Nickola Pazderic

University of Washington
nickola@u.washington.edu

Susan Jeffords. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 212 pp.

Peter Lehman. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. x, 237 pp.

In many ways the books of Peter Lehman and Susan Jeffords read well together. Both books are concerned with representations of the male body in popular media and how these representations become part of the prevailing ideologies of contemporary life. Both books are concerned with the implications of “hard” or the “phallic” representations of masculinity in particular. Both writers argue convincingly that the machismo which these representations reflect, encourage, and perpetuate, “work[s] to support patriarchy” (Lehman, 5). While the books share in this important fundamental concern, the books come to possess an interesting difference in their efforts to link popular representations with actual political and social conditions. This difference points to an important methodological implication for the study of masculinity in a patriarchal society.

Jeffords’s interpretive reading of Reagan era films chronicles the stunning confluence of cinematic representations of the masculine “hard body” and the official ideologies of the Reagan administration. Neither the films nor the ideologies evolved in an historical vacuum. One of the strengths of Jeffords’s work is its ability to bring the films and the ideologies into mutual focus by interpreting them as part of a broader historical narrative of postwar American triumphs and errors which both undergirds and is produced by the films and ideologies.

In brief, the narrative maintains that America in the 1950s experienced a glimpse of utopia which was soon eclipsed by lack of resolve during the later-Vietnam War period. The country came to a crisis of purpose which was marked by Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon. The Ford and Carter years were a period of anxiety and malaise in which indecision and femininity came to the fore in public life. The narrative maintains that this period of weakness came to an end with the election of Reagan and the imposition of his agenda of national restoration, individualism, and technological advancement. That this narrative is not unfamiliar to any American who has lived through the past decades is, in part, testimony to the power of movies such as those of the Rambo series (1982, 1985, 1988), which, as Jeffords reads, depict and reinforce a longing “that only a return of the ‘physical king’ could resolve” (11).

The “return of the ‘physical king’” in the guise of Ronald Reagan was both prefigured in the writings of people such as Richard Nixon and Robert Bly and reinscribed through such films as the Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989, 1991). For as Jeffords states: Ronald Reagan fulfilled “both Nixon’s and Bly’s desires for the United States and for men by restoring economic and military as well as spiritual strength” (11). While it is certain that Bly and Nixon would agree on few things, Jeffords’s reading tellingly reveals shared presuppositions about just what a male (and the state) is and should be: i.e., sharply delineated, assertive, tough, and, when necessary, violent — in short, a “hard body.” Once the “hard body” was in place, the narrative was reinscribed both on the literal body (through the survived assassination attempt) and on film, through such ideologically obvious films as the Robocop series (1987, 1990) and in less obvious films such as the Back to the Future series. Jeffords’s fascinating reading of the Back to the Future films illuminate how Marty McFly, when he returns to the past in order to save the present of the people of Hill Valley, actually mirrors the reworking of the past that was a part of political life during the Reagan era, thereby legitimating the practice and the narrative. In the first of these two films, McFly returns to the 1950s. By intervening on behalf of his wimp father, he alters the course of history, changing his family from dysfunctional to prosperous. This forgetting and reworking of the past, which was prefigured by Bly and Nixon, was central to Reagan’s ability to capture the public imagination through his often apocryphal (but never politically vacuous) recollections (e.g., Reagan’s public recollections of movie scenes as historical facts).

The looping character of historical prefigurings and recollections serves patriarchal predilections, yearnings, and practices in contemporary society. Following in the fashion and the analysis of poststructuralists, many critics have come to term this form of domination as it exists, especially in theory and in ideology, phallocentricism. Peter Lehman’s primary concern is to disconnect the theoretical and ideological presence of the phallus from the actual lived conditions of many, though surely not all, men. In order to disconnect representations from reality, Lehman posits a distinction between penises, which “are all inadequate to the phallus” (10), and the phallus itself, which “dominates, restricts, prohibits, and controls the representation of the male body, particularly its sexual representation” (9). By way of this distinction Lehman seeks to illuminate male subjectivities without ossifying sexual differences — a problem which is recognized to exist within some feminist writings. Lehman states: “men desire and fear, and sometimes desire what they fear, in ways that confound any simple notions of male subjectivity” (8).

Lehman’s book avoids the pitfall of pity by illuminating how the discourses of both men and women come to be influenced, if not determined, by preconceptions of “hard” masculinity. In chapter eight, “An Answer to the Question of the Century: Dick Talk,” Lehman analyzes the movie Dick Talk (1986). In this movie a group of women engage in a round-table discussion about female sexual pleasure. The conversation continually returns to the topic of the penis, its ize, its function, and its erotic potential. (Thus, the question of the century: What is the size of the average erect penis?). The irony of the film is that, however liberating and counter-patriarchal the women’s irreverant discussion may appear, its constant recurrance to the theme of phallus, penis, erection serves ultimately to reinscribe the very terms of a masculinist hegemony. Such an irony will be familiar to readers familiar with the anthropological literature on the role of hegemonic oppositions in the discourse of subdominant groups; in many instances, hegemonic groups serve as an other in relation to which the subdominant constitutes its own identity. There is a tendency as well for the hegemonic group to serve as something of a fetish for the subdominant. It is clear that the male penis has become something of a fetish for the women in the film, and that this relation to the penis limits the subversive potential of their “dick talk.”

Lehman’s book also addresses itself to representations of the penis in medical discourse. In this discourse Lehman finds a similar, though perhaps more thoroughly veiled, fetishization of the penis. Lehman points out that although modern medical journals have displaced the language of pleasure and desire in favor of the language of statistics, they preserve in all its urgency the “question of the century.” The journals’ statistics serve to call forth and rehearse, as well as to assuage in a “professional” and “objective” manner, men’s anxieties as to the normal and sufficient size of their penises. And in this way the medical discourse helps to preserve the special fetishistic allure, as well as the concrete social efficacy, of the phallus.

Lehman and Jeffords seem to share a hope that by bringing the prevailing narratives and conceptions of masculinity into examination, we can perhaps, one day, find a way to diminish their hold over our daily lives. The chief difference is that Lehman moves further toward unsettling the egregiously masculinist representations that Jeffords merely traces across the recent cultural scene. By marking some of the fault lines between the ideal of the “hard body” and the more ambiguous and unstable realities of lived male experience, Lehman helps us to locate points of potential resistance to the dominant ideology. Such potential is, of course, temporary, for the dominant ideology, and the representations that comprise it, are capable of rapid adjustment and transformation when challenged. But Lehman is right to locate the ground for hope on the plane of ordinary people, and in the spaces that open up between the lives these people actually lead and the socio-sexual ideals to which they can never quite measure up.

Rob Wilkie

Hofstra University
rwilkie1@hofstra.edu

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton. Theory as Resistance. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.

By opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, postmodern theory offered the potential to radically transform the object of literary studies. No longer would intellectual work in the Humanities be limited to the scholarly documentation and annotation of “great works” or to the fetishization of cultural artifacts. By making visible the ideological processes by which meaning is naturalized, such work held the possibility of challenging existing institutional structures (academic disciplines and specializations) as well as the ideologics that legitimated their rule. Above all, the aim of such work was directed toward deconstructing the category of the bourgeois individual as the linchpin of a liberal humanism complicit with a variety of dominations along lines of race, class, and gender. Put to practice in a thoroughgoing way, such work would make serious demands on existing institutions, not to mention the power arrangements and modes of production those institutions reproduce and legitimate. Many ways of escaping precisely these consequences have thus emerged. In their contestatory work, Theory as Resistance, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton argue that at present, the political center of the academy is powerfully reconstituting itself through negotiating its relationship with “theory.” In their book Zavarzadeh and Morton explore the ways in which the “unrest” caused by the theoretical “battles” of the 1980’s is now being settled and managed.

Zavarzadeh and Morton make a strategic intervention into conventional understandings of recent changes in the Humanities. Curricular change is currently attacked by conservatives who argue that the Humanities has abandoned its moral mission of preserving transhistorical aesthetic and philosophical values, instead offering a crassly politicized understanding of culture in order to satisfy the demands of militant activists. Much “left” response to these claims has been little more than weak attempts to “defend” and preserve such small reforms as have taken place. Theory as Resistance, however, intervenes in this debate from a far different angle, arguing that current reorganization in the Humanities, premised on a pluralistic adoption of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, in fact only helps to contain current historical transformations by producing more liberalized institutions capable of training and managing “multicultural” workforces. Thus, the debate between the “right” and “left” (that is, between the outmoded and emergent sections of the academy) has already been won by those representing a new postmodern center. And, as Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, the effect of this “recentering” has been to suppress more radical positions which call not for piecemeal reform of the institutions that manage intellectual production, but for transformation in the mode of production itself.

In each of the essays in their study, Zavarzadeh and Morton chart the emergence of an “anti-conceptualism, an “anti-theory theory” premised on a rejection of theory as critique. That is, they argue what has taken place in academy is an accommodation of the “insights” of postmodern theory to the needs of an uncertain and unstable domestic economy and global situation. In other words, the up-dating of practices in the humanities is related to other current sites of institutional “damage control” as the contemporary university currently finds itself, like all other bourgeois institutions, pressured by a range of internal and external crises. The pressures brought to bear on the academy by economic change, particularly the pressures toward privitization, are making their effects visible in the increasing emphasis on institutional “flexibility.” As a result, the postmodern theories most valuable to current institutional rearrangements are those “ludic” postmodern theories which premise the liberation of “difference” on the abolition of systemic critique. And under this postmodern regime, Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, the category of the autonomous subject, though reconceived and rendered more flexible, remains essentially intact.

Both traditionalists and “theorists” (using “theorists” as Zavarzadeh and Morton do, to indicate progressive liberals who have updated their liberalism through an adoption of a postmodern “ludic liberation”) envision the need for a change in the humanism that contemporary society has outgrown. And both pursue this change through inclusionary curricular reforms that seek to “expand” the subjectivity of the student. Zavarzadeh and Morton argue that the seeming opposition between traditionalists and theorists is a false one: the battle lines that have been drawn divide not over principles and concepts — what is to be done and why — but merely over pragmatics — how it is to be accomplished. The traditionalists still see merit in the literary canon and in the survey course that sets a “moral” base from which the student can learn about human “experience,” while the “theorists” wish to expand the curriculum to include postmodern texts and poststructuralist theory in order to “expand” the human “experience.” But there is no fundamental ideological difference in this opposition: the bourgeois subject of the traditional curriculum has not been expelled from the theorists’ academy, merely updated.

What Zavarzadeh and Morton explicate throughout these essays is how the positions of the traditionalists and theorists prop each other up in an effort to manage the real threat to their business as usual: materialist criti(que)al theory. Such a critical practice would not only offer a sustained critique of the politics of culture but also demonstrate the complicity of both “old” and “new” pedagogical positions in the very political/economic situations they (either “morally” or “ludically”) pretend to subvert. Through a detailed analysis of the historical determinants that have brought the American university to its current state of being, Zavarzadeh and Morton challenge the “progressive” e ommonsensical understanding of the recent changes to the Humanities and show how the current postmodern university does nothing but continue to reproduce the subjectivities necessary for the maintenance of late capitalism.

Within the framework of capitalism, education needs continually to reproduce the workers/consumers necessary for capitalism’s survival. Like the changes made to American education during the Industrial Revolution, when the classroom was adapted to fit the needs of the routinization, repetition, and division of discourse/labor of the factory, postmodern capitalism requires incoherent/”plural” subjectivities willing to fulfill the transitory needs of multi-national corporations. As Zavarzadeh and Morton point out, “the humanists and the theorists who participated in the debate over the change of curriculum, were therefore acting within the historical conditions of postmodern capitalism, which demanded change since it no longer had any use for the older humanities” (11).

The traditional humanities curriculum, grounded in a theory of the individual necessary to the early stages of capitalism’s growth, is “based upon the idea that the individual is the cause and not the effect of signification” (55). According to this way of thinking, the “self,” an ahistorical entity, is “free” from economic and social restraints and is able to “enter into transactions with other free persons in the free market but is, at the same time, obedient to the values of the free market that legitimate the existing political order” (58). The immanent nature of the traditional humanities curriculum keeps people focused on their “self” while searching out the “eternal truths.” Any critique that arises, therefore, remains trapped at the level of an analysis of discrete individuals while deflecting a systemic and materialist critique of institutional situations as a whole.

While the traditional humanities curriculum was necessary for a post-Industrial-Revolution ideology, contemporary technological revolutions and the subsequent growth of multi-national corporations now call for a new “indefinable subject.” As late capitalism found itself running out of markets and faced with the growing numbers of the technological underclass (the increasing disparity between the have and have-nots based upon their access, or lack of access, to recent technological advancements), it became necessary to update the means of production of labor. Zavarzadeh and Morton point out that “the change of the curriculum is, in short, a response to the change of the labor force . . .The rising labor force requires skills that go beyond the linear and empirical and produce in workers an understanding, no matter how elementary, of systems operations in general” (139).

Although postmodern and poststructural theories were originally assumed “inherently” to oppose the traditional understandings of “self,” Zavarzadeh and Morton argue that the indeterminacy and “playfulness” of meaning of a “ludic postmodernism” gave late capitalism the methods needed for its reproduction. The humanities curriculum could be filled with a piece-meal “theory” that made use of theoretical terms stripped of their oppositional potential. This has occurred, Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, because the discourses that have been absorbed into the academy are those which achieve their intellectual effects from a postmodern revision of categories like “experience,” “identity,” and “power,” as well as from an explicit or implicit dismissal of categories like “totality,” “critique,” “contradiction,” and “ideology.” Because of the rejection of these latter categories, categories that have been fundamental to Marxist and other radical theories of revolutionary social transformation, the postmodernism of the academy can support local change and reform, while simultaneously arguing that systemic change is impossible. The focus of Zavarzadeh’s and Morton’s argument is on those uses of postmodern theory which firmly separate the “local” from the “global,” and attempt to forestall any rearticulation of the two by associating systemic conceptualization with authoritarian politics.

One of Zavarzadeh and Morton’s most compelling analyses is found in chapter 4, “The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop,” where they inquire into one of the most ideologically protected spaces in the academy. Although it has not historically been perceived as the most “serious” site of literary study, the Creative Writing program has come, under the pressures brought to bear by critical theory on the bourgeois subject, to be regarded as the last bastion of the “self.” “The fiction workshop is not a ‘neutral’ place where insights are developed, ideas/advice freely exchanged, and skills honed. It is a site of ideology: a place in which a particular view of reading/writing is put forth and, through this view, support is given to the dominant social order” (92). As detailed in chapters four and five, the commonsensical understanding of the Fiction Workshop as the “free” expression of the “self” through “unmediated” creativity has enabled its acceptance by both traditionalists and “theorists.” Based upon a bourgeois understanding of the “self,” the fiction workshop reproduces an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. “The dominant fiction workshop…adheres to a theory of reading/writing that regards the text’s meaning as “produced” less by cultural and historical factors than by the imagination of the author as reflected in the text ‘itself’” (85). In reaction against the discrediting of the author as authority, and enabled by the incessant “play” and plurality opened up by poststructuralism, the university has created a space in which the proponents of capitalism can revert to a site of pre-theory that privileges “the human subject” by means of “heavy emphasis on aesthetic experience, on style (as the signature of the subject) and on such notions as ‘genius,’ ‘inspiration,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘author,’ and ‘authority’” (75). As a result of grounding the fiction workshop on the sanctity of “experience” and the pseudo-equality of “free” expression, the university has preserved a site where both notions of a “free” individual and an equally “free” ahistorical knowledge can be “freed” from the “threat of theory.”

The fiction workshop, through the “violent separation of ‘reading’ from ‘writing’” (87), reproduces not just the idea of the “self” as “individual” and “unique,” but also an understanding of the self’s servitude: the subjectivity necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist economy is the “free” individual who can “create” what is needed. It is through the fiction workshop’s “acceptance” of opinion, *without any critique of “opinion” itself*, that future writers learn only to reproduce the dominant ideology, i.e. what is most immediately intelligible as “what is needed.” The ideological inviolability of the ruling regime of “truth” results, as Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, in “the socially dominant class [having] the final say in the designation of what is ‘real’ . . . and what is ‘nonreal’ . . . in a society.” (85)

The separation of “reading” and “writing” also reproduces an acceptance of a particular economic system. The future writers, who through the unquestioning basis of the fiction workshop “learn” to reproduce the commonsense, become the “boss”; while “the scholars/critics/editors not only accept but indeed enthusiastically define themselves as the subjects of reading. . . . The separation of ‘readers’ from ‘writers’ interpellates them as different ‘experts,’ ‘professionals’ whose unique expertise cannot possibly be undertaken by ‘others’” (87-88). This dichotomy is what keeps people willing to accept the oppressions of capitalism as inevitable; the “writers” of the commonsense are reproducing the “real” world, as they have been taught to “see” it, and the “readers” are perfectly willing to internalize that world so that at the end of the cycle it appears “realistic.”

Theories that seek to raise questions about the “free-ness” of “opinion” and “creativity,” such as the ones presented by Morton and Zavarzadeh, often get dismissed as “authoritarian” since they pressure the very notion of freedom necessary to the “managed democracy” of capitalism. As Morton and Zavarzadeh argue, “experience” is not a given but is mediated through language and through the way one has been taught to “read” culture. But traditionalists and “theorists” understand “‘creativity,’ . . . [as] the ability to transcend the political, the economic, and in short the ‘material’ conditions of writing.” Since this understanding of “freedom” structures the fiction workshop, students enter an ideological space in which their “ideas” get reaffirmed without any questions about the “production” of those “ideas,” questions such as, where did they come from? or, what interests do they serve? The group of discourses that Zavarzadeh and Morton collect under the rubric of “ludic postmodernism” have helped further this tendency by privileging an understanding of meaning in which the slippage of signification results in an inability to permanently “fix” any notion of “the real.” As Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, this “playful” conception of meaning, with its concomitant notion of a constant, nearly “accidental” shifting of identities, reproduces a revamped pluralism in which every position is given an “equal” footing. Since “real” meaning cannot be determined, poststructuralist theory legitimates our ignoring of the historical and political framework in which the writing subject is situated.

In its entirety, Zavarzadeh and Morton’s book is a call to arms. As a result of the recent acquisition of “theory” by the American university, they insist, it is now more than ever imperative that those who wish a revolutionary change begin “what amounts to a daily hand-to-hand combat with the liberal pluralism that underlies today’s resistance to theory” (1). One must engage in an oppositional pedagogy which forces the “invisible” reproduction of the status quo out into the open. It is necessary to produce students who can recognize the entrapments of the dominant ideology as political/economic constructs used to benefit a small few. Teachers must introduce concepts involving the “material” nature of “ideas,” that one does not simply have/hold an idea “for no reason” but because it enables a particular political position. Students must be forced to account for their “opinions” and learn to conceptually visualize what “owning” such an idea means. We must not simply fill our curriculums with an unquestioning “plurality” which only restructures the traditional notions of Literature and “self” by reproducing author as authority. An oppositional pedagogy is one that does not seek to “interact” with students on a “humanistic” level, but instead attempts to make the “invisible” boundaries of the classroom (as a politically constructed site)”visible” so that students could eventually challenge the reigning concepts of “knowledge.”

One hopes that this call to arms will find other ears as receptive as my own. Yet, as the authors recognize, their critical materialist agenda is neither easily presented nor easily carried out. The American university is a highly resilient institution. The postmodern adjustment of this institution has now penetrated well beyond the “elite” universities where it began and is bringing changes to the humanities curriculums even in second- and third-tier colleges. But these changes are far from the kind of fundamental restructuring of the academy and its disciplines that once seemed to be in the offing. On the contrary, as Zavarzadeh and Morton demonstrate, the “expansion” of curriculums to include multicultural texts alongside more traditional canonical material, as well as the elevation of “creative writing” as a site of special privilege, are effecting a containment and erosion of materialist critical theory. By restructuring the boundaries of the center to include only those parts of “theory” which serve to reproduce current political positions, the university has managed to present theory which aims at actual change as “extreme,” “irrational,” and “totalitarian.” Within and against such an institution, truly critical theorists face a daunting task. But with Theory as Resistance, Zavarzadeh and Morton have made a good start.

Steve Martinot

Univ. of California at Berkeley
marto@ocf.berkeley.edu

Jean-Luc Nancy. The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

If there were a movie version of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Experience of Freedom, the scene would be a dark cabaret and dance hall. In it, the air is smoke-filled and murky, though there are few people in the place. In the background, one hears Heidegger’s music; it has his tonality, his phraseology, his syntax, played in his favorite key. On the dance floor, Nancy is dancing with Heidegger himself. They dance closely and intimately. In a dark corner of the cabaret, someone is leaning against the wall, watching Martin and Jean-Luc dance. He is thin, gaunt, tough looking, in a black beret and turtleneck sweater; a Gauloise hangs from the corner of his mouth. He slowly approaches the dancing couple; his walk is lithe, like a boxer. It is Sartre. He taps Heidegger on the shoulder, as if to cut in. Nancy turns on him shrilly, “Oh go away! It is dead between us. I’m with someone else now.” Sartre smiles. “But I taught you that dance which you’re trying to make him do.” Nancy cuts him off, with an expression of disdain, arrogance, and piety all at once. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?” Sartre shrugs, and wanders over to the bar to continue watching the dancers, who dance more stiffly now and with some space between them. Heidegger begins to look a little out of place. Nancy sighs and says to no one in particular, “I wish I knew some more worldly people, a poet perhaps in a beret and cigarette; I could really go for one of them. Too bad there aren’t any around.”

In The Experience of Freedom, Nancy maneuvers between two languages, that of Heidegger — of being, presencing, withdrawing, and the ontological difference — and that of Sartre — of freedom, nothingness, precedence, and transcendence. The secret charm of this book, behind its patina of rigor, is that while Nancy owns one language and disowns the other, he ends up speaking them both. But there is an aura of hesitancy, of appearing to “reinvent the wheel,” in dispensing with Sartre (a tradition, it seems, that has become self-defeating) that truncates Nancy’s project.

In the last chapter, which is a series of “fragments” (culled perhaps from the “cutting room floor” of other chapters), Nancy tells what he knows about what he has done. Speaking of the difference, forgotten by metaphysics, between being and beings, he says:

But this difference is not — not even the “ontico- ontological difference.” It is itself the very effacing of this difference — an effacing that has nothing to do with forgetting. If this difference is not, it in effect retreats into its own difference. This retreat is the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom. (167)

That is, freedom is to be the arche, the deconstruction of the ontological difference (and of Heidegger with it). Furthermore, Nancy has just asked, “How might a discourse of freedom correspond to its object? How might it ‘speak freely’ in speaking of freedom?” (148). To be still asking this at the end of the book suggests that his project of “setting freedom free” is really a question of language, one whose central problematic is not articulation but the inarticulable; that is, the problem of freedom is one of textual form.

Nancy posits the following. With Heidegger, who taught philosophy how to move anterior to subjectivity, anterior to beings and to thematization (philosophy) itself, the thematization of freedom came to an end. Nothing can happen except in freedom. “Existence as its own essence is nothing other than the freedom of being” (23). The problem becomes how not to abandon existence and essence to each other; existence must be “freed” if thought is to have anything left to think (9). Freedom must be thought again. Yet the means to do so have been exhausted. The ontology of subjectivity traps itself between principles of freedom and the freedom that founds subjectivity. The freedom reflected in history, evil, liberty, etc., cannot be made an idea without falling into those things. If, like god, freedom contains all in itself, unlike god, it must belong to finite being since infinite being cannot be free. The question becomes that of liberating freedom from infinitude while preserving the inarticulability of its anteriority. Thus, Nancy’s starting point is that freedom is anterior to all that is anterior in philosophy, and to all foundations; if he is to find an articulation, as he argues he must, it will be through a notion of the experience of freedom.

These are the stakes in thematizing freedom. The stakes for Nancy himself extend to how to rethink certain issues in the light of rethematized freedom. Those issues are 1) sharing or community and 2) the possibility of evil (evil will be addressed below). “Sharing freedom” occupies the center of Nancy’s text, just as care does in Being and Time, and Being-for-others does in Being and Nothingness; it is where Nancy makes a connection with the social. Sharing is where “we already recognize freedom” (74). On this issue, he essentially adopts a Heideggerian stance: one’s relations to others are anterior to an “I” and make the “I” possible. This is perhaps the weakest argument in the book because it retreats most heavily into a reliance on Heideggerian rhetoric.

The strength of the book is how Nancy grounds this endeavor in a notion of an experience of freedom, for which he does not use language descriptively but rather formally, through the strength of a structure. To address the “experience of freedom,” both Kant and Heidegger must be surpassed, the former toward a factuality of freedom (22), and the latter toward the existent’s (Dasein’s) decision to exist as an obligation to the undecidable limit of its freedom (28). For Nancy, the experience of freedom becomes thinking as experience, thinking knowing itself as freedom and knowing itself as thought (59). In sum, freedom presents itself unrepresentably as and in the experience of experience.

If this invokes Sartre’s sense of the term erlebnis,¹ it is also noteworthy in iterating the structure Sartre gives the *non-thetic* self-awareness of the for-itself that he calls conscience(de)soi (though Nancy does not want it to). Both structures are self-referential (thought referring to itself as thought per se), and both rely on parallel notions of obligation (of Dasein to exist and of the for-itself’s “having to be”). Like disaffected lovers, the two thinkers appear to couch the same idea in inverted terms in order to appear to be at odds.

Nancy: “Thinking cannot think without knowing itself as thought, and knowing itself as such, it cannot not know itself as freedom.” (59)

 

Sartre: “Freedom is nothing other than existence. . . that of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it.” (BN, 543; EN, 520, translation modified)

Though there is a distinction between “mode” and “knowing” (to which we shall return), the quarrel Nancy picks with Sartre is more gratuitous. For Nancy, freedom is the “foundation of foundation” (35), and he claims Sartre’s notion is different, that it is “foundation in default of foundation” (97). But for Sartre, “foundation comes into the world through the for-itself,” both as the contingency of being and as idea (BN,100). Nancy makes his accusation because he interprets Sartre’s sense of nothingness and lack as absence rather than as difference (cf. BN,105). One can imagine Sartre shrugging and saying, “feel free.” Perhaps Nancy would try again, saying, “freedom has the exact structure of the subject” (90).

For Nancy, if freedom is what cannot be founded on anything else, since all foundations are discovered in freedom, it attains a certain factuality. “Freedom belongs to existence not as a property, but as a fact” (29). And Sartre would agree, though in/on his own terms (as usual): the facticity of the for-itself (freedom) is that the for-itself “is not, it is in order not to be” (BN,101). That is, its essence is its inarticulability — which is Nancy’s essential point as well. Nancy understands freedom through its incomprehensibility, Sartre through its inarticulability as such (“the for-itself is always other than what can be said about it” — BN, 537).

But the inarticulable is only approachable in form, as a construction rising above the plane of language, a textual form that does not itself “mean,” though it brings meaning into inarticulable play as that construct. The textual form Nancy deploys is interesting. “Freedom is the infiniteness of the finite as finite” (172); “Experience . . . is the act of a thought which does not conceive, or interrogate, or construct what it thinks except by being already taken up and cast as thought, by its thought” (20). In paraphrase, an inarticulable (freedom, experience) is something that cannot be constituted by an aspect of being except insofar as that aspect generates itself and as the very mode of its self-constitution. In each case, it is self-referential across the difference of an iteration, and self-referentiality is the structure of what both is not and is only that structure (what Gasche has called a heterology ²). Another example: “Experience: letting the thing be and the thing’s letting-be, and the thing-in-itself, … is existence” (89). Again, there is a double mode of self-referential iteration, which is not dialectical because there is no contradiction. As iterative, it relies on nothing other than itself for its articulation, and as self-referential, it means prior to meaning; thus, as a structure, it gives reality to the inarticulable. Nancy uses this structure as a logic; it is not a simple form of reasoning, and a lot gets packed into it.

But this is a structure, or mode of descriptive reasoning, that had already come into its own in Sartre; it is what gives BN its charm (and for some its inaccessibility). For Sartre, freedom, the being of the for-itself, constitutes the inarticulable (what escapes the cogito — BN, 90) at the core of consciousness; consciousness is always both thetically conscious of itself as not being what it is conscious of, and non-thetically of itself as conscious. The thetic and the non-thetic are incommensurable, inseparable, and constitutive of a self-referentiality whose structure is that its essence is its existence as an inarticulable. It too is non-dialectical; the condition for dialectical negation is commensurability. Here, the difference from Nancy’s approach can be made explicit. In Nancy’s structure (of the experience of experience), it is the knowing of freedom that parallels what for Sartre is non-thetic. Sartre would not couch it in terms of knowing because that would imply a subject matter. If, for Nancy, the experience of experience is nothing other than experience as such, and freedom is the transcendental of experience, as experience, then experience repeats the structure of self-referential incomensurability (and fulfills the function) that Sartre gives to consciousness (87). Sartre, however, would find Nancy’s approach to the inarticulable incomprehensible, and Nancy faults Sartre for being too articulatory. Such is life.

What is nicely ironic in this homology is that Nancy’s deconstruction of being and beings gives structure in turn to a fundamental ambiguity in Sartre’s notion of freedom. The ambiguity has been noticed by many commentators, who decry that Sartre can say one is free even if in chains (which even Sartre condemned on one occasion as utter rationalism).³ For Sartre, though freedom is an absolute to which one is condemned, it remains conditioned by tactical choice and situational constraint. That is, inseparable from ontological freedom, there is what could be called situational freedom, reflected in the strategies and tactics by which one realizes one’s project. Each is the condition of the other in the sense of being and beings (or langue and parole in Saussurean semiotics). One can be situationally unfree only if there is an absolute, inescapable freedom, as a trace conditioning the possibility of deprivation. Absolute freedom is the trace in all situational freedom and unfreedom, from which it differs and is deferred. Thus, the irony is that while Nancy arrives at a singular freedom from a deconstructed ontological difference, Sartre begins with a singularity that must in turn be read as revealing within itself an interior difference, an ontological difference of freedom.

When Nancy devotes part of a chapter to Sartre, he dispenses with this difference. He critiques a passage from Cahiers pour une Morale,⁴ one of Sartre’s posthumous works. It is a work Sartre promised at the end of BN, in 1943, and then chose not to publish. It belongs to the negative category of “works Sartre refused to publish,” and its publication, in 1983, must be attributed to l’autre-Sartre (or a-Sartre, for short), that is, to a different author from the author of “works Sartre chose to publish.”

In what sense is man possessed by freedom? Sartre interpreted this thought in his celebrated formulation: “We are condemned to freedom.” Now this is certainly not the sense in which freedom should be understood, unless we confuse a thinking of the existence of being with an “existentialism.” For Sartre, this “condemnation” means that my freedom . . . intervenes in order to found . . . a project of existence . . . in a situation of “determinism” by virtue of which I am not free. (96)

Nancy then goes on to quote a-Sartre describing the situation of a person beset by tuberculosis, who is both unfree against the disease, and still free. In a passage Nancy ellipses out, a-Sartre says,

for my life lived as ill, the illness is not an excuse, but a condition. Thus, am I still without surcease, transformed, undermined, reduced and ruined from elsewhere, and still free; I am still obliged to render myself to account, to take responsibility for what I am not responsible. Wholly determined and wholly free. (CM, 449)

Nancy then remarks, “the condemnation to freedom is itself the consequence of a condemnation to necessity.” But in BN, Sartre says, “I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free” (BN, 537). And a-Sartre adds that one is free before the illness and free after it, implying the necessity to assume responsibility for one’s life, not to be condemned to it.

Sartre speaks here on the ontological plane; a-Sartre’s sense of “wholly determined and wholly free” is a statement of ontological difference. Nancy reduces both to the ontic. In his discussion, he imposes a Kantian sense of causality upon Sartre to revise this sense of the determined. He ignores a-Sartre’s notion that one must give oneself the given (CM, 448) — which means that one’s freedom is always the condition through which the world’s adversities are understood. Nancy reads being “condemned to freedom” as being imprisoned in the necessity to surpass, “to make a life project out of every condition” (97). Nancy doubles causality (100ff) in which one becomes (willfully) causal in the world “because” the world causes one to do so. Nancy appears on the verge of attributing to Sartre the approach of bureaucratic Marxism which held people to be “determined” by their class background and origin — and which Sartre had rejected

But the shadow of a more unfortunate politics accompanies Nancy’s argument with Sartre. For instance, in the 60s, the era of the civil rights movement, ghetto rebellions, and the demand for affirmative action, radicals argued that the overthrow of Jim Crow wasn’t enough, that a social environment had been created by racism that had to be taken into account; i.e., until the vestiges of discrimination, separate and unequal schools, apriori condemnation, and a social reality of being watched, noticed, singled out, and continually re-racialized had been expunged, rebellion and affirmative action would be necessary. In effect, to become a subject, one had to find a way actually to confront, contest, and contradict that given environment and its influences (cf. Fanon). Reactionary thinking responded by twisting and revising the argument to render the social environment causal, viz. discrimination caused the rebellions, and impoverishment caused family breakdown and uneducability. Black people were seen as no more free in rebellion than under Jim Crow. If that social environment was to be changed governmentally, through bureaucratic control of civil rights programs and new regulations, these become the first steps toward the new, contemporary criminalization of blackness of the 90s, which grounds itself in causal arguments. The logic of Nancy’s argument is to place Sartre philosophically in the latter category rather than alongside Fanon, a singular violence to Sartre. And the shadow lengthens when Nancy says,

freedom . . . matters to us. . . . we have always been defined and destined in her [freedom]. Always: since the foundation of the Occident, which also means since the foundation of philosophy. Our Occidental- philosophical foundation is also our foundation in freedom. (61)

Is philosophy (and therefore freedom) only Occidental? Is this what Nancy wants to substitute for the (Kantian?) causality he finds in Sartre? One hesitates to ask just how exclusive this “us” of his is to be.

Ultimately, it has a religious tinge. If the “experience of freedom relates the inarticulable to thematization” (97), a different (ontological) difference emerges between unknowability and experience, in terms of a thread Nancy introduces at the inception of his project when he poses two contextualizing questions: 1) Why is there something? and 2) why is there evil? (10). He follows Heidegger’s lead in “The Essence of Truth,”⁵ where Heidegger articulated freedom both as truth (“exposure as the disclosedness of beings”) and as “mystery” (the concealment of being) (41). Nancy recasts “the identity of being and beings” as a distinction between a singular unknowability and the singularity of freedom, that is, between a oneness that connotes mysticism and a unitarity that connotes reification. In Nancy’s exposition, the religious dimension of this confluence of mysticism and reification (of freedom) is given a certain reality. He confronts evil in terms of a similar dilemma as that which besets Christianity; viz. if god is good, then where does evil come from? if freedom is good, then where does evil come from? And he refers to his own ontology as an “eleutherology” (a referrence to Zeus as Eleutherius, the god of freedom) (19). In effect, this term metonymizes a dream of a dual poetics, between a Miltonic loss of paradise and a Lyotardian paganics.

For Nancy, evil is the ruin of good, not just its opposite; evil must be decided upon, as this ruin, in a renunciation of freedom and a hatred of existence (for which Auschwitz is the icon). Evil is thus unleashed on the good, on the promise of the good, of freedom, and on freedom itself. But freedom itself is this unleashing; thus, evil is freedom’s self-hatred. (Like Milton, Nancy reifies evil.) Though the wicked being awaits its unleashing, the unleashing of evil is nevertheless the first discernibility of freedom (just as, for Heidegger, the tool first becomes discernible as equipment when it is broken). The unleashing of evil, the hatred of existence as the absence of all presence, substitutes itself for the ground of existence (127-30). One is left thinking that evil is actually the completion of Nancy’s ontological difference of freedom.

Again, Sartre shrugs. For Nancy, evil is the fact of Auschwitz. For Sartre, evil is the Nazi occupier’s face, or that of any occupation or invading army, under the aegis of a multi-level knowledge of Auschwitz. For Nancy, Sartre would be in bad faith seeing evil as always elsewhere; for Sartre, evil is always elsewhere if the perpetrator of evil must see his act as good in order to have chosen it at the moment of perpetration. And it is in this sense that, for Sartre, conflict between people becomes possible, while for Nancy, it would have to involve a conflict of existence at the level of the inarticulable.

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966); p. 271. Citations hereafter given in the text as BN. Translated from L’Etre et le Neant (Paris, Gallimard, 1943), cited in the text as EN.

2. Rudolph Gasche. The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); p. 91ff.

3. On this question, see Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954); Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and David Detmer, Freedom as a Value (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1988).

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour un Morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Citations given in the text as CM; translations are mine.

5. In Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

Kristine Butler

University of Minnesota
butle002@maroon.tc.umn.edu

Chantal Akerman. “Bordering on Fiction: Chatal Akerman’s D’Est.” Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota. June 18-August 27, 1995.

Chantal Akerman’s career as a filmmaker spans more than twenty-five years. Her cinematic oeuvre has explored and problematized theoretical questions of the visual and aural languages of cinema and their implications for cinematic representation, placing her alongside such Franco-European directors as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, and Agnes Varda. Akerman’s filmography to date includes some thirty-two films, ranging from shorts to feature length productions, from documentary to narrative fiction; she has shot in color and black and white, from video to 16mm to 35mm. Throughout her career, Akerman has been consistently concerned with exploring, exposing, and stretching the limits of cinematic genres with a unique style of difference and deferral within repetition.

Akerman’s cinema is born of a certain perceived loss of the real, born of a critical look at the very elements that make up the cinematic medium itself. The cinema, drawn from the beginning toward the celebration of movement, has tended increasingly to exploit such developments in cinematic technology as make possible a “seamless” cinema, inducing ever more persuasively “realistic” effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction. This drive toward seamlessness — a drive both aesthetic and commercial — led Jean-Luc Godard and other New Wave directors to react against the technical perfection, the slick “realism” of Hollywood, by, for example, abandoning directional microphones and carefully mixed sound tracks in favor of a single omni-directional microphone, and by employing a style of editing which would allow the editor’s work to show. As Godard’s work evolved, his style became a reflection on the cinematic process, filmed by an increasingly self-conscious apparatus that sought to expose, rather than conceal, the site of production. Though Akerman’s work is very different from Godard’s, she shares with him a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.

“Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est,” now enjoying a ten-week run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before it moves to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, is in many ways a conceptual continuation of her earlier work in films such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), News from Home (1976) and Histoires d’Amerique (1988). The installation also represents a branching out for Akerman, in which she re-poses questions about the cinematic process and the construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space. “Bordering on Fiction,” Akerman’s first museum installation, is a work which raises questions about the film itself as an artistic construction and the act of viewing such a construction.

Funded in part by the Bohen Foundation and Etant Donnes, The French-American Endowment for Contemporary Art, and conceived by Akerman, Kathy Halbreich (then Beal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and currently the director of the Walker Art Center), Susan Dowling (producer for WGBH Television), Michael Tarantino (an independent curator and critic), and later joined by Bruce Jenkins (film and video curator for the Walker Art Center) and Catherine David (then curator at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris), “Bordering on Fiction” represents a multinational collaboration on the coming together of the European community, and “the concomitant rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism.”¹ The installation itself consists of three integrated “movements” corresponding to the three galleries in which the exhibit is contained. Upon entering the first gallery, visitors are confronted with a darkened room where the finished version of D’Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in three trips during 1992 and 1993, runs continuously. A second room holds 24 video monitors arranged into eight triptychs, all simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery contains a single video monitor and a pair of small speakers placed on the floor, with Akerman’s voice reciting passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. As we the viewers move forward through the installation, we move conceptually backward through a deconstruction of the filmmaking process, both from the final product to the artist’s vision of the work, and from the technologically “finished” film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks.

Akerman’s previous work shares affinities with what Serge Daney has called the “cinema of disaster”² — cinema that emerges from the desire to come to terms with, and the impossibility of finding language for, contemporary disasters such as the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. Like Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s collaboration Hiroshima, mon amour, and more recently, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Akerman’s D’Est treats themes of personal crisis in the midst of social upheaval, of disaster and its aftermath, as well as the personal and societal stakes of remembering and/or forgetting that upheaval. Watching D’Est, one has the sense of passing time, of waiting, and of the uncertainty born of daily life that continues in the midst of despair. Akerman focuses on moments preceding or following the events of daily life: she films people waiting in train stations, snowy streets at dawn, people walking, sitting in their kitchens, standing, waiting in long lines, quietly conversing. “All exteriors are places of passage and transit, traversed or occupied by an errant humanity laden with baggage and packages and heading toward an improbable destination.”³ Akerman has consistently focused on the events of daily life in her work, reversing the hierarchy of public and private, a principle which she considers specifically feminist. As she says about her 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: “I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash come[s] higher, and I don’t think that’s an accident. . . .”⁴ In Jean Dielman, the repetitive and ultra-normal nature of a housewife’s daily routine opens out onto pathology. In Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), the filmmaker protagonist’s travels from Germany through Belgium to Paris take the form of a routine of waiting in hotel rooms and train stations, chance and planned encounters, and frustrated phone calls to her lover in Italy. This concern for the daily, for privileging the personal over the national or the political, is at the basis of D’Est as well, a film which focuses on the personal without a single named character, without narrative, but rather formally and compositionally, through examination of the film itself as both a theoretical possibility and a finished product, and the conditions that provide for its creation and reception.

In all of Akerman’s work there is a quality of filmic composition that is almost musical, akin to such composers as John Cage or Steve Reich. Like Cage and Reich, whose musical compositions are based on a principle of difference and repetition, Akerman’s filmic compositions exist to be varied in time and in space, while retaining certain grains of the original “theme,” as a sort of fluctuating loop. D’Est exists on a principle of deferment. Built on a system of formal and thematic oppositions that seem fairly simplistic — exterior vs. interior, day vs. night, summer vs. winter, silence vs. noise, crowds vs. individuals, long vs. short sequences, fixed vs. moving cameras — the film, instead of presenting a binary composition of conflict and resolution that one might expect from a documentary, presents ruptures, frustrated attempts, and deferred resolutions.

About her reasons for making D’Est, Akerman writes:

Why make this trip to Eastern Europe? There are the obvious historical, social, and political reasons, reasons that underlie so many documentaries and new reports — and that rarely indulge a calm and attentive gaze. But although these are significant, they are not the only reasons. I will not attempt to show the disintegration of a system, nor the difficulties of entering into another one, because she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preoccupations. This undoubtedly will happen anyway; it can’t be helped. But it will happen indirectly.⁵

D’Est, though it is ostensibly “about” the fall of the Eastern bloc, renounces the authoritative voice of the documentary, eliminating the voiceover and narrative structure which would typically weave through and connect the various moments. What we have instead is a continuous montage of images and sounds, which lends to the installation a sense of obsessive repetition and looping, the sound often existing as a counterpoint to the image, rather than as its complement. Intentionally, voices are not “selected” by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if “naturally.” The camera moves slowly, deliberately, in lateral movements, not stopping to focus on anything, not making exceptions, filming people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same impartial eye. Akerman recorded the sound for the film live, then remixed it in its entirety; often the sound is the dominant element of the sequence and exceeds the image and its duration. In addition, the sounds themselves are often startling in their lack of immediate “relevance” to the image: the seemingly paradoxical nature of their presence or absence relative to the image track, relegates the sound to function as “noise” or interference. The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.

The apparatus is thus an integral part of the film, impossible to ignore. The effect is troubling, taking the spectator/listener out of a position of passivity associated with the “natural” or realistic pairing of image to sound, of lips to voices, of objects to the sounds we associate with them. The viewer must either be frustrated in his or her attempt to focus, stop, develop a story, or else must allow for the camera’s refusal to weave, out of these disparate parts, an easy, coherent narrative. The camera’s “choice” of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, eventually exposes the arbitrary nature of any narrative one could choose to recount: certain shots or frames seem to be echoes of other, past narratives, testifying to the depth of our own investment as viewers in the cinematic tradition and the expectations that we have as consumers of different types of visual media. Thus D’est, while questioning the primacy of the image and the subservient, verifying nature of the sound track, and exposing the medium of film in its mechanical composition, also questions the production of discourse about Eastern bloc countries in the aftermath of the Cold War, in post-communist society, through the media, and the spectator’s consumption of the products of these discourses.

Akerman’s cinematic style is uniquely suited to the demands of a museum installation as a space made for wandering. In her past work, she has developed a film language in which the lateral movements of the camera suggest the wandering of a subject at once spectator and participant. D’Est, though it is certainly informed by Akerman’s cinematic work, is not simply a film, but an event: the very personal movement of each museum goer, who walks, sits, looks or does not look, listens to out-of-sync noises and dialogue, leaves or does not leave, echoes the movement of the installation itself; we as an audience are caught up in the waiting, the absence of knowing when, or if, something will “happen,” as the notion of “happening” itself comes into question.

“Bordering on Fiction” opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on January 18 for a three-month run. Following its visit to the Walker from June 18 to August 27, it will make successive stops at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, October 23-December 3; the Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles/Vereniging voor Tentoonstellingen van het Paleis voor Schone Kunsten Brussel in Brussels, December 14 to January 10, 1996; the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany, April to July 1996, and the Ivam Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, September to November 1996.

Notes

1. Cited in Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, published on the occasion of the exhibition (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1995) 8.

2. See Serge Daney on écriture du desastre in Cine Journal 1981-1986 (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinema, 1986).

3. Catherine David, “D’Est: Akerman Variations,” in Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, 61.

4. Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, 51.

5. Cited in Halbreich and Jenkins, 20.

Tamise Van Pelt

Idaho State University
vantamis@fs.isu.edu

The Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. June 21-24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany.

queer v. 1. To bring out the difference that is forced to pass under the sign of the same. 2. To require to speak from the position of the Other.

Postcards mailed from Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany’s Black Forest during the week of June 18, 1995 bore the apt cancellation: FREIBURG HAT WAS ALLE SUCHEN (Freiburg has what everyone is looking for). Appropriately, then, eighty desiring subjects from four continents came to Freiburg to map the territory of Freudian and post-Freudian studies at the Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. The four-day conference was sponsored by Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat (once home to Erasmus, Husserl, and Heidegger), the Universities of Paris X (Nanterre) and VII (Jussieu), the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie litteraire (Paris), and the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (Lisbon). United States sponsor was The Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida, conference coordinated by Andrew Gordon. Papers in English and French were delivered at the conference location, the Kolpinghaus, while papers in German were delivered at the nearby Akademie. Several clear themes emerged from the collective theoretical effort; gender binary as the foundational construct of psychological analysis proves inadequate to the demands of contemporary theorizing; psychological theories reveal their limits and internal contradictions when read against literary implications; and the postmodern’s dystopian and utopian impulses push psychoanalysis for a response.

Linguistic constructions and gender issues were quite literally on the table when a translation of the first day’s menu announced that lunch was to be “bird in estrogen sauce.” At this point, conference participants had already hear Bernard Paris’s (Florida) plenary address on Karen Horney’s “one great love” — not for the men in her life but rather for her actress/daughter Brigitte. Later, they would gaze at the martial codpieced statuary women adorning Freiburg’s Kaufhaus. Consequently, the bird positioned itself amid a chain of signifiers of gender slippage, a slippage thematically relevant to several conference panels. William Spurlin (Columbia) reviewed the work done by heterosexuality in traditional Freudian theory, interrogating Freudianism’s insufficient critical attention to it’s own position vis-à-vis the heteronormative thinking of the social and cultural institutions of which it is a part, but also interrogating queer theory’s tendency to “[reduce] Freud’s theories of homosexuality to the homophobic ideologies of his time.” Another alternative view of psychoanalytic gender — a view of gender as space — was provided by Virginia Blum (Kentucky) who drew on feminist geography to critique Lacan’s “parable of the train station where gender is ‘entered’ via the doors marked ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’,” reading Lacan’s story in connetion with Klein’s case study of Little Dick’s train therapy and Freud’s writings on Hans’s traumatic childhood train ride.

A unique human gargoyle clings to the first-story gutter of Freiburg’s Munster U L Frau. With its head and hands gripping the cathedral facade and its fanny facing the cobblestone street, a strategically placed drainpipe seems to invite the most literal of anal readings. In fact, the irreverent aperture points from the cathedral toward Freiburg’s government offices, a perptual Gothic mooning of secular authority. Similar obeisance to Freudian authority was continually evidenced by conference participants seeking to honor Freud as much in the breech as in the observance. Kathleen Woodward (Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Wisconsin-Milwaukee) initiated the reevaluations with her critique of Freud’s developmental notion that mature guilt replaces immature shame, shame being merely a primitive emotional response to the disapproving gaze of another. Shame takes on a performative dimension in recent gay and lesbian theory, Woodward argued, and shame takes on differing “temporal dimensions” relative to cultural locations themselves inseparable from gender, race, and sexual preference. In the spirit of Woodward’s critique, Claire Kahane (SUNY, Buffalo) paid similar respects to Freud’s construction of mourning as an obsessional involvement with the lost object. Kahane posed the difficult questions that pushed Freud’s object-dependent definition beyond its ability to answer: “What if the mourned object was missing in the past?” “What if there was no object to mourn?” The Holocause demands the response to just such questions, Kahane pointed out, since the Holocaust dead signify holes in their families’ history, absences in the “genealogy of the subject.”

Freud was not the only analyst whose work found itself reexamined. Ulrike Kistner (Univeristy of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) examined Deleuze’s use of a “World Without Other” to separate the concept of perversion from its moral entanglements. Kistner challenged the “slippage between structure-Other, others, and literary characters” evident in Deleuze’s deployment of Friday, or the Other Island to reread perversion. She pointed out that Tournier’s narrativity itself defines new relations between neurosis/repression and perversion/defense, relations that exceed Deleuze’s analysis. Shuli Barzilai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) interrogated the political/personal involvements displayed in Lacan’s critique of Sandor Ferenczi’s 1913 essay “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality,” suggesting that Lacan’s debate with Ferenczi sometimes overstepped “the bounds of polemical decorum.” Nancy Blake (Illinois, Urbana) found Lacan’s mirror stage essay limited in its capacity to theorize the bodily constructions in Anne Sexton’s poetry, Sexton tending to locate the womb “outside the bodies of women” in a scramble of layers that exceeds the Lacanian imaginary. Indeed, the very practice of psychoanalytic reading was itself reexamined when Norman Holland (Florida) reread his own 1963 Freudian analysis of Fellini’s 8 1/2, positioning himself as a reader response critic “who believes that spectators construct their experience of a film,” and finding his own prior reading inadequate. Clearly, the Twelfth International Conference was no mere reiteration of Our Fathers’ Psychoanalysis.

Freud’s intellectual influences were evident, however, and some speakers chose to emphasize Freud as source. In a visual alchemy, Robert Silhol (Paris VII) literally drew for his audience the transformation of Freud’s models of the ego presented in “On Narcissism,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “The Ego and the Id” into Lacan’s model of the subject, Schema Z. All told, Freud fared best with his Hungarian readers. Laszlo Halasz (Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) found in Freud’s archaeological interpretation of Jensen’s Gradiva the model for history. Halasz’s Freudian view of history as a “series of regressions, fixations, and repetitions” culminating in refamiliarization seemed particularly poignant in light of the contemporary bloodshed in Eastern Europe, where refamiliarization is a culmination devoutly to be wished. Similarly, Antal Bokay (Janus Pannonius University) found in early Freudian hermeneutics the models for postmodern praxis, linking past to present affirmatively. (The Hungarians’ willingness to mine Freud’s contributions rather than his limitations recalled for me a position articulated by another Eastern European scholar, at Catherine Belsey’s seminar on Shakespeare and the Sexual Relation at the University of Virginia in 1993. The concept of the decentered subject whose instabilities were so readily embraced by Belsey’s largely American audience had far less romantic appeal in Romania than in the U.S., the Romanian scholar pointed out.) Thus the Freiburg conference’s many perceived theoretical conjunctions and disjunctions served as reminders of the radically contextual, historically contingent nature of critical values. There, as elsewhere, the reception of theory was contingent upon the socio-political in/stabilities framing each participant’s intervention into psychoanalysis.

The statue of an elegantly dressed young man faces the main entry of Freiburg’s Gothic cathedral. It stands farthest from the door, even farther from salvation than the statues my tour guide insisted on referring to as the “stupid virgins.” The young man’s elegance fools no one; his back crawls with the creatures of nature’s dark underbelly, with snakes and spiders and loathsome grotesques. He is a clear signal to the illiterate faithful, a graphic incarnation of the end times the doorway depicts, a demand for the examination of spirit. A visual blitz, centuries before the postmodern, yet oddly consonant with it. Aptly, then, postmodernism was as significant an area of inquiry as gender studies for Freiburg’s visiting theorists. James Sey (Vista University, South Africa) asserted that the millennial tendency of postmodern techno-culture to view the body as obsolete cannot be separated from the cultural pathology of serial killings and mass murders so frequently on media display. In a similar end times mood, Jerry Fleiger (Rutgers) used Zizek’s discussion of Lacanian anamorphosis to read three works by Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Zizek himself from an avowedly “paranoid” slant, noting that all three works share a concern with the dehumanizing apects of technology characteristic of postmodern life. Art, Fleiger argued, makes us see that we can’t see everything, that we ourselves occupy a paranoid position from which art looks back at us.

The dystopic visions of postmodern technology were extended by Marlene Barr’s (VPI) exploration of the “dystopian gaze” directed at the objectified prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red light district. Barr contrasted Dutch window culture with an alternative utopianism offered by the paintings of Bill Copley and Claes Oldenburg in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. This utopian contrast to the bleakness of postmodern techno-vision sounded a note echoed in several presentations. Angelika Rauch (Cornell) found in the Freudian dream image a heiroglyphic desire for the better that paralleled similar desires in the Romantic historicism of Novalis and Schlegel. Henk Hillenaar (University of Groningen, Netherlands) offered a psychoanalytic rereading of the dismissive attitudes toward mysticism that have colored the interpretation of the relationship between the French preceptor Fenelon and the mystic madame Guyon. Only Sarah Goodwin (Skidmore) emphasized the darker side of the romantic vision, exploring a Romantic uncanny that “subtly associates the pressures of the marketplace with a bodily uneasiness,” both in Freud and in the dancer’s performance of the ballet based on Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann.”

All in all, the Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology was a successful and substantive production. The Thirteenth Annual Conference is tentatively scheduled for July 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, contact Andrew Gordon, The Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts, Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA, agordon@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu. The Institute list, PSYART, can be subscribed to by sending the message: subscribe psyart [1st name] [last name] to listserv@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu; bibliographies of the 1993 and 1994 conferences are available online. Proceedings from the 1995 Freiburg conference will be published, forthcoming 1996. The volume can be obtained from Prof. Doutor Frederico Pereira, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Rua Jardim do Tabaco, 44, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal, dir@dir.ispa.email400.marconi-sva.pt.

Crystal Bartolovich

Literary and Cultural Studies
Carnegie Mellon University
crystal+@andrew.cmu.edu

Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation. Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Traffic (trae-fik), sb. . . . 1. The transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade; hence, trade between distant or distinct communities.

 

— OED

Cultural geographers are now experimenting with a range of new ideas and approaches, their aversion to theory now firmly overcome. These developments have drawn extensively on contemporary cultural studies and on other theoretical developments across the social sciences. But the traffic has not been in one direction: there is now at least the potential for repaying this debt by informing cultural studies with some of the insights of social and cultural geography.

 

— Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning

I have chosen the above passage from Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (1989) as the starting place for a discussion of his more recent book, Constructions of Race, Place and Nation, a collection of essays he edited with Jan Penrose, because its “trade” metaphor (“traffic”/”debt”) calls attention in an economical fashion to a troubling aspect of both texts: a tendency to view “cultural studies” as a sort of theory warehouse for traditional disciplines, and to see “theory” as a stockpile of portable commodities (“ideas and approaches”) ready to be transported anywhere interchangeably. As Jackson and Penrose put it in their introduction, geographers have become “increasingly sensitive to debates in cultural studies” (19). In this essay I will pursue the limits of this “sensitivity” insofar as it can be traced in Constructions. The academy — from its perspective — is comprised of disciplines with well-defined, although semi-permeable, borders. Indeed, the “trade” image argues — linking the previous book even more firmly to the concerns of the more recent one — that disciplinary boundaries function rather like those of nation-states (before they were unsettled by transnational capital). Minimally, it assumes that controlled and accountable transactions (import and export) are negotiated among distinct scholarly domains. The very desire to set the balance of payments aright between “geography” and “cultural studies,” however, is already to undermine cultural studies understood as a postdisciplinary, critical practice.

Since I will be criticising Constructions largely on the grounds of its investments in “geography” as a discipline — investments that I think render a “sensitvity” to “cultural studies” impossible — I want to make my own institutional position and interests as explicit as I can from the start: I teach in a literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. In spite of the profound difficulties of doing so, we are committed to attempting to resist disciplinary structures, not only to make a “place” for ourselves, but also because the current organization of the university renders it problematic to cultural studies politically, intellectually, and practically. Attempts at transdisciplinarity threaten power bases of departments, which jealously guard their faculty lines, resources, and boundaries for reasons that often have more to do with self-reproduction than intellectual conviction — as most department members will readily acknowledge. Crises induced by university funding cuts have intensified these border fortifications. In a terrain of entrenched disciplines, it is very difficult indeed to pursue the kind of postdisciplinary practice toward which cultural studies has been moving. Given these conditions, the common gesture of traditional disciplines looking to cultural theory to revitalise themselves without in any way questioning their own disciplinary integrity can be seen as destructive to cultural studies. I address this state of affairs in the following pages.

A more sympathetic reader might object to my critique of Constructions on the grounds that it is a “specialist” book whose primary agenda is not, after all, positioning itself in relation to cultural studies. In any case (the defender of the book might add), its heart is in the right place; at a time of right-wing backlash against the left in the academy, and traditionalist backlash against “theory” and “cultural studies,” a book such as Constructions, which attempts to bring the highly charged issue of racism to the attention of a generally conservative discipline, is surely not an enemy. ¹ The book — after all — deals with a very important topic. Without disputing these points, I am still left with the conviction that the collective effect of dozens of books like Constructions is to keep in place the disciplinary structure of the university that cultural studies is attempting to break down. If the transdisciplinary tendency of cultural studies were simply an incidental preference for the new and an anarchic preoccupation with smashing up the old, then ,Constructions would be quite right to refuse to join in. However, since cultural studies has been suspicious of inherited disciplines insofar as they have been participants in the very sorts of oppressions that Constructions attempts to bring to the attention of geographers, perhaps it might have taken more notice. Anthropology (Fabian), History (de Certeau), English (Viswanathan), ‘Oriental’ Studies (Said) — even Geography (Blaut) — have all come under question as disciplines in recent years for the ways in which they have helped to “construct” and maintain racism, (neo)colonialism, exploitation, and many other not so very admirable realities. Attention to the role of “geography” in the processes of racism Constructions describes would not only make it a stronger book; it would render it more politically useful since it is, after all, published by two university presses (Minnesota acquired the U.S. rights from University College London Press) and directed largely to an academic audience.

The disciplinary investments of Constructions are explicit. Most of the essays were earlier given as talks at the 1992 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, and assume a geographer as reader. As the editors explain in the preface: “Besides the application of social construction theory to particular empirical materials, the following chapters are also united in their adoption of a geographical perspective” (v). They add: “we hope the volume will help clarify some of the highly charged issues that revolve around notions of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ as well as contributing to the development of a more rigorous social construction approach within geography” (vi). The marketing categories (“Geography/ Sociology”) printed on the back cover of the book confirm that the University of Minnesota Press agreed with this editorial self-assessment of audience.

Instead of pursuing the racisms in which this very audience can be implicated, however, Constructions describes racism as if it only existed in a world beyond geography and the university.² Even Alastair Bonnett’s discussion of “anti-racism and reflexivity” manages to evade any hint that “social geography” might be complicit with the world of secondary school teachers he discusses. Social Geography is for him merely the medium in which racism can be studied; it, apparently, can do so without participating in that world. I cannot imagine a position that could be further from that of the two prominent cultural theorists, Gayatri Spivak and Paul Gilroy, Bonnett includes in his bibliography. Whereas both of these theorists have been relentlessly critical of disciplinary neutrality, and scrupulous in interrogating their own positions and interests, Bonnett simply brings their work “home” to geography, domesticating it, as if this were not a fraught andproblematic gesture. He disparages “auto-critique” and “textual reflexivity” which he describes as insufficiently attentive to “wider political and social processes that structure and enable people’s attitudes and activities” (166). Yet he never pauses to wonder what those processes might be in his own case as a researcher, contenting himself with examining others without considering where their struggles touch (or not) his own — not as an “individual” but precisely as a subject situated in “wider political and social processes that structure and enable . . . [his] attitude’s and activities” as a geographer.

Cultural Studies, on the other hand, is a critical practice that few of its practitioners would feel comfortable taking for granted in the way Bonnett’s article takes “geography” for granted. Iain Chambers has recently put it this way: Cultural Studies “cannot rest content within an inherited discipline, invariable paradigm, or fixed set of protocols. It exists as an act of interrogation: a moment of doubt, dispersal, and dissemination. It reveals an opening, not a conclusion; it always marks the moment of departure, never a homecoming. Criticism practised in this manner, in this style, cannot pretend disciplinary recognition . . .” (121-2). The contributors to Constructions show little evidence of such interrogation of themselves as geographers — or even the desire for it.

The book is divided into four sections of two articles each, with section titles that echo key texts and problematics in cultural theory. And yet the book evades discussion of the tensions that might confront the articulation of such texts and problematics with “geography.” Its first section, “Constructing the Nation,” offers an essay by Jan Penrose on “social constructions of nation, people, and place” in Scotland and the U.K. and a piece on “immigration and nation building” in Canada and the U.K. A second section moves to a consideration of “Constructions of Aboriginality” with two articles, one by Kay Anderson and one by Jane Jacobs, focusing on Australia. A third section takes up “Places of Resistance” with a study of co-op housing in New York city by Helene Clark and a discussion of struggles to acquire state funding for Muslim schools in the U.K. by Claire Dwyer. The final section, “Politics and Position,” contains the essay — briefly discussed above — by Alastair Bonnett on how self-consciously school teachers deal with questions of race in U.K. classrooms, and a piece by Peter Jackson on police/minority relations in Toronto.

According to the editors, the “central argument” of all the chapters concerns the “constructed nature of ‘race,’ place and nation” (19). The book is, in fact, maddeningly repetitive in making this point. Yet, while the volume is adamant in its claim that “‘race,’ place and nation” are constructs, none of the contributors seems to worry much that “geography” is as well. As the editors note in their closing remarks: “Ironically, for a collection of geographical essays, we may have achieved greater sophistication in our theorisation of ‘race’ and nation than we have collectively achieved in theorising the significance of place” (207). One effect of this inattention to “place” — especially the institutional situation and investments of its contributors — is that “geography” has much the same status in this book as the uncritical acceptance of “nation” which the book purports to unsettle. As Michel de Certeau has reminded us concerning history writing: “all historiographical research is articulated over a socio-economic, political, and cultural place of production” (58). He advocates the making visible of this “place” as part of any history-writing project so that usually unaccounted for interests might more easily be exposed. This is not, I would suggest, a merely academic matter. As Jane Jacobs, in one of Construction‘s more interesting pieces, notes (without, alas, unsettling the editors’ disciplinary certitude): “Geography has long been seen as a discipline complicit with imperial intent” (100). “New approaches” will not in themselves expose, interrupt or resist this “complicity.”

New approaches, however, are what we get in Constructions, described in ways which the writers are careful to announce are specific to the concerns and methodologies of geography, which are opposed to “textuality.” In her “Constructing Geographies,” for example, Kay Anderson notes: “to conceptualise localities as unidimensional byproducts of economic regimes would seem to be as restricting as the approach growing out of some branches of cultural studies that places/landscapes are mere ‘texts’ to be ‘read’ for their cultural meaning” (85). The antidote to the supposed semiotic excesses of “some branches of cultural studies” is a “realist” approach that Anderson associates with the work of geographers such as Diane Massey and P. Bagguley, who investigate “spatial ranges of the many causal elements that impinge on a local area” (84; Anderson is quoting Bagguley here). Such an approach, Anderson admits, has the limitation of a too heavy emphasis on the economic, “as if the process of place-making can be wholly captured by measuring statistical changes over time in labor forces, gender relations, market pressures and so on” (84). In any case, the effect of Anderson’s gesture (aside from further disseminating a misunderstanding of textuality) is that “cultural studies” is coded as excess so that cultural geography, on the other hand, can become the science of the sensible middle.³

This “middleness” is perhaps best exemplified in Jackson’s own contribution to the volume, an essay on “police-community relations” in Toronto which ends with the following sentences, musing about the potential for “riots” in that city: “The liberal conclusion would suggest that recognising the need for change will help prevent any further deterioration of police-community relations. The more radical conclusion suggests that Blacks have every right to protest, by what ever means necessary, while they continue to be faced with differential policing and institutionalised racism” (198). The narrow set of options (for example, might not “whites” think that protest of some kind is in order?), and the emphasis in the article on police-“black” relations rather than “community” more broadly understood, takes the pressure off the white reader — and the author as well. In Jackson’s discussion, “Blacks” are engaged in a (perhaps legitimate) battle with “the police” that does not seem to implicate anyone “outside” this nexus.

At the beginning of his “conclusion” section, Jackson nods in the direction of subject-positioning (“I would like to reflect on my position as a White English academic evaluating the problems of another society in situations of heightened social tension”), but his reflections actually have the effect of attenuating his stand on the issues he raises. In the end, taking sides is difficult, he muses, because all the folks he interviewed were nice to him personally, and the leader of the major black anti-police-violence organisation is suspect because he beats his wife, and so on (no information on the “private” lives of other interviewees, it should be noted, was provided; one need not excuse violence against women to note this discrepancy). Since the world is so complicated, Jackson equivocally decides “it is possible to be both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of police-community relations in Toronto” (197).

Indeed, in his zeal to be “balanced” and to let his interviewees (ostensibly) speak for themselves and (supposedly) not guide the reader’s analysis of the situation unduly, he allows troubling racist assumptions into his article without any qualification. Here, for example, is the Chair of the Police Services Board speaking as recorded and represented by Jackson: “[People] have to understand that there are some things that police officers simply have to do. They do have to stop people at three in the morning and ask them where they’re going if they don’t seem to belong to the neighborhood. Those are validpolicing exercises and the community has got to understand that” (184). One might wonder how it is that “neighborhood” and identity become intertwined (i.e. what structures these relations) so that attributions of “belonging” can be determined to be a “valid” police activity. While he claims to be against “racism,” apparently such questioning does not enter into Jackson’s understanding of how one might be anti-racist. By focusing ultimately on the personalities of individuals he interviews (and himself), rather than the conflicts between groups, he manages to render a situation of explicit systematic racism less clearcut. This tendency to focus on “individuals” — in several of the articles as well as in editorial assumptions — helps the editors and contributors maintain a certain blindness to their institutional position as “geographers” as well.

The editors’ concluding comments particularly emphasise “individuality”: “as individuals, we must locate ourselves within the intersecting matrix of human identity and difference in order to become aware of our potentially common position” (202). This humanist appeal to a universal belies the nod to the politics of difference that surface from time to time in the volume. More importantly, however, as de Certeau has suggested, the “place left blank or hidden through an analysis which overvalue[s] the relation of individual subjects to their object might be called an institution of knowledge” (60). Institutional critique is bypassed in the Jackson and Penrose volume because the contributors are depicted as atomised “individuals” without apparent structuration (“place”) as a group. By leaving this “place” uninvestigated, Constructions preserves a certain tidiness for “geography” that contrasts markedly with what Angela McRobbie has described as the [desirable] “messiness” of cultural studies: “precisely because it is so embedded in contemporary social and political processes, because, for example, the recent changes in Europe affect how we think about culture . . . cultural studies must continue to argue against its incorporation into what is conventially recognized as a ‘subject area’” (722). Resisting “incorporation,” however, is difficult if cultural theory is continuously appropriated by scholars who are in no way troubled by the functioning of traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The academic situation of “cultural studies” as outré, as the exotic foreign land from which geography can import theoretical necessities and perhaps a few methodological luxury goods, brings up the question of disciplinary difference and relations with which I opened this essay. One way in which the boundary issue often manifests itself in cultural studies is in terms of “tensions.” For example, the historian Catherine Hall once commented in the question period after a talk — specifically when asked about “textual approaches” to history — “it [your question] makes me think about what the tensions are for me between doing history and being a feminist, which is the productive political tension out of which my work comes. And then the tensions between being a historian, being trained as a historian, and then trying to learn new kinds of methods through the development of cultural studies and associated activities” (273). Hall’s work, unlike Constructions, constantly foregrounds the conflicts attendant with operating in a traditional discipline while working toward “cultural studies.”

Do folks in cultural studies need to read books like Constructions of Race, Place and Nation? Janet Wolff has made a strong case for a less dismissive approach to the products of mainstream disciplinary research: “I . . . want to argue strongly against exiling critical cultural studies to its own separate enclave.” She suggests that interventions outside of cultural studies on issues of concern to its practitioners are too quickly “written off as traditional, mainstream, or conservative” when they instead might be read for productive “contradictions” which render their easy assimilation into the merely conservative difficult: “I think we are now in an excellent position to pursue the study of culture within disciplines and on the margins of disciplines, as well as in the newly cleared space of interdisciplinary studies” (716). The problem with Wolff’s perspective is that it helps keep intact disciplinary boundaries which are themselves part of the problem of forming cultural studies as a “critical practice” in the academy today.

Fortunately, there are other ways of envisioning the “travels” of theory — and the academy. Edward Said, for example, in theorising the movements of theory, saw this process as undermining the disciplinary closure that the Jackson and Penrose volume takes for granted. “To prefer a local, detailed analysis of how one theory travels from one situation to another,” Said writes, “is also to betray some fundamental uncertainty about specifying or delimiting the field to which any one theory or idea might belong” (227). He has in mind literary studies in particular and muses: “the invasion of literary discourse by the outré jargons of semiotics, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis has distended the literary critical universe almost beyond recognition. In short, there seems nothing inherently literary about the study of what have traditionally been considered literary texts” (228). Surveying this terrain with a sigh, Said concludes: “In the absence of an enclosing domain called literature, with clear outer boundaries, there is no longer an authorised or official position for the literary critic” (230).

With neither clear boundaries nor an absolute ground to rely on, the theorist (and critic) must be highly flexible and vigilant if he is not to fall prey to mere mechanistic application of theories to situations for which they cannot possibly be fully adequate. “A breakthrough can become a trap,” Said warns, “if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly” (239). To combat against this dilemma, he argues that all theory must be supplemented with “critical consciousness,” which he describes as the “awareness of the difference between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported . . . above all . . . critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict” (242). When we read Constructions with Said’s warning in mind it quickly becomes obvious that the book lacks such “critical consciousness.” Following a general practice of “application” rather than interrogation, it fails to consider what it might mean to move theory from something it calls “cultural studies” and make it serve the interests of something it calls “cultural geography.”

I will end with one of the more egregious examples of this sanctioned ignorance at work. Throughout Constructions, the signifier “race” is enclosed in scare-quotes. According to an editors’ note, “the word ‘race’ appears in quotation marks to distance ourselves from those who regard ‘race’ as an unproblematic category. For a discussion of thisstrategy, see Gates (1986).” However, when we turn to “Gates (1986),” the introduction to the 1985 issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference,” we do not find a “discussion of this strategy.” In fact, in the body of the text of this issue, attention is relatively infrequently drawn to “race” in this way — certainly not as ubiquitously as in the Jackson and Penrose book.⁴ What we find, rather, is a call for the development of critical tools appropriate to specific situations — and an abandonment of the uncritical application of methods and theories drawn from elsewhere: “I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures” (13).

When Jackson, Penrose, and their contributors “imitate” and “apply” what they mistakenly presume to be Gates’s gesture, they are forced into bizarre formulations, such as: “she [Vron Ware] prefers to write of the *mutual constitution* of ‘race’ and gender, rather than implying that any one ‘dimension’ has priority over the other. (A similar argument could, of course, be made for the mutual constitution of ‘race’ and nation, or of each of these categories and particular places.)” (18). In sentences like these, the scare quotes single “race” out, again and again, giving it “priority” in the text, undermining Ware’s point in their presentation of it. This gesture is certainly hierarchical and even oddly segregationist in its implications. Are we really to think (following the logic which the editors’ themselves attribute to the scare quotes as discussed above) that race is a more problematic category than gender? Or, more to the point, that Ware would claim that it was? Not only does the thoughtless, knee-jerk universal typographical privileging of the category of race in Constructions fall far wide of developing a site-specific set of strategies for theorising race matters, it also weirdly distances the reader and writer from dealing with race rigorously once the scare quotes are relied on to do the work of “calling attention” to the constructedness of the category.

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has recently moved beyond simply observing the mutual imbrication of current notions of “race” and “nation” and called for a critical practice which resists the logic of the nation-state by refusing to assume (as all the essays in Jackson and Penrose assume) the “nation-state” as the logical or necessary (albeit “constructed”) unit of analysis, whether alone or in “comparison” with other nation-states. For Gilroy, such a reconstitution of space opens up the possibility of seeing the production of identities (specifically “black” identities in his book) as more mobilely and complexly negotiated than the focus on “national” units of analysis permits. The demand in Black Atlantic to imagine other spaces of analysis than those that we inherit through the academic disciplines and “every day” life have implications for how we might think the university as well. The import/export logic of books like Constructions needs to be persistently critiqued if a more worldly politics is to emerge in an institutional space where, currently, disciplines defend their perceived boundaries more often than they imagine other spaces, other ways of seeing, other worlds.

Notes

1. On the homogeneity and conservatism of geography (from a specifically feminist perspective), see Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: “the white bourgeois heterosexual masculinities which are attracted to geography [as a discipline], shape it and are in turn constituted through it” (11).

2. The false division between “the university” and “the world” becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain as universities are reorganized as corporations serving transnational capital. Maseo Myoshi puts it this way: “We know that the university is actually a corporation in style and substance. It is integrated into transnational corporatism, in which its specific role is being redefined. We the faculty are participants in many facits of this enterprise: the students we teach, the knowledge we impart, the information we disseminate, the books we write, the perspectives we open, the life-style we adopt, the conferences we organize, the scholarly associations we belong to — all are enclosed in seamless corporatism” (77). Along these lines, Gayatri Spivak also has observed of intellectual production “there is interest, often unperceived by us [theorists], in not allowing transnational complicities to be percieved” (256). See also her “Reading the World.”

3. Textuality is so often misrepresented as the reduction of the world to a book that Anderson’s contention is not surprising. It is, nonetheless, incorrect. Contrast her view with Michael Ryan’s: “‘Text’ names that interweaving of inside and outside through the process of reference which puts in question the philosophical desire to posit a pure outside to space, history, and materiality — as a transcendental realm of ideality (meaning) — or a pure outside to differentiation and referential realtions as a positivist materiality that would be of a completely different order than the differential or realtional structure of a language which refers to it (idealism turned inside out), or a pure nature prior to all culture, institution, technology, production, or artifice, by virtue of which such things can be termed derivative degradations rather than ‘natural’ necessities” (23).

4. A more accurate citation would have been Paul Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack‘, which does enclose “race” in scare quotes throughout, a gesture which Gilroy repeats in Black Atlantic. Houston Baker notes in his introduction to the 1991 reprint of Ain’t, however, that “Gilroy and the black British cultural studies project of which he is a member can lead us, I believe, to both a more analytical and a more practical sense of race than the quotation-marked provisionality and embarrassed silences that have characterized our academic past.”

Works Cited

• Blaut, J. M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. Guilford Press, 1993.
• Baker, Houston. “Forward” in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Paul Gilroy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
• Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
• Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. “Editor’s Introduction” in “Race, Writing and Difference.” (Critical Inquiry 12, Autumn 1985). reprinted Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1993.
• —–. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. (first published in 1987).
• Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
• Hall, Catherine. “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Jackson, Peter. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
• —– and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Miyoshi, Maseo. “Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy.” boundary 2 22.1 (Spring 1995): 61-84.
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• —–. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1983.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
• —–. “Reading the World.” In In Other Worlds. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• Wolff, Janet. “Excess and Inhibition: Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Art.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.

Rhonda Garelick

Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado at Boulder

The scene opens with diet guru Richard Simmons wearing old-fashioned driving goggles and an aviator scarf. He is driving a 1930’s style convertible roadster. Winking at the camera and his audience he tells us that he is on his way to pay a surprise visit to one of his clients or customers, a woman who has overcome serious obesity through his diet program. The roadster, after driving by some pasteboard scenery, arrives at a suburban middle-class home in what appears to be a midwestern state. We witness the woman’s shock and joy as she discovers Simmons at her door. Inside, they sit together in her living room holding hands. Together they weep over an old photograph of the woman, taken when she weighed over 250 pounds. They weep over the pain and humiliation she once felt, lacking the confidence to date, unable to buy clothes. Simmons empathizes with the woman; he too was once obese, he says. Sometimes the woman’s family is included in the scene, but they do not cry. This is a synopsis of a scene routinely played out in television “infomercials” for Richard Simmons’ “Deal-a-Meal” fitness program.

I would like to examine Richard Simmons’ camp performance, its relationship to the women he works with, and how this curious blend of queer sensibility and shopping mall culture functions. One obvious and important departure point for my argument will be the marginalized space shared by obese woman and gay men — the space Eve Sedgwick has aptly called the “glass closet,” a prison with transparent walls. Specifically, I’m interested in the relationship between Simmons’ performance and the commercial and sexual economies into which, I will argue, this performance reintegrates the obese woman. (I should add here that while it’s true that Richard Simmons does use some men in his exercise videos and television programs, his main “clientele” is female and his reliance on a mise-en-scène of domesticity and the kitchen codes his realm as female.)

As a rule, camp connotes a certain radicalism, an attempt to expose — through parodic theatricality — society’s highly constructed fictions of identity. Camp always “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture and consumerist culture,” writes David Bergman, “the person who can camp and can see things as campy is outside the cultural mainstream” (Bergman, 5). And despite its frequent loudness, furthermore, camp in mass culture cannot be discussed; it remains a private, oppositional irony. If we accept this definition of camp, Richard Simmons’ performance and his tremendous success become problematic. How can Simmons be camp when he is plugged directly into middle-American consumerism? What do we do with someone whose camp performance works to reintegrate people into the mainstream? First, we will need to look at how this reintegration takes place. As we will see, Simmons has invented a clever combination of dietary economics and theme park capitalism.

Simmons’ elaborately constructed persona is part cheerleader, part father confessor, and part Broadway chorus boy. His two uniforms are striped gym shorts and tank top and the Red Baron-style ensemble of goggles and scarf I just mentioned. With his androgynous look, his bitchy humor, and his exaggerated physical affection toward men and women, Simmons cultivates a very recognizable theatrical style. He is unmistakably camp. We can’t miss his campiness when he sings love songs to Barbra Streisand with “Linda Richman” (a drag character, played by Mike Myer) on Saturday Night Live, or when he announces — as he did recently — that he has commissioned a doll in Streisand’s likeness, which he plans to revere since the real Barbra refuses to meet with him (Letter, 24). We see Simmons camping it up in his newest exercise video, entitled “Disco Sweat,” which is performed entirely to 1970s disco music.¹ During the video’s first several minutes, Simmons struts along the same Bensonhurst street down which John Travolta paraded at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. This delectation of Travolta’s leather-clad machismo (“I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk,” go the background lyrics), coupled with the uncharacteristic reference to urban ethnicity (Simmons’ target audience is strictly middle-America) make “Disco Sweat” Simmons’ most “out” video to date.

But camp is more than just satire. Richard Dyer sees it as “hold[ing] together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. . . intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a depreciating sense of its absurdity” (Dyer 1994, 143). Christopher Isherwood observes that camp involves “expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun, and artifice, and elegance” (qtd. in Bergman, 4). And indeed such extremes are constantly present in any Simmons performance. Although his tears are real when he confers with his clients², for example, the infomercials and exercise videos also showcase an ironic Simmons doing the cha-cha or tango-ing to 1950’s and 60’s music (figure 1), or doing exaggeratedly serious ballet stretching exercises (in his gym shorts) to classical music.

Figure 1 (3.2MB Quicktime clip)

The study of camp has become something of a political battleground, with the main issue being whether camp is exclusively queer. Since its beginning — arguably around the turn of the nineteenth century — camp has been associated with a male gay sensibility and counter-cultural discourse. With the goal of uncovering culture’s constant, insidious process of naturalizing normative desire, camp puts on a grand show of de-naturalized desire and gender. Since 1964, however, when Susan Sontag published her now-famous “Notes on Camp,” the term has expanded to include a broader, less politicized meaning. Sontag’s essay seemed to authorize the use of “camp” as an adjective for objects, artworks, and styles seen merely as ironic — to be appreciated for their retro-charm, their nostalgia or their flamboyance — but not necessarily as political gestures. “Notes on Camp,” it has been argued, allowed camp culture to shade off into Pop culture. In a recent, manifesto-like essay, Moe Meyer has lamented what he calls “Sontag’s appropriation” of camp, which “banished the queer from discourse, substituting instead an unqueer bourgeois subject under the banner of pop.” “It is this changeling,” writes Meyer, “that transformed Camp into [an] apolitical badge” (Meyer, 10). Meyer, and others,³ want to reclaim a politics of camp, to establish it as an agent of “the production of queer social visibility,” specifically as a performance (not an object or a style) “used to enact queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility” (11).

Meyer’s article takes up many other important and polemical issues, (there’s an argument against Andrew Ross here as well as against Sontag⁴) but for my purposes, I’d like to borrow from him this one essential notion: that camp or queer parody is a performance that lends or produces social visibility. I focus on this issue because Simmons’ audience — persons usually at least 100 pounds overweight — share (paradoxical as it may seem) this powerful need for social visibility. The paradox of the obese is that they are hidden in plain sight, all too painfully visible but not “perceived” properly, not absorbed properly into the social, sexual and commercial economies. But there is little in the way of a style of performance that could restore visibility to the obese (heterosexual) woman, while remaining particular to her. There are, of course, political groups of obese women which are fighting for the right to remain fat and be recognized, but in many cases the public performances of these women are perceived as camp — perceived, that is, as belonging somehow to a queer, male sensibility. Furthermore, obese women in middle America do not really yet comprise a political entity; they are, rather, stigmatized and isolated — pressured constantly to transform their bodies.

(IMAGE)

Interestingly, in Simmons’ television talk sessions, the process of bodily transformation, of losing the weight, is referred to as liberating the thin person hidden within the fat person. The thin person is waiting to “come out,” to proclaim her true identity (figure 2). And so, while Simmons’ campiness may well announce his queerness, when the camp performance lends itself to the obese women, the goal is reversed. The woman’s identity is not affirmed, this is not her liberation. The fat woman’s “coming out” can only be accomplished by rejecting her current body. (She does not come out in her body; she comes out of her body.) Her social visibility depends upon her becoming less literally visible, and, as we will see, upon her becoming less a visually obvious “consumer” and more of a smoothly circulating element in the capitalist machine.

In writing this I realized that I’d been having a hard time coming up with the right word for these women — are they Simmons’ audience? his clients? his customers? his patients? his congregation? The reason for this difficulty is that his relation to them comprises at once the theatrical, the commercial, the medical and even, the religious. When Simmons leads the women through the narrative of their overeating and subsequent weight loss, he is physician, priest, and shopping consultant. But in all cases there are secrets to be told. And the secrets belong to the women, never to Simmons, for although Simmons’ queerness is immediately apparent through his camp performance, it remains nonetheless an unspoken and unacknowledged matter. His sexual persona, while openly celebrated in his non-diet industry appearances (such as on the David Letterman show⁵), is never alluded to in any way in his Deal-a-Meal performances. Unlike, say, Paul Rubens’ erstwhile character Pee Wee Herman whose television program featured a “playhouse” of campy friends (including a macho, bare-chested cowboy, and a drag-queen “genie” in a magic box), Simmons plays his gayness straight, leaving it in plain sight of his middle American target audience without ever pointing it out. The overt “coming out” is done by the women. His performance leads them to thinness, their confessions obviate his.

Richard Simmons did not begin his career as a camp diet consultant. His first break in show business came in the late seventies, when he won the role of a male nurse on General Hospital. That this soap opera connection remains a part of Simmons’ persona will become clear if we consider for a moment some of the factors peculiar to the genre. Soap operas are a unique form of entertainment in that they incorporate themselves into the daily, domestic lives of their primarily female audiences. Tania Modleski sees the soap opera as melding with and mimicking the daily stop-and-start rhythms of the housewife at home, accompanying her throughout the day as she performs her various tasks.⁶ I would add that, more than film or nighttime television, soap operas also blur the line between fiction and reality. It is soap opera viewers who write to their favorite characters as if they were real, warning them of impending disaster or congratulating them on their marriages. Soap fanzines easily blend the characters’ onscreen stories with the private lives of the actors. And the fantasy that a “star” will visit you in your own living room and make you famous is much more powerful in daytime television’s mythology than anywhere else in mass culture.

Simmons’ modus operandi clearly recalls this easy crossing over from screen to domestic space. He continually stages himself striding right into the living rooms, kitchens, and high school gymnasiums of his viewers. This is a soap opera move and the connection may help us understand the relationship between Simmons and his confessees. Writing of confession in mass culture, Modleski has pointed out that, unlike the confessional scenes of classical melodrama in which the revealed secret sets the plot right and ends the narrative, the confession of the soap opera depends upon on a continual re-encoding of secrets (Modleski, 107-109). Soap operas rely upon their non-teleological quality for their survival; they must, by their very nature, continue endlessly. No revelation, therefore, can set the plot right, because that would end the story line. Instead, the tell-all moment of the soap opera usually enchains a still more buried secret (“I have amnesia, but what you don’t know is that the baby is not yours”). Soap opera confessions resemble the Foucauldian, medicalized confession, the confession of the doctor’s office or the analyst’s couch. Unlike the Catholic version, these confessions contain no possibility of absolution, they are endlessly repeatable performances.

The Simmons confession operates more like the soap opera confession than the traditional melodrama confession. The women confess but he doesn’t, and that enables his domestic entertainment to continue indefinitely. As in soap opera, what subverts total, finite confession is consumption, the need to continue to sell things. Simmons’ secret is still apparent, but never becomes the overt confession that would surely end his diet empire and the domestic drama that is its vehicle. Instead, the confessional narrative draws out endlessly a double discourse. It produces first the performative discourse of Simmons’ sexuality, which is at once provocative and socially acceptable to America’s prurient but homophobic culture.⁷ The second discourse produced is that of consumerism, the extra-narrative determinant that subverts any possible telos to the confession.

Female obesity has a longstanding and highly charged relationship with commercial consumption. This is the relationship parodied and exploded, for example, in Percy Adlon’s 1990 film Rosalie Goes Shopping. The film follows the outrageous adventures of the brilliant Rosalie (played by Marianne Sagebrecht) who makes a career of shopping on endless credit, without ever paying up. The overextension of her credit represents a delirium of overconsumption, just as her abundant flesh represents an overconsumption of food. The film’s fascination lies precisely in the unchecked quality of both Rosalie’s body and her spending. And this point brings me to details of Richard Simmons’ diet system itself, which suggests the intimate relation between women and shopping (a relationship that dates to the nineteenth century and the birth of the department store⁸).

With “Deal-A-Meal,” Simmons is a pedagogue of corrective consumption. The system cleverly teaches food rationing using a wallet and a pile of stiff-backed coupons or “foodcards,” with the goal of training overeaters to consume restricted amounts. Deal-a-Meal divides foods into their major groups (fats, carbohydrates, proteins, etc.) and offers color-coded cards for each group. Every day the dieter may eat as many servings of a given group as there are cards for it in the wallet. Each portion of food eaten corresponds to a “spending” of one or several foodcards. When she has no more yellow cards left in the unspent portion of her wallet, for example, the dieter may consume no more fats — she has spent all her “fat” cards. The goal is to learn to apportion one’s eating so that one has enough cards to “cover” a day’s “spending.” The system presumes that its built-in rewards and punishments will reinforce its behavior modification lessons, so that the dieter will learn early on not to gorge herself at breakfast or she will be left with no cards to “spend” by midday.

The most obvious aspect of this system is its twinning of shopping and eating. The whole idea of the “consumer” becomes quite literal here, since the shopper actually ingests what she buys. For obese women, the issue at stake is often not just excessive food consumption but also inadequate commercial consumption. The fat woman, that is, often cannot participate fully in commerce. In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick discusses the difficulty facing the obese female shopper. She writes:

To that woman [the fat woman] the air of the shadow-box theater of commerce thickens continually with a mostly unspoken sentence, with what becomes under capitalism, the primal denial to anyone of a stake in the symbolic order. `There’s nothing here for you to spend your money on.’ Like the black family looking to buy a house in the suburbs, the gay couple looking to rent an apartment . . . this is the precipitation of one’s very body as a kind of cul-de-sac blockage or clot in the circulation of economic value (Sedgwick, 217).

The notion that fat women represent the stoppage of the commerce system is perpetuated regularly in mass culture. On television’s Married with Children, for example, hapless shoe salesman Al Bundy finds exceptional personal torment in the number of fat women who come to his shopping mall store. For Al, the fat women, whose bodies suggest over-consumption, paradoxically signify a distasteful and total cessation of the system. Alone in the shoestore, Al waits for a thin, beautiful woman onto whose delicate feet he might slip shoes, but he is condemned largely to catering to fat women, who, he clearly believes, have no business in the shopping mall, and who, furthermore, can never find shoes that fit.

In addition to the promise of slimness, then, Deal-a-Meal offers a reintroduction to ritualized spending for those whose culture promotes it heavily, but whose body type can make it very difficult. Using this diet system, the Simmons customer relearns the management skills necessary to negotiate consumption for both the space of the body and that other spending space: the commercial clothing store. She learns to consume less food in order to be able to consume more of the other luxury commodities. The Deal-a-Meal system allows its participant to reestablish herself as part of the flow chart of capitalism while she waits to join the crowds of spenders outside.

Furthermore, as if to reproduce more exactly the specific kind of shopping from which obese women are barred, Deal-a-Meal operates as a kind of credit system. The middle-class shopper, after all, rarely pays for food or groceries with credit cards; credit cards live in the domain of the department store. For the obese woman, exiled from the utopic capitalist themepark of the suburban mall, the Deal-a-Meal coupons and the sleek wallet they come in offer a practice model of our credit card-based culture of luxury buying. The coupon cards resemble credit cards both visually and functionally. Looking closely at Simmons’ package, one sees that the coupons fit, like credit cards, into special slots on either side of a wallet. As the dieter “spends” the foodcards, she moves them — just as she might arrange credit cards — from slots on the “uneaten” side of the wallet to slots on the “eaten” or “spent” side. And like credit cards, the Deal-a-Meal cards trade against a future resource, simulating buying on time. In this case, however, the dieter does not trade against next month’s paycheck, but against next month’s future, thinner self, the self who will be less of an embolism in commerce and more of a participant.

But Deal-a-Meal is only one part of the multilayered Simmons program. Another aspect is his low-impact exercise system, detailed in a series of videos entitled “Sweatin’ to the Oldies.” The videos feature Simmons leading groups of mostly female exercisers through simple, choreographed movements to music from the 1950s and 60s. The exercising takes place on lavishly decorated sets that recreate amusement parks or high school gymnasiums. Simmons refers to his each of his several sets by the same name: “Sweatin’ Land.” These backdrops (figure 3) typically feature such nostalgic memorabilia as carousels, ferris wheels, bandstands, and colored balloons; and the obvious evocation of other oneiric “lands” (Disney, Wonder, Never-never . . .) cannot be avoided. According to Simmons, Sweatin’Land is a place where no one is an outcast, no one suffers embarrassment because of her weight, and exercise is simple and fun. The various Sweatin’Lands offer a series of fictional, nostalgic spaces, “demilitarized zones” for the persecuted obese. They act as alternatives to the delirious, commercial wonderland of shopping malls — “lands” whose main escapist pleasures are denied to the obese. Sweatin’Land (figure 4) represents the high school gym class revisited, with none of the torment that an overweight girl or a gay boy might have experienced there; it is the amusement park trip for which you have, at last, a date to sit next to on the ferris wheel.⁹

But the heavily nostalgic component of these videos has other purposes as well. The evocation of the 1950s and 60s is not limited to the exercise videos; it is a consistent element throughout Simmons’ whole system. As I mentioned earlier, in his infomercials, Simmons arrives at the home of his clients behind the wheel of a vintage roadster convertible, the dream date vehicle in countless movies of the 1950’s and 60’s. And just as in those movies, this visit represents the triumph of the story’s heroine and her entry (or re-entry) into marriage and heterosexual society. This is made especially clear in the infomercials when the women’s husbands thank Simmons for repairing their marriages, for “giving them back” newly desirable wives. In a sense, then, Richard Simmons’ de-eroticized television romancing of these women enacts a return to an earlier, idealized femininity: a date in a convertible, a gentleman caller, a high school dance or a carousel ride and, finally, the apotheosis of the heterosexual couple. Simmons just adds one extra step: instead of entering into the heterosexual couple himself, he “delivers” the woman back to her already extant couple via his camp performance.¹⁰

Moe Meyer complains about “unqueer appropriation of queer praxis with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the ontological challenge of camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation” (Meyer, 5). The straight appropriation of camp, he says, “casts the cloak of invisibility over the queer at the moment it appropriates and utters the C-word” (10). Does this apply to Richard Simmons? Is Simmons’ performance an example of queer sensibility selling itself out to straight culture which then appropriates and defuses it? In fact, the answer, I think, is no. But what actually happens is even more troubling. Simmons’ camp works well. It does, certainly, lend him social visibility as a queer; and in this respect it adheres to the most politicized version of the performance. At the same time though, it fulfills a second purpose: its lends social visibility to the obese woman. This form of social visibility, however, is far from radical. Indeed, it may simply be a slightly different kind of “invisibility cloak.” While Simmons’ camp makes his gayness apparent, it reincorporates the obese woman into the dominant ideology. His difference is expressed and dramatized; hers is obliterated. His spectacle is celebrated; hers is erased.

Contemporary critics of camp have vilified Susan Sontag as a symbol of straight culture’s appropriation of camp. I would argue that the phenomenon of Richard Simmons proves that Sontag’s understanding of camp may not, in fact, be so destructive to it. In fact, her “Notes on Camp” essay might simply have been registering the degree to which camp can be appropriated by other causes, not itself causing this reappropriation. It may not be straight culture exactly that takes over camp, but consumer culture. Simmons’ performance can at once affirm his queer identity and help bolster the identity of consumerist capitalism. The surprise is that camp–even while retaining its political, sexual valence, even while resisting one kind of naturalized desire — can function as an agent for the renaturalization of consumerist desire, accomplishing this via a reinscription of women into the capitalist culture of suburban life. All of which proves that capitalism is still stronger than anything, even a good camp performance.

Notes

1. For an analysis of disco’s camp effect see Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” in Only Entertainment.

2. Richard Simmons’ over-the-top, lachrymose performances lead one to ask whether he is, in fact, only mourning the suffering of the obese. To see a gay man crying so publicly over a disease of too much flesh makes one wonder whether this might be a displaced lamentation over that other disease, the disease that emaciates. To my knowledge, Simmons has never mentioned AIDS publicly or associated himself with any gay political causes.

3. Two recent anthologies, The Politics of Camp (1993), edited by Meyer and Camp Grounds (1994), edited by David Bergman, have refocused attention on the connection between gay politics and camp.

4. Meyer takes issue with Andrew Ross’s influential 1989 essay, “Uses of Camp,” which maintains that the camp effect occurs “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste” (Ross, 58). Meyer believes that Ross’s argument “defuse[s] the Camp critique . . . relocating the queer to a past era by defining him/her as a discontinued mode of production” (14). “Situating the queer’s signifying practices in the historical past,” writes Meyer, “creates the impression that the objects of camp no longer have owners and are up for grabs” (15).

5. Last year, while appearing on the Letterman show, Simmons asked Letterman to “teach him to smoke a cigar.” The arch banter that followed involved much campy irony about all the implications of knowing the right “cigar-smoking” techniques.

6. See Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women.

7.”From the Christian penance to the present days,” writes Foucault, “sex was a privileged theme of confession . . . the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it . . . for us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of anindividual secret” (61). In the case of Simmons’ confessions, one bodily secret — the narrative of closeted overeating and the subsequent guilt — holds the place of the other, more explicitly sexual secret of Simmons’ gayness.

8. When the department store was born in the late-nineteenth century, the medical establishment was quick to diagnose and identify an attendant female malady: kleptomania. Simple thievery was transformed from a crime into an illness of body and mind when middle-class women succumbed to it. See Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse eds. The Ideology of Conduct, and Michael Miller’s The Bon March: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920.

9. I would like to thank Gregory Bredbeck here for helping me to see the particular significance of Simmons’ stage decor.

10. It is not surprising that Simmons achieved his greatest success during the three Republican administrations. The implicit view of womanhood promoted by his system jibes perfectly with the ideology of a Pat Robertson or a Marilyn Quayle.

Works Cited

• Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. “Introduction.” The Ideology of Conduct. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Bergman, David. “Introduction.” Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality ed. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993. 3-16.
• Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985.
• Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• —–. The Matter of Images. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Meyer, Moe. “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 1-22.
• Miller, Michael. The Bon Marchè Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
• Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982.
• Richard Simmons DiscoSweat. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. 1995. 60 min.
• Richard Simmons Get Started. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and Stuart Karl. Karl-Lorimar Home Video, 1985. 60 min.
• Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. Deal-A-Meal Corporation, 1988. 46 min.
• Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies 3: Tunnel of Love. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. GoodTimes Home Video Corporation, 1993. 60 min.
• Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1988). (Rpt. in Bergman, Camp Grounds. 54-77.)
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
• Simmons, Richard. Interview. David Letterman Show. CBS. 15 February, 1994.
• —–. Letter. Vanity Fair. 58 (January 1995): 24.
• —–. Infomercials for the Deal-a-Meal Corporation. Prod. Richard Simmons, 1987-1995.
• Susan Sontag. 1964. “Notes on Camp,” A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage, 1983. 109-119.

Charles Woodman

and Scott Davenport

PLUNDER SQUAD is a twenty-minute video program by Charles Woodman and Scott Davenport

Date: Mon, 11 Sep 1995 16:59:49 -0400

Tony Thwaites

Department of English
University of Queensland
tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.oz.au

Steven Helmling’s “Historicizing Derrida”¹ reads Derrida’s writings, and particularly the huge corpus of other writings which have grown up around them, as lacking an essential “historically informed awareness” (1) which he proposes in part to supply.

A starting place, then, a place where two — at least two — sets of texts face each other. A program: “historicizing Derrida” is to be taken in the objective rather than the subjective sense the construction allows. Derrida does not historicize, Derrida is to be historicized. Helmling’s first sentence elaborates on what this “historicizing” might involve:

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. (1)

Historicizing is above all to be the narrativizing of the particular development which is proper to a corpus: its own story, resulting from its own internal contradictions. It is a matter of constructing a chronology, from early to late, as marked by the original French publication dates. A staggered schedule of translation may have obscured this particular chronology, but now that most of the Derridean corpus is available in English it is possible to gain an overdue “historically informed awareness of Derrida” (1). Translation, in other words, has no real historicality: all it does is obscure history, the real history, the one to be narrativized. Once we have bracketed off such features as incidental to the real history of “Derrida” — and they would seem to include anything involving “Derrida” after the publication dates and anywhere else but in France — we find that this chronology is marked by a single and massive break, whose shorthand is “May 1968.” The texts written before and after this divide are significantly different: the earlier ones have “a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility,” while the later are marked by a “steady-state pathos” closer, it would seem, to the existential despair of Sartre and Beckett (5-6). Later in the essay, this distinction become equivalent to another, between “Derridean ‘writing’ … as grammatological theme [and] as ‘perverformative’ practice” (24, emphases in original). If Of Grammatologywas a “project of liberation,” it was only as an “early excitement” from which the later writings have unfortunately strayed (5-6).

It’s not difficult to raise all sorts of objections to this schema. Even if we were to grant in all its vastness the reduction of historicity to bibliographical sequence, the proposal simply wouldn’t work in its own terms. Derrida’s writing just doesn’t fall into anything like such a simple before-and-after pattern, as indeed Helmling himself points out. In a careful piece of close analysis, for example, he shows very well that the pre-1968 Grammatology has its own elaborate rhetoricity which is quite irreducible to the constative (8-10). It would not be hard to find similar examples in all of the earlier work. On the other hand, neither do constative, argued and expository texts or texts of direct political intervention cease after the magic date. Indeed, one of Helmling’s more elaborate statements of this before-and-after schema (24) comes immediately after a paragraph most of whose examples point out the simultaneity of both constative and perverformative features, and thus the impossibility of maintaining that pre- and post-1968 distinction. I add French publication dates to underline the point:

in Glas [1974] 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 [1978], for example, between the material on Kant and Hegel in “Colossus” [i.e., “The Colossal,” part 4 of “Parergon,” 1974] on the one hand, and the diary or postcard (“Envoi” [sic] -like) format of “Cartouches” [1978] and the dialogue of “Restitutions” on the other; or in Margins[1972] itself, the contrast between “Tympan” [1972] and such pieces as “White Mythology” [1971].

 

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”… (23-24)

But Helmling has just shown, this very moment, that 1968 marks no such break, and his earlier analysis of the “Exergue” from Of Grammatology has shown that neither does it inaugurate it. Something quite interesting is going on here. It’s not simply that Helmling is wrong about Derrida, though he is certainly that too. What is far more interesting about it is that he also points out quite clearly just where he is wrong about Derrida and the precise aspects of Derrida’s texts which show this, andin the very same passages in which he asserts Derrida’s error. Helmling both misreads Derrida extensively and in that very misreading gets things right. It is a pattern we shall see again.

Conceptually, the problems soon multiply. What Helmling offers as an internal history, powered by the internal necessities and developments of the corpus under study, depends on that massive reduction of the entire field of historicality to that of publication, an act of abstraction which is marked rather than alleviated by the recognition of the need to “relate [Derrida’s work] to its historical period.” In its focus on this development of what is already specified as internality, Helmling’s historicization risks not seeing what occurs other than as development of what is already given, and thus of proposing, despite itself, a programmatic determinism. As this development is linear and unidirectional, this also occludes the ways in which history is necessarily and irreducibly also retroactive, even in the details of the ways in which texts face each other. Zizek puts it memorably: the repressed returns not from the past but from the future², and the significant event is constructible as such only in the light of hindsight. Helmling’s “historicizing,” though, seems to be able to conceive of historiography only as transparent, secondary and unproblematic. All of this is a worryingly singular history, too: everything which is historical, genuinely historical, will line itself up on this one vector of publication dates punctuated by 1968. And as the omission of translation from consideration shows, what falls by the way includes the ways in which “Derrida” has been a very different thing in, say, France, the UK, the US and Australia: each of these, and more, would require their own complex chronologies, plural and diffuse, irreducible to each other in the concrete materialities of their specific modes of institutional, professional, pedagogical, economic and political existence. But even within these, the timelines surely proliferate and divide as one considers the various disciplines within which “Derrida” is done: “Derrida” in philosophy is not the same set of practices — or even concepts — as it is in literary criticism, and both differ again from the uptakes of “Derrida” in, say, architecture and the social sciences. It is odd that Helmling can claim a “historically informed awareness” of Derrida only by the total bracketing-off of the ways in which “Derrida” is already, as the very condition of its existence, a massive, diffuse set of practices which are irreducibly and simultaneously material, social, and, yes, political, whatever that politics might be. And it is, to say the least, distinctly ironic that a claim for genuine historical awareness and political realism should have as its model the succession of publication dates in French editions of Derrida.

Throughout Helmling’s argument, “historicizing” seems to be a matter of invoking certain grand signifiers which are monolithic, globalising and almost entirely without discernible materiality. Thus, for instance, “one ‘historicizing’ answer” to the question of why Derrida’s confrontations with his contemporaries such as Foucault, Lacan and Levinas tend to be more anxious affairs than his critiques of past giants such as Hegel

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 . . . . 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 . . .³ (21)

What is “our current historical moment in the West?” Who are “we” that this is “our” moment? Is it only one? Helmling and I both work in English departments, but the “English” course and degree, indeed the university itself, mean different things in the United States and Australia; they do different things, within different relays of pedagogy, governmentality, commerce and the cultural industries, within different histories. We do not simply share a “current historical moment,” but are placed differently in a series of complex overlapping and differential historical temporalities. Is “philosophy’s status” the same everywhere in these? (Even if the chronologies of publication and availability of the contested texts are quite different for Anglophones and Francophones?) Where precisely do the “‘contest of faculties’ motif” and “the literature/philosophy opposition” “appear?”⁴ It is a massive synecdoche which says “Western culture” instead of the vastly smaller set of specific sites in which such contests and oppositions are shorthands for very real issues and contestations; it’s also a synecdoche which it is really only possible to make from certain positions. While it makes noises of urgency and unswervable import (what could be more pressing than “our current historical moment in the West?” — at least for us in the West, if that’s where Australians are), it also avoids saying anything in the slightest bit specific about the historicities and politicalities of philosophy and literature, either as concrete historical and political practices themselves or about their actual or possible relations to other such practices: the occasion for the invocation of our “current historical moment in the West” is, after all, a consideration of the protocols of what philosophers do . . . . Instead, what is offered as “historicizing” turns out to be a commonplace drawn from, of all people, Matthew Arnold.⁵

Or again, having characterized Derrida’s “perverformative” writing in texts such as “Tympan” as a “special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing . . .”⁶ (26), Helmling adds:

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. (27)

Now this is, to say the least, highly dubious history, literary, social or otherwise. Even if the Iliad is in some way about “salvation” (an assertion I can treat only with a great deal of scepticism), it makes no sense at all to see either Job or Homer in terms of an opposition of the individual and collective. That is, certainly, a thematic common enough in some forms of literary criticism over the last eighty years or so, if not quite over all of “Western Culture” per se. In other words, it is a relatively contemporary concern which has arisen in a particular nexus of disciplines, and is here being written back into previous texts to produce a tradition. Its effect is to remove the entire question of the individual and the collective from the historical, making it into an eternal verity like “human nature” and “Life” — ironically enough, here in the name of historicizing and politicizing.

Helmling’s vast brushstrokes paint a History of Ideas of the most idealizing kind. There is a huge leap between abstractions such as “Western culture” and concrete questions of what cultural formations such as the literary actually entail: their existence within certain institutions and cultural industries, their specificities of class, sex, ethnicity, their strategies of class distinction, their economics and pedagogies, and so on, and so on. Invocation of commonplaces from a moral-political high ground serve only to obscure and even trivialise the very politicalities of critical practices they supposedly champion.⁷ In reducing the complex temporalities of texts to single linearities, and the question of relationships among texts to ruptures marking out oppositions, Helmling produces an eminently mythic topos. Once narrativized by “historicizing,” it inevitably produces a story of the Fall, or its symmetrical opposite, the Apocalypse, or both: once “Derrida” was apocalyptic, but now it’s lost it.

Helmling’s judgement on the fallen Derridean “perverformative” after-texts can hardly be surprising then, given as it is by the initial setting-up of the problem. What may be more surprising, though, is the complex misgiving of its demurral:

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. (26)

That “I’m afraid” is on the one hand a way of making a bottom-line statement of an unpalatable truth which can neither be retracted nor modified (“That’s just the way it is, I’m afraid”). On the other hand, it’s a marker of a real apprehension in its apology for introducing the moralistic into a discussion of the political. The unease is in the sheer excess of qualifications: well, yes, this is moralistic, or at least it sounds moralistic, if only a bit and for a first answer; what’s more, this first answer is rapidly going to become a last word, as the matter is out of my hands, it can’t help sounding like this, that’s simply the way things are, I’m afraid. If it can’t help sounding moralistic, it’s because that’s exactly what the argumentative strategy here is: in its insistence on a certain position beyond negotiation or reconsideration, beyond contingency and event, moralism, in the pejorative sense both postulated and feared, is precisely the stance of withdrawal from the vicissitudes of the political: this, I’m afraid, is non-negotiable: the bottom line. And it worries the argument that at this point the only way it can progress is through such a move. A split has opened up again, which all its qualifications cannot close, only note.

The occasion for this nervous, diffident, even apologetic introduction of moralism is a move in which “application” comes to define “the political” itself. Outside of “application,” nothing can be political or have anything to say about the political; but it can become political if it applies itself in the right way, by immersing itself in and allowing itself to be determined by the criteria to which it dutifully applies itself. What “Derrida” can contribute, if it is of true political will to undergo these Loyolan exercises, is the obedient offer of its special skills to a project whose aims, means, conceptualisation and limits are already fully known and remain unchanged by its arrival: all that “Derrida”‘s arrival affects is the strategies its skills might enable in working towards those ends.

This asymmetry of “application” is perhaps at its clearest in Helmling’s persistent conflation of deconstruction and Ideologiekritik, as stated most concisely in an early footnote:

“Metaphysics” as analogy 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). (footnote 2)

Ryan’s range of possible relations between deconstruction and Marxism is somewhat wider than a straight application of the former to the latter, though it is still far too concerned with showing them to be at bottom the same thing rather than with the more complex questions of the complementary and sometimes highly disjunct politicalities of two historically, conceptually and contextually specific discourses. Were this to be taken into account, we would have minimally to augment Ryan’s statement with a rider: the deconstruction of metaphysics cannot be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is also the infrastructure of critique. There must always be something left over in such an “integration,” which can thus no longer simply be an integration. Ryan recognizes this: to the extent that metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology, the two cannot be coterminous. But for Helmling, the two are simply and unproblematicly analogous: one is the other, and that’s self-evident; deconstruction, if it is to have any political application at all, can only be Ideologiekritik.⁸

In this reconfiguration of the relations between two discourses as exclusively a matter of “application,” a distinction and an elision are being made at the same time. On the one hand, the distinction is between “the political” and “the apolitical,” or “the historical” and “the ahistorical.” The two need to be distinguished from each other very sharply for the argument to have any force. They have different moral values, for a start: Derrida does not historicize. But as the very narrative here is of making political, of historicizing and narrativizing and giving sight where there was only blindness before, the two cannot be held altogether separate: Derrida must be historicized. One term becomes the other, if it tries very hard (or alternatively not enough), or gets a little help. The simple and necessary possibility of movement from one to the other means that they can never be as far apart as on the other hand they need to be. In this conceptual-pragmatic economy, the distinction between them can only be one of an uneasy vigilance, which is always in danger of finding itself empty because all that is necessary to it is that it be a vigilance in making distinction. “Politically oriented criticism” in this sense — and here is the pity — is all too easily criticism which exhausts itself and its efficacity in this vigilance.

On the other hand, the simultaneous elision on which this distinction relies is that of the political with position. That is, rather than being an affair of what Arkady Plotnitsky characterizes as “the irreducible complexity of the heterogeneous”⁹ and the differences and differends which arise from the positional, “the political” becomes the name for a certain range of actual positions. What is between positions is collapsed into position, and this in turn — given Helmling’s emphasis on the constative as the favoured mode of the political — is collapsed into the proposition. The political is the propositional, the thematic, the referential. In that the “perverformative” resists reduction to the constative, it does not lend itself to the political, but must be redefined as purely linguistic, formal, immanent:

The Aufhebung of speech/writing proposed in Derrida’s early work was projected as belonging to the future (or, at a 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. (27)

We may question whether Aufhebung is really an accurate description of a series of investigations into what in “writing” refuses to be subsumed into “speech.” More importantly, can the immanence of performativity in the letter really be sustained for a moment? What performative force can the statement “I declare you married” have outside of the elaborate social-political-economic-religious-ethical-governmental apparatuses which support it, and only within which marriage becomes a possibility? Indeed, it is hard to see how any of even the classical Austinian illocutionaries such as contracts, promises, warnings, condolences and greetings — let alone the altogether more complex issues of Derridean “perverformativity” — can in any sense at all be “consumed in the ‘present’ . . . without any remainder . . . importable into a future”¹⁰. Odder still, though, in the very next sentence this hermetically sealed present from which nothing whatsoever passes into the future comes by quite unspecified means to determinethat future, and with an absolute and iron law:

The future . . . becomes . . . 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. (27)

Grammatically, the “will have been” of the future anterior is not at all a matter of “a future determined by what preceded it:” that would be a possible — but certainly not even then a necessary — use of the simple future, the “will be.” The future anterior is a much stranger tense, of a future which has not yet arrived and is itself yet to be determined, but which determines retrospectively, in its turn, the past which will have beenfor that future. Invoking a past which has itself not yet arrived, or is always in the process of arriving, the future anterior not only describes the empirical delays attendant on any historicity, but also, in its complex textual folding, the very structure of historicity as perpetually renewed wager.

There is a strange blinkering going on here, through that elementary error in tenses: its effect is to allow two alternatives which logically exclude each other — a total and absolute granulation of time into an endless series of independent and monadic presents, and the equally total and absolute determinism of a single eternal present — to be collapsed into absolute equivalents. The move begs, I would suggest, to be read in the same way as the “kettle logic” from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious¹¹: as a parapraxis giving away and at the same time attempting to manage an unease. What is being pushed out of consideration at the cost of this radical incoherence is again just the same sort of temporality we saw emerging at other points of unease in Helmling’s text. It resonates with the ways in which the before-and-after-1968 scheme refuses to behave itself, and in which Helmling’s very statements of it are contradicted in advance not only by the “Derrida” to which they opposed themselves, but also by Helmling’s own text in the act of positing them; and with the ways in which the very possibility of “application” relies on and is marked by an anxiety about the reversibility of what it needs to insist is one-way, the direction of authority itself.

Helmling’s text wants to posit a history which has a single and linear temporality as the development of the internal logic proper to its object. Within this history, the relations texts have to each other are oppositional: early texts face late, constative face “perverformative,” “historicizing” face “historicizable.” But over and again, whenever Helmling tries to argue this point his own text shows manifest unease — performs its own unease — at its insistent inability to maintain those very properties even for itself, as the distinctions collapse in the very passages which attempt to shore them up. On the one hand, Helmling explicitly answers and demolishes his own particular argument against Derrida, complete with scholarly protocols of evidence from the texts in question, before he even presents that argument. On the other hand, to the extent that the evidence for that demolition is already there in Derrida’s texts, they have already given an answer. On both counts, Helmling’s argument arrives too late for itself, answered in advance not only by Derrida but also by itself. It finds its arguments refuted in advance, by a text which refuses for all that to place itself in any relation of simple opposition to Helmling’s, but is instead implicated in it liminally. Where Helmling’s text wants to assert its coherence of purpose, it finds itself divided against itself; and where it wants to draw a clear opposition, it finds itself unable to sustain the distinctions.

It must be emphasised that this is not just a matter of aporetics. What begins to emerge across the multiple ruptures Helmling’s argument has to negotiate and the legible indecision to which that gives rise, is a very different set of temporalities and spatialities from those he proposes, and quite irreducible to the linear sequence which is his model. These temporalities and spatialities are those of the performativity within which and as all such argument takes place. Here, certainly, we must be careful: “performativity” here would have to be recast not in terms of willed acts by individual subjects, but as the very possibility of that subject’s appearance in the social, within a sheaf of multiple and already social, political, institutional histories which alone (and without necessarily delimiting) give the “performative” its locutionary force and possibilities. “Performativity” in this sense would be, among other things, a way of naming the time and space of the institution so thoroughly absent from consideration in Helmling’s account. In its complex, open and eddying temporalities and its fractal, invaginated spatialities, such “performativity” would no less describe quite precisely those very features of Helmling’s argument which that argument cannot itself account for, and before which it exhibits such distress. In particular, given the non-totalizability of the histories from which the performative takes its locutionary force¹², it describes the ways in which response itself — structurally, institutionally, historically — is never simply a matter of conceptual opposition, but always part of a claim in a wager on the future. The dynamics of that wager — within which a certain modernist vanguardism would be a possible if by now somewhat pre-empted move of doubtful efficacity — are yet to be outlined.

Notes

1. Steven Helmling, “Historicizing Derrida,” Postmodern Culture 4.3 (May 1994). All references to this article will appear as parenthetical paragraph numbers in the main text.

2.Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 55-56.

3.I’m not being flippant in suggesting that there may be a more immediate, perfectly concrete and pragmatic answer to the question of Derrida’s nervousness, and one which doesn’t involve recourse to abstractions like “our current historical moment in the West.” Live people argue with you. I feel much more apprehensive about Helmling’s reply than I ever did about getting e-mail from Freud in the last paper I wrote.

4.Here Helmling joins a number of other projects of winnowing Derrida’s writings to separate the good (or at least politically or disciplinarily acceptable) from the bad. See, for example, Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), or Rodolphe Gasché, The Taint of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986).

5.Via that most Arnoldian of contemporary British critics, Terry Eagleton (34), the early chapters of whose Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) accepts and re-inflects Arnold’s fears of a decline in religion, and whose critique of Raymond Williams in Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978) traces his own genealogy back to Arnold through Williams, Leavis and Eliot.

6.”. . . a writing whose whole point is to be different from (or ‘other’ to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as-usual . . .” But Derrida’s point is that there is no writing in general, and in particular no normative writing from which one measures deviations. There are specific forms, modes, genres, practices of writing, all of which can be specified only in their differences.

7. For a particularly thorough version of this argument, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993).

8.To rehearse the differences very briefly: Ideologiekritik, as Helmling uses the term throughout, opposes knowledge and non-knowledge as truth and falsehood, sight and blindness, politicality and apoliticality, or political effectivity and ineffectivity. The pairings line up, and in each pairing one term excludes the other. With Derrida, though, what is at stake is the ways in which knowledge and non-knowledge are implicated in each other. Non-knowledge becomes a condition and possibility of knowledge. It is what makes knowledges possible, but in the same movement is also what makes their completion impossible — and this, it should be added, in a way which has nothing whatever to do with the “existential absurdity” with which Helmling conflates it (4-5), but everything to do with the insistent openness of such a structure to what Lacan designates “the encounter with the real” (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 51-5). In Helmling’s version of Ideologiekritik, knowledge and non-knowledge are exterior to each other, at least ideally; in “Derrida,” they are liminal to each, forming each other’s internal and external limits. In the one case, they abut along a geometrical boundary; in the other, they are fractally invaginated into each other.

9.Arkady Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1993), 300.

10.To say nothing of the entire category of exercitives, which Austin significantly states as “troublesome” and “difficult to define” (Austin, 151) for their very diversity, frequency and multiplicity of function. When expositives “are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references” (160) — and they include performances of affirming, denying, conjecturing, accepting, asking, answering, revising, deducing, analysing, explaining and interpreting — we may doubt there is any such thing as a non-performative, purely constative text. For all the reservations it is necessary to make about Austin’s strictures on the “serious” or normative speech act, and the formalism of any attempt to locate “locutionary force” within language itself, the great value of the category of performativity is precisely — even if as much against Austin as with him — in its resistance to the decontextualization on which Helmling’s “historicization” of Derrida depends. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962).

11.Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 100.

12.And here, the reference to Derrida is certainly useful: this is of course a central argument of “Signature Event Context,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 309-330.

Jeffrey T. Nealon

Department of English
The Pennsylvania State Unversity
jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu

The metaphysical desire . . . desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness — the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it . . . . [Desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.

 

–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Junk yields a basic formula of “evil” virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. . . . I never had enough junk. No one ever does.

 

–William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Just say no!” Odd advice indeed. Say no to what or to whom? Say no to a threat, to something that will draw you too far outside yourself. Say no because you want to say yes. Say no because, somewhere outside yourself, you know that this “you” owes a debt to the yes, the openness to alterity that is foreclosed in the proper construction of subjectivity. Of course, “just say no” never says no solely to a person — to a dealer or an addict; rather, you “just say no” to the yes itself — a yes that is not human but is perhaps the ground of human response. The constant reminder to “just say no,” then, is always haunted by a trace of the yes. As William Burroughs asks, “In the words of total need, ‘Wouldn’t you?‘ Yes you would.”¹

In Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, Avital Ronell argues that the logics of drug addiction can hardly be separated from the discourse of alterity. As she writes, in the exterior or alterior space of addiction, “You find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owing, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. This relation — to whom? to what? — is no more and no less than your liability — what you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist.”² Ronell is, of course, no simple apologist for a Romantic celebration of intoxication; as she writes, “it is as preposterous to be ‘for’ drugs as it is to take up a position ‘against’ drugs,”³ but it is the case that the logics of intoxication, as well as the kinds of desire that one can read in spaces of addiction, are inexorably tied up with current critical vocabularies of alterity and identity: postmodern thinkers increasingly understand alterity as a debt that can never be repaid, a difference that constitutes sameness, the incontovertiblity of a continuing obligation to someone or something “other.”

Of course, the leisurely space of recreational drug use most often can and does serve to produce isolated reveries that cut the subject off from alterity, but the serial iteration of episodes of intoxication — what one might clinically or etymologically call “addiction,” being delivered over to an other — brings on another set of considerations.⁴ For example, as William Burroughs characterizes the junk equation in our epigraph from Naked Lunch it necessarily begins in an economy of simple need over which the subject exercises a kind of determinative imperialism: junkies want, on the surface, to be inside, to protect and extend the privilege of the same; they want the pure, interior subjectivity of the junk stupor — with “metabolism approaching absolute ZERO” (NL, p. xvii) — to keep at bay the outside, the other.

But that economy of finite need and subjective imperialism quickly shows an economy of desire, an infinite economy of “total need” which breaks the interiority of mere need. In Naked Lunch Burroughs writes, in the voice of the smug, bourgeois “Opium ‘Smoker,’”

How low the other junkies “whereas We — WE have this tent and this lamp and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and warm in here nice and warm nice and IN HERE and nice and OUTSIDE ITS COLD . . . . ITS COLD OUTSIDE where the dross eaters and the needle boys won’t last two years not six months hardly won’t stumble bum around and there is no class in them . . . . But WE SIT HERE and never increase the DOSE . . . never — never increase the dose never except TONIGHT is a SPECIAL OCCASION with all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold.” (p. xlvii, Burroughs’s ellipses)

Here, the junkies’ increasing need for junk shows a finite economy of subjective determination turning into an infinite economy of inexorable exposure to the outside: “But WE SIT HERE and never increase the DOSE. . . never — never increase the dose never except TONIGHT.” The junkies’ need draws the junkies outside, despite themselves, from their warm tent to the place of “all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold.” According to Burroughs, the junk user, as he or she necessarily increases dosage, is drawn inexorably from the warm protective interior (the fulfilled need) of use to the cold exterior of addiction — the revelation of “total need” beyond any possible satisfaction. As Burroughs writes about his addiction, “suddenly, my habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. And still it was not enough” (p. xiii). Addiction, it seems, inexorably mutates from a question of fulfilling need to something else: something other, finally, than a question with an answer; something other than a need that could be serviced by an object or substance.

In other words, addiction takes need to the point where it is no longer thematizable as subjective lack; as need becomes addiction, the junkie is no longer within the horizon of subjective control or intention. As Burroughs writes in Junky, “You don’t decide to be an addict . . . . Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to an increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”⁵ “Junk” opens onto an unrecoverable exteriority beyond need, an economy that we might call infinite or “metaphysical” desire, following Emmanuel Levinas’s use of the term in our epigraph.⁶ For Levinas, the desire at play in the face-to-face encounter with the other cannot be confused with a simple need; rather, it is a “sens unique,” an unrecoverable movement outward, a one-way direction: a “movement of the Same toward the Other which never returns to the Same.”⁷ And, as Burroughs’s Sailor reminds us, there may be no better description of addiction: “Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can’t go back no more” (NL, p. 186). However, within Burroughs’s exterior movement, we will have to encounter an other other than the Levinasian widow, stranger or orphan — an other, finally, that is other to the human and the privileges of the human that the philosophical discourse of ethics, including Levinasian ethics, all-too-often takes for granted. An inhuman other — an other that is other even to the enigmatic alterity that one encounters in the face to face. What happens, we might ask, when one comes face to face with junk, the other of anthropos traced in Burroughs’s “the face of ‘evil’ [that] is always the face of total need”?

Levinas in Rehab

For Levinas, to be sure, drug intoxication is far from an experience of alterity. In fact, he writes that “the strange place of illusion, intoxication, [and] artificial paradises” can best be understood as an attempt to withdraw from contact with and responsibility for the other: “The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother.”⁸ According to Levinas, intoxication brings only a greater intensification of the subject’s interiority, a refusal of “fraternity” as exterior substitution for the other.

In fact, intoxication or junk addiction brings to the subject only the disappearance of the world and the concomitant submersion in the terrifying chaos of what Levinas calls the il y a [“there is”] — a radical givenness without direction that is similar in some ways to Sartre’s experience of “nausea.”⁹ As Levinas describes the il y a “the Being which we become aware of when the world disappears is not a person or a thing, nor the sum total of persons and things; it is the fact that one is, the fact that there is.”¹⁰ For Levinas, the there is is the indeterminate, anonymous rustling of being qua being. As Adriaan Peperzak comments, the il y a is “an indeterminate, shapeless, colorless, chaotic and dangerous ‘rumbling and rustling.’ The confrontation with its anonymous forces generates neither light nor freedom but rather terror as a loss of selfhood. Immersion in the lawless chaos of ‘there is’ would be equivalent to the absorption by a depersonalized realm of pure materiality.”¹¹ A phenomenological-methodological link between his earliest and latest texts, the il y a is an unsettling fellow traveler for the entirety of Levinas’s career. Curiously, the il y a performs a kind of dual function in his texts: as Peperzak’s summary makes clear, the first function is the ruining or interruption of a self that would think itself in tune with the harmonious gift of being. In the expropriating experience of the il y a (a “depersonalized realm of pure materiality”), being is indifferent to the subject. The il y ais the anonymous murmur that precedes and outlasts any particular subject. As Levinas writes, “Being is essentially alien [étranger] and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us” (E&E, p. 23/28). So for an ethical subject to come into being at all, such a subject must not only undergo the experience of being as the il y a he or she must go a step further and escape from it. As Peperzak continues, “With regard to this being, the first task and desire [of the ethical subject] is to escape or ‘evade’ it. The source of true light, meaning, and truth can only be found in something ‘other’ than (this) Being.”¹²

Against the Heideggerian injunction in Being and Time to live up to the challenge of being’s gift of possibility, Levinas offers a thematization of being as radical impossibility: for Levinas, existence or being is the terrifying absurdity named by the il y a and this indolent anonymity functions to disrupt the generosity and possibility named by Heidegger’s es gibt [“there is” or “it gives”]. For Levinas, existence is a burden to be overcome rather than a fate to be resolutely carried out; the existent is “fatigued by the future” (E&E, p. 29/39) rather than invigorated by a Heideggerian “ecstacy toward the end” (E&E, p. 19/20).¹³ To be an ethical Heideggerian Dasein must live one’s life authentically in the generous light of being’s possibility, an ontological multiplicity revealed by the ownmost possibility of one’s own death.¹⁴ According to Levinas’s reading of Heidegger, at its ethical best any particular Dasein can live with or alongside other Dasein each authentically related to his or her own ownmost possibility. Ethics, if it exists at all, rests not in Dasein‘s relation to others but in the authenticity of its relation to its own death as possibility — and by synecdoche, the relation to being’s generosity. In Heidegger, then, the relation with others is necessarily inauthentic, always subordinated to Dasein‘s authentic relation with neutral, anonymous Being-as-possibility.¹⁵

For Levinas, on the other hand, if one is to be an ethical subject, one must escape the dark, anonymous rumbling of being; in order for there to be a subjectivity responsive to the other, there must be a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of its wallowing in the solipsistic raw materiality of the il y a. Out of the there is of anonymous being, there must rise a here I am [me voici] that nonetheless retains the trace of the hesitation and debt — what Levinas will call the “passivity” — characteristic of the il y a‘s impossibility. As he writes, hypostasis is subject-production, the introduction of space or place into the anonymous murmur of being: “to be conscious is to be torn away from the there is” (E&E, p. 60/98).

Subjectivity is torn away from the anonymity of the there is by a responding to the other that is not reducible to any simple rule-governed or universalizing code; the ethical subject is, in other words, a responding, site-specific performative that is irreducible to an ontological or transhistorical substantive. As Levinas writes,

the body is the very advent of consciousness. It is nowise a thing — not only because a soul inhabits it, but because its being belongs to the order of events and not to that of substantives. It is not posited; it is a position. It is not situated in space given beforehand; it is the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself. . . . [The body as subjectivity] does not express an event; it is itself this event. (E&E, pp. 71,72/122,124)

This is perhaps the most concise statement of Levinas’s understanding of a subjectivity that rises out of the il y athrough hypostasis: the subject comes about through a performative response to the call of the other, through the bodily taking up of a “position,” “the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself.” Here the subject is brought into being through a radically specific performative event or saying, but it will be a strange “being” indeed, insofar as being is generally understood to be synonymous with a generalizable, substantive said.

Of course, the Levinasian subject is a kind of substantive; it has to have a body — a place and a voice — in order to respond concretely to the other. It cannot merely languish in and among a network of possible responses to the other. Rather, the subject is an active, responding substantiation: “it is a pure verb. . . . The function of a verb does not consist in naming, but in producing language” (E&E, p. 82/140). He goes on to explain:

We are looking for the very apparition of the substantive. To designate this apparition we have taken up the term hypostasis which, in the history of philosophy, designated the event by which the act expressed by a verb became designated by a substantive. Hypostasis . . . signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is, the apparition of a private domain, of a noun [or name, nom] . . . . Consciousness, position, the present, the “I,” are not initially — although they are finally — existents. They are events by which the unnameable verb to be turns into substantives. They are hypostasis. (E&E, pp. 82-83/140-42)

The performative hypostasis is the birth of subjectivity, but the ethical network of substitution or signification that a subject arises from — this network of performative responses that must precede, even if it is finally inadequate to, any particular response — also necessarily makes that hypostatic subject a non-coincident one, open to alterity. The subject that arises in the hypostasis is not a simple substantive or noun, even though it necessarily becomes one through a trick of syntax. As Levinas writes, “One can then not define a subject by identity, since identity covers over the event of the identification of the subject” (E&E, p. 87/149-50). Identity, even when all is said and done, is not something that the subject has; identity is, rather, the “event of the identification” that I am, and this “originary” hypostatic “event” is (re)enacted or traced in the subject’s continuing performative responses to the call of alterity.

Hence, it is the pre-originary debt that any subject owes to this prior network of substitution-for-the-other that keeps subjectivity open, keeps the saying of performative ethical subjectivity irreducible to the simple said of ontology. Levinas will call this a network of “fraternity” or “responsibility, that is, of sociality, an order to which finite truth — being and consciousness — is subordinate” (OTB p. 26/33). Sociality, as substitution of potential identities in a serial network of performative subjectivity, both makes identity and response possible and at the same time makes it impossible for any identity to remain monadic, static, and unresponsive: the subject always already responds in the movement from the anonymous “one” to the hypostatic “me;” the subject responds in the very subjection of identity, the very act of speaking.

However, this hypostasis is not the intentional act of a subject; it is, rather, subjection in and through the face-to-face encounter with the other person. As Levinas writes, “the localization of consciousness is not subjective; it is the subjectivization of the subject” (E&E, p. 69/118). Thus, “here I am” rises out of the there is as an accusative, where I am the object rather than the subject of the statement, where I am responding to a call from the face of the other. As Jan de Greef writes, “for Levinas the movement [of subjectivity] does not go from me to the other but from the other to me . . . . Here I am (me voici) — the unconditional of the hostage — can only be said in response to an ‘appeal’ or a ‘preliminary citation.’ Convocation precedes invocation.”¹⁶ It is to-the-other that one responds in the hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the il y a the face of the other, and its call for response-as-subjection, is the only thing that can break the subject’s imprisonment in the anonymous il y a and open the space of continuing response to alterity. As Levinas sums up the project of his Existence and Existents, “it sets out to approach the idea of Being in general in its impersonality so as to then be able to analyze the notion of the present and of position, in which a being, a subject, an existent, arises in impersonal Being, through a hypostasis” (p. 19/18). As the evasion of the “impersonal being” that is the il y a hypostasis (as the concrete performative response to the face or voice of the other person) is the birth of the ethical Levinasian subject.

Such a subjection to the other makes or produces a subject at the same time that it unmakes any chance for that subject to remain an alienated or free monad. As Levinas writes, “The subject is inseparable from this appeal or this election, which cannot be declined” (OTB, p. 53/68), so the subject cannot be thematized in terms of alienation from some prior state of wholeness; in Levinasian subjectivity, there is an originary interpellating appeal of expropriation, not an originary loss of the ability to appropriate. Identity and alterity, rethought as performative response, are fueled by the infinity of substitution, not by the lack and desire for reappropriation that characterizes the evacuated Lacanian subject. And this Levinasian responding signification or substitution leaves the subject inexorably responsive to the founding debt of alterity: “Signification is the one-for-the-other which characterizes an identity that does not coincide with itself” (OTB, p. 70/89). There is, in other words, no subject unbound from other because the process of subject formation (the production of a subject) takes place in and through this common social network of iterable substitution. In the terms Levinas uses most insistently in Otherwise than Being, identity is a performative “saying” that is irreducible to a substantive or ontological “said”; insofar as substitution or signification literally makes and unmakes the subject in the diachronic project of saying “here I am,” such an ethical entity — both subject of and subject to alterity — is literally otherwise than being, other-wise than an ontological, synchronic, or substantive identity.¹⁷ The “saying” is beyond essence because it makes the “said” of essence possible without ever being merely reducible to it; just as infininte metaphysical desire subtends and traverses mere subjective need, the performative ethical saying is before and beyond the substantive ontological said.¹⁸

The Junk Con

If we return to Burroughs and the question of drugs, then, it seems fairly clear why, for Levinas, intoxication or addiction is not akin to ethical subjectivity: because intoxication is a wallowing in the terrifying materiality of the il y a‘s “impersonal being,” a state where the call or face of the other counts for nothing. Strictly speaking, there can be no response to alterity — no saying, substititution, or signification — from an entity immersed in anonymous being: in the il y a an ethical subject has yet to arise through a hypostasis. Perhaps we could take, as a concrete example of such anonymous immersion without ethical response, Burroughs’s narration of his last year of addiction in North Africa:¹⁹

I lived in one room in the native quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction . . . . I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit — and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit — I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision — a grey screen always blanker and fainter — and not caring when he walked out of it. If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn’t you? (NL, xiii)

Surely this is a portrait of drug use beyond the production of pleasure or nostalgia for it; rather, this is a portrait of addiction as the horror of immersion in the il y a where the addict does “absolutely nothing,” save an interminable staring at anonymous objects, wallowing in a state of sheer materiality.²⁰

From a Levinasian point of view, however, more disturbing than Burroughs’s portrait of the “bare fact of presence” (E&E, p. 65/109) in the interminability of addiction is the accompanying renunciation of a relation with the other: “If a friend came to visit . . . I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision . . . and not caring when he walked out of it.” And even more horrific than the mere ignoring of the other is the callous disregard shown by the addict for the other’s very being: “If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn’t you?” There is little for any ethical system to admire in these lines, and they seem particularly to bear upon Levinas’s concerns about a subjectivity for-the-other: here Burroughs’s junkie is inexorably and completely for-himself; even the death of the other would not disrupt the interiority of the same. In fact, the death of the other would have meaning only insofar as it could feed the privilege of sameness — as long as the other had some cash in his or her pockets to feed the junkie’s habit.

However, the approval or condemnation of such behavior is not the location of the ethical in this scene. That which calls for response here is, rather, Burroughs’s insistent and strategically placed question, “Wouldn’t you?” I would suggest that the callous disregard shown here is, on an other reading, a kind of absolute exposure — an exposure more absolute and limitless than the relations “welcoming” that it would seem one owes to the corpse or the friend. “Wouldn’t you?” calls me to non-reciprocal substitution-for-the-other, interpellates me through a saying that is irreducible to a said. Such a saying calls not for moral judgment, but for ethical response to my irreducible exposure to the other.

It is crucial, I think, to forestall any reading of Burroughs’s “Wouldn’t you?” that would endorse a kind of perspectival notion of alterity — where “Wouldn’t you?” would be read as asking or demanding each reasonable participant in a community to see issues through the eyes of the other.²¹ For Burroughs, that kind of subjective imperialism is not the solution but rather problem of control itself, “sending” as “one-way telepathic control” (148) projected from “I” to “you.” If “Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book” (203), perhaps it calls for a kind of hesitation before the other, a responding other-wise: “How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall. . . . Doors that open only in Silence. . . . Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse” (203, ellipses in original). Such a Burroughsian “Silence” is not a simple lack of response (how can one read without responding, without attention?); rather, it is the hesitation before response — an attention that does not merely project itself as the theme and center of any encounter, does not merely take its own pulse. There is, in other words, a gap or “Silence” between the other and myself, and that gap is precisely my inexorable exposure to the other — that which comes before what “I” think or “I” do.

Indeed, in Levinasian terms the “welcoming” of the face of the other is precisely this inexorable exposure before a decision: the yes before a no (or a known), saying before a said, the openness or “sensibility” of the body-as-face that precedes any experience of knowing. These are all what Levinas calls “my pre-originary susceptiveness” (OTB, p. 122/157).²² As he writes, “Sensibility, all the passivity of saying, cannot be reduced to an experience that a subject would have of it, even if it makes possible such an experience. An exposure to the other, it is signification, is signification itself, the one-for-the-other to the point of substitution, but a substitution in separation, that is, responsibility” (OTB, p. 54/70). According to Levinas, the openness to the other — sensibility, saying, signification — cannot finally be reduced to an “experience” of the other; that would be to suture a subjective void, to reduce the saying of the other to the said of the same, and to collapse the subjective “separation” necessary for Levinasian “responsibility.” The other, then, must be attended to not in terms of my experience but in terms of my substitution and separation — not in terms of my project but in terms of my subjection.

That being the case, it seems that one can frown on Burroughs’s portrait of addiction as “unethical” only by reducing it to an “experience” of addiction that leads to an utter disregard for the ethics of response. But Burroughs’s Levinasian insistence on the consequences of total need as absolute exposure would seem to oblige us to attend to this episode somewhat differently — not in terms of the obviously unacceptable ethical behavior represented by Burroughs’s junkie, but rather in terms of the condition of absolute exposure that is prior to any ethical action: the question of substitution for-the-other. In other words, the instructive Levinasian moment here is not the one in which the junkie might rummage through the dead friend’s pockets, but the moment where that relation is thematized in terms of an absolute exposure that makes such an action possible, if not inexorable: “Wouldn’t you?”

The desiring junkie-subject is never a “said,” never a complete or alienated synchronic monad. He or she is constantly in diachronic process; the junkie-subject “nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.”²³ The “I” that is the junkie is characterized by a “saying” that constantly keeps the junk-addled subject in touch with its subjection the other: if the Reagan-Bush drug slogan “Just say no!” seems to put forth a certain faith in intentionality and the choosing monadic subject (when it clearly evidences the opposite), Burroughs’s insistence on the junkie’s question, “Wouldn’t you?”, inexorably directs us outside ourselves, to that somewhere between, before or beyond the same and the other. Finally, and perhaps to the chagrin of Levinas, I’d like to suggest that the radically exterior Levinasian ethical subject is always a junkie, moving constantly outside itself in the diachronic movement of desire, a responding, substitutable hostage to and for the other.

Perhaps, however, this opens a certain moral question, but moralizing about junk can begin only when one reads the junkie’s inability to “just say no” as a subjective weakness. Levinas, who clearly has no interest in such a moralizing ethics, offers us a way to read Burroughs’s episode in wholly other terms. On a Levinasian reading, the problem with junk — as with the il y a so closely related to it — is not the absence or evasion of self or destiny; the problem is, rather, the absence or evasion of the other or response. As Levinas writes, the concept of “evasion” — so precious to those who would moralize about drugs sapping the subject’s will — already presupposes an unrestrained freedom of the will: “Every idea of evasion, as every idea of malediction weighing on a destiny, already presupposes the ego constituted on the basis of the self and already free” (OTB, p. 195n/142n). While the anti-drug crusader sees addiction as a fall from or evasion of will, Levinas asks us to read addiction as the continuation or logical extension of an almost pure imperialist will, an extension perhaps of the Nietzschean will-to-power that would rather will nothingness than not will at all.²⁴

For the “just say no” moralistic version of drug rehabilitation, the dependency of the addict needs to be exposed and broken so the subject can be free again. If there were a Levinasian rehab, it might proceed in exactly the opposite way — by exposing the dream of subjective freedom as symptom of addiction rather than a cure for it; such a “cure” might hope to produce not a sutured subject, free again to shape its own destiny, but rather “an ego awakened from its imperialist dream, its transcendental imperialism, awakened to itself, a patience as a subjection to everything” (OTB, p. 164/209). For a Levinasian ethical subject to come into being, it is clear that “the there is is needed” (OTB, p. 164/209). However, in Levinas the there is functions not as the drug counselor’s negative portrait of an unfree self, but as a kind of deliverance of the self from its dreams of subjective imperialism. Such a deliverance calls for a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the il y a into responsibility, out of the interiority of self into the face-to-face as “the impossibility of slipping away, absolute susceptibility, gravity without any frivolity” (OTB, pp. 128/165).

Can I tug on your coat for a minute?

Finally, though, this leaves us with any number of unanswered questions and potentially unhappy resonances between Levinas’s discourse and the moralizing ethics that he denounces. First, there is the odd question of will. Levinas offers an interesting rejoinder to those who would read the junkie as will-less, but when he argues that intoxication is evasion — “slipping away” from responsibility, away from a “gravity without any frivolity” — and as such is in fact an act of will, he returns full circle to a very traditional discourse on drugs, a discourse perhaps more sinister than the discourse of subjective weakness. For Levinas, it seems that intoxication is a brand of turpitude, a willful renunciation of citizenship and responsibility — “murder of the brother.” Certainly, a thematization of the drug user as a passive dupe is inadequate, but Levinas’s portrait of the willful druggie may prove to be even more troubling. Both thematizations seem to avoid the question of desire as it is embodied in intoxicants, in something other to or other than the human subject and its will.

This problem of the will is related to Levinas’s insistence on “overcoming” or evading the il y a It seems that the overcoming of the il y a in ethical face-to-face subjectivity is an avoidance of the very thing that interrupts and keeps open this relation without relation. In other words, Levinas’s analysis seems to beg the question of how we can protect the face-to-face’s authentic ethical disruption (calling the subject to respond) from the il y a‘s seemingly inauthentic disruption (sinking the subject into anonymous fascination).

This doubling of disruptions is especially puzzling since the il y a— as unethical disruption — seems to be in a position of almost absolute proximity to the material network of ethical substitution out of which arises a specific “passive” ethical subjectification. As Levinas writes, “The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity . . . . The recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity identified in the said is constituted” (OTB, pp. 104-05/132-33). This “hither side of the presnt” [en deçà du présent] is the debt that ontology owes to the undeniable proximity or approach of the other, the inexorable upshot of something on this side of the transcendental hinter world.²⁵ This transcendent (but not transcendental)²⁶ “something” on the hither side — the legacy of phenomenology in Levinas’s thought — has various names in various Levinasian contexts: desire, the other, substitution, the face, the body, signification, sensibility, recurrence, saying, passivity, the one-for-the-other. This is not, as it would seem at first, a confusion on Levinas’s part — an inability to keep his terminology straight. It is, rather, central to his project: signification, as substitution for the other, calls for a specific substitution or response in each situation. Just as, for example, in Derrida’s work the economy of pharmakon is not the same as the problem of supplement (each is a radically specific response to a paticular textual situation), the constant shifting of terminology in Levinas is crucial to the larger “logic” of his thinking.

There remains, however, something of a “good cop, bad cop” scenario in Levinas’s thematization of such a pre-originary discourse.²⁷ Fraternity and responsibility are the pre-originary good cop: holding me accountable to the other and the others, they function as a debt that must be returned to time and again. The il y a on the other hand, is the pre-originary bad cop: exiling me to a solipsistic prison without visitors, it is a horror that must be overcome if I am to be an ethical subject. Certainly, either way there would have to be a hypostasis to bring the subject from the pre-originary network into a specific position in or at a particular site: whether thematized as benign or menacing, the pre-originary network of fraternity or the il y a is not itself response, even though (or more precisely because) it makes response possible. Saying in Levinas is an act, first and foremost; as Lyotard puts it in his essay on “Levinas’s Logic,” it is a doing before understanding.²⁸

Levinas posits a pre-originary network — a prescriptive call before denotative understanding — to keep open the (im)possibility of further or other responses. Such a network is structurally necessary in his text to account for the subject’s not coinciding with itself, but in terms other than alienation, loss or lack: Levinas’s discourse can separate itself from the existentialist or psychoanalytic thematization of the other as my enemy only if there is a pre-originary expropriation, such that there can be no simple alienation as a separation or fall from wholeness. Certainly both the revelation of the trace of “fraternity” and immersion in the il y a perform this pre-originary function of ruining and opening out the interiority of monadic subject. The question remains, however, concerning how Levinas can protect his discourse of fraternity from the il y a and what are the consequences of such a protection.

Levinas’s reasons for insisting on the primacy of the face-to-face are easy enough to understand: as we have seen, in an attempt to save something like Mitsein in Heidegger from the monadic interiority of Dasein‘s fascination with “anonymous” death and being as possibility, Levinas introduces the ethical as the exterior irreducibility of human contact in the face-to-face (in OTB the animated ethical “saying” that is irreducible to the neutrality of the ontological “said”). But the ethical, we should note, is thematized here strictly in humanist terms — the face and the voice.

 
Burroughs allows us to pose an essential question to Levinas: What happens when one encounters, within the world rather than in the realm of being, the “face” of the inhuman (as junk) and the “voice” that makes voice (im)possible (as an anonymous serial network of subjective substitutions)? If, as we have seen, Levinas’s problem with Heidegger is that Dasein‘s relation with being is posed in terms of possibility rather than impossibility, one has to wonder then about Levinas’ own evasion of the radical impossibility named by the il y a — about the work done in his own discourse by the face and the voice. In other words, Levinas’s posing of the other in terms of the face and the voice may surreptitiously work to evade the “experience” of the impossible that is alterity measured on other-than-human terms.

 
To unpack this question, we could perhaps turn back to Burroughs — specifically, his “Christ and the Museum of Extinct Species,” a story that, among other things, points to the ways in which extinction haunts existents. The domination of “man” has brought about the extinction of its other — animals — but this extinction haunts “man” as it experiences its closure; and “man” is constantly kept in touch with the extinction of animals — with its other — by the virus of language: “What does a virus do with enemies? It turns enemies into itself . . . . Consider the history of disease: it is as old as life. Soon as something gets alive, there is something waiting to disease it. Put yourself in the virus’s shoes, and wouldn’t you?”²⁹ Of course, “Wouldn’t you?” is the junkie’s question from Naked Lunch the question of the “inhuman” junkie posed to the human society, the question which should merely reveal the need of the junkie — who seemingly justifies him- or herself with this response — but which also reveals the structure of infinite desire which grounds all mere need. This, finally, returns us to the quotation marks around the “‘evil’ virus” in the quotation from Burroughs that serves as one of this essay’s epigraphs: junk is an “evil” to human culture — to thinking and action — because it is quite literally inhuman, that which carries the other of anthropos: “junk” brings the denial of logos, the sapping of the will, the introduction of impossibility, and the ruining of community. One must be suspicious of anyplace in Burroughs’s text where he seems to be moralizing; it seems that the liminal states that “junk” gestures toward make its ham-fisted identification as merely “evil” impossible, insofar as this liminal state quite literally names the exterior field of alterity in which any particular opposition must configure itself.

 
“Junk” forces us to confront the face of that which is wholly other — other even to the other person. And it is also here that one can call attention to Burroughs’s continuing fascination with the “virus”; as Benway introduces the concept to the Burroughs oeuvre in Naked Lunch, “‘It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life from. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, toward dead matter’” (p. 134). The virus, famously related to language in Burroughs, carries or introduces the alterity-based temporality of the postmodern subject, which “may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter”: between the individual and the “parasitic” network of iterable substitution from which it arises.

 
Insofar as Levinas teaches us that the individual is nothing other — but nothing less — than a hypostasis within the shifting categories of substitution for-the-other, his own account of subjectivity as such an iterable substitution would seem to create problems for the privileging of the category “human.” Levinas himself warns us “not to make a drama out of a tautology” (E&EM, p. 87/150), not to mistake the hypostasis of subjectivity for an originary category of supposed discovery or self-revelation. Both Levinas and Burroughs force us to acknowledge that the parasitic network of substitution, which seems merely to feed on the plenitude of human identity, in fact makes the plenitude of that identity (im)possible in the first place.³⁰ But this very logic of the iterable network of performative identity would seem to pose essential questions to Levinas’s thematization of identity and alterity by questioning his insistence on what he calls the “priority” of the “human face”³¹ and voice (and concomitant evasion of “junk” as radical material iterability). Despite Levinas’s well-taken criticisms concerning ontology’s fetishizing of “anonymous” being, it may be that the wholly other is traced in other than human beings. That (im)possibility, at least, needs to be taken into account; and the attempt to analyze such an (im)possibility in terms of Burroughs’s thematization of “junk” helps to draw Levinasian ethical desire outside the human, where it is not supposed to travel.

 
In the end, it seems to me that Levinas attempts to exile the very thing that makes his discourse so unique and compelling: the irreducibility of the confrontation with the wholly other. In his insistance that the subject must overcome the crippling hesitation of the il y a to respond to the other, Levinas offers us an important rejoinder to those ethical systems that would be content to rest in generalizations and pieties. Levinas insists instead on an ethics of response to the neighboring other in the light of justice for the others. But when Levinas argues that one is subjected solely by other humans in the face-to-face encounter, he elides any number of important ethical considerations. First is the role of inhuman systems, substances, economies, drives and practices in shaping the hypostatic response that is both the self and the other. Certainly Levinas teaches us that the subject is never a monad: it is always beholden to the other in its subjection; it is always a hostage. But if subjective response is a “saying,” the material networks of languages and practices available to the subject in and through its subjection need to be taken into account. The subject’s daily confrontation with interpellating inhuman systems is, it would seem, just as formative as his or her daily confrontation with the humans that people these systems.

 
As Levinas insists, contact with something anonymous like “work” is not of the same order as contact with coworkers. People overflow the roles they are assigned within such systems; Larry in Accounting is more than Larry in Accounting. What we do at work or have for lunch today sinks into anonymity, while in our face-to-face meetings — on break from our tasks, over cigarettes and coffee — Larry somehow isn’t simply consumed or forgotten. If we attend to his difference as difference, Larry can’t sink into anonymity. Burroughs, however, teaches us also to ask after the lunch, cigarettes and coffee, which may not disappear into anonymity quite so quickly. Neither, he might add, should the spaces in which we work and the systems that parse out such space, and therefore frame many of our daily face-to-face encounters. These “inhuman” considerations likewise call for response.

 
Certainly, Levinas recognizes this when he brings the third into the drama of the face-to-face. As he writes of social justice, “If proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would not have been any problem.”³² But the others confront me also in the face-to-face with the other, and demand that the “self-sufficent ‘I-Thou’” relation be extended to the others in a relation of justice. Here Levinas — responding, always, to Heidegger — is careful not to pose the relation of social justice with the others as an inauthentic falling away from the authenticity of the face-to-face: “It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being that it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.”³³ While the face-to-face has a certain quasi-phenomneological priority in Levinas — there has to be the specificity of bodily contact and response if one is to avoid mere pious generalizations — the face to face opens more than the closed loop of my responsibility for you: insofar as “the face qua face opens humanity,” my repsonsibility for the others is inscribed in my very responsibility for you. The specific other and the social-historical realm of others cannot be separated in the revelation of the face-to-face.³⁴

 
But even in his thematization of justice, there nevertheless remains the trace of Levinas’s most pervasive ethical exclusion, an absolute privilege of the same that lives on in this discourse of the other: “justice” in Levinas — infinite response in the here and now — remains synonomous with “humanity”; justice is owed to the others who are as human as the other. The face-to-face extends my responsibility to all that possess a face; the saying of my response to the other human’s voice extends to all other humans’ voices. I must respond to — and am the “brother” of — only that which has a voice and a face. But what about the face of systems, the face of total need confronted in intoxicants, or the face of animals? As Levinas responds,

I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called “face.” The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face . . . . I do not know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being . . . . [W]ith the appearance of the human — and this is my entire philosophy — there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.³⁵

In thematizing response solely in terms of the human face and voice, it would seem that Levinas leaves untouched the oldest and perhaps most sinister unexamined privilege of the same: anthropos and only anthropos has logos and as such anthropos responds not to the barbarous or the dumb or the inanimate, but only to those who qualify for the privileges of “humanity,” only to those deemed to possess a face, only to those recognized to be living in the logos ³⁶Certainly, as the history of anti-colonial and feminist movements have taught us, those who we now believe unproblematically to possess a “face” and a “voice” weren’t always granted such privilege, and present struggles continue to remind us that the racist’s or homophobe’s first refuge is a distinction between humanity and its supposed others.

In addition, we might ask about those ethical calls of the future from “beings” that we cannot now even imagine, ethical calls that Donna Haraway categorizes under the heading of the “cyborg [which] appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.”³⁷ Certainly, the historical and theoretical similarities that Haraway draws among the discourses surrounding her title subjects, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, should force us to ask after and hold open categories that have not been yet recognized as ethically compelling.³⁸ As Judith Butler maintains in her work on performative identity, “the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.”³⁹ The “human,” in other words, may name the latest — if certainly not the last — attempt to circumscribe a constitutive boundary around ethical response. Of course, the permeability of this boundary is traced in nearly all the crucial socio-ethical questions of today. From abortion to cryogenics to cybernetics, from animal research to gene therapy to cloning, we see the ethical necessity surrounding the “disruption and rearticulation” of any stable sense or site we might offer to define (human) life itself. And any strong or useful sense of ethics would seem to entail that such response is not limited from before the fact.

 
In the end, Levinas’s insistence on the “human” as sole category of ethical response further protects and extends the imperialism of western subjectivity — what Butler calls, in another context, an “imperialist humanism that works through unmarked privilege” (118). Despite the Levinasian advances toward a non-ontological ethics of response as substitution for the other, Levinas nevertheless also extends the privilege of “man,” which, as Haraway reminds us, is quite literally the “the one who is not animal, barbarian or woman.”⁴⁰ And to quote selectively from Levinas’s citation of Pascal, “That is how the usurpation of the whole world began:” with the protection of the category “human” from its others.⁴¹

Special thanks are due here to Sherry Brennan, Rich Doyle, Celeste Fraser Delgado, William J. Harris, John Proveti and Alan Schrift for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1992), p. xi. Further references will be cited in the text as NL.

2. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 57.

3. ibid., p. 50.

4. Addiction is from the Latin addictus, “given over,” one awarded to another as a slave.

5. William Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. xv-xvi.

6. While they share similar concerns, Levinas’s conception of desire and alterity remains in sharp contradistinction to Lacan’s, insofar as the Lacanian horizon of desire for the “great Other” is tied to a conception of lack. For both Lacan and Levinas, desire is animated by its object, but the Hegelian conception of desire as lack or insufficiency (failure to complete itself) remains characteristic of desire in Lacan: the upshot of the Oedipal drama is the lamentable expropriation of the self from the real into the symbolic. Though ostensibly the locus of ethics in Lacan, the Other in fact remains my enemy, the marker for that which constantly frustrates the animating ontological desire of returning to “essence,” returning to myself. As Lacan writes in book II of the Seminar, desire is “a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists” [The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, trans Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 223]. Compare Levinas, where desire is “an aspiration that is conditioned by no prior lack” (“Meaning and Sense,” p. 94). As he writes, “Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence…. I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation” (OTB, p. 114/145-46, my emphasis). In Levinas, being for-the-other — which he will call “substitution” — exists before essence, before the real; hence, for Levinas there can be no alienation from and or nostalgia for the return to self: “Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself” (OTB, p. 124/160). For Lacan, need (as loss of the real) subtends and traverses desire. For Levinas, the opposite is the case — any conception of loss or lack is subtended by the infinite, which exists before the distinction between lack and plenitude.

7. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 75-108, p. 91, italics removed.

8. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 192n. Originally published as Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). p. 110n. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as OTB, with the translation page number cited first, followed by the page number of the French.

9. For his engagement with Sartre, see Levinas’s “Reality and Its Shadow,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 129-43. Certainly more could be said on this topic, insofar as Sartre’s Nausea likewise owes a tremendous debt to Heidegger’s 1929 lecture on the nothing, “What is Metaphysics?” Suffice it to say, Levinas is interested in an other than the distinction between being and nothingness. See OTB: “Not to be otherwise, but otherwise than being. And not to not-be. . . . Being and not-being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being. Or else the negativity which attempts to repel being is immediately submerged by being. . . . The statement of being’s other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness — the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence” (p. 3/3).

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 21. Originally published as De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Fontaine, 1947), p. 26. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as E&E, with the translation page number cited first.

11. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 18.

12. ibid., p. 18.

13. The horror of the il y a is, in Levinas’s concise words, “fear of being and not [Heideggerian] fear for being” (E&E, p. 62/102, my emphases).

14. For more on this point, see John Llewelyn’s “The ‘Possibility’ of Heidegger’s Death,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14.2 (1983), pp. 127-38, p. 137: “The distinction between a possibility which something has and a possibility which something is compels us to take notice that Heidegger writes not only of death as a possibility of being, a Seinsmöglichkeit, but also of death as a Seinkönnen. A Können is a capacity, power or potentiality. Ontic potentialities are qualities which things have and may develop, as a child may develop its potentiality to reason. But being towards death is an ontological potentiality, a potentiality of and for being. Dasein is its death itself.”

15. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 308: “Dasein is authetically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.” For more on this question, consult R.J.S. Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Duquesne U P, 1993), pp. 38-53.

16. Jan de Greef, “Skepticism and Reason,” trans. Dick White, Face to Face With Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 159-80, p. 166.

17. Here Levinas seems to have much in common with Judith Butler’s recent work on performative identity in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). For Butler, like Levinas, to say that subjective agency is “performative” is not to say that agency doesn’t exist or that all agency is merely an ironic performance; but rather it is to say that such agency is necessarily a matter of response to already-given codes. The performative subject does not and cannot merely found its own conditions or its own identity, but at the same time this subject is not merely determined in some lock-step way; as Butler writes, “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” (p. 145). Certainly, focusing on the question of gender would open up a considerable gulf between their projects (see footnote 39), but there is at least some traffic between Butler and Levinas on the question of identity and performativity.

18. See OTB, p. 13/16: “In its being, subjectivity undoes essence by substituting itself for another. Qua one-for-the-other, it is absorbed in signification, in saying or the verb form of the infinite. Signification precedes essence . . . . Substitution is signification. Not a reference of one term to another, as it appears thematized in the said, but substitution as the very subjectivity of a subject, interruption of the irreversible identity of the essence.”

19. Levinas specifically points his reader to Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure for the experience of the il y a (E&E, p. 63n/103n). See also Levinas’s Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), esp. pp. 9-26, and his interview on the il y a in Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 45-52. For more specifically on Blanchot, Levinas and the il y a see Simon Critchley, “il y a — A Dying Stronger Than Death (Blanchot with Levinas),” Oxford Literary Review 15.1-2 (1993), pp. 81-131, esp. pp. 114-19; Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), pp. 201-11; Edith Wyschogrod, “From the Disaster to the Other: Tracing the Name of God in Levinas,” Phenomenology and the Numinous, ed. Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), pp. 67-86; and Paul Davies, “A Fine Risk: Reading Blanchot Reading Levinas,” Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 201-28.

20. As Levinas writes in a similar context, “One watches on when there is nothing to watch and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful. The bare fact of presence is oppressive; one is held by being, held to be. One is detached from any object, any content, yet there is presence, . . . the universal fact of the there is” (E&E, p. 65/109).

21. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 296-98.

22. Compare Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), p. 197: “The idea of infinity, the overflowing of finite thought by its content, effectuates the relation of thought with what exceeds its capacity. . . . This is the situation we call welcome of the face.”

23. ibid, p. 34.

24. See the final lines of Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), essay III, section 28.

25. See Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” p. 131.

26. Levinas wishes to rescue a notion of transcendence as phenomenological self-overcoming, but shorn of its contological intentionality. Davies defines “transcendent” as follows: “that is to say, for Levinas, [the transcendent subject] can approach the other as other in its ‘approach,’ in ‘proximity’” (“A Fine Risk,” 201).

27. This may be more accruately — or at least philosophically — posed as a “good infinite, bad infinite” situation, which would bring us to a consideration of Hegel, for whom Levinas’s alterity would be precisely a kind of bad (unrecuperable) infinite. It seems clear what Hegel protects in his exiling of the bad infinite: it keeps the dialectical system safe from infinite specular regression. Here, however, I would like to fold Levinas’s skepticism concerning Hegel back onto Levinas’s own text: why the exiling of the il y a as a bad infinite, and what privilege is — however surrepticiously — protected by or in such a move? See Rodolphe Gasché, “Structural Infinity,” in his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1994) for more on the Hegelian bad infinite.

28. Jean François Lyotard, “Levinas’ Logic,” trans. Ian McLeod, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 117-58, pp. 125, 152.

29. William Burroughs, “Christ and the Museum of Extinct Species,” Conjunctions 13 (1989), pp. 264-73, pp. 272, 268.

30. Compare Jacques Derrida’s discussion of AIDS in “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” trans. Michael Israel, differences 5.1 (1993), pp. 1-24, p. 20: “The virus (which belongs neither to life nor to death) may always already have broken into any ‘intersubjective’ space . . . . [A]t the heart of that which would preserve itself as a dual intersubjectivity it inscribes the mortal and indestructible trace of the third — not the third as the condition of the symbolic and the law, but the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond.”

31. See the interview “The Paradox of Morality” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 168-80, p. 169.

32. Quoted in Peperzak, To The Other, p. 180.

33. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213.

34. This is contra Peperzak’s To the Other, which casts Levinas as a metaphysician profoundly disdainful of the social or material world: “The secret of all philosophy that considers society and history to be the supreme perspective is war and expolitation. . . . As based on the products of human activities, the judgment of history is an unjust outcome, and if the social totality is constituted by violence and corruption, there seems to be no hope for a just society unless justice can be brought into it from the outside. This is possible only if society and world history do not constitute the dimension of the ultimate. The power of nonviolence and justice lies in the dimension of speech and the face-to-face, the dimension of straightforward intersubjectivity and fundamental ethics, which opens the closed totality of anonymous productivity and historicity” (pp. 178-79).

35. Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” pp. 171-72. For more on the question of animality in Levinas, see John Llewelyn’s The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger, and Others (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 49-67. See also Simon Critchley’s treatment of this topic in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 180-82.

36. Compare Heidegger’s translation of this Aristotelian privilege in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 15-89, p. 73, 76: “Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant and animal, there is also no openness of what is . . . . The primitive . . . is always futureless.”

37. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 152.

38. Certainly to have recognized women, gays and lesbians or post-colonial peoples as ethically compelling subjects has not solved their respective social and political problems; no ethical system can promise that. My point here is that the recognition of “humanity” is not — and historically has not been — a self-evident or ideology-free procedure.

39. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p.8.

40. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 156. For a critique of Levinas’s thematization of the feminine, see Luce Irigaray’s “The Fecundity of the Caress,” trans. Carolyn Burke in Face to Face with Levinas, pp. 231-256, and her “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love” in Re-Reading Levinas, trans. Margaret Whitford, pp. 109-19. For an outline of the debate and something of a defense of Levinas, see Tina Chanter, “Feminism and the Other” in The Provocation of Levinas, pp. 32-56.

41. The third epigraph to OTB, Pensees 112, reads: “‘. . . That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”

Peter Consenstein

Department of French
Borough of Manhattan Community College
pxcbm@cunyvm.cuny.edu

Although Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle — The Workshop for Potential Literature) does not want to be considered a literary school, or to overtly advance specific ideologies or theories, its goals portray an understanding of literature that merits outline and critique. Oulipo was founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. The oulipians emphasize the use of formal constraints in their literary production in reaction to the emphasis placed on “écriture automatique” by the Surrealists. Although a mathematical equation is usually at the base of their constraints, oulipians also pay tribute to literary history by declaring all structures of all various genres of past eras open to innovation. In so doing, they define their relationship with French literature: it is one of direct innovation on the stockpile of texts of differing genres, and their goal is to offer new forms to future writers by elucidating the potential of past literary forms. In essence, they work actively with literary history and do not submit to its domination. By “working under constraint” they have raised their level of consciousness because — their dictum — if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them. Such a level of consciousness controls how they are perceived, and received. Their relationship with the past, their work with literary genres, and their capacity to shape their own reception, outlines a relationship with literature with which postmodern theorists ought to be acquainted.

Oulipians innovate upon the architecture of genres not to “blur,” “transgress,” and “unfix” boundaries, but to grasp a genre’s potential.¹ The oulipian notion of potenitality goes in two directions: on the one hand it attempts to build structures in a systematic and scientific manner; that which is potential is that which does not yet exist. On the other hand, oulipians strongly believe that potential and inspiration are codependent. By acting systematically and scientifically oulipians focus and clarify, not “blur,” their approach to genre transformation. Although the result may be a certain “unfixing” of boundaries, it is done in the guise of literary progress, of testing the relationship between expression and construct, and not on ideological grounds. The connection between inspiration and a scientific approach to literature was made by Raymond Queneau in his 1937 novel Odile.² If, as I argue throughout my essay, the structure of oulipian works both recalls and further mutates past genres of literature, must their work then be considered postmodern, or, as Queneau argues, simply the work of a “true” poet?

Raymond Queneau, one of the founders of Oulipo, was one of many authors, such as Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, rejected by the Surrealists. Passages from his 1937 Odile reveal hints of oulipian thought, a profound appreciation of mathematics, as well as a rejection of the Surrealist definition of “inspiration.” Odile‘s main narrator explains that the French language is simply incapable of expressing entities that exist in “other” worlds, worlds beyond daily experiences. Some people, states the narrator, believe that the world of “nombres et des figures, des identités et des fonctions, des opérations et des groupes, des ensembles et des espaces” (of numbers and figures, of identities and functions, of operations and groups, of sets and spaces), is simply a world of abstractions based upon Nature. They believe that once humans apply reason to the world of abstractions, they construct “une demeure splendide” (a splendid dwelling). The narrator denounces this point of view as the most vulgar possible, and declares that the world of equations is like the science of botany, because in a world independent from the human mind great discoveries are made. His concern, however, is for the language used to express them. Confusion, stemming from the mode of expression and not from science itself, leads to a lack of appreciation of scientific discovery. In fact, he concludes, logistics could be considered the “philology” of mathematics (26-28). In this obvious mixture of science and literature — logic and philology — it is easy to infer that philology must examine literature in a more “logical” fashion, determining if its accomplishments fulfill its premises. The formation of Oulipo fulfills his literary premise, it is his literary “logic.” Oulipians devise constraints, either from past literary forms or from mathematical conundrums, and attempt to realize their potential by applying them to a text. The constraint is the logic of the text; the text realizes the potential of a logical, pre-conceived, and pre-evaluated equation.

Further, Queneau addresses the notion of inspiration, held captive by the Surrealists, and submits it to his “philogogy.” He decries the opposition of inspiration to technique. “On peut difficilement tenir pour inspirés” (It is difficult to consider as ‘inspired’) he states, “ceux qui dévident des rouleaux de métaphores et débobinent des pelotes de calembours,” (those who unroll bobbins of metaphors and who unwind balls of puns). He examines Surrealist technique and determines that it does not realize its potential: metaphors and puns do not add up to “inspiration.” His initial thinly veiled reference to the Surrealists is followed by a more virulent attack:

Mais ils ont perdu toute liberté. Devenus esclaves des tics et des automatismes ils se félicitent de leur transformation en machine à écrire; ils proposent même leur exemple, ce qui relève d’une bien naïve démagogie. L’avenir de l’esprit dans le bavardage et le bredouillement!

 

(“But they have lost all their freedom. Having become slaves to twitches and automatic reactions, they congratulate themselves for having been transformed into typewriters; they even offer themselves as examples, which indicates a simply naive demagogy. The future of the mind resides in chatter and mumbling!”)

The author then discusses inspiration vis-à-vis the “true” poet. A true poet is above the “more” and the “less” of inspiration because he or she possesses both inspiration and technique, and here Queneau’s words are famous: “Le véritable inspiré n’est jamais inspiré: il l’est toujours; il ne cherche pas l’inspiration et ne s’irrite contre aucune technique, (he who is truly inspired is never inspired: he always is; he does not look for inspiration and is not bothered by any sort of technique) (158-159).³ Although in 1937 Queneau had not conjured up the term “constraint,” it is clear, through his concern for the potential of language and his understanding of inspiration, that he must trace a new path. It is also clear, in his definition of the “true” poet, that technical prowess is essential to artistic creativity. Again, is this postmodern, or is it in direct correlation with the original Latin definition of “artis” as a skill?⁴

In 1960, at Cerisy-la-Salle, at a conference dedicated to Raymond Queneau and that revived DuBellay’s famous “Défense et illustration de la langue française,” the initial group, first called S.L.E., short for “sélitex,” or “séminaire de littérature expérimentale,” was founded (Lescure, “Petite histoire . . . “). Original members include Noël Arnaud, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, André Blavier, Paul Braffort, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Duchateau, François Le Lionnais, Jean Lescure, Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval, Albert-Marie Schmidt, and the second wave of members includes Marcel Bénabou, Italo Calvino, Luc Étienne, Paul Fournel, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, and Jacques Roubaud. Is Oulipo a unique movement? In Marjorie Perloff’s opinion, not at all. Her 1991 study Radical Artifice suggests that the application of “artifice” to text production is a world-wide phenomenon. She posits Duchamp’s readymades, and John Cage’s compositions as a contemporary “recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing” (27-8). Artifice, she contends, makes audiences aware of “how things happen.” Oulipians are exemplary of a form of artifice she terms “procedurality” (139), and I will illuminate their challenge to the literary world.

In my essay, two of the most famous oulipian works, Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi⁵ and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler⁶, will be studied. Jacques Roubaud’s La Boucle, recently published, participates in his literary “project,” which I have studied in depth. La Boucle is also, I will argue, the fulcrum of oulipian efforts in that it exploits a constraint that is derived from the physiological act of memory, amplifying and embodying a principle oulipian goal which involves measuring the potential of past literary forms, and devising a constraint that not only realizes its potential, but also produces a work that is entirely new. Although genres are transformed by testing their potential, traces of the past are left behind; the past is remembered and modified at the same time. For that reason, La Boucle involves the telling of Roubaud’s life. Could it therefore be said that he is voluntarily participating in its destruction because he consciously modifies it? Does he commit a sort of literary suicide? The question of memory, its biological, psychological, and literary functions, are intertwined in Roubaud’s latest master constraint.

One cannot take lightly Roubaud’s recent declaration⁷ stating that we are living in both the “époque des têtes vides” (era of empty minds) as well as in the “époque des têtes refaites” (era of remade minds) (152-3). Although he is referring directly to the role of memory in contemporary society, he is also underlining yet another factor of postmodern transformation, that being the movement from the age of the written word to the age where the image dominates. By “empty minds” Roubaud underlines the distance between eras where texts and words filled the mind, through their memorization. By “remade minds” he refers to our era where hard drives, CD-ROMs, and video and cyber imagery, dominate. Why though does his declaration, with the use of the word “tête,” seem so personal?

Within the oulipian version of literature, as I will soon detail, personal “life” and the “life” of literature are one. However, based on the above declaration it could also be said that Roubaud espouses a traditional if not romantic notion of literature: one’s personal life is entwined with, both actively and passively, not only Nature in its enormity, but also the enormity of the body of works commonly understood as “literature.” The oulipian version of this relationship is expressed through pressing contemporary aesthetics. For example Bartlebooth, a central figure of Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi understood that to conceive of a project that might describe “la totalité du monde” (the world in its totality) (156), a romantic concept, would in its enormity constitute its ruin. Nevertheless, Bartlebooth did construct a rigorous life-long project. Thus, a reversal occurs in that the development of a project, or a constraint, be it literary or personal, no longer needs to either reflect (mime) or modify the world, but it does govern one’s life. Such a project would be “restreint sans doute, mais entier, intact, irréductible” (restrained of course, but complete, intact, irreducible). This, in essence, is the underlying and sufficiently satisfying oulipian goal; to build bricks — lives, books — bricks that have personal, restrained, complete, intact and irreducible features, bricks that build on the edifice of literature. The constraint at work in La Boucle by Jacques Roubaud crystallizes these goals in a manner not yet seen, while at the same time it resonates with a transitory quality that obliquely reflects our epoch.

The personal side of Roubaud’s literary project must be emphasized: like many oulipian endeavors his project functions, and for him its function is nothing less than a life preserver. In the “avertissement” to the project’s first “branch,” Le grand incendie de Londres,⁸ Roubaud places his project at a par with his “existence,” he terms his decision to embark on the project “vitale,” in fact the project represents an “alternative à la disparition volontaire” (alternative to willful disappearance) (7). In terms of oulipian approaches to literature I am initially stressing the terms “project” and “function” and will later relate them to the act of memory, while at the same time I am strongly inferring that these are not simply cold, “scientific” machinations, the projects themselves are imbued with a personal conscience, and this is crucial when looking upon oulipian writing through a postmodern eye glass. Roubaud’s story itself is not my target of analysis, but the implicit meaning of the literary constraint that governs its narration will be. For example, Roubaud chooses to narrate his life story in the present in order to illuminate the difference between one’s life, which is forever in the past, and the telling of one’s “story” (réçit).

In essence an oulipian constraint is an act of memory as well as an assertive inscription of contemporary innovative artifice. The constraint Roubaud employs in La Boucle is an oulipian constraint par excellence in that it crystallizes and focuses on the actual physiological act of memory, its formalities. It is in a sense a “meta-constraint”⁹ because if a constraint records a model or a preliminary architecture of thought, or if it innovates upon a genre of literature, then Roubaud’s constraint crystallizes, gives literary form to, the recollection and reshaping of the past: memory.

The constraint employed in La Boucle is a tri-partite three dimensional framework. The work is divided into three main parts; the “récit” is followed by “incises” and then “bifurcations.” Within each of the three above named main divisions there exist three main constants: 1) each division contains six chapters, 2) each of the six chapters contains a limited, numbered, and repetitive set of sections, resembling a sort of complex metrical scheme, and 3) each of the sections contains a quasi-fixed number of paragraphs. Not only does the architecture of each of the three main divisions repeat itself, but so does the alignment of the subject matter. Chapter 1 of the “récit” is expanded upon in the first “incise” entitled “du chapitre 1‘” (in fact the numbered sections of “Chapitre 1” make explicit reference to the numbered sections of “du chapitre 1“). Chapter 1 and the incision entitled “du chapitre un” are then expanded further in “bifurcation A.” His autobiographic structure resembles the actual physiological act of memory, yet, from another angle, the tri-partite architecture also functions as a mnemonic device for helping to remember. Physiologically speaking, memory is itself a three stage process: an event is encoded, stored, then retrieved.

Studies on the function of the brain in the act of memory suffer from a sense of frustration because they reveal extremely high levels of complex brain activity, because of the fact that memory involves different physiological and psychological components. For example, scientists are not sure exactly where information is stored or its channels of transmission.¹⁰ Information itself can be categorized as “episodic” or “semantic” yet the two are intertwined. The above categories of memory refer to that which is consciously remembered versus “implicit” memory that accounts for “coordinates in space and time”¹¹ (12). Semantic memory refers to “retention of factual information in the broadest sense,” providing information about the world that exists beyond one’s immediate circle of vision (13). Episodic memory refers to the “personally experienced past” and although it depends on semantic memory it “transcends” it. Above all episodic memory is “unique.” The synapses themselves are studied in relation to their “plasticity,” or their capacity to “vary their function, to be replaced, and to increase or decrease in number when required” (Thompson, 11). Given the various stimuli at work when memory is both encoded and retrieved, and that all five senses participate at various levels of intensity, the act of memory is complex indeed.

Roubaud’s complex constraint, which I believe portrays the manner in which the retrieval of memory sparks new memories, responds to an oulipian principle requiring that the text speak of the constraint being employed.¹² The initial “récit” of chapter one, in this case memories of the author’s room as a child, his home, his backyard, neighborhood, childhood games, etc., is driven by detailed descriptions, in bold type on the page, of recalled images or flashes. Those images awaken new thoughts and reflections, which make up the corpus of La Boucle. In fact the first page and a half of the book, except for the first sentence, is in bold type. Subsequently, at the first section of the first “incision,” Roubaud returns to and muses upon the initial image. In the first incision he literally cuts into the initial image, attempting to draw sparks from it which he might use to ignite more memories, memories that define the importance of his life’s initial image. Finally, in “Bifurcation A” he returns once again to the bedroom of his childhood and finds himself able to evoke even more remembrances.

Reflecting the actual function of memory, Roubaud works to decode his encoded past, and thoroughly incurs the impact the present moment has on a past memory; hence his insistence on remaining in the present. For example, the book opens with the following sentence in regular font: “Pendant la nuit, sur les vitres, le gel avait saisi la buée” (During the night, ice had seized the mist) (11). “Le gel” has seized “la buée” (vapor, mist, steam). One agent of nature has transformed another: “Le gel” (frost) has taken that which pictorially represents the ephemeral, and has made it into that which is more solid, more manageable, more “real.” The tense of the verb “saisir” — the “plus-que-parfait” — also imbues the opening line with a sensation of “previous” time. The event took place before the immediate past, and, given that we are at the very beginning of the novel, a sort of pre-time is implied. The use of the “plus-que-parfait” renders the night of the first sentence a metaphor, a metaphor for an unknown time, mysterious and dark, looming and lengthy. The narration continues, in bold font, in an effort to succinctly situate and then examine the importance of the above incidence of memory, a memory that Roubaud calls his “souvenir premier” (40).

The description of the frozen moisture,

un lacis de dessins translucides, ayant de l’épaisseur, une petite épaisseur de gel, variable, et parce que d’epaisseur variable dessinant sur la vitre, par ces variations minuscules, comme un réseau végétal, tout en nervures, une végétation de surface, une poignée de fougères plates; ou une fleur. (11)

 

(“a network of translucid drawings, having some thickness, a slight layer of frost, variable, and since the thickness was of variable grades it engraved upon the window, these miniscule variations, like a biological network, full of nerve endings, a vegetation on a surfaceI, a handful of flat ferns, or a flower.”)

reveals a flower, (La fleur inverse is the title of the first chapter and one of his works on Troubadorian poetry¹³) a “réseau” (network), an important consideration in his theory of rhythm,¹⁴ and then finally the word “nervures” (nerve endings) an opening to ideas about synapses, brain functions, and the interconnection of memories. In the nine sections that compose the opening chapter, Roubaud explores the significance of his initial image in relation to the enterprise he has just begun, that of remembering. Much as frost transforms condensation, the act of memory transforms the event being remembered. When a memory is relived a destruction occurs that engenders the construction of a new world because the role the event played is reevaluated. The same could be said about Roubaud’s modification of the autobiographic genre of literature: reading La Boucle remindsthe reader of other autobiographies while also modifying his or her perception of them, and his or her future encounter with autobiographies.

The role of the flower functions within the same paradigm of destruction and construction. Roubaud’s relationship to the flower lies within a Troubadorian conception of love, expressed in a poetic voice: “Sous la voix, comme sous le gel de la vitre, il y a le néant nocturne des choses périssables et disparues” (Below the voice, like below the frost on the window, there is the nocturnal nothingness of things perishable and long gone) (23). Troubadorian love underlines a premise whose accomplishment or realization — the act of love — was not necessary. Lurking behind the joy of love was “le gel de l’accomplissement, la férocité du réel mélangé de mort. Il y a l’envers de la fleur d’amour. . . ” (the frost of accomplishment, the ferocity of reality mixed with death. There exists the other side of love’s flower. . .) In Roubaud’s memory of the frozen window lurks all that has been forgotten, and all that occurs as memory surfaces on the present pages of his novel.

When he returns to his initial image in the first “insertion” he reflects upon the use of the word “nervures,” and reinforces the accuracy of its usage. In the first insertion he discusses the use of the term in relation to the branches of his literary “projet.” The image of nerve endings returns in his discussion of the title of the second chapter “Le figuier,” a fig tree whose “nervures veinées” (veined nerve endings) (59) dominated the backyard of his uncle’s home. Since the fig tree existed as a living thing that broke into the kitchen of the house, it therefore “tenait son pouvoir de disjonction” (held its power of disruption). Roubaud suggests that the tree’s ability to dislodge the provencal hexagonal floor-tiles (“tomettes”) of the kitchen corresponds to the act of memory, since its power evoked his initial “prise de conscience de la dissymétrie” (consciousness of dissymmetry) (272). The fig tree worked to invade the memories, the floor-tiles, of the kitchen of the present, and effected his literary project by representing the multitude of directions his memory could travel. Its power of “dissymmetry” forced him to invent — and thus continue in the Troubadorian tradition of “finding,” “trouvére” — a new division of his novel, which he calls the “entre-deux-branches” (between-two-branches). Not only does the division satisfy numerological necessities of the novel’s constraint by crystallizing the need for a “frayage,” it also participates in the “la grande feuille de mémoire,” (the great leaf of memory) (276). Thus the initial image of condensation “seized” by frost, its “nervures,” participates in the construction of the novel, indeed the entire literary project, because it reflects the functioning of memory.

Memory is voyage in two directions:

. . .les déductions de la mémoire diffèrent sensiblement selon la direction choisie pour les exhiber. Et la compréhension du moindre souvenir est à ce prix. Ainsi, tout simplement, dans un voyage, le paysage du retour n’est pas, pour celui qui l’accomplit, identique à celui de l’aller. (30-1)

 

(“Memory’s deductions differ subtlely according to the direction chosen to reveal them. And the understanding of the smallest recollection reflects the choice made. Thus, simply put, while traveling, the countryside of the return trip is not, for the traveler, identical to the countryside as it was initially perceived.”)

Roubaud’s reference to the Troubadorian flower and his musings on the functioning of memory coincide, while at the same time reflecting a contemporary physiological understanding of memory. “Le parcours inverse suit le parcours direct comme son ombre, son fantôme. . . . Chaque image du passé est donc un double, révélé par le mouvement qui l’entraîne, qui sera seulement arbitrairement arrêté par la mise en mots” (The inverse trajectory follows the direct trajectory like its shadow, its ghost . . . Each image of the past is therefore doubled, highlighted by the trail of its movement, that will only arbitrairely be stopped when it is put into words.)

Information is processed in the same manner, but its retrieval, or reappearance are in a sense “plastic.” Roubaud’s constraint resembles the plasticity of synapses and challenges the genre of autobiography. Speaking solely on brain function in memory in an article entitled “Concepts of Human Memory” Endel Tulving states:

I use the term synergistic ecphory (P.C. — retrieval) to express and emphasize the idea that the outcome of an act of memory depends critically not only on the information contained in the engram (P.C. — encoding) but also on the information provided by the retrieval environment, or retrieval cues. “Synergistic” serves to remind us that ecphory, the main component process of retrieval, is governed by these two sources of relevant information, one derived from the past, the other one representing the present. (7)

The sum of the past and the present is the synergistic resultant of La Boucle‘s literary constraint. Roubaud’s insistence on writing an autobiography in the present, and not attempting to relive the past, touches upon the heart of his literary project; it is life confirming, and the constraint guarantees its transmission. The present effects the past, transforms the past, and the oulipian constraint that Roubaud has devised exemplifies that phenomenon; the synergy of the constraint, its reflux, loyally reflects not only the act of memory, but also its capacity to shape the present. The magnitude of a memory is forever transformed by its retrieval and integration into the present: a past event itself is unchangeable, but the perception of an event evolves. Memory is the locus of the “plasticity” of history. For this reason I have chosen to depict his constraint in the following manner:

(Image)

The “depiction”¹⁵ that I have composed reflects both the actual composition of La Boucle as well as my own manner of perceiving its function. The “depiction” represents a cross-section of the novel; only the first chapter of each of the three main divisions of the text is depicted. If the work were to be depicted in its entirety it would unfold to the right in order to portray the remaining five chapters. Other than appearing something like branches of a tree, the expected correlation, I chose to represent the number of paragraphs per section as resembling, albeit crudely, nerve endings in the brain. Although they seem disconnected, that is not so, they belong to the construct of the text system. Not only can each of the sets of “nerve endings” act upon the one to its side — thus supporting the narration’s linearity — it also affects the “nerve ending” below it, in the corresponding chapter of the following division. I hope the above model gives a sense of how the “plasticity” of memory, with its intertwining stimuli, does in fact formally guide the construction of the text.¹⁶

In Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi the puzzle functions not only as a central theme of the novel, or “novels” as indicated on the title page of the book, but also as a generating apparatus of its constraint(s).¹⁷ Perec adhers to the oulipian dictum that the constraint participate in a text’s story, whereas specific puzzles themselves reinforce the oulipian theories of literature I am discussing: literary constraint as the reconstruction, “aide-mémoire,” almost the resurrection, of a life. Harry Mathews, another member of Oulipo, speaking directly to Perec in an interview¹⁸ clearly stresses how the notion of constraint permeates the novel in that it functions both in the construct of the novel, as well as in defining the character of the main protagonists.

les trois personnages principaux du livre sont tous soumis à des contraintes: Bartlebooth se donne des contraintes pour remplir le vide de sa vie; Winckler ne choisit pas une contrainte mais en subit une dont il se sert pour se venger; enfin Valène choisit une contrainte ressemblant étrangement à la vôtre pour emplir non pas sa vie mais plus modestement sa toile. Celle-ci néanmoins, à la fin du livre, reste pratiquement vierge, dissolvant tout ce que je venais de lire et montrant que tout était à recommencer. C’est comme si tu avais mis en scène trois expériences yde la contrainte.(54)

 

(“The principal protagonists of the book are all under constraint: Bartlebooth gives himself constraints in order to fill the voids in his life; Winckler does not choose a constraint but submits to one in order to abstract vengeance; finally Valene chooses a constraint that strangely resembles your own in order not to complete his life, but his canvas. Nevertheless this final constraint, at the end of the book, remains practically unused, dissolving all that I just read and showing that everything had to recommence. It is as if you had intertwined three different realizations of a constraint.”)

Mathew’s comments are interesting in that he outlines “three experiences of constraint” within Perec’s novel, and all three relate to one’s life (it goes without saying that the different “experiences of constraint” contained within La vie . . . illuminate why it is a true “tour de force”). One of Perec’s protagonists, as Mathews points out, uses constraint to “fill the emptiness of his life,” another submits himself to a constraint to abstract revenge, and a third uses constraint not “to fulfill his life,” but rather “his canvas.” This third experience of constraint, states Mathews, demonstrates that “everything had to start anew,” thus emphasizing a constraint’s potential. Working under constraint, as Gilbert Adair,¹⁹ the translator of Perec’s La disparationdeclared, “turned out to be liberating in a certain sense, because it forced you down certain paths which you would otherwise never have taken” (17). The notion of constraint, of working under constraint, serves to construct both a life and a literary work in both practical and unseen manners.

While it is true that the notion of puzzle functions at different levels of the novel(s) I will delimit my study by first looking upon how what Bernard Magné has termed Perec’s “metaconstraints” (116), which I describe below, effect the entire construction of the novel. I will then discuss how the composition of the character Bartlebooth, the different states of mind attributed to him, his goals and his procedures, resemble the artisanal and technical work of Perec himself as author and as member of Oulipo, connecting yet again, constraint and one’s personal life. Perec’s own life, as his biographer David Bellos²⁰ indicates, is engaged in remembering, and the subject of his literary work, from Les choses²¹, to La disparition²², to Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien²³, involves recording, in exacting detail and for posterity, lives and places, both forgotten and remembered.

A fundamental architectural constraint of La vie. . . is a 10X10 square that superficially represents the facade of a Parisian apartment building in which live the occupants/protagonists of the novel(s). In order to touch upon all of the windows of the apartment building, and thus develop and interelate the stories of the building’s occupants, Perec utilized what is known in chess terms as the Knight’s Tour. The Knight’s Tour, usually performed on an 8X8 chessboard, allows the knight to go around the board touching every square. The author’s use of the Knight’s Tour on his 10X10 façade, a mathematical feat in and of itself, of a Parisian apartment building designates the order of the chapters: the order of the knight’s tour on the chessboard-façade, touching all the windows, dictates the appearance of the characters behind them. The depth to which the 10X10 square “constrains” the novel does not stop here.

Magné indicates that “each chapter of the novel can be likened to a syntagmata of 42 elements each of which has been selected from a paradigm of ten alternatives” (116). The sequence of the ten alternatives is always different because selection is made from the “Graeco-Latin bisquare,” a grid containing all the possible combinations of the first ten integers, encompassing the entire combinatory of the number ten. Said grid, a 10X10 box, corresponds to the grid within which Perec works to construct the order of his chapters because it too coincides with the façade of the Parisian apartment building. By overlaying the Graeco-Latin bisquare on the 10X10 chessboard-façade, the author determined the contents of each chapter. In fact, the entire list of 42 themes was constructed before the actual writing of the novel: “Au terme de ces laborieuses permutations, j’en arrivai à une sorte de “cahier des charges” dans lequel, pour chaque chapitre, était énumérée une liste de 42 thèmes qui devaient figurer dans le chapitre” (At the end of each of these laborious permutations, I arrived at a sort of “book of inventory” in which, for each chapter, a list of 42 themes that would figure in the chapter was enumerated) (“Quatre figures . . .” 392). The 42 themes were divided into ten groupings of four each, leaving room for two extra “themes.” These “themes,” not truly themes but possibilities of further permutations within the mechanics of the construction, were termed “faux” and “manque” which Magné has translated as “gap” and “wrong”; these further permutations underline the role of the “clinamen,” another important component in the theory of oulipian constraints.

The clinamen plays a role in oulipian constraints, in the reconstruction of genres, and in relation to recollection. A clinamen is an Epicurean notion formulated in response to early atomist theory as articulated by Democritus. It assures the creation of new forms because it represents a deviation from the norm; atoms could not create worlds unless, declares Epicurus, a minimal deviation occurs. Moreover, Epicurus’ notion of clinamen functions as an “un atome de liberté”; within his philosophy. The “atom of liberty” justifies “le mouvement volontaire des vivants et la responsabilité morale de l’homme” (the voluntary movement of living creatures, and the moral responsibility of man)²⁴ (871). A clinamen can “justify” man’s moral responsibility by demanding of him the consciousness of will in deviating from societal norms.

The Oulipians hold dear to the notion of clinamen in relation to the constraint, their “raison d’être.”²⁵ They hold dear to this notion for the same reason Epicurus did; the essential elements of their constraints must, in order to create a world (oeuvre, text) deviate from the norm in an arbitrary fashion so that the constraint is not constrictive, so that the contstraint maintains its creative potential.

As I have stated, the constraints in La vie . . . determine the interactions of the novel’s characters. Comparing the unfolding of Perec’s epic of a Parisian apartment house to the great nineteenth century novels by Stendahl, Flaubert, and Zola for example, it becomes clear that the origin of representation has shifted. No longer is the author attempting to imitate life, as did Zola’s in Germinal“²⁶ where the target of his mimetics is, as the sub-title proclaims, the “histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second empire.” By inventing his own constraints, arbitrary and thus reflective of the author’s mind, Perec allows his own machinations to guide him to both artistic, and of course personal, discovery. His observations of society are no less personal than those of the great nineteenth century authors, yet the constraints reflect his inner pathways more self-consciously than does the narrative architecture of a Flaubert. Although ultimately both a Perec and a Stendahl, Zola, or Flaubert, depict society, and none would claim pure objectivity, Perec’s self-determined constraints propose another adventure. He understands that inspiration comes from within and he plays the role of a barthian “scriptor.”²⁷ The clinamen guarantees a place for spontaneity, for further permutation, and also assures the novel’s future, and the unpredictability of (its) life. The mnemomics of the chessboard, as I shall later reveal, is a mnemotechnique that supports Perec’s own need to remember, for remembrance is the foundation of the future.

Research into the various constraints at work in La vie . . . began directly after its publication with the special 1979 issue of L’arc dedicated to Perec, which contained his “Quatre figures pour La vie mode d’emploi.” David Bellos, the English translator of La vie . . ., contributed his 1989 article entitled “Perec’s Puzzling Style”²⁸ while Hans Hartje, Bernard Magne, and Jacques Neefs, also made important discoveries. It is only in 1993²⁹ that the publication, photographically reproduced, of Perec’s own “cahier des charges,” the notebook which divulges the exact elements of each chapter, occured. Until the publication of the “cahier des charges” the greatest difficulty for researchers had been to ascertain the alternatives or “rubrics” of the 10 groupings (alternatives) of forty-two “themes.” ³⁰

Given the list of elements at work in Perec’s narration, the question concerning the definition of a “theme” within the context of oulipian constraints deserves reflection. It deserves reflection because the definition of a theme is here subsumed in the working of a constraint. In essence, the constraint determines the novel’s themes; the theoretical consequences of working under constraint are such that the novel is “constraint-driven” not “theme-driven.” An outcome of the oulipian credo could be termed a “constraint-theme,” and since the themes are “constraint-driven,” and integrated into predetermined configurations, they are more easily retrievable, more easily remembered, because of the inherent system of classification. The themes are the common denominators of both the novel and the protagonist’s “life.”

The list of “themes” that comprises chapter twenty three contains such elements as “thé,” “chat,” “triangle,” “manteau,” and “tapis de laine.” Respectively they belong to the categories “boissons,” “animaux,” “surfaces?,” “vêtements,” and “tissu (nature).” These “objects” can not be considered “themes”; they are “items” which must somehow be made to fit in to the story being told, they are the pieces of the puzzle that each chapter represents and they “disappear,” or take on a specified form, once the chapter is composed. As such, they belong to the conscious challenge the author presented himself, and they pertain as much to the world being described, as to Perec’s self-discovery through game theory. Once the chapter is composed the “list” is fully integrated into the story; the list itself “disappears” and diminishes in importance, and the novel continues to recount its epic tale.

As well, for Perec the person, the constraint must disappear. In fact, he viewed the importance of the constraint as minor after the novel’s completion. In an interview conducted in 1981³¹ he stated that he simply no longer remembered the constraints he used, and that “d’une certaine manière, je m’en moque. Je veux dire que c’était très très important au moment où je le faisais . . .,” (in a certain way, I could care less. I mean it was very, very important when I was doing it . . .) however once he had resolved the complexities of his constraints, “cela n’a plus d’importance” (it was no longer important)(53). The completed novel is the philological result of the contraints logic. The whole, a sum of its parts, is the author’s ultimate gift, and the reader’s knowledge of the logic is not always necessary. Once a puzzle has been completed it is no longer a “puzzle”: a puzzle must puzzle.

I too entertained “une certaine idée de la perfection” (a certain idea of perfection) (157). Before I knew that the actual “cahier des charges” had been published I disassembled each of the chapters dedicated to Bartlebooth in order to resurrect the chapter’s original architecture, and to obtain a clear picture of the specific themes attributed to the protagonist. Even with such a picture, the puzzle was not solved, its pieces did not represent the final product: Bartlebooth. Knowledge of the elements that compose said protagonist provides insight into the construction of a narration, however it does not indicate, by any means, a mastery of the narration’s intent, which cannot be obtained through any single approach. Instead, it demonstrates a constraint’s limitations: a constraint acts only to indicate the bearings of a text’s directions and not its ultimate destination. It is the map towards discovery, it is not the voyage itself.

Any attempt to “analyze” the protagonists of such a novel through thematic dissection, is an exercise in futility; it is like attempting to grasp the intricacies of a puzzle by examining its pieces. Especially since the character of Bartlebooth embodies the dichotomy of art and life. Art represented Bartlebooth’s “mode d’emploi” for life itself: art was the blueprint, the “techna” for life, much like Perec’s constraints acted as the narration’s “mode d’emploi.” Bartlebooth simply “n’avait pas de soucis d’argent” (had no money problems) (154) and therefore had the leisure of leading life free of financial constraints; this does not infer that he was free of constraint, but he did have the leisure to design his own. Bartlebooth became himself through art. Valène, the artist who spent ten years teaching Bartlebooth the art of “aquarelle” (waterpainting) and who narrates a good part of the first of the five Bartlebooth chapters, declares that Bartlebooth demonstrates a “totale absence de dispositions naturelles” (a total absence of natural abilities) (154). It was not waterpaints that interested Bartlebooth, it was what he wanted to do with them; through art (technique) he would acquire a “natural ability,” reflecting Perec’s, and Queneau’s, view that constraint equals inspiration. Bartlebooth spent ten years learning how to translate onto paper the nuances of nature, he then traveled the world for twenty years, had his paintings transformed into puzzles, attempted to solve the puzzles for twenty years, and had them all restored to their original state of blank canvas; this was his life project, his life’s “constraint.” Perec too dedicated an enormous time period to his endeavor, signing La vie . . . “Paris, 1969-1978” (602). In the first Bartlebooth chapter a question was asked: “que faire?” (what is there to do?) and the answer was “rien” (nothing) (157): “rien,” the blank canvas, symbolized his goal. All he had was a “certaine idée de la perfection” and his life revolved around pursuing it, all the while acknowledging its impossibility.

In order to make his protagonist credible Perec too had a plan. Perec “constructed” Bartlebooth through the use of a pre-determined set of places, characters, dates, décors, allusions to exterior works, and various events and activities — his “alternatives”; these are the components of his narration. Perec revealed and then employed the tools of the art of narration to give life to a personality who lacked “dispositions naturelles.” Analogously, Bartlebooth dedicated his own life to the apprenticeship of an art, and then to making it disappear. Bartlebooth’s personality is revealed through his project, his approach to building a life. Perec’s personality, in his attempt to write a novel in “today’s fashion,”³² is revealed through the constraints he embedded in his tale. The method of his narrative art is Perec, and through his constraints he has guaranteed that he too will be remembered.

In Petit traité invitant à la dècouverte de l’art subtil du go,³³ published in 1969 or the same year Perec started La vie…, the authors draw a parallel between the game of “go” and writing. The authors understand as “paradoxal” the fact that “on puisse s’adonner à un jeu qu’on ne maîtrisera jamais” (it is possible to abandon oneself to a game that one will never master) (41). Their incapacity to master the game entails commiting actions that players are doomed to “répéter servilement” (repeat servilely). The committement to playing a game of such tradition and subtility means that the players repeat actions “sans les avoir jamais vraiment assimilé;s, sans pouvoir en faire la critique, sans pouvoir en inventer d’autres, des coups parfois millénaires” (without having ever truly assimilated them, without the ability to analyze them, without the ability to invent others, moves that are sometimes a thousand years old). It is clear that Perec’s invented method of constructing persona, his “cahier des charges” composed of paradigmatic “themes,” is a shuffling of “thousand year old moves,” or narrative techniques and literary allusions overpowerfully pre-existent. For the authors of Petit traité . . . the weaving of black and white stones on the “go” board is simply the drawing of “des lignes, des réseaux, des zones agréables à regarder” (lines, networks, and zones that are pleasant to look at) (42). The beauty of the “go” strategies emanates from the fact that they are part of a “chemin infini,” an “infinite path”; the activity of playing “go” they state, can be compared to only one thing: “l’écriture.” Perec rearranged the “the thousand year old moves” of narration to put his mark on genre evolution, on the constructive signifiers of literature. In so doing he recalls the works of Raymond Queneau, who demonstrated in his famous Exercises de style³⁴ that literary effects, whether they be the romantic style of the authors of the nineteenth century or the sensation of “écriture automatique,” are the results of a limited set of rhetorical and structural operations, and that any good artist-author-rhetorician could master them.

By spending his life in the pursuit of remembering (traveling the world in order to record — paint — the places visited), reconstructing, and then effectively forgetting (having his works destroyed), Bartlebooth made himself a “life.” The protagonist’s memory was governed by his self-imposed constraint in the same way that the narrator’s art — the ability to create a “personnage” and in this case to construct a “user’s manual” for life itself — was governed by lists of items that, after death, remain as the mementos of one’s “life.” Perec’s constraints allowed him to bring to the forefront the elements of narration that have been used through the centuries in the creation of fictive protagonists. Mimesis of an outside world becomes unnecessary stimulus as the technique of art (narration in this case), its “mode d’emploi,” becomes the source of memory that is being “mimed”; life does not imitate art, they combine to create, they contend with each other in a rhythmic fashion; art is life is art through unifying rhythm.

Perec once said: “I represent myself as something like a chess player and playing a chess play with the reader and I must convince him, or her, to read what I wrote and he must begin the book and go until the end”³⁵ (26). The active participation of the reader, who mediates and thus becomes implicated in the novel’s constraints, is an essential element of the oulipian concept of literature. One of the best oulipian examples of the reader’s role is apparent in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

If on a winter’s night a traveler is composed of twenty-two chapters; twelve numbered chapters interspersed with ten titled chapters. All of the numbered chapters have “you,” the second person pronoun, the reader, as their main character, whereas the titled chapters all represent incipits, the beginning chapters, of various novels by various authors including of course, If on a winter’s night . . .. The novel’s tension is built upon “your” search for the continuation of the novels that “you” have begun. Calvino’s work then, like the perecian puzzle, snares the literary analyst in a trap. If If on a winter’s night . . . recounts the tale of a reader’s encounter with novels that have no conclusion, then to capture the work in its finality is impossible. Without conclusions, Calvino’s novel becomes a reflection of the perpetuity of literature, and its analysis is the novel’s continuation. Any reading of If on a winter’s night . . . puts one in the position of the “you” of the novel who will always be searching, whereas the book itself does “end” with the reader finally married to another reader; the final scene finds one reader in bed with the “other” reader who is finishing Calvino’s If on a winter’s night . . . The novel is a tautological hall of mirrors that concerns the act of reading, while controlling it at the same time.

In his expository essay “Comment j’ai écrit un de mes livres,”³⁶ Calvino indicates that the figure of a square is the model of the constraint that governs the numbered chapters, where “you” are the main protagonist. The constraint functions in the following manner: each corner of the square represents an element of the relationship between the reader and the novel, the reader and other readers, the reader and fake novels, the reader and the “author,” the “author” and the reader, the reader and the State, etc. “Your” various actions, and the relationships “you” are involved in, occupy the four corners of the square. The narration advances both clockwise around the square, and, at various intervals, opposing corners of the square interconnect, thus prolonging the narration. The number of squares per chapter increases by one until the sixth chapter; at that point chapter seven also comprises six squares, whereupon the number of squares per chapter decreases until, like the first chapter, chapter twelve is composed of one “square” of events.

The title of Calvino’s article refers intertextually to Raymond Roussel’s famous essay “Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres.”³⁷ Roussel’s works have often been viewed by the members of Oulipo as pre-oulipian.³⁸ Aside from the titles, the two articles contain similarities and differences. Both Roussel and Calvino limit the number of constraints they choose to discuss. Roussel discusses what he terms a “procédé très spécial” (11) (a very special procedure) at work in four texts: Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus, l’Étoile au Front and la Poussière de Soleils, whereas Calvino reveals only one of many constraints at work in If on a winter’s night . . . Both authors utilize poetic language: Calvino’s discourse is in quatrains and couplets, as I will soon detail, and Roussel explains that his procedure relates to rhyme (23). The initial similarities between the two articles indicate that, on the one hand, preliminary meditations of a text’s structure is not limited, in neither time or place, to Oulipo; on the other hand, poetic language is a language of constraint par excellence whose “procedures” can be applied to the construction of any genre of literature.

Michel Foucault, in his book Raymond Roussel,³⁹ believes that the posthumous publication of Comment j’ai écrit . . ., works to “propager le doute” (propagate doubt) (13). By revealing the fact that a secret exists, Roussel undermines the reader by imposing a “informe, divergente, centrifuge” (shapeless, divergent, and centrifugal) (19) sense of anxiety. Said anxiety is provoked by Roussel’s use of “rhyme,” or what he himself termed “combinaisons phoniques” (phonetic combinations) (23). Words are imbued with a fragility different than the power of tropes; Foucault says they are both “animé et ruiné, rempli et vidé”; (animated and ruined, filled and emptied) by the sense that a second word exists, that there meaning is contained in both words, or neither, or a third, or none at all (20). Roussel’s essay is integral to his work because it reveals his procedure, includes biographical notes, as well as hommage to Jules Verne and to the imagination. Foucault attributes Roussel’s narrative acrobatics to the author’s view of perpetuity, to his need to know that the end is a return to the beginning, and finally to an expression of “folie.”

Calvino, however, is researching the cross-roads between science and literature, believing that a “wager”⁴⁰, can exist between literary and scientific languages. Said “wager” would permit both parties to gain. Literature supplies the scientist with “imaginative courage in taking a hypothesis to its ultimate consequences,” while the the language of mathematics repairs the “disrepair that words and images have fallen into as a result of being misused” (37). Further, Calvino recognizes that the purpose of literature is not realized unless the reader approaches it with “critical reflection,” (36) and his expository essay “Comment j’ai écrit . . .” is part of his strategy to snare, and ultimately seduce, the reader. According to Carl D. Malmgren⁴¹ , Calvino is trying to “find a way out of” the “dead end for narrative” enacted by “postmodernist metafiction” (106). In fact, Patricia Waugh indicates that Calvino’s emphasis on the reader completes “Barthes statement: that the death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader.”⁴² By referring to Raymond Roussel, and by investing his reader with, in a sense, the authority of authorship, Calvino is committing a double act of memory. He invests his skills with the weight of literary precedence, and distributes his investment to his readers, his “stock” holders.

As I stated earlier, the structure of “Comment j’ai écrit . . .” strongly resembles a poem. Either four or six sentences follow each square. Each sentence describes the event or persona that occupies each of its corners; two other sentences are added each time opposite corners interrelate. Thus, the figure of a square precedes either a single “quatrain” (a sentence per corner) or a “quatrain” and a “couplet” (the opposite corners interrelating). In essence, the seventeen page article summarizes in a poetic fashion all the events that occur in the numbered chapters of If on a winter’s night . . . , and the constraint can thus be viewed as a fixed form of poetry, using traditional stanza composition. By embedding poetic conventions into his work, Calvino has invested it with a time-tested mnemonic device, limited and repetitive stanzas.

Calvino informs the readers, at the end of “Comment j’ai écrit . . .” that the squared model of constraint is an “adaption personelle” (personal adaptation) (44) of A. J. Greimas’ structural semiology. Calvino has, in a rhythmic and combinatory fashion derived from stanza structure, explored various permutations of the relationship between the reader, the book he and/or she is reading, and the completion of the various novels contained therein. By informing us that the particular square upon which he has chosen to model his constraint is no ordinary square, but the “same” model of a square used by A. J. Greimas to represent aspects of structural semiology, Calvino links his constraint to the manner in which the seme signifies. Thus, the constraint underpins not only the reader’s quest for the novel’s conclusion, but ultimately the novel’s meaning. By contrasting Calvino’s essay to that of Roussel, the difference between the possible gain stemming from Calvino’s “wager,” and Roussel’s injection of a “sense of anxiety” into his writing, can be clearly detected. Calvino plumbs the mine of literary creativity, whereas Roussel was seeking salvation.

Calvino’s constraint guarantees that the novel’s “completion,” in the sense of its ultimate meaning, is entirely dependent upon “you,” whether “you” be the reader of the novel or the reader in the novel. Calvino’s narrative trickery guarantees that literature cannot exist without “you”; his constraint has completely embedded the reader into the tale. Two key sentences in “Comment j’ai écrit…” underline the extent to which a reader “destabilizes” yet at the same participates in a novel’s meaning: “Le livre lu et le livre écrit ne sont pas le même livre” (The written book and the read book are not the same book) (37) and “Le livre lu par chaque lecteur est toujours un autre livre” (The book read by each reader is always another book) (42).

All the various permutations of the reader’s role, of the reader’s relationship with other readers, as well as with other authors, do not bring If on a winter’s night . . . to a conclusion, its meaning remains in eternal flux. A Wiley Feinstein⁴³ finds that the “doctrinal core” of If on a winter’s night . . . is that the author finds himself in a “horrifying double bind.” This is caused by “readers, [who] in their demanding capriciousness and insatiability, are as impossible to live with as they are to live without” (152). Feinstein obviously makes reference to the difficulty men and women experience living with each other, and the “double bind” to which he refers is comparable to the eternal marriage whence there is no divorce, the marriage between author and reader. The cement of this marriage is literature, life, and memory. Both author and reader pursue the novel(s), and use it to embody and transform the need to tell, and to listen to, stories. Marriage, a complex binary operation par excellence based on shared and eternal memories — “till death do we part” — of stories told and heard, such that personal ones are indistinguishable from those shared.

As I previously suggested, the constraint in Roubaud’s La Boucle reflects the physiological act of memory, or, in reverse logic, the physiological act of memory has been transformed into a literary constraint: he has demonstrated how the present moment always renders memory plastic. Perec’s puzzling mathematics describe the virtually infinite combinatory (possibilities) of life’s events, and Calvino devised permutations that take into account the reader’s impact on the novel’s ultimate meaning. The reason that their constraints inscribe them indelibly into the present moment of literary history is that the constraint is a mnemonic device.

When Roubaud addresses questions within La Boucle that pertain to the autobiography as a literary genre he bemoans the demise of the “Arts de la mémoire.” He asserts that the novelist is a “victime inconsciente d’une mutation historique: l’extériorisation du souvenir” (unconscious victim of an historical mutation: the exteriorization of memory) (322). The Ars memorativa were memory techniques that underpinned not only erudition, but also both self-esteem and self-identity; they were the method by which one became learned, and constructed one’s inner library.

Mary Carruthers, in The Book of Memory⁴⁴, not only describes mnemonic techniques of the past, but she too underlines their importance in relation to becoming learned. From her vantage point, medieval writers viewed learning as,

. . . a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information into patterns, organizational principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered . . . (2)

During the eras she studies, memoria and mnemotechniques engendered more than what is presently viewed as “memorizing.” Memoria, the mother of the Muses, and subsequently the Ars memorativa, consists of elements, such as prudentia or meditatio, that are the backbone of a medieval scholar’s classical education. Said Arsdetermine one’s “education and character,” (187) and also maintain one’s ethical standards. In essence, Carruthers’ book examines the lofty and often metaphysical goals of the well-rounded medieval scholar, and, more importantly, the process by which said goals were achieved.

There are parallels between mnemonic devices of old and oulipian constraints. Amongst the many different mnemonic devices invented, two different elements of Roubaud’s constraint, the use of mathematics as well as the use of specified loci, are elements of many earlier memory tools. For instance, Carruthers offers the “numerical grid” as an example of an “elementary memory design.” The text to be memorized was divided into limited passages which were assigned numbers and then placed into imaginary “bins”; the “bins” were then formed into a diagram. Each numbered “bin” was “titled” with the text’s opening words. Highly ornate opening letters, common to medieval texts, served as visual means of remembering first sentences, thus stimulating the synesthetic traits of memory.

Similarly, Roubaud created a numerical grid of sorts to write La Boucle. Visually, he underscores the recollection of actual images (flashes) by using bold typefacing; his interjections, in fact the entire passage of “incisions,” is in a different font size. He reproduced, indented on the page and in an entirely new font, tracts of his grandmother’s journal. Now, when looking upon his constraints within the epistemology of a philological education, the connection between literary and personal lives, and both of their needs to remember the past, is clear. His constraint reflects the physiological act of memory by remembering the formal training of our literary forerunners.

Looking upon the constraints that govern La vie mode d’emploi by Georges Perec, two classical mnemonic tools are apparent; the first is “architectural mnemonics,” and the second is the chessboard. A manner in which one sets tracti, or other texts for that manner, to memory was to build a place to store them. Carruthers underlines the importance of places by referring to both Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium, book III, and then Tully’s Ad Herennium: she determines that places should serve as background to memory, and these different backgrounds provide spacing. Such spacing was often specifically architectural. Carruthers finds that Tully used vocabulary from Roman architecture, such as “‘aedis’ (a house), ‘intercolumnium’ (the space between columns, a colonnade), ‘angulus’ (a recess), ‘fornix’ (an arch)” (139). By using the façade of a Parisian apartment block to construct a narrative, Perec has committed a specific architectural design to memory, and after having thoroughly “digested” his work, those apartment blocks can never look the same for the reader; their façades contain stories.

Carrruthers also reveals that Jacopo da Cessola, a Dominican friar from the 1300’s, wrote “an allegorical treatment of the game of chess” in what was one of “the most popular of late medieval ethical manuals” (144). The ethical texts to be memorized from the manual were placed into a grid, and the grid was precisely a chessboard “filled with images.” The form of the manual adopted the mnemotechniques familiar to medieval audiences, which was “the form of a grid filled with images, familiar . . . as a basic format for the page of memory.” Almost naturally then, Perec’s Graeco-Latin bisquare and the chessboard coalesce. The narration’s constraint allows it to be easily set to memory, much like the work of the Domincal friar Jacopo da Cessola. Drawing on contemporary — the apartment house — images, on ninteenth century narrative techniques, and medieval mnemonics, erec committed his story (history) to French cultural memory. He offered the reader grids, mathematical combinations, architectural space, façades, chessboards and chess pieces, as well as the spontaneity of clinamen, as stimuli for recording the “life” of a building. As such, the reader, implicated and invested in the process, commits his or her own life to memory, and reevaluates the various components that build stories, and lives. The grid-like combinatory, its architectural space, as well as the chessboard and its pieces, compose a novel that is the basis of life’s “mode d’emploi.”

Calvino’s constraint in If on a winter’s night a traveler starts with the figure of a box. As previously stated, the number of boxes increases, arrives at a plateau, and then decreases. On the opening page of the article “Comment j’ai écrit un de mes livres” an illustration of the boxes regularly increasing and decreasing resembles a bar-graph or a grid-like diagram. Much like in mnemotechniques of the past, limited information about the texts is contained within the boxes. Below the novel’s surface lies the fundamental building blocks of memory, the original grid to be filled with the profound texts of one’s memoria.

The interspersal of the incipits of novels and the reader’s pursuit of them, is also an act of memory; in medieval times the reader completes the book by committing it to memory. So does the reader of/in If on a winter’s night . . . Carruthers calls the act of reading in medieval times a “‘hermeneutical dialogue’ between two memories” (169). She emphasized the extent to which metaphors for eating, digesting, and even harvesting underpin meditatio, also related to the act(ion) of reading (168). Rumination and murmuring versus silent reading, legere tacite versus viva voce, are employed at different moments to assure the text’s committal to different levels of memory. Such active readings define a different sort of reader; a reader who is not an “interpreter” but the text’s “new author, or re-author” much like, “Petrarch has re-spoken Virgil; ‘re-written Virgil’” (168). When attempting to grasp Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, it is quite evident that there is only one author, Italo Calvino himself. But when attempting to analyze the narration, there exists many authors, fictive and even plagiarizers of fictive authors. And since the chapters where “you” are the main character sustain and represent the essence of the novel’s tension, it could easily be said that “you” are part-author of the book. Therefore, the dominant constraint of the novel demands that the reader assume the responsibility of “authoring” the novel, and of being a participant in the renovation of the genre. Calvino’s constraint actively engages memory. It acts to construct a novel where active reading functions as did the memoria of medieval scholars, by participating in meaning.

As early as 1967 in the article “Écriture et mass-media”⁴⁵ Perec maintains that a “changement de fonction” is occurring in the arts that provides “un échange plus réel entre l’oeuvre et le spectateur” (a more concrete exchange between the work and the audience) (8). Mass-media, he affirms, offers the writer a space where “le simultané et le discontinu” (the simutaneous and the discontinuous) can create “irruption dans l’écriture” (irruption within writing) (9). Narration must no longer resemble the linearity of a river, models of writing can adapt the form of “l’arbre” (a tree), “l’épi” (a stalk), and “des tiroirs” (drawers) (9). Based on the new physical forms that mass-media offers to a writer, mimesis is no longer a necessity, and discontinuity as well as simultaneity can be fully integrated into a work. In other words, writing can, and must, embrace abstract thought. In order to clearly communicate such thought, a writer’s work depends upon exchange, whether it be between puzzle and puzzle-maker (La vie . . .), between reader and author (If on a winter’s night . . .), or between the past and the present (La Boucle). In the rejection of mimesis, and the adoption of the philosophy of writing under constraint, oulipian writers incur the responsibility of “falsifying” the past, portrayed by the various authors in If on a winter’s night . . . Even though they transform past texts, they do pay homage to their predecessors, they are “remembering” them, by encoding the present moment of literary evolution with contemporary versions of past literary endeavors.

Roland Barthes’ memorable essays, “La mort de l’auteur,” and “De l’oeuvre au text”⁴⁶ consider the activity of contemporary textuality, and help situate the texts I am studying. Perec suggests that narration must no longer be linear, and can integrate “the simutaneous and the discontinuous” into its production, much like Barthes, in declaring the death of the author and the birth of the “scriptor,” declares that “il n’y a d’autre temps que celui de l’énonciation, et tout texte est écrit étenellement ici et maintenant” (64) (there is no other time than the moment of declaration, and all texts are written in the eternally here and now.) The eternal hic et nunc — Roubaud’s insistance on the present tense, for example — executes the perecian simultaneous and discontinuous, thanks to the postmodern, and/or oulipian, heightened sensitivity to the textual signifier. Barthes calls the signifier the “après-coup” (after-shock) of meaning because it cannot infinetly refer to an unspeakable signified, but it embodies, and plays, the text’s “jeu” (72) (game). The “game” corresponds directly with contemporary, Derridean, notions of “écriture,” with the oulipian constraint, and with the epistemology of mnemotechniques. After having considered three oulipian texts, can I not logically conclude that the constraints that reinforce genre architecture are a blueprint, the set of rules, the “mode d’emploi,” of the textual game played by author and reader? And participating in that game (a personal game of memory and addition?), contributes to both the past and the future of literary architectural evolution.

Our consciousness of literary evolution returns us in time to previous eras where form, and emphasis on exchange, predominated; to ancient Greek theater and the orality of the Odyssey. Which is why Calvino states that there is no true “original book.” To believe that an author, or a computer for that matter, could generate novels, or a new form of literature, is to believe that an original story exists, be it told or untold: “L’ordinateur-auteur de romans est un rêve comme le pére des récits” (The computer-novelist is a dream much like the existence of the Father of all stories) (33) he states in “Comment j’ai écrit . . .” No original tale exists, there are only innovations and replications of last genres and of past tales. In the chapter entitledy “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (The Literature Machine 3-27) he states that “the true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order” (13). Writers, he believes, are “already writing machines” (15)⁴⁷ because they are always elaborating upon the architecture of preceding genres, always contending with and remembering the literary past.

Calvino offers what he terms a writer’s “combinatorial mechanism” (21) as a way of contending with the literary past, and expanding upon the barthian notion of the signifying game. In the mechanism’s search for the “new,” a permutation “clicks,” and then a “shock” (22) occurs. On the one hand, the “shock” takes the form of a text that “becomes charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately: an unconscious meaning” (21). On the other hand, the “shock” will not occur if the writer is not “surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society” (22). Even after the “click” and the “shock,” the process of evolution is far from finished because “Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading” (15). Then “The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on contact with the eye of the reader” (16). Thus for Calvino, and I would add for the members of Oulipo in general, the “combinatorial mechanism” is human, societal, and cultural. The game of their “écriture,” based on the above metaphors, involves abstraction, and cannot be solitary; it includes the past, all of society, and the lives of the reader and the writer. As scientists and writers, oulipians use abstract means of self-discovery. Abstract paths are true to their nature, even if literature, and “littérateurs,” find them difficult to follow.

The ultimate goal of devising a constraint is to discover one’s unconscious, one’s inner life, through permutations of the past, through a conscious plunge into the combinatory of literature. Silas Flannery, one of the fictive authors in If on a winter’s night . . ., declares that “memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form” (181); in other words the form cannot be hermetic, it cannot be infallible, and in a sense, such infallibility is impossible because “you,” the reader, are the ultimate variable, the clinamen of literature. “You” bring (your) life to the text by remembering, by making the game new through memory, by making the game worth playing.

I have stated that Roubaud’s constraint in La Boucle resembles the physiological act of memory. It functions as “meta-constraint” for the entire oulipian project, and although the oulipians pay strict attention to questions of language and to literature’s inner structures, their goal is to explore the humanity of abstract thought. As Calvino says, authors are already writing-machines. David Bellos, in his studies of La vie . . ., discovered a “giant reverse diagonal acrostic” (17) where Perec hid the word “âme” (soul). The author’s soul, an intangible yet essential element of his life, drives the novel’s constraint. A consciously determined constraint is the path, the philosopy, the “philological logic,” of self-discovery. Mimesis still drives the oulipian author, however their target of replication is no longer nature, but the structures of literature, and the application of abstract thought to the production of texts.

The oulipian constraint is a philosophical approach to life. Roubaud states that an essential perecian question is the eternal “que faire?” (what does one do?) and that Perec answers clearly: “rien” (nothing).⁴⁸ For Perec the constraint was, states Roubaud, “la question-réponse décisive de la vie” (the decisive question-answer of life). Since “rien,” or zero for a mathematician, represented Perec’s solution to life’s equation, then the intrigue lies in how to arrive at nothing. The constraint remains the quintessential means — “la question-réponse” — at arriving at nothing, at guaranteeing that Bartlebooth’s paintings be reduced to virgin canvas, only after life was lived, only after the constraint was applied, only after as Roubaud states “d’immenses efforts” (58). A constraint represents a consciousness of life, and an acceptance of death, of worthlessness, but without Rousselian anxiety. By raising questions about “life,” about one’s soul, about mastery over the novel’s language and construct, Perec embraces what Bellos has termed “unpostmodernist concepts.” Is oulipian “écriture” postmodern in its romantic desire to discover the soul through literary adventure?

Cybernetic analysis offers a good foil for understanding oulipian work. David Porush in The Soft Machine⁴⁹ views cybernetic fiction as “the diminution of the role of the human presence or persona in favor of some deterministic, clockwork fictional universe operating apparently through its own agency” (157). Also, he indicates that cybernetic fiction is composed of a “typical congruence between form and function, the concern with linguistic artifice, the constructedness or emphasis on structure for structure’s sake” which describes oulipian concerns. From the oulipian point of view, however, a machine already exists in all of us. The oulipian novel-machine now targets the self, it utilizes — La Boucle, for example — a physiological act as the target of mimesis, implying a new level of unity of book and self, book-self. In fact, the constraint can be considered constitutive of the self, an exploration of one’s capacity, of one’s potential: the constraint is the machine’s engine.

The book is a true “buckle,” La Boucle, highlighting the link between one’s inner machine and one’s consciousness. The search for machine-like qualities can end because “the author is already a writing-machine.” Oulipian textuality engages in a ludic exchange with literature, mediated by the constraint cum machine, forcibly modifying the economics and the stakes of individual cultural exchange. Much like culture can be seen as a field of commonalities and differences, so too can the structure of memory. Individuals process cultural information, remember it, makes it their own, in a machine-like way. Oulipian constraints are exemplars, equations, allegories, of the consciousness of process.

The oulipian consciousness of process can be seen as a plea. Roubaud’s comments about the “époque des têtes vides,” and the “extériorisation du souvenir,” reinforce this plea directed at a society that has been termed “post-literate.” It is a plea to respect the capacity to remember, to utilize the structures of literature as not only a means of reflecting on the architecture of thought, but as a means of constructing our own inner library, one where reader and author are co-authors.⁵⁰ In earlier times the book was a tool to be integrated into one’s memory, it was to be added to a thinker’s “private” and interior “collection.” Roubaud calls the description of exterior objects, contemporary media, “lent” (slow), “morselé”; (in pieces), and a “multiplication de details prélevés crûment” (a multiplication of details crudely deduced). He contrasts them to what he calls a “vision globale” contained within a “réel intérieur.” The constraint in La Boucle, an interior adventure depicting Roubaud’s abstract understanding of memory, confirms that a life occurred, secures it, and inscribes that life in literary memory. The “extériorisation du souvenir” indicates, then, an historic reversal in thinking. The reversal in thinking is that instead of the medieval habit of permitting a well-organized memory to “complete” the book, our epoch searches for a method to reclaim, restore, and replicate the interior structure of memory so as to resurrect, secure, and inscribe our book. We stand on the threshold of allowing images alone to record our memories — images and bytes. To allow our “souvenirs” to remain “outside” or exteriorized, is the equivalent of weakening the use of language. With it goes the syntax and the organization of thought that language provides, that the brain provides. Roubaud works as a contemporary troubadour, finding and/or inventing new means of expression. I have termed his latest constraint a meta-constraint because it is a tool for remembering to remember.

The oulipians practice what Roubaud called “plagiat par anticipation” (plagarism by anticipation); time barriers are destroyed. An oulipian constraint is a constraint that must have a clinamen, a constraint that must be fallible, a constraint that guarantees an enormous flexibility of meaning, and finally it is a constraint that, if well construed, will always “disappear.” The foundation of the constraint is that it is an act of memory. Memory of literature, memory as an art form, memory that evokes what one of Calvino’s “authors” might term “la bibliothéque infinie.” If time barriers are destroyed, if the library is infinite, and if the constraint is a means of self-discovery, I then ask: is oulipian “écriture” postmodern, or simply the work of Queneau’s “true poet”?

Notes

1. See Marjorie Perloff’s “Introduction” to Marjorie Perloff, ed., Postmodern Genres, (Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1988) 3-10, as well as Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?,” same volume, 11-27. An interesting quote from Cohen’s essay is pertinent to oulipian texts: “The generic concept of combinatory writing makes possible the study of continuities and changes within a genre as well as the recurrence of generic features and their historical implications” (14). The formal result of realizing a structure’s “potential” is often a mathematical combinatory. Within potential literature lies the remnants of the past, therefore a past memory accompanies innovation, and is in fact essential to it.

2. Paris: Gallimard, {1937}, 1964.

3. Jean Lescure, “Petite histoire de l’Oulipo,” in Oulipo, La littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 24-35 makes the following remarks concerning Queneau’s famous quote: “It has not been sufficiently noted what an important revolution, what a clear mutation, this simple sentence introduced into a conception of literature that was still given to romantic effusions and subjective exaltations. In fact, this sentence revealed a revolutionary concept of the objectivity of literature, and opened, as of that moment, literature to all possible kinds of manipulation. Simply put, like mathematics, literature could be explored” (28).

4. In Radical Artifice (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) Marjorie Perloff asks, in relation to poetic structure: “. . . what happens after modernism?” (137). She suggests that “a prosody based on intonational contours” is the problem, and that the result is that contemporary poets, in what she terms “the most common postmodern practice,” “take the existing meters and stanza forms and [ ] treat them parodically” (138). A different approach to poetic structure, Perloff maintains, is “constraint or procedurality,” best practiced by Oulipo. She views the oulipian approach, “a procedural poetics,” as applicable to both “prose” and “verse” (her quotations, 139). Once Perloff has claimed oulipian “procedural poetics” to be postmodern, they conform to her own theoretical paradigm, and I ask if this too reflects the age-old academic tendency to label and compartmentalize?

5. Paris: Hachette, 1978.

6. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, {1979} 1981.

7. L’invention du fils de Leoprepes (Saulxures: Circe, 1993).

8. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

9. Although Bernard Magné, “Transformations of Constraint” Review of Contemporary Fiction XIII:1 (Spring 1993) 111-123, defines a metaconstraint as “a constraint which modifies a constraint” (118) I am referring to a constraint that serves as an overview of the entire oulipian project. If the constraint at work in La Boucle represents a formalization of the act of memory, then it is a metaconstraint in that all oulipian constraints serve the same purpose.

10. Richard F. Thompson, “The Memory Trace,” Richard F. Thompson, ed., Learning and Memory (Boston: Birkhauser, 1989) 11-13. Here Thompson states that “the greatest barrier to progress” in understanding learning and memory has been the “problem of localizing the neuronal substrates” (11). In relation to locating “the memory trace” he describes a process that might “involve a number of loci, parallel circuits, and feedback loops.” The following structures are thought to be implicated: “the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, and cerebal cortex” (12).

11. See Endel Tulving, “Concepts of Human Memory,” Larry R. Squire et al, eds. Memory: Organization and Locus of Change, (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 3-32.

12. Certain principles guide their work; in their texts “le mode de fabrication est tantôt indiqué, tantôt non.” (the means of production is sometimes revealed, sometimes not) (V) Oulipo, La Bibliothèque Oulipienne v.1, (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1987). Two complementary principles are enunciated by Jacques Roubaud, who is also a Professor of mathematics: 1) “la définition d’une contrainte est écrite suivant la règle fixée par cette contrainte” (the definition of a constraint is written according to the rule established by said constraint) (IV), in other words a constraint defines itself as it implements its own rules. 2) that “un texte suivant une contrainte parle de cette contrainte” (a text under constraint speaks of that constraint) (90) Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).

13. See Roubaud’s works on troubadorian poetry which include the following titles: Les Troubadours (Paris: Seghers, 1971) and La fleur inverse (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1986).

14. Not only does Roubaud define his theory of rhythm in the following terms: “La théorie du rythme abstrait est l’entrelacement d’une famille de théories ayant en commun une combinatoire séquentielle hiérarchisée d’événements discrets considérés sous le seul aspect du ‘même’ et du ‘différent’” (The theory of abstract rhythm is the intertwining of a family of theories that have in common a sequential and hierarchised combinatory of discreet events considered under the sole aspect of the “same” and the “different”), a definition put forth in the series of seminars he offered through the “Centre de poétique comparée,” a department of the “Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales,” but in an interview he goes so far as to state that “le fond essentiel de la mémoire est plutôt de nature rythmique” (the essential depth of memory is of a rather rhythmic nature) (100): “Les cercles de la mémoire — entretien avec Aliette Armel” Magazine littéraire, (juin, 1993) 96-103.

15. The “*” indicates that number of paragraphs within the section varies.

16. The structure of the rest of the novel is as such:

The mathematical constraint of the novel reveals distinct numerological patterns. Said patterns exist both within each of the three main divisions — the “récit,” the “incises,” and the “bifurcations” — and across the divisions. The mathematical constraint thus governs the novel’s development in a linear manner and in a cross-sectional manner: on the one hand it could be said that it reflects the way an event is encoded in different areas of the brain and also the way an event is recalled, always stimulating various other memories. On the other hand it functions as a numerical grid functions in mnemotechniques, allowing the author to distribute and organize specific moments of memory in order to oversee the manner in which memories interplay, affect, and counter-affect one another.

17. Perec indicates in “Quatre figures pour La vie mode d’emploi” Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981) 387-395 that of “trois ébauches indépendantes” (three independant outlines), (387) that I will soon discuss and that structure the novel, the third, which “allait devenir l’histoire de Bartlebooth” (was going to become the story of Bartlebooth) was discovered while working on a “gigantesque puzzle représentant le port de La Rochelle.” Perec decided that all of the stories contained in the novel would be built “comme des puzzles” which would render the story of Bartlebooth “essentielle” (388).

18. Georges Perec, “‘Ce qui stimule ma racontouze‘” TEM – Texte en main I (Printemps 1984) 49-59.

19. Lisa Cohen, “The Purloined Letter,” Lingua franca 5:2 (Jan.-Feb. 1995) 16-19.

20. Georges Perec — A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993).

21. Paris: Julliard, 1965.

22. Paris: Denoel, 1969.

23. Paris: C. Bourgois, 1990.

24. Jacques Brunschwig, “Epicure,” Dictionnaire de philosophes, v.1 (Paris: P.U.F., 1984) 866-873.

25. In my research I found many different references, by many different authors, to the clinamen, for example: Paul Braffort, “F.A.S.T.L. Formalismes pour l’analyse et la synthèse de textes littéraires” in Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard [1988], 1981) 108-137, states that “Le rôle du clinamen se précisa peu à peu (mais ici de difficiles recherches sont encore nécessaires)” (The role of the clinamen will slowly become more precise (but here difficult research is still necessary)) (108-9) which gives an idea as to the importance and complexity of the clinamen in his own research; he continues: “Bref, on se proposait de plus en plus de rendre explicites les jeux de contraintes dont un auteur ne saurait se passer, afin d’y rendre possibles calculs et déductions rigoureuses (au “clinamen” près)” (110) (In brief, we were proposing more and more to make the constraining games that an author could not pass over more explicit, in order to make possible rigorous calculations and deductions (to the nearest “clinamen”).)

Italo Calvino, in “Prose et anticombinatoire” Atlas . . . 319-331, declares: “Cela montre bien, pensons-nous, que l’aide de l’ordinateur, loin d’intervenir en substitution à l’acte createur de l’artiste, permet au contraire de libérer celui-ci des servitudes d’une recherche combinatoire, lui donnant ainsi les meilleurs possibilités de se concentrer sur ce “clinamen” qui, seul, peut faire du texte une véritable oeuvre d’art” (This shows, we think, that the help of a computer, far from intervening as a substitute for the creative act of the artist, allows for, au contraire, his liberation from the servitude of combinatory research, giving him the greatest possibility to concentrate on this “clinamen” which, alone, can make of a text a veritable work of art) (331). This citation accords to the clinamen the status of the “creative act of the author” and, much like Epicurus indicates the clinamen’s capacity to create a “world,” Calvino’s terms this creation “a veritable work of art.”

Jacques Roubaud, “Air” Oulipo, La bibliothèque oulipienne, v.1 (Paris: Slatkine, 1981) 83, the poet describes the form of the poem he entitled “Air,” and dedicated to Raymond Queneau, in the following terms: “Une case vide — longueur des syllabes — dans la table est comblée, minimalement, par ce sonnet selon les règles et aussi quelque ironie. Un clinamen dans le compte des lettres, par absence et excès, dit le destinataire. Comme la parenthèse à la ligne en plus, coda.” (An empty space — the length of syllables — in the table is filled, minimally, by this sonnet written according to the rules as well as a little irony. A clinamen in the letter count, by absence and excess, says the addressee. Like a parenthesis with an extra line, coda.) Here Roubaud employs a clinamen in order to claim originality.

In the following haiku, Roubaud, “Io et le Loup — dix-sept plus un plus plus un haiku en ouliporime”, La bibliothèque . . .323-333, the poet purposely misspells the word “clinamen” in order to create a true clinamen which will coincide with the theme of the haiku, dedicated to Oulipo:

III: oulipo

(16)  xlinamen

L'hétérogramme est doux
		le lipogramme est prolixe
	le tautogramme cherche les hapax.
					(pour Jean Queval) (329)

Finally, Francois Caradec, “La voie du troisième secteur”, Oulipo, La bibliothèque oulipienne, v.3 (Paris: Seghers, 1990) 157-181, researches a “troisième secteur” which he calls “para-pata-littérature” (160) and declares that the clinamen shall play the role of a “frange” (fringe), or a condition which exists between two notions: “je retrouve le double d’une lettre datée du 20 octobre 1972 dans laquelle je me permettais, énergiquement d’ailleurs, un certain nombre de suggestions. Au nom du clinamen, je proposais la notion de ‘franges,’ parfois simplement par ‘usure’ sémantique, ‘franges’ qui permettaient à l’occasion de ‘frangir’ les limites imposées un peu arbirtairement par François Le Lionnais . . .” (166) (I discover the copy of a letter dated October 20, 1972, in which I allowed myself, even energetically, a certain number of suggestions. In the name of the clinamen I was proposing the notion of “fringe,” sometimes only by semantic “wearing away,” “fringes” allowed at that moment “to fringe” the limits imposed somewhat arbitrarily by François Le Lionnais. . .)

The preceding evidence supports the notion that the Oulipians cling to the clinamen as an obligatory stage in creating something “new,” in allowing a constraint to reach its potential.

26. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1928.

27. In fact, in La disparition Perec espouses the role of “scriptor” consciously. In the first paragraph of the “Post-scriptum” one reads: “L’ambition du ‘Scriptor,’ son propos, disons son souci, son souci constant, fut d’abord d’aboutir à un produit aussi original qu’instructif, à un produit qui aurait, qui pourrait avoir un pouvoir stimulant sur la construction, la narration, l’affabulation, l’action, disons, d’un mot, sur la façon du roman d’aujourd’hui” (The ambition of the “Scriptor,” his proposal, let’s say his concern, his constant concern, was first off to produce a product as original as it is instructive, a product that would have, that could have a stimulative power on the construction, the narration, the affabulation, the action, let’s say, in a word, on the fashion of today’s novel) (309).

28. PN Review 15:6, 68 (1989) 12-17.

29. Georges Perec, Eds. Hans Hartje, Bernard Magné, Jacques Neefs, Cahier des charges de La vie mode d’emploi, (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1993).

30. The forty-two elements at work in each chapter are the following: (16-20)

 

1) Position	2) Activité	3) Citation 1	4) Citation 2
5) Nombre	6) Rôle	7) Troisème secteur	8) Ressort?
9) Murs	10) Sols	11) Époque	12) Lieu
13) Style	14) Meubles	15) Longueur	16) Divers
17) Âge	18) Sexe	19) Animaux	20) Vêtements
21) Tissus (nature)	22) Tissus (matière)	23) Couleurs	24) Accessoires
25) Bijoux	26) Lectures	27) Musiques	28) Tableaux
29) Livres	30) Boissons	31) Nourriture	32) Petits meubles
33) Jeux et jouets	34) Sentiments	35) Peintures	36) Surfaces
37) Volumes	38) Fleurs	39) Bibelots	40) Manque
41) Faux	42) Couples

 

(Translation:

 

1) Position	2) Activity	3) Quote 1	4) Quote 2
5) Number	6) Role	7) Third sector	8) Spring?
9) Walls	10) Floors	11) Epoch	12) Place
13) Style	14) Furniture	15) Length	16) Diverse
17) Age	18) Sex	19) Animals	20) Clothing
21) Cloth (natural)	22) Cloth (material)	23) Colors	24) Accesories
25) Jewelry	26) Readings	27) Musics	28) Paintings
29) Books	30) Drinks	31) Food	32) Small furnishings
33) Games and toys	34) Feelings	35) Paint	36) Surfaces
37) Spaces	38) Flowers	39) Knicknacks	40) Wrong
41) Gap	42) Couples)

31. Georges Perec, “‘Ce qui stimule ma racontouze‘” TEM – Texte en main I (Printemps 1984) 49-59.

32. See note 27.

33. Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1969).

34. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

35. “The Doing of Fiction” Review of Contemporary Fiction. XIII:1 (Spring 1993) 23-29.

36. Oulipo, La Bibliothèque Oulipienne vol. II (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1987) 26-44.

37. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963.

38. See Francois Le Lionnais, “A propos de la littérature expérimentale,” Oulipo, La littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 246-249.

39. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

40. “Two Interviews on Science and Literature,” The Literature Machine (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1987) 28-38.

41. “Romancing the Reader: Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6:2 (Summer 1986) 106-116.

42. Quoted by Ian Rankin, “The Role of the Reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6:2 (Summer 1986) 124-129.

43. “The Doctrinal Core of If on a winter’s night a traveler,” Calvino Revisited — U of Toronto Italian Studies 2, (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions Inc., 1989) 147-155.

44. New York: Cambridge UP, [190] 1993.

45. Preuves 202 (déc. 1967) 6-10.

46. Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 61-67, 69-78.

47. Perec also has been called “une machine à raconter des histoires” Cahier des charges, 7.

48. Jacques Roubaud “Préparation d’un portrait formel de Georges Perec” L’arc 76 (1979) (54-60).

49. New York: Methuen, 1985.

50. See also Barthe’s statement in Le bruissement de la langue, (Paris: Seuil, 1984): “. . . le Texte demande qu’on essaie d’abolir (ou tout au moins de diminuer) la distance entre l’écriture et la lecture, non point en intensifiant la projection du lecteur dans l’oeuvre, mais en les liant tous deux dans une même pratique signifiante” (the Text asks one to try to abolish (or at least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, not at all by intensifying the projection of the reader onto the oeuvre, but in linking the two together in the same signifying practice) (75).

Daniel White and Gert Hellerich

University of Central Florida
University of Bremen
postmod4u@aol.com

Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom

 

— Jacques Derrida, “Différance” (22).

NARRATOR (in peripatetic mode, a little paranoid about the possibility of being hit by a cabbage flying from the Pit):

To do something so peculiar as to place the greatest critic of Christianity at the altar, especially in the electronic age, may require some explanation. To write about a philosopher who rejected traditional philosophical style — argumentative exposition in expository prose — and the epistemology that goes with it in favor of a more aphoristic and staccato mode requires special considerations. How to “understand” a thinker who pointed out that “to understand” means, “to stand under” and so to become a “subject,” a stance which this very “author” rejected? To write about an author who rejected “authority” as a species of “subjectivity” and so of slavery, or mastery, in a hierarchy of underlings and overlords, and in trying to “understand” “him” become “authors” ourselves, borders on the ludicrous — amusingly absurd, comical — requiring the power of play. We have decided, therefore, to be serious only when necessary to keep our textual “play” centered enough to be “understood” by the sane: a questionable act in itself, given the fact that Nietzsche’s preferred persona seemed to be that of a Madman whose language was not particularly ego or otherwise “centric.” “Our” rhetorical strategies (“we” are becoming a little schizoid in honor of our mad teacher) thus include both traditional “exposition” (“laying out” as when one reveals one’s “hand” in poker, a metonym for the five cards one masks from others) and “play.” Our play includes Nietzsche, of course, and some of his recent friends, including ourselves, all chatting about some of the more irksome qualities of Western civilization, epitomized by Christianity and its devotees. Because “we” are part of our own play, the ensuing drama is inevitably recursive — rewriting itself like those M.C. Escher hands — but so is that Nietzschean historical milieu in which we currently live: the postmodern-ecological condition. So, please bear with us.

Traditional academic discourse requires a “subject” in more ways than one. The Latin roots sub plus iectum (past participle of iacere), hence subicere — literally “cast under” — suggest the subject’s function. Initially, it seems the discourse must be “about” something, have a theme, which presumably is the underlying substance or substratum, for Aristotle hupokeimenon (literally “an underlying thing”) which serves as the logical “basis” upon which or the “center” around which various other ideas may be predicated. Nietzsche, whose writings on religion are the principal “subject” of this text, was a critical traditionalist, a classicist, who well understood Aristotle’s need to write in terms of clear subjects which were ultimately grounded in “substances” (things) or the metaphysical referents of substantival terms which possess qualities just as linguistic subjects possess predicates:

The origin of “things” is wholly the work of that which imagines, thinks, wills, feels.

 

The concept of “thing” itself just as much as all its qualities. — Even “the subject” is such created entity, a “thing” like all others: a simplification with the object of defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all individual positing, inventing, thinking as such. (Will to Power sec. 556)

He also resisted a discourse so grounded, preferring to reject a univocal style grounded in a unitary subject in favor of a polyvocal one with constantly shifting subject “matter” as well as a constantly shifting authorial subject. He apparently wrote in this way because he thought that style implied a metaphysic and an epistemology — a theory of reality and of knowledge — and he didn’t like the Western episteme (picture a bust of Aristotle) or its underpinnings (its pedestal). So, to the best of his ability he shattered it, writing in an unorthodox style to which academics typically have to attribute a subject, not to mention an author, in order to “understand” it — subject it to their own modes of discourse.

This appropriation of Nietzsche’s writings to traditional Western style, however, ends up making Nietzsche a “subject” of the King of the Academy, Aristotle, whom Nietzsche, the ever-inventive class clown, was inclined to bombard with bubbles, little aphoristic exploding bubbles, like viruses, to bring down the information edifice of Apollonian learning. If Aristotle were head of FBI, he would probably view Nietzsche as the Polybomber.

So, how to write in the spirit of Nietzsche, to invoke that recalcitrant shade in the Mode of Information, offer him a modem as a sling, and let him cast stones at the strange new Christian Goliath — a.k.a. Jesse, Jimmie, Pat, Newt — that has supplanted what Nietzsche would think of as the genuine Evangel (who had the guts both to claim he was god and to act like it) with an evangelical capitalist overlord who lives not in heaven but in electronic space? We have tried bundling up little power-packets of our Mentor, along with some spit balls from some of his recent historical friends (Bataille, Bateson, Cixous et al.) and hurling them at the digital statues of power that stand at the intersection of Christianity and Capitalism in Neoimperial America. We are riding in a New Automodem, soon to replace older forms of transportation and prefigured by Darryl Louise’s (DL’s) car in Vineland, “a black ’84 Trans-Am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary Ramón La Habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents” (Pynchon, 105), in which we have been cruising the ruined cities of late modernity, wandering through the strip malls, looking for Event-Scenes (reported by Kroker’s Canadian Gang), and tossing explosive bubbles, as we head for a nine inch nails concert. Accompanied by this estranged yet critically engaged collection of personae — Nietzsche and his friends, our Thought Gang if we may steal the tag from Tibor Fischer’s recent novel parked on our shelves — we find ourselves on a new road.

The Mode of Information (Poster, 1990), already an Emerging Super-Highway leading to one more Utopia, the Electropolis just beyond the millennium, provides a main artery from which the contours of our text may be drawn. We understand “information” not in the usual sense, as a noun referring to the digital “bits,” the Boolian shifters, zero and one, out of which logical syntax and hence, subjects and predicates and deductions (the purest form of argument) may be constructed. Instead, we understand in-formation as a verbal noun (a gerund — like différend) depicting a process. The English term “form,” has been widely used to represent the Greek term idea, used by Plato and Aristotle in reference to the fundamental metaphysical principles that organize the world of “nature.” Boethius translated Aristotle’s idea as species, utilizing a Latin term that would stick with the Western tradition down through Darwin and even into the present. But if “information” is understood as having verbal force, then it becomes not the “thing” to be explained or quantified — “How is it that we have a certain range of ‘species’ making up the biosphere and how many of them in what quantities constitute its biomass?” — but rather a process of production of forms: differentiation, morphogenesis. In this sense information becomes isomorphic (insofar as this is possible) with Bateson’s definition of idea (or idea) as a “difference which makes a difference” and Derrida’s différance — “the name we might give to the active, moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science” (“Différance,” 18). Information taken in this sense becomes the basis of an infodynamics (Salthe, 1993), which does not rely on “subjects” or “substances” independent of the discourse-productive processes of evolution: the play of différance.

Our argument, in a nutshell (that infinite space over which Hamlet would have been king if it were not for those embarrassing bubbles of primary process, his dreams — Hamlet II, ii), is that the works of Nietzsche, Bateson, Cixous, Bataille and others provide a cross-disciplinary language which may provide, upon analysis, a “substantive” (apologies to Nietzsche’s critique of our faith in grammar) strategy for cultural politics: critically to situate and creatively to rewrite the combination of Christian devotionalism and capitalism with science that characterizes modernity. An especially formidable dimension of the opposition is in the metaphysics and epistemology of what Salthe calls Baconian/ Cartesian/ Newtonian/ Darwinian/ Comtean (BCNDC) science, which is central to devotional scientism. This Christian-capitalist-industrialist creed is situated within the technological-historical architecture of what Mumford called the Pentagon of Power. Mumford’s Pentagon, like Foucault’s Panopticon, is a metaphor for the imposition of the BCNDC creed via technology on the biosphere, enveloping cultures and other life forms as surely and confidently, with as much moral reflection by court philosophers and poets laureate, as Disney devouring ABC. To engage this monolith, NBCBN writers agree, is vital to the what Mumford called the conduct of life. (NBCBN is an acronym for the next merger of secular and sacred broadcasting, which is, fortunately, made up of Bateson, Cixous and Bataille surrounded by Nietzsche, and indicates our hope for a new discourse.)

NBCBN criticism is defined both by what it engages — the forms of what Mumford called Sun Worship in the temples of advanced technocracy — and the kinds of rewriting it suggests. Just as NBCBN critique encircles the Pentagon with incantations — wafting little explosive bubbles that drive the Generals (all played by George C. Scott) ripping mad, and the presidents (all played by Peter Sellars) to the hot line. (That famous phone is now, by the way, connected to the CONTROL CENTER at Epcot in the tourist mecca of America, Disney, that projection of the Neoimperial Imaginary, where all of the presidents gather their virtual presences to plan the take-overs not only of NBCBN but also, if THEY [in Pynchon’s paranoid sense] haven’t already, Washington.) So NBCBN discourse is identifiable by the style of its rewriting: recursively ecological. In the ecological writing of our NBCBN colleagues, polyform, heterogeneous, metaphoric, metonymic strands of discourse intertwine in a mindful web of in-formation that envelops the Disney-Pentagon; it wraps the generals in silk strands, jangling their medals and their jewels, tickling their skin, provoking, for a moment even here, spontaneous laughter. In what Mumford called, in his last section of The Pentagon of Power, “The Flowering of Plants and Men,” this biomorphic diversity provides a living matrix out of which even the reductive strategies, the monological discourses of “normal” subjects are drawn, like cups of water from a bottomless well; it is the language potential of what Bateson calls the Ecological Mind. Its authorship produces not only flowers and trees but language-using organisms, self-designating — recursive — personae called “human beings.” NBCBN writers respect the diversity out of which their ideas grow and to which they contribute; they don’t mind sharing authorship with the biosphere. NBCBN writers agree, moreover, that there is a central illusion of modernity: the subject, heir of the Christian soul turned entrepreneur, conceived as a metaphysical entity who seeks “control” over a world of objects. This subject is “transcendent” because it is not (so its practitioners believe) recursively constructed out of a set of communicative life practices — language, kinesics, paralinguistics, play, mime, metonymy, metaphor. Foucault saw this imago, what Lacan posited as the “self-image” in the Stade du Miroir (“Mirror Stage”), as typifying all those subjects who were subject to, subjected by, Modernity since the Enlightenment.

NBCBN criticism and theory therefore require, as an alternative, an infodynamic idea of the “subject,” in all senses of this term: a “human being” constructed out of the multilevel dynamics of play: a mask which may be worn, like your Narrator’s wizard hat, only with the knowledge that it is, after all, an artifact, so that we become, as Haraway says, “cyborgs” (as opposed to, say, robots), the living artifice of the ecological mind. Hence the hilarity with which Nietzsche views the legions of the Serious — those penta-goners, the living dead — who make up what he thinks of as the “herds” of modernity. These are the ones who, like Pynchon’s Thanatoids (Vineland, 170 ff.), have watched too much Disney on ABC (or vice-versa, we anticipate future history here) and have come to believe that the Mouseketeers — like the ones in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the glossy rock idols of Spin, not to mention (for traditionalists) Castiglione’s The Courtier — are themselves. Laughter, we conclude, provides a dynamical structure analogous with différance which breaks out of the traps of metaphysics, disciplinary reason and imposed personae, opening the possibility of jouissance as cultural practice (White & Hellerich, 1996 [forthcoming]).

In a smaller nutshell: postmodern-ecological (NBCBN) discourse provides a critical/creative alternative to its modern (BCNDC) predecessor. The alternative utilizes the polysemic strategies of play, metaphor, and metonym to construct a semiotic technology that envelops and (we hope) transforms the monological pentagon of power that characterizes modern discourse: the language of the dead. By situating the infodynamic production of form — différance, “the difference which makes a difference” — at the interface of entropy and information, the alternative creates a living simulacrum of evolutionary ecology: the language of the living. The alternative, moreover, is sufficiently powerful (in Nietzschean terms) to construct not only sciences, information technologies, literatures and the like but also authors and characters, self-images, personae, including “man” and “god.” Nietzsche’s critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular, opens the way toward a new zen of cultural practice in which these characters, including “self” and “god,” become the poetic constructs of writers — “you” and “me” — whose religious sensibility is best expressed by laughter (White, 1996 [forthcoming]).

Being members of a thought gang — taking a critical-theoretical position — in a world circumscribed by messianic entrepreneurs and collapsing ecosystems, leaves us, as the sight of seeing a peasant woman scramble to collect feces dropped from his aristocratic elephant did Aldous Huxley, feeling, in spite of the consolations of philosophy, a bit pensive. Nevertheless, as was Aldous, we are not too glum for laughter at our collective condition, even if “we” — increasingly the “middle” and “working” classes of what Jencks calls the new “cognitariate” and Coupland, perhaps even more appropriately, calls Microserfs — are increasingly the ones scrambling to pick up the manure. This is our materialist interpretation of “trickle down” economics. It’s not so amusing, however, when you are the one scrambling and not riding on high. Academics have more or less been on the elephant for some time, but with the pervasive migrant worker (adjunct) economy emerging in academe, the cognitariate and the proletariate increasingly have a lot to share. It is this materialist political stance in the mode of information — call it a Nietzschean-Marxian inclination to “talk back,” especially via electronic media, to power — combined with the infodynamic confluence of arts and sciences in interdisciplinary critical theory — call it recursive epistemology (Harries-Jones, 1995) — that animates our work. Now, meet some members of the gang.

Bataille, the great Nietzschean erotic-demonic rebel, offers a reading of his mentor that aptly engages the merger of Christianism, Capitalism and Statism — the Pentagon in its various forms with all its religious significance — that has contributed so much to the blood feast of modern history. Bataille commented appropriately, as he wrote his Preface to On Nietzsche in 1944, “Gestapo practices now coming to light show how deep the affinities are that unite the underworld and the police. It is people who hold nothing sacred who’re the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus.” Bataille is speaking about “run of the mill doctrines” of anarchy “apologizing for those commonly taken to be criminals” (xxv). This kind of “anarchy” is best represented, ironically, by the devotees who take food from the school children of OTHERS (especially people of color), and wave their yellow ribbons during the National Anthem under God while the bombs fall on OTHER children abroad, all the while vehemently proclaiming that they are PROLIFE: for these folks, only self-aggrandizement is sacred. Bataille’s analysis of the reduction of religious ideas, supposedly transcendental and therefore beyond appropriation for human purposes, to the very temporal goals that they are supposed to transcend, clearly indicates what has happened in the religions of modernity: the quite temporal and material objectives of wealth and power become deified by hoards of believers who imagine that Jesus actually wants them to make money and launch the F15s against the enemies of “our” oil — the “Bombs and Jesus crowd,” as Hunter Thompson calls them, who feel sanctified in the pursuit of profit and military hegemony. This is the most vocal and disturbing strain of Americanism — gleefully resounding in Congress these days — the criticism of, let alone the resistance to, which is branded as demonic. Bataille nicely situates this mythos,revealing its operative logic — its stage mechanics — and so the SELF-serving idolatry that generally passes nowadays for religion in “America.”

Unfortunately for all of US, these personae are THEM-selves, identities mass produced and distributed from the Magic Kingdom in consultation with the Command and Control network linking Epcot, Washington and Madison Avenue. Are YOU one of THEM? Are WE? The result is a pervasive cultural coding that inscribes the monologic of subjectivity and correlative objectivity on a population who are increasingly programmed to be Mouseketeers, to wear yellow and cheer and sing songs of Christian devotion as the bombs fall on the Iraqis; or for that matter, since academics wore a lot of yellow during that TV series too, to turn out academic papers on, and by, the usual subjects insuring the trivialization of the American “intellect.” Trivia, of course, brings up the function of Modern academic research within the Pentagon, a point that Bateson — another member of our gang — makes at length in “The Science of Mind an Order” (Steps xvii-xxvi), a key work in the NBCBN corpus. He argues that any discourse not cognizant of the axial difference between entropy and information and their associated fundamentals — namely the BCNDC creed — can tell us little about the evolution of our world or the niches of various communities, social or biotic, within it: hence it is trivial (cf. Salthe, ch. 1). In contrast, it is precisely at the meeting of these two realms — at the difference which makes a difference — that the strategies of life are formed and the significance of signification is created. This interface of entropy and information is none other than the différend — the productive disagreement between Dionysus and Apollo that Nietzsche saw animating Hellenic civilization.

Cixous, in whom we see an uncanny resemblance to that radical gangstress of comic book and recent film, Tank Girl, appears here interposed first amidst the text of Derrida contemplating Nietzsche on women (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles), as the cybernaut who steers the ship of l’écriture feminine on a differential course, riding the whirlpool that forms at the interface of entropy and information, Dionysus and Apollo. Here, where we would situate the différend, is the meeting place of what Bateson called, following the Gnostic Jung, pleroma and creatura: “The pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no ‘distinctions.’ Or, as I would say, no ‘differences.’ In the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference” (Steps, 462-463; also see Hoeller, ch. 2). In theological terms, we suggest that pleroma and creatura are analogous to what Otto called numina and phenomena: the numinous being the mysterious realm of the “holy” about which “we” can only surmise. “We can study and describe the pleroma, but always the distinctions which we draw are attributed by us to the pleroma” (Bateson, 462). The play of discourse is phenomenal, discursive, yet its force, its power, is numinous. It is precisely the role of the Daimon — Mind, as in Maxwell’s Demon — to produce the differences that constitute living forms. Here we would situate Bateson’s ecological Idea and Derrida’s “différance“: “‘Older’ than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. . . . This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system” (Derrida, “Différance” 26-27). Cixous’ writing and the daimonic sorceresses and hysterics that inhabit it, we suggest, are the embodiment of this Demon of Difference, which the priests and psychiatrists have long tried to exorcise. Characterized by her mad laughter, she is the template for the cybernetic creatura envisioned by Haraway as for the emergence of new natural-cultural formations — metaphors — in terms of which the dance of life — the tarantella — can be articulated.

We situate the Nietzschean post devotee right here, at the whirling interface of pleroma and creatura where Cixous sails: not the course of God but, rather, of the différend out of which gods are created. We situate the Christian capitalist devotee, in the spirit of Reagan and Bush and their heirs, in a box seat on the 50 yard line at the Super Bowl.

Returning to nutshells, a narrator friend of OURS, attributed to an “author” named Conrad and a text called Heart of Darkness, but seemingly with a life of his own, once remarked about a yarn spinner, Marlow, situated on the moonlit deck of a sailing ship bound for Africa, on the Thames:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (19-20)

So we situate ourselves, your Narrator, and our argument amidst the spectral illumination of our Characters, not presuming to “subject” them to our theories but to let them speak, interposed with our own pronouncements. Hence, now, an intertextual dialogue among our hero-heroines of discourse, who all have appeared, situated miraculously in various forms, with YOURS TRULY, amidst the riotous set of a nine inch nails Concert, during the Gulf War: a perfect setting for the emergence of Nietzsche’s favorite character.

Event-Scene I:

THE SITUATION: Electric Dionysian Theatre: God comes back to split the Mt. of Olives on CNN: nine inch nails emerge. Filmic time-lapse images, projected on skeins enveloping the band, of a rabbit decomposing, of nuclear explosions and the atomic wind, of corpses hanging by the neck, frozen in the Bosnian winter, of the growth of stems and leaves and the turning spirals of the jet stream, metamorphoses of global and microscopic dimensions, the dance of life and death. “If i could kill you and me i would,” lead singer and writer, Trent Reznor, intones: “the pigs have won tonight/ now they can all sleep soundly/ and everything’s all right.” The skeins fade to reveal the asymmetrical architecture, the broken bombed skyline, of the set, band members perched here and there among vaguely suggested, jagged rooftops, and columns standing at crazy angles to form a fractured cityscape both ancient and modern, under ghostly images of light on fine netting, like the skein of stars that envelops human conduct in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In the Pit, reveling fans form a living social body, human waves pulsing phosphorescent across its surface toward the thundering stage. Suddenly, a spectre from the electromagnetic spectrum appears on stage left, a philosopher sculpted from light:

NIETZSCHE (speaking out of memory, in a resounding voice):

The Madman:Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

 

“Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers.

 

. . . Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it. There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us — for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history hitherto.”

 

. . . It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his requiem aeternam deo. Let out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” (Gay Science, sec. 125)

NARRATOR (who appears to be a Nietzsche fan, and whose Wizard hat now glows):

 
In this famous passage from Nietzsche’s later writings, striking images confront us, biblical in tone, apocalyptic in perspective, yet iconoclastic in effect: a madman lighting a lantern in the bright morning to proclaim the death of god, his accusation that we have killed Him, his conjuring of blood rite, baptism, religious festival, his challenge to us to become gods in compensation, his vision of churches as “sepulchers of God,” darkly alluding to and transforming the Gospel story of the empty tomb from which Christ has arisen into a parable about our own reawakening as divinities trapped within the tomb of Christendom. This emergence from the grave brings the devotees into a new, “higher history,” one not circumscribed by the master narrative of Christian eschatology, with beginning middle and end like a good tragedy. Rather, the new history is to be radical, without a metaphysics, without a transcendental aeternitas to provide the reference point against which to measure time and change. This is to be a history of immanent activity not transcendent verities, a cultural mode whose signs and symbols, whose semeiosis, is generated not from a transcendental signifier or signified, in Saussure’s terms, but from communicative practices, the self-writing of a new generation of Übermenschen and Übermädchen (the latter to write a higher “Herstory”) who are not so much “atheists” as the old god reincarnated and pluralized in a diversity of new personae, heralding a new religion of the living instead of, as Nietzsche would say, the traditional worship of the dead.

In this regard Nietzsche has turned religion back into theater, or theater into a religion, in which the mask, the constructed persona, is the only persona, in which the theoretical pose, the transcendent gaze, of the philosophical critic too becomes revealed as a mask through the genealogy of criticism, so that both the ultimate Substratum, God, and the human subject who would worship or know Him, become no more than actors on the stage of Europe, the realization of which makes it closing time for the West: the grand play, the force of which required the suspension of disbelief by the audience, is now revealed as a farce with pretence to tragedy, revealed by Nietzsche just as the Wizard of Oz is sniffed out from behind his curtain by Toto. Yet, where could this possibly leave audience and actors who have apparently transcended the play of their civilization, only to find themselves still in the mood for self-transformation? Is there any show left after Nietzsche’s Madman steals the stage? Has the “self-overcoming” that, as Charles E. Scott says, “. . . defines the movement of the ascetic ideal as well as the movement of Nietzsche’s genealogical account of that ideal,” an overcoming that ” . . . is primarily not a theory but a discursive movement that he identifies in Western thought and practice as well as in his own writing,” rendered former devotees of the narrative mere phantoms, as their lack of substance would suggest? Does Nietzsche’s writing, as well as the culture it genealogically deconstructs, finally become “. . . a mask of appearance without reality, a movement that we undergo as we follow his discourse” (226)? What is left amidst the ruins of the civilization that has killed its own ideal, its God? Is it “the omnipresence of power,” as Foucault has it, “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another” (History of Sexuality, I, 93)? Are we then left with a world in which “politics is war pursued by other means,” or at least in which a “multiplicity of force relations can be coded — in part but never totally — either in the form of war’ or the form of politics,’ . . . a strategic model, rather than a model based on law” (93, 102)?. Yet for Nietzsche as for Foucault, the ultimate aesthetic of power is not one of war but, we think, of love, not the Platonic-Apollonian variety — the love of death, “the separation of the soul from the body,” as Socrates in the Phaedo (64C4-5) defines both the terminus of the philosophical quest and the act of dying — but rather the joyous awakening of soul and body fused in the act of living-as-creating: Dionysian ecstasy.

DELEUZE (breaking in):

 
Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification of essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative. (85)

NARRATOR (trying again):

 
In Bateson’s terms, Nietzschean will is thus “the difference which makes a difference” that proliferates into the mindful patterns of the living world (Steps, 272, 381 ff.); in Derrida’s it is différance, the generative power producing the differentiation of discourse per se. Will to Power, “difference which makes a difference,” différence: at the convergence of these ideas lies a new joyous science, and what we shall call The Philosophy of Laughter. Yet joyous knowledge is heretical, both to the orthodoxy of “modern” science and to its traditional antagonist, the Christian establishment. Could these two team up to form a new Inquisition of “Blue Meanies,” as the forces of enforced Platonism are called in the Beatles’s film Yellow Submarine, whose Heaven looks suspiciously like Disney World and whose Hell is Baghdad?

Thus that practitioner of joy, FOUCAULT (arising like a specter from the Underworld below the stage), poses a counter-practice to the Christian worship of Death stemming from the Socratic separation of the soul from the body, as well as to the “ruses” of repressive desublimation, control through sexuality, in a consumer economy:

We are often reminded of the countless procedures which Christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious. Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless talk of forcing its secret, of extracting the truest confessions from a shadow. (History of Sexuality, 159)

It is between the fanged Scylla of Christian asceticism and the swirling Charybdis of commoditized desire that a Nietzschean fröhliche Wissenschaftmust steer, and the kybernetes (“steersperson,” “cybernaut”) best able to steer her ship through that chasm is Dionysus:

NIETZSCHE (wearing a cross in his ear, just like one historic version of Madonna):

In contrast to the Pauline crucified Jesus, who exalts death over life — who is close, but not identical, to the Jesus who wanted life without facing death — Dionysus confronts death, certain of the over-fullness of life and his own recreative power. “The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be the expression of an over-full power pregnant with the future (my term for this, as is known, is Dionysian’)” [Will To Power, sec. 846] (Valadier, 250).

NARRATOR (recalling a memorable bout of shopping):

The worship of death, disguised as the otherworldly Kingdom in Christianity, has been transformed in the capitalist modern era into the pursuit of deferred gratification, the Foucauldian economy of sexuality, through the fetishization of commodities, the Church of the Consumers, as we have described it in “Nietzsche at the Mall” (White & Hellerich, 1993). For, as Max Weber astutely observed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the protestant work ethic which supplied the basic norms for European capitalist culture was a materialized version of the old medieval quest for salvation. The new ethic became “God helps those who help themselves,” meaning, in effect, that those who work hard and save will eventually achieve the Kingdom, not of the old transcendental heaven above but rather of a materially abundant future attainable through progress. With the advent of consumer capitalism in the twentieth century, the work ethic became conjoined with what might be described as the “pleasure ethic,” the virtually religious pursuit of commodities by nearly everybody. Thus the old monotheistic god is made imminently available in the myriad forms of concretized desire that make up the idols — the brands and shapely surfaces — of the marketplace. Or, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (cited in Fullerton, 11).

KRISTEVA (wanders out of a Huge Digital Mirror rolled on stage, dragging along Benveniste as Pozzo drags Lucky in Beckett’s Godot):

After reviewing the various etymological interpretations, he [Benveniste] argues that from the beginning credo/ sraddha had both a religious meaning and an economic meaning: the word denotes an “act of confidence implying restitution,” and “to pledge something on faith in the certainty that it will be returned,” religiously and economically. Thus the correspondence between credence and credit is one of “the oldest in the Indo-European vocabulary” (Kristeva, 30).

NARRATOR (after a commercial break, rejoins): It is in the context of late nineteenth-century capitalism and industrialism that Nietzsche wrote his famous Madman passage, and it seems clear now that he was more describing the actual religion of Europe than attacking traditional theology (which he of course does elsewhere). He is certainly shattering the illusion of transcendental spirituality that still functions as an ideological justification of capitalist culture: those who are wealthy are so because god has smiled on them for their hard work, and the poor are being punished for their laziness, a sentiment worthy of Ronald Reagan or of his devotee, presidential-hopeful Pat Buchanan. At the same time, however, he is challenging the devotees of the power and progress, and the church of the consumer which would emerge from their faith, to offer an alternative to their alienated idolatry.

BATAILLE (enters from the same sub-stage sepulchre as Foucault, humming nine inch nails’ “Closer,” in French; erotic dancing breaks out, along with an extraordinary laser light show, in the audience, which appears in the ghostly light of the beams and skeins, as a complex web of reveling shadows, like so many organelles pulsing to the musical heartbeat; he begins by citing Nietzsche):

“The majority of people are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. In this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them . . . .”

 

But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? . . . Whoever acts, substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is glory of the state or the triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesn’t act, and isn’t specialized; it’s specialized when gobbling up flies! . . . (On Nietzsche, xxi-xxii)

BATESON (appearing instantly projected on a stage skein by the NIN laser light apparatus, raising a Lucky Strike, interjects):

 
Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical and causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all, it may be money or power. (Steps, 440)

NARRATOR (offering him a light):

 
So the operation of what you call “conscious purpose” is akin to the machinations of instrumentalism whose grammar depends on the bifurcation of subjects and objects: the self, the subject, delineating objects which it desires and appropriating — making use of — them technologically to achieve its end?

BATAILLE (thumbing a copy of Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime):

 
The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object . . . Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal — what’s normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal. Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. (On Nietzsche, xxvii)

BATESON: (Ruminating on Adam and Eve’s discovery of conscious purpose — the linear logic of objectification — and its ecological consequences.):

 
Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D. They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic nature. After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared . . . (Steps, 441) (stops to take a draw on his Lucky)

BATAILLE (aside, to Bateson, “Could I have one of those?”):

 
The use of the word God is deceptive therefore; it results in the distortion of its object, of the sovereign Being, between the sovereignty of an ultimate end, implied in the movement of language, and the servitude of means, on which it is based (this is defined as serving that, and so on . . .). God, the end of things, is caught up in the game that makes each thing the means of another. In other words, God, named as the end, becomes a thing insofar as he is named, a thing, put on the plane with all things. (The Accursed Share, III, 382-383)

BATESON (laconically):

 
Be that as it may. Adam went on pursuing his purposes and finally invented the free-enterprise system. Eve was not, for a long time, allowed to participate in this because she was a woman. But she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate. (Steps, 442)

NARRATOR (intoning chorally): Amen.

Event-Scene II: Situation: War Rages

A neon sign blinks on and off at the rear of the stage, signalling the band’s return after a break:

The Neocapitalist Imagology of the Sacred
                   or
  Bush Does Baghdad:  The TV Mini-Series

TAYLOR AND SAARINEN ( sound biting their way out of a bubble):

Media philosophy rejects analytics in favor of communication. Explosive, outrageous communication is the lifeblood of hope in the world of simulacra, bureaucracy and collapsing ecosystems (Imagologies, 9).

NIETZSCHE (glowing demonic red as he prepares his anti-sermon):

I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all corruptions. . . . To abolish any stress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it created distress to eternalize itself . . . .
Parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anemia, of “holiness,” draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed — against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself.  (The Antichrist, sec. 62)

ALSO SPRACH REZNOR (apparently regarding his uncle, Sam):

   he sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see
      he tries to tell me what i put inside of me
        he has the answers to ease my curiosity
     he dreamed a god up and called it christianity
           your god is dead and no one cares
         if there is a hell i'll see you there
he flexed his muscles to keep his flock of sheep in line
   he made a virus that would kill off all the swine
   his perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain
   demands devotion atrocities done in his name . . .
     "heresy" (nine inch nails, The Downward Spiral)

NARRATOR (feeling uneasily like an academic sheep on the way to the slaughter):

 
The images of Christian sanctimoniousness conjoined with those of capitalism, technological power and American beneficence, abound in the United States today, and do a great deal to shape the imaginations of the public. The more subtle consumer iconography of the mall we have already described, but the explicit imagery of fundamentalist Christianity is worth focusing on, for it is the bastion of perhaps the chief antagonist to creating a culture devoted to life — “conservatism” — the euphemism used to describe the radical brand of corporate empowerment and public impoverishment that is now avidly sweeping the people of the US into that bin of victims and exploitees called the Third World. The spirit of what Nietzsche would see as the religion of death is nowhere more apparent than in George Bush’s orchestration of Christian devotion in support of the TV opera, “The Gulf War,” aptly described by Baudrillard as “pornographic” in a Der Spiegel interview.

KELLNER (is led in chains by the Texas Rangers, since he has been associated with a drunken Frenchman speeding through the tumbleweeds and making dubious pronouncements about their beloved America; even though Kellner protests that he is mostly a critic of the mad Frenchman, this distinction is lost on the Rangers, who, in the meantime are suspiciously eying the book, The Persian Gulf TV War, which is almost mistaken for a special issue of TV Guide: then Kellner begins to read aloud):

A minister appearing on CNN’s Sonia Frieman show after the war on March 1 [1991] properly said that it was literally blasphemous for Bush to invoke the name of God in favor of his murderous war policies. But Bush continued to play the war and religion theme, telling the annual gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention on June 6, 1991, that he recalled praying at Camp David before ordering the start of the Gulf war. According to the New York Times (June 7, 1991), Bush wiped tears away from his eyes as he described praying before ordering the bombing that began the war against Iraq and the 23,000 delegates roared their approval, stood up and shouted “Amen!” Bush was on a political trip, trying to cement alliances with “conservative, church-oriented Republicans whom he and his advisers see as crucial to his political strength” [NYT A7] (Kellner, 279-280, n. 15).

NARRATOR (trying not to make ALL Christians feel like Unabombers):

 
Clearly, not all Christians are worshippers of death, as Nietzsche’s analysis of the Evangel indicates. But the virulent American strain of “conservative church-oriented Republicans” clearly find the death, at least of officially demonized OTHERS, quite appealing. Thus Kellner also details the imagological demonization of Saddam Hussein, as part of Bush’s sanctimonious warmongering, with the full compliance by major media whose function Chomsky appropriately describes in his title, Manufacturing Consent.

KELLNER (reads on, in spite of the fact that a burly Ranger from Waco is approaching him with a roll of tape):

From the outset of the crisis in the Gulf, the media employed the frame of popular culture that portrays conflict as a battle between good and evil. Saddam Hussein quickly became the villain in this scenario with the media vilifying the Iraqi leader as a madman, a Hitler, while whipping up anti-Iraqi war fever. Saddam was described by Mary McGrory as a “beast” (Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1990) and as a “monster” that “Bush may have to destroy” (Newsweek, Oct. 20, 1990, and Sept. 3, 1990). George Will called Saddam “more virulent” than Mussolini and then increased Hussein’s evil by using the Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor in his syndicated columns. New York Times editorialist A.M. Rosenthal attacked Hussein as “barbarous” and “an evil dreamer of death” (Aug. 9, 1990) . . . The New Republic doctored a Time magazine cover photo on Saddam to make him appear more like Hitler. . . . Saddam’s negative image was forged by a combination of rhetoric, popular culture demonology, and Manichean metaphysics that presented the Gulf crisis as a struggle between good and evil.” (62-63; see Kellner’s note 1, p. 104, on the “Manichean frames of U.S. popular culture.”)

SAID (rather tattered and powder burned from an untimely visit to friends in Iraq, though he seems as one used to being stepped on, like that storybook Palestinian Jesus, who had a similar view of Roman power; he arrives smoking a Camel and wearing a placard saying, RIDING ELEPHANTS IS EGOTISTICAL, and reads from his tome, Culture and Imperialism):

Historically the American, and perhaps generally the Western, media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural context. Arabs are only an attenuated recent example of Others who have incurred the wrath of a stern White Man, a kind of Puritan superego whose errand into the wilderness knows few boundaries and who will go to great lengths indeed to make his points. Yet of course the word “imperialism” was a conspicuously missing ingredient in American discussions about the Gulf. (295)

NARRATOR (who has just bought a virtual pachyderm, which he has ridden confidently on stage, proclaims righteously):

 
The worship of death and the “Christian” obligation to support the blood-feast of massacre, demonstrably felt by Bush’s “conservativechurch-going Republicans,” is the expectable outcome of a cultural persona that is committed to imposing its language-of-self on a world of Others of whom it is Paranoid (another glance to the Pit here) so that it sees its mission as one of Imperial Self-Defense: Orwellian Double Speak par excellence! (Resounding silence, then . . . )

BATESON (wanders back on stage from the dark, in flannels and smoking another Lucky, muttering “seventy some years on this fucking planet are enough;” he challenges the audience, still reverberating from The Downward Spiral, to take an “ecological step” and see here the cultural expression of a religion that is projected down to the fundamentals of Western “science” — especially to the Darwinian selection of the “unit of survival” in evolution as “the individual or set of conspecifics” instead of the communicative organism-environment relationship):

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. (Steps, 468)

PLATO (apparently roused from 2,000 or so years of stony sleep by the unbearably earthly tone of Bateson’s remarks, not to mention by the irritation of all the NIN din, arrives from OUTSIDE to offer his longstanding view that mind and body, “god” and “nature” must be kept separate, for the object of the philosophical quest is precisely the separation of the soul from the body):

Therefore is death anything other than the separation of the soul from the body? And [is it not so] that death is this, the body becoming separate from the soul and alone by itself, as well as the soul coming to be alone by itself separate from the body? (64C4-8)

NARRATOR (trying now to improve on the Ancients, yet disaffected from the Moderns — who may as well be seen as gangs competing for intellectual turf — attempts to explain, from a newly constructed post on the frontier of modernity, simply represented on stage by a soap box):

 
Plato’s language — one which separates soma, “body” from psyche, “soul” indicates etymologically that the religion of death is already here: for, as Snell points out in The Discovery of the Mind, the original meaning of soma, in Homer, is “corpse,” the inert body devoid of life. Psyche, congruently, means “breath,” and hence “life breath,” and is often translated by the Latin anima, at the base of words like “animate” and “animal”: living things (Snell, 16-17). The separation of the one from the other, so that each is alone by itself, is, as we pointed out earlier, the apex of the Socratic-Platonic philosophical quest: to die, to exist as an entity alone by itself. This is the culmination of the Western, ultimately the American Dream, externalized as the Utopian Republic of Disney to which, prophetically, the visionary neoimperial epithet “World” is added. So the NeoChristian Genie of the Living Dead produces a new evolution of Faustian Creatura: synthetic replicants, Event-Scenes, robots, creations without originals, simulacra in ever more fantastic and insidious forms, including in part your Manichean Narrator, programmed to serve their idol: the spectral SELF in its utopian politeia. Nietzsche, as a classical scholar, saw all this clearly, and had the foresight to reveal it genealogically right down to the deep cultural logic of Platonic software.

This imageology of the neocapitalist sacred is wrought subtly and insidiously in the realm of information technology, especially artifical intelligence and virtual reality. For as the television mini-series Wild Palms tried to indicate, the image-generating and intelligence-projecting power of these new media may be used for the most diabolical ends: the conjuring of “immortal” “leaders,” “commanders,”a new priesthood that fulfills in the key of high technology the traditional priestly mission as described by Nietzsche. It is the role of the priesthood to maintain themselves, their unilateral, hierarchic power over the populace, particularly by manipulating the imagery of the sacred which is actually a projection of their own egotism, their own acquisitiveness, into the absolute, so making it unassailable. “Religion has debased the concept man,’ Nietzsche writes, “its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through the act of grace –” (Will to Power, sec. 136). This “grace” is mediated, dispensed, by the priesthood, in the old Church between god and man, in the new capitalist information order between the mysteries of nature, the genie-like powers unleashed from the electromagnetic spectrum through the architecture of cybernetic minds, into the public sphere as a series of technological breakthroughs, “miracles,” the demonstrated powers of the scientist magicians who work for the priesthood and affirm their power. “Priests are the actors of something superhuman which they have to make easily perceptible, whether it be in the nature of ideals, gods or saviors” Nietzsche continues, “. . . to make everything as believable as possible they have to go as far as possible in posturing and posing,” projecting their personae in the forms of pseudo public officials, epitomized by Ronald Reagan, who read the Word handed down by the priests from a script designed — literally by market research — to be a stimulus for statistically predictable responses from the image-consuming public.

Those who doubt this need only watch Bill Moyers’ four-part PBS series: The Public Mind (see especially part 2), where the transformation of the electorate from citizens into consumers is detailed. WHO ARE the alleged priests of the late capitalist information order? One need look no farther, initially, than a Frontline documentary, “The Best Campaign Money Can Buy,” released just before the last US presidential election (October 27, 1992), which deftly shows that both the Democrats and Republicans successfully courted many of THE VERY SAME INTERESTS for campaign funding. The script of the new order is read by Republican or Democrat, yet the play is very similar. The drama of the Christian right, however, threatens to unleash a new LEVEL, even a new QUALITY, of repression “at home,” very similar to that practiced by the US and its sympathizers abroad: a monological game of self-righteously exploiting or destroying the other: from the Iraqis to Nicaraguans to any and every living being that would hinder the manifest destiny of the chosen religion; to ACT — employ American Christian Terrorism — to translate the biosphere into sprawling urban real estate — the suburbs and ghettos of the multinational New Atlantis epitomized in Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil and, for Übermädchen particularly, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (novel and film). Hence we feel obliged to write the “Acts of the Electronic Apostles,” a book chronicling the sanctimonious behavior of the New Christian Right, in the Techno-Evangelical Scriptures of the new Totalitarian Ordo Saeculorum for Terror and Ecclesiastical Racism through the Orwellian News Ethernet — TESTOSTERONE (Studies in Post Christianity by the Orlando Circle, I, Authors, forthcoming. We are considering — instead of Ordo Saeculorum, which means “order of the Generations” or, as in Rome, of imperial succession, hence suggesting the New World Order — employing the phrase Ordo Saecularium, which would be the Order of the Secular Games as in the Late Empire: we take this to suggest the Super Bowl.)

KELLNER (hearing all this talk about the Imperial Games, blurts out, his voice muffled by tape which the Rangers have thoughtfully, if incompetently, put over his mouth — a trick they learned from watching reruns of the Chicago Seven Trial and the taping of Bobby Seal — manages to blurt: “During the Super Bowl weekend of January 25-26 [1991] patriotism, flag waving, and support for the war were encouraged by Bush and the media.” Spitting the tape out altogether, his anger giving him almost the power of the Übermensch, Kellner intones):

The football fans at home, in turn, were rooting for the troops while watching the game. One sign said: “Slime Saddam” and a barely verbal fan told the TV cameras that “he’s messin’ with the wrong people,” while fan after fan affirmed his or her support for the troops. One of the teams wore yellow ribbons on their uniforms and the football stars went out of their way to affirm support for the troops and/or the war. Halftime featured mindless patriotic gore, with a young, blonde Aryan boy singing to the troops “you’re my heroes,” while fans waved flags, formed a human flag, and chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”, reminding one of the fascist spectacles programmed by the Nazis to bind the nation into a patriotic community. (258)

BAUDRILLARD (driving on stage in his Cadillac with overblown tires, borrowed from Hunter Thompson, with whom he studied in Las Vegas, still a little tipsy from his foray across Texas and on the run not only from the Rangers, who luckily for Baudrillard have got the wrong man, but also from the Moral Majority whose mythic persona has recently been renewed as a kind of halo around Congress, manages to say):

We live in a culture which strives to return to each of us full responsibility for his own life. The moral responsibility inherited from the Christian tradition has thus been augmented, with the help of the whole modern apparatus of information and communication, by the requirement that everybody should be answerable for every aspect of their lives. What this amounts to is an expulsion of the other, who has indeed become perfectly useless in the context of a programmed management of life, a regimen where everything conspires to buttress the autarchy of the individual cell. (165)

NARRATOR (trying to deflect the attention of the Rangers from one of his (their) favorite post-philosophers, fearing his mouth will be taped shut, raises a question he hopes will resonate in police ears):

 
But are the “captains” of multinational corporations really in control of their dominions — notice that the New Atlantis of Brazil and Handmaid’s Tale is contested by forces of REBELLION — or do they work for new, emerging entities that are truly godlike insofar as they transcend the powers of their priests fully to understand and conceivably to control them?

MUMFORD (who is rolled onto stage sitting in the top story of a skyscraper, with barred windows, where he’s been imprisoned by the inquisition of “the priests of the megamachine,” as he calls them, stewards of the emerging powers of cybernetically controlled megatechnology after Word War II; he voices his concerns about the genies of technology):

The new megamachine, in the act of being made over on an advanced technological model, also brought into existence the ultimate decision-maker and Divine King, in a transcendent, electronic form: the Central Computer. As the true earthly representative of the Sun God, the computer had first been invented . . . to facilitate astronomical calculations. In the conversion of Babbage’s clumsy half-built model into a fantastically rapid electro-mechanism, whose movable parts are electric charges, celestial electronics replaced celestial mechanics and gave this exquisite device its authentic divine characteristics: omnipresence and invisibility. (Pentagon of Power, 272-273)

NARRATOR (helpfully chorusing):

 
The megamachine is nominally run by two classes, the technical specialists or technocrats and the presidents of corporations or Commanders, the magicians and priesthood of celestial electronics.

ARTHUR KROKER (of the Canadian gang, arrives in the digital mirror but, like a Poltergeist, from the OTHER SIDE, to recount his recent visit to the research labs of the emerging technology, a euphemism for the Fields of the Dead):

To visit these labs is a singularly depressing experience. Singularly astonishing to realize how sophisticated the development of demonic power in the hands of the technocrats has become; and singularly depressing to realize that the technocrats are immensely pleased to abandon their selves, abandon their bodies, abandon any kind of individuation of emotion as quickly as possible. These are really Dead Souls. But at the same time they are dead souls with real missionary zeal — because they equate technology with religion and they call it freedom. (82)

NARRATOR:

 
What is even more disturbing is the expansion of religious awe on the part of the public, at least the believers, to the realms not only of the arts, which is understandable in a culture otherwise bereft of meaning, but into politics and science as well.

NIETZSCHE:

The wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms: but growing enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and generated a thorough mistrust of it; therefore, feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by enlightenment, throws itself into art; in certain instances, into political life, too, indeed, even directly into science. Where one perceives a loftier, darker coloration to human endeavors, one may assume that the fear of spirits, the smell of incense, and the shadow of churches have remained attached to them. (Human, All too Human, sec. 150)

NARRATOR:

 
These are the new altars where the new priests stand, their technocrats staging televised, even virtual, miracles, altars outfitted with cellular telefaxes, to get the WORD directly from HEADQUARTERS, and the Artificial Intelligence inside, before whom the CEO’s sit, fused with their terminals, trying to embody the cybernetic spirit of the times.

But it’s just possible for hackers armed with Nietzsche to slip a few alternative texts into the “mind” of this cyberbeast, to loose a little creative chaos into its programmatic ideals, liven it up a little, so that the words appearing on the telefax have a different ring, and the priests, the technocrats and, yes, the Herd of devotees in the telechurch will be shocked back into life. As Taylor and Saarinen observe, “Foucault is right when he notes that the western tradition is unusual in its limitation of art works to external physical products that are exhibited in museums. Media philosophy insists that one must take his or her life seriously as being-for-the-other in the space of spectacle. You speak to others and to yourself through the media” (9). So we do NOT suggest spreading computer viruses and other forms of infosabotage–the tools of literal-minded war. We prefer, instead, an electronic Renaissance inspired not by the distanced observer of linear perspective around whom the arts, sciences and religion of Modernity were centered, but rather by the jouissance commensurate with recognizing “ourselves” as participants in the Dionysian-Appolinian creativity of the ecological mind. This Daimon is well played not by God but rather by none other than Nietzsche, just arriving at the electronic Altar.

Event-Scene III: The Dionysia

          The Devotee of Life or
God Quits Moralizing, Gets a Gender Change
                    and
        Cultivates a Sense of Humor

ZEN BUDDHIST: “The miracle is to walk upon the earth.” REZNOR:

i want to fuck you like an animal
  my whole existence is flawed
    you get me closer to god
(nine inch nails, "closer", downward spiral)

NARRATOR (As the music fades to a faint pulse):

 
The God of the European tradition was an imperious moralizer, looking down on his children below, pointing a threatening finger at sinners, handing down the law, allowing no revisions. The specter of God the Father has haunted European culture like the Ghost of Hamlet Senior, compelling it to violence and retribution in the Oedipal cycle of the patriarchic nuclear family: male struggle for power within hierarchic structure, One king dominates kingdom just as One god rules the cosmos; one father, in heaven as in the family, ruling over his wife and children; a son who must in turn overcome the father to take his own position beside the surrogate mother, his wife or queen, to complete the cycle of the generations. The transformation of social relationships by the deconstructing of traditional oppositions, the rewriting of the cultural text in terms that are immanent and differential instead of hierarchic and classificatory, is precisely Nietzsche’s goal in his critique of religion. It is furthermore to this Oedipal religion that Nietzsche, significantly, counterpoises the genuine evangel:

NIETZSCHE:

In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin” — any distance separating God and man — is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality — the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguished the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently.

 

The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than this practice — nor was his death anything else. He no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with God — not even prayer. He broke with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the practice of life that one feels “divine” . . . . (The Antichrist, sec. 33)

OTTO (Wearing one of those T-shirts with a tuxedo serigraphed on the front, on one lapel of which, in bright green, appears the word “numinous,” and on the other in a comparable hue of pink, appears “pleroma,” and on the cummerbund, bright yellow, lights “predicate,” which from its flashing we take to be an imperative, like “fornicate:” think “pleroma is numinous;” on the back of his T, invisible to the audience and even to one of our personalities, flash “phenomenal” and “creatura,” with a similar imperative):

The truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. (28)

NARRATOR:

 
This conception of the holy as “wholly other,” as ever “beyond” (epekeina), as it appears in Otto’s analysis, is isomorphic with the Christian notion of a godhead transcending the limits of the human, before which the devotee is stricken with awe, not only with wonder but often with the power and presence of majesty, and so with chill and fear; as Rilke remarks in the Duino Elegies, “Every Angel is Fearsome [schrecklich].”

All of this makes Nietzsche’s challenge to traditional theology, to the idea of a transcendent god, of extraneous numina, even more radical. He would, on our reading, deconstruct the “wholly other” of the divine, the semeiotic bifurcation and opposition of devotee and god, soul and almighty, earth and heaven, evil and good, to present the priests — of the Catholic Church as of Multinational Corporation (which includes the varieties of Protestantism, as their ultimate catholic form) — with a startling challenge: “Quit pretending that you are on one side of the semeiotic divide between phenomena and noumena, altar and its divine reference, and god is on the other: realize that you are none other than Him (Her?) pretending not to be! True power is not the use of the holy to wow the congregation but to wake yourselves and them up to the presence of mystery, of unlimited creative power, here and now. ‘You’ and ‘God’ are characters in the play of culture, and now that the secret is out, yes, god IS dead as a separate Entity, so the art of world making, become the art of culture making (Kulturmachen), resides in the communicative activities of “human beings” who are self-designating numina.” This is the meaning of the Zen maxim with which the section begins, “The miracle is to walk upon the earth.” Nietzsche’s visit to the altar brings God, the gods, the angels, crashing down onto the pages of the holy telefax, revealing them as the communicative signs of an extraordinary mind whose been having trouble with alienation for a couple of thousand years, so badly that He went into business and tried to forget His troubles via material gains, and when He failed at that tried to commit suicide by creating industrial civilization, and has been trying to e-mail himself to a heaven conjured by the new Christian Information Network (CIN), but who now may be obliged, with His life flashing before His eyes on the divine video monitor (right next to the holy fax), to wake up.

BATAILLE (Who, inverting the logic of Clinton, inhales his borrowed Lucky without smoking it):
Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there’s no separating anything now. An entire human being is partly a clown, partly God, partly crazy . . and is transparence. (On Nietzsche, xxix)

NARRATOR: An evangel, beyond, including, Good and Evil? God and the Devil in a new, immanent polymorphous savoir.

BATAILLE:

 
I’ve already said it: the practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I can’t distribute it or let it serve the interests of good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I can’t acquire anything at all: I can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone’s interest. (On Nietzsche, xxvii)

NARRATOR: So YOU are the evangel? Hypocrite!

BATAILLE (Giving a bow of thanks to the Narrator for this praise of his acting skills):

 
Apparently the moral problem took “shape” in Nietzsche in the following way: for Christianity the good is God, but the converse is true: God is limited to the category of the good that is manifested in man’s utility, but for Nietzsche that which is sovereign is good, but God is dead (His servility killed Him), so man is morally bound to be sovereign. Man is thought (language), and he can be sovereign only through a sovereign thought. (Accursed Share, III, 381).

DERRIDA (Appearing as a Cheshire apparition on a skein, croons of Nietzsche on language, truth, art, dissimulation — and women):

 
Here I stand in the midst of the surging of the breakers . . . — from all sides there is howling, threatening, crying, and screaming at me, while in the lowest depths the old earth shaker sings his aria . . . monsters tremble at the sound. Then suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before the portal of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant, — a great sailing ship (Segelschiff) gliding silently along like a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what enchantment it seizes me! What? Has all the repose and silence in the world embarked here (sich hier eingeschifft)? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier ego, my second immortalized self . . . As a ghost — like, calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping neutral being (Mittelwesen)? Similar to the ship, which, with its white sails, like an immense butterfly, passes over the dark sea. Yes! Pass over existence! (Über das Dasein hinlaufen!) That is it! (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style, 42-45)

NARRATOR (Mock heroic in tone, here, and split into two voices):

 
Who is that at the wheel of Nietzsche’s dissimulating schooner, traversing the Middle Way between creatura and pleroma, self and other, life and death, information and noise, order and chaos, so gracefully on the differential waves of semeiosis? It is none other than the Femme de l’écriture cybernétique, the steerswoman from hell — WHO?

CIXOUS (Whose NIN T-shirt now lights with the day glow letters, l’écriture féminine, and when she turns to look astern, lights, in English, with TANK GIRL):

 
“Writing offers the means to overcome separation and death, to give yourself what you would want God-if-he-existed to give you’” (Coming to Writing, 4).

DERRIDA (Peering at Cixous’ fluctuating image, and the magnificent ship she commands, remarks): Woman, mistress, Nietzsche’s woman mistress, at times resembles Penthesilea. (Spurs, 53).

CIXOUS:

 
And she, Penthesilea, cuts through his [Achilles’ — Nietzsche’s?] armor, and she touches him, she finally takes her shining bird, she loves it mortally, it is not a man that has come into her bare hands, it is more the very body of love than any man, and its voice as well, which she cruelly makes her own . . . She hurls herself wildly toward the end of love; eating Achilles, incorporating him, devouring him with kisses. The space of metaphor has collapsed, fantasies are carried out. Why not? (121)

NARRATOR (a little embarrassed by all those devouring kisses, drawls):

 
Sounds like Cixous says of Achilles (Nietzsche?) what Nietzsche says of schooners (women?): “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” as John Lennon, then wearing a WALRUS SUIT, once remarked.

CIXOUS (After a remarkable rendition of “Goo Goo Ga Joob” au français):

 
Yes, all is well, beyond History. Where Achilles is comprehended within Penthesilea, whom he comprehends beyond any calculation. . .

(Aside to Nietzsche, and Reznor): How to love a woman without encountering death? A woman who is neither doll nor corpse nor dumb nor weak. But beautiful, lofty, powerful, brilliant?
Without history’s making one feel its law of hatred?
So the betrothed fall back into dust. Vengeance of castration, always at work, and which the wounded poet can surmount only in fiction. (121)

REZNOR: . . . my whole existence is flawed.

BATAILLE (Apparently commenting both on nine inch nails’ and Cixous’ writing practices):

 
Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I’m leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We’re brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a “questioning” of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. (Guilty, 109)

NARRATOR:

 
Yet, the Woman, like Nietzsche’s Madman, is surrounded by believers in the Almighty’s transcendent Word whose seriousness is unassailable. Nevertheless, as Clément says of the Sorceress & Hysteric who is a template for “the newly born woman:”

But she, she who made Satan, who made everything — good and evil, who smiled on so many things, on love, sacrifices, crimes . . . ! What becomes of her? There she is, alone on the empty heath . . . .” And that is when she takes off — laughing. (Newly Born Woman, 32)

Event-Scene IV: Encore

       The Philosophy of Laughter:
                    or
Adam Flushes Money and Eve Ditches Bridge
            when they discover
                Jouissance

BATESON (In a story-teller fashion that he learned both at home and in New Guinea):

                    Dunkett's Rat-Trap:

Mr. Dunkett found all his traps fail one after another,
and he was in such despair at the way the corn got eaten
that he resolved to invent a rat-trap.  He began by
putting himself as nearly as possible in the rat's place.

"Is there anything," he asked himself, "in which, if I
were a rat, I should have such complete confidence that
I could not suspect it without suspecting everything in
the world and being unable henceforth to move fearlessly
in any direction?"

"Drain Pipes," [came the answer one night in an
illuminating flash]

Then he saw his way.  To suspect a common drainpipe would
be to cease to be a rat. [So] a spring was to be concealed
inside [of the trap], but . . . the pipe was to be open
at both ends; if the pipe were closed at one end, a rat
would naturally not like going into it, for he would not
feel sure of being able to get out again; on which I
[Butler] interrupted and said:

"Ah, it was just this which stopped me from going into
the Church."

When he [Butler] told me this I [Jones] knew what was
in his mind, and that, if he had not been in such
respectable company, he would have said:  "It was just
this which stopped me from getting married." (Jones,
Samuel Butler: A Memoir, vol. 1; cited in Bateson,
Steps 238)

NIETZSCHE (Twirling one end of his, even in Longinian terms “awesome,” moustache):

 
To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth — to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that. Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition “the species is everything, one is always none” has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only “gay science” (fröliche Wissenschaft) will then be left. (Gay Science, Ch. I, sec. 1)

BATAILLE (Looking up from a stage copy of Tank Girl comics):

 
Nonmeaning normally is a simple negation and is said of an object to be canceled. . . But if I say nonmeaning with the opposite intention, in the sense of nonsense, with the intention of searching for an object free of meaning, I don’t deny anything. But I make an affirmation in which all life is clarified in consciousness. Whatever moves toward this consciousness of totality, toward this total friendship of humanness and humanity for itself, is quite correctly held to be lacking a basic seriousness. (On Nietzsche, (xxx).

NIETZSCHE (Throwing a spitball at a poster of Hobbes, “. . . that philosopher who, being a real Englishman, tried to bring laughter into ill repute among all thinking men . . . ,” hanging off stage):

 
I should actually risk an order of rank among philosophers depending on the rank of their laughter — all the way up to those capable of golden laughter. (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 295)

NARRATOR:

 
It is significant that Umberto Eco, in The Name of The Rose, represents medieval Christendom as being dependent on the suppression of laughter, which would be validified by the discovery of a secret manuscript, the work on comedy written by the ultimate authority of the Gothic Church, Aristotle. If any qualities most distinctly mark Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian cultural text, they are iconoclasm and laughter.

Eco aptly describes the subversive power of Aristotle’s lost work on comedy, particularly his remark in the Poetics that the comic mask distorts the features of characters it represents:

Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. (491)

CLÉMENT (Smiling as she recalls her sorceress-hysteric): “She laughs, and it’s frightening — like Medusa’s laugh — petrifying and shattering constraint” (32).

BATAILLE (chuckling, possibly at Tank Girl as a “hysteric” with the nonsense to fight back):

 
To destroy transcendence, there has to be laughter. Just as children left alone with the frightening beyond that is in themselves are suddenly aware of their mother’s playful gentleness and answer her with laughter: in much the same way, as my relaxed innocence perceives trembling as play, I break out laughing, illuminated, laughing all the more from having trembled. (On Nietzsche, 55)

NARRATOR (Uncompromisingly serious):

 
If the semeiotics of laughter require that it transform — in Aristotle’s language, “distort,” in Clément’s “shatter” — the truth it represents, how does it accomplish its task? Structurally, laughter is akin to play, and the kinesic sign, “This is laughter” may be compared to the sign, “This is play.” In Gregory Bateson’s language, the latter sentence may be translated, “These actions in which we now engage, do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” Or, in other words, “These actions do not mean what they would mean if they were serious.” This indicates that “This is play” is a metamessage about communication at a lower level of abstraction, a lower logical type, and that the effect of the metamessage is partly to negate, undermine, “distort,” the meaning of the behavior referred to. So play fighting is not real fighting, the “nip” is not the “bite,” as Bateson remarks, though it uses identifiable aspects of the bite as an abstract sign indicating a metacommunicative bond, an understanding, between the players (Steps, 180). If Bateson is right the paradoxical shift of the messages of literal behavior into those of play, which require the constant oscillation between the literal message suggested by the nip and its negation (the nip is both bite and not-bite) is fundamental to the creation of social life and culture. As Anthony Wilden points out, regarding Lévi-Strauss, the familial roles established by the incest taboo in the development of human society are in fact forms of play in Bateson’s sense: a “brother” is a male who is not a male, a mate, for a “sister,” who is a female who is not a female, a mate, for her brother, and so on (System & Structure, 250-251). So, what about laughter?

In “our” (admittedly schizoid and to this degree ecstatically narrative) view, extending Nietzsche’s and Eco’s, and possibly Aristotle’s, representation of the matter, laughter performs a role closely related to that of play: To laugh at the literal behavior of other characters in the social drama, is to change the truth value of what those characters do so as to undermine its seriousness, its claim to veracity, to authority, and so to call it into question. One must not laugh in church, or at the Emperor, for this would undermine its/his claim to power. “Laughter breaks up, breaks out, splashes over . . . ,” says Clément (33). This is why Dunkett’s Rat Trap is taken as a metaphor for the “trap” of metaphysics by Butler: the closed drain pipe of transcendent truth and the indissoluble bonds of “church” and “marriage”; yet the humor evoked by the story disarms the trap. So, also, to laugh at oneself is to undermine one’s own claim to seriousness, one’s claim to know the truth, to be substantial. Yet it is also to become a fabricator, a maker of new forms, in Haraway’s view, to become a Medusan “cyborg.”

HARAWAY:

Inhabiting my writing are peculiar boundary creatures — simians, cyborgs, and women — all of which have had a destabilizing place in Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the verb to demonstrate. Monsters signify. . . . the power- differentiated and highly contested modes of being of monsters may be signs of possible worlds — and they are surely signs of worlds for which “we” are responsible. (22)

NARRATOR:

 
To laugh at “the truth,” as Nietzsche would have and, what is more, “to laugh out of the whole truth,” is “monstrous,” signifying the shortcomings and the creative possibilities of civilization; it is ultimately to proclaim the indeterminacy, the paradox, the constantly shifting meanings of play, as the condition humaine: to be human is to play; that’s how character and culture are formed. The sudden recognition of this, as in the story of Dunkett, provokes laughter. As Nietzsche says in Human, All too Human, referencing (laughing at/with?) Plato: “Seriousness is play. . . . all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless . . . “(sec. 628; Plato, Republic, 10.604b). To practice this philosophy is to ally wisdom with laughter to produce the unfettered self-writing that Cixous and Clément call jouissance or, in Nietzsche’s terms, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, the “Joyous Science.”

This has important implications for the devotee, as well as the philosopher, for laughter is not only to be allied with wisdom as with the holy, but also with “you” and “me.”

NIETZSCHE (Straight faced): Zarathustra says,

So learn to laugh away over yourselves!  Lift up
your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher!  And
do not forget good laughter.  This crown of him
who laughs, this rose-wreath crown:  to you, my
brothers, I throw this crown.  Laughter I have
pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh!
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV,
sec. 20.)

NARRATOR (Chorus-like in his conclusive tone):

 
And so, when Nietzsche arrives at the altar as bishop or philosopher king, expect him to kneel, remove his crown, and toss it over his shoulder, with a chuckle, directly into your devoted hands. In case you don’t get the message, he might say, Don’t worship god, Play him, but remember, to BREAK the fundamental rule of seriousness, especially with regard to your new self —

NIETZSCHE (Breaking in for the last word, to state the rule that must be broken):

 
“There is something at which it is absolutely forbidden to laugh” (Gay Science, I, sec. 1).

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Stephen Barker

School of the Arts
University of California-Irvine
sfbarker@uci.edu

I. Parallax: Toward a Nietzschean Genealogy of the Paramodern Fragment

To attempt any genealogy, let alone a Nietzschean one, of the kind of fragment one confronts in Nietzsche, Derrida, Blanchot, and Beckett, and to do so within the context of the faux-postmodern,¹ is to invite more and less obvious problems of orchestration, content, and performativity. Since my desire is to demonstrate the effect of the paramodern fragment and its vertiginous effect, from philosophy to “literature,” I will desire here instead to move a poiesis of the conception and the use of this disruptive and transgressive site; at this site we will discover a poetic Nietzschean and a critique of what Derrida in Truth in Painting calls the parergonal, as a parasite, and thus marginal and contiguous to something — something that may be a nothing — ostensibly not in any margin, a fragmentary circularity.

What is the work of which the marginal, the parergonal, the fragmentary, is outside? How is one to map this exchange, of terms and of texts, and how will this economy of the marginal, the transgressive, the nameless, or unnamable, operate within the aestheticized space of writing and reading?

The work required to address these questions, adumbrated in Nietzsche’s questions at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, is the work of philosophy:

The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect — what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! . . . until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? (1)

For Nietzsche, the nature of the philosophical enterprise, which is simultaneously a poetic exercise, is imbued with the interrogation of the “strange,” the “wicked,” and the “questionable.” The work of philosophy is a ubiquitous vielleicht, the “perhaps” of the circular question of value. In Nietzsche’s own work, when “we finally come to a complete stop” we are, like Heraclitus, just beginning to revalue the stasis by which our questioning is marked. These opening fragments of Beyond Good and Evil have come to fascinate Derrida more and more in recent years, with their implicit questions not only of truth and value but of the transgressive desire for untruththat transparently shines through the cruder truth-questions with which we seem to occupy ourselves. This subtler work is addressed by Derrida as work to

economize on the abyss: not only save oneself from falling into the bottomless depths by weaving and folding the cloth to infinity, textual art of the reprise, multiplication of patches within patches, but also establish the laws of appropriation, formalize the rules which constrain the logic of the abyss and which shuttle between the economic and the aneconomic, the raising and the fall, the abyssal operation which can only work toward the reléve and that in it which regularly reproduces collapse. (Truth in Painting 37)

But the collapse of the abyssal operation, described in such vertiginous language by Derrida (as both a fall and relève) does not and cannot occur, as Derrida shows, because of the laws of formalization beyond which the law, and the articulation of the law, cannot go, and which must therefore remain the nameless name. The fall and the relève are both consummate transgressions, by which the law of genre, and thus of aculturation, is formed. In Derrida’s elliptical shard, as he economizes on the abyss, the fragment behaves as such: no grammatical sign to open, no period to close the period of its semantic passage: an imitative strategy of abyssal subversion. Thus is the shard, like fragmentarity itself, revealed as oxymoronic: as a parergon in the imperative voice; a parodic work outside the work operating, it seems, sui generis, within earshot of Blanchot’s noli me legerebut reading nonetheless.

If, as Nietzsche declares, the world is a work of art that gives birth to itself, does it give birth wholly? In part? Can a fragment be born? What is the gestation of a fragment, on and as the margin? And how is this metaphorical and dialectical birth, split from itself as both general and regional economy, in Bataille’s terms, finally transgressive?² Of what would such a transgressive, fragmented birth consist, and how would it delimit and define the world thus born? These questions lie at the metaphorical core of, and are perpetually addressed by and in the work of Blanchot and Beckett, as they are in that of Nietzsche and Derrida, (de)forming a web of associational vectors linking strategies of writing and reading. Any (apocryphal) core of this work is radically metaphorical, and thus a function of the connectives, the affinities and tropic tightropes, by which metaphorical associations are forged: the core is and is not a core, but always dispersed out into magnetic, imagistic constellations; meaning and value (as revaluation), so-called, are functions of this elementalism.

[Stage direction: “Nietzsche” and “Derrida,” voices in a conversation outside time, as though these voices were speaking into cups connected by a wire, stretched taut like Zarathustra’s parodic tightrope; on this discursive filament a tropic dance takes place. Two figures appear on the wire/tightrope: a tightrope walker, sliding across the humming wire; then, second, a darkly liminal figure, who harries the first, disrupting the performance. There is danger of a fall, but always counteracted by the danger of a relève; no fall occurs. Story’s end, like that of all fragmentary stories, is the (impossible) death of transgression itself — and of the fragment; the figures suspended on the filament of discourse are “Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond (Le pas au-delà),” the tightrope walker, and “Beckett’s The Unnamable (L’inommable),” the ironist.]

Nietzsche and Derrida as philosophers of the fragment; Nietzsche for a poetics of aphoristic compactness, Derrida for highly-styled fragmentary and interrogative treatments of marginality and presence. Beckett and Blanchot as poets of the fragment. Beckett knew Nietzsche and Blanchot but not Derrida; Blanchot knows Nietzsche, Derrida, and Beckett. Nietzsche read none of the others; Derrida reads all. Voilà pour l’histoire.

Transgression is never complete(d).

Transgression means inherent structures and strategies of reversal and subversion in which, for example, Nietzsche aestheticizes the world (“a work of art that gives birth to itself”), but as a world of existential — bodily — proportions; he very strategically goes [not] beyond (another kind of jenseits, another dimension of [pas] au-delà), into a Dionysian collapsing together of aesthetic categories and genres that form the creative labyrinth of thought. This collapsing, a disordering and fragmented reconstruction of generic distinctions and definitions, is also a transgression of Derrida’s law of genre, an admixture of sensory data and rational aesthetic. Codes of beauty, and even of being, threaten to shatter and fall before this Nietzschean reinscription, in becoming functions of parallax. Nietzsche’s perspectivism, manifested in both “thought” and writing — itself a synaesthetic disordering and yet the beginning of the transgressive order of the fragment — originates in what appears to be the solipsistic madness of the anthological, in “radical, secular self-creation” and the “Dionysian impulse of self-submersion” (Aschheim, 51). Perspectivism is a function of experience in the world, of the moment of experience both Blanchot and Beckett seek so diligently and which is always chimerical. The chronicling of that metaphoric search produces the anthology of fictive selves and their stories, while simultaneously producing the generative conditions of work under which such stories can be produced. Since self-creation demands an accounting for excess in the form of that Dionysian impulse, such stories are always alien. The resultant radical synaesthesia produces incandescent fragments as enigmatic as Heraclitus’s, and like the Heraclitan fragment simultaneously infused with wit and weight, with an unbearable lightness and an inconceivable portentousness.

To lay out a paramodern map, then, pointing toward an aesthetic of disruption characterized by Nietzsche, clarified and codified by Derrida, implemented by Blanchot and Beckett, one might start with five propositional fragments:

1. (Transposing the modern; the paramodern permutation): addressing the paramodern means confronting the possibilities of a transgressive permutation of the modern, subtle but radical, from a humanistic, artist-centered revolutionary viewing of the world to a para-humanist, mediatized, theorized positionality which is not a worldview. The human being, as such, beginning with the body, is placed beyond the margin of the paramodern, and what remain are surrogates, echoes, mechanized topoiof the “space of the individual” in an economy of identification and consumption that cannot return to the subjective substance of the modern, but that floats next to the tenacious, energetic modernist world, a parasite on it and its transpositions from the Enlightenment and Romanticism.2. (The Nietzschean World and Its Synaesthesia): Nietzsche synthesizes this permutated world in his aesthetic (“a work of art that gives birth to itself”), which consists of a strategic denigration of the Rational Positivist tradition of anthropomorphic agency written out of the elevation of reason, repression and suppression of emotion, circumscription of the imagination, and privileging of the artist-eye perspective. For Nietzsche the world consists of an absolute parallax, infinite points of view determined and defined by and within a fragmented poetic fabrication. Nietzsche’s anti-representationalism sets the terms for the performative theoretical space of paramodern synaesthesia as a sensory disruption, a “euphoric disorientation” producing a “dizzying pleasure” (Auslander, 12).

 

3. (The nonmoral inherent in the Nietzschean paramodern): As Nietzsche lays it out in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” and Beyond Good and Evil, the jenseits of the nonmoral sense transcends the longing, the guilty morality of which herd society (characterized by ressentiment) consists, and further of the apocryphal establishment of a higher plane of morality producing the ambivalent effects of, on the one hand, a soaring (and dizzying) freedom from guilty constraint (cf. “The Songs of Prince Vogelfrei”) and, on the other, an acknowledgement that to be free of the constraints of conventional morality one must accept a refinement out of existence, assigning one’s agency (as will-to-power) to language, narrative, and semantic/semiotic structures, which are now, in the paramodern, the loci of the primal drives-as-other.

 

4. (The Theoretical Tightrope): For the paramodern, this ambivalence itself consists of the theorization of the world, acceptance that experience is indeed virtual experience, hyper-experience, self-conscious without self, in the hypothetical fabrication of a self-position from which self-operations take place within the limits of discourse. If this is all-too-familiar familiar territory, it is chiefly because we paramoderns have accepted the theoretical frame of the world in which we live. In the paramodern, this relinquishing of the apparent substance of human power out of systems of sign-formation (which is not to say of communication) means that all immediacy is theoretical/hypothetical. The world is the space of theory that gives birth to itself.

 

At the same time, this is to say that it is poeticized, subject to and a function of its fabrication within that theoretical framework: “the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself;” and on which we gaze with indifferent passion, trying to understand who, where, and what we are in this discursive, theorized, and mediatized (“videated”) world.

 

In the guise in which I want to discuss it here, this theorizing of the world is itself a Zarathustran tightrope, and since in this pervasively theorized paramodern world of hyper-fabrication and hyper-poetics, as Nietzsche pointed out so presciently, style is everything, I want to explore the nature of a possible paramodern style, and more particularly the aphoristic/fragmentary, “parergonal” style predicated in Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s aphoristics, and how their contribution to paramodern disruption illuminates the work and the world of paramodern poietes whose subject-positions are named “Maurice Blanchot’s Le Pas au-delà” and “Samuel Beckett’s How it is.”

 

5. (Why and How Disruption?): But why the “disruption” of the paramodern? It is axiomatic that in the paramodern the ironic-modern becomes the parodic-postmodern, and that the permutation we generally call postmodernism concerns itself centrally with the parallel and orchestrated subversion of modernist strategies of world- and self-formation, “revealing” them as such. This is precisely what Arnold Toynbee had in mind for the term “postmodern” when, in the early 50’s, he first used it: to indicate a disruption of the culminative and evolutionary humanist project of modernism which, however revolutionary and innovative its fringes might have been in the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, is always grounded in assumptions about the myth of artist-presence and the validity of the experientially-contexted poetic, however much it might be critiqued and, seemingly, undermined by the “Post-” (and this is why “Post-modern”is such a bad designation for the machinations of the paramodern-modern). Modern(ist) self-focus, that is a focus on the self, provides the culminative crisis of reality-formation that humanism fermented in the Premodern world; it requires a tendentious and strategic response. This is why Nietzsche did not “write a philosophy,” as such, but always toward a philosophy of the future — a future that could never come, since the very nature of “a philosophy,” as a constellation of reasoned and ordered structures within the rational-positivist or, now, humanist, mode, is self-serving, myopic, and finally of questionable soundness, however much it may struggle to retain its validity. The paramodern, then, is disruption — of meaning, of style, and of the philosophic and poetic project.

 

The paramodern is para- rather than post- because of the collusive element at its core. The law, in this case subject-centered modernism, is in a necessary collaboration with its violation. Thus, transgression and its re-inscription are always, as John Gregg shows, incomplete: “the law always survives the infraction because the latter is in the service of the former” (13).³ The most telling transgression in the paramodern is precisely where Blanchot and Beckett mark it: at the inception of the subject-claim they want to subvert. Gregg claims that Blanchot — and the same is as true or truer for Beckett — “situates the origin of reading at the very moment that the author is dismissed from the work. . . . Reading is thus the disappearance of both a personal author and a personal reader” (57). In this emergent disruption lies the origin of the noli me legere which characterizes all four of these writers’ works, and which begins in the very (de)structure of the text itself.⁴

 

Aphorism from the Greek aphorizein, to mark off, divide,
from apo– (from) + horizein (to bound) = from or outside the bounds,
across the threshold [liminal, transgressive].

 

fragment from the Latin frangere, to break = (n) a part broken away
from the whole; broken piece; detached, isolated, or incomplete part;
a part of an unfinished whole; (v) to break into fragments.

Nietzsche is said to write aphoristically — but in fact this is rarely true. While whole sections of Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, Zarathustra, and other works are “truly” aphoristic — that is, liminal, most are fragments that not only do not close and do not aid memory, but actively thwart these — in favor of the active forgetting required for the breakage of the fragment, not the closure of the aphorism.

The fragment is will-to-power as art, “itself” consisting of difference and of the dialectical tension between general and regional economies, consisting further of not will, not power, not a step beyond, distilled in the fragmentary, as these nearly-contiguous fragments from Nietzsche (“The Will-to-Power As Art”) demonstrate:

	The work of art where it appears without an
artist, e.g. as body, as organization. . . .  To what
extent the artist is only a preliminary stage.

	The world as a work of art that gives birth
to itself.

	The phenomenon "artist" is still the most
transparent -- to see through it to the basic instincts
of power, nature, etc.!  Also those of religion and
morality!

	"Play," the useless . . . .

	All art exercises the power of suggestion over
the muscles and senses. . . .  The aesthetic state
possesses a superabundance of means of communication,
together with an extreme receptivity for stimuli and
signs.	It constitutes the high point of communication
and transmission between living creatures -- it is the
source of languages.

	The artist who began to understand himself would
misunderstand himself.

	One is an artist at the cost of regarding that
which all non-artists call "form" as content, as "the
matter itself."  To be sure, then one belongs in a topsy-
turvy world: for thenceforth content becomes something
merely formal--our life included.

	We possess art lest we perish of the truth. 

(The Will to Power 796-822)

Nietzsche’s thematic, fragmentary coagulations across the white patches on the page, fragmentation whose weight and meaning collapse in on themselves, is an interrogative critique. Nietzsche’s paramodern consists of the step (not) beyond what Heidegger calls “the quest for the proper word and the unique name” to a topos “without nostalgia” (though not without memory); “that is,” as Derrida says, “the outside of the myth of a purely material or paternal language . . . in a certain Nietzschean laughter and a certain step of the dance.” (see Margins of Philosophy, 27). This is the tightrope logic of Nietzsche’s paramodern fragment. Extra-aphoristic liminality underlies the contestation of Apollinian particulars “existentially made comfortable to what can be known,” as Ofelia Schutte points out (21). The Dionysian principle of dynamic continuity is violated to such an extent that Dionysus’ only recourse is to take revenge on humanity “by condemning it to perpetual fragmentation” (21). Fragmentation, then, is the Dionysian threat in reaction to reason and the Law.

In Nietzsche, this Dionysian threat becomes a transgressive practice, in which fragmentary style is part of an effort to “atomize” poetic discourse and philosophy, to “return” it to its basic semantic and grammatical ingredients. Only interpolations of sense emanate from the noli me legere of Nietzsche’s fragmentary logic, marking a portentous opening from and to a void. Fragmentation is for Nietzsche an inescapable solipsism, carefully and energetically distinguished from and in contradictinction to what he calls “philosophy so far.” His aphoristic and fragmentary works are themselves, as he calls them in The Gay Science, freigeisterei, “free-spirit works,” thus marking their extra-moral sense and their play on (and away from) the surface. In this transgressive (non-) designation in which the aphorism, or the fragment, is to be seen as the free spirit, at the same time one must remember that the freigeisterei, in their flight from reason and the Law, must accept in that flight the slippage that makes them “vogelfrei,” “free-birds,” as in the Songs of Prince Vogelfrei with which The Gay Science concludes. These “free-bird songs” begin with a short poem “To Goethe,” the first stanza of which declares that,

Das Unvergängliche
Ist nur dein Gleichnis!
Gott der Verfängliche
Ist Dichter-Erschleichnis . . .
[The intransitory
Is but your parable!
God the ineluctable
Is poetic pretension . . . ] (Gay Science, 350)

Here Nietzsche borrows shards and fragments from Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus at the conclusion of Faust, Part Two, where Goethe makes precisely the opposite claim: “what is destructible is but a parable.” Nietzsche’s appropriation from and parody of Goethe’s parabolic song, here in the song of the free-bird, compounds the transgressive nature of the vogelfrei, who is not only a freigeist but also (as Nietzsche points out) an escaped criminal, a bird who has broken free and who can (and should) be killed on sight; that is, whose freedom is dramatically curtailed by the sentence of death and marked by a double transgression, commission of a crime and escape from prison.⁵ The freigeistis a quintessentially liminal figure adumbrating those in Blanchot, Beckett, and the paramodern.

Thus the outcome of Nietzsche’s strategic fragmentation is a radical atomism insisting that we “cannot legitimately group together individual momentary experiences or sensations” (McGowan, 72), but then do just that, precisely to show that the “legitimation”of such a grouping is always its illegitimacy, its danger, the manifestation of die treibe, the “drives” (Nietzsche’s word, not yet Freud’s) both within and (not) beyond writing. This atomism is echoed in the elementalistic language strategies of Blanchot and Beckett, in which the most fundamental elements are examined for inclusion and rejection.

But in a reversal of expectation as dramatic as anything in these texts, the Nietzsche-position on the fragment and thus to the nature of meaning can present itself in all of its duplicity, as these two contiguous fragments from Beyond Good and Evil demonstrate:

(222) Poet and Liar. -- The poet considers the liar
a foster brother whom he did out of his milk.  Hence
his brother remained weak and wretched and never even
attained a good conscience.

(223) Vicarious senses. -- "Our eyes are also intended
for hearing,"said an old father confessor who had
become deaf; "and among the blind he that has the
longest ears is king."

This juxtaposition emphasizes the atomism and synaesthesia — the poetic violence — of the Nietzschean disruption which, as a disruption of the senses, is for Nietzsche a gateway to pre-semiotic writing drives, and at the same time a strategic and parodic juxtaposition of (not) logical discourse, another step (not) beyond. Thus art, for Nietzsche, in its very subjectivity is an exploding of the subject as chimerical aesthetic object, an ontological de-realizing that undermines and destroys the law-as-subject and replaces it with the tension of and in language-as-other(ing), a “reduction of the subject to an effect of antagonistic forces” (Slöterdijk, 16), the drives by which writing operates.

Derrida, like Nietzsche, plays within the forcefield of those enigmatic and antagonistic treiben; Derrida’s writing recapitulates the vogelfrei-position taken a step (not) beyond Nietzsche’s. In Derrida’s quasi-aphorisms it is impossible to discern what the fragment’s “trajectory” might be: it is always a function of the parergon of declaration, semiotically marginal or liminal. The fragment, as Derrida says,

knows of no proper itinerary which would lead from its beginning to its end and back again, nor does its movement admit of a center. Because it is structurally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning. There is no end to its parodying play with meaning, grafted here and there, beyond any contextual body or finite code . . . . Its secret is rather the possibility that indeed it might have no secret, that it might only be pretending to be simulating some hidden truth within its folds. Its limit is not only stipulated by its structure but is in fact intimately con-fused with it. (133)

For Derrida, as for Nietzsche, the fragment’s fragmentation is both limit and ineluctable transgression of the limit. Derrida’s playful anthropomorphism in this passage operates as a paramodern reminder of the modernist notion of immanent meaning, itself fragmented in the paramodern and pointing toward an evolutionary developmental step (not) beyond Nietzsche: as Derrida remarks, “if Nietzsche had indeed meant to say something, might it not be just that limit to the will to mean which, much as a necessarily differential will to power, is forever divided; folded and manifolded” (133). The “differential will to power” to which Derrida points finds its difference (and of course its différance) in the gulf between text (as other) and decoder of text, but also within the tensions and textures of difference within the fragment-heap of the paramodern text itself.

To investigate both the inner and outer differential wills to power manifested by the paramodern text, we must return to the Nietzschean notion of the vogelfrei and its appropriation in Derrida’s articulation of “les paroles soufflées,” words spirited away from (and to) the law, mots volés. For Derrida, word theft (sometimes euphemistically called “appropriation”), by reader, writer, and text “itself,” by the paramodern vogelfrei in language and culture, and thus within experience itself, is the theft of a trace. Thus the transgression is an act outside the law that enforces the law. The poetic logic of the fragment and its disruption in both Nietzsche and Derrida is the theft of a trace from any quasi-originary source and from any telos of value or meaning. For the free-bird, this theft, and its resultant mortal danger (that is, the return of the Dionysian) produces, to cite a Nietzschean fragment, “the greatest danger that always hovers over humanity, and still hovers over it,” which is “the eruption of madness — which means the eruption of the mind’s lack of discipline.” If for a moment we seem to have come full circle to an echo of Platonism, Derrida immediately adds that this greatest danger, madness, is not to be eradicated nor suppressed, but rather needs to be “eternally defended” (The Gay Science, 76), as the very core of the paramodern disruption. Nietzsche’s reference to a lack of discipline alludes not to chaos nor nihilism but to “an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with and within poetry, in which poetry (and poiesis), as the art of making and of making whole) is “continuously avoided and contradicted” (The Gay Science 92). All such (anti-) poetry theory and practice (what Nietzsche calls “everything abstract”) becomes the parodic focus of a strategic re-incursion into the modernist agenda, and “wants to be read as a prank against poetry and as with a mocking voice” (The Gay Science, 92).

For Derrida, as for Nietzsche, this “madness” is a question of death and of the disruption of a theoretical topoi without hysteria, the transgression of the law that is the law. For Derrida, fragment-thinking insists on its radical liminality and leads to the most abyssal of dialectically encrypted thoughts. Here Derrida takes up the genealogical baton and creates conditions for a paramodern poiesis:

How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? (Margins of Philosophy, 19)

In this impossible simultaneity of thinking, what I have called fragment-thinking, lies the seed of the “impossible presence” which, as “irreparable loss of presence,” reveals the death instinct as a theoretical condition at the center of every human exchange, every “economy.” Thus the death instinct is not merely nihilistic nor morbid, which would be but another inscription of modernism, but a parallel or virtual subject-position for the concept, as Derrida has shown:

The signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. ( Margins, 11)

Any play of differences must of course involve both space and time, and must involve the re-theorization of the space in which it occurs. In “Aphorism Countertime,” some reflections on writing, time, and the fragment within the context of a critique of the proper name in Romeo and Juliet, Derrida disfigures the proper name of aphorism by calling attention to the fact that the apocryphal originary whole of any fragment is built not only on the death but on the denial of the/any whole and on the destruction of sequential logic, even while recalling a sequential logic that hovers like a shadow across the texts Derrida’s aphoristic fragments from “Aphorism Countertime”show:1. As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation (apo), it terminates delimits, arrests (horizo). It brings to an end by separating, it separates in order to end (finir) and to define (définir). [inherent in the end is the difference by which we know that an end cannot occur, a Law that defies the Law.]

2. An aphorism is an exposure to contretemps. It exposes discourse — hands it over to contretemps. Literally — because it is abandoning a word [une parole] to its letter. [The word is thus always stolen.]

3. The aphorism of discourse of dissociation: each sentence, each paragraph dedicates itself to separation, it shuts itself up, whether one likes it or not, in the solitude of its proper duration. Its encounter and its contact with the other are always given over to chance, to whatever may befall, good or ill. Nothing is absolutely assured, neither the linking nor the order. One aphorism in the series can come before or after the other, before and after the other, each can survive the other — and in the other series.

4. This aphoristic series crosses over another one. Because it traces, aphorism lives on, it lives much longer than its present and it lives longer than life. Death sentence. It gives and carries death, but in order to make a decision thus on a sentence of death, it suspends death, it stops it once more.

5. There would not be any contretemps, nor an anachrony, if the separation between monads only disjointed interiorities. (Attridge, 416)

Not only so-called interiorities are disjointed by fragmentary separation; the law of the fragment is not one of absolute disintegration nor of erosion but of proliferation and expansion. The paramodern fragment is a network transgressing without transforming, opens without ending, just as the last aphorism in a series is not closed but hangs suspended, as Nietzsche and Derrida show, truncated and never concluded. As Nietzsche so emphatically declares, any seeming finality of content is undermined and synaesthetized by form.

Enter the tightrope walker.

Content synaestheticized by form: this is what Blanchot refers to as the step (not) beyond, le pas au-delà, and which in the book of that enigmatic name forms the central strategy of juxtaposition, looping, and pharmakon-logic.

Blanchot’s is a fragmentation of oscillatory complexity, a play of arching connections and non-sequituurs that inserts itself into the textual space and into narrativity, producing there a virtual narrativity and a radically undermined mimetic theory of literature and of narrative. Blanchot enters the marketplace of reversal in which “nothing is absolutely assured, neither the linking nor the order, that “gives and carries . . . a sentence of death” but which at the same time “suspends death, . . . stops it once more.” This space is prohibition and transgression, denial and passing (not) beyond of the subject, just as Nietzsche’s paramodern aesthetics enacts at once the prohibition/denial and the transgression/displacement of the subject/artist. We see before us the potential for a metalepsis to the “sentence of death:” if subjectivity is now a “contained, agonistic entity” (Slöterdijk, x), then any pretense to representation is the result of this agonistic, a function of the inherent tensions between forces, and is not mimetic. Here, the positionality named “aesthetic subject” or “aesthetic object” is a purely dialectical constellation emphatically not a mirror or reflection of a “self” emphatically not “unified” but unrepresentable and contaminated.

II. Blanchot’s Fragmented Subject

Good reasons exist for the historical suppression of play/différance/writing. They entail terrible burdens: the frisson of “absolute loss,” death, dissolution, anxiety — in Nietzschean terms, the forgetting of Apollinian order and reason and the remembering of Dionysian suffering. Thus literature, in the paramodern, reveals what it conceals: its movement toward and play with its own disappearance in silence, at the threshold of discourse. This movement is a forgetting and forgetfulness of the subject-position; in Derrida, it is the advent of différance and the liminality of the Law and its transgression; in Beckett, it is the approach to silence and its corollary, the parodic gesture of the impossible heap of meaning. Absence in and of the text, and of the textual subject.

Blanchot manifests this absence by radically fragmenting the subject position: “‘I’ never arrives there, not as an individual that I am, this particle of dust, nor the me of all that is supposed to represent the absolute consciousness of self: but only the ignorance that incarnated the I-that-dies in accessing this space where, dying, he never dies as ‘I,’ in the first person” (Gregg 16). Impossible to know who is speaking (no “who” is speaking), an inevitable outcome of the perpetual and ubiquitous failure of any metaphoric leap to the Übermensch. Thus, Blanchot’s text (Le pas au-delá) is testimony to the absence, the impossibility, of testimony; quasi-testimony as fragment, tracé, always performative evidence of a poiesis.

Signs of the simulation of testimony by a quasi-subject pervades Le pas au-delá, such that any page is characterized and marked by its appearance, from the diamond-shaped bullets marking each fragment to the page’s “look” of fragmented sparcity. Characteristics of this double page as emblematic of the work are such things as multiple voices, lists, key terms and obsessions, complete diffusion of subject-position:

(Image)

Blanchot’s text is, as Derek Attridge points out, a “turning back on the literary institution, . . . linked to the act of a literary performativity and a critical performativity” attempting to “question, analyze, and transform this strange contradiction, this institutionless institution” (41). Like Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s, Blanchot’s text explores the aphoristic click of différence and the fragmentary ellipsis of differance with an obsessive regard for contretemps and the ramifications of dissociation. Blanchot has listened to Derrida echo Nietzsche in admonishing that writing is “a performance of theoretical propositions in the poetic ‘space’” (Kamuf 144), just as Derrida has listened to Blanchot the (paramodern) poetic formalist in exploring the “invention” of an aesthetic “truth” by remembering and appropriating poiesis (meant here as “invention,” in the Greek sense) as a simulacrum. Paramodern poiesis sees that literary “truth” is the discursive theoretical link between Derrida’s confrontation of aphorism/fragment in “Aphorism Countertime” and Blanchot’s similar confrontation in Le pas au-delà. The spaces of poetry and of philosophy (or, as here, theory) circumscribe each other and “take each other’s measure” (Kamuf, 145).

In so doing, these spaces enact their own tightrope walk of steps taken and not taken. Blanchot is obsessed in this text with both the texture and the tendentiousness of additive fragments oscillating within a strategic slippage. For Blanchot in Le pas au-delà, this slippage takes a particularly Nietzschean form recalling and offering testimony to Zarathustra and the tightrope:

Transcendence, transgression: names too close to one another not to make us distrustful of them. Would transgression not be a less compromising way to name “transcendence”in seeming to distance it from its theological meaning? Whether it is moral, logical, philosophical, does not transgression continue to make allusion to what remains sacred both in the thought of the limit and in this demarcation, impossible to think, which would introduce the never and always accomplished crossing of the limit into every thought. Even the notion of the cut in its strictly epistemological rigor makes it easier to compromise, allowing for the possibility of overstepping (or of rupturing) that we are always ready to let ourselves be granted, even if it is only a metaphor. (27)

Blanchot is here troubled by the dialectical tension not only of impossible transcendence and impossible transgression but also between the fragmentary elements of Blanchot’s book (i.e. its contiguity) and whatever “message” the text offers us (i.e. its continuity). This particular fragment occurs in a section of the text exploring the notion of “luck,” and is immediately followed by the statement, at the beginning of the next fragment, that “it is not only with the law that luck has a remarkable relationship” (27). Blanchot goes on to point out, very much within the context of his suggestion of the slippage of “transcendence” into “transgression,” that desire and luck operate within the ineluctable slippage between law as limit and transgression, the transgression of the law being the inception of another law, etc,. as Derrida so clearly points out.⁶

This play of transcendence and transgression, luck and desire, inevitably finds its way into the parodic play of “voice” in Blanchot, which amounts to “the obscure combat between language and presence, always lost by one and by the other, but all the same won by presence, even if this be only as presence of language” (31), given that, as “Blanchot”‘s “voice” “tells” “us,”

I am not master of language. I listen to it only in its effacement, effacing myself in it, towards this silent limit where it waits for one to lead it back in order to speak, there where presence fails as it fails there where desire carries it. (30)

Blanchot’s impossible claim of “self-effacement” (“I efface myself in language, and therefore am and am not its master”) occurs in the discursive play of desire, luck, and transgression.

Fragmentarity speaks directly to the ontology and teleology of the text. But this paramodern fragmentarity remains without referent to a whole, as a non-representational space emblemizing and echoing Nietzsche’s atomistic dispersion; the space of the simulacrum. Blanchot:

The fragment. There is no experience of it, in the sense that one does not admit it in any form of present, that it would remain without subject if it took place, thus excluding every present and all presence, as it would be excluded from them. Fragments, marks of the fragmentary, referring to the fragmentary that refers to nothing and has no proper reference, nevertheless attesting to it, pieces that do not compose themselves, are not part of any whole, except to make fragmentary, not separated or isolated, always, on the contrary, effects of separation, separation always separated, the passion of the fragmentary effects of effects. (49)

Here, early in Le pas au-delà, Blanchot has read the fragment-world as Beckett will read it, as a virtual series, a Möbius strip that demonstrates the “passion of the fragmentary effects of effects” and is always the “effect of separation.” In this passage, Blanchot narrates the enervation of the fragmentary, down to the helix of self-referential repetition: since the fragment cannot take place in any present, it cannot be part of experience and, further “would remain without subject if it took place.” This future conditional is the most unreliable of markers, a double exclusion, refusing presence and to be present. Its referent: nothing. “Nevertheless,” Blanchot teases, the non-reference of the paramodern fragment (which we are reading; a double immersion in subject-denial) continues to “attest” to reference in “pieces that do not compose themselves” and “are not part of any whole.”

Fragmented, atomized, but never isolated. The paramodern fragment transgresses even separation to become a “separation always separated,” the division of division, for which no cure exists. Here the paramodern death wish surfaces again, and will not conceal itself. The “fragmentary effects of effects,” tending toward the Beckettian heap, circles on itself in a stasis of language that is at once still and in motion. Like the paramodern fragment, the fragmentary effect (which is death itself, an effect that cannot take place) piles itself before us relentlessly and limitlessly. As for Nietzsche and Derrida, for Blanchot the acknowledgement of the paramodern fragment produces the death-effect in and of language, as a threshold or fold of a slippage in which each proper step (pas) is a misstep.

The “pas” of the completely passive — the “step /not beyond”? — is rather the folding back up, unfolding itself, of a relation of strangeness that is neither suffered nor assumed. Transgressive passivity, dying in which nothing is suffered, nothing acted, which is unconcerned and takes on a name only by neglecting the dying of others. (122)

In “folding” itself, that is in its articulation, the slippage of the paramodern fragment, the pas or ne pas, unfolds itself, revealing itself as a nonreferential space whose relativism is “completely passive” and internalized with no duration and no presence. What Blanchot calls the “transgressive passivity” of the fragment and of fragmentivity, as a constitutive “dying in which nothing is suffered, nothing acted” brings us abruptly face to face with the fragmentary strategy of The Unnamable. In “taking a name only by neglecting the dying of others,” the liminal and transgressive step onto the tightrope of the paramodern, then, signals the entrance to the realm of the unnamable, the paramodern jester.

As though bearing the weight of Baudrillard’s dead hand of the past, Blanchot has been a co-visionary in Beckett’s unnamable cosmos. While Beckett’s The Unnamable operates through an alternative logic of excess, in which another use is made of the liminal language of the fragment, it is closely related to Blanchot’s strategy in the last two fragments we have considered.

Beckett, however, sees the fragment in a more microscopic (elemental) way: in The Unnamable the fragment is part of a sea of undifferentiated fragments in which the play of différance is minutely interstitial, dramatically demonstrated in the syntactic structuration of the page itself and its denial of the subject-position of the writer or the reader. Blanchot has demonstrated some of this: segments that seem to flow together eventually swirling around themselves until they begin to chase their own momentum, finally achieving a kind of static circularity that denies syntactic progression and the “period” of prose or poetry in its duration as writing and for the consciousness of the reader. The expected release of information in the fragmentarity of Blanchot, as in Beckett, is halted, indeed imploded, and yet goes on: it can’t go on; it goes on. The Unnamable consists entirely of these unstructured and yet highly structured reversals of expectation, bringing character, substantiality, and any veracity of narrative radically and unresolvedly into question.

III. Beckett’s Unnamable Meaning to Mean

Beckett’s récit (or is it actually a novel?) consists of eighteen paragraph-like divisions, the first seventeen of which are caught, like Blanchot’s, Derrida’s, and Nietzsche’s, on a tightrope somewhere between fiction and abstract discourse. They tell a story — without telling a story; they mark or trace a virtual story in what must be called the “storyesque.” We can recognize the genealogy of the story-fragment through Nietzsche in these sections, and the taxonomy of the story/theory aphorism through Derrida. But for Beckett, these short, first-person narratives then develop into something quite different. The eighteenth quasi-paragraph, the final one in the text, is 157 pages long, and goes through a series of disintegrative steps (pas) that turn the “paragraph” increasingly in on itself until its very punctuation disintegrates (the final three pages are without full stops — with the exception of the final enigmatic period, the mark of closure with [the book stops] and without [satisfaction in the conclusion of the narrative is withheld] closure). This last section consists of a series of often-aphoristic phrases linked together by commas, which syntactically connect all the phrases into appositives even when they seem to “represent” full-stop positionalities, and seem to indicate, in their (non)sense, sentence-divisions.

If Beckett is playing, as are Nietzsche, Derrida, and Blanchot, with the energization and enervation, the exhaustion and exhilaration, of style, his poetics of disruption and fragmentation requires an energy opposite to that required of the reader in Nietzsche’s aphoristic experiments. His style is subtly and powerfully anti-representational, rewriting the relationship between the individual word and image and their cumulative result, seemingly attempting to form an additive agency (to “amount to something,” as in Beckett’s image of the impossible heap in Endgame and elsewhere) but always problematizing that agency through a fragmented aphoristics that denies morality, “author,” subject, and telos, fabricating a solipsistic prose.

The very idea of the first-person, with all of its claims to agency, is undermined in Beckett, who uses it to confess the absolute conundrum of the paramodern storyteller. “Where now? Who now? When now?” (3) the text begins, setting out the terse, journalistic conditions by which the quasi-narrator will proceed. Then, a few lines later, “What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my position, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple?”

As the Nietzschean logic of the fragment has shown us, “aporia pure and simple” is impossible. On the other hand, we have seen the way in which impossibility discourses with possibility chez Blanchot, and that this aspect of tightrope logic is a seminal aspect of the transgressive texts of Blanchot and Beckett. To recall Libertson’s words, since paramodern art is “a mobilization of possibility which . . . realizes too late its essential rapport with impossibility, and realizes that its unwavering trajectory toward failure is its only ‘authenticity,’” the impossibility of aporia becomes more than possible; indeed, it becomes the general economy of failure through which Beckett operates, and within which the discourse of “possibility” and “impossibility” is the mark of the regional economy of criticism attempting to do it justice. This is what Blanchot means when he declares, in L’Entretien infini, that “l’interdit marque le point où cesse le pouvoir. . . . Elle désigne ce qui est radicalement hors de portée: l’atteinte de l’inaccessible, le franchissement de l’infranchissable” (308). This outside-of-reach-ness to which Blanchot refers is the aporia of possible/impossible within which both Blanchot and Beckett write.

For Beckett, this discourse of fragments in their liminal heap requires something more than aporia, since the gaps by which we recognize the paramodern are held in place by the gestures of a poetic prose operating in the tightrope logic of poiesis we have visited in Blanchot. This “something more” Beckett immediately provides: “I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means. Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?” Aporia compounded by aporia. Once we have looked it up, discovering that ephectic means “lost in rhetoric” — can one indeed be lost in rhetoric otherwise than unawares? — and that the aporia is deepened (if this were not impossible) by Beckett’s qualification and explanation of it, one is forcibly reminded of the radical resistance to readability Beckett’s noli me legere presents, keeping all questions unresolved, in flux, in a perpetual agon inhabiting, Beckett seems to tell us, the very nature of language itself. This is to be “one’s” “experience” of it. But Beckett goes on:

Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know. With the yesses and the noes it is different, they will come back to me as I go along and how, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception. The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. (291)

To be silent (further echoes of Hamlet), one must possess a silent “I,” or cease to operate in a world of différance; one must erase the differend. Alternatively, one might float at the very edge of silence with impunity, even transgress its law. And indeed, Beckett has here produced not paragraphs, not aphorisms, but paragraph-elements declaring that if meaning is in the surface of the text (if it is anywhere), if the representative or mimetic quality of the text is truly eradicable while not eradicating the text itself, as Nietzsche called for (i.e. if the subject disappears, leaving only the “base metal” of writing itself), then this is the result: an insular, hermetic, self-conscious prose that, while radically self-aware, remains subjectless and interstitial. Or, as the characterless voice of the unnamable occupying the subject position in The Unnamablesays:

I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, all of those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing” (386)

This “I” to which the writing in The Unnamable refers, as “a quite different thing,” is in fact something quite différant, inscribed as other, precisely as Beckett indicates in his non-characterological narrative. Important, further, to remember that The Unnamableis written in the “first person impossible” Beckett adopts for his subject-less texts of liminal subjectivity in which the upright pronoun does not represent any subject but the voided subject position, “this dust of words.” Indeed, Beckett further inscribes the otherness of the subject-position in this dizzingly detached anti-space by going on (without going on):

. . . I’m something different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek . . . . (386)

Et que j’ecoute, et que je cherche. . .A poetics of desire, of remnants and remains. Here, any notion of the transcendental teleology of aphorism is eradicated; what remains, as remains, is the impossible heap, in equivalency, transmuting and permutating before our eyes into their own negations, authorizing the page on which they are to be found, and simultaneously, opaquely, remaining behind, earthbound yet afloat. Beckett operates here as the ironist on a tightrope of paramodern discourse, a perpetual-motion machine poised at the threshold of the abyss yet always slipping on away from it, forcing us to rely on these substantial and insubstantial words. And why? Toward what end?: the storyesque, as we have confronted it in Blanchot:

. . . to have them carry me into my story, the words that remain, my old story, which I’ve forgotten, far from here, through the noise, through the door, into the silence, that must be it, it’s too late, perhaps it’s too late, perhaps they have, how would I know, in the silence you don’t know, perhaps it’s the door, perhaps I’m at the door, that would surprise me, perhaps it’s I, perhaps somewhere or other it was I, I can depart, all this time I’ve journeyed without knowing it, it’s I now at the door, what door, what’s a door doing here, it’s the last words, the true last, or it’s the murmurs, the murmurs are coming, I know that well, no, not even that . . . (413)

Beckett’s pseudo-teleology here, the death-wish parodied into the word-wish for silence beyond the door, the threshold, of words which, like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, cannot be and cannot butbe transgressed, permits only the slippage of discursive permutations back into the fold of words, even if they take the form of quasi-words mechanically anthropomorphosed — murmurs, always “far from here” and always “too late,” but with the tendentious possibility of “carrying me [the objective pronoun] into my story,” always in the future conditional. In this notion of the transgressive fragmentation of language, the door of sense can only be opened (transgressed) in the storyesque, and always operates to occlude the subjecthood of experience that would cross over. This dialectic of limitation and limitedness, of the possible and the impossible, points toward the nameless non-transcendence of the fragment. Indeed, as Beckett concludes, “how would I know?”

To be at the threshold of those longed-for end-words, behind which might be the impossible silence; to define, as Beckett’s quasi-protagonist does, that space (“what’s a door doing here, it’s the last words, the true last”); and then to slip (not) beyond that defining certainty into the contingent fragmentarity by which story is (not) in the storyesque (“the last words, the true last, or it’s the murmurs, the murmurs are coming”) in murmurs that are “here,” and then not “here,” and then not known at all. . . . This unnamable condition is the resistance to synthesis, the unreadability of what Bataille calls “supplication sans espoir” (L’Expérience intérieure, 47). No wonder Beckett ends (and begins) The Unnamable with a critique of “going on,” finishing with “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” having started with “Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.” As Derrida says,

There is no name for it. . . . This unnamable is not an ineffable being which no name could approach. . . . This unnamable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names. (Margins of Philosophy, 26)

“The chains of substitutions of names” define Beckett’s strategic effacement as the signature of a radically problematic presence of law as separation in the condition of an eternal simulacrum. For Nietzsche, Derrida, Blanchot, and Beckett, poiesis is unavoidable simulacrum, what Derrida calls ineviterability. The othering at the center of paramodern poiesis, and its inscription of the unnamable, is, Derrida claims, “prenomial”(Margins, 26), ineviterable, transgression that “dislocates itself.” Thus Beckett’s impossible heap, what Linda Hutcheon calls “a flux of contextualized identities” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 59), wanders, refusing to follow lines of symmetrical and integral inverses, at play, announcing or testifying to “the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end” (Margins, 7).

Progressions of the unnamable, proceeding from Nietzsche’s elementalism, which initiates the critique of narrative as well as of truth. In the paramodern, such legitimation is always its own illegitimation and its danger, “the manifestation of the drives beyond and within writing” (McGowan, 72), revealing an “originary violence” (McGowan, 117) repressed by the metaphysics of narrativity in an effort to “embody a logic of self-preservation,” while “différance points toward self-dissolution,” stepping (not) beyond the master/slave dialectic of disrupted representations endemic to discourse itself. “Progressions of the unnamable,” “poetics of disruption”; these are themselves oxymoronic literary spaces of contradiction, since to “make” such a “poetics” must be to step (not) beyond poiesis, an internal call for another limit there on the tightrope of paramodern discourse, the step (not) beyond.

Notes

1. I have explored, in a series of essays, the strategic parallel strategy of subversion within the so-called modern, at least from the Enlightenment to the present. Because this mapping clearly shows the dialectical nature of a subversive parallel aesthetic texturality at work, I have jettisoned the common “postmodern,” as a ruinously-flawed méconaissance, and adopted the more accurate “paramodern,” which also contains, as shall become increasingly obvious here, the reverberation of the parasite, which is precisely the way in which the paramodern should be read.

2. No discussion of Blanchot, Beckett, the marginal, and transgression can proceed without reference to Bataille who, throughout his work, explores the nature of excess and the creative negativity of the margin. Bataille’s discussion of the economy of transgression (general and regional) can be found in the Oeuvres complètes VII-VIII. See also Joseph Libertson’s Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), Chapter Two, for a discussion of transgression in Bataille and Blanchot.

One must distinguish between Bataille’s notion of transgression as general economy and of “failure as a virtue” (Gregg 15) and Foucault’s notion of transgression, as laid out in his “A Preface to Transgression,” published in 1963. For Foucault, as Roy Boyne points out, transgression is “magnetic, wonderful, unnameable, and waiting to reveal the face of the absolutely unacceptable” (Boyne 80-81). Many of the themes developed in this essay are adumbrated in Foucault’s transgressive which, though it at first appears to be a metaphysical or transcendental phenomenon, is finally an issue of identity and madness: “our face in an other mirror, not the face of the other seen through our mirror, the mirror of reason” (Boyne 81). For Foucault as for Bataille, an uncrossable limit cannot exist except as a “non-positive affirmation,” which is just the sort of abyssal space Blanchot and Beckett introduce.

3. Gregg has a good deal to say, very usefully, about the relationship between the transgressive and the economy of the law. His Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton, 1994) is a fine study of the ways in which Blanchot relates, through Bataille’s regional and general economy, to the Nietzschean world of contingency. Gregg adumbrates a thorough sense of the paramodern in his work, particularly in his sense of the vertiginous inherent in Blanchot’s writing. Gregg states that at the heart of the aesthetic experience is the transgression of the law. This is emblemized in Orpheus’ turning — for the second time — to look at Eurydice, thus losing her forever. That turn is the unavoidable, endemic transgression of the divine law, the turn “marks the point at which power and mastery cease to be his overriding concerns and are replaced by the dispossession of fascination” (47). This turning symbolizes for Gregg the central elements of transgression: impatience and desire. Orpheus’ glance is in fact the success of the aesthetic process, since in it he maintains the distance between the impossible figure of Eurydice and himself, producing the perpetual “approach to an ever-receding horizon that remains perpatually out of reach” (47). This transgression of success itself — the “failure”of art is indeed its success, as Gregg shows Libertson pointing out, renders art a “mobilization of possibility which . . . realizes too late its essential rapport with impossibility, and realizes that its only unwavering trajectory toward failure is its only ‘authenticity’” (146; Gregg 48). This inversion of so-called success and so-called failure is an emblematic marker for both Blanchot and Beckett, as it is for Nietzsche and Derrida.

4. As a parody of the noli me tangere with which Jesus confronts Mary Magdalene immediately following the resurrection, this noli marks the exclusion of any possible “writer” from any conceivable text. If Christ is the inspiration for the transgressive nature of the disruptive texts of Nietzsche/Derrida/Blanchot/Beckett, Mallarme is the catalyst: “the volume takes place all alone: done, been” (Gregg 57). As both limit and unavoidable invitation to transgress the limit/law, the text circulates between these poles in a series of looped returns concentrated in the aphorism.

5. For Blanchot and Beckett, the issue of transgression and the fragment is integrally enmeshed with the theme of death. Transgression, in writing, is a spectacle in which culture witnesses the illegal without committing it. But the transgression — the “text itself,” and in the texts in question this is compounded by the paramodern strategies of fragmentation and parody — leads finally to sacrifice, in which death itself is transferred to a figurative other [See Gregg 14]. The fragment takes the form of the emblematic sparagmos, parodying the nature of the sacrifice without giving up its agency.

6. For Blanchot, as we have seen, “transgression” is a “less compromising way to name” “transcendence,” since “transgression” always re-introduces the notion of the limit and the law “into every thought.” In this circularity, every advance is a regression, every success a failure, every completion another opening. The same strategy of reversal takes place in Beckett’s work.

Works Cited

• Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P. 1992.
• Bataille, George. L’Expérience intérieure. 1943.
• —–. Oeuvres complètes VII-VIII. Paris: Gallimard. 1973.
• Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press. 1958.
• Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. 1969.
• —–. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1993.
• —–. The Step Not Beyond. Albany: SUNY Press. 1992.
• Boyne, Roy. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman. 1990.
• Derrida, Jacques. ‘Aphorism Countertime.’ Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge. 1992.
• —–. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1972.
• —–. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1987.
• Goethe, Johan von. Faust. Trans. Philip Wayne. Baltimore: Penguin Books. 1962.
• Gregg, John. Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP. 1994.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. 1988.
• Kamuf, Peggy. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia UP. 1991.
• Libertson, Joseph. Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille, and Communication. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1982.
• McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP. 1991.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1966.
• —–. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1974.
• —–. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1966.
• —–. The Will to Power. Trans and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1968.
• Shutte, Ofelia. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks. Chicagoy: U of Chicago P. 1984.
• Slöterdijk, Peter. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1989.

Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Centers for Ideas and Society
University of California – Riverside
hamm@citrus.ucr.edu

1. can’t find a better man²

A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and direct a critical detour from the wild and wooly trail mapped out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces. I track his assumption that rock culture — the stars of whom have replaced both heroes and cinema icons — provides a useful, crucial set of metaphors for thinking about contemporary high-culture, and extend the route with my conviction that both high culture writers and theorists are canonized within and beyond academe in ways that mimic the vagaries of rock and roll “fame.”³ Marcus notes in his earlier work, Mystery Train, that rock music is not so much an object of interpretation as an interpretive enabler for our own particular situation — a hermeneutic which “acts upon” the listener/viewer and which produces different meanings at different moments (Street on Marcus, 157). So, I will use one man to get another; I leave Marcus I and turn on Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom I turn into an apparatus rather than a mere object (although he is this also) in order to shed light upon the work of Roland Barthes and Peter Handke. It is also apropos; Barthes repeatedly expressed his admiration for such underground masculine icons as professional wrestlers (one wonders what he would have made of grunge), while Handke has frequently cited rock lyrics in his most seemingly neo-classical works, as in the pastoral poem Beyond the Villages (Über die Dörfer), which is prefaced by a quote from Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I would like Barthes and Handke to meet (and jam) on Eddie Vedder’s stage for several reasons. First, I bewail their relegation to the esoteric heights of high literary endeavor; they have become so “important” that no one knows who they are, as opposed to Vedder who is so unimportant that everyone knows about him. Like the critically acclaimed art films that no one sees and that can’t be found on video, and the avant-garde art exhibitions which no one goes to, Barthes and Handke are writers that no one reads, because their work can’t be located at Super Crown or at B. Dalton. No one, meaning, regular people; no one meaning everyone who isn’t an intellectual. Second, I distrust the fact that they have consistently been written about in such complete accordance with the stereotypes about French and German language and culture which have functioned for at least 200 years (i.e. since the Enlightenment). Third, I suspect that Eddie Vedder is indeed “important,” in spite of himself. Fourth, in my fem-fan capacity, I want to introduce questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure/pain to the mix of rock and roll, cultural studies, postmodern writing and see how they play, for play they must. Will their (my) presence wreck the party which is postmodernism/ity? Maybe, or maybe their presence make any party more interesting, as Leslie Gore once tearfully implied. Joni Mitchell, Simone de Beauvoir, Bjork, Desree, and Avital Ronell second that emotion — that it is necessary for girls to deconstruct boys who deconstruct.

Clear nationalist biases are at work in the general understanding of Barthes and Handke, and these transparently “obvious,” genetic differences between the French and the German — between a wry ironic pederasty and an ascetic, parzival-like heterosexuality — are tempting, for they look very neat; Barthes and Handke become, according to such orientations, mere inverted mirrors of each other, and on the surface (if only there) this binary holds. The French one moved from semiotic criticism to a writing which increasingly proclaimed itself to be personal, eccentric, and unscientific — a creative writing which made the essay into a kind of internal theater, a critical strip-tease which resembled the disreputable joints Barthes frequented on the night he was killed. Not surprisingly, the written words about Barthes mimic the perception of him; they spill over the pages in a testimonial to bliss, they break the rules, they invoke photography and cinema, erotica and pornography. Barthes’ work is so idolized, particularly in the United States, that over 500 essays have appeared on him in the past 10 years, and Greg Ulmer asks a highly pertinent question when he muses “what interests me about Barthes, is why I am interested in him” (219). What Ulmer uncovers but does not discuss is the degree to which puritanical American academe looks with awe at European (particularly French) high theory, and projects upon it its unspoken desires/fears, as D.H.Lawrence already noticed a frighteningly long time ago.

It is consequently not at all surprising that much less has been written on Peter Handke, who has made a writerly move which looks directly opposite to that of Barthes’. Handke has more or less abandoned the theatrical and novelistic works which made him famous, and has oriented himself toward the essay, towards essays about essays (as in Versuch über die Jukebox), and towards fragments such as Noch einmal für Thucydides. In Handke’s case critics speak in hushed tones about pain, about language as torture, about aesthetics, romanticism, the German tradition, a hard, cold sort of beauty, about the theories of Benjamin, of Lacan, of a poststructuralism which is deadly serious, and of course, inevitably, a little about fascism.

Feminine France versus the masculine Vaterland: manly, wounded, spiritual German; effeminate, decadent, self-indulgent French. The legacy of WW II — the German soldiers marching under the Arc de Triomphe on one hand, and on the other, actress Arletty condemned to death for sleeping with the enemy (she responded that her heart belonged to France but that her ass belonged to the world) as infantile America looks on like Freud’s child at the primal scene?

It is because of this reception that I would like to speculate as to what would happen if we read Handke and Barthes together — one with the other — against Vedder, who is, as we shall see, the infantile American boy turned inside out. What if we used Eddie Vedder to ask the same questions of both barthian and handkesque textual corpuses? I look forward hopefully to these provisional answers: the one, obvious — that both Barthes and Handke are enriched, problematized, foregrounded not only as eccentric individuals who write against the grain, but as compelling exponents (with, rather than instead of Vedder) of the episteme which we call the late 20th Century, postmodernity, the end of the millennium; the other perhaps less so — that textual pleasure can be found sometimes in very unexpected places. This/my act of “conjoining seemingly isolated forms” (Polan, 57) is, of course, itself a pleasure, a political practice, and an (intellectual ?) attempt to understand this particular cultural moment.

When placed against Vedder on the stage/screen of rock, Barthes and Handke’s dichotomous identities make a more resonant kind of sense. Roland Barthes retains his Frenchness but may now be considered, arguably, the David Bowie of écriture (a metaphor that would have no doubt pleased him) — glamorous, androgynous, slick, smart in both senses, constantly undergoing theoretical/stylistic ch-ch-changes; Barthes was a beautiful surface in love with surfaces, an author whose gestures in The Lover’s Discourse approach in many ways those of the composer-performer of “Modern Love.” Like Bowie, Barthes was one of the first to pose/perform such questions — to “. . . play games with gender [which] were genuine challenges to existing assumptions” (Street, 173). Adulated in the late 60’s, Handke, for his part, resembles a literary Neil Young who shone too brilliantly in the Woodstock years, and now as a still skinny middle-aged rocker appears strident, unappealing, and disturbing in some unfathomable way — a brilliant, but unpredictable talk-show guest.⁴ Men of too much critical substance, Handke and Young produce vaguely satirical, understatedly ironic works which point to a multivalent critique of our culture and society that cannot be reduced or thematized. “A man needs a maid” and The Goalie’s Anxiety.

2. “Son” she said, “i’ve a little story for you.”

In the autobiographical rock hit by Pearl Jam, entitled Alive, an agonized angry male singer relates the traumatic encounter with his mother, where she tells him that his real father died when he was thirteen. It is an imperfect memory, badly mangled, but filled with conflicting emotions, and as a mnemonic shard, it cuts into the singer, whose voice vibrates with pain. In “Alive” that currently notorious, hysterically unauthentic lyricist-performer Eddie Vedder conjures up a well-known specter — the specter of the mother, speaking. She is a complete cipher, as mothers of the Western tradition generally are, her motivations for telling are unfathomable (guilt, cruelty, warning?), although they resonate with distant meaning. The person known only as “she” uses a historically embedded, mysterious language that he does not appreciate and cannot understand to tell a story — what else? — a bad story about the father. She carelessly narrates the father’s death, and thereby asserts through that information — which like that of Jocasta is told to the adult son too late, and when it is least expected — her own subversive primacy in the patriarchal family. This apparently triumphant telling, performed before the adult son in his bedroom is an outrage, charged with a sexual resonance familiar to other bedroom encounters between mothers and sons — Oedipus, Hamlet, Proust’s Marcel. But, the real outrage, the son hints, occurs much earlier. The scandal consists in the mother’s absence — in fact that the boy was alone at home when the father died; the mother was not there with him. And where was she? We never know. At the end of the song, the son disclaims the mother’s power; she cannot authorize his existence as the father could; he is, it seems, alive in spite of rather than because of her.

In this manner, the son of Eddie Vedder’s song/poem compensates for paternal absence by an erasure of the overweening maternal presence, and this act of compensation takes the form of a scrambled portraiture which fragments speech, and silences the sybill-like powerful mother, the mother who belatedly tells the truth about the father, and the son uses his own narrative power to delay and defer what her presence connotes about the father: it testifies to his insufficiency, to his lack, and more threateningly perhaps, to the possibility that he may not matter so much after all, and that consequently the son — the future father — may not matter so much either. But the son pays the price for such an exchange; his own language — the language with which he usurps the mother’s story about the father — is literally broken English, so greatly impoverished that it cannot complete the sentences it tries to formulate, and it can just barely make sense. The filial act of remembrance which dismembers the mother ricochets on the son; he retroactively silences her but she, in turn, withers his grammar. The son’s speech is language made poor, a linguistic economy pared down to the subsistence level of rage, and this rage has spoken volumes to millions who have heard Alive and who have purchased Pearl Jam’s first album. Does not this rage conceal a longing? What is really being spoken here?

3. Wounds in the mirror waved

In his essay “Parabiography” (Georgia Review, 1980), Ihab Hassan aptly suggested that there was something unprecedented about the challenge posed by autobiography to the late 20th Century West:

Autobiography has become . . . the form that the contemporary imagination seeks to recover. . . Yet . . . autobiography is abject unless, in the words of Michel Leiris, it exposes itself to the “bull’s horn.” For writing about ourselves we risk cowardice and mendacity; and more, we risk changing ourselves by that writing into whatever an autobiographer pretends to be.

The image invented by Leiris and invoked by Hassan combines the masculine spectacle of the matador with an equally masculine writing practice which risks something like castration — as though the writer were reliving in his text the masculine tragedy of The Sun Also Rises. The writer of autobiography is at once Odysseus, Hemingway, and Freud — a modern, epic hero and the psychoanalytic author/subject; he must negotiate perils, he must analyze himself, he must resist all outside pressure; he must display himself and still remain manly. He must avoid abjectness — an interesting word connoting a dangerously feminine state of passivity as well as a moral and social state of utter inferiority. Like Bunyan’s Christian, he must steer between the pitfalls of cowardice and falsehood (Thou shalt not bear false witness about thyself) but there is also something of a pagan striptease at work here — one thinks of the lithe, undressed bull-dancers from the walls of Knossos courting danger as they vault over the stylized bull. And Hassan’s bull? What might it signify? The bull here seems to signify at once the genre of autobiography, the practice of writing, and the problem of language as a whole — one which the human sciences have eloquently agonized over again and again during the course of our century in their own matadorian performance of Angst. Hassan implies that the beast of literary language threatens the contemporary writer’s project not just to invalidate it, but — much more theatrically — to tear it, to punch holes in its argument, and then to bring it down (the literal meaning of abject [past tense of the Latin abicere], to lay it low, to unman it before the roar of the crowd — the jeering spectators. And yet without the horn and without the danger of the horn there can be no writing, there can be no audience, there can be no pleasure in the spectatorship of this spectacle of pain. There is then also in Hassan’s formulation the suggestion that aesthetic pleasure is generated by the pageantry of individual pain, at least at far as autobiography is concerned.

Even a casual observer of contemporary rock culture cannot help but think of the ambiguous polysemous spectacle presented by Eddie Vedder and consider how well it fits this paradoxical description of the postmodern autobiographer. Vedder’s songs are usually at once frankly and fraudulently autobiographical: either based on his “real” life experiences referred to obliquely in the media releases about him or sucked out of people whom he ostensibly knows and whom he chooses to impersonate. He performs their narrative half-lives for them, employing a deep and powerful vocal instrument to give voice precisely to voices which cannot possibly sound anything like his; his impersonations are frequently feminine, juvenile or both ranging from physically abused little girls, mentally abused boys, young girls forcibly committed to insane asylums, a lonely old woman in a small town, a young woman trying unsuccessfully to leave her lover, to small animals; he is never a practitioner of but almost always the victim of violent aggression, an avid sexual desirer with a gun “buried under his nose,” an angrily prone body stretched out (suggestively) at the feet of a disembodied “you” characterized only by a “crown.” He is the passive, hysterical other waiting for the lover to arrive (“you’re finally here and I’m a mess”), the quintessential “nothing” man, read a man who isn’t, a man whose masculinity is zero.

Vedder’s Gestalt is similarly complicated. His name connotes both the insincere, boyish, and sexually dubious trouble-maker of “Leave it to Beaver” and the sinister powers of Darth Vader; its spelling also connotes Edie Sedgwick — Warhol’s ill-starred debutante. He is long haired, diminutive, dressed childishly in a pastiche of ill-fitting masculine gear — the 60’s flannel shirt (lumberjacks, hippies), over the t-shirt (manual laborer), over too large shorts. He hunches over the microphone in an almost disappearing act (in a clear stylistic rejection of the histrionics of Mick Jagger and Jagger’s heavy-metal male descendants) and yet at the same time he remains elusive, satiric, false, gymnastic.⁵ He self-consciously performs an unwillingness to perform (at the 1993 MTV video awards he walked up to the podium with a Camcorder pointed at the t.v. camera) and then throws himself off the top of the stage for good measure, allowing himself — perhaps — to be caught and borne up by his audience.⁶ Vedder’s performances are so immensely popular, because he would appear to expose himself to Hassan’s bull’s-horn on a regular basis. He mimes being gored, but the performance contains a whiff of “real” danger; he is an autobiographical tight-rope walker limping on the wire with a broken leg whom “we” — mostly young white men, but also, increasingly, young women, and now, a literary critic — watch with fascination, wondering if he will fall like Kurt Cobain — his nihilistic and now deceased grunge Doppelgänger, rock culture’s current Schiller to Vedder’s survivalist version of Goethe. Together they form the pop culture masculine monument of our moment — a space where cultural myth and spectacle enter into conflict (Polan, 56).

Hassan’s complex and powerful description of autobiography projected upon the spectral video image of Eddie Vedder marks out a space where the Christian and the Pagan interlock, where the classical tradition runs into late capitalism, where Hemingway meets Augustine meets the Odyssey meets the Rat-Man and they all meet the Beatles. It is perhaps for this reason that there is something arch about the anxious cluster of images displayed in “Alive.” The absent father, a present mother made absent, a longing for her which hides behind a longing for him, the shifting of negative emotion onto her problematic ontology and psychology, and the problem of language — these “issues” re-rehearse the simultaneously hysterical and mundanely familiar symptoms of a masculine crisis of (artistic) self-representation which has been discussed by just about everybody in the United States — by such cultural critics as Katja Silverman and by Iron John author Robert Bly; it has become a common subject on talk-shows, as the popularity of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus testifies.⁷

Vedder, Barthes, and Handke are important in this regard, not because they are doing something essentially “different” from mainstream culture, but because they have upped the ante in the crisis of masculinity. They undertake a frantic, frenetic, deeply ironic and highly self-critical series of performative attempts to revise the genre called autobiography at the same time as they struggle to complete, kill off, and have done with the modern. Using Vedder’s example, we can see that Barthes and Handke share a surabundance of common interests of which the most important (for this essay) are: a regard for spectacle, an obsession with the photograph, a fixation on the dead mother, and a love-hate relationship with language. Unabashed narcissists, they have taken Montaigne’s caveat to the nth degree and beyond (Park, 392) — “je suis moi-même la matiere de mon livre” (“I am the [feminine] matter of my book”) — but, Barthes and Handke, just like Eddie, dismantle the matiere/stoff of autobiography toward the imagining of a new textual body, one that does not confront but rather submits itself de facto to the bull’s horn; the goring is in fact the pre-text, and the text which follows is constituted around the wound, around and because of the tear. It is the very failure of the autobiographer which constitutes the textual spectacularity of Barthes and Handke and the pleasure in pain which might open up new possibilities for writing. Like Vedder, Barthes and Handke go as far as boys can; owners of the phallus, they enact the vaginal wound in their go arounds with mother and with the mother tongue (language); they court abjection for our wonder, and dream of a freedom which must always fail.

4. The picture kept will remind me.

Barthes has already insisted on the aesthetic possibilities offered by failure in Degree zero of literature, and this notion of failure is connected to another problem, tantalizingly expressed (but when isn’t Barthes tantalizing?) in The Pleasure of the text:

No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure . . . . For the writer, however this object exists; its not the language [le langage], it is the mother tongue[la langue maternelle]. The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body . . . in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take to the limit of what can be known about the body. . . . (The Pleasure of the Text, “Langue/Tongue” 37)

Earlier in this work in a section called “Babil/Prattle”, Barthes discusses boredom in terms of a writing which is infantile, which indiscriminately adheres not to la lange but to le langage, which — in a wonderful gender-bender — he makes into a masculine wet nurse, the mother’s impossible, false surrogate. Here in the passage just quoted he affirms the Oedipal pleasure of language; his play is with la langue maternelle— his mother’s tongue (feminine speech versus masculine writing) and the native language, and perhaps by analogy that feminine organ which resides in another, forbidden, unspeakable mouth — the truly (re)productive one. This act performs an erotic game with the speaking body of the mother, to see what there is of her that the son/writer can recognize in himself. For Barthes, the advantages of reorienting the conception of language as a carnal, feminine, sexual, fertile, and physically vocal presence are many. Through this play, the pederast son recaptures and improves upon the lost infantile primal intimacy with the mother, described by Theresa Brennan as the language of the flesh, the primal code which circulates between/in the mother-unborn child, and which persists in the mother/baby dyad. To play with the body of the mother is to at once refuse the notion of language as patriarchal law (à la Lacan) and to assert a different kind of imperative and a different kind of unity — not the murderous adulation of father and son — the middle man in the Oedipal triangle has been so to speak eliminated, as he was in Barthes’ own life — but the prior pleasure where son and mother are one. Thus, Barthes’ gesture reasserts the power of language — not in its capacity as phallic authority but in its maternal (w)holenesss. The play of language can be “foreplay” in its most literal sense, the first play, that which precedes the other, secondary, and implicitly inferior play — namely that of heterosexual coitus — where the mother must submit to a fatherly penetration.

But in this passage Barthes’ play is also afterplay, a reversed funeral rite in which the enraged bacchante, Barthes, tears asunder the body of the goddess, the Dionysian mother, in an attempt to consume her power — desire become appetite become bloodlust — as body of the mother disintegrates into pieces. Desire and rage, glorification and disembowelment, celebration and mourning, the pleasure of pain — these animate and radiate the body of Barthes’ mother within the body of Barthes’ own texts (think, for example, of the reading of Phèdre in On Racine).

Yet, Barthes’s radical and radically honest portrayal of the conflicting drives at work in the masculine play-practice on la langue maternelle fails drastically in his final work, Camera Lucida/La chambre claire — a work torn very literally between a study of the aesthetics of photography and a quest for the essence of Barthes’ dead mother.⁸ It is a strange book, self-consciously fragmented as is most of Barthes’ later work but dramatically lacking the sensual exuberance of the earlier writing. Further, in the account of his final days with his mother, Barthes falls back into very role of male nurse which he dismissed so contemptuously in The Pleasure of the Text for he himself becomes the male mother who infantilizes the mother back into a child, recuperating her into the patriarchal order — giving birth to her, so to speak, as a Zeus produced Athena, a product of head-sex parthenogenesis.

During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph. (72)

The fact that Barthes’ mother is only recognizable to him as a girl-child in the photograph at the Winter Garden suggests that his apparently unconditional adulation of his mother and his celebration of her power is not what it appears to be. Her relegation in memory to the softness of crepe de chine and the smell of rice-powder — a combination which reminds us of the technology of photo making (silver grains deposited on smooth paper) — suggests that Barthes can talk about his mother only in terms of the proustian project (Blau, 86), that is to say in terms of a fin-de-sieclesentimentality which glosses over the surface but which does not permit the other to speak. The autobiographer/critic senses this shift in tonal gears; he makes contradictory claims — proclaiming that he has found the truth of his mother and then admitting:

In front of the Winter Garden Photograph I am a bad dreamer who vainly holds out his arms toward the possession of the image; I am Golaud exclaiming “Misery of my life!” because he will never know Mélisande’s truth. (Mélisande does not conceal but she does not speak) . . . (100)

Unable to reconstruct, to give voice to, the mother, and by connection to the “langue maternelle,” the book on photography breaks down, returns to the surface linguistically and phenomenologically. The result is utter banality.

I know our critics: what! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance? (115)

And yet there is something suspect about this relentless sweep across the surface, about this intellectual abjection. Barthes tells us that he will not show the Winter garden photograph of his mother to his reader, so that in this book peppered with photos, the most important one is held back (Sarkonak, 48). Barthes insists that we will not see anything in it — it is too personal, and that it will mean nothing to us, but I think instead, that this very gesture itself is highly significant;⁹ it is the selfish maneuver of an overgrown child who can only pretend to share, and who can perhaps, only pretend to love, and as such displays the fallacy of his own “a la recherche d’une maman perdue,” because he doesn’t in the end want to find her, and he certainly doesn’t want us to. The critic Lawrence Kritzman anticipates this reading of Barthes when he notes that “like the abandoned child, the lover finds himself in a state of solitude, the consequences of which reveal the inability to complete separation because of a past which cannot be extricated from the present. . .” (“The Discourse of Desire,” 860).

Thus, the passionate postmodernist critic reverts to an elegant dandyism (J. Gerald Kennedy refers to Barthes’ “extravagant devotion,” 386) — to an impressionistic modernism and to a nineteenth century sentimentalism — when, as an autobiographer, he discusses his mother’s death. I will observe in passing how important it has been for a number of critics to defend Barthes on this particular point; although critics decry sentimentality everywhere else, it is — curiously — not only admissible but somehow crucial for Barthes when it comes to his mother (see Blau, Woodward, Hoft-March), as though she were the alibi both for his pederasty and for his postmodernity — at once maternity and modernity.

Oddly, Barthes reveals himself here to be much like Peter Pan, the alter-ego of the Victorian pederast J.M. Barrie; like the boy who would not grow up, Barthes prefers the prepubescent girl-mother who cannot threaten him and he will ship her out the moment she possesses even the glimmer of agency (especially sexual). He has indeed dismembered mama in the ostensible act of remembering her, in giving her presence he has ensured her absence, much as the dishonest Chevalier des Grieux erases the object of his desire even as he outlines compulsively how she has done him wrong (Hammer, 48). As is the case in that false confession written in 1732, Barthes uses the absence of the literal “matiere” of “moi-même” — what Domna Stanton calls the feminine “matter/mater” which constructed the “moi-Même” called Roland Barthes out of herself — to reveal the falsity of the autobiographical subject and to foreground the emptiness of the whole “I remember Mama” enterprise.

Yet, this self-conscious fissure (or what Anselm Haverkamp calls the exposed aporia, 259) is precisely one of the places where Barthes is terribly important to us, as Jane Gallop remarks:

Barthes and Proust . . . Male homosexuality and the mother, strange bedfellows, yet to be retheorized, in the wake of feminism (133).

To his credit, Barthes explicitly exposes the uneasy connection between pederasty and mother-love in the book by juxtaposing the narrative about the mother’s missing picture with the display of the erotic Mapplethorpe self-portrait. Mapplethorpe as maternal stand-in — a beautiful young man grinning off-center at the camera — tells us, as much as anything does, what the book is really about. But the Maplethorpe self-portrait may also stand-in for Barthes himself. As his own autoerogenous object-author Barthes uses himself as a text and camera; he opens the autobiographical aperture and freezes himself in a series of positions doomed to insufficiency and incompleteness. So, even as Camera Lucidafails — unable to recover the happy sexuality which Barthes dreams of (“the breast which nourishes a sexuality devoid of difference” [Kritzman, 856-7, “The Discourse of Desire”]) — it also looks beyond itself to something unsayable — to a kind of knowledge of the mother, HIS mother which belongs only to love. As Kennedy notes in his essay, “RB, autobiography, and the end of writing,” this love is not reducible to linguistic formulation, as this passage and its failure to actually “say” what it wants to makes clear:

In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother. It is always maintained that I should suffer more because I have spent my whole life with her; but my suffering proceeds from who she was; and it was because she was who she was that I lived with her . . . for this originality was the reflection of what was absolutely irreducible in her, and thereby lost forever . . . for what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (Camera lucida #31, 75)

Barthes’s impossible book culminates with an impossible affirmation — that of the persistence of a love made rich by a suffering that was itself an aesthetic expression and which he could not dispense with — that cannot be reduced to a bloodless theory. Neither reduced nor resuscitated, Barthes’ mother is relegated to the uneasy ontology of the unseen photograph, the private, punctumthat only the author can see.

5. I got bugs

One problem (at the very least) remains. That “she” is not more recuperable for pederast, mother-loving Barthes than she is for hysterically straight mother-hating Vedder speaks to the impossibility of situating mother within anything possessing even the vaguest resemblance to the standard masculine autobiographical project.¹⁰ Risking abjection is not enough.

6. When she couldn’t hold, she folded

The son’s ecstatic union with the mother who is and is not he, the playing with a permeable body in a way which is not intrusive but inclusive and at the same time the rage to tear the mother apart to take to the limit her body’s recognition, the mourning for her loss, the use of this entire complex for writing for the practice of langue, a remembrance of the mother which fails and which is tied to an investigation of aesthetics which also fails — how might this string be invoked for Peter Handke? There is no linguistic foreplay in Handke, only after play, for, it is to the disjunction from mother that Handke repeatedly returns — the alienation between Claire and Delta Benedictine in Short Letter, Long Farewell, the bicycling mother who dreams of going crazy as her toddler looks on dazed in Wings of Desire, the motherless Kaspar, a postmodern lost boy, the dead mother’s problematic legacy in Through the Villages — but of course nowhere more powerfully than in A Sorrow beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Ungluck), his self-proclaimedly failed attempt to document his mother’s life and suicide. Like Gertrude Stein on Alice B. Toklas, Handke decides to tell the story that the feminine other cannot or will not tell about herself, although the son is implicated in his mother’s story in ways that the female lovers are not. From the outset, Handke’s play with the barthian langue maternelle — in German, the feminine word die Muttersprache — is a both Oedipal and necrophiliac act of necessity; it is overtly about death and death is as, Camus — one of Handke’s most importance influences — has noted, a dirty and not always terribly interesting business. And perhaps it is Orphic too — Handke’s attempt to call his mother back from the dead, and from the living death that was her existence — not through the power of song, but through the clenched mundanities that he documents in his writing. He also writes about her perspective intermittently as “Man” (one/masculine) and as “sie” (she) signifying the gendered impossibility of talking about her — implicating us and himself, by necessity in our own mothers’ pain under the rule of that false universal “das ewig mannliche,” the eternal masculine.

And there is a great deal of pain here. Want, discomfort, disgust, and rage for and against his mother, for and against himself as her son and, as a man, as the accomplice in the society which victimized her — a society which reduced her existence into a village game called ” Tired/exhausted/sick/dying/dead” (249). Handke is relentlessly unsentimental as regards the entire project (Jerry Varsava notes that Handke “strips Proust bare,” 122) — he criticizes his enunciations about her even as he speaks them:

. . . the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences — have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. . . I try with unbending earnestness to penetrate my character. . . She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper. (264-5)

This mother cannot be so easily anatomized, as Rainer Nägele notes (399); she is protean, when fragmented she does not becomes surface but rather a morass which engulfs the son:

Now she imposed herself on me, took on body and reality, and her condition was so palpable that at some moments it became a part of me. (282-3)

Rather it is the son’s words that splinter about him in his attempt to make her congeal.

Not surprisingly, the body of Handke’s mother appears not as cosmetic surface but as bodily fluid and as dirty anality. It is the malodorous spittle used to clean the children’s faces; tears wept in the toilet; it is an embarrassing fart during a mountain hike with Handke’s father — it is the hidden excrement in the underpants of the deceased — impure ejaculations, fetishized elements of a lost body that should not be seen thus, and whose viscosity continually contrasts with the photographs which Handke mentions at crucial moments in anironic, poignant counterpoint. It seems significant that Handke never worries about the “reality” of the photographs he discusses,and this is all he has to say about the matter in this particular work:

The fiction that photographs can “tell us” anything — . . . but isn’t all formulation, even of things that have really happened more or less a fiction? . . . (253)

So much for Barthes’ theory of photography.

And yet it is in Handke’s text about his mother, rather than in Barthes’, that we find a kind of ecstasy, that pleasure in the spectacle of pain heralded by Hassan — one that we are summoned and positioned to share, for Handke’s text is one of both of rage and celebration; his mother’s suicide speaks to him of a kind of courage which borders on a feminine and feminized notion of heroism:

Yes, I thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to myself: THAT DOES IT, THAT DOES IT, THAT DOES IT, GOOD, GOOD GOOD. And throughout the flight I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. (292)

It is here, and not in Barthes, that we run into the disruptive, unsettling nature of a “jouisaance” which, as Jane Gallop has argued, goes beyond “the pleasure principle”, not because it is beyond pleasure but because it is beyond principle (Gallop, 113), and which unites pleasure with emotion with fear, with disruption, with loss of control — jouissance qua catharsis qua abjection, in Kristeva’s rather than Hassan’s sense, that which unravels “identity, system, order” (Kristeva, 10)

Thus, it is not the child but the war veteran and the concentration camp victim whom Maria Handke resembles; she is not the writer-son’s mind-child but his hero, an Antigone/Anne Frank — a tragic victim of a tyrannical state. And as in the ancient tragedy, it is the moral implications of burial which motivates the entire story; at the end of this piece we discover that Handke is enraged by the depersonalizing effects of his mother’s funeral, that it is at the cemetery that he decides he must write about her. This rage is Maria Handke’s clearest legacy to her son, an emotion which grounds an aesthetic and an ethic which arguably informs all of Handke’s writing thereafter: a refusal to never not be angry, a hatred of authority and institution, a hatred of the father, a hatred of Austria — all this as a monument to the rage of his mother a way to let it speak, a way for the son to recall and use the silenced, outraged MUTTERSPRACHE. Katherine Woodward has argued that Barthes refuses normal mourning in La Chambre Claire, but this seems far truer for Handke, as a self-conscious practice, as an act of atonement. In this way, Handke sees through the Oedipal romance at the heart of his own narrative manoever and rejects it; realizing that his rage is his mother’s rage, that the two are intertwined and inextricable, Handke goes Eddie Vedder one better; he foregrounds and then refuses to tell the tale of the “bad” mother and pathetically victimized, neurotic son; he sees through the misogyny of that strategy and will not fall for it, although he clearly feels its power.

In this way Handke becomes both the avenging fury and fugitive son (Orestes) to the specter of his own mother’s death, or to use another classical analogy, if Barthes is a wannabe Zeus, Handke is a self-crippled Hephaestus, who throws himself down the father’s stairs for the sake of themother. Is it any wonder that — despite the bewildering array of first person narrators and writer-doubles who populate Handke’s work — that Handke himself is never to be found in any of them? Autobiography becomes for him the absence of the subject, especially himself, and this is perhaps his scriptible manner of atoning for the erasure which his mother underwent herself. I remember the dismembered Mama and I dismember myself, the body of my text, so that she may be protean, so that she may live in me. Handke’s literary transsexualism — his wanting so much not to be a man, and to be SHE.

7. All my pieces set me free¹¹

In Barthes and Handke, the son plays with the corpse of the mother and together they give birth to writing where the problems of langue vs langage, of personal utterance versus societal formula, of pleasure, pain, of aesthetics, play themselves out on paper through the spectacle of the son’s remembrance of the dead mother and haunt us precisely because they do not succeed. In Barthes, we witness the death throes of the modern, the recapitulation of the high-style dandyism of Wilde, Proust, and the rupture of the Victorian mama’s boy (how I suffered with maman but I alone understood her) in the face of the photograph and the mass visual media which it portends; from this perspective one of the things being mourned in La chambre claire is certainly modernity itself. In Handke, we witness the postmodern acceptance of the photograph and of visual culture in general as artifacts of artifice, as well as a linguistic exuberance which operates in the very interstices of exhaustion¹² — a quirky artistic masculine life which struggles from out and on behalf of the body of the mother. And in Vedder — against whose projected image this essay has played itself out? — where the other (tongue) is all but cut out, leaving a trail of body parts in her (its) wake — a hand, a breast, blood — consequently leaving the critic with little to “work” with? In Eddie Vedder’s self-obscuring spectacle and in grunge as a whole we can see both — the self-consciously doomed struggle of the “low” modernism of 60’s rock with its pomo double, Punk — Jim Morrison meeting Sigmund Freud and DEVO. But to this menage à trois we must add a fourth figure; for Eddie Vedder’s wounded masculinity travels through Morrison, Freud, and DEVO to a different, oddly indeterminate gender-destination. Looking at his performances, I am reminded of Janis Joplin reborn as a generation-X boy in shorts. Eddie Vedder, like Roland Barthes and Peter Handke, reverses the Pinocchio principle, and dreams of being a real girl. Do call me daughter.

Thus, in all three autobiographical practioners we see not just the crisis of masculinity but a struggle to rethink the masculine subject as feminine if not downright feminized, and it seems significant that this occurs in both the self-avowedly homosexual and in the determinedly heterosexual male texts which I have considered here. Many feminist critics have regarded this move with apprehension¹³ — an apprehension by which I am repelled and to which I am also attracted. On one hand, it is hard not to see the autobiographical gestures of Vedder, Barthes and Handke as important, for they take on and try to say something new about that most difficult of contemporary topics — love (as Eilene Hoft-March has noted in her essay on Barthes)– and they contemplate possibly the most difficult of western loves to talk about — difficult in the sense that it is controversial, notorious, theoretically and politically embedded and at the same time for feminism crucial to rethink and revise: the love between/of the son and/for the mother. Hopefully this essay has suggested that the tortured mechanics of this love are still everywhere in western culture — from Oedipus to rock and beyond.

8. she dreams in colors she dreams in red

Crucial, and yet . . . This piece on autobiography, on postmodernism/ity and on the woundedness of performing boys will not close without my own ambivalence, a personal variation on E. Ann Kaplan’s reservations about the postmodern versus the feminist (Kaplan, 38). What “we” — our postmodern culture — have yet to move beyond (where indeed no man has gone before) is that this love for/from mother, still, expresses itself best over mother’s dead body, around the edges of her missing photographs, over and against the linguistic traces which testify to and yet still seek to erase her actual presence. The failure of the aesthetic enterprise discussed here — the as far as a boy can go pomo prime directive — is one, then, which we should theorize, discuss, and even admire, but which we should not accept. For, even as I write, from around the margins of the photograph, from behind the performance of wounded masculine annihilation, and against the hateful image of Yoko Ono as rock and roll’s maternal black widow extraordinaire, an outrageous maternal body materializes before our very eyes. Clad in wings on the cover of Vanity Fair (June, 1995) or exposing a slightly rounded postpartum stomach and braless, t-shirted, imperfect breasts on the cover of Rolling Stone (August, 1995), she demands to be seen and heard, requires our attention, defies our judgment, makes money, achieves fame NOT as the safely silent feminine object of mourning, but as bad mom mourner who fronts the co-ed, sexually multivalent band, called, appropriately, Hole:

i want to be the girl with the most cake
someday you will ache like i ache.
(Courtney Love)

Notes

For K, with Love. Also thanks for RG, JG, and in particular DD for staging a dress rehearsal of this gig at the UCR Comparative Literature Spring Colloquium in 1994.

1. In Wim Wenders’ quintessentially strange, overwrought male-bonding road movie, Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1975) the protagonist sings along with an old recording whose refrain is “just like Eddie.”

2. All frame lyrics by Eddie Vedder.

3. I.e. the “coolness” of post-structuralism has been affirmed by a recent article in the computer-tech magazine Wired, (where, incidentally Roland Barthes is included as an important progenitor) in much the same way as Spin confirms the angst of Eddie Vedder (who is displayed on the cover).

4. For a more lengthy discussion of Handke’s reception in the 80’s and 90’s, see my essay “On the Bull’s Horn with Peter Handke” in Postmodern Culture, September 1993.

5. See for example, Vedder’s recent, deeply parodistic photographic self-portraits in Spin (January 1995).

6. In this way, Vedder skews and violates the standard rebellious, macho stances of male rock performance which are geared to reinforce masculine identity values in male viewers (See Toney and Weaver, 568 ff.).

7. I concur with Dana Polan’s caveat that popular culture is not “necessarily” free from the constraints of ideology (Kaplan, 52). Indeed what is interesting about Pearl Jam is precisely this performative tension between the ideological and the subversive.

8. Elissa Marder also argues persuasively that Camera Lucida may be read also as a revelation of the “essence” of contemporary history — that of cliché. See Works Cited.

9. Haverkamp falls for Barthes’ line (265).

10. Similarly, Maurice Berger notes “one of the greatest lessons implied in his writing was one he never fully understood: that men . . . should be able to ask form rather than demand, love.” (Berger, 122).

11. Which provides an interesting intertext with Wayne Koestenbaum who observes, “Masculinity sucks; it divides into pieces” (Koestenbaum, 79).

12. Or as Handke put it in a January 1994 interview/performance, “Lassen Sie mich mit Modernismus!” (Handke, “Die Einladende Schweigsamkeit,” 18).

13. See in particular Carole-Anne Tyler’s brilliant essay “Boys Will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag.”

Works Cited

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• —–. The Pleasure of the text. Farrar Strauss Giroux: New York, 1975.
• Berger, Maurice. “A Clown’s Coat.” Artforum (April 1994) 82-122.
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• —–. “Beyond the Jouissance Principle.” representations 7 (Summer 1984). 110-115.
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• Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
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