methods compatible with his own (Marxism and Deconstruction, xiv-xv, 45-6).

     

    14. For a brief but incisive survey of these, see “The Story of Deconstruction,” chapter 2 of Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32-60.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Derrida, Jacques. Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. NY: Columbia UP, 1991.
    • —. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Originally Donner le temps. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1991.
    • —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1982. Originally Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972.
    • —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Originally De la Grammatologie. Editions de Minuit, 1967.
    • —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1981. Originally Positions. Editions de Minuit, 1972.
    • —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1987. Originally La Carte Postale: De Socrate a Freud et au-dela. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.
    • —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago UP, 1979. Originally Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Flammarion, 1978.
    • —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1978. Originally L’Ecriture et la difference. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967.

     

  • Three Poems

    Alice Fulton

    Department of English
    University of Michigan
    alice.fulton@um.cc.umich.edu

     

    ==

     

         It might mean immersion, that sign
             I've used as title, the sign I call a bride
     after the recessive threads in lace ==
     the stitches forming deferential
                     space around the firm design.
                             It's the unconsidered

     mortar between the silo's bricks == never admired
                             when we admire
     the holdfast of the tiles (their copper of a robin's
             breast abstracted into flat).

             It's a seam made to show,
     the deckle edge == constructivist touch.
             The double equal that's nowhere to be found
                             in math.  The dash
             to the second power == dash to the max.

     It might make visible the acoustic signals
     of things about to flame.  It might

               let thermal expansion be syntactical.  Let it
     add stretch

                             while staying reticent, unspoken
     as a comma.  Don't get angry == protest == but a

     comma seems so natural, you don't see it
     when you read: it's gone to pure
     transparency.  Yes but.
                                     The natural is what

     poetry contests.  Why else the line == why stanza == why
             meter and the rest.  Like wheels on snow

                     that leave a wake == that tread in white
                             without dilapidating
                             mystery == hinging
                     one phrase to the next == the brides.

     Thus wed == the sentence cannot tell
     whether it will end or melt or give

                      way to the fabulous == the snow that is
     the mortar between winter's bricks == the wick that is

                             the white between the ink

     

    Southbound in a Northbound Lane

     

         A fetish is a story masquerading as an object.
                                   --Robert Stoller

     Her anatomically-correct smile 
     turned to frown when she turned
     upside down:  the inflatable naked woman
     the student body tossed, cum laude,
     through the graduating bleachers.
     Like gossip, a bubble bred for turbulence,
                     she tumbled
     to the Ph.D.'s, who stuffed her
     under their seats. 
             I think the trick to falling is never landing
             in the palm of someone's hand.
     The lyric, which majored in ascent,
     is free now to labor and cascade.
     What goes up must ==
                                     Waterfalling
     means the story visits tributaries
     at a distance from itself.  Consider
     what it takes to get us off
     the ground:  what engines laying waste
     to oil.  I'd rather hit the silk
     from a span
     and let gravity enhance my flight.
     Though the aerodynamics of jets are steadystate
     and can be calibrated,
     I'd rather trust a parachute,
                     which exists in flux and can't be touched
     by mathematical fixations.
             In what disguise will she arrive --
             whose dissent is imminent yet unscripted --
             offensive as necessary?
             Whose correct context is the sky.
     Arrive like something spit out of a prism
     in a primary tiger bodice.  Be modern
     as an electronic vigil light, precisely
     delicate as nylon,
     the ripstop kind, that withstands
     40 pounds of pull per inch.
             Spectators, if we jump together,
             we'll bring the bleachers down.
     "I was frightened.  My flesh hissed
     and I thought I'd perished,
     but the sensation of descent vanishes
     once the body stops accelerating.
     It's astonishing how nothingness
     firms up.  Air takes on mass.
     The transparent turns substantial.
     I stretched out on that dense blue bed 
     until the canopy expanded
     like a lung shoved from my body,
     plucking me off the nothing matt.
     What held me up was hard to glimpse
     but intimate as mind or soul.
     I sensed it was intensely friendly.
     I almost thought it cared for me."
             If you can't love me, let me down gently.
             If you can't love me, don't touch me.
     If we descend together
     like Olympic skydivers or snowflakes    
     we can form patterns in freefall. 
     Like a beeswarm, we can make a brain
     outside the body.
     When falling is a means of flying,
     the technique is to release.
             How many worlds do you want,
             my unpopular bodhisattva?
             Let's sneak one past the culture's
             fearless goalies, be neither one
     nor the other, but a third
     being, formerly thought de trop.
     Before I throw my body off, my enemy
     of the state, I'm going to kneel
     and face the harsh music
     that is space.

     

    Call the Mainland

     

         Nature hates a choir.  Have you noticed
             the lack of chorus in the country every dawn?
     The birds spent the night looking down on earth
             as that opaque, unstarred space. 
     The vivacious soundscape they create at day 
             must be their amazement
     that the planet's still in place.

     No wait.  Time out and whoa.  There I go --
     coating the birds' tones with emotion,
     hearing them as my own.  I know, I know. 

             Yet I can't say birds aren't feeling
     in their hollow bones some resonance of glad
                     that night has passed.
             I can't claim their hearts don't shake
     when the will to live another day
                     in the cascade of all that is
                             is strong.  Emotion

              makes its presence felt in flesh.
     Maybe you've noticed -- the body speeds
     its reflexes and is moved.  It moves.  It makes

              the heart, lungs, and gut
                remember their lives
     like sleepers between bouts of sleep.
              While more serene delights
     are intellect selective, without cardiac effect:
                the mind sparks
     at a Borges story or elegant proof in math,
             a bliss that doesn't shift
                     across the blood-
     brain barrier.  Such heady pleasures
              are never for the birds.
                           To be key
     rather than bit player, of independent means -- 
     to sound your own agenda in polyphonic overlay
     as day takes shape == as day takes shape

             the birds begin their final take.
     They'll never know themselves as symbols
             of the sublime.  Transcendent
     messy shrines == whose music won't stoop
               to unison or climax:
               tell them I said hi.

     

  • Clockwork Education: The Persistence of the Arnoldian Ideal

    Geoffrey Sharpless

    Department of English
    University of Pennsylvania

     

    For boys follow one another in herds like sheep, for good or evil; they hate thinking and rarely have any settled principles. . . . it is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the School either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in London streets, or anything between these two extremes.

     

    –Tom Brown’s School-days, 151

     

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

     

    –A Clockwork Orange, 1

     

    Critics conventionally position Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange within the sub-genre of futuristic dystopias without considering its nostalgia for a version of masculinity best understood as typical of the Arnoldian public school. This misprision is natural, since the Russianized argot and Dionysian “ultra-violence” of Alex the droog do not immediately evoke Tom Brown’s School-days–or any other portrait of the public school boy. Nonetheless, juxtaposing these narratives, which are separated by more than a hundred years, throws important illumination on A Clockwork Orange, and redirects critical attention to the persistence of Arnoldian masculinity in twentieth-century British literature.

     

    “Arnold’s Rugby” achieved such astonishing conceptual closure over elite education that it must be considered a unique chapter in the history of Western culture. Rightly or wrongly, Thomas Arnold is usually credited with four innovations in pedagogical praxis: the introduction of competitive sports, uniform dress, and science in the curriculum, and an emphasis in schools on “moral scrutiny” or “character.” Thomas Hughes emphasizes this last feature, writing in Tom Brown’s School-days, “In no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a public school” (TBS, 151). Whether Rugby School ever existed as portrayed by Hughes, or any of his adherents, or even whether Thomas Arnold would have considered it faithfully Arnoldian is moot. The artistic, intellectual, legislative, commercial, and martial activity of its broad alliance of graduates–the ideal schoolboys of “Arnold’s Rugby”–became an unsurpassed tool by which to produce and measure masculinity and culture, as well as a means to govern their mutuality. This class of public school males succeeded, for generations, in representing its interests as the general interest in Britain and around the world–thus fulfilling a Marxian prescription for political dominance (Marx, 53).

     

    Burgess’s critics might have been more alert to Alex’s matriculation in an Arnoldian program had they considered more carefully Time for a Tiger, the first piece of Burgess’s Malayan trilogy. This novel, about the difficulty of exporting Rugby-like schools to the minions in Britain’s empire, depicts an educator who abandons the Arnoldian ideal, and is absorbed by the exotic country he goes to convert. This might itself have been sufficient to establish that Burgess had an overt interest in public school pedagogy. The hero of A Clockwork Orange, however, is an unequivocal practitioner; even his resistance is characteristic. Indeed, Alex’s remarkable fraternity with the Arnoldian product suggests a complete triumph for the latter’s pedagogy. This similarity holds even for the most optimistic and influential version of the public schoolboy, Tom Brown, whose story “made the modern public school” (Mack & Armytage, 100).

     

    This pairing of Tom and Alex would be unusual if only because Alex seems to be one of the most evil representations of boyhood ever forwarded popularly and Tom–for another era–one of the most virtuous. As Coleridge observed, however, opposites are but farthest apart of the same kind–and, rather than incommensurate, prove to be the two sides of the same coin. Reading Alex and Tom as twins, it does not take long to discover even in Hughes’s happy fantasy of Rugby that his Arnoldian telos of self-control, heterosexual love, moderation, and upright morality is interpenetrated with perversity, pederasty, a fetishization of style, Machiavellian management training, an interest in hand-to-hand combat and blood-letting, and, ultimately, a conviction that adult heterosexual manliness smacks of death.

     

    Forgetting the debt that modern British versions of masculinity owe to Arnoldian culture has led to the consistent claim that A Clockwork Orange indicates a terrifying rupture in history. “There is something about the novel so frightening that it demanded a new language,” observes Petix (Bloom, 88). In this view, Burgess’s Jeremiad about the end of civilization is redeemed by its concomitant invitation to wage war on what Devitis calls Britain’s “socialized nightmare” (Devitis, 106). Droogery then becomes a reasonable response to the mediocritized, globalized, televisionized welfare state, where all traditional British values have been abrogated and the heroic individual exiled to the streets, as Hughes feared. Hugh Kenner, for example, reflecting on a street brawl he recently witnessed in London, seizes on the novel’s popularity as itself proof that British society has absorbed the apocalyptic “ultra-violence” of Burgess’s vision (Kenner, 242). Thus the true shock of the novel is its demonstration that a new man is already here; like Pogo’s herald, we have met the enemy and he is us. Put more formally, A Clockwork Orange compels not because it transgresses, but, like most dystopias, because its image of the future is shockingly familiar.

     

    Burgess’s own comments on A Clockwork Orange suggest the size and subtlety of the Arnoldian shadow cast over him. A prolific writer and interview-giver, he can be found struggling with the text’s incongruities. On one hand, he reinforces its anarchistic non serviam. In his revealing essay, “Clockwork Marmalade,” Burgess pairs his work with the dystopic 1984, and expresses his hope that A Clockwork Orange “takes its place as one of those salutary literary warnings . . . against flabbiness, sloppy thinking and overmuch trust in the state.” (Bloom, 129). Similarly, he warned in a 1973 interview in the Paris Review that “governments are what I try to ignore. All governments are evil” (Aggeler, 49).

     

    On the other hand, that salutation to anarchy stands alongside his professed embarrassment over the book’s “moral simplicity.” Burgess was ahead of his critics in complaining that the book–rather than brilliantly occupying a barely-imaginable, anarchic, Nietzschean world beyond good and evil–is, if anything, too moralistic and simplistic. The point of the novel, according to Burgess and critics eager to echo his “Manichean philosophy,” is “the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice.” Burgess sees the novel as “being too didactic to be artistic” and as flawed because its message about the necessity of moral choice “stick[s] out like a sore thumb” (ACO, x).

     

    Burgess’s inability to decide whether the novel is anarchistic or moralistic has appeared not only in his un- Joycean interventions in the novel’s exegesis, but in the publication of different versions of the text. As first issued, the novel had twenty chapters; conceived and written, the novel had twenty-one chapters, that number standing, in what Burgess called his “arithmology,” for the age of adulthood. In most readings the excluded twenty- first chapter is taken to address precisely the question of the story’s final moral position, as expressed in an acceptance of adulthood.

     

    In the first seven chapters, Alex and his droogs are in the raptures of a criminal adolescence; the next seven chapters follow Alex’s two years in prison where he murders a cell-mate, snitches on his fellows, and jumps at a chance at early release, not realizing that he is to undergo a personality-warping conditioning. In the final third of the book, Alex is unable to commit violence. His former victims repay him by beating him repeatedly. Burgess leaves Alex to be tortured to death by music, a stimulus designed to sicken him. Deranged, Alex leaps from a window to kill himself, but does not “snuff it.” He wakes up in a government hospital, unprogrammed, and announces he is ready to return to his ultra-violence, “carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva . . . I was cured all right” (ACO, 179). So ends the shorter version.

     

    The most recent Norton edition includes the twenty- first chapter. In it, Alex finds himself once again sitting around with his droogs, chanting, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” This mantra begins each of the three main sections, as well as appearing intermittently throughout– reminding readers that the droogs still drift in the currents of casual murderous impulse. But something has changed–something purposefully kept unclear and distinct from any feature of Alex’s will or choice. A biological mystery of mortality and maturation has begun to affect Alex. Bored and hopeless, he refuses to buy everyone drinks, reluctant to throw away his “hard-earned pretty polly” (183); then, caught carrying a photograph of a baby around, dreams of himself as “a very starry chelloveck . . . an old man, sitting by a fire” (186). An image of his future son comes to him and he waxes poetic.

     

    Yes, yes yes, brothers, my son. And now I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plot, feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. . . . Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. (ACO, 190)

     

    The difference between these two endings underscores the philosophical conflict that structures Burgess’s novel. Does Alex’s story end with chapter twenty’s return to sexual perversity, demonized youth, and validation of violence? Or should it end with Alex’s abandoning the criminal pleasures of droogery, embracing melancholy “normal” adult values, and recapitulating his own father’s petit-bourgeois condition of wife, family and household?

     

    While a critical claim can be heard that there is, or at least should be, a consensus that the shorter version is more interesting, each ending poses a conundrum. In neither ending is evil punished, nor is Alex shown to repent or regret his atrocities. Neither ending answers whether the conscious conditioning by the state is any more or less moral than the unconscious conditioning by family, economy etc. Neither ending reveals if conditioning is better or worse that makes us peaceable or allows us to be violent, or if we can ever be more than merely clockwork. Both endings are thoroughly and equally ambivalent about the point Burgess claims the novel makes entirely too obvious–about moral choice. Similarly, the point that Burgess himself can be heard prefering the shorter ending, and that we should credit this obiter, is also dubious. Burgess calls the shorter version “sensational” but “not a fair picture of human life,” and then, undoubtedly savoring the irony, defends the longer version via Pontius Pilate’s “Quod scripsi scripsi” (ACO, xi).

     

    That Burgess himself does not know whether he wants this text to end by celebrating the perverse pleasures of boyhood or the muted satisfactions of adult masculinity reflects the very contradiction that mobilizes Tom Brown. Suspended between an Arnoldian disdain for boys’ “wickedness,” and Hughes’s hopeful fantasy about the utopia of boyish pleasure, both A Clockwork Orange and Tom Brown’s School-days relate the importance of resisting adulthood, and retaining the pleasures of remaining in a timeless, childish perversity. Both versions of ACO and TBS are significantly structured by their concern, as Matthew Arnold put it, that “faith in machinery is . . . our besetting danger” (Culture and Anarchy, 10). Both texts are deeply–almost furiously–nostalgic for a moment of health and wholeness that never existed. Thus, when Alex is implicated in the Arnoldian tradition of schoolboy Eros, this does not return the narrative to a lost simplicity, because that tradition is itself subject to the contradictions that animate A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s brutal conditioning, his strange language and dress, his savage sexuality, his wickedness, cruelty, and sadism, his devious sensitivity to the ebb and flow of group power, were in fact essential to Arnold’s Rugby School, and helped catapult it into international prominence as an unsurpassed institution of man-making.

     

    The Arnoldian pedagogy engages and activates the Victorian concern with the male body as a locus of political power. The nineteenth-century British schoolboy doctrine that athletic contests like rugby and football formed the character of the man derives significantly from Tom Brown. His popularity was crucial to teaching the world that the public school virtues of strong character, self-dependence, readiness, and pluck were “best learned on the playing field” (Haley, 161). Moral health, Arnoldian Victorians like Hughes believed, was profoundly implicated in physical achievement. The notion of moral health came to include physical courage: unless one was willing to assume physical risk, one could not hope to achieve moral salvation.

     

    The famous aphorism that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” reveals the relation of this philosophy of athleticism to the practical exigencies of empire. The promotion of physical courage was taken as a necessity for a nation needing soldiers, and breaking a leg or rib or head in the playing-field at Rugby prepared one for the rigors of a battlefield somewhere else. “Meet them like Englishmen!” Hughes’s narrator cries to the creatures of his own imagination. Thus the narrator of Tom Brown’s School-days describes the climactic School-house match (an early form of rugby) in terms that would today be considered scandalous:

     

    My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except the boys would be men, and the balls iron, but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. (TBS, 103)

     

    Yet when the health of the Empire thus was seen to depend on the physicality of schoolboys, athletics acquired an importance–even a holiness–that carried indisputable moral weight.

     

    The modern public school, as invented through Tom Brown’s School-days, manifested the Victorian obsession with the physical body’s perfectability and corruptibility. While Hughes repeatedly praises Thomas Arnold in the text, he also unconsciously reveals that the headmaster, in his treatment of the bodies of his students, enacted his morbid identification with Christ’s physical suffering. Hughes wishes to portray school rituals like boxing, football–and even fagging and bullying–as expressing the unalloyed joys of youthful play. Yet School-days also reveals Dr. Arnold’s abhorrence of the liminal and transgressive body of youth. The book’s textual and graphic representation of the body illustrate Arnold’s theory that to educate boys is to turn them from beasts into Christians–to re-enact the moral development of human society: moral ontogeny recapitulating moral phylogeny.

     

    Where Hughes differs from Arnold is in his attitude towards boyhood. Arnold sees boyhood solely as a condition to be mortified and overcome; Hughes agrees that in the end it must be left behind, but relishes the opportunity it offers for maximizing the pleasures of the body. Without reference to any moralizing process, he concludes his paean to rugby with a remarkable claim about the proportionate value of sport to everyday life:

     

    This is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a half-hour worth a year of common life. (TBS, 106)

     

    The interpretation of the school’s physical harshness as a source not only of mortification but also of ecstasy has, according to Hughes, deep roots in English culture and history. He makes this point explicit in an important episode placed in a country fair, a “veast.” Here, the narrator delights in a brutal contest called backswording that involves two men trying to draw blood from each others’ scalps with cudgels. “The weapon is a good stout ash stick,” Hughes tell us, “the players are called ‘old gamesters’ . . . and their object is to break one another’s heads.” The game is over when the blood flows “an inch anywhere above the eyebrow” (TBS, 40). The climacteric is pleasurable for all: “‘Blood, blood!’ shout the spectators as a thin stream oozes out slowly from his hair” (TBS, 41).

     

    Hughes goes on to regret the passing of this event, and ends with a disquisition on the relationship of the body of the boy to the body politic, including a discussion of class conflict, reform and capitalism. He observes that such violence is essential to reformers, who won’t

     

    really lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which hasn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country 'veast'; something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, to make them rejoice in their strength. (TBS, 46)

     

    The rage for “bloodsports” that comes to dominate British education for a hundred years begins here. Hughes asserts that this is part of moral reform–in effect that such violence is in the service of molding martyrs for the state. But his pleasure in physical violence is not far from a sheer carnivalesque interest in the grotesque body that characterizes the popular reading of A Clockwork Orange.

     

    Though Hughes periodically reminds us that violent play is good for the state, Tom Brown loves it for its own sake. Alex’s passion for “the old ultra-violence,” while notched higher in damage inflicted, reflects the same celebration of the pleasures of the incoherent body that characterize Tom Brown’s matches in the mud and blood of the close. Alex never tires of detailing the propensity of adult vecks to turn into porous gore and blood when beaten. The droogs describe blood as “our dear old droog”; “red-red vino on tap and in all the same places, like it’s put out by the same big firm” (ACO, 22); “Then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful” (ACO, 7); “A fair tap with a crowbar . . . brought the red out like an old friend” (ACO, 10); and “then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy rot. Then we went on our way” (ACO, 14).

     

    These separate confirmations that bodies are never discrete entities, but oozing, porous and liminal, precede a gang-fight that culminates in a glorious extrusion of blood. Having enhanced the ecstasy of this bloodletting by taking “milk with knives” to “sharpen” his sensations, Alex’s success in piercing the body of the other droog makes him rhapsodic:

     

    [Billyboy] was a malenky too slow and heavy in his movements to vred anyone really bad. And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz--left two three, right two three--and carve left cheeky right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. (ACO, 17)

     

    Reversing the direction of our analysis about the culture of Rugby School and the managed violence of the playing-field, we can locate the culture at work in this scene of droogish anarchy: we can not only find the violence in the gentleman; we can find the gentleman in the violence. The “curtains of blood” in the above passage do not herald the apocalypse, but evoke a sportsman’s appreciation for the results of good technique that borders on the aesthetic. We hear Alex’s pride in his team–the captain’s sense of the players’ movements around him. He details with pleasure his own movements, and the violence softens into a gentleman’s dance, with the expert’s assessment of the opponent’s weaknesses, and of proper footwork.

     

    The measured cadences of sporting play-by-play include a dramatic cataloguing of the players’ skills and equipment. For this particular fight “Dim had a real horrorshow length of oozy or chain round his waist, twice wound round, and he unwound this and began to swing it beautiful in the eyes or glazzies. Pete and Georgie had good sharp nozhes, but I for my own part had a fine starry horrowshow cut-throat britva which, at that time, I could flash and shine artistic” (ACO, 16). The cutting and the bleeding do not provoke Dionysian horror in Alex or in the reader. Neither does Alex’s confrontation with the grotesque pig-like body of the other signal the devolution of man into beast. Instead, an appreciation of the sportsman’s style, cool observation, and a studied ability to execute with grace materialize under the pressure of battle.

     

    The emphasis on style–even in the middle of marked danger–would seem to sharpen the subversive point of Alex’s pleasure in flouting the conformity expected of the Arnoldian male body. Like Oscar Wilde’s dandy–another response to the certitudes of public school masculinity– Alex uses style as a declaration of independence. Thus, when Alex recalls his fight scene with Billyboy, he remembers that his droogs looked marvelous; Alex proudly observes that his droogs were “dressed in the heighth of fashion” (ACO, 2). For Alex, his clothes assert that he controls his own body, and he uses the image he presents to the public as a “semiotic guerilla warfare,” in Eco’s phrase.

     

    By reducing male physical difference to nothing but broad shoulders, garish neckties and odd crotch-protectors, Alex’s fashion statement displays his ironic relation to normative masculinity. The droogs wear “waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (‘pletchoes’ we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that.” They wear “off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud.” Most noticeably, however, they wear a pair of “very tight tights with the old jelly mould” on the crotch which draws attention to their genitalia (ACO, 2).

     

    Alex’s personal style of dress seems at first to indicate his resistance to power. But when Alex appropriates fashion as a means of asserting his identity he is building a new temple on the site of the old. Instead of forwarding himself as a new man, his preoccupation with style and taste above all else renders his portrait as an “old boy” strikingly clear: Alex disdains those who do not follow his idea of fashion.

     

    That Alex, in insisting on irony and rebellion, is merely recreating a conformist world in microcosm, appears most readily in his confrontation with Dim. For example, “Poor old Dim” does not know or care that Alex’s ostensible punkishness engages a high-culture seriousness toward aesthetics yoked to his own political ambition. Alex approves of the genital designs of his droogs Pete, who has a hand, and Georgie, a flower, on his groin, but finds himself in a perplexing spot for an anarchist when he finds Dim’s choice of a clown’s face in bad taste–evidently too close to naming “the clown he was” (ACO, 6). Such an overt image lacks the tension and irony Alex requires to see himself and his droogs as beings of superior taste. Alex feels demeaned by his association and fellowship with such a philistine as Dim. This conflict is the first suggestion that Alex’s idiosyncratic style, which at first seems to be a marker of his resistance to British culture, has roots in the traditional mechanisms of class.

     

    The antagonism brought on by Alex’s conviction of his own superiority to Dim increases throughout the novel’s first section. Noting the lost opportunity that Dim’s name–like the symbol on his jelly mould–affords for an ironic or subversive gesture, Alex regretfully observes that “Dim really is dim.” This includes Dim making a display of proving he can read, a gesture which Alex finds distasteful (ACO, 7). Dim’s lack of moderation, too, marks him as no proper droog of Alex’s–or of Tom Brown’s. He “goes too far, like he always did” (ACO, 6). When he fights he always gets “dirty and untidy, like a veck who’d been in a fight . . . you should never look as though you have been” (ACO, 11). After a break-in, Dim is “going to dung” on the carpet, and Alex stops him; though amused by bleeding, Alex does have a standard of bodily purity that, for example, forbids scatological transgressions. Later, Alex finds he smells bad, “which was one thing I had against old Dim” (ACO, 26).

     

    Alex’s conflict with Dim recasts a class distinction central to the ideology of Tom Brown’s School-days. Certain readers, noting that the emotional peaks of the novel involved athletic prowess, used the term “muscular Christianity” to accuse Hughes’s hero of excessive interest in the physical body. The writer responded, in his sequel Tom Brown at Oxford, by offering to distinguish his protagonist from the debased “muscleman.” He writes that “the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him . . . Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians . . . does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he” (Hughes, TBO, 113). Alex shows a muscular Christian’s disdain for Dim, a mere muscleman.

     

    Alex would have had no trouble following Hughes’s lesson. Alex’s exquisite sensitivity to class distinctions would have made him at home at Rugby, where an entire social hierarchy could be constructed upon the most minute sartorial propriety. When Arnoldian reform implemented uniform dress codes, they became, ironically, an important medium for schoolboys to express and control their own lives. Refusing to allow uniforms to reduce their individuality, as well as class difference, the boys instantly re-deployed them for their own use. Within the officially prescribed regulations, they developed a complex code for proper attire. Often as subtle as showing a bit of a handkerchief, or leaving a button undone, these points of style, self-enforced, became a powerful way to indicate and control the hierarchy of schoolboy life. Thus style–even when used against a totalitarian standard–did not promise a liberation; rather it facilitated a transference of power that guaranteed the authoritarian lesson. The older and more powerful boys themselves found they had a stake in enforcing the Arnoldian principle that the ruling class must control semiotics.

     

    Tom Brown’s first encounter at Rugby emphasizes that violating standards of style and taste carries an ineffable–even an unthinkable–danger. During Tom’s first day at school, his cicerone, Master East, glances at Tom and immediately begins the necessary indoctrination:

     

    'This'll never do--haven't you got a hat?--we never wear caps here. Only the louts wear caps. Bless you, if you were to go into the quadrangle with that thing on, I--don't know what'd happen.' The very idea was quite beyond young Master East, and he looked unutterable things. (TBS, 87)

     

    Like Tom, Alex has to come to the very end of his narrative before he thoroughly grasps the political lesson of this difference: inevitably, fraternizing with those beneath one’s class drags one into trouble. At first Alex tolerates Dim, who, “for all his dimness was worth three of the others in madness and dirty fighting” (ACO, 15), but Alex, after “slooshying and viddying Dim’s vulgarity,” finally excoriates him. Exploding in the idiom of the Arnoldian schoolboy, Alex strikes Dim and says, “Bastard, filthy drooling mannerless bastard” (ACO, 28). When Alex’s right to deliver such a remonstrance is questioned, he defends his authority, like a praepostor facing a schoolboy insurrection. “Dim has got to learn his place,” Alex says, “There has to be a leader. Discipline there has to be. Right?” (ACO, 29). The mutinous answer he receives is not the one he hopes for, and leads to his ruin: Dim beats Alex and leaves him for the police.

     

    Understanding how richly both Alex’s and Arnold’s traditions are invested in disciplining their subjects through semiotic codes of dress and fighting allows us to re-appraise the text’s distinctive language, Nadsat. The decadent flavor of this invented language, though reminiscent of the playful ambiguity of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” has been taken to signal the end of civilization as we know it. Certainly Burgess’s work on Joyce substantiates the modernist inclination to prove that one linguistic knot can derange our normal concept of identity. Thus, in A Clockwork Orange, Alex is “a law” or “a word” but also “without law” or “without word”; “horrorshow”–via a Russian root–means good. Placing this Freudian interest in the antithetical meaning of words alongside the infantilisms of “appy polly loggies,” “skolliwoll,” “purplewurple” (for apologies, school and purple), suggests Nadsat’s antic linguistic inventiveness is related to Alex’s repetitious interest in rape and murder. The suggestion is that Alex’s refusal to grow up into normal or healthy morality expresses itself in a macaronic verging on a criminal glossolalia.

     

    Reading Alex as an Arnoldian schoolboy, however, helps to correct the interpretive error that Nadsat signifies postmodern chaos and anarchy: in fact, the words always have a direct and obvious referent. The teen dialect through which Alex refracts his developmental narrative is not designed to make the reader accept that the apocalypse is already upon us, nor does it confirm “the break-down of consensus in the post-war period” (Hebditch, 17). On the contrary, Alex is the most determined of literalists, whose bid for linguistic authority leaves him operating, however paradoxically, in the positivist Arnoldian tradition his slang ostensibly replaces. He does not speak Nadsat because the modern youth of the day don’t know any better. His use of Nadsat is a cultural achievement in the same sense that his fashion statements are: both enhance his own authority. He does not just narrate the story, but authors himself as the subject who knows. The reader, by contrast, becomes the cultural exile. If you cannot figure out what Alex means, your existence–at least as a reader–is marginal.

     

    Recognizing the power of language, Alex has learned to talk very well indeed. He is a student of different dialects of his society, and notices when words are alien; he remembers the words of an older prisoner’s slang he cannot fathom, and makes sure to point out that this superannuation has made the speaker powerless. He hears two younger girls in a record shop “who had their own way of govoreeting” (ACO, 50), and immediately gets the idea to seduce them. He comments on this encounter, which consists primarily of Alex’s sadistic sexual attacks, that “they must still have their education. And education they had had” (ACO, 54). His familiarity with the allusive patterns that determine appropriate speech can become quite humorous; here, in an ironic improvisation, he speaks a Shakespearean language of the duel: “How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou” (ACO, 15). He also believes that he can shift his shape through the proper words, and, when trying to get out of prison, he imitates a sycophantic “gentleman”: “‘Sir, I have done my best, have I not’ I always used my very polite gentleman’s goloss govoreeting with those at the top. ‘I’ve tried, sir, haven’t I’” (ACO, 81). Even the lyrical idioms of traditional Eros are accessible when he needs to escape the nausea he is programmed to feel when experiencing violent impulses towards women:

     

    O most beautiful and beauteous of devotchkas, I throw like my heart atyour feet for you to like trample all over. If I had a rose I would give it to you. If it was all rainy and cally now on the ground you could have my platties to walk on so as not to cover your dainty nogas with filth and cal. (ACO, 128)

     

    To celebrate Nadsat as verging on a perverse interior gibberish misses that Alex demands that language be meaningful enough to free him from an inner exile. Nadsat represents a rupture with “normal” teleologies only if you ignore its conventional referentiality. Similarly, even the intermittent triumphs of Alex’s perversity, whether linguistic or physical, do not manage to forestall his inevitable graduation into an Arnoldian version of adult health–at least in the longer version of the book.

     

    The final destination for Alex’s narrative sublates the book’s beginning, which details the droog’s first attack, on a “starry school-master type veck.” That this elderly pedagogue is carrying books about science recalls that introducing science into the curriculum was one of the innovations with which Arnold was credited. The victim is also carrying sweet love-letters, whose sentimentality harkens back to a different ethos of manliness. They accuse him of sexual perversity and filthiness, tear up his books, steal and mock his letters, yank out his false teeth and crush them, kick him in his “pot,” and strip him to his underwear. From the droogs’ point of view, he has so little money–or capital, one might say–that they do not even steal it–they just throw it in the street.

     

    Though in the opening the droogs mock his “teacher- type goloss” (speech), the schoolmaster gets the last word; his losses are temporary and his triumph final. After being programmed to sicken at violent impulse, Alex again comes across this doddery veck. This time, along with his fellows in a library, the old man beats Alex severely, and turns him over to the police. The punishment Alex suffers as a result of his youthful transgression against this pedagogical authority hasten Alex into adulthood–at least in the longer version–as Dr. Arnold justified floggings to “hasten” his schoolboys out of youthfulness. That the narrative restores the schoolmaster’s power to punish, even after Alex’s attempt to disempower him, reflects Burgess’s enrollment in the Arnoldian ideal of manliness. In effect, both versions of Clockwork portray a world that has become a globalized Rugby School. Britain has not declined, but become rarified, more clearly itself: a state machine producing itself in and through its males. As Alex’s conglomerated language reveals, the imperial machinery of man-making has overcome antiquated national boundaries. Alex has not been interpellated as Euro-trash by “enemy” culture–the Russian of the cold war. Instead, he is a star pupil of an international macaronic, and his mastery of it enables his personal imperialism. The longer version–Burgess’s original conception–confirms the Arnoldian narrative even more persuasively, as the temporary reign of droogish play and perversity gives way, harmlessly and naturally, to the traditional image of the gentleman.

     

    The irony of Burgess’s ambition to replace the droog with the Arnoldian schoolboy is that they have always been thoroughly integrated; Alex’s wickedness and cruelty are as much the stuff of empire-building as is the Arnoldian gentleman’s phantasy of morality. In effect, though Rugby’s classrooms are now called Correctional Schools, State Jails, and conditioning laboratories, and the playing fields have become the London streets, Alex’s education terminates in the same phantasized ideal of adult masculinity that Tom’s does. Burgess has not overturned a public school idea of proper masculine development, but fulfilled Thomas Arnold’s ambition to write his pedagogy across the face of the world.

     

    [I would like to thank Eric Rabkin for his generous comments on this essay while in progress.]

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1979.
    • Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Chelsea House, 1983.
    • Bloom, Harold., ed. Anthony Burgess. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
    • Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: Norton, 1986.
    • Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1978.
    • Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School-days. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
    • —. Tom Brown at Oxford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
    • Kenner, Hugh. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
    • Mack, Edward C., and W.G. Armytage. Thomas Hughes. London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1952.
    • Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. Ed. C.J. Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.

     

  • Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting the Loom: Interpreting the Challenger Disaster

    Ann Larabee

    Dept. of American Thought and Language
    Michigan State University
    21798ANL@msu.edu

     

     

    As in a play, the nation rises again
    Reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars;
    Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom.

     

    Howard Nemerov
    On an Occasion of National Mourning

     

    Lifepod

     

    In 1993, in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, a made-for-TV American movie called Lifepod depicted brutal, claustrophobic conditions in a small space craft, containing a handful of survivors from the terrorist bombing of a much larger space transport. Looking very much like the ocean liner from one of the first large-scale disaster films, The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the large space transport holds not enough “lifepods” for its passengers, and the one vessel that does escape is in bad repair and not sufficiently stocked with food or water. Furthermore, its design is inadequate for space navigation, and its pilot, trapped in a small chamber without solar shields, dies a slow and gruesomely pustulous death from radiation bombardment. The rest of the survivors fight with each other and their depleted technological surroundings until only two remain to be saved.

     

    Blaming the survivors’ harsh conditions on a vaguely belligerent, self-serving, and inefficient governmental authority, Lifepod contains a lesson about preparedness, with imagistic references to the Cold War’s abandoned fallout shelters and the exploding Challenger space shuttle, which carried no escape vehicles. Lifepod depicts a hostile technosystem that controls air, food, and water, as the survivors pant, sweat, bleed, freeze and starve, at the mercy of their drifting enclosure. While this psychologically tense, physically urgent, claustrophobic existence throws body-technology relationships into sharp relief, the film argues that preparedness–the prediction of all exigencies under any conditions–is possible and necessary. Unlike the negligent lifepod, a well-designed, well-stocked escape vehicle would maintain technological transparency–that is, its inhabitants would take its smooth functioning for granted, and the border between body and machine would be translucent, the oar an extension of the arm. Evoking crisis in post-industrial cultures, cybernetic relations would be stabilized in the ideal lifepod.

     

    A symbol of preparedness and accurate prediction, the lifeboat is both a physical and psychological escape from technocultural terrors and, more ambiguously, a condensed version of that same technoculture. In a radioactive, terrorist, and generally chaotic world, one can only plan a move to a smaller, safer box–ideally the enclosed world of the harmoniously functioning and disaster-resistent spaceship. While enthusiasts herald the spaceship as a lifeboat, a way of escaping a doomed planet and sowing the seeds of homo sapiens across the universe, the Challenger space shuttle explosion on 28 January 1986, demonstrated that increasingly scaled-down lifeworlds are not especially life-sustaining. Like the unfortunate inhabitants of the negligent lifepod, the Challenger seven lived to experience a gruesome drift, the long descending spiral to the ocean where pressure crushed the crew cabin. Later, critics of NASA would ask why there were no lifeboats on the shuttle, no means of escaping a relatively untested, inevitably disastrous technology, comprised of over 700 critical components, any one of which might cause a fatal accident. One of the lessons of the Challenger disaster was that in complex closed environments, catastrophe is inescapable and its victims–even friendly school teachers–have no viable means of ejection. This televised spectacle of claustrophobia and futility riveted millions, who helplessly viewed the exploding microcosm of post-industrial life. Gregory Whitehead writes that the media’s construction of the Challenger disaster was a “thanaturgical excess of fire & fire & light,” a Futurist’s necrodrama provoking dread and shock.1

     

    The 1980’s witnessed an unprecedented number of such media-fed disasters–core breeches in nuclear reactors, sinking ships, oil spills, chemical leaks. With a nearly continuous spectacle of large-scale technological calamity–the Bhopal Union Carbide Plant’s emission of methyl isocyanate (December 1984), the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion (January 1986), the Chernobyl nuclear reactor core explosion (April 1986), the Exxon Valdez oil spill (March 1989)–the mass media declared the 1980’s, the “age of limits.” As Charles Perrow wrote in the wake of the Challenger disaster, the culture of high-risk technologies had made a “habit of courting disaster.”2 Perrow, in Normal Accidents, suggests that uncertainty and error are normal in a complex, “tightly coupled” system.3 In such a system, many components are highly interdependent, so that the failure of one component quickly escalates into total catastrophe. The unfolding of these catastrophes can neither be predicted nor prevented. While Perrow carefully frames certain “systems”–nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, aircraft and airways, genetic engineering–he uses metaphors that suggest a broader cultural paradigm. In his tale, “A Day in the Life,” he describes “your” apparently familiar encounters with overheated coffeepots, lost keys, bus strikes, faulty automobile parts, all interacting in unpredictable ways to undermine “your” daily schedule.4 Intended as a parable to illuminate complex, tightly coupled systems, “A Day in the Life” implies that normal accidents comprise the very texture of post-industrial culture. The plugged tea kettle is more than a simile for a nuclear plant’s core meltdown, it is a component of the relentless, complex, uncertain technological composition of postmodern life. Similarly, the many interpretations of the Challenger disaster not only sought to find the cause of the accident, but to make some broader statements about artificial life and its organization. The Rogers Commission investigation of the accident, and the interpretations that followed, attempted to restore safety and transparency to body-technology relations in the lifepod.

     

    The Rogers Commission determined that the shuttle exploded because of the hot gas breach of a seal, essentially comprised of putty and rubber washers (O-rings). Those parts, assembled by Morton Thiokol and familiar to anyone with a leaky faucet, were the central focus of testimony from engineers, who described evidence from earlier shuttle flights of “blow-by”–the leaking of hot gases from the booster seals. “Blow-by” was indicated by the presence of soot, ranging in color from gray to black. According to Morton Thiokol engineer and whistle-blower, Roger Boisjoly, black, which appeared when the seal was subjected to cold temperatures, indicated that the seal was going “away from the direction of goodness.”5 When the Challenger was launched under cold temperatures on the morning of January 28, the seal failed completely, and the shuttle caught fire. The Rogers Commission verified suspicions that the poorly designed seal of the right solid rocket booster was the technical cause of the accident. But it also accused the managers of NASA and its contractor for the solid rocket boosters, Morton Thiokol, of not heeding early warnings from engineers about the faulty seals.

     

    Consisting of five published volumes, including 1700 pages of testimony and numerous appendices containing charts, graphs, and parts lists, the Rogers Commission report resembles product liability trials that set out to identify the responsibility for the technological failures of daily life–faulty wiring, exploding gas tanks, toys small enough to choke infants. According to Elaine Scarry, the product liability trial is a “cultural self-dramatization. The courtroom is a communal arena in which civilization’s ongoing expectations about objects are overtly (and sometimes noisily) announced.”6 Here, a narrative of disaster is constructed in order to restore civilization:

     

    Implicit in this mimesis of restorability is the belief that catastrophes are themselves (not simply narratively but actually) reconstructable, the belief that the world can exist, usually does exist, should in this instance have existed, and may in this instance be “remakable” to exist, without . . . slippage.7

     

    Part of this remaking is enacted through compensation for bodily damage, a healing of technological wounds through judgment and financial reward.

     

    Like the judge and jury in a product liability case, the Rogers Commission was certainly engaged in a remaking of civilization and its projects. The trial was enacted before the public eye, a national demonstration to restore the narrative of technological progress with testimony from scientific experts. The commission’s broad mandate was to “investigate the circumstances surrounding the accident” and “develop recommendations for corrective or other action.”8 And this mandate was framed by a “firm national resolve” to restore the space program–a program that has reified cultural identity around a supposedly common endeavor that transcends cultural differences.9 In the many reiterations of the steps that led to disaster, in the meticulous documentation of the shuttle components’ performance and NASA decision-making hierarchies, the Rogers Commission report sought to reinvent the Nation–and indeed all human making–without blow-by and slippage.

     

    The most spectacular moment in the Rogers Commission’s testimony was when Commission member and eminent physicist Richard Feynman dropped a bit of O-ring material into a glass of ice water to prove its lack of resiliency under cold temperatures. Immediately picked up by the press, who lionized Feynman, this simple impromptu experiment seemed to cut through the waffling, confusing, jargon-riddled rhetoric of the NASA decision-makers’ testimony. But perhaps more important, the experiment demonstrated that catastrophic failure occurs in basic technological parts and everyday household experience. As engineer Roger Boisjoly later claimed, “most failures occur because some minor subsystem gives: 25-cent washers, $2.50 bolts, $25 clevis pins.”10 The press claimed whistle-blowers Feynman and Boisjoly as heroes precisely because they seemed to expose the simple truth about quotidian life in the technological age. Our most familiar objects carry incipient, unforeseen, body-threatening dangers: in his discussion of technological accidents, sociologist Ron Westrum writes, “A computer chip smaller than a thumbtack can send an airliner crashing into a hillside.”11 The preface to the Rogers Commission report states:

     

    The Commission construed its mandate somewhat broadly to include recommendations on safety matters not necessarily involved in this accident but which require attention to make future flights safer. Careful attention was given to concerns expressed by astronauts because the Space Shuttle program will only succeed if the highly qualified men and women who fly the Shuttle have confidence in the system.12

     

    As a public hearing on body-technology relations, the Commission report attempted to restore confidence in even minor sub-systems, to reinstate a national faith in technological existence, made safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance, down to the thumbtacks.

     

    Disappearing Bodies

     

    What is most strikingly absent from the remade world of the technocractic Rogers Commission report is any effort to reconstruct and assess bodily damage. While it opens with the now famous photograph of the smiling shuttle astronauts and payload specialists in their shiny sky-blue space suits, posed with an American flag and a toy model of the Challenger, the report contains no discussion of the bodies. The corpses were found in March by salvage divers, working on their hands and knees in low-visibility conditions, feeling about in the debris until one spotted a space suit.13 The Rogers Commission took testimony until early May, but almost no forensic evidence was given, nor did the commission publicly express any desire for such evidence. The only exception lies in the testimony of FBI special agent Stanley Klein on February 7, who reported that:

     

    we do have human hair, Negro hair, Oriental hair, and hair from two different brown-haired Caucasians, and what is interesting, according to the laboratory, is that there were no signs of heat damage to any of the hair, which was surprising. The hair came from face seals, fragments of helmets, and helmet liners, and headrests.14

     

    This reduction to anonymity of NASA’s highly-touted racially and ethnically diverse shuttle crew was quickly passed over in favor of a discussion of possible laser terrorism by Libyan dissidents and Puerto Rican pro-independence groups.

     

    The Rogers Commission followed NASA’s lead. NASA’s official position in the disaster’s aftermath was that the astronauts and payload specialists had died instantly, an assumption easily accepted by television viewers who had watched the fiery explosion. And yet careful study of footage from the explosion clearly revealed that the forward fuselage containing the crew compartment hurtled to the ocean intact. Neither NASA nor the Rogers Commission were very willing to admit this dangerous fact as they attempted to restore public faith in technology. Indeed, while NASA now displays the Challenger’s barnacled, carefully arranged debris in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center, the crew compartment is not part of the reconstruction.

     

    The strict control of information surrounding the bodies of the lost Challenger astronauts and payload specialists had purposes beyond delicacy and respect for the crew’s loved ones. Their relatively long and horrifying deaths had to be suppressed in the interests of continuing manned space flight. With two eminent astronauts–Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong–participating, the presidential investigative committee remained committed to manned spaceflight, hearing from other astronauts who testified that “man can do many wonderful things in orbit.”15 However, former Challenger pilot Paul Weitz suggested that:

     

    Every time you get people inside and around the orbiter you stand a chance of inadvertent damage of whatever type, whether you leave a tool behind or whether you, without knowing it, step on a wire bundle or a tube or something along those lines.16

     

    While the enormously complicated technologies of the space shuttle might, in ideal circumstances, provide a secure enclosure for experimental human and animal bodies, those bodies are marked by mundane clumsiness, inadvertent behaviors, everyday chance and uncertainty.

     

    Furthermore, bodies are not especially suited for life in space. On long flights they are subject to muscle and bone deterioration and weight loss, and ubiquitous radiation may damage reproductive organs. As NASA consultant Harry L. Shipman has explained in his book about the future of space flight after the Challenger accident, bodies pollute spacecraft, transforming them into smelly “urine dumps.”17 While male astronauts in the good old days used catheters and plastic bags, the presence of women requires more elaborate plumbing–the shuttle’s zero-gravity toilet, the “slinger,” gave “serious problems in actual use and . . . required a good bit of cleaning.”18 During the May 1985 flight of the Challenger, twenty-four rats and two squirrel monkeys being tested for their responses to weightlessness produced an unanticipated “flood” of feces, so that the uncomfortable crew had to wear face masks.19 The scatological body, especially the female or animal body, mars the strictly hygienic myth of the clean machine. A dead body is even worse.

     

    The fundamental question in the decades-long argument over manned space flight is whether bodies need to be present at all. As the eminent physicist James A. Van Allen wrote in the wake of the Challenger disaster, “all the truly important utilitarian and scientific achievements of our space program have been made by instrumented, unmanned spacecraft controlled remotely by radio command from stations on the earth.”20 Thus, the loss of the Challenger seven called into question NASA’s commitment to the “man-machine mode” in space travel. In its The Human Role in Space (THURIS) study, NASA laid out its theory of cybernetics, its rhetoric vacillating between technological mastery and autonomous technology:

     

    There is no such thing as an unmanned space system: everything that is created by the system designer involves man in one context or another; everything in our human existence is done by, for, or against man. The point at issue is to establish in every system context the optimal role of each man-machine component.21

     

    THURIS created a taxonomy for human-machine interactions: manual (hand tools), supported (manned maneuvering units), augmented (power tools, microscopes), teleoperated (remote control systems), supervised (computer functions with human supervision) and independent (artificial intelligence). These categories do not make much sense in themselves–clearly some manual manipulation is required for power tools and microscopes, wrenches and hammers augment and support human capabilities. But the taxonomy inscribes a fossil record, a technological evolution towards “self-actuating,” “self-healing,” independent machines.22 The THURIS authors hoped that such independent machines would require “human intervention” and attempted to describe uniquely human contributions to largely automated space enterprises. Humans, they argued, possess the unique capacity for visual evaluation, motor coordination appropriate to complex assembly, and mental powers of interpretation, innovation, deduction, and judgment. (Recent developments of artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic call even these “human” powers into question.) According to THURIS, the least important aspect of human intellect is memory: “Man’s memory, of all intellectual capabilities, is the one most easily duplicated and surpassed by computer activities.”23 Memory, the basis of culture, becomes unnecessary when humans function to service the machine.

     

    THURIS did not present a particularly attractive justification for the human presence in space, especially in the midst of virtual reality’s popularization. If humans on Earth can operate finely sensitive space robot arms and eyes or drift remotely through hallucinatory worlds more fantastic than alien planets, why are their bodies necessary in space? In NASA’s continuing efforts to sell its programs, bodies were inscribed with socially charged markings of liberal democracy. The Challenger seven crew consisted of a social studies teacher, an electrical engineer, a physicist, and a corporate representative from the Hughes Aircraft Company. Malcolm McConnell observed that Christa McAuliffe was “a little chubby” and that Greg Jarvis “could have easily lost ten or fifteen pounds.”24 The Challenger crew represented a populist presence in space. Dwarfed by the massive shuttle, their mission was to mediate the machine for a young television audience–Christa McAuliffe was to have taken her remote students on a video field trip around the Orbiter. After the explosion of the homey, domestic world presided over by a teacher mom, psychologists and grief specialists raced in to erase the spectacle of graphic technological violence and the imagination of Christa McAuliffe’s body. In the discourse of the Challenger disaster, the bodies of the shuttle crew had to remain behind the technological veil, in the interests of continuing manned space flight.

     

    However, folklore scholars have noted that the many popular jokes emanating from the Challenger disaster often involved those bodies in quite graphic ways. These jokes present the body/technology interface as a spectacularly violent one, as opposed to the cultural ideal in which interaction between the human body and the machine is a flow state.:

     

    Q: What do you call a burnt penis on the Florida shore?

    A: A shuttlecock.25

     

    Q: What was the last thing that went through Christa McAuliffe’s head?

    A: A piece of fuselage.26

     

    Q: Why didn’t they put showers on the Challenger?

    A: Because they knew that everyone would wash up on shore.27

     

    Based on familiar rhetorical patterns and cycles, these “sick” jokes have been called political cynicism, a rebellion against the mass media’s pompous reverence, a critique of national institutions, and an alleviation of death anxieties in the nuclear age.28 Don Ihde has written that we expect our technologies to be transparent so that ideally we are scarcely aware of the machine’s presence. For example, we expect our telephones to bring us the voices of our loved ones as if they were really present, rather than coded into energy impulses in fiber-optic cables. Skilled operators are supposed to become one with their machines; distinctions between the organic and the technological disappear in harmonious signal and response. Technological disaster shifts the terms of that interaction, for here technology violently entraps, penetrates, and chars the body locked in its embrace. It is this possibility that evokes both national efforts at repression and the return of the repressed through the joke cycle. In a national spectacle of disaster, the body is the pain of technological violence that can never be represented, but only displaced by word and image. Thus, the body is reconstructed within an organizational safety model, a new lifepod, that denies any further possibility of collapse.

     

    Groupthink

     

    The Rogers Commission Report made it clear that NASA’s organizational decisions were to blame in the decision to launch the space shuttle, despite icy weather and faulty booster seals. Thus, NASA’s management, as well as failed machine parts, became an object of study. NASA’s organization was represented in the Rogers Commission report as a self-regulating system without external surveillance or intervention, a situation sociologist Diane Vaughan credited, in part, to NASA’s secret military projects.29 An effective external regulator would have had access to classified materials, an unacceptable risk in the Cold War climate. Without external reality checks, many critics suggested, NASA had become isolated in its own delusional can-do ideology, derived from its Apollo mission successes. Furthermore, media coverage of the Rogers Commission hearings displayed the homogeneous make-up of NASA administrators and its corporate engineers–all middle-aged white men with a life-long devotion to NASA and the aerospace industry. Observing the “shocking” and “rancorous” displays of agency in-fighting at the hearings, the New Republic suggested that NASA itself seemed to be experiencing a “mid-life crisis.”30 The modern organizational man was exposed and displayed through the figure of the NASA administrator, locked in a decaying air-tight compartment of his own making and possessed of the “wrong stuff.”

     

    In the scientific press, especially in the first assessments of the disaster, some attempt was made to blame NASA’s rank and file. A few weeks after the disaster, Science magazine twice reported that an internal review of the shuttle had found “relaxed workplace standards” including “worker inexperience, lack of motivation, and faulty equipment.”31 Furthermore, it indicated that NASA’s investigation included speculation that workers had forgotten to plug a hole in the faulty booster after a leak test.32 Despite the search for “inadvertent damage” caused by flawed workers, blame was soon leveled at NASA’s and Morton Thiokol’s decision-makers who came to represent a nation-wide corrupt power-elite, now open to investigation. Charles Perrow, whose study of accidents in complex systems would often be evoked in discussions of the Challenger, decried the “Pentagon effect” at NASA that created a climate of managerial self-aggrandizement and toadying to corporate and military sponsors and the media.33 Journalist and long-time NASA observer, Malcolm McConnell, wrote that “the rank and file people in NASA are among the hardest-working, most productive, and most talented employees in the federal government.”34 McConnell blamed ambitious policy makers engaged in “the political intrigue and compromise, the venality and hidden agendas” that led to disaster.35 In another account, Joseph J. Trento also called the disaster a political failure, quoting shuttle mission specialist John Fabian on the Challenger investigation: “It just unraveled like Watergate.”36 Thus, discussions of the Challenger disaster spread beyond mechanical error to wide critiques of post-industrial capitalists, skilled at political manipulations in a secretive high-tech world.

     

    The mass media harkened back to NASA’s glory days, benevolent and safety conscious, suggesting that the organization had devolved, degenerated, decayed from a golden age of right rule–benevolent and safety-conscious. The same space journalists who attacked a highly politicized NASA, rhapsodized about the pride and the glory, the “heroic neoclassical elan of the moon race.”37 Little connection was made to NASA’s ever-recurring technical failures, including the horrifying Apollo space capsule fire that entrapped three screaming astronauts in a fiery furnace and melted them into a nylon puddle. Nor was much mention made of NASA’s origins–the “Rocket State” developed in tandem with nuclear weapons, ignited by Nazi rocket scientists, and fueled by Cold War paranoia.38 This lack of a thorough cultural critique left a way open to NASA’s salvation.

     

    The vision of NASA as a once-effective, decadent organization was very appealing to academic theorists who set about to “fix” the agency, using it as a research model. In the flurry of sociological studies that followed the Challenger disaster, NASA’s homogeneity and in-group ambience, its hidden agendas, political maneuvering, and back-stabbing, came to signify the internal workings of all corporations. Social theorists searched for ways to explain and heal the breach in organizational systems, dissected and exposed in a public hearing, fanned by a nationally televised tragedy. Academia, in itself a largely homogeneous entity with its own industrial and military affiliations, responded to the Challenger disaster with a corporate consultant’s enthusiasm.

     

    Ensconced in university government documents sections, the five-volume, disembodied Rogers Commission report provided an easily accessible text for applications of organizational theory and systems models, based on information flow within conveniently closed circuits. According to organizational theorists, NASA was, like the space shuttle itself, a malfunctioning, but correctable, system with faulty components–namely, NASA’s and Morton Thiokol’s managers, and NASA’s external and internal regulatory units. NASA had experienced blow-by and slippage in its communication linkages: some of Morton Thiokol’s engineers had attempted to voice their fears about the faulty booster seals and cold-temperature launches to their bosses, who had essentially ignored what they considered unproven speculations.

     

    Many theorists attributed the communications failure to NASA’s fall from grace. According to this scenario, NASA once had “a less hierarchical and flexible matrix structure” that relied on “nurturing consensus.”39 From these days of childhood innocence, the agency had grown increasingly isolated, streamlined and pressurized, indulging in overweening bureaupathological fantasies about its abilities, despite budget cuts. In addition, NASA’s components had become highly specialized in their activities, languages and fundamental world-views so that, for example, the professional ethics of engineers did not match the expedient decisions of managers.40 Isolated from engineers, NASA’s management engaged in “groupthink,” driven by fantasies of invulnerability and a need for unanimity and cohesion.41 Thus, the decision to launch the Challenger was a technocracy’s “major malfunction.”

     

    Despite rumblings in the media that the space agency was in its last hours after an apocalyptic failure, academic theorists accepted NASA’s continuing existence at face value. Like the shuttle, it was a machine that could be repaired through better interactions and linkages among its components. The machine was wearing out, but it could be restored through an overhaul. Engineers and managers could be realigned. Better brakes could be put on quick decisions. Communications and regulatory valves could be cleaned of soot and debris. The processing system could be repaired to allow the correct flow of information energy, to prevent lacks or excesses of data, to turn away maladaptive codes. Then, tires kicked, the ship would be ready to sail to Mars with human and animal bodies safely enclosed.

     

    The Challenger disaster provided organizational theorists with an opportunity to show that the systems model applied equally well to machines and human societies. Using Charles Perrow’s work on accidents in complex systems, Diane Vaughan wrote that technological failures could not be separated from organizational failures, and that the language of systems applied to both. NASA “malfunctioned” because: “The failure of one component interacts with others, triggering a complex set of interactions that can precipitate a technical system accident of catastrophic potential.”42 The use of systems theory in critiques of post-Challenger NASA was disputed by G. Richard Holt and Anthony W. Morris using Yrjo Engestrom’s “activity theory,” acknowledging that human “activity” is “‘messy,’ disorganized, seemingly chaotic, and hence endlessly fascinating.”43 To ensure safer space flights, Holt and Morris argued, NASA had to accept the internal contradictions and wide possible outcomes inherent in such activity. While the authors exposed gaps in systems models of NASA, their aim was to fix the agency as an information processing system, a contradictory position in itself.

     

    The Challenger catastrophe threatened political mythologies of the final frontier, and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and the entire cultural project of systems building. In his Evolutionary Systems and Society, Vilmos Csanyi writes that systems models, despite their predictive value, can only approach the “ontological complexity” of nature, but “the interactions of matter . . . are infinite and immeasurable.”44 Thus, the systems model can only represent a semiotic, self- referential complexity. The models of organizational theorists reflected the strict methods of disciplines and vested interests in the national space program. A radical sense of discontinuity, uncertainty, potentiality, and violence–the ontological complexity of catastrophic events–threatened the fundamental order of disciplines, apparatuses, and methods. Charles Perrow put this in the strongest terms reminiscent of the 1960s radical left: “Risky systems are full of failures. Inevitably, though less frequently, these failures will interact in unexpected ways, defeat the safety devices and bring down the system.”45 Thus,the academic response to the Challenger explosion was an effort to restore stable systems, and, in an entirely self-referential mode, to reassure its academic audience that their systems, ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and all was right with the world. There might yet be a teacher in space.

     

    To the Stars

     

    One of the outcomes of the Challenger disaster was a massive public relations campaign by space enthusiasts to resell the idea of manned space flight. The National Commission on Space, appointed by Ronald Reagan, produced a strategic planning report in 1986 on the future of space ventures that included renewed shuttle flights, construction of space station Freedom, increased space surveillance of the biosphere, and human settlement on the moon and Mars. In 1989, George Bush called for a lunar settlement by 2004 and a manned trip to Mars by 2019. In 1990, the U.N. endorsed 1992 as International Space Year (ISY), the quincentennary of Columbus’s landing, inflaming the usual cant among U.S. politicians and space enthusiasts about human destiny, pioneering spirit, and life on the new frontier.

     

    In that same year, Philip Robert Harris, a “management and space psychologist” and NASA consultant, published Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization, an attempt to justify the use of the behavioral sciences in space settlement design, using James Grier Miller’s living systems theory. The book was introduced by Jesco von Puttkamer, a NASA program manager and strategic planner, who briefly described the post-Challenger NASA as rejuvenated, ready to “penetrate the new frontier of space.”46 Von Puttkamer argued that the Challenger explosion had provoked a public outpouring of support for manned space flight because of an “unconscious, unspoken feeling that we are dealing here with evolutionary forces at work.”47

     

    In behavioral science, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence research, systems theory proposes that the biosocial world is comprised of systems with interactive components, allowing flows of information and energy.48 According to these theorists, a natural, intuited law dictates that systems evolve into more and more complex entities: for example, molecules-cells-organisms-ecosystems-biospheres, or cells-organisms-groups-societies–supranational systems. The evolution of Earth systems under the influence of matter, energy, and information flows has resulted in a global, biocultural, technologically regulated super-system. Thus, the world-wide cybernetic information exchanges of the post-industrial world are seen as the result ofthermodynamic, evolutionary processes leading to higherorganizational levels.

     

    Systems theorists associated with space programs see human expansion into space as the next organizational level beyond the biosphere. Thus, von Puttkamer writes that manned space travel allows “Man,” “Earth,” and “Space” to be “one single creative system,” an “intricately closed-loop feedback system, a super-ecology.”49 In addition, the formation of extra-planetary biospheres will be designed for what von Puttkamer predicts will be a new cybernetic species, a weightless species, floating in a space womb, transcending gravity and “entropic deterioration.”50 These ideas of evolutionary expansion into space reflect the principle of plenitude, a persistent idea in Western culture that God created life to reproduce richly and diversely and fill the Void. Thus, John Allen, creator of Biosphere II, the desert amusement park disguised as a scientific experiment in space living, explains that his project will expand life’s quest to fill all available econiches, hedging its bets against catastrophe.51

     

    The idea of an impending catastrophe, by nuclear war, environmental disaster, or cometary collision is the favored reason for human extra-planetary expansion. During International Space Year, Charles D. Walker, assistant to the president at McDonnell Douglass and president of the National Space Society, explained his support of manned space exploration:

     

    Human survival. Political and economic survival in technical competition within the global economy, sure. But more than that: All human creation, all life as we know it, is here on earth. All our eggs are in one basket, one planet. But our embryonic resources are diminishing, and our nest becoming fouled. Our technological nature has given us the means to remove that risk.52

     

    Here, haunted by the specter of catastrophe, the dreams and aspirations of the postindustrial knowledge class 53have been given the shape of science fiction and justified through the nineteenth-century language of “evolution” and “nature” and the twentieth-century language of systems. The rhetoric of eggs and nests reminds us of the dinosaurs, now popularly recognized as warm-blooded, egg-laying, and nurturing creatures wiped out by a cometary collision that brought nuclear winter to the earth. Frequent evocations of “eggs,” “embryos,” “cradles,” and “wombs” reinscribe sexual reproduction within an entirely mechanical environment, a protective exoskeleton of metal plates that will protect, control and manage the human body, and ensure the genetic continuation of the Chosen spacefarers. Ironically, human sexual reproduction in space may actually be impossible, under weightless, radioactive conditions.

     

    The political and social meanings of this consensual future are quite apparent in the imagined space settlements of Living and Working in Space. Philip Robert Harris refers to the expansion of the human species, the global human family, into the solar system, fulfilling a natural urge for frontier exploration. But his space settlements are built and inhabited by only a segment of that family, the postindustrial knowledge class, envisioned as a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, technicians, corporate managers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, teachers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, architects, film makers, and designers. Harris writes:

     

    the colonists to the New World during the eighteenth century were largely poor, ill-used white artisans and indentured servants, as well as African slaves. The prospects are that the space colonists of the twenty-first century will be more affluent and self-directed, better educated and chosen. Expertise is required of specialists in cross-cultural relocation and living in exotic environments to design systems for deployment and support of spacefarers.54

     

    Thus, the Challenger disaster provided the text for the post-catastrophe survival of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through systems theories. The Challenger disaster suggested that technological and organizational systems were ever on the verge of collapse; the massive public relations campaign for space settlements imagines a safe new biosphere, a closed ecology, for academics, civil servants, and corporate managers, freed from environmental disaster, atmospheric impurity, starvation, poverty, disease, and gravity. Harris suggests that this cross-disciplinary community will result in a transformation of human consciousness, a spirit of collaboration that will trickle down to the problematic Earth populations left behind.

     

    A compendium of recent work in space settlement planning, Living and Working in Space promotes the use of the behavioral sciences in mediating a technological environment for human habitation. As part of the space team, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will maintain continual surveillance of human bodies, studying reproduction, sleep cycles, time sense, physical and mental stress, and the effects of weightlessness, isolation, and noise. “Artificial life” may produce time sense warps, “psychotic reactions,” “spatial illusions,” interpersonal conflict, depression, boredom, “anger displacement,” a “need for dominance,” motion sickness, water retention in the face, and a loss of body mass.55 In addition, conflict among disciplines, cultures, and ethnic groups might arise.

     

    The answer to controlling these human disturbances in techno-utopia is the application of James Grier Miller’s “living systems theory,” a complex symbol language of subsystems and processes. In a space environment, bodies become ingestors, distributors, converters, producers, extruders, and decoders, components in a bio-technical system for control of matter, energy, and information flows.56 Thus, differences are transcended as humans become synergistic, ergonomically conditioned components in the metamachine. Here, the “informating” of knowledge workers in a postindustrial economy based on instantaneous communications, erosion of managerial hierarchies, the formation of strategic alliances and teams in electronic exchanges, the potential for “virtual” universities and corporations, is given stability under the rubric of mission success and safety.57 Living systems theory provides the paradigm for a new, entirely planned macroculture that will determine every facet of a spacefarer’s existence, from decor to diet, from language to sex, for harmonious system functioning. For example, Living and Working in Space, sounding much like an L.L. Bean or Land’s End catalogue, extols space shuttle fashion: a “custom-fitted, cobalt blue, soft cotton, line zipper jacket and pants with coordinated blue shirts,” having the functional attraction of being fireproof; other suits are of “light and heat reflecting metallic mylar which also serves to protect from meteorites.”58

     

    Still, cobalt-blue, fireproof uniforms did not save the interdisciplinary, ethnically and racially diverse Challenger seven from utter destruction. Thus, in its designs for the space station, NASA has considered emergency escape vehicles. Jerry Craig, head of NASA’s Crew Escape and Reentry Vehicle planning office, has suggested that the space station have enough “lifeboats” for everyone. In answer to critics who feel that the space station should be made safe enough to do without lifeboats, Craig says, “That’s kind of like saying the Titanic would never sink.”59 Still, space planners are not especially interested in discussing escape vehicles, for then they would have to admit that space travel is overwhelmingly dangerous and that their dreams are as fragile as the Hubble telescope and the Mars Observer, notoriously failed systems. Since space settlements are promoted as lifeboats in themselves, lifeboats for the lifeboats seem superfluous and lack political weight. Instead, space planners stress the safety of their rationally managed synthetic biospheres which include “storm shelters” for protection against solar flares.60

     

    In this Thorstein Veblein fantasy of a postindustrial army in space, fears of impending accidents make all cultural expression a safety function. Indeed, space planners have invented a culture of catastrophe based on faith in prediction. Catastrophe provides the rationale for subsuming the disciplines under “spaceology,” the transformation of the body into a stable energy-matter-information channel, and the continual mapping and surveillance of system biotechnical components. This national vision of the human future counters (and is thus dependent on) the construction of the thrilling and threatening mass media cyborg, imaged as the Terminator or Robocop, who perform destabilized and penetrated social identities.61 Furthermore, the national science fiction of space travel seems reassuring next to the spectacles of disaster in the 1980s and 1990s, not only the real life disasters of leaking toxic chemicals and exploding machines, but those designed for entertainment: graphic nuclear holocausts with shriveling humans in flames; raging dinosaurs ripping men in half; artificially intelligent computer systems trapping and suffocating workers; buildings exploding and falling into gaps in the earth, crushing their inhabitants; planes crashing in an elegant bloody montage of flying shrapnel. Space planners reassure us that catastrophe is our origin and our nature: the Earth-crossing asteroid or comet that destroyed the dinosaurs “allowed a tiny creature, the ancestral mammal, to grow, differentiate, and fill vacated ecological niches, giving rise eventually to homo sapiens.”62 Those asteroids can now be mined for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen to feed the transcendent bio-technical organism of the postindustrial knowledge class, emptied of troublesome memory, safe at last.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Gregory Whitehead, “The Forensic Theatre: Memory Plays for the Post-mortem Condition,” Performing Arts Journal 12 (Spring 1990): 100-101. For a discussion of the Futurist tradition of the self-destroying machine, see William Leiss, “Technology and Degeneration: The Sublime Machine,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

     

    2. Charles Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” Nation 11 (October 1986): 329.

     

    3. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984): 3.

     

    4. Perrow, Normal Accidents, 5-9.

     

    5. Testimony of Roger Boisjoly, Report to the President, U.S. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (Washington, D.C.: The Commission, 1986): 784-5.

     

    6. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 304.

     

    7. Scarry, 298.

     

    8. William P. Rogers, “Preface,” Report to the President:1.

     

    9. Report to the President, 1.

     

    10. Roger Boisjoly, “Interview with Tony Chiu,” Life 11 (March 1988): 22.

     

    11. Ron Westrum, Technologies & Society: The Shaping of People and Things (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991): 259.

     

    12. Report to the President, 1.

     

    13. E. Foster-Simeon, “Picking up the Pieces,” All Hands (June 1986): 22.

     

    14. Testimony of Stanley Klein, Report to the President, 213.

     

    15. Testimony of P. J. Wietz, Report to the President, 1437.

     

    16. Testimony of P.J. Weitz, Report to the President, 1437.

     

    17. Harry L. Shipman, Space 2000: Meeting the Challenge of a New Era (New York: Plenum, 1987): 315.

     

    18. Shipman, 331.

     

    19. Anastasia Toufexis, “Good Data and a Feces Crisis,” Time 13 May 1985: 61.

     

    20. James A. Van Allen, “Myths and Realities of Space Flight,” Science 30 (May 1986): 1075.

     

    21. Stephen B. Hall, ed., The Human Role in Space: Technology, Economics and Optimization (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1985): v.

     

    22. Hall, 63.

     

    23. Hall, 38.

     

    24. McConnell, Challenger: A Major Malfunction (New York: Doubleday, 1987): 94.

     

    25. Collected by Elizabeth Radin Simons, “The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher,” Western Folklore 45 (October 1986): 269.

     

    26. Simons, 272.

     

    27. Collected by Willie Smyth, “Challenger Jokes and the Humor of Disaster,” Western Folklore 45 (October 1986): 244.

     

    28. Simons; Smyth; Patrick D. Morrow, “Those Sick Challenger Jokes,” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (Spring 1987):175-185; Elliot Oring, “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (July-September 1987): 276-287; Nicholas von Hoffman, “Shuttle Jokes,” New Republic 24 (March 1986): 14.

     

    29. Diane Vaughan, “Autonomy, Interdependence, and Social Control: NASA and the Space Shuttle Challenger,” Administrative Science Quarterly 35 (June 1990): 232.

     

    30. Robert Bazell, “NASA’s Mid-Life Crisis,” New Republic 24 (March 1986): 12.

     

    31.Science 14 (February 1986): 664; Science 28 (February 1986): 911.

     

    32. Science 28 (February 1986): 911.

     

    33. Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” 354.

     

    34. McConnell, ix.

     

    35. McConnell, x.

     

    36. John J. Trento, Prescription for Disaster (New York: Crown, 1987): 4.

     

    37. McConnell, 12.

     

    38. Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (New York: Verso, 1988): 6-7.

     

    39. Barbara S. Romzek and Melvin J. Dubnick, “Accountability in the Public Sector: Lessons from the Challenger Tragedy,” Public Administration Review 47 (May/June 1987): 227-238. See also Howard S. Schwartz, Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal (New York: New York University Press, 1990): 107-126; C.F. Larry Heimann, “Understanding the Challenger Disaster: Organizational Structure and the Design of Reliable Systems,” American Political Science Review 87 (June 1993): 421-435.

     

    40. Michael Davis, “Thinking Like an Engineer: The Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (Spring 1991): 150-168. See also Vaughan, 252.

     

    41. Gregory Moorhead, Richard Ference and Chris P. Neck, “Group Decision Fiascoes Continue: Space Shuttle Challenger and a Revised Groupthink Framework,” Human Relations 44 (June 1991): 539-551.

     

    42. Vaughan, 225.

     

    43. G. Richard Holt and Anthony W. Morris, “Activity Theory and the Analysis of Organizations,” Human Organization 52 (Spring 1993): 101.

     

    44. Vilmos Csanyi, Evolutionary Systems and Society: A General Theory of Life, Mind, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989): 15.

     

    45. Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” 354.

     

    46. Philip R. Harris, Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization (New York: Ellis Horwood, 1992): 9.

     

    47. Puttkamer, in Harris, 9.

     

    48. This work stems from Ilya Prigogine’s hypothesis that chaotic systems may take up energy and begin to manifest orderly behavior. See Ilya Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984).

     

    49. Puttkamer, in Harris, 17-18.

     

    50. Puttkamer, in Harris, 22.

     

    51. Jim Robbins, “Biosphere II: Our Western Home in Outer Space,” American West 24 (August 1987): 42.

     

    52. Charles D. Walker, “International Space Year,” special insert, Ad Astra 4 (January/February 1991): 7.

     

    53. Daniel Bell predicted that the industrial labor force would be replaced by workers skilled in the production and dissemination of information in The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1976; New York: Basic Books, 1973). For a discussion of the cybernetic goals and fantasies of these knowledge workers in the late twentieth-century, see Grant H. Kester, “Out of Sight is Out of Mind: The Imaginary Space of Postindustrial Culture,” Social Text 35 (Summer 1993).

     

    54. Harris, 68.

     

    55. Harris, 95.

     

    56. Harris, 102. James Grier Miller and Jesse L. Miller, “Living Systems Applications to Space Habitation,” in Space Resources: Technological Springboards into the 21st Century, ed. M. F. McKay (Houston: NASA Johnson Space Center, 1992); James Grier Miller, Living Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978); James Grier Miller, “Applications of Living Systems Theory to Life in Space,” in From Antarctica to Outer Space, ed. A.A. Harrison, et al. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991): 177-198.

     

    57. The term, “informate,” was first used by Shoshana Zuboff to describe the computer’s effects on mid-level professionals. See her In the Age of the Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1984). For the managerial view of the growing information economy, see Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan, eds., Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).

     

    58. Harris, 130.

     

    59. Quoted in Karen Boehler, “Lifeboat to Safer Shores,” Ad Astra 1 (March 1988).

     

    60. National Commission on Space, 71-2.

     

    61. Cynthia S. Fuchs, “‘Death is Irrelevant’: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria,” Genders 18 (Winter 1993): 114.

     

    62. National Commission on Space, 65.

     

  • An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and Star Trek’s Imperial Subject 1

    Valerie Fulton

    Department of English
    Colorado State University

     

    “In the twenty-fourth century, there will be no hunger, and there will be no greed.”

     

    –Gene Roddenberry, to actor Jonathan Frakes

     

    Following in the footsteps of another primetime television drama, Northern Exposure, which has featured both Franz Kafka and Federico Fellini in recent programming, Star Trek: The Next Generation bridged its 1992 and ’93 seasons with a cliffhanger that meshed the cast of fictional Star Fleet officers with another “real-life” historical figure, Samuel Clemens. This trend of having writers and avant-garde film makers appear in popular t.v. series suggests not so much an acceptance of the sort of cultural criticism going on in academia today as it does an appropriation of high cultural figures by the corporate television industry. The industry “sells” Kafka and Fellini to the viewer, complete with the signifying props that have come to denote intellectualism–dark clothing, moodiness, an aura of mystery–all of which serve to take the place of any real attempt to engage the potentially subversive ideas expressed either in Kafka’s fiction or in Fellini’s films. Such strategies of appropriation are particularly important to a show like Northern Exposure, whose success depends less on the images of alternative living it presents than on the standard t.v. equation of thriving capitalism–its main characters include an ambitious doctor, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a restaurant owner–with Kantian altruism, here reenforced by the program’s background cast of righteous but predominantly voiceless Native Americans.

     

    This process by which commodification finally stifles alternative discourse is described well in Susan Willis’s study, A Primer for Daily Life. Willis uses the California school system’s promotion of “earthquake kits” to demonstrate how consumer packaging can result in a series of items’ “complete condensation to the commodity form” (165). She differentiates between camping out, which relies on articles developed for military use yet can also be used to stage anti-military protests, and the earthquake kit itself, the contents of which merely “embody the simulated remembrance of how they might have been used if purchased for a camping trip, but . . . do not give access to social practice or its guerrilla theatre reversal” (168). The process by which high cultural figures become reduced to t.v.’s commodity form differs only in the sense that few Americans are aware of the originary ideas behind a signifying figure. When a friend once defended Northern Exposure to me on the ground that “a show that quotes Nietzsche can’t be all bad,” she hit on the central problem. We live in a culture where “Nietzsche” is a metonym for intellectual thought much in the way that “Kleenex” is a metonym for something to wipe one’s nose on: to appreciate, even identify with, the t.v. character who quotes from Beyond Good and Evil, one hardly needs to have read or even to know of the text. Networks can thus extend their appeal to (and in the process help define) the “thinking American,” whose pleasure comes from seeing the metonymic association in this unfamiliar context, while at the same time risking neither their mainstream audience nor their corporate sponsorship.

     

    The appearance of Samuel Clemens on Star Trek: The Next Generation confirms the idea that intellectual thought can be reduced to the least common denominator of the commodity form. Moreover, Clemens’s appearance on the show underscores the extent to which t.v. programs themselves may unintentionally reproduce ideological assumptions that we consume, store, and later regurgitate. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show about the future’s altruistic exploration of life on other planets, tacitly helps to perpetuate the conventional U.S. wisdom that acts of imperialism by our government against third world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving, benign rather than aggressive. Clemens’s appearance on the episode in question as an inquisitive and bothersome fixture of the western American frontier situates him firmly in a past where the imperial self was a fixture both dominant and heroic. This portrayal does more than belie the strong anti-imperialist tenor of Clemens’s later work. In being asked to consume the writer as a frontier artifact we are not only encouraged to believe that Star Fleet Command–and, by extension, the television viewer–has progressed beyond the sort of “frontier mentality”2 Americans have come to associate with acts of wrongful acquisition; we are simultaneously discouraged from practicing the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative modes of discourse and lead toward social change.

     

    I. to boldly go where no one has gone before

     

    Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s U.S.S. Enterprise, the flagship for an entire fleet of Federation vessels, has as its “continuing mission” a duty to “explore strange new worlds” and to “seek out new life forms.” Since it also has the weapons capacity to annihilate a small planet, crew members sometimes find themselves obliged to reassure species from less technologically advanced worlds that, remarkable as it may seem, the arsenal is for defensive purposes only. Unlike the incredulous life form who believes weapons are made to be used, American t.v. viewers have little trouble accepting the show’s nonviolent premise–in large part because we are accustomed to the routine stockpiling of nuclear and other advanced weapons for the protection of our country’s “national security.” Yet the program itself, which pretends to see through twentieth-century self-deceptions by presenting our time in retrospect as avidly militaristic, provides its viewers with still another rationale. The Federation’s Star Fleet officers are not inclined to act aggressively, Star Trek tells us, because everything they need is already at their disposal. In other words, the show relies on Marx’s early notion that human nature is bound to the mode of production to explain how future generations have become more “civilized” and “humane.” The material substances used to reenforce this notion are, not coincidentally, food and energy.3 Here human agency has been removed from the mode of production altogether: “food replicators” provide all crew members with abundant, effortless, computer-generated meals, while the “warp coil” draws on a fictitious energy source to power the Enterprise through space. When not burdened by the exigencies of frontier travel, Star Trek‘s crew is free–with some help, of course, from the Holodeck’s simulated landscapes–“to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Marx, 53). Nor is this multiplicity of roles limited to recreational practice. Although there is an ostensible division of labor among the program’s main characters, Star Fleet commanders not only manage to avoid disaster by employing the critical methodologies or expertise of absent crew members, they also pool information to discover unified solutions to most of the emergencies that threaten their ship.

     

    But if Star Trek implies that the future will liberate us from alienating modes of production, the program is finally unable to conceive a community based on Marx’s notion of mutual ownership rather than on the principles of state control. Star Fleet is, after all, a military organization, and like all military organizations its order of command follows a strict hierarchy. The crew members’ willingness to obey their superiors is so routine, in fact, that Star Trek‘s writers appear to have become bored with it; their invention of the renegade “Q,” a representative from a “nearly omnipotent” life form, allows for the intrusion of Byronic skepticism without the threat of a specific challenge to the status quo. For instance, “Q” mocks the egalitarianism which prompts Captain Jean-Luc Picard to call his first officer “number one” by reminding Commander Riker that he is, in the established order, no better than “number two.” Yet “Q” himself, who wields seemingly infinite power for personal rather than altruistic reasons, does not present a more attractive alternative to Star Fleet’s hierarchical model. In fact, his character suggests that to be freed from the controlling mechanisms of an “illusory community” (Marx, 83) is to become capricious, childlike, and unresponsive to the rights of others.

     

    That Star Trek portrays an ideal future community in which humans have surpassed twentieth-century greed and aggression while at the same time relying on recursive models of the state apparatus is an unavoidable paradox; the show can, after all, do no more than pretend to know a future we have yet to live. For that reason, I will not question its least probable expedients–that all aliens converse in perfect English, that humans can interbreed with alien life forms, that most planets seem atmospherically conducive to human life, etc…4 Rather, I concentrate on the show’s central paradox, the fact that its future orientation coincides with the exploration of “strange new worlds,” something Americans perceive as a completed historical task. As I have already suggested, the erasure of the present moment from this formulation helps to direct viewer attention away from the fact that exploration, conquest, and colonization continue to be routinized parts of twentieth-century American economic policy. Just as important, however, is the extent to which this erasure reveals the future’s dependence on and connection with the past. Frontier travel can never signify an absolute departure, since not only does this idea imply that our invention of new experience or of new means of socialization is possible; it suggests that we are able to describe otherness without reverting to the language and ideological constructions of the same. As Derrida argues in “Psyche: The Invention of the Other,” “invention does not create an existence or a world as a set of existents”; it “discovers for the first time . . . what was already found there” (338, original emphasis). Moreover, while invention “presupposes originality,” it will “only receive its status of invention” when it is “protected by a system of conventions that will ensure . . . its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a lineage, a pedagogical tradition, a discipline, a chain of generations” (316, original emphasis).

     

    Tzvetan Todorov, writing about Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean, provides a means to address these ideas in relation to a logic of frontier exploration. Because guided by a system of absolute conventions and beliefs, Columbus “knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth already possessed” (17). Thus, confronted by natives who tell him that Cuba is an island rather than part of the Asian continent, “he decides to eliminate” this information and “challenges the quality of his informants” (21) instead of altering his initial hypothesis. He is likewise unable to register diversity in language; the “only two possible” ways he can behave when forced to communicate with Indians are “to acknowledge [their foreign tongue] as a language but to refuse to believe it is different; or to acknowledge its difference but to refuse to admit it is a language” (30). As Todorov argues, Columbus’s inability to perceive otherness stems from his belief that Spanish language and culture do not constitute “one convention among others, but [are] rather the natural state of things” (29). Such foundational thinking is central to most notions of frontier exploration and conquest.5 Consider, for instance, the statement of purpose used to introduce Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Federation’s goals are both “to seek out new civilizations” and “to boldly go where no one has gone before”–missions that clearly contradict each other unless read through the lens of frontier ideology, which grants new civilizations existence only to the extent that the originary culture has “found” them.

     

    II. “Prime” Surveillance

     

    In carrying out their mission of frontier exploration, Star Fleet officers are at all times bound to obey the “Prime Directive,” a policy designed by Star Trek‘s writers to underscore the future’s first commitment to justice and humanity. The ordinance, which prohibits all Federation personnel from interfering with the cultural development of less advanced worlds, bears a striking resemblance to the mandate now issued at federal parks and wilderness areas throughout the U.S., usually in the form of a sign cautioning against the destruction of a “fragile ecosystem” and requesting that visitors leave everything as they found it. Because the Federation takes an anthropological interest in developing cultures, but is prevented by the Prime Directive from openly engaging in their study, research teams descend to the planet under investigation and conceal themselves either behind an electronic blind or within surgically altered bodies; like the twentieth-century field biologist, their objective is to collect observable data without disturbing subjects or taking them outside their natural habitat.

     

    These measures bear a less obvious but important resemblance to current naturalist strategies in the extent to which both justify surveillance as the necessary precondition for scientific research and, ultimately, the greater good of humanity. I do not wish to suggest that the surveillance of wilderness areas or game preserves is in itself problematic, but simply to point out how readily a logic of “stewardship” translates into a logic of imperialism.6 On a recent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “First Contact,” Commander Riker has been disguised and sent on a recognizance mission to determine whether a species about to attain warp drive is ready to assume to the sort of responsibilities Federation officials deem necessary in using such advanced technology. Unfortunately, Riker is hospitalized on the planet’s surface; the surgeons who operate notice his strange internal structure and conclude that he is a different species from themselves. Although this series of events might easily have led to a critique of Star Fleet surveillance practice, the episode focuses instead on the threat these aliens’ recognition of Commander Riker poses to the Prime Directive, which Picard must violate if he wishes to save his first officer’s life. The show encourages us to identify with Picard’s “human” dilemma before we consider the inconsistency presented by his “away team”‘s surveillance procedures, in large part because it portrays the aliens themselves as xenophobic–so much so that they resolve to postpone warp drive testing until they can face a universe in which their culture is neither dominant nor central. This resolve, culminating in a refusal to join the Federation alliance, reconstitutes the marginal and particularly non-human status of the alien race; unlike their leading scientist, who prefers to accompany the crew of the Enterprise rather than live among outmoded ideas and technology, the others are content to remain behind. That Picard’s largesse permits them this freedom, moreoever, obscures a more pressing issue–the impossibility of their ever regaining the cultural autonomy they seek. Like the earth’s remaining predators, which roam our wilderness parks while human advocates tag them, keep track of their procreative habits, and lobby for their protection, the aliens have already been inscribed within Star Fleet’s cultural heritage. They have been seen, regardless of whether they choose to see.

     

    In “The Eye of Power,” Michel Foucault evokes the “Panopticon” as a conceptual model for the Enlightenment’s more general goal, first to erradicate “any zones of darkness . . . established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation,” and then to realize “the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each” (152). Instead of the social attainment of this goal, however, what emerges is a disciplinary system in which authority becomes “a machinery that no one owns” and “class domination can be exercised just to the extent that power is dissasociated from individual might” (156). Foucault’s rejection of “ownership” as the primary means of attaining and inscribing power is especially pertinent to a discussion of Star Trek: The Next Generation, since most property on board the Enterprise is collective, and money no longer exists as a form of exchange within the Federation’s economic system. In fact, one might argue that the bodies of the crew members themselves have become the abstract property (in Deleuze’s sense of “abstract machinic” arrangements)7 of the moral capital established at the interface between Federation members and the all- encompassing surveillance mechanism within which they live and work. This device, the ship’s computer network, no longer represents the strictly visual surveillance that Foucault theorized, but is instead a kind of “infosensorium” internalized in the body-as-computer, with the result that the frontier of the body itself becomes “colonized” as a self-monitoring machine.8

     

    Not surprisingly, and despite the fact that the computer is used as frequently to obtain information about Federation staff as it is to investigate other, possibly hostile life forms, Star Trek viewers are discouraged from making an overt connection between the constitution of power relations and the surveillance of crew members. Instead, they are asked to see the computer as a direct extension of benign human agency, a tool no better than the individuals responsible for its use. Potential anxiety about the dangers of surveillance technology is further minimized– while, ironically, the process by which the body becomes machinic is advanced–by giving the computer a human counterpart. Ship’s counselor Deanna Troi, a genetic mixture of the human and Betazoid races, has inherited powers of mental telepathy that enable her to bring others’ hidden emotions to light much in the same way that a computer probe can determine their physical structure.9 However, the counselor escapes becoming the mere agent of surveillance practice in large part because, as she is also portrayed, she is a feminine woman who loves chocolate, gossip, and romantic settings. Channelled through this familiar and nonthreatening human personality, Troi’s telepathic powers emerge as little more than a refined form of “female intuition.” Thus, while the television viewer may be able to trivialize her role as a Federation officer, it is almost impossible to imagine Troi as an alien endowed with the potential to “access” human minds.

     

    As these examples suggest, surveillance technology intersects frontier ideology at the level of the distinction between self and other. The concept of an “imperial self” is especially important: regardless of a given Star Fleet officer’s race, that officer’s success as a member of the Federation is contingent on how closely his or her actions correspond to the specifically human ideals of hard work, loyalty, and compassion; aliens, on the other hand, are those who do not willingly subordinate their cultural impulses to the dominant model. For the American television viewer, this ought to be a familiar concept, since it is directly analogous to the commonly held belief that marginalized peoples should be accepted only to the extent that they assimilate white, middle-class notions of culture and value. Dissent among Star Fleet officers, when it occurs, is thus an effect not of bad Federation policy, but rather of covert intrusions from the outside which conspire to make Federation personnel “other”–much in the same way that rising suburban crime rates are thought to result not from discriminatory U.S. economic policies, but instead from the immigration of ethnic minorities into predominantly white neighborhoods. Likewise, aliens who serve as members of Star Fleet Command must continually prove their allegiance to the Federation, usually through confrontations with their native cultures that are designed to reconfirm the superior ideological position they have adopted. For instance, the program’s Klingon Security Officer, Lieutenant Commander Worf, has not merely chosen to join the Federation; his father has been wrongly denounced as a traitor by the Klingon High Council, a mistake that makes Worf “alien” to his own people while at the same time showcasing the autocratic, rash, and narrow-minded impulses of the Klingon race.

     

    Ultimately, characters like Worf allow Star Trek‘s writers a convenient means of circumventing the Prime Directive, since all such characters engage in a continual conversion to the Federation’s higher goals and principles. Moreover, as the figure of one-of-a-kind android Data suggests, the conversion must take place even when there are no originary cultural impulses to challenge those of the Federation. Lieutenant Commander Data’s ambition to become “more human” in particular belies the facile multiculturalism implied both by ordinances like the Prime Directive and by Star Fleet’s ready tolerance of other cultures’ cursory habits of mind–their holidays, foods, ornamental objects, etc.. Designed to resemble an anatomically correct Caucasian male, Data is a perpetual human drag show whose attempts at imitation result in a series of comedic postures. Despite the fact that they may initially suggest multiplicity or play,10 Data’s approximations reaffirm, in the long run, the forces of social hegemony on board the Enterprise, since, of course, these gestures signify each time the dominant rather than suggest an alternative ideological commitment. Data’s choice to become the same thus points once again to the surveillance mechanisms that, in a Foucauldian sense, constitute disciplinary power: by watching, acting, imitating, Data demonstrates how “the effects of power” circulate “through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions” (Foucault, 151-2).

     

    III. High Plains Data

     

    In all the ideological assumptions that Star Trek: The Next Generation and its American television viewers share, a complex and contradictory notion of individualism predominates. Just as we are encouraged to “be ourselves” and are at the same time bombarded by stimuli that ensure dominant forms of mimetic desire, just as we are trained to believe that “all people are created equal” while at the same time asked to compete in an economy that routinely discriminates against women and minorities, so does Star Trek‘s position contend that individualism is both desired and improbable. I have already suggested the extent to which the program’s tacit imperialism complicates notions of autonomy and difference. Here, I would like to comment on Star Trek‘s attitude toward radical individualism. On the one hand, the program advocates personal achievement and self-determination, two individualistic qualities necessary for movement within the Federation’s ranks. Captain Picard, for instance, has achieved his dominant status precisely because he is willing to take risks and work outside the strict parameters of the law. It is important to realize, however, that Picard’s autonomy is contingent on an ideological commitment to and ideal understanding of the status quo so strong that even his insubordination constitutes obedience to the Federation’s larger goals and principles; in attaining the highest position of power, Picard has become synonymous with power and its agencies alike. By constrast, the radicial individual invariably poses a threat to both ship operations and the cooperative efforts of Star Fleet Command. Frequent episodes demonstrate that individual crew members who have succumbed to the invasive influence of some alien culture or identity must be subdued, brought back in line; moreover, given the extent to which Federation culture is meant to exemplify the most advanced stage in a strict teleological progression, individuals who evince revolutionary or renegade tendencies often come to be associated with the past.11

     

    “Time’s Arrow,” the two-part episode which features Samuel Clemens, is readily able to engage this process by which radical individualism is marginalized and suppressed, since the story’s premise involves travel to a time which most U.S. citizens recognize as one of vigilantes and solitary gunmen. The first episode in particular draws on the American frontier’s symbolic resonance to construct a contrast between past and future habits of mind. It begins with the discovery that archaeologists have unearthed android Data’s decapitated head from a cavern beneath twenty-fourth century San Francisco alongside “several artifacts from the 1800s–a watch, eyeglasses, a gun.”12 That Data’s positronic circuitry should be placed alongside items which Federation technology has rendered obsolete makes immediately clear the juncture between past and future. But the decision to focus on Data is also more subtly significant. Data’s state of Deleuzian “human- becoming”13 places the android in a perfect position to confront the frontier past, since not only do self- fashioning and a lack of feeling define both the android’s and the Hollywood outlaw’s %modus operandi%; Data’s unique status as a life form makes him the ideal candidate to assume a guise of radical otherness.

     

    In fact, the first part of “Time’s Arrow” features Data as a type of the “man with no name” persona Clint Eastwood has popularized in westerns like High Plains Drifter. Having unwittingly followed a group of aliens through the time portal that connects the planet Devidia Two with nineteenth-century Earth, Data finds himself on the streets of frontier San Franscisco armed with nothing but his clothing and Star Fleet communicator badge. He immediately uses the latter as collateral in a poker game, earning him both the means to continue researching the mystery of his anachronistic “death” and the admiration of bellboy Jack London, who becomes his faithful sidekick. Data’s success in manipulating the economic resources around him to serve his own interests and his ability to command respect despite the fact that he occupies a position of complete anonymity are only two features he shares with Eastwood’s nameless drifter. Though motivated by a sense of urgency ostensibly unrelated to the concerns of those around them, both figures form a temporary alliance with certain of these others in order to overpower a common enemy. Thus, Data’s search for the cause of his own destruction becomes inextricably bound with Star Fleet’s investigation into a series of deaths on nineteenth-century earth; these deaths, attributed to cholera but really the work of aliens from the planet Devidia Two, give common, humanitarian cause to Data’s mission while at the same time displacing the role of radical otherness from the android to the parasitic Devidians, who have travelled back in time to feed on human energy.

     

    That Lieutenant Commander Data’s presence in frontier America can be justified only when the android undermines his claim to individuality finally separates him from the character Eastwood portrays in High Plains Drifter. The drifter, a ghost who has returned for the most personal of reasons–to avenge his death–can never transcend the limitations of this condition to join the citizens with whom he has organized; the spectre from some existential spirit world, he must remain adrift and solitary. The android’s limitations, on the other hand, guarantee that he reacts impersonally even to his own death. In fact, far from sensing a need to vindicate himself, Data considers his disembodied head to suggest a point of commonality between him and the humans he emulates; he “seems to take solace in the fact that he is now mortal” (6). The obvious point is that androids cannot feel for themselves. It is also worth noting, however, that Data has been cast in the role of Hollywood outlaw not so much because of his facile resemblance to this figure, but because he is the character least able to carry the role to its logical conclusions. Just as Data can do no more than approximate the actions of his human counterparts, so can he do no more than signify an image of radical individualism already contained and commodified by American consumer culture.

     

    IV. The Viewer “Sitting in Darkness”14

     

    Data is not the only figure in “Time’s Arrow” to occupy a commodified position. The two-part episode also features a representation of Samuel Clemens that relies heavily on the writer as a familiar cultural icon. Despite the fact that Clemens left San Franscisco in 1866, at the age of thirty-one, the show depicts him in the guise of the white-haired, white-suited curmudgeon whom Americans readily recognize–in large part because a white-haired, white-suited automaton “Mark Twain”15 greets millions of visitors each year to Disney’s Frontierland. Representations like Disney’s serve to foster an image of the writer as presiding over and to some extent creating our frontier past; that Clemens has come for so many Americans to signify this past may account for Star Trek‘s willingness to make him–rather than a sheriff, mayor or other politician–the proper authority to negotiate between the time travelers and their nineteenth-century ancestors. However, Star Trek grants this position of unprecedented power to a literary figure only on the condition that Clemens remain a commodified cultural object. The program’s underlying message is that oppositional thought, like radical individualism, must either be suppressed or contained within the dominant ideological structure.

     

    Interestingly, Clemens enters the program’s narrative as an oppositional and potentially disruptive force. After eavesdropping on a conversation in which he discovers that Data is an “invader” from the future, Clemens explains to a San Franscisco reporter that he “wrote a book about” time travel which “chronicles the tale of a man of our era who fouls Sixth Century by introducing newfangled gadgets and weapons, all in the name of progress” (9). This frankly anti-imperialist gloss of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court16 typifies Clemens’s initial response to the Federation, whose motives he compares to those of the Spanish, Dutch, and Portugese (11). Skeptical about whether the U.S.S. Enterprise can really be a “ship of peace,” the writer objects that this is “what all conquerors say” (11); he also resists Star Fleet operations by stealing into Data’s hotel room, sabotaging the android’s “time-shift detection device,” threatening members of the crew’s “away team” at gun point, and thwarting Picard’s entry back through the time portal.

     

    Insofar as Clemens works to undermine what he perceives as a threat to “all humanity” (9), his actions are not unlike the patriotic resistance efforts of General Washington, Joan of Arc, and deposed Phillippine leader Emilio Aquinaldo, whose ideals Clemens thought should be “held in reverence by the best men and women of all civilizations.”17 Far from seeming heroic, however, Clemens’s solitary efforts to save his race are made to appear intrusive and wrong-headed. His chief mistake, the episode makes clear, lies in an inability to see the “real menace” (9). “Newfangled gadgets and weapons” are not the problem; as one of the Enterprise crew explains to Clemens, technological advances have led to “the end of poverty and the cooperative ways of the United Federation of Planets” (11). The problem is instead the Devidians, who have used advanced technology for the purpose of harvesting, storing, and consuming human energy. The Devidians–not members of the U.S.S. Enterprise–are the “real” imperialists; even the fact that the deaths for which they are responsible have been attributed to cholera suggests a comparison with North America’s first European colonists, who spread this and other communicable diseases to the native population. That the aliens have traveled to nineteenth-century San Francisco in order to obtain their “only source of nourishment” (11), moreoever, suggests that imperialist activity is somehow particular to America’s frontier past. Certainly, this is the lesson Samuel Clemens learns. “Slightly less cynical” by the program’s end, the writer not only claims that his discovery of the twenty- fourth-century time travelers constitutes his “greatest adventure”; he thanks Data “for helping a bitter old man to open his eyes and see that the future turned out pretty well” (12).

     

    By priviledging an image of Clemens as the teller of “great adventures” and displacing his anti-imperialist sentiments with expressions of vaguely patriotic optimism, Star Trek encourages its viewers to contextualize his work in a way that undermines the full complexity even of those aspects it engages. And insofar as the process by which Clemens evolves from “bitter old man” to advocate for an enlightened future relies on the substitution of one discrete ideological position for another–insofar as it relies, that is, on the substitution of a “mistaken” position for the “truthful” one–the program actually neglects to engage one of the most salient features of his late work, its Nietzschean skepticism. According to Clemens, no one group or civilization may claim the right to dominate another on the ground that it occupies a superior ethical position; each is instead alike in “knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government,” and “each [is] proud of its fancied supremacy.”18 He also dismisses outright the concept of altruism, one of those qualities to which we have attached a “misleading meaning.” Charity, benevolence, and self- sacrifice exist for Clemens only to the extent that they serve to gratify individual “self-approval”; a man must content “his own spirit first–the other person’s benefit has to always take second place.”19

     

    These ideas go far toward explaining Clemen’s specific objections to imperialist policy. Consider, for instance, the following passage from his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”:

     

    The Blessings-of-Civilization trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. . . . But Christendom . . . has been so eager to get at every stake . . . that the People who Sit in Darkness . . . have become suspicious of the Blessing of Civilization. More, they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessing of Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be better, in a dim light. (286)

     

    He continues by noting that this package of exported “blessings”

     

    is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. (287)

     

    Clemens not only shows how imperialists commodify values like “Love,” “Gentleness,” and “Mercy” (286) in order to manufacture a fair business exchange out of what might otherwise be seen as the exploitation of another culture; he also suggests that for the “Person in Darkness” to accept the “Blessings-of-Civilization” package, she must learn to value “mere outside covers” more than “actual things.” Thus Clemens considers ideology–not “progress” or “newfangled gadgets”20–the imperialist’s most powerful tool of oppression. That is why, at the conclusion of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, all Hank Morgan’s firepower and “civilizing” inventions together cannot undermine the foundations of Catholicism; that is why, at the end of “The War Prayer” (1904-5), the “aged stranger” who asks those around him to reconsider their use of Christianity as a justification for violence is dismissed as a “lunatic” by the rest of the congregation (682). Clemens would have been especially wary of a society like the United Federation of Planets, which claims that advanced weapons and technology have enabled altruism, since for him all “material advantage” amounts to “the same thing”; it cannot change the fact that human beings “seek the contentment of [a] spirit” which is “indifferent to . . . man’s good” and is intent only on “satisfying its own desires.”21

     

    In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Clemens acknowledges not only that successful strategies for marketing a benevolent American identity are necessary “for the sake of Business,” but that it is the skillful communicator’s duty to “arrange [the other culture’s] opinions for [it]” (291). What was once the imperialist’s imperative is now, in today’s “global economy,” the duty of those corporate agencies that manufacture televisual and other mass-produced representations for the purpose of securing control over the world’s consumer marketplace. A recent trend in cultural studies has been to suggest that such representations can produce a wide spectrum of possible responses, including those conducive to the exploration and transformation of our routinized selves. This assumption, formulated in part to counter the belief that film, television, and popular fiction are “low” media, the opiate of an easily manipulated mass audience, has yielded a great deal of useful material.22 Nonetheless, I think it is possible to overstate the progressive impact televised subject matter has on individuals, regardless of their socio-economic status or educational background. The danger lies in focussing too much on the cultural critic’s attempt to rescript an isolated representation or set of representations for the purpose of empowering marginal discourse, while at the same time downplaying the economic dominance of those managerial forces responsible for placing the representation in its original televised context. For instance, Constance Penley’s article “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture” demonstrates how fanzine versions of the relationship between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock reconceptualize ways of looking at gendered and sexual identity in order to serve interests not addressed by the Star Trek series.23 However, the fact that certain fans have rescripted the show’s intended parameters by no means changes Star Trek‘s patriarchal treatment of women or its dismissal of romantic relationships in favor of such male gendered themes as aggression and conflict. Nor does Penley’s article explain why the same fans whose stories transform Kirk from a womanizer into Spock’s willing sex partner feel that the feminist agenda implicit in the transformation is one they must repudiate. One might in fact argue, as Penley herself suggests,24 that the tension between these two marginal discourses–“slash lit” and feminism–effectively reveals the power of hegemonic ideological representations not only to dominate the mainstream, but also to make difficult any form of sustained collective resistance to it.

     

    But it is also important to realize the extent to which dominant managerial positions can retain their power even though they learn to “sell” marginal representations, a point that becomes apparent when the discussion moves from naturalized gender roles on the first Star Trek series to naturalized versions of the imperial self on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The product of two distinct historical periods–one in which the Women’s Movement had not yet begun to gain a popular American audience, the other in which “Reaganomics” owed its success to arms’ proliferation and U.S. intervention in third-world countries such as Panama and Nicaragua–each television series may be said to contain ideological concerns that reflect and generate contemporary anxieties about the infiltration of a potentially disruptive “other” into the mainstream.25 Where the two differ is in the degree to which they see both the marginalization of women and the colonization of consumer subjects as necessary for corporate capitalism’s growth and perpetuation. While it is possible to coopt women into the system as producers, and therefore to enfranchise interests like feminism, women as a group are just one target in corporate capitalism’s ongoing need to colonize a subject, whatever its provisional “frontier.” Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s reconstitution of an imperialist ideology thus mirrors the more general process by which television programs work to colonize, represent, and even produce consumer interests. The containment and commodification of alternative discourse–especially that which, like Clemens’s, questions the nature of capitalism itself–is a necessary part of the process. Given this conundrum, one thing is certain: although cultural critics must continue to examine the progressive possibilities that exist in popular social texts such as Star Trek, we must also align our analyses of diverse cultural representations with an examination of the monolithic cultural capital that commodifies diversity for profit, while threatening to manage our critical attention as well.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Many thanks to the readers at Postmodern Culture, and to Paul Trembath, for helping with the revision of this essay.

     

    2.The latest Gene Roddenberry spin-off, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, suggests a resurgence of interest in the frontier as a place both of infinite possibility and of violence, hardship, and continual strife; this change from Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s view of space as predominantly colonized, ordered, and governed may reflect the U.S.’s recent swing from years of Reagan prosperity to the current economic recession and a renewed interest in libertarian politics.

     

    3.The threat of world hunger and the depletion of our natural resources pose two of the greatest challenges to the environmental, economic, and humanitarian policy of our century.

     

    4.Recent episodes have attempted to provide an explanation for some of these phenomena. For instance, the preponderance of humanoid life forms in the galaxy is the result of one ancient species’ having centuries ago seeded several planets with its own DNA; thus, there is a “real,” not merely coincidental, genetic kinship among the Cardassian, human, Klingon, and Romulan races. Similarly, the Enterprise computer’s “universal translator” is responsible for making sure that all communication on board the ship is conducted in English. These justifications are merely cosmetic, however, and do little to explain the show’s decidedly anglo-centric bias, a condition that is behind the program’s decision to designate English as the Federation’s official language in the first place. Other evidence for the bias includes our solar system’s designation as sector “001,” and the fact that the Federation’s prestigious Star Fleet Academy is housed not just on planet Earth, but in the city of San Francisco.

     

    5. Thinking about the frontier remains foundational as long as one assumes that the progression from “here” to “there” is unilaterally one-dimensional. New writing on the frontier discards this belief, stressing instead what Gayatri Spivak calls the “interanimating relationship” between margin and center. In the forefront of such work is Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987). The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (Texas A & M University Press, 1989) also works to challenge traditional notions of the frontier by approaching the idea of “new territory” from a number of possible angles, including canon formation and ethnic studies.

     

    6. Just a few of the many recently published books which consider the ethics of wildlife and resource management are Walter Truett Anderson’s To Govern Evolution (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (N.Y.: Cambridge, 1986); Bill Devall’s and George Session’s Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985); and Rosemary Rodd’s Biology, Ethics, and Animals (N.Y.: Oxford, 1990). Views on the subject range from Anderson’s belief that it is lamentable but imperative that people act on the behalf of other species to Devall’s and Session’s call for human beings to assume a decentered subject position in relation to the world that both surrounds and encompasses us.

     

    7. For an explanation of this sense of the word “machinic,” see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983), 36-41; for a discussion of “abstract” machines see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 1989), 131-5 and 145-9. For a critique of Foucault’s “panoptic” view of power as it can apply to Star Trek‘s computerized re-centralization of power in Federation bodies, see Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 11-12, and Arthur Kroker and David Kook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 170-81. In the terms of this paper, Deleuze and Baudrillard are uncharacteristically compatible, since both Deleuze’s notion of “machinic arrangements” and Baudrillard’s notion of “dead power” theorize power as a field of immanence which is neither centrist nor diffuse, but rather effected in the collective attentions of bodies themselves. Such a view of power explains the absolute coextensivity of computer monitors to Federation bodies aboard the Enterprise–a coextensivity within which power is so all-pervasive it virtually disappears into the experience of “life” itself.

     

    8. For a discussion of the body as a kind of “frontier” whose power to affect and be affected is always open to decoding and re-territorialization–particularly in the alluring presence of capital–see Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalism,” in The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia U Press, 1993), 241-44.

     

    9. There is in fact some claim for describing Troi as the computer’s offspring–at least insofar as the same actress who plays Troi’s mother (Majel Barrett) also speaks the part of the Enterprise’s voice-activated computer.

     

    10. Butler, for instance, suggests that “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself–as well as its contingency” (137).

     

    11. For this reason, both Federation uniforms and Federation equipment are pictured as sleek, spare, and antiseptic. The self-willed Klingon “warrior,” by contrast, assumes a Beowulfian guise and inhabits a ship the contents of which are as dark and labrynthian as any medieval hall’s.

     

    12. Quotations from “Time’s Arrow: Part One” (teleplay by Joe Menosky and Michael Piller) and “Time’s Arrow: Part Two” (teleplay by Jeri Taylor) are taken from John Sayer’s synopses of both episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Official Magazine 23 (’92-’93 season): 6-8; 9-12. The current citation comes from page six. All future references to either episode will appear parenthetically.

     

    13. See Deleuze’s and Parnet’s chapter, “A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?” (1-35), for a discussion of “becomings.” Although Star Trek defines the goal to become human as a goal to become the same–and as such precludes the Deleuzian possibility of an invention of “new forces” (5)–the program constantly exploits Data’s non-human status to produce multiple plots, multiple variations on a theme, multiple encounters, so that there is what might more productively be called the constant illusion of Data’s becoming.

     

    14. Clemens’s essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) was a response to America’s role in the Boxer Rebellion.

     

    15. To mention Clemens’s famous pseudonym is implicitly to acknowledge the extent to which the writer commodified his own identity in order to facilitate the sale of his work. Throughout this essay, however, I have not only deliberately avoided noting the many, sometimes glaring inconsistencies between the opinions Clemens expressed in the form of political satire and the actions of his daily life; I have also attempted to engage the writer only at the level of his work. Not surprisingly, Star Trek collapses Clemens’s ideas and life into a single “personality.” At their farewell meeting, Picard expresses a wish that “time would have allowed [him] to know [Clemens] better,” to which the writer replies: “You’ll just have to read my books . . . . What I am is pretty much there” (12).

     

    16. Star Trek‘s reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court again illustrates the program’s tendency to simplify Clemens’s work. In fact, as Werner Sollors points out, the novel is not easily reduced to a clear or stable interpretation; it has been “embattled by interpreters” who question whether it constitutes “light and humorous praise of worthy progress” or is instead “a bitter and gloomy anticipation of the century of nuclear holocausts and mass genocides” (291).

     

    17. Samuel Clemens, “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million,” 52.

     

    18. Samuel Clemens, “What is Man,” 399.

     

    19. “What is Man,” 352, 342.

     

    20. Clemens, in fact, was fascinated by inventions and “newfangled gadgets.” As John Lauber notes in the preface to his biography of the writer, he was even “an inventor in a small way, patenting a self-pasting scrapbook and a self-adjusting vest strap, copyrighting a game to teach historical facts, even imagining microprint” (xi).

     

    21. “What is Man,” 394, 393.

     

    22. For just a few of the many examples of work that rescripts dominant representations in the service of a more progressive agenda, see Patricia Mann’s work on agency, Micro-politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1994), Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford U Press, 1985), and John Ernest’s “Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” PMLA (Vol. 109, No. 3: May 1994), 424-438.

     

    23. Penley’s argument focusses on the phenomenon of “slash lit,” or the reconceptualization of the platonic friendship between a televisual “buddy” pair like Kirk and Spock in the form of a sexually explicit gay relationship.

     

    24. She comments: “We would indeed love to take this fandom as an exemplary case of female appropriation of, resistence to, and negotiation with mass-produced culture. And we would also like to be able to use a discussion of K/S [the “slash” relationship between Kirk and Spock] to help dislodge the still rigid positions in the feminist sexuality debates around fantasy, pornography, and S & M. But if we are to do so it must be within the recognition that the slashers do not feel they can express their desires for a better, sexually liberated, and more egalitarian world through feminism; they do not feel they can speak as feminists, they do not feel that feminism speaks for them” (492).

     

    25. The shift from naturalized representations of gender to naturalized representations of the imperial self is announced even in each program’s introductory remarks. While the crew of Star Trek‘s Enterprise embark on their voyage of discovery “where no man has gone before,” the postfeminist members of The Next Generation venture “where no one has gone.”

    Works Cited

     

    • Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Clemens, Samuel. “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million.” The Atlantic Monthly 269 (April 1992): 52-65.
    • —. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. and with an introduction by Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
    • —. “The War Prayer.” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. Neider. Doubleday, 1963.
    • —. “What is Man?” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. Neider. Doubleday, 1963.
    • Deleuze, Gilles, and Clair Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia, 1987.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: The Invention of the Other.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Gordon, Colin, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
    • Lauber, John. The Invention of Mark Twain. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.
    • Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Ed. and with and introduction by C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 1988.
    • Penley, Constance. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Sollors, Werner. “Ethnicity.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Lentriccia, Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1990.
    • Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984.
    • Willis, Susan. A Primer for Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 1991.

     

  • Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century

    Jonathan Beller

    Literature Department
    Duke University

     

     

    The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society.

     

    –Karl Marx, Grundrisse

     

    Cinema 3: Towards a Dialectical Film of the Cinema (Books)

     

    What is cinema? By posing the infamous question yet again I mean to set forth the task of thinking the development of the concept of cinema and of cinema itself in terms of political economy and social organization.

     

    Let me begin this kind of thinking about cinema with a quick discussion of the “Capital Cinema” shown and shown up by the Coen brothers in their 1992 film, Barton Fink. In the film, Capital Cinema is the name of the late 1930s pre-war Hollywood production studio which, according to the story, makes cinematic expression possible. This company, as a representative of the studio system, is used by the Coen brothers to demonstrate that cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation and an economic form, that is, a site of economic production. As factory and as economic system cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and its war economy. As a factory of representation Capital Cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, Capital Cinema dictates limits to forms of consciousness per se.

     

    The film Barton Fink, in which the Jewish writer Barton (John Turturro) falls from celebrated playwright to abject existentialist hack as he tries to make the shift from New York playwrighting to Los Angeles screen writing, is about the spaces and sensibilities which fall out of (are absent from) a cinema which is a fully functioning component of the capitalist economy. The movement from New York to Los Angeles marks the movement for Barton, but also for representation in general, into a new era. The climax of the film occurs when the film confronts the limits of its own conditions of representation.

     

    Indeed, the thesis of Barton Fink is that there remains an unrepresentable for cinema: experience that refuses commodification. Although such unrepresentability of experience occurs in the film via specific instantiations of race (Jewishness), gender (the wife who has written all of her alcoholic husband’s books), sex (the homoerotic tensions in the hotel room scenes) and class (the inner life of the encyclopedia salesman), it is perhaps even more interesting to think about invisibility as a general case in capital cinema–a predicament of disenfranchised elements in others and in ourselves. The writer Barton is trying to create a script about the real man, about “everyman,” but when the film finally encounters everyman’s never told biography, the biography of the failed encyclopedia salesman (John Goodman) and the biography that Barton, being preoccupied with his script, has not had the time to listen to, the encounter is and can only be indirect, off-screen as it were, and that, as a crisis. At the moment of the encounter between cinema and the experience of “everyman,” a conflagration erupts. Inside the frame the film set is burnt, while outside the frame in the space beyond the film the very edges of the frame burst and flame–the medium literally self-destructs as the reality principle of the film is destroyed in the confrontation of its limits.1 As a film steeped in the protocols of profit, the particular experiences of Goodman’s mad encyclopedia salesman, that is, the myriad experiences of failure in capitalism, fall below the threshold of knowing possible in capital cinema and are precipitated only as effects. These effects, much like a labor strike, confront the mode of production as a crisis and halt its smooth functioning. The experience of Everyman, nearly uncommodifiable by definition, cannot be represented in Capital Cinema.2 Its emergence threatens to destroy the medium itself.

     

    If consciousness in late capitalism, generally speaking, functions like (as) cinema–relatively unable to think beyond the exigencies of capital, then it is important to note at the outset that cinema as consciousness is overdetermined by capital regulation. Cinema, as money that thinks, fuses the protocols of representation and capitalist production. This claim remains relatively unproblematic until one takes cinema not only as a form of representation but as consciousness itself. The idea, simply put, is that something like the Coen brothers’ Capital Cinema manufactures not just films, but consciousness in general, complete with its possibilities and lacunae.3 This consciousness can be shown to be hegemonic if what I call the cinematic mode of production has fully infiltrated (some aspects of) our minds and converted them into money that thinks. Such thinking money is money of a special form, not money as a mere medium of exchange but, in short, money as capital. The screenwriter for the studio, like the professor for the university and the citizen for the state must be a source of profit. Capital consciousness has a variety of perceptual possibilities, thresholds and limits. In explaining this idea more fully it will be useful to turn to the cinema of Deleuze’s cinema books, that is, to a cinema conceived as consciousness par excellence. Although Deleuze does not dwell on the relationship between cinema and consciousness per se, cinema, at least in its incarnation in the masterpiece, is for him the ur-form of consciousness which challenges state-forms, the very process of mechinic assemblage. No longer a consciousness pared down and limited by the constraints of a body, of a subject, of a state, and no longer a consciousness taken as ideal, cinema in the cinema books is expanded consciousness, consciousness unbound–free-ranging, multi-perspectival and rigorously material– consciousness itself.

     

    My present motivation for such an inquiry into the political economy of consciousness and hence of cinema, as well as for an inquiry into the Cinema of Deleuze, is suggested by the idea of “cultural imperialism.” In as much as the phrase suggests not just “culture,” but “imperialism” as well, and in as much as we keep in mind that imperialism is an economic undertaking as well as an ideological and libidinal one, this phrase today remains an incomplete thought. I mean to suggest here that whatever the project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the presence of the fantasy called Postcoloniality.4 Rather, as world poverty indexes readily show, the pauperization process is intensifying. The “expiration” of national boundaries and the so-called “obsolescence” of the nation state only imply that these national forms are being superseded (sublated) even as they continue to do their work.5 The thesis here is that cinema and cinematic technologies– television, telecommunications, computing, automation–provide some of the discipline and control once imposed by earlier forms of imperialism. Furthermore, the media work to organize previous forms of discipline and control, which remain extant. Transnationalism, which finds its very conditions of possibility in computing, telecommunications and mass media, implies that these media are playing a fundamental role in new modes of value production and value transfer. The cinema, I shall be arguing, is a first instance of these other “higher forms” of mediation. With the globalization of capital it may turn out that economic expansion is presently less a geographical project and more a matter of capturing the interstitial activities and times between the already commodified endeavors of bodies. Every movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value. I am speaking here of media as cybernetics, of capital expansion positing the body as the new frontier.

     

    We are thus dealing with two distinct yet interactive sets of relations here. In the first set, capital cinema regulates perception and therefore certain pathways to the body. It is in this sense that it functions as a kind of discipline and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor process (e.g., Taylorization). The second moment, related yet distinct from the first, is the positing by capital cinema of a value- productive relationship which can be exploited–i.e., a tapping of the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value.

     

    Before turning to Deleuze I would like to sketch in brief some of the basic characteristics of the larger project upon which I am currently working, provisionally entitled The Cinematic Mode of Production, and then to show how such a project might occasion a rethinking of Deleuze’s cinema books. My argument with respect to Deleuze is that the cinematic mode of production as a world historical moment is already implicit in Deleuze’s work; it is immanent. However, in the name of and desire for a “non-fascist politics,” he represses the concept of the mode of production generally in and as the concept of “the machinic assemblage.” Though it is immanent, Deleuze refuses to think cinema in dialectical relation to capital.6

     

    The Cinematic Mode of Production

     

    The Cinematic Mode of Production proposes a situation and a name for the dominant mode of production during the historical period that begins at the turn of our century and is just now drawing to a close. During this period capitalism and its administrators organize the world more and more like a film: modern commodity production becomes a form of montage. Much as film stock travels along a particular pathway, eventually to produce a film-image, capital travels along its pathways to produce commodities. As in the assembly of films, capital is edited while moving through its various determinations in commodity production. Today, with the convergence of the once separate industries for image and other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity par excellence), we are in a better position than ever before to see the global dynamics of the cinematic mode of production and to reckon some of its consequences.

     

    The key hypotheses and claims of my work are:

     

    1) Cinema simultaneously images and enacts the circulation of economic value. It images the patterns of circulation of economic value itself (capital).7

     

    2) This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor. I should emphasize here that all previous forms of capitalized labor remain intact; however, looking as labor represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction. Though this tendency is becoming dominant, which is to say that the relationship between consciousness and the state is more important than ever before, all previous forms of exploitation continue. When a visual medium operates under the strictures of private property, the work done by its consumer can, like ground rent, be capitalized and made to accrue to the proprietor of the medium. In other words, some people make a profit from other people’s looking. The ways in which this profit is produced and channeled fundamentally defines the politics of cultural production and the state.

     

    3) Such a revolutionary method for the extraction of value from the human body has as profound an effect on all aspects of social organization as did the assembly line–it changes the dynamic of sight forever, initiating what can be thought of as a visual economy. As I shall sketch briefly, this economy has been developing for some time.

     

    4) Understood as a technology capable of submitting the eye to a new disciplinary regime, cinema may be taken as a model for the many technologies which in effect take the machine off the assembly line and bring it to the body in order to mine it for labor power (value).8

     

    5) The advent of such a new method of value-transport and value-extraction demands a new contribution to the critique of political economy.9

     

    The hypothesis that vision, and more generally human attention, are today productive of economic value can be supported by showing that the labor theory of value, especially as discussed by Marx, is a specific instance of a more general hypothesis which is possible concerning the production of value. This I call the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention, or the attention theory of value. It is derived from the way in which capital process occupies human time in the cinema and in other media. Assuming for the moment that human attention is a value-adding commodity sought by capitalized media, it can be shown that if to look is to labor, then at least a partial solution to the dilemma posed to the political economist by the very persistence of capitalism presents itself. We should recall that for the radical political economist today, capitalism thrives in apparent violation of the labor theory of value and the law of the falling rate of profit. These two limitations on the expansion of capital cause Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and others to predict a critical mass for capital–a catastrophic point beyond which it cannot expand. Unable to expand and hence unable to turn a profit, fully globalized capital, remember, was expected to self-destruct. The law of value was to have been overcome and a world in which any of us, should we so desire, could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize at night was to have come into being. Clearly, and despite the globalization of capital, this auto-annihilation has not happened. I am suggesting that, from the standpoint of capital, as geographical limitations are in the process of being fully overcome by capital, capital posits the human body as the next frontier.10

     

    In order to follow the developmental trajectory of ever expanding capital (of which cinema is so crucial a part) one must give thorough consideration to the cyberneticization of the flesh–what Virilio calls “the habitation of metabolic vehicles.”11 Like the road itself (the productive value of which Marx intuited but never showed), such machine-body interfaces clearly shift the distribution of the body over its machinic linkages, opening up many more sites and times for the production of value, multiplying, as it were, the number of possible work sites. Capital expands not only outwards, geographically, but burrows into the flesh. This corkscrewing inward has profound consequences on life-forms. Seeing how modern visual technology tools the body for new labor processes during the twentieth century suggests parallel studies of other arts, technologies and periods, past, present and future. Art as cultural artifact is interesting, but art and culture as technology shot through with historical, libidinal and visual necessity promises a more compelling account of human (cybernetic) transformations. The technologically articulated body does not undergo transformation in order to merely reflect new social relations or express new desires; the retooling it undergoes is endemic to the economics of social production and reproduction–a necessary development of social relations.

     

    Because cinema as a perceptual medium is nothing less than the development of a new medium for the production and circulation of value, a medium no less significant in the transformation of human relations than the railroad track or the highway, human endeavors generally grouped together under the category “humanities” and (perhaps) once experienced as realms of relative freedom can be, and are being figured as economically productive. The entire history of cinema remains as a testament to this practice; advertising, television and culture generally today testify to it.

     

    Certain relationships between looking and value already are and will continue to become sites of extensive legislation and political struggle. The Mapplethorpe photos, the pink triangle, English words in French advertising, and images of sex in American films shown in the Philippines are examples of some of these relationships; others include corporate competition for industry standards in High Definition Television, satellite communications and computing. Here, at the most general level, I am speaking about the commodification of culture and mediation, about culture as an interface between bodies and the world system. Much work has already been done on this problem of the commodification of culture, but none is fully conscious of the problem of the quantitative as opposed to the merely qualitative or metaphorical capitalization of culture.12 A sense of the quantification of cultural value as capital proper begins to shed light on how radical indeed the qualitative shifts in culture have become. The corollary here is that academic, philosophical, historical and aesthetic concerns are essential aspects of socio-economic transformation– haptic processes that integrate the body with social production in general. The amalgamation of the labor involved in such process as the production of cultures, identities and desires, is already and will continue to be the way in which political blocs, however ephemeral, are formed and persist in postmodern society.

     

    The Movement-Image13

     

    As I mentioned, we might imagine for a moment that at a certain point in history (Taylorism and Fordism) the world began to be organized more and more like a film.14 As Geoffrey Nowell Smith points out, the form of assembly line production easily invokes montage–hence, the French phrase chaine de montage, but the circulation of capital itself may as well be thought of as a kind of cutting.15 Much as film stock is edited as it travels along a particular pathway to eventually produce a film-image, capital travels along its various pathways to produce commodities–it is edited as it moves through its various determinations in assembly line production. Like the screen on which one grasps the movement of cinematic production, capital is the standpoint or frame through which one can see the movement of value, the scene in which emerges a moment in the production process. Capital provides the frame through which one observes economic movement. The finished commodity or image (commodity- image) results from a “completed” set of movements. Cinema, then, is already implied by capital circulation; dialectical sublation is a slow form of film.16 Thus Marx’s Grundrisse, a Nike sneaker, and a Hollywood film all share certain systemic movements of capital to create their product/image.

     

    We can trace proto-cinematic technologies even further back in historical time. The standardized production of terra-cotta pots, the Roman minting of coins, the Gutenberg press and the lithograph mentioned by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” could all be taken as early forms of cinema.17 Like shutter, frame and filmstock, each technology mentioned above repeats a standardized and standardizing act while striking an image that subjugates the eye to a particular and consequential activity. From the recognition of money to the reading of print, these activities place the eye within the discipline of a visual economy which corresponds to the type and speed of the mode of production. For each mode of production there necessarily exists a particular scopic regime. With the advent of cinema and the speeding up of individual images to achieve what is called “the persistence of vision” (that is, the illusion of a smooth continuity of movement among individuated images) there was an equally dramatic and corresponding shift in the relation of the eye to economic production. From the historical moment of the viewer circulating before the paintings in a museum to the historical moment of images circulating before the viewer in the movie house, there is an utter transformation of the visual economy, marked not least by the movement from what Benjamin called “aura” to what today postmodern theory calls “simulacra.” This movement was accompanied by a changeover from yesterday’s ideology to today’s spectacle. With the increased speed of its visual circulation, the visible object undergoes a change of state. In apprehending it, the textures and indeed the very properties of consciousness are transformed.

     

    The Greek casts for terra-cottas and coinage, the woodcut, the printing press, the lithograph, the museum, all of which Benjamin elaborates as pre- cinematic forms of mechanical reproduction, are also all technologies designed, from one point of view, to capture vision and to subjugate it to the mechanics of various and successive interrelated economies. These forms of mechanical reproduction, with their standardized mechanisms and methods of imprinting are, in effect, early movies. That upon its emergence the “aura,” which Benjamin theorizes, is found not on the visual object but in the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived (it accompanies the gaze, the gazing) is consistent with Benjamin’s dialectical thesis that the sensorium is modified by the experience of the modern city. The development of film, like the development of the metropolis, is part of an economy which has profound effects on perception.18 That modernization modifies perception is also consistent with the dialectical notion that in the production and reproduction of their own conditions human beings modify themselves. Perception’s aura, I suggest, is the subjective experience of the objective commodification of vision.

     

    Because of the increased intensity of the image’s circulation, the simulacrum produced by mass media is, far more than the painted masterpiece, utterly emptied out and means only its own currency in circulation. The “original” and hence any possibility of the “copy” are liquidated in the frenzy of the circulation of the postmodern image.19 With the pure simulacrum, we are looking at the pure fact of other people’s looking at a particular nodal point in media flow. The simulacrum is primarily an economic image; a touchstone for the frenetic circulation of the gaze.20

     

    Aura as “a unique distance” never was anything other than the slow boiling away of the visual object (the painting, for example) under the friction of its own visual circulation. The painting in the museum becomes overlaid with the accretions of the gazes of others on its surface. This statement is merely a reformulation in visual terms of Lukacs’ analysis of commodity reification: “underneath the cloak of a thing lay a relation between men [sic].”21 With the painted masterpiece, which, as a unique object, has been seen by so many others, the viewer’s image of it is necessarily measured against all other imagined viewers’ images. That is, his or her perception of it includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object–the sense of the number and of the kind of looks that it has commanded. This abstracted existence, which exists only in the socially mediated (museum reproductions, etc.) and imagined summation of the work of art’s meaning (value) for everyone else (society), accounts for the fetish character of the unique work of art. The relations of production in the production of the value of art are abstract and hence, because they have heretofore lacked a theory, hidden.22 Because the visual fetish emerges when one cannot see the visual object in its totality (the totality of looks in which it has circulated), we may grasp that part of the object’s value comes from its very circulation. The fetish character intimates a new value system; the aura intimates visual circulation in a visual economy. As I have proposed, this circulation is productive of value in the classical terms of the labor theory of value.23

     

    What Benjamin understood as “information”–that is, events, “shot through with explanation”–the rise of which coincides with the fall of the story, the decline of experience and the dawning of modernity, is now recognizable as a predominant feature of new forms of mediation in the capitalist economy.24 In the intensification of the logic of capitalist information society, the pure and immediate visible object becomes ever more recondite, the oceanic bond with it ever more distant. As the distance between the eye and the originary visual object approaches infinity, aura passes into simulacrum.25

     

    As with information, which must appear “understandable in itself,” and the coin, so with binary code and the media byte.26 The media byte is media understood in two determinations: 1) as its particular content, mediation in its synchronic form, and 2) as part of a system of circulation. As with all objective forms that must be reified (taken out of capital circulation, at least conceptually) in order to be constituted as objects, the media byte travelling at a certain speed (in the form of a nineteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, for example) has a fetish character or aura. As the image accelerates, the aura undergoes a change of state and becomes simulacrum. Simulacra travel so fast, circulate among so many gazes, that the content (as context, as socio-historical embeddedness) is sheared from the form, making the history of their production ungraspable. Indeed, to a certain extent the category “history” no longer applies to them. The simulacrum has value and nobody knows why. This result should be taken as a gloss on the famous phrase “the medium is the message.” The aura, in its conversion to simulacra, means the regime of mediation. The specter of the visible (aura) has become the substance of the visual (simulation). In the visual arena as well, exchange- value overtakes use-value, forcing vision itself to partake directly in the dynamics of exchange. Hence today there is an almost palpable integument overlaying society. This integument can no longer properly be described as “ideology” (since ideology is a concept welded to a narrative and therefore quasi- historical core), but is more adequately denoted by the term “spectacle.”27

     

    Aura, then, is to ideology as simulacrum is to spectacle. In the simulacrum, the particular content of a message, its use value, is converted into nothing but pure exchange value. The amplitude of the message itself is liquidated under the form that it takes. Media bytes realize their value as they pass through the fleshy medium (the body) via a mechanism less like consciousness and more like the organism undergoing a labor process–call it an haptic pathway. New synapses uniting brain and viscera are cut and bound. Internal organs quiver and stir. We arise from our seats in the cinema and before our television sets remade, fresh from a direct encounter with the dynamics of social production and reproduction.

     

    Properly speaking, contemporary media bytes do not have an aura, but have become simulacra. The term aura is better reserved for the painting hanging on the gallery wall–its circulation among gazes transpires at a slower speed. As I noted, the painting’s aura derives from the gap between what one sees and its status as a work of art in circulation. One covets the authentic knowledge of an object that is slowly boiling away under the gazes of passers-by only to be reassembled as an abstraction of what the many eyes that have gazed upon it might have seen. The painting becomes a sign for its own significance, a significance that is an artifact of its circulation through myriad sensoriums. Simulation occurs when visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation. Liquidated of its traditional consents and intimating the immensity of the world system, the affect of the visual object as simulacrum is sublime.

     

    Put simply, the aura is Benjamin’s name for the fetish character of vision.28 It is the watermark of the commodification of sight. The frustratingly mystical properties of the aura are due to the fact that it is the index of the suppression of the perception of visual circulation. The aura is the perception of an affect and indicates the moment where the visual object is framed by the eye with the desire to take it out of circulation. Like the fetish, it marks the desire to convert exchange value into use value, to free the object from the tyranny of circulation, and to possess it. The fetish character of the commodity is the result of capital’s necessary suppression of the knowledge of the underbelly of production, i.e., exploitation; it is the mystification of one’s relationship to the products for consumption. Here, this mystified relation, expressed most generally, is our inability to think the production of value through visual means, that is, our inability to thoroughly perceive the properties and dynamics of the attention theory of value in the production of aesthetic, cultural and economic value. The fetish marks the independent will of objects, their monstrous indifference to our puny desire, their sentience, that is the registration of their animation in circulation. Commodity fetishism is the necessary ruse and consequence of free enterprise, and its sublimity is the antithesis of social transparency. This sublimity is further intensified (as is social opacity) with simulation in the postmodern.29 The aura, as the visual component of the fetish, specifies the character of representation, visual and otherwise, under capitalism during the modern period. Simulation, which occurs at a higher speed and greater intensity of visual circulation, specifies the character of representation in the postmodern period.

     

    The Time-Image

     

    It is important to think for a moment that for Deleuze cinema is to our period what capital was to Marx’s. Of course the parallel is not strict since, if you will allow me to misrepresent both thinkers slightly, Capital is for Marx a matter of development, while Cinema is for Deleuze an ontological condition. However, I put it this way not because I want, with Deleuze, to posit cinema as consciousness par excellence, but because I want, against Deleuze, to make an historical claim for cinema as the consciousness par excellence of twentieth century capitalism.

     

    For Marx, Capital posited a universal history of which capital the idea was the culminating moment, in that it allowed us to grasp universal process. The name of the work, Capital, is the hypostatization of the machinic logic that had the world in its grip: a process as a thing (capital), which, when actualized as process (movement) unlocked the secret dynamics between the historical construction of the world and of consciousness. Capital the idea, with its ability to deploy the concepts developed in Capital, was precisely the consciousness of capitalism, at once the realization and representation of the material and conscious processes of capital itself: its specter, if you will. Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 can be taken also as names for modes of production, spectral projections of cinematic circulation in the discourse of philosophy.

     

    If “cinema” as the process and the sign for the dominant mode of production does not immediately have the same resonance as “capital,” one need only begin to think of cinematic relations as an extension of capitalist relations–the development of culture as a sphere of the production line. Thus cinema is at once a sign for itself as a phenomenon and its process, as well as a sign for capital as a phenomenon and its processes. Cinema here marks a phase in the development of capitalism and capital’s utter modification (metamorphosis) of all things social, perceptual, material.

     

    The cinema for Deleuze is nothing if it is not a force of deterritorialization. So too, we must remember, was capital for Marx: simultaneously the most productive and destructive force unleashed in human history. But the cinema, for Deleuze, is an industrial strength modifier of consciousness capable, in its strong form, of unweaving the most arborescent and solidified of thought formations, the most reified of perceptions–it annihilates traditional thought forms as well as tradition itself. Hence its attraction for philosophy. Cinema, like capital, is also a relentlessly material practice which can be recapitulated in the movement of concepts. Deleuze works “alongside” the cinema, producing cinema’s concepts in order to deploy cinema’s deterritorializing forces within the discourse of philosophy. This way of working is to be taken at once as a kind of representational verisimilitude, a performance of cinematic movement/time in the discourse of concepts, and also as a polemic against philosophy that takes on the statist forms purveyed by Freud, Lacan, Marx and other theorists whose work excises from the realm of possibility certain kinds of movements (desires) and blocks their becoming. Deleuze is interested here neither in ideology critique nor in psychoanalysis, the two dominant modes of film theory at the time of writing; he builds his assemblages around the work of auteurs, whom he takes as machines who produce certain distinct kinds of forms.

     

    To write cinema as an agent of deterritorialization, Deleuze eliminates most of it. He makes a distinction at the beginning of Cinema 1 between the work of the great directors–who are to be compared “not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers,” and all the rest of cinema’s products, what he calls, “the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematic production.”30 We will have to consider all of cinema, but for Deleuze, “We are talking only of masterpieces to which no hierarchy of value applies.”31 This leaves him one or two hundred directors at most, and their commentators. We are left to assume that the rest, the producers of “rubbish,” recapitulate state forms.

     

    The translators of Cinema 1 say that “[t]he book can . . . be seen as a kind of intercutting of cinema and philosophy,” but even given that cinema is a force for the unweaving of existing structures, conceptual and otherwise, Deleuze must keep philosophy itself from arborescence, that is, from becoming a reterritorializing practice that would undo the cinema and put the breaks on desire.32 However, this means that Deleuze must write, as it were, without history. As I have noted, to accomplish this unweaving he conceptualizes filmmakers as other great philosophers, painters, and writers have been conceptualized by the New Critics and their legacy, that is, as auteurs, geniuses. Desire, the animus of movement, is to Deleuze what Power, the animus of immobilization, is to Foucault: the name for praxis, the ether of relations, the field of the event. To release desire (that is, the becoming molecular of the molar, the destratification of the stratified) and to weave by unweaving is precisely the desire of Deleuze. How then but through the debunking of history to keep philosophy from producing a field of stratification, from undoing the work Deleuze sees performed by cinema and that he would himself perform in the force field of philosophy (and again in the world) by filming cinema with his numerous and extraordinary descriptions/abstractions of its relations? In short, how to keep philosophy from becoming a state form?

     

    The difficulty of the cinema books is a partial answer to these questions. The fact that there is only one periodization in the books provides another answer. Their concepts are neither hierarchized nor even serialized. Although the concepts emerge from each other and draw on each other, they are not locked into any strict array. Yet, for all that, they have the aura of a profound interdependence. As do the films he writes about, the movement of Deleuze’s concepts sets up alternate economies of forces. These alternate economies are economies of movement, of time, of knowing, which are not/have not yet been produced on a massive scale. This refusal of stratification, the refusal of concepts to become knowledge in Foucault’s sense of the word, makes Deleuze’s concepts of the cinema as difficult to understand within their “system” as it is to understand the “system” itself. His “system,” if one had but world enough and time, would, I fear, end up like the proverbial Chinese emperor’s map of the kingdom that is as big as the kingdom itself–not much of a map for the Chinese emperor, not much of a system for the philosopher. The system is manifest rather as a mode of production–one learns one’s way around by following a path and by wandering about. Deleuze is not building a system, he is making pieces, pieces for us to use in our own constructions, pieces at once so delicately, precisely and precariously placed that as soon as we touch them, they become something else. Cinema is for Deleuze a machine that makes machines. Deleuze machines concepts from cinema’s flows. The consistency of the flow of Deleuze’s concepts one from the other, their complex yet ultimately undecidable relations to an unconceptualizable whole of Cinema (hence Cinema 1, Cinema 2), negates what for Deleuze is fascistic understanding, an understanding that takes the form of recognition, of history. This recognition which for Deleuze and Guattari confirms the cliches of pre-fabricated thought, prevents the encounter.33 The ostensible consistency of method in the cinema books, a consistency that withstands a thousand variations of angle, illumination and content, is here at once the sign of the game of philosophy and its undoing as a state form in Deleuze’s terms.

     

    This fluidity then is very much like the Grundrisse, the first draft of Capital, with one important (historical) difference: it is “post- dialectical,” non-hierarchical and non-totalizing. Like the cinema books, the Grundrisse is also not a solid; it is as well precisely a representation of production process. In the Grundrisse one cannot understand the commodity form without understanding the entire process of exchange. One cannot understand exchange without understanding circulation and production. One cannot understand circulation and production without understanding money. One cannot understand money without understanding wage labor. One cannot understand wage labor without understanding necessary labor time and surplus labor time. One cannot understand these without understanding the falling rate of profit and so on until one can see the grand functioning of all aspects of the model, each mutually interactive and as a result mutually defined. The constituent concepts of capital flow into each other to create an image of social totality similar in form to the grand spiral that Deleuze sees in Eisenstein. Deleuze’s concepts, on the other hand, all precisely defined and interactive, create discrete images of a totality that are individuated and non- interdependent. As with Marx, the process of this totality occurs off-screen, as it were, but unlike with Marx its architecture cannot, even in theory, be grasped in its entirety. For Deleuze the process of consciousness is unremittingly material but can never be fully conceptualized. The concepts abstracted from the materials that make up a filmic thought arise from the way the elements combine with each other, but then fall away, necessarily positing a world outside. However, unlike a dialectical logic, the logic embedded in the concept tells us nothing final about what is beyond the frame: hence the plateau, the auteur, the assemblage. The method here is not differentiation and sublation, but differentiation and transgression. One moves across, not through and beyond. But the necessity of moving across the infinity of proliferations, the tireless press of movement, becomes a beyond–quantity becomes quality, even for Deleuze. This beyond is precisely the conditions of possibility for the time-image. Even though he does not write “in the name of an outside,” an outside appears. The precision of Deleuzian concepts, taken together with the impossibility of finding an underlying logic which explains them in their totality, makes them figurations of the fact of a beyond: they are sublime.

     

    Recall the way each of the sections in the cinema books ends–with phrases like “the three time images all break with indirect representation, but also shatter the empirical continuation of time, the chronological succession, the separation of the before and after. They are thus connected with each other and interpenetrate . . . but allow the distinction of their signs to subsist in a particular work”34 or, “It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic [sic.], and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a circulation: the noosphere.”35 What I am interested in here is the motion of the phrasing. In the cinema books a summary of what came before is already a going after. These are examples of the Deleuzian cut, which as it finishes something off, begins it anew in another key. Always leaving something behind, always moving on to something else, the Deleuzian cut is always, infinitely in between.

     

    The mode of production in the cinema books is well described in A Thousand Plateaus. In the chapter entitled “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?” Deleuze and Guattari say:

     

    This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing the lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram,' as opposed to still signifying and subjective formations. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the plane of consistency.36

     

    Deleuze understands such occupation and tipping as characteristic of the cinema. Whether in the dialectical yearning of the image he notes in Eisenstein, the interval he expostulates in Vertov, the free and indirect discourse of Pasolini, the duration of the time-images from the films of Ozu, the effect present in the masterpiece is one of an actual retreading of perception and hence of thought. Cinema “connects, conjugates and continues,” making us pass over into something else. For as Deleuze says, “Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema . . . . Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs whose theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice.”37 For Deleuze, this practice checkmates pre-fabricated thought and releases desire, either pushing thought beyond itself into its own unthought, or, as Deleuze puts it by paraphrasing Artaud, making thought aware that it is “not yet thinking.”38As the body undergoes new forms of viscerality, new forms of thought are produced.

     

    I am suggesting that the encounter with the paralysis of thought, the encounter with the immensity of the not yet thought that results for Deleuze in an encounter with the sublime, marks at once a moment in the retooling of our sensoriums and cinema’s encounter with the immensity of, for lack of a better term, the world system. The retooling of the sensorium that occurs in the encounters with the unrepresentable occasions in the work of Deleuze a retooling of philosophy. Though I can only suggest it here, it should turn out that the experienced events in the cinema are from the standpoint of capital experiments about what can be done with the body by machines and by the circulation of capital. Not all of these visceral events turn out to be equal. The structures and intensities of surrealism, for example, seem thus far to have had greater possibilities for capital expansion (e.g., MTV) than those of suprematism. Deleuze’s conceptualization of these events (the encounters between machines, value and minds) is, as he himself admits, a finding of concepts for forms. Cinemas 1 and 2, it seems to me, grapple in the language of concepts with the Darstellung of cinema in a manner similar to the way in which Marx’s Capital, or better, the Grundrisse (because there one sees the thought happening) grapples with the Darstellung of capital. Deleuze’s books are at once an attempt to translate the logic of cinema into an explicitly conceptual language, and an excrescence of cinema. With respect to the body, geography, labor, raw material and time, one might well imagine cinema to have become the most radically deterritorializing force since capital itself.

     

    To show the relevance of Deleuze’s cinema to the visual economy and the cinematic mode of production, I have noted that there is really only one explicitly historical thesis in the cinema books, a thesis which at once unifies and divides the two volumes.

     

    "Why," asks Deleuze, "is the Second World War taken as a break [between the movement image and the image, between Cinema 1 and Cinema 2]? The fact is that in Europe, the post war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe . . . . [These] situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once [Deleuze's exhibit A is the neo-realism of Rossellini]: what tends to collapse is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action image of the old cinema. And thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage, it is time, 'a little time in the pure state', which rises up to the surface of the screen. Time ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself . . . .39

     

    The emergence of what Deleuze calls the time- image is a result of the increase in the number of situations to which we do not know how to respond. For Deleuze it leads directly to the sublime, and he produces it as such. That the time-image is also a response to the informatics of culture and to informatics itself, to what Benjamin called in “The Storyteller” a decline of experience, should also be clear: “Was it not noticeable after the [first world] war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent–not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.”40 Shock, whether from war, from modern life in the metropolis, or from the profusion of information, severs organic (low speed, traditional, non-metropolitan) human relationships. Deleuze notes that, “The life or afterlife of cinema depends upon its internal struggle with informatics.”41 Here in Cinema 2 Deleuze, again very close to the Benjamin of “The Storyteller,” writes with the desire to ward off the categoricality of capital-thought, that is, the degradation (reification) of thought and experience which comes with the mass communicational regime–information’s procrustean bed. For Deleuze the category of the time-image, with its attendant sublimity, its ability to cancel or bully thought and identification, names a multiplex of forms that cinema (the ultimate Body without Organs) as contemporary consciousness actualizes as resistance to molarity, to the field of stratification, to the plane of organization of which a key player is capitalism and its perceptual order. This perceptual order is marked by the stratification (reification) essential to capital process. Its overcoming (as well as its recoding) must be taken as a form of labor. Indeed such overcomings and recodings take place all the time. In the social sciences they are referred to as informal economy or disguised wage-labor.42

     

    Elsewhere in Cinema 2, cinema’s struggle with the informatics of capitalism is made more explicit:

     

    The cinema as art lives in direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within, as the most intimate and indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. The only rejoinder to the harsh law of cinema--a minute of image which costs a day of collective work--is Fellini's: 'When there is no more money left, the film will be finished.' Money is the obverse of all images that the cinema shows and sets in place so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film . . . .43

     

    Deleuze argues that the film within the film is in one way or another a film about the film’s economic conditions of possibility. One should take the citation from Fellini at once literally (when the filmmaker runs out of money his film is finished) and absolutely (when and if the money form becomes obsolete film will be outmoded, which in a way it is). Though Deleuze says disappointingly little about film’s direct relation with “a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within,” it is clear that for him cinema as forms of thought is locked into a dire struggle with capitalism. The cinema of masterpieces is at once enabled and threatened by the schizophrenia of capital. For Deleuze the criteria of the masterpiece is the schizophrenic relation to hegemony.

     

    After writing that “the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money,” Deleuze goes on to claim that in cinema “we are giving image for money, giving time for image, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end.”44 Though one might be tempted to claim that this is not for Deleuze an implicit recognition of the dialectical relationship between cinema and money–on the contrary, the relationship between time and money, with respect to cinema, is one of reciprocal presupposition, a reciprocal relationship that is not dialectical but, as Deleuze emphasizes, “dissymetrical”–I should note here that Deleuze’s example to illustrate the dissymetricality of the relationship between cinema and money is Marx’s expression M-C-M, which he contrasts to C-M-C. The formulation C-M-C, Deleuze writes, “is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked dissymetrical exchange.”45 Though for Marx it is the very mystery of the dissymetrical relationship money-commodity-money which produces for him a critique of political economy (that the second “money” is greater than the first “money” raises the whole question of the production of value), for Deleuze this dissymetricality produces the category of the unthought, “money as the totality of the film.”46 “This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of equivalence.”47

     

    “It is this unthought element which haunts the cinema of the time-image (e.g., Citizen Kane and the unthought and unthinkable Rosebud which conditions the chrono-logical unfolding of the film).”48 Taking Citizen Kane as a point of analysis, there are three things that I would like to establish here. First, in refusing to think political economy, or rather, in flirting with the idea of political economy in order to do something else, Deleuze is playing a game–his internal struggle with informatics. He ends the section on M-C-M and dissymetrical exchange not by invoking the mysteries of the production of value, but by repeating the line from Fellini, “And the film will be finished when there is no more money left.” At once, in the next section, he begins his writing of cinema anew–the film is not yet finished. Second, Deleuze’s flirtation with political economy takes the form of his concept of cinema–his flight from political economy follows what he believes cinema itself to be accomplishing. The unthought or the unthinkable that drives the time-image is, for Deleuze, the non-differentiated condition of consciousness–it is that which cannot be made conscious. For example, the investigation into “what is the thing (the being) called Rosebud”49 drives Citizen Kane, and causes it to deploy for Deleuze what he calls “sheets of past.” “Here time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored.”50 Deleuze continues:

     

    In relation to the actual present where the quest begins (Kane dead) they [the sheets of past] are all coexistent, each contains the whole of Kane's life in one form or another. Each has what Bergson calls "shining points," singularities, but each collects around these points the totality of Kane or his life as a whole as a "vague nebulosity."51

     

    As is nearly always the case with Deleuze’s Cinema, the metaphysics posited by the masterpiece in question are the metaphysics of cinema generally–the film functions as an allegory for cinema. In the passage above, Kane stands in for cinema: his being, “the totality of Kane or his life as a whole,” is given by the being of cinema which culminates this time in a “vague nebulosity.” In a new key the vague nebulosity which the sheets form marks again the totality that exceeds mapping of which I spoke earlier; it is in the glowing rhizome of cinema in general that Deleuze finds the “shining points,” the concepts. By using the films as figures of the concepts he is describing, Deleuze shows that the films are the concepts. “The hero acts, walks and moves; but it is the past that he plunges himself into and moves in: time is no longer subordinated to movement but movement to time. Hence the great scene where Kane catches up in depth with the friend he will break with, it is in the past that he himself moves; this movement was the break with the friend” (italics in original).52 The fact that this movement was the break with the friend is the demonstration that in the cinema of the time-image movement is subordinated to time since in effect the movement renders the time of the break. Hence my second point, that Deleuze’s flirtation with political economy takes the form of his concept of cinema, is confirmed because a more general rule applies: Deleuze’s flirtation with everything that the cinema touches takes the form of his concept of cinema. Cinema is composed of homologies of Cinema. It is in the search for Rosebud, and in cinema itself, and finally in reality itself as well (“temporality showed itself as it really was”), that the sheets of past are all coexistent. Thus for Deleuze the film figures an ontological (ahistorical) condition. Film itself achieves the ability to mime the being of time, and Deleuze mimes the film. It is because he puts film in the tradition of art and philosophy and because, in spite of himself, he finds truth there, in the forms set forth by Spinoza, Bergson and Peirce, that he does not see the temporal relations deployed by Citizen Kaneas an emergent historical condition.

     

    Cinema is composed of homologies of Cinema, yet certain homologies are discarded. Here, in order to make my third point with respect to Citizen Kane and the cinema books, that the unthought of the cinema books is production itself, it will be useful to recall that Rosebud, the unthought in Citizen Kane, embodies the matrix of desires which inaugurated Kane’s empire building–Rosebud is the repository of desire for and by the forces of capitalist production, the originary formation in the biography of Kane’s libidinal economy. It is also a question: How does this Rosebud, which is at once forgotten, a child’s toy, an eternally blossoming flower, and an anus, relate to Kane’s libidinal economy? Are Kane’s libido and economy fused in the intensity with which the object must be held onto even in the face of the final and necessary letting go, or in the eternal return of a dissatisfaction caused by the cessation of movement which must necessarily occur at the bottom of a hill, or, again, in the hidden and ever renewing promise of a mobility dependent upon a generalized homogenization of the landscape and brought about by a snow that brings with it mobility across all obstacles as well as communion with a certain childhood bliss? Though one could extend this list of questions to include questions about technology and speed and the constitution of childhood, whatever constellation of anality and the holding on to things, and release, of the rhythm of circulation, of the homogenizing and mobilizing effects of money one decides upon, it is perhaps most important at this point to remember that the empire which Kane builds is a media empire. Rosebud, the unthought, is at the core of a capitalist media project.

     

    The fact that all of Citizen Kane‘s great temporal gyrations through sheets of past are not about presenting the mystery of anyone but precisely of Citizen Kane, the capitalist media mogul, and his relation to Rosebud, that obscure object of his desire, is not in itself sufficient proof to show that the time-image has at its core an inadequately explored economic component. Nor can we take Deleuze’s using the formula M-C-M to explain cinema’s dissymetrical exchange with money as adequate evidence for the necessity of doing a political economy of cinema, and therefore as adequate evidence for the need to posit something like the attention theory of value. Even if such an account might help to explain what Deleuze cannot: namely, cinema’s sheer existence as an industry, but also its presence at the provenance of the transformation of the terms of production via new forms of mediation; and even if Deleuze’s many other flirtations with cinema as the formal equivalent of capital formations tempt us to think that cinema is capital of the twentieth century; we can conclude only that a line of thought is cut off in the cinema books. Deleuze writes, “What [Welles] is showing–already in Citizen Kane–is this: as soon as we reach sheets of past it is as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave, time gets out of joint, and we enter into temporality as a state of permanent crisis” (italics in original).53 However tempting it might be to suggest that the transformation of temporality in cinema is much more akin to Lukacs’ concept of the spatialization of temporality in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” or to Ernst Bloch’s synchronicity of the nonsynchronous in “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics”54 than is here admitted, or however much the undulations of great waves and the state of permanent crises sound like descriptions of capital’s cycles of boom and bust, we can only conclude that Deleuze ignores this line of inquiry because he operates with an idee fix that cinema, that is the masterpieces of cinema, operate in excess of capital, are indeed its unthought. This unthought is for him at once the dissymetrical exchange with money, and outside of political economy. My suggestion here is that it is precisely in the region of excess, in the overloading of forms, that we find the creation of new possibilities for production.55 The synchronicity of the nonsynchronous is only one of them.

     

    If Deleuze’s cinema books are to be taken as an enactment of the organizational possibilities of cinema in the discourse of philosophy, then his Cinema is within Cinema; it is a film within a film and therefore, even by his own logic, a film about money. The philosophical praxis which goes under the name of Cinema is a sign of the world system–a projection in the arena of philosophy of the cinematic mode of production. What remains to be done here is to suggest the role of cinema in political economy.

     

    Cinema 3: The money-image

     

    New German Filmmaker Wim Wenders films the cinema as such in his explicitly multinational and hence self-consciously contemporary work, Until the End of the World. There, optical machines interfaced with computers and the human sensorium allow the blind to see through the eyes of another person. This other person, the filmmaker, so to speak, must go out to see things and then during the playback of the images remember them with the feelings he had for them in order that the images may pass through his consciousness and into the consciousness of the blind. The filmmaker’s role, in a manner a la Vertov and Kino-Eye, is to aid those who, in post-industrial society, cannot see because of their bio-historical restrictions. The filmmaker does not, however, as in Vertov, have to create an image of totality, simply an image rooted to the world by passing through a human and humanizing mind.

     

    But in the late capitalism of Until the End of the World, visual representation and the unconscious are portrayed on a convergent course. Furthermore, they are impacted in a third term, the commodity. In a new innovation, the same technology which allows the blind to see is used to record and replay an individual’s dreams by cutting out the filmmaker- other. One of the characters involved in the research on this new technology develops an addiction to the ghostly colored electronic shadows of her own pixilated dreams that flicker then vanish only to coalesce once again as, for example, liquid blue and yellow silhouettes walking hand in hand on a blood red beach. Endlessly she watches the movement of the abstracted forms of her desire mediated and motivated only by technology and her own narcissism, rather than seeking an encounter with the outer world through another visual subject. Her addiction feeds on her dreams and her dreams feed on her addiction. This video within a film is capital’s shortest circuit–an environment where the individual immediately consumes her own objectification. Staring endlessly at video, only breaking off in order to sleep, she is immersed in the time of the unconscious and cannot be reached from outside. The time of the unconscious secreted on the screen is taken also as the Ur-time of late capitalism–a temporality resulting from the infinite fluidity and plasticity of a money that responds to desire before desire can even speak, and a desire which, no matter what else it is, is desire for money, the medium of the addiction. As emphasized by the setting, a James Bond style cave full of high tech imaging equipment staffed by aboriginal people in the middle of the Australian outback, the strange outcroppings of capital circulation are under scrutiny here. In late capitalism three strands, representation, the unconscious and the commodity, tend to converge in the image.56

     

    A different filmmaker might have ended such a history of the world and its cinema here, with a time- image marking the end of the world, but Wenders, who has always painfully yet often beautifully believed in the world, ends the film with a knowing farce: Returning not exactly to Earth, but to the logical time of official world history, the video junky kicks the habit and gets a little perspective on the planet by working in an orbiting shuttle for Green Space. Despite Wender’s partial yet inadequate ironizing of such “political” alternatives which utilize the money- consciousness system with a little perspective, I think that we can take Until the End of the World as exemplary of Deleuze’s argument that “the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation [italics his]. What the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money . . . . The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time.”57 In the strange temporality of Until the End of the World, the plot breaks down where the video starts. The video interludes drip with the temporality of pure mediation. Locked into the circuits of economic flow, the time-image is a money-image as well.

     

    The time/money-image that reveals the end of thoughtful action and the impetus to the narcissism of philosophy (or even to the masochist’s elation in sublimity) is not, as Deleuze might have us think, the sole province of the latter half of the twentieth century. Nor, I should add here, is it the only form of the money-image–only the most philosophical of them. In The Time Machine of H.G. Wells, which is contemporary with the beginning of cinema, we have another harrowing time-image of the end of the world: The lonely time traveller sits in his now ancient time machine on the last beach at the end of the world, a cold thin wind arising as the giant red sun, gone nova, droops into the final sky. To avoid the giant crabs that slowly close in on him at the end of eternity, he first moves on a hundred years only to find them still on the beach, so he moves forward a few million more. The giant crabs are gone and the only living creature to be seen is a black sea- dwelling football-like animal that takes a single leap out of the dark ocean. The thin wind blows and in the twilight snow falls. This scene suggests that the forces of reason capable of producing the time traveller’s time machine are also capable of hailing the foreclosure of the human species. Wells’s time- image at the end of the nineteenth century as well as Wenders’s at the end of the twentieth put forth two images of time and its ruins, or better, its ruining, at the end of the world. This “a little time in its pure state” is at once a meditation on the consequences of rationality, and equipment for living. If we reconstitute ourselves in the presence of the sublime, perhaps we become inured to it as well. In our responses, conscious, unconscious, visceral, what have you, we incorporate the terms and protocols of the new world as it incorporates us.

     

    What do the time machines of H.G. Wells and of the cinema have in common? Is not Wells’s late nineteenth-century time machine already a form (in Deleuze’s terms) of “post-war” cinema, a device for the utter severing of the sensory-motor link? I am suggesting that the cinema machines this severing, that it is not a mere response to an objective historical situation that can be reified under the sign of the war. Rather, such a severing ought be thought of as a tendency of convergent logics and practices. Antonio Gramsci, recall, in his essay “Americanism and Fordism,” predicted the necessary emergence of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type in which sensation and movement are severed from each other.58 One must consume such severing to produce it in oneself. After all, like the spectator, the time- craft just sits there utterly motionless as night and day alternate faster and faster, as the solid buildings rise and melt away, and then, still accelerating, as everything goes gray and the sun becomes a pale yellow and finally a red arc racing around the sky. The Time Machine‘s bleak registration of the infinite extensionality of a time which yields only emptiness and extinction emerges only out of the theory and practice of a scientific rationality which we know that Wells associated with specialization, capitalism and imperialism. The time machine is the consciousness of these formations. In many ways the story of The Time Machine works much like Max Horkheimer’s assertion in “The End of Reason” that the concentration camps are the logical result of instrumental rationality.59 Rationality to the point of irrationality; Temporality to the point of extinction–these are the trajectories emerging out of a cultural logic which the very form of Deleuze’s ultimately aestheticizing thought elides.

     

    In processing the time-image we produce our own extinction, a necessary condition for many of today’s employees.60 In capitalism our labor confronts us as something alien, as Marx said. Today we work (consciously and unconsciously) to annihilate our own constitution as subjects and make ourselves over as information portals able to meet the schizophrenic protocols of late capitalism. Just as in one era at the behest of social organization we built ourselves as consolidated subjects, in another mode of production we dismantle and retool.61 Today we are schizophrenics.

     

    If cinema is a time machine then perhaps its sublime is precisely the image of our own destruction (as subjects, and therefore, in the “free world,” as a democracy). The pleasure we get as we consume our own annihilation marks a contradiction as absolute as that which emerges, for example, from the awe inspired by the latest I-max film (an excellent name for a late- capitalist medium), Blue Planet. As our eyes, like those of Wenders’ video junkie, experience the exhilaration of digging deeper and deeper into the infinite resolution of six story tall images of entire continents shot from outer space, the film proposes with far less irony than Wenders’s Green Space that space observation might aid in saving the visibly eroded planet still-swirling majestically below us. This proposition conveniently elides the notion that the present condition of an earth that requires saving is a direct result of the very technology (optical, military, communicational–and the economics thereof) which offers us such breathtaking and “salvational” views. The message of the universal project of Science (which can here be understood to be one with the universal project of “good” Capitalism) is reinforced by the moving image of the awesome and eternal Earth. If in the time images of Deleuze’s “masterpieces” we confront the many forms of our own annihilation, “the impower of thought,” and elsewhere, “the destruction of the instinctive forces in order to replace them with the transmitted forces”62, and if in the time images of our popular culture we confront the apotheosis of production/destruction dynamic of capitalism, then we must confront the question of the significance of the aestheticization and philosophization of sublimity in lieu of a political economy of the time-image. We must question the aestheticizing reception of modernists. And if, as Fredric Jameson says, the spectacle which we consume in late capitalism is the spectacle of late capitalism itself,63 we must challenge the aestheticizing reception of the postmodernists as well. As today’s images hold us rapt, it is our own sensory-motor responsiveness which is being retooled and replaced with an aesthetic and aestheticizing function. What future society might emerge from an apt political economy of aesthetics?

     

    Politics

     

    Could we rethink the hold of the cinema on our eyes by producing another way of thinking about it which at once takes seriously the sublime, the internalized relation of the cinema with money, the function of cinema as time machine, and yet which does not reproduce either aesthetics or philosophy or repeat the work of ideology critique or of psychoanalysis?

     

    I believe it is possible. One might begin to think, for a moment, of cinema not only as an aesthetic or philosophical occasion, but as a variation of other media like the road or the railroad track or money: a mental pavement for creating new pathways of commodity flow. Marx never resolved the question of the productive value of the road.64 Cinema presents an occasion where the question of the productivity of the road and the question of mediation in general take on new forms. As an instrument capable of burrowing into the body and connecting it to new circuits, cinema and mass media in general are deeply imbricated in economic production and circulation in the world system. Indeed, cinema performs a retooling of the sensorium by initiating a new disciplinary regime for the eye.

     

    It should come as no surprise that the labor necessary to produce the manifold forms of our systemic compatibility is our own. On an immediate level this claim implies that we work for big corporations when we watch their advertising, but more generally, our myriad participations in the omni- present technology fest are, in addition to whatever else they’re doing, engaged in insuring the compatibility of our sensoriums with prevailing methods of interpellation. These interpellations reach us not only by calling us into identification in the Althusserian sense but by calling us to rhythms, to desires, to affects. Daily we interface with machines in order to speak the systems-language of our socio- economic system. The retooling of ocular and hence corporeal functions is not a one time event; retreading vision, sensoria, and psyches requires constant effort. It is important to note that we are thinking of organic transformation channeled not only through discourse, but through visual practice. (One must, of course, at this point acknowledge the ear as well.) Though certain hardware remains standard for a time, even the screen, for example, has undergone many modifications in its movement from movie to TV to Computer. Today the screen is again being superseded by virtual reality–in the so-called “fifth generation” of computer technology we will be inside information.65 However, micro-adjustments and calibrations of the practices of concrete bodies are being made all the time: as fashion, as sexuality, as temporality, as desire.

     

    I would like to recapitulate briefly two propositions concerning the question of value: 1) The perception that images pass through the perception of others increases their currency and hence their value. Vision adds value to visual objects. Often this value is capitalized. Inevitably this value changes the form or the character of the image, not least because this value is the bio-technological placing of the image in circulation, its very mediation. If circulation through sensoria creates value (recall the painted masterpiece) then this value is the accruing of human attention on the image. Because the images circulate in regulated media pathways (channels), the media itself becomes more valuable as its images do.

     

    2) In what the sociologists might call informal economy, value is produced by viewers as they work on their own sensoriums. In other words, some of the effort in the near daily remaking of the psyche is provided by the labor time of the viewer. This tooling of the body to make it amenable to commodity flow–to make it know how to shift times and to operate at the different speeds that the non-synchronicity of late capitalism demands, to make it address certain ideologies and desires, to elicit certain identifications–requires human labor time and is productive of value.66 Thus at a formal level the value of media and of images is increased, while at an informal level we work on ourselves so that we may work in the world. Though it is important never to forget that in the present regime of sensorial production, all earlier forms of exploitation (wage labor, slavery, feudalism) coexist with the visual and the sensual production of value that I have described, if to look is to labor, then one finds the possibility of such labor accruing to circulatory pathways of our own choosing or even making rather than pathways chosen for us. Where we put our eyes makes a difference. If we look at things normally obscured, or if we rechannel our perceptions and our perceiving via our own intellectual production, we might–through endeavors such as alternative video, writing, performance, etc.–build some of the circulating abstraction that make possible confrontational cultural practice. The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else.

     

    One might think of the cinema as an instrument (along with radio, television, telecommunications) that has, without our really noticing, been the harbinger of a new regime for the production and circulation of economic value at a new level of economic practice as well as of economic conceptualization. Aesthetics and philosophy would then be secondary media (access roads) activated by the cinema. Other cinematic attractions, for example, narrative, circus acts, street shows, identity politics and terrorism, imply other cinematic methods for the harnessing of human attention potentially productive of value; we would do well to follow up the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention.67

     

    If we can dare to think that human attention is productive of value, all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back (as well as those of radio and TV) and scrutinized for the multifarious ways in which they have begun a global process of repaving the human sensorium, opening it up to the flow of ever newer and more abstract commodities. At the same time, because we have all been converted into performers and multitudes, they have rendered anything like what used to be meant by democracy utterly and literally unthinkable. The “masterpieces” could also be studied for their participation in certain visuo-economic practices and their resistance to others, though their interest (and status) might dwindle for many. And, I should add, new canons of masterpieces would be (are being) produced by people with different market shares, people who labor and are enfranchised by circuits for the circulation of capital partially antagonistic to the dominant.68 We witness (and participate in) these alternate circuits in the amalgamation of the attention of blocks of viewers in, for example, gay cinema, cinema of the African diaspora, or third world cinema.

     

    What if one thought of cinema not so much as a factory for the production of concepts, but as a factory for the production of a consciousness more and more thoroughly commodified, more and more deeply integrated in a world system? In a world organized like cinema, consciousness becomes a screen on which the affects of production are manifest. What if one thought of cinematic technologies, with their ability to burrow into the flesh, as a partial solution to the problem of expansion faced by the full globalization of capital? In a fully globalized situation, capital expands not outward, spatially and geographically, but into the body, mining it of value (Videodrome). In this schema, television viewers work in a sort of cottage industry performing daily upkeep on their sensoriums as they help to open their bodies to the flow of new commodities. When we come home from work and flip on the tube, our “leisure time” is spent paving new roads. The value produced (yesterday and elsewhere by labor time, but in advanced societies by human attention) accrues to the shareholders of the various media. It is tabulated statistically in what is called ratings and sold to other employers (advertisers) at a market value. But if, for example, we put our eyes elsewhere, or rechannel our viewings into different media, we might build some of the circulating abstractions which make possible medium scale confrontational cultural practice.

     

    Vision becomes a form of work. Bodies become deterritorialized, becoming literally machinic assemblages, cyborgs. The extension of the body through the media, which is to say the extension of the media into the body, raises myriad questions about agency, identity, subjectivity, and labor. Question for the next century: Who (what) will control the pathways in which our attention circulates? Technologies such as cinema and television are machines which take the assembly line out of the space of the factory and put it into the home and the theater and the brain itself, mining the body of the productive value of its time, occupying it on location. The cinema as deterritorialized factory, human attention as deterritorialized labor. Global organization as cinema–the potential cutting and splicing of all aspects of the world to meet the exigencies of flexible accumulation and to develop new affects. Consciousness itself as cinema screen as the necessary excrescence of social organization. Cinema as a paradigm of corporeal calibration. Each body- machine interface may well be potentially productive of value–how else could there have been a Deleuze?

     

    Notes

     

    The author wishes to thank Eleanor Kaufman, Paul Trembath, Jeff Bell, Jonathan Beasley, and Jim Morrison for their helpful comments on the manuscript while in progress.

     

    1. By “reality principle” I mean the set of logics, conventions and strategies by which the film creates the reality effect of the narrative and the mise en scene. The term is particularly apt since it is the eruption of various repressions in the form of walls dripping ooze and sinister sounds which in the film threatens the integrity of the reality principle before its final catastrophe. Sigmund Freud’s elaboration in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the reality principle as that principle which replaces the pleasure principle and works “from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world” coincides precisely with my thesis here that consciousness in its dominant forms is the cinematic excrescence of social organization. To put it very crudely, capitalist production, organized more and more like movie production, produces certain difficulties and contradictions which must be resolved in cinema/consciousness. Sounding somewhat like Max Weber, Freud tells us that “Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle [italics Freud’s]. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.” In his development of this formulation Freud could well be describing the representational strategy of Capital Cinema: “In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego [or in this case, the film]. The former are then split off from this unity by a process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction.” That Freud uses the trope of cutting is perhaps no accident. If the “incompatible” instincts succeed “in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure . . . . Much of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure [italics Freud’s]. It may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus–that is, which is recognized by it as ‘danger’.” The ego here can be seen at once as the psychic consequence of a repressive social order pitted against a polymorphously perverse body and as a theater of perception. As a matrix of mediation it occupies the bio-social space which during this century has been overtaken by cinema in the special sense of the word which I attempt to develop here. All of the above citations of Freud come from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961); pp. 4-5.

     

    2. This point can be made more forcefully still if we see, with Walter Benjamin, the category of experience fundamentally at odds with the commodification of culture during a certain historical juncture. Experience and narrative are in decline because of the emergence of rationality as shock and information. See “The Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83-109.

     

    3. As I have noted elsewhere, during the twentieth century the world is organized more and more like a film; commodity production becomes a form of montage. Commodities, the results of the cutting and editing of materials, transport systems, and labor time take on the status of filmic objects which are then activated in the gaze on the screen of consciousness. The transformation of consciousness, wrought by the cinematic organization of production and the transformed status of objects, is tantamount to consciousness’s full-blown commodification.

     

    4. By the fantasy of postcoloniality I mean fantasy in the same spirit in which it appears as “the First World fantasy of the Free World” in Neferti Xina M. Tadiar’s essay “Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community,” in What Is In a Rim: Critical Perspectives of the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 183-210. Tadiar notes that the First world fantasy of the Free World is “the shared ground upon which the actions and identities of its participants are predicated–it is a field of orientation, an imaginary determining the categories and operations with which individuals as well as nation-states act out their histories” (183). My use of the term encompasses a somewhat smaller constituency, intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless it derives, as does Tadiar’s from Slavoj Zizek, for whom a fantasy construction “serves as a support system for our ‘reality’ itself: an illusion which is structuring our effective, real social relations and which is masking thereby some insupportable, real, impossible kernel” (205, n. 1). In this case the kernel is the persistence of the processes of colonialism itself which are the very conditions of possibility for the institutional construction and deployment of the fantasy of postcoloniality.

     

    5. One need only think of the crucial role borders and passports continue to play in regulating immigration. Precisely because people can’t move, capital, with its ability to cross borders, can pit one national population against another as they compete to sell themselves ever more cheaply than their neighbors. For an excellent discussion of the new form of the nation state see Arif Dirlik’s essay, “Post-Socialist Space Time: Some Critical Considerations,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Duke University Press, 1994 [forthcoming]).

     

    6. In thinking the relationships between cinema and capital there is, to my mind, plenty of room to disagree with Deleuze about the fascistic, statist, stratifying, “outcome known in advance” character of Marxism. Despite the lessons of Deleuze and Guattari about the mode of analysis requisite for the combatting of fascism, Antonio Negri, with his emphasis on radical autonomy and revolutionary subjectivity, provides one alternate example, while Gramsci, whom Deleuze never ventures to touch, provides another.

     

    7. For a more complete discussion of this sketch of an idea see my essay “The Circulating Eye,” Communication Research (Sage Publications, vol. 20, no. 2, April 1993), pp. 298-313.

     

    8. See my essay on Robocop 2 entitled “Desiring the Involuntary,” which discusses the cyberneticization of the flesh as a further realization of what cinema has been doing to its audiences all along, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (cited above).

     

    9. Two related lines of thought: First, that the new technologies for mining economic value from human flesh produce a new type or class of worker equipped to meet the protocols of flexible accumulation (by this logic, all TV viewers are involved in “cottage industry”); and second, that an elaboration of the dynamics, properties and economic relations of “infomercial” labor will help to theorize other kinds of informal economies.

     

    10. I develop this idea in an essay on S. Eisenstein, I.P. Pavlov and F.W. Taylor, “The Spectatorship of the Proletariat.”

     

    11. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).

     

    12. I am thinking here of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-Francois Lyotard as well as that of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. More recently, the very interesting work of Jennifer Wicke, Mark Seltzer and Anne Friedberg has addressed the commodification of vision and visual culture. It is my contention that though all of these thinkers see the logic of commodification at work in the articulation of cultural forms, commodification remains for them largely metaphorical, a code.

     

    13. I should note here that my use of the term “movement-image” differs somewhat from that of Deleuze’s use of the term. My critique of his work necessarily demands an adaptation of certain aspects of his language and a refusal of other aspects. Though I accept the category “movement-image” just as I accept the category “cinema,” I cannot argue with Deleuze at every point along the way, at every point along his way, if I am to say what I want to say even in this preliminary way. To show the dialectical aspects of the movement-image I need to tell another story–one that does not find the movement-image in the masterpieces, but the masterpieces in it.

     

    14. In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Janet Staiger has noted that “Hollywood’s mode of production has been characterized as a factory system akin to that used by a Ford plant, and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films.” Though I do not disagree with this I am arguing the opposite as well: rather than cinematic production copying Fordism, I would argue that it is an advance over Fordism. Cinematic production uses the practices of Fordism but begins the dematerialization of the commodity form, a tendency which, more than anything else, characterizes the course of economic production during this century. Rather than requiring a State to build the roads that enable the circulation of its commodities, as did Ford, the cinema builds its pathways of circulation directly into the eyes and sensoriums of its viewers. It is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for new commodities.

     

    15. Geoffrey Nowell Smith points this out in his introduction to Eisenstein Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1991).

     

    16. In the cinema, the technologies for the organization of production and of the sensorium converge. Film/Capital is cut to produce an image. Today, the convergence of the once separate industries for image production and for other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity par excellence) realizes a new and hybridized form: the image-commodity.

     

    17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 217-251.

     

    18. “The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus–changes that are experienced by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present day citizen” (Illuminations, p. 250, n. 19).

     

    19. Deleuze, in a characteristic and brilliant reading of Plato, provides an analysis of simulation and suggests that it has always haunted the house of philosophy. What I find characteristic about this essay is that in locating the need for idealism to banish simulation in Greek philosophy, Deleuze elides the historical problem of simulation: Why is it possible to make this analysis now? See “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

     

    20. Instead of withering away like the State, the fetish character of vision, the mystical warping of the visual field surrounding the visual object of perception called “aura,” has achieved, in the situation of televisual reproduction under capitalism, a change of state on par with the change in the status of the object itself: today’s equivalent of aura is the simulacrum. This change of state in the object’s specter raises questions about the changing characteristics of mediation and the historical causes thereof.

     

    21. Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).

     

    22. Here it is is important to note that I am speaking about the production of value generally. Whether or not this value will be capitalized depends upon a variety of factors, including how pervasively capital has prevaded the arena of the work of art’s “consumption.”

     

    23. That Benjamin at one point extracts the aura from the solitary seer’s gaze upon a tree branch serves only to prove that the supplemental excess of vision that is the aura is not particular to any one moment in an economy of vision, but is distributed along all nodal points in the economy of sight. That which Benjamin called “distance” is actually the irreducibility of the visual object into a static object free from the visual circulation which eventually annihilates the visual object as an object of sight. This finally is as simple as the fact that we cannot look at the same thing forever and that things impel us to look at other things. The way in which our gaze moves is directly related to the way in which our bodies and our eyes are plugged into the economy itself. “Distance,” then, is a form of vibration between the two determinations of mediation. Like the commodity, the object of vision occupies two states simultaneously, it is at once a thing, a use value, and a place holder in the syntax of an economy of vision, an exchange value. The experience of unbridgeable distance registers the impending disappearance or submergence of any visual object back into the regulated circulation of vision itself. Distance, that is, aura, is the poignant registration of the visual object’s oscillation between its two determinations: an object of vision, and a moment in the circulation of vision.

     

    24. Illuminations, p. 89. Benjamin notes in “The Storyteller,” the essay from which this citation is taken, that “It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it,” (Illuminations, p. 89). Storytelling in the essay is pitted against the production of events designed for easy consumption, that is, what Benjamin presciently calls “information.” The clash of storytelling and information in this wonderful essay stages the confrontation of two modes of production which also clash in “The Work of Art,” the pre-industrial and the modern.

     

    25. Information, as it turns out, has less use-value outside of the circuits of the market than did storytelling. It is not knowledge really; to function it must remain in channels. It is important here to distinguish between mediation per se, as in the mediation of events by a medieval manuscript or the transportation of sugar cane on a barge, and mediation in its self-conscious form; that is, media as media that, like the commodity in circulation, has both a particular component (use value) and an abstract component (exchange value) in every “byte.” To understand media thus is to argue that each infinitesimally small slice of media has value both in its content, its information, and in its form as media itself. Media as media always posits and refers back to the circulatory system in which it has and is currency.

     

    26. Illuminations, p. 89.

     

    27. What Benjamin only peripherally perceives about the phenomenon that he dubs aura is that it is an artifact of a visual economy. His perception of it marks a shift in the speed of the circulation of visual economy. The aura, as observed and constructed by Benjamin, is a primordial form of the exchange value of the visual object produced by the systematic circulation of looks, and hence of “images,” in an emerging economy of sight. The labor power accreting to the visual object gives it a certain palpable agency; that is why compelling objects look back. In the moment of their looking at us, we encounter the indifference of the value-system to our own being. In the postmodern, objects look back at us with such intensity that they see through us. In their indifference to our individuality is their sublimity. Benjamin records earlier experiences of this kind of event. Quoting Proust, he transcribes, “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them,” adding, “(The ability it would seem, of returning the gaze.)” As Benjamin notes, “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.” In his effort to define the auratic he quotes Valery as well: “To say, ‘Here I see such and such an object’ does not establish an equation between me and the object….In dreams, however, there is an equation. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, pp. 188 and 189). The concept of the aura is the semi-conscious acknowledgement of the work or image as simultaneously commodity and currency–as being at once itself (an object) and a moment in the circulation of vision. As with storytelling itself, which for Benjamin becomes a topic on the eve of its extinction, the aura becomes observable as soon as there is a transformation in the status of objects. Visual objects, like the events that are no longer held in an organic relation by storytelling but instead appear as information, appear via a new mode of production in the modern. This mode of production functions at a new speed.

     

    28. Through the eye one may grasp the dynamics of circulation in general. Because such disappearance of authenticity is at once more clearly marked in the realm of the visual (Benjamin, Berger, Baudrillard) and, simultaneously, at present more characteristic of late capitalism, I will here restrict my comments to the visual component of aura.

     

    29. If one takes the fetish as an intimation, to the abject individual, of the power of the world system, then it could be said that simulation as spectacle is a dim version of the sublime; it occurs when the shutter on the lamp of the unrepresentable is just barely open. If simulation is an excess of reference without a clear referent, then the sublime is an excess of referent without adequate reference. All the simulation in the world cannot represent the world system, even though the sublimity of such a spectacle evokes its ominous presence. This dual inadequation between a symbolic which cannot represent its object and an object which cannot find its symbolic representation defines the semantic field of the postmodern condition.

     

    30. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.

     

    31. Cinema 1, x.

     

    32. Cinema 1, xii.

     

    33. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

     

    34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 155.

     

    35. Cinema 2, 215. Deleuze defines the noosphere as follows: “The noosphere is the sphere of the noosign–an image which goes beyond itself towards something which can only be thought” (Cinema 2, 335).

     

    36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 161.

     

    37. Cinema 2, 280.

     

    38. Cinema 2, 167

     

    39. Cinema 2, xi. For a thumbnail sketch with which to see the difference between the movement-image and the time-image, think of the difference between Griffith and Antonioni, or between Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.

     

    40. Illuminations, 84.

     

    41. Cinema 2, 270.

     

    42. See The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, eds. Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells and Lauren A. Benton (Baltimore: Thge Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). I am suggesting that in the humanities such informal practices occur in the sphere of literature, film, criticism, television, style, politics, etc., in short, culture. The negotiation of value at the level of consciousness is at once socially necessary labor and unregistered in the GNP.

     

    43. Cinema 2, 77.

     

    44. Cinema 2, 78.

     

    45. Cinema 2, 78.

     

    46. Cinema 2, 77.

     

    47. Cinema 2, 78.

     

    48. For this comment I am indebted here to the readers at Postmodern Culture whose valuable suggestions are to be found doing their work throughout this paragraph, the previous one, and the one that follows.

     

    49. Cinema 2, 105.

     

    50. Cinema 2, 105. In the context of another discussion, this sentence might well describe the relationship between history (historical sheets) in the spatialized present of the postmodern. I add this thought because my project in this section is to show the historical conditions of possibility for Deleuze’s thought and for the resonance of this thought in us. To argue that what Deleuze finds uniquely in the cinema is at present part of a generalized perceptual bathosphere seems to me to be a precondition for the suggestion I am making here concerning media’s pre- eminent place in political economy. Political economy is the unthought of media theory even as it is the empirical if mystified practice of media itself.

     

    51. Cinema 2, 105-6.

     

    52. Cinema 2, 106.

     

    53. Cinema 2, 112.

     

    54. Ernst Bloch, “Nosnsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, no. 11, 1977 pp. 22-38.

     

    55. Though Deleuze would most likely agree with this statement, he would not however be in accord with the idea that production as such can be productively thought about in terms of political economy. The machinic assemblage, for example, is for him precisely a mode of production that avoids what he takes to be the Oedipalizing tendencies of Marxism which returns all variations to the law of value. Whether or not Deleuze is correct on this matter I leave to readers to decide. Here I would only like to suggest that the philosophical sources upon which Deleuze draws so heavily in the cinema books, namely Henri Bergson and Charles S. Peirce, particularly with respect to their work on quality–which arises from a certain excess and manifests itself in time–might be analyzed using the strategy adopted by Georg Lukacs in his analysis of Kant. By posing the question, what has capital done to perception and consciousness, or alternately, how are models of perception and consciousness and the consciousness they depict utilized by capital, the work of these philosophers might take on a new significance. Peirce defines thirdness, the category that in part gives rise to Deleuze’s category of the time-image, as “that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York: Dover Publications, 1955; p.91). This idea of a guiding persistence manifest in such formulations as “Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists” (91), might well be considered in the light of the emergence of organizational relations which inflect the construction and the circulation of objects, i.e, developments in capital circulation which orchestrate the temporality of objects and thus change the character of their significance. Such affects might be briefly classed as aura, fetish, or the ideology of private property, but their variety might be, finally, as diverse as affect itself. Bergson too, who claims that “our perception . . . is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within” (Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer [Garden City: Doubleday, 1959], p. 215), might be studied in light of the diminishing agency of subjects and the increasing agency of things.

     

    56. The flattening out of the space between the unconscious and representation is precisely the argument implicit in a variety of socio-linguistic analyses from Orwell to Baudrillard: things are as they appear, all of the would-be contradictions, yesterday’s contradictions, are on the surface, and since they are on the surface they are no longer contradictions. The space of the fold that registers alienation has all but disappeared. When dystopia is no longer recognizable as such, we are in the postmodern; as in much of the work of Tarkovsky, we are the unconscious. To the Orwellian Trinity WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, we may add a maxim for the theorist: CONSCIOUSNESS IS UNCONSCIOUSNESS.

     

    57. Cinema 2, 78.

     

    58. For Gramsci, Americanism implied not only a routinization of work experience, but the concomitant necessity of “breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing of productive operations exclusively to the mechanical physical aspects” (302). “It is from this point of view,” Gramsci tells us,

     

    that one should study the "puritanical" initiative of American industrialists like Ford. It is certain that they are not concerned with the "humanity" or the "spirituality" of the worker, which are immediately smashed . . . . "Puritanical" initiatives simply have the purpose of preserving, outside of work, a certain psycho-physical equilibrium which prevents the physiological collapse of the worker . . . . American industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. It is in their interests to have a stable skilled labor force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts. (303)

     

    Hence, for Gramsci, Americanism implied not only a reorganization of work, but a reorganization of cultural forms. Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Goeffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 277-318.

     

    59. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 26-48.

     

    60. See Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Nafta: The Monsters of Mankind,” in The Nation, March 29, 1993, pp. 412- 416. Chomsky argues that the necessary condition of transnational corporations is the destruction of democratic consciousness. In any case they are acting as if it didn’t exist and putting policy into place to insure that it doesn’t exist at least at the level of representation. How much more effective when the mass media engages the microcosms of our own sensibilities to work in tandem with the macrocosmic interests of transnational capital.

     

    61. This is the basic mise en scene of cyberpunk.

     

    62. In the program of the masochist from A Thousand Plateaus, 155.

     

    63. Spoken from the podium during the conference Visions From the Post-Future, Duke University, Spring, 1993. The idea here is, as I understand it, also one of the central theses of The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).

     

    64. Marx thought that the road was built with surplus labor time (surplus value) that was somehow taken out of circulation in its use as road and hence ceased to be capital. Elsewhere, however, it is clear that the roads are necessary for capital circulation, i.e., that they are constituted with what should be necessary labor time. Clearly, surplus labor cannot be necessary labor without forcing the implosion of the labor theory of value since capital is built, that is, realizes a profit, precisely on this split. Marx couldn’t decide if roads were profitable or not. By taking cinema, and more generally mass media, as higher forms of the road, some of these problems begin to resolve themselves precisely because of the increase in intensity of circulation and in the increasing frequency of the production of “roads.”

     

    65. As a citation in Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality says, “Computer programming is just another form of filmmaking.” Rheingold describes the generational development of computers as a slow meshing of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, a gradual decreasing of the distance between the mind and the machine. At first one handed punched cards to an operator. Then one could input information oneself. Then there was a switch from base two to primitive code words, and after that more common language and the screen. In the fifth generation (VR) we will be inside information, able to fly through information spaces, making simple physical gestures, such as pointing, which will then activate complex computerized functions.

     

    66. I would venture as well that it is this unrecognized value producing activity along with other kinds of informal economy (attention) described as disguised wage labor, both in third world economies by political scientists and in patriarchal economies by feminist socio-linguists, that make up the bulk of the unacknowledged maintenance of the world.

     

    67. To repeat, such a theory should in no way obscure the plight of workers whose exploitation continues to take on the forms already visible at the beginning of the industrial revolution. As Einstein’s equations reduce to Newton’s at low velocity, so too ought the attention theory of value reduce to the labor theory of value at low velocities of monetary circulation, that is, at velocities lower than the speed of cinema.

     

    68. Canons are themselves excellent examples of the kind of institutional entrenchment possible by garnering the value produced by attention. The existence of a canon, already and obviously a politics, is one of the myriad forms in which attention is organized and which continues to organize attention.

     

  • Selected Letters from Readers: Response to Jonathan Beller’s Essay, “Cinema: Capital of the Twentieth Century”

    Jeff Bell

    Dept. of History and Government
    Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond
    FHG$2395@ALTAIR.SELU.EDU

     

    Jonathan Beller has set forth an interesting and provocative account of the relationship between cinema and what he takes to be the condition for the possibility of cinema–i.e., capital. Beller draws upon many resources to support this thesis, from the film Barton Fink to the work of Gilles Deleuze, and generally the arguments are well thought out and thought-provoking. In particular, Beller argues, and rightly I believe, that with cinema capital extends its domain onto and into the conscious attention of individuals, and with this a new form of exploitation is made possible. As Beller puts it, capital cinema can be used to tap “the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value” (par. 7). Or again, “some people make a profit from other people’s looking” (par. 10). The basic argument is Marxist, yet Beller supplements it by stressing the significance of human attention as a form of labor, a labor that is productive of value, and hence productive of surplus value when exploited under capitalism.

     

    In support of this basic argument, Beller brings in an enlightening discussion of the transition from aura (following Walter Benjamin) to simulacra. In both cases human attention constitutes value. In looking at a work of art, for example, there is what one actually sees, and there is the fact that many others have seen this same thing. The gap between what one sees and the circulation of this artwork among many other gazes defines, for Beller, the “aura” of this work, an aura which gives value to the work. A simulacrum, on the other hand, results when “visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation” (par. 23), and this liquidation is the result of a speeding up of the circulation of these visual objects. Value in this case is nothing more than the circulation of the object among many gazes, and thus value is cut free from anything having to do with the object itself. In the words of a recent television commercial, “image is everything!”

     

    I do not have much to add to Beller’s fine discussion of these issues, and for the most part I agree with what he says. What I want to respond to is Beller’s use of Deleuze’s Cinema books to support his arguments and his effort, through a critique of this work, to distance himself from Deleuze. More precisely, I want to respond to Beller’s three chief criticisms of Deleuze’s theory of cinema. The first and most important criticism is that Deleuze, according to Beller, ignores and “refuses simply to think” the fact that cinema is a capitalist industry. A second and related criticism is that Deleuze only discusses the masterpieces of cinema while ignoring everything else. And finally, Beller claims that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. By responding to these charges on behalf of Deleuze, I hope to clarify some of the central issues that are at stake in Beller’s work and contribute to the important discussion which this work has begun.

     

    Although Deleuze, according to Beller, refuses “to think political economy,” he does flirt with it. Such flirtation becomes clear when Deleuze cites Fellini: “When there is no money left, the film will be finished.” Beller finds in Fellini’s remark, and in Deleuze’s treatment of it, evidence for the claim that cinema is always “in one way or another a film about the film’s economic conditions of possibility” (par. 38). This is only a flirtation, however, for Beller believes Deleuze says “disappointingly little” about cinema’s own conditions of possibility–i.e., capital. Deleuze may not say much about the economic conditions of possibility in his Cinema books, and perhaps he is to be faulted for this, but much is said on these matters in Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Central among their claims in this book is that capitalism is a functioning assemblage of processes, interactions, codings and overcodings; however, the raison d’etre of capitalism is the decoding of flows. In other words, the pursuit of surplus value hinges upon creating new markets, new values, needs, etc. (i.e., the “new and improved” syndrome of capitalism); and yet to do this requires decoding or deterritorializing existing markets, existing values, needs, etc. To return to Beller’s example discussed above, the transition from aura to simulacra entails the decoding of value, a value which is tied to the “traditional contents” of art (i.e., qualities of the visual art object itself), so that new values and needs can be created–i.e., value as tied only to the circulation of the object among many observers. This example betrays the very process of capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari, and for that reason they would agree with Beller’s analysis. But capitalism, and this is the crucial point, must continually avoid complete deterritorialization, complete decoding; in short, it must avoid schizophrenia. Consequently, every process of decoding and deterritorialization entails a simultaneous recoding and reterritorialization. Without this capitalism could not function. On this point, Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit: “one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale.”1 Thus, although simulacra result from a decoding of aura, simulacra are nevertheless set forth as new values, as new standards and codes.

     

    With this in mind we can see that yes, for Deleuze and Guattari that capitalism as decoding and deterritorializing process (or what Deleuze refers to in the Cinema books and elsewhere as the “genetic,” “differentiating” element) is the condition of possibility for cinema. However, this unthought and unthinkable differentiating condition is also the exterior limit of capitalism and cinema, the limit which must be pushed back. Consequently, capitalism and cinema find themselves recoded and reterritorialized upon existing values, existing standards, existing relative limits. On this basis we can understand Deleuze’s treatment of Fellini’s statement. Just as capitalism itself requires the reterritorialization of its deterritorializaing tendencies, so too does cinema’s deterritorializing process require reterritorialization, and it is precisely money which fulfills this role and which Fellini laments. The deterritorialization of a Fellini film does not go unchecked, but is reterritorialized by the financial backers of the film with their budgetary constraints. There is thus a double role of money which needs to be stressed here, for although Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the deterritorializing aspects of money and capital, they also point out the reterritorializing and stratifying processes associated with money, and it is the latter process which Deleuze is referring to when he claims that “cinema as art lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money . . . .”2 Put more simply, cinema as art, as a process which creates new values, new ways of looking at the world, etc.; this cinema confronts the demands of financial backers who want to see a profit from a film, who don’t want something new so much as something that sells. And we need not look far in the history of film to find a successful film that is widely imitated with the hopes of “cashing in” on its success. This is the reterritorializing conspiracy of money, a conspiracy filmmakers who are not in the “mainstream” constantly confront (such as Fellini, Orson Welles, Antonioni, etc.)

     

    This brings me to the second of Beller’s criticisms–i.e., Deleuze’s emphasis upon the masterpieces of cinema at the expense of everything else. For Beller, recognizing that human attention is productive of value leaves open the possibility that “all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back” (par. 58). They could be brought back because human attention, even of the non-masterpiece variety, is assumed to be capable of creating new ways of seeing, valuing, etc. Deleuze’s point is not that new values are produced only within the work of a few “recognized” masters; rather, his point is very Nietzschean in that he claims that all new values have been produced and created away from the marketplace. From what we have said above, we can see that this does not mean that new values, in particular new values associated with cinema, must be produced in isolation from capital and capitalism, but only that these values always entail a process of deterritorialization, and this occurs apart from, and at odds with, the reterritorializing conspiracy of capital and capitalism. When something new is said, or when a film shows us a different way of looking and feeling, this happens, for Deleuze, because of a deterritorialization of existing values and codes; but these films are always exceptional for Deleuze, because for the most part films are made on the basis of the security of what is already known to sell (i.e., money as reterritorializing). That this tendency is especially so with respect to cinema as art, in contrast to the many other arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, poetry, etc.), should be obvious: i.e., it takes a large capital investment simply to make a film. Investors are subsequently more apt to back the film which has the greater chance of returning their initial investment with a profit. To capitalize on cinema, therefore, takes roughly one of two tracks: either the financial backers act on the basis of what is already known about public taste, etc., in order to decide which project will be profitable; or they risk losing their investment by supporting a project that is novel and yet risks not being accepted. It should be clear that the first track is the more common, and yet, and this is Deleuze’s point, masterpieces always result from the second approach. This is not to say that all films made from this second approach are masterpieces; to the contrary, and again Deleuze is explicit on this point, if a masterpiece truly says something new it will be at odds with the reterritorializing tendencies of capital, but it does not follow from this that every film that is at odds with these tendencies does say something new.

     

    In reference to literature, though we could apply this to cinema just as easily, Deleuze makes some comments which get to the heart of Beller’s concerns as well as his difficulties with some of what Deleuze is arguing. In an article titled “Mediators” in his book Pourparlers, and in a section of this article titled “The Conspiracy of Imitators” (which should recall the conspiracy with which cinema as art is confronted, the conspiracy Beller claims is discussed “disappointingly little”), Deleuze claims that “Fast turnover [of books, but equally films] necessarily means selling people what they expect: even what’s “daring,” “scandalous,” strange and so on falls into the market’s predictable forms. The conditions for literary creation, which emerge only unpredictably, with a slow turnover and progressive recognition, are fragile.”3 What the market is interested in, or what capital as reterritorializing is interested in, is what is predictable; and it is precisely this conspiracy of imitators which authors and filmmakers, if they are interested in creating something new (i.e., in deterritorializing predictable forms and codes), run up against.

     

    This brings us finally to Beller’s final criticism that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. On the one hand, Beller is certainly correct to make this claim. The time-image does indeed entail the possibility of leading to extinction. Deleuze often recognized this possibility, however, and in Thousand Plateaus for example he pointed out the dangers of making one’s self a body without organs. The danger is that to make one’s self a body without organs one must deterritorialize themselves, but if this deterritorialization goes too far this could lead to our self-destruction and extinction. In a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s distinction between the nagual and tonal, which corresponds roughly with the distinction between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they claim that “the important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. . . . You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual.”4 In other words, to deterritorialize, and this is just what Deleuze believes the time-image does, is also to risk deterritorializing too much, with the result being the extinction and destruction of self with which Beller was concerned.

     

    The time-image, or deterritorialization, if it can avoid the black hole of self-annhilation by holding on to some reterritorialization, can then create something new, can produce new values. To create a new way of seeing the world with cinema is therefore a very risky affair. One risks either succumbing to the conspiracy of imitators who will only financially back a film which imitates a given formula for success; or one risks deterritorializing given values and standards too much with the result that the film, and consciousness which was Beller’s concern, collapses into the black hole of self-destruction and extinction. Deleuze was quite aware of both dangers and yet argues that if we are going to change the way things are we must face these dangers nonetheless. Deleuze would agree wholeheartedly with Beller’s following claim: “The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else” (par. 56). Deleuze’s thought and work is motivated by just this type of revolutionary concern; however, Deleuze cites the dangers inherent in revolutionary activity. Every revolution, whether in politics, economics, or cinema, risks collapsing into the stratifying stranglehold of tyranny and fascism, the conspiracy of imitators; or it risks exploding into the chaos of anarchy and self-destruction. Deleuze would agree with Beller’s call for revolutionary change, but would caution us to beware of its dangers.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 246.

     

    2. Cinema 2. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 77.

     

    3. Pourparlers (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), 175. Translation mine.

     

    4. Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 162.

     

  • The Superhero Meets the Culture Critic

    Christian L. Pyle

    Department of English
    University of Kentucky
    uk00028@ukpr.uky.edu

     

    Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Studies in Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.

     

    Although the “superhero” has been a staple of American mass media since the emergence of Superman in 1938, a definitive study of the genre has not appeared. Therefore, I greeted the American edition of Reynolds’s book (first published in London by B. T. Batsford in 1992) with enthusiasm. Its potential seemed substantial, as suggested by the back cover copy:

     

    The popular figure known as the superhero has exerted such a strong and mushrooming influence upon society, morality, and politics that a mythology now pervades our culture. . . . Here is a study of this superhuman creation, revealed as a proliferating symbol whose dimensions over sixty years of comic book history have been rendered to satisfy the demands and expectations of the popular audience. This fascinating book shows how the superhero has become a vivid figure in the mainstream of modern culture.

     

    This is a description of the book that popular culture scholars and postmodernists have needed: a wide-ranging yet detailed study of the proliferation of the superhero myth. Regrettably, Reynolds’s Super Heroes, while it has several merits, is not that book.

     

    Reynolds begins with “a first-stage working definition of the superhero genre” expressed in seven criteria:

     

    1. The hero is marked out from society. He often reaches maturity without having a relationship with his parents. 2. At least some of the superheroes will be like earthbound gods in their level of powers. Other superheroes of lesser powers will consort easily with these earthbound dieties. 3. The hero's devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law. 4. The extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his surroundings. 5. Likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature of his alter-ego. Certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos. [By taboos, Reynolds will explain further on, he refers to myths in which the hero gains strength through abstinence.] 6. Although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws. 7. The stories are mythical and use science and magic indiscriminately to create a sense of wonder. (16)

     

    Rules 1 and 3 are accepted facets of the American hero, as true of Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn as they are of Superman and Batman. Rules 4 and 5 are also familiar and straight-forward (although rule 4 could use a footnote regarding heroes who alternate between mundane surroundings and fantastic realms, such as outer space, Asgard, or astral planes). Rule 2, however, is flawed in a way that points to a major weakness of Reynolds’s book: its forshortened historical perspective.

     

    Parallel to the “earthbound god” tradition of costumed heroes stemming from Superman is the “masked man” tradition of heroes with no real “superpowers.” The best-known comic book example is Batman, but he was preceded by other comic book heroes (the Crimson Avenger), pulp fiction heroes (the Spider, the Black Bat), and radio heroes (the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet). Batman, the subject of three sections within Super Heroes, is obviously in Reynolds’s mind when he refers to “superheroes of lesser powers.” One could argue that Batman’s above-average intelligence, athletic ability, weaponry, or fear-instilling costume are “powers,” but Reynolds does not go into that. Instead he defines the super-ness of such heroes in terms of their interaction with the Superman crowd. This idea, as well as Reynolds’s lengthy discussion of continuity later in the book, depends upon the existence of a “universe” in which all the characters owned by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world. However, the idea of a fictional universe is more recent than Reynolds seems to realize. He links it to superhero teams (37-38), but, prior to the emergence of Marvel in the 1960s, the adventures of superteams were isolated from the solo adventures of the teams’ heroes. (I don’t mean to be overly pedantic, but one could ask if the Green Lantern appearing in All-American Comics is the same character as the Justice Society member appearing in All-Star Comics, just as we ask if the Quentin of The Sound and the Fury is the same character as the Quentin of Absalom, Absalom!). The formation of a universe in which casual allusions are made between titles really only began with Marvel and was integrated into DC only recently.

     

    The failure to consider how the genre has changed over time is the central flaw of Reynolds’s study. A perusal of the dates of texts he selects for close readings (1938, 1940, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1986-87, 1987) shows that his real interest/background is in the comics of the 1980s. However, Reynolds does not qualify his generalizations as to which parts of comics history they apply. Also, he makes no attempt at delineating critical periods of the genre except for references to the “Golden Age”/ “Silver Age” distinction used by fans, a distinction which is useful for separating, say, the “Golden Age Flash” from the “Silver Age Flash,” but which lacks a scholarly foundation.

     

    Reynolds’s best points tease us because, though fascinating, they remain always underdeveloped. For example, in his chapter on costumes, Reynolds discusses how costumes function differently depending on the hero’s gender:

     

    The costumed heroine may be frankly the object of sexual attraction, and therefore (for many male readers) will constitute the object of their gaze, as well as the subject or protagonist through which they engage with the action of the text. So, whilst for the superhero the transformation into costume can best be achieved with something as instantaneous as Billy Batson's "Shazam," which calls forth the invincible Captain Marvel, for the superheroine the process can (at least potentially) be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease. And thus the (male) reader is called upon to 'read' both heroines and villainesses as objects of desire--'good girls' and 'bad girls' maybe, but objects of the same rhetorical logic. (37)

     

    Before we can accept this point as valid, we need a detailed comparison of typical transformation scenes of heroes and heroines. The issue is further complicated by the use of an atypical strip tease (from The Sensational She-Hulk) as an illustration for the section. If the gender discussion were expanded, Reynolds would also have to deal with the homoeroticism question, especially since superwomen in skintight outfits are considerably less popular with the primarily male readership than supermen in skintight outfits. Anyone familiar with the critical literature will know that the question has been a major issue since Frederic Wertham asked it in Seduction of the Innocentin 1954. By asserting that the gaze is exclusively heterosexual, Reynolds evades the homoeroticism issue altogether.

     

    Another major issue of the Wertham era was the implied fascism of the superhero, who (coincidence?) was born just as the Nazi “supermen” were marching across Europe. In his sixth criterion for the genre, Reynolds refers to the potential “patriotism” of the hero. Here he may be thinking of all the early 1940s covers with heroes toting flags, fighting alongside troops, or selling war bonds. While he doesn’t really deal with the fascism question, he discusses the conservativism of the genre:

     

    A key ideological myth of the superhero comic is that the normal and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through heroic action --and defended over and over again almost without respite against an endless battery of menaces determined to remake the world for the benefit of aliens, mutants, criminals, or sub-aqua beings from Atlantis. The normal is valuable and is constantly under attack, which means that almost by definition the superhero is battling on behalf of the status quo. Into this heroic matrix one can insert representatives of any race or creed imaginable, but in order to be functioning superheroes they will need to conform to the ideological rules of the game. The superhero has a mission to preserve society, not to re-invent it. (77)

     

    Having made this relatively straightforward point, Reynolds then teases us once again with a more provocative argument that he never fully elaborates. In a somewhat tentative fashion, and using what seem to be nonrepresentative (and mostly quite recent) texts, he suggests that “nuances and subtleties which function as irony and satire” can undercut the superhero’s tendency toward political conservatism (79). One would have liked Reynolds to go further here, but he chooses rather to evade what perhaps seems to him too complex and highly-charged a topic.

     

    A third evasion in Super Heroes is that of the role of corporate mass production and commodity culture in the genre. Superheroes are not just fictional characters, they are registered trademarks. Reynolds considers how continuity constrains the creativity of writers and artists in the superhero industry, but he does not deal with the role of the editor whose concerns include sustaining sales and maintaining a corporate image.

     

    A final flaw of Reynolds’s book is that it does not reference or discuss previous works which make similar points. Reynolds’s discussion of continuity, for example, would be enriched by a consideration of Umberto Eco’s well-known 1972 essay “The Myth of Superman.” Reynolds argues that “intertextual and metatextual continuity create a subsidiary world in which the process of time can be kept under control. While this process does not exactly abolish history from superhero comics, it does divorce the superheroes [sic] lives from their historical context” (44). But Eco had already announced this divorce twenty years ago. He explained that if Superman stories were true narratives, placing their events in real time, Superman would be, like the rest of us, “consumed” by events until he would eventually grow old and die, a fate which cannot befall a mythic figure (333-334). To avoid this, observed Eco, Superman stories “develop in a kind of oneiric climate–of which the reader is not aware at all–where what has happened before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy” (336). This is by no means the only instance where Reynolds fails to make the obvious reference. Another example is his discussion of the superhero costume as a fetish, which runs along lines very similar to those of Gillian Freeman’s argument in her study of pornography (the last chapter of which is devoted to superhero comics).

     

    The strength of Reynolds’s study is its emphasis on close readings of specific texts–often, indeed, of specific pages and panels. Most of the previous studies of superheroes have prefered to analyze the basic premise of a series rather than a specific story. Reynolds’s “key texts” chapter is especially strong in this regard. Its detailed readings of The Uncanny X-Men, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen draw attention to the distinctive skills of particular writers and artists. In reference to reprinted X-Men pages, for example, Reynolds describes how penciller John Byrne “employed a style of sequential art that was ‘cinematic’ in the sense that it constantly interpreted each panel and each segment of the narrative from an implied and subjective point of view” (86). The detail of Reynolds’s analyses makes up in depth for what they lack in breadth.

     

    In the last few years, the University Press of Mississippi’s Studies in Popular Culture series, under the general editorship of M. Thomas Inge, has placed several worthy volumes on the bookshelves of comics scholars, including Joseph Witek’s Comic Books and History, Inge’s own Comics and Culture, and a reprint of Coulton Waugh’s The Comics. Reynolds’s contribution does not measure up to the tradition those predecessors established, but it does offer a promising starting point for the scholar who wants to write a more thorough and definitive study.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics 2 (1972): 14-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Poststructuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986. 330-344.
    • Freeman, Gillian. The Undergrowth of Literature. The Natural History of Society series. London: Nelson, 1967.

     

  • Postmodern Jeremiads: Kruger on Popular Culture

    Kevin J.H. Dettmar

    Department of English
    Clemson University
    dkevin@clemson.edu

     

    Barbara Kruger. Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 251 pp. $19.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).

     

    In some ways, Barbara Kruger’s photomontage texts–red-blocked captions slapped across black & white photographs which they ironically reinscribe, like ransom notes, holding those images and their ideology hostage–make an ideal starting point for an examination of the postmodern impulse in the contemporary arts. The desire for such a point of entry has been on my mind a lot lately as I prepare again to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course on postmodernism this fall, to a classroom of majors from all across campus. There’s nothing especially subtle or coy about Kruger’s verbo-visual texts, but their power is never in question, even for students majoring in Packaging Science, Ceramic Engineering, and Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management. I can always count on at least half of my students to vent undisguised hostility at Andy Warhol’s postmodern chameleon pose, or Kathy Acker’s post-feminist pornography with a (teensy-weensy but oh-so significant) difference; but Kruger is an artist with something urgent to say, and students have no problem figuring out where she stands vis-a-vis her texts. No cool memories here, no undecidable postmodern irony, no death of the author, no Sir: here’s art that speaks to the complexity of life in contemporary America in a powerful, and relatively straightforward, way. Call it sincerity; in the eyes of my students Kruger has rediscovered the importance of being earnest in an age of “anything goes,” and in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, John Cage’s chance operations, and Brian Eno’s oblique strategies, they’re mighty grateful for it.

     

    Of course Kruger is a postmodern artist, being, along with Jenny Holzer, a major supplier of those po-mo slogans that grace so many t-shirts and trendy greeting cards: “Your gaze hits the side of my face,” “Your body is a battleground,” “I shop therefore I am.”1 In fact, when Dag in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X complains that “the world has gotten too big–way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers,” he would seem to have Kruger squarely in mind.2 But Kruger’s postmodern slogans have always been anti-sloganist, if not indeed anti- postmodernist, in tendency. She would agree with another Generation X character, Claire, who says that “it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments,” and that “either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”3

     

    Remote Control, Kruger’s latest text, collects her occasional writings over the past fifteen years, the largest group having previously been published in Artforum; there are no visual images here, outside the rather striking one that graces the cover. Here we have Kruger the teller, rather than Kruger the show-and-teller; and if Kruger the show-and-teller sometimes inclines toward the didactic, Remote Control for long stretches is almost unbearably preachy. Kruger too much enjoys what Sacvan Berkovitch has called the American Jeremiad; and while her work in photo-montage almost of necessity strikes a balance between mimesis and diegesis, the essays in Remote Control never err on the side of giving the reader too much credit. Hence the paradox that one of our most scriptible visual artists turns out to be a resolutely lisible writer, and these turn out to be fundamentally modernist texts about postmodernism. Quelle drag.

     

    At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none other than the historian. The keeper of the text. The teller of the story. The worker of mute mouths.”4 This text, published with Philomena Mariani in 1989, sounds as if Hayden White and Michel Foucault had never written: Kruger seems to think she has suddenly stumbled upon the notion that history is a narrative, and is as such subject to narrative laws. Few would today dispute such a claim; but that’s exactly why the strident tone of the essay rings slightly false. For whom does Kruger write? On the other hand, the enigmatic photomontage of the legs of standing and seated businessmen, in their suit pants and loafers, sprawled against the backdrop of a livingroom carpet (high-ball glass just visible in the foreground), which Kruger captions “You make history when you do business,” gets at the same idea, the same “truth,” much more elliptically and provocatively.5

     

    If much, perhaps too much, of Remote Control consists of somewhat tendentious postmodern propaganda (and I’ll leave aside the question of whether postmodern propaganda is really possible), it is not without many shrewd and amusing moments. Kruger is at her best, I think, when talking about television (the section called “TV Guides”) and when theorizing about the postmodern, even if she rejects the term (“that vaporous buzzword, that zany genre with legs: post-modernism” [3]). Her analysis of the Jerry Lewis telethon, for instance, is absolutely, savagely on-target: “Perhaps Jerry Lewis is about a kind of abjection; a glistening knot of anger and petulance marinated in a soup of vindictive disingenuousness. (Write him for the recipe)” (66). When Kruger takes TV seriously, her observations are fascinating; like Cultural Studies avant la lettre, Kruger deigns to take low culture (The Care Bears, The Price is Right, The Home Shopping Club) on its own terms, and uses these texts to read the culture that both produces and consumes them. Perhaps this is the contemporary version of Colonel Kurtz’s Horror: looking into the heart of darkness and seeing Jerry Lewis there, the embodiment of “outrageous schticksterism, oozing with every show-biz cliche, every bad dream of what it might mean to be an ‘entertainer’” (67).

     

    But unlike most proponents of the new Cultural Studies, Kruger doesn’t seem to “love to hate” Jerry, or Maddie Hayes and David Addison (Moonlighting), or Robin Leach (Life-styles of the Rich and Famous)–she just hates them. One begins to suspect that with Kruger, the game’s been fixed: low culture is allowed to play, but it’s never allowed to win. I’m tempted to say that Kruger’s a cultural critic in the way Allan Bloom was a cultural critic, but that’s not quite fair; after all, Kruger at least reads the texts of our culture, and reads them with great care and prodigious intelligence, before pronouncing them banal. But she is no more amused by these texts than Bloom was.

     

    The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover: for though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control” (5). Sound familiar? At the heart of Kruger’s collection is the unvoiced assertion that television is the root of all contemporary American evil; TV is, to paraphrase Baudrillard, the evil demon of images. “We don’t have to think about anything once television lulls us to sleep,” Kruger drones, “and begins its dictations. Like a mad scientist of global proportions, it elects presidents, conducts diplomacy, and creates consensus: a consensus of demi-alert nappers caught halfway between the vigilance of consciousness and the fascinated numbness of stupor” (49).

     

    Is it just me? I had thought the discourse about the American media, and about the reciprocal flow of ideology into and out of the TV tube, had progressed somewhat beyond this. Foucault, to take just the most prominent example, has rendered such a simplistic theory of power and hegemony entirely untenable for the contemporary culture critic. But Kruger’s hostility to popular culture is more than just a matter of an out-of-date or vulgar-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Her refusal of pop pleasures seems as willed and unrelenting, as theoretically unnecessary, as Theodor Adorno’s. In fact, I’ll bet even Adorno would have enjoyed Three’s Company more than Barbara Kruger does.

     

    If there’s a thread that connects the writings collected in Remote Control, it’s the philosophy of social constructionism: the notion that our individual experiences are hemmed-in by the ubiquitous, often understated or implicit, narratives of our culture(s). This is a familiar theme in postmodern texts; one thinks, for instance, of Jack Gladney, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, who (believing he is about to die) wanders into his kids’ bedroom in the middle of the night to say his final goodbyes: “I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d wandered into a TV moment.”6 You think you’re feeling something, but suddenly realize that Vicks, or AT&T, or Coke, or the Carpenters have been there before you. You’re not saying your goodbyes, you’re quoting someone else’s. Quelle drag encore. In “Talk Normal,” Laurie Anderson meditates on the inconvenience of being robbed of her own identity by her media persona: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: Oh No! / Another Laurie Anderson clone!”7 Laurie Anderson is accused of being a Laurie Anderson wannabe; DeLillo’s Jack Gladney confesses that he is “the false character that follows the name around.”8

     

    What distinguishes DeLillo’s and Anderson’s treatment of this theme from Kruger’s, however–and, I would argue, renders if far more supple and subtle–is their realization that the simple recognition of the socially constructed nature of reality doesn’t automatically produce its transcendence. In Kruger, too often, it appears to; that we are thrall to images, to narratives, is for Kruger a sign of our postmodern, almost post-Reagan/Bush, condition, and she suggests that through consciousness raising we might attain to an illusion-free Reality. “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger writes in the collection’s opening essay. “The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie. In a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don’t mean anything (as Peggy Noonan and Co. have so ably demonstrated)” (5). Though she was certainly good at it, Peggy Noonan hardly invented political rhetoric; “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger complains–but when was it? What are the good old days to which Kruger harks back? Plato didn’t believe that seeing was believing, and certainly put the notion of truth into crisis long before Nietzsche. “To put it bluntly,” Kruger continues, “no one’s home. We are literally absent from our own present. We are elsewhere, not in the real but in the represented” (5). Here Kruger sounds eerily like Habermas: everything was hunky dory before postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, descended upon us–the storm cloud of the late twentieth century; Kruger’s perverse twist on this all-too-well-known story is that, paradoxically, only postmodern art and theory can rescue us from the postmodern condition.

     

    All of which begs the question, for Kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: If we’re all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? How does one slip out from under “remote control” in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? In U2’s recent Zoo TV Live From Sydney video, for instance, we see the song “The Fly,” from the Achtung Baby CD, staged against a backdrop of video monitors flashing words, phrases, and slogans at almost subliminal speed, à la Jenny Holzer’s truisms: “DEATH IS A CAREER MOVE,” “EVERY THING YOU KNOW IS WRONG” (Firesign Theater?), “AMBITION BITES THE NAILS OF SUCCESS,” “ENJOY THE SURFACE.” But the song’s “punchline” is twenty seconds worth of one phrase, repeated on the video monitors dozens and dozens and dozens of times: “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT.” Jeepers, guys. How? The sentiment of this closing “truism” seems to come from the U2 of The Joshua Tree who still hadn’t found what they were looking for; but according to the logic of the new, postmodernized U2, such an unproblematic, positivistic assertion of the individual subject’s ability to shape her world seems unsupported by the visual and verbal rhetoric of the song’s performance. Equally problematic, for similar reasons, is the video monitors’ warning that “SILENCE=DEATH,” or the band’s use of live satellite video from war-torn Bosnia during other concert dates, or their trademark blurb to “Join Amnesty International” that appears in the liner notes of even the Zooropa CD.

     

    How can we steer a middle path between the naive voluntarism suggested by U2’s “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT” and a kind of philosophical quietism acceptable to almost no one? Kruger’s piece called “Repeat After Me”–a sort of twelve-step program for the treatment of modernist nostalgia–insists that we wrap our voices around a number of propaganda bites: “That ‘we’ are not right and ‘the enemy’ wrong. . . . That God is not on our side. . . . That TV and print journalists should begin to acknowledge and understand their ability to create consensus and make history” (223). (This must be at least the sixth time in the collection we’ve been reminded that TV makes history.) But then the symptomatic punchline, the culminating slogan: “empathy can change the world” (223). I hate to be so damn cynical, but doesn’t that sound a litle like “Visualize World Peace”? Shouldn’t it go on a bumper sticker somewhere? Kruger’s work, like that of U2, can display all the trappings of postmodernist thought and then blithely ask us to place our hope in the most stale and familiar of liberal causes.

     

    Kruger may have rebounded off the wall of postmodernity and ended up–like U2, like Baudrillard–a kind of neo-modernist, but at least she, has not settled into the comforts of cynicism. (Recall that our word “cynicism” is derived from the Greek word for dog; philosophy, taken in a certain direction, results in a despair which leads one to give up all hope and ambition and to lie in the street like a dog.) Indeed, to overcome cynicism Kruger seems prepared to credit the notion of postmodern voluntarism. And why not? Like Jean-Francois Lyotard, she believes that when the Great Narratives of enlightenment can no longer be believed, it is time for us to write smaller narratives of our own.9 That at least is how I would want to read the passage from Kruger’s essay “Quality” where she calls for “an esthetic of qualities rather than the singularity of quality. I think I could go for that esthetic. I think I could second that emotion” (9). Even the allusion to Smokey Robinson seems promising: popular culture employed lovingly for once rather than dismissively. “Shredded totalities,” Kruger writes toward the end of the volume, “go the way of highly classified documents which disappear and take their secrets with them. Maybe” (231). But nature abhors a vacuum, and an unnarrated cultural space cannot stay uninscribed for long. Power doesn’t lie simply in the hands of the evil Wizards of Madison Avenue, or the Rockefeller Center; we can’t but live in the realm of the represented, rather than the real, and we’re never at a loss for representations to whose magic we might become enthralled. Razing the totalizing, repressive grands recits clears a space upon which we must rebuild quickly; we can build on it ourselves, or let someone else do it, but it won’t stay vacant for long, for someone’s sure to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.” Perhaps enough of the demolition is now accomplished that we might think about what we’d like to put up here.

     

    Notes

     

    1. A great many of Kruger’s images are conveniently reproduced in Kate Linker’s Love For Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).

     

    2. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 5.

     

    3. Generation X, 8.

     

    4. Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 12. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

     

    5. Linker, Love For Sale, 68.

     

    6. Don DeLillo, White Noise. (New York: Penguin, 1985), 244.

     

    7. Laurie Anderson, “Talk Normal,” Home of the Brave (Warner Bros. 9 25400-2, 1986).

     

    8. DeLillo, White Noise, 17.

     

    9. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), 1984.

     

  • Permanence and Change in the Global Village

    Thomas Benson

    Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric
    Pennsylvania State University
    t3b@psuvm.psu.edu

     

    Garry, Patrick M. Scrambling for Protection: The New Media and the First Amendment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.

     

    The economy, the technology, and the regulatory infrastructure of communications are undergoing rapid change, with unpredictable but probably important social consequences. In his brief and readable book, Scrambling for Protection, Patrick Garry proposes that policy and law guiding the developments in new media industries should be governed by a reconstructed understanding of the press clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights addresses issues of freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition:

     

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

     

    Garry argues that changes in media technology, as well as changes in the press and its public reception, render outmoded an existing patchwork of doctrines that have evolved through a historical process of case law and ad hoc regulation. Newspapers have increasingly become monopolistic creatures driven by large conglomerates remote from the local communities they serve. Journalism has changed from an organ of community information and opinion formation into a scandal-mongering, adversarial, investigative enterprise open to only a few professional journalists and a small band of experts. As a result of these changes in the press, the public, disenfranchised by journalism, is increasingly hostile and apathetic towards both the press and the political system. Meanwhile, information delivery systems have blurred the distinctions among the largest media industries–press, phone, broadcast television, radio, cable–and there is every indication that further blurring is on its way.

     

    Garry proposes a way to solve the problems of the press and the public by guiding the coming changes in information technology from the perspective of the press clause of the First Amendment. But this requires, as well, a re-definition of the press clause. According to Garry, the most attractive feature of the new information technologies is that, with their vastly increased bandwidth and the new social practices they are tentatively exercising on the internet, media consumers have now become active–and interactive–media participants. If we could restore participation as a feature of journalism, argues Garry, we could restore a sense of community, giving American media and government back to the people. How would such a change be brought about in a consistent way? Here is where Garry attempts his reconstruction of the press clause, arguing that the best features of the new media are precisely consonant with what the authors of the Bill of Rights meant to protect with the press clause.

     

    Garry argues that the Bill of Rights was not meant to protect the press, as such, and certainly not journalism as it has evolved over the past two hundred years, but rather that it was meant to protect certain practices and principles that were embodied in the American press of the late 18th century. Garry distinguishes between freedom of speech and freedom of the press by arguing that “while the speech clause protects individuals in their act of speaking, the press clause protects the dissemination of those views and assures an open forum for communication in society and for democratic political dialogue” (115). The framers meant to protect three primary values: (1) the attainment of truth through the open clash of antagonistic views; (2) the promotion of democratic government by rendering the government more rational in its decision making and the public more energetic in the formation of political coalitions; (3) the promotion of democratic society through the development of social bonds that help to “create a common social world” (113). These values, writes Garry, and not the press itself, were the objects of protection.

     

    What follows from Garry’s redefinition of the press clause is that in developing law and policy for the changing media infrastructure, the courts and agencies should be guided not by any attempt to prefer the press as it now exists, and not by outmoded attempts to preserve distinctions among major media and media industries, but to regard all the agencies of dissemination as, essentially, “the press,” and to enact policies that favor participation, democracy, community, and the open clash of political views.

     

    There is much to admire in Garry’s argument, which I have attempted to summarize in a manner sympathetic to his views. But since so much is at stake, it might also be well to entertain some misgivings.

     

    In redefining the press clause of the First Amendment, Garry resorts to a peculiar mixture of historically rooted original-intentionism and transcendental essentialism. On the one hand, Garry appeals to a description of “the press” as it existed in late 18th-century America, where entry to the arena was relatively cheap for a printer-publisher, making for a crowded and diverse marketplace of ideas; where most of the content of a newspaper was partisan political argument submitted by readers; and where local interests played a strong role in defining press content. Pressing the historical analogy between the 18th-century press and contemporary computer systems, Garry claims that “essentially, colonial newspapers were bulletin boards for their communities; they were both subject to and responsive to the wishes of colonial society” (98). But Garry wants to go beyond historical comparison–he wants us to accept as fixed and transcendent a set of values he abstracts from his description of the colonial press.

     

    Garry’s distinction between “speech” and “press” is also troublesome, creating a neat and tidy dichotomy that overly limits what is called “speech” and that appears to leave out of the circle of protection a variety of communicative enactments that appear to be neither “speech” nor “press” as he defines them. When he assigns to “press” the whole range of institutions and activities having to do with dissemination, Garry reduces “speech” to the act of individual utterance (or analogous symbolic action). But this reduction of speech to individual behavior fails the very historical test to which Garry puts “press,” since in the late 18th century “speech,” including public speaking in churches, courts, legislatures, and public assemblies, was a major institutional formation that (with the press) enabled the creation of resistance, the fomenting of revolution, and the building of a constitutional democracy. Freedom of speech protects not merely individual utterance but shared social communication. Further, to reduce speech to individual utterance and to confine the protected zone of the press to that which promotes political community would seem to endanger the expanding range of freedom to disseminate communication of all sorts, including the arts, without having to justify their freedom on the basis of their right to communicate political ideas. Speech and press are not so easily dichotomized on historical, theoretical, or constitutional grounds, nor would they remain, if reduced to Garry’s formulation, a sound basis upon which to protect communicative freedoms generally.

     

    At many points, Garry seems overconfident of his ability to penetrate matters of causation in the empirical realm. For example, though there are legitimate grounds to argue that the Fourth-Estate model of the press, in which professional journalists of the post-Watergate era specialize in adversarial and investigative attacks on the political realm, contributes to political alienation, it seems unlikely that such changes can be attributed to a simple cause-effect model, and it seems even more unlikely that we could predict the results of adopting social policies designed to destroy the Fourth Estate. The complexity of the interactions of press, politics, and public, within the context of society as a whole groping its way through history, makes it very difficult to assign the sorts of cause and effect upon which Garry’s argument depends. Garry’s book abounds with such extravagant claims about causation, with abbreviated and facile historical analogies, and with extraordinarily optimistic projections of the ability of computer bulletin boards to salvage democracy.

     

    Despite these misgivings, Garry’s book is a brisk, optimistic, confident, and provocative work that deserves broad discussion and debate. Garry is unwavering in his search for an open, democratic society; he does a skillful job of condensing a broad argument, sketching his evidence, and outlining the consequences of accepting his view. Readers interested in the interaction of media and democracy will be prompted by Scrambling for Protection to consider the challenges it poses to the construction of the media of the next century.The clarity, brevity (only 195 pages), and force of Garry’s bookmake it suitable for adoption as a text (though its $29.95 price tag will discourage some); the book seems well designed to stimulate spirited discussion.

     

  • Blurring the Lines: Art on The Border

    Jonathan Markovitz

    Department of Sociology
    University of California, San Diego
    jmarkovi@weber.ucsd.edu

     

    La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. Organized by the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The exhibit will be on display at the San Jose Museum of Art from October through December 1994. This review is based on the showing in San Diego in May of 1993.

     

    The first thing to note about La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience is that the exhibit’s title is a bit misleading. The various pieces of work in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as “the . . . Border Experience.” Instead, while it is possible to draw out some common themes, the exhibit represents an extremely diverse multiplicity of “border experiences.” But even this phrasing would make for a somewhat misleading title, because one of the central concerns of the project is to problematize the notion of “border” in a variety of ways. Borders between Mexico and the United States are only one set of oppositions which are interrogated, and to some extent (I’ll conclude this review by questioning to what degree), broken down. The various art works in this exhibit also challenge the borders that divide: art and criticism; production and reception; public and private; religion and entertainment; communication and imperialism.

     

    One of the outstanding works in the show, Yolanda Lopez’s “Things I Never Told My Son About Being A Mexican,” is a collage made up of various items from popular culture. Newspaper articles are interspersed with a bag of “Batman tortilla chips” and a Wonder Woman comic book the cover of which shows Wonder Woman eating cafeteria-style rice and beans. According to the accompanying blurb, the work “highlights the otherwise subtle and persistent means by which the mass media defines Mexican American Identity. . . . [It] exposes racist subtexts in seemingly neutral expressions of contemporary popular culture.” This description is worth examining, since the collage itself presents the various items to us without any accompanying commentary, and it is not clear how we would know that the work “exposes” racism if the blurb did not tell us so. The blurb in fact is part of the larger apparatus by means of which the exhibit attempts to construct its audience.

     

    The first thing to note in this connection is that while the collage as a whole is clearly about Mexican-American identity, many of the individual artifacts are not. Many people looking at the Wonder Woman comic would not, for example, pay any attention to the food’s cultural history. Identity is “highlighted,” therefore, only by juxtaposition of the various elements. Seen together, the different items yield a common theme. But this theme is racism only to the extent that a prior agreement or orientation toward Lopez’s collage has been established among the audience–only to the extent that racism has already somehow been designated the object of attention.

     

    One of the ways this prior orientation is established is through reviews of the exhibit, nearly all of which have focused on racism, imperialism, or border-zone policing practices. Then, for those few who manage to come in to the exhibit without having seen any of the reviews, there are plaques on display at the museum’s entrances which mention the same constellation of concerns. And finally, in addition to placing a descriptive/prescriptive blurb beside Lopez’s piece, the exhibitors have surrounded it with other pieces which depend on similar aesthetic strategies and are described in similar terms. My point here is that the piece only “works” as a statement on the racism of popular culture if (and because) the viewer has absorbed certain lessons in how to view it. This is as it should be: an exhibition of emergent artistic practices must fulfill the pedagogical function of training a suitable audience. But in this case the organizers’ desire to establish “racism” as the audience’s primary term of reference may have the effect of prematurely foreclosing some alternate readings.

     

    These questions aside, there is much to applaud in the Frontera exhibition. Lopez’s collage in particular succeeds in challenging some deeply entrenched oppositions, or conceptual borders. To begin with, the artifacts she has collected will tend to disrupt any presumed border between high culture and low, art and trash. Moreover, while individually the items might be examples of “naturalized” racism, collectively they can represent a syncretic appropriation of racist notions. In this sense, the piece is simultaneously an indictment of domination, and a gesture toward something different. There are other examples of “border crossings” within this piece, but I want to stop here, because I think that the notion of artistic syncretism is particularly useful for an understanding of the work adjacent to Lopez’s, Cesar Augusto Martinez’s “Amor a la Tierra en el Sur de Tejas,” or “Love of the Land of South Texas.”

     

    Martinez’s piece appears to be a simple landscape–pretty, but not terribly interesting. On second glance, however, the work takes on an entirely new dimension. It turns out that the piece is painted on a “No Trespassing” sign, an the accompanying text tells us that the sign is from the border. The text goes further to say that “by painting over a No Trespassing sign, Martinez presents the despair of immigrants who come with hope to an unwelcoming land.” While this may be true, Martinez is surely representing something other than, and beyond, despair. The land is clearly unwelcoming, but Martinez seems to be saying that it makes its appeal to him anyway. Moreover, by transforming a hostile border sign into an artwork (an object that has already furthered his professional reputation), Martinez has managed to turn the very symbol of his unwelcome and alien status to his advantage on this side of the border. I do not want to trivialize the despair that the blurb refers to, and I’ll note that many of the other works in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that lots of people are not able to cross the border at all, and that many of those who do are forced to suffer extreme hardships. But it is precisely for this reason that Martinez’s work most clearly marks a moment of artistic syncretism. If it is only because of the problems of domination that Martinez needs to appropriate a border sign, then the work is syncretic in that it moves beyond appropriation and into creation of new forms and possibilities for cultural transformation. In the process of appropriation, Martinez has posed a serious challenge to the notion of borders.1 The work makes it possible to see the border not as a line marking containment, but as just one more piece of canvas. Repressive politics or transformative art? Martinez poses the possibility that the border might be both at once.

     

    David Avalos deals with a similar set of issues in his “San Diego Donkey Cart.” This piece focuses on tourism in border towns as a way of putting into question the prevailing norms of U.S./Mexican relations. The work is, in Avalos’s words “a simulacrum of a Tiajuanan Donkey Cart.” These hand-drawn carts with photos of “friendly Mexicans” are popular border attractions. Avalos’s sculpture substitutes a drawing of a “border patrol agent arresting an undocumented worker” for the traditional photo. The result is that “Tiajuana and San Diego’s tourist trade is thus juxtaposed with the socioeconomic reality that underlies it and upon which it depends for its survival.” This is perhaps the one work in the exhibit best suited for a discussion of syncretism as a process.

     

    The “original” border town donkey carts were already simulacra, appropriations of Mexican culture for the purposes of a U.S.-dominated tourist industry. (Donkey carts were used for transportation before they were used for tourism). Moreover, construction of the tourist cart relied on a previous Northern appropriation and construction of Mexican identity, in the form of the stock figure of the “friendly Mexican.” Avalos’s work is merely the next step in the process–a further re-construction. But the exhibit is quick to note that the process did not end here.

     

    Avalos’s original donkey cart was a life-sized sculpture commissioned as a public work, and placed in front of a San Diegan federal court house in 1986–a site from which it was quickly removed. A judge ordered it confiscated (a further act of “appropriation?”) because of the “threat that it posed to public safety.” The work that’s in the exhibit is, therefore, a reproduction of Avalos’s original simulacrum. Avalos, however, refused to allow the judge’s actions to go uncontested, and enlisted the aid of the ACLU to fight for the cart’s release and reinstatement. The case was ultimately dismissed, but Avalos has now gathered the judge’s statements along with magazine articles and various court documents into a booklet that has become an intrinsic part of the current exhibit. Appropriation and transformation are unending. The “original” donkey cart now provides the occasion for a whole series of discussions that problematize U.S./Mexican borders, public/private distinctions, and individual/government relations.

     

    This last of these oppositions is important because it is bound up with the categories of “tourist” and “friend.” Avalos’s work clearly links both of these generalized individuals to their respective governments. “Tourist” becomes “U.S. tourist,” and “friend” becomes “Mexican friend.” This was of course, always the case, but forced recognition of the nationality of both categories (even in Mexico, tourists can see “U.S.” as an invisible norm) denies the presumed innocence of the former. Moreover, “friendship” is high ighted as an economic, rather than as an emotional relation, one which Mexicans must take up as a strategy of survival.

     

    Though the exhibit includes far too many works for me to discuss or even describe, the three I’ve mentioned exemplify the kinds of border-crossing gestures that comprise it. Virtually everthing in the exhibit is concerned to transgress or transform boundaries and to resist all efforts at containment. The question I’d like to end with, however, is this: What does it mean to group all of these works together, and contain them within the “borders” of museum walls?2 What is the relationship between the exhibit’s various critiques of socio-cultural borders, and the borders of the institution in and through which the exhibit has its existence? There is an effort here to produce what bell hooks calls a space of “radical openness;” but is it not the case that this openness is brought to a kind of closure after all by the physical and social limitations of the museum’s space? These are not trivial questions, yet nor are they easily decidable. We must bear in mind that cultural syncretism is an ongoing process whose effects, or lack thereof, cannot reliably be extrapolated from current arrangements. Whatever its institutional position, the cultural work on and of the border represented by the La Frontera exhibition warrants our closest attention.

     

    Notes

     

    1.I don’t want to go too far here. Undocumented workers provide cheap labor which is essential for many United States industries. Despite political posturing and an ever increasingly abusive immigration system, employers rely upon, and are secure in their ability to maintain access to, this labor pool. In a very real sense then, border crossings (and appropriations of border markings) challenge very little.

     

    2.One piece of art that is referred to in the exhibition’s catalog was, in fact, never contained by museum walls. “Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate” by Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos was more explicitly interactive and public than a museum would allow. The artists applied for an NEA grant, and used the money to print up certificates for undocumented workers to sign. Attached to these certificates were $10 bills (which were also NEA money). When workers signed the certificates, they received the money. The idea I think, was to give back some of what was due, and to point out that, rather than an economic drain, these workers were actually vital parts of the U.S. economy. Needless to say, the NEA was not very pleased with this use of their funds. The resulting debates (in the mass media and within government circles) are ongoing. This piece, however, was commissioned to appear in conjunction with, and not as part of, the exhibition.

     

  • Theory That Matters

    Jeffrey Nealon

    Department of English
    Pennsylvania State University
    jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu

     

    Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York & London: Routledge, 1993.

     

    Editor’s note: readers may also be interested in the PMC-MOO discussion of this book, archived here .

     

    — JU

     

    Judith Butler has certainly produced a body of work that matters. It matters not only because it takes “theory” into the realm of difficult socio-political analysis, but also because it does so without sacrificing the complexities, hesitations and difficulties that necessarily surround such a project. For Butler, theory matters precisely as practice, as material response to specific (and often horrific) political situations: it is an analysis of how these situations have come to be structured as they are, and how they can be changed without simply reinstituting the very same normative interpellating discourses that gave rise to such situations in the first place. In Bodies That Matter, Butler takes up “the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (9, italics removed). And it is precisely in accounting for identity as the product of still-conflicted exclusionary normative practices that Butler asks us to consider the possibility of reinscribing “our” heterogeneous present and future. While categories of identity certainly cannot and should not be abandoned in such a project, Butler nonetheless argues for the theoretical and political necessity “to learn a double movement: to invoke the category, and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest” (222). It is because her work has this relentlessly dual focus–calling for concrete responsive action in the present while preserving the possibility, indeed necessity, of a reinscribed future–that Butler’s work matters so singularly and crucially. Bodies That Matter is a book very much written in the margins of 1990’s Gender Trouble, itself a kind of feminist rewriting of Butler’s vastly underrated (or at least underquoted) book on Hegel and contemporary French thought, Subjects of Desire (1987). There is, in other words, a great deal of Bodies That Matter devoted to correcting or complicating certain (mis)readings of Gender Trouble, especially those readings that took it to be arguing for an understanding of gender as a performance. As Butler writes, if she were arguing that gender was a performance, “that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” (Bodies, x).1 But as Butler makes clear time and again in Bodies That Matter, her notion of gender as performative is not simply equatable with understanding gender as a performance; “The reduction of performativity to performance,” she writes, “would be a mistake” (234).

     

    But how, then, are we to understand this crucial distinction? Drawing from Foucault’s work on discursive formation, Derrida on speech act theory and iterability, and Eve Sedgwick’s work on queer performativity, Butler fashions a notion of performative identity that “must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (2).2 According to Butler, because the subject is the product of specific constraining normative frames, it cannot simply choose its gender as actors pick parts in plays; but, at the same time, because these compulsory normative frames never merely determine a subject without simultaneously opening spaces of resistance (in other words, because interpellation sometimes fails), agency is made possible and efficacious precisely because of and within these frames. “And if there is agency,” Butler writes, “it is to be found, paradoxically, in the possibilities opened up in and by that constrained appropriation of the regulatory law, by the materialization of that law, the compulsory appropriation and identification with those normative demands . . . Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical” (12).3 The subject, in other words, is itself a product of interpellating codes, and therefore it cannot simply enforce a critical distance between itself and these codes. If there is to be subversion of identities, it must be subversion from within, a reinscription rather than a supposed remaking ex nihilo.

     

    As the book’s subtitle might suggest, Butler’s theoretical apparatus is quite specifically constructed out of a consideration of the category “sex” within the normative frames of compulsory heterosexuality. As Butler argues, “sex” is itself such a performative or citational practice:

     

    “Sex” is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make. Paradoxically, however, this productive capacity of discourse is derivative, a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification, not creation ex nihilo. . . . [W]hat is invoked by the one who speaks or inscribes the law is the fiction of a speaker who wields the authority to make his [sic] words binding, the legal incarnation of the divine utterance. (107)

     

    As speech-act theory argues, performatives seem to found a situation that they merely cite: the judge’s “I now pronounce you man and wife” or the midwife’s “It’s a girl” pretend to be the “legal incarnation of the divine utterance,” when on further examination either speech act is actually “a form of cultural iterability”: such performatives iterate interpellating codes; they do not somehow found a wholly new state. A subject is, then, always cited into an identity, but, in what is only a seeming paradox, it is precisely the necessity of repeating these interpellating citational codes–of constantly identifying oneself before the law–that offers possibilities for subverting or rearticulating identity. The necessity of repetition opens the possibility of repeating these codes with a difference: “I now pronounce you man aswife” or “It’s a lesbian.” As Butler writes, “Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure” (108).

     

    If this were as far as Butler’s work went, it would certainly be a valuable enough contribution to feminist theory–which remains, on Butler’s reading, mired in an unproductive and divisive essentialism/constructionism debate. Certainly a notion of citational performativity allows us to see past the limiting binarisms of this debate to explore the ways in which particular historical and social interpellations give rise to specific subjectivities; likewise, and perhaps more importantly, it allows us to see the ways in which those interpellations contain the very terms of their own reinscription. If Butler’s work were to stop here, however, it would leave open the question of how one gets from a notion of the citational construction of identity to the subversion or reinscription of that identity; it would leave unanswered the question of how one gets from interpellation to resistance–or, more accurately and pressingly, how one gets from the possibility of resistance to its actual activation or articulation.

     

    And it is precisely her intricate and nuanced consideration of this question that makes Butler’s Bodies That Matter not merely timely, incisive, and challenging reading, but essential reading. Bodies That Matter certainly clarifies Gender Trouble‘s arguments about an identificatory citational interpellation that carries the possibility of its own subversion; however, in Bodies That Matter Butler goes a step further, taking up the

     

    critical question of how constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies. The latter domain is not the opposite of the former. . . ; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside. . . . To claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced. (xi, italics removed)

     

    Butler here asks us to take a step past the platitudinous understanding that “everything is socially constructed,” and move toward an examination of the specificexclusions by which social construction secures identities. As she writes, “thinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself” (xi), and such a rethinking entails accounting not only for the production of normative identities, but the simultaneous production of unlivable, abject identities–though such sites may turn out, in a painful paradox, to be primary among the potential sites for normative identity’s subversion.

     

    In other words, while it is certainly important and productive to point out that “‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal … that will produce its remainder, its outside” (22), it is another matter altogether to account for the ways in which such “remainder” subjectivities are produced in specific historico-cultural situations as abjected, produced as by-products of the violent exclusions that secure normative identities. As Butler writes in the service of that project:

     

    there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which can only be thought–when it can–in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that ‘everything is discursively constructed’; that point . . . refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. (8)

     

    The upshot of Butler’s notion of performativity, in other words, is not that everything is structured, but rather that everything is dependent on structures–linguistic, institutional, political–that are cited and recited in any specific case; and, she argues, it is precisely an attention to the material specificity of the “constitutive ‘outside’” in any particular case that would allow us to respond to and reinscribe the multiple exclusions that make an identity possible or livable, while making other identities impossible or unlivable. The constructionism debate, in other words, needs to pay attention to the specificity of the restrictions that make possible the social construction of a particular normative ideal; as Butler insists, for example, an analysis of the workings of contemporary homophobia is notequal to or simply metaphorizable as an analysis of contemporary racism (18).

     

    In fact, Butler argues that feminism itself is necessarily founded on similar exclusions, and loses much critical force if it does not engage its own grounding restrictions (29). For example, Butler takes up bell hooks’s thematization of the drag balls portrayed in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning as misogynist. Butler points out that with this charge hooks “makes male homosexuality about women.” In turn, this reduction of the specificity of drag offers a troubling “way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity” (127). In other words, such feminist readings of Paris is Burning misfire when they read it solely in terms of a supposed male-identified femininity, rather than as a multiple, conflicted renegotiation or “site of the phantasmatic promise of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimation” (130).4 Similarly, Butler argues that Irigaray’s work runs a parallel risk when it reads the exclusion of the feminine as the master or paradigmatic exclusion in philosophical, cultural or political life. While Butler affirms the importance of Irigaray’s feminist reading of Plato, she nevertheless hesitates, asking after the multiple exclusions that secure normative identity in Plato’s texts:

     

    There are good reasons, however, to reject the notion that the feminine monopolizes the sphere of the excluded. . . . This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others, and those whose ‘natures’ are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. . . . Irigaray does not always help matters here, for she fails to follow through the metonymic link between women and these other Others, idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the feminine. But what is the ‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’? (48-49)

     

    It is this “metonymic link between women and these Others” that Butler’s text helps us to form. While it would seem that feminism loses critical force and focus if it concerns itself with exploring exclusions other than the exclusion of the feminine, Butler persuasively argues that the opposite is the case–that feminism is doomed to inefficacy unless it takes up the multiplicity of exclusions that actually form the seemingly totalized category “feminine.”

     

    While such collective identifications under common-cause signifiers (“woman,” “queer,” “African American”) are indispensible for the project of recognition within a conflicted democracy, Butler argues that

     

    the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. (4)

     

    Again, Butler here reemphasizes the importance of a kind of double movement: the necessity of identification coupled with the necessity that this identificatory movement be open to reinscription. As she insists throughout Bodies That Matter, there is no stable identificatory site of “femininity” or “queerness,” and, in fact, ensuring the multiplicity of such identificatory sites is critical to feminist and queer body politics. I take the upshot of Butler’s discussion here to be that feminism, for example, cannot protect its identificatory sites from being inhabited by drag queens, Phyllis Schlafly, James Joyce or whomever. In fact, to turn a Foucaultian phrase, Butler asks us to consider what it costs us to protect such seemingly stable sites of contestation from contestation itself? In other words, what normativizing practices are reified and extended in protecting a site of stable identificatory femininity? This is perhaps Butler’s most poignant question to identity politics; as she writes, “it seems important, then, to question whether a political insistence on coherent identities can ever be the basis on which a crossing over into political alliance with other subordinated groups can take place, especially when such a conception of alliance fails to understand that the very subject-positions in question are themselves a kind of ‘crossing,’ are themselves the lived scene of a coalition’s difficulty” (115).

     

    However, and just as importantly, Butler’s is not merely an empty celebratory gesture toward a contentless “postmodern” multiplicity.5 As she writes, “one might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply” (229-30). How is it, we might ask, that simply recognizing the multiplicity of possible identificatory sites (or is that cites?) “underestimates the radical challenge to the subject” that Butler wants to pose? To answer this question, perhaps we need to turn to Butler’s continuing engagement with Lacan. Butler takes very seriously Lacan’s Freudian vocabulary of “foreclosure” as the suturing constitution of the subject. Such foreclosure, of course, creates both the subject and the exclusions that she calls us to attend to throughout Bodies That Matter. For example, Butler points out that within the constraints of Lacan’s compulsory heterosexuality, the “feminized fag and phallicized dyke” become the uninhabitable positions which are foreclosed in the taking up of compulsory heterosexuality, “a move that excludes and abjects gay and lesbian possibilities” (96). But what happens, Butler asks, when those abjected sites, by and through their very exclusion or foreclosure, become sites of subversive desire and identification? What happens, in other words, “if the taboo becomes eroticized precisely for the transgressive sites that it produces” (97)? Certainly, Lacan would have taught us that this is just how desire works (98ff), but what happens when we subject the Lacanian analysis of sexual difference to a kind of symptomatic Lacanian reading?

     

    What happens (if I can try to extrapolate from an intensely nuanced, sustained and careful reading) is that the monologizing Lacanian Oedipal law of signification–expropriation from the real into the symbolic under the threat of castration–loses its absolute privilege. Certainly, as Butler notes, Lacan’s version of resistance to interpellating norms–desire necessarily cathecting onto forbidden objects, the power of the imaginary to resist the law of the symbolic–has proven productive for his feminist readers. In fact, the imaginary has proven to be the productive hinge by which to read Lacan against Lacan’s own foreclosure of other economies. As Butler writes:

     

    this version of resistance has constituted the promise of psychoanalysis to contest strictly opposed and hierarchical sexual positions for some feminist readers of Lacan. But does this view of resistance fail to consider the status of the symbolic as immutable law? And would the mutation of that law call into question not only the compulsory heterosexuality attributed to the symbolic, but also the stability and discreteness of the distinction between symbolic and imaginary registers within the Lacanian scheme? It seems crucial to question whether resistance to an immutable law is sufficient as a political contestation of compulsory heterosexuality, where this resistance is safely restricted to the imaginary and thereby restrained from entering into the structure of the symbolic itself. (106)

     

    Here, Butler argues that we must pay attention to the specificity of the subject’s foreclosures and the resistances that they enable; in other words, resistance to the law of the father is to be found in inhabiting and reinscribing specific abjected subjectivities rather than simply lamenting the necessity of such foreclosures–reading them as necessary if regrettable symptoms of the law of the father–or concentrating on the imaginary spaces of freedom that such foreclosures seem to allow. Finally, Butler suggests that this resistance of and to foreclosure breaks down the wall between the Lacanian symbolic and imaginary: “if the figures of homosexualized abjection mustbe repudiated for sexed positions to be assumed,” she argues, “then the return of those figures as sites of erotic cathexis will refigure the domain of contested positionalities within the symbolic” (109).

     

    The key concept that Butler wants to rescue from Lacan is that of resistance, or more precisely, of the resistance to foreclosure through desire. While Foucault and Derrida are helpful in the project of enabling resistance–showing how it is possible if not inevitable–it seems that for Butler, Lacan allows us to demonstrate how resistance happens, how it is engendered and made concrete through foreclosure itself. Butler departs from Lacan, however, by questioning his reduction of all such response or subversion to the very terms of the originary loss or foreclosure of the real: in other words, Butler questions the monologizing reduction in Lacan of all laws to the symbolic law of failure, lack, and expropriation from the real. For Butler, Lacan (and, for that matter, Slavoj Zizek) reduces all resistance to a symptom of Oedipal expropriation–reduces all laws to the law of lack–and thereby reduces the complexity of specific historical and cultural power relations that foreclose specific identities at specific times to pave the way for normativity. In Lacan and Zizek, the consistent failures or misrecognitions of the subject all point to the same monologizing drama of Oedipal expropriation. For Butler, such subjective misrecognition calls to be read otherwise, not as a symptom of the Law of the Father but as the condition of its subversion. As she writes, “the resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” (237, originial emphasis removed). If there is a notion of Lacanian failure or “lack” running through Butler’s work, it is, perhaps, “failure” as that which enables and calls for another reading, another response, another movement. Misrecognition is the moment or movement of critique in Butler’s work–the exposure of the weakness or inefficacy of the negative or normative; but it is this other or second move–working that weakness by reinscribing it–that makes Butler’s work so decisive and important. It is this movement that takes Bodies That Matter a step beyond Gender Trouble.6

     

    Based on this theoretical ground, which I have only rather idiosyncratically begun to sketch here, Butler goes on to supply a series of painstakingly careful analyses of identity, race and gender in a wide range of discourses and texts–Lacan, Paris is Burning, ACT UP, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Slavoj Zizek, queer theory. It is here, with these specific analyses, that Butler makes a decisive intervention: a critical, insightful, necessary intervention. An intervention that matters.

     

    Notes

     

    1. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib’s critique of Gender Trouble in Situating the Self (New York & London: Routledge, 1992): “Along with the dissolution of the subject into yet ‘another position in language’ disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-reflexivity, and autonomy. The subject that is but another position in language can no longer master and create that distance between itself and the chain of significations in which it is immersed such that it can reflect upon them and creatively alter them. The strong version of the Death of the Subject thesis is not compatible with the goals of feminism. . . . If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?” (214-15).

     

    2. The linchpin figure here is Derrida, specifically his reading of performativity and speech act theory in “Signature Event Context” (in Margins of Philosophy. Tr. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 307-30). As Derrida writes, “Every sign . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring” (321). For Derrida, one can’t play substantives against performatives precisely because citational performatives make the supposed plenitude of substantives possible in the first place: “the condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity” (328).

     

    3. Compare Butler’s Gender Trouble (New York & London: Routledge, 1990): “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (145).

     

    4. Butler’s point, we should note, is certainly not that drag is unproblematically subversive: as she writes, there is “no necessary relation between drag and subversion” (125). See also 231 on this question.

     

    5. As Butler writes about this kind of postmodern pragmatist constructionism, “it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification” (53). Butler likewise remains suspicious of the “liberal” multiculturalist position which would ask us to walk a mile in the other’s shoes: “sympathy involves a substitution of oneself for another that may well be a colonization of the other’s position as one’s own” (118).

     

    6. Certainly, Gender Trouble formulates the questions before us in Bodies: “theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated ‘etc.’ that so often occurs at the end of such lines?” (Gender Trouble 143). Gender Trouble, it seems to me, gestures toward such readings, but does not actually supply them. Bodies That Matter goes on to demonstrate precisely the “political impetus” of a certain “failure.” This would, however, also be the point at which one could open a dialogue with Butler concerning the problematic Hegelian legacy of this notion of lack or misrecognition. In pursuing this question, which there is no time to do here, we could perhaps turn to Blanchot’s work on the weakening of the negative in Hegel (see, e.g., “Literature and the Right to Death” in Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus. Tr. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981, 21-62; and Le pas au-dela. Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

     

  • Black Modernisms / Black Postmodernisms

    Russell A. Potter

    English Department
    Colby College
    rapotter@colby.edu

     

    Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan UP/ UP of New England)

     

    Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard UP)

     

    The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in the development of the cluster of intellectual and political movements that move variously under the banners of Postmodernism, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and American Studies. In one sense, they have been almost too successful in gaining academic currency–some academics, it seems, have embraced them before they even quite knew what they were, happily tacking these new rubrics over the departmental doorframe in hopes that they would work the magic of keeping up with the theoretical Joneses. And yet, at the same moment, these new fields have been attacked with unusual virulence by such veterans of the academy-bashing circuit as Roger Kimball and Shelby Steele. Black Studies, both in the U.K. and the U.S., has in particular felt this crisis, continuing to serve as a favorite target for the self-declared traditionalists even while it comes under pressure from newer “Studies” competing for the same academic niches. Earlier debates, such as those over the questions of canon and curriculum, are now overshadowed by far deeper and more ominous rumblings, as internal divisions have erupted in an academic left that was perhaps never as unified as its conservative critics liked to believe. And, just to turn up the flame a little higher, college and university budgets have begun to shrink, forcing many of the new generation of academic mavericks and activists into arguments over who will get how big a slice of the dwindling pie–or who will get no slice at all. The distant laughter of the conservative critics of the academy adds a sense of lurking despair to this morose game of musical chairs.

     

    Meanwhile, back in the “cultures” that these fields ostensibly study, the wheel of new subcultural formations and their commodified doppelgangers has been spinning with increasing speed. While this acceleration has been marked in rapid changes in video, film, multimedia, and hypertext, one of the most visible sites of change has been music; yesterday’s rhythms of revolution are today’s pricey national concert tours, and tomorrow’s instant retrocompilation CD’s. Under such circumstances, academics who cast their hats into the ring of “popular culture” or “cultural studies” had best be prepared for a fast-forward free-for-all; if they emerge with something more than a handful of someone else’s hair, they probably ought to get some sort of medal. The battered academic Volvo suddenly finds itself caught between sound-system-loaded Jeeps blaring Ice Cube on the one side and air-conditioned Lexuses with the radio tuned to Rush Limbaugh on the other. It’s culture wars with a vengeance, and yet it’s also a time when there is an opportunity, however fleeting, for voices from within the academy to perform potent acts of cultural translation, acts which, even if they can’t resolve the cacophony, can at least articulate what’s at stake, and perhaps finally break through the strained dichotomies between “intellectual” and “popular” culture, and perhaps even take account of the interpenetration of such categories. That, after all, was supposed to be one of the benefits of the post-structuralist critiques that pried open this door in the first place; it seems strange that, a generation after Barthes, people should still be discovering the mythologics of culture as though this were something never heard of before.

     

    A large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very discourses post-structuralism has deployed to describe itself. As bell hooks put it back in the first issue of Postmodern Culture:

     

    The contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.1

     

    Hooks’s rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of postmodern critiques to ignore or tokenize black expressive artforms, but also the long-standing–and oftentimes justified–suspicion on the part of black writers and philosophers over what (if anything) postmodernism could possibly offer for the kinds of critical histories they were engaged with constructing. As recently as 1989, it was possible for Cornel West to allow, in his essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” that “the current ‘postmodernism’ debate is first and foremost a product of significant First World reflections upon the decentering of Europe.”2 West, as one of the leading black philosophers of our time, saw both the parochial and ludic elements of postmodernism as signs of its insufficient engagement with black culture, even as he gestured toward “a potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism.”3 Yet in the light of critiques and analyses by scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric Lott, and Paul Gilroy, it has become increasingly evident that what had earlier been articulated primarily as the subcultural resistance of black artforms has in fact had a long and intimate relation with the founding dialectics of “Western” modernism, and consequently of “postmodernism” as well. Now, at last, it seems possible to begin to acknowledge the manifold ways in which black studies, and the histories and arts that it has engaged, have been and continue to be absolutely central to the questions raised by contemporary theory, and consequently to the numerous appropriations and figurations of blackness that have (in)formed modernist and postmodernist thought (as well as of the black artists and writers who have claimed and reclaimed a place in the genealogy of avant gardes).

     

    Still, both Gilroy and Rose, though for somewhat different reasons, tend to eschew the term “postmodern”: Gilroy prefers “anti-modern” or “counterculture of modernity”; Rose uses the more materialist-inflected “post-industrial.” Gilroy has a healthy suspicion of the simplistic relativism of some avatars of postmodernism, and prefers to see these black cultural formations as oppositional modernities, rather than postmodernities. Interested primarily in reclaiming the territory of the modern as a movement instigated by the historical experiences and philosophical implications of black slavery and diaspora, he looks dimly on the kind of glib postmodernism of writers such as Jameson, whose academic “we” never feels the need to account for its own racial, sexual, and gender presuppositions. Rose, for her part, never directly addresses the implications of postmodern theory, though she makes ready use of many of its strands. Her commitment to a thoroughly materialist account of the roots of black expressivities makes her suspicious of some of these strands, but she confines her critique to one or two writers who exemplify its worst qualities. Both Gilroy and Rose are right, I think, to be wary, but at the same time their work raises questions which are absolutely fundamental to postmodernist theory and practice, and indeed draw forcefully on some of the same decentering discourses as some of the more political postmoderist texts.

     

    I will discuss Rose’s book first since, despite the fact that it does not explicitly engage with the questions of (post)modernity, it works within a certain characteristic bind of one genre of academic postmodernism. For, both with “high” cultural formations (such as the writings of Derrida or the post-Haraway theorists of cyberspace) and with so-called “popular” formations (hip-hop, grunge, rock videos), the most common tone taken up by public intellectuals is that of the “bluffer’s guide.” What should we know about hypertext? What’s the latest word on street culture? To audiences for whom such questions elicit a potent mixture of curiosity and anxiety, there is an endless hunger for articles or books that will give them a ready grip on the latest cultural movement. Academic writers, especially those who like to work as activist public intellectuals, implicitly address this broader audience, and yet in their desire to fulfill its wishes for a synoptic overview of a critical issue, they often serve reductive ends. This is partly the doing of reviewers and readers, who are looking for ready-made rhetorical handles, but it is also part of academic writers’ desire to enjoy a spotlight broader than the private accolades of students or colleagues.

     

    The crucial question is that posed by Michel de Certeau in Heterologies: “From what position do the historians of popular culture speak? And what object do they constitute as a result of that position?”4 For it is rarely in the interests of “insurrectionary knowledges” (such as hip-hop) that the historians or chroniclers of “culture,” as constituted by the knowledges of semiotics, anthropology, or literary theory, have spoken. Those on the right, informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of “the decline and fall” from a Norman Rockwell past into a Piss Christ present, explicitly oppose all insurrectionary arts; intellectuals on the left, unfortunately, have seemed more interested in making academic capital of the popular than in articulating to a broader audience just what the value of such insurrections might be. When it comes to books whose explicit subject matter, rap music, is among the chief targets of the moral panicists of the right, as well as a phenomenon frequently held up by those on the left as a sign that artistic political resistance is alive and well, the exemplary questions of the public intellectuals of the left and right go toe-to-toe, each trying to claim hip-hop as a centerpiece of their social agenda. It’s a fight to the finish, as one critic’s nihilistic gat-toting hoodlum is another’s organic intellectual. As rappers say, “It’s on.”

     

    And Tricia Rose, for one, is ready for the battle. Black Noise is the kind of book you would like to send in a plain brown wrapper to everyone who dismisses rap music as a long-lived fad, mindless posturing, or minstrelsy for the ’90s. She provides ample evidence for skeptics of the development of rap music, its place within hip-hop culture and black American culture in general, and its efflourescence in the face of all kinds of direct and indirect attacks. Her opening chapter, “Voices from the Margins,” effectively summarizes rap music’s cultural imbrication at the level both of its production (she uses rap video as an example here) and of its consumption, with the associated questions of performance, audience, and technology. This segues nicely into the second chapter, “All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York,” where she provides a detailed social history of the South Bronx as the primary site of the emergence of hip-hop culture. The history is crucial, and ought to be required reading for critics such as David Samuels or C. Delores Tucker, clarion-callers of the “rap is a white plot” conspiracy theory. And, while writers such as David Toop or Stephen Hagar have given more detailed accounts of the musical developments in the years leading up to hip-hop’s ascendancy, Rose offers an account that clearly demonstrates the links of all the musical and artistic dimensions of hip-hop culture to the material situation of young black and Latino Americans in New York City in the late 1970’s and early ’80’s.

     

    The latter part of this chapter extends Rose’s arguments, attempting to link certain productive hip-hop tropes, such as “flow” and “breaking,” to the cultural histories she details. Here, however, she seems to founder a bit, as she comes up against the age-old musicologist’s conundrum of how to link form and content in a structure that is, to a large extent, not representational (or, on the verbal level, never simply representational). And, as attractive as it is to categorize rap music’s formal features, unless such accounts explicitly address the material histories at stake, they quickly dissipate into hazy generalities (just what is “flow,” anyway?). Rose seems to sense this, as she quickly moves into a discussion of hip-hop culture’s holy trinity of writing, breaking, and rapping, for each of which she offers succinct and suggestive accounting. As in other parts of the book, one has the sense that Rose is more at home supplying cultural contexts than she is in producing close analyses of particular rap lyrics or hip-hop creations.

     

    Rose’s next chapter, “Soul Sonic Forces,” takes a second drive by the same territory, and is considerably more successful. Rose performs a difficult balancing act between those who would link hip-hop to pre-modern African-American or African traditions, and others who would rather see it as a wholly new innovation dependent on technology. For the most part, she is able to delineate the ways in which rap music partakes of both orality and technology, without being limited by the paradigms of either. Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, she tends to see those who read rap as a “postmodern” artform as necessarily moving away from the materialist grounding of black studies, and does not allow for the possibility of a materialist postmodernism. Nonetheless, she acutely cuts down to size those who disembody hip-hop, taking it as a postmodern machine without a driver, and thus forgetting the actual black communities who have produced and consume it.

     

    At the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop’s aesthetic with the questions of originality, production, and commodification that have long been points of contention among critics of African-American music. At least since Adorno’s attempt to trash jazz as mindless musical repetition–up there with religion as an opiate of the masses–critics have argued over the social implications of music and other artforms “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Rose neatly sidesteps Adorno, quite accurately observing that he assumes that “mass production sets the terms for repetition and that any other cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems of mass production, are subsumed by the larger logic of industrialization” (72). On the contrary, Rose asserts, repetition, precisely because it antedates and post-dates industrial capitalism, is an ideal mode of resistance, both because it can re-appropriate and hijack technological machinery, and because it in fact makes a very potent agent for denaturalizing dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes art.

     

    This offers Rose another smooth segue into the question of sampling, which she quite accurately identifies as central to hip-hop’s technological practices and aesthetic values. I wish that she would have taken up the critical ways in which, as she richly suggests, sampling challenges notions about originality and intellectual property, but she chooses instead to focus on the specific techniques which some of rap’s best-known producers–such as Eric “Vietnam” Sadler–use to “bring the noise.” Her interview with and analysis of Sadler is fascinating, but at the end the theoretical issues raised by such practices are only touched on in passing. Rose does, however, offer a salient critique of some of the past scholarship on sampling, again moving to complicate the all-too-easy dichotomies of technology versus community, or fragmented versus whole, that tend to underpin many analyses.

     

    The central chapter, “Prophets of Rage: Rap Music and the Politics of Black Cultural Expression,” finally enables Rose to free herself from the work–necessary, but to some extent deadening–of sketching in the sociological and musical contexts of hip-hop; having made her points about the material situation of the music, she is free to assess its larger cultural engagements. And, at the beginning, she is forceful in articulating the intense, inevitably contradictory power of rap music in society. She offers a model–of “public” and “private” transcripts–which suggests the doubleness, the coded nature of rap lyrics. And as far as this analysis goes, she’s right on the money. Yet it’s odd, given the substantial work done on the black tradition of Signifying, that Rose seems to eschew this model, choosing instead a rather generalized model that does not resonate as strongly as it might with other critical work in the larger field of Black Studies. Nonetheless, the point is substantially the same, which is that rap lyrics play with what its listeners know (or don’t), drawing them in even as it shape-shifts through tropological sequences that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to ‘hook’ its listeners like an angler snagging a trout.

     

    Rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop lyrics–Paris’s “The Devil Made Me Do It,” KRS-One’s “Who Protects Us from You?,” L.L. Cool J.’s “Illegal Search,” and Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” Her readings, while uneven in places, certainly demonstrate the potency of these lyrics, as well as their rhetorical fluidity. Yet just at this point, where there is the greatest opportunity to analyze how rap lyrics work on the tropological level, Rose instead reads all four lyrics in a basically narrative sense, comparing them with anecdotes from her own life, hypothetical reflections on the class dimensions of L.L. Cool J.’s status as a wealthy entertainer, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the video for PE’s “Baseheads.” There are salient social points in every reading, but only scattered observations on exactly how these raps managed to bum rush the mass-media stage, or on the promised “politics” of black expression. There is also, for the most part, no close reading of the tropological moves that structure these raps: it’s rather like reading an account of a boxing match that talks only about strategy without offering any blow-by-blow details.

     

    Again, de Certeau’s question comes to mind: in presenting analyses of larger cultural movements, what is at stake? However much academic writers would like to eschew the role of talking heads, their commentary spliced in between footage of current or past events, is there another, more fully engaged role open to them? Rose is clearly struggling with these questions, as anyone who writes such a book must, and expectations perhaps run too high. Hip-hop is too vast to lend itself to ready analysis in any one book, as Rose herself notes frankly in her preface, and however detailed or full her readings, they can’t stand in for hip-hop culture as a whole. Still, the modality of object and analysis, of the critic as commentator, suffuses much of this book, and gives it at times a frustrating distance from what it tries to bring most closely into view. Rose is at times, it seems, uncertain just where to set the dial between the rhetorical distance of conventional criticism and the ready familiarity and engagement of a fan of the artform. Having to explain every reference at every point can be deadening, and yet dropping allusions left and right risks leaving many readers scratching their heads.

     

    Rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is at her best when she can use specific material histories or social trends. Her analysis of the politics of the decline in large-arena rap venues, which makes up the balance of her “Prophets of Rage” chapter, is compelling, and brings together numerous sources to make evident the repressive but often behind-the-scenes politics of large concert venues. Yet this analysis, as acute as it is, does not quite fulfill the chapter’s promise of an accounting of the politics of black musical expression, since it does not address studio recordings, magazine and newspaper attacks on rap, show-trials such as those of Biz Markie or 2 Live Crew, or the problem with rap’s lack of radio exposure, all of which are at least as significant as the politics of live concerts–perhaps more, given that rap music today is primarily produced and consumed via recordings, despite its reliance on dialogic structures which remain fundamentally linked to acts of reception, call-and-response, and interlocution.

     

    Rose’s final chapter, “Bad Sistas,” is in fact her strongest, bringing together as it does her ability to read social structures–such as sexism and homophobia–not simply alongside but within the discourses of rap lyrics and media hype. She rightly rejects the sort of identity politics that thinks it solely the job of women rappers to answer male rappers’ misogyny, or for that matter assumes that a woman rapper is necessarily a feminist rapper. She denounces the implicit heterosexism of many champions of hip-hop (in particular Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Nelson George). Yet she does more than simply call such bias out on the carpet, but goes further, situating critical discourses over rap in relationship to the uneasy alliances between bourgeois, predominantly white feminism and black women whose struggles, while allied in a general sense with those of this feminism, have had to be contested within very different social and economic structures. She moves astutely from this analysis to a series of examples drawn from the raps and videos of artists such as Salt-n-Pepa, Roxanne Shante, and MC Lyte, demonstrating the ongoing and complex verbal play via which women rappers dramatize their own multiple and at times contradictory positions in relation to their lovers, their rivals, and their homegirls. Finally, she offers a refreshingly candid account of the ways in which black women’s sexuality manages to be both openly expressive and resistant to objectification, a kind of feminism that, though reluctant to name itself as such, clearly has a potent and complex contribution to make to feminist theory and practice. Ultimately, Rose implies, the vernacular ethos of black women struggling against sexism and racism is the root and ground which feminism–particularly academic feminist theory–tends to overlook, even as it continually invokes its name. There are valuable grounds here for analysis of the larger relations between academic discourses and vernacular artforms and social structures: though there is no space in the book to develop them, I hope that Rose (and others) will continue to do so.

     

    Black Noise, despite its shortcomings–and some are inevitable in any book that tries to tackle a vibrantly living and changing artform–is without question the best book on rap music and hip-hop culture yet to appear. Even though much of its time is spent detailing the backgrounds of the music, such backgrounding is an inescapable necessity when writing about a cultural formation so often attacked, distorted, and hyped within both the academic and the popular press, and about which there is so much misinformation and sheer ignorance. Rose, admirably, does not try to over-simplify her topic, and at its best her book offers a snapshot of hip-hop with all its urgent and yet at times contradictory messages and tactics intact. With the appearance of Rose’s book, it is to be hoped that hip-hop critics inside and outside the academy will be able to move on toward a more detailed engagement with the numerous political, social, and aesthetic issues it raises, without having at every turn to stop and explain the basic issues and histories at stake.

     

    One aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate hip-hop within the larger histories of black expressive arts, and still more broadly, within the critical debates over culture, identity, and (post)modernity that have helped define the terms for the social and intellectual struggles of the ’90’s. Rose, concerned primarily with defending hip-hop as a cultural movement, only gestures toward these broader issues, and while identifying hip-hop as a “postindustrial art,” she does not address exactly what that might mean from the point of the historical development of black arts. Here the work of Paul Gilroy offers an apposite yet wholly supportive counterpoint; working with what seems at the outset an impossibly broad brush, Gilroy sets out to demarcate the histories of what he calls “the black Atlantic,” in the process sketching out the fundamentals of a new, trans-national, yet non-reductive model of the interrelations between black diasporic cultures. And, while it is hard to compete with the dust-jacket accolades showered upon Gilroy’s book by critics such as Anthony Appiah or Hazel Carby, it is impossible to overstate the importance of his work to black studies, or to cultural studies as a whole. A radical scholar who nonetheless has a passion for carefully balanced observations, Gilroy’s book is forty theses on the door of cultural studies, and if the folks inside neglect to read them, they do so at their peril. Few writers–maybe none–can combine as Gilroy does a series of potent, historically articulated textual epiphanies with the broad yet meticulous brush of synthesis. Precisely because the book is so thoroughly grounded in the particularities of black histories and artforms, there is no way to review it without attending to each of Gilroy’s specific investigations in turn–and yet to do this is to be reminded (as I suspect Gilroy would want us to be) of the complexity as well as the continuity of black diasporic artforms.

     

    Central to Gilroy’s thesis is the claim that modernism(s) cannot be conceived of as European, that in fact the genealogy of modernism is from the outset bound up with black histories, cultural forms, and the historical experience of slavery. Gilroy bases this claim not on a sweeping monumental survey, but on an incisive tropological tour through the tutor-texts of modernism, among which he includes not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, but Douglass, DuBois, and C.L.R. James. But before making these specific cases, Gilroy wants first to sketch in the problematics of contemporary cultural studies, within which blackness and modernity orbit in circles both of contest and exchange. Gilroy’s chronotope here is that of a ship, undertaking multiple transatlantic crossings, carrying slaves through the immeasurable horror of the Middle Passage, and in later times carrying the speech, song, and spirit of what Gilroy sees as a fundamentally transnational black Atlantic culture. As a sort of shot over the bow, Gilroy fires the first of many broadsides at those whom he calls black “particularists” and “exceptionalists,” and, rebel without a pause, directs an equal volley at the ostensibly allied fleet of the anti-essentialist position. Black culture, he argues, need not answer the call to (mis)represent itself as wholly unified and ethnically absolute, nor need it disperse to the four winds of assimilation, appropriation, commodification, and reification. It can, in fact, very well claim for itself both roots and routes (Gilroy’s favorite trope, and one that resonates throughout this book)

     

    Yet in order to make such claims, Gilroy must first do what very few in his position have done, and that is to critique the very field of cultural studies within which he stands. For, while in the U.S. black studies came up through the academy within a fairly consistent humanistic paradigm, in the U.K., black studies has been shaped by a long alliance with left intellectuals in the field of cultural studies. Now that cultural studies itself has become such a popular U.K. export, Gilroy has something to say about the nature of its cargo. He notes the conspicuous absence in the histories narrated by British Marxists of the anti-colonial struggles of previous centuries, which plays into the pernicious and yet rarely explicit assumption that to be “British” was (and is) to be “white.” As Gilroy tells it, it’s striking how the ostensibly revolutionary sentiments of British cultural studies at times partake as intensely of a kind of nostalgic nationalism as the far more reactionary ideologies of the most stodgy conservatives. This same nationalism underpins the logic of “American Studies” in the U.S., and Black Studies as well; African-American culture is held forth as the paradigm and fons sacrae of blackness, against which what Gilroy calls “U.K. Blak” or the polymorphous Black cultures of the Caribbean are all too often marginalized. Like Marxists before them, critics within cultural studies seem blind to their own reliance on precisely the sort of nationalistic frames which erode their claims to larger mass formations. In the case of black diasporic cultures, this tunnel vision is particularly costly, as Gilroy demonstrates forcefully in the chapters that follow.

     

    Much of the balance of the first chapter–“The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”–are devoted to an analysis of the writings of Martin Delany which, while valuable, seems peripheral to Gilroy’s project. Gilroy’s analysis of Delany as a foundational force in the linkage of black masculinity and patriarchy to black national identity is forceful, but represents only one aspect of the ethos Gilroy seeks to define. His threefold model of black consciousness is only sketched here, but it is highly pertinent: black modernisms have been edged on either side by a kind of longing for the “anti-modern” past and an anticipatory yearning for a postmodern yet-to-come” (37). Delany works well as an exemplary thinker of the “past” element in this triad, but to lay out the other end of the spectrum Gilroy turns to black music. For as he pointedly observes, music both forces an accounting with the extra-textual world and takes account of the performative vernacular dimensions of black culture, for which heavily literary accounts of black culture have so often failed to account, and yet which are so central. Music, furthermore, serves as a force of continuum, reaching back to draw from African melodic and rhythmic roots, even as it is shaped by its own transatlantic routes of transmission, as when American R&B traveled to Jamaica and was reborn as Ska, which in turn gave rise to rock steady, Reggae, and dancehall (each of which in turn has traveled both to and from the UK and US). Whatever the textual and literary arguments Gilroy makes–and they are compelling in and of themselves–music is his trump card, as it offers the clearest framework within which his thesis of the black Atlantic as the “counterculture of modernity” can be materially demonstrated.

     

    Gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden (and at first, rather obscure) movement back to a discussion of Hegel, and the central role of the master-slave dialectic in his philosophy and those of his peers and followers. It’s a different tack (to maintain the nautical tropology), and yet a strategic one. All too often, the deep-seated racialism of Hegel and those who wrote in his wake is glossed over, or (perhaps worse) admitted as though it were an incidental blot on an otherwise unblemished cloth. On the contrary, as Gilroy insists, it is fundamental to the philosophical turns which led directly to modernism. Slavery, he notes, was for a great period of time considered as a problem internal to the European “West”: it was only after the moral campaign against it that it was jettisoned as if it were some sort of awful accident. The relation of slave and master changes and fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of slave and master–on this, both slavery’s defenders and the first generation of its critics could agree: if it became at times an abstraction, its material presence was never far away. Gilroy embodies this potent material corollary in stunning readings both of the narrative and life of Frederick Douglass and the case of Margaret Garner (which Toni Morrison used as the basis for Beloved); the experience of escape–failed or successful–from the psychological bonds of slavery emerges as a kind of limit-experience which tests the very foundations of subjectivity. And more: Douglass, for one, emerges as a signal modernist figure, not simply a self-made man, but a self made via a particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist smithies of the soul.

     

    Gilroy’s next chapter finally addresses the central question of black music, and in many ways it’s the most free-ranging and compelling reading in the whole book. It’s refreshing to read a critic who knows the music thoroughly, whether he’s writing about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Miles Davis, or Eric B. and Rakim. There is none of the usual critical hand-wringing over 2 Live Crew et. al.–Gilroy knows enough to know that’s not where it’s at–nor is there the kind of list-of-names vertigo of a critic who’s trying to link everything with everything. Gilroy treats musicians as artists on their own terms, and finds linkages in their thought and performance that are the mortar of his larger claims. The Fisk Jubilee Singers form one trope, with their extensive European tours making a signal moment for the European dimensions of black arts, even as they return later in the book to represent blackness to a young and still very northeasterly W.E.B. DuBois. Their modern counterparts have far more compact means of transportation, as the chronotope of the turntable replaces that of the ship, and the triangulation between UK Blak, US soul and R&B, and Caribbean musics is traced with attention to the ways in which it refutes any simplistic notion of Africa (or the U.S., or anyplace) as the point of origin, even as it structures and propagates truly synthetic and recognizable black styles. By examining instances of transatlantic fusion such as those of Soul II Soul, Ronnie Laws, and Apache Indian, Gilroy articulates what he sees as a cultural formation that is both “constructed” and yet has (a) “soul,” an essence if you will, a musical spectrum both whole and heteroglot, connected and fragmented.

     

    It’s a shame that Gilroy doesn’t develop this particular thesis further, and it is a potent corrective to the kind of reductive musical nationalism practiced by many black critics, even as it squarely claims for black music a “counterculture of modernity” which must be met on its own terms. Still, while music is vital to his argument–forming, as he notes, a crucial mode beyond textuality and simple representation–Gilroy has far broader ambitions, specifically the (re)clamation of black Atlantic formations in literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. To this project, his re-examinations of DuBois and Wright are of the utmost importance, and not simply because of their travels and exiles (DuBois to Germany as a young man, and to Africa as “The Old Man,” and Wright’s move to France), but because they enable Gilroy to rewrite the genealogy of blackness itself.

     

    Gilroy’s analysis of DuBois takes a twofold focus: a detailed re-examination of The Souls of Black Folk, and a reading of some of DuBois’s long-neglected polemical novels (which, though fascinating, there is not room to discuss here). In the background of both, Gilroy posits a surprising–even scandalous–connection: the thought that DuBois’s nationalism owed something to the German nationalism he encountered while studying in Germany. Yet at the same time as the power of national identity impressed itself on DuBois, he could not fully follow the kind of black particularism espoused by precursors such as Martin Delany or Alexander Crummel, for the simple reason that he was particularly aware of the ways in which national and racial identities were formed and informed by a complex and often conflicting set of historical urges. Gilroy sorts these out into three stages, which he associates with the three sections of The Souls of Black Folk: the struggle against the institution of slavery, the struggle to win bourgeois rights and liberties, and the pursuit of spaces of black community and autonomy. He notes that the battle against racism is necessarily different in each of these phases, and also that the ways in which these stages overlapped each other led to the coexistence and conflict of what were, on a tactical level, very different struggles. The falling out between DuBois and Washington, for instance, is newly intelligible in this light, as education had a radically different role to play in the first two of these phases. The third stage–with all its attendant anxieties of assimilation and particularism–is, Gilroy argues, the moment for the emergence of oppositional black modernisms:

     

    The third stage characteristically involves a deliberate and self-conscious move beyond language in ways that are informed by the social memory of the earlier experiences of enforced separation from the world of written communication. A countercultural sense of the inability of mere words to convey certain truths inaugurates a special indictment of modernity's enforced separation of art and life as well as a distinct aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) standpoint. Music is the best way of examining this final aspect. (123-124).

     

    The special significance of black spiritual songs for DuBois, as well as the ongoing refiguration of black musics as the representative cultural productions of the black Atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and suggests a still more potent claim. Perhaps it is not, in fact, at the level of intellectual vanguards that the final phase of black struggle needs to take place, but precisely at the vernacular level. Gilroy, however, leaves this possibility hanging as he offers a strong reading of The Souls of Black Folk: while there is no space to reiterate his argument in the detail it deserves in the scope of this brief review, suffice it to say that it reveals strong and all-too-often neglected undercurrents, which militate toward a skeptical rejection of the broadconcept of “progress” or “progressivism” with which DuBois is conventionally associated. The DuBois who emerges in these readings has a richer and more complicated engagement with all three phases of black struggle, and his model of “double consciousness” marks not a flaw but a prophetic pointer toward a different kind of vision, a “second sight” which looks far beyond the fuzzy humanism of most modernist thinkers and toward the postmodern possibility of seeing split subjectivity as a critical asset.

     

    Gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling look at Wright’s career, focusing on his years in France. Wright was faulted by many for his move to European turf, and to this day the books he wrote in France have been disparaged and neglected for failing to represent the kind of realist, experiential models of race that were central to the positive reception accorded his earlier novels. Again, Gilroy discovers an unexpected Wright, a person engaged with European modernity not via the margin, but from the very questions that formed its center. Wright’s interest in Nietzschean affirmation via negation (as one example of which Wright offered the “Dozens,” the verbal ancestor of today’s hip-hop disses), his engagement with existentialism, and his deliberate refusal of the simplistic representational terms which critics and publishers held forth as the condition for their renewed interest in his work, all become newly meaningful in Gilroy’s reading. For Wright, to claim modernism as his own was a serious task, and grew as strongly and deeply from the same experiences as earlier had led him to write Native Son. In a compelling passage, Gilroy quotes Wright’s comments on the subject, which might well be addressed to all of the detractors of his later work. Wright claimed, in fact, that double consciousness–which he called “split subjectivity”–gave him a particular and potent slant on the crisis of modernity:

     

    I've tried to lead you back to the angle of my vision slowly . . . My point of view is a Western one, but a Western one that conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the West. Am I ahead of or behind the West? My personal judgment is that I'm ahead. And I do not say this boastfully; such a judgment is implied by the very nature of those Western values I hold dear. (qtd. 172)

     

    It’s a shame that Wright’s angle of vision has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves, and Gilroy offers a number of compelling readings of Wright’s later work which will, hopefully, renew interest in his later writings.

     

    The final chapter, “Not a Story to Pass On: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime,” offers a fitting culmination of the book’s syntheses, though Gilroy is quite clear that his book only sketches the barest outline of black Atlantic roots ‘n’ routes. The title epigraph, drawn from Morrison’s Beloved, underlines the double valence of tradition in black cultures; it is the bearer both of “jewels brought from bondage” and of the unspeakable imprint of slavery. The bitter intertwining of pain and pleasure, so graphically evoked by Morrison in the scene where Paul D traces out the “chokecherry tree” of scar tissue of Sethe’s back, is brought into critical focus as Gilroy traces the debates between fragmented and whole racial selves, between constructivist and essentialist polarities, and again brings forth a new possibility. Gilroy shuns the “spurious security” of melaninism, and is critical of some of the more historically oversimplified versions of Afrocentricity. And yet, nonetheless, he historically situates the appeal of these discourses, and in fact demonstrates compellingly the role of the yearning for such stability in the production of the heteroglot yet synaptically linked expressions of black diasporic experiences. The “catastrophic rupture” of the middle passage finds its compensation in acts of creation from materials at hand, from vernacular syntheses of speech and music, and in the deliberate engagement of these discourses with the European modernities whose ideology and aesthetics make for unexpected points of resonance. Music, in particular, has the capacity both to “tell the history” (as Jamaican DJ Prince Buster puts it) and to bear the unbearable, extra-linguistic dimensions of what Gilroy comes to call the “slave sublime.” Music, furthermore, is a profoundly temporal art, and in its rhythmic unfolding builds a time for community. The trope of time, as instanced in the Nation of Islam’s question “What Time Is It?,” and its multiple diasporic answers (Sun Ra: “It’s after the end of the world”; The Last Poets: “Time is running out”; Flavor-Flav’s gargantuan timepieces), both embody and transcend historical time by, as Gilroy puts it, “asserting the irreducible priority of the present” (202). Because of this ability, music is capable of bearing the historical pain that is the legacy of black diasporic cultures, and Gilroy offers a suggestive reading of Percy Mayfield (“Hit the Road, Jack”; “Please Send Me Someone to Love”) as a synecdoche of this transvaluative engagement with melancholia and pain.

     

    This gives Gilroy the segue for his final and bold movement, an accounting of the historical borrowings and transformations that have linked black cultures in all corners of the Atlantic to Jewish beliefs, traditions, and intellectual syntheses. The most obvious vernacular link is of course the landscape of black Spirituals, whose talk of bondage in “Pharaoh’s Land” and dreams of “Crossin’ the River of Jordan” draw from the Old Testament histories which slaves encountered in the Caribbean and the Americas. Their previous systems of belief fragmented and eroded by the violence of the middle passage and the experience of slavery, black slaves’ appropriation and use of the Jewish experiences of slavery constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most profound “transvaluations of all value” ever accomplished. This early legacy formed the ground for later returns to Jewish religious and political thought, in the process of which aspects of Jewish nationalism, and the idea of black culture as “diasporic,” grew readily. Black Atlantic religious practices such as those loosely coalescing about Rastifarian religion are a testament to the vernacular potency of these connections; all the mythology of a return to Ethiopia, the figure of Sellasie as Messiah, the myth of the Black Star Liners which would carry Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” back to the Promised Land, can be traced to this potent conjunction. Gilroy gives a succinct and suggestive account of one person, Edward Wilmot Blyden, an influential black Caribbean writer and historian, and one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. Yet despite some of the patriarchal and parochial qualities of his work, Blyden’s engagement with Jewish thought was, as Gilroy shows, full and complex: Blyden learned Hebrew and studied Jewish history with David Cardoze, a rabbi on the island of St. Thomas. It was Blyden who made the historical connections between Jewish and black experiences of slavery and dispersal, which were revived with the start of the Negritude movement in France in the 1930’s.

     

    All this, of course, brings Gilroy face to face with the claims of both black and Jewish particularists, each of whom asserts that their collective experience is untranslatable, and that (for some) even to compare the two does violence to the sanctity and integrity of memory. Gilroy does not offer a detailed critique of these claims, but makes a passionate and very compelling argument for renewed and continuing dialogue, a dialogue which might begin to theorize more fully the “redemptive power produced through suffering” as it works in a variety of very different historical circumstances. Finally, Gilroy, reflecting once more on Morrison’s Beloved, looks outward and onward to the ethical and artistic power of history recovered and told via a process of “imaginative appropriation.” It is at this level, indeed, that the questions Gilroy raises become especially pertinent, since he clearly values some appropriations more than others. Having voluntarily deprived himself of both the cudgel of anti-essentialism and the mystic unifying power of black particularism, Gilroy cannot offer any ultimate criterion by which we might know which appropriations we ought to value. In any case, as he readily acknowledges, the complex hybridities and recurrent transits of the black Atlantic render any such judgments temporary at best; what counts is an engagement with the questions they raise, and a refusal to trade the richness of uncertainty and heterogeneity for what Gilroy sees as the poverty of dogmatic certainties. It’s a difficult struggle, but one to which Gilroy’s own work makes an immeasurable contribution. Cultural studies, it is to be hoped, will never be the same in the wake of the passage of Gilroy’s revolutionary work.

     

    Notes

     

    1.bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1.1

     

    2.Cornel West, “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989): 87-98.

     

    3.West, 96.

     

    4.Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 129

     

  • Prehistory and Postmodernism

    Andrew Levy

    Department of English
    Butler University
    Levy@Butler.edu

     

    Labor Day Weekend, 1984. Erik Huber signs a “drive-away” contract with a man from Queens to drive his car to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley in two weeks time. Erik then lets nine days lapse, packs his college belongings in the back of the car, and offers to show me Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the “eating tour” of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Across the country, there was a record heat wave that week. We drove during the days, drinking six packs of warm diet coke to keep us nervous. At night, we slipped into campgrounds with our headlights off, spread sleeping bags under the stars and between the Winnebago campers, sipped from a bottle of Jack Daniels, and whispered conjectures about what invisible landscape would materialize around us in the morning light: strawberry fields in Missouri, a giant red rock in New Mexico.

     

    On the third or fourth day, driving a high mountain highway in Arizona, we saw a tall, slender pole rising in the horizon. Amid the aged pines and desert landscape that neither of us had ever seen before, we assumed that the pole was an Indian totem. As we approached, we made out a vaguely human icon atop the pole. As we approached nearer, we recognized the figure: it was Fred Flintstone. We drove through twenty more miles of pristine desert, and found Bedrock: a campground, tourist shop, and restaurant modelled after the cartoon, a place to sit in a Flintstone car, sleep in a Flintstone home, eat a Brontoburger, shake hands with one of the two unlucky individuals dressed in bulky Fred and Barney costumes in the Arizona heat, and buy postcards or t-shirts.

     

    We bought postcards. They flew out the car window on a long downhill several miles out of “town”; we stopped the car in the middle of the road, ran back to where the cards lay unmoving in the road, and looked up, horrified, to see a gasoline truck mount the top of the hill above us and begin its hurtling descent toward our parked, purring, borrowed car. We raced back, pulled the car onto the shoulder, and listened to the peeved whistle of the skidding truck, its driver too stunned to curse as he passed.

     

    We drove on to Barstow and Los Angeles. Erik had so laden the back of the car that the exhaust pipe had been skipping against the highway for three thousand miles, sending out sparks in our absurd trail. In Reseda, we saw that we had worn the exhaust pipe down to a sliver. We listened to the car’s owner complain about the pipe, all of us confused about what might constitute adequate compensation, and then drove our rental car back into Los Angeles.

     

    There we got drunk, relieved and giddy about being in California, about not having started a conflagration in Arizona over a couple of Flintstone postcards, and about not having to drive anymore. Late at night, we wandered through downtown, and came across the La Brea tar pits, a dark hole behind a chain-link fence amid the skyscrapers of central Los Angeles. Erik explained how fossils would periodically rise to the surface, where paleontologists would retrieve them, and set to work determining how the new find altered our modern vision of prehistory. I looked through the chain link fence, and saw a sculpture of a saber-toothed tiger being pulled down into the pit with a graphic look of displeasure on its face.

     

    Nobody should ever be too proud of their practical joke ideas, but I can’t seem to forget the one that Erik and I devised that night in Los Angeles. We would return to Bedrock, get those Fred and Barney costumes, stuff them with medical school skeletons, and toss them at night over the chain link fence into the tar pit, just so, for a few moments at least, the researchers at the La Brea site would have to say to themselves, and to the world: the Flintstones are not fiction; prehistoric man wore a tie and punched a time card.

     

    Meanwhile, six thousand miles away in Paris (picture a camera panning at great speed over desert, heartland, ocean, and stopping in an oaken office with ostentatiously Parisian monuments prominently displayed outside its windowsill), the philosopher Jean Baudrillard was composing his own kind of practical jokes, in the manner of postmodern French philosophers. Throughout the 1980s, Baudrillard released a series of slim volumes of playful, iconoclastic philosophy, published in the Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series and bearing titles like Simulations or The Ectasy Of Communication. In these works, which by the end of the decade would become a philosophy of choice for many American academics, graduate students, cyberpunks, and consciously hip adolescents, Baudrillard wrote of the shifting relationship between what has previously been called “the real,” and its many reproductions in mass media. For Baudrillard, the postmodern age was marked by the rise of the “hyperreal,” mediated experience that is more ‘real’ than the authentic experience from which it is generated, and which is, in turn, used as the model for the production of further authentic experience. The map, to use Borges’ and Baudrillard’s famous metaphor, does not mimic the territory anymore; the territory mimics the map.

     

    In an era where a Presidential candidate overtly emulates the glamorous media image of a previous President, and becomes President himself, the presence of the “hyperreal” in our daily lives surprises nobody. It is useful, perhaps, that Americans look to France for intellectual authority, that Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard and Baudrillard find larger, more spirited audiences in our country, just as Jerry Lewis, Clint Eastwood, and Edgar Allan Poe have found smaller, more respectful audiences in theirs. It might be more useful, however, not to wait for foreign recognition of our more unlikely sources of genius, a tedious process that leaves a persistent gap between what we choose to teach in schools, and what our students, still untutored in the ways of professional education, psychology, and literature, might choose to understand.

     

    I have wanted to write this essay for a long time, frustrated for nine years by the nagging fact that Erik Huber and I never tossed those faux Flintstones into the La Brea tar pits, that we never forced the official guardians of the distant past, those sun-bronzed Californian paleontologists, to admit even momentarily what we, in our hyperreal way, already knew: that we really were descended from the Flintstones. I have not written this essay because the channels of intellectual authority in America leave little room to maunever: one can attempt to write about a cartoon, and face derision for choosing such low brow subject matter; or one can choose an scholarly pedestal from which to discourse, Popular Culture or Child Psychology for example, and then write an aggressively jargoned and analytical essay that anyone who ever enjoyed an episode of the show would recognize as bizarre and even hostile to the program’s intent. This is an especially awkward situation, given the fact that most of the teachers, academics, psychologists, and other professional assessors of culture under forty in America today received much of their early intellectual development in front of a TV screen. I learned about the hyperreal from Fred and Barney, not from Jean. We are Flintstone intellectuals; we should act like Flintstone intellectuals.

     

    As with most inexpensively made cartoons, the Flintstones seem like a child’s primer to Cubism. Wilma and Betty, the two wives, each wears her hair parted, and the part faces the audience no matter whether the character is facing left or right profile. They are, of course, impossibly slim: Wilma wears a three-pearl necklace beneath which her neck disappears, and their legs, rarely apart except when running or walking, taper down into tiny feline feet. The men are several times wider than the women: they wear cylindrical animal skins, although they have no shoulders that might support the garments. Their heads, which seem to float above their animal skins, remain perfectly level as they walk, although their bodies move up and down. Height seems irrelevant: although Barney is several times wider than Betty, he is also several times shorter, anatomical details that probably explain why the couple had to adopt.

     

    They live in a place called Bedrock, which takes on the characteristics of either a large city (a stone-age Los Angeles, it seems) or a small town, depending on the dramatic demands of the episode. In Bedrock, every proper name contains at least one reference to some mineral object: Rock, Slate, Stone (it would be as though every name in our own era, the Atomic Age, bore some reference to nuclear technology). When modern celebrities appear, their names are altered appropriately: Ann-Margaret becomes Ann-Margrock, Tony Curtis becomes Stony Curtis, Rock Hudson (who in theory could have made the transition to Bedrock life with his name intact) becomes Rock Hudstone. The Bedrock code of dress is strangely formal, and unutilitarian: the women wear stones on their wrists and necks that are larger than their hands and heads. The men wear ties but no shoes. On formal occasions, they wear spats, but still no shoes.

     

    There are two reasons to watch an episode of the Flintstones as an adult. The first is the show’s amiable spirit; it is among the least dour works of art ever produced in this country. Like its progenitor, The Honeymooners, the Flintstones is noisy, and full of motion. Musical themes and sound effects shift constantly on the soundtrack; on the screen, brightly colored characters move through a visually memorable rock-laden world, sliding down dinosaurs’ backs, bumping into stone impediments, racing into each other’s arms. The characters themselves are cartoon-sized, energetic and elemental. Fred, a loudmouth and a buffoon, possesses a broad capacity for kindness and self-realization; he loves to shout with joy (Yabba Dabba Doo, of course), and dance on his oversized toes. His body, which is sketched just slightly convex of a perfect cylinder to suggest overweight, is surprisingly fluid in movement. Barney, his best friend and neighbor, is a simpleton, but he is also instinctively inclined toward pleasure: his head bounds rapidly up and down inside the cylinder of his animal skin when he laughs. Wilma and Betty, frustrated and wise in the manner of early 60s television housewives, still sing, laugh freely, and live with the consanguinity of women who know they are unconditionally loved. Flintstone episodes do not conclude as ordinary situation comedies do, with difficult situations resolved by the introduction of moral principles; they end when an effusion of good humor rises to the surface and usurps the dilemma. They end in song, in laughter, with babies cackling happily, or with Fred and Wilma “smooching.” In some mythical anthology of American culture, the Flintstones would be winking on the page opposite Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger, telling children not to perfect themselves, but to enjoy themselves.

     

    The second reason to watch the Flintstones is the pleasant buzz of anachronism. It is perhaps only as an adult that one can recognize the clumsy but gentle affection with which the Flintstones’ writers constructed their Bedrockian era. In this stone age, for instance, unlike the one that paleontologists record, dinosaurs and humans roam the earth together. Interestingly, only the docile dinosaurs seem to remain: uncomplaining brontosauruses function as cranes and earth movers, pterodactyls substitute as planes, but there are no tyrannosauruses in sight, no meat eaters except for Fred and Barney, who wolf down giant platters of oversized dinosaur ribs. Similarly, while some Bedrock technology is unquestionably modern–their radios, televisions, and telephones all function normally–most of their machines have been configured to accomodate a world before electricity. Fred starts his car, a redwood and granite sedan, by lowering his feet to the ground, and running for a few yards; the car then glides effortlessly up and down cartoon hills for miles. The Flintstones camera is a box that contains a bird that pecks out a picture on a 3 X 5 square of stone. Their vacuum cleaner is a small, somber wooly mammoth who sucks up dirt while Wilma and Betty converse; like the bird in the camera, or the weary animals that function as sprinklers, lawnmowers, or brooms, he also provides ironic commentary on the actions of the human characters, or shrugs at the camera and tells us something like, “It’s a living.”

     

    Watching the Flintstones, one often suspects that the stone- age technology is the real star. The Flintstones re-invents all the technologies upon which we are most dependent, and makes them at once ludicrous and comprehensible. One wants to say that the show provides childrens’ explanations for complex machinery, but these Flintstone appliances are not purely children-sized: it is likely that more adult Americans are more familiar with the bird inside the Flintstone’s camera than they are familiar with the actual contents of their Kodaks. It is possible that the Flintstones reminds us how technology makes us infants or aborigines amidst our sophistication, dependent upon large, mysterious forces with almost supernatural powers: ATM networks, telecommunications highways in the sky. That is the part of us that watches the television in an entranced and docile spirit. But the Flintstones also startles us back into a sense of wonder about these machines we have created and so easily take for granted. It reminds us instead what we have suspected all along, that our machines have animal hearts and human feet. That is the part of us that refuses to be alienated from, or intimidated by, our technology.

     

    As these machines roil and putter in the background of every Flintstones episode, however, the characters in the foreground are acting out an ancient national drama. The Flintstones seems to have been created by people in a state of infatuation about the success of the American dream: not the big American dream, where we become idealized versions of ourselves living in a City On A Hill, but the little American dream, where the land is rich and forgiving enough that persistent good humor, if nothing else, can save us. As I wrote this essay, friends with children reminded me how impossible it was to get their children to not watch the Flintstones. But friends without children shared with me images they have retained of watching the show: how Fred and Barney snapped their fingers without actually touching forefinger to thumb; the way Wilma’s jewelry seemed to float without touching her body; or the rock group “The Way-Outs,” four Beatlesque mopheads with abdomens that detached into separate tire-shaped pieces during performance epiphanies. All of these images, and the pristineness and affection with which they have been preserved in memory, suggest that the Flintstones was also a kind of primer for living in a world slouching toward Bethlehem: a lesson that there were real pleasures living in a world that was just barely falling apart, or just barely not coming together. Watching the Flintstones, we were ending our careers as modernists, beginning our careers as postmodernists, and we were barely five years old.

     

    We were Flintstone intellectuals; we could have done worse. Entire schools of thought could be founded upon the Flintstones. Traditional archaeology, the archaeology in vogue during the period of the Flintstones production, maintained that primitive man had primitive social structures, was id-driven and animal-like, and was technologically naive. More recent discoveries have suggested that mankind developed at irregular paces in different geographic locations, and developed complex, mannered, and self-conscious social structures while remaining in a state of comparative technological innocence. This is Flintstones archaeology. The Austrian Iceman, frozen suddenly in his everyday dress 5000 years ago and discovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, has given modern researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study Neolithic Man: they found that he wore well-tailored leather clothes, kept his fingernails trimmed, and, just like Betty Rubble, wore a single white stone on a strap around his neck.

     

    There is also Flintstones Child Psychology. According to the US Census, American children rank drugs, pollution, and the environment as the three largest problems facing America today. 62% of all ten year olds worry that a friend might get AIDS, while 84% have used a remote control device. Nearly half of all American boys polled by the Gesell Institute of Human Development believed that they had adequate information about sex, while studies published by Nintendo report that American boys now consider “game prowess” a “fundamental male social marker.” If sentimental (and sometimes academic) Child Psychology holds that childhood is essentially an innocent state, these statistics suggest that contemporary children are growing up wizened and self-conscious, while maintaining aspects of the childlike innocence that most adults still expect. The Flintstones, pumping out of TV screens across the country, is like CNN for five year olds: it gives them an emotional roadmap of innocence and experience, and tells them that the seemingly anachronistic state where those two traits exist in the same person is a natural one. It confirms their image of the world as a place full of absurd but wonderful machines and adults full of unanticipated motion and desire.

     

    It also provides an early lesson in what it means to have free access to the global media village. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Americana (1971), one character remarks that television came over on the Mayflower. What DeLillo’s Pilgrims carried on the Mayflower was not a real television, of course, but the idea of television, or what television, a neutral and faceless device, would become when yoked to the visions of fresh lands and new selves that the settlers brought with them, and which have never left. The Puritans, weaned on infant capitalism and a media revolution of their own, the printing press, took the Bible and, for better or worse, beat back the forest with it; they taught us that the distance between our literature and our landscape was slight by any measure, providing that we had the resolve and the technology.

     

    It should come as no surprise that someone has built a version of Bedrock in the desert in Arizona; Americans have been building visionary communities in the desert from the very start, a fact that suggests that the idea of the hyperreal is not so postmodern after all, or that postmodernism is older than we think. But now we build communities on television as well as land. It is as though we have two countries: the shared space from sea to shining sea, and the cable-equipped television. Both are vague, inchoate, diverse: but, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, only one anymore is commensurate to our ability to wonder. The child perched daily in front of a television screen is face-to- face with something older than television, something older than America, the primal core of all our ingenuity: the sheer beauty of awakening self-consciousness, the epic moment of inventing a new country or the tiny thrill of finding the bird who takes the picture. Watching TV is like watching someone else’s dreams.

     

    Bedrock in Arizona is not a radical utopia, like Plymouth or New Harmony; it is a tourist stop. But Bedrock on television, Bedrock in our homes, in our memories, is something different. Bedrock in Arizona is a parable for the turn of the twentieth- first century. It is a reminder that, for those Americans who have come of age in the last thirty years, the icons of popular culture are not artificial attachments to our conception of what constitutes our real life and our land, but are now integral to those things. Fred Flintstone on a totem pole is exactly right: television is aboriginal and mythic, and its icons flit through our REM sleep (that is, after all, where they came from). Bedrock in the Arizona desert is striking not because it is anomalous, but because it resolves. Television came over on the Mayflower, but it was invented in the Stone Age. And it was invented by children.

     

    Say their names: Rock Derrida, Michel Foucaultstone.

     

  • Differentia

    Lidia Yuknavitch

    nubin@gladstone.uoregon.edu

     

    Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious,” devoted to bodily functions.

     

    –Hannah Arendt

     

    I talk to myself. When you are out of the room of the world, things speak to one another. Probably they leave you out of the talk altogether when you leave the room. There is truth in that, or something like it, something too small to know. There is a species of logic resting in the space between molecules of air, between white and white, little extraordinary happenings, little meanings between words. There is something obscene about our boxing it all in–conversations, the page, the frame, the caught expression. That is why pictures make you ashamed, that is why movies swallow you up. I know I am babbling. I am only telling you this because I had a premonition about this story. I saw, not unlike a nightmare, what would happen so clearly, so perfectly, I could have touched the facts of it with my tongue. So I guess this is all really like talking to oneself.

     

    What I am talking about now is an image, a single, cannibalized image. I say cannibalized because that is what we did. One image, three writers, three texts, three mouths, three murders committed among species of intellect. We saw something and we did what writers do, we wrote. The problem is that I am stuck and they are not; that is, the two men I know have moved on all right. The air has again filled their lungs, their words are their words, their groins quiver as before, their hands are recognizable to them, they move as if motion were not a series of stilted, jerky, pornographic moves.

     

    It is me that is paralyzed.

     

    I am an intelligent woman. I look for things between seeing and saying, I try to catch them, write them down. But something happened between what I saw and what I wrote. I mean, usually I can take an image right to paper, give or take a day or two, I can bend whatever it is I am feeling toward metaphor and flight. But something different happened to me with this one. There is no other way to do this. I will put you at the scene:

     

    it was from our car driving along a freeway that we saw it. Me and my lover. Two dead horses on the road's shoulder, precisely paralleled in all respects--their brown horse bodies at the same angle, their horse heads and noses pointing at some invisible object long gone and unimaginable, the last thing they saw, sky maybe, because that's all you can see in their too-open dead eyes, their paired gray entrails winding like twin slithers out of the slit and gashed bellies, insides ripped out or spilled on the road, saliva, and again their eyes, unbearably open.

     

    And then the car was past them, our eyes rolling back toward the past and the brain, our breath sucked back into our lungs through our mouths in a gasp, our mouths, unguarded, animal-like, open, tongues lolling, our minds pressed back and in as if by wind. It was not the same as slowing for an accident. With that you know, as all the other cars slowing know, that you are hoping to see carnage, you are hoping to see signs of wrecked bodies. But when you get there it is almost always just smashed-up cars, isn’t it. And don’t our hearts sink a little as we speed back up, weren’t we wishing for something overwhelming?

     

    We could have seen a dead dog, a dismembered deer, a flattened raccoon or mangled cat, anonymous guts even; any one of these would have passed as normal. But not these, looking to us as if they had been deposited from the horse trailer by some expert psychopathic movie director: in scene one they are two beautiful brown velvet asses and black silken tails exposed from within the vehicle meant to transport animals on the move. In the second scene they have spilled carefully out onto the pavement with little to no change, a brilliant shot, cut to the star’s face recording a disfigured horror in the rear-view. No one could have arranged it more perfectly, I mean it was stunning, truly, dead horses.

     

    It wasn’t like sympathy, and I suppose it could not have been empathy, but something closer to the shock of the too-beautiful. What care had been taken! So gently placed. The round curves and swells unmatched on any human, unmatched of course because these were what we call beautiful animals. Bridled or free, dead seems wrong for these. You know what I mean, too much. Think of the movie The Black Stallion, or back to your first viewing of National Velvet. Or how many times have we winced when, in the western, the horses are seen falling down a hillside when the rider is shot?

     

    You have to understand, we were in a car, traveling at perhaps seventy or so. At seventy there is no stopping, no slowing down to question. Like the time we passed two neon horse-sculptures on highway five and spent the next week trying to figure out what in the world we had seen. It wasn’t until the newspaper verified our sighting–an artist had planted them in a farmer’s field–that we knew. Strange comparison. Their open eyes, their necks alongside one another, the soft warmth and fuzz between the nostrils, the memory of them running head to head, manes whipping, snorts, or grazing docile and mighty, all this from movies and television. Images that stick in your brain like they happened, ripping up through the thing itself with flashes of color, sound, light, shape and particle over what can be said was seen. Dead horses.

     

    In the film version of Equus, Richard Burton loses his mind to the desire of a boy. There is a horse, a magnificent heat and flesh quiver, there is writing and god too close to the drama. Anyone who has seen the movie has been convinced by the scene: the boy naked legs splayed on the bare back of the sweating dip of muscle the ritual chanting the perversion of speech the movement of words into body his body its body the roaring sweat the bleeding grown the bit at the mouth the foam the release . . . who among us can bear it away? It is easy to picture a man losing his mind to the desire of a boy. It is easy to see action killed, the sheer temperature and senseless beauty of desire.

     

    He, the man I love, was only giving me a lift to meet another man. It was a ride from one man to another, no one meant any harm, the man I lived with transporting me to the man I worked with, and me between them, me the journey between them. My lover and I, the other man, writing, three writers. Both men carried weight. Can I say they were like words? Yes, words have convulsed me before. When a woman has a mind, she is compelled to ask, from where and why? This passion, ideas, what orbit have I chanced to cross which drives me to think and spins me into this world? A woman has to ask, which me is it today, this year? And in relation to what? Only then can she dress as before and move around as always. And so it was that in our driving our talk froze in our throats and ears, because the horses stopped all conversation in the cab of the blue pick-up truck, the dash instruments filled the dead air with the silence of their functioning, stupid. I think we commented or said oh. Up against the slobber of excess one often comments. I don’t remember what he was saying before the horses. I can almost say he was telling me about performance art, the visceral, the raw materiality, about the way Arnold Swartzkogler’s dismembering his own member or some other man’s crawling naked on his belly over broken glass or some woman pulling a scroll from her vagina put you inescapably at the site of your own body. It preceded the horses in effect anyway. His mouth, my mouth, the words out of the mouth.

     

    I am certain that I was listening before we were struck with the blow of two sentences in both our minds: that cannot be what it looks like, and, that is exactly two perfectly paired dead horses on the side of the road. And then we were gone. In the nothing of that image whatever our words were were stolen, escaped me now. What I remember is that we said nothing.

     

    So it was that he drove me, me dizzy but of course carrying on like anyone would, to a meeting with the other man. As if this were every day. He drove me up to the door of a cafe so familiar I didn’t recognize it. I opened the blue metal car door, I saw the metal arms and shapes of the car door innards, I gave him an intimate glance, he blew me a kiss, I slammed the door, the sound, harsh and horribly familiar, I raised my hand to wave, familiar, he drove away, I was through the cafe door and into the room and over to a table and down in a chair and the other man across the table from me greeted me, as you would expect, everything was as expected. A series of prepositions directed me entirely, the background music in the cafe could be either classical, minor notes with decrescendo, or perhaps modern, disconnected and dissonant jazz.

     

    You must be aware that this was a necessary meeting, for some reason, some particular reason one could definitely articulate, one knows one’s work after all. It had to do with my writing, some place where we, me and the other man I mean, intersected. He was my teacher. I learned what steps to take a little clearer every time we met. The thing is, on a literal level, I really had learned to despise this man, his too-groomed black hair slick as a record album, his sculpted, lightly browned skin, his black eyes, his unbelievably dough-like mouth, almost pliable. His hands waving around, his words filling the air. Me breathing all this in, regurgitating most of it back, so as to metaphorize into brilliance like his.

     

    Occasionally I stole words, used what he said when I wrote. This seemed pleasing to him. I am certain that I have used some of his words here, or else they were mine but in the cycle of his producing and consuming and my reproducing them they were sucked into this. That’s what an intelligent woman understands.

     

    We ordered cappuccino, or maybe it was some other coffee drink which has been designed cleverly away from labor and heat and broken backs. Disfigured beauty. Maybe it was cafe au lait. We were talking about some topic as if a cellular division had occurred, we carried the trace of a shared thing in our voices, or, we were simply copying each other. This doubling is quite ordinary, really, and also quite necessary for the growth of a woman’s intellect, but not her body, ironically. For example, when my lover speaks to me about performance I feel the urge to strike him, but instead I stroke some part of his flesh, touch him, skin on what appears to be kin, or more, mouth on the image of mouth, maybe we even make love eventually. My legs up against his shoulders, his hands kneading the swells of my body, the thrusting, the yielding, the necks straining, all the curves in flux and pulsing as in a race or contest. At any rate, he speaks and I am touched by our inability to be one another, a moment of pure violence which is what I take to be love. I would never say the things he is saying to me and I am glad, I am full and spilt over with our samelessness. I live for it. I run home to it at night, I ache to feel it inside me, I am sorry to slam the car door and hear the truncated difference severed by metal.

     

    So I’m missing my lover even in the cafe because the echo of the car door slamming has worked like a palimpsest, I am making love after conversation and I am seeing the horror-vision, pulses pounding against thin epidermis, sweat producing itself, saliva collecting in the pockets of the mouth, heart begging amplification over voice, or blood surging inside veins and ears as if to say forget words all together–we said, of course, nothing of this. So it was that all I could feel in my mind as this ridiculously brilliant man spoke to me was the urge to fuck my lover, or worse, the urge to write it all down.

     

    As has always been like truth to me, sex follows violent images words sounds scenes rather consistently. But within this clearest of desires, I mean, the fatal image of the horses and the unfiltered wanting, this repulsive, beautiful man was filling the space between us with duplications of his own persistent face, hands, eyes, thoughts. He was saying something about writing and mirrors, and I heard the word mirror, I swear to god I heard it, and I saw like the face in front of me what I saw in the moment after the horses: I saw the words, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, because of course my rear-view mirror was my only access to the past. The words, dead horses, shrinking and blurring into distance and light.

     

    I don’t know what he said but I am certain that I was listening, that I nodded my head as he did, that I raised my hand toward my chin and rested my head there, which he followed, that I creased my brow either as his or preceding his brow creasing, that I responded with a pre-arranged face and body made up of all the writing he had told me to read and all the writing I was, and he repeated me, or I him, and then again the same whatever he said, I said. The word, conversation was an indivisible movement between us, the words, a series of cafe gestures endlessly repeated over the course of an hour. None of this noticed in the moment. But you would have, had you been there, you would have been struck by the two mimes. Two too sculpted heads, two pairs of shoes or watches or colognes which carried prices over and above the salaries of those serving, those subjects of literature and art and what to do about them. His white shirt and his black echoed in my black blazer and white chemise, in my cornea, in the typed words on the menus, in the condiments, everything following everything else as if one thing were the other. We were talking about writing and writing made us in its own image. Poor black and white copies mimicking every word they’d ever felt in their lives. Somewhere in the very back of my mind I was thinking of something I wanted to write down when I got home.

     

    Once in an argument my lover asked me why I always wrote about sex, was I a fucking whore or something. He had unwritten permission to speak to me this way because of love. Anyway, in the instant before I answered I saw a ticker-tape answer jerking in front of my eyes like a waking dream that said, yeah, I am, and all the language I had been learning for the last twenty-eight years flew out of my brain and a new language blew out: Sex is death. Sex is life. Sex is oxygen. Sex is poison. Sex is prison. Sex is gism on your lip. Sex is in someone's ass, cunt, mouth, any hole you can get into and come. Sex is a silver blade slicing open your worst fear you paranoid fuck like maybe a deep gash across your cock or scrotum or from your balls to your rectum which is the same as your dumb little need to be in control, to be on top of things. Sex is you hitting me with your stupid little question and me getting a black eye and telling all your friends. What would you say it is? I'll try not to laugh. After you have answered, why don't you explain it to me because I can be a very good listener what you think sex should be for me too. Then everything will be clear and hunky-dorey like spam. O.K.? And then of course I snapped out of it and realized that all that was a little excessive an answer to the small innocence of a question asked out of jealousy and anger. So all I said was, actually, I have yet to write about real sex and yes, I was once a prostitute as an effect of my first marriage. By the way, I love you out of my mind.

     

    Beautiful–we say that word over and over again between us in the cafe over the white tablecloth stretched like a stage between us, sometimes for or to literature and art, or to ourselves, or to the deserts we have ordered which are red and oozing some thick sweet liquid and also in flames, set on fire and brought to our table as the impossible delicious combination of life and death that they are. The beautiful desert, we salivate and anticipation drips our faces. The unexpected, the tortured but silent red and swollen forms being burned alive, just plain old strawberry flambe. The beautiful desert, the beautiful poem, the beautiful lover, his beautiful hands or skin, your own beauty, even the waiter’s blue black skin and the way he slides across the black and white checkered floor, effortlessly (having been trained and paid in small medium wage increments to do so), and most of all the way the waiter says cahn ah get you anythin ils, trinidadian or something like that, the white and the black in a decade where everyone is supposed to be enlightened, all are beautiful. Everything and one and word is reflected in every other thing and one and word. The cacophony of words too loud, and I am able to think to myself, most likely because of the tear the dead horses have made, I am able to articulate in my mind’s eye that this is work. Work is making the unbearable beautiful. Work is the repetition of this man’s words and clothes and hair and eyes and smell and writing exactly on top of me, and I am up and through everything he is, whether or not my hating him enters the picture or not, and all this makes perfect sense to me.

     

    If I have not learned how to become this man fully it is only because the dead horses and moments like that have always interrupted the Xeroxing. Strange saviors. If I become him, I will be in his image, I will be the black words on the white page, I will be the black skin of the waiter and the white tiles and napkins, the teeth, the tablecloth, I will be reflexive with anything I see. Beautiful.

     

    The meeting thus far begins to seem successful to me because I have realized quite by chance even in the midst of the transfusion that what I want is power, the power of work, of writing, of him. I was the star all along and only pretending to be the underdog. But what I want to do when I get there is attack from the inside out, be the maggot eating the dead thing, turning rot into alive. I also realize that the reason I hate him is that I am not actually him yet and this comforts me. He keeps trying to convince me that he has desire for me but I don’t want him I want to be him and then kill him and let all the waiters and horses and women talking to themselves into the tower for a big party. I look into the waiter’s eyes longingly, I know I could love him.

     

    And then I’m looking down into my dark brown liquid and of course it’s the horses again, that is the way an intelligent woman’s mind works, did they suffer, was the death instantaneous, what speed were they traveling at, perhaps seventy, like us, what shock does a horse feel, does it, as a very brilliant man once explained to me, lose its horse soul and what if there exists no shaman, no magic to retrieve it? Is horse shock the convulsion that it is to us, do their minds spasm as their bodies realize impossibility, what are “dead horses?” I am immediately sad and tragic inside and I want my lover inside this cavity, this literal chasm where verisimilitude masquerades. I want his man echo. I am writing a journal entry.

     

    I want to hear him reciting to me opposite and unknowable populations of painful difference and people who will remain separate no matter what I do not want to write stories right over their bodies or learn their languages or interpret their art I will not, cannot be them, have them, never ever. I want resistance to win so we can have love. I want my lover to read raw poems to me and not talk about them so that I can know what I am not, so that I can know what I’ve made too much like me, what we’ve made of and into ourselves. And he will, too. He is trustworthy that way. And we will be sucked up in each other’s eyes with the ecstasy of two people who cannot be one another, and our bodies will lunge and devour one another, the words of our love will happen in bursts of semen and wet sticky and spilt estrangement. We will have arrived out of time. I want my lover to read poems to me about the dead and the native and the animal and the criminal and the insane and the violent and the unjust so I can feel.

     

    I swirl my espresso around in the too fragile cup and the man who is teaching me asks me a question. Did I forget he was there for a moment? It is quite possible, though he would not believe it, the dead horse flashbacks are indistinguishable in time. Can I give you a lift somewhere I think is what he said. I can’t be certain that he said this, but I am certain that we left money behind and that I rode in his car. I must have asked for a ride to the library because that is where he began to take me. You must see it, magnified to cinematic proportions, being in a car again with a man, the shape of the windshield shaping vision, or the square frame of the window sectioning off sections of what I could see, one of us driving, one of us a passenger, our moving, our dumb static presence contained inside motion and time, 25 MPH, 30 MPH, 45 MPH until I finally came out with it, said the words which turned the wheels in the direction of the carnage even though I had described very little of what I had actually seen. He followed my words with his hands on the steering wheel and his foot on the pedal and his eyes on the road. He followed me because he too is a writer and he remembers that one cannot look away from an accident. Or perhaps it remembers him. We are all helpless that way.

     

    As that movement, that illogical car movement toward something as if something would be there when you arrive, as that movement carried us the whole cafe conversation finally dawned on me. The further the car mindlessly traveled, like a recording or like vomiting up the previous night the sentences came:

     

    death is the beautiful site or scene of beauty's most powerful moment, death marks its passing, beauty is death and death beautiful, death is the sublime, a paradigm case for the experience of the sublime, the ground itself undoing itself, we are both before and after death always, his love is so powerful it kills her, her death, beauty, even the angles are envious, the poem, his love, his life are produced by death, after all, could this love or beauty happen without death?

     

    Who was speaking?

     

    What happens in returning? What desires drive us and what place do we expect to arrive at? And who are these characters in our minds, A and B, interchangeable, and how is it that A says to B we have no time like the present? Why do we ever bother to write about irony?

     

    For minutes or hours we drove up and down a one mile stretch of road. At some point what we could see was nothing, darkness or night. The more we could not find the horses the more anxious I became, my body again murmured the same utterances, writing itself, pulse, adrenaline. I knew where they had been but because the place was empty, or because sameness and difference were bleeding in my ears, I believed that I had forgotten. We drove back and forth so that I became hysterical, and he kept suggesting his apartment, how he wanted to see me naked, and I was even more hysterical, and he suddenly said you are becoming hysterical.

     

    Each time I looked over at him I was nauseated by his sheer brilliance, his black pant legs on his seat and my black pant legs on mine, his two eyes looking into my two eyes and mine into his, his window and door parodying the window and door on my side. I felt I could strike him. I demanded that he pull the car over at the place where I knew dead horse had wounded the world. We were pulling over. He was asking how I knew this was the place. I got out of the car and slammed the door. He got out of the car like an echo. See the gravel I said, don’t you see where the gravel reveals two bodies were here? I don’t see he said. It just looks like gravel he said. We said the word gravel between us three times. We didn’t have raincoats. It was quite dark. I dropped to my knees. He was very frustrated, he dropped down beside me and said this is ridiculous, there is nothing here. Obviously they have removed them he said. I spread my hands out across the gravel and now mud and moved them around. Oh Jesus he said. Finally some words heaved up from my belly, up from my hands on the gravel and through my palms against the grain of the road, against rocks and cement, after awhile of course the flesh tore, my hands becoming raw and my blood mixing with jagged edged real road made by men. So too my knees came conscious because of the faint pain coming through the weight of me bearing down on them, the gravel puncturing flesh as gravel does. There is a difference between being thrown down onto gravel and the will of slamming and scraping one’s hands again and again on the road for no reason except that reasonability doesn’t make any sense to a crouched figure on the side of the road, bleeding, wiping her face with her sliced hands, crying, the cuts, the red, the dark, the moans. The throwing one’s body out onto the road in front of speeding cars. The man grabbing at you and pressing himself down on top of you through his own uncontained excitement. The vomit. The urine. The come, the blood, the shit. Performance.

     

    I can hear them hear the mutating whinnies of two surprised beasts thrown for an instant into air hear the extraordinary thud of their bulk falling from their man-made trailer to gravel and asphalt can't you hear them can't you smell the shit and piss and spilt blood and heat I can see them each of them as well as both of them together can't you see them ripped open can't you let go of me can't you see them see me is this what it takes how far into my flesh until the anger is in focus not fictionally justafiable just in focus and why can't we just leave it at that that I am a reproduction I am reproducing I am anger and repetition and I am learning to live with it

     

    Cars passing would have seen this in the path of their headlights: two crouched over black and white figures on the road’s shoulder, very much the same, making little if any sense, as if searching for something together, wreckage upon wreckage. Although, you might not make that last observation, having only seen a flash of the two huddled black shapes in your white headlights. I had no choice. People are dying all over the world and we are writing their stories. I clawed at his face until I was blind and unconscious. I have dreams of a bloody face, of the impossibility of human expression.

     

    I am in the hammock on the back porch. It has been unseasonably warm. I have a deep tan, I am brown all over except for where the bandages were. My hands hold tiny white scars. For a time I couldn’t make love: the scabs on my knees reopened every time I bent them, as if the joint itself had changed somehow, as if I was meant to stand. My lover has been reading poems to me. Soon my hands will be healed. The other man has written an essay on memory and pain. My lover is writing a Performance piece concerning the mutilation of flesh. As I remember this, there is massacre in Eastern Europe. As I picture these phrases, the Gaza Strip is bleeding between peoples. My hands are white and smally textured. They repeat themselves uselessly.

     

    The Lover’s Poem

     

    Some bodies stay put
others 
release themselves
like air
like light
over the incomprehensible world
over the 
small human cities
over the dumb world.

Some bodies leak radiance,
letting you 
think love will wash over you,
letting you think the night will not penetrate
the 
room of thick sweet.

But some bodies are just dead,
deadening silences dead of 
the dead
Deathly afraid of the beauty of death
Beautiful as a death laid bare 
like a body before you.

These are love,
these are what we long for.

     

  • Two Poems

    Michael Evans

    mrevans@delphi.com

     

    The Behavior of Bodies, the Motion of Clocks

     

    
An orbit is a way of keeping time--
                                        not a metaphor
for life
         together with another life--a body and a body
at odds with the room's linear constraints.

(The room itself is not a metaphor
                                                   for how we live.)

The bed does not unfold like two hands
--one circling
                         the other
and transparent--
as if loneliness (the beating silence of these days
         he lives without speaking) were enough

to suggest that time and distance are measured
with the same equation.
                            At night, he sets the clock
to an hour
             that already exists
                                      (thinly, as light)

beyond the orbits he understands--
                               the comings and goings
of doctors, this routine of pills.
He listens
to the elliptical path
                                     of his breathing
and he knows the universe will not collapse
in time to save his youth

(for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am,

if like a crab you could go backward).

He dreams himself a young man,
                                       but wakes to nothing
less than he is.
He is not allowed a mirror and does not look

at his hands. Breathing, he counts
himself to sleep.
    Were he a crab, he would give up this shell.

     

    The Love Songs of Leonardo da Vinci

     

    1 Between the Eye and the Object Seen There is another kind of perspective which, by the atmosphere, in a single line of the same size, is able to distinguish the remotest (as a couple) and represent them in a picture –between my eye and them– more than another and a somewhat equal– them and the same density of them and in a single line make them appear and almost of the same as the atmosphere. There is a perspective which the atmosphere attracts to them– their images exist– and not their forms merely. There is a kindness between them able to make the nearest above and of its same color, the more distant bluer. Between the single line of them, between the eye and moon of them– without suffering– they are the same. Among them, a rose does the same and other perfumes. 2 Spechio In the mirror of the room, these two (their bodies) stand among the others, apart– in the light from a single window, they are the same (equal and almost) –if each should notice the other (their shadows opposite the window) in the mirror above the sofa– should see (as if distance is abbreviation) the other at an angle that is the angle of the body– if each should touch the glass to touch the other, isn’t it the other who will understand this distance between them?– (the other reaching out to touch) the eye of the other (in the mirror) will see him (his finger on the glass) touching his own. 3 On the Cause of Generation No part of the body is always the same. The shadow of the other and of the self like two hands in front of a candle– which one is twice as dark? Which one moved across the body moves more slowly? I will not breathe within the light leaking through the curtain and the reflection of the moon. There is proportion to the breadth of shadow–the nearer, the deeper it appears (as light, only opposite). But if direct, how long before the eye sees at a distance another shadow move the body such that light is of an equal size? At that moment, stars take on the shape of stars and the angle of the skin is impossible to compass. It’s the calculus of living that we need. Touch me. Touch the surface of these bodies placed next to each other– the same and nearly opposite. Come in and mingle with them.

     

  • Cheered By Battleship

    James Boros

    jboros@ravenpress.com

     

    In memory of Kurdt Cobain

     

    (1) Apocalypse Then

     
    It ended in an open shaftway, following LBJ’s example. By designating cauldron 19 as their sauce, mirages (against no odds) vented mighty grams of plenty, and cast visceral tracking smoke in henceforth unforeseen celebrations of danger. Without too much grinding, her inappropriate spasm posed as a lofty cur: negation would only disprove gaiety in instances not involving firecrackers declared insipid by consensual bigotry. Having agonized under lack of stress, the rambunctious turnip sought deadeni ng solids as a means of obtaining “gaslight marginality” amidst dining vocations of porn. Besides, where in Charlie’s hell is there room for another afghan recorder?

     

    They didn’t intend to exclude any (or all) whirlpools, yet commuted out toward superior concomitance as stipulated by the father-in-law-to-be. After choking on phosphorescence, everything seemed easy! But, tagging along in front of her, Olive Branch swor e enmity . . . before being drugged by collared stoolies in layered Indonesian target gear. It took all our strength, and less, to meditate on daisies with their plasma turned inside out until ecumenical cowards could line the streets with surgery.

     

    Plasticity was not one of his least appealing codices; despite eternity, certain amounts of clout swam through, only to find a shortage of beckoning gas bags at their perfectly tuned birthright calamity function. Nodal ‘tater within reach (and gravit y well below norm), it sprung out of action at a pace which would certainly not make a vagrant tough wince twice. Automotive vengeance, at least!

     

    “I am no longer a fatality.” However, as common scents voraciously take dictation, enzyme plagiarism casts the entire apparatus in an elderly light, at least, that is, if “that damned beveller” cheats us out of native opportunities. Eagles did not count: Friday’s children sped toward fate’s waiting mint as if watchmakers were only milling around by the dozen. Caulk? Aggravate us, and find your true butler.

     

    This grieving advertisement put ’em in a vault with lather and resin, and prayed for the delivery of wounds. Would non-systematic complaining prove fruity (or does vinegar bury its weeds)? She tried for the fourth level, but failed to chasten elabo rate pins and needless violence . . . or so they did not think. With a spoke-like jerk, truculent adjectives bogged down in a grimey land war with outlandish paper goods, and delivered kitties’ pauses to the breeze. We sang–and read comfortable pylons- -before drifting off with choice albino zebras, nameless olympic runts with heads like extinguished candle wax.

     

    . . . On and on, reeling in daft plaque via assorted remora directionality . . . . Semblances, forked like brazen espresso wallflowers, logged furiously against the wishes of “kelp,” delegating crap to wealthy bunglers whose pouches struck Mickey as naked. Without releasing her grasp, she slept like a doll, and edited flatware stalks in glowing rapture as fishermen slapped sewage with crazy apoplexy. It was as if . . .

     

    (2) Spokane Joe

     

    Traditions upheld with a pang, we jogged into sunbeams laden with molten beef, and skimmed the celebrants’ Tuscany while dimming flaps destined to be lamp-lit in a superficial vein. Prognoses adhered to rougher points (like sawteeth) despite their h aving been abused in deep water. Without the benefit of “coffee nerves,” switchboards lit up for dour grapplings betwixt elegant sphincters of prostration; when they reached the podium, Bess collapsed with our famous “mmmmmmm” sound. The first and final straw is that old donkey’s reluctance, enough to make any child cry out for shears.

     

    Upon crossing the lumbar nerve, it noted several uranium holster supplements making faces at crossfire emitted from one of the New England states. Her dance resembled that of a thumbprint, water-logged janitors aside. (But couldn’t this money welde r deliver electricity outside of the allotted time?) It was Pele’s turn: without so much as a spitting tundra file, massive media churned bread into wafer-thin rafters, leaving us holding the balloon (and its constituency).

     

    Television sags waywardly as tugboats get a grip on varnished chalices: this much we know. Requests for itty-bitty steam lowered the issue of unwritten swordplay within cloaked banjo sex abbreviations, and the phalanx swung (mercifully) in another d irection. One more planet: will the contest begin?

     

    . . . Had somehow managed to lose its jugular! Like fine wine, scalloped fabric-suckers wagged motorcyclical dumbfoundedness in suggestive napkin agendas christened at the time of Lou’s passing. (Believe it!) A cordial was passed from lip to breast–an d back again–throughout the following daytime, all of which didn’t lead him to wring: “Could gore, bladder bug that it is, send ripples across a translucency hound composed of elemental pragmatics, bracing epidermal survivors?” And on the cross, that ca ve-dweller, in a sort of gin-rummy trance, lit the first cracker of the session. It’s comin’ out of the hovel, fast!

     

    Sassy and brained, she elbowed her wagon train into a fulcrum fire left behind by verticality gone wayward, and saw to it that end table #88 registered at the previous nebula. “Goodness!” Without bravura, and with a bold, medical wavering, our awni ng killed off the worm handler, seeing asylum (for the umpteenth time) as a jiggling puff of glandular boasting. Because of chutzpah . . .

     

    Their elliptical sense of ignorance proved fatal to straw women (for example, NUDGE CEREMONY SCHEDULER PAN). Simplicity’s argonaut selected six of the most bruised erasures, forcing limbo to pulsate with embraceable ruddiness in spite of applause di rected at the Nepalese border. Shunting in a display of granular body-building, and bringing out a budgie with eyes like leptons, expositional tracking patellas sounded the heights of razor, primed elegance with jocular binges, and dragged polarity about by its sweaty atmosphere. Things had never been so good.

     

    (3) Long And Dusty Blow-hole

     

    There was a glob of nymphomania attached to version 0! We wrought ironic fat cells around context-bent westerlies begrudged to one poor, hollow actuarial knight (after jazz depicted Bozo clocking molecular drips with a jigsaw). The picayune inertia so often associated with wobbly plowshares stood between middle-wing smilers and their raving shorelines; ask not what time cannot do for you, but then again, why?

     

    “Kind of false hairline”: connotes temporal gist apparatuses capable of withholding dregs as they blossom forth and back within a minute crevice perturbed by nautilus recession. A cheesy enterprise, fraught with rogue wattage (henceforth “marmot whi z hullabaloo”), and probed willingly by tensile demeanor, landed flat on its batch of troubling documentaries (after we glimpsed thirty-eight softies propping up unborn winches with, of all things, messages from Saint Hoofbeat). If re-routing formerly gr eeted cylinders evoked glistening alarm, they would simply extract wiggly einsteinium after counting aqua vitae as one o’ the boyz.

     

    Phenomenal! Blathering pastiness was responsible for only 27% of xylem lossage, seeing as how everybody clapped like beetle sycophants while the remaining ingot lost gravity in a wilderness to the left of etiolated plane musculature. Cleft in stogi es (bottomed-out speed demonstrators), or parted down the middle (exasperating la-la-land butt), the very fabric of space and/or tiger ankle came forth to be massaged by trench coats laundered in photon brine by dry-mouthed Caucasians. Choices: (945) “Op aqueness delivers”; (11) “Lubricant repletion without sandy booklet”; (2006c) “Memorial explosion truss.”

     

    After a quick seizure, we drilled for newsprint, and attached a wire to symbols of age-old hemorrhage leaps. One should not, however, assume that her Christ-like scissor hold pored over both the cape and intricate powder rhythms quacked out h alf-assedly by tours through attic fan wavelengths.

     

    Without his ukulele, he was like a god, roaming the width of major network tummy-prose, glaring at polar strip joints with nauseating relief. . . . But, despite baseline twitch-amplifier deaths by the dozens of hundreds, it was not enough to knock th e wind into vegetation. Finally, with a warning, they converted to larger sizes, none of which looked like rotund/chalky mammoth residue. (See illustrations in all three telephony starch smolderings, esp. “neglected suitor: magneto.”) OPTIONS STILL AVA ILABLE.

     

    July’s wallpaper left no doubt as to the melody of buried cynicism. Hadn’t there been a choco-lobbyist in that corner? It wasn’t uncouth, but there were brimstones placed metaphorically along the garden airbus . . . what comes up must . . . goes around and down!

     

    “Her majesty” was unable to comply without backing into a hedge, all the while shining well-endowed ash quarters pocked with fashion. Acid reindeer grovelled naughtily regardless of asteroids from Pope, the binging hypochondriac, and his half-witted cardiac mime. Our strength lies deep below this manifold juggler: chowder, regaining stolid spark-nipples as it directed a fierce tai-chi emergency, bowled a 2 and bowed out shrugging.