POSTMODERN CULTURE

Year: 2013

  • Celeb-Reliance: Intellectuals, Celebrity, and Upward Mobility

    Bruce Robbins

    Department of English
    Rutgers University
    brobbins@interport.net

     

    “Scholars Fear ‘Star’ System May Undercut Their Mission.” Appearing on the front page of the New York Times in December, 1997, this headline advertised to the world the perplexity that has surrounded the emergence of so-called academic stars, both inside the academy and beyond it. Does the academy have a “mission” for these celebrities to undercut? If so, what is it? The sources quoted are not forthcoming on these points. Nor can they agree about whether it is brilliance or mere trendiness that gets rewarded, whether teaching suffers or benefits from the stars’ presence, whether they are to be admired as hyper-productive geniuses or despised as fakes and opportunists. This is not merely journalistic balance; it also traces the outline of a more widespread narrative. While worrying conscientiously about the cost of off-scale raises and reduced teaching loads, the Times titillates its readers with success stories like that of historian Alan Taylor, whose prize-winning book won him overnight offers from several prestigious universities. The thrill is familiar, and so is the way its enjoyment is hedged round by scruples about the means, misgivings about the ends. New the academic celebrity may be, but we have all heard stories like this before, from Great Expectations to Hoop Dreams.

     

    For the Times, in other words, celebrity is a contemporary variation on the notorious national theme of self-reliance and upward mobility–a point that Jeffrey Decker has recently made at greater length (xiv-xv). And this suggests that academic confusion about the new academic celebrity may reflect a more general confusion about self-reliance itself.

     

    Before elaborating on this suggestion, let me try to distinguish between what does and does not deserve complaint. What clearly deserves complaint is the tendency, in an increasingly corporatized university, to institute a two-tiered employment structure and a two-tiered salary scale: that is, to increase the already dramatic divide between fewer and fewer tenured and tenure-track people on the one hand (whether stars or not) and more and more untenured, adjunct, part-time people on the other. This drive to proletarianize the vast majority of university teachers is an abomination, though an abomination with non-academic precedents; one thinks for example of the increasing recourse to cheap and disposable part-time workers that helped precipitate the recent UPS strike. If it is allowed to widen much farther, the divide between part-timers and full-timers will destroy the relatively democratic version of higher education that has arisen since World War II. The two-tier system has to be maligned and mobilized against at every opportunity. Taking it on will require people organizing on the bottom tier, and without much expectation of support from those who have lucked out generationally and now find themselves with job security or reasonable expectations of it. And it will mean academics fighting corporatization in the university as part of a self-conscious struggle against the same corporatization elsewhere–speaking up against all forms of outsourcing, subcontracting, and systematic irresponsibility, making the exploitation of part-timers in the academy into a general case in favor of more accountability. Otherwise, where are our non-academic allies supposed to come from?

     

    But vague sentiments about celebrity can only cloud current assessments of the academic job crisis and the shifting conditions of academic work. Celebrity is usually defined by starting from fame and subtracting something: fame minus merit, or fame minus power. The sparest of these definitions by deficiency is Daniel Boorstin’s: being known for being known. Whatever its other deficiencies, however, celebrity cannot be defined as a cause or result of two-tier employment. Arguing that stars “command an ever larger share of shrinking resources,” David Shumway adds, with understandable hesitation, that their salaries “may have encouraged the hiring of more part-time and temporary faculty members” (94). Sharon O’Dair argues with no such hesitation that we have the star system “because [the emphasis is hers] there are so few tenure-track jobs” (609). Are we really supposed to believe that if there were more jobs, there would be none of the inequalities of intellectual visibility, veneration, and influence that celebrity implies? Cary Nelson is surely right to dismiss this argument out of hand. However greedy, self-delusive, and disgusting the behavior of certain academic celebrities may be, he writes, and however “morally corrupt” it is “to reward some categories of people while literally impoverishing others” (43), “the argument that superstar salaries are a significant financial problem for higher education is a sham” (39). Celebrity itself may well be inevitable; what is not inevitable, Nelson declares, is that it will be “quickly converted into a lifetime salary way above the discipline’s campus average” (43). We should certainly try–it won’t be easy–to break the links between reputation and salary. But we should do so for moral and political reasons, not in the illusion that this will make a decisive economic difference to universities that spend the enormous sums they spend on athletics, administration, and so on. “No academic honor is supportable,” Nelson says, “unless all employees are treated fairly” (54). Note that this is a moral argument; it is about jobs and salaries, not about reputation or fan psychology; and it applies as much to tenure and even to the tenure track as it does to stardom.

     

    It seems likely that a great deal of complaint about academic celebrities has nothing to do with the parlous condition of academic labor. Much of the resentment is probably, in Jennifer Wicke’s words, “celebrity worship disguised as purgative hatred of celebrity” (775). Given how unjust the allocation of rewards can be, some resentment is natural enough. But I think there is something more interesting going on here than mere resentment.

     

    Shumway’s argument shares at least one thing with Sean Wilentz’s denunciation of supposed “celebrity-mongering” on behalf of the new black public intellectuals, and for that matter with the Times article. All three criticize the celebrity-besotted present in the implicit name of a past in which merit was supposedly granted its just reward.1 For Wilentz, the modern celebrity writer, valued for personality rather than ideas, was born with the Dick Cavett show, or generally with television (294). As a historian, Wilentz should know more about the pre-television lecture circuit of the nineteenth century. From the 1840s on, something like half a million people a week went to public lectures in season. The lecturers, avidly competed for by different towns and avidly written up in the newspapers, were certainly celebrities. Often they were college professors who were supplementing their income. “The importance they attached to their public lecturing,” historian Donald Scott observes, “… appears to have exceeded that which they gave to their classroom activities” (17). If this sounds familiar, and it should, then television is not the root of the problem.

     

    For Shumway what’s wrong with the present is the airplane and the conference-circuit rather than TV, and the pre-celebrity past is represented by the profession of literary criticism before the First World War. In that period men with three names like George Lyman Kittredge and John Livingston Lowes were disciplinary heavyweights but not, Shumway says, stars. If “visibility” is the defining value of academic work today, the value for Kittredge and company, he goes on, was “soundness” (94). Shumway apparently accepts this “soundness” at face value; he apparently presumes that in that era, unlike our own, professional judgment somehow measured merit accurately and rewarded it appropriately. In the context of today’s job crisis, let us recall that “soundness” was also the criterion by which the patronage system, otherwise known as the “old boy network,” which is what Shumway is describing, worked to define and allocate jobs. If we do not assume that jobs were justly allocated under that system, is there any reason to think that the old boys did better in objectively judging intellectual merit?2 By supplying an alternative method for distributing cultural capital, the celebrity cult has served (among its other functions) to open up what remains of those tight, all-male professional circles.

     

    But if this opening up can be called an improvement, as I think it can, it is not because we have now escaped the old boys, or modern counterparts to the old boys. When I suggest that “soundness,” Shumway’s standard of merit, conceals the mediating presence of the patronage system, I don’t mean to imply that there exists a version of pure, genuine, absolute merit that would not depend on patrons or mediators at all.3 On the contrary. This is the mistake that makes critics of celebrity into perhaps unwitting celebrators of self-reliance.

     

    Whether or not they are nostalgic for the days when merit supposedly got its just reward, critics of celebrity tend to imply that there can and should be such a thing as merit in a pure form–merit without the external intervention of the media, influential mentors and patrons, prestigious institutions, or whatever. Yet the classic ideal of self-reliance on which they thus rely is less straightforward than it might appear. Consider for example this characteristic throw-away by William Henry III in his In Defense of Elitism: “an entertainer is someone who can actually do something, someone who has a verifiable skill or talent, whereas Vanna White is a celebrity” (181). The interesting ambiguity here resides in what Henry doesn’t mention: Vanna White’s good looks, which stand for her apparent lack of merit. But are good looks so obviously distinct from merit? Like “skill or talent,” they too might be seen as “God-given,” acquired without verifiable sweat and toil. And what counts as being able to “actually do something” is almost as difficult to pin down as the question of where the ability came from. What will count in the case of a woman, for example, may not be quite the same as what will count in the case of a man. “Whereas the traditional self-made man sold his story as an afterthought to the accumulation of riches,” Decker writes, “the celebrity’s primary source of income is her story” (113). For Decker, the upward mobility story has been taken over by women (his examples are Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey), its female protagonists are celebrities, and these female celebrities no longer do anything, they merely tell a story–even though, as Decker himself notes, the story that both Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey tell involves laboring on their bodies, working hard to refashion them through dieting, exercise, and will-power. As if in answer to Henry on Vanna White, in other words, both present good looks not as given but as earned by their labor. Yet that does not soften the reflex invocation of celebrity as fame minus merit. This double standard is of course not unprecedented. Recall in Sister Carrie what Dreiser has the authorial Ames say to Carrie about the acting talent that has made her a theatrical star: “It so happens that you have this thing. It is no credit to you–that is, I mean, you might not have had it. You paid nothing to get it” (385). Even if Carrie had paid for it, the questions would not stop. Where did the money come from? Who was her acting coach? Dig deep enough into any instance of merit, and you will discover social determinants, factors like family and friends, lovers and mentors, identities, interests, and institutions that advantaged some and disadvantaged others. Why choose to deconstruct merit here, at the intersection of women, theatricality, and media, and not deconstruct it everywhere?

     

    Surprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep in order to catch a glimpse of social determination at work beneath apparent self-reliance. It lies right at the surface, though not precisely at the center, of the most notorious self-reliance stories we have, the tales of Horatio Alger. As many critics have noticed, Alger’s stories are not in fact the tales of triumphant self-reliance they are popularly thought to be. “Alger’s heroes are rarely ‘alone and unaided,’” John Cawelti noted in 1965, “and do not win their success entirely through individual effort and accomplishment. From the very beginning of his career, the Alger boy demonstrates an astounding propensity for chance encounters with benevolent and useful friends, and his success is largely due to their patronage and assistance” (109). Alger’s texts concern themselves largely if paradoxically with mediation by patrons and benefactors, figures who invite the suspicion that (like Alger himself) they are interested in something less innocent than merely rewarding the merit of their young protegés. In Michael Moon’s words, social ascent happens through “a mutual seduction of sorts” between street boys, with their “handsome faces and comely bodies,” and genteel patrons (94). It is about boys and old boys–one might say, dirty old men. But what social determinants do these old boys represent?

     

    Aside from the pederasty that led to Alger’s expulsion from his Massachusetts ministry, the most obvious explanation for these patrons is that they represent a throwback to an earlier time, a kinder, small-town America that had not yet discovered cutthroat capitalism–and where family and old boy connections were still decisive, as indeed they were early in Alger’s life. For Cawelti, the patrons demonstrate Alger’s “reassertion of the values of a bygone era in an age of dramatic change and expansion” (120). Yet a case could be made that the social force incarnated in these mediating figures is something newer than residual paternalism or sublimated homoeroticism. Moon’s argument, brilliantly buttressed by an analysis of the double meaning of “saving” in Ragged Dick, is that this homosocial bonding stands for an incipient corporate capitalism. As Moon points out, Dick is not merely interested in rising; he also carries on the “saving” of other boys–a practice learned from his own benefactors–by means of free spending that drastically (if only temporarily) depletes the savings deposited in his own account. Thus, though the “all-boy families” formed around these moments of generosity may represent, as Moon says, a version of capital’s own fantasy of “asexual breeding” (104) and may hide a supplement of erotic interest, they are not founded on a simple computation of self-interest of the kind that the word “corporate” might suggest.

     

    In his efforts at “saving” the less fortunate, Dick is also imitating the role of benefactor that Alger himself, only months after leaving his ministry, began to adopt toward the homeless boys of New York City. “Alger’s room, first in St. Mark’s Place and after 1875 in various boarding houses around the city, became a veritable salon for street boys,” his biographer writes. “A generation after he settled in New York, Alger remained a kind and popular benefactor of the street Arabs” (Scharnhorst 77). His work was long commemorated for example by the Children’s Aid Society (80). Scharnhorst suggests that the “stock adult character, the Patron… paralleled the part Alger had begun to assume among the street children of the city. He literally projected himself into his stories” (83). Were Alger’s sustained and well-documented philanthropic efforts only the legitimate margin of a lifetime of illicit erotic activities? Did this life remain secret only because these boys, unlike the children of his congregation, conveniently had no parents to suspect or complain? These are not unreasonable questions, but evidence is lacking. Whatever their motivation, however, the social experiments in which Alger participated were part of a historical process by which the private efforts of parents and philanthropists, who could no longer cope with the proliferation of homeless children generated by industrial capitalism on a massive scale, found an eventual if still insufficient and sometimes sinister substitute in public institutions. This shift from private to public responsibility required a momentous ethical transformation. The resistance this shift elicited at its earliest stages can be surmised from the fear and loathing of state interference that such taxpayer-financed institutions so often continue to elicit.

     

    The self-reliance story has of course been read as part of that resistance to public responsibility. But Moon’s astute alignment of Alger with corporate (as opposed to entrepreneurial) capitalism suggests that Alger may be less nostalgic than anticipatory. The “limited liability” that gave the corporation its first English name involved a dispersal of individual responsibility that, however convenient as a device for making and protecting profits, was also about to be put to very different uses. It defended investors against proper demands for accountability, but it also encouraged the threateningly relativistic “no fault” view of poverty, based on a vision of ineluctable social interdependence, that support for the social welfare state would require. After all, the welfare state needed “limited liability” no less than the corporation did.

     

    As a recent parallel, consider the film Good Will Hunting, where the climactic encounter between the Therapist (played by Robin Williams) and Heroic Individual (played by Matt Damon) is marked by the repeated phrase “It’s not your fault.” In order for the film to release the latter’s innate talents into the upward mobility they seem to call out for, it must first break down his resistance, compounded of working-class solidarity and anti-authoritarian individualism, and get him to accede to the expert/therapeutic mantra of the social welfare state, here represented by its kindliest and least official voice. The individual must come to believe that what he is and does is neither entirely his fault nor–the corollary is inescapable–entirely his achievement.4 Pop psychology aside, this social dispersal of the self is just what society as a whole had to be persuaded of in order to divert its resources into rescuing its less fortunate members from what would otherwise seem the results of their own actions and inactions. The logic of the film’s therapist/mentor is the logic of Alger’s patrons.

     

    The fact that Alger, who had only one bestseller in his own lifetime, won his astonishing posthumous celebrity only in the Progressive Era could thus be explained by a different aspect of that era. The “virtue rewarded” narrative was obviously useful in combating the newly interventionist state. But Alger’s benefactor figures also played a less obvious role in undermining popular patriarchal individualism and preparing the ethical metamorphosis presupposed by the welfare state’s increasing replacement of private with public responsibility its establishment of what would look to many individuals like new zones of dangerous irresponsibility. Rather than celebrating the grasping individualists of Alger’s own time, then, Alger’s “instructive narrative” would thus be (in Alan Trachtenberg’s words) “a fictive analogue to campaigns for reform” (106).

     

    Adjusting individual ambitions to the obliqueness of an emergent welfare state clearly involved learning a new set of lessons about responsibility, social interdependence, and desire. It should not be shocking to consider that some of these lessons were necessary both to capitalism’s emerging corporate form and to the civil/bureaucratic institutions emerging to constrain and contain it, or save it from its own drive to achieve short-term profit at all cost. Nor should it come as a surprise, given the current fragility of such institutions, that we are still in the process of learning them. Indeed, this is arguably one of the functions of the media-begotten celebrity.

     

    According to P. David Marshall’s Celebrity and Power, Oprah Winfrey exemplifies television’s “familiarization function” (131), a term that refers to “intimate” content as well as to the familial context in which so much viewing happens. But what is the “familiarity” that Oprah’s televisual personality produces? Under analysis, it becomes something more like defamiliarization: an opening up of the family to expert knowledge putatively representing a more general and official view of its welfare. In a show on children bullying their parents, Marshall writes, Oprah characteristically “resolves the apparent impasse of attempting to assess blame by concluding that it is a family problem as opposed to a problem contained within any individual family member” (133)–her version of “It’s not your fault.” Here, as in most episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show, this “form of resolution,” which is “pivotal to the narrative construction of the show,” occurs by means of the intervention of an outside expert (133). “After hearing from the ‘problem guests’ and after the guests are asked a series of questions by the studio audience and Oprah herself, an expert is positioned in the mediating role center stage, among the guests” (135-36). Though the expert expresses “the voice of authority,” offering a solution to the dilemma of the day, his or her authority “does not provide the necessary closure and resolution of the problem raised in the program. Rather, he or she serves as an essential instrument for the way in which Oprah works the program to a resolution…. Oprah positions herself as, once again, the representative of the audience and, by implication, of the ordinary people. She rewords the professional’s advice into language of practicality and usability for the audience” (135-37). Just as the Robin Williams figure in Good Will Hunting must win Matt Damon’s assent to his informed and authoritative viewpoint (in this case, the need to be cured of a neurotic attachment to the conveniently pathologized working class), so Oprah, in Marshall’s words, occupies the role of “therapist” in television’s “public talking cure” (143). She mediates between the expert’s knowledge and a lay audience, in effect putting across that knowledge to a public whose resistance can be assumed.

     

    Marshall is not starry-eyed about Oprah’s social function, but he sees it–correctly, I think–as an instance of mass-mediated democracy. Hosts like Winfrey and Donahue, he argues, “try to present… various discourses of the excluded and marginal” so as to reintegrate them “into the social mainstream. Oprah and Phil represent a cast of American liberals whose main approach to social problems is articulated through the slogan ‘Something should be done about this’” (140-41). Especially given the largely female audience for both shows and the political tendencies of female voters, there is reason to speculate that the absent subject implied by the slogan “Something should be done about this” is the social welfare state.

     

    “Something should be done about this” is by no means the same message as “Seek to emulate my standard of living.” To see these two messages intertwined in a celebrity like Oprah, as they are intertwined (no less paradoxically) in the tales of Horatio Alger, is to see that both the fantasy of upward mobility generally and celebrity-worship in particular offer something more than a trap for the unwary.5 Both celebrity-worship and the more general fantasy of upward mobility try to seduce, yes. But both seduce precisely to the degree that, unlike the critique of celebrity, they do not rely on a fantasmatic self-reliance or a paranoid view of powerful, utterly hostile, morally empty institutions that is the obverse of self-reliance. Rather, the power of celebrity and upward mobility resides in a moderated vision of the relation between individual and institution, one that recognizes that media and state bureaucracies, institutions which incarnate better as well as worse values, also let better and worse values enter into their influence over who rises, how, and why.6 What tempts the ambition, according to this view, is not merely spectacular wealth or glory but also the perhaps no less outlandish prospect of legitimacy–the hypothesis that individual desire might be blessed with institutional support precisely because its satisfaction aids and abets some version of the general welfare.

     

    I’ve laid out here, briefly and schematically, a way of reading upward mobility stories, along with celebrity as one recent endpoint of such stories, against the background of the emergent welfare state. But this line of thinking also has something to say to academics trying to face the general blockage of upward mobility. Along with “something must be done about this,” it insists “it’s not your fault.” And this reading suggests that “it’s not your fault” is the basis of a political program.

     

    Organizing is probably the only way to restore dignity to part-time and temporary work. But organizing will not increase the total number of jobs available for refashioning into stable and dignified ones. And the exhortation to organize can easily start to sound like another version of the exhortation to be self-reliant–a collective version of course, but no less committed to the illusion that the burden of responsibility lies on the self alone.7 Foregrounding the intrusion of mediators into the story, whether wishful or sinister or both, is meant to highlight the real historical dispersal of that responsibility, thus pointing out more people to blame but also more people with whom to ally and more venues where alliance can be made to matter. The academic job market depends directly on the willingness of the public to fund higher education, along with other social services. For better or worse, the market for our services is bound up with the legitimacy, power, and good will of the welfare state. Academics share a great many interests with other providers and recipients of social services, from parents worried at the proportion of their children’s classes taught by non-tenure track faculty to secondary school teachers who–like university part-timers–would love some equivalent of the sabbatical. But academics cannot mobilize around the defense and extension of the welfare state if we continue to see ourselves as uniquely and heroically condemned to be mavericks, outsiders, anti-bureaucrats, and celebrity-haters.8

     

    Those few academics lucky enough to occupy what Stanley Aronowitz calls “the last good job in America” must of course expect the envy and the satire that their privileges attract. They, or rather we, are legitimate targets, for we are a swing vote; it matters a great deal whether we join the fight against the two-tier system or merely continue to enjoy the fruits of that system. This is where something can be accomplished, and not by berating the much tinier and less representative band of academic stars. Nothing can be expected from reliance on the celebrity as scapegoat, for that is merely self-reliance itself, old-fashioned and pre-political, decked out in more fashionable clothes.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For Régis Debray, writing in 1979, media celebrity already occupied the same slot in the French “fall of the intellectuals” narrative that later American jeremiads tended to assign to universities in the academicization-of-intellectual-life story.

     

    2. As one bit of evidence among others, consider soundness in the context of earlier university publishing. “Until the late fifties,” according to Phil Pochoda, “university presses, though publishing many sound scholarly books, could be characterized fairly as academic vanity presses. Behaving more as printers than publishers, they generally produced, without editing or evaluating, books dropped off by their local faculty, or Ph.D, theses written (and the publishing paid for) by their graduate students. Manuscript reviews by outside readers and a wider search for books outside the home institution only began in earnest in the late fifties” (12).

     

    3. Charismatic female lecturers whose personal style helps them build intellectual constituencies (by hinting at felicitous answers, for example, to the question of how intellectual work matters to life) may not possess institutional power, like their old boy predecessors. But what they wield is indeed a form of power, and as such will appear equally extraneous and illicit from the perspective of a putatively pure and unmediated intellectual merit–the perspective from which Socrates objected to the gaudily-dressed, honey-throated rhetor Ion. There may well be grounds for complaint, both about Ion and about the celebrity lecturer. But those complaints will get a better hearing if they do not adopt the all-or-nothing mode of complaints about mediation itself. See Langbauer for a complaint about celebrities in cultural studies that takes this point but draws a different conclusion from it.

     

    4. On the connection between the therapeutic world-view, the welfare state, and the erosion of individual accountability, see Lasch. For a useful corrective that enables Lasch’s insights to be recoded in a less tragic vein, see Livingston.

     

    5. Academics would do well to avoid such traps, Jeffrey Williams writes: “The star model, offering name recognition and public appeal, suggests a kind of intellectual Horatio Alger story for those unemployed and underemployed to strive for, at the same time that the actual institutional conditions make that dream all the more improbable” (29).

     

    6. Here a contrast will perhaps be helpful. For Bourdieu, bureaucratic institutions are precisely the truth of upward mobility stories. But according to the “oblate” model in Homo Academicus, upward mobility can only mean selling yourself, or selling out, within the total, absolute, and unconditional terms of all-powerful institutions. Originally an oblate was “a child from a poor family entrusted to a religious foundation to be trained for the priesthood” (291 n. 31). Bourdieu adapts the term to refer to children without social capital whose upward mobility depends entirely on the educational institution to which they were entrusted, and who respond to it with unconditional loyalty. “They offer to the academic institution which they have chosen because it chose them, and vice versa, a support which, being so totally conditioned, has something total, absolute, and unconditional about it” (100-101). See Robbins (1997) for further elaboration.

     

    Bourdieu’s argument is representative of French sociology generally, where “sociologies of ‘reproduction’”–that is, investigations of the state educational apparatus–“have taken the place of a theory of social mobility” (Cuin 227). The fact that the state has a major place, perhaps the major place in what amounts to the topic of upward mobility in France, while passing for the very antithesis of that topic in the US, is welcome support for my contention that this antithesis is parochial and misleading, and that state institutions are indeed one place we must look for the secrets of upward mobility.

     

    7. This can also be turned around. Anyone who tried to organize teaching assistants and adjuncts by offering them a self-image in which there was nothing but collective interests and collaborative efforts would quickly discover that, for better or worse, this is a profession (it’s not the only one) in which allowance must be made for the excess and incorrectness of individual desire. Only a dreamer would think of trying to eradicate these from professional formation.

     

    8. On academics and bureaucracy, see Miller.

    Works Cited

     

    • Aronowitz, Stanley. “The Last Good Job in America.” Social Text 51 (Summer 1997): 93-108.
    • Boorstin, Daniel. The Image. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
    • Cawelti, John. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.
    • Cuin, Charles-Henry. Les Sociologues et la mobilité sociale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
    • Debray, Régis. Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. 1979. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 1981.
    • Decker, Jeffrey. Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
    • Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. 1900. New York: Bantam, 1958.
    • Henry, William A. III. In Defense of Elitism. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1994.
    • Langbauer, Laurie. “The Celebrity Economy of Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies 36.4 (1993): 466-72.
    • Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: Norton, 1995.
    • Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1994.
    • Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
    • Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.
    • Moon, Michael. “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger.” Representations 19 (Summer 1987): 87-110.
    • Nelson, Cary. “Superstars.” Academe (Jan/Feb 1997): 38-43, 54.
    • O’Dair, Sharon. “Stars, Tenure, and the Death of Ambition.” Michigan Quarterly Review 36.4 (Fall 1997): 607-627.
    • Pochoda, Phil. “University Presses On.” The Nation 29 December 1997: 11-16.
    • Robbins, Bruce. “Murder and Mentorship: Advancement in The Silence of the Lambs.” boundary 2 23.1 (Spring 1996): 71-90.
    • —. “Head Fake: Mentorship and Mobility in Hoop Dreams.” Social Text 50 (1997): 111-120.
    • Scharnhorst, Gary, with Jack Bales. The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
    • Scott, Donald M. “The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.” Professions and Professional Ideologies in America. Ed. Gerald L. Geison. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. 12-28.
    • Scott, Janny. “Scholars Fear ‘Star’ System May Undermine Their Mission.” The New York Times 20 December 1997: A1, B9.
    • Shumway, David R. “The Star System in Literary Studies.” PMLA 112.1 (January 1997): 85-100.
    • Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. NY: Hill and Wang, 1982.
    • Wicke, Jennifer. “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (Fall 1994): 751-778.
    • Wilentz, Sean. “Race, Celebrities, and the Intellectuals: Notes on a Donnybrook.” Dissent (Summer 1995): 293-299.
    • Williams, Jeffrey. “Spin Doctorates.” Voice Literary Supplement. November 1995: 28-29.

     

  • Rock ‘N’ Theory: Autobiography, Cultural Studies, and the “Death of Rock”

    Robert Miklitsch

    Department of English Language and Literature
    Ohio University
    miklitsc@oak.cats.ohiou.edu

     

    The following essay is structured like a record–a 45, to be exact. While the A side provides an anecdotal and autobiographical take on the origins or “birth” of rock (on the assumption that, as Robert Palmer writes, “the best histories are… personal histories, informed by the author’s own experiences and passions” [Rock & Roll 11]), the B side examines the work of Lawrence Grossberg, in particular his speculations about the “death of rock,” as an example or symptom of the limits of critical theory when it comes into contact with that je ne sais quoi that virtually defines popular music (“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it, I like it”). By way of a conclusion, the reprise offers some remarks on the generational implications of the discourse of the body in rock historiography as well as, not so incidentally, some critical, self-reflexive remarks on the limits of the sort of auto-historical “story” that makes up the A side.

     

    A Side: The Birth of Rock, or Memory Train

     

    “Don’t know much about history”

     

    –Sam Cooke

     

    In 1954, one year before Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock,” what Robert Palmer calls the “original white rock ‘n’ roll” song, became number one on the pop charts, marking a “turning point in the history of popular music” (Rolling Stone 12, emphasis mine); and one year before Elvis covered Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” (then signed, under the expert tutelage of Colonel Parker, with RCA); in 1954–the same year the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional–the nineteen-year-old and still very much alive Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service and cut Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

     

    Elvis recollecting Phillips’s recollection of a phone conversation with him: “You want to make some blues?”

     

    Legend has it that Elvis immediately hung up the phone, ran 15 blocks to Sun Records while Phillips was still on the line… and, well, the rest is history: by 1957, one year before Elvis was inducted into the Army, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard had crossed over to the pop charts, and the “rock ‘n’ roll era had begun” (Palmer, Rolling Stone 12).

     

    The irony of the above originary moment–at least for me–is that I somehow missed the Mystery Train. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate Elvis’s music, especially the early Sun recordings (and, truth be told, later kitsch, cocktail-lounge stuff like “Viva Las Vegas”); however, to invoke the storied lore of “family romance,” Elvis is a formative part of my sister Cathy’s life in a way that he’ll never be for me. Though she’s only a year older than me, Elvis for her is it, the Alpha and Omega of rock. For me, Elvis has always been more icon than influence, and a rather tarnished one at that.

     

    The seminal musical moments in my life are both later, post-1960, and less inaugural. For instance, I can still remember sitting with a couple of other kids in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, listening to a tinny transistor radio (one of the new technologies that transformed the music industry in the 1950s), and hearing–for the very first, pristine time–“Johnny Angel” [1962]). I’m not sure what it was about this song that caught my attention–the obscure, angelic object of desire does not, for instance, have my name, as in “Bobby’s Girl” (and “girl group rock,” as Greil Marcus calls it, was mostly about “The Boy” [Rolling Stone 160]),1 but I’m pretty sure sex, however sublimated and pre-pubescent, had something to do with it.

     

    I can also distinctly remember watching Shelley Fabares sing “Johnny Angel” on an episode of The Donna Reed Show, a program–like The Patty Duke Show–that was de rigueur, i.e. “Must See TV,” at the time. Though Ricky Nelson performed regularly on The Ozzie and Harriet Show (and even Paul Petersen had his fifteen minutes of fame with the lugubrious “My Dad” (1962)), Fabares’s small-screen version of “Johnny Angel”–sung, if I remember correctly, at a high-school dance–remains a touchstone of sorts for me.

     

    Indeed, “if you were looking for rock and roll between Elvis and the Beatles” (as I no doubt was at the time), girl groups were–as Marcus says–the “genuine article” (Rolling Stone 160). Who can forget “hokey,” genuinely hokey, “teen morality plays” like the Shangri Las’ “Leader of the Pack” (1964), which my sisters, all four of them, would listen to over and over again on my cousin Karen’s plastic portable record player? Or the sublime teen romanticism of Lesley Gore, whose songs I still listen to (on my Sony CD player), returning to some fugitive, long-lost source of pleasure, replaying it over and over again like any good arrested adolescent.

     

    "Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

     

    In the interregnum–between, that is, Elvis and the Beatles–there were of course other standbys, like the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys (East Coast and West Coast, Italian-American doo-wop and So-Cal surf music respectively), but all this changed–forever, as it were–in 1964 with the British Invasion. In his Rolling Stone contribution on the topic, Lester Bangs contends that the Beatles phenomenon–set off by their first, tumultuous appearance on American television (February 9, 1964!)–was a belated, libidinal response to the national mourning and melancholia that ensued in the wake of JFK’s assassination (169).

     

    Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two more dramatic and diametrically opposed moments than the “depressive,” wall-to-wall television coverage of the JFK assassination and the Beatles’ first “manic” appearance on Ed Sullivan. The ’60s, in all its liberatory excess (“sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”), is born, like some Frankensteinian thing, out of this vertiginous moment.

     

    Though Elvis had already appeared on Ed Sullivan–Ed’s now notorious reservations notwithstanding–with a “sneer of the lip” and a “swivel of the hip” (Guralnick 34), the Beatles, with their hook-happy songs and shaggy telegenic appeal, were made, like JFK, for network television. For one thing, unlike Elvis, or later the Stones, you didn’t have to shoot them from the waist up or expurgate their lyrics.

     

    But even as the Beatles were producing pop-romantic masterpieces like “Yesterday” (1965), the Stones were making up for lost time fast with songs like “Satisfaction,” their seventh–count ’em, seventh–U.S. single, which not-so-subtly hinted that rock ‘n’ roll was not, in the final analysis, about romance but, as Mick’s snarling voice insinuated, that down-and-dirty thing: sex. If the lyrics of “Satisfaction” mime the slow, painfully pleasurable climb of sexual arousal (“Cause I try, and I try, and I try…”) only to climax with one of the most exhilarating anti-climactic lines in the history of rock (“I can’t get no…”), the rhythm–set by the steady four-in-a-bar beat–totally subverts the negation, aurally delivering what the lyrics ostensibly deny.2

     

    Not that the lyrics were superfluous, mind you, since I spent many an hour listening to this song, trying to determine whether the third verse was, in fact, “about a girl who wouldn’t put out during her period” (Christgau 192).

     

    Given that they’re still rockin’ (the 1997-98 Bridges to Babylon tour came complete with “tongue,” inflatable girls, and “lewd,” big-screen video cartoons), the Stones would probably be a convenient and appropriate place to conclude this, the auto-anecdotal part of this “record”; however, I would definitely be remiss if I did not at least touch on the third element in the holy trinity of post-’50s “youth culture”: drugs.

     

    If the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll ends, according to received wisdom, around 1957, the second period–rock and roll (without the apostrophes fore and aft)–reaches its musical and psychedelic apex in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some thirty years later, I can still remember retreating to the basement of my parents’ home to play Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. I spent hours gazing at the cover, Elvis one face in a sea of famous faces, but the song that kept haunting me, déjà vu all over again, was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: with its surreal lyrics and trippy melody, it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. For some reason, perhaps the color of the back cover, I always associate it with the color red, the color of revolutionaries, and Sgt. Pepper’s, vinyl turning round and round on the turn table, turned me upside down, transporting me–like LSD later–to another, phantasmagoric world.

     

    1967 was also the year a next-door neighbor–I can still recall his name, Donnie Glaser, if not his face–turned me on to Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? in the basement of his parents’ house, basements being the preeminent place of domestic refuge in the late ’60s, pre-mall suburbs. Hendrix was subversive not so much because of his psychedelia (though I certainly registered this aspect of his music) but because Donnie’s parents were racists, albeit the classic sub rosa Northeastern sort. In other words, it was a black and white thing. It was also, needless to say, a sexual thing, since I can vividly remember Donnie telling me about seeing Hendrix live in concert in Buffalo and how he would look at the white girls in the front seats. I wasn’t exactly sure what all this meant (I was thirteen, altar-boy Catholic, and definitely not “experienced”), but like Sgt. Pepper’s, Are You Experienced? spoke of mysteries of race and sexuality elusive as that sky-diamonded girl, Lucy.

     

    Since rock, especially punk, is inseparable–as Dick Bradley reminds us–from the culture of amateurism (13, 15-16), I would also definitely be remiss if I did not somehow mention that I spent many hours in the mid-’60s playing drums on an incredibly cheap drum-kit (one snare, one bass drum, one non-Zildjian cymbal–no tom tom, no hi-hat), and that one of the things that the kid behind me in high school endlessly talked about (Miklitsch, Miniccuci… ) was Mitch Mitchell’s drumming on “Fire,” which percussive effects we would try to duplicate, no doubt to the consternation of our long-suffering Franciscan instructors, on our ink-scarred desktops. Given the rapid-fire drumming, it’s not surprising that this song became our standard. The point is: part–a very large part–of the kick of rock music for me was the “beat.” How else can one explain the fact that years earlier, at recess, out on the asphalt playground at St. Pete’s, my grammar school, I wanted to be Ringo: think of it, not John or Paul or even George, but Ringo!

     

    I might add by way of a musical-historical peroration (and before I turn to the “B side” and the subject of the “death of rock”), that by 1970, even as Elvis was beginning to make his glittery way in Las Vegas, Hendrix was dead, the Beatles had disbanded, and the Stones–post-Altamont–were all “black and blue.”

     

    B Side: Rock in Theory, or Paint It Black

     

    Much like rock, [cultural studies] has always been for me empowering and enabling, and like rock, it is always fun.

    --Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself

     

    The Stones aside (though it remains almost impossible, when talking about rock, to set the Stones aside for very long), it would not be until that annus mirabilis, 1977, the year that Elvis finally left the building for good, that the world of popular music would begin to understand what had come to pass in the preceding decade–which is to say, in the 1970s, now freshly immortalized in all its sleazy glory in Boogie Nights (1997). “Sister Christian” anyone?

     

    1977 was not only the year that the Sex Pistols celebrated Queen E’s Silver Jubilee with their outré version of “God Save the Queen,” the lyrics of which (“God save the Queen, the fascist regime….”) couldn’t be further from the faux-pastoral sentiment of Elton John’s threnody to Diana, “Candle in the Wind” (“Songs for Dead Blonds,” as Keith Richards put it [31]); it was also the year that Lawrence Grossberg first began teaching classes on rock music. This segue is not, needless to say, a little bathetic (i.e., from the national punk-sublime to the academic pedagogical-pedestrian), but it underscores an important theoretical moment in the discourse of cultural studies, a moment when–as in Resistance through Rituals (1976) and Subculture (1979)–British cultural studies began to examine the impact of popular music on “culture and society.”3

     

    More to the point perhaps, while numerous critics associated with the field of cultural studies have written on popular music and, in particular, rock (too many in fact to name), Grossberg–unlike a lot of his American cohorts–not only studied at the Birmingham Centre (with Hall and Hoggart),4 he is now arguably the theoretician of rock in Anglophone cultural studies. As Neil Nehring remarks with not a little irony, even disdain, in Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism (1997), Grossberg is the “dean of academics writing on popular music” (47), the “CEO of cultural studies” (67). Though Grossberg cannot, of course, stand as some sort of synecdoche for either cultural studies or popular music studies (if the latter has only recently achieved any semblance of disciplinary coherence, the former remains a model of inter-, not to say, anti-disciplinarity), his writings on rock are nonetheless symptomatic, or so I want to argue, of a certain unexamined “death drive” at work in cultural/popular music studies.

     

    In Dancing in Spite of Myself (1997), a recent collection that gathers together Grossberg’s work on popular music, he persuasively argues that rock is a necessary object of critical investigation because it has frequently been mobilized, often negatively (as in the neo-conservatism that he critiques in We Gotta Get Out of This Place [1992]),5 as a discursive token in the ideological contest over what he calls the “national popular” (9). Thus, in “Another Boring Day in Paradise” (1984), he contends that it is only with Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) that Bruce Springsteen emerges as a national popular sign of the body and sexuality as well as motion and mobility, a set of signifiers most economically constellated, according to Grossberg, by the figure of dancing: dancing not only bespeaks the body, it embodies release, from boredom, from ennui and anomie–from, that is to say, the sometimes repressive, imprisoning routines of everyday life. It is not for nothing, then, that the title of Grossberg’s collection on rock invokes the trope of dancing–dancing in spite, or despite, one’s self–since as he says in “I’d Rather Feel Bad Than Not Feel Anything at All” (1984), “someone who does not dance, or at least move with the music, is not prima facie a fan” (87).

     

    Still, given Grossberg’s fascination with the body in motion, or what I think of as the “body in dance,”6 one of the retrospective ironies of his reading of Springsteen–virtually the only “close reading” in all of his work on rock–is that it somehow neglects to mention the infamous moment when the Boss, live onstage in St. Paul performing his top-ten single, “Dancing in the Dark,” pulled a pre-Friends Courteney Cox out of the audience and, in an MTV moment, became a fully-fledged pop-idol-cum-sex-symbol.7 Later, writing in the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election (when “Born in the U.S.A.” was opportunistically appropriated by Ronald Reagan’s campaign handlers), Simon Frith concluded that Springsteen’s Live (1985) was a rock monument, but–and this is the postmodern twist–a monument to the death of the “idea of authenticity” (98, 101).

     

    I invoke the above MTV instant not to rehearse the familiar, now-dated critique of Springsteen, but because Grossberg, like Frith, has frequently seized on this national-popular moment in Springsteen’s career to deconstruct the idea of authenticity, replacing it with what Grossberg calls “authentic inauthenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 230). In fact, Frith’s account of the end of authenticity points up, if only by inversion, the privileged place of authenticity in Grossberg’s account of rock–say, the way in which early rock ‘n’ roll, drawing on the liberatory sexual subtext of rhythm & blues (itself a not-so-latent critique of white, “I-like-Ike” America), offered a highly effective cultural compromise formation, a way to both rock against, and roll with, the times.

     

    Now, if rock assumed this particular existential function in the 1950s, it consolidated this position in the ’60s, so much so that the proper, analytical object of study for Grossberg is not so much rock music as the culture of rock, or what he calls the “rock formation”: “the entire range of postwar, ‘youth’-oriented, technologically and economically-mediated musical practices and styles” (Dancing 102). Although Grossberg has typically been more concerned, true to the Deleuzian-Foucauldian cast of his project, to chart the spatial element of this formation, I want to focus here on the temporal or historical register of his project because in his most recent work, such as his contribution to Microphone Fiends (1994), “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?,” he has been “obsessed” (his word) with the “death of rock.”

     

    To be fair, in the revisionary introduction to Dancing in Spite of Myself, Grossberg observes that the proposition “rock is dead” is not so much an evaluative judgment about “particular musical practices or variants of rock culture” as a “discursive haunting within the rock formation” and (a crucial, if somewhat contradictory, afterthought) a “possible eventual reality” (17). Indeed, as Grossberg himself seems to recognize, his speculations about the death of rock are neither especially new nor news (Dancing 103). In 1971, for instance, in The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett had asserted the death of “rock ‘n’ roll,” if not “rock and roll” or “rock” per se.8 And, rather more recently, in “Everything Counts,” the preface to Music for Pleasure (1988), Frith composed the following epitaph:

     

    I am now quite sure that the rock era is over. People will go on playing and enjoying rock music... but the music business is no longer organized around the selling of records of a particular sort of musical event to young people. The rock era--born around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols--turned out to be a by-way in the development of twentieth-century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass cultural revolution. (1)

     

    For Frith as for Gillett, rock is now all but dead as a mass-cultural force because for all its revolutionary “energy and excitement,” anger and anarchism, it has finally succumbed to those twin demons: capital and technology.

     

    Given that rock has not historically dominated the popular-music market (see, for example, Dave Harker’s analysis of the ’70s which convincingly argues that the “representative” sound of the era was not, say, punk but Elton John), one might counter that Frith’s reading here of the death of rock is predicated on a substantial misreading of the music industry. (Consider, if you will, Garth Brooks, who is not only the third top-selling act of all time but whose most recent CD, Sevens [1997], had the second-highest first week sales in the 1990s.9) Frith’s claim about the death of rock also betrays, it seems to me, a not-so-residual romanticism where, as in the ideology of high modernism, the artist-as-rocker steadfastly refuses the Mephistophelian commercial temptations of late capitalism.

     

    This said, it might be useful–before I broach a critique of Grossberg’s claims about the “death of rock”–to review his account of the present “state of rock.” As Grossberg sees it, rock’s original historical conditions of possibility have undergone a radical transformation over the last forty years. Not only has the liberal quietism of the fifties, a political consensus that underwrote the affluence and conspicuous consumption of the period, been superseded by a neo-fundamentalist conservatism intent on destroying the last vestiges of the welfare state (one hyper-visible target of which has been rap music: think Ice-T10), but also youth culture–once the ground of the performative ethos of communitarianism–has been subjected to the micro-differentiation and super-fragmentation of the contemporary media-market. Call it, with appropriate adcult brio, Generation Next.

     

    As for the “structure of feeling” (which in the ’50s could be summed up by one word, alienation), postmodernism has arguably gone from being an emergent to the dominant cultural-political formation, so that now everything–including and especially rock–has come under what Grossberg calls, courtesy of Benjamin, the “antiaura of the inauthentic” (117): in other words, not alienation but simulation, not parody but pastiche.

     

    Finally, in the industrial-technological sphere, even as the “indies” enjoy a less contentious relation with the majors (to the point in fact where leisure-and-entertainment multinationals have come to view independent labels as their “minor league” [Negus, Popular Music 118]), revenues derive less and less from sales and more and more from merchandising and secondary rights associated with related “synergetic” sources such as film, TV, and advertising.11 Put another way, in an age of digital reproduction (not LPs but CDs, or CD-ROM), rock has become a commodity like any other commodity, at best a depoliticized form of fun and, at worst, Muzak to divert you while you’re home shopping.

     

    A number of these transformations–including the paradigm shift from aural-print to cyber-visual culture, not to mention the consequent lack of, for Grossberg, “any compelling images of rebellion” (Dancing 55)–are reflected, albeit with a perverse, “hermeneutic” twist, in the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon. Beavis and Butt-head not only mirror the politics of neo-conservatism (in reverse, à la Lacan), they arguably embody the enlightened cynicism associated with the ideology of MTV. I mean, what could be more postmodern than a couple of loser, latchkey kids who when they’re not loose in school or on the streets, sit around and crack wise on bad music videos?

     

    Still, the irony of this example (which, oddly enough, seems lost on Grossberg) is that Beavis and Butt-head also represent, in however twisted or demented a form, the continuing vitality of rock. That is, if Beavis and Butt-head can be said to dramatize the demise of what Grossberg calls the “ideology of authenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 205), it’s pretty obvious that for all their benumbed, dumb-and-dumber behavior, they can hardly be said to be affectless when it comes to the subject of rock.

     

    To be sure, the concept of affect as it is appears in Grossberg’s discourse is not simply a synonym for emotion or feeling, since it is a function of, among other things, cathexis and libidinal quantification (as in Freud and Nietzsche respectively).12 Moreover, for Grossberg (as for Deleuze and Guattari), affect is a “structured plane of effects.”13 Affect in fact is the key to what he calls “mattering maps,” or the maps people fabricate in order to articulate what matters most to them in their everyday lives. Rock is therefore a fundamental “affective articulatory agent,” not least because–to recollect one of his favorite maxims–it “helps us make it through the day” (Dancing 20).

     

    While Grossberg’s theorization of everyday life here, together with his neo-Gramscian elaboration of affect and the rock formation, represents, it seems to me, an important contribution to the critical discourse on rock,14 the irony–in this case, a critical, not to say fatal one–is that his writing on popular music tends to be extraordinarily “abstract and speculative” (Dancing 30). Or, in a word, affectless. Grossberg has freely conceded–too freely, for my money–the limits of his project, observing in the apologetic preface to Bringing It All Back Home (1997) that “almost everything he has written on rock music,” operating as it does on a “particularly high level of abstraction” (16), is “too theoretical” (27); that his work has become a “constant detour deferring the concrete.”15

     

    One manifestation of this pervasive theoreticism is his persistent neglect of issues of race and sex-gender.16 Although John Gill’s and Angela McRobbie’s critiques of, respectively, “gay” disco and subcultural theory (to adduce only two examples17) indicate that rock is by no means a function of identity politics, I think it’s fair to say that Grossberg’s preemptive, categorical disregard of gender has also blinded him to recent transformations in rock music. To wit: Beavis and Butt-head may be a “negative,” comic-parodic instance of what sometimes seems like the hard-wired masculinism of rock (though as Robert Walser has shown, even heavy metal is not without its moments of “gender trouble”), but Riot Grrrl music suggests–if, say, Patti Smith or Joan Armatrading hadn’t already–that women can rock too.18

     

    As for race, though Grossberg has summarily discussed the role of “Black music,” in particular R & B, in everyday life (Dancing 151-52), he has had surprisingly little to say about, for instance, rap. I say “surprisingly” because rap has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the “new internal site of authenticity” and/or “heir to rock’s vitality and potential as a nascent act of resistance” (Dancing 104). Accordingly, if it is in fact true, as Grossberg himself has claimed, that he is less interested in the death of rock than in “rock’s becoming something else” (Dancing 22), it strikes me that his work, “abstract and speculative” as it is, would benefit from a more thorough consideration of the specific preconditions and continuing longevity of rap and, more generally, hip-hop culture.

     

    History is instructive in this regard, since the very first rap records–such as The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III” and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”–appeared in the immediate wake of the so-called punk apocalypse and can therefore be seen as part of the rebirth of post-“rock” popular music. (Significantly, both of the above rap records were released in 197919). Though it would not be until well into the next disco-driven decade that Run-D.M.C. would catapult “rap into the crossover mainstream” (Perkins 14) when their Aerosmith-flavored, rap-‘n’-rock “Walk This Way” (1986) became hip-hop’s first MTV hit, thrusting rap “strategies of intertextuality into the commercial spotlight” (and, not so incidentally, rap music “into the hands of white teen consumers” [Rose 51-52]),20 rap, it is clear, has irrevocably altered the rock/pop landscape.

     

    The point is, from Afrika Bambaataa, one of the seminal old-school Master of Ceremonies, to Run-D.M.C. and “new school,” pre-“Walk This Way” rap-‘n’-rock tunes such as “Rock Box” (1984) and “King of Rock” (1985) to, most recently, Sean Combs and his Police-inspired ode to the Notorious B.I.G., “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997), rock has been part and parcel of that eclectic mix that is rap, a musical melange forever memorialized in the lyrics of “Payoff Mix”: “Punk rock, new wave and soul/Pop music, salsa, rock & roll/Calypso, reggae, rhythm & blues,/Master, mix those number-one tunes.”21

     

    A recent exchange between Puff Daddy and Rolling Stone confirms the intimate/extimate relation between rock and rap. Rolling Stone: “What bands do you like now?” Puffy: “Radiohead” (78).

     

    "Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

     

    I hasten to add that if the relation between rap and rock is not one of simple exteriority (as the above parenthetical is intended to suggest), this is not to claim, as Grossberg does, that “for practical purposes,” there are “no musical limits on what can or cannot be rock” (We Gotta Get Out 131, emphasis mine). On this particular score, one must, I think, be vulgar: rock is, first and foremost, music–with the critical proviso that, to paraphrase a parody, if a little formalism turns one away from history, a lot brings one back to it.22

     

    I’m not talking about musicology here, useful as it is (especially in the proper hands).23 Nor am I suggesting that the issue of reception, or even fandom, is negligible, since one of the real virtues of Grossberg’s work is its extensive investigation of the various, extra-musical contexts of rock reception. I am suggesting–as it were, to “bring it all back home”–that it’s difficult to talk about rock or popular music in the 1990s without engaging the issue of genre and production.

     

    On the constitutive difference between rock and the pre-“r&r” tradition of popular music, Robert Palmer has, for instance, written:

     

    Today's popular music could hardly have evolved out of "Your Hit Parade" and the pre-r&r popular mainstream.... Rap, metal, thrash, grunge, have different attitudes towards the organization of sound and rhythm. Their distance from pre-r&r norms cannot be explained by advances in musical instruments and technology alone. Far more than musical hybrids, these sounds proceed from what amounts to a different tradition, different from the old mainstream pop and different right on down to the most basic musical values. (Rock and Roll 9)

     

    Given Palmer’s riff here on rock’s “traditional” difference from the “popular music” that precedes it (e.g., the late, great Frank Sinatra or, before him, Bing “The King of Croon” Crosby), it is clear that although one can speak of rock as a species of popular music, one cannot make the opposite claim (i.e., not all popular music is rock).

     

    Such a distinction would seem commonsensical enough, but “rock imperialism,” as Keith Negus has demonstrated, is pervasive in English-language writing on popular music. The problem with this approach–of which Grossberg’s work is a paradigmatic example (as the above assertion about “musical limits” indicates)–is that it ignores, as Negus notes, “vast numbers of generic distinctions made by musicians and audiences across the world” (Popular Music 162, emphasis mine). The net result of this “imperialist” position, paradoxically enough, is a “rockist” methodology that is at once inclusivist and exclusivist, inclusivist because generically-different kinds of music (such as rap) are included as rock, exclusivist because generically-related kinds of music (such as country) are reflexively excluded.

     

    This problem is compounded when the universalist category of “rock” is applied to popular music in the global context, so-called “world beat” or “world music.” (Examples of this music are the South African Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who are probably best known for working with Paul Simon on Graceland [1986] or, more recently, the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who sang with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on the soundtrack for Dead Man Walking ([1995]). Thus, if it is true, as Negus states, that there is a lot of music “being listened to by the ‘youth market’ that would be described using a label other than rock,” it’s equally true that “for many music fans across the world, there are numerous musics that cannot be rock” (Popular Music 161). One of the negative byproducts of this “methodological strategy”–of, that is to say, the “global” deployment of rock–is that it tends to reproduce the “classic” division between rock and pop, where rock refers to the “musical and lyrical roots that are derived from the classic rock era” and pop to rock’s “status as a commodity produced under pressure to conform by the record industry” (Friedlander 3).

     

    The way this particular binary plays out in the context of the “rock/world music” opposition is, alas, all-too-predictable: North American, Western-style rock is “impure” and/or passé (or passé because impure), while virtually all, non-Western popular musics are “authentic” and, therefore, “vital.” Not so surprisingly (especially if one remembers that rock was originally black slang for “having sex”), this sort of racial-ideological thinking is a product of a not-so-residual colonialist mentalité. As Timothy D. Taylor flatly puts it in Global Pop (1997): “rock music, which used to be pure sex, has lost its grinding energy; musics by others (read: people of color) still have something to do with sex” (20).

     

    Still, the real political-economic paradox, if you will, is that although world musicians are considered inauthentic if they begin to sound too much like their Western counterparts, they are effectively doomed to a discourse of authenticity, “since the structures of the music industry exclude virtually all world musicians from the venues, visibility, and profits that might make them appear to be sellouts to their fans” (Taylor 23). This, then, is the bottom line of the asymmetrical relations of production that subtends the global music marketplace. Due to the concentration of capital in a handful of multinational corporations (that are located, in turn, in a handful of “core” countries), Western popular music is increasingly available in the traditional peripheries, but the (semi-) peripheries do not have the same access to their own music. Hence the distinctly inequitable system of distribution that currently obtains, where, say, “it is much easier to buy… Madonna in China than Cui Jian, the leading Chinese rock musician, in the US” (Taylor 201).

     

    I will return to these issues below in the context of contemporary youth culture, but this might be an appropriate place to mark the limits of the classical-Marxist account of the mode of production and propose, instead, what I take to be a more immanent, constructive model of the music industry. An innovative work in this regard–innovative because it draws equally on both reception and production studies without the theoretical baggage of either approach–is Negus’s Producing Pop (1992) which, in displacing the methodological emphasis from the “production of culture” to the “culture of production” (61-64) retains a role for what Marxists used to call the “primacy of production” even as it demarcates a space for what Negus calls the “cultural practices of personnel” (press officer, A & R person, studio producer, etc.).24 Noting that writing on popular music often works from unexamined predicates about art and commerce, creativity and capitalism, Negus contends that such an approach not only tends to “overlook the temporal dimension which cuts through the production of commercial music,” it also tends to radically underestimate the extent to which the various personnel involved in producing music are actively “contributing to the aesthetic meanings employed to appreciate the music,” thereby defining the contours of what in fact popular music means at any given time (153).

     

    The value of this approach is that by concentrating on what Bourdieu calls “cultural intermediaries” (qtd. in Negus, Producing Pop 62), it usefully blurs the typical, hard-and-fast distinction between labor and leisure, production and consumption. Rather more to the point, Negus’s perspective emphatically re-accentuates the music in the “music business,” foregrounding the sorts of music that people in the business actually listen to. To tender such a claim is not, of course, to proffer a covert defense of the music business, since one of the very real strengths of Negus’s work is that it provides an “inside” critique of the way in which the “recording industry has come to favor certain types of music, particular working practices, and quite specific ways of acquiring, marketing, and promoting recording artists” (and here issues of race and sex-gender re-materialize in all their social-institutional force [Producing Pop vii]). Simply put, Negus’s culture-of-production approach–attuned as it is to both the cultural and industrial demands of the music industry–elucidates the intricate, conflictual “web” of relations out of which popular music is wrought.

     

    In Grossberg’s anxious swerve away from anything that smacks of Marxism or economism (which sometimes appear to be the same thing for him), he has been intent to develop what he calls a “spatial materialism” (Dancing 10). While this spatial-materialist perspective might conceivably offer a novel way to talk about the production and consumption of popular music, the aggressively theoreticist cast of Grossberg’s approach is evident in his inordinately “thin” description of his project: “to find a radically contextual… vocabulary that can describe the ongoing production of the real as an organization of inequality through an analysis of cultural events” (24). Put another, more critical way: if Grossberg’s analytical focus on space in rock provides a valuable complement to the general underdevelopment of spatiality in the discourse of Marxism,25 this very same valorization also comes at the direct expense of a proper consideration of the dialectical other of spatiality–temporality or, more precisely yet, historicity.

     

    Bluntly, it will not do, on one hand, to ruminate about the death of rock and, on the other hand, to confess that one has “given too little attention to the changing shape of the rock formation across space and over time” (Dancing 19). Given this performative contradiction, though, what, one wonders, is driving Grossberg’s “obsession” with the death of rock?

     

    Reprise

     

    "Drivin' around in my automobile..."
                 
--Chuck Berry

     

    The above, not simply rhetorical question about the end or “death of rock” brings me abruptly back full-circle to the beginning of this essay–to, that is, the “birth” of rock and the formative popular-musical influences in my life. My life aside (for the moment), I want to submit that detailed, medium-specific attention to the temporality and spatiality of rock indicates that it has by no means died but has merely become, among other things, “more geographically mobile” (Negus, Popular Music 163).

     

    The interest of this “geographical” perspective is that it assumes one of Grossberg’s signature Deleuzian themes, what one might call the mobility of rock (as almost any Chuck Berry song attests, “classic” rock ‘n’ roll is frequently about auto-mobility), and situates it in a particular, national-historical context. In other words, it’s not simply that rock has become part of transnational capitalism (though this proposition is undoubtedly true and has any number of implications for the present “rock formation” [vide supra]).26 Rather, it’s more that a certain form of rock may well be dead, or at least embalmed, in the U.S. or North America but is alive and kickin’ elsewhere–say, in Cuba or China, Argentina or South Africa, Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union.27

     

    As for the U.S. or North America, it seems pretty clear that some form of post-“rock” music is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, given that it has become an indispensable part–along wth TV, movies and, most recently, the personal computer–of contemporary “youth culture.” I’ve already suggested that one, flamboyant manifestation of this culture is the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon, where this particular “franchise” comprises not only an animated series (that comprises, in turn, music videos–mise-en-abîme, as it were) but a profitable feature film, both of which mass-media “texts” have spun off various other commodities such as books, soundtracks, etc. But if Beavis and Butt-head and, more generally, MTV (as opposed to, say, VH1) is “youth-skewed,” what does it mean to invoke the category of youth today, late in the 1990s?

     

    I raise this question here because although there is obviously a statistically-determinate audience–“defined by age”–for rock/pop music (say, conservatively speaking, 14-24), the idea of youth, as Donna Gaines comments, is simultaneously a “biological category,” a “distinctive social group,” and a “cultural context” (47). Though there is little doubt that age-driven demographics drive corporate marketing and advertising, it’s also no secret that in an age of Viagra, cosmetic surgery, and hyper-“health & fitness,” the “signifier ‘youth’ has gradually been detached from the age-grade and made available to everyone” (Weinstein 82)–which is to say, to anyone who has the desire and requisite economic resources.

     

    One consequence of this process of “democratization” is that the concept of youth today retains only a residual, even vestigial, connection to its “biological” referent. In fact, the rapidly changing cultural construct of the term since World War II–from, say, “youth culture” to “counterculture” to “youth subcultures” (the last with a decidedly post-Parsonian emphasis)–has radically de-differentiated its social distinctiveness. On one hand, the category of childhood–of which youth is the “antithesis” and adulthood the “synthesis”–is “shrinking”: “people as young as eight or nine years old are sharing in the youth life-style in terms of consumption of products such as clothing, leisure activities from video games… to record purchases, and knowledge of the ‘real world’– sexual, political, ecological, etc.” (Weinstein 20).

     

    On the other hand, the social idea of youth is rapidly expanding, so much so that it might not be too much to say, as Deanna Weinstein does, that young people “have become marginal to the idea of youth itself” (73). Since the “central feature” of youth culture, at least in the United States since the 1950s, has been music, rock music (Weinstein 69), this trend–what one might call, after Grossberg, the colonization or reterritorialization of youth–has had a profound influence on contemporary music. In an epigram: “Rock, like youthful looks, is no longer the province of the young” (Weinstein 75).

     

    As in some grade-B werewolf movie, the rock-around-the-clock teenagers of the ’50s have become the “classic rock” baby-boomers of the ’90s, and the latter “constituency,” in turn, a prime grade-A target for the increasingly competitive music industry. More specifically, since the youth market cannot sustain long-term artistic development (and therefore new artists are no longer simply aimed at youth in the restricted, “biological” sense [Negus, Producing Pop 68]), there are powerful economic imperatives to cross-over and attract the expanding “class” of middle-aged consumers. In fact, data on consumption patterns circa 1993 suggest that while the “purchase of rock music declines with age,” this decline is “gradual across ages 25-44” (Negus, Producing Pop 100). With this in mind, it might not be too much to say–at least if these figures are any indication (and I think they are)–that rock is no longer simply the “music of youth” (Negus, Producing Pop 100).

     

    Of course, “young people”–however one defines the term–have also actively resisted the wholesale appropriation of their subcultures. Sometimes this has involved distancing themselves from “adulterated” discourses such as, precisely, rock. (Hence the pejorative epithet “rockist.”) In other cases, it has involved a complex process of re-appropriation of the popular-cultural terrain. (Witness the revival of swing and lounge or “martini” music.) In general, it has involved the formation of subcultures that entail a determinate dialectical relation not only with the dominant “parent” culture (itself in the process of being made over in the eternal image of youth) but with the dominant, corporate-sponsored youth culture.

     

    The “good news,” as it were, is that “genuine” youth subcultures have emerged by “marginalizing themselves from the leisure culture’s free-floating definition of ‘youth’” (Weinstein 83). (SNL aside, the new “goth culture” in all its queer mutability is, it seems to me, one instance of this resistance.) The “bad news” (as if the double alienation consequent on the above self-marginalization were not enough) is that young people are now free to choose from among an “array of confrontational youth subcultures” (Weinstein 82). In this overconsumptivist scenario, “free-floating” is not so much a term of liberatory potential, however slim, but a euphemistic signifier for the “forced choice” that is postmodern consumer capitalism. In a nutshell (to sample an Entertainment Weekly cover story): Hanson/Manson.

     

    Although one might argue that the current musical culture is merely yet another moment in the ongoing cyclical history of pop/rock (where, to revisit the late ’50s and early ’60s, the choice between the Crystals and Chiffons, Ronettes and Shirelles, or–to adduce the “boy groups”–the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys was, for some, no choice at all), the difference between the immediate post-“rock-‘n’-roll” period and the present moment is the sheer volume of (recorded) music that is now available. For instance, in 1962, before the advent of the British Invasion (which is to say, pre-Beatles and pre-JFK assassination), “total industry sales were under $1 billion” (Goodman 29); now, circa 1998, “they’re almost 40 times that figure” (29).

     

    That the impact of this economic and popular-musical “boom” on youth culture has been enormous goes, I think, without saying. Most obviously perhaps, the almost exponential increase in the production of rock/pop music has resulted in an almost infinite “array” of musical (sub-) genres from which people, “young” or otherwise, can “freely” choose. A recent postcard survey distributed by Atlantic Records illustrates the extraordinary range of music that one can now purchase: Children’s / R & B / Pop / Rock / Dance / Singer Songwriters / Traditional Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / New Age / Ambient / Classical / Country / Metal / Alternative / Rap / Theatre Music / World Music.

     

    About this list, I would make only two observations. First, rock, it is important to note, is only one genre or category among a host of genres and categories; equally or more importantly, most, if not all, of these genres can be further subdivided. (Thus, to take just one genre, “New Age/Ambient” can–and probably should–be divided into two separate categories, where Ambient or, more properly perhaps, Electronica can then be divided into various subgenres such as Techno, Jungle, Trip Hop, Drum and Bass, or sub-subgenres such as Illbient and Ambient Dub). Second, in an informal survey that I conducted at Ohio University using the above survey (I chose a class composed of “freshmen” since they effectively straddle the teen/college music audiences), the participants answered–almost to a person–that they not only listened to rock but that they felt it remains a “viable form of music.”28 In other words, the combo “youth and rock” may not be as tight as it once was, but “rock”–or what Grossberg calls the “rock formation”–still means something to young people.

     

    Although the concept of “youth” is crucial, it is clear, to any future discussion of the “death of rock,” another, perhaps more pointed way to reframe this issue–to return to the larger, historical shifts in the meaning of “youth culture” (as well as the A side of this essay)–is to reconsider the generational axes of rock. Thus, to re-cite Frith, conventional wisdom has it that rock was born around 1956 with Elvis, peaked around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s, and died around 1976 with the Sex Pistols. Or, as Negus metaphorically puts it, in the mid-1970s, “the blooms start wilting, the body decays, and rock starts dying” (Popular Music 148).

     

    This late-Spenglerian vision–Verfallsgeschichte made flesh–offers a peculiarly seductive image for some of the history of rock, with rock consuming itself, never mind Nirvana, in one final catastrophic conflagration with punk. Indeed, with the late Elvis and Sid Vicious in mind, the one bloated from food and drugs almost beyond recognition, the other an early poster-boy for heroin chic, it would appear, if only in retrospect, that the banks of flowers on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s were funereal after all, florid intimations of rock’s mortality or, to echo the Sex Pistols, “flowers in the dustbin.”29

     

    But could it be, given that Grossberg began teaching rock in 1977 (when, presumably, the corpse was still warm), that the historical claim about the death of rock is, as it were, auto-biological; that, not to put too fine a point on it, the mantra about the death of rock is merely a projection of the white male baby-boomer’s rapidly aging body?

     

    To endeavor to be fair to Grossberg, he is by no means unaware of the paradoxes and potential pitfalls of writing about rock if you are old enough, now, to remember seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan in 1956, or the Beatles on the same venue, as I did, in 1964.30 In “Rock and Roll Is Dead and We Don’t Care,” the Rubinoos-inspired conclusion to “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” he speculates about a baby-boomer imaginary haunting the real of Generation X, remarking that “images of youth and change” have been replaced by images of boomers trying to “deal with responsibility and ‘middle age’” (61). Grossberg’s reading here of the vampiric relation between the generations represents, it seems to me, discursive haunting with a vengeance, the return of the corporeal repressed, where the historiography of rock and roll is infused–like some ghost or specter–with all the ways of the flesh.

     

    However, as Negus’s meta-organic metaphor makes clear (“the blooms start wilting, the body decays…”), it is probably inadvisable, critically speaking, to interpret musical genres such as rock “as if they were living bodies which are born, grow, and decay” (Popular Music 139). When it comes to contemplating and composing the history of rock, one would do better to attend, as Barthes advises, to the form of the music, a “turn” that inevitably returns one to history, to the form of history and the history of the form. While the former, “historiographic” locution signifies the various, sometimes radically divergent histories (such as rap) that have generated what Robert Palmer calls the “rock tradition,” the latter “formalism” refers to historicity–say, the “gospel,” blues-based, call-and-response of soul–in all its gross materiality.

     

    Grossberg himself declares in the preface to Dancing in Spite of Myself that rock is “material” since it is lived, as he says, in the “body and soul” (15). However, if this is in fact the case, it must also I think be said that his work on rock–studiously attentive as it is to the body and dance, affect and sexuality–is surprisingly soulless.

     

    But what’s a body of work without soul? It’s like rhythm without the blues. Rock without the roll. It’s dead, deader than dead Elvis.

     

    If writing on rock in cultural studies is to matter today, it seems to me that it must remain alive to a veritable “forcefield” or constellation of factors–to the “culture of production,” at once micro and macro; to the body–raced, sexed, and gendered; to the various histories of rock with all their zigs and zags, swerves and curves; and, of course, to the music itself. As for theory, if it too is to matter, if it is to rock, it must not only continue to move with the times, it must also somehow remember that as in dancing or cruising (and this is the trickiest part), the point is, as Chuck Berry says, that there’s “no particular place to go.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. However, for the girls’ POV, see Bradby.

     

    2. For my sense of this song, see Whitely 88-89.

     

    3. For an informative and critical overview of this period of British cultural studies, see Middleton, “Subcultural Theory” 155-66.

     

    4. On Grossberg’s intellectual itinerary, see “Another Story,” in Bringing 22-29.

     

    5. See, in particular, the second section of We Gotta Get Out of This Place, “Another Boring Day in… Paradise: A Rock Formation” 131-239.

     

    6. On the “body in dance,” see the introduction to my From Hegel to Madonna 9-36.

     

    7. See Marcus, “Four More Years,” Ranters 269.

     

    8. In “The Sound Begins,” Gillett argues that in “tracing the history of rock and roll, it is useful to distinguish rock ‘n’ roll–the particular kind of music to which the term first applied–both from rock and roll–the music that has been classified as such since rock ‘n’ roll petered out around 1958–and from rock, which describes post-1964 derivations of rock ‘n’ roll” (1).

     

    9. On Garth Brooks, see Brunner, “By George, He’s Got It” and “Winner of the Week.”

     

    10. On Ice-T and Time-Warner, see, for example, Ross on “Cop Killer” (1992) and Madonna’s Sex (1992) in “This Bridge Called My Pussy.” With respect to the rhetoric of the “death of rock,” it’s worth noting that after Ice-T decided to pull “Cop Killer” from Body Count (1992), “it was only a matter of time,” as Ross notes, “before an organ of record [i.e., the Source] announced the death of rap” (Microphone Fiends 3).

     

    11. On social consumption and copyright revenue, see Negus, Producing Pop 12-14.

     

    12. See, for example, Grossberg, “Affect and the Popular,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place and “Postmodernity and Affect” in Dancing, 79-87 and 145-65 respectively. As Grossberg comments in the introduction to the former text, “My studies of rock convinced me of the importance of passion (affect) in contemporary life” (2).

     

    13. Grossberg provides a concise and popular-cultural gloss on his sense of affect in “Rockin’ in Conservative Times,” the penultimate essay in Dancing: “the affective logic, which I have described… as being at the center of rock culture,… is being reorganized and redeveloped in the service of a specific agenda [i.e., neo-conservatism]. What was… an empowering machine is turned (as in Star Wars’ image of ‘the force’ being turned to the dark side) into the service of a disempowering machine” (257). For a recent restatement of Grossberg’s understanding of affect, see the introduction to Bringing 28.

     

    14. For a critique of Grossberg’s notion of affect with respect to rock (albeit one that tends to flatten out the positive, cultural-populist elements of his use of the term), see Nehring, Popular Music 47-52.

     

    15. For a more elaborate take on the “detour of theory” (Marx), see Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” (1995), in Bringing 262-64.

     

    16. Grossberg is adamant on this point: “In truth, I do have theoretical reservations about theories of identity and difference and strategic concerns about the efficacy of a politics organized around investment in cultural identities. Nevertheless, the mere absence of a topic from a discussion, however important, does not, in my opinion, necessarily constitute a serious weakness” (25). For Grossberg’s sense of identity politics, see, for example, “Identity and Difference” in Bringing 356-63; and “Difference and the Politics of Identity,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place 364-69.

     

    17. See McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures,” first published in Screen Education (1980); for the Gill, which is in part a response to Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” (1979), see, for example, “Nightclubbing.” For a succinct overview of these issues, see Negus, “Identities,” in Popular Music 99-135, esp. 123-30.

     

    18. On the Riot Grrrl movement, see White, “Revolution Girl Style Now” (1992), reprinted in Rock She Wrote; and Gottlieb and Wald. More recently, see Nehring, “Riot Grrrls and Carnival,” Popular Music 150-79; and McDonnell.

     

    19. On The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III,” see Toop 81-82. For an update on the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (which has recently been re-recorded by Redman, Keith Murray, and Erick Sermon), see Brunner, “Birth of Rap.”

     

    20. I might add that in terms of what one might call the semi-autonomy of rap with respect to rock music, Nelson George has pointed out that although Run-D.M.C. “recaptured a piece of the rock audience” with “Walk This Way,” they were able to do so “without dissolving themselves… into white culture” (194).

     

    21. Afrika Bambaataa on the Bronx hip-hop scene in ’84: “I used to catch the people who’d say, ‘I don’t like rock….’ I’d throw on Mick Jagger–you’d see the blacks and the Spanish just throwing down, dancing crazy. I’d say, ‘I thought you don’t like rock!’ They’d say, ‘Get out of here!’ I’d say, ‘Well, you just danced to the Rolling Stones’” (cited in Toop 66). On “Payoff Mix,” Double D and Steinski’s mastermix of, inter alia, G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid’s “Play That Beat, Mr. DJ,” see Toop 153-54.

     

    22. I am alluding here to Barthes’s “Myth Today,” in Mytholgies 12.

     

    23. See, for example, Midddleton, “‘Change Gonna Come’? Popular Music and Musicology,” in Studying Popular Music 103-26; and the section on musicology and semiotics in On Record, in particular McClary and Walser 277-92.

     

    24. The seminal text for the “production of culture” perspective is Peterson; for another, more recent example of this approach, see Crane.

     

    25. For something of a corrective to this theoretical poverty, see Soja.

     

    26. On rock and capitalism, see, most recently, Taylor, “Popular Musics and Globalization,” Global Pop 1-38. For a survey of rock with respect to media and cultural imperialism, see Negus, “Geographies,” Popular Music, in particular “Music and the Modes of Media Imperialism” and “Feeling the Effect: Cultural Imperialism and Globalization,” 168-71 and 171-80 respectively; and, in general, Robinson et al.

     

    27. On Cuba, see López; on China, Argentina and South Africa, see, respectively, Brace and Friedlander; Vila; and Martin. On Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, see Ramet and Ryback. In general, see Denselow.

     

    28. This survey was conducted during the Fall 1998 quarter; the class, titled “American Popular Culture,” was composed of 19 students, 11 of which were “female,” two “African American.” The other questions, in addition to those already mentioned (i.e., “Do you listen to rock?” and “Do you think rock, however one defines it, is still a viable form of music?”), were: “What is your favorite kind of music?,” “What, for you, is an example of rock music?,” and “Is rap a form of rock music?” Typical answers to these questions were, respectively, rock, pop, rap, and alternative; Beatles, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Guns ‘n’ Roses; and “no” (e.g., “I think rap is a whole different genre”). The majority of “negative” responses to the last question confirms Negus’s observation about fans’ sense of generic distinctions; as one student wrote about the difference between rap and rock: “A lot of music that is generalized (or promoted) as rock should fall under other categories.”

     

    29. See Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin.

     

    30. In the introduction to Dancing, Grossberg acknowledges that his “faith that rock is at the center of the relevant formations is probably more the result of [his] own position as a fan, and [his] particular generational identity as a baby boomer, heavily invested, in different ways and at different times and places, in rock” (15).

    Works Cited

     

    • Bangs, Lester. “The British Invasion.” Miller 169-76.
    • Barthes, Roland. Mytholgies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday P, 1990.
    • Brace, Tim, and Paul Friedlander. “Rock and Roll on the New Long March: Popular Music, Cultural Identity, and Political Opposition in the People’s Republic of China.” Garofalo 115-27.
    • Bradby, Barbara. “Do-Talk and Don’t-Talk: The Division of the Subject in Girl Group Music.” On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 341-68.
    • Bradley, Dick. Understanding Rock ‘n’ Roll: Popular Music in Britain, 1955-1964. Buckingham, UK: Open UP, 1992.
    • Brunner, Rob. “Birth of Rap.” Entertainment Weekly 9 Jan. 1998: 84.
    • —. “By George, He’s Got It.” Entertainment Weekly 19 Dec. 1997: 78.
    • —. “Winner of the Week.” Entertainment Weekly 19 Dec. 1997: 79.
    • Christgau, Robert. “The Rolling Stones.” Miller 190-200.
    • Colòn, Suzan. “The Gloom Generation.” Details July 1977: 122-29.
    • Combs, Sean. “Puff Daddy.” Interview with Anthony Bozza. Rolling Stone 776/777 (Dec. 25-Jan. 8, 1998): 78.
    • Crane, Diana. The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts. Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage, 1992.
    • Denselow, Robin. When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.
    • Friedlander, Paul. Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1996.
    • Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. New York: Routledge, 1988.
    • Gaines, Donna. “The Local Economy of Suburban Scenes.” Adolescents and Their Music: If It’s Too Loud, You’re Too Old. Ed. Jonathon S. Epstein. New York: Garland, 1994. 47-65.
    • George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
    • Garofalo, Reebee, ed. Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
    • Gill, John. “Nightclubbing.” Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1995. 134-42.
    • Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1971.
    • Goodman, Fred. “So How’d We Keep Score.” Entertainment Weekly 3 May 1996: 29.
    • Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock.” Rose and Ross 250-74.
    • Grossberg, Lawrence. Bringing It All Back Home. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
    • —. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
    • —. “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On ‘The State of Rock.’” Rose and Ross 41-58.
    • —. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Guralnick, Peter. “Elvis Presley.” Miller 19-34.
    • Harker, Dave. “Blood on the Tracks: Popular Music in the 1970s.” The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? Ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert. New York: Routledge, 1994. 240-58.
    • Lopez, Humberto Manduley. “Rock in Cuba: History of a Wayward Son.” Bridging Enigmas: Cubans on Cuba. Ed. Ambrosio Fornet. Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 96.1 (1997): 135-41.
    • McClary, Susan, and Robert Walser. “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock.” On Record. 277-92.
    • McDonnell, Evelyn. “Rebel Girls.” Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. Ed. Barbara O’Dair. New York: Random House/Rolling Stone P, 1997. 453-63.
    • McRobbie, Angela. “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique.” On Record. 66-80.
    • Marcus, Greil. “The Girl Groups.” Miller 160-61.
    • —. Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Anchor, 1994.
    • Martin, Denis-Constant. “Music beyond Apartheid?” Trans. Val Morrison. Rockin’ the Boat. 195-207.
    • Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse.” Selected Writings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. 345-87.
    • Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Buckingham, UK: Open UP, 1990.
    • Miklitsch, Robert. From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism.” Albany: SUNY P, 1998.
    • Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House/Rolling Stone P, 1980.
    • Negus, Keith. Popular Music in Theory. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/UP of New England, 1997.
    • —. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold, 1992.
    • Nehring, Neil. Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1993.
    • —. Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.
    • Palmer, Robert. Rock & Roll: An Unruly History. New York: Harmony Books, 1995.
    • —. “Rock Begins.” Miller 3-14.
    • Perkins, William Eric. “The Rap Attack: An Introduction.” Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture. Ed. Perkins. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 1-45.
    • Peterson, Richard. The Production of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1976.
    • Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ed. Rocking the State. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
    • Richards, Keith. “Glimmer of Youth.” Interview with David Browne. Entertainment Weekly 3 Oct. 1997: 31.
    • Robinson, Deanna Campbell, et al., eds. Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Diversity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991.
    • Rose, Tricia, and Andrew Ross, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/UP of New England, 1994.
    • Ross, Andrew. “Introduction.” Rose and Ross 1-8.
    • —. “This Bridge Called My Pussy.” Madonnarama. Ed. Lisa Frank and Paul Smith. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis P, 1993. 47-54.
    • Ryback, Timothy W. Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
    • Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1988.
    • Taylor, Timothy D. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge, 1997.
    • Toop, David. Rap Attack 2: African Rap and Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991.
    • Vila, Pablo. “Rock Nacional and Dictatorship in Argentina.” Garofalo 209-29.
    • Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/UP of New England, 1993.
    • Weinstein, Deanna. “Expendable Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture.” Adolescents. 67-85.
    • White, Emily. “Revolution Girl Style Now.” Rock She Wrote. Ed. Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers. New York: Delta, 1995. 396-408.
    • Whitely, Shiela. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

     

  • Fleshing the Text: Greenaway’s Pillow Book and the Erasure of the Body

    Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

    Comparative Literature Department
    Indiana University
    pwilloqu@indiana.edu

     

    Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.

     

    –Gary Snyder

     

    Striving to represent the world, we inevitably forfeit its direct presence.

     

    –David Abram

     

    Peter Greenaway’s incorporation of other art forms in his films has become a well-established trademark of the British artist. The terms “mixed-media” and “multi-media” have been used to describe, respectively, Greenaway’s use of different media within a work and across works and his increasing interest in “high tech” technologies, such as the Internet and CD-ROM.1 Most film critics and art historians, in commenting on Greenaway’s work, have focused on his exploration of the potentiality of painting for the cinematic, and on his pastiche renderings of paintings by famous artists. Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, for instance, note how Greenaway manipulates historical structures and genres and imitates the style of individual artists, often reproducing their paintings in the mise-en-scène (see also David Pascoe’s work). Angela Dalle Vacche, on the other hand, in her study of films that redefine art history in their composition of the cinematic image, does not discuss Greenaway’s films at all, except to explain why she does not: the particular brand of intertextuality and quotations exhibited in Greenaway’s films, she explains, “is more preoccupied with defining itself than with redefining art history” (8, my emphasis). In other words, for Dalle Vacche, Greenaway’s references to the other arts are at the service of his own self reflections about cinema.2 Amy Lawrence, in her recent study of Greenaway’s feature films, shares this view of the British artist as a self-conscious “auteur” who makes art “out of ideas about art” (5).

     

    I agree with Dalle Vacche’s and Lawrence’s assessments, but I would also contend that what Greenaway redefines through his “art-about-art” is, more broadly speaking, representationality itself. Greenaway’s references to art history are but particular manifestations of his comprehensive investigation of what it means to represent. Greenaway’s films explore the means through which humanity has sought to represent itself and the world–through images (paintings, drawings, photography, films), objects (architecture, sculpture), words (print, calligraphy), sounds (speech, music), and bodies (dance, sex, death).

     

    I will discuss here only two of these representational means, the written word and the body, through an analysis of Greenaway’s most recent film, The Pillow Book (1996). The reading of the film I advance is one that is consonant with what I understand to be some of the fundamental preoccupations of the British artist. My reading will draw from personal conversations with Greenaway, as well as from a selection of theoretical works which I have found stimulating and useful in elucidating my approach to this film. One of the objectives of my reading is an exploration of the Oedipal resonances of the story. Drawing from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Human Perception in a More-Than-Human World, I would also like to engage in a discussion of Greenaway’s portrayal of the written word, and of his references to ecology.

     

    Abram applies phenomenology, most specifically the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to an investigation of the impact of written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, on our perception of and relation to our bodies and to the “body” of the world around us. In this study, Abram examines the origins of writing and describes writing’s subsequent gradual divorce from its natural referents–the human body and the land. What I would like to suggest in my analysis of The Pillow Book is that the split between language and body, which, Abram convincingly suggests, was brought about by alphabetic writing, is something analogous to the split, hypothesized by Lacanian theory, of the Subject from the totality of Being brought about by the Subject’s entry into the Symbolic. I further suggest that this split is the central motif of the Oedipus legend, and that this legend operates as a master narrative in our particular patriarchal civilization, a civilization that, in abandoning its roots in the living body of the Earth that nurtures it, has inscribed itself in a deadly narrative of biospheric proportions.3

     

    The Pillow Book brings the written word and the body together in what might be called a “deadly embrace,” as Nagiko’s lover’s body is fashioned into a book–a pillow book. This conjunction of body and text is certainly not new in Greenaway’s cinematic corpus, and neither is its association with death. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover presents us with a rather graphic death by text as Michael, the lover, is made to swallow pages of his favorite book–on the French Revolution. The Belly of An Architect makes both explicit and implicit references to deaths by books as well. Stourley Kracklite, perhaps in an attempt to come to grips with his illness, thrusts the corner of a hard-bound copy of Vesalius’ Anatomy into his stomach. The Anatomy is, of course, a book about the body–most particularly about the dead body. That this scene links the body, the book, and death–specifically Kracklite’s impending death–is made clear by the fact that the Anatomy is opened at a page “showing a half-stripped-down male corpse with the various organs and features of the stomach much in evidence” (Belly 97).4 That the corpse is that of a male not only links death with Kracklite but also with masculinity in general, I would argue. It is no coincidence that most of Greenaway’s male protagonists are dead at the end of the films, and this is an aspect of Greenaway’s cinema that deserves to be explored more fully, but to which I can only briefly allude here.5

     

    The Pillow Book also links sex and text, again, not an unfamiliar coupling for Greenaway. In A Zed and Two Noughts, Greenaway introduces us to Venus de Milo, the prostitute/writer of erotic animal tales who, like Nagiko, trades sex for text. Sex and text are also, of course, linked to authoring and to taking possession, which in turn are linked to the figure of the male patriarch. Amy Lawrence notes that the centrality of the issue of possession in Prospero’s Books is indicated by the title (143), which also functions to fuse the notions of possession, patriarchal authority, and authoring with books and language. The Pillow Book introduces an interesting twist to this linkage by associating sexuality and textuality not only with a male figure–Nagiko’s father–but also with female figures–Sei Shonagon and Nagiko, herself.

     

    I have argued elsewhere that Prospero’s scriptural enterprise in Prospero’s Books is, first, one of conquest and colonization, and then one of geographical and historical rewriting.6 Walter Ong speaks of the word as a form of action, an event or occurrence whose power to affect thinking processes might be termed magical (31-32), for it fosters abstraction and separation, alienating the knower from the known, and essentially creating these as distinct categories.7 Thus, as Lawrence argues, “writing makes possible the categorization of the world into encyclopedia, of people into races and types, of colonization and slavery, Ariel and Caliban” (142).8 Similarly, Michel de Certeau has called writing the “fundamental initiatory practice” (135), which posits the existence of a distinct and distant subject and a blank space, or page. Prospero takes the island in which he is exiled to be such a blank page waiting to be scripted by him. Through the written word, he orders the world into being in two senses: he summons it forth and imposes on it a specific structure, which he controls. Indeed, Prospero’s Books opens with a scene that suggests the written word has replaced water as the source of life. “Like God,” remarks Lawrence, “Prospero creates the world not out of a drop of water, but with a word” (140). Prospero’s world is thus a world constituted by language, not an organically evolved world. It is, then, an artifact of language and human subjectivity, and it is ruled by a consciousness. In the case of The Pillow Book, language–in the form of ink–will be substituted not only for water but also for human blood, for life itself.

     

    This process of substitution is initiated when Nagiko’s father ritually inscribes a birthday greeting on his daughter’s face and neck. Greenaway calls this ritual an “incantation” (The Pillow Book 90).9 It is designed, I would argue, to mold the child in very specific ways, according to a familiar pre-existing script or narrative, one we have come to call the Oedipal narrative. Although the Oedipal resonances of this story are not lost on the viewers, I hope to show the full implications of reading this story as fundamentally Oedipal by linking the Oedipal legend itself to a shift in perception which, as Abrams argues, occurred when alphabetic writing became established and the spoken word began losing its connection to the human body and to the land in which both body and word are rooted.

     

    This shift–from the organic connection between speech and body to a connection between speech and alphabetic writing–helped inaugurate what Jacques Derrida refers to as the subordination of writing to spoken language characteristic of Western metaphysics, where the written word is taken to be a mere “supplement to the spoken word” (Of Grammatology 7). While Derrida’s intention is to deconstruct the basis for this subordination of writing to speech, and to return to writing its disruptive potential, my desire here is to suggest that something more fundamental is lost in this process whereby speech and alphabetic writing become linked. What is lost is the sense that a material, organic body is at the source of the production of both speech and writing–whether alphabetic, hieroglyphic, or ideographic. Moreover, what is also lost is the sense that all types of bodies, not just human bodies, are capable of what might be called “speech.”

     

    The logic of Derrida’s argument is that Western metaphysics privileges logos because of its proximity to the signified. Since the essence of the signified is presence, the privileging of logos amounts to a privileging of presence. This privileging of presence is, for Derrida, a privileging of univocal meaning and truth. While I agree with Derrida’s project to deconstruct the notion of logos as the carrier of universal truth, I would like to suggest that the equating of logos with universal absolute truth could only have arisen with writing, most particularly with alphabetic writing. The privileging of “speech” by Western metaphysics would then be a retroactive privileging, made possible by the very existence of writing. This privileging amounts to an appropriation of speech by subjects constituted by writing. If speech comes to have the value of truth, it is only because writing has already made possible the dissociation between a “concept” and any particular, local manifestation of what is represented by the concept. Thus, Plato can speak of “virtue” or of “beauty” independently of any particular instance or experience of a “virtuous” or “beautiful” thing or action. There is, perhaps, in Western metaphysics, a fundamental misunderstanding of what speech might have been for pre-scriptural peoples.10

     

    I suggest, then, that neither logos nor grammatos ought to be privileged, for any such privileging relies on the notion of universalizable truths. Quite likely, non-scriptural cultures understand (consciously, unconsciously, or experientially) meaning and truth as only temporally and locally relevant and adequate. By separating “knowledge” from the body of the “knower” and from place, writing makes possible the abstraction of knowledge, its transportability in time and space, and consequently its universalization and permanence.

     

    Moreover, alphabetic writing defined the knower as human, and the non-human world was relegated to silence and thought to be incapable of “speech.” Abram, who agrees with Derrida that there is no self-identical author legislating meaning, argues, however, that “Derrida’s critique has bite only if one maintains that the other who writes is an exclusively human Other, only if one assumes that the written text is borne by an exclusively human subjectivity” (282). Abram posits a homology between the act of reading a text and the reading of animal tracks by our indigenous ancestors, that is, a homology between our markings–writing–and those of other animals. “I am suggesting,” says Abram, “that that which lurks behind all the texts that we read is not a human subject but another animal, another shape of awareness (ultimately the otherness of animal nature itself)” (282). Derrida himself has acknowledged that our Western sense of what writing is, is rather limited and limiting. He argues, for instance, that we do not recognize as writing the actions of people who describe their acts of writing as “scratching,” “scraping,” or “drawing lines”: “To say that a people do not know how to write because one can translate the word which they use to designate the act of inscribing as ‘drawing lines,’ is that not as if one should refuse them ‘speech’ by translating the equivalent word by ‘to cry,’ ‘to sing,’ ‘to sigh’?” (Of Grammatology 123). Interestingly, in support of his own argument, Derrida goes on to cite a passage from J. Gernet’s “La Chine, aspects et fonctions psychologiques de l’écriture,” in which Gernet elucidates the multiple meanings of the Chinese word for writing, wen. Not only is wen not limited to designating writing in the narrow sense, as discussed by Derrida, but wen is also used to refer to non-human forms of inscription. Gernet’s observation that wen “applies to the veins in stones and wood, to constellations,” as well as “to the tracks of birds and quadrupeds on the ground,” and “to tattoo and even, for example, to the designs that decorated the turtle’s shell,” supports both Derrida’s and Abram’s positions (qtd. by Derrida in Of Grammatology 123). Genet even suggests that, according to Chinese tradition, the observation of these very markings produced by non-human animals is what might have suggested the invention of writing–pictographic and ideographic writing.11

     

    Before resuming my discussion of The Pillow Book, it is also worth noting that Nagiko’s father’s birthday greeting is a kind of gift–the gift of writing, or pharmakon. In his illuminating discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing by the god Thoth (or Theuth) on the basis that it will cause people to become forgetful and threaten truth, Derrida argues that the antithetical meanings of pharmakon–poison and cure–must not be resolved in favor of one or the other. “All translations into language that are the heirs and depositaries of Western metaphysics,” explains Derrida, “thus produce on the pharmakon an effect of analysis that violently destroys it, reduces it to one of its simple elements by interpreting it, paradoxically enough, in the light of the ulterior developments it itself has made possible. Such an interpretative translation is thus as violent as it is impotent: it destroys the pharmakon but at the same time forbids itself access to it, leaving it untouched in its reserve” (Dissemination 99). While resolving the ambiguity of a word or text may reduce its richness, its plurivocality, and while I agree that it could be argued that Greenaway’s text, The Pillow Book, manages to retain a certain degree of ambiguity as to the ultimate meaning of this pharmakon, I find that there is enough evidence in the film proper and the intertexts–since, “il n’y a pas de hors-text” (Of Grammatology 158)12–to support the contention that writing operates here mostly as poison. Of course, Derrida himself concedes that “there is no such thing as a harmless remedy” (Dissemination 99): what may be the cure in one case is the poison in another; what may be the cure in small dosages is the poison in large dosages–this is the principle of homeopathy. Whether pharmakon is cure or poison in any particular case, and I do not mean here simply in any particular textual case, since writing is the basis for much action in the world–thus depends on the use which is made of writing as pharmakon and on how one perceives its effects. How one perceives these effects is, of course, subjectively motivated.

     

    My argument here is that, in The Pillow Book, the living body is literally, not simply metaphorically, sacrificed in the name of the written word. The film allegorizes the process, described by Jean Baudrillard, of “substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (4). If an analogy is drawn between the human body and the body of the world, and between text-making and map-making, Greenaway’s film can be taken as an allegory of the process through which the map comes to replace the territory–through which, in the film, Jerome’s skin is literally fashioned into a book. Jerome’s flesh is removed, separated from the skin, and discarded as garbage.13 What de Certeau has said about the establishment and imposition of a national language is equally applicable here: the written language, particularly one which has been imported, “implies a distancing of the living body (both traditional and individual) and thus also of everything which remains, among the people, linked to the earth, to the place, to orality or to non-verbal tasks” (138-39). The Pillow Book can thus be taken to support Abram’s contention that written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, has permitted a timeless and disembodied kind of “knowledge” that estranges us and alienates us from the living, sensuous world, and that ultimately becomes fatal to us and to the world. Abram uses the term “storied” (109) knowledge to refer to a way of understanding that differs from our current abstracted way of knowing, an understanding that is not dependent on a textual practice and that reflects the complex ways in which we relate to the living sensuous world around us. I will conclude this study by examining the ending of The Pillow Book and the extent to which Greenaway might be offering us some insight into this “storied” type of understanding.

     

    Greenaway’s The Pillow Book is inspired by the classic 10th-century Japanese text, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a diary written by a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Heian empress, Sadako. In this diary, Sei Shonagon recounts her amorous adventures, offers aesthetic observations, and indulges in one of Greenaway’s own favorite activities: list-making. What also drew Greenaway to Sei Shonagon’s text was the Japanese author’s enthusiasm for literature and the natural world, an enthusiasm which Greenaway clearly shares.

     

    Greenaway’s heroine, Nagiko Kiohara, was herself, as a child, inspired by Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, which her aunt read to her as part of a yearly ritual that took place on her birthday and lasted until Nagiko was 17 years old and engaged to be married. The film opens with this birthday ritual. We see Nagiko’s father gently painting a birthday greeting on her forehead, cheeks, lips, and neck, while a gramophone plays a record popular at the time Nagiko’s parents met. Nagiko’s mother, grandmother, and aunt are present as well, but mostly as witnesses (audience, readers). The father’s action is described in the filmscript as ritualized and affectionate, but also as odd and disturbing: “the child is no more, for a moment, than something to write on. And the father’s signing is a little too Godlike” (The Pillow Book 31). The father’s drawing of the letters on the girl’s face is accompanied by his recitation of an oral incantation, a spell of sorts, which works to establish the child’s identity and role within a filial narrative, one she is destined to pass on to her own child.

     

    Click here to view the film clip

     

    Indeed, following her father’s tradition–therefore, the patriarchal tradition–Nagiko writes a birthday greeting on her one-year old daughter’s face at the end of the film, thus bringing the story “full circle” (The Pillow Book 101).

     

    My use of the word “spell” is deliberate and intended to evoke the word’s multiple meanings: to spell a word is, in a sense, to cast a magical spell. David Abram notes that the meanings of “spell” were not always as distinct as they are today for, he explains, “to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth” (133). This is precisely what Walter Ong means, I believe, when he suggests that words are events, and that they have magical powers.14 So, when Nagiko’s father writes on her face, he literally casts a spell on her:

     

    When God made the first clay model of a human being, he painted the eyes, the lips, and the sex.

     

    And then He painted in each person’s name lest the person should ever forget it.

     

    If God approved of His creation, he breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His own name. (The Pillow Book 31)

     

    It is here, in a scene that suggests an Oedipal situation, that Nagiko is initiated into language, the Symbolic, the Law of the Father–and, consequently, into ego consciousness. Her Oedipal trajectory is linked to language in two ways: first, through her father’s writing on her face, and then, through her aunt’s reading of Sei Shonagon’s diary. From this point on, Nagiko’s life-story, the narrative of her life, will be controlled by the text which her father has written on her face. The father, as we will see, is only an intermediary, however; he is simply a messenger for the real and higher authority which is the text. As Lawrence notes in her discussion of Prospero’s Books, not only is the text a higher authority, but it will outlast the teller or writer, and even render him/her superfluous (143).

     

    Subjectivity and narrative are further linked when Nagiko sees her own written-upon reflection in a mirror. Her specular experience thus takes place from within the Symbolic realm, through language. Kaja Silverman has argued that the Lacanian mirror stage, which I believe this scene is also designed to evoke, “is always mediated through language, and can only be understood in terms of organized cultural representations” (85). To dramatize the importance of this moment of self-recognition, of Nagiko’s own recognition and acceptance of herself as a Self, as an Other, as an authored subjectivity, the image reflected in the mirror is colorized, while the rest of the frame remains in black and white. Greenaway has suggested that the mixing of black and white with color photography plays with the notion that the truth is in black and white while fantasy is in color.15 One implication of this is that the colored reflection of Nagiko in the mirror is a fantasy of egocentric subjectivity which will become the reality of modern man’s and woman’s emergence into the Symbolic.

     

    Nagiko is initiated into a particular role: to live out her destiny as a Subject of language and patriarchy. Furthermore, she will fulfill her role as model for other women–a “clay model” says the incantation–by becoming a fashion-model in Hong Kong, a city which is a paradigmatic symbol–a model–of modernity and progress, but also of death, as suggested by the mirroring of the city-scape in the cemetery where Jerome’s body is buried.

     

    Click here to view the film clip

     

    Nagiko is also duly marked by the Name of the Father, who breathes the model into being by signing His name. Through this ritual, Nagiko is constituted as a cultural Subject by means of two representational systems: the word and the image. According to Jacques Lacan’s formulation, self-recognition through representationality amounts to mis-recognition, for Subject and Being become radically split, as split as the body becomes from language with the advent of alphabetic writing. Nagiko is also quite literally framed by and within her own reflection. This framing amounts to a form of imprisonment, as the Subject is trapped in a culturally constructed image, entangled in the links of a signifying chain, perhaps the very linguistic chains that open the film and accompany the credits.

     

    Click here to view the film clip

     

    Greenaway’s avowed disillusionment with cinema centers on what he identifies as the double tyranny of Text and Frame, and on the loss of corporeality and physicality.16 Increasingly, in all his artistic productions, Greenaway has tried to bring the human body to the foreground. Perhaps, more than we have imagined, the cinema is a perfect reflection of our own civilization’s demand that we abide by certain scripts, that we trim ourselves as needed to fit the frame, to paraphrase Alba Bewick in A Zed and Two Noughts.17 Like any other civilization, ours is shaped by our means of expressing and representing ourselves, by our myths and legends–in short, by our narratives, be they religious, as in Genesis; scientific, as in Darwin; or mythological as in Oedipus. The difference between our civilization and primal or tribal cultures is simply that by confusing–or rather, fusing–our narratives of the world with the textual word, we have come very close to fully replacing the world with its representation. By virute of being visible, only the written word, as opposed to the spoken word, could be mistaken for a body and/or a world.

     

    Although it may be true that our sense of having access to, or making contact with, what might be called “reality” is dependent on our means of “representing” reality–whether in images, mathematical formulas, or words–and, although it may also be true that thinking itself is representational, quantum physics has taught even the natural sciences that representations are never a transparent disclosure of reality. Narrative, as an instance of representation, when temporally and locally contingent, has proven useful in helping societies cope with the unknowability of the world surrounding them. I am, thus, not suggesting that we do away with narrative once and for all–even if that were possible–but that we continue reminding ourselves that our narratives never fully align with our experience of the world, and that our experience of the world never fully aligns with the world. This simply means we must be careful which narratives we construct, and which narratives we allow to become the basis for our real actions in the world.18

     

    I would like to return to the Oedipus legend and to its manifestation in The Pillow Book to show that this myth has not only marked a shift in perception with the emergence of modern man and ego consciousness, as Erich Fromm, Alexander Lowen, and others have argued, but that this shift in consciousness is analogous to the one identified by Abram in his study of the evolution of alphabetic language. Lowen describes this shift as a move from the subjective to the objective position, when the human animal no longer sees itself as part of a greater whole, but as separate and thus able to view and control both inner and outer nature. Abram argues that alphabetic language made possible the development of a new sensibility which can operate in a more autonomous and isolated way–solipsistically, and independently from the body and the land. I believe all of Greenaway’s films investigate this same set of issues but that The Pillow Book, by showing the fusion of textual language and the body through the Oedipal structure, is Greenaway’s clearest but also most allegorical cinematic expression of humanity’s alienation from its own body and the body of the world. As Greenaway recently stated, “in an overall strategy which would also be a continuing characteristic of much of my cinema, I believe the body must be up there earnestly and vigorously rooting for its supremacy, text or no text” (“Body and Text”).19

     

    Erich Fromm, in The Forgotten Language, suggests that the Oedipus trilogy’s dramatization of the struggle against the paternal figure had its roots in a much older struggle between the patriarchal and the matriarchal systems–a struggle which was resolved in favor of patriarchy. Similarly, Erich Neumann, in The Origin of History and Consciousness, interprets the legend as being about the ego’s rise to power and its victory over the unconscious, represented by Oedipus’ victory over the Sphinx through his use of reason, analysis, and language. Neumann takes the Sphinx to be the original Earth Mother Goddess, imported from Egypt, the giver and taker of life. He also links the figure of the Sphinx with the unconscious, the body, the earth, and nature–with the feminine–while Oedipus is linked to consciousness, the ego, language, rationality, progress, and even salvation–with masculinity. For Neumann, then, patriarchy refers to “the predominantly masculine world of spirit, sun, consciousness,” and matriarchy to “a preconscious, prelogical, and preindividual way of thinking and feeling” (168).

     

    Oedipus’ patricide and incest are not, according to this reading, his real crime. In fact, Alexander Lowen argues that the “crime” for which Oedipus must be punished by blinding himself is not the transgression against the patriarchal order, but the destruction of the Sphinx, that is, the destruction of the female goddess of the matriarchal order who rules over life and death. By solving the riddle, Lowen goes on to argue, Oedipus takes control over the mysteries of the processes of life and death on which the power of the Sphinx depended. His real crime, then, is the Promethean arrogance of knowledge and power (213).

     

    Oedipus thus represents the values of language, power, knowledge, possession, and progress–the very patriarchal values by which we still live today, in the East and in the West. The implication here is that an escape from the Oedipal legacy necessitates not a simple reconsideration and reassignment of gender definitions and functions, but a devaluation of the dominant traits of our culture which are associated with masculinity–that is, linearity, action, progress, and the domination of nature. Thus, Nagiko’s taking up of writing should be regarded with some skepticism, as should Georgina’s taking up of the gun in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Pen and gun are intended to symbolize the phallus, and Greenaway explicitly links the writing instrument to the signifier of power by describing it as “a sensuous object inevitably likened to a penis” (The Pillow Book 15). The Cook and The Pillow Book seem to suggest that, if given the opportunity, women too can wield the phallus, but that mere role-reversal, in “real” life or in representational practices, contributes very little to any significant change in our civilization’s patterns of opposition and domination.

     

    Let me now turn to Greenaway’s rendition of the Oedipus legend, for there is an important aspect of Nagiko’s birthday ritual which has not yet been accounted for: that is, the presence of Nagiko’s father’s publisher, the very same publisher whom Nagiko will seek when she herself, as an adult, becomes a writer like her father. On each of Nagiko’s birthdays, after the father has performed the ritual inscription on her body, he meets with his publisher for another ritual, a primal scene of sorts: the exchange of money and sex for the acceptance and publication of his latest manuscript. These sexual encounters, where the father is sodomized by the publisher, are, I believe, meant to be taken metaphorically, as an expression of the father’s acquiescence to a greater power, a power on which hinges his ability to support his family, to maintain intact the structure represented by the Oedipal trajectory. They also can be taken as a repetition of Oedipus’ real crime since they ritualize the exclusion of the mother/Mother. Allegorically, then, the publisher is the patriarchal function, as illustrated in the scene where the publisher himself takes up the brush to play God, and signs his own name on Nagiko’s neck, as her father used to do: “If God approved of His creation, he breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His own name” (39). This occurs the year Nagiko’s father is sick and her mother is summoned to perform the birthday celebration in his place–her only action in the film–but is prevented from completing the ritual by the arrival of the publisher.

     

    The first time we witness Nagiko’s birthday ritual is also the first time that Nagiko sees her father’s sexual ritual with the publisher–a primal scene of sorts which she witnesses through a sliding screen. This screen both reveals the action and hides its significance for the child. The film thus links Nagiko’s birthday celebration not only to language and specularity, but to sexuality and power. More importantly, the film also visually links all these elements to paper money by means of the superimposition of the images of the two men, a page from Sei Shonagon’s diary, and a bank note, the latter deliberately placed at the base of the image.

     

    Click here to view the film clip

     

    A further link between money and writing will be made, later, when Nagiko remembers enjoying the smell of paper as she enjoyed the smell of the banknote her father once gave her after a visit to the publisher’s.20

     

    On her sixth birthday, following the annual ritual, Nagiko is taught how to write and vows to become a writer like her father, and like Sei Shonagon. As an adult, she begins to keep her own diaries, or pillow books. After her marriage to the publisher’s nephew fails, she flees to Hong Kong, where she becomes a fashion model. She also begins to seek out lover-calligraphers, offering her body to them in exchange for their writing on it. Her body continues to serve as a page as she trades sex for text, until she meets Jerome, an English translator, who becomes her lover and who, we later learn, is also, like her father, the publisher’s lover.

     

    The introduction of the character of Jerome is of great significance, both to Nagiko’s life and to my argument. It is after meeting Jerome that Nagiko takes up the pen and trades her position as a writing surface to become the writing instrument, or as Greenaway puts it, she becomes the pen and not the paper. The significance of Jerome to the present argument is that it is through him that the issue of oral languages is explicitly introduced into the film, which has up until now dealt with language mostly as writing and image. Although Greenaway goes to great lengths to draw our attention to the spoken word–to its rhythms and cadences–by leaving much of the spoken dialogue untranslated, and by introducing multiple languages and dialects, he also dramatizes the death of oral languages by drawing our attention to those languages that only exist today in written form.

     

    When we first meet Jerome, we learn that he speaks four languages, including Yiddish. Later in the sequence, Nagiko asks Jerome to write on her breast, in Yiddish. She asks, “What’s Yiddish for breast?” Jerome then proceeds to write BRUSTEN, the Yiddish for breast, in capital roman letters just above her breast. The significance of this episode is four-fold.

     

    First, the episode immediately follows a sequence in which Nagiko had been written on with invisible ink by a young calligrapher. In response to Nagiko’s dismay at not being able to read the writing on her body, the calligrapher points out that “some cultures permit no images, perhaps some cultures ought to permit no visible text” (57). This commentary is further emphasized in the filmscript by the fact that the calligrapher is said to be pointing to a television showing a documentary on Islamic calligraphy, as he makes this remark. There are other indications in the film that Greenaway is aware of the implications, the effects, perhaps even the dangers, of the rise and predominance of written language. The film goes to great lengths, for instance, to dramatize the fact that none of the writing is permanent–that is, until the very last scene, when we are briefly shown that a permanent tattoo now covers Nagiko’s entire chest area. In fact, up until that point, the writing on bodies is shown to be water-soluble: the rain, a bath, or even the lick of a tongue dissolves it. In this context, it is interesting to note that the script calls for a scene which was shot but not included in the commercially released film. In the script, the calligrapher hands Nakigo’s maid an onion before he leaves. Surmising that perhaps the onion juice will reveal the invisible writing on Nagiko’s body, the maid rubs the onion over the body of the young model. Although the juice from the onion fails to reveal the writing on the body, it causes Nagiko to shed tears which, as they splash on her body, magically expose the letters. Once again, the body itself–its fluids–is shown to be the agent of language. The agents of language here are tears, however. Thus, the emergence of written language is associated with the shedding of tears–with grief, pain, and loss.

     

    Since the release of The Pillow Book, Greenaway has often emphasized in discussions and interviews that the writing on bodies is non-permanent: “We have been at pains in the film,” he explains, “to insist on writing in a non-abusive, non penetrative way with brush and ink, infinitely washable, as is made evident several times in the plot of the film” (“Body and Text”). One of Nagiko’s lovers, an “elderly talkative calligrapher,” says the script (54, my emphasis), is shown to be an advocate for the impermanence of writing by arguing that “you should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense–better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong” (54). As if further to assure us of the impermanence of script, Nagiko walks out onto the verandah, after the calligrapher is finished with his task, and allows the rain to wash away the writing, “whilst the elderly calligrapher watches his literary efforts trickle away down her body. He shakes his head in acceptance, all the while taking gulps of cold green tea” (54). Another way to put this notion across is simply to say, as Greenaway did in relation to The Belly of An Architect, that “man-made art is denied the immortality status” (qtd. in Woods 253).

     

    Second, BRUSTEN is significant also because it is the first non-oriental word inscribed on Nagiko’s body, and thus signals a break with oriental calligraphy. The significance of this shift can be better understood if we remember that oriental calligraphy is not only a form of writing which fuses the pictorial and the linguistic, but is one of the few scripts that, albeit abstracted and stylized, still retains some ties to the phenomenal world. Greenaway’s use of oriental ideograms in this film is an expression of his ongoing efforts to find a suitable union of image and text in his elaboration of a non-narrative cinema. The ideogram embodies this fusion, for, as Greenaway explains, “when you read text, you see image, when you view the image you read text. Would not this be an exciting module, a template, a basis on which to reconsider some cinema practice?” (“Body and Text”).

     

    By dramatizing this shift from an ideographic to an alphabetic–and, thus, completely abstract system of writing–and simultaneously calling our attention to the body, could Greenaway be urging us to reconsider something more than our cinematic practices? In effect, might he not be suggesting that we reconsider all of our representational practices, and, more specifically, our own use of language to represent ourselves and the world? Might he not be inviting us to rediscover the roots of our language in the organic world and in our bodies? Such a notion is certainly echoed by the “talkative calligrapher” discussed above, for he also insists that the word’s relation to the thing it names not be arbitrary, but mimetic: “The word for smoke should look like smoke–the word for rain should look like rain” (54). As Abram and others have argued, the oriental ideographic script retains some ties to the phenomenal world of sensory perception. The Chinese ideograph for “red,” for instance, is composed of abbreviated forms of the pictographs for things that are red–a rose, a cherry, or rust, for example (111).

     

    The progressive movement from a pictographic model of writing to the ideogram, and later to the rebus, to the Semitic alephbeth, and finally to the Greek alphabet, carries with it an analogous movement toward abstraction and distancing, and, as articulated by Saussurian linguistics, toward arbitrariness. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception as participatory, and of human language as carnal and rooted in sensorial experience, Abram goes on to show how the linguistic model adopted by the West encourages, even promotes, “a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances” (72). With these shifts in what might be called “technologies of expression” come shifts in consciousness. It is precisely this technologically produced consciousness which, I believe, Greenaway’s film invites us to investigate. Greenaway’s interest in other forms of technologically produced expressions and representations–the Internet, CD-ROM, electronically produced layering of images–seems a natural extension of his fascination with the effects of writing on being and on the body.

     

    In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman argues that any new technology does not simply add or subtract something from the culture, but changes everything. Technologies–and Postman sees written language as one of our most fundamental technologies–contain their particular ideological bias and, thus, have an effect on the structure of our interests, on the character of our symbols, and on the nature of our communities. That is, technologies alter what we think about, what we think with, and the environment in which our thinking takes place. In other words, technologies alter the ways we perceive and construct reality (13-22). Abram contends that “today we are simply unable to discern with any clarity the manner in which our own perceptions and thoughts are being shifted by our sensory involvement with electronic technologies, since any thinking that seeks to discern such a shift is itself subject to the very effect that it strive to thematize” (115). I would agree with both positions insofar as we maintain our commitment to an ideological predisposition against questioning what we regard as the fundamental capacity that distinguishes the human from the non-human animal–language. As Postman notes, language appears to us to be a natural expression emanating from within us so “we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is.” He further adds that a sentence functions much like a machine, in so far as it “re-creates the world in its own image” (125).

     

    The radical distinction between humans and non-humans on the basis of the former’s unique capacity for language is challenged by current research on the linguistic capacity of chimpanzees, for instance. Under experimental conditions, chimpanzees have been shown to have more linguistic capacities than they actually use in the wild. The effects that such findings will have on the way we think about ourselves, on our uses of language, and therefore, on how we imagine and live out our relationship to the world and to other beings is, however, uncertain.21 Abram’s intention is to propose an alternative to seeing language as a mere code, as having an arbitrary connection to the world–and, thus, as being truly separable from it–and as being detached from the act of speaking, that is, from the body. To think of human language in that way, argues Abram, is to justify our seeing humans as significantly different from other beings. This, he argues, has in turn justified “the increasing manipulation and exploitation of nonhuman nature by, and for, (civilized) humankind” (77). I believe Greenaway is thinking along analogous lines:

     

    Darwin's evolutionary theories have dramatically obliged us to look at our animal origins and our physical selves with new eyes. Our ideas of corporeality and sexuality have to be adjusted with new sympathies [...] In the light of this fact, we have been obliged to re-examine notions of the greatest sensitivity, to reconsider such dearly-held concepts as conscience, spirit and the soul, concepts which we pride ourselves on possessing to make us a superior animal, capable of communicating with even greater forms of intelligence, mortal or immortal [...] By the final use of his thinking, Darwin was sure that despite any heartfelt wish for the contrary, man was not the sum and end of the evolutionary process, and that, in every likelihood, homo sapiens was, in evolutionary terms, no more than a link that would continue after him, and probably without relationship to him, since evolutionary progress had seen so many dead ends, cul de sacs, and abortive developments, especially in the highly developed species. (qtd. in Woods 64)

     

    Like Darwin before him, Greenaway applies thought to the critical investigation of thinking. Greenaway is also deploying multiple representational means to ask critical and crucial questions about representationality itself. Above all, he invites “new sympathies” with the non-human world by recasting man’s position in that world. He reconnects language to the body by showing that oral and written expression emanate from the body. Finally, Greenaway reveals the dangers to the body of substituting an abstracted and arbitrary body of language for the expressive sensorial body.

     

    A third way in which the word BRUSTEN contributes to our understanding of Greenaway’s meditations on language and representationality is that, as Greenaway has pointed out in a personal conversation, Yiddish was mostly an oral language. When first committed to paper, it was written in Hebrew. The speakers of Yiddish were also, apparently, forbidden to use the language to describe body parts. Jerome subverts these interdictions associated with spoken Yiddish by writing the name of a body part on a body part, and by using the phonetic alphabet. Like Prospero at the beginning of Prospero’s Books, Jerome commits to writing a word which was meant to be spoken, and thus helps establish a gap, or disconnection, between language and the body. This disjuncture is further intensified with the advent of mechanical writing, which puts the body at one further remove from the written word by introducing the keyboard as mediating device between the gesture of the hand and the word on the page (and on the screen). Until print, even alphabetic writing, after all, retains a vestigial connection to the body by literally leaving visible traces of the body’s presence. As Abram notes, “we may be sure that the shapes of our consciousness are shifting in tandem with the technologies that engage our senses–much as we can now begin to discern, in retrospect, how the distinctive shape of Western philosophy was born of the meeting between the human senses and the alphabet in ancient Greece” (115). This is precisely Postman’s point that “language is pure ideology” (123).

     

    Lastly, BRUSTEN also suggests breath, for it is the word for the part of the body that houses the human breath–the very breath that animates both the body and the spoken word. The Semitic text, before the introduction of vowel indicators in the 7th century A.D., had to be read aloud, the reader’s breath being necessary to animate the written text. Vowels are but sounded breath, and the Hebrew interdiction against the representation of vowels has been explained by the fact that the ancient Semites regarded breath as sacred and mysterious, and thus inseparable from the holy breath. Abram suggests that Hebrew scribes may have avoided creating letters to represent the sounded breath so as not to make a visible representation of an invisible and sacred force (241).

     

    Greenaway has compressed the evolution of language from its spoken origins to its alphabetical form in this one word, BRUSTEN. He has also traced the development of language as something emanating from, or produced by, the body to something which now produces the body, scripts it, and envelops it as a second layer of skin. Brody Neuenschwander, Greenaway’s calligrapher for Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, explains that the particular script style chosen for the writing on the bodies in The Pillow Book was gridded and typographic in quality, so as to contrast more dramatically with “the irregular curves of the body, becoming like a second layer over the skin” (quoted in Owen 29). As Jerome’s fate ultimately demonstrates, however, this superimposition of text over body introduced into the film with Nagiko’s birthday rituals becomes a fatal substitution of text for body–as the black ink Jerome drinks in a quasi-suicidal gesture is substituted for his own blood. Here, pharmakon, in the form of ink, works quite literally as the poison that kills Jerome.

     

    Each linguistic development–from the early ideograms, to rebuses, to the Semitic aleph-beth, to the Greek alphabet–introduces a new level of abstraction and separation, or distance, between language and the body, and between human culture and the rest of nature. Our understanding of and engagement with the world has been radically altered as we have displaced our sensory participation in its three-dimentionality with a two-dimensional surface–a wall, a clay tablet, a sheet of paper, a computer screen, or a movie screen. Our semiotic system, which was once intimately linked to our bodies and to the more-than-human-life-world, is now a mere abstract code, having an arbitrary connection to the world, and is, therefore, detachable from both the act of speaking and the geographical location which once gave rise to the stories our ancestors told. For primal cultures, storytelling serves to wed the human community to the land, which itself works as a mnemonic trigger. Before the invention of writing, says Abram, language was quite literally not only rooted in the body of the speaker, but in a particular soil: “in the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning” (139-40). Writing for us has replaced the land as referent and as the visual counterpart of speech. Whereas the landscape operates as a mnemonic trigger for oral peoples and weds them to the land, the written text makes possible the preservation of cultural stories independently of the land. Abram talks about the written stories of the Hebrew tribes as a kind of “portable homeland for the Hebrew people” (195), who found themselves in the difficult position of trying to preserve their stories while being cut off from the land for many generations. It is thus understandable that one of the central motifs of the Hebrew Bible is exile or displacement. It is also understandable that what makes Judeo-Christian religions so universalizable is their transportability in the form of a book.

     

    Moreover, once a written tradition becomes established, the reasons for remaining bound to a particular place are weakened. The devastating effects this has had on the land and on our relationship to the land is a topic of great concern for us today, and one that needs to be explored more fully in relation to Greenaway, I believe. It is no accident that The Pillow Book makes more explicit references to ecological questions than any other film by Greenaway, and that it links these references to writing. Although a fuller development of ecological themes in Greenaway is the focus of another, longer project, a few examples of its connection to writing in The Pillow Book can be offered here.

     

    Nagiko is often linked to natural elements, such as gardens, water, and even whales. These elements are often depicted as constrained, framed, or enclosed. Gardens, but particularly the Japanese garden, are obvious examples of a manicured, molded nature–a nature shaped by human hands, according to a “model-in-thought,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression (169). Water, when not contained in the form of pools or lakes, flows freely from the sky as rain, and, as we have noted, is often associated by the film with cleansing rituals–such as baths–and with the washing away of writing. Nagiko is also associated with whales by means of the two sculptures of the tail flukes of whales that adorn her and her husband’s home. In one of the publicity stills for the film, reprinted in the script, these flukes are clearly linked to imprisonment and death: the room is lit in such a way as to cast multiple horizontal shadows against the back wall, suggesting prison bars. Superimposed on these shadows are the shadows of Nagiko’s husband’s phallic arrows (he has pretensions to archery), which are reminiscent of harpoons–particularly when juxtaposed with the image of the whales.

     

    Another reference to whales–and to their real and symbolic importance in the film and to environmental activism–appears in the dialogue. The “talkative” calligrapher, advocate for the impermanence of writing, explains that his brother works for the forestry commission and would like to make green ink “a standard colour for all forestry business” (54). He then goes on to link writing, vision, and whales through the following remark: “I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind” (54). However ironical and playful the reference, its political weight cannot be denied–the Japanese whaling industry and Greenpeace would, without a doubt, be sensitive to it, but for different reasons, naturally.22 Shortly after this scene, Nagiko is kidnapped by a gang of nihilist youth clad in black (they are described as “anti-Japanese, anti-American, anti-Ecology,” in the script, 61), while she is at home having breakfast with Bara, one of her lover-calligraphers and an advocate of “clean living ecological purity” (59) who writes ecological slogans on her body.

     

    Since she was a young child, Nagiko herself has been linked to writing in multiple and opposed ways. As an adult, she is linked to both its production and its destruction. At one point in the film, she attempts to drown her typewriter; twice, her writings are destroyed by fire, the second time through her own action. In his films, Greenaway has subjected books to every conceivable form of destruction: by water, earth, wind, fire, and ingestion. The Pillow Book also connects Nagiko’s destruction of her own writings with the destruction of forests: the fire that consumes her books also burns down the wooden columns in her house, columns that are deliberately made to look like tree trunks. At other points in the film, the print industry itself, represented by Nagiko’s father’s publisher, is associated with deforestation and ecological holocaust.

     

    The ending of The Pillow Book suggests that language is now fully rooted in books, and that its connection to the body is, at best, superficial, skin deep. It also suggest that the body has been fully scripted by our civilization’s narrative, an Oedipal narrative, as demonstrated by the permanent tattoo we see on Nagiko’s chest as she breast-feeds her child. This is disconcerting, given that the film has gone to great lengths to convince us that the writing on bodies is impermanent and soluble. Moreover, the human body, as represented by Jerome’s body, and the body of nature, as represented by the Bonsai tree adorning Nagiko’s living room, have been thoroughly bound–Jerome’s into a book, and the tree into a root-bound potted plant. That these two bodies have succumbed to the same fate, that both have been texted, is indicated by Nagiko’s placing–burying–of Jerome’s Pillow Book in the soil of the Bonsai tree. Having broken the connection between language and the body, says Greenaway, “we have set up for ourselves a bundle of trouble. It intimates a yet further denial of the physical self to the conveniences of the non-corporeal world, and even greater reliance on the machine ” (“Body and Text”).

     

    That the film ends with the flowering of the Bonsai tree, and that this flowering takes place outside the diegesis of the film, may be taken, allegorically, as a reminder that human expression remains linked to, and dependent on, the human and more-than-human body of the world and its eternal cycles of death and rebirth. While the flowering of the tree takes place outside the narrative proper of the film, some ambiguity remains as to the fate of the tree, since, as the tree begins to flower, the credits begin to roll. Interestingly, the credits seem to “make room” for the tree, at least for awhile, by being pushed to the margins of the image, the edges of the frame.

     

    If there is a hopeful message at the end of this film, it lies in our recognition that, to quote Greenaway once again, “the body must be up there earnestly and vigorously rooting for its supremacy, text or no text.” As the Thirteenth Book, “the book to end all books” (The Pillow Book 112), inscribed on the body of the sumo-wrestler sent to kill the publisher, says: “‘I am old,’ said the book. ‘I am older,’ said the body” (The Pillow Book 112).

     

    The book to end all books.

    The final book.

    After this, there is no more writing

    no more publishing.

    The publisher should retire

    The eyes grow weak, the light dims.

    The eyes squint. They blink.

    The world is prey to a failing of focus.

    The ink grows fainter but the print grows
    larger.

    In the end, the pages only whisper in deference.

    Desire lessens.

    Although dreams of love still linger,

    The hopes of consummation grow less,

    What could be the end of all these hopes and
    desires?

    Here comes the end.

    ("The Thirteenth Book," The Pillow Book 112)

     

    Notes

     

    This is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association’s 1997 Conference. I would like to thank PMC for expressing interest in having me expand the essay, and its anonymous readers for their suggestions.

     

    1. See, for instance, a call for papers for a 1998 MLA session on the roles of mixed and multi-media in Peter Greenaway’s works. Greenaway has produced, so far, three mixed-media operas (Rosa: A Horse Drama, 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop-Opera, and Christopher Columbus) that make extensive use of cinematic projection. He is currently working on a mega-cinematic project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which will include an eight-hour long film, a television series, a CD-ROM component, and an Internet site to be updated daily. Unless otherwise specified, all comments by Greenaway and information regarding his future projects were obtained during conversations with the artist.

     

    2. In keeping with this focus, Greenaway’s new film, 8 1/2 Women, to be released at Cannes in 1999, proclaims itself to be an homage to both Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard, and is about the making of a film (interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 1998).

     

    3. For a related treatment of this question, see my “God, Art, and the Gospel: The Construction of the Heterosexual Couple According to Godard,” forthcoming in Film/Literature Quarterly.

     

    4. For an interesting discussion of books and bodies in Greenaway, see Bridget Elliott’s and Anthony Purdy’s “Artificial Eye/Artificial You: Getting Greenaway or Mything the Point?”

     

    5. The most significant exception to this is Prospero. Although Prospero does not die, he does drown his books and relinquish control over the island and its inhabitants. In a conversation, Greenaway explained his attitude toward his male protagonists as follows: “And film after film after film, my distrust, I suppose, of the male hero, the macho behavior, the vulgarity, the philistinism… I suppose you could take these theories a lot further. Basically, I would support the notion of the female over the male; I always find females far more exciting and entertaining. Females are on the cusp now of the greatest revolution that is happening in the world; it’s not political, it’s not capitalistic, it has to do finally with some sense of emancipation of the female which has never been present before in our civilisation” (Interview with the author, Indianapolis, April 28, 1997). In light of this comment, we can only await with much anticipation Greenaway’s treatment in his next film, 8 1/2 Women, of the protagonists’ obsessions with the women in Fellini’s and Godard’s films.

     

    6. See my “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books as Ecological Rereadings and Rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” forthcoming in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment.

     

    7.Jacques Derrida too has referred to the word, to writing, as an “event,” rather than merely a “program”–although his conclusions regarding the impact of the word-as-event on Being are quite different from those of Ong. Geoffrey Bennington’s “biography” of Derrida, like many of Derrida’s own texts (Margins of Philosophy and Dissemination, for example) is meant to be an “event” that offers surprises, and remains indeterminate and unpredictable. In the running commentary by Derrida that parallels the progression of Bennington’s text, Derrida writes: ” […] for it is true that if I succeed in surprising him [Bennington] and surprising his reader, this success, success itself, will be valid not only for the future but also for the past for by showing that every writing to come cannot be engendered, anticipated, preconstructed from this matrix, I would signify to him in return that something in the past might have been withdrawn, if not in its content at least in the sap of the idiom, from the effusion of the signature […]” (32).

     

    8. Derrida, once again, would argue that the prison house of language, of writing, is the book, not writing itself. Derrida’s challenge to the authority of the book is offered as a challenge to what he perceives to be Western metaphysics’ prioritizing of speech over writing, of presence over absence. The book represents a totality of the signifier that relies on the notion that a “totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs and is independent of it in its ideality” (Of Grammatology 18). A Derridian reading of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, for instance, would see Prospero’s books as quasi-living organisms, or as events–always in process, always multiple, unfixable, without origin, and without end. The encyclopedic nature of Prospero’s books, as portrayed by Greenaway, would, from this perspective, serve to challenge this notion of the book as a fixed, unchanging, totality. While I am all in favor of challenging the notion of the book as a fixed totality, the Derridian reading of Prospero’s Books which I am suggesting here poses a grave danger: it regards the island on which Prospero is exiled–the island which he remakes and populates with mythological figures out of his books–as the product of textual inscriptions, as itself a text, in effect. We are uncannily close here to a conception of the world as the product of discourse, and of consciousness. While this might be in keeping with the Judeo-Christian notion that “in the beginning was the Word,” the ethical and ecological implications of conceiving the world as the product of discourse, in effect, as a representation, are tremendous.

     

    9. For “incantation,” hear also inkcantation. I have to thank Larry W. Riggs for pointing out this double-entendre following my reading aloud of an earlier version of this paper at the 1997 MLA Conference.

     

    10. While Derrida is not suggesting that writing preceded speech in the evolution of language, he is making a case for a conception of writing as something that exceeds phonetic notations, that is, as “arche-writing.” “If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation, it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say of obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general. No reality or concept would therefore correspond to the expression ‘society without writing’” (Of Grammatology 109). The notion of a “society without writing,” Derrida goes on to argue, arises out of an “ethnocentric, misconception of writing” (109). The point could also be made, however, that to expand the notion of writing so as to include all forms of classificatory differences is an instance of ethnocentric projection. According to this logic, there is nothing that is not a text (“il n’y a pas de hors-text,” see note 12). The danger of this kind of thinking, to my mind, is that it authorizes seeing the world as a text: “the Book of Nature”–as an authored, readable, rearrangeable construct, awaiting the intervention of a reading Subject who will give it life, so to speak. While, for Derrida, a text’s meaning is not fixed nor univocal, text itself–and particularly the printed text, that is, one which no longer even evokes the presence of a body behind the script–appears to us as visible, tangible, fixed marks on a page. I cannot help but wonder what would be the most effective way of minimizing our civilization’s destructive impact on the environment: whether to adopt Derrida’s view of text as plurivocal–which I agree it is–and continue regarding the world as a text, or to dispense altogether with the analogy between text and world.

     

    11. This is not the same as to say that the world is a text. To attribute “writing” to non-human beings may also be an instance of anthropomorphic projection. It need not be an instance of anthropocentrism, however. Abram would content that this might, in fact, help break down the rigid boundaries between the human and the non-human worlds, and foster a more empathetic rapport with our fellow creatures. To a certain extent, however, the same caveat brought up above in relation to Derrida applies here.

     

    12. I am playing with the plurivocality of the expression. In note 10 above I used the expression to suggest that if there is nothing outside text, then all is text. Here I am suggesting that the text which I am discussing, The Pillow Book, is not limited to the film in a narrow sense: it includes both the filmed and the printed versions of the story (and the film version would also include footage shot but not used in the final released version), as well as all the imaginable intertexts.

     

    13. The subtexts for Greenaway’s thematic treatment of the body as texted, as representation, and of death by text, are multiple: they range from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” where the penalty for disobedience takes the form of death by a machine, the “Harrow,” that writes on the body of the accused, slowly but eventually killing him, to Lewis Carroll, one of Greenaway’s favorite writers along with Jorge Luis Borges. Of note are Carroll’s stories Sylvie and Bruno Concluded and The Hunting of the Snark, both of which are allegories of the implications of substituting maps for territories, representations for organic “reality.” The former has to do with an astonishing map drawn up on a scale of one mile to the mile which covers the entire territory of a farm, thus shading the crops from the life-giving sun. The latter is a blank map, which, in covering the territory, erases its features and renders it blank, like an empty page. In both cases, the body of the land is rendered barren.

     

    A subtext for Greenaway’s treatment of the flaying of Jerome’s body might be Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570), depicting the Phrygian satyr Marsyas being flayed alive as a consequence of having lost a musical duel with the god Apollo. David Richard’s reading of this painting is consonant with my reading of the transformation of Jerome’s body into a textual representation: “the painting is paradigmatic of a recurrent ‘crisis’ of representation which lies deep in the platonic tradition of European art and interpretation. Western art is constructed upon this problem of representing that which it cannot, while effectively dismissing the actual body as an inconsequential means to the end of an impossible representation” (13).

     

    14. “Oral peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things. […] First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name: without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand, for example, chemistry and to practice chemical engineering. And so with all other intellectual knowledge. Secondly, chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen. Written or printed representations of words can be labels; real, spoken words cannot be” (Ong 33).

     

    15. Greenaway has made this point several times in lectures given while touring the U.S. to promote the film. For more on this point and for a discussion of other technical aspects of The Pillow Book, see William Owen, “Bodies, Text and Motion.”

     

    16. In 1996, Greenaway staged an exhibition at the Gallery Fortlaan, in Belgium, entitled “The Tyranny of the Frame.” See also his The Stairs/Geneva: The Location.

     

    17. “A fine epitaph: here lies a body cut down to fit the picture,” says Alba, after having her second leg amputated by Van Meegeren, the Zoo surgeon with aspirations to being a Dutch painter (A Zed and Two Noughts 107). Earlier in the film, after being fitted with a mechanical–fake–leg and asked to wear a replica of the dress–another fake–which appears in Vermeer’s “The Music-lesson,” Alba protests: “I’m an excuse for medical experiments and art history” (A Zed and Two Noughts 77).

     

    Greenaway has also produced a series of paintings, The Framed Life (1989), which feature “frames” as their primary content and organizing principle. The text accompanying the exhibition of some of these paintings at the SESC Vila Mariana in São Paulo, Brazil (15 July – 17 August, 1998) suggests that life events and social roles–social narratives and myths like the Oedipus legend, for example–might be regarded as framing devices: “Since all pictorial art, all performance disciplines, and the moving images are restricted to the frame, we can say this is also the case with reality. The series The Framed Life was to do just that; squeeze a life into a frame. Conception, birth, childhood, puberty, sex, love, marriage, adultery, maturity, illness, senility, death–all held together in a fixed rectangle.” For reproductions of some of these paintings, see Peter Greenaway, Papers, Editions Dis Voir, 1990; Leon Steinmetz and Peter Greenaway, The World of Peter Greenaway, Journey Editions, 1995; and the 1998 catalogue to accompany the opera 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop-Opera (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 6-9 and August 14-17).

     

    18. Quantum physics has reminded us of something which, according to Catherine Wilson, microscopists in the early 17th century were forced to confront, even as they strove to find means of describing the subvisible world of nature. According to Wilson, these early scientists were disappointed with the contributions made by the microscope, for they had to recognize that the images that it revealed were fundamentally different from the reality under scrutiny.

     

    19. All quotations from “Body and Text” refer to a lecture by Greenaway. I would like to thank Peter Greenaway for making the text of this lecture available to me.

     

    20. The script reads: “Nagiko’s father takes out a bank-note (1,000 yen) and gives it to his daughter, who rubs it between her fingers and then looks at it closely. Bringing it up to her nose, she sniffs it. Her glance is absent for a few moments as she concentrates on catching the scent of the new bank-note. Its smell makes a strong impression on her” (38). Printed paper money is, of course, the universal proxy and the ultimate abstraction.

     

    21. Jim Nollman, director of Interspecies Communication, Inc., and author of The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet, argues that “interspecies communication is far more common in nature than biology warrants. Whether it occurs at any given moment has less to do with intelligence than with timing and sensitivity. It depends on how willing we are, as individuals and as a culture, to seek out the unknown, push beyond the quantifiable, and adopt new, ethically based ways for studying the possibilities. Orthodox scientists say this view of interspecies communication reeks of anthropomorphism. But perhaps this criticism is handy obfuscation that serves to uphold the dogma that keeps humans above and separate from the rest of nature” (“Secret Language” 100).

     

    22. David Ehrenfeld notes that quick profits from the commercial exploitation of whales, to the point of extinction can be turned into greater profits than if the whales were captured at a rate commensurate with their ability to survive as a species (202). Ehrenfeld also recounts a conversation he had with a fellow scientist who was deeply concerned about the survival of a species of great whale he was studying. Ehrenfeld asked this scientist why, if he was so concerned with protecting this whale population from whalers, he was publishing maps and descriptions of its exact location. The man replied that “he couldn’t withhold scientific truth, even if it meant that the whales could suffer for it” (248). This seems to me another instance of prioritizing the map over the territory, the representation of life in the form of scientific “knowledge” about life, over life itself.

    Works Cited

     

    • Abram, David. The Spell Of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
    • Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983.
    • Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991.
    • Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used In Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1967. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
    • —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. 1972. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
    • Elliott, Bridget, and Anthony Purdy. “Artificial Eye/Artificial You: Getting Greenaway or Mything the Point?” Literature and the Body. Ed. Anthony Purdy. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992. 178-211.
    • —. Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory. London: Academy Editions, 1997.
    • Ehrenfeld, David. The Arrogance of Humanism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
    • Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1951.
    • Greenaway, Peter. The Pillow Book. Paris: Dis Voir, 1996.
    • —. “Peter Greenaway on The Pillow Book.” Sight and Sound (Nov. 1996): 14-17.
    • —. The Stairs/Geneva: Location. London: Merrell Holberton, 1994.
    • —. The Belly Of An Architect. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
    • —. A Zed & Two Noughts. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
    • Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
    • Lowen, Alexander. Fear of Life. New York: Collier Books, 1980.
    • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964.
    • Neumann, Erich. The Origin and History of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.
    • Nollman, Jim. The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., forthcoming April 1999. —. “The Secret Language of the Wild: What Animals Could Tell Us if We’d Only Listen.” Utne Reader 86 (March-April 1998): 40-45, 100.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London, New York: Routledge, 1996 [1982].
    • Owen, William. “Bodies, Text and Motion.” Eye 6 (1996): 24-31.
    • Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
    • Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
    • Richards, David. Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
    • Silverman, Kaja. “Kaspar Hauser’s ‘Terrible Fall’ into Narrative.” New German Critique 24-25 (1981-82): 73-93.
    • Steinmetz, Leon, and Peter Greenaway. The World of Peter Greenaway. Boston: Journey Editions, 1995.
    • Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books as Ecological Rereadings and Rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment. Ed. Michael P. Branch et al. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1998. 247-69.
    • —. “God, Art, and the Gospel: The Construction of the Heterosexual Couple According to Godard.” Film/Literature Quarterly. Forthcoming.
    • Wilson, Catherine. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1995.
    • Woods, Alan. Being Naked, Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

     

  • Derrida, Algeria, and “Structure, Sign, and Play”

    Lee Morrissey

    Department of English
    Clemson University
    lmorris@CLEMSON.EDU

     

    More than thirty years after Jacques Derrida first read his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the Johns Hopkins Conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” it may seem redundant to return to the “originary” moment of its spectacularly successful–and simultaneously remarkably simplified–American reception. However, now that, reportedly, “deconstruction… is dead in literature departments today”–as Jeffrey Nealon writes in Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction–it may be possible to reconsider its “birth,” particularly the commonly accepted notion that Derrida’s work avoids, overlooks, or prevents a relationship with history and/or politics (22). While the historicizing approach of this essay is made possible in part by the increasingly explicit treatment of historical and political questions in Derrida’s recent work, such as Spectres of Marx and Jacques Derrida, it is also made possible by a second “interpretation of interpretation” put forward by “Structure, Sign, and Play,” that which “affirms play” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). If, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” contends, “[b]eing must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around,” I am revisiting this early essay to “play” with the possibility that the recent focus on politics, (presence), neglected though it was (absence), is part of its being (play), having been there from the “beginning.” Specifically, I consider Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1966), in terms of the relationship between Paris and Algeria or Francophone North Africa, what the recent History of Structuralismcalls “the continental divide of structuralism” (Dosse 264). By “playing” with Derrida’s essay in terms of the “liberation” of Algeria (c. 1962), what emerges is a Derridean argument much more politically and historically aware than his work is generally thought to be, especially in the earlier essays.

     

    During the initial discussion after his reading of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida stated, “I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it…. It is a question of knowing where it comes from” (Macksey and Donato 271). As he has discussed more frequently in his recent work, Derrida happens to come from Algeria, where he lived until he was 19 years old. He has recently described his experience of Algeria in part in terms of “Vichy, official anti-semitism, the Allied landing at the end of 1942, the terrible colonial repression of Algerian resistance in 1945 at the time of the first serious outbursts heralding the Algerian war” (Derrida and Attridge 38-9). The war in Algeria, which lasted eight years, “toppled six French prime ministers and the Fourth Republic itself,” with casualties of “an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and the expulsion from their homes of approximately the same number of European settlers” (Horne 14). Derrida returned to and lived in Algeria for two years during the war. Where “Structure, Sign, and Play” tentatively claims that “perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event,” and answers the obvious question–“what would this event be then?”–with the cryptic claim that “its exterior form would be that of a rupture” (278), this essay, on the one hand, treats the Algerian liberation as that rupture, while on the other, considering the cryptic, tentative tone of “Structure, Sign, and Play” as symptomatic.

     

    The fact that this context has not informed the typical response to “Structure, Sign, and Play” over the past thirty years probably has more to with American unfamiliarity with Francophone North Africa than with the famous opacity of Derrida’s writing. When, for example, the editors of the influential anthology Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983) set out “to stimulate serious, careful assessment of [deconstruction] in relation to recent American criticism and to the critical tradition,” they argue that in order “to achieve this initial location, [they] had to refrain from pursuing other important current concerns, such as feminism, semiotics, and ethnic and regional studies” (Martin ix). It is not clear what remains when one excludes so many fields which address so many issues. This rather comprehensive list of exclusions turns out to have included issues that the recent work of Derrida, the key figure in the approach the editors of Yale Critics were trying to survey, indicates have been of central importance. Overlooking what they call “regional studies” means that they might have missed precisely the trans-Mediterranean context that Derrida’s recent work so directly discusses.

     

    Jean Hyppolite, the first person to ask a question regarding “Structure, Sign, and Play” when it was first read, asked what remains the “central” question; recognizing that the “technical point of departure of the presentation” is Derrida’s discussion of the center, Hyppolite asked “what a center might mean” (Macksey and Donato 265). Hyppolite wondered, “is the center the knowledge of the general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege with the ensemble?” (265). Derrida’s answer, “I don’t mean to say that I thought of approaching an idea of the center would be an affirmation,” echoes his essay’s claim that “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). However, by doing to the word “center” what Derrida says the center does–making a “substitution of center for center” so that “the center receives different forms or names”–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can describe the complexity of Algeria’s decolonization (292).

     

    For Derrida’s definitions of “the center” constitute abstracted definitions of a political center: “The center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing that structure escapes structurality” (279). The center “governs” and is “constituted”; the political implications of Derrida’s terms here are very important. We are all familiar with how centers manage to escape structurality: consider, for example, the South African National Party’s 1997 contention before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that its leaders had no knowledge of what members of the army (“the structure”) were doing to black South Africans. When pressed, the center says that power was always elsewhere. In this sense, then, “the center is not the center” (279). Or, as Derrida also says, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (279). Like a governmental center, the “center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form” (278-279), even as it also “closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible” (279). Some possibilities cannot be considered even by the freest of centers.

     

    According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” this comparative narrowness of possibilities is the result of centering: “The structurality of structure… has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (278). The center thus controls, in the sense of “containing,” the structurality of the structure, reducing it; the extremes are neutralized by the center. For many people (although “Structure, Sign, and Play” might say, for “the structure”), this containment is a good thing: “the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (279). Limiting freeplay is reassuring, “and on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered” (279). The center, which governs, allows certain freedoms, and even if allowing these closes off others, it is considered preferable to the absence of centering because with it a reassuring certitude, through which anxiety can be reduced, is implied.

     

    “Structure, Sign, and Play” emphasizes that the center is “not a fixed locus but a function” (280). In one sense, then, the governmental function need not be put in one place; the function can be distributed throughout the structure. This is another way of understanding that the center is not the center; the center of power need not be at the central place. Even decentralized power functions as power. Moreover, if the center is a function, not a place, then it is highly variable; not only can the function be fulfilled from different places, but different centers can fulfill the same function. “If this is so,” according to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center” (278). In governmental terms, whatever fulfills the function of the center is itself just a substitute for a (previous) center; the function remains the same even if the center has moved, i.e., is not a fixed locus.

     

    “Structural” conditions in Algeria made these issues all the more complicated and important. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870 automatically made Algerian Jews French citizens and left Algerian Muslims French “subjects,” with the option to apply for citizenship. However, legislation which permitted Algerian Muslims to be subjected to Islamic, rather than French, law “became in effect a prison, because Muslims wishing to adopt French citizenship had to renounce these [Islamic] rights, thereby virtually committing an act of apostasy,” according to Alistair Horne (35). Moreover, French was simultaneously made the official language of the land, Arabic being considered foreign, and with Koranic schools shut down, individuals who wanted an education would need to attend a French school, where they would learn about “their” French culture. As a consequence, “by 1946,” write David and Marina Ottaway, “about forty-six thousand Algerians out of a total population of seven and a half million had full French citizenship” (30). This, it seems to me, is an instance of the structurality of the structure.

     

    According to Jacques Derrida, in 1942, when Derrida was 12 years old, the French government in Algeria, which had not been occupied by Germany, revoked the Crémieux Decrees; consequently, as it is put in one of the three accounts of it in Jacques Derrida, “they expelled from the Lycée de Ben Aknoun in 1942 a little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it” (Bennington 58). In addition to being expelled from school, Derrida also lost his French citizenship. Overnight he was a Jew and was not French. Being both was seemingly no longer possible. A teacher said that day that “French culture is not made for little Jews” (326). In the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Algeria had undergone a substitution of center for center, and in 1942, this new center neutralized a possibility for freeplay, mastering a certain anxiety; but the center, the structure, had repositioned Derrida: “thus expelled, I became the outside” (289). From the point of view of Algeria (perhaps especially the point of view of a schoolboy expelled for being Jewish), it could be said that Paris governs while escaping what is applied to the rest of the structure, the governed.

     

    From 1870 on, whether one were “Muslim” or “Jewish” had a significant impact on one’s relationship with the center; but whereas “Muslim” could include a variety of origins–Kabyle, Chaoui, M’zabite, Mauretanian, Turkish, and Arab, for example–to simply refer to all these peoples as “Muslim” was itself a distortion that says something about the structural possibilities for freeplay at the center. The marker of difference was Islam, to which all other differences were relegated. Even the phrase “pieds noirs” could refer to French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese immigrants. As for how these questions worked in practice, consider the following transaction from the Algerian Assembly in 1947, seven years before the War:

     

    M. Boukaboum–“Don’t forget that I’m an Algerian, first and foremost!”

     

    M. Louvel–“That’s an admission!”

     

    From several benches, in the center–“You are French, first and foremost!”

     

    M. Boukaboum–“I am a Muslim Algerian, first and foremost!”

     

    M. Musmeaux–“If you consider the Muslim Algerians as French, give them all the rights of the French!”

     

    M. Louvel--"Then let them declare they're French." (Horne 70)

     

    From this example, we can see that it was understood that the structure demands/asks people to “be” one thing, and then treats them in different ways if/once they “are.”

     

    This argument can be read in relation to a famous passage from “Structure, Sign, and Play,” according to which “the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies” (282). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” is usually read in terms of “the history of metaphysics,” this analogy between metaphysics and the history of the West works both ways, relating to the history of the West as much as it does to the history of metaphysics. After all, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “we have no language–no syntax and no lexicon–which is foreign to this history” of metaphysics (280). In claims such as “I am an Algerian,” and “I am a Muslim,” it is metaphors and metonymies that posit existence, or, in the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” would seem to be the “determination of Being as presence in all the senses of this word” (279). Although metaphors claim to state that this is that, or while metonymies, as the root indicates, make possible changes of names, in fact, they are nothing but descriptions with reference to some center. Their power is rhetorical, and, granted, such power is substantial and real. But words do not necessarily establish what the object is; they instead participate in “a history of meanings” (279). Moreover, because saying that you are somebody, or something, takes the form of both a metaphor (x=y) and a metonymy (a name change, “I” am “something else”), what you are may still be different from what either the metaphor or the metonymy can suggest. “We live in and of difference,” according to Derrida (“Violence and Metaphysics” 153). We are not who we say (we are). In fact, we cannot be, because when we say who we are we are only using metaphors and metonymies.

     

    Insofar as there is a difference between Being and a metaphor, we live in difference. Those metaphors and metonymies only have meaning in relation to some center which contains the freeplay of the structure so as to master a certain anxiety, probably the anxiety of difference, which is also the anxiety of similarity. The “rupture,” with which “Structure, Sign, and Play” begins, “comes about when the structurality of the structure had to begin to be thought” (278). Once people begin to recognize that the structure is a structure, and nothing else, a rupture can occur; prior to that, when people believe that the structure is something other than a structure (e.g., “the way things are”), they have instead fallen for metaphor. Once people become conscious of how the structure structures them, then there can be an event, which, when considered externally, could be called a rupture. To some extent, by the mid-1960s this thinking the structurality of the structure had begun to be thought in Algeria, temporarily suspending the usual substitution of center for center, resulting in what is called a “rupture.” “Structure, Sign, and Play’s” word “rupture” is used by others to describe the results of the Algerian civil war: Jacques Soustelle, for example, refers to the “rupture between the Sahara and France” (126), and the entry “Algerie: Les Intellectuels Avant La Decolonization,” in Dictionaire des intellectuels français: Les Personnes, Les Lieux, Les Moments, refers several times to “les ruptures” (Yacine 51-2). While both examples suggest an “Algerian,” and 1960s, usage of the word “rupture,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” claims that it is only “before the rupture of which we are speaking” that the entire history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center (278). The rupture, which might “be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural–or structuralist–thought to reduce or to suspect” (278), has changed that pattern of substitution.

     

    According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (292). On the one hand, the non-center (either the “margins,” or “the rupture”) is not necessarily a loss; perhaps in the case of Algeria the decolonizing rupture is not a loss. But of course, on the other hand, the extraordinarily qualified, tentative tone of this affirmation clearly mitigates against celebrating the rupture that “Structure, Sign, and Play” suggests has occurred. There are several reasons for such reserved appreciation of the rupture. First, it is not clear that there is ever such a thing as a “rupture,” a total break. For example, as Said explains, “imperialism did not end, did not suddenly become ‘past,’ once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires” (Culture and Imperialism 282). Describing change as a rupture, as a break, suggests that all that came before has stopped, that there has been an ending, or a new beginning, a claim which must, of course, overlook continuities, or traces. Lyotard’s claim–made as early as 1958–that “there is already no longer an Algerie française, in that ‘France’ is no longer present in any form in Algeria” (Lyotard 202), for example, replays the dichotomizing logic of the center, by overlooking what persists (including, most obviously, the French language, although that too has recently become an issue). Or as “Structure, Sign, and Play” puts it, “one can describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account… the problem of the transition from one structure to another, by putting history between brackets” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 291).

     

    With reference to his own experience in Algeria, Derrida has recently spoken about what persists despite (or through) change, about what survives the brackets. Although Derrida “always (at least since 1947) condemned the colonial policy of France in Algeria,” during the emigration of Jews from Algeria “he even put pressure on his parents not to leave Algeria in 1962. Soon afterwards recognized his illusions on this matter” (Bennington 330). Although he describes these “illusions” as “his ‘nostalgeria’” (Bennington 330), to see how nostalgeric Derrida was, and/or how controversial it is to claim that the rupture was not a rupture, it is important to note that of an estimated 140,000 Jews in Algeria before the outbreak of the war in 1954, only 10,000 remained by 1962, and by 1970, that number had dropped to 1,000 with only one talmus torah in the entire country. And this drop, in most cases, was precipitous as Independence approached: “whereas in 1961 as many as 22,000 Jews lived in Oran, during the summer of 1962 only 1,000-5,000 remained” (Laskier 334, 344, 338). Moreover, the social circumstances in “the Algerian Jewish scene [were] totally different from that in either Morocco or Tunisia,” according to Michael Laskier’s study of North African Jewry (40). Algerian Jews were more Francophilic; only 10,000 emigrated to Israel between 1954 and 1962; most of the rest went to France. Of course, in his ambivalence over how to respond to decolonization, Derrida is not alone: Francine Camus, for example, admitted, “I feel divided… half-French and half-Algerian, and, in truth, dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognize, since I never imagined them separated” (Horne 542).

     

    If it is possible to understand Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” in terms of this historical “event,” it is nonetheless still a question as to

     

    why, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of his circa 1968 writings, and despite the widespread, taken-for-granted assumption that he is "of the left," Derrida so consistently, deliberately and dexterously avoided the subject of politics. Why, for example, has he danced so nimbly around the tenacious efforts of interviewers to pin him down on where he stands vis-a-vis Marxism? (Fraser 127)

     

    Precisely because this hesitant relationship with Communism is thought to represent Derrida’s hesitancy with the left in general, it is important to remember how the Algerian and French Communist Parties responded to the Algerian War. In Algeria, the Communist Party, “which tended to support petits blancs rather than the Muslims,” “strongly condemned the Sétif Uprising, and was actually reported to have taken part in the reprisals” (Horne 136). The French Communist Party, “by granting the Guy Mollet-Lacoste government full power for its North African policy, the vote of the French Communist Party not only resulted in the escalation of the colonial war, but also caused a schism in the traditional Left” (Marx-Scouras 34). “Knowing where it comes from” makes Derrida’s mistrust of the Communist Party in Algeria seem politically progressive (Macksey 271).

     

    Regardless, Thomas McCarthy is not alone in believing that “Derrida’s discourse, it seems to me, lives from the enormous elasticity, not to say vagueness and ambiguity, of his key terms” (McCarthy 118). But that elasticity moves his writing beyond the categorical imperative that might be placed on it by a “metaphysics of presence” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 281). Derrida has recently said, “I’d like to escape my own stereotypes,” meaning, in a sense, he’d like to substitute an absence for a presence (Derrida and Attridge 34). With its “elasticity,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” can be as hybrid, as multiple, as his work suggests identity is. “I absolutely refuse,” writes Derrida, “a discourse that would assign me a single code, a single language game, a single context, a single situation; and I claim this right not simply out of caprice or because it is to my taste, but for ethical and political reasons” (Derrida, “Remarks” 81). Readers have long wondered how it could be “ethical,” not to mention “political,” to refuse a single code. Ernesto Laclau recently pointed out “this does not sound much like an ethical injunction but ethical nihilism” (Laclau 78).

     

    However, the point is not that no position will be taken, but rather that the code that marks positions will be refused, precisely because of how it has been centered, a point that may make more sense when considered in the post-colonial situation represented by Algeria. For example, in his influential article and subsequent book, Samuel P. Huntington contends that “culture and cultural identities… are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world” (20). Huntington’s claim, that “world civilizations” predating Cold War alignments are reshaping the world, is the type of assumption that “Structure, Sign, and Play” challenges, for ethical reasons. Huntington, and others, would, on one level, reduce the complexity of identity to a single code, a single language game, etc., and, on another level, would perform the same centering operation on the structure that Derrida’s essay describes. They would be, as even Huntington admits, “groping for groupings” (125). “Structure, Sign, and Play” asks us to examine how those “groupings” are claims to identity, rather than identity itself.1 (With “Structure, Sign, and Play,” it can be seen that recent arguments over the so-called “third way” also run the risk of simply recentering within a new structure.)

     

    “As an adolescent,” Derrida has recently said, “I no doubt had the feeling that I was living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed” (Derrida and Attridge 38). In its “elasticity,” or its “refusal of a single code,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” entails both of those perceptions: the difficult conditions, and the interdiction against speaking. The essay could be understood as part of what Hal Foster describes as “a shift in conception” “from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma,” as a traumatic response to an event (Foster 146). In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma “in terms of its indirect relation to reference” (7), according to which both the violent event and the violence of that event cannot be fully known. This traumatic indirect relation to reference may account for the oft-noted elasticity, obscurity, generalization, a-historicism of Derrida’s work; it could be the result of a traumatic incomprehension or of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. For the problem of reference that haunts the reception of Derrida’s work is in fact the problem of reference that is indicative of a response to trauma, i.e., having the feeling of living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed. Derrida’s recent discussion of wanting “to render both accessible and inaccessible” could thus be read as the traumatized wish to speak, but not speak too much or too directly, about the trauma (Derrida and Attridge 35).

     

    Recently, Derrida has stated that “what interests me… is not strictly called either literature or philosophy,” but something for which “‘autobiography’ is perhaps the least inadequate name” (Derrida and Attridge 34). And there is a way in which, by trying “to read philosophers in a certain way” (as “Structure, Sign, and Play” describes it), “Structure, Sign, and Play” could be considered an autobiography (288). But “autobiography” is the least inadequate name because there is more to the essay than what it says about Derrida’s biography. When read with “play,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is like Derrida’s recent definition of literature: “in principle [it] allows one to say everything” (Derrida and Attridge 36). As that rhetorical strategy whereby one says more than one has said, literature (and, perhaps more specifically, metaphor) allows one to say one thing and mean many things. Like literature, “Structure, Sign, and Play” need not, and does not, say everything in order to convey more than it actually does say–about metaphysics, about the history of the West, or, perhaps, about nostalgeria.

     

    In La Mésentente, Jacques Ranciere provides a name for the paradox of saying more than one has said: “a determinate type of speaking situation: where one of the speakers at the same time intends and does not intend” (12). Neither a “misreading” nor a “misunderstanding”–for “the concept of misunderstanding assumes that one or the other of the speakers, or both of them… may not know what one or other says” (12)–in la mésentente conversants know what is being said, even if it strikes them as a contradiction. For Ranciere, this knowing the contradiction makes la mésentente the image of politics: la mésentente “concerns, in the highest degree, politics” (14), which he also describes as “the art of the local and singular construction of the universal case” (188). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” could describe a decolonizing experience in Algeria, that word, “Algeria,” is but a metonymy for a confluence of factors, larger than, and also visible elsewhere besides, Algeria. Like literature or la mésentente, more is said here than just references to metaphysics or the history of the West. What Derrida says in Spectres of Marx concerning Apartheid could also apply to his own experience in Algeria: “one can decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world” (Spectres of Marx xv). Algeria, like Apartheid, is an example of what is going on in many places; it is a local and singular example of the universal case.

     

    Although Derrida has claimed that if “one has an interest in this, it is very easy to know where my choices and my allegiances are, without the least ambiguity” (“Almost Nothing” 84), the ambiguity, the traumatic elasticity of terms give “Structure, Sign, and Play” its political charge. As a “mésentente,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is intrinsically political, although not in the narrow sense of liberal or conservative, but rather in the much more significant sense of what Slavoj Zizek calls “the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized” (“Leftist Plea” 999). The fact that in this literary-political struggle for recognition every injustice could potentially represent a universal wrong means that “Structure, Sign, and Play” is applicable without reference to the context of its origin. This “playful” universality has been taken to mean that Derrida’s work is not political, or, in Eagleton’s memorable phrase, “is as injurious as blank ammunition” (Literary Theory 145).

     

    At the same time, however, with a universalizing reading, or with what Zizek describes as “the possibility of the metaphoric elevation of her specific wrong,” the uniqueness and singularity may be overlooked (“Leftist Plea” 1002). It may simply be recentered within a new structure, rather than being recognized in itself. If, as Zizek contends, “politics proper designates the moment at which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more” (1006), then the elasticity of the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” aims at something more. The consequent play, by facilitating “the movement of signification,” “excludes totalization” (Structure, Sign, and Play” 289). As “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “there is always more” (289). This “something more” represents the uniqueness of the situation which would be lost in re-structuring it as universal. Instead of such a polarized, universal–and then “recentered” structure–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can be seen as part of Derrida’s on-going argument that “in order to recast, if not rigorously refound a discourse on the ‘subject’… one has to go through the experience of deconstruction” (Derrida and Attridge 34).

     

    Notes

     

    1. Homi K. Bhabha makes a similar point in The Location of Culture: “The taking up of any one position, within a specific discursive form, in a particular historical conjuncture, is thus always problematic–the site of both fixity and fantasy. It provides a colonial ‘identity’ that is played out–like all fantasies of originality and origination–in the face and space of the disruption and threat from the heterogeneity of other positions” (77).

    Works Cited

     

    • Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
    • Derrida, Jacques, and Derek Attridge. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts of Literature/Jacques Derrida. Ed. Derek Attridge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. New York: Routledge, 1992. 33-75.
    • Derrida, Jacques, and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
    • —. “The Almost Nothing of the Unrepresentable.” Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
    • —. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Richard Rorty. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. New York: Routledge, 1996. 77-88.
    • —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • —. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278-293.
    • —. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on The Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
    • Derrida, Jacques and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Eating Well.” Who Comes After the Subject? Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Dosse, François. History of Structuralism, Vol. I: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
    • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: A Critical Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
    • Foster, Hal. Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.
    • Fraser, Nancy. “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?” New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-154.
    • Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
    • Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
    • Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipations. New York: Verso, 1996.
    • Laskier, Michael M. North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York: New York UP, 1994.
    • Lyotard, Jean-François. “Algerian Contradictions Exposed 1958.” Political Writings. Trans. Kevin Paul. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 197-213.
    • Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.
    • Martin, Wallace. “Introduction.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ix-xiii.
    • Marx-Scouras, Danielle. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996.
    • McCarthy, Thomas. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
    • Nealon, Jeffrey T. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
    • Ottaway, David and Marina. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970.
    • Ranciere, Jacques. La Mésentente: Politique et Philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995.
    • Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995.
    • Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
    • Yacine, Tassadit. “Algerie: Les Intellectuels Avant La Decolonization.” Dictionaire des intellectuels français: Les Personnes, Les Lieux, Les Moments. Eds. Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996. 51-52.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 988-1009.

     

  • Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet Metageographies

    Terry Harpold

    School of Literature, Communication & Culture
    Georgia Institute of Technology
    terry.harpold@lcc.gatech.edu

    “The Blankest of Blank Spaces”1

     

    Figure 1. “Map of Africa, Showing
    Its Most Recent Discoveries.”
    W. Williams, Philadelphia, 1859. [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Figure 2. Detail of Figure 1.
    Note the blank field straddling the
    equator, labeled “UNKNOWN INTERIOR.”

     

    It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:

     

    “When I grow up, I shall go there.”

     

    And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter century or so an opportunity offered to go there–as if the sin of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there being the region of Stanley Falls, which in ’68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface.

     

    --Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record

     

    Joseph Conrad’s account of his discovery of a map of Africa in his grandfather’s library is among the most famous anecdotes of modern literary biography. (Which map he found is unknown; it must have resembled one published by W. Williams of Philadelphia about nine years earlier [Figures 1 and 2].) Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, will repeat the memory as his own in the opening chapter of Heart of Darkness; Conrad will describe the event again near the end of his career, in a sympathetic essay on the British Empire’s great explorers. As Christopher GoGwilt has shown, the seductions of the map’s “unsolved mystery” are central to Conrad’s authorial project; they bind the physical and imaginary geographies of his fictions to one of the defining visual tropes of high colonialism (126).2 The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the most active of the modern partitioning of Africa, with a half-dozen European powers scrambling for position on the continent through territorial exploration and appropriation, armed conflict, and diplomatic negotiation. This activity depended on the accuracy and completeness of the maps used by the Europeans to describe their African possessions (McIlwaine 59-62).

     

    Now, maps, in the narrow sense of the word–pictorial representations of a physical terrain, commonly in the form of planar (2D) projections–are never merely descriptive; they are also heuristic, suasive, and hegemonic. (My reasons for stipulating this narrow definition of “map” will become clear shortly.) Individuals, communities, and nations rely on them to manage spatial and political complexity that would otherwise exceed human perception and memory, and to adjudicate claims of ownership and jurisdiction. Mapping appears to be fundamental to human consciousness of space and time. All cultures record their experience in artifacts which are consumed in plainly maplike ways, though these artifacts may little resemble the brightly-colored wall hangings that most Americans (for example) recall from grade-school geography classes.2 This universality of mapping practices may account for the persuasiveness of a broader, more metaphorical sense of the term “map” used in many disciplines and technical practices to describe any intentional structuring of space, time, or knowledge–thus we speak of “maps” of a text, “map” views of data, “cognitive maps,” and so on.

     

    Because they are fundamentally cultural things, maps (again, in the narrow sense) are embedded in the epistemological and ideological structures that Roland Barthes calls the “my thologies” of semiological systems (111). The “unsolved mystery” Conrad discovers in the map of the Congolese interior names one such mythologizing structure. We may safely assume that the mapmaker did not believe there were no topographically significa nt features in the region left blank, only that no European had witnessed and described those features. (This is precisely the sense of the observation encoded in the label “UNKNOWN INTERIOR” in Figure 2.) The blank region is “empty” only in relation to the comparable fullness of the rest of the map. The blank represents the essence of late nineteenth century Africa as an absence: as the negative of the evidentiary transparency of the European landscape (in this discourse, “European” always connotes fullness, completeness, transparency). To fill the blank is what colonial exploration and territorial appropriation are, in a sense, all about. One may be tempted here to cite childhood curiosity regarding the taboo or the invisible, and to invoke the language of screen memories and primal scenes, but that is not necessary to demonstrate the significance of the unfinished region of the map for Conrad and his contemporaries. Tie the epistemological puzzles of the blank to the opportunistic interests of ca pital and the evangelical fervor of the Christian missionary (neither of which operated in isolation from the other), and you have a sufficiently broad practical foundation upon which to sustain multiple desires to transect symbolically and materially the empty field of this imaginary terrain: with rivers, lakes, trade routes, roads, railways, and territorial boundaries.3

     

    Consider now two examples from a series of more recent maps. Figure 3 shows one of several widely-reproduced images created by Kenneth Cox, Stephen G. Eick, and Taosong He, and described in their influential 1996 paper on 3D network visualization techniques.4

     

    Figure 3. “Arc map” showing worldwide Internet traffic
    during a two-hour period, February 1-7, 1993.
    (Image © 1996 Stephen G. Eick, Visual Insights.
    Used by permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Shown here is one frame of an animation of Internet traffic between fifty countries via the NFSNET/ANSnet backbone during a two-hour period of the week of February 1-7, 1993. Each country with active nodes on the network is represented by a box-shaped glyph, positioned at the location of the country’s capital, and scaled and colored to encode the total packet count for all links emanating from the country. The arcs between the countries indicate the flow of network traffic, with the higher and redder arcs indicating the larger flows. One of the most striking traits of this image is its dissymmetry: the greater part of the arcs and glyphs are traced on the upper-left field (rou ghly North and West, in relation to the equator and Greenwich meridian). Pinning the origins of the arcs to the capitals of countries underrepresents the actual geographical distribution of traffic, but it’s clear that, apart from a few arcs converging in Pretoria, there is nothing much going in or coming out of the Africa in early 1993.

     

    Figure 4 shows another projection from the series by Cox, Eick, and He. This “arc map” traces the same traffic flows and uses a similar color-coding scheme, applying it to a 2D projection, viewed on a variable vertical axis.5

     

    Figure 4. “Arc map” showing worldwide Internet traffic
    during a two-hour period, February 1-7, 1993.
    (Image © 1996 Stephen G. Eick, Visual Insights.
    Used by permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Like the image in Figure 3, this image encodes Internet traffic statistics in arc height, color, and thickness. Cox, Eick, and He’s stated aim in producing these maps was to improve the usability of network visualizations based on cartographic techniques. Shifting the traffic arcs into a third dimension, they propose, and encoding them with height and color to indicate relative bandwidth and flow, eliminates the complex line crossings that would make 2D maps of the same data difficult to read.

     

    These are arresting images. Their play of light (the neon hues of the arcs) and dark (the black background) must have been dictated to some degree by technical considerations. They were created for viewing on computer terminals, and the techniques available to the researchers were those best suited to the cathode ray and the binary logic of computing: one/zero, on/off, traffic/no traffic. One consequence of that (probably automatic) choice of representational schemes is, however, problematic: the binarisms of data flow are recast in an analogous but distinct tropology of fullness and emptiness: a light “on” (brighter still when exceptionally “on”); a light “off” (entirely absent when truly “off”: darkness visible). The lines of Internet traffic look more like beacons in the night than, say, undersea cables, satellite relays, or fiber-optic cables. Moreover, the decision to include national borders in Figure 4, and to fill them in with solid hues representing the intensity of traffic to and from each nation, binds the viewer’s visual identification of those nations to the valences of the network. Even at this oblique angle, it is easy to identify the outlines of Australia, India, Western Europe, Alaska, etc. The identities of the networked regions are in turn reified by their apparent internal uniformity–all spaces within their borders are of a single color representing the national level of traffic, thus eliminating any suggestion that the diffusion of network signals may vary locally. The unnetworked nations seem equally uniform, but in an opposite sense: framed voids, they would merge with the empty background, were it not for their faint borders. Thus, the fusion in these images of a tropology of presence/absence and fullness/emptiness with conventional signifiers of regional and nation encodes the traces of network activity with meanings beyond the mere visual registering of place-names. Viewed with an eye to their unacknowledged political valences, these images of the wired world (that is, of the mostly unwired world) draw, I will argue, on visual discourses of identity and negated identity that echo those of the European maps of colonized and colonizable space of nearly a century ago.6

     

    This essay is based on research in progress which interrogates these and similar cartographic representations of the Internet as a first step in a critique of the complicity of techniques of scientific visualization with the contrasting invisibility of political and economic formations. I propose that these depictions of network activity are embedded in unacknowledged and pernicious metageographies–sign systems that organize geographical knowledge into visual schemes that seem straightforward (how else to illustrate global Internet traffic if not on images of… the globe?), but which depend on historically- and politically-inflected misrepresentation of underlying material conditions.

     

    I borrow the word “metageographies” from Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen’s recent study of mapping discourses, The Myth of Continents. Lewis and Wigen’s analysis of the genealogy of Eurocentric constructions of continental geography and East/West, Europe/Asia/Africa/American divisions of the human world is an invaluable model for deciphering the conventions of Internet cartography. Their call for new, politically-progressive articulations of the relations of material and social human spaces to political power suggests that an analogous reworking of visualizations of emerging virtual realms is needed at this time. “It is simply no longer tenable,” they write,

     

    to assume that all significant high-order spatial units will take the form of discrete, contiguous blocks; analyzing contemporary human geography requires a different vocabulary. Instead of assuming contiguity, we need a way to visualize discontinuous "regions" that might take the spatial form of lattices, archipelagos, hollow rings, or patchworks. Such patterns certainly have not displaced the older cultural realms, which continue to be important for the multiple legacies they have left behind. But in the late twentieth century the friction of distance is much less than it used to be; capital flows as much as human migrations can rapidly create and re-create profound connections between distant places. As a result, some of the most powerful socios patial aggregations of our day simply cannot be mapped as single, bounded territories. To grasp these new realities will demand an imaginative approach to regional definition; to map them effectively will demand an innovative approach to cartography. (200)

     

    The lines of force defining information flow in the networked and unnetworked spheres are not merely geographical or technological; they are also–and irreducibly–political.

     

    The Blind Spot of Cartography

     

    Figure 5. The Bellman’s chart,
    from Henry Holiday’s 1876 illustrations to
    The Hunting of the Snark.

     

    He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found 
  it to be
A map they could all understand.

What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and 
  Equators,
Tropics, Zones and Meridian lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would 
  reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands 
  and capes!
But we've got our brave captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's brought 
  us the best--
perfect and absolute blank!"

--Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

    7

     

    Few readers of maps are so canny as the Bellman’s happy crew in Carroll’s mock epic. Late twentieth-century postindustrial culture is saturated with maps; we rely on them daily in myriad ways, without taking much notice of their specificity or conventionality. Denis Wood has argued that this near ubiquity of maps and mapping technologies contributes to map-users’ general inattention to the cultural and historical props of maps (34). In this section, I offer two general observations regarding the form and effects of cartographic representations of real and virtual spaces.

     

    First observation. Maps depict a selective distortion of the information available to those who design them. Mark Monmonier has famously observed that maps must as a matter of course mislead their users, if (1) the maps are to be legible at all, and if (2) the maps are to address the specific purposes for which they were designed. The first of these conditions is based in the physical limitations of paper, print, and video technologies, and the capabilities of the human eye. Everything that is noteworthy about a place will not fit on the page or screen; some levels of detail will have to be excluded (and the shapes and placement of some landmarks altered) to avoid filling the map with illegible, overlapping blots. The second condition is an extension of this common-sense constraint on graphic design, and a consequence of the semiological and cultural work of maps: which cartographic details are to be shown in a given map will be determined by technical or strategic forces that bear no necessary relation to the map’s general “accuracy”; details are commonly eliminated, falsified, or distorted so as to improve a map’s efficacy toward a particular end, resulting in the misrepresentation or exclusion of information which may serve other ends or reveal inconsistencies.8

     

    Figure 6. Mercator’s projection.

     

    For example, the Mercator projection (Figure 6) is helpful if you need to plot a constant navigational bearing between two points at sea (you just draw a straight line–a rhumb line–on the map), but its gross distortion of regions near the poles makes it a poor device for understanding the relative sizes of Greenland and South America. Use of the Mercator projection as a general-reference map (still common in the U.S.) is a cause for frequent complaint by cartographers, who insist that the projection was designed to facilitate ocean navigation in the 16th century, and is thus ill-suited to modern applications where the plotting of rhumb lines is not relevant.9

     

    Figure 7. Goode’s homolosine equal-area projection,
    with interruptions to preserve landmasses.

     

    Goode’s homolosine equal-area projection (Figure 7), considered by many to be the best general-purpose modern projection, preserves relative areal sizes, but it does so at the cost of interrupting the oceans and splitting Antarctica into four pieces (Snyder 196-98).

     

    Figure 8. The Gall-Peters projection.

     

    The acrimonious debates provoked by the popularity in the 1970s and early ’80s of the Peters orthographic equal-area projection (Figure 8, also known as the Gall-Peters projection) suggest the disciplinary and political stakes at play in the choice of projections.10 Advocates of the Peters projection claimed that it corrected Mercator’s failings as a general-purpose map by, in effect, recentering the viewer’s eye. They complained that the Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of the continents, favoring the Northern hemisphere and underrepresenting the sizes of landforms in the Southern hemisphere. (For example, in Figure 6, North America appears substantially larger than Africa–it is in fact only about 80% as large; Greenland appears to be four or five times the size of Australia, though it is about one-third its actual size.) Peters’s projection, it was claimed, represents a more realistic and “equitable” view of the world, as it depicts the relative areas of the major landmasses more accurately than Mercator, at the expense of vertical distortion of familiar (that is, Mercator-like) continental outlines. Critics of the Peters projection found its claims of originality misleading, its goals propagandistic, and its appearance just plain ugly (cartographer Arthur Robinson famously compared its appearance to “wet, ragged, long winter underwear” [Wood 60]). As Wood wryly observes, however, no one questioned the claim of Peters’s improved overall areal accuracy in comparison to Mercator. The objections were, essentially, that the Peters projection looks funny–but only “to those who have been confusing the map and the globe” (210 n46). Criticism of the projection’s aesthetic qualities, Wood argues, were little more than a smokescreen to cover the anxiety of mapmakers and users elicited by the projection’s evidence of the political interestedness of every cartographic projection.

     

    Distortion is simply a mathematical consequence of how maps do what they do. Two-dimensional (planar) projections of a three-dimensional (spherical or ellipsoidal) terrain, no matter their scale or detail, must depict that terrain inaccurately, and the inaccuracy will increase as the scope of the terrain shown increases. This built-in error of 2D projections accounts for their enormous number and variety, each representing a different compromise of areal accuracy to angles, shapes, and directions.11 It accounts as well for the many recent efforts to produce stereoptic or pseudo-3D maps (that is, maps that are not planar projections, but instead purport to show the Earth in a form more nearly corresponding to its “actual” shape), through the use of composite satellite imagery, and interactive video and animation techniques.12 Most proje ctions of large regions are not created to serve as general-purpose maps; their distortions are deemed acceptable because some other attribute of the projection meets a specific need or fits a clearly-defined context of use.

     

    Identifying a map’s possible misreadings, however, is not so simple as legislating appropriate or inappropriate uses for that projection. The inevitable inaccuracies of planar projections have historically provided cover for unacknowledged or unconscious motives of the advocates of a particular projection.13 That maps distort is a fact of mathematics and human perception; which distortions are favored over others, which map is selected as the “best” fit for a given context, is determined by institutional and political forces. Thus the objection to Mercator raised by the advocates of Gall-Peters: Mercator was created to simplify navigation within a specific region of the planet that corresponded to the principal foreign territories of the European colonial powers. That the projection also made Northern and European nations appear equal to or larger in area than the ir African and Asian territories–when they were in fact substantially smaller–was not, these critics claimed, merely an accidental attribute of the projection’s geometric technique. The specific distortions of the map, they argued, contributed to its lasting popularity in the West: Mercator visually reinforced Eurocentric assumptions about the spatial, political, and economic priority of the colonizing powers, and helped to prop up European paradigms of nation-state boundaries and identities that had little or no historical basis among the indigenous peoples of the colonized regions.14

     

    Second observation. The bounded shapes of cartographic representation are conventional, historically-determined signs, rather than visual analogues of real terrains. Maps are noteworthy examples of the treachery of images. A closed, irregular geometric form whose contours are said to approximate those of a bounded region of space is not a priori a more suitable sign for that region than some other shape that would seem to resemble it less, because the vast majority of users of the map will never encounter an object that is not defined by this or another map, to which they might compare it.15 This assertion is, of course, trivial in the case of political, ethnic, or linguistic divisions of territories otherwise unbroken by “natural” boundaries (rivers, mountain ranges, shorelines, etc.). But the fact that these soft boundaries often traverse the harder formations of the geophysical terrain demonstrates that distinctions between natural and cultural demarcations of landspace are at best provisional. Dry land may stop at river banks and seashores, but human definitions of city, nation, and continent do not. “Natural” barriers dividing land regions are fixed or erased by political strategy, technological intervention, or military conquest, not by the innate properties of soil and water.

     

    We’ve learned to recognize and to internalize iconic representations of nations and continents in much the same way we’ve learned to accept the verisimilitude of other images of things we’ve never actually seen: from a cultural toolkit of forms, patterns, and strategies for making sense of them in relation to other signs, and from frequent exposure to stereotyped depictions that have become a part of that toolkit. Colored mosaics hanging from schoolroom walls, bound within road atlases, or framed by the edges of a computer monitor look like maps because… that’s what maps look like. And continents and nations look like, well, shapes on maps. Users of maps depend on them to discover unities and identities across space and time that are meaningful first of all because they are mapped that way. (This is why the Peters projection is odd-looking to those schooled in projections that depict very different shapes of the major landforms.) Signifying artifacts that don’t much resemble the geometries of land and water that we know from our maps, but which are used by their authors for similar sorts of navigation and recognizance as we use our maps, are interpretable by us as maplike because they are founded on this steady creep of the map from metaphor to metonymy.16 In an important sense, Turnbull observes (contradicting Korzybski’s famous dictum), the map is the territory in the minds of its users, because the cultural force of specific maps and shared vocabularies of cartographic elements and techniques overdetermines every perception of the “real” spaces they figure (61).

     

    Dark Continents

     

    Here, in its simplest terms, is my claim regarding cartographic representations of Internet diffusion and traffic: the blind spot of cartography–the matrix of cartographic selectivity and convention–is commonly bound in these images to an unrepresented structure of established and emergent political economies that is mistaken for the given, natural background of any discussion of the past, present, and future of the networked realms.

     

    Figure 9. “International Connectivity, 9/91.”
    © 1991 Larry Landweber and The Internet Society.
    http://info.isoc.org/internet/infrastructure/connectivity/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Figure 9 shows an image created by Larry Landweber, representing the state of Internet connectivity worldwide in September, 1991. The color scheme of the map distinguishes between four levels of connectivity: “No connectivity,” “email only,” “Bitnet but no Internet,” and “Internet.” The map includes no indications of the speed or bandwidth of the connections. Though it includes national boundaries, it gives no information regarding the distribution or state of networks within those boundaries.

     

    Figure 10. International Connectivity, 6/97.”
    © 1997 Larry Landweber and The Internet Society.
    http://info.isoc.org/internet/infrastructure/connectivity/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Figure 10 shows a similar map created by Landweber, showing Internet connectivity worldwide in June, 1997. The later map suggests that a great deal has changed in the intervening six years. Whereas only a few countries had full Internet access in 1991, there appear to be even fewer countries without full access in 1997.17

     

    Figure 11 shows a map created by Mike Jensen representing the total bandwidth linking African nations to international Internet hubs in May, 1996. Figure 12 shows a similar map representing bandwidth in October, 1998.18 Once again, the differences between the maps suggests a dramatic expansion of Internet diffusion: a total of 64 kilobits per second (Kbs) or greater bandwidth is now available in most African nations, whereas that level of bandwidth was previously available in only a handful of countries. (Keep in mind that the T1 connections common in most of the wired world are capable of transmitting up to 1,544 Kbs–not quite enough for full-screen, full-motion video. T3 connections are capable of transmitting up to 44,736 Kbs.)

     

    Figure 11. “International Links by Country.”
    Mike Jensen, May 1996.
    http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Figure 12. “International Links by Country.”
    Mike Jensen, October 1998.
    http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    All four of these maps suffer classic problems of areal aggregation common in choropleth maps.19 As was the case of the Internet maps shown in Figures 3 and 4, the use of a single metric to identify the kinds of connectivity or levels of bandwidth within an entire nation gives no indication of the distribution of network resources inside the borders of that nation. Moreover, the limited palette of the map’s key encourages misleading equivalencies between nations, obscuring dramatically different conditions of access. (For example, the total bandwidth of international connections for most of the nations shown in Figure 12 is near 64 Kbs. The total bandwidth in Egypt is, however, about 2000 Kbs; in South Africa, it is about 37,000 Kbs. [Spangler 46].) The fundamental problem with these representations of Internet diffusion is that they measure levels of diffusion within a (cartographic) discourse of discrete national-political identity which is arguably irrelevant to the global structure of that diffusion, and which eliminates much of the variance in material conditions upon which that structure depends. None of these images is able to account for the extreme local obstacles which must be overcome before anything like a viable African Internet is possible, at least as netizens of digitally-saturated, liberal-democratic nations understand the Internet.

     

    The economic, technological, and institutional legacies of colonial occupation are discernible in every aspect of the African networks. Of an estimated 151 million online users worldwide in December, 1998, fewer than 1%–somewhat less than a million–live on the African continent.20 Approximately 800,000 of those live in one country, South Africa. Internet node density in Africa–the ratio of active nodes to overall population–ranges from a low of 1 to 65 in South Africa, to a high of 1 to 440,000 in The Democratic Republic of the Congo (which nation includes the region of Conrad’s “blankest of blanks” [Jensen]). By way of comparison, the average Internet density worldwide is about 1 to 40; in the U.S., it is nearly 1 to 6. Excluding South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has fewer Internet nodes than the nation of Latvia (Jensen).

     

    In October, 1998, approximately forty-nine African nations and territories had some level of Internet access in their capital cities. The greatest part of the available network bandwidth in these locations is reserved for multinational firms with regional headquarters in the cities, or for university and government employees. Eighty percent of Africans live in rural areas. Network nodes outside of the largest cities–and there are very, very few of these–are punishingly slow and expensive, making them ill-suited for anything besides FidoNet-style store-and-forward email.21 Local PTT and power infrastructures are notoriously unreliable and weighed down with bloated, inefficient state bureaucracies held over from the colonial era. In many regions, these infrastructures are at risk of sabotage and pillage from warfare between and within states, political corruption, or outright thie very. Outside of the wealthiest commercial concerns and the largest universities, much of the computer hardware and software in sub-Saharan Africa is antiquated, unevenly distributed, and costly to maintain and update. Repairs usually require hard or fore ign currency badly needed for other social services. The lack of a well-developed cadre of computer scientists and technologists (only a few African nations offer advanced degrees in computer science and telecommunications) and of a skilled mid-level managerial class poses enormous barriers to efficient network implementation and support (Odedra 26).

     

    These constraints on network development reflect a more general lack in Africa of the basic telecommunications resources upon which digital networks in most of the wired world depend.

     

    Africa, with over 12 percent of the world's population, has only 2 percent of the telephone lines. By comparison, Latin America has 8% of the population and 6% of the lines.... The teledensity... in sub-Saharan Africa... equates to approximately one phone line for every 200 people. By comparison, the teledensity in the United States is 65 (equivalent to one phone line for every two people), and 45 in Europe.... There are, in fact, more telephone lines in New York or Tokyo than in the whole of Africa. (Butterly)22

     

    The poor state of telecommunications infrastructure in most of the continent prevents expansion of existing network services, and virtually insures that large portions of Africa will remain far behind much of the wired world with regard to digital communication technologies, which seem to require firm foundations in analog technologies before they are able to take hold.23

     

    Some companies and political institutions looking to accelerate network diffusion in Africa have proposed increased reliance on “wireless” telecommunication systems, connected by Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, which would not depend on legacy systems of fiber or copper.24 But these networks depend no less than wired networks on a reliable power grid; maintaining the infamous “last mile” of wire or fiber between the downlink station and the desktop will likely prove even more troublesome in Africa than it has in the developed world. The underlying technologies of wireless communications are more complex, technically fragile, and costly to set up and administer than those of traditional wired networks. LEO systems require many more satellites than the Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) systems now in use for most international voice and television traffic, and rely on extremely sophisticated networking schemes to manage signal “handoff” between satellites. LEO satellites have shorter life-spans than do their GEO counterparts, adding to the costs of long-term maintenance of these systems. The LEO networks now under development will support paging services and voice transmissions–comparable in quality to land-based cellular phone systems–but only very slow data transmissions (on the order of 2.4 Kbs).25 Implementation of LEO satellite systems capable of handling the bandwidth required for multimedia and high-speed data exchanges faces substantial technical and financial obstacles; none of these systems is much beyond the drawing board (Evans 78).26 Moreover, the economic restructuring resulting from increased reliance on wireless networks could prove catastrophic for the African nations which currently depend on the export of minerals widely used in wired infrastructures.27

     

    These are hardly numbers to sustain fantasies of interactive distance education, e-commerce, real-time collaboration, or even sporadic text-only Web browsing. They suggest that utopian visions of a world network culture that includes Africa (with a population roughly equal to those of North America and Europe combined) must be tempered by pragmatism concerning the sophistication and scope of the technological, economic, and organizational infrastructures that would be required to develop and maintain such a culture.

     

    They must be tempered as well by some critical thinking about the nature of disparities that divide the unnetworked from the networked spheres. Public and academic discussions of “access” in the West tend to be dominated by language of privacy, censorship, and freedom of speech, framed in idioms having meaning only for netizens of wealthy liberal democracies. The two-page spread shown in Figure 13 is from an article in a 1997 issue of WIRED, entitled “Freedom to Connect.” “Freedom” in this case means “freedom of content” and “freedom to access any and all material online” (106)–in other words, the freedom of the user to read, see, and hear anything she wishes to read, see, and hear on the Internet, without the interference or surveillance of a government or law-enforcement agent.

     

    Figure 13. Leila Conners, “Freedom to Connect.”
    WIRED 5.08 (1997): 106-7.
    (Image © Michael Crumpton.
    Reproduced with permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    “This map does not reflect the reality,” notes the author, “that this freedom is often locally restricted without formal legislation” (106). The ambiguous phrase “restricted with out formal legislation” fronts in this context for a host of material and political barriers to access that have no necessary relation to the spread’s narrow definition of “freedom.” Indeed, it would appear that, apart from a few liberal Western democracies (notably excluding the U.S.), “freedom to connect” as defined by this map is primarily a function of a government’s inability to regulate the behavior of those citizens who have Internet access, rather than its tolerance of what they choose to do with that access. The crudeness of the map’s visual scale–distinguishing free from unfree connections in only five steps that must represent differences across all political-legal, economic, and technological contexts–begs the question: how meaningful is it to compare the “freedom to connect” in Mexico City, Paris, Brisbane, and Algiers, and come up with the same result? One answer is suggested by Figure 14, which shows a world map from Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal’s State of the World Atlas, depicting international differences in state-sponsored censorship and political and religious oppression. The Kidron and Segal map uses fewer discrete metrics for oppression than does the WIRED map (four, instead of five), but its assumptions regarding the nature of “freedom” result in a very different picture of the world. Citizens of nations who are “free to connect” to the Internet, according to WIRED, may be unable, according to Kidron and Segal, to connect on more human registers.

     

    Figure 14. “The Three Monkeys.”
    World map showing “states’ infringement of freedoms
    of belief, expression, communication, and movement.”
    (Reproduced with permission from Michael Kidron
    and Ronald Segal, The State of the World Atlas,
    5th edition, Penguin, 1995.
    © 1995 Myriad Editions, Limited.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    In equating “freedom to connect” with “freedom to surf,” the WIRED map confuses possible movements of data with the actual movements of information and the free practice of thought and belief. It thus excludes evidence of historical and political structures that have restricted access to information technologies, their presumed benefits, and their economic and social costs, in the unwired world. “Some unfortunate nations,” the legend of the map comments, “have no physical means of connection” (106). Given the obvious bases of this misfortune in the continuing legacies of colonial exploitation, the patronizing character of this comment should scandalize the thoughtful reader. Note the concentration of most of the unconnected nations–colored dark purple in Figure 13–near the center of the map: an unknown interior, a lack that seems to explain much… by saying nothing at all.

     

    The View from Above

     

    What are the semiological functions of the political borders traced on these maps of Internet infrastructure and traffic? The borders are on the one hand heuristic conveniences: they frame visualizations of Internet traffic within well-established cartographic conventions, rendering abstractions of Internet “space” and “density” easier to interpret for those who are familiar with those conventions.

     

    But cartographic schemes of representation are not necessary to the depiction of virtual networks; the networks traverse political borders and render problematic concepts of local, national identity that these schemes reinforce. Borders are anything but merely descriptive–they are, rather, among the most coercive of instruments for naturalizing, reifying, and depoliticizing cultural-historical formations. They are in that regard hallmarks of the map’s selective distortions of space and time, signifiers of political hegemony which overdetermine their depiction of roads, fences, rivers, coastlines, etc. The tracing of political borders in these maps of putatively virtual domains (their hegemonic effects unremarked by the authors, assumed to be both essential to the interpretation of the maps and accidental to their representations of the network) naturalizes specific relations between nation-state and network identities–and, as a result, obscures the global political forms of the Internet with a mosaic of individual national forms. The borders thus provide a scheme for naming only selected particulars of network diffusion, and excluding representation of structural forces which take effect across or outside the network: a kind of can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees cover for larger, metanational systems of information flow.28

     

    Figure 15 shows a map of the Internet in July, 1998, created by MIDS (Matrix Information Directory Services, Inc.), a research firm specializing in print and online reports of activity on the Internet and other telecommunications networks. Though the map’s legend is ambiguous, the overlapping colored circles appear to mark the distribution of active Internet domains worldwide.29

     

    Figure 15. MIDS. “The Internet, July 1998.”
    http://www.mids.org/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    This visualization scheme avoids the misleading national aggregations characteristic of many of the maps discussed earlier in this essay: it’s clear that domains figured on the map are scattered unevenly within most nations. (Domains in Australia, for example, are shown to be clustered around the country’s perimeter, near the major urban centers.) But the visibility of some of the national borders in this image signals this map’s different encoding of access in terms of national-political affiliation. The visual saturation of domains in the U.S. and Western Europe obscures virtually all borders within those regions. Political borders within Africa, on the other hand, are easily discerned. One is given the impression of a nearly-monolithic presence of the Internet in two or three regions of the globe–and of equally monolithic absences most everywhere else. National-political identity is significant, this image suggests, exactly where the Internet is not.

     

    Figure 16 shows a map of active Internet hosts per capita (that is, within nations) as of January, 1998, created by Martin Dodge (“Geographies”). Nations with similar distributions of active hosts are colored the same, and the most active nations are distinguished from one another by their positions on a vertical axis calibrated to the absolute number of hosts. Thus, only those nations with distributions much higher or lower than those of their neighbors are discernible as nations. Geographically contiguous nations at the same level of distribution merge into one another, supporting the impression of vast politically unmarked terrains free of significant activity, and others, politically-differentiated but also uniformly towering over the rest of the world.

     

    Figure 16. Martin Dodge, “Internet Hosts Per Capita, January 1998.”
    http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/aag/aag.html [Click on image to see enlarged view]

     

    Figures 15 and 16 would seem at first view to invert each other’s schemes for showing the relation of network diffusion to national-political identity, but I would counter that they thus share a common economy that should be by now very familiar: on/off, traffic/no traffic/, wired/unwired. Think of Figure 16 as a sort of topographical map. Across its peaks and valleys emerges an archipelagic, virtual landmass that traverses the conventional boundaries of continents and nations. Viewed from on high, the vast, flat surface of the network’s digital plains seem far removed, alien and obscure.

     

    Between Borders

     

    The border is all we share / La frontera es lo unico que compartimos.

     

    -- Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika

     

     

    The peaks and valleys of this virtual continent are evidence of forces unmarked on these maps: the plate tectonics, if you will, of a process of technological and cultural change that is nearly invisible, unthinkable, expressly because it covers its forms with counterfeit ubiquity and technological reasonableness. Obscurantism of the spectacle; masquerade of the border in the place of other, multiple and heterogenous, identities: these maps support triumphalist fantasies of the potential (and desirable) saturability of the Internet, expressly by excising representation of the varied historical conditions that have generated the binarisms on which they depend. Recasting the fractiousness of material culture in the tidy efficiencies of the digital sample, they hide nascent lines of force that thread through and across those stark divides.

     

    These lines of force are discernible, I propose, only by a contrarian reading of these images which does not take their forms for granted: a decentered regard by which the maps (and the very logic of mapping itself) may be seen to describe, not the light and dark continents of high colonialism but rather–though only indirectly–an emerging, virtual “dark continent” specific to our historical moment. This new political-symbolic structure traverses and fragments prior political entities, even as it makes use of fantasies of national identity to cover its advances.30 In a deeply ironic way, the networked instauration of the dark continent reverses the extractive logic of classic colonialism: instead of raw materials (ore, precious stones, humans) freighted out of the heart of darkness for consumption by the wired-colonial metropole, the information order, to the extent that it penetrates the unwired world, will be largely devoted to freighting information in its motley forms into the benighted realms. In this context, “information” has the sense of both a commodity–a thing for sale over the networks–and a coercive force: the networks are able to inform the unwired realms; the new dark continent reproduces itself over the wires without regard for the prior conventional definitions of nation, region, or continent.31

     

    What does this emergent telegeographic entity look like? How might we figure its contours? The problem with those questions is that the new digital information order doesn’t look like much of anything, at least not anything that may be named by the metageographical idioms on which the most common representations of the global networks rely. It may be possible to produce images of the virtual terrains that adapt techniques of scientific visualization to those of classical cartography, while unbinding the former from its most positivist and politically naive biases, and the latter from its reliance on outdated and pernicious representations of the lived places of the human world. But that’s not what the idioms of the dominant cartographic conventions do; they instead tend to unname, to render unremarkable (literally unseeable) the political economy shaping the new information orders.

     

    As I’ve suggested throughout this essay, the selective distortions of the map, though mathematically and culturally irreducible, render it a problematic construct for describing the heterogenous conditions and practices of the emerging global telecommunications networks. Maps must mislead if they are to be usable; that much is clear. What matters most in any appeal to a tropology of maps and mapping is whether or not we understand the uses that may be concealed in our reception of maps as a privileged way of figuring human spaces, be they material or virtual.32 A provisional strategy for fostering consciousness of the prejudices of the map might be simply to multiply in a disorderly way the instances of Internet mapping practice: to read maps of the wired and unwired domains against representations that interpret human spaces in terms for which wiring may be irrelevant, or which eschew conventional cartographic signs in favor of formations which entirely detach the network from its national-political borders. (The metaphor of the “dark continent” I’ve proposed here should be conceived as operative only within contested and multiple contexts such as these.)33

     

    A more salient question with regard to these and similar images may be, why should it matter? So what if the maps are inaccurate? Calling for more “accurate” visualizations of Internet diffusion–for example, challenging fantasies about the uniformity of the diffusion and growth of telecommunications access (MOSAIC)–may not in the end be different from calling for new maps, without questioning the method of the map: that is, attempting to increase the sample size, criss-crossing the blanks with additional lines of force, finding a more efficient scheme for measuring shades of light and dark. We should be cautious of strategies that seek to repair a lack of data with more, “better” data, while still relying on the epistemological and visual figure of the border-as-national-boundary. As the map has been a primary tool for commodifying physical space, it may serve equally well as a tool for commodifying information; replacing a Mercator with a Gall-Peters does not eliminate the epistemic coercion of the map.34

     

    On the other hand, misrepresentations of conditions of access and identity in the wired and unwired realms do certainly matter in one sense: the imaginary orders they produce and sustain are likely to return to the real as consequences of economic policy, military intervention, and technological and symbolic exclusion. Those who will plan the network infrastructures of the next century are likely, however we may characterize their conscious motives, to rely on maps of one sort of another. Sustained, progressive critique of the metageographies of Internet diffusion and traffic must look beyond the limited (and limiting) visual vocabularies of national-political identity, and base its investigations on new schemes for representing the archipelagic landscapes of the emerging political and technological world orders.

     

    If we analyze techniques for figuring the formations of the Internet with an awareness of the historical and ideological constitution and effects of those techniques–if we look for traces of the excluded matter they cannot show–we will perhaps be better able to make sense of a studied neglect of fractious material realities characteristic of the predictions of both the cyberspace utopians dreaming of “one world, one network,” and the economic opportunists looking for new unknown interiors ripe for exploitation. This will require a careful and comprehensive examination of the emerging class and semiological domains of the post-colonialist world (Alkalimat 278-85), and a better understanding than we now have of the broad reach of networks of all kinds, and of the changes they are effecting in regional and global systems of cultural and economic exchange.35 The accelerating development and expansion of the virtual archipelagoes call for this kind of work, because the new structures of information and movements of virtualized capital will be among the most powerful forces redefining human geographies and semiological systems of the next century. Established definitions of national and economic identity and relation are being recast by the heterogenous and often contradictory material and political facts of the cyber-ecumene, where bands of light and dark, access and no access, are knotted in unprecedented ways within the “same” city, nation, or continent.36 In the networked era, the heart of darkness is an interstitial formation–which is to say, its borders are drawn around and between us. The maps we now have obscure this emerging terrain.

     

    Notes

     

    An early version of this essay was presented at the 1998 Conference on Science, Technology, and Race (STAR ’98), Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2, 1998. I thank Deepika Petraglia-Bahri, Jeanne Ewert, and Kavita Philip for their invaluable comments on the manuscript of this version. I thank also Mark Monmonier for his kind assistance in creating the maps shown in Figures 6, 7, and 8.

     

    1. GoGwilt’s subtle and evocative reading of the “double-mapping” of Europe and the African colonies in Conrad’s work links the political and epistemological functions of maps in the late nineteenth century with Conrad’s equivocal reconstructions of his Polish childhood.

     

    2 See Wood (32-47), Turnbull (28-36), and Sack (ch. 1).

     

    3. A synonym for “blankness” in this discourse is “darkness.” The late nineteenth-century journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley popularized the description of Africa as “The Dark Continent” in several best-selling memoirs of his journeys in Equatorial Africa. In Stanley’s books, “darkness” is an unfortunate state opposed to the light of Reason: Africa’s spiritually and politically benighted interior is badly in need of European science, religion, and civilization–in short, of the stabilizing, epistemological ordering that only a finished map can signify.

     

    4. These and similar images are included in Martin Dodge’s “An Atlas of Cyberspaces” (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/). Dodge categorizes the visualizations on this site into twelve different categories: Conceptual, Geographic, Traceroutes, Census, Topology, Info Maps, Info Landscapes, Info Spaces, ISP Maps, Web Site Maps, Historical, and 3D Gallery.

     

    5. “Although the geographic map is drawn on a 2D plane, it can be arbitrarily positioned and oriented in the space. Therefore the user can interactively navigate the display by translating, rotating, scaling, and visualizing the network from different perspectives under different rendering conditions” (Cox, Eick, and He 52).

     

    6. This repetition of the structural functions of the blanks of high colonial maps is evident in a series of Internet maps created by Batty and Barr for their 1994 article on “The Electronic Frontier” (707-708). The six maps in the series illustrate the growth of the Internet between July, 1991 and January, 1994, in the form of a global grid on which countries with active nodes are shown in outline form, and those without active nodes are invisible. Over the course of the series, small landmasses (more properly, political masses) seem to appear over time out of a cartographic void. Much of the lived human world remains unseen–literally not present–in the topography of the wired world. The maps are reprinted in Kitchin (40-41).

     

    7. Turnbull also uses this illustration of the Bellman’s chart in the introduction to his discussion of the conventionality of maps (3).

     

    8. See Monmonier (ch. 3) for a discussion of “generalization” techniques to improve map legibility and Monmonier (chs. 7-8) for a survey of classic cartographic distortions in the service of political and military ends. Wood (ch. 5) critiques these techniques more aggressively than Monmonier, emphasizing their support of ideological ends.

     

    9. See Monmonier (ch. 1), Snyder, and Wood, for typical critiques of the modern misapplications of this projection.

     

    10. Arno Peters created his 1967 projection apparently unaware that similar techniques had been used by James Gall to produce a nearly-identical map more than 80 years previously. See Monmonier (11-19) and Snyder (165-66). The Gall-Peters projection was adopted by UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, and several other international organizations, expressly because of the claims of political equity made for it. For detailed discussions of the debates concerning the Peters projection, see Wood (ch. 3) and Monmonier (ch. 1).

     

    11. Snyder lists more than 150 projections and variants developed in the 20th century alone (277-86). See Misra and Ramesh (93-152) for an overview of the mathematical limitations of planar projections, including discussion of the Mercator, Goode Homolosine, and Gall-Peters projections.

     

    12. The advantages of animated 3D projections over 2D schemes are promoted in one influential paper on geographical mapping of traffic through a single WWW server: “by providing true three-dimensional views, stereopsis and virtual reality allow us to avoid the distortion problems that have plagued cartographers and planar projections” (Lamm, Reed, and Scullin). Most projections of this kind are properly 2.5D views, as they must be displayed on two-dimensional fields (computer screens), with the illusion of depth suggested by movement or shading, as in the Cox, Eick, and He “arc maps.”

     

    13. Wood is a good example of this line of argument.

     

    14. The projective “corrections” of Gall-Peters did not, of course, eliminate its dependence on conventions closely tied to European and Northern hegemonies, a point that Turnbull demonstrates by recentering the projection on the Pacific, and turning it upside-down (with the Southern pole at the top of the map). See Turnbull (7).

     

    15. What does the state of Georgia look like? The nation of France? The continent of Africa? These questions depend on–indeed, are meaningless outside of–a cartocentric worldview that confuses being, visibility, and mappability.

     

    16. Turnbull (ch. 5) includes a discussion of Aboriginal Australian dhulanj (“the footprints of the Ancestors”), depictions of clan territories in the form of elaborate animal shapes and geometric patterns. Though the patterns of the dhulanj look nothing like the contours of Western cartographic projections, these “maps” of the Aboriginal homelands are, Turnbull demonstrates, no less specific nor less accurate for their intended uses.

     

    17. Attentive readers will notice that the level and distribution of Internet access depicted in Figures 9 and following are not consistent. Reliable information regarding Internet use, even in countries with relatively long histories of use, is notoriously hard to come by. Moreover, the authors of these maps appear to have drawn their information from different sources. Nonetheless, I would argue, the maps are consistent in two regards: 1) their demonstration of broad trends of changes in Internet access and use, and 2) a tendency of these and similar visualizations to obscure the particularities of access and use.

     

    18. These images are included in an animated .gif created by Jensen, showing the change in link distribution and bandwidth between 1996 and 1998. See http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afranim.gif.

     

    19. A choropleth map uses graduated tones and discrete areal units to depict variations in some condition over a geographical area. Changes in the selection of breaks between categories of a choropleth map can result in dramatically different interpretations of the same data. For example, the total international bandwidth available in South Africa is so much larger than that of any other African nation that it arguably deserves its own measure on Jensen’s maps. If that were the case, Figures 11 and 12 would tell a different story about recent changes in African Internet diffusion: South Africa continues to be the exception to nearly every general rule of the African Internet, for historical and economic reasons which are easily guessed. For a discussion of the ways in which areal aggregation may influence interpretation of choropleth maps, see Monmonier (ch. 10).

     

    20. See Nua Internet Surveys (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html). Other estimates of active Internet users worldwide vary somewhat from this figure. 150 million, plus or minus 10%, appears to be a reasonable estimate. See also “Headcount.com” (http://www.headcount.com/), and Staple (79).

     

    21. In some countries, a 9.6 Kbps international leased line can cost the equivalent of US$130,000 annually; dialup access charges often exceed US$10.00 hourly (Spangler 46). (Average annual income in all but a handful of African nations is less than $2000 annually, with the majority of nations averaging at less than $1000 annually [Kidron 36-37].) It is difficult to ascertain the number of persons that make regular use of the African networks. This is especially true of modem-based, store-and-forward email systems, which do not use the same network structure as true Internet systems. In the developed world, it is not uncommon for a single Internet node to serve dozens of users. An informal review of one online list of Sub-Saharan networks (“AAAS User’s Guide to Electronic Networks in Africa” [http://www.aaas.org/international/africa-guide/bynation.htm]) suggests that the number of users supported by African networks varies widely. In the most networked African nations (South Africa, for example), use of computers probably resembles the multiple-user model common in more developed countries. In many nations, however, the total number of users for a network may run no higher than single digits.

     

    22. In this regard, most of the world is more like Africa than the U.S., Western Europe, or Japan. Average teledensity worldwide is roughly 10 lines per 100 inhabitants. About 80% of the current world population has never used a telephone (Goldstein 339, 365n4).

     

    23. The myth of network culture’s essential virtuality tends to obscure the dependance of digital networks on other, more material–one might say, mundane–networks. Arnum and Conti have identified a close historical correlation between the deployment of non-Internet wire (telephony, television, electrical grids), paved roads and railways, and gross national product. The wealthiest, most widely-paved or -railed, and most heavily-wired nations are in general, those in which diffusion and use of the Internet has been greatest, and is growing at the greatest rate. See also Hargittai’s conclusion that the unwired nations are unlikely to ever catch up with their wired counterparts in the distribution of digital technologies.

     

    24. “LEO satellites can provide relatively inexpensive communications between simple earth receivers and satellites from any where in the world (even Africa!). Africa may actually be at an advantage in implementing these new technologies as it does not have an extensive investment in existing infrastructure” (Butterly). Such a system is an important component of the “USAID Leland Initiative: African GII Gateway Project” (http://www.info.usaid.gov/regions/afr/leland/).

     

    25. The first of these, Motorola’s Iridium (http://www.iridium.com/), will go online near the end of 1998. A recent cover story about Iridium in WIRED magazine breathlessly endorsed the idea that the service will “leap geopolitical barriers in a single bound” (“Anyware! Iridium launches the global phone”) (Bennahum 134) with an image that combined metageographic tropes with erotically-valenced clichés of the cyber-denizen. The cover showed the naked scalp, nape, and back of a young woman of uncertain ethnicity. Projected on her skin: a brightly-colored map of Russia, Asia, and the Indian Ocean, presumably important markets which will be newly opened to subscribers to the service. Iridium will face steep competition from expanding cellular phone networks, and is expected to have no more than 11 million subscribers by 2007 (http://www.ovum.com/).

     

    26. Though he is cautious with regard to the technical scale and cost of large, satellite-based systems, Goldstein is sanguine about the potential of these systems to accelerate the growth of telecommunication infrastructure in the unwired world.

     

    Of course, we cannot expect that most developing countries will reach teledensity levels that rival those of developed countries in just 10 years. Nevertheless, millions of individuals and businesses in heretofore unconnected or underconnected towns and villages will gain at least some access to essential national and even international narrowband voice, data, and Internet services--leapfrogging the traditional wait for wired services. This will be one of the most significant developments in communications over the next decade, although the true impact of these new entrants into the electronic marketplace may only begin to be felt by 2008. (340)

     

    Goldstein is more careful than many evangelists of the wireless realms to unpack the multiple technical, economic, and political obstacles to the development of these systems. But the devil is in the details: the capabilities of “narrowband” versus those of “broadband” services; the practical sense of “at least some” level of access, etc.

     

    27. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia depend on copper exports for over 50% and 95% of export earnings, respectively (Alkalimat 279).

     

    28. My reading of the signification of political borders in these images is in a sense the reverse of Edward Tufte’s complaint against a series of thematic maps illustrating cancer deaths by U.S. county: “They wrongly equate the visual importance of each geographic area rather than with the number of people living in the county (or the number of cancer deaths.) Our visual impression of the data is entangled with the circumstances of geographic boundaries, shapes, and areas” (20). Yes and no. “Geographic boundaries” are social and political structures applied to and enforced over physical terrains. Events that occur within them may be impossible to disentangle from those structures. The lines only get in the way–obscure the “real” purpose of the image–if one assumes that the things represented by the data (cancer deaths, Internet access) may be abstracted away from all political interests.

     

    29. MIDS produces a similar animated map, projecting daily Internet traffic latency and congestion on a spinning globe. The globe can be viewed online, at http://www.mids.org/weather/world/index.html.

     

    30. The inverted form of that fantasy is the McLuhaneque “global village,” spanning prior national borders via the wonders of new communication technologies. McLuhan’s mediascape is, of course, no less selective in its misrepresentations of conditions at the local level of communication practice than the misleading areal aggregations in the images I’ve discussed in this essay. (For a brief but decisive critique of McLuhan in this regard, see Jarvis [24-29].) The “global village” is, perhaps, another name for the structure I’m calling the new “dark continent.”

     

    31. Shadowing the voids in virtual space is another kind of absence: the lack of any articulated alternative to the boosterism for privatization and free market forces as the only and the inevitable fix for the backwardness and decrepitude of the telegeography of the developing world. In the language of the cyberlibertarians, this enthusiasm for technological “progress” is recast in the uplifting terms of information emancipation and an ethos of unrestrained individualism. Given the apparently–the unimaginably–unstoppable expansion of network culture at this moment in history, the private and the personal seem perilously close to losing any vital particularity they may have once had, and to being obscured by the penumbra of larger, unthinkable political formations that are quite able to maintain for themselves a different sort of invisibility.

     

    32. This caveat will apply whether the discourse of mapping is conceived of in terms sustaining or critiquing established political economies. Brian Jarvis’s recent Postmodern Cartographies brilliantly demonstrates that selective abstractions of economic materiality via the trope of the map are common in the writings of many critics on the Left.

     

    33. In a simple way, my comparison of the “freedoms” figured in Figures 13 and 14 is an example of this. Kidron and Segal’s atlas is an excellent model of multiple mapping: it includes fifty maps, cartograms, and charts depicting political, economic, and social indicators. Taken as a whole, the atlas figures profoundly heterogenous and, at times contradictory, assertions about the conditions of life for most of the planet. Examples of visualizations of the Internet and other networked formations that do not rely on the cartographic conventions informing most of the images in this essay may be found at Dodge’s “Atlas of Cyberspaces” site (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/). See also a new project to map thematically-related sites on the WWW, based at the Guggenheim Museum, http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/ (Ippolito 17).

     

    34. Nor does the preference for more “accurate” mapping address the deeply intertwined and mutually-constitutive roles of modern mapping techniques, scientific positivism, visual subjectivity, and market economies. See Avery for a brief but evocative foray into the relation of maps to capital, colonial exploitation, and modern conceptions of the subject.

     

    35. The Internet is only one form of the accelerating spread of networked formations of power and representation at the close of the 20th century. A comprehensive account of the emerging networked realms–ignoring for the sake of clarity the many questions that the word “comprehensive” raises in that description–would need to take into account the massive and heterogenous material networks that support the diffusion of formations like the Internet as their “infrastructure,” including such systems as copper and fiber wiring for both information and power, microwave and satellite communication systems, cellular phone and beeper systems, the manufacturing and distribution systems tied to these systems, etc. In his recent typology of virtual geographies, Michael Batty identifies a realm he calls “cyberplace” that roughly corresponds to this broader sort of network:

     

    [Cyberplace is...] the substitution, complementation, and elaboration of physical infrastructures based on manual and analogue technologies by digital... [It] consists of all the wires that comprise the networks that are being embedded into man-made [sic] structures such as roads, and buildings. It extends to the material objects that are used to support this infrastructure such as machines for production, consumption and movement that are now quickly becoming a mix of the digital and the analogue. (346)

     

    Batty’s distinction between “cyberplace” (the material realm reshaped by the demands of the digital) and “cyberspace” (the virtual realm that is being created to represent the digital for its users) unironically reverses Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space. For de Certeau, place is the static, rationalized–the mapped–form of space, which is multiple, heterogenous, and contingent (117). Approached with de Certeau’s distinction in mind, Batty’s “cyberplace” takes on the appearance of a vectorized, rationalized material order whose possibilities are determined by the reductive binarisms of the digital order.

     

    36. The cyberspatial blank that divides my office at Georgia Tech from crumbling, technologically-antiquated public schoolrooms within city of Atlanta–one of the most networked cites in the U.S.–is, in practical terms, as yawning and irreducible as the blank separating my office from classrooms in many cities in the developing world. See Moss and Townsend; McConnaughey, Nila, and Sloan; and McConnaughey and Lader. McConnaughey and Lader’s research suggests that the “digital divide” in the U.S. (most often drawn along racial, economic, and regional lines), between Internet-connected and -unconnected households, is in fact growing.

    Works Cited

     

    • AAAS Sub-Saharan Africa Program. User’s Guide to Electronic Networks in Africa. http://www.aaas.org/international/africa-guide/bynation.htm.
    • Alkalimat, Abdul. “The New Technological Imperative in Africa: Class Struggle on the Edge of Third-Wave Revolution.” Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution. Eds. Jim Davis and Thomas Hirschl. New York: Verso, 1998. 271-86.
    • Arnum, Eric, and Sergio Conti. “Internet Deployment Worldwide: The New Superhighway Follows the Old Wires, Rails, and Roads.” INET ’98: The Internet Summit. July 21-24, 1998. Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.isoc.org/inet98/proceedings/5c/5c_5.htm.
    • Avery, Bruce. “The Subject of Imperial Geography.” Prosthetic Technologies: Politics and Hypertechnologies. Eds. Gabriel Brahm, Jr. and Mark Driscoll. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. 55-70.
    • Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1973.
    • Batty, Michael. “Virtual Geography.” Futures 29.4/5 (1997): 337-52.
    • —, and Bob Barr. “Exploring and Mapping Cyberspace.” Futures 26.7 (1994): 699-712.
    • Bennahum, David S. “The United Nations of Iridium.” WIRED 6.10 (1998): 134-38; 194-201.
    • Butterly, Tom. “Constraints to the Development of the ‘Wired’ Economy in Africa.” http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/african_analysis.html.
    • Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
    • Conners, Leila. “Freedom to Connect.” WIRED 5.08 (1997): 106-7.
    • Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.
    • —. A Personal Record. 1912. Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1982.
    • Cox, Kenneth, Stephen G. Eick, and Taosong He. “3D Geographic Network Displays.” SIGMOD Record 25.4 (1996). (See also http://www.bell-labs.com/user/eick/bibliography/1996/
      3D_copyright.ps.gz      .)
    • De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Richard Nice. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
    • Dodge, Martin. “An Atlas of Cyberspaces.” http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/.
    • —. “The Geographies of Cyberspace.” Association of American Geographers Conference. Boston: March, 1998. http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/aag/aag.html.
    • Evans, John V. “New Satellites for Personal Communications.” Scientific American. April, 1998: 70-79.
    • GoGwilt, Christopher. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
    • Goldstein, Irving. “Stars of Good Omen: Satellites in the Global Electronic Marketplace.” The Future of the Electronic Marketplace. Ed. Derek Leebaert. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. 335-66.
    • Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. Warrior for Gringostroika. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1994.
    • Hargittai, E. “Holes in the Net: The Internet and International Stratification.” INET ’98: The Internet Summit. July 21-24, 1998, Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.isoc.org/inet98/proceedings/5d/5d_1.htm.
    • Headcount.com. http://www.headcount.com/.
    • Ippolito, Jon. “What Does Cyberspace Look Like?” ArtByte 1.4 (1998): 16-17.
    • Jarvis, Brian. Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
    • Jensen, Mike. “An Overview of Internet Connectivity In Africa (December 1998).” http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm.
    • Kidron, Michael, and Ronald Segal. The State of the World Atlas. 5th ed. New York: Penguin, 1995.
    • Kitchin, Rob. Cyberspace: The World in the Wires. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
    • Lamm, Stephen E., Daniel A. Reed, and Will H. Scullin. “Real-Time Geographic Visualization of World Wide Web Traffic.” Fifth World Wide Web Conference. May, 1996. http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/Projects/Mosaic/WWW3/.
    • Lewis, Martin, and Kaeren E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
    • McConnaughey, James W., Cynthia Ann Nila, and Tim Sloan. “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America.” National Telecommunications And Information Administration. July, 1995. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fallingthru.html.
    • —, and Wendy Lader. “Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide.” National Telecommunications And Information Administration. July, 1998. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/falling.html.
    • McIlwaine, John. Maps and Mapping of Africa: A Resource Guide. New Providence, NJ: Hans Zell Publishers, 1997.
    • MIDS (Matrix Information Directory Services, Inc.). http://www.mids.org.
    • Misra, Rameshwar Prasad, and A. Ramesh. Fundamentals of Cartography. Rev. and enl. ed. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Co., 1989.
    • Monmonier, Mark. Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
    • —. How to Lie With Maps. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
    • MOSAIC Group. “The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project: An Initial Inductive Study, March 1998.” http://www.agsd.com/gdi97/gdi97.html.
    • Moss, Mitchell L., and Anthony M. Townsend. “Spatial Analysis of the Internet in U.S. Cities and States.” Taub Urban Research Center, New York University, April 1998. http://urban.nyu.edu/research/newcastle/newcastle.html.
    • Nua Internet Surveys. “How Many Online?” http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html.
    • Odedra, M., et al. “Sub-Saharan Africa: A Technological Desert.” Communications of the ACM 36.2 (1993): 25-29.
    • Press, Larry. “Tracking the Global Diffusion of the Internet.” Communications of the ACM 40.11 (1997): 11-17. http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/articles/worldacm.htm.
    • Sack, Robert David. Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
    • Snyder, John Parr. Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
    • Spangler, Todd. “Africa’s Net Challenge: Overcoming Regulation, Poor Telecom Infrastructure.” Inter@ctive Week 5.47 (November 30, 1998): 46.
    • Staple, Gregory C., ed. Telegeography 97/98: Telecommunications Traffic Statistics & Commentary. Washington, DC: Telegeography, Inc., 1998.
    • Starrs, Paul F. “The Sacred, the Regional, and the Digital.” The Geographical Review 87.2 (1997): 193-218.
    • Tufte, Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983.
    • Turnbull, David. Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
    • “USAID Leland Initiative: African GII Gateway Project.” http://www.info.usaid.gov/regions/afr/leland/.
    • Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 1992.

     

  • Bibliography of Postmodernism and Critical Theory

     


    Bibliographic Database
    Register Add an Entry Update an Entry
    Search by Author, Title, Keyword, or Contributor
    Browse by Title Browse by Author Browse by Contributor

  • Poetry at the Millennium: “Open on its Forward Side”

    Richard Quinn

    Department of English
    The University of Iowa
    Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu

     

    Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

     

    Talk-poet David Antin got it right when he argued that “it is precisely the distinctive feature of the present that, in spite of any strong sense of its coherence, it is always open on its forward side” (98-99). That the present is always unfinished, needing the future to provide closure, is a fact that has led to both anxiety and optimism as the millennium turns. Y2K paranoia and nostalgic recitations of old-fashioned values jostle with enthusiasm for economic expansion and explosions of alternative culture. Antin’s own poetics consistently points to the “open” nature of moments like ours, doing so with excitement rather than ennui. Consequently, it makes perfect sense that a piece of Antin’s “Endangered Nouns” would make it into Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two, a decidedly exciting anthology of modernist and postmodernist poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Nothing short of a celebration, the anthology returns to the past, peruses the present, and speculates about the future of experimental poetic practices without ossifying either history or poetry. The experience of twentieth-century life, tempered by the horrors of war, genocide, and cultural revolution, meets the cyberpoetic future in the works of over two hundred poets included in this 850-page book. In its totality, such a book can only be called what the editors themselves recognize as “a mapping of the possibilities” (13).

     

    Picking up where volume one left off, volume two continues the project of constructing a millennial poetics outside traditional canonical frameworks. Such a poetics, first and foremost, includes both the oft ignored “experimental” wing of modernism and the international postmodernisms of nations like Japan, Iran, Russia, the United States, and Italy, to name a few. As the editors put it, the anthology

     

    is the celebration of a coming into fullness--the realization in some sense of beginnings from still earlier in the century. And yet the poetry like the time itself marks a sharp break from what went before, with World War II and the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima creating a chasm, a true aporia between then and now. (1)

     

    Of course, one result of an anthology like Poems for the Millennium is the continued questioning of monikers like “modern” and “postmodern.” While the disjunction between modernity and postmodernity (epochs) and modernism and postmodernism (aesthetics) has been theorized and historicized by artists, philosophers, and scholars since at least the 1970s, the editors doubt whether such a decisive rift truly exists. Despite their claims that the included poetry represents both a “realization” of prior processes (modernist becoming postmodernist) and the actuality of new art (uniquely postmodern), wisely the editors avoid indicating which poems fit within which framework. Words like “modern” and “postmodern” may apply to the whole of the anthology but certainly not to the constituent parts. It would seem that the question of where experimental modernism ends and postmodernism begins remains deliberately unanswered.

     

    Nevertheless, the editors ask that we consider the relationship between poetic practices, whatever their aesthetic status, and the world with which they interact. Rothenberg and Joris state that much of the poetry included within the anthology is driven by “a renewed privileging of the demotic language” and “the exploration of previously suppressed languages” (11). Moreover, the poetry attacks “the dominance in art and life of European ‘high’ culture” leading to an “exploration and expansion of ethnic and gender as well as class identities” (12). In this sense, poetry is part and parcel of the fight for human recognition, but with a “shifting connection to related political and social movements” rather than firm ties to rigid ideologies (12). Joining cultural critics like Paul Gilroy and Charles Bernstein then, the editors argue for artistic practices that reflect both millennial openness and reflective linkages to particular human identities, though such linkages are always “shifting.”

     

    And it is within the realm of language itself where such links and shifting occur. Much of the poetry included herein participates in the twentieth-century work of interrogating the mediational function of language. Included work, ranging from Lyn Hejinian’s My Life to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Poster Poem,” attacks the notion of language as purely indexical, and suggests the possibility of language entering into new configurations. But of course much of “European high culture” raised similar questions. The difference revolves around divergent perspectives on the relationship between language, art, and the world at large. High culture, in what the editors call “the Age of Eliot (T.S.) and of the new critics,” turned away from romantic notions of spirit and began debating the intellectual authority of art (3). Art, in new critical assessments, duplicates neither world nor identity but maintains its status as a separate material entity. High culture presented the world, but only through “a dominant and retrograde poetics” which sought to create distance between poet and subject (3). Through the use of aesthetic distance, high modern art diminished life’s complexity in order to report from on high what it perceived as the universal principles driving life itself.

     

    Rothenberg and Joris succeed in presenting work which dismisses high modernist notions of a life/art distinction. Much of the writing anthologized here concerns not universal principle but rather the foregrounding of language itself as a constructive tool. Poems from Paul Celan’s “Breathcrystal” to Bernard Heidsieck’s Canal Street dismantle “the more tyrannical aspects of the earlier literary and art movements” in order to create a freer matrix of poetic reference, untethered to ideas of absolute source. Rothenberg and Joris include poetry that rejects “totalizing/authoritarian ideologies and individuals” through the use of linguistic fragments, chunks of thought, and streams of sound. Such poems, they argue, question established connections between word and world by emphasizing a language that goes beyond what is intended. Nevertheless, the writing included herein does not deny meaning. It merely asserts that meaning is generated through the processes of its creation rather than through the deciphering of particular poems. In a sense then, reading no longer takes a back seat to writing and becomes Barthes’s “writerly” text even without the text. In short, in order to explore the complexity of late twentieth-century life, the texts and artists in Poems for the Millenium seek to embrace the subversion and irrationality which European high culture pushed away.

     

    Despite such an embrace of the radical, readers will find many poets comfortably familiar from anthologies past. The text’s first two sections of poems, “Prelude” and “Continuities,” include writings by canonical artists like Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams just to name a few. Nevertheless, expect the unusual even here. The piece by Williams is not about wheelbarrows but is taken from the third book of Paterson (“It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written”). Similarly, the editors bypass Tender Buttons in order to present the “Concluding Aria” from Stein’s The Mother of Us All. But it is not in its inclusion of the canon’s unrepresented works that the anthology gains strength. Rather its most compelling turn is toward what we once termed the “non-canon” but which makes more sense as the “anti-canon.” The goal is not to establish another privileged grouping, this time of “alternative literature,” but to banish such groupings altogether. (Rothenberg and Joris themselves state in their introduction that “it would be foolish… to view what follows as an attempt to set up a new canon of contemporaries” (13).) No matter how well read a person is, it would be a remarkable reader indeed who had more than passing knowledge of each writer represented here.

     

    The “Prelude” section presents poets coming out of World War II who envision both devastation and promise. Out of Toge Sankichi’s image of atomic destruction: “Loud in my ear: screams / Soundlessly welling up, / pouncing on me: / space, all upside-down,” Olson asks us to “Put war away with time, come into space” (29, 23). Following the war, life space seems both “upside-down” and inviting (“come into space”). The poets following in “Continuities” provide just that: connective tissue between poetry of the past and that to come, what Muriel Rukeyser, a poet in this section, calls “Resurrection music,       silence,       and surf” (70). From the World War II wasteland comes a redemptive music, pointing readers into a poetic future, serenaded by the siren’s song. Pablo Neruda invites us to join him: “Come up with me, American love. / Kiss these secret stones with me” (64).

     

    Following “Prelude” and “Continuities,” the book is divided into two expansive “galleries,” separated by a section entitled “The Art of the Manifesto” and followed by “Postludes.” The galleries, making up the major portion of the text, include works by individual writers and mini-anthologies of poetic “movements.” In the first gallery, The Vienna Group, The Tammuzi Poets, Cobra, concrete poetry, and beat poetry have their say, while the second gallery includes collections of oral poets, postwar Japanese poetry, Language Poets, the Misty Poets, and finally, cyberpoets. While the editorial apparatus is minimal, the editors open each mini-anthology with a brief but extremely helpful introduction. They also include short commentaries, usually a paragraph or two, following some selections. Many of these commentaries include insights from the poets themselves, offering fascinating insider views.

     

    While all of these mini-anthologies deserve mention, three stand out: “Cobra,” “Concrete Poetry,” and “Toward a Cyberpoetics.” While anthologists past, victimized by space restrictions and the demands of uniform presses, have been forced to reduce the visual aspects of poetry to limited form, Rothenberg and Joris present the visual excitement inherent in much experimental writing. One reason for doing so is simple, along with a burgeoning “intercultural poetics” seeking to “break across the very boundaries and definitions of self and nation” upon which corporate globalism is based, comes the concomitant investigation of “poetry-art intersections in which conventional boundaries between arts break down…” (12,11). In essence, once one boundary is breached, all bets are off. Rothenberg and Joris respect the linguistic-visual nexus through the careful reproduction of spatial poetry by Cobra poets Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, concrete poets Emmett Williams, Ilse Garnier, and Pierre Garnier, and so-called cyberpoets Abraham Lincoln Gillespie and Steve McCaffery. Add to this list work by Susan Howe, Maggie O’Sullivan, John Cage, and Tammuzi Poet, Adonis (not to mention at least a couple dozen more included herein), and you understand why this anthology is such a significant accomplishment. Certainly the editors face the limitations of page size and are forced to shrink some work (a black and white photograph of Duchamp’s “Rotative Demi-Sphere,” for example), but such complaints are petty when faced with such an overwhelming collection of visual writing.

     

    Like the collection of poetry-art and mini-anthologies, the text’s galleries range widely. Olson, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and a number of others are represented by more than one poem, though their texts are frequently dispersed throughout the book. Rothenberg even organizes his own work this way. His “That Dada Strain” and sections from Khurbn and The Lorca Variations surface in the second gallery, while his “Prologomena to a Poetics” closes out the anthology as the final piece in “Postludes.” The effect of such dispersion is to minimize the poet’s power, in essence putting poems before poets. Readers looking for poetry as an expression of individual authority best look elsewhere. The editors dispense with lengthy sections of individual poets for the same reason they dispense with biographical blurbs. In an anthology so dismissive of boundaries, individual ego should not compete with the interpersonal flux streaming through the pages. My only complaint here is the predictable one: without biography or context, historiography suffers. Knowing something about Amiri Baraka such as his relationship to civil rights struggles, the Black Arts movement, and black nationalism can enliven “Black Dada Nihilismus” in ways that formalist readings alone cannot.

     

    The central section, “The Art of the Manifesto,” includes “Black Dada Nihilismus” and breaks yet one more convention through its dismantling of the practice/theory antinomy. I have already indicated how the post-structural ideas of authorial demise and the mediational function of language interact within Poems for the Millenium. In “The Art of the Manifesto,” theories are stated directly as poetry and poetry as theory. Included here is a selection from Charles Bernstein’s now famous poem-treatise “Artifice of Absorption,” discussing the interaction between “absorptive” and “impermeable” poetic techniques, considering their relationship to a disempowering and “absorptive” politics. Similarly, an equally well-known portion of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Otherhow: Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the Avant-Garde wonders about avant-garde writing, the very writing comprising the anthology within which her own work appears: “Does it secretly lovingly to itself hold the idea of poet as priest, poem as icon, poet as unacknowledged legislator?” (433). If so, the text argues, “turn yr. back on it. Or, not to tell you what to do, My back” (433). The fact that such statements appear between galleries (the simple fact of their appearance in a “poetry” anthology makes the text unique) speaks to the value such thinking places on interaction over hierarchy. The poetry-theory included in “The Art of the Manifesto” responds to and with the writing which surrounds it.

     

    Ultimately, anthologies like Poems for the Millennium will be judged on questions of inclusion. Anticipating such, Rothenberg and Joris offer a rationale for their selection process: “the question of inclusion and exclusion, which can never be properly resolved, was less important with regard to individuals and movements–more with regard to the possibilities of poetry now being opened” (15). Furthermore, “[w]here a choice was to be made… we put ourselves deliberately on the side of what we took to be the ‘experimental’ and ‘disruptive’–in U.S. terms the ‘new American poetry’…” (15). That Rothenberg and Joris see their text as revolutionary rather than reformist is laid bare here, and my own feeling is that careful readers cannot help but take up the flag. To include Eduardo Caldersn, Miss Queenie, Robert Johnson, and Tom Waits in a section on “oral poets” dismantles all notions about what an anthology is about or should be. More revolutionary would have been the inclusion of sound (particularly given the intermedia focus of the book), since printed versions of works like Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” fall a little flat without the blues progression ringing in one’s ear.

     

    Such minor complaints aside, the two volume Poems for the Millenium stands alone in the history of literary anthologies. It addresses questions of completeness through a celebration of the incomplete and runs roughshod over boundaries established to protect and preserve established aesthetics. In doing so, it participates in a process once described to me as “the maximization of the principle of non-exclusion.” As such, the book not only includes the unrepresented of the poetic past, but through its foregrounding of an “open” poetics, it includes the very principle of inclusion we hope will reign in the next millennium. Poems for the Millenium is nothing short of heroic.

    Works Cited

     

    • Antin, David. “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry.” Boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 98-133.
    • Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

     

  • Derac(e)inated Jews

    Julian Levinson

    Department of English and Comparative Literature
    Columbia University
    jal15@columbia.edu

     

    Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race In America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998.

     

    During the summer of 1986, when Hip-Hop music was just becoming a fixture in the panorama of American pop culture, I sat down to compose my first rap. For my intro, I drew from the lessons I had absorbed at Sherith Israel Sunday School on Bush Street in San Francisco: “Five thousand years ago Moses took command / He led my people to the promised land / Pharaoh was outsmarted, the Red Sea parted / And that is how my religion got started…” This rap initiated my truncated career as a Jewish rapper, a vocation–or, if you will, “subject position”–that seemed to offer itself as a viable one for me even though all the rappers who populated the music scene were, at that point, African Americans.

     

    The immediate stimulus for my rhymed outpouring of Jewish pride had been a rap by the highly popular and by then mainstream group Run DMC, an inspiring rant entitled “Proud to be Black.” Moved by the lyrics, I couldn’t bring myself to sing them without feeling like an impostor, and rather than donning black face (like my illustrious predecessor, Al Jolson), I ventured a Jewish version, inserting the Biblical liberation story where Run DMC had spoken of heroic black figures like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr.

     

    In retrospect I wonder at the legitimacy of my Jewish rap. Was it a case of unwarranted borrowing or, worse, cultural hijacking, to insert my own lyrics in place of Run DMC’s? For a WASP in my position, it would have been a stretch to contrive an “ethnic” identity comparable to blackness. Was it different for me as a Jew, and a largely assimilated one at that? Historically, Blacks and Jews have both played the role of the scapegoat, the hated and maligned Other. We have both suffered brutal violence and struggled to maintain our cultural heritage and personal dignity in the face of institutionalized hostility. Does this shared historical experience make my Jewish rap somehow more legitimate than, say, my neighbor’s hypothetical WASP rap?

     

    At issue here, clearly, is the question: Are Jews white? In a 1993 Village Voice article, “Jews Are Not White” (18 May 1993), Michael Lerner flatly asserts that they are not. He begins with the premise that in America, “to be ‘white’ means to be the beneficiary of the past 500 years of European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world” (33). He then argues that only somebody with a severe case of amnesia, unable to remember the recent history of anti-Semitism, could put the Jews into this category. In her recent book, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America, anthropologist Karen Brodkin takes a more equivocal (and more sophisticated) approach to the question, arguing that at times Jews have been white and at other times they have been “not-quite-white.” Her premise is that whiteness is and has always been a shifting designation, one that has much more to do with social class than with skin color. In an analysis that is at once speculative and grounded in concrete data, she argues that the entitlements of whiteness are extended to specific groups at specific moments, and that the historical experiences of these groups cannot erase such undeniable social facts.

     

    Brodkin begins by making an analytical distinction between “ethnoracial assignment” and “ethnoracial identity.” Ethnoracial assignments are imposed upon us by the outside world, articulated by the public culture and instituted by social policies. They are slots in a three-dimensional graph containing axes for race, class, and gender. Brodkin asserts that at least since the beginnings of slavery, this field of possible ethnoracial assignments in America has been inexorably divided by a central line separating “whiteness” from “nonwhiteness.” Ethnoracial identities, by contrast, are what we shape for ourselves once we’ve been assigned to one slot or another. They register our idiosyncratic reactions to the station we’re fated to inhabit.

     

    Jews make for an illuminating case study of race in America because, according to Brodkin, their ethnoracial assignment has shifted at two specific junctures during the past hundred and fifty years. She explains that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were grouped together with other European immigrants, all of whom were “more or less equally white” (54). They were extended the same privileges as others on the white side of the racial divide and quickly absorbed into mainstream society. As the waves of immigrants (both Jewish and gentile) began arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, however, there developed a sizable underclass of “unskilled” and residentially ghettoized industrial workers. At this point, “Americans [came] to believe that Europe was made up of a variety of inferior and superior races” (56). Suddenly Jews, a conspicuous presence in the new urban working class, were classified as “not-quite-white.” They became a source of fear and repulsion for native-born Americans, who imagined Jews to be inherently deficient. Such a view, she notes, is expressed in a New York Times article that appeared at the turn of the century describing the Jewish Lower East Side: “It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or by the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be” (29). This sort of anti-Semitic revulsion would find expression as Jews sought entrance into mainstream American life. At a 1918 meeting of the Association of New England Deans, for example, a primary subject of concern was that colleges “might soon be overrun by Jews” (31), and various covert methods were employed to limit the number of Jews in institutions of higher education.

     

    In Brodkin’s view, this was a case of old ethnoracial assignments applied to a new demographic situation. Racial categories imprinted on the national psyche during the years of slavery continued to assert themselves as native-born Americans surveyed the new masses of immigrants. As a result, certain jobs were restricted to those deemed white, while other jobs (i.e., along assembly lines or in sweatshops) were deemed appropriate for those who were “not-quite-white.” This racialized division of labor created geographical divisions between groups, reinforcing the notion of an inherent racial hierarchy. Brodkin ignores here the question of what happened to the approximately 250,000 German Jews in America, many of whom had by 1880 secured for themselves a position in the more affluent sectors of society. Were they retroactively raced, and if so by what means and to what extent?

     

    Leaving this tricky issue aside, Brodkin’s narrative proceeds to explain how Jews once again became white. Amidst America’s postwar economic boom, there was an expanded need for professional, technical, and managerial labor, and Jews and other previously “nonwhite” Europeans rushed into these positions, joining the emerging middle class. Unlike African Americans, who continued to be regarded as “natural” members of the underclass, the new middle-class workers were “cleansed” of their previous racialized status. Brodkin admits that she cannot account for this development with a unidirectional causal analysis. “As with most chicken and egg problems,” she writes, “it is hard to know which came first. Did Jews and other Euro-ethnics become white because they became middle-class?… Or did being incorporated into an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to middle-class status? Clearly, both tendencies were at work” (36). What is beyond doubt, Brodkin insists, is that Jews increasingly benefited from the array of social policies instituted to aid the rising middle class, among them education subsidies (i.e., the GI bill) and loans from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Needless to say, such benefits were not extended in the same proportion to African Americans.

     

    Brodkin’s three-act drama about Jews shuttling about America’s racial map is schematic but undoubtedly useful. It effectively debunks the myth that Jews succeeded in America solely on the basis of their own Horatio-Algeresque ingenuity. So much for ethnoracial assignment in America. From here, she goes on to examine Jewish ethnoracial identity (how Jews shaped themselves within the context of their assignments), and here her analysis becomes at once more provocative and more problematic. She argues that when Jews were ghettoized in ethnic enclaves and considered not-quite-white, they created a uniquely Jewish working class culture, which she calls Yiddishkeit–a Yiddish word that means “Jewishness” and generally stands for the secular but distinctly Jewish culture that emerged in the late nineteenth century. As she describes Yiddishkeit, her previously measured rhetoric swells to a glowing bombast: “Yiddishkeit did not rest upon invidious comparison for its existential meaning, and it held out a different and more optimistic vision than that of modernity (even as it participated in modernity). Instead of having to choose between individual fulfillment and communal belonging, it expected Jews to find individual fulfillment through responsibility to the Jewish community” (186). She claims that it also offered women more options than did bourgeois American society with its cult of domesticity: “[Women] were not delicate of constitution or psyche. They were sexual (even if the histories do not tell us much about their sexual agency). And they were social actors valued as individuals…” (186). Brodkin has evidently projected her own utopian/socialist fantasies upon the Jewish Lower East Side, implying that the restrictions imposed upon Jews paradoxically created the conditions for a more humane culture. Yet, if we recall, this was a community that encouraged its sons and daughters to climb as far up the American social ladder (and away from this Edenic Lower East Side) as they could manage.

     

    In any case, Brodkin’s narrative continues by showing how the Lower East Side begins to unravel as soon as the Jews become white folks. Her last chapter examines the reactions of American Jews to the breakdown of Yiddishkeit and the sudden opening up of middle class entitlements. Here the central term in her analysis is ambivalence. “In one sense,” she argues, “the experience of whiteness is an experience of ambivalence, of having to choose among unsatisfactory or partially satisfactory choices” (184). When they were extended the privileges that come with being white in America, the Jews cut a sort of Faustian bargain, half aware that they were relinquishing a rich cultural heritage, but unwilling to decline the invitation to profit from the postwar boom. One way that the Jewish man dealt with this ambivalence, she argues, was to invent the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess; it was she not he who had thrown culture to the wind and bought into the American consumerism. “JAPs,” she writes, “are Jewish men’s projections of their own nightmares about whiteness onto Jewish women” (163). Jewish women expressed their anxieties about their new identities (had they really become white?) in more self-punishing ways, leading to “the 1950s epidemic of nose jobs and in their obsession with bodily deficiencies” (165).

     

    Her argument shows that even Jews who from the 1960s onward became prominent in leftist political movements abandoned Yiddishkeit. Some rejected wholesale the claims of their Jewish origins, and some simply left their Jewishness at home, acting politically as “generic white folks.” Admitting that she herself belongs in the first of these categories, Brodkin maintains that both strategies “led to impoverished forms of resistance and a loss of cultural alternatives, which were better preserved in the richer and more vital Yiddish-speaking left” (173). That is, political movements launched from the position of whiteness have little authority to speak on behalf of anything besides some version of the status quo.

     

    It is at this point that the programmatic aspect of Brodkin’s book becomes clear. She maintains that whiteness inflicts a form of “psychic damage.” More specifically, those who have become white invariably end up endorsing “a worldview that has difficulty envisioning an organization of social life that does not rest upon systematic and institutionalized racial subordination” (186). In the final section, entitled “Resisting Whiteness,” Brodkin issues a call to “build an explicitly multiracial democracy in the United States” (187). In part, this project relates to the broader multiculturalist endeavor to uncover and valorize previously excluded non-white voices. Yet the specific role of Jews in this picture is left unclear. After all, her argument has insisted that Jews are no longer non-white; Yiddishkeit depends upon conditions now irretrievable. How, then, can they “resist whiteness”? She concludes with the somewhat vague offering that “the challenge for American Jews today is to confront… our present white racial assignment” (187). But, again, it is unclear whither such a confrontation could or ought to lead. Finally, Jews seem to be left in a nebulous position, disqualified from articulating anything besides wistful reveries of the Lower East Side.

     

    This would make for a dissatisfying conclusion if not for the fact that the introduction to Brodkin’s book itself exemplifies a form of confrontation. In what is undoubtedly the most moving section of the book, she tells the story of her own family, emphasizing how each generation reacted to the changing racial assignments of Jews in America. She tells of her grandmother’s unbearable sense of loss after moving to suburban Long Island, of her mother’s ambivalent modes of adaptation, of her own yearnings to measure up to the “blond people.” Here Brodkin gives some sense of how it actually feels to inhabit a racial assignment, how racial codes make themselves felt on one’s skin, as it were. By infusing her cultural analysis with autobiography in this manner, she points to a way out of the impasse at which her argument arrives. For here she opens up or at least points to the interstices between racial assignments, and these are perhaps the spaces from which a forceful political agency–unmoored to the false solidities of either whiteness or Yiddishkeit–can finally emerge. So while her book presents undeniably illuminating data about race in America, it is finally her contribution to the genre of Cultural Studies, her blend of social analysis and self-scrutiny, that is most valuable.

     

  • Watching Los Angeles Burn

    Stephen Nardi

    Department of English
    Princeton University
    snardi@princeton.edu

     

    Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books – Henry Holt & Company, 1998.

     

    Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) has been recognized as a modern classic. Davis’s analysis of the impact of an ideology of urban planning that emphasizes security and surveillance over city and community provides a devastating corrective to the predominantly aesthetic postmodern interpretation of trends in architecture from the 1970s to the present. His description of the use of architecture as defense, and the new interpretations of public space that it makes visible, has had as significant an impact on the way that we view the contemporary city as Jane Jacobs’s 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

     

    Unlike Jacobs, however, Davis offers his devotee little in the way of an alternative vision. Jacobs, after all, devotes the bulk of her book to detailing how cities might be better built. Her suggestions are concrete, her precepts easily made practical. Indeed, perhaps the greatest impact of Jacobs’s argument was that doing nothing at all with the urban fabric is better than doing something badly. City of Quartz, on the other hand, expends the majority of its pages building a complex and fascinating case against the very philosophical background of the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area. As a result its thesis has been frequently, and not entirely unfairly, summarized as “Los Angeles–a big mistake.” Davis mitigates this reductivism, however, with a broader argument implicit in the book’s subtitle: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. L.A., it seems, is to be excoriated not merely for its traffic jams and bad taste, but because it represents a foreshadowing of the city toward which we are uncontrollably tumbling. L.A., Davis claims, with all of its ugliness and division, is the city that we Americans now want to build, and certainly deserve.

     

    In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Davis returns to Los Angeles’s economic structure with a variation on his previous theme. Fundamentally, the problem of Los Angeles, Davis argues, is that urban development has been allowed to be dictated by real estate interests’ immediate profits, rather than any realistic long-term analysis of the natural environment of Southern California. The result is a city built in such a way as to invite a cycle of disaster and reconstruction–that which Davis calls the “dialectic of ordinary disaster.” By blatantly ignoring the realities of the natural environment (rather un-ironically called “Eden” in a chapter title), Angelenos have built a city that is permanently subject to periodic catastrophes.

     

    Instead of describing man’s destruction of the natural environment, however, Davis reverses the typical trajectory of this narrative. According to Ecology of Fear, state and development interests have either ignored or concealed the process by which nature is turning on L.A. itself. A chapter on the hidden plague of tornadoes in L.A., and the careful concealment of the true strength of L.A.’s wind system by L.A. corporate media interests, argues that there is an active conspiracy deeply rooted within the L.A. power structure to conceal the extent of the environment’s hostility to the city. Davis’s extensive research turns up evidence that tornadoes strong enough to have thrown a wrench in the state’s campaign to attract home buyers were systematically downgraded in the press to “strong storms” or “freak occurrences.” Earthquakes, as well, he argues, have been much more powerful and pose a much greater threat to “earthquake proof” buildings than is commonly acknowledged (a point underscored by recent discoveries of ever stronger and ever more threatening faults directly underneath downtown L.A.). In another chapter, Davis describes how development in the mountains displaces mountain lions, who then range into urban areas with predictable spasms of fear among the populace at risk of attack. Development, in other words, challenges nature and then, when it loses, passes the bill over to the city to pay.

     

    Returning to the roots of City of Quartz, Davis points out that disaster in L.A. has become not only a routine part of the social fabric, but a key indicator of the distribution of power and privilege. The structure of L.A.’s economy, he argues, was more clearly laid open in the 1994 Northridge earthquake than the interiors of the devastated buildings. The basic point here is obvious; the highways that allow rich people to avoid poor black neighborhoods are rebuilt first, and the neighborhoods themselves, once bypassed, are allowed to languish. But Davis’s point is more interesting than simply an anatomy of inequality. At the heart of his case is the notion that the Los Angeles power structure adopts the inevitable cycle of disaster in order to perpetuate itself. In the chapter “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” he argues that preserving ritzy Malibu (built on a mountainside prone to wild-fires), for example, drains attention and resources from the inner city where fires could actually be prevented.

     

    Likewise, those killer earthquakes on the horizon are being prepared for not through tougher building codes and careful limitations on building in the most vulnerable areas, but through the creation of a political and financial structure that will keep developers solvent despite the most extreme destructive impact, at a cost, of course, to the public. President Clinton’s quick reaction to the Northridge quake, for example, allowed tracts of luxury houses to be rebuilt at tremendous cost despite the foolish placement of these neighborhoods in the first place. Million-dollar housing developments, built in neighborhoods certain to endure tremendous damage in the near future, are guaranteed by the Federal Government under the notion of saving home owners from random acts of nature. The fact that these acts of nature are fully predictable goes pointedly unnoticed.

     

    Most striking of all, and the point where Davis’s argument about “Excavating the Future” returns some satisfactory dividends, is the underlying notion that disaster, in becoming part of the social ecology of Los Angeles, is being programmed into the creation of the nightmare future. Frequent, devastatingly expensive disruptions, Davis notes, will not wipe L.A. off the map. Instead, they will contribute to the increasing divide between rich and poor, the have and have-nots. This in turn, he argues, will drive the city further into the model of containment envisioned in City of Quartz. Inner cities, repeatedly devastated and vulnerable to natural disaster, will be deprived of the funds for social programs by the need to keep subsidizing the defense (against both nature and the masses) of expensive housing developments on the periphery.

     

    The result of this process is a future for L.A. that will resemble Blade Runner much more closely than Endless Summer. “Megacities like Los Angeles,” Davis writes, “will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts” (54-55). The “dialectic of ordinary disaster” and the public will that makes it possible result in a city increasingly divided between the protected few whose publicly subsidized escape is won at the cost of the enforced isolation of the worst affected areas.

     

    Here Davis’s argument comes into its own with its most powerful example: the Los Angeles riots of 1992. In discussing the riots, the Ecology of Fear becomes most visible and most effective. The riots, in Davis’s vision, are a natural and inevitable outcome of the structure of the social system that increasingly applies pressure to poor neighborhoods. Their destructive results, however, become a justification for more of the same pressure. The militarization of poor neighborhoods produces riots, which then justify increased militarization. This is the Ecology of Fear in a nutshell.

     

    In the last chapters of the book, Davis describes the legislative maneuvers to contain and control the expanding net of social chaos that is the long-term legacy of the ecology of fear. In Davis’s descriptions of the homeless “containment” zones, the gated communities, the rapidly expanding legal apparatus of exclusion and control developing in Los Angeles’s governmental structure, he presents his most convincing evidence that the culture of crisis and containment he sees looming in the future has already begun to arrive.

     

    Davis’s argument is convincing, frightening, and provoking in the best sense of the word. In addition, his evidence is well marshaled and thoughtfully presented. Yet this movement away from the “Excavating the Future” model of L.A. to the specificity of L.A. as a unique case among cities weakens the interest of the book considerably. In building a case that so specifically indicts Los Angeles for its response to its particular environment (both natural and sociological), Davis sacrifices some of the wider vision that rescued City of Quartz from becoming an anti-L.A. diatribe. Simply put, a New Yorker will not recognize his city in the picture Davis paints.

     

    This becomes clearest in the chapter on the various literary depictions of Los Angeles. Going back to the turn of the century, Davis exhaustively traces the development of disaster narratives about the city. At times this is entertaining stuff, as is the chart in which Davis lists the variety of ways in which L.A. has been leveled. Likewise, at times his analysis rings painfully true. He notes, for instance, the ease with which Bob Dole can proclaim Independence Day (which features the fiery destruction of L.A.) a great patriotic movie. It is now an act of great service to the country to flatten Los Angeles. But this argument also emphasizes the degree to which L.A. is an exception, rather than the rule. In the same way that New York City, in its particular emphasis on the walkable street and mass transit, is an exception to the rule, it may well be that L.A. is also unique in its nexus of problems and futures.

     

    It may be true that our culture is leaning more and more toward finding pleasure in watching the urban core burn. An uncomfortable number of movies last summer, after all, involved major metropolitan areas being pulverized (by asteroids, by nuclear monsters, etc.). Clearly the classic Jane Jacobs’s street is under siege by those who prefer the privatized sanctity of the mall. But urban centers may no longer be so clearly losing this battle. The resurgence of interest in city living shown in everything from the number of new sitcoms set in New York to the sudden emergence of urban sprawl as a campaign issue (a far cry from the cliché of the suburban paradise).

     

    Other recent books on the city have made the case that the social orders arising out of the postmodern landscape, as much as they involve policing and surveillance, also offer the possibilities of a new mixing of urban pleasure. Davis fixes on a vision of the city which is undoubtedly important, and probably accurate. But the singleness of that vision, so refreshing in its originality in City of Quartz, is a bit more suspicious now. As Davis retreats from a grand vision of new urban realities, he loses some of the visionary force that made his arguments so compelling in the first place.

     

  • Writing the Body: Problematizing Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Feminism’s Relevance

    Mahmut Mutman

    Department of Design and Communication
    Bilkent University
    mutman@bilkent.edu.tr

     

    Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

     

    As the newly branded Cultural Studies makes its way into Western academia, it seems as though we have left a number of dogmas behind. A strange, hybrid blend itself (of Gramscian Marxism; semiology; psychoanalysis; ethnography; post-structuralism; Frankfurt School, feminist, and post-colonial criticisms), the emergent field of cultural studies is apparently established on an epistemological refusal of truth or reality and in relentless opposition to a positivistic or realistic concept of natural laws. We are produced by signifying practices and ideologies, discourses motivated or determined by power, and our gender or cultural identities are contingent politico-cultural constructions, not natural givens. Culture thus becomes a new object of study in a new broadly “constructionist” ethical and political framework.

     

    Endorsing its critical conceptual and political insights, Vicki Kirby is nevertheless skeptical of the current state of cultural theory and provides us with a productive criticism of its present linguistic framework. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal focuses on the nature/culture divide as this binary opposition is implicated with other binarisms which inform the data of cultural studies: man-woman, mind-body, sex-gender, sign-referent, west-rest. Kirby convincingly demonstrates that an argument which takes the sign as that which institutes culture should attend to the fact that the sign is not a homogenous object, and the strange duality internal to it is never closed. At the moment we accept a final closure as the identity of sign or of language in opposition to body and substance, we inevitably inscribe nature into culture precisely under the guise of their radical separation or difference. Given the association of woman and cultural “others” with nature, an uncritical acceptance of the culture-nature divide would have critical ethical and political consequences. Kirby’s argument is refreshing, opening the path where it is closed. Thus, where many of us find a home for radical theorizing, a secure new beginning in the tranquillity of the cultural sign, Kirby finds a risk, an unnoticed reversal which might leave “nature” intact in its very institution or inscription of “culture.” To her, cultural studies is hazardous terrain, one where we must move vigilantly. More importantly, Kirby develops her argument in the no less hazardous terrain of feminist theory, through a deconstructive engagement with the arguments of its most eminent writers in the Anglo-Saxon world.

     

    Telling Flesh is no easy read. But, a book of exceptional significance and merit, it has much to offer to the patient and meticulous reader. In the opening chapter of the book, Kirby accomplishes a fascinating reading of Saussure and post-Saussurian theory of the sign. As intriguing and complex as it is, this chapter draws the main contours of her argument. Taking her lead from Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Kirby offers an original account of “what Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account,” and evokes the rich potential implications of Saussure’s predicament for the present work in feminist theory and cultural studies. We must remember that, as cultural studies owes much to semiology, it is a commonplace to the radical cultural analyst/critic that the sign is arbitrary. What this is supposed to mean, however, is little asked, while the implications of rooting the sign in the real object are regarded as naturally conservative. Kirby shows how Saussure’s definition of the sign as arbitrary is constantly visited by the ghost he wished to expel: the nomenclature theory as simple naming of objects in the real world. Hence the complex, repetitive, and often contradictory account of sign and language in Saussure’s text calls for close scrutiny, especially given that, in their disciplinary haste to begin from a methodological foundation, “the interpreters have tended to defend the value of its legacy by separating its insights from the peculiar ambiguities of the text’s failures” (9). The inevitable result is that they have missed its most radical implications. While Saussure’s ambiguities implied that the referent is not easily dispensable, the followers have insisted on a radical separation between language and its outside–an insistence that is reminiscent of a moral injunction. However, Saussure’s concept of language as a differential system without positive terms implied that the concept of arbitrariness cannot simply be located between two separate terms; it is also within each term. The implication is that “identity is always divided from itself, constituted from a difference within (in between) itself; a difference that at the same time determines its difference from another supposedly outside itself” (30). As this puts the identity of both language and identity in crisis, the logical implication is that the sign’s identity cannot be foreclosed. The sign is informed by a context that is more than linguistic, and the morphology of the Derridean grammatological textile cannot be confined within society. Therefore “the transformational plasticity that identifies culture must also inhabit nature” (56). The body is as mutable and articulate as culture.

     

    Kirby’s contention is that Derrida’s concept of text has been mistaken for a phenomenal concept of writing, while this philosopher’s aim was to deconstruct precisely a linguistic metaphysics or linguisticism which is based on an absolute separation between signification and reality. The view that is predominant in cultural studies maintains that reality is an ideological effect that might be constructed differently through time and space. Kirby warns us that this view has already assumed an immutable ground or natural limit: the body is excluded from the analysis as the universal biological stuff. However, the uncanny examples that she gives speak a body that is never mute: the hysteric body that is written upon signs itself, the Hindu devotee who walks a distance with metal spokes driven into his skin and organs does neither bleed nor scar, the deaf percussionist hears the wrong notes. The body is not the universal biological stuff written by culture, that dead, inert matter assumed both by the culturalist and the biological reductionist, but this matter is endlessly transformable and mutable, a fold, a fascinating plasticity where the distinction between culture and nature, the inside and the outside, are convoluted. What writing measures itself up (body, substance, matter) is also a scripture. The intertext of this mutual implication of body and signification disrupts the temporal determination of what comes first.

     

    To some, this may sound like an unfortunate return to biological essentialism. But Kirby defies this reading by confronting the question of essentialism. If body/nature is no longer solid ground, then the question of essentialism can be thought differently. As essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology, its double bind is enabling as well as prohibitive. Kirby succinctly argues that the question is not the what but the how of essentialism: “how is essence… naturalized within our thought and our being? how does it congeal into a corporeal reality?” (72). In an effort to open the question of essentialism, she devotes a separate chapter to three important feminist theorists: Jane Gallop (1988), Drucilla Cornell (1991), and Judith Butler (1993). In a close and diligent reading of their texts, she demonstrates how Gallop, Cornell, and Butler attempt to come to terms with this impasse in their different ways, and each (especially Butler) make important advances. However, they end up excluding the body from the analysis because of their founding commitment to an absolute separation or gap between signification and body. Kirby’s criticisms are not simply negative. Her debt to these feminist theorists is made clear as she mimes their arguments in a deconstructive manner, in a way that opens them up to a different and complex account of the convoluted logic of binarism. The result is more than recognizing their limits; indeed their political force is expanded rather than diminished. Deconstructing their “restricted” economy, i.e., their implicit or explicit reinscription of an hermeneutic horizon which leaves the body/nature as inaccessible and immutable, Kirby argues that it is not the biological truth that is inaccessible to cultural interpretation but “the very tissue of their interweaving” (80). It is this “intertext” she invites us to bring back. However, her proposal is not at all that of an easy transition to Derrida’s general economy, as it may seem to an indiscreet understanding of this philosopher’s notion of text as an expansion of the problematic of language. Rather she suggests that “we work at the interfacings of these binary borders [between culture and nature, mind and body] to question the very notions of identity and separability they maintain” (96). The problem is not indeed simply limited by feminist theory. Kirby shows in another chapter that the recent concern with cyberspace suffers from a similar problem: conceptualizing cyberspace as a form of habitation in a conceptual space without location and without bodily anchor, the recent theorizations of cyberspace, “pro-” and “anti-technology” alike, maintain a Cartesian notion of subject which keeps mind and body separate.

     

    The powerful Anglo-Saxon invention of postmodernism and/or cultural studies is not immune to the well-established liberal illusions of modernity. The present canonical and political enterprise of adding more names to the list of identities virtually bars the questioning of the identity’s process of becoming itself. The paradox of the politics of inclusion is its oppositional logic, in which mind and body, culture and nature, self and other are carefully kept separate in order to re-shuffle social identities in multi-culturalism. Arguing that the subject’s assimilative, cannibal economy is overlooked in the present cultural theory, Kirby asks whether the passenger list on the global rail is the menu on the Western subject’s table.1 Furthermore, can the analysis still be confined with a restricted sense of writing or language, if I am also implicated within the fold of its différance? It is not a question of simply giving up on postmodernism, for indeed, with the interventions of Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault, and Deleuze, we now have the means to contest the culture of cannibalism in and by an engagement of the uncanny confluence of the matter and the idea as generalized writing. Against an old notion of ideology-critique which proposes to “just say no” to essentializing discourses such as biology or sociobiology, Kirby powerfully argues that nothing can be excluded from analysis because “the political force of essentializing discourses cannot be confined to their truth claims, but exceed the politics of correction”: the essence is ceaselessly rearticulated within the complexity of the body as the scene of writing.

     

    As we cannot not demand cultural and social rights, we should also be vigilant of the benevolent subject who re-inscribes himself in a circumscription of such demands. Kirby provides a brilliant philosophical critique of benevolence as an epistemological-moral determination of the subject. Depending on a probing observation by Maurice Blanchot, she succinctly argues that if we cannot know the other, nor can we simply declare our non-knowledge, for this would already be a determination of the limits and identity of our knowledge.2 We have to work at the border again and never stop asking: who determines cultural “difference”? who makes the oldest demand that the “other” should speak up? For even the most particular is not immune to the viral force field of the general, which is already within it, which keeps it moving (as the deconstructive reading of Saussure has demonstrated). Even a corrective critic such as Edward Said is forced to admit the productive efficacy of writing by describing his work on Orientalism as the inventory of the traces of this hegemonic discourse upon him (1978). Nevertheless Kirby provides a short but illuminating criticism of Said’s corrective politics. If Orientalism’s wrong writings are inhabited by an empowering mutability, she asks, does this not mean that it is determined by a constitutive economy that exceeds the classical notions of identity and mediation? The implication is that we can no longer keep the critique of colonialism within the bounds of a unified subject of humanity, as Said insists most remarkably in his recent work on intellectuals (1994). Orientalism or (neo)colonial discourse is certainly part of the force field of value which produces Man as the subject of humanness. In issues of cultural difference, then, the subject of our query is no less than this subject of “humanness,” i.e., the discourse on cultural difference should be a query of how Man is differentiated, individuated, and given a fictitious autonomy in oppositional terms such as reason versus unreason, civil versus primitive, and so on.

     

    For Kirby, postmodernist cultural theory’s re-writing of Man as intrinsically displaced, dislocated, and hybrid, elaborated in the writings of cultural critics such as James Clifford (1988) and Homi Bhabha (1994), is only apparently a step further than Said’s unified human subject. But this replacement signals a new anthropologism rather than a deconstruction of Man. The replacement of purity with hybridity assumes purity, and thus hybridity functions precisely in the place of purity: a new form of identity politics that does not touch Man but implicitly acknowledges his place as the truth of culture. Kirby suggests, however, that we do not assume the place but question its placing, for there is more to this becoming-place than the logic of sameness or op-position allows. A reversal of binarisms (pure-hybrid or universal-particular) cannot protect the otherness of the other, since this apparently humble pluralism is still a problematical determinism of difference. It reduces a “politics of location,” understood as “the infinity of co-ordinates that produce the re-markability of the body” (161), to the comforting demand that natives talk hybrid.

     

    In conclusion, Kirby argues that by replacing culture for nature, representation for origin, and effect for cause, postmodernism has created a new doxa that has become more paralyzing than enabling. The need for a new para-dox might begin with the observation that, by making nature a synonym for what is given and immutable, postmodern doxa has just missed the question of given culture. Those formulaic statements of “our present,” the decentering of the humanist subject, the critique of intention, and the concept of contingency imply a move from the universal to local knowledge. But this replacement is already inscribed within the trajectory of modern thought. What Kirby aptly calls “the subject of humanness” is the blindspot in postmodern cultural criticism: “it is entirely unclear how this subject of humanness recognizes itself as a unified subject of humanity, individuates itself within species-being and identifies itself as possessing sufficient stability to ground the destabilization of grounds” (151). Within the framework of the unified subject of humanity, language belongs to Man, is mediation by and for Man. Against this age-old metaphysics, Kirby proposes a corporeography in which “the body is more than a visitor to the scene of writing… it is the drama of its own remarkability” (154). By a powerful critical articulation of Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Marx’s “body with no possible outlines,” she argues that the infinity of the body’s limits and borders are at the same time internal to the spacing of its tissue.3 With this concept of body, which Kirby derives from a highly original reading of Derrida, the essence is no longer an identity, a seamless unity of its manifold manifestations, nor is it simply lacking, happily replaced by a “plurality” which always remains within the unity of humanity. The essence is now a complex, open-ended, and mutable writing–and it is essence that is writing.

     

    The significance of Kirby’s argument for feminist theory cannot be underestimated. Her call for a re-reading of corporeality takes its impetus from an original and powerful reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of generalized text as a deconstruction of the reduction of the proper or reality to language, as well as Luce Irigaray’s relentless feminist questioning of phallogocentrism, which Kirby proposes to read as “biology re-writing itself.” Within Kirby’s understanding, the body is not just a new object or construct that has finally come to the attention of cultural experts at the end of a long and triumphant theoretical and political progress. The body is never just there, passively waiting to be signified. The effort of telling flesh is the story of the flesh that is never mute but always already telling, always already articulate. Like Irigaray, Kirby too believes and powerfully articulates that the “question” of the body or woman is indeed the question of Man. Thus, far from being a mere denial of progress, her text invites us to see the immense scope of feminism’s relevance today.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Kirby follows here a recent argument developed by Derrida in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, where Derrida relates the question of the “who” (of the subject) to that of “sacrifice.” Their conjunction recalls the concept of the subject as phallogocentric structure, and further concepts of “carnivorous virility” and “carno-phallogocentrism” as the given culture (Derrida 113).

     

    2. Blanchot writes: “There is an ‘I do not know’ that is at the limit of knowledge but that belongs to knowledge. We always pronounce it too early, still knowing all–or too late, when I no longer know that I do not know” (qtd. in Taylor 1).

     

    3. In her interview with Ellen Rooney, Spivak argues that the body as such has no possible outlines. For her, this means that it cannot be approached: “… if one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. I think that’s about what I would say. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it” (Spivak 149). Kirby’s contention is that Spivak has just approached the body when she said that she cannot.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
    • Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1988.
    • Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Who Comes After the Subject. Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 96-119.
    • Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
    • Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
    • —. Intellectuals. London: Vintage, 1994.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Ellen Rooney. “In a Word. Interview.” differences 1 (1989): 124-155.
    • Taylor, Mark, ed. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

     

  • Pernicious Couplings and Living in the Splice

    Graham J. Murphy

    Department of English
    University of Alberta
    gjmurphy@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca

     

    N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

     

    The collection of essays forming the text of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics is the most recent attempt by noted scholar N. Katherine Hayles to re-insert embodiment1 into the discourses of cybernetics, cyberspace, and human evolution. To accomplish this goal, Hayles charts embodiment from the dawning of cybernetics during the Macy Conferences of the 1950s through to our contemporary age of computers and virtuality. Particularly important to her study are three story lines:

     

    The first centers on how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded. The second story concerns how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years following World War II. The third, deeply implicated with the first two, is the unfolding story of how a historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman. (2, original emphases)

     

    Defining the posthuman as a point of view that has predominantly stressed information patterns over materiality, Hayles uses her advanced degrees in both chemistry and English literature to weave a coherent account of the posthuman that unites the disciplines of science and the humanities. How We Became Posthuman is a highly intelligent and lucid analysis of the posthuman condition that, by re-inserting embodiment into the equation, succeeds in offering a viable alternative to dangerous fantasies of disembodiment.

     

    The impetus for this project, what Hayles calls a “six-year odyssey” (2), was her reading of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Struck numb by Moravec’s future vision of human consciousness extracted from the biological and downloaded into the synthetic, Hayles was disturbed to find the same message enacted in multiple venues: Norbert Wiener’s suggestion in the 1950s that “it was theoretically possible to telegraph a human being” (1); the matter transporter technology in the original Star Trek which reduced the body to atoms speeding through space; molecular biology treating “information as the essential code the body expresses” (1); Marvin Minsky’s proposition that human memories will eventually be extracted and transported onto computer disk; and, finally, the “bodiless exultation” of cyberspace popularized in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Resisting the Moravecian rapture of disembodiment, How We Became Posthuman veers away from this fantasy by demonstrating that disembodiment was not an inevitability in the rise of cybernetics and, as a result, the current emphasis upon disembodiment is only one avenue available to the posthuman. For Hayles, this text is an attempt to address an information/materiality hierarchy that often privileges the former over the latter and to recuperate a vision of the embodied posthuman:

     

    If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (5)

     

    In her analysis of the history of cybernetics, Hayles divides the development of this discourse into three waves. The first wave involves an analysis of the Josiah Macy Foundation conferences, held during the 1940s and 1950s, that gave rise to the field of cybernetics. In her analysis, she demonstrates that amidst the cacophony of voices attempting to come to terms with information theory, one important battle was taking place: homeostasis vs. reflexivity. The homeostasis “camp,” epitomized by figures such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and John von Neumann, focused on maintaining the neutrality of the scientific observer. By removing the observer from the information system, complex mathematical equations were used to define “information” as an entity separate from any material instantiation: “[Information] would be calculated as the same value regardless of the contexts in which it was embedded, which is to say, they divorced it from meaning. In context, this was an appropriate and sensible decision. Taken out of context, the definition allowed information to be conceptualized as if it were an entity that can flow unchanged between different material substrates…” (53-54, original emphases). Donald MacKay, a British researcher, championed the importance of reflexivity and argued that the Shannon-Wiener approach was “selective information” wherein information is “calculated by considering the selection of message elements from a set” (55). MacKay’s approach, endorsed by others, was dubbed “structural information” and took into account the receiver of information: “Structural information indicates how selective information is to be understood; it is a message about how to interpret a message–that is, it is a metacommunication” (55). By incorporating an embodied presence into the system, MacKay was interested in developing an information theory that took into account the meaning of information. Bristling at Shannon’s interpretation of information as a series of “subjective probabilities” (54), MacKay’s approach to information theory was firmly grounded in embodiment; however, homeostasis received the scientific nod because of the extreme difficulty of quantifying reflexivity: “To achieve quantification, a mathematical model was needed for the changes that a message triggered in the receiver’s mind” (56). The difficulty of coming up with just such a model explains why MacKay’s approach “continued to be foundational for the British school of information theory, [while] in the United States the Shannon-Wiener definition of information, not MacKay’s, became the industry standard” (56).

     

    The most prominent figure to emerge from the Macy conferences was, of course, Norbert Wiener, who became known as the father of cybernetics. Remapping the human body as an informational pattern, Wiener, according to Hayles, still sought to retain liberal humanist control. Consequently, Hayles underlines a fundamental tension as Wiener’s version of cybernetics, expanded beyond the scientific disciplines, threatened to position the subject as a powerless by-product of intricate micro- and macrosystems. Should cybernetics be expanded beyond the scientific disciplines, it could reduce “the individual to a connective membrane with no control over desires and with no ability to derive pleasure from them” (111). Wiener’s insistence that cybernetics not be used in non-scientific disciplines demonstrates to Hayles that he was fully aware of the tragic implications for the liberal humanist subject of a cybernetics taken too far. Although he did his best to contain cybernetics, Hayles notes that this restraint was inevitably futile as not even “the father of a discipline can single-handedly control what cybernetics signifies when it propagates through the culture by all manner of promiscuous couplings” (112).

     

    In the second wave of cybernetics, during the 1960s, Hayles notes a gradual mutation of ideas, not a radical break with the past. Cybernetics developed as a “seriation,” a shift wherein the old is gradually replaced with new concepts. The key motif of the first wave, homeostasis, becomes what Hayles terms a “skeumorph” for the second wave. In other words, homeostasis is no longer a key concept for the second wave but performs “the work of a gesture or an allusion used to authenticate new elements in the emerging constellation of reflexivity” (17). In this second wave, homeostasis was displaced and a fresh group of scientists, notably Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, emerged as the principal proponents of reflexivity.

     

    For Hayles, Heinz von Foerster is the transitional figure who ushered in the shift from the first wave to the second wave of cybernetics. As the editor of the Macy conference papers, von Foerster became interested in exploring manners by which the observer could be re-inserted into the cybernetic system. While von Foerster may have ushered in this next stage, Humberto Maturana and (albeit later) Francisco Varela were responsible for bringing it to maturation. Central to the reflexivity of the second wave is the notion of “autopoiesis,” theorized predominantly by Maturana. In the autopoietic view, the methods by which an individual observes a system are inevitably implicated in the system from the outset. Studying the sensory receptions of a frog, Maturana demonstrated that the reflexivity of the frog and its environment causes the frog to develop an observatory ability (e.g., ability to see flies for food) specific to the frog species; in other words, a frog sees a frog world and not a wolf world, elephant world, or human world. This construction of reality holds true for human perceptual abilities as “[w]e do not see a world ‘out there’ that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. The environment merely triggers changes determined by the system’s own structural properties. Thus the center of interest for autopoiesis shifts from the cybernetics of the observed system to the cybernetics of the observer” (11, original emphasis). While not willing to abandon completely the homeostatic structure, Maturana reinserts embodiment into the information system by relying upon “structural coupling,” which reasons that “[a]ll living organisms must be structurally coupled to their environments to continue living: humans, for example, have to breathe air, drink water, eat food” (138).

     

    Although this new phase of cybernetics brings embodiment back into the equation, Hayles is quick to point out that the key problem with Maturana’s theory is the difficulty of factoring in mutation and evolution. For Maturana, autopoiesis is a closed system that Hayles cannot fully embrace: “The very closure that gives autopoietic theory its epistemological muscle also limits the theory, so that it has a difficult time accounting for dynamic interactions that are not circular in their effects” (147). Hayles rightly questions the applicability of a theory that is unable to account for mutations; furthermore, while she supports Maturana’s re-insertion of embodiment, she questions a system that relegates consciousness to a feedback mechanism rather than the individual’s physical and linguistic interaction with other embodiments: “The grounding assumptions for individuality shift from self-possession to organizational closure and the reflexivity of a system recursively operating on its own representations” (149). Despite her support of Maturana’s attempts to factor embodiment back into the cybernetic system, Hayles is dissatisfied with the structural limitations of autopoiesis and wants to ensure that autonomy is not the price paid for embodiment.

     

    The third wave of cybernetics comprises our contemporary age dominated by cyberspace, virtualities, and the competition between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. Like von Foerster before him, Francisco Varela is the transitional figure from the second to the third wave. Varela’s break from Maturana and his shift into exploring the possibilities of Artificial Life indicate the move of cybernetics into the realm of virtual technologies. Departing from the historical overview of cybernetics, the last few chapters in How We Became Posthuman display the complexity of Hayles’s insights and are her finest work. “The Materiality of Informatics” is an astute analysis and is exceptional in its positioning of the posthuman on the boundary of body/embodiment. In other words, Hayles proposes that the posthuman can live in the splice separating oppositional terms rather than choosing sides. The tension between the body and embodiment comes forth in the dialectic of inscription/incorporation. Like the body, inscription is normative “and abstract, in the sense that it is usually considered as a system of signs operating independently of any particular manifestation” (198). Conversely, incorporation is a “practice such as a good-bye wave [that] cannot be separated from its embodied medium, for it exists as such only when it is instantiated in a particular hand making a particular kind of gesture” (198). Rather than choosing inscription/body vs. incorporation/embodiment, however, Hayles recognizes that both sets of “being” are not mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, interdependent. Living in the splice enables new configurations of the posthuman that offer the alternative to the Moravecian disembodiment that Hayles finds so unappealing and dangerous: “The recursivities that entangle inscription with incorporation, the body with embodiment, invite us to see these polarities not as static concepts but as mutating surfaces that transform one another…. Starting from a model emphasizing polarities, then, we have moved toward a vision of interactions both pleasurable and dangerous, creatively dynamic and explosively transformative” (220).

     

    As I noted earlier, Hayles possesses advanced degrees in both chemistry and English literature; she offsets each wave of cybernetics with specific novels from the science fiction (SF) repertoire. “The scientific texts,” she writes, “often reveal, as literature cannot, the foundational assumptions that gave theoretical scope and artifactual efficacy to a particular approach. The literary texts often reveal, as scientific work cannot, the complex cultural, social, and representational issues tied up with conceptual shifts and technological innovations” (24). Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) is the literary parallel for the first wave of cybernetics and it explores the implications for the body that cybernetics heralds. “Limbo,” writes Hayles, “is a staging of the complex dynamics between cyborg and literary bodies. As such, it demonstrates that neither body will remain unchanged by the encounter” (130).The analysis of Limbo is quite thorough in its exploration of the anxieties that parallel Wolfe and Wiener. Wolfe’s novel touches on amputations, prosthetics, warfare, gender, and sexual politics, and Hayles links these diverse issues to cybernetics with some success. The first half of the chapter flows from Wiener to Wolfe with relatively minimal effort. Midway through, however, as Hayles begins to address gender, the chapter loses its focus somewhat and comes across as stylistically choppy; it is almost as if Hayles has taken two essays on Limbo and amalgamated them into one.

     

    Hayles chooses several of Philip K. Dick’s novels as representative texts for the second wave of cybernetics. Like the reflexivity scientists, Dick chose to take into full account the position of the observer and, by modifying the information system, the boundaries of “human,” “body,” “subjectivity,” and “reality” are all called into question. His 1969 novel Ubik brilliantly explores this problematic as Dick never completely identifies for the reader just who is and who is not in the system. Reality in Ubik is, as Hayles’s chapter title indicates, turned inside out. Complicating this question of reality, however, is the interrogation of the nature of humanity illustrated in the gender politics running through several of his novels. “Dick,” Hayles writes, “is drawn to cybernetic themes because he understands that cybernetics radically destabilizes the ontological foundations of what counts as human. The gender politics he writes into his novels illustrate the potent connections between cybernetics and contemporary understandings of race, gender, and sexuality” (24). The roles of the “schizoid android” (161) and the “dark-haired girl” become central to a deeper understanding of how Dick engaged gender issues in his novels and how he saw cybernetics testing the ontological boundaries of reality. In Hayles’s reading, the gender politics of Dick’s work are more structurally coherent than those in Wolfe’s. The reason that this essay is more coherent may have to do with the number of texts available to Hayles for her analysis. Unlike the chapter on Limbo which was confined to one novel, this section moves through a variety of Dick’s texts. This multiple sampling from one of the most prolific (SF) authors of English literature gives the reader a better sense of cybernetics in the 1960s and gives the chapter a much stronger impact than the one on Limbo.

     

    Hayles hits her stride in the shift from Dick to the cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk phase of her study. The growth and ubiquity of cyberspace and virtuality owe a great deal to Gibson’s seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. The novel introduced two important concepts: a disembodied point-of-view (which Hayles calls the “pov”) that allows the user to circulate in the computer matrix without the constraints of a physical shell; second, the matrix itself, cyberspace, which is defined in Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination” (51) but misquoted by Hayles as a “consensual illusion” (36). Since Neuromancer,2 the possibilities of this new form of technological (dis)embodiment have opened the door to new expressions of subjectivity. Especially important is replacing the “floating signifier” with the new “flickering signifier”: “[Information technologies] fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies created what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language” (30, original emphasis). The flickering signifier is a conceptual framework rife with possibilities for exploring the subjectivities that virtuality engenders and, as the world becomes increasingly on-line, will no doubt play an important role in future configurations of embodiment/body and inscription/incorporation.

     

    While her analysis of Neuromancer may be left wanting (see Endnote [2]), Hayles succeeds better in her use of SF to demonstrate that posthumanism should be more appropriately termed posthumanisms. In this respect her arguments are both engaging and astute. Using the semiotics of virtuality to explore the plurality of posthumanism, Hayles constructs a semiotic square of presence/absence and randomness/pattern upon which four key novels are placed: Blood Music (Greg Bear),[3] Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers), Terminal Games (Cole Perriman), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). On one axis, “Blood Music asks, ‘What if humans were taken over by their component parts, functioning now as conscious entities themselves?’ Terminal Games asks the complementary question, ‘What if humans were made to function as if they were components of another entity?’” (251). Similarly, on a separate axis, Galatea 2.2 asks “‘What if a computer behaved like a person?’” while Snow Crash contemplates “‘What if people were made to behave like computers?’” (251). In a nutshell, all four books struggle with the same question: “when the human meets the posthuman, will the encounter be for better or for worse?” (281). Working her way through the codings in these novels, Hayles demonstrates that it is “evident that there is no consensus on what the posthuman portends, in part because how the posthuman is constructed and imagined varies so widely. What the topology [reveals] is not so much an answer to a deep question of how the human and the posthuman should be articulated together as the complexity of the contexts within which that question is being posed” (251).

     

    The only major difficulty with How We Became Posthuman concerns the issue of political agency. While Hayles does succeed in re-addressing embodiment, the term itself remains fairly isolated. Put another way, embodiment is a concept that Hayles identifies as parallelling the body; yet, it remains distanced throughout this text from the signification of bodily markers such as race or gender. While the embodied posthuman prompts new modes of thinking about humans and technology, there is minimal in-depth exploration of the gendered or racially embodied posthuman. While Hayles does an excellent job in exploring cybernetics, bodily markers remain conspicuously beneath the surface.[4] The reader may ask, “Now that embodiment is back in the picture, where does posthumanism go regarding gender issues? race issues?” Hayles seems content to leave the future of the posthuman in the hands of SF authors (all male in this text) whose novels demonstrate some blind spots towards these self-same questions. While some may argue that Hayles has laid the groundwork and it is now up to successive generations of scholars to plot the course of posthumanism, this fallback position feels inadequate. How We Became Posthuman contains a large portion of revamped and expanded essays that have appeared in earlier incarnations from 1990 onwards. While this is certainly normal in academic publishing (and not to be balked at), it would have been helpful and thought-provoking to see her project her hopeful vision of the posthuman in addition to expanding it.

     

    Inaccuracies regarding the SF literature aside, How We Became Posthuman is an insightful, thought-provoking, and important work in the ongoing development of the posthuman; it succeeds in displacing the fantasy of disembodiment of the “Moravecians” by re-inserting embodiment into the posthuman condition. The posthuman, as Hayles defines it at the beginning of the text, is a point of view (as opposed to the disembodied pov of Neuromancer) that, “grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information… [,] offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines” (287). While it leaves the issue of political agency relatively untapped, How We Became Posthuman redefines the terms of the posthuman debate. Hayles presents her dream to oppose the Moravecian nightmare. She demonstrates that the anti-human vision of the posthuman is not an always already entity and, as such, “we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves” (291).

     

    Notes

     

    1. Embodiment is not to be confused with the body as Hayles makes a concerted effort to distinguish the two terms. The body for Hayles is a construct that “is always normative relative to some set of criteria” (196) whereas embodiment is “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with ‘the body,’ however that normalized concept is understood” (196). In fact, embodiment is a disruptive condition that is in perpetual tension with the body:

     

    Experiences of embodiment, far from existing apart from culture, are always already imbricated within it. Yet because embodiment is individually articulated, there is also at least an incipient tension between it and hegemonic cultural constructs. Embodiment is thus inherently destabilizing with respect to the body, for at any time this tension can widen into a perceived disparity. (197)

     

    2. While the pov and cyberspace certainly evoke the sense of disembodiment, critical discussion of Neuromancer, including that of Hayles in this text, may overlook the ambivalence Gibson expresses regarding the notion of disembodiment. While this is not the place to begin an analysis of Neuromancer, it should be noted that Gibson does not wholeheartedly advocate disembodiment. Case makes the decision to forgo techno-transcendental utopia with Linda Lee in favor of the “meat” at the terminal. Similarly, the Dixie Flatline, a personality construct, is bothered that nothing bothers him/it and requests techno-euthanasia: “‘This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing’” (107).

     

    3. Although Hayles does weave together a taut semiotic square, she does demonstrate some carelessness regarding her literary texts. Aside from the Neuromancer misquote, she incorrectly summarizes the plot of Blood Music when she states that Virgil Ulam swallows his biochips (252), whereas he actually injects them into his bloodstream (Bear 24).

     

    4. The first overt appearance of gender takes place in a wonderful, albeit brief, mention of Janet Freed, the woman responsible for transcribing the Macy Conferences into journal format: “On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied, that messages don’t flow by themselves, and that epistemology isn’t a word floating through the thin, thin air until it is connected up with incorporating practices” (83).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: ACE Books, 1986.
    • Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: ACE Books, 1984.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

     

  • If You Build It, They Will Come

    John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis.London: Routledge, 1998.

     

     

     

     

    1.      Last year I found myself staggering down the very long sidewalk of the Las Vegas Strip in a somewhat disoriented state, an Antipodean on his first trip to the United States. There I was, during the middle of a scorching Las Vegas July afternoon, foolishly trying to walk from Circus Circus to the Luxor Hotel–a case of culture schlock perhaps? While this moment of pedestrian delusion was partially attributable to the intense desert heat, it was no doubt helped along by some of the “delirious” sights I passed on my foot journey. The structures facing on to the Strip, such as the extraordinary New York New York casino-hotel with its giant replicas of Manhattan buildings and associated landmarks (Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge) neatly wrapped up in a rollercoaster ribbon, present themselves to the contemporary would-be flaneur like purpose-built entries in a giant VR encyclopedia devoted to the subject of the postindustrial/postmodern city. Celebrated urban critic Mike Davis recently described the city as “the brightest star in the firmament of postmodernism” (54),1 and indeed Las Vegas has long provided theorist-tourists with a productive stomping ground for engaging with postmodern urban forms, experiences, and structures, which manifest themselves in this place with a peculiar luminosity and intensity.

       

       

    2.      Among the first to “discover” this exemplary postmodern landscape were the architects Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, whose seminal manifesto Learning From Las Vegas (1972) provided the blueprint for a number of ongoing debates on postmodern aesthetics and the built environment. Almost three decades, however, have passed since that book was published, and Las Vegas itself now exudes quite a different kind of postmodernity. Regardless of whether you prefer the older and seedier Vegas or the more recent “Disneyfied” version, the city continues to exert a strong attraction with new residents, tourists, and cultural theorists (myself included in the latter of these two categories), who continue to travel there in ever increasing numbers. However, as Mike Davis has slyly noted, the philosophers who celebrate Las Vegas as a postmodern wonderland–presumably he is referring to Baudrillard?–don’t actually have to live there and deal with the city’s less appealing aspects. It’s an important critical point, yet as John Hannigan’s suggestive and welcome new book, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis, indicates, there is in fact no need for postmodern philosophers to live in Las Vegas because the chances are that many of the urban trends spectacularly visible there will be probably coming to a city near those philosophers soon (if they haven’t already done so). Centrally, Hannigan proposes that we are witnessing a new phase in the development of consumer societies: the introduction of an “infrastructure of casinos, megaplex cinemas, themed restaurants, simulation theaters, interactive theme rides and virtual reality arcades which collectively promise to change the face of leisure in the postmodern metropolis” (1). According to Hannigan, this development trend, which one finds in a heightened form in Las Vegas, will become a fully-fledged global phenomenon as we enter the new millennium. Certainly my own delirious pomo walk on the Las Vegas Strip was not framed just by an experience of the now “clichéd” tropes of simulation, hyperreality, and time-space compression, but also mediated by my own experience of a new casino-entertainment complex that had recently opened a hemisphere away in my home city of Melbourne.

       

       

    3.      Yet while Las Vegas may epitomize many of the elements of this new entertainment infrastructure in the city and is a regular reference point in Hannigan’s book (a pre-redevelopment image of downtown’s Fremont Street graces the cover), the neon capital is but just one stop on a much more ambitious urban tour which ranges across a large number of North American cities and also does a quick comparative circuit of select cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim. At its best, then, Hannigan’s book sketches out a complex differential history of a new kind of “uneven development” in which postindustrial cities are being both reconstructed and trying to differentiate themselves as centers or “hubs” of leisure and consumption.

       

       

    4.      In his introduction Hannigan defines “fantasy city” according to the following six features: it is organized around a marketable theme; it is aggressively branded; it operates day and night; it features what might be termed modular components; it is solipsistic in so far as it ignores surrounding neighborhoods; and it is postmodern. These features then prompt Hannigan to set up some central questions and problematics (some of which seem more useful than others):

      Are fantasy cities the culmination of a long-term trend in which private space replaces public space? Do these new entertainment venues further entrench the gap between the haves and have-nots in the "dual city"? Are they the nuclei around which new downtown identities form or do they simply accelerate the destruction of local vernaculars and communities? And, finally, do they constitute thriving urban cauldrons out of which flows the elixir to reverse the decline of downtown areas or are they danger signs that the city itself is rapidly becoming transformed into a hyperreal consumer commodity? (7)

      This last question is a pivotal one, for the author frames his overall inquiry within a general thesis (to which I shall return) that fantasy city is “the end-product of a long-standing cultural contradiction in American society between the middle-class desire for experience and their parallel reluctance to take risks, especially those which involve contact with the ‘lower orders’ in cities” (7).

       

       

    5.      As a means of plotting the trajectory behind contemporary manifestations of that “cultural contradiction,” Fantasy City strategically opens with a three-chapter section on the historical context of entertainment’s role in the development of the American city from the late nineteenth century to the present day, particularly as it manifests itself in spatial terms (downtown life versus that of the suburbs). Thus in his first chapter, Hannigan discusses the so-called “golden age” of urban entertainment that invigorated downtown city life in North America between the 1890s and 1920s and that provides a possible historical precedent for the contemporary emergence of “fantasy city.” Here the author traces the construction of the notion of a then new commercial leisure culture in the city that while representing itself as “public”–in the sense of it being democratic and affordable to all–still managed to maintain rigid socio-spatial barriers along class, race, and gender lines. This chapter seems especially important because it challenges nostalgic laments by those contemporary urban critics who yearn for an often idealized public realm. The second chapter in this section, entitled “Don’t go out tonight,” moves on to chart the slow and gradual decline of the popularity of central city entertainment precincts from the 1950s onwards, a decline connected to widespread suburbanization and the evacuation of downtown areas by the middle classes. Finally, in the third chapter, Hannigan charts a remarkable return of entertainment developments to the central city. This return begins in the 1970s with the building of downtown malls and festival markets and eventually consolidates and expands into “fantasy city” in the 1990s thanks to a proliferation of “new” forms and technologies such as themed restaurants, sports-entertainment complexes, I-Max theaters, and virtual reality arcades.

       

       

    6.      Having set up this useful historical context, Hannigan directs our attention to the attractions of contemporary Urban Entertainment Developments (UEDs) in a section on “Landscapes of Pleasure” which contains two chapters. In the first of these chapters Hannigan tries to outline the appeal of fantasy city to consumers and argues that this can be summarized in terms of four categories: “the siren song of seductive technology; a new source of ‘cultural capital’; a prime provider of experiences which satisfy our desire for ‘riskless risks’; and a form of ‘affective ambiance’” (10). The author also asks (in a rather insubstantial one and a half pages) how these new environments stack up as sites for the production of identities and lifestyles. The second chapter in this section takes a different tack by highlighting the vital “synergies” or convergences in fantasy city between previously segregated and distinct leisure/consumer practices such as shopping, entertainment, dining, and education.

       

       

    7.      This second section offers some tantalizing insights but is, I would suggest, a bit thinly spread in its coverage (relative to the other two sections of the book). While the material that Hannigan covers in this section is engaging, cogent, and relevant, it does seem to be somewhat uncertainly situated methodologically speaking. In particular, the structure of the book has much to indirectly say about the difficult interdisciplinary challenges faced by anyone writing in regard to the slippery signifier of “the postmodern city.” Studies of the city are going through a boom phase at the moment, riding high on a surge of interest in the problematics of space and place. That interest is spread across a diverse range of disciplines, a number of which feature in Routledge’s subject description on the back of Hannigan’s book: “Urban studies, Sociology, Urban geography, Cultural studies, Tourism.” Despite its invitation to interdisciplinarity, however, the style of the book will, I suspect, appeal more to those adhering to the traditions of the first two of those fields. In other words, while the subtitle of his book suggests an equal division of inquiry into “pleasure” and “profit” (which seems to be roughly analogous to saying “consumption” and “production”), Hannigan’s emphasis tends to fall rather too heavily on the production side of the equation. In this regard, then, Hannigan’s book seems to fit most into a tradition of urban analysis that is articulated in such classic works as David Harvey’s Postmodernism: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (1990), itself a pivotal work much concerned with “the postmodern and the city,” and that while outlining a complex relationship between base and superstructure ultimately posits the latter as a reflection or symptom of the former.

       

       

    8.      Thus the final and lengthiest section, where Hannigan flexes his urban-sociological muscles to chart contemporary developments regarding entertainment and the city, stands out as the strongest and most coherent. Here the scope of the study and its considerable empirical evidence make the arguments particularly compelling. At the same time, in these latter chapters a potentially tedious reliance on a barrage of reports and statistics concerning the ownership of various developments, their building costs, and economic performance threatens to halt the momentum and flow of Hannigan’s argument. Fortunately, however, some relief is available in the form of an often illuminating series of mini-case studies of about one to three pages that are scattered throughout the book. For example, one such section discusses the failure of the Freedomland U.S.A. theme park in the 1960s, another charts the failure of a public-private partnership, while another considers the effect of the introduction of legalized gambling on the community of Gilpin County. These case studies engagingly ground some of the broader issues and trends with which Hannigan grapples.

       

       

    9.      In this third and final section of Fantasy City, Hannigan opens with a chapter outlining some the key corporate and entrepreneurial players (including the coalition of entertainment conglomerates and real-estate developers) in the leisure development game. This discussion dovetails smoothly with the following chapter, which addresses the increasing importance of private-public partnerships and focuses in particular on sports complexes. In the opening of this chapter, the author quotes the famous invitation from the baseball film Field of Dreams (1989): “If you build it, they will come.” While for my taste Hannigan may have not have explained this enough in terms of why consumers take up such an invitation, and the different kinds of value they might produce or experience in relation to these sites, he certainly offers a compelling and informative analysis of why city authorities find themselves under increasing pressure to “join forces with a corporate savior” in order to build projects that will hopefully “constitute an economic miracle”(129). How often, asks Hannigan, do taxpayers really get a reasonable return for their subsidies or regulatory concessions, what are the risks, and who is really “calling the shots” in this sort of urban development?

       

       

    10.      Hannigan then turns to Las Vegas and its transformation from a seedy mixture “of neon, glitter, blackjack and organized crime… [to a] booming entertainment center” (10). Here, he helpfully contrasts Vegas’s economic miracle with other more troubled gambling developments and teases out the implications and consequences of the recognition of gambling as the entertainment equivalent of a cash crop for economically struggling cities. Following this, in a chapter on the leisure revolution taking place “off-shore,” Hannigan takes us on a quick tour around a number of cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim. While his attempt to move beyond a North American focus is admirable, it is undermined by its whistle-stop nature and can’t really do justice to the specific entertainment histories of the countries. Chief among those differences is the spatialization of cities along class lines. Hannigan acknowledges this when he notes that unlike the American case, “the Asian middle class don’t regard a trip into the central city as a safari into a zone of crime and danger” (185). To his credit, this leads him to conclude that despite “the considerable American content of these new urban entertainment destinations… they are by no means carbon copies” (186).

       

       

    11.      Finally, in his concluding chapter on the future of fantasy city, Hannigan argues that the civic worth of urban entertainment developments hinges upon the ability of urban policy makers to be “proactive rather than reactive” participants in costly projects. In this same chapter Hannigan also reiterates his central argument that driving the production of fantasy city is the American middle-class desire “for predictability and security [that] has for a long time spilled over into the domain of leisure and entertainment” (190). I wonder, though, whether this is the most interesting conclusion to be drawn from the diverse range of case studies that the author presents to the reader. It appears to me that this component of Hannigan’s argument is an unnecessary generalization–must these new urban entertainment developments be grouped together as one coherent form that is constituted in relation to the motives of such a specific “public”? Perhaps it would be equally productive to explore how specific sites constitute themselves in order to attract “mixed” markets–and how and why, do different socially marked groups decide a certain site is worth patronizing (something that Hannigan’s studies admittedly attempt to do). In Melbourne, where I live, for example, one of the most interesting things about the new central city Crown Casino Entertainment Complex (the largest structure of its kind in the southern hemisphere) is precisely the way it tries to negotiate interactions between a necessarily diverse customer base. For example, while the “high rollers” and “whales” as they are known in gambling parlance may remain invisible thanks to private gaming rooms and private elevators, there is still a significant blend of middle-class, professional-managerial-class, and working class patrons in the “public” part of the casino. In terms of American developments, and particularly that of Las Vegas, Hannigan’s work encourages me to wonder about the distinctions that mark the different Vegas casino venues, and the question of who goes there versus say the more “low-rent” gambling town of nearby Laughlin on the Colorado River. Put another way, how do the operators of “fantasy city” attempt to manage the social production of difference at these sites and how do consumers negotiate those management strategies? “Build it and they will come” intones the mantra, but as a cultural theorist with an interest in the productivity of consumption I wanted to know more; specifically, who will come, why do they come, and how do you keep them coming back once they have already visited the place? These reservations aside, John Hannigan’s book is to be heartily welcomed as an excellent starting point–setting up as it does a stimulating range of questions–for the investigation of a topic that deserves to be foregrounded in studies of the city, entertainment, postmodernism, and urban culture.

      Department of English with Cultural Studies
      University of Melbourne
      b.morris@english.unimelb.edu.au       [an error occurred while processing this directive]

      Copyright © 1999 Brian Morris NOTE: Readers may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. In addition, subscribers and members of subscribed institutions may use the entire work for any internal noncommercial purpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual’s personal use, distribution of this article outside of a subscribed institution without express written permission from either the author or the Johns Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.

      Notes

      1. In this same chapter Davis argues that Las Vegas is in fact just an exaggerated version of Los Angeles.

      Works Cited

       

      Davis, Mike. “Las Vegas Versus Nature.” Reopening the American West. Ed. Hal K. Rothman. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1998. 53-73.

      Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

      Izenour, Steven, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi. Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1972.

  • Prophecy and the Figure of the Reader in Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time

     

    James McCorkle

    mccorkle@epix.net

     

    The work of the contemporary experimental poet Susan Howe undertakes the formation as well as retrieval of a prophetic poetics. By shifting the attention from writer to reader there is a similar shift from prophet to prophesy, from the one who prophesies to the oracle’s graphesis–its condition for reading. Howe’s poetics underscores not only the importance of writing, but also the consequences of reading, and the necessity of developing a pluralistic, participatory–hence prophetic and visionary–modality of reading. Prophecy entails not an appropriation or consumption of the language nor the reversal, the swallowing up of ourselves. Rather, prophecy agitates the space of language: it opens rifts, insists on waywardness, to be unhoused in and by language.

     

    Howe signals the importance of prophecy as a process of pre-figurement and indicates her own engagement with that process. The prophetic word, like the poetic, signals something coming, the advent or arrival of event, effect, or experience. Writing in The Birth-mark of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, Howe states, “this captivity narrative is both a microcosm of colonial imperialist history and a prophecy of our own contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness” (B 89). Howe’s prophetic poetics, as exemplified by her Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, depends upon a retrieval and re-habitation of history and puts into question our position in history: “Collision or collusion with history” (S 33). History, arguably, possesses us; Howe offers a poetry that foregrounds the interpretive process by which we read our identities and positions within history.

     

    Howe’s poetry offers what Heidegger, in his Discourse on Thinking, would call an “openness to the mystery” [Offenheit für das Geheimnis]. Heidegger proposes a way of maintaining a meditative, not calculative, mode of thinking that involves a “releasement toward things” [Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen] implicitly informed by early German mysticism (54-55). Heidegger’s argument describes a comportment of being and thinking–that is, an interpretive process. Gerald Bruns explains:

     

    what happens in the hermeneutical experience is that we are placed in the open, in the region of the question.... The hermeneutical experience in this respect is always subversive of totalization or containment... this means the openness of tradition to the future, its irreducibility to the library or museum or institutions of cultural transmission, its resistance to closure, its uncontainability within finite interpretations (tradition is not an archive). (8-9)

     

    This approach eschews any normative, disciplined method of exegesis.

     

    Contact with the otherness of history involves what Heidegger called in Identity and Difference the “step back” [der Schritt zurück] (59). Rather than the recuperation of old positions, by stepping back instead one faces an ainigma or dark saying: “it is not to be penetrated or laid open to view,” writes Bruns, “there is no way of shedding light on what it means in the sense of a content or message that can be conceptually retrieved” (69). This contact with history parallels Bruns’s description of poetry as the “renunciation of meaning as that which grasps and fixes, that which produces determinate objects” (106). Introducing Heidegger, particularly through Bruns’s inspired reading, gestures toward many of the concerns of Howe. Heidegger’s thinking on poetry insists upon poetry as the “giving up of refuge in the familiar or the same” (185) and “exposes us to that which manifests itself as alien and inaccessible the way… language speaks as that which withholds itself” (184). Poetry refuses to be mastered, nor does it master others–it remains outside control. Poetry, then, as exemplified by Howe’s work, becomes a language marked by extremity and crisis.1

     

    If poetry is this renunciation and estrangement, working against the unified and foundational, then we must confront a “re-visioning” of ourselves as readers, to use Adrienne Rich’s term (Rich 35), to pose the question what we read for, that is to pose the question of linguistic mastery. First published as a chapbook in 1987, Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, a representative text of hers, prophesies and acts as a radical didactic process. Readings that seek to provide a literal outline or narrative, such as those by Marjorie Perloff and Linda Reinfeld, quickly acknowledge the difficulty of such an endeavor: Perloff begins by attempting to trace a narrative–and indeed that is our first response as readers–but she quickly breaks off that line of exegesis and notes that not only “does Howe frequently decompose, transpose, and re-figure the word… she [also] consistently breaks down or, as John Cage would put it, ‘demilitarizes’ the syntax of her verbal units” (305). Reinfeld argues that “[t]o the degree that language makes sense, to the extent that it forges connections, it risks falsity and bad faith: it becomes regimental, the enemy. Only those chosen are saved and only the poet–specifically, the poet set apart by a capacity for visionary experience–can hope to emerge from chaos with something like self-possession (‘My voice, drawn from my life, belongs to no one else’). As we move toward meaning, ‘deep so deep my narrative’, we move into a language so fluid that the rescue of reason becomes impossible” (140). The poem, in Reinfeld’s view, becomes an emptying of meaning and order from language and a movement toward innocence and renewal. By concluding that Howe’s poetry folds into the great Western cyclical myths, Reinfeld diminishes the localized displacements of order Howe explores simultaneously in a specific language and history. By casting the interpretive process into solitary communion, Reinfeld further undercuts Howe’s performative position as prophet, which has an implicit social role. Prophecy requires an audience: the source must have its seer, yet the seer must also have listeners.

     

    Perloff interjects a specific polemic in her argument by seeing in Howe’s text a rebuttal to the packaged sentiments of a workshop poem and the need to re-vision history in poetry. Such a reading does locate rifts and locates Howe in particular contexts and lineages–but it also pulls away from any hermeneutical consideration, which I think the poem brilliantly offers. Reinfeld suggests a recuperative reading: that we do move toward “meaning”–implying that there is a point or final destination and that “self-possession” can be attained. Though the sense of self is left unclear, there is implied a unity of self–a movement from chaos to light or enlightenment?–that the poem, in fact, swerves us away from. Indeed, Reinfeld falls prey to that “regimental” exegesis–the belief in a final dwelling of meaning–that she otherwise argues against. As useful as Perloff’s and Reinfeld’s readings are–and they are very useful, for they do overturn the charge that Howe’s poetry is elitist and nonsensical–they also point to the entrapments reading confronts and the difficulty of eluding those traps.

     

    The title, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, poses and exemplifies the difficulty of reading. “Articulation” is both linguistic practice as well as muscular kinesis. “Sound” implies not only vocality, but also safety and value, particularly in regard to financial risks, as well as a body of water and the plumbing of that depth (as Thoreau did, seeing the ruins beneath the water’s surface). “Forms” engages both as noun and verb. Lastly, “in time” suggests a border or margin, an extreme edge, a crisis averted. Howe presents the reader with a series of choices, not meaninglessness, but a series of choices whose reading will be dependent upon the cultural and historical positioning of the individual reader. Howe does not re-invoke the Emersonian ideal of the self-reliant individual, but re-visions the significance of that individual as mediated (or disciplined) by her or his culture.

     

    To read becomes a series of retrievals: Howe’s own reading of Dickinson’s poetry, particularly “My Life had Stood–a Loaded Gun,” brilliantly defines this process. To begin her discussion of Dickinson’s poem, Howe generates a list, “Possibilities”:

     

    My Life: A Soul Finding God.

     

    My Life: A Soul finding herself.

     

    My Life: A poet’s admiring heart born into voice by idealizing a precursor poet’s song.

     

    My Life: Dickinson herself, waiting in corners of neglect for Higginson to recognize her ability and help her to join the ranks of other published American poets.

     

    My Life: The American continent and its westward moving frontier. Two centuries of pioneer literature and myth has insistently compared the land to a virgin woman (bride and queen). Exploration and settlement were pictured in terms of masculine erotic discovery and domination of alluring / threatening feminine territory.

     

    My Life: The savage source of American myth.

     

    My Life: The United States in the grip of violence that threatened to break apart its original union.

     

    My Life: A white woman taken captive by Indians.

     

    My Life: A slave.

     

    My Life: An unmarried woman (Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw) waiting to be chosen (unidentified) by her Lover-husband-Owner (Edgar Linton).

     

    My Life: A frontiersman's gun. (MED 76-7)

     

    This list subverts the dominance of any single theory or interpretation: reading becomes inclusive; there is no authoritative reading. The anaphora my life fuses the poem’s phrase with the colloquial and autobiographical writing of “my life” as well as with Howe’s possessive title My Emily Dickinson and its various implications, from interpretation to reading to Howe’s own poetry. “My” marks not only possession but also the transfer of possession. This list does not attempt to provide a summation or an ordering, for if a poet “is to be true to vision and possibility, to the continuing exertion of vision’s power, then all the hierarchies and closures of criticism must be resisted,” writes John Taggart on Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (172). Howe’s reading of Dickinson, like her reading of Melville or Rowlandson, puts our versions of our selves, histories, and world into question. To read prophetically is to read against realization, not toward an indeterminacy, but, to invoke Wallace Stevens, in a state of imaginative inquiry of the evidence or the real.2

     

    Texts allow memory and limit memory: in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the opening documents seek to limit memory, to sum it up and thereby dismiss or contain memory. The first is Howe’s prose description of some of the conditions in May 1676 that led to the rout of English force, including the clergyman Hope Atherton, on the Connecticut River. At its conclusion, Howe asks, “In culture Hope is a name we give to women. Signifying desire, trust, promise, does her name prophetically engender pacification of the feminine?” (S 4). The second is an extract of a letter written a century later, seeming to discredit Atherton’s story. Placed in conjunction with Howe’s description and her concluding questions, we see a repetition of history and a failure to inquire of history; this is underscored by the resonance of the date of the Falls Fight 1676.

     

    To unleash one memory is to release other voices, thus delimiting sources and origins. In her My Emily Dickinson, Howe states,

     

    Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century. (MED 51)

     

    To re-order the “forward process of reading” is a central element in Howe’s poetics and visionary reading. Slowing the consumption of text, resisting the emptying of language and the packaging of intellect and imagination becomes the task of the poet, then, in turn, of readers. As prophecy, Howe’s text re-orders our sense of time by stepping back, or re-visioning, so as to enter “an old text from a new critical direction,” which for women is “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (Rich 35). Prophecy locates one in history: Howe inserts herself into the lineage of Rowlandson, Dickinson, and Melville as well as letting the reading of one moment–Hope Atherton’s wanderings and rejection–prefigure, supplement, and reveal another cultural and historical moment.

     

    Howe’s reading of Dickinson is a radical didactic, for in it she demonstrates the degree to which our reading of Dickinson has been policed, confined, and violently pacified. Her demonstration works as instruction, yet it does not assume the voice of master or authority; instead, the voice is relative yet possessed, as indicated by the word “my” in the title My Emily Dickinson. With each word, each of Howe’s texts necessitates choice, as the opening segment from the second section, “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time demonstrates:

     

    Prest try to set after grandmother
revived by and laid down left ly
little distant each other and fro
Saw digression hobbling driftwood
forage two rotted beans & etc.
Redy to faint slaughter story so
Gone and signal through deep water
Mr. Atherton's story Hope Atherton  (S 6)

     

    As many readers note, the opening word “Prest,” plays upon soundings of oppressed, pressed, impressed, and the sense of set after. However, read with the segment’s final line, the word suggests an urgency in maintaining an identity as an inviolate object–an “I”–rather than as a subject: the pres–sure of being (still) Hope Atherton, of being not reduced to someone’s (Mr. Atherton’s) story. The risk is to become story and then become marginalia, a curiosity discovered among one’s cluttered papers. Although this segment is most transparent, for the narrative of ambush, escape, and survival are apparent, so is the fragmentation and decomposition of the word. This is most apparent with ly. As Perloff notes, this little suffix can join with any number of words and works as well as a decomposition of lie, itself an ambiguous word (305). The reader must address each word as a signal coming “through deep water,” hence wavered, distorted, and transmuted.

     

    Hope Atherton becomes a mirror for ourselves as readers. Harried both by Indians–in their war for survival–and the British militia, he is the prey of military actions. What he has seen must be confined, obliterated, or rendered silent. Only a certain reading is allowed, hence Hope Atherton is ostracized from his community, who do not believe his story. Our condition as readers then is resolved by and reflects our condition as a community. “Mythology,” writes Howe, “reflects a region’s reality” (MED 43). As the poem continues with Hope Atherton’s wanderings, the lines, writes Peter Quartermain on another of Howe’s poems but applicable here, “seem to register a process of perception and thought subject perpetually and continuously to re-casting, re-seeing, re-vision. They register a process of cogitating, meditating, and exploring an old enigma, endemic perhaps to all human culture but especially acute in the history of New England, perpetually evoked and invoked by the complex of the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the cultivated and the wild: The relations between the real and the visionary” (187). Quartermain’s comment, echoing Heidegger’s proposal of stepping back and exploring the enigmatic or the otherness of history, emphasizes the local in terms of geography and language. Quartermain, however, affirms a binary structure that Howe, in her visionary capacity, seeks to avoid. For instance, Howe does not negate the opposition of “the cultivated and the wild” but rather finds it inadequate. That we allow language to fail by re-enacting such dualisms, indeed by becoming through our words purely oppositional, demonstrates our crisis.

     

    Howe does not accommodate the reader: Atherton’s wanderings become our own as we construct readings–and question their foundations–from the gatherings of words. Words reveal their localness, habitation, or sited-ness:

     

    scow aback din

flicker skaeg ne

barge quagg peat

sieve catacomb

stint chisel sect  (S 10)

     

    In this ninth segment, with its fourth line crossed out but not erased, Atherton finds himself re-counting the miasma of his wanderings, yet we are drawn back to foundational words. For example, “ne” appears fractured and incomprehensible, yet it is an obsolete form for nephew, and more importantly, it is an archaic form of not, and part of the negative structure of neither… nor. It also serves as a homophone for knee, and so points to the kinetic qualities of language as well as Atherton’s flight.

     

    If we follow the Oxford English Dictionary, itself a lexicon of certain relations of history and power, “quagg,” or quag as the dictionary has it, is identified with marshy, boggy ground, is a descriptor for flabby, unsound flesh, and forms a verb, to submerge. Submerged in this quag is “skaeg,” which is not found in the O.E.D., but which is homophonically related to “quagg” as well as suggestive of the fracturing of American Indian languages, such as the Narraganset. Also, it prefigures–in regard to Howe’s work–and echoes Melville’s “Queequeg.” Emerging from dialects and perhaps onomatopoeic formations, as well as mutations of American Indian words, words such as “quagg” make their first recorded appearance, according to the O.E.D., just prior to Atherton’s wanderings and the early wars against the Indians typified by the Falls Fight. Hope Atherton’s vision, cast in the ambiguous outline of forest and syntax, is the hope-less destruction of wilderness and otherness: the cultivation of land and the harnessing of language. In the figure of Hope Atherton, Howe reads the consequences of Cartesian dualism: the exaggerated and hence distorted position of humans as fully distinguished and separated from nature and the further distinction between nature as a subject of theory and wilderness as perceived through experience.3 The Cartesian split between the human and nature parallels the schism between reader and writer, the text and the reading. The generation and textual as well as muscularly oral articulation of sound (forms) moves toward an eros or play of language, and away from normalizing distinctions and codes, away from the separation of body, cognition, and world.

     

    Are we then caught in a miasma–a defilement–of sound and meaning, or are we asked to interrogate the origins of words for the latent struggles of power and meaning? If the latter, then what of the seeming directive of the excised, but not removed “sieve catacomb”? A notation against the excavation of word-tombs? A notation against the impulse to “chisel” and “stint” words into tombs or “sects”? To “stint” a word, to stop its movement and flow, to assuage its pain, and the rupturing of instinct, is Hope Atherton’s fate: his vision of the forest, the violence unleashed, is stinted by his sect.

     

    Howe directs us to this close, demanding reading–and the realization that all readings will be stinted–through her circular constructions, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth sections. This is not a palindrome, but an articulation of sound, that is the pronouncement of movement. In the articulation of movement back-and-forth, oscillation, retrieval, and continuity become important rather than a shift to the symbolic ordering of Return and Organic Wholeness associated with the image of the circle. Reading the final words of section fourteen, “see step shot Immanence force to Mohegan,” which are reversed to become the first words of the next section as well as typographically compressed, connections between words are fluid. Yet “Immanence,” with its Dickinsonian capitalization, is destroyed. To lift a passage out and isolate it from the text is to risk perpetuating violence, and yet such is Howe’s own compositional method.

     

    The third section of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, “Taking the Forest,” is comprised of twenty-five segments composed primarily in declarative couplets. The highly stressed, compact lines never rupture as they do in “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings.” Instead these lines seem set as “Letters sent out in crystalline purity” (S 22). Hank Lazer helpfully suggests that in Howe’s writing there are

     

    several noteworthy lyricisms: A lyricism of "disturbance" (of syntax and the layout of the page), that concentrates attention on the individual word, or even the syllables or letters in a word, as well as the word's placement on the page; a lyricism of statement in which the "philosophical" or didactic also sings; and a lyricism of historical fact, acting as an image or epiphanic vortex, often intensified by its opposition to accepted or normative historical accounts. (63-4)

     

    Lazer’s “lyricism of statement” describes this third and final section. Single lines, a single couplet, or even a grouping of couplets often form an oracular meaning. In segment seven, one of two (the other being the sixth segment), which is composed in single lines not couplets, there is a tension between the line as isolated meaning or prophesy and the entire segment as narrative (a recapitulation of the Falls Fight):

     

    Shouting an offering

Messengers falter

Obedient children elder and ever

Lawless center

Scaffold places to sweep

unfocused future

Migratory path to massacre

Sharpshooters in history's apple-dark    
                               (S 22)

     

    Howe names the condition “Lawless center,” a cipher loosed from the draft of history, a rejection of that pleading Yeatsian vision in “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” That tightened circle of falcon and falconer, of unity (but also that celebrated predatory violence that sweeps through Yeats’s work), is the early American town’s green, that of stocks and “Scaffold places.”

     

    Howe offers a spiritual history that forms an ongoing prophecy: the twenty-second segment opens with the line “Latin ends and French begins” thus compressing the transformation of languages that coincides with the shift of power, the rise of the vernacular, and the nation-state. By compression–an exercise of violence itself–Howe is able to delineate the history of the taking of the forest:

     

    Caravels bending to windward

Crows fly low and straggling
Civilizations stray into custom

Struts structure luminous region
Purpose or want of purpose

Part of each kingdom of Possession

Only conceived can be seen
Original inventors off Stray

Alone in deserts of Parchment
Theoreticians of the Modern

--emending annotating inventing
World as rigorously related System

Pagan worlds moving toward destruction 
                                (S 35)

     

    Like Blake reading the already and always past, or Dickinson reading the Abstract and Luminous, Howe prophesies in what we know what we are becoming still. By moving toward prophecy, Howe eludes the claim of authorship. Heidegger’s description of poetry, that of the renunciation of linguistic mastery and an opening to language’s danger or mystery, informs Howe’s Hope Atherton. In every word, Howe implies at the poem’s conclusion, occurs the “Archaic presentiment of rupture” (S 38).

     

    In Howe’s poetry, the withdrawal of an identifiable authorial “I” re-emphasizes the demands placed upon the reader. Writing has ceased, but the act of interpretation continues. Howe’s work suggests her own reading–each text is never complete, each word a presentiment. Howe inserts herself into the canon through the interrogation of those texts (of Dickinson, Thoreau, Melville, Rowlandson), as Megan Williams argues, thus rescuing herself for posterity. As Williams notes, the reader of Howe’s texts, when faced with the blankness often surrounding the words, faces “the threat that words and literary stature can be reduced and written out of history” (110). Williams continues, arguing with acuity that the study of literary history in general does not acknowledge the choices individuals make in constructing chronologies so as to “create an ordered present that is a coherent continuation and conflation of our personal past” (121). When examining the prose sections that begin Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the work becomes a clear demonstration of the process Williams describes: Atherton–and his writing–are lost because they do not conform to the history of the unfolding dominion over the forest.

     

    While Howe does place herself in the lineage of Rowlandson, Dickinson, and Melville, she does so as a prophet and thus inflects our readings with their own historical value. As Williams and Peter Nicholls have argued, Howe’s investment in colonial history may respond in part to a patrimony from which she has been excluded: her father was a Harvard historian interested in the colonial period. Yet Howe seldom asserts her own authoritative “I” that would thus displace the father or the Harvard academic circle. Rather, her non-authoritative, anonymous positioning recalls Dickinson’s or Melville’s position outside the margins, a situation pre-figured in Atherton’s wanderings which take him from his community.

     

    The reader assumes the responsibility of making meaningful the text; this is not to say that Howe has made meaningless works, but rather part of her work’s significance (its signifying value) is the need for the reader to participate in the signifying process. This involves one’s own meditation both on the historical context of reader and text and on the historicity of words. As Mark Long has argued, texts are not simply objects to use, nor are “readings simply successive appropriations of the object-text” with the ensuing “effect of discontinuing as well as deauthorizing a continued process of inquiry” (95). In regard to Dickinson, Howe writes that “[p]oetry is never a personal possession. The poem was a vision and gesture before it became sign and coded exchange in a political economy of value” (B 147). Echoing Stevens in her claims for poetry, Howe contends that poetry transcends critical practice, and in fact jeopardizes that professionalization of language and reading: “Poetry is the great stimulation of life…. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation” (MED 138). Cultural institutions mediate and discipline–and as Howe demonstrates, violate that vision, as in the case of Dickinson, out of the fear of otherness, the forest, and eros.

     

    Hope Atherton’s “wanderings”–as opposed to the disciplinary and teleological sense of journey–reiterate the necessity, and danger, of being open to mystery. Wandering suggests never reaching one’s goal and indeed, perhaps never fully positing a goal to be reached. Nonetheless, Howe suggests we are carried by “hope”–the word itself–as Atherton’s name became the figure for himself, or he the figure for the word. Atherton, wandering between forest and town, becomes a liminal figure. He prophetically occupies borders and becomes a specter from regions of otherness. He is in trespass, a kinsman to the “Shoal kinsmen trespass Golden / Smoke splendor trespass” (S 32). These “Shoal kinsmen”–thronging and skeletal, from the related Old English sceald from the word shallows–rise to the surface in this eighteenth section of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time from “muffled discourse from distance / mummy thread undertow slough” (S 32). Atherton, in his liminality, also carries us into, and prophetically summons forth, that other region:

     

    Eve of origin Embla the eve
soft origin vat and covert

Green hour avert grey future
Summer summon out-of-bound shelter  (S 32)

     

    Howe trebles the feminine origin: Eve, Embla (the first woman in Norse mythology created from an elm), and eve. The line suggests no unitary source but rather multiple sources, hence multiple identities and readings. The palindrome of “eve” is echoed in the line’s phrasing, which further suggests the fluidity of time and identity. It is at such moment that reading as a discipline becomes ungoverned, perhaps dangerous, but also fruitful.

     

    These lines carry the force of prophecy as a form of stepping back to confront history, in that prophecy collapses time into the event of the utterance: the past informs the present in ways requiring participatory interpretation. Atherton’s wanderings has led to “Taking the Forest,” which suggests an ongoing rapine whose history has not yet concluded. Poet and prophet can still invoke “Green hour avert grey future,” which implies, as Howe has put it, a “redemption from pessimism.” This moment, although coming in the final third of “Taking the Forest,” must be tempered by the scene of the penultimate section of receding scenes:

     

    Last line of hills

Lost fact dim outline

Little figure of mother

Moss pasture and wild trefoil
meadow-hay and timothy

She is and the way She was

Outline was a point chosen
Outskirts of ordinary

Weather in history and heaven

Skiff feather glide house

Face seen in a landscape once   (S 37)

     

    Embla and Eve, the “little figure of mother,” are superimposed and become that “Face seen in a landscape once.” That the world is rendered as landscape, and particularly a pastoral one of “meadow-hay and timothy,” suggests a depletion, at least in our language’s capacity to realize, of the nexus of the feminine, the land’s greenness, and eros.

     

    Countering the tonal nostalgia of the previous section, Howe concludes Articulation of Sound Forms in Time with the bleak assessment that Atherton’s wanderings are already figured in earlier histories:

     

    To kin I call in the Iron-Woods
Turn I to dark Fells last alway

Theirs was an archheathen theme
Soon seen stumbled in lag Clock

Still we call bitterly bitterly
Stern norse terse ethical pathos

Archaic presentiment of rupture
Voicing desire no more from here

Far flung North Atlantic littorals

Lif sails off longing for life
Baldr soars on Alfather's path

Rubble couple on pedestal
Rubble couple Rhythm and Pedestal

Room of dim portraits here there
Wade waist deep maidsworn men

Crumbled masonry windswept hickory (S 38)

     

    Through her highly stressed syllables and internal rhymes, Howe moves from the nostalgic awareness of recollected loss to the moment of history–if history in its very moment of enactment could be uttered. In the edition published by Wesleyan University Press, a typographical bar separates this final section of text from the blank final third of the page: as if there were more–a still earlier history now silenced, or as if the whiteness threatened to over-run the text. Or as if that space, with its traditional association of whiteness-virginity-Nature, were soon to be cultivated.

     

    The closing passage, nonetheless, enacts another stepping back, pointing toward the Norse sagas, diaspora, and bleak destruction. Those “Far flung North Atlantic littorals,” as Perloff suggests, point to Howe’s predecessors such as Melville, Crane, and Olson (310). More importantly, however, it is also Howe’s invocation, or nekkia, or voyage to the underworld’s realm to seek knowledge. “To kin I call in the Iron-woods” encapsulates the poet’s passage into the otherness of history, her realization of her own prophetic calling, and her return with those gifts of poetic and prophetic language. With the poem’s concluding line, “Crumbled masonry windswept hickory” (S 38), the prophet’s and poet’s possession of knowledge is revealed; her warning of desolation sweeps around us.

    Notes

     

    1. See Allan Megill’s Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida for discussions of Heidegger’s rhetoric of crisis and the prophetic element within his writings (128-36, 142-170). While constituting parallels between Howe and Heidegger, rhetorical formations such as the creation of a genealogy and the location of moments of crisis are more useful as general elements describing a prophetic poetic. It is Heidegger’s views on poetry that remain critically compelling and instructive for creating ways of reading, especially texts such as Howe’s. Nonetheless, Howe’s insistence upon the specificity of history–but not simply a reiteration of the given–distinguishes her poetics from Heidegger’s.

     

    2. Complementing Dickinson’s poetics and Howe’s reading of them are such statements as these by Stevens from Necessary Angels: “Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words” (33), and “It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential” (33) and “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real” (6); from Opus Posthumous: “Poetry is a means of redemption” (189) and the “genius of poetry… is the spirit of visible and invisible change” (242-43) and poetry “makes itself manifest in a kind of speech that comes from secrecy. Its position is always an inner position, never certain, never fixed. It is to be found beneath the poet’s word and deep within the reader’s eye in those chambers in which the genius of poetry sits alone with her candle in a moving solitude” (243).

     

    3. See Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), 85-89, for a discussion of the impact of Descartes’s work on the idea of nature.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bruns, Gerald. Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry in the Later Writings. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
    • Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. Anderson, John M. and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
    • —. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
    • Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1993. [Abbreviated in the text as B.]
    • —. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985. [Abbreviated in the text as MED.]
    • —. Singularities. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1990. [Abbreviated in the text as S.]
    • Lazer, Hank. Opposing Poetries, Volume Two: Readings. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.
    • Long, Mark C. “Reading American Literature, Rethinking the Logic of Cultural Work.” Pacific Coast Philology 32.1 (1997): 87-104.
    • Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: California UP, 1985.
    • Nicholls, Peter. “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History.” Contemporary Literature 37.4 (Winter 1996): 586-601.
    • Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990.
    • Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
    • Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.
    • Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.
    • Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1951.
    • —. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. New York: Knopf, 1980.
    • Taggart, John. Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1994.
    • Williams, Megan. “Howe Not to Erase(her): A Poetics of Posterity in Susan Howe’s Melville’s Marginalia.” Contemporary Literature 38.1 (Spring 1997): 106-32.

     

  • Textual Indigence in the Archive

    Jed Rasula

    Department of English
    Queen’s University
    rasulaj@post.queensu.ca

     

    The adjective “encyclopedic” is equivocal: as an enticement to comprehensiveness and mastery, it is awkwardly shadowed by its Enlightenment provenance and tainted by its association with master narratives. Yet the sort of narratives associated with encyclopedism are the very ones most insistently cited for their burlesque heterogeneity; and, inclining to pastiche, this has made Gravity’s Rainbow seem paradigmatically postmodern. Our distance and our proximity to the thought of encyclopedic narrative is patently linked to the publication date of Pynchon’s novel. In 1976 Edward Mendelson published “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (in the Pynchon festshcrift Mindful Pleasures) and “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (in MLN), establishing a cogent vocabulary and a rationale for viewing Gravity’s Rainbow as the latest in a line of singular narratives exceeding the bounds of the novel. Ronald Swigger had previously written “Fictional Encyclopedism and the Cognitive Value of Literature” (Comparative Literature Studies, 1975), citing Pynchon as example but concentrating on Flaubert, Broch, Borges, and Queneau. Hilary Clark’s doctoral study, published in 1990 as The Fictional Encyclopedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers, was given concise theoretical recapitulation in “Encyclopedic Discourse” (SubStance, 1992). Despite its relevance to the prodigious debate occasioned by Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives, “encyclopedic narrative” (or “discourse”) has not been assimilated to studies in postmodernism. But the appearance of Underworld by Don DeLillo raises the spectre once again–if only by virtue of its thematic scope and sheer length–imposing itself on the postmodern because DeLillo’s work has been instrumental in weaning the novel away from the gambit of metafiction and, by doing so, staking a claim for a more patently contemporary postmodern fictional practice–one attuned to “waning of affect” (Jameson) and epistemological ungrounding, yet oddly sensitized to glimpses of the sublime.1Insofar as the sublime is an anti-representational concept, it appears antithetical to the encyclopedic impulse. But as I will elaborate here, encyclopedism is a more complex legacy than its proximity to the household Encyclopedia suggests; its archival propensity is subject to a paradoxically restorative disabling which I will call “indigence.”

     

    Mendelson’s portrait of encyclopedic narrative is descriptive rather than prescriptive, drawn from a select core of authors (Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, Pynchon). Indexing features common to these writers, Mendelson contends that the encyclopedic narrative offers a robust depiction of the knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while at the same time exposing its underlying ideological orientation, thereby providing a tacit theory of social organization. In this endeavor such narratives assume a polyglot dimension, since their ideological analysis is contingent on a broad understanding of linguistic variety (being polyphonic, as Bakhtin would say), and they assimilate various generic protocols as a way of integrating linguistic perspectivism into their structures. Encyclopedic narrative is therefore formally indeterminate, exemplifying the double function of prophecy and narrative and thereby tending towards an epic dimension–a dimension marked by gigantism. Its prophetic and satirical enterprise is at once intrinsic and extrinsic to the society depicted, so Mendelson indicates that encyclopedic narrative is set near the immediate present but not in it (Pynchon’s 1973 novel takes place during World War Two, Underworld traverses the 1950s and early ’60s, with stroboscopic bursts of the ’90s); but such works display a temporal elasticity commensurate with their formal indeterminacy. Finally, in what might seem the most specific and thus most exclusive feature of the encyclopedic narrative, Mendelson claims that it offers a full account of at least one technology or science.2

     

    Where Mendelson’s approach is content-oriented, Hilary Clark’s anatomy of “encyclopedic discourse” is formalist and cognitive. With “unreadability” as its signature trait, such discourse is made evident in its compulsiveness, its impetuous desire, and its adoption of encyclopedic material as a pretext for philosophical speculation. Encyclopedic discourse is self-defeating, in Clark’s view, because its investigative energy is finally directed at its own premises and its own performance, and these are necessarily found wanting: “any text (fictional or not) that we would call encyclopedic must speculate on its own discursive processes of discovery and arrangement and on the limitations of these processes” (Clark 105).3 Ronald Swigger characterizes the resulting stance of the encyclopedist: “Impatience for cognition, for perception, is qualified in our modern and ‘postmodern’ literatures by various reservations: skepticism, aestheticism, and various sorts of irony” (352). Swigger equivocates, however, by refering this cognitive thirst for comprehensiveness to “literature as such”–an attribution which renders encyclopedism inconsequential, or else disqualifies as “literature” all but the most ambitious instances. Nevertheless, Swigger’s “impatience for cognition” corroborates Clark’s emphasis on the psychotropic profile of the encyclopedic compulsion; that is, the encyclopedic, disclosed as compulsion, is detached from objective conditions and made available to the more plastic measures of dream and desire. Underworld, for example, does not conform to Mendelson’s requirement for the comprehensive depiction of a science; but Underworld is an encyclopedia of mannerisms and gestures, a commodious vision of the mid-century American habitus, a panorama of inchoate desires.

     

    What Underworld makes instructive for the legacy of encyclopedic narrative is not a database but the glimpse it affords of stasis, its mid-century America trapped in paralytic arrest–or is it hibernation? Mendelson’s avatars are conspicuously associated with pilgrimage, which endows Joyce’s Dublin or Pynchon’s Europe with a sense of topological adventure. DeLillo’s work summons a geographical expanse too, but only to render it claustrophobic (Clara Sax’s fleet of deactivated military aircraft being converted to art in the desert; Matt Shay’s relationship falling apart during a car trip, paradigmatic site of the open road; Lenny Bruce’s nightclub tour resolved into crammed venues, objective correlatives of the manic congestion of his performance rants; and even Bobby Thompson’s homerun baseball, passing from hand to hand, turns out to be a mockery of mobility, dissolving in simulacra–its pedigree being open to question–and sequestered in private collections of memorabilia). Underworld immerses us in cold war tensions between encyclopedism as cultural ambition and the fear of knowing too much–a subject DeLillo previously rehearsed in The Names, White Noise, Libra, and Mao II. The model of mobility was gradually adapted in the cold war to the command-control operation, in which omniscience belongs not to those out in the field but to those in the bunkers underground, scanning screens and radar blips and databases. DeLillo’s unique contribution is to help us see the extent to which the posture of immobility and confinement, having been associated with the omniscience of global warning systems for decades now, has itself become conflated with knowledge. DeLillo’s work discloses the impasse between information and understanding, between data and human sense. But, importantly, DeLillo resists the judgement that this impasse signifies a breakdown. Rather, he surveys a world in which the specifically human dimension that arises out of cognitive craving and encyclopedic resources is a profligate unproductivity; he is intent on discerning freedom and mobility outside those familiar (and thoroughly commodified) American icons, the open road and the rocket capsule.4 The claustrophobic paralysis of Underworld reminds us that, for all its oceanic voyaging, Moby-Dick is set on the confines of a ship. Confinement can itself resonate with encyclopedic pressures: this is what gives Beckett’s work its apocalyptic aura, and it’s what is rendered more patently encyclopedic in the archival sense in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, set in a tuberculosis clinic. Mental ubiquity and intellectual restlessness, it seems, are symptomatic of blockage rather than liberation, paralysis rather than mobility.

     

    Although vague to begin with, and rendered hopelessly flacid by an ubiquity of citations, with modest foreshortening the term “postmodern” consistently evokes a certain mobility–speed and transitivity, symptomatized by channel surfing, jump-cuts, and hypertext modes of information linkage. Speed, of course, cannot be consigned exclusively to the postmodern, associated as it is with Marinetti’s manifesto of Futurism (1909) in which he celebrated a world enriched by “a new beauty… the beauty of speed” (Selected Writings 41). “Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science,” Marinetti wrote in 1913. “Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches” (Futurist Manifestos 96). Behind Futurist hyperbole was an accurate assessment of communication technologies in the era of mass media and hyperkinetic transport.

     

    The transportation revolution that has had such a conspicuous impact on the public sphere in the past two centuries has been accompanied by a corresponding acceleration of sapience. Arnold Gehlen ventures a plausible supposition that “the modern psyche develops at the same time as the science of it and as the art which mirrors it ” (81-82).5 Insofar as we associate modernity and speed, Gehlen’s triangular configuration speaks to a prolonged mutation in which the singularities of the present are obscured unless we submit them to a broader historical dialectic. To do so would mean, for example, overcoming the stereotypical association of Nathaniel Hawthorne with what was, even for him, an antiquarian interest in Puritanism, discerning in his work symptoms of Gehlen’s “modern psyche” in the vitro of industrial adaptation. In that light, Hawthorne’s story “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834) is prescient in its fanciful illustration that information outpaces fact, that in the feedback loop of signal/response a reversal of flow is possible–the response anticipating the signal which it then precipitates by virtue of impetuous expectancy. It also suggests a correlation between information and speed, an ominous complicity famously realized in Gravity’s Rainbow. When Pynchon gruffly concedes, late in the novel, “You will want cause and effect. All right” (663), we find ourselves confronted with Higginbotham’s catastrophe: that is to say, the traditional expository order of narrative is revealed as a regressive model of mental calculation. In fact, the real challenge of speed in modes of transport was always mental, not physical. The ultimate exhilaration of speed is psychic displacement, simulated ubiquity–not being everywhere, but knowing everything, as is now ineluctably demonstrated by the pervasive array of monitors (video games, personal computers, television) which combine sedentariness with speed.

     

    My concern in what follows is to investigate, by way of a reading of Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain, the fate of this aspiration to know all, particularly as instantiated in the practical medium of print. The modern enthrallment with speed is a nascent stipulation of communication technologies, and these technologies are modeled on, and answerable to, the cross-referencing mobility pioneered in the Enlightenment encyclopedia. In these novels by Melville and Mann we find that beneath the utopian fantasy of total data transfer–a dream of unambiguous signals and noise-free channels–there is a different dimension, one that I call indigence. My choice of the term will be elaborated later; but for the moment I offer a preview by way of Italo Calvino. In the second of his six Memos for the Next Millennium, “Quickness,” Calvino writes: “In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication into a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language” (45). Sharpening differences: with this exhortation Calvino joins Maurice Blanchot, who commends the encyclopedic enterprise precisely insofar as it permits us “to know… in such a way that it renders us somewhat other in relation to ourselves” (51).

     

    Encylopedic Narrative and the Legacy of Wallowing

     

    The Encyclopédie pioneered by Diderot and D’Alembert remains the most famous and influential of encylopedic projects. Despite the contributions of Rousseau, Voltaire, the editors themselves, and a legion of notable peers, a conspicuous feature of the encyclopedic enterprise is that of a comprehensive book that writes itself out from under the coercion of authority and, by implication, releases itself from the charmed circle of authorship. The encyclopedia, then, is the “text” that dispels onerous authorizations of the “work” in Roland Barthes’s sense.6 But what are the guiding principles of such a text? It is evident that somebody, or some editorial board, is responsible for selecting the topics to be covered and somebody writes them. They are not spontaneously self-generating incarnations of a higher knowledge. By the same token, the “great books” are not self-selecting, despite Robert Hutchins’s contention that “there never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were” (xi), so the Great Books were “almost self-selected” (xx).7 Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World were adopted by committee, and may be said to have followed Enlightenment precedent by according a role to scientific as well as literary titles. The famous Syntopicon, a two-volume conceptual index to the fifty-eight volumes (of the second edition) of the Great Books, also conforms in an interesting way to the norms of scientific culture: it is numerically valorized and statistically directed. The Syntopicon charts 2,987 topics, recording 163,000 references to passages in the Great Books. “The five most discussed ideas are GOD, KNOWLEDGE, MAN, STATE, and LOVE, in that order” (there are 102 “ideas” in all, from ANGEL to WORLD). Moreover, these great ideas are validated as statistical dominants: “We can assume,” says Adler, “that the amount of space devoted to the discussion of an idea gives an approximate measure of how much thought has been bestowed on it” (Great Ideas 129).8 By what measure, however, may one of these ideas be regarded as under discussion in Moby-Dick (in volume 48) or, for that matter, in works by Sophocles, Rabelais, Cervantes, or Ibsen (among other authors of Great Books)? What is the fate of an idea when it is encased in and elaborated by satire, tragedy, saga, picaresque, drama, lyric?

     

    The presumption of a “Great Conversation”–envisioned not only by Adler but by his cohort Robert Hutchins–proved to be seductive, at least as a marketing strategy.9 It has proven even more pervasive, culturally, as a tacit paradigm for the obscure and nearly inscrutable interplay of author and culture, text and context, which was addressed by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and, more flamboyantly, by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (or more openly configured as a cultural context in The Western Canon). To think of the “agon” of writerly self-assertion as a “conversation” may be accurate, but the convivial nature of Adler’s term obscures darker forces at work; it is almost too obvious to bear repeating to say that “conversation” is all too often a verbal exchange between participants who are unequally endowed, prepared, or situated. The same is true of “discussion.” Much is “discussed” in Moby-Dick, to be sure, but on what ground? When the narrator identifies the right whale as a Stoic and the sperm whale as a “Platonian” (443), on what basis is a discussion convened? That Melville sports with the austere topics of philosophical debate is evident to any reader of Moby-Dick, yet its inclusion in the Great Books tacitly dignifies its improprieties (generic, conceptual, strategic) by suggesting some “contribution” to the discussion. From the Great Books perspective, Melville’s place at the table is ensured not by virtue of his prodigious cetological lore, but because he compares one whale to Locke and another to Plato (his irreverence being construed as stylistic exuberance). But what if whales really are the vital matter in Melville’s textual leviathan, and the philosophical materials no more than arabesques?

     

    The assumption behind the Great Books paradigm is one which has elsewhere been defined as the “archive”: “the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern” (Richards 11).10 Interestingly, the terms themselves suggest the problem: the master pattern is subject to the epistemological vicissitudes of its creaturely ordainer, whose representations of the “known or knowable” will indeed make use of the fantastic. (In Régis Debray’s concise definition, culture is “an incessantly renegotiated interaction between our values and our tools” [117].) Where there is method there is madness; though this does not necessarily mean aberrance, but rather a guiding and inspiring mania, a divine prompting, an enigmatic surplus which at once provokes, secures, and makes manic the dream of total knowledge. The archive predisposes value as preservation (and in the same gesture, it might be argued, disposes of use as value), and archival preservation in its purest form is inertia (the documents that are never handled last the longest). Rhetorical and performative orders arise and dissipate; but their interregnum, however stately and composed, is always accompanied by the entropic undertow of the archive. The mass resists the method: the bulk of available material impedes the convened strategies of mobility. Plenitude leads to intransigence, to wandering in circles or meandering without purpose.

     

    As programmatically addressed in the Prospectus to the Encyclopédie, “The tree of human knowledge could be formed in several ways, either by relating different knowledge to the diverse faculties of our mind or by relating it to the things that it has as its object. The difficulty was greatest where it involved the most arbitrariness. But how could there not be arbitrariness? Nature presents us only with particular things, infinite in number and without firmly established divisions. Everything shades off into everything else by imperceptible nuances” (qtd. in Darnton 195).11 The arbitrariness that concerns the editors is conceptual–concerning a final indeterminacy of nomenclature, of classification, or cognizance–but by a seemingly unrelated practical decision the arbitrary is instantiated as the governing principle of the Encyclopédie itself, in its alphabetic arrangement of topics. “C’est l’ordre alphabétique contre l’ordre divin,” writes Meschonnic (21). In the empirical universe of experimental science and technology sanctioned by the Encyclopédie, the sacred paradigm of the tree of knowledge is scrapped (retained only as a rhetorical topos, as in the passage cited above), and the resulting heap of data occupies a paradoxical condition: the subordination of knowledge to the categorical formatting of information renders knowledge strategically robust but conceptually ungrounded. “Information is knowledge fractured into bits and pieces that can be moved around easily but never really assembled successfully into an integrated whole,” writes Thomas Richards (76). By the 19th century, the modern dispensation of arts and sciences was rapidly being consolidated within a circle of learning convened by Enlightenment encyclopedism. The winnowing out of “divine learning”–which had still been a feature of Francis Bacon’s encyclopedic program–was a decisive step, escalated by Diderot and D’Alembert into a revolutionary principle.

     

    The encyclopedic impulse is not to be accredited strictly to Enlightenment rationality. Even within the Encyclopédie itself there are conflicting aspirations, as the phantasm of “order” testifies to an underlying tension between technique and desire; between a positivist exposition of the emergent order of secular wisdom and a program of provisional confrontations with historical exigency; between strategies of accumulation and tactics of provocation. The iconoclastic intensity of the Encyclopédie was prefigured and inspired by Pierre Bayle’s idiosyncratic Dictionnaire historique et critique, a work of singular importance for Melville and a reminder that Moby-Dick anatomizes not only the bodies of whales but the ideological dispositions of men. Like Bayle’s Dictionary, the audacious labor of the Encyclopédie consists of a series of treatises and provocations. The Encyclopedia as envisioned by Diderot was a gesture of textual insubordination, an act of defiance against the authority of scripture, as was Voltaire’s (anonymously published) Dictionnaire philosophique, which appeared and was widely denounced by clerics in 1764, midway through the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772).12

     

    Wilda Anderson summarizes Diderot’s encyclopedic dream as an “operational poetics” (257). The mark of progress associated with the encyclopedia, she suggests, “comes not from accumulating content but from provoking an act of thinking” (100). Distinguishing the “d’Alembertian Reader” from the “Diderotian Reader,” Anderson characterizes the latter as moving in the “direction of increasing virtue (philosophical intelligence)” while the former’s emphasis on accumulation of knowledge is merely “erudite stupidity” (107). The truly progressive function of the encyclopedia, then, is twofold: to introduce order and recompose it through an active engagement with disorder.13 It is as a proponent of poetic resourcefulness that Voltaire and Diderot hail as heirs of their encyclopedic impulses not the functionalist cultural bureaucrats of the ordered secular state, but those polyglot nomads like Ezra Pound, or Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the insolent encyclopedism on display in Bataille’s Dictionnaire critique (in Documents, 1929-30), the anonymous Da Costa Encyclopédique (1947), and Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Poeia.14 The dual legacy of Enlightenment encyclopedism persists inasmuch as we remain polarized between accumulation (d’Alembert) and provocation (Diderot); between the allure of “master narratives” (with Lyotard’s diagnosis of their serving as one more instance of their survival) and the countermotions of dissemination.15

     

    A concomitant feature of the Encyclopedia as text is its arrangement of parts, its convening of a space made enticing by the prospect of increased fluidity. Such a prospect, of course, appeals as readily to the poet as to the statistician, albeit in different ways and for different ends. The modern (post-Enlightenment) encyclopedic activity has increasingly made its impact in the culture at large, outside the strict ordination of topics within the confines of a publication. Division of labor, cross-reference documentation, and centralization of data in major resources and institutions are the key characteristics of encyclopedic culture; together, they ensure mobility within a given field, a mobility contingent on conceptual consistency and standardization of aims. Cross-referencing is a technical device facilitating ease of movement; but such mobility obscures the aleatory dimension of non-hierarchical traversals of data. The efficiency of the archival web of encyclopedism readily leads to a complacent mirage of power and control, vividly depicted in Moby-Dick in “The Mat-Maker,” when the sailors grow lethargic in their mechanical expertise. In an analogy, Melville speaks of a weaver god, deafened by the sound of the weaving, who can’t hear the workers’ words “inaudible among the flying spindles”; but outside the factory windows they are audible, “so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.” Melville’s parable suggests the necessity of an outlet, a vent through which the sound of labor, and the undertone of dissent, can be transmitted and made audible.

     

    Melville revisits the infernal factory in “The Tartarus of Maids,” this time a paper mill, in which the narrator is moved by the sight of the blank paper to reflect on John Locke’s tabula rasa, as well as the “unbudging fatality,” the “metallic necessity,” with which the multitude of blank sheets are forced through the presses. The attendant maidens are as pale as the paper: “there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls… their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica” (284-285). Melville’s conflation of blank faces and blank pages with the miraculous imprint of the saint suggests that, by some preternatural twist, blankness is not given, as Locke would have it, but marks the spot of an effacement. At present, the microchips powering our massive computational technoculture are produced overseas, by a largely female underclass, another “tartarus of maids” in which the only difference from Melville’s tale is that the spectral apparition of the saint would appear now not in the form of a face on a blank page but as a face in a hologram. Beneath the utopian fantasy of total data transfer–a dream of unambiguous signals and noise-free channels–we find this occluded dimension, one that I call indigence, manifest in the narrative deployments of Moby-Dick.

     

    Melville’s factory scenes from Moby-Dick and “The Tartarus of Maids” resonate with an Enlightenment prelude. The effaced wage-slaves of the 19th century factory were a populace formerly consigned to the underclass category of indigence. In the revolutionary project of the Encyclopédie, the entry on Indigence ridicules the complacent presumption that social stratification is a measure of innate worth. “Indigent: a man who lacks the necessities of life in the midst of his fellow men who are enjoying, with offensive luxury, all the possible superfluities.” So contrary to nature is this state of affairs, according to the author of the article, that while “[a] vicious person is invited out, we shrink from the indigent” (40). To put this in perspective, it needs to be recalled that Diderot’s encyclopedic project scrupulously dignified technical manual labor: the whole enterprise can be read as a How-To Manual for tradespeople as well as an emancipation of reason from an (institutionally perpetuated) inheritance of superstition. Of course, the philosophes failed to foresee the rise of monopoly capital with industrial technology, which ensured that the indigents of the ancien regime would remain indigent ancillaries to the industrial revolution. The emergent social portrait is far more complex, of course, but what I want to establish here is a link between encyclopedia and indigence, specifically as narrative strategy. On a representational level the indigents appear in Moby-Dick as the indigenous figures Tashtego and Queequeg. On a structural plane, however, it is the bipolarity of Ahab and Ishmael that affords access to a narrative register of indigence.

     

    The 19th century whaling ship was among the most advanced technological production units of its time; and it has been common to recognize Ahab as a captain of industry. Ahab is a “hot old man” Stubb finds; “eyes like powder-pans” (223). Ahab accuses Stubb of treating him like a cannonball (222). The captain of another ship surmises that Ahab’s blood is “at the boiling point!–his pulse makes these planks beat!” (553). Ishmael observes “his eyes glowing like coals” (650). Ahab is an explosive force, and Stubb’s prognosis of him as a cannonball proves accurate. Michel Serres provides an instructive perspective on the source of Ahab’s explosiveness. The body, he says, “is not plunged into a single space, but into the difficult intersection” of multiple spaces, and “whoever is unsuccessful in this undertaking… explodes from the disconnection of spaces” (44). This is not to ascribe Ahab’s agony to the overcommitments of modern corporate man, but to recognize the multitude of striations that mark and disfigure him–not only the lost leg, but the seam that runs the length of his body, as if he were in his essence a geophysical fissure that is sealed only momentarily, and like the Vesuvius in which Ishmael would dip his condor quill, Ahab is ready to blow.

     

    Ahab’s seam is a crease marking the traversal of information technologies absorbed into the composition of Moby-Dick, and in its typological specificity it can be read as the mark of Pierre Bayle. Melville purchased Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) in 1849. The book provided him not only with a compendium of resources on the thought of antiquity but also a way of rehearsing that legacy, in the spirit of Calvinism, as dualistic calamity–the religious inheritance of both Bayle and Melville. Through Bayle, Melville invents Ahab as Zoroaster, the fire-worshipping God of the Parsees and survivor of a lightning bolt.16 As a transposition of Bayle’s signature to Melville’s, Ahab is not simply the tragic hero of the tale but a trace-element of the mobile, cross-referencing encyclopedic resources at his author’s command. He is an insignia of Melville’s compositional procedure. As Millicent Bell indicates, Melville’s borrowings from Bayle are often very close, and would count as plagiarism had they been contemporaries. This is not a reproach to Melville, but evidence of encyclopedic culture in which cribbing is necessarily endemic. In the same spirit Thoreau closely followed Charles Kraitsir’s Significance of the Alphabet (1846) in his celebrated alphabetic reverie on the railway embankment in the “Spring” chapter of Walden.17 Likewise, Ezra Pound continues and amplifies the practice in The Cantos, explicitly incorporating an Enlightenment archive from John Adams and from Père de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine (1777-1783). Ahab, then, marks a complicitious network of resources which archivally predispose narrative potential, and he is himself the composite figure of competing information regimes.

     

    Confronting the horizon of possibilities, Ahab’s is a posture of defiance. His hubristic ambition is an assault on the whale not as mammal but as god, enigmatic prototype of an “antemosaic, unsourced existence… which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over” (569). Father Mapple closes his sermon with the prescient question, “what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?” (143). Ahab’s impertinence consists in his determination to outlive his god, to exceed his earthly portion–compensating the insult of archival pre-inscription by outliving the nemesis that defines him. Ruminating on Vishnu as world-creator, Melville suggests that the Vedas pre-existed the creation as an archive of possibilities: “these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes” (472). The term “volumes” freely mingles text with water and with whale. The pun is later revisited by Ahab, who curses the “mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the world’s books” (583). Ahab is “down” in the world’s books in several senses: hemmed in by contractual obligations (the surface meaning of his remark); but also sunken or mired in complicity, drawing on the demonic resources of his shadowy Parsees to mobilize the crew as agents in his own vengeance (this would be the allegorical reading of being down in the books). Ahab is typologically down in the world’s books as Prometheus, as Lear, and as Faust.

     

    The deadly unilateral force of Ahab is not to be associated with encyclopedism, despite his Faustian aspirations. He does not demand total knowledge, but impossible knowledge, like the knowledge of metaphysical shadows and phantom sensations. The alertness and vigilance of Ahab is at odds with the incumbency of the archive. But a distinction is needed between the archive and the encyclopedia. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault anachronistically imposes on the old regime of print media the switching capacity of modern electronic communications. The intransigence of the old archive took centuries and repeated attempts to dispell, as the cross-referencing practices of Pierre Bayle, Ephraim Chambers, and Diderot eventually succeeded in undermining the heavy archival mass of “sacred learning,” or institutionalized superstition as the philosophes saw it. Foucault imagines the archive as a propulsive force, like an explosion which necessarily displaces everything, introducing a new configuration by detonating the old. “It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make” (131). Foucault is describing the inexorable dispersal of temporality, the unbidden fatal archivist. When the inexorable is summoned into the scope of human affairs by an Ahab it takes the form of speed and realizes intensity as explosiveness.

     

    Currently, the Internet reanimates our dreams of instantaneous telepresence, as this latest archival medium presumes to abolish the lag time that has hitherto been the atavistic impediment clinging to every technological innovation–a dream testifying to what Paul Virilio calls a “dromocratic revolution” in systems efficiency, in which we pass “from freedom of movement to tyranny of movement” (Virilio and Lotringer 70).18 The greater the subordination of components in a system, the more rapid the transit within it. But this coordination of resources also makes rapid transit compulsory. In the information pilgrimage, the marked link makes a repeatable path, and repetition smooths the way for enhanced speed. (Film and television serialization operates by means of such links, which help mobilize salient characteristics–stars, jingles, mannerisms, merchandise–into broader cultural orbits.) Mobility within the book is as crucial as geographical mobility outside it, and the book comes to mirror the world–no longer in the image of cosmic harmony, but as grand central station of rapid transit, with the figure of the earth itself consigned by NASA photos to its subordinate role as home base and launching pad.

     

    In the old pedestrian topography, the wandering scholar is forced to soak in the world and its contingent apparitions as the condition accompanying access to the book. But what might otherwise seem a nuisance is given a different texture when we recall the consistency with which medieval culture epitomized the world itself as a book, “in which the pages are turned with our feet” as Paracelsus put it (qtd. in Curtius 322).19 The peril attendant on digitized telepresence is that the uniform encoding of data obliterates the tactile agency of the pilgrimage. The book of the world is no longer commensurate with the world of the (computerized) book. There is, however, a residual manner in which a phantom materiality lingers on, and this is traceable by way of the cross-referencing and multiple-coding options of the Encyclopedia. The obstacle that emerges with a plenitude of cross-referencing is one of surfeit: the enhancement of cognitive speed confronts the increased magnitude of material to which its rapid conceptual transit has access. This forces the recognition that the archive is latent in matter as such: material forms always bear the imprint of an ancestral script. Footprints and fossils, for example, contribute to a venatic drama of pansemiosis in which everything signifies simply by being in contact with matter, leaving its trace in a passive cascade of imprints, like the pallid faces of the Tartarean maids on the paper they produce. Ahab is a scholar of the whale’s traces, seizing on its moments of breeching as nothing less than apocalyptic transfigurations in the fabric of matter itself. For all that the whale is associated with force and speed, however, we need to disassociate it from Ahab’s messianic explosiveness, for these qualities do not represent the whale in its natural state but as preyed upon by humans. In his Etymology Melville construes whale from “wallen“–“roll” and “wallow” (75). A contemporaneous etymological fantasia attributes the derivation of all mental acts “from Material objects,” so thoughts are thereby “attached to the Agitation of the Earth”: “‘To Revolve things in the mind’ [is] connected with Wallowing in the mire” (Whiter 129). Wallowing is an image of felicitous habitation, being at home in the world, enjoying “the pleasures of merely circulating” (to quote Wallace Stevens).

     

    As narrator, Ishmael is inclined to wallow, adapting his resources to the character of his subject. He is unflappably aware that we are all “down in the world’s books,” but rather than finding this an outrage he takes it as a compositional principle. Ishmael’s affirmation parallels his author’s, of course, and we hear them echoing one another in Ishmael’s query about the enigma of archival semiosis: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?” (286). In the figure of Ishmael, Melville invents encyclopedic indigence. Ishmael is sanctioned to tell the tale not by superior wisdom but simply because he survived (“orphan” is the last word in Moby-Dick [687]). He is an indigent, a naïf like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, and his encyclopedism is instructively gratuitous. What we find in Moby-Dick is a circumspection with respect to the tyrannous mobility of encyclopedic culture. The tactical narrative expedient is one of delay, meander, filibuster–like a work stoppage, or a blockade of auto routes. Ishmael’s narrative detours are compendious not from bombast but as an understated (if overdone) way of deferring the chase. Cut to the chase we say, urging the action on to its bloody finality. Ishmael’s is a pacifist narration which demonstrates in its own terms the constancy of a bloodbath in the natural cycle of predation, illuminating the futility with which the cycle is recast in manichean metaphysics by Ahab. Maximizing the tension between documentation and storytelling, Ishmael’s narrative rhythms articulate a rhapsodic seismography erupting along fault lines of the archival grid. Its encyclopedism is dedicated to a whimsy no less caustic and devastating than that of Flaubert’s hapless Bouvard and Pecuchet, while at the same time disclosing that myth is the original encyclopedic fund or fundament.20 The elusive chimera of the white whale attests to an archaic cosmos generative of archival magnitudes indifferent to the human archive–a circle, like the ouroboros, which is not contingent on the paradigmatic boundaries, and the self-absorbed constraints, of human learning.

     

    The circle commands the entire scope of cosmological activity, from chaos to terrestrial paradise; and as a geometric figure, the circle accommodates these extremes by its ability to expand and contract. Melville is assiduous in complying with Emerson’s dictum on “Circles.” “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” When Queequeg is sick and preparing for his death he wastes away “till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.” But “his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller…. And, like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand, so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity” (588). As the school of whales gathers in “The Grand Armada” the Pequod is surrounded by leviathans, and Ishmael discovers a preternatural calm at the eye of the latent storm:

     

    though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (498)

     

    There is a final element in this non-vicious circularity in Moby-Dick which reminds us that “encyclopedia” means, in its Greek components, circle of learning–and which Pound adapted from Frobenius as “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (57).21 Ishmael, expounding upon the magisterial dimensions of his subject (“when Leviathan is the text” [566]), admits to being swollen with purpose:

     

    Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences.... Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. (566-7)

     

    This organic expansion is narrative mimicry of the whale’s inbreathed volume of air flamboyantly released in a shower of spray when the whale breaches. The lampooning, speculative, and data-saturated asides that add so much bulk to Moby-Dick are nothing less than Ishmael’s breachings.

     

    The affiliation of narrative venture with animal respiration indicates that Moby-Dick is not strictly an encyclopedic narrative: its somatic topology (in which leviathans are anatomized as The Folio Whale, the Octavo Whale, and the Duodecimo Whale [231]) is a covert nod to the predecessor of the modern encyclopedia: the Renaissance anatomy. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy parses its topic in such detail that a diagrammatic recapitulation runs to ten pages of fine print, with major headings given signs of the zodiac as emblems. The idea that a partitioned world needs to have guardians or patrons of its partitions goes back to the Middle Ages, and manifests as late as the 14th century in Domenico Bandini’s gigantic encyclopedia, Fons memorabilium universi, arranged in five parts in honor of Christ’s wounds (Collison 70). There is also a rich foreground of encyclopedism in the combinatorial diagrams of Ramon Llull, Juan de Celaya, Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, Athanasius Kircher, and Francis Bacon. What is instructive in the trajectory from medieval combinatorial wheels to enlightenment encyclopedia is a drama of expository mobility, a mobility that begins to impinge on the episodic character of the romance, injecting into the nascent genre of the novel a synoptic respiration. It is an itinerary that will culminate in Joyce’s Ulysses, with its diagrammatic scheduling of hours with motifs, organs, arts, symbols, and narrative techniques, its leitmotifs so sedulously reverberated in its own archival residue that repeated reading finds the whole text recapitulated on every page. (Almost: since Joyce doesn’t actually attempt this until inventing a language–a vehicle–for it with Finnegans Wake.)

     

    As a narrative that sides with animal life, wallowing in its archival resources, Moby-Dick offers a distinctive response to the problematic legacy of the encyclopedic archive. Its epistemological lesson is that a surface rationalism conceals an atavistic endowment which is at once a “pre-rational” or mythic threat as well as a repository of creative energy–the very energy that is required in order to compose the work. So it convenes its circle of learning like the momentary apparition of circles on the surface of a pond, expanding and dissolving at once, its sapience at one with the agent of its recognition, forced to reckon with agency as the orphan of whatever will have occurred. Moby-Dick also demonstrates that truth does not remain unblemished by being immersed in the volatile medium of actual human agents–a point amply and equally evident in Thomas Mann’s encyclopedic novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).

     

    The adventures of Moby-Dick constitute Ishmael’s education, just as Melville said of his own whaling experience that it was his Harvard and Yale. Likewise, The Magic Mountain rehearses its author’s humanistic training in the comparably remote setting of a tuberculosis clinic in the Alps. Hans Castorp’s experience in the clinic is a model paideia, a scene of instruction in which he is exposed to humanism in the figure of Settembrini, spiritual messianism in the Jesuit Naphta, medical science in the clinic’s director Behrens, experimental science in Krokowski’s lectures, and Dionysian joie de vivre in Claudia Chauchat and Peeperkorn. In contrast to the unilateral program of Settembrini’s encyclopedism, Hans Castorp forms a non-cumulative relation to the learning to which he is exposed. What he retains, and rehearses, is the model of the circle rather than the learning (the enkyklos not the paideia of “encyclopædia”). “In both space and time, as we learn from the laws of periodicity and the conservation of mass,” Castorp says, all motion is circular (376) [Alle Bewegung ist aber kreisförming… Im Raume und in der Zeit, das lehren von der Erhaltung der Masse und von der Periodizität (536)].22 He comes to this understanding through the precession of the zodiac, which rehearses what he calls “the practical joke of the circle, of eternity that has no permanent direction, but in which everything keeps coming back” [der Eulenspiegelei des Kreises und der Ewigkeit ohne Richtungsdauer, in der alles wiederkehr (521)].

     

    It’s as if we’re being led around by the nose, in a circle, always lured on by the promise of something that is just another turning point–a turning point in a circle. For a circle consists of nothing but elastic turning points, and so its curvature is immeasurable, with no steady, definite direction, and so eternity is not “straight ahead, straight ahead,” but rather “merry-go-round.” (365)

     

    [Man wird ja an der Nase herumgezogen, im Kreis herumgelockt mit der Aussicht auf etwas, was schon wieder Wendepunkt ist... Wendepunkt im Kreise. Denn das sind lauter ausdehnungslose Wendepunkte, woraus der Kreis besteht, die Biegung ist unmeßbar, es gift keine Richtungsdauer, und die Ewigkeit ist nicht «geradeaus, geradeaus», sondern «Karussell, Karussell». (520-521)]

     

    Late in the book Hans Castorp calms a neurotic patient by speaking with “serene religiosity” of these elastic turning points and of “the mirthful melancholy of eternity” (622) [gelassener Religiosität… der übermütigen Melancholie, die in der ohne Richtungsdauer in sich selber laufenden Ewigkeit liege (887)]. The circle is not a panacea, however, as Castorp comes to recognize the viability of deviation and noncompliance with the revolving order of things. In the blizzard he wanders in a vast circle in a vain attempt to escape, and subsequently sees in circularity something “natural and impersonal and beyond all individual conscious effort, much as the temptation to wander in circles overcomes someone who is lost or sleep ensnares someone freezing to death” (526) [gesetzmäßig-unpersönlich und überlegen aller individuellen Bewußtheit, wie die Schlafverführung, die den Erfrierenden umstrickt, und wie das Im-Kreise-Herumkommen des Verirrten (749-750)]. One cannot act personally with reference to the entire cosmological order as configured in the zodiac; in fact, the assignment of natal identity in terms of a given zodiacal sign suggests that, beneath and within the circle of universal respiration, human affairs zigzag and criss-cross, meander and snag and only fitfully approximate the grand design by submitting to “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” (to cite a title by Wallace Stevens23).

     

    Despite its exemplary circularity, the cosmological cycle resists being cast in human terms.24 This enigmatic recalcitrance of fate is beautifully summarized in an episode in which the inmates of the sanitorium gather in seance. The spirit Holger comes to them, and recites an epic poem, piling up

     

    a thousand details that it seemed would never stop--and an hour later, there was still no end in sight, for the poem, which had dealt relentlessly with the pain of childbirth and a lover's first kiss, with the crown of suffering and God's strict, fatherly kindness, had plunged into the warp and woof of creation [sich in das Weben der Kreatur vertiefte (933)], into epochs and nations, had lost itself in the vastness of the stars, even mentioning the Chaldeans and the zodiac, and would most certainly have lasted on through the whole night, if the conjurers had not at last removed their fingers from the glass and with politest thanks declared to Holger that that had to be it for now. (654)

     

    The otherworldly encyclopedic summation of the entire cosmic panorama, in short, moves its human auditors to boredom. At the level of basic human awareness and interest, encyclopedism is best confined to smaller projects; immortality, as it were, requires intimation not elaboration.

     

    Settembrini’s project is paradigmatic. As a member of the International League for the Organization of Progress [Internationaler Bund für Organiserung der Fortschritts (344)], the Italian humanist is engaged in an ambitious international undertaking, a “large-scale scientific program of reform… embracing all presently known possibilities for perfecting the human organism” (241) [Ein wissenschaftlich ausgearbeitetes Reformprogramm… das alle augenblicklichen Vervollkommnungsmöglichkeiten des menschlichen Organismus umfaßt (345)]. One aspect of the program is an encyclopedia in some twenty volumes, Sociological Pathology [Sociologie der Leiden; Sociologischen Pathologie (346, 347)], one volume of which is devoted to literature. As editor of this volume, Settembrini envisions it as “solace and advice for those who suffer, a synopsis and short analysis of all masterpieces of world literature dealing with every such conflict” (243) [den Leidenen zu Trost und Belehrung, eine Zusammenstellung und kurzgefaßte Analyse aller für jeden einzelnen Konflikt in Betracht kommenden Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur enthalten soll (347)]. Mann’s wit (too often mislabeled “irony”) is evident here, not only in view of the fact that literature is very nearly all about suffering–so Settembrini’s project is interminable–but also that The Magic Mountain itself is an immense chronicle of suffering, set in a tuberculosis clinic. Such a malady enables Mann to demonstrate that suffering is rarely physical, but predominately psychological and cultural. In fact, Hans Castorp’s own condition is ambiguous: he never manifests any real tubercular symptoms, and the fever that wins him admission to the select clientele of the clinic is gradually made to appear synonymous with life itself–albeit life as corpuscular rage, life as the supreme malady. Hans Castorp, in short, like Ishmael, incarnates in his indigence an encyclopedic propensity which is properly that of organic life, that microbial sapience that makes us what we are without our ever having to know anything about it; the charmed circle of life, in which the pleasures of circulating exceed the compass of human knowledge.

     

    Despite his almost visionary cordiality with the divine legation of the stars, Hans Castorp remains “life’s problem child” as Mann refers to him throughout the book [Lebens Sorgenkind (1006)] and he descends from the mountain to join in the first world war, that “wicked caper of amusement” [das arge Tanzvergnügen (1006)]. The entire novel is in many ways a rehearsal, after the event, of the intellectual and cultural stakes leading up to that conflagration. It is not incidental that the contributing ideologies are dissociated from militarism, and reviewed in the passional setting of personal debate and friendship. As a novel of ideas, though, its conceptual fabric is permeated with the personalities of the asylum residents, rendering problematic the Enlightenment aspiration to codify principles of universal validity. The truth can never remain unblemished when immersed in the volatile medium of actual human agents.

     

    Myth and the Pathos of Data

     

    Thomas Mann presents a deliberately static survey of humanistic pedagogy in the sealed confines of a tuberculosis sanitorium, exposing and satirizing the gridlock of disciplinary thinking, for which the only release appears to be Naphta’s “Terror” or the apocalyptic conflagration of war. In The Magic Mountain, as in Moby-Dick, we find a distinctive response to the problematic legacy of the encyclopedic archive, the prevailing lesson being that a surface rationalism of instrumental organization conceals an atavistic endowment which is at once a “pre-rational” or mythic threat as well as a repository of creative energy. Mann’s novel, like Melville’s, concedes that a subconscious or preternatural encyclopedism persists as a menacing subtext that is ineradicably part of encyclopedic rationalism. The dream of reason is accompanied by the dream of unreason, and together they form an uncanny alliance, at once traumatic and enlivening. Likewise, in the postmodern environment of encyclopedism recast in the chimerical allure of the Internet and online telepresence, we should bear in mind the imposing parameters of myth as phantom delegation and informing undertow.

     

    “Myth is a form of integrated perceptual awareness which unites ‘fact’ and ‘explanation,’ because it is a form of awareness in which fact and explanation have not yet become disunited” (Falck 117).25 Colin Falck’s definition is part of his attempt to restore a sacralizing outlook in the service of a “true post-modernism.” Falck diagnoses a regressive tendency in technophilia, reminding us that “objective or theoretical modes of explanation–such as natural–scientific ones, which in effect determine much of what we experience, as well as of what we do, in a technological world–may remain dependent on quite different, and ultimately more primitive, modes of comprehension which are essentially mythic” (119). It is not a coincidence that fledgling technologies are accompanied by such phenomena as Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars, and Neuromancer; for there is a deep proximity between hi-tech and mythic resonance. Falck’s aspiration (openly derived from Romantic and Modernist precedent) is to restore myth to making so as to reaffirm the constitutive faculty by which we invent what is memorable.26

     

    Charles Olson (the American poet credited with one of the earliest known uses of the term “post-modern”) was adamant in retaining myth for his “special view of history,” regarding myth as “what is said of what is said”–now more familiar simply as “discourse” (57).27 Discourse is the vibratory archive of propositional forms, the quivering web of language we inhabit; any proposition summons retort or affirmation in a complex series of overlapping echoes, perturbations of the known. Some statements achieve priority as assertions of fact, some as assertions of feeling, others as examples of alluring shapeliness. Mythopoesis can be thought of as the stitching together of incommensurate discursive charms (“charm” in the sense in which any particular discursive register exercises its magic in convincing us it is self-evident).28 Northrop Frye sought to preserve history and myth as co-extensive terms. “To me myth is not simply an effect of a historical process,” he wrote, “but a social vision that looks toward a transcending of history, which explains how it is able to hold two periods of history together, the author’s and ours, in direct communication” (Words with Power 60-61). In Libra, Don DeLillo depicts the fragile matrix of sentience attending the historical trauma of President Kennedy’s assassination:

     

    People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. (414)

     

    Nicholas Branch, the intelligence analyst in Libra who is archivist of the assassination files, is appropriately situated in “the room of history and dreams” (445). History and dreams: this is the decisive configuration; and we should understand by “mythopoeisis” our propensity for rendering the concrete plastic and malleable. In Diderot’s hands, it was not the data that set you free, but the exercise of faculties (reason and passion) that kept you free.

     

    Even the basic hermeneutic act of establishing a horizon of understanding inevitably partakes of a speculative and sympathetic (that is, pathically endowed) approach. Our historical understanding of another time, no less than gleaning the intent of another person, is stabilized by a mythopoetic reckoning in which we make what we know encompass more than we can possibly know, and in the process make the image of the known into the image of the possible. If this sounds risky, it’s because it is. The stakes in myth are always high–that is, imaginative risk is not recuperable to the ideology of “development.” It is a mistake to link myth with belief, says Roberto Calasso: rather, “we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves in such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself” (278). When Robert Duncan attests that “[t]he depths emerge in a kind of dream informed by the familiar tale. It is important here that the myth be first so familiar, so much no-more-than an old story, that the poet is at home with what is most perilous” (27), he might as well be speaking of Ishmael’s fate, his domesticity consentingly risked astride the perilous depths.

     

    It is from the depths that a symptom of engulfment emanates, a clue or reminder of what has been lost and what awaits recovery–the indigent reserve, the anomalous animation of the texture of the real.29 Stanley Romaine Hopper refers to it as the cry of Merlin:

     

    [T]he surfacing of Merlin's "cry" in the literature of our time signifies that we realize today more keenly than we have ever done that we live within a symbolic reality. Whether we think of this in terms of "standpoint" philosophy, or a philosophy of symbolic forms, or mythopoiesis, or "world hypotheses," or "master images," or archetypes of the unconscious, or radical metaphor, or "models," or "fields," or "frames of reference," or "language games," or "the global village," or the "house of being," the same point is being made. Our "thinking"--religious, philosophical, literary--belongs to "that prodigious net of numinous creation in which man is captured, although he himself has brought it forth." (15)

     

    In Hopper’s view, the constraints of knowledge networks and operative paradigms need the alleviation of “a new logos, a new grammar of awareness” (14). If “rational grammar” meant a measure proportionate to the human condition, it would suffice to call it that. But the claims of encyclopedism need to be viewed with the same circumspection as that applied to Reason. The Encyclopédie was a project, a venture, a point of engagement, a political weapon, an act of profound cultural generosity, and much more; but it was also an iconoclastic project, everywhere bent on clarification and elucidation–Promethean light–bringing–banishing the dark, the undertone, the demi-monde of anything not dedicated to the claim of reason. In the wake of this prejudicial inclination of the philosophes, there have been numerous works laying claim to the occulted legacy of a pre-Enlightenment encyclopedism, of which Finnegans Wake can be taken as exemplary.

     

    In the Wake Joyce depicts (in part through the polyglot texture of the book itself) the exemplary resolution of archival mass as a rubbish heap fermenting provocative incitements that do not so much illuminate as thicken or increase the texture of the darkness. In Underworld DeLillo offers a comparable vision; and the contending claims of illumination and passion converge in a passage in which Brian Glassic, a waste management engineer, confronts an enormous refuse heap, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.

     

    In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us. (184)

     

    Any search for a new grammar of awareness would benefit by attending to the indigent recess heaped up in our needs and wishes, our passion and excess.

     

    It is from the vantage given us by this exceptional prospect–this unwarranted and mongrel exemption; this underworld with its undertones, its duende of all that makes dark sounds30–that we might, in conclusion, recognize a familiar thread of thought that is at once alluring and disturbing. The thought goes by various names, from mathesis universalis and lingua generalis to the lucid demystifications of the Enlightenment philosophes, though our vernacular expression is now simply “encyclopedic.”31 The positive aspect of encyclopedism is increased access to comprehensive knowledge which is beyond the capacity of any of us to know on our own. It is this aspect that has been revitalized by computer technologies. Despite its association with McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy exploding into the hot and cold media of the electronic era, the issue is not strictly technological. It has also been propagated through more organic models, including Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, Bohm’s implicate order, and, earlier in the century, Jung’s collective unconscious, Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and H. G. Wells’s “world brain.”32 These organic visions are now being revisited in utopian affirmations of our multi-media “infosphere”–a “process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain” (R.U. Sirius), a “‘hive-mind consensus’” through which we will supposedly “evolve into ever higher forms” (Louis Rossetto), with humans as the “brain cells… waking up” the planet (Jody Radzik).33 Such euphoric proclamations are tantamount to pledges of religious faith in the beneficence of a higher power (albeit without Teilhard’s explicit Christology). But emanating as they do from the convulsive archives of blip culture and channel surfing, I am inclined to see them rather as evidence of a condition forecast early in this century by Henry Adams. Reviewing his own contortions of mental growth in the instructively third-person format of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams found that the exponential development of power and information had broken the historical neck of the old Enlightenment viewpoint which had formed the characters of his presidential predecessors. “Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions,” he discovered, as “the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive. The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 to 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react–but it would need to jump” (498). And jump it has. What Adams in his prescience recognized was that there is no advantage in revisiting, let alone attempting to resuscitate, the romantic/modernist antinomies of nature versus culture, primal intuitive energy versus rational artifice.

     

    The “new American” has long since become the Global Everyone, although the “need to think in contradictions” has not necessarily resulted in any vernacular dialectic. Rather, contradiction has become so pervasive as not to seem anomalous: as the material I’ve reviewed here suggests, there is a violence without and a violence within, but the relation between them lacks the reciprocal elegance of Wallace Stevens’ formulation (“The mind… is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality” [36]). Stevens, writing in 1942, was attempting to preserve a balance between imponderable violence and civil grace, and (like Adams) he thought of nobility as a “force.” As we enter into the pacts and pledges of cyborg life and hypertext mobility, the assignment of force to any particular sphere is increasingly perplexing. A “show of force” by striking workers hangs in limbo when management in the global economy is at once everywhere and nowhere; as for “mind,” we might now adjust Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s famous remark in Axel to read: “Thinking? Our computers can do that for us” (183).34 While they are doing that, we might get busy thinking of ourselves (meat puppets that we are) not only as creatures whose desires and fantasies alone can keep pace with the new dromocracy–the world of entitlements to speed–but who have a long and instructive legacy of wallowing and apparently aimless circularity. Entertaining the thought of such insouciant drift in the figures of Ishmael and Hans Castorp, we might wonder about the cost of impetuously casting such indigence behind us once and for all. The Enlightenment legacy derives from the recognition that, if knowledge is power, specific acts and agents are what empower it. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas confronts the question of such empowerment: to ask whether to project a world is at the same time to ask shall I know what I know?35–that is, shall I discern the limits of what I know and include that within the compass of my knowledge? The augmentation of an act of knowing by metacommentary adds one circle around the other. As Pynchon, DeLillo, Mann, Melville, and Joyce each exemplify, the circle of learning is empowered by an encompassing circle of awareness about the scope and limits of “learning” as such. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn,” wrote Emerson, “and under every deep a lower deep opens” (403).

     

    Notes

     

    1. Since Libra vaulted him into prominence, DeLillo has been conspicuously affiliated with postmodernism: see John A. McClure, “Postmodern Romance”; Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique”; and the articles collected under Lentricchia’s editorship for New Essays on ‘White Noise.’ In this collection Michael Valdez Moses (“Lust Removed from Nature”) celebrates DeLillo for having “given [postmodern technological reality] its most detailed, expressive, and philosophically powerful representation” (63); while Paul A. Cantor (“‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You’”) acknowledges that “[b]y setting White Noise within the academic world, DeLillo may have taken us close to the bloodless heart of postmodernism” (47). Cantor is thinking of the epistemological slippage associated with the simulacrum, and ventures an important distinction: “Is DeLillo a postmodern writer or is he a pathologist of postmodernism?” (58).

     

    2. See Edward Mendelson, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” and “Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon.” My summary covers the points common to both articles.

     

    3. The dilemma of endless differential slippage as a challenge to encyclopedic completeness is taken up by Vincent Descombes, who elaborates on Derrida by citing the “extra place of the supplement [which] takes the place of the missingplace in the book” (59). “In other words, what is missing [in the encyclopedia] is the place for what is missing, and that is why it is necessary to supplement this lack” (58).

     

    4. As some of the more hyperbolic reviewers (like George Wills) of DeLillo’s novels have suspected, there is something “un-American” in his work; but they are too eager to equate this with anti-Americanism. DeLillo’s fiction is remarkably free of editorializing or grandstanding, and actually conforms to Stendhal’s model of the novel as a mirror carried through the common road, its mudstains deriving from the road not the mirror. In Underworld, though, there’s no mistaking capitalism as a malevolent force–a force which is significantly relocated at the end of the novel in the new Russia, while its American foreground is consigned to dump sites and inner city collapse like the Bronx.

     

    5. A similar historical thesis is developed by J.H. van den Berg; see The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (“Metabletica”) and Divided Existence and Complex Society.

     

    6. I combine, in this remark, the import of two of Barthes’s most influential essays: “From Work to Text” and “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language.

     

    7. For more on Hutchins and the Great Books, see Jed Rasula, “Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naive Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates.” The trope of self-selection continues to thrive in such sites as the rhetorical framing of American poetry anthologies: see Rasula, “The Empire’s New Clothes: Anthologizing American Poetry in the 1990s.” A somewhat different approach to the problem emerges when the genre is not poetry but pornography: “The principle of self-selection by the reader–so that all pornographic texts become, formally, like encyclopaedias–is what is largely responsible for the monotony with which they are charged by literary critics,” writes Jeremy Palmer in “Fierce Midnights: Algolagniac Fantasy and the Literature of the Decadence” (94). The alliance of pornography with encyclopedism is not as capricious as it may sound: Roland Barthes pointedly anatomizes the encyclopedic proclivities of pornography, spiritual exercises, and social reform in Sade, Fourier, Loyola.

     

    8. The number of topics and of references are given in the Introduction by William Benton (vii), who cites the further statistic that the Syntopicon took $2 million and eight years to compile. In his autobiography, Philosopher at Large, Adler remarks that “Bill Benton never forgot, and never quite forgave, the enormous discrepancy between the original estimate and the final cost” (239). The original estimate was $60,000 and two years. The most famous vilification of the project remains that of Dwight Macdonald, who characterized the Syntopicon as “one of the most expensive toy railroads any philosopher ever was given to play with” (260).

     

    9. To frame the hard work of reading Aquinas or Kant as a conversational contract was crucial to the commercial success of the project. Character-building by means of market resources is the tradition to which the Great Books enterprise belongs, much as it was institutionally sanctioned during Hutchins’s term as president of the University of Chicago beginning in 1929, and later with the founding of St. John’s College in Annapolis in 1937, which retains its Great Books curriculum to the present. The concept of a core curriculum of “great books” was pioneered by Columbia professor John Erskine (Adler was one of his students). Erskine’s affable approach is epitomized in his recommendation to aspiring readers of the Great Books: “get yourself a comfortable chair and a good light–and have confidence in your own mind” (qtd. in Rubin 168).

     

    10. See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. Richards’s subject is more specifically elaborated in a clause appended to the above citation, which continues: “… master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.”

     

    11. These two dispositions of the tree of knowledge are derived from Ephraim Chambers, whose Cyclopædia (1728) was the work Diderot and D’Alembert were commissioned to adapt in 1747 as the basis for a French encyclopedia, a task which famously outgrew its founding intent. Diderot and D’Alembert preserved Chambers’s avowed didacticism, but they also retain and amplify the “scientific” dimension which Chambers found less congenial. In his prospectus he distinguishes these approaches:

     

    There are two manners of writing: in the one, which we may call scientific, we proceed from ideas, and things, to words: that is, first lay down the thing, then the name it is called by.--This is the way of discovery, or invention; for that the thing ought to be first found, before it be named. In this way we come from knowledge to ignorance; from simple and common ideas, to complex ones. The other is didactic, just the converse of the former; in which we go from words and sounds, to ideas and things; that is, begin with the term, and end with the explanation.--This is the historical way, or the way of teaching, and narration; of resolving the extraordinary knowledge of one person, into the ordinary of another; of distributing artificial complications into their simple ideas; and thus raising, and levelling again, what art had erected. (xvii)

     

    Chambers adds that his own work follows the latter method.

     

    12. Voltaire remarked, of the Encyclopédie, that “[t]wenty folio volumes will never make a revolution. It is the little portable volumes of thirty sous that are to be feared. Had the gospel cost twelve hundred sesterces the Christian religion would never have been established” (Besterman 7). Undeterred by the anticlericalism of the Enlightenment enclopedists, Northrop Frye locates the encyclopedic paradigm in scripture itself, in which he sees a continuous form that totalizes the episodic elements feeding into it as tributaries, such as oracle, commandment, parable, prophecy, and aphorism (Anatomy of Criticism 55-56).

     

    13. Disorder obviously means something different for us than it would have for an Enlightenment philosophe. As an “operational poetics,” however, a link can be made. Eighteenth century verse practiced orderliness. The metric regulae of Pope’s couplets secures for poetry even so encyclopedic a topic as an “Essay on Man.” Subsequent perigrinations of the medium through blank verse to free verse and most recently to transcribed talk (Antin, Benson) and aleatory and cut-up methods (MacLow, Andrews) have not abandoned order but, quite the contrary, pursued more resourceful means of procuring it. To subscribe to the rhymed couplet, after all, is not to appeal to an innate condition of mind, but to refer the material resources of the poem to such accidents as morphology and phonology. If rhymed couplets had never been invented until 1960, they would assuredly have become, by now, as idiomatic and pervasive a sign of the times as Warhol’s soupcans.

     

    14. Both the Dictionnaire critique and the Da Costa are translated as Atlas Arkhive Three (Documents of the Avant-Garde), Encyclopaedia Acephalica, assembled and introduced by Alastaire Brotchie. Bataille’s concept of the informe informs and forms the arrangement of topics in Formless: A User’s Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Finally, Pharmako/poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft by Dale Pendell is a lovely promenade of esoteric information and gentle sagacity, arranged in a topical alphabet of hallucinogenic plants.

     

    15. Jay David Bolter traces another tension in the encyclopedic tradition, one between a synoptic vision of knowledge and the establishment of accurate information. See Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (88-93). Bolter favors the potential of hypertext to achieve both goals simultaneously. Hilary Clark addresses the issue in comparable terms as a tension between tactical goals and ideal completeness, and in the process raises another concern: whether order is discovered or imposed, objective or subjective (a concern which is also that of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49).

     

    16. See Millicent Bell, “Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick.” On Bayle, see Paul Burrell, “Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.”

     

    17. See Michael West, “Charles Kraitsir’s Influence upon Thoreau’s Theory of Language.”

     

    18. Another useful model for considering speed is that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, in which they distinguish between striated and smooth space: between the systematic regularity of institutionally convened (or striated) space and, on the other hand, the perturbations and irregularities of nomadic (self-effacing or smooth) practice. Singularities prevail in nomadism; duplication and repetition are characteristics of the striated grid. A comparable paradigm is explored in The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau. Virilio’s thesis of dromocracy is elaborated at length in Speed and Politics.

     

    19. See Curtius passim 319-326 on “The Book of Nature.”

     

    20. “Le mythes sont la première encyclopédie,” says Henri Meschonnic (Des mots 214).

     

    21. It was the dense complexity of “tangle” that Pound emphasized: “I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in action” (58).

     

    22. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg. [Gesammelte Werke Band 17] (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981). Subsequent bracketed German citations follow this edition.

     

    English citations follow The Magic Mountain, tr. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995).

     

    23. “Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby | Might well have been German or Spanish, | Yet that things go round and again go round | Has rather a classical sound.”

     

    24. This resistance of universality to the finite labors of human expression persists as incitement to philosophical encyclopedism, however. Mark Taylor remarks of Hegel’s encycopedic labors, “[t]he voice that says it all… talks in circles,” adding that for Blanchot philosophy is “the discourse that tries to say it all by talking in perfect circles” (Altarity 222). And Hegel himself affirms that “[t]he whole of philosophy resembles a circle of circles” (Taylor 224)–a prospect which Emerson finds to be the character of life as such: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn” (403).

     

    25. There is much to recommend Falck’s position, but it’s not helped by his hostility to all things “post-structuralist.” So he is not inclined, for instance, to recognize in Paul de Man a recuperative potential congruent with his own project. When de Man calls “the conception of literature (or literary criticism) as demystification the most dangerous myth of all,” far from conflating literature and criticism (as Falck assumes) he is asserting literature’s unique claim to be “demystified from the start” (14)–that is, not engaged in partial projects of demystification, but something that “knows and names itself as fiction” (17) and thereby ungrounds itself. De Man surely learned from Blanchot, as did Derrida, that lack of a ground does not disable literature but, on the contrary, discloses in it what the poet Robert Duncan called “fictive certainties” (the title of a collection of his essays). De Man’s recommendation that criticism follow literature (in its program of self-demystification) is not a declaration of their indistinguishability, as it is often taken to be.

     

    26. “The narratives we agree to call myths are the products of an intellectual activity that invents what is memorable,” says Marcel Detienne in “Myth and Writing: The Mythographers” (11).

     

    27. In the early 1970s Olson was a major figure in the Boundary 2 context, at a time when it bore the subtitle “A Journal of Postmodern Literature.” But, despite the prodigious outpouring of work on postmodernism since then, it was not until 1995 when Olson’s prescient claims for the post-modern were finally recognized: see Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern (20-23). Despite a common perfunctory gesture towards Language poetry (sanctioned, in effect, by Fredric Jameson’s remarks on a poem by Bob Perelman), the genre of poetry as such has been neglected in discussions of postmodernism–a condition attributable, I think, to a shift in the profession of literary studies in which a presumed vanquishing of the New Criticism also discarded the genre most conspicuously associated with Tate, Ransom, Blackmur, Warren, and Brooks.

     

    28. Northrop Frye sought to preserve history and myth as co-extensive terms. “To me myth is not simply an effect of a historical process,” he wrote, “but a social vision that looks toward a transcending of history, which explains how it is able to hold two periods of history together, the author’s and ours, in direct communication” (Words with Power 60-61). Frye’s own openly declared inclination as an anatomist led him to favor sensible wholes over abstract distillations of data. The sense-making provocations of a multi-generic legacy of “encyclopedic aggregates” like that canonized as the Bible was Frye’s model of encyclopedic as “a total body of vision” (Anatomy of Criticism 55-56).

     

    29. The concluding quote within the citation is by Erich Neumann.

     

    30. “All that has black sounds has duende,” Federico García Lorca cites approvingly (from composer Manuel Torre): “Play and Theory of the Duende” (43).

     

    31. Encyclopedic programs are of course imponderably numerous and diverse. But, apart from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, a very short list might include “Das allgemeine Brouillon” of Novalis, Coleridge’s “Opus Maximus” as well as his plan for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, Bentham’s “Chresthomathia,” and Humbert de Superville’s ambitious attempt at “a single, figured and configuring, sign system,” the aim of which “was to uncover the corporate or permanent character of human thought and feeling” (Stafford 41). One might also take into account the encyclopedic social physiology in the novel cycles of Balzac and Zola, as well as The Cantos of Ezra Pound, with their explicitly extra-literary obsession with historical, fiscal, philosophical and scientific data (an uncited but pertinent predecessor being Lucretius’s De rerum natura). Finally, encyclopedic pressures impinge on Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Scriabin’s synaesthetic “Mysterium.” And even A Vision by W.B. Yeats attempts an encyclopedic synthesis of the phases of sublunar existence. For a wide-ranging and thoroughly informed panorama of encyclopedic impulses (though not named as such) in a multi-media context, see Donald Theall, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. “The tendency to scientize all progress often leads us to disregard the importance of the heuristic power of the poetic in what comes to be,” Theall writes (265); his book seeks to rectify this oversight.

     

    32. H.G. Wells’s “world brain” may be the least known concept on this list. In the mid-1930s, he delivered a series of talks urging the international synthesis of knowledge in “a sort of mental clearing house for the mind” (49) that “would compel men to come to terms with one another” (16); “not a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification and a synthesis… [that] would play the rôle of an undogmatic Bible to a world culture” (14), “directing without tyranny” (23)–yet spreading “like a nervous network, a system of mental control throughout the globe” (23)–to establish a “common ideology” (62) (or “common sanity” [48]) as “the only means, of dissolving human conflict into unity” (62). Fritjof Capra provides a useful synthesis of research in self-organizing systems (like Gaia) in The Web of Life. The theories Capra discusses have striking affinities with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of cosmogenesis–a resemblance due in part to the fact that Teilhard’s “noosphere” is explicitly modelled on the notion of the biosphere. As is the case with Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Teilhard’s references to his most famous concept abound throughout his books. A convenient source is “The Formation of the Noosphere” in The Future of Man; but the concept is so thoroughly integrated into an evolutionary framework (drawing on paleontology, biology, chemistry, physics) and elaborated in a religious synthesis (Catholicism) that it’s worth attending to Teilhard’s more complex resumes in The Appearance of Man and The Phenomenon of Man.

     

    33. The citations from Sirius, Rossetto, and Radzik are from Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (47). A blend of organic and technological hyperbole, while increasingly common, is perfectly achieved in a Mondo 2000 exhortation: “Why settle for passé kinkiness when you can actualize techno-aphrodisia from the infosphere?” (Dery 38).

     

    34. The passage in Axel involves a renunciation of earthly existence in terms that are also relevant to current visions of techno-transubstantiation: “It is the earth, don’t you see, that has become the Illusion! … in our strange hearts we have destroyed the love of life–and… it is indeed in REALITY that we ourselves have become our souls! To agree to live after that would be but a sacrilege against ourselves. Live? Our servants will do that for us” (183).

     

    35. “Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross” (82).

    Works Cited

     

    • Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
    • Adler, Mortimer. Great Ideas from the Great Books. Rev. ed. New York: Washington Square Press, 1961.
    • —. Philosopher at Large. New York: Macmillan, 1977.
    • Anderson, Wilda. Diderot’s Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
    • Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Rustle of Language. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 49-55.
    • —. “From Work to Text.” The Rustle of Language. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 56-64.
    • —. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Tr. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.
    • Bell, Millicent. “Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick.” PMLA 66 (1951): 626-648.
    • Benton, Bill. Introduction. Great Ideas from the Great Books. Rev. ed. By Mortimer Adler. New York: Washington Square Press, 1961.
    • Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1995.
    • Besterman, Theodore, ed. and tr. “Introduction to Voltaire.” Philosophical Dictionary. Baltimore: Penguin, 1971.
    • Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
    • Blum, Carol. Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher. New York: Viking, 1974.
    • Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
    • Bolter, David Jay. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.
    • Brotchie, Alastaire. “Atlas Arkhive Three.” Encyclopaedia Acephalica. London: Atlas, 1995. 9-28.
    • Burrell, Paul. “Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.” Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopédie. Ed. Frank Kafker. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1981. 83-103.
    • Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Tr. Tim Parks. New York: Knopf, 1993.
    • Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. New York: Vintage, 1993.
    • Cantor, Paul A. “‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You.’” New Essays on ‘White Noise.’ Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
    • Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor, 1996.
    • Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopædia. 5th ed. 1741.
    • Clark, Hilary. “Encyclopedic Discourse.” SubStance 67 (1992): 95-100.
    • Collison, Robert. Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages. New York: Hafner, 1964.
    • Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Tr. Willard Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
    • Darnton, Robert. “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie.” The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 191-214.
    • de Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Tr. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
    • de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
    • Debray, Régis. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms. Tr. Eric Rauth. New York: Verso, 1996.
    • DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1989.
    • —. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
    • Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
    • Descombes, Vincent. “Variations on the Subject of the Encyclopaedic Book.” Tr. Ian McLeod. The Oxford Literary Review 3.2 (1978): 54-60.
    • Detienne, Marcel. “Myth and Writing: The Mythographers.” Mythologies. Vol. 1. Ed. Yves Bonnefoy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 10-11.
    • Duncan, Robert. The Truth and Life of Myth. Fremont, Michigan: Sumac, 1968.
    • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
    • Falck, Colin. Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
    • Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
    • Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
    • —. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. New York: Viking, 1990.
    • Gehlen, Arnold. Man in the Age of Technology. Tr. Patricia Lipscomb. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.
    • Hopper, Stanley Romaine. “‘Le Cri de Merlin!’ or Interpretation and the Metalogical.” Anagogic Qualities of Literature. Ed. Joseph Strelka. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1971. 9-35.
    • Hutchins, Robert. The Great Conversation. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.
    • Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 431-453.
    • —, ed. New Essays on ‘White Noise.’ Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
    • Lorca, Federico García. “Play and Theory of the Duende.” Deep Song and Other Prose. Ed. and tr. Christopher Maurer. New York: New Directions, 1980.
    • Macdonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture. New York: Vintage, 1962.
    • Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg. [Gesammelte Werke Band 17.] Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981.
    • —. The Magic Mountain. Tr. John E. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995.
    • Marinetti, F.T. Selected Writings. Ed. R.W. Flint. Tr. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
    • —. “Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words-in-Freedom.” Ed. Umbro Apollonio. Futurist Manifestos. Tr. R. Brain et al. New York: Viking, 1973. 95-106.
    • McClure, John A. “Postmodern Romance.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 333-353.
    • Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin, 1972.
    • —. “The Tartarus of Maids.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986.
    • Mendelson, Edward. “Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon.” MLN 91 (1976): 1267-1275.
    • —. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Eds. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. 29-52.
    • Meschonnic, Henri. Des mots et des mondes: Dictionnaires, encyclopédies, grammaires, nomenclatures. Paris: Hatier, 1991.
    • —. “L’encyclopédie sortant de son mot pour se voir.” Tous les savoirs du monde: Encyclopédies et bibliothèques, de Sumer au XXIe siècle. Ed. Roland Schaer. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Flammarion, 1996.
    • Moses, Michael Valdez. “Lust Removed from Nature.” Lentricchia, New Essays 63-86.
    • Olson, Charles. The Special View of History. Berkeley: Oyez, 1970.
    • Palmer, Jeremy. “Fierce Midnights: Algolagniac Fantasy and the Literature of the Decadence.” Decadence and the 1890s. Ed. Ian Fletcher. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979. 88-106.
    • Pendell, Dale. Pharmako/poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995.
    • Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1938.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • Rasula, Jed. “Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naive Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates.” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 50-77.
    • —. “The Empire’s New Clothes: Anthologizing American Poetry in the 1990s,” American Literary History 7.2 (Summer 1995): 261-283.
    • Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. New York: Verso, 1993.
    • Rubin, Joan S. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.
    • Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
    • Stafford, Barbara. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
    • Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1951.
    • Swigger, Ronald. “Fictional Encyclopedism and the Cognitive Value of Literature.” Comparative Literary Studies 12.4 (1975): 351-166.
    • Taylor, Mark. Altarity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
    • Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Appearance of Man. Tr. J.M. Cohen. London: Collins, 1965.
    • —. “The Formation of the Noosphere.” The Future of Man. Tr. Norman Denny. London: Collins, 1964. 155-184.
    • —. The Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins, 1959.
    • Theall, Donald. Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995.
    • van den Berg, J.H. The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (“Metabletica”). Tr. H.F. Croes. New York: Norton, 1961.
    • Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Philippe Auguste. Axel. Tr. May Guicharnaud. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
    • —. Divided Existence and Complex Society. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1974.
    • Virilio, Paul, and Sylvére Lotringer. Pure War. Tr. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
    • Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Tr. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
    • Wells, H.G. World Brain. London: Methuen, 1938.
    • West, Michael. “Charles Kraitsir’s Influence upon Thoreau’s Theory of Language.” ESQ 19 (1973): 262-274.
    • Whiter, Walter. Etymologicon Universale; or, Universal Etymological Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1822.

     

  • Automating Feminism: The Case of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man

    Heather Hicks

    Department of English
    Villanova University
    hhicks@email.vill.edu

     

    In his historical review of various American theories of “postindustrialism,” Howard Brick makes the point that “[t]he historical reconstruction of the concept… helps to place the idea of postindustrial society in a new relation with the idea of postmodern culture. Rather than being regarded as corresponding definitions of ‘society’ and ‘culture’… postindustrialism and postmodernism might be taken to imply two distinct and alternative interpretations of contemporary social change and its significance.” Turning to the political stakes of adopting a “postindustrial perspective,” Brick speculates that viewing America through this lens might make us more likely to achieve “the long-standing social and political aspirations of the Left” than would attempts to make sense of American life in terms of postmodernism (350).1

     

    Brick’s suggestion strikes me as worth pursuing, for despite claims that the concept of postmodernism has “been able to welcome in the appropriate areas of daily life or the quotidian” (Jameson xiv) that other concepts, including postindustrialism, could not, the conceptual framework of postmodernism often functions as a surrender to abstraction rather than as an attempt to understand, much less change, daily life in America. It is more often in postmodern theories’ origins–as opposed to their current applications–that one finds specific insights about the “quotidian”; as Margaret Rose has demonstrated in her exploration of the relationship between theories of postmodernism and postindustrialism, most contemporary characterizations of American culture as “postmodern” begin from an understanding of Western nations as postindustrial.2 Returning to this initial set of insights as a fresh approach to thinking about contemporary American culture, then, would seem a particularly promising way of moving beyond the limitations of various postmodern models.

     

    Nonetheless, for the contemporary literary critic, taking the “postindustrial perspective” at first seems improbable. Aren’t postmodern poetics, after all, the cultural expression of what Fredric Jameson has famously referred to as the “impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38)? In the cultural arena of representation as opposed to the domain of intellectual history from which Brick’s own work emerges, aren’t we fated to ponder only the residues of postindustrialism, the shattered remnants of narrative left in the aftermath of this (tidal) wave of capitalism? While I do not disagree that the formal traces of postindustrialism may reside in depthless, fragmented contemporary narratives, I also believe that a significant number of contemporary writers have attempted to engage with postindustrialism directly. In particular, a number of writers have, since 1945, attempted to represent changes in Americans’ experience as workers. The process of recovering the concept of postindustrialism in contemporary literary and cultural studies should begin with them.

     

    One of the most fascinating of these writers is Joanna Russ. In what follows I would like to offer a reading of her famous novel, The Female Man, understanding it not (or not only) as a classic instance of narrative postmodernism, but as a narrative obsessed with the meanings of postindustrial work for women. As I have discussed elsewhere, America’s economic shift from manufacturing to services has had particularly complex ramifications for American women, whose entry into the work force in massive numbers has happened in concert with this economic transformation.3 Specifically, I will argue here that Russ’s text is an attempt to rethink “women’s work” in a historical moment when liberal feminists were campaigning to put women to work while the New Left–increasingly wedded to the concept of “postindustrialism”–was claiming that cybernetic automation would soon make work obsolete. By illuminating these dynamics, The Female Man lays bare the ideological tangle from which a crucial present-day formulation of postindustrialism as the “feminization of work” was born; in these terms, I will suggest the ways that Russ’s text historicizes and complicates Donna Haraway’s conception of contemporary female workers as “cyborgs.”

     

    In The Female Man, which was written in the late 1960s but not published until 1975,4 Joanna Russ explores the lives and feelings of four female characters–Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael–each of whom is from what Russ terms a different “probability/continuum” (22). They are, in other words, women from four parallel universes that are characterized by very different economic and social histories. Joanna, based rather explicitly on Russ herself, is the product of our own “continuum.” She is a college professor living in a late-’60s America that is historically recognizable to the reader. Jeannine is a librarian who lives in a universe in which World War II did not happen, the Great Depression never abated, and the revolutionary social changes of the 1960s have not even been imagined. Janet, who is arguably the main character in this text, is an envoy from a point more than 900 years in the future–and a world in which a plague killed off the men, and the women built a utopian society, “Whileaway,” in their absence. Finally, Jael is an assassin from a future point closer to the present in which men and women are at war with one another.

     

    Anything but a linear narrative, Russ’s novel weaves together a variety of genres, from dramatic monologues, to fairy tales, to excerpts from fictional book reviews of The Female Man itself, all the while playfully staging a series of encounters between the four women. The first three quarters of the text are structured around Janet’s adventures and impressions, using them as a framework to introduce not only her history and the history of Whileaway, but also extended passages where we are privy to the daily experiences and private thoughts of Joanna and Jeannine. In the last quarter of the text, Jael, who has previously made only fleeting appearances, takes center stage, and we learn that it is she who has engineered the time travel necessary for the four women to come together and talk. In the process of enlisting their aid in her war against the men in her continuum, she reveals that they all are, in fact, the same woman; their differences are the product of the different histories of their respective universes (161-62).

     

    Critics who discuss The Female Man almost inevitably begin by identifying it, implicitly or explicitly, as a response to the burgeoning American feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to imagine a characterization of this text that did not begin with that premise, since the problem of women’s oppression fairly saturates its every passage.5 Yet I believe the brand of feminism with which Russ engages in the text is more open to question. Most critics have treated The Female Man as an expression of radical, rather than liberal, feminist politics.6 However, perceiving the degree to which Russ’s text is a meditation on liberal feminism, I contend, is the first step to understanding its role as an equally complex meditation on postindustrialism.

     

    There are, of course, a number of grounds on which to read Russ’s feminism as radical. In an interview in 1984, Russ remarked that the genre of science fiction generally lends itself to “radical thought” because “it is about things that have not happened and do not happen” (“Dialogue” 29).7 Yet the formal experimentations of The Female Man are exceptionally radical, even by the standards of science fiction. On its most basic level, the fragmented, heterodox form of Russ’s novel, which Sally Robinson, in terms inspired by Julia Kristeva, has described as “the kind of radicalization that can disrupt the symbolic order through dissidence” (115), suggests a profound and revolutionary resistance to the rationalism on which the status quo in the West is predicated.8

     

    That formal radicalism, moreover, is enlisted to make a number of points that were central to radical feminist thought of the late 1960s. According to feminist historian Alice Echols, “[e]arly radical feminists believed that women’s oppression derived from the very construction of gender and sought its elimination as a meaningful social category” (50). In Russ’s fragmentation of one woman across four different “universes of probability” (163), as well as her interest in the mingling of gendered identities that her title implies, we see her preoccupation with the social construction of gender. On a less abstract level still, in imagining her feminist utopia as one entirely free of men, Russ also defers to those radical feminists who claimed liberation meant separation of the sexes. It is also fair, I think, to concede the point made by Gardiner that the palpable anger that surfaces periodically in the text echoes the outrage expressed by many early radical feminists.9

     

    Yet while reading Russ’s text as a response to the radical currents within American feminism in the late 1960s is clearly both appropriate and productive, I believe reading the text for its engagements with liberal feminism can open up discussions that make Russ’s text particularly relevant to current debates about both feminism and postindustrialism. Counterpointed to the many facets of radical feminism in Russ’s text is a persistent focus on the complex and in some senses paradoxical relationship between women’s liberation and women’s entry into the (public) work force.

     

    The importance to the liberal Women’s Movement of women’s access to paid, prestigious work can scarcely be overstated. From its beginnings in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), liberal feminism focused doggedly on middle-class women’s equal right to work as a virtual panacea for their discontents. Friedan’s text set out to expose and give a name to what she termed, “the problem that has no name”–the nebulous misery plaguing American middle-class women. According to Friedan, the “feminine mystique,” as she came to call it, was quietly crushing the life out of a whole generation of women by telling them that rather than attempting to compete with men, they should seek “fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love” (43).

     

    Once she had identified the problem, Friedan isolated work outside the home as the only conceivable solution to women’s quiet suffering:

     

    ...work can now be seen as the key to the problem that has no name. The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self-realization was taken from them. (334, emphasis mine)

     

    According to Friedan, the public work place, as opposed to the housewife’s private domain, was “the sphere of our culture that is most morally worthwhile” (165). Friedan was careful, however, to spell out that she did not mean just any work. Her unapologetically classist project was willing to leave industrial work and menial forms of labor to some unspecified others; “busy work or punching a time-clock” (334) was simply not the sort of work she had in mind for her suburban sisters.10 “Honored and useful work” must be her female readers’ goal, she insisted again and again, and this sort of “work toward a greater purpose” was synonymous for her with work in a “profession” (335, 338).

     

    On very rare occasions in the course of Friedan’s 400-page text, she conceded that the professional American work place was not all that it could be. Citing David Riesman’s and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s well-known indictments of American corporate work places as conformist and dispiriting, Friedan acknowledged that men were already coping with the realization that even a professional career was not enough to guarantee a fulfilling sense of identity:11

     

    It does not come from just making a living, working by formula, finding a secure spot as an organization man. The very argument, by Riesman and others, that man no longer finds identity in the work defined as a paycheck job, assumes that identity for man comes through creative work of his own that contributes to the human community: the core of the self becomes aware, becomes real, and grows through work that carries forward human society. (334)

     

    Yet while Riesman in The Lonely Crowd argued for a revolutionary replacement of work with play,12 Friedan’s text ultimately sets out a program that would provide white, middle-class women with full access to careers that “demanded ability, responsibility, and decision” without manifesting any serious intent to transform the structure of the economy or the category of “work” itself (252).

     

    Friedan’s focus on women’s employment carried over, more or less unmodified, to later liberal feminist political efforts. Most of the language of the “Bill of Rights” adopted by the National Organization for Women at its first national conference in 1967, for example, concerned equal opportunity in employment. Of the eight rights this document demanded, five explicitly concerned employment, including an end to sex discrimination in hiring, maternity leave rights, tax deductions for working mothers, and daycare centers (512). A sustained concern with women’s relationship to work would, moreover, be reflected in the extended battle for the Equal Rights Amendment.

     

    The imprimatur of this decade-long fixation on work as a means to women’s liberation is unmistakable in Russ’s text. At a number of moments throughout The Female Man, Russ uses set pieces to make it clear that whether or not women should be allowed equal access to the work place is the defining issue of feminism in most Americans’ minds. Early in the text, for example, her narrative takes us on a careening tour through a series of conversational fragments at a Manhattan cocktail party. We “hear” the offhand remark, “You women are lucky you don’t have to go out and go to work” (35). Later in the same scene we are moved through the room to another snippet of conversation, in which a man asks Janet, who is a guest at the party, “What do you think of the new feminism, eh?… Do you think women can compete with men?” (43). After establishing that he regards feminism as a “very bad mistake,” the male speaker answers his own question:

     

    "You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations," (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations." (43-44)

     

    Russ’s comical flourishes here, as the male speaker’s own physical limitations are subtly communicated, should not detract from the larger function of this passage. The party motif allows Russ to distill to its essence the public’s understanding of feminism. In the form of “small talk,” the complexities of feminism are reduced to the struggle for “equal pay for equal work.”

     

    Later in the text, however, the depth of seriousness with which Russ herself regards the issue of women’s right to work is foregrounded. In another set piece in which an anonymous man and woman discuss their life together, a more thoughtful and complex version of women’s work dilemma is offered:

     

    HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman?

     

    SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence–namely money.

     

    HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren’t making money at all. You can’t make money. Only I can make money. Stop working….

     

    SHE: ... Why can't you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can't earn a living? Why-- (117-18)

     

    Despite its black-and-white theatricality and an honesty in presenting motivations that is, again, almost comical (“You can’t make money. Only I can make money.”), this scene finally takes very seriously the pain caused by women’s relegation to the domestic sphere. The passage not only echoes Friedan’s insistence that “‘Occupation: housewife’ is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin…” (248); if possible it actually intensifies the tone of desperate defiance that Friedan’s text communicates in its discussions of society’s unjust conception of “women’s work.”

     

    Russ’s interest in liberal feminism’s claims regarding the liberatory potential of work is likewise apparent in the emotional struggles of her two most manifestly oppressed female characters. As both Joanna and Jeannine try to imagine happy lives for themselves, they repeatedly come back to a prestigious place in the work force as the most likely means to this end.

     

    Jeannine, the most benighted of all, struggles feebly throughout the text to imagine some other role for herself than the one of wife-and-mother that she feels thrust upon her both by her family and her society. In one of the most complex and poignant moments in the text, Jeannine agonizes about the course of her life and is counseled by that part both of Joanna and of herself that has acquiesced to sexism:

     

    "Jeannine, you'll never get a good job," I said. "There aren't any now. And if there were, they'd never give them to a woman, let alone a grown up baby like you. Do you think you could hold down a really good job, even if you could get one? They're all boring anyway, hard and boring. You don't want to be a dried-up old spinster at forty, but that's what you will be if you go on like this. You're twenty-nine. You're getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine." (113-14)

     

    Much of the force of this passage comes from its apparent truthfulness. While a reader invested in seeing Jeannine liberate and transform herself cannot help but resist the negative voice that whispers in her ear here, the text presents much evidence that corroborates the words of the naysayer. Jeannine’s world is so mired in sexism and economic torpor that she truly is precluded by complex historical forces from finding work that can sustain her. Later this taunting voice becomes even more strident as Jeannine’s resistance to marriage begins to slip away:

     

    Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it? And they won’t let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it?…

     

    I'm trying to talk to you sensibly, Jeannine. You say you don't want a profession and you don't want a man... so what is it that you want? Well? (122-23)

     

    Ultimately, the effect of these passages is to bring work and its inaccessibility into focus as a key source of Jeannine’s sense of entrapment and despair. The jobs listed here, which are particularly associated with conventions of masculinity–the technology of airplanes and trucks, and the science of mathematics–reinforce the message that employment in her world has been carefully coded and mapped onto a gendered grid.

     

    As a successful professor of English, Joanna, the most autobiographical character in the text, has achieved the professional status that Jeannine can scarcely dream of, yet she feels torn between societal expectations that she be “feminine” and her intense pleasure in her work:

     

    I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully…. There’s only one thing wrong with me:

     

    I’m frigid.

     

    In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn’t think I’d survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair,… live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don’t care, become stridently contentious…. I’m very badly dressed.

     

    But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck! (110)

     

    Again echoing Friedan, Russ’s text suggests that professional work can open the door to intense happiness, and even intense sexual satisfaction. And although Joanna concedes that despite her Ph.D. and prestigious career, her colleagues do not respect her, treating her as though she wore a sandwich board that reads, “LOOK! I HAVE TITS!,” she never abandons her hope that the public work place will be a site of further liberation in the future (133). Near the conclusion of the text, Joanna returns to the centrality of paid work to women’s identity:

     

    It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example:

     

    My doctor is male.

     

    My lawyer is male.

     

    My tax-accountant is male.

     

    The grocery-store owner (on the corner) is male.

     

    The janitor in my apartment building is male….

     

    I think most of the people in the world are male.

     

    Now it's true that waitresses, elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don't see them again at all. I think it's a legend that half the population of the world is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly justifies making such a big fuss. It's just that I'm selfish. My friend Kate says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and that's why you don't see them, but I can't believe that. (203-4)

     

    Persisting in Joanna’s last extended meditation on work is a sense that bringing women into the public work place is a crucial aspect of asserting the equal significance of women in the world. As in Friedan’s text, public, paid work beyond the conventional confines of “women’s work” is equated with a visibility that will necessarily translate into liberation.

     

    It is in the context of this feminism dedicated to the right to work that Russ’s engagement with New Left notions of post-scarcity becomes so interesting. In fact, I want to argue here that postindustrial, cybernetic technologies leave “women’s work” a deeply fractured and open category in Russ’s text. Despite the very fluid structure of The Female Man, Russ indisputably gives particular emphasis and detail to her account of Whileaway, the utopia from which Janet has emerged. Whileaway relies for its manufacturing on the sophisticated technology of the “induction helmet”–a cybernetic device which transmits brain waves directly to the controls of machinery without any physical exertion on the part of the user, making it “possible for one workwoman to have not only the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands” (14). Critic Tom Moylan, in his study of what he characterizes as the “critical utopias” of the 1960s, has discussed the extent to which The Female Man is a cultural artifact of the New Left’s interest in cybernetics. Moylan suggests that in her construction of Whileaway, Russ combines “post-industrial, cybernetic technology with a libertarian pastoral social system” (67). Indeed, Russ’s text bears the unmistakable mark of an element of New Leftist thought that is often overlooked.

     

    Today, when one mentions the American “New Left” the discussion is likely to turn immediately to protests against the Vietnam War. And if the discussion broadens and deepens, a narrative takes shape which begins, alternatively, with Martin Luther King’s Freedom Walks of the mid-1950s or the Greensboro, North Carolina lunch-counter protest of 1960, and then stretches to those Vietnam protests across an expanse of middle-class student actions against the “multiversity.”13 I find that when I mention the role that cybernetic automation played in American New Left politics, I am met with blank stares. And yet automation, specifically, and postindustrialism, generally, was a consistently recurring issue in New Left thought from the very beginning of the Movement. Indeed, what one sees in reviewing the documents of the “most representative organization of the Movement” (Teodori 53), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as documents from other New Leftist groups, is a gradual embrace of automation as a route to utopia.14

     

    As Massimo Teodori has suggested, in the early 1960s members of the newly formed SDS made America’s underclass their first cause (25-29). Appalled by the specter of poverty in an America where so many lived in resplendence, student groups fastened particularly on the problem of unemployment. In reflecting backward from 1967 on the early days of the Movement, activist Todd Gitlin remarked that the students believed that “the issue of jobs or income might be a single decisive lever of change” (138). This campaign against unemployment was marked by a set of fears distinctive to the post-World War II era; according to Gitlin, the basis of the SDS’s fixation on employment was “some naive expectations about the pace and effect of automation” (138).15

     

    In his description of the activities of one early SDS program, the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), Richard Rothstein, writing in 1969, explained that a crucial articulation of those expectations regarding automation was a 1963 manifesto entitled “The Triple Revolution” (275). Written by a “coalition of liberals and radicals,” including Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Todd Gitlin, the manifesto claimed that revolutions in “cybernation,” weaponry, and human rights demanded radical changes in American society (275).16 In particular, the writers of “The Triple Revolution” considered “the cybernation revolution” the linchpin for their own national revolution. Describing a “machines-and-man drama” in which American jobs were “disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines,” the writers reasoned that this domestic crisis made the current economic system manifestly untenable (340).

     

    Rather than calling for limits on the automation of manufacturing, however, the authors of “The Triple Revolution” advocated “the encouragement and planned expansion of cybernation” (347). Tapping a vein of social thought with deep roots in Western history, these writers characterized the U.S. as a post-scarcity society, a society in which “sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone… ” (342).17 Contrary to liberal conventions that treated welfare as the safety net for the unemployed, this more radical phalanx believed that an “unqualified right to an income… would take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures” once the society was fully automated (348). Nor would this “right to income” be predicated on full employment of American workers. Instead, the manifesto writers sought to eliminate the “income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand–for granting the right to consume” (343). Soon, work itself would simply no longer be part of the economic equation: “The economy of abundance,” they wrote, “can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work” (348). While uncertain of the specifics, they called for a society in which “work” was replaced by “many creative activities and interests commonly thought of as non-economic,” by “new modes of constructive, rewarding and ennobling activity” (348).18

     

    It would be inaccurate to suggest that “The Triple Manifesto” immediately turned the rank and file of the New Left on to a vision of a fully-automated, work-free America. If anything, the elements of this document that had the most powerful effect initially were its dire warnings about short-term unemployment, which were echoed by another report in the same year that predicted unemployment of 13% by 1970 (Rothstein 275-76). Subsequent writings of the SDS produced in the first half of the decade tended to dwell on the immediate “threat of automation,” to borrow activist Carl Wittman’s phrase, rather than its long-term promise (129). In the statement generated by their 1963 convention, “America and the New Era,” the SDS made this threat a central theme. The pamphlet described a crisis in the work force produced by “a new type of automated production” which allowed manufacturers to “increase productive output by seventy per cent, with no increase whatever in the number of manufacturing workers” (174). Again in 1965, a group of older leftists active on the editorial board of Studies on the Left alluded to the threat of automation to American employment, writing that “discontent is widespread, the conditions of work continue to worsen and security will diminish steadily with the continued spread of automation” (“Up from Irrelevance” 214). And in the streets and poor neighborhoods of America, too, students focused more on the short-term threat of automation, counteracting it with various projects meant to respark the force and energy of labor unions, generate employment and, in cases where job loss was unavoidable, improve the welfare system.

     

    Over the course of the 1960s, however, the more positive perspective on automation expressed by “The Triple Manifesto” gradually gained ground. In 1966, activist Richard Flacks predicted “the use of technology to eliminate demeaning labor, [and] the development of new definitions of work and status based on humanistic criteria” (195). And by the end of the decade numerous New Left thinkers were weighing in with wholesale paeans to full automation. Marvin Garson; Dave Gilbert, Bob Gottlieb, and Susan Sutheim; Martin Sklar; and Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman all produced economic and social analyses of the U.S. which called for the full automation of the society.19 In each of these accounts the conventional meanings of “work,” with all of their connotations of rationalization and social order, were unraveled by a vision of easy abundance.

     

    The notion of “work” itself, of course, did not disappear from every account. As late as 1972, Alan Adelson remarked that, when and if the revolution was actually achieved, student radicals had little idea of what sort of society should replace the current one (119). Adelson’s assessment was half true. Most students radicals looked toward some variation of a “post-scarcity society” as the goal of their revolutionary efforts. The place of work in such a society was open, however, to considerable debate. Certainly, throughout this era of intensified interest in a work-free, post-scarcity society, there were those who were standing by the importance of “work” as a source of personal fulfillment.20 Even in Calvert and Neiman’s book-length call for full automation, A Disrupted History, the writers seem unsure about work’s place in a post-scarcity world. At one point the writers argue that “living without working is the potential of capitalist economic and technological development” (86-87, emphasis mine), while at another moment they strategize for a “rational system of decentralized worker-controlled production and the creation of an ecologically sane environment” (137, emphasis mine).

     

    Yet despite such oscillations, there was unquestionably a new enthusiasm for a life without work. In summing up his overview of the New Left’s history and looking to the future, Teodori wrote, “The society dominated by the work ethic is being replaced by one in which creativity and imagination can play an important role in the realization of human potentialities” (83). In their later reflection back on the end of the 1960s, the editors of Social Text likewise identified a new contempt for work:

     

    Zero work, unwork, the merging on the [assembly] line of work and play, this signalled a new politics of labor. It also created new space, cleared by freeing time normally subordinated to capital. This is no longer the unemployment of the economic crisis: it is workers turning away from labor itself, abjuring the income ineluctably tied to it. As capital aims to fill all spaces in the day with activity that produces surplus value, labor aims to free itself from these spaces, to create its own space inside the work place. In the 60s, the anti-work ethic was thus introduced. (Sayres, et al. 3)

     

    Cybernetic automation underwrote these dreams of “unwork” and play, offering the possibility that work places might soon be a thing of the past, that men and women might soon be able to organize their lives not in terms of a regimented schedule of formal tasks, but in response to those highly personal desires revealed by the absence of the demands of production.21

     

    One would be hard-pressed, indeed, to find a society that more completely replicates the spirit of the New Left’s vision of post-scarcity than Whileaway. The “induction helmets,” which represent Russ’s version of cybernetic automation, have produced in Russ’s utopia precisely the sort of eruption of creativity that the New Left made its goal:

     

    ...there is, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world. (54)

     

    Such descriptions prompt Moylan to describe Russ’s vision of Whileaway as largely inspired by the “the deep changes advocated by the all-male new left of the 1960s” (66). Yet I differ from Moylan and other critics who have discussed Russ’s text by resisting a reading that sees this notion of post-scarcity as readily compatible with Russ’s feminist politics.22

     

    Russ’s mixture of New Left post-scarcity politics with her liberal feminist enthusiasm for work, which I mapped earlier, yields strange results indeed. Despite its remarkable advances, Whileaway still has a number of social problems, and among these, one is given particular emphasis. No point is made about Whileaway with greater regularity than that the women of Whileaway work much too hard: Russ writes, “Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work” (54, original emphasis). In speaking of the hiatus from incessant toil Whileawayans enjoy during the five years in which they raise their infant daughters, Janet explains: “There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so little after…. At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again” (15). Her interlocutor in Joanna’s continuum, taken aback by this characterization asks, “And this is considered enough, in Whileaway?” to which Janet replies, “My God, no” (15).

     

    Yet, where work is concerned Whileaway is a riddle. For we are also told that Whileawayans do not work more than sixteen hours a week, or for more than three hours on any one job (56, 53). While the recent advent of the induction helmet may have somewhat abruptly reduced what had previously been more constant labor (Russ does not make this clear), the repeated complaints about too much work are framed as a current issue, not one of the past.23 These enigmatic formulations allow for a number of possible interpretations. Critic Frances Bartkowski, untroubled by the apparent contradictions concerning work on Whileaway, implies in her reading of the novel that Whileawayans’ laments about their work reveal that even sixteen hours of formal employment have come to seem excessively burdensome within the enlightened society of Whileaway (73). Yet one might also understand Russ’s treatment of work in her utopia to imply the opposite–that every female activity, even those not formally understood as work, has been colored by a pervasive work ethic. Finally, it is possible that the text simply sets up separate, irreconcilable accounts of Whileaway–that the moments when Janet claims that Whileawayans work all the time and those when she claims they work only sixteen hours are meant to be two alternative visions of Whileaway–just as Russ occasionally allows to coexist different, contradictory accounts of certain events elsewhere in the text.24

     

    I would push things a bit further here, however, and maintain that none of these readings is complete without being situated in the context of Russ’s extended engagement with liberal feminism’s celebration of work. It is only in these terms that we can understand Russ’s persistent representation of “work” in a society so clearly modeled after the “zero-work” societies being advocated by the New Left. It is not just any work that is happening in Whileaway, we must conclude, but a version of “work” that has its roots in the liberal feminist appropriation of this category in the 1960s. This women’s work, so brazenly, ostentatiously out of place amidst the industrious circuitry of her utopia, demands that the reader interrogate whether “work” indeed should remain an important category for women when there is no longer an economic imperative to participate in it.

     

    In other words, looking forward from a point at which automation seemed to promise the end of work, Russ reexamines what a feminist notion of women’s work should be. Is “work” a means to an end–that end a state of leisure? Is it a concept that women should embrace as a constant source of respect and power–a term that should become so permeable with the concept of feminism that the two become synonymous? Or is it possible that Russ, in her attention to the endless work that plagues life on Whileaway, is suggesting that by striving toward a life of work at the moment that the New Left was dismissing work as obsolete, women were fettering themselves to a confining rather than liberating set of practices–that women instead should disown and resist work?

     

    At least part of the answer lies, I believe, with the character Janet, the emissary from Whileaway whose arrival in Joanna’s continuum in 1969 opens the novel. Janet’s work as an emissary is strictly temporary. Her regular work on Whileaway is as a “Safety and Peace” officer (1). Specifically, what she does in this job is to track down those who are “unable to bear the tediousness of [their] work,” and, if they cannot be persuaded to return to their job, to kill them (55). In other words, Janet, who stands in metonymic relationship to Utopia itself, is also the one who forces women to work. To simplify that equation a bit further, feminist utopia is in some sense epitomized by, even the equivalent of, the necessity to work.

     

    A slightly different, but not uncomplementary, reading that the text seems to make available is that a conventional gender binary, with its categories of “man” and “woman,” is itself essential to the distinction between work and leisure. That is, Russ’s text allows for an interpretation in which, in the absence of men, all binary structures disappear. The resulting, prevailing epistemology on Whileaway, spurred by the feminist drive to enter the public world of work, constructs work as a totalized category.25 The women of Whileaway “work all the time” because work has become tantamount to existence itself. Certainly the very public and private spheres which have traditionally defined male and female sites of work are abandoned in Whileaway. Janet remarks of Whileawayans at work:

     

    [T]hey work outdoors in their pink or gray pajamas and indoors in the nude until you know every wrinkle and fold of flesh, until your body's in a common medium with theirs and there are no pictures made out of anybody or anything; everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside. (95)

     

    While the elimination of binaries such as public/private and subject/object seem to signal profound liberation, Russ’s insistence that work has simply taken over the binary of work/leisure once again returns us to the question of the meaning of “work” in such a fluid sphere.

     

    I would argue that despite her sense that “work” was in the process of being evacuated of its original economic meanings in the late 1960s, Russ was convinced that women should not relinquish their new-found purchase on this concept. Both Janet’s role as an embodiment of the need to work, and the apparent absence of a meaningful alternative to work, suggest that, while Whileawayans complain about work, they also claim it as their ontology. Even as their lives move closer to complete freedom, their notion of themselves as workers bound to a collective future continues unabated. For Russ, it appears, the course on which women had set themselves in the early days of the second wave was inextricably connected with a notion of “work.” The female worker was, de facto, a feminist, and, conversely, the feminist was a female worker.

     

    It is precisely here, from within Russ’s contradictory utopia of automated feminist work, that we should place her text in dialogue with one of its theoretical progeny, Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” For the distance between Russ’s complex notion of the continuation of work in an automated society as feminist and Haraway’s understanding of it as feminized suggests the particular relevance of Russ’s thinking about women and postindustrial work for us today. Reading Russ’s text at the intersection of New Left and liberal feminist politics begins to answer Mary Ann Doane’s implicit invitation to historicize Haraway’s contemporary notion of the “cyborg.”26

     

    Russ’s characterization of life on Whileaway as one without binaries–where “everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside”–is strikingly similar to what Donna Haraway describes as “the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone” in her contemporary meditation on cybernetics and feminism (192):

     

    Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the distinction of public and private domains--suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms--it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. (193-94)

     

    In some senses, the superficial similarity between Haraway’s and Russ’s visions here is not difficult to understand. Haraway explicitly names Russ as one of the inspirations for her thinking about contemporary workers as “cyborgs.” Unlike Russ, who celebrates the evaporation of the public/private binary as part of her utopia, however, Haraway characterizes this “privatization” as part of a trend that she describes as the “feminization” of work:

     

    Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. (190)

     

    Both Russ and Haraway generate visions of societies that, despite their remarkably productive machines, still require extraordinary amounts of work from their human–especially female human–populations. Yet the significance of this merging of women and work in their respective accounts could not be more different. In her discussion of paid, postindustrial work as “feminized,” Haraway presents an ironic twist on earlier liberal feminist projects of ushering women into the work force. Rather than work transforming the meanings of “woman” in American society so that it came to connote strength and independence, it appears, in Haraway’s account, that the binding together of work and woman has instead transformed the meanings of “work,” to a degree negating its positive valence–or, in those cases where it was already regarded negatively, increasing that negativity.

     

    Certainly, both Russ and Haraway see the cyborg as a means to epistemological transformations that can empower women socially and economically. Jael, whose steel teeth and cybernetic claws mark her as an archetypal cyborg, is the character in The Female Man who most straightforwardly communicates the transformative power of work for women. In the future she inhabits, Manlanders have increasingly “farmed out” work to Womanlanders, producing an effect not unlike that which Haraway identifies with contemporary postindustrialism. Yet Jael perceives this trend not as a diminishment of the value of work but a strengthening of women’s cause. Emphatically stating that, “Work is power” (170, original emphasis), Jael permits herself occasional moments of leisure, but finally she makes sense of her life as one of work:

     

    Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work. (192)

     

    Near the conclusion of the text Jael reveals that her war efforts are part of the same historical continuum that will produce Whileaway–that her world and her work are necessary to achieve Janet’s utopia (211).27 Similarly, Haraway treats her “cyborg myth” as a vehicle for utopian politics, seeing the trope as a figure for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (178).

     

    Yet in Haraway’s account, it is unclear what status work would be assigned in the enlightened cyborg society she calls for.28 Perhaps what understanding the complex social context of Russ’s text can provide us in our current discussions of cyborgs, then, is an increased awareness that incorporating technology more centrally into our understanding of ourselves is not enough to produce a more just world. In these terms, while Russ’s embrace of work qua work may seem anachronistic in our era of multinational capitalism, her insistence that we make work integral to our discussions about feminism and technology could not be more timely.29

     

    In her 1977 essay, “SF and Technology as Mystification,” Russ decries the tendency of academics to obscure the reality of human work and workers with “false abstractions” (35). She suggests that academics “are insulated from the solid, practical details of their own lives by other people’s labor; they therefore begin their thinking about life by either leaving such practical details out or assuming that they are trivial” (34). Russ’s intervention in the historical collision between liberal feminism and the post-work politics that emerged around automation in the 1960s, when placed next to Haraway’s highly influential tract, forces us to ask what new meanings feminists need to attach to work in the cyborg world we inhabit.30 As committed to utopian possibilities as Russ, Haraway invites us to reimagine ourselves as intimately linked, like Jael, to the cybernetic circuitry that surrounds us. Yet, finally, placing Haraway’s text in the context of The Female Man reminds us that another manifesto waits to be written, a document that will rearticulate not women’s imaginative relationship with technology, but their relationship to work in a postindustrial context. Such a document would be the next step in the process of rethinking contemporary postindustrial “work” in ways that will help us transform it from the feminized state in which Haraway finds it to the feminist form Russ dreamed it might take.

    Notes

     

    1. Brick is particularly dedicated to reviving interest in those postindustrial theories that worked toward a type of “social change in which new forms of community emerged as counterweights to market-based norms of organization” (350). My own use of the term “postindustrialism” in this discussion more broadly encompasses the historic shifts in American work and its conceptualization that occurred in response to the extensive automation of production after World War II.

     

    2. Rose states this generalization explicitly (20, 167-68) and supports it throughout her text using specific instances of both theories.

     

    3. See my “‘Whatever It Is That She’s Since Become’: Writing Bodies of Text and Bodies of Women in James Tiptree, Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ and William Gibson’s ‘The Winter Market,’” esp. 62-69.

     

    4. According to Samuel R. Delany, fragments of what would resurface in Russ’s novel as the feminist utopia, Whileaway, were first developed in 1966, as she began writing the short story, “When It Changed”; Marilyn Hacker has indicated that Russ began writing the novel itself in the spring of 1969 (as qtd. in Moylan, 219, 3ff; 57).

     

    5. For accounts that situate The Female Man in relation to specific feminist currents and/or critics, see Ayres; Bartkowski (17, 49-78); Gardiner; Moylan (55-90); and Robinson. For discussions that assume Russ’s feminism as their starting point, see DuPlessis (182-84); McClenahan; Spector; and Spencer. Only one critic, Marilyn J. Holt, has explicitly resisted contextualizing Russ in terms of the development of second-wave feminism, insisting that Russ’s text is “more understandable if it is viewed as preceding, rather than proceeding from, the feminist movement” (488). Admittedly, Holt’s reminder to us that because Russ completed her book in 1971, “she owes many fewer debts than the 1975 publication date indicates” (488), is not without some value in helping us to historicize The Female Man. Yet the critic’s statement that “Russ invented the modern feminism and the dialectics she wrote” (488) overlooks Russ’s own explicit acknowledgment of her debts to “Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest” in the final chapter of the novel (213).

     

    6. They identify Russ’s politics with Women’s Liberation, that is, as opposed to the Women’s Movement. The Women’s Movement emerged in the early 1960s in response to the almost simultaneous publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the findings of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and was comprised largely of middle-aged, professional women. Women’s Liberation, on the other hand, emerged in the late 1960s as a result of the frustration of female members of the New Left with the blatant sexism of that movement (Lauret 52-64; Ryan 309-17). Sara Evans has documented the details of the emergence of Women’s Liberation from the New Left (156-211). For discussions that foreground the tensions as well as points of intersection between Women’s Liberation and the older Women’s Movement, see Evans (19-23, 217-18); and Ryan (309, 312-17).

     

    7. Russ first explored this way of understanding science fiction in her 1973 essay, “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction.”

     

    8. Robinson’s essay, which analyzes the “multiplicity and heterogeneity” of Russ’s text, among others, to demonstrate “the affinity… between French theory and American fictions” is an interesting–if somewhat essentialist–example of how a postmodern perspective can be effectively brought to bear on The Female Man (115, 122).

     

    9. Ayres’s essay, “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man,” offers the most thorough analysis to date of the ways that “gender roles are indeterminate and contingent” in Russ’s novel (32). Tom Moylan has discussed the link between Russ’s novel and the separatist wing of the feminist movement (75-76). A number of critics have identified the importance of anger in the text; Moylan (74-90) and McClenahan (118-125) characterize it as an essential–and positive–element of the liberation Russ is enacting (and Russ herself has corroborated this interpretation in a 1993 interview with Donna Perry [291]; Bartkowski, on the other hand, associates it with a dangerous “false future” (61). It is Gardiner, however, who specifically contextualizes Russ’s uses of anger in The Female Man within the history of “radical feminists who focus on women’s united need to confront and attack male dominance and patriarchal institutions” (104).

     

    10. Friedan’s text addressed two groups of middle-class women, both of which she felt were selling themselves short: women who stayed home and did no paid work, and women who had accepted work in industry that required no “training, effort, [or] personal commitment” (186). In the case of the former, Friedan’s occasional references to “canning plants and bakeries” as well as automatic household cleaning devices suggest she felt much of this work would be taken up by automation of one form or another (254, 216-17). As to who would take over factory work, Friedan does not say.

     

    While Daniel Horowitz has recently argued persuasively that Friedan’s early leftist activism and journalism place her, and hence liberal feminism, further to the left politically than has been previously acknowledged, I maintain that Friedan shows little concern for or interest in the working class in The Feminine Mystique.

     

    11. See Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Whyte’s The Organization Man.

     

    12. Riesman’s remarkable text argued for the continued expansion of automation–to a degree that would drastically reduce human work–and the elevation of “play” to a new status as the crucial activity in American life: “Objectively,” he wrote, “the new situation surrounding work permits a reduction of hours; subjectively, it permits a withdrawal of the concern work demanded in the earlier era and the investment of this concern in non-work” (263). As Howard Brick has noted, Riesman’s ideas regarding automation and work would eventually contribute to the visions of a post-scarcity America promoted by the New Left (350-62).

     

    13. I do not, in fact, mean to imply that these forms of action were not crucial to the history and identity of the New Left. When I refer to the “New Left” throughout this section of my discussion, I mean specifically the American political movement that emerged in the late 1950s–a movement comprising both liberals and radicals that departed from the American “Old Left” in its resistance to the “hierarchical party structure and systematic ideology of the Communist Party” (Trimberger 434). I find Howard Zinn’s characterization of this movement as “that loose amalgam of civil rights activists, Black Power advocates, ghetto organizers, student rebels, [and] Vietnam protestors,” quite appropriate (56). It is my interest here, however, to demonstrate the underlying fascination many of these activists shared in the cybernetic technologies that were proliferating throughout the 1960s.

     

    14. I am indebted to Howard Brick’s essay, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” for first leading me to many of the sources I cite in my discussion of the New Left’s interest in automation. Brick treats 1967 as the date after which the New Left largely lost interest in the concept of postindustrialism, remarking that by 1967, “anti-imperialist perspectives were more salient on the Left than postindustrial ones” (351). In my own discussion here I maintain that, despite the increased attention directed to Vietnam after 1967, visions of a fully automated post-scarcity America continued to flourish among New Leftists through the end of the decade.

     

    15. The degree to which New Left expectations about “the pace and effect of automation” were actually naive is, of course, very open to question. For an account that underscores the dramatic and frightening effects of automation on production workers, see Denby’s “Workers Battle Automation.” For a more skeptical account of the New Left’s ideas about automation, see Adelson (251).

     

    16. Gilbert, Gottlieb, and Sutheim define “cybernation” as “the automated control of automation” (426). For discussions of the impact of “The Triple Revolution,” see Rothstein (275), and Brick (353-54).

     

    17. First and foremost, of course, this view was articulated by Marx, who, as David Harvey suggests, understood that “[r]evolutions in technology… had the effect of… opening up the capacity to liberate society from scarcity and the more oppressive aspects of nature-imposed necessity” (110). In the U.S., as Andrew Ross has demonstrated, the notion of a technologically enabled post-scarcity state was entertained as early as the World’s Fair of 1939 where, “technology’s potential to create a postscarcity culture out of machine rather than human labor” was one of the “principal elements of the Fair’s philosophy” (128). Yet while the Fair was billed as “the first fair in history ever to focus entirely on the future” (128), and its conception of post-scarcity was framed in these terms, the students of the New Left believed that the technologies were already available to make their vision a reality. David Riesman also anticipated a work-free America before the New Left had taken up this idea, both in The Lonely Crowd (1950) and in “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society” (1958) (Brick 351-353).

     

    18. In this regard, the neo-Marxists of the New Left were updating Marx’s own view that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases…. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom” (qtd. in Harvey 111).

     

    19. See Garson, “The Movement: It’s Theory Time” (1968); Gilbert, Gottlieb, and Sutheim “Consumption: Domestic Capitalism” (1968); Sklar, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society” (1969); and Calvert and Neiman, A Disrupted History (1971).

     

    20. In their description of their activism within the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), for example, Marge Piercy and Bob Gottlieb call for the creation of “alternative jobs, alternative ways of living in the society,” while also stressing that “we must take into account the degrees to which a person identifies with his work” (408). They envision a post-revolutionary society in which “new work-places must enable a man to sort out what is truly creative in his field, the real meat of it, from the part that is merely professional obfuscation” (408).

     

    21. Given the centrality of the concept of labor to the notion of the human itself in Marx’s thought, the forms of activity that arose in a post-scarcity society would still be understood as labor from a Marxist perspective. Yet, clearly, this version of human work departed dramatically from the paid, public activities being touted by liberal feminists. My interest in this discussion, then, is how Russ fuses these apparently incompatible modes of work in her feminist project.

     

    22. Moylan, for example, suggests no conflict in Russ’s portrayal of “the use of an advanced technology in the service of a female humanity” (72). Nor does Bartkowski isolate such tensions between the feminism and leftism of The Female Man, despite her reading of such tensions in another text of the same period, Woman on the Edge of Time (63-64).

     

    23. The helmet is represented as currently, “turning Whileawayan industry upside down” (14).

     

    24. For a discussion of such contradictory moments, in which “the sequence of events makes sudden and disorienting leaps, back and forth, across time probabilities wherein some of the events never happened or happened differently,” see Moylan (84-85).

     

    25. This theory seems to be supported by the fact that the only period in which women enjoy leisure on Whileaway is when they tend their children during the children’s infancy. This is the period when there is an “other”–another kind of identity distinguished from their own. It is merely distinguished in the register of age rather than sex.

     

    26. Doane writes that “The cyborg is born all at once, fully developed, a full-fledged member of the work force…. Haraway’s aim is to detach the cyborg from a past and an origin–effectively to dehistoricize it” (210). Later, Doane admonishes that “[o]riginary narratives are not the only way of conceiving of history” (211). What I offer here is not the originary narrative of the cyborg, but one of many.

     

    27. The most feminized “worker” in Russ’s novel, on the other hand, is–significantly, I think–the one to whom the term “work” is never attached in any way. Late in the text Russ graphically describes a sexual encounter between Jael and her cyborg, Davy. Generated in a lab from monkey DNA, and outfitted with cybernetic components, Davy most directly embodies Haraway’s characterizations of the cyborg; he is literally part human, part animal, and part machine. Perhaps the strongest message Russ’s text offers in its creation of a notion of postindustrial “women’s work” is its presentation of a male cyborg who is socially coded in a traditionally “feminized” sense by his identity as Jael’s sex toy. Obediently dwelling in her house, where he plays, exercises, and awaits Jael’s commands, Davy represents everything Russ’s text refuses to signify as feminist work–although it was, during the years Russ was writing and until very recently, activity condescendingly characterized as “women’s work.” What Davy does is not “work” in the sense in which Russ intends this term; and what he represents is not what women should be. Rather than feminizing the meanings of work, Russ expunges an outmoded notion of femininity and reserves the term “work” for the empowering activities of Davy’s contemporary, Jael. In so doing, the text associates weakness with automated leisure and projects both onto the only male body portrayed in any detail in the text.

     

    28. In the first chapter of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Haraway identifies with the Marxist view that “the labour process constitutes the fundamental human condition” (28). Yet if, for Haraway, “labor is the humanizing activity that makes man,” it is less clear how labor figures in the construction of the “disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self” that is her cyborg (“Manifesto” 182, 187).

     

    29. While a host of contemporary books document the crises of postindustrial labor, two of the best are the collection edited by Fraser and Freeman, and the economic study by Schor. The increasing centrality of work to American women’s lives is demonstrated most graphically by the latter, which indicates that the number of hours the average American woman works annually has increased by 305 hours since 1969 (29).

     

    30. The degree to which automation put pressure on Russ’s thinking about women’s work is evident in the differences between her original conception of Whileaway in “When It Changed,” and the version she creates in The Female Man. In the early story the technology of Whileaway is characterized in mechanical rather than cybernetic terms, and there is no significant attention given to the concept of “work.” Moreover, both Russ’s 1968 novel Picnic on Paradise and her 1970 novel And Chaos Died weigh images of gendered work and leisure against a backdrop of automated societies.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Adelson, Alan. SDS. New York, Scribner, 1972.
    • Ayres, Susan. “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man.” Science-Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 22-34.
    • Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
    • Brick, Howard. “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s.” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 348-80.
    • Calvert, Greg and Carol Neiman. A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism. New York: Random House, 1971.
    • Denby, Charles. “Workers Battle Automation.” 1960. Long, New Left 151-71.
    • —. “A Dialogue: Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ on Science Fiction.” Interview. With Charles Johnson. Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 7:3 (1984): 27-35.
    • Doane, Mary Ann. “Commentary: Cyborgs, Origins, and Subjectivity.” Weed, Coming to Terms 209-14.
    • DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
    • Echols, Alice. “The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-83.” Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. 2nd Ed. Ed. Carole S. Vance. London: Pandora, 1992. 50-72.
    • Editors of Studies on the Left. “Up From Irrelevance.” 1965. Teodori, New Left 209-17.
    • Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Knopf, 1979.
    • Flacks, Richard. “Is the Great Society Just a Barbecue?” 1966. Teodori, New Left 192-96.
    • Fraser, Steven B., and Joshua B. Freeman, eds. Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
    • Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. New York: Laurel, 1983.
    • Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russ’s The Female Man.” Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 87-111.
    • Garson, Marvin. “The Movement: It’s Theory Time.” 1968. Teodori, New Left 380-84.
    • Gilbert, Dave, Bob Gottlieb, and Susan Sutheim. “Consumption: Domestic Capitalism.” 1968. Teodori, New Left 425-37.
    • Gitlin, Todd. “The Radical Potential of the Poor.” 1967. Teodori, New Left 136-49.
    • Gottlieb, Bob, and Marge Piercy. “Movement for a Democratic Society, Beginning to Begin to Begin.” 1968. Teodori, New Left 403-11.
    • Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” 1985. Weed 173-204.
    • —. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
    • Hicks, Heather J. “‘Whatever It Is That She’s Since Become’: Writing Bodies of Text and Bodies of Women in James Tiptree, Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ and William Gibson’s ‘The Winter Market.’” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 62-93.
    • Holt, Marilyn J. “Joanna Russ.” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s, 1982. 483-90.
    • Horowitz, Daniel. “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America.” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 1-42.
    • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991. Durham: Duke UP, 1992.
    • Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. London: Routledge, 1994.
    • Long, Priscilla, ed. The New Left: A Collection of Essays. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.
    • Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.
    • “NOW Bill of Rights.” Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Vintage, 1970.
    • Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. 1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
    • —. “Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society.” Mass Leisure. 1958. Eds. Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960.
    • Robinson, Sally. “The ‘Anti-Logos Weapon’: Multiplicity in Women’s Texts.” Contemporary Literature 29 (1988): 105-24.
    • Rose, Margaret A. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis. 1991. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
    • Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991.
    • Rothstein, Richard. “Evolution of the ERAP Organizers.” 1968. Long, New Left, 272-88.
    • Russ, Joanna. And Chaos Died. 1970. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978.
    • —. The Female Man. 1975. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
    • —. Interview. With Donna Perry. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. Ed. Donna Perry. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 287-311.
    • —. Picnic On Paradise. New York: Ace, 1968.
    • —. “SF and Technology and Mystification.” Russ, To Write 26-40.
    • —. “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction.” Russ, To Write 15-25.
    • —., ed. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
    • —. “When It Changed.” Again, Dangerous Visions. Ed. Harlan Ellison. New York: Doubleday, 1972. 233-239.
    • Ryan, Mary. Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: Franklin Watts, 1983.
    • Sayres, Sohnya, et al. Introduction. The 60s Without Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres, et al. 1984. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 1-9.
    • Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
    • Sklar, Martin J. “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society.” Radical America 3:3 (1969): 1-41.
    • Spector, Judith. “The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy, and LeGuin.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Ed. Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 197-207.
    • Spencer, Kathleen L. “Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ.” Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 167-87.
    • Students for a Democratic Society. “America and New Era.” 1963. Teodori, New Left 172-182.
    • Teodori, Massimo, ed. The New Left: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969.
    • —. “Historical and Critical Notes.” Teodori, New Left 3-89.
    • Trimberger, Ellen Kay. “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life.” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 432-449.
    • —. “The Triple Revolution.” 1963. Long, New Left 339-54.
    • Weed, Elizabeth, ed. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1989.
    • Whyte, William H., Jr. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
    • Wittman, Carl. “Students and Economic Action.” 1964. Teodori, New Left 128-33.
    • Zinn, Howard. “Marxism and the New Left.” Long, New Left 56-68.

     

  • Violence and Reason on the Shoals of Vietnam

    Anthony Burke

    jetzone@ozemail.com.au

     

    “Tell me, pray,” said I, “who is this Mr Kurtz?”

     

    “The chief of the Inner Station,” he answered in a short tone, looking away. “He is a prodigy…. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else. We want… for the guidance of the cause entrusted us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wider sympathies, a singleness of purpose… and so he comes here, a special being…”
     
    –Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (55)

     

    "Vietnam is still with us."


    --Henry Kissinger (Karnow 9)

     

    Ironic perhaps, that we begin with the words of Henry Kissinger–Harvard academic, international relations theorist, member of the Trilateral Commission, of the boards of American Express, R.H. Macy, CBS, Revlon, Freeport-McMoRan, and former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Of course Kissinger, placed so powerfully at the locus of several influential discourses of world order in the post-war age, had his own axe to grind. He went on to say: “[Vietnam] has created doubts about American judgement, about American credibility, about American power–not only at home, but throughout the world. It has poisoned our domestic debate. So we paid an exorbitant price for the decisions that were made in good faith and for good purpose” (Issacson 142).

     

    The crisis to which he alludes would be viewed and characterised differently by the victims and opponents of the war on one hand, and on another, by the elites to whom “Vietnam” stands as a signifier of defeat, failure, crisis, and further paranoia. The conservative scholar Daniel Bell has written that the “American Century”–heralded by Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941–“foundered on the shoals of Vietnam” (Bell 204). What is happening here? I suspect a new story of the West, an ironic metanarrative, that seems to appear everywhere: a long journey, a great sea voyage, a shipwreck. Or as Lyotard has written: “The narrative function is losing… its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (The Postmodern Condition xxiv).

     

    Perhaps these men overstate the setback which the defeat in Vietnam represented for American global interests, but their views are no less significant for that. Their words acknowledge a certain challenge to their power, and in turn the power of the institutions, structures, and systems to which they devote themselves and their thought. This challenge both arises out of the United States’ (and broader western) experience in Vietnam, and coalesces around it. Other markers include the 1973 oil price shocks and other third world attempts to assert control of vital commodity markets and prices, as well as the global economic stagnation and inflationary spirals that the war helped to provoke. Further ongoing crises in the project of western economic expansion and modernisation have been provided by the economic nationalism of third world elites, and the struggles of millions for decolonisation, human and civil rights, democracy, and economic and political self-determination. In such a context, “Vietnam” then becomes both a complex and problematic historical event and a tableau, a stage upon which further related crises and problems–mythological, epistemological, political, cultural, and economic–are played out.

     

    This essay thus takes as its object some of the more influential and paradigmatic historiographic texts of the war: Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, A History, a companion to the PBS television series; Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie; Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect; and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. While there is an immediately “political” question of their power as vehicles of a certain historical “reality” of the war, there are also questions about the very fact of their appearance in our culture. In The Perfect War James William Gibson argues that during the 1970s and early 1980s the war was “abolished” in America, “progressively displaced and repressed at the same time it was written about”; yet by 1983-4, it had suddenly become “a major cultural topic… as if a legendary monster or unholy beast had finally been captured and was now on a nationwide tour” (Gibson 6).

     

    I am motivated here by an element of this paradox. My interest in these particular texts arises because while they form their narrations in relation to the vast array of events which are assumed collectively to constitute the war, they also do so in relation to a series of broader cultural narratives, conflicts, and myths that reach into the very bedrock and possibility of our modernity. This essay takes up the theme of politics and violence by addressing the way reason–as a form of state power, an index of civilisation, and a movement of historical progress–has been problematised within these texts. I make no claim that they are the most representative of the vast memorial literature on the American war in Vietnam; likewise it must be acknowledged that there are many texts which contest their apologetics for the war, in many different ways, from films like Born On the Fourth of July and Full Metal Jacket, to the memoirs of servicemen and books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches.1 I suggest that these texts reveal key themes of the post-Vietnam literature as this literature relates to a crisis in U.S. foreign policy and national identity. I also suggest that these texts are riven with internal contradictions that derive from the cultural contradictions they attempt–and fail–to reconcile.

     

    Specifically, these texts attempt to reconcile two antithetical impulses: the first opens up a vast aporia within modernity’s (and America’s) claims to reason and culmination, an event Lyotard characterised as an abyss within enlightenment thought, and to which Habermas’s work is also addressed; the second, more sinister, seeks recuperation. Here no such aporia is acknowledged, and reason becomes an apologia for the violence of the war and the discursive architecture that drove its execution. The violence and self-certainty of the Cartesian paradigm are retained, and reason’s function as a promise of historical perfection is revived through a vast act of forgetting, especially in the writing of Francis Fukuyama. The essay concludes that the invention of formal models of non-coercive reason are of less use than a relentless suspicion of the concrete historical effects of such metaphysical claims to liberation.

     

    McNamara’s War

     

    If any event proved that “Vietnam is still with us,” it was the 1995 publication of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. McNamara had been recruited to his position in 1960 by John F. Kennedy from the Ford Motor Corporation where, not long before, he had been appointed its youngest President. He served the Kennedy and Johnson administrations until 1968 when, disillusioned with the war from which he then advocated America’s withdrawal, he was moved to the World Bank. Yet he had become so closely identified with the war in Vietnam that it became known as “McNamara’s war.” In 1995, after sixteen years, he broke his silence and declared the war a mistake.

     

    The book’s brief opening sets out the war’s epistemological and strategic significance for western elites, the narrative strategy McNamara would pursue in an attempt to contain and recuperate its loss, and perhaps unwittingly, the aporias that would remain:

     

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values.

     

    Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.

     

    I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions but of judgement and capabilities. I say this warily, since I know that if my comments appear to justify or rationalise what I and others did, they will lack credibility and only increase people’s cynicism. It is cynicism that makes Americans reluctant to support their leaders in the actions necessary to confront and solve our problems at home and abroad.

     

    I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did, and to learn from them.... That is the only way our nation can hope to leave the past behind. (McNamara xvi-xvii)

     

    Here, in the slide from “principles and traditions” to “values and intentions,” is the causal movement which frames an event that saw as many as three million people killed, millions more wounded, and immense and lasting damage done to the environmental and genetic order. Here too is the moral quarantine that would partition “judgement and capabilities” from the beliefs which underlay them, in the hope that this event could finally recede from memory. But can “we” really leave “the past” behind in this way, obscure its legacy and prevent its continual irruption into the present? In this narrative the essential “values” that form the core of the modern American identity remain untainted, except for their application; the broad project of American foreign policy and mission remains, all delivered in the rousing tones and generalities of a Presidential Inauguration speech. (Whatever Clinton’s views on the war, such gestures of recuperation are crucial to making his talk of a new American century possible, a kind of speech impossible only ten years before.) In a formulation that mirrors much of the other historiography of the war, McNamara’s framing text makes a concerted effort to contain the war’s corrosive power and turn its “lessons” to future use. Or to put it another way, what we are witness to here is a modern Descartes contemplating the awesome consequences of the wrong method. Reason still seeks its own return.2

     

    Both Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow open their histories in similar ways. Karnow’s book opens with the November 1982 dedication of Washington’s Vietnam memorial, “an angle of polished black stone” upon which are engraved the names of over 58,000 Americans killed or missing in action during the 20 years of direct American involvement there. These names, Karnow writes,

     

    record more than lives lost in battle: they represent a sacrifice to a failed crusade, however noble or illusory its motives. In a larger sense they symbolise a faded hope--or perhaps the birth of a new awareness. They bear witness to the end of America's absolute confidence in its moral exclusivity, its military invincibility, its manifest destiny. They are the price, paid in blood and sorrow, for America's awakening to maturity, to the recognition of its limitations. With the young men who died in Vietnam died the dream of an "American century." (Karnow 9)

     

    This passage casts the war in terms of a great rift, a break that sets the possibility of something redeeming (“a new awareness,” a “recognition of limitations”) against a panorama of loss. Karnow’s words here–particularly their reference to the doctrine of manifest destiny and the post-war vision of Henry Luce–also owe a great deal to Daniel Bell’s essay “The End of American Exceptionalism,” published a few months after the fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon in April, 1975.

     

    Sheehan’s opening section is simply titled, “The Funeral.” Although it commemorates the death of a single American soldier, this event also announces the death of a great deal more. A state funeral, it is accompanied by all the mythological trappings of the American nation, signs which refer to its earliest origins and the decisive battles that brought it into being:

     

    Six gray horses were hitched to a caisson that would carry the coffin to the grave. A marching band was ready. An honor guard from the Army's oldest regiment, the regiment whose rolls reached back to the Revolution, was also formed in ranks before the white Georgian portico of the chapel. The soldiers were in full dress, dark blue trimmed with gold, the colors of the Union Army, which had safeguarded the integrity of the nation. (Sheehan 3)

     

    The funeral itself, held at Arlington Cemetery on May 16, 1972, was for John Paul Vann, around whose larger-than-life figure Sheehan organises much of the moral and political drama of his book. Vann had risen, despite many long-running conflicts with his superiors, from a position as American advisor to the South Vietnamese army in 1962, to wielding in 1971 so much influence within the U.S. civil-military bureaucracy and the Saigon government structure that he was “the most important American in the country after the Ambassador and the commanding general in Saigon.” His role is so decisive, or emblematic, that he was for Sheehan, “the soldier of the war in Vietnam”:

     

    In this war without heroes, this man had been the one compelling figure. The intensity and distinctiveness of his character and the courage and drama of his life had seemed to sum up so many of the qualities Americans seemed to admire in themselves as a people. By an obsession, by an unyielding dedication to the war, he had come to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam. He had exemplified it in his illusions, in his good intentions gone awry, in his pride, in his will to win. Where others had become defeated or discouraged over the years, or had become disenchanted and turned against the war, he had been undeterred in his crusade to find a way to redeem the unredeemable, to lay hold of victory in this doomed enterprise. (Sheehan 3)

     

    “A failed crusade,” “a doomed enterprise”: these writers build ambivalence into the very buttresses of their American Vietnam stories. The war for them is an event disputed, a nation divided and traumatised, a healing shadowed by the destruction and horror of times past. They will strike out in search of narrative unity, but find it continually thwarts them. Karnow’s introduction concludes with an attempt at recuperation, which focuses on the November 1982 march to dedicate the memorial:

     

    From afar, the crowds resembled the demonstrators who had stormed the capital during the Vietnam war to denounce the conflict. But past controversies were conspicuously absent this weekend. Now Americans appeared to be redeeming a debt to the men who had fought and died--saluting their contribution, expiating their suffering. The faces, the words of dedication, and the monument itself seemed to heal wounds. (Karnow 10)

     

    This is moving, and plausible enough in isolation–but when followed by the sobering argument of Bell’s essay, the troubles of veterans, and the bitterness and frustration of policymakers, the gesture seems weak. Karnow’s subsequent attempt at synthesis resolves little, and is accompanied by no small disingenuousness, clouding the USA’s responsibility for the violence and the disproportionate toll on Vietnamese society: “In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won–a struggle between victims. Its origins were complex, its lessons disputed, its legacy still to be assessed by future generations. But whether a valid venture or misguided endeavor, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions” (Karnow 11). Sheehan seems less convinced, saying that “some of those who had assembled at Arlington wondered whether they were burying with [Vann] more than the war and the decade of Vietnam. They wondered whether they were also burying with him this vision and this faith in an ever-innocent America” (Sheehan 8).

     

    Crisis, Modernity, and American exceptionalism

     

    Beneath their surface performance of American identity and strategic crisis, these texts are traversed by a deeper set of problems involving a broader structure of western legitimacy and self-identity. Allied with the direct strategic, economic, and mythological crisis of American power is a crisis of what Lyotard has called metanarratives–the narratives of progress, freedom, justice, and reason that have formed the silent philosophical buttresses of the vast cultural, economic, political, scientific, and technological transformations which modernity names. Robert Pippin, in a way similar to Habermas, has called this “the modernity problem,” a problem of the moral and ethical value of modernity, of its “legitimacy”–its ability to ground itself, its project, and its normativity (Pippin 1-4).3 Edward Said in turn links this phenomenon to the process in which a Western cultural identity was simultaneously constructed and destabilised through the historical experience of imperialism. Reproving Lyotard for not suggesting why the metanarratives came into question, Said suggests they went into decline largely as a result of the “crisis of modernism, which… was frozen in contemplative irony for various reasons, of which one was the disturbing appearance in Europe of various Others, whose provenance was the imperial domain… Europe and the West, in short, were being asked to take the Other seriously” (Said 223).

     

    I would argue that we must treat the linkage of these themes, directly played out in Apocalypse Now, as a significant cultural effect; the result of the enormous historical sweep and deployment of the mythology which posed the United States as “the exception,” a new Europe in an untouched space, the newest societal embodiment of reason and progress. In particular Daniel Bell’s essay “The End of American Exceptionalism” traces out this process. He cites the philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley (whose 1726 poem proclaimed “Westward the course of empire”); Hegel, who proclaimed America “the land of the future” in his 1822 Philosophy of History; John O’Sullivan, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who espoused the United States’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”–a doctrine used to justify the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of Florida and California, and the dispossession of native American tribes; and Publisher Henry Luce, whose February 1941 Life editorial outlined his vision of a post-war “American Century”–a “vision of America as a world power which is authentically American… America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind… America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” (Bell 195-203).

     

    These images Bell grouped beneath “the conception of ‘American exceptionalism”:

     

    the idea that, having been "born free," America would, in the trials of history, get off "scott free." Having common political faith from the start, it would escape the ideological vicissitudes and divisive passions of the European polity... [and] as a liberal society... it would escape the dissaffections of the intelligentsia, the resentment of the poor, the frustrations of the young--which historically, had been the signs of disintegration, if not the beginnings of revolution, in other societies. In this view too, the United States, in becoming a world power... would, because it was democratic, be different in the exercise of that power than previous world empires. (197)

     

    This was a revealing description of the ideals of “the American dream,” the construction of a distinctively American (meta)narrative of identity and progress in terms of the Hegelian “project of a total history” that seeks to “reconstitute the overall form of a civilisation” according to “the continuous chronology of reason” (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge 8-9). But Hegel’s “Universal History,” and America’s shimmering place in its teleology, was not the only philosophical idea at issue here. In this description of “exceptionalism” (and in Hegel’s view of America as “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber room of old Europe”) was a sense that the United States was developing as a political and geographic space where Europe could re-invent itself and its project. By virtue of its youth, its seemingly boundless tracts of land, and its liberal ideals, America would escape the “signs of disintegration” represented by the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and by a polity beset with poverty, misery, and class warfare.4 It was as if, by getting off “scott free,” America could escape the postmodern moment of its modernism, and initiate a pure, consensual modernity that would provide the foundations of future world hegemony and stand as a beacon for the civilised West. Furthermore, in Henry Luce’s vision and in its post-war foreign economic policy, America would spread these values around the globe, driving an enormous global cultural and economic transformation whose deeply contradictory effects are still with us.5

     

    The phenomenon called “Vietnam” would strike a great blow to this arrogance, to America’s world-historical mantle, bringing into its culture all the “postmodern” contradictions long experienced by other western societies. Using a revealing metaphor, Bell wrote that “[t]he American century lasted scarcely 30 years. It foundered on the shoals of Vietnam” (204). But traumatic as the Vietnam defeat may have been for American elites, in Bell’s essay its effect was not restricted to questions of “credibility” and the narrowing of foreign policy options; the war became a stage for a number of related concerns about the health of the American polity, the structure of consensus, and the long-term survival of America’s economic supremacy. “Can we escape,” he asked in a sentiment worthy of McNamara, “the fate of internal discord and disintegration that have marked every other society in human history? What can we learn from the distinctive ideological and institutional patterns that have, so far, shaped a unique American society and given it distinctive continuity in 200 years of existence?” (205).

     

    (Post)modern Echoes: Apocalypse Now

     

    Apocalypse Now plays out such themes, linking them with the deeper malaise Lyotard and Said identify. While many commentators have attacked the film as flawed and overblown, I see the film’s failings as symptoms of the enormous cultural and philosophical contradictions it attempts to reconcile.6 The film’s title signifies these preocupations; it suggests that the war is not only a barely thinkable horror, but a moral and cultural disaster of major order–an event that precipitates the end of the world, the end of civilisation as we know it, the end of metanarratives.

     

    In a gesture at once curious and apt, the film’s structuring narrative teleology is appropriated from Conrad’s classic modernist novel, Heart of Darkness (1902). Coppola’s is one of the few Vietnam films, in the torrent which have appeared, to rework a western literary classic in this way, placing the war squarely within a philosophical problematic which dates to modernity’s earliest self-awareness. The Marlow character, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), is an assassin sent by a shadowy command to terminate the activities of the Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who is running operations without license from a base just inside the Cambodian border. He has been charged by a military court with murder, having ordered the execution of some South Vietnamese whom he considered to be double agents. Marlow’s movement between the various “stations” of the novel, toward the “heart of darkness,” provides Coppola with both a stage for a number of rather surreal narrative episodes, and a temporal space in which a more overtly political rhetoric can develop. Willard introduces his journey by saying: “I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet… weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz….” During the briefing for his mission, Willard hears a tape of Kurtz’s voice: “I watched a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor–that’s my dream, my nightmare… crawling across the edge of straight razor, and surviving… we must kill them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army and they call me an assassin, what do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassins…?” Kurtz is described by the briefing general as “one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever had,” but he has somehow gone bad, his “ideas, his methods, became unsound.”

     

    In a brief monologue, the General prefigures both the film’s political problematic, and much of its moral and philosophic scope: “Y’know Willard, in this war things get confused out there… power, morality and practical military necessity… out there with these natives it must be a temptation to… be God… because there is a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph… sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’” Coppola’s Kurtz is a hybrid figure who, like his precursor in Conrad, emerges slowly, an object of desire, speculation, and awe, providing the journey upriver with direction, significance, and mystery. Existing as he does, at the very heart of darkness, he functions as a space in which the film combines its broader moral/philosophic concerns with two countervailing rhetorics of the war.

     

    Simplifying a little, these rhetorics divide on the morality of the war and the question of America’s failure. One rhetoric can be read in many of the film’s visual sequences (especially the helicopter attack on the Mekong Delta village commanded by Colonel Kilgore) and in some of the more isolated narrative episodes, and presents the war as a horrific and meaningless event where, in the words of Coppola, modern technology was used to perpetrate genocide (Connolly 65). The other rhetoric, which is developed via the figure of Kurtz and in Willard’s ruminations on his mission, is deeply at odds with this first reading. This rhetoric seems to suggest that Kurtz is less a monster acting “beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct,” than a harassed and strangely prophetic figure who truly understands the reserves of brutality and discipline that would have to be harnessed if America was going to prevail. In short, it repeats the crude argument that America fought the war with one hand tied behind its back.

     

    This reading is suggested by an interpretation of Kurtz’s remarks on the tape played for Willard–the “snail” is the Vietnamese enemy, the “straight razor” it crawls across, and survives, is the American military machine. And early in the film Willard remarks–referring to his mission–that “charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” As he reads Kurtz’s file on the journey, Willard’s admiration increases:

     

    October 1967 on special assignment in Kontum Province 2 Corps, Kurtz staged "Operation Archangel" with combined local forces. Rated a major success. He received no official clearance. He just thought it up and did it. What balls! They were gonna nail his ass to the floorboards for that one, but after the press got hold of it, they promoted him to full Colonel instead. Oh man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to step out of it.

     

    Similarly, Willard reads a letter Kurtz had addressed to his son, in which Kurtz expounds his philosophy on the morality and use of force:

     

    In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action. What is often called ruthless, what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it... directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. As for the charges against me, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid, lying morality. You have all my faith, your loving father...".

     

    Reason is not a stable value here; reason is not a space outside which we are led to assume Kurtz exists. Certainly he has been denounced as “insane,” his methods called “unsound,” but such definitions are countered by as many valorisations of his approach. These tensions seem largely unresolved, but they point to a notion of reason whose morality is pliable and uncertain, a question of what reason allows, what it may find necessary or just; that it may, in this instance, allow and require a man like Kurtz.

     

    Political Reason and History

     

    I am not arguing here against reason as such, as if it could be easily abandoned–as Derrida reminds us, metaphysics supplies the very languages and terms with which we seek to undermine it. However I am suggesting that any use of reason, even mine, must acknowledge its problematic status; its features then must be differentiated, and its deployment into particular historical and institutional contexts be critically analysed. This view bypasses, for instance, Habermas’s efforts to reconstitute a universal rationality free from its past coercive implications, rather taking its cues from a poststructuralism which, in Robert Young’s words, “reanalyses the operations of reason as such” (8).7

     

    While I have sympathies with Habermas’s broad political impulse, I am uncomfortable with a strategy that seeks to preserve the sovereignty and metaphysical claims of a transcendental concept rather than interrogate the specific forms of rationality which produce and enable events like Vietnam. A metaphysics that differentiates between reason and unreason in order to apply political and moral value is no longer viable and has in fact been undermined by the experience of the war. We need to think of such events not as irrational but as rational in one way or another. We need, that is, to jettison the emotive and superior value we place upon rationality and to define it as the operation of specific political and cultural deployments of power, that combine institutional, legal, economic, technological, and scientific frameworks in a strategic fashion. As Foucault comments, in the exercise of political power it “is not ‘reason in general’ which is implemented, but always a very specific type of rationality” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 73).

     

    Of course the problem of reason relates to more than simply political efficiency: in these histories reason is further at issue both in terms of the moral and ethical values which have been imputed to it, and in terms of its place at the intersection of the broader exercise of political power and the life of individual subjects: how they are governed, how they govern themselves, and the values and ideals with which they do so. Reason as a measure of the efficacy of political power was a problem central to the seventeenth-century doctrines of “reason of state,” which Foucault discusses in his 1979 lectures published as “Politics and Reason.” Here the problem was not the link between the prince and the state, as it was in Machiavelli, but to reinforce, expand, and strengthen the state itself. Reason of state, says Foucault, was a search for “a rationality specific to the art of government” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 58-77).

     

    In the philosophy of history reason also had an added temporal function. In Kant’s 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History,” reason was the “guiding thread” which supplied history with direction, but was also a powerful political technology: “a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct” (13). Hegel further elevated reason into a virtual law of historical development, which bound together the state and the individual subject in an inevitable and ideal embrace. The state was “the material in which the Ideal of Reason is wrought out” (9); individuals realised their “essential being” in “the union of the subjective with the rational will… the moral Whole, the State” (38). The possession of reason was also a measure of historical progress among peoples: History could only be taken up “where Rationality begins to manifest itself in the actual conduct of the World’s affairs (not merely as an undeveloped potentiality)” (59). Thus it was in Reason in History that reason of state and teleology became united–united in their concerns for the strength of states and mechanisms of government, in representing historical change as rationality, and in stengthening the union of personal and national identity, of individual freedom with the state and its destiny.

     

    Failures of Reason

     

    Both McNamara’s and Sheehan’s books take as their central themes this problematic of “rationality,” in particular the post-war search by American policymakers for an effective rationality of global power, a “rationality” that would forge an ideal combination of strategic assumptions, political strategies, and administrative, diplomatic, and military techniques with realistic and legitimate goals. This in turn was linked with the larger historical movement of reason of which the United States was seen as a vehicle–with the effect of obscuring this reason’s practical techniques and consequences within an emotive metaphysical smoke. In this John Paul Vann and McNamara appear as paradigmatic figures. McNamara was the figure of the Cartesian, mathematical policymaker who believed that the gradual and massive application of superior force would prevail, and who drew up fantastical assessments of troop numbers, casualty rates, and time frames for victory. Vann was the idealistic citizen, courageous warrior, and fierce anticommunist with an enormous organisational, tactical, and administrative ability–the soldier-archetype.

     

    McNamara was a paradigm case of a thinker whose craving for certainty and whose almost unshakable belief in reason’s power to control reality contributed to the destructiveness of the war; however, this was entirely consistent with what James William Gibson describes as a “deeply mechanistic world view” which took hold in the postwar policy elite of the United States. He cites Kissinger as writing, without irony, that after 1945 American foreign policy had been based “on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries.” This “scientific revolution” had “for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy.” Gibson suggests that, in such a system, the defeat of the United States by “a nation of peasants with bicycles” was literally unthinkable (14-16).8

     

    Seeing this hubris so starkly laid out allows us to understand the dual crisis of technical and philosophical reason that the defeat engendered. There is a strong sense in both Sheehan’s and McNamara’s books that the crisis of these strategies and capabilities had an added historical force that brought the whole metaphysic of the American century (and its self-conscious echoes of exceptionalism and manifest destiny) into question. In particular Vann’s figure dramatises a conflict–within the nation, the government, and the U.S. Army–over the merits and prosecution of the war. Vann’s appeal for Sheehan is played out in two narrative streams: his military biography which, in recounting his constant battles with higher authority, dramatises his “candor,” “moral heroism,” and “truth telling”; and his personal biography which presents his character in more psychologising terms as torn between “a duality of personal compulsions and deceits that would not bear light and a professional honesty that was rigorous and incorruptible.” Here, his inner struggle becomes a metaphor for the unhappy mix of idealism and “dark compulsions” at the heart of the American dream (Sheehan 385).

     

    While Vann conducted a principled campaign against the corruption of the Saigon regime, the brutality and slaughter of the air war, and the ruthlessness of many soldiers, he did so out of an underlying belief that the war was fundamentally just and that the range of politico-military strategies brought to bear had to be changed. Even after the Tet Offensive of January 1968, after which so many–including McNamara–advocated withdrawal, Vann remained a fervent proponent and became a major source of inspiration for Nixon’s “Vietnamisation” strategy. In this way, Vann functioned as a touchstone, a quasi-ideal locus of rationality by which other actors and institutions could be measured. Also, as far as can be gleaned from Sheehan’s account of Vann’s commitment to the state and his passionate refusal to lose faith in the war, he functioned to illustrate the limits to this rationality; thus the book oscillates between an immersion in the rhetoric which Vann’s story forms and a more detached and principled critique of Vann’s actions and thinking. Sheehan’s writing, for instance, does allow the reader to question the limits to Vann’s outrage, which, according to the story, lay at the core of his reputation for “moral heroism.” In 1968 Vann had encouraged CIA station chief William Colby in his efforts to have Thieu support the “Phoenix” program, which aimed to capture or assassinate the cadres of the NLF’s clandestine government (Sheehan 732-33). Colby estimated in 1971 that 28,000 people had been captured and another 20,000 killed under the program, which was in reality a gross and systematic violation of human and civil rights, the imprimatur of a military dictatorship its only legal justification.

     

    Reason then, as a moral value, ultimately became a measure of necessity and discretion in killing, a discretion moderated and controlled by the requirements of political and military efficiency. Sheehan wrote that “Vann had no moral qualms about killing Vietnamese Communists and those who fought for them, nor was he troubled by the fact that he would be getting Vietnamese who sided with the United States killed to achieve American aims in Vietnam… he assumed that he and his fellow Americans in Vietnam had a right to take life and to spend it, as long as they did so with discretion, whenever killing and dying were necessary in their struggle” (12). In his introduction, Sheehan explained that Vann opposed the air war because “he considered it morally wrong and stupid to wreak unnecessary violence on the innocent” (6). Vann’s convictions brought him common cause with Senator Edward Kennedy, who had attempted to alleviate the suffering of the civilian war wounded and the refugees, and, Sheehan wrote, “had shared Vann’s concern for the anguish of the Vietnamese peasantry and had, like Vann, attempted to persuade the U.S. government to wage war with reason and restraint” (42, emphasis added). The form of words here is crucial, highlighting as it does the limits to this morality, which refuses to question the United States’ claimed right to intervene, and ultimately subsumes its denunciation of the violence beneath the pragmatics of the war’s continued prosecution. This attenuated morality united both men like George Kennan, who argued for Vietnam’s essential strategic irrelevance to the United States, and men like Vann who, wrote Sheehan, while concerned with reducing pain and suffering as much as possible, “believed with equal firmness that there was no choice but to sacrifice the Vietnamese peasants to the higher strategic needs of the United States” (535).

     

    McNamara’s final chapter is entitled “The Lessons of Vietnam,” and turns around a list of the major causes for American failure. These include a misjudgement of Vietnam’s “geopolitical intentions” and of “the power of nationalism to motivate a people”; an ignorance of Vietnamese culture and history; a failure “to recognise the limitations of modern, high-technology equipment, forces and doctrine”; a failure to “draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion”; and a failure to “recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient…. We do not have the god-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose” (320-23). Of particular interest here is the crisis in McNamara’s (self) image as the epitome of the rational, controlled, mathematical policy-maker: a Cartesian psychological and administrative formation that exalts problem solving and strives for certitude and mastery. This insight is suggested to me by writers like Elizabeth Grosz and Christine Sylvester who challenge the gendered “normativity of sex” in international relations which aligns maleness, order, reason, and intellect in opposition to passion, disorder, and the body–values constructed as perpetually threatening, irrational, backward, and disruptive.9 This approach thus reveals the mechanistic world-view as self-consciously masculine. McNamara makes an interesting comment as his tenth “cause”: “We failed to recognise that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. For one whose life has been dedicated to the belief and practice of problem solving, this is particularly hard to admit. But at times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world” (323).

     

    McNamara almost finds the understanding, but he fails at the crucial point. In that final metaphor of an “imperfect, untidy world,” the flaw in his recuperation becomes evident. While initially it had seemed that he had discarded the geopolitical baggage of an earlier period, it becomes clear that he has not. Lapsing into the propaganda of the time, he says that “the United States of America fought in Vietnam… for what I believe to be good and honest reasons… to protect our security, prevent the spread of totalitarian Communism, and promote individual freedom and political democracy.” Thus it wasn’t the fundamental strategic rationale which was wrong, or the metaphysical abstractions which underpinned the policy, but simply its field and application; McNamara argues that the “South Vietnamese… had to win the war themselves… external military force cannot substitute for the political order and stability that must be forged by a people for themselves” (McNamara 333).

     

    With this mantra of “stability” McNamara betrays a refusal to acknowledge that the South Vietnamese state was, and always had been a lie; nor was it ever democratic and nor did the U.S. ever seriously encourage an open political system that would have had to include the NLF. He refuses to acknowledge, except in the most oblique way, that the loss in Vietnam was determined by politics, not force, and that the intervention was fundamentally unjust from the outset. Nor does he acknowledge the immense human destruction caused by the twenty-year U.S. operation and the responsibility–equalling that of post-war Japan or Germany–that needed to be borne. Ultimately he remains committed to the idea of rational judgement and decision, in all its metaphysical fullness. He mourns perhaps the optimism and certitude with which this rationality was once was applied, tempers the hubris a little, and hopes finally to heal and improve the interlinked system of ideals, belief, and administration the war so damaged. Much like George Bush rejoicing after the Gulf War at the defeat of the “Vietnam syndrome,” McNamara seeks to enlarge the possible field of rationality and intensify its nuances, rather than to interrogate its very grounds or legitimacy. The American Century, holed in the bow, can be refloated with the tide and resume its grand imperial voyage.

     

    Aporias: Apocalypse Now Concludes

     

    The final scenes of the Apocalyse Now demonstrate most clearly the moral aporias central to this body of historiography, in turn relating them to the broader problematic of western identity that structures Heart of Darkness. These scenes come closest in the film to any scenes in the novel, and circle around the question of the exact nature and moral value of the rationality Kurtz represents. The rhetorical outcomes from this climactic sequence, and thus the film as a whole, remain deeply ambiguous. The scene opens as Willard’s boat approaches Kurtz’s camp, which is guarded by local Montangard tribesmen who stand silently, their bodies painted white, a still assembly of latent threat. The compound is festooned with stakes topped by skulls and severed heads, and Willard is imprisoned for a time in a kind of “tiger cage” where Kurtz, his face painted like some demon, torments him. In the novel, Kurtz is dying when Marlow reaches him, his ruthlessness, power, and efficiency by that time a memory. Still, this section of the film presents the Kurtz of the novel, a Kurtz who “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” and in whom “there was something wanting”:

     

    Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistably fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core... (Conrad 53)

     

    Here the film appropriates Conrad’s moral sleight of hand, which, while portraying Kurtz as a destructive emissary of “progress,” ultimately projects his violence back onto the jungle, as if the colonial enterprise he represents had been contaminated by the primaeval land it raped. The Montangards function as symbols of darkness and death, a projection which in turn activates a long tradition of western fears of paganism, ritual, and cannibalism. Once again, the figure of the savage becomes the repository of the guilt and fear associated with imperial control, and the isolated figure of a man who has lost his reason stands in for the systemic violence of the European enterprise.

     

    Yet while Coppola makes this somewhat attenuated denunciation, I also see another rhetoric available from this scene, one that seeks to expand the space of reason to encompass a necessary and intensified level of violence. This moment comes with a long monologue spoken by Kurtz, which is accompanied by none of the censure that surrounds his figure in the novel. Kurtz begins by saying that Willard has “a right to call me a murderer… but you have no right to judge me” and that “horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror, horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.” Kurtz goes on to recount a story of how, after his Special Forces unit had been inoculating children in a village, the Viet Cong came through and “hacked off every inoculated arm.” Kurtz describes how he first wept, and then realised

     

    the genius of that, the genius to do that... I realised they were stronger than we because they could stand it... If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly... you have to have men who are more and at the same time who are able to utilise their primordial instincts to kill without feeling without passion without judgement... without judgement... because it is judgement that defeats us...

     

    The Viet Cong atrocity recounted in this scene is pure fiction; what is interesting here, however, is the morality of this argument, a firmly contemporary nuance with no parallels in the novel. Simon During has commented that having chosen for his story “an old mythic narrative: the voyage to the underground and back” (one with other western antecedents, such as Dante’s Inferno), Conrad was confident “that the culture [could] narrativise its own reneging on enlightenment” (During 26). I sense that Coppola, having recognised how bound the Vietnam war was with that American enlightenment narrative, felt no such confidence. The myth was gone, wrecked on the shoals of this war; no return could be made. At the film’s end Kurtz is killed, hacked to death by Willard to the strains of The Doors’ The End. But however violent this scene, it ultimately seems meaningless, a climax without narrative significance, the plot’s attempt to conclude and solidify a logic that here founders on a chaotic diffusion of signs, falling and scattering like mercury. All that is left is Kurtz’s wish, like the America for which he is metaphor, to escape “judgement,” and a pathetic and chilling vision which could only intensify a rationality that so clearly, and terribly, has failed.

     

    The Abyss of Reason

     

    So why now, an abyss? Toward what space do these texts lead us, at a time when other prophets speak of “the end of History,” of the imminent culmination of human reason and endeavour, the realisation of an imagined, utopian space that our ideals, our system, and our masters have always been creating for us. This would be a space that admits no abyss, except as an already resolved contradiction, a loss without memory. Many will recognise Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Hegelian historico-philosophical claim, one I treat with the utmost seriousness, given that its broad contours mirror increasingly powerful global discourses of economic and cultural integration.10 Fewer perhaps would recognise how, in the 1992 book which expanded Fukuyama’s original essay, a broad cultural phenomenon of “deep historical pessimism” was posed as one of the fundamental challenges to his project. This was a symptom of “truly terrible events” like the Holocaust, the two world wars, or Stalin’s Soviet Union, events “in which modern technology and modern political organisation” were put “to the service of evil.” True to his claim and his reading of Hegel, Fukuyama subsumes these problems beneath a new “dialectical” optimism which takes the fall of “strong states” and the global spread of “economic and political liberalism” as its final proof (Fukuyama 3-12). Like McNamara, Fukuyama allows the past to recede so recuperation can begin.

     

    The work of Lyotard thwarts an easy resolution of such contradictions. In “The Sign of History,” he argues that Auschwitz was a “proper name” which “places modern historical or political commentary in abeyance…. Adorno pointed out that Auschwitz is an abyss in which the philosophical genre of Hegelian speculative discourse seems to disappear, because the name ‘Auschwitz’ invalidates the presuppositions of that genre, namely that all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real” (163). Such events thus produce an immense “fission affecting the unity of the great discourses of modernity” (192). In my view, the French and American wars in Indo-China are just such an event: one which should, and does, produce a serious ethical and historic rupture in the value we place upon “modernity” and a philosophical rhetoric of historical progress. In particular, this event produces a “fission” in a particular historical experience of modernity in which the United States has been seen as a beacon and in which it has acted as a hegemonic and universalising force. Nor are these the only such events in American history: we could consider the destruction of native American tribes, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recent events like the support for the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, or the wars against Nicaragua, Panama, or Iraq. And most western nations, through their roles as colonisers or as post-war geopolitical and economic actors, share such stains.

     

    This however does not amount to a wholesale polemic against something called “the enlightenment,” which, as both Foucault and Derrida have argued, still provides valuable tools for its own critique and continues to shape the languages in which we frame our thought, however critical.11 Rather, as I have tried to do here through this discrete cultural history of “reason,” it forces us to differentiate its elements and to analyse its historical formation and deployment into particular systems of rationality. Many understandably worry that poststructuralist critiques such as Lyotard’s deny us the ability to distinguish between good and bad uses of reason, between destructive and ideal deployments of truth and power, and robs us of the idealist core of the enlightenment project.12 While accepting the importance of such concerns, I don’t necessarily agree. This essay for instance has implied that the forms of reason deployed by the antiwar movement or the NLF had superior claims to those of the American war and foreign policy machines. Broadly speaking they did; however criticism ought to be made of the NLF’s frequent resort to brutality and terrorism (and the failure of sections of the antiwar movement to acknowledge this) and of its perversion into Stalinist repression as the form of the post-1975 Vietnamese state solidified.

     

    In answer to such problems I suggest that we cannot be happy with a reason that retains its metaphysical gloss at the expense of a permanent and restless activity of self-critique. This is the insight I take from Lyotard and from deconstruction, and for which I believe Habermas to have been arguing in his own way. The idealist impetus can be retained, as long as we are also able to question the ways in which the universalising and teleological claims of such metadiscourses, whoever deploys them, too often close off moral and political contradictions and limit the scope of the possible. In the western context, such claims to reassessment or democratic culmination retain deeply misogynist and ethnocentric assumptions which legitimate a continued geopolitical economy of violence, along with neocolonial patterns of economic power and fundamental privilege. Above all, we must acknowledge the grave cultural problem present in almost all these texts: the contemporary recuperation of a metanarrative structure constituted by a simultaneous refusal to think properly its own abyss.

     

    Notes

     

    My thanks to Caroline Graham, Robert Young, and Jim George, and to the anonymous reviewers who made many useful suggestions for this essay. Thanks also to Simon During, whose 1987 essay “Postmodernism Or Postcolonialism Today” first brought my attention to the links between Coppola’s film, Heart of Darkness, and the philosophy of Lyotard. Although my reading of the film departs from his, a considerable debt is still owed.

     

    1. For a survey of the veterans’ literature on the war see The Perfect War (462-76). Gibson comments that this literature “contradicts the war managers at virtually every level” yet has “failed to influence the conventional assessments by both the ‘error in judgement’ and the ‘self-imposed restraint’ schools. How can a major war like Vietnam be absorbed into the historical record without listening to those who fought the war, especially when over 200 books have been written by soldiers and their close observers? What are the tacit rules governing ‘legitimate’ knowledge about the war…?”

     

    2. Paul Hendrikson’s book The Living and the Dead, an intriguing personal and political biography of McNamara, is an important additional reference here. He discusses the layers of (self)deception and denial which shaped McNamara’s political career and his relationship to the war, and which re-emerged in his 1995 memoir. His devotion to science and mathematics, and its influence on his prosecution of the war, are also traced, along with their slow and partial breakdown as he allowed the human tragedies of the war to affect him.

     

    3. See also Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

     

    4. See Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815-1830, especially Chapter 5.

     

    5. Here I am referring to Lyotard’s idea of the postmodern as both a dialogue of disillusionment with modernity, and existing contemporary with it, rather than being temporised as coming “after” modernism or as synonymous with “late capitalism.” As he writes in The Inhuman,

     

    neither modernity nor so-called postmodernity can be identified and defined as clearly circumscribed historical entities, of which the latter would always come "after" the former. Rather... the postmodern is always implied in the modern because of the fact that modernity, modern temporality, comprises in itself an impulsion to exceed itself into a state other than itself. And not only to exceed itself in that way, but to resolve itself into a sort of ultimate stability, such for example as is aimed at by the utopian project, but also by the straightforward political project implied in the grand narratives of emancipation. Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity. (25)

     

    6. My reading of Apocalyse Now tends to cut across, but not necessarily refute, readings which see the film as entirely complicit with the war through its making, its director’s inflated vision, and its technology, which involved the hire of helicopters from the Filipino military and the burning of vast tracts of forest to achieve some shots. Such a reading has been made by Jean Baudrillard, for instance, and I have no essential quarrel with it. I have also noted disturbing complicities in terms of the film’s rhetoric, but also anti-war elements. Rather than seeking to produce a conclusive, homogeneous reading of the film, I have chosen to explore these contradictions and ask what broader cultural symptoms they reflect.

     

    7. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign And Play In The Discourse Of The Human Sciences” (280).

     

    8. Gibson’s book is a particularly insightful and systematic attempt to lay out and critique the mechanistic assumptions which underpinned the American prosecution of the war, and must be a crucial reference for anyone who wishes to explores these elements of U.S. policymaking.

     

    9. See Christine Sylvester, “Handmaid’s Tales of American Foreign Policy”; and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism.

     

    10. Former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Gareth Evans, for instance, extolled the brilliance of Fukuyama’s thesis in a 1990 speech. Speculating upon its growing realisation in Asia, he cited the moves by the Chinese and Vietnamese toward market economies, the “democratisation” of Taiwan and South Korea, and the growing acceptance among regional leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum. He carefully avoided the questions of democracy in Singapore and Indonesia, and, given his hopes for a U.N. brokered settlement in Cambodia, would no doubt have questioned Fukuyama’s later myopic attitude to the U.N.

     

    11. Derrida comments that “[t]here is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language–no syntax and no lexicon–which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (280). A crucial essay here is Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?”

     

    12. For a profound presentation of such concerns see Jurgen Habermas’s essays in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, which, while presenting a strongly argued critique of much poststructuralism, shared much with those thinkers’ critiques of Hegelian forms of liberalism and classical marxism.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bell, Daniel. “The End of American Exceptionalism.” The Public Interest 41 (Fall 1975): 193-224.
    • Connolly, Keith. “Apocalypse Now.” Cinema Papers (February-March 1980): 65-66.
    • Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Wadsworth, 1960.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign And Play In The Discourse Of The Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278-294.
    • During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today.” Textual Practice 1.1 (1988): 32-47.
    • Evans, Senator Gareth. “Change in Asia and the End of History.” Address to the Asia Society. New York. 27 September 1990.
    • Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
    • —. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1988.
    • —. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
    • Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992.
    • Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
    • Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
    • Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. London: Polity Press, 1987.
    • Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures On The Philosophy of History. New York: Prometheus Books, 1822.
    • Hendrikson, Paul. The Living and the Dead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
    • Issacson, Walter. “Kissinger’s Web.” Vanity Fair September 1992: 142-148.
    • Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815-1830 London: Orion Books, 1991.
    • Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” On History. Ed. L.W. Beck. Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. 10-24.
    • Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin, 1983.
    • Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
    • —. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.
    • —. “The Sign of History.” Poststructuralism and the question of history. Eds. Attridge, Bennington, and Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 161-170.
    • McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.
    • Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991
    • Said, Edward. “Representing the Colonised: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry 15.2: 205-225.
    • Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie. New York: Pan-Picador, 1989.
    • Sylvester, Christine. “Handmaid’s Tales of American Foreign Policy.” Unpublished paper, 1995.
    • Young, Robert. White Mythologies. London: Routledge, 1990.

     

  • Publicizing the President’s Privates

    Loren Glass

    Center for the Humanities
    Oregon State University
    loren.glass@orst.edu

     

    For me an audience interminable.

     

    –Walt Whitman

     

    And I will make a song for the ears of the President.

     

    –Walt Whitman

     

    On Monday, August 17, 1998, a day that seemed to have gone down in history before it even arrived, President Bill Clinton made the obviously poll-driven and eminently quotable claim: “Even presidents have private lives.” Clinton was assuming that his national television audience distinguished between his public office and his private life, and that he could consequently convince them that his blowjobs were his business. The plethora of public opinion polls that preceded his appearance did seem to reflect a national belief that some sort of commonly understood and juridically established division between public and private is crucial not only to a healthy presidency, but to a healthy society. Clinton seemed safe in assuming that the American public would agree to let him resolve the affair privately.

     

    And yet The Starr Report, certainly the most widely distributed public document in the history of the Republic, appears to have proven him wrong. Bill Clinton’s private life and personality became a vital center of public discussion in the United States and the world. The tragicomic narrative of his doomed affair with Monica Lewinsky was followed avidly by millions, if not billions, of readers. The explicit sexual details of their furtive encounters are now universally known. Never before has something so private become public so rapidly and spectacularly. In fact, I would like to claim that the explicit content and democratic distribution of The Starr Report indicate a significant transformation in the structure of the American public sphere.

     

    The scandal exposed a schizophrenic split in American public subjectivity: While the polls repeatedly revealed that Americans claim to respect Clinton’s right to privacy, the intense media scrutiny clearly solicited public curiosity about how he exercises that right. The prudery of America’s public conscience collided with the prurience of its public libido.1 Such contradictions in public subjectivity tend to have concrete symptoms, and the symptom of the Clinton Crisis couldn’t be clearer: it is the President’s penis. Not the phallus, not the symbol of his office, but his actual anatomical penis: The palpable specificity of Clinton’s penis has stood at the center of this crisis, from Jones’s allegation that she could identify its physical idiosyncrasies to Kenneth Starr’s irrefutable scientific claim that only one penis out of 7.87 trillion could have spilled the semen onto Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

     

    Slavoj Zizek defines the symptom as “a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation.” This particular element is both “a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for the field to achieve its closure” (21). Thus “freedom” as a “universal notion” is enabled by a symptomatic exception: the worker’s freedom to sell his labor, which is really the opposite of freedom. The American presidency occupies a similar relation to the ideological field of bourgeois law, which is supposedly based on impersonal norms. In a constitutional republic conceived as a “government of laws, not of men,” the President is the one man who must in turn embody the Law. In this sense, the Presidency is the enabling symptom of republican government. His personal power is the exception that proves the rule of bourgeois democracy.2

     

    However, the explicit acknowledgment of the president’s anatomical masculinity pushes the logic of the symptom past the threshold of the enabling exception, threatening to generate a crisis in the ideological field of American patriarchal authority itself. As a symptom of a symptom, a concrete positivity that gives the lie to the foundational symbolic anchor of the Law, Clinton’s penis stands for an unprecedented breakdown in both the intelligibility and effectivity of that Law. In Lacanian terms, the entire edifice of male entitlement to power under the Law of the Father depends upon the ideologically crucial yet admittedly vulnerable equation between the phallus as the transcendent signifier and the penis as its anatomical referent.3 One of the principal strategies for reinforcing this equation is simply to conceal the penis. In fact, we could say that our patriarchy to a great degree depends upon concealing the anatomical penis behind the symbolic phallus. The penis–in the end a paltry thing–must be concealed if its fictional equation to the omnipotent phallus is to be sustained. And the public exposure of the penis, particularly the erect penis, has been and remains in our culture the ultimate violation of privacy, acceptable only in–and indeed partly constitutive of–the realm of pornography to which the Clinton scandal is consistently compared. Clinton’s apparent inability to restrain his libido, to keep his dick in his pants, constantly reminds us of the human penis behind the official phallus. This repeated thrusting of the pornographic penis into a public realm organized around the symbolic phallus indicates a crisis in the patriarchal structure of authority that has traditionally undergirded the American public sphere.

     

    In this paper, I would like to trace the coordinates of this crisis, and its attendant risks and opportunities, across three public spaces of discourse and debate. First, I will analyze The Starr Report itself as mobilizing the contradictory appeals of what I am calling the pornographic public sphere, in which explicit discussion and representation of sexuality has come to articulate political allegiances and antagonisms. Second, I will discuss the crucial role the online magazine Salon played in framing public discussion of the scandal, in order to indicate the close relationship between new technologies of communication and new protocols of public discourse. Finally, I will conclude with a consideration of Bill and Hillary’s opaque “professional” marriage, which I believe indicates an ambiguous model of domesticity that seems to be displacing more conventional patriarchal models of the family. My argument throughout will be that the Clinton sex scandals have shown that the ideology of patriarchy is becoming increasingly unable to regulate the boundary between private life and public representation in the United States.

     

    The Pornographic Public Sphere

     

    Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, Voices veiled and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

     

    –Walt Whitman

     

    The obsessive public focus on President Clinton’s sex life, which only reached a certain apogee in The Starr Report, offers a particularly spectacular example of what Lauren Berlant has called the “intimate public sphere,” in which “narratives about sex and citizenship ha[ve] come to obsess the official national public sphere” (Queen 5). Both popular and academic intellectuals have tended to decry this privatization of public life as indicating a disintegration of the political integrity of citizenship and civil society in America.4 Certainly it is undeniable that there are more important political issues facing America than Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the Clinton scandal and The Starr Report are politically insignificant, nor that they signal a further decline in the integrity of American public culture. In fact, a significant rhetorical and legal battle is being waged in America between an increasingly vocal, puritanical right wing that has used the Clinton crisis as a platform to call for abstinence until marriage, and an increasingly marginalized left wing that endorses open public discussion and expression of sexuality. I would like to argue that this struggle is getting played out in a relatively novel collective space, a space whose political possibilities are yet to be fully evaluated or explored, a space I will call the pornographic public sphere.5

     

    This pornographic public sphere has grown out of and remains in close relation with its more traditional counterparts. Thus Habermas’s foundational definition of the Enlightenment public sphere as an arena for rational-critical debate remains central to an understanding of the Clinton scandals, and I think it is crucial that we recognize “the people’s public use of their reason” in the public reaction to and discussion of The Starr Report (27). The unprecedented free distribution of the text precipitated Internet discussions, radio and TV call-in shows, and water-cooler gossip across the nation about the relationship between private life and public office, a relationship which is, after all, a genuine political and constitutional issue. Further, it is no accident that Clinton’s lawyers in their published rebuttal to the Report attempted to clarify this relationship through recourse to the intentions of “the framers of our Constitution” by way of Alexander Hamilton’s discussion of impeachment from the Federalist 65 (445-62). Both the rational rhetoric of The Starr Report and the Clinton Rebuttal and their widespread public distribution are solidly in the tradition of Enlightenment political debate that goes back to the pamphleteering of the Revolutionary era.6

     

    This tradition of collective discussion has always been split between the democratic scope of its philosophical rhetoric and the restricted access of its historical reality. If the public in theory has seemed to include everyone, in practice it has always involved complex structures of exclusion. In terms of gender–the principal identity category foregrounded by the Clinton scandal–these structures of exclusion can be attributed to the close historical relation between patriarchal authority and the Enlightenment public sphere. Habermas confirms that the audience-oriented subjectivity appropriate to participation in public dialogue “had its home, literally, in the sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family” (43). Euro-American patriarchy dictated the asymmetries that traditionally have restricted women’s access to public debate up to this day. Critics working in the Habermasian tradition have yet to describe a public sphere not centrally informed by patriarchy.7

     

    The Starr Report proves that, despite the oceans and centuries that intervene between contemporary American society and the European Enlightenment that forms the focus of Habermas’s study, the categories of gender and sexuality remain central to the concept and structure of the public. Both the rhetoric and practice of modern citizenship have developed out of and remain grounded in the structure of the bourgeois nuclear family. In stage-managing an adulterous affair into a constitutional crisis, the Starr investigation foregrounded the persistent connections between the patriarchal family and the public sphere in America, and revealed how the psycho-sexual tensions of the former can generate social symptoms in the latter.

     

    Traditionally, the psycho-sexual drama of the patriarchal conjugal family has been played out in the novel and its various mass-mediated offspring. Habermas affirms that the audience-oriented subjectivity of the family found its signal expression in “the domestic novel, the psychological description in autobiographical form” (49). And, as many scholars have affirmed, if the rational-critical debate of the political extensions of the public sphere is traditionally gendered male, then the novelistic discourses that instantiate private subjectivity are traditionally gendered female.8 It was frequently through the genre of the novel that women were able to gain the public voice denied them in more traditional political venues.

     

    Thus it is highly significant that, dominated as The Starr Report is by the two men whose public struggle it documents, the central narrative therein is told by a woman. “Monica’s story,” as it has come to be called, complements the rational appeal of a constitutional debate with the affective appeal of a romance novel. And, just as it is crucial that we respect the rationality of the constitutional debate, it is equally important that we respect the authentic emotional appeal of Lewinsky’s narrative.9

     

    This emotional appeal is rooted in the affair’s very conventionality. Here Monica narrates her first private meeting with Bill Clinton:

     

    We talked briefly and sort of acknowledged that there had been a chemistry that was there before and that we were both attracted to each other and then he asked me if he could kiss me.

     

    Starr himself simply and sensitively concludes the inaugural moment: “In the windowless hallway adjacent to the study, they kissed” (72). Lewinsky and Starr in essence collaborate in weaving a deeply conventional narrative of the development, consummation, and disintegration of a doomed romance into the dryer fabric of legalistic detection that frames the Report as a whole.

     

    For the most part, however, this romantic narrative is told in Monica’s words and remains firmly anchored in her emotional universe. She reports upon her uncertainties: “I didn’t know if this was developing into some kind of longer term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been” (82). In letters written but never sent she expresses her frustrations with the President: “I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn’t wait to have me back” (104). When Clinton gives her a special edition of Leaves of Grass, she calls it “the most sentimental gift he had given me… it’s beautiful” (114). Finally, Lewinsky speaks for Clinton himself, as she recounts a July 4 discussion between them over the possibility of their marrying after he leaves the White House: “And he said, well, I don’t know, I might be alone in three years…. I think I kind of said, oh, I think we’d be a good team…. And he… jokingly said, well, what are we going to do when I’m 75 and I have to pee 25 times a day?” At this point, she “just knew that he was in love with me” (128).

     

    Once the lawyers and the media close in and the affair gradually unravels, the Report has established its emotional core in the voice of its primary witness. And the appeal of “Monica’s Story” is only enhanced by the dramatic irony created by our knowledge of the tragic denouement. Thus the “narrative” that constitutes “Part One” of The Starr Report is a love story which all but obligates its audience to sympathize with its central female voice. The sober and impersonal public appeal of the “Introduction” and the “Grounds” sandwiches this narrative solicitation of the reader’s emotional susceptibilities.

     

    Of course, affect and argument have always been entangled in the various articulations of the modern American public; and on this level Starr’s interweaving of a romantic narrative and a juridical dilemma is nothing new. It simply demonstrates his and our familiarity with the formula for classical Hollywood narrative, that ubiquitous “machine for the production of the American couple.” Combining a love story and a crime story is one of the central recipes for mainstream American film. The telic momentum of this narrative interweaving tends toward the achievement of some overlapping truth: the truth of the relationship in love or separation and the truth of the crime in guilt or innocence. In mainstream film, this truth almost always represents a containment of the ideological threats the story has posed to the sanctioned norms of heterosexual coupling.

     

    In The Starr Report, however, the “truth” toward which the narrative moves represents an unprecedented ideological unmasking of the very subjective and sexual capacities that generated it in the first place. For the truth that The Starr Report establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt is, once again, the president’s penis. On this level, the Report is a pornographic narrative that begins with Monica’s exposure of “the straps of her thong underwear,” moves through Clinton’s historic insertion of “a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina,” and concludes with the money shot of the President ejaculating on Lewinsky’s “navy blue dress from the Gap.” These almost awkwardly pornographic episodes are punctuated throughout by interrupted blowjobs, such that Clinton’s ejaculation becomes the climax for which the preceding narrative is only foreplay. The semen stain then becomes the ultimate proof both of the love demanded by the love story and of the crime implicit in the detection process. It is the signature that confers authenticity on the narrative.

     

    This authenticity gives the lie to the conventional truths normally endorsed by such narratives, and in the process overturns one of the constitutive exclusions of American public discourse. For if the classical and mass-cultural versions of the public sphere have always been somewhat entangled, pornography has persisted as their dialectical underbelly; in fact, one could venture a sort of negative definition of this notoriously slippery zone of representation as that which constitutes the dominant public by exclusion. Thus Sade has remained as central to an understanding of the Enlightenment as Rousseau, Addison, or Franklin. In the eighteenth century, sexual passion emerged as antithetical to disinterested reason, and the graphic textual solicitation of sexual desire became the shadowy counterpart to the public appeal to reason.10 This dialectical coupling persisted even as emerging mass-cultural texts and images became understood in libidinal terms. The cyclical moral panics about the sexual depravity of popular narratives and the eventual hegemony of the pseudo-Freudian cliché that “sex sells” in advertising have both occurred within a mass-cultural public sphere that excludes the graphic depiction of sexual acts. Until recently, pornography was a hidden subculture defined by its complete exclusion from mainstream public culture.

     

    This began to change in the fifties and sixties, with the historically overlapping emergence of men’s magazines like Playboy, the sexual revolution of the sixties, and the women’s movement. The success of Playboy and the magazine industry it spawned established “male” sexuality as a viable commercial market and forged a sustaining link between that market and more highbrow intellectual public discussion. In the sixties, popular intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Norman O. Brown confirmed a connection between sexual and political liberation for the post-war New Left, whose challenge to traditional sexual morés became a central trope in media coverage of political events in that decade. Finally, the feminist tenet that the “personal is political” confirmed sexuality, gender relations, and pornography as crucial areas of public debate.11

     

    The generic syncretism of The Starr Report indexes the complex and contradictory appeals of the public sphere that have emerged out of this gradual entry of sexually explicit representations and references into public discussion. Despite its patently partisan motives, the Starr investigation nevertheless staged a classic appeal to reason, asking us to adjudicate the relation between the private behavior of the President and the integrity of his public office. The story behind the crisis staged a mass-cultural appeal to affect, asking us to share in the pleasure and pain of a doomed love affair. The sexual images and acts that constitute the “truth” behind both former appeals forced a fascinated public attention toward the spectacle of the pornographic penis heretofore excluded from democratic display.

     

    Disembodied Seduction

     

    The earth to be spanned, connected by network.

     

    –Walt Whitman

     

    This messy intermixture of rational debate, sentimental narrative, and sexually explicit representations also characterizes the new media that many blame for precipitating the Clinton crisis in the first place. Ever since the story first broke in the Drudge Report, the country’s cultural elite has blamed the Internet for thrusting such trivial trash into public attention. Spokespeople for the traditional media outlets complain that the uniquely democratic architecture of relatively unregulated access which characterizes the Internet–at least for now–threatens the distinctions between elite media and tabloid trash. Thus Seth Schiesel, writing in the New York Times, warns that “a result of the essential democracy, or anarchy, of the Internet is that established news organs have no more claim to screen space than basement efforts.” The traditional news media hierarchy of highbrow academic analysis, middlebrow journalistic reportage, and lowbrow sensationalist exposé–a hierarchy reinforced by a stratified public and by separate venues of production and reception–no longer seems sustainable in a virtual geography that configures all information identically.

     

    Other intellectuals, both popular and academic, celebrate this virtual confusion as heralding a new form of public sphere that promises democratic participation beyond anything the founding fathers could have imagined. Thus Mark Poster argues that the Internet diminishes “prevailing hierarchies of race, class, and especially gender,” and can therefore “serve the function of a Habermasian public sphere” (213). And Jon Katz, one of the emerging gurus of Internet democracy, compares the “digital revolution” to the American revolution, proudly citing U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Stewart Dalzell’s claim that “the Internet ha achieved… the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country–and indeed the world–has yet seen” (54).

     

    The Clinton crisis was in a sense manufactured both for and by this new public marketplace, where everything from policy debates to popular culture to pornographic videos are available in the privacy of your home with the simple click of a mouse. Clinton’s unprecedented brand of pornographic celebrity has been at least partly enabled by this new proximity, and some of the most interesting discussions of the scandal’s significance have occurred in the new media.

     

    This intimate relation between the Internet and the Clinton scandal was confirmed when the online magazine Salon broke the story of Henry Hyde’s adulterous affair. Salon is a far cry from the Drudge Report. Founded in 1995, it has since been deemed “Web Site of the Year” for 1996 by Time Magazine and “Best Website” of 1997 by Entertainment Weekly; and it won the Webby Award for “Best Online Magazine” in 1997 and 1998. Salon became a clearinghouse for information and discussion on the Clinton scandal, greatly expanding both its corporate sponsorship and its reader base in the process. It provides an excellent case study in the coordination of Internet publicity and Clintonian salacity.

     

    Salon‘s editors explicitly endorse the Enlightenment ideal of “the search for knowledge through conversation with others.” In his “Brief History of Salons,” executive editor Gary Kamiya reminds us that this ideal has had as much to do with drawing room gossip as it had with abstract rationality. Kamiya sees the Internet as “an instrument of disembodied seduction… in the finest salon tradition.” Thus Salon, which boasts contributions from such popular contemporary luminaries as Susie Bright, Jon Carroll, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Richard Rodriguez, presents itself as a (safe) sexy public sphere, a cross between enlightened rationality and bohemian rhapsody. The extensive discussion of the Clinton scandal that appears on its pages offers a fruitful illustration of some of the possibilities opened up by the breakdown in the traditional protocols of public discussion.

     

    Two of Salon‘s most prominent columnists–Susie Bright and Camille Paglia–were particularly provocative in their deployment of pornographic public personae. When the scandal first broke, Bright, celebrity sex theorist and author of The Sexual State of the Union, light-heartedly identified with Clinton’s problems. In those frenzied weeks, Bright reported “a certain erotic kinship with the president today, a level of connection that transcends my normal role as his neglected constituent and makes me feel, at the very least, like more of a psychic friend.” In fact, at the height of the scandal, Bright exploited the perpetual present of cyberspace by claiming to “know what the president wants right now, and I do mean right this second… Right now, what President Clinton wants is to get laid.” In fact, “our president could use about a dozen blow jobs right now, in rapid succession, from a series of adoring fresh faces who would offer the sweetest solace, the most nurturing, ego-affirming escape hatch ever devised between a pair of lips.” But Bright’s voice doesn’t emanate from these lips. She could never give the president a blowjob because “I’m too much like him. I’m erotically oriented toward my clitoris, and on those uncomfortable occasions when someone asked ME to begin and end a sexual episode by performing a blow job, my selfish thought was always, “What’s in this for me?” (“I Know”).12

     

    Bright leverages her identification with Clinton into a call for more open public discussion of sexual preferences and dispositions. She is overjoyed that Clinton has “driven a stake into the mandate for penis-vagina, missionary position sex,” proving thereby that “you can have the hottest, most crazed sexual affair ever and never even exchange bodily fluids!” The Clinton crisis provided Bright with a platform from which to call for “a sense of democracy and accountability that is bigger than any one man’s dick,” a public culture in which we would all “have the courage to talk about [our] erotic convictions like they counted for something” (“School”). Bright has elsewhere endorsed the Internet as an ideal space for precisely such a “democratic discussion,” in which we could productively and openly ponder the similarities between Bill Clinton’s penis and Susie Bright’s clitoris (Sexual 221).13

     

    Paglia also saw the Clinton crisis in terms of challenges to sex roles and gender identity. In her Salon column, “online advice for the culturally disgruntled,” Paglia characterizes Clinton as “literally omnivorous: He would gobble up all the hamburgers and women in the world, if he could…. He wants to suck everything up, have it all, cram life with every sensation and emotion…. He has the complexity of a great star–like Judy Garland or Joan Crawford. Yes the only analogies to him are female, not male.” Deploying the crude psychoanalysis for which she is notorious, Paglia attributes this omnivorous orality to Clinton’s fatherlessness. In essence, Clinton has “more of a mother problem than a woman problem”; he has “problems separating his own identity from that of women.” Instead of being a patriarchal figure, Clinton becomes a sort of devouring mother whose “[c]rimes are incestuous: He makes the whole world his family and then seduces and pollutes it, person by person” (“Why”).

     

    And, of course, if Clinton is the mother, Hillary must be the father. By a peculiar psychoanalytic inversion, “Bill is the lush, disorderly id, while Hillary is the prim, censorious superego keeping it all in check.” Paglia has been the chief propagandist for the lesbian “ice queen” image of Hillary that has always complemented Clinton’s classically feminine fluid ego boundaries. According to Paglia, “Hillary’s mind is stone cold–an intimidating abstract state that women must learn to occupy” in our modern post-feminist corporate world. But the first lady shields her masculine mind behind an icily female exterior, making her “a drag queen, the magnificent final product of a long process of self transformation from butch to femme” (“First”).14

     

    If Bright identifies with Bill Clinton, Paglia openly admits that she identifies “strongly with [Hillary] and recognize[s] in her present difficulties an echo of my own career disasters.” And Paglia leverages this identification into an indictment of Bill Clinton as a new breed of feminist-friendly philanderer, who has introduced a new post-patriarchal double bind for the American woman: he’s replaced the classically Victorian virgin/whore complex with a new postmodern lesbian/whore complex. Clinton gladly concedes power to careerist “ice queens” like Hillary Rodham, Janet Reno, and Madeleine Albright, while eagerly pursuing blowjobs from trashy young sluts like Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. As a model of the new sensitive male, he can have his cake and eat it, too.

     

    The End of Patriarchy?

     

    Bright’s and Paglia’s columns not only confirm the crucial importance of the Internet in propagating and processing the Clinton scandal, they also confirm Jennifer Wicke’s contention that, in the nineties, “the celebrity zone is the public sphere where feminism is negotiated” (757). In fact, celebrity feminism and the Clinton presidency are historically coincident. The gradual eclipse of grassroots movement feminism by high profile celebrities such as Paglia, Bright, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Susan Powter, and others has paralleled the Clintons’ rise to power. Hillary Clinton herself should be included in the ranks of celebrity feminists whose new prominence indexes the degree to which political struggles over sexuality and gender relations are being negotiated in the mass-cultural public sphere. In fact, the intense scrutiny of Bill and Hillary’s private lives reveals how extensively politics in general is increasingly imbricated in the culture of celebrity.15

     

    The Clintons accommodate their mass-cultural celebrity to their political power through the image of the consummate professional. Both Clintons are perceived as highly intelligent, technocratic, careerist pragmatists. In fact, insofar as the vision of the “professional couple” is a focus-group-driven product of the Clinton administration’s professional media team, it is a product of itself: “professionalism” is both the manufactured image and the working reality of the Clinton White House. Even their personal relationship is increasingly characterized as pragmatic and professional; their marriage seems to be a “working” relationship, in both senses of the term.

     

    The Clinton crisis must be understood as a collision between the new middle-class model of the dual-career marriage and the political volatility of the culture of celebrity. The Clintons are the first first couple to explicitly present to the American public a marriage in which both parents work, and in which, to a great degree, the marriage itself is seen as work. Laura Kipnis has eloquently discussed the symbolic role adultery plays in this regime:

     

    In the Marriage Takes Work regime of normative intimacy, when the work shift ends and the domestic shift begins hardly makes much difference; from surplus labor to surplus monogamy is a short, easy commute. Under conditions of surplus monogamy, adultery--a sphere of purposelessness, outside contracts, not colonized by the logic of productivity and the performance principle--becomes something beyond a structural impossibility. It's a counterlogic to the prevailing system. (298)

     

    Certainly Clinton’s ill-advised dalliance with Lewinsky occurred in this “sphere of purposelessness.” Even those who didn’t find it immoral still thought it was irredeemably “stupid.” Nevertheless, as a series of desperate encounters squeezed into a schedule so busy and a space so small, it tragically underscores the scarce opportunities for pleasure in a regime so tightly and obsessively organized around work.

     

    Significantly, Bill Clinton works at home. The White House is both a residence and an office; it is architecturally constructed and symbolically understood to contain both domestic and professional activities under one roof. Thus if Clinton represents the regime of all-consuming careerism that characterizes the culture of the Baby-Boom generation, Monica Lewinsky enters–youthful, underpaid, and single–as a Generation-X dream of leisure, a “structural impossibility” for such a busy man. The Starr Report illustrates this quite clearly. As Clinton repeatedly rebuffs Lewinsky, the contrast between his busyness and her idleness comes to the fore. The more he neglects her with the excuse of “work,” the more she spends her free time drafting letters and gossiping. Lewinsky’s only escape, and both she and Clinton knew this, was to use her leverage with him to get a high-paying professional job. But when the scandal broke she was forced into perpetual idleness–she was unemployed, couldn’t even go out in public, and was relegated to helping her lawyers with their filing–while Clinton increasingly immersed himself in the distraction of “work.” And it was in the end Clinton’s professional work ethic that kept his approval ratings so high: as the polls incessantly reminded us, most Americans thought he was “doing a good job.”

     

    Thus the final symptomatic irony of the Clinton scandal is that the affair that threatened the marriage confirms masculine entitlement to political power, while the marriage that was threatened has become a model of political gender equality. It is increasingly perceived as a “professional” relationship, a marriage without sex. The more the public absorbs of Clinton’s image as a philanderer, the less it can imagine any sexual intimacy with Hillary. The two are in effect assumed to be mutually exclusive. In fact, however, this is the region–the actual bedroom behavior of Bill and Hillary–in which the Clintons really seem to have retained a modicum of privacy. Everyone knows what Bill and Monica did, but the nature of intimate relations between Bill and Hillary Clinton remains open to speculation.

     

    Are they happy? Do they have sex? Do they have an “arrangement” about infidelity? Does Hillary also engage in extramarital affairs? What are her sexual preferences? Bell hooks–quoted, of course, in Salon–has an interesting, if partial, answer:

     

    Nobody understands that women can feel relieved sometimes when their husband is fucking someone else. It's hard to satisfy men with big egos.... In terms of their relationship, they are the most progressive couple we've ever had in the White House. People want to make them pay for that. It would be the most positive thing for our culture if we respected the love between Hillary and her man. We need a love ethic at the seat of power.... Their relationship is based on respect and love. Not necessarily on sex. (Peri and Leibovich)

     

    Love in the marriage and sex outside it, at least for the man: this is certainly one of the more prevalent images we have of the first couple. But Hillary’s sexuality remains a cipher on which the progressiveness of hooks’s model hinges. Certainly a power couple with a philandering husband and a frustrated wife is not terribly new.

     

    What sort of a “family” did Bill Clinton want to retreat into when he made his famous declaration of privacy? His and Hillary’s political careers and personal lives span the rise and fall of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement in America, and the complex opacity of their relationship reveals that the connection between the patriarchal conjugal family and the public sphere has in our age become a contradiction. That contradiction, I believe, has generated a crisis around the articulation of their specific family dynamics and their political power.

     

    In order to evaluate fully the significance of this crisis, the question of the Clintons’ private happiness is, I believe, crucial, if finally unanswerable. Have they introduced an emotionally fulfilling family model that articulates with a political public sphere no longer based in patriarchy, or have they simply updated the psychic and material oppression of the conventional nuclear family for a post-political world? Does the scandal confirm Kipnis’s assertion of “both the impossibility of living by the rules of conventional ideologies of intimacy, and the dangerous impossibility of making happiness any sort of a political demand” (319)? Or does it prove, as hooks claims or hopes, that we actually do have a “love ethic at the seat of power.” Maybe, in some dialectical joke on us, the answer is both.

     

    But who is the “us” on which this joke is being played? And do we, in the end, get it? Kipnis’s article, entitled simply “Adultery,” is the first essay in the Winter 1998 special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to “Intimacy.” That this special issue–edited by Lauren Berlant and including contributions from many of the most influential academic luminaries of the contemporary critical moment–came out the very month the Clinton crisis broke is almost enough to make one believe in synchronicity. Kipnis recognizes Clinton as our “Libido in Chief” (314), and sees our current obsession with his adulterous behavior as a reminder that “toxic levels of everyday unhappiness or grinding boredom are the functional norm in many lives and marriages” (319). For Kipnis, adultery emerges as a fleeting utopian moment of pleasure in this marriage regime completely dedicated to work. She concludes by urging her audience–whom she addresses as “we avant-gardistes of everyday life, we emergent utopians who experimentally construct different futures out of whatever we can” (327)–to make “an unembarrassed commitment to utopian thinking” (326). Kipnis’s essay functions both as an introduction and as a gauntlet to the essays that follow; she offers adultery as an inchoate zone of utopian practice upon which her colleagues might built a theory.

     

    Kipnis notably represents her audience as workaholic professionals, and it is in this operative assumption that we see the intimate overlap between her audience and the demographic to whom Salon is addressed. The average household income of a Salon reader is $69,500; 85% are college graduates; 59% are categorized as “professionals.”16 Critical Inquiry‘s readers might not make quite as much money, but I think we can presume that both of these publications address what one might call the intellectual vanguard of the American professional-managerial class.

     

    If the Clinton scandal represents a crisis in the social reproduction and public representation of this professional-managerial class, Critical Inquiry and Salon are public spaces in which it is attempting both to exploit and to resolve its latest crisis. And, judging by the success of Salon, we’re doing quite well. In 1997, PC Week wondered whether “a quality publication can make a profit on the web” (Diamond). Pundits and commentators were skeptical as to whether Salon‘s highbrow pretensions could meet the Internet’s corporate bottom lines. Since the Clinton scandal broke, Salon has signed a two-year deal with Barnes and Noble to sell books online, and has recently hooked up with the search engine Go.com, partially owned by the Disney Corporation. Salon now has its hands in some pretty deep pockets; the pornographic public sphere appears to be here to stay.

     

    In the pages of Salon and Critical Inquiry, then, we witness a class fragment formulating a new discourse of self-presentation in the public sphere, and searching for new models of domesticity and intimacy in a corporate order that places enormous stress (in both senses of the word) on the conventional couple form. And yet, one can’t help but feel that this corporate order in fact thrives on this very crisis and that capitalism–far from relying on an established patriarchy–continuously reproduces its middle classes through offering us the utopian vertigo of its disintegration. The President’s penis, in the end, could be a harbinger of a future American society in which capitalism no longer depends on patriarchy.

     

    Notes

     

    1. This schizophrenic split is most effectively registered by polls that asked respondents to speculate on the public itself. Thus in a February 1998 poll taken by CBS news, only 7% of respondents said they were fascinated by Clinton’s sex life; but 25% thought other people were fascinated, and 49% said other people were at least mildly curious (Berke).

     

    Such responses confirm that public subjectivity is not directly reducible to the individual sensibilities of those solicited by it; rather, the public subject emerges from the manner in which we are solicited. Michael Warner has effectively theorized this relation: “no matter what particularities of culture, race, and gender, or class we bring to bear on public discourse, the moment of apprehending something as public is one in which we imagine, if imperfectly, indifference to those particularities, to ourselves. We adopt the attitude of the public subject marking to ourselves its nonidentity with ourselves” (377). It is this public subject that found itself split between prudery and prurience by the Clinton scandal.

     

    2. Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt confirms that “the same conditions that promote [the President’s] leadership in form preclude a guarantee of his leadership in fact” (8). Neustadt differentiates between formal powers, which he associates with the constitutional position of the president as simply a clerk or office boy for the legislature, and power tout court, which he sees as a question of “personal influence.” For a recent discussion of the contradictory nature of the presidency, see Cronin and Genovese (1-29).

     

    3. For an excellent discussion of how American patriarchy relies on the mystified equation between the penis and the phallus, see Silverman (15-52). For the source of the distinction in Lacan, see Feminine Sexuality, in particular Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s introductions, and the essays “The Meaning of the Phallus” (74-86) and “The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex” (99-123). Lauren Berlant confirms that “male embodiment itself threatens to collapse the public authority of patriarchy” (Anatomy 121).

     

    4. Berlant herself unequivocally proclaims that her “first axiom is that there is no public sphere in the contemporary United States, no context of communication and debate that makes ordinary citizens feel that they have a common public culture” (Queen 3). See also Jeffrey Rosen’s discussions of the Clinton scandal for The New Republic, “The End of Privacy” and “I Pry.” Both foundational studies of the rise of the “public” in the eighteenth century–The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and The Fall of Public Man–correlate its decline with the mass-cultural focus on private personalities. See Habermas (141-59, 181-211), and Sennett (150-95).

     

    5. My understanding of the term “pornographic public sphere” emerged out of discussions with Helen Thompson concerning the political significance of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and The Starr Report. Helen’s thinking about pornography and the public has deeply influenced my own in this section.

     

    6. Few would characterize the public discussion of the Clinton/Lewinksy scandal as rational, but I would argue that our very understanding of “rationality” must be revised if we are to apply it intelligibly to the contemporary mass public. It is worth reminding ourselves, in this regard, of Walter Benjamin’s characterization of the modern public as “a collectivity in a state of distraction” (239). According to Benjamin, “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (241). Benjamin’s approach saves us from easy dismissals of the participatory mechanisms of mass mediated spectacles. Thus we can understand public discussion of the Clinton scandal as a mass-cultural version of “distracted” rational-critical debate.

     

    7. Feminist scholarship on Habermas has focused on precisely this problem. In addition to Berlant, see Fraser, Ryan, Young, Landes, and Hansen, all of whom critique Habermas toward the end of adapting the emancipatory extensions of his theory for a feminist critical program.

     

    8. See, for example, Watt, Showalter, and Armstrong.

     

    9. On the political significance of the mass-market romance, see Radway.

     

    10. On the prehistory of pornography and its modern invention during the Enlightenment, see Hunt.

     

    11. On the history and theory of modern pornography, see Williams and Kendrick. On the political significance of pornography for the postwar generations and the women’s movement, see Lederer and Ross (171-209).

     

    12. Bright found The Starr Report itself “ANTI-erotic,” mostly because she saw it as part of a sustained pattern of right-wing co-optation of left-wing sex talk (“Hijacked”). Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the crisis itself provided an unprecedented forum for Bright’s views on the public discussion of sexuality.

     

    13. Mark Poster affirms that the Internet “produces a new relation to one’s body as it communicates, a cyborg in cyberspace who is different from all the embodied genders of earlier modes of information” (212-13). On how the concept of the cyborg challenges conventional gender identity, see Haraway (149-83).

     

    14. This gender-bendy image of the Clintons is at the center of Joe Klein’s thinly veiled portrayal of Jack and Susan Stanton in both his originally anonymous runaway bestseller Primary Colors, and in the subsequent film. Midway through the book, in a scene significantly left out of the film, a former classmate of Stanton remembers: “He was needy the way a woman is, he needed the physical proximity.” Susan Stanton, on the other hand, is compared to a toothpaste commercial, with an “invisible protective shield [that] didn’t just stop at the mouth” (370-71).

     

    It is far from incidental that this former classmate is an African-American woman who had been Stanton’s girlfriend in college. In fact, Primary Colors, the story of a white southern governor’s pursuit of the democratic presidential nomination as narrated through the eyes of his black campaign manager, crucially relates the post-women’s movement gender politics of the Clinton presidency to its post-civil rights approach to race issues, and these also, interestingly, turn on the boundary between the President’s public and private behavior. The novel symbolically opens in Harlem and its narrator is the yuppie grandson of a slain civil rights leader clearly modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr. However, though Henry Burton, the central voice and moral center of the narrative, sees himself as black, his mother is white and, in the end, it is the “private” issue of interracial sex and marriage which makes the title Primary Colors into a double entendre. The central crisis of the narrative turns on the possibility that Jack Stanton impregnated the African-American teenage daughter of the local proprietor of his favorite barbecue joint. Susan Stanton’s discovery of the rumor drives her, “the world’s most fortified bunker,” into Burton’s bed (340). And the revelation toward the end of the novel that Stanton did at least have sex with the girl precipitates Burton’s final loss of innocence.

     

    It is worth comparing this near obsession with interracial sex in Primary Colors to the issues raised by the Lewinsky scandal. For it is a matter of public knowledge that Clinton exclusively preferred oral sex with Lewinsky, that he propositioned oral sex to Paula Jones, and that he believes that oral sex doesn’t count as “sexual relations.” If we accept the obvious equation between Stanton and Clinton, however, we see that the case is different when the young woman is black. If Clinton gets blowjobs from young white girls, he apparently prefers to inseminate young black girls. In other words, sex would appear to be the answer Primary Colors offers to America’s persistent race problem. If the title refers to skin color as well as party colors, then the only partially hidden message is confirmed: you only get the “full picture” if you mix the primary colors. Not surprisingly, Warren Beatty–certainly a contemporary of the Clintons–offers a similar solution in his recent satire Bulworth, in which the rapping white senator proposes that we all have sex until we become the same color. It is as if the only way to solve the intransigent “race problem” were to eliminate race, and the only way to eliminate race is to have interracial sex.

     

    15. For a discussion of the increasing interpenetration of political power and the culture of celebrity, see Marshall (203-51).

     

    16. Demographic information about Salon‘s readership can be found on the “Salon Fact Sheet” (http://www.salonmagazine.com/press/fact/).

    Works Cited

     

    • Anonymous (Joe Klein). Primary Colors. New York: Warner Books, 1996.
    • Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
    • Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Shocken, 1968. 217-251.
    • Berke, Richard. “So Clinton’s OK in the Polls? Guess Again.” New York Times. 15 Feb. 1998, sec. 4: 1+.
    • Berlant, Lauren. Anatomy of a National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
    • —. The Queen of American goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
    • Bright, Susie. The Sexual State of the Union. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
    • —. “I Know What Bill Wants.” Salon. 30 Jan. 1998. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/01/nc_30brig.html>.
    • —. “School for Scandal.” Salon. 28 Aug. 1998. <http://www.salonmagazine.com /col/brig/1998/08/nc_28brig.html>.
    • —. “Hijacked.” Salon. 25 Sept. 1998. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/09/nc_25brig.html>.
    • Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.
    • Cronin, Thomas E. and Michael A. Genovese. The Paradoxes of the Modern Presidency. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
    • Diamond, David. “The Web’s Salon.” PC Week 17 March 1997: A1-A3.
    • Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 1-32.
    • Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989.
    • Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Bablyon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
    • Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800. New York: Routledge, 1993.
    • Kamiya, Gary. “A Brief History of Salons.” Salon. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/05/bookfront/history.html>.
    • Katz, Jon. Media Rants: Postpolitics in the Digital Nation. San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997.
    • Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Viking, 1987.
    • Kipnis, Laura. “Adultery.” Critical Inquiry 24:2 (Winter 1998): 289-328.
    • Lacan, Jacques and the Ecole Freudienne. Feminine Sexuality. Eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.
    • Landes, Joan. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
    • Lederer, Laura, ed. Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. New York: Quill, 1980.
    • Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
    • Neustadt, Richard. Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Free Press, 1990.
    • Paglia, Camille. “The First Drag Queen.” Salon. 25 Jan. 1999. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/06/features/paglia.html>.
    • —. “Why feminists are co-dependent with philandering Bill.” Salon. 3 Feb. 1998. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1998/02/nc_03pagl.html.
    • Peri, Camille and Lori Leibovich. “Can this marriage be saved?” Salon. 23 Jan. 1998. <http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/ feature/1998/01/cov_23feature.html>.
    • Poster, Mark. “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere.” Internet Culture. Ed. David Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. 201-217.
    • Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
    • Rosen, Jeffrey. “The End of Privacy: How Bill Clinton Lost the Right to Be Left Alone.” New Republic. 16 Feb. 1998. 21-24.
    • —. “I Pry.” New Republic 16 March 1998: 17-19.
    • Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.
    • Ryan, Mary. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
    • —. 1992. “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America.” Calhoun 259-89.
    • Schiesel, Seth. “Clinton Scandal Explodes in Cyberspace.” The New York Times. 26 Jan. 1998.
    • Scott, Janny. “Internet, Cable News Said to be Eroding News Judgement.” The New York Times. 6 Feb. 1998.
    • Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Norton, 1974.
    • Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
    • Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • The Starr Report. New York: Pocket Books, 1998.
    • Warner, Michael. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” Calhoun 377-401.
    • Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.
    • Wicke, Jennifer. “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity. South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (Fall 1994): 751-79.
    • Williams, Linda. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
    • Young, Iris Marion. “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.” Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies. Eds. S. Benhabib and D. Cornell. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. 56-77.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1989.

     

  • The Blair Witch Project: Technology, Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis

    David Banash

    Department of English
    The University of Iowa
    dbanash@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu

     

    The Blair Witch Project.Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Perf. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams. Artisan Entertainment, 1999.

     

    Given its preposterously low budget, outsider production, and a priori cult status as ludic masterpiece, The Blair Witch Project does not seem a likely candidate to become the allegorical moment of our postmodern media-scape. In fact, the major obsession of all reviewers has been, thus far, that the film somehow by-passes technology altogether, returning us to an authentic psychological (think Hitchcock) rather than technical horror (Wes Craven). The marketing of the film exploits this fact–i.e. here is the real horror of your imagination rather than the over-produced kitsch of Freddy Kruger or Pin-head. This undisguised appeal to the authenticity of imagination is paradoxically coextensive with BWP‘s presentation and marketing of itself as a documentary. Thus, not only is the film obsessed with returning the viewer to an authentic experience of self under the sign of imagination, it simultaneously presents itself as an unmediated, even “unimaginative,” reality. However, BWP is, ironically, a deconstruction of the possibility of such authenticities in our technologically mediated culture, and the return of this knowledge is where the real horror of the film is to be found.

     

    The classic horror narrative is based on the return of the repressed: From Mary Shelly’s left-for-dead monster to Candyman, the theme asserts itself as both causality and moment of terror. BWP is in this sense no exception. Written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the film presents itself as the raw footage of three student filmmakers (director Heather Donahue, cinematographer Joshua Leonard, and sound technician Michael C. Williams). As they venture into Maryland’s Black Hills Forest in search of the legendary Blair Witch, we witness both the initial shots for their documentary project (complete with slates) and their continual filming of the strange events that ensue as they are stalked by a malicious presence. As we are told in the opening credits, the three were never seen again. The narrative, then, is the return of the Blair Witch, who, presumably, is responsible for the disappearance of the filmmakers. However, there is another way we might grasp the return of the repressed in this film, and thus explain both its popularity and power. The marketing and reception of the film are centered around its supposed ludic repression of technology and return to authenticity. Yet, within the narrative, we are left with only film cans, DAT tapes, and 8mm Video. To put this rather more pivotally, the substantive repression in our reception of the film is not that of the witch herself, but of technology’s mediating role in every aspect of our world. Yet at every turn in the narrative, and encoded into the documentary format which relies on both grainy black and white and shaky video, the technological apparatus and its inability to represent the witch are underscored. The real horror of the film is built out of the return of this knowledge–that we remember our powerlessness in a world saturated with, but immune to, a technological mimesis we can neither trust nor escape.

     

    Much has been made of the BWP‘s status as a psychological horror film that relies on imagination. The consensus established in the reviews is that the omnipresence of billion dollar effects in films from The Phantom Menace to Aliens are, these days, no longer effective because they alienate the audience from its imagination. As Entertainment Weekly Online puts it, “[t]oday, when moviegoers know everything about everything (and can never unimagine, say, that ‘Alien’ monster bursting from John Hurt’s chest), the only true fear lies in what’s not shown” (Schwarzbaum). The old argument here is that films which push technology towards a total mimesis no longer frighten audiences so desensitized that they can watch any evisceration disinterestedly. However, the reason for that jaded passivity is that real horror must be the evocation of our own fears; in short, a return to and paradoxical affirmation of the self. The success of BWP, so the argument continues in the New York Times, is that everything “is left to the imagination. And the imagination works overtime watching the acuity of these talented filmmakers” (Maslin). The formula for successful horror, is then, according to Kristen Baldwin, “asking the question ‘Hey, do you want to see something really scary?’ and letting your mind provide the example.”

     

    There are two moves worthy of some serious scrutiny here. First, there is an obvious backlash against over-budgeted, over-produced, studio monsters of all genres. Part of the fascination with BWP is also part of the current idolization of indie hip, and thus critics are quick to laud any successful film “whose cost, according to its makers, was about the same as a fully loaded Ford Taurus” (Brunette). However, the way BWP gets reviewed is strikingly different from say El Mariachi or In the Company of Men. These films are depicted as postmodern tales of directorial self-reliance and Horatio Alger success against late capitalist corporate culture. Such receptions are often divorced from the actual narratives of the films. In contrast, BWP is not only represented as an allegory of economic self-reliance but a more total, perhaps transcendental, affirmation of the very concept of self metonymically transformed into imagination. According to Salon, “the fact that a shoestring-budget mockumentary with no name stars, no special effects, no rivers of bloody gore and not even a musical score can be this spooky is a testament to the storytelling ability of the filmmakers, and to their trust in the audience’s imagination. It’s been a long time since a movie did so much by showing so little” (Williams). Here, reaction against studio slick is coupled with a defense of what such obviously constructed, special-effected films threaten: the very concept of self. Where the studio monster is always constructed for us, given to us in the most graphic detail, it simultaneously calls attention to the very way it is attempting to manipulate audience reactions, constantly reminding the audience that it has little control over the way in which it is being mediated. BWP is such a powerful film, so the critics conclude, because it returns the audience (think trust as empowerment) to unmediated self-hood and agency (your fears, your mind, your self).

     

    But with all this emphasis on imagination, we might wonder if critics and audiences aren’t protesting just a bit too much. BWP is now famous for what it does not show. We do not see Josh’s abduction. We do not see the presumably gruesome ends of Heather or Matt. We do not see the witch. All these, it is said, are left to the imagination. But what if this is about something more than empowering the imagination? For all these moments in the narrative are coordinated by the film’s central plot: the failure of a documentary project. It is this failure that is shown in agonizing detail as the mimetic technologies (maps, compass, DAT, video, film) break down along with the collective cohesiveness of the filmmakers. Thus, what our reception itself represses is the very failure of technology as an armature and expression of a will to knowledge and, by extension, the possibility of self.

     

    Throughout the film, technology is equated with power and control over the world. As the filmmakers enter the woods (a stark pre-modernism), they rely on a map and compass. However, immediately they have difficulty reading the map. These are the first really tense scenes of the film, and they introduce the longest narrative theme: being lost. We witness Josh and Mike becoming more fearful as Heather miscalculates their distance from shooting locations. This theme is developed over the course of two days in which the very validity and usefulness of the map is called into question. What is at stake is representation itself. Heather, though she has misread the map, maintains that it is an accurate representation of the territory which they can interpret if they simply take the time. Josh initially struggles with Heather, retaining faith in the map, but arguing over its interpretation. Mike, unable to read the map, maintains that either it is inaccurate or no one has the interpretive skills to read it. On the third day, the map disappears all together. Though Mike later confesses to destroying it, it remains uncertain if this is true. The map, then, is the first technology to be called into question. What the disappearance of the map dramatizes is their dependance on a technology of representation they either do not trust or cannot use, but on which they nevertheless must rely. This theme is repeated in the subsequent failure of the compass. Deciding to take a course south, they follow the compass all day but by nightfall have simply come full circle to their campsite. Even more emphatically than the map, the compass has failed. In the map and the compass the film presents a world immune to technological representation. This theme is more subtly but effectively developed in the failure of their audio/visual recording equipment.

     

    Though they believe they are being stalked by a presence, and speculate that it may be the witch, they cannot capture it on film. This is hardly a problem of proximity. Whatever is shadowing them approaches their tent over the course of four nights, leaving totemic piles of rocks and bundles of sticks. Though they hear noises over the course of these nights, they cannot capture a single image and manage to record only the most muted and distorted clicks and rumbles on the DAT (despite the fact that they describe these sounds to one another as shouts, footsteps, and the cries of a baby). Just as they fail to master their navigational equipment, they are unable to mobilize their recording equipment to capture (and thus understand or contain) whatever is menacing them. It is curious that our attention is displaced from this aspect of the narrative, for the horror of confronting a world that cannot be represented is shown in chilling detail.

     

    Just as they continue despite everything to rely on their map and compass, so do they continue obsessively to film their ordeal. Though when they are first lost Josh frequently argues with Heather over this, accusing her of irresponsibility given the possibility of death either from exposure or the unknown, she defends her decision and continues, as do both Josh and Mike despite their occasional protests. Yet in a tense and self-reflexive moment in the film, Josh confronts Heather. Taking her video camera, he says, “I see why you like this thing. It’s like filtered reality.” While Heather does not object to this statement, and critics and audiences have all but made a rallying cry out of it (what you can’t see on the screen is scarier), the narrative suggests something a bit darker. It is not as if Heather, or we, could simply remove our gaze from the lens. Technologies of representation are, as we know, omnipresent. Worse, they are the only possibility we have to engage the world. Yet, they are always flawed, always inadequate, always shifting and deceptive. The fact that the witch cannot be captured on the film is the horror of the film, but not because it empowers unmediated imagination. It is horrifying because it dramatizes (shows!) our total reliance on technologies that, if pushed, break, rupture, and give over to chaos. In a later scene, (perhaps the most famous of the film, in which Heather holds the camera to her face in the blackness capturing only her own image), the would-be director apologizes: “I insisted on everything [the whole project, the locations, the directions they took, etc.] I’m sorry, it was my project. I was naive.” What Heather realizes in this monologue is the position in which her own will to knowledge has placed her and her crew. Accepting the necessity of and trusting in mimetic technology, expecting that technology to adequately represent the world, she and the others have pushed it to a rupture, and death seems likely. Confronted with a world that we cannot represent/imagine (be it postmodernism itself or merely the Blair Witch), the real drama is not the empowerment of imagination but our horror in the face of our simultaneous reliance upon and critique of the technologies of representation.

     

    It is curious that our initial reception of the film has been so interested in BWP‘s specious affirmation of imagination, for the other most remarkable narrative and stylistic feature is its status as documentary. Though both the legend of the witch and the disappearance of the three students are fictional, the creators of BWP have done everything they can to present their film as an actual documentary. For instance, their web-site treats the entire story as history and journalism, complete with mock historical records, time-lines, and local news-clips. This material has even been taken up and turned into a featured special, “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” on the Sci Fi cable channel. The program, treating the material as historical fact, poses the question “[i]s this century-old pattern of murders part of a complex conspiracy by a radical cult attempting to keep the threat of the Blair Witch alive?” (scifi.com). Even the film itself has the look of truth that has come to dominate, from the emergence of MTV’s The Real World to The Fox Network’s Cops, or even America’s Funniest Home Videos. In fact, in both reviews and postings to chat-groups, viewers associate much of the fright with this realism. Such realism was part of the film’s very production. The actors retained their real names, improvised almost every scene with minimal direction, and, deprived of sleep and food, made method acting an extreme sport. Yet this, more than any other feature of the film, should make us suspicious of the endless claims in favor of imagination. Consistently employing the discursive and filmic conventions of journalism and history, BWP performs the fact that all representations are incomplete constructions incapable of laying bare a god’s-eye view. And it does this with an effortless elegance, for not only has the documentary failed, it asks its audience to adopt a critical stance toward all documentary (mimetic) claims. Thus the film contains its own self-reflexive critique, dramatizing the literal end/impossibility of mimesis. To obsess over imagining the witch is to elide the horror that is on screen throughout the film; it is a reactive desire to escape the critique of mimesis, for in the supposed freedom of imagination we forget that our very psyche is as constructed, incomplete, and mediated as the film itself.

     

    Jameson’s classic argument in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” reminds us that part of the popularity of blockbuster films (horror films in particular) is their ability to “entertain relations of repression with the fundamental social anxieties and concerns, hopes and blind spots, ideological antinomies and fantasies of disaster, which are their raw material” (141). The utopian moment of popular film, according to Jameson’s Blochian reading, is a repression of these fundamental materials through “the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony” (141). For Jameson, popular films are popular because they tap the collective’s fears. However, the Hollywood ending always resolves these fears by transforming them into an utopian moment that underwrites the immediate social order. What is so curious about BWP is not that it taps such fears, but that it offers no such resolution. The utopian moment simply is not to be found in the narrative of this film. It has been displaced onto the plane of our reception. The raw materials of BWP are, no doubt, our fears of and insecurities with (mimetic) technologies that we can neither trust nor escape. And with its stark, bleak ending–the failure of a documentary project, the disappearance of human agents, and the inhuman survival of the tapes and film–BWP offers no consolation. But such fears are repressed and turned into a utopian affirmation of our contemporary moment through the valorization of our imagination (self) coupled with the indie myth of good old American economic self-reliance. For audiences and reviewers, the film is thus coded as a return to utopian authenticity. Yet narratively, this moment is precisely what the film denies. The rhetoric of our reception thus becomes our alibi for the masochistic pleasure we take in witnessing BWP‘s horrifying and literal evisceration of mimesis.

     

    Works Cited

     

     

  • Memory, Orality, Literacy, Joyce, and the Imaginary: A Virtual History of Cyberculture

    Donald F. Theall

    Department of Cultural Studies
    Trent University
    dtheall@trentu.ca

     

    Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW: A 21*C Book published by Interface, 1998.

     

    What might more properly be referred to by a more prosaic term such as “the digimediatrix” or “the digi-infomatrix” has through the poetic magic of William Gibson come to be known as “cyberspace.” And by the same token, the new cultural formations that are emerging from this amalgam of telecommunication, digital computing, information storage, and the merging of media are now denominated “cyberculture.” The standard approach to these new cultural formations is to examine them as if they represented a radical, near absolute break with the past by which we are moving beyond history. Whether pessimistic, enthusiastic, theoretic, or critical, most commentators place primary stress on the uniqueness and radical newness of the contemporary experience. With a few remarkable exceptions, academic historians, literary critics, and linguists have produced accounts of “hypertext” and “hypermedia” which are keyed almost entirely to the present. They have given us a view of some fundamental transformations in our understanding of the act of reading and the nature of the material text, but have failed to discover the ways that the cyberculture is shaped by critical moments of our remote as well as our more recent history.

     

    In this situation, Memory Trade: A Pre-History of Cyberculture written by Darren Tofts, Chair of English and Media Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, and illustrated by the Award-winning digital artist Murray McKeich from the Department of Creative Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is a major contribution to the current debate. This is an elaborate, complex, and yet compact book which is as remarkable for its splendidly satiric, posthuman illustrations and its high-quality production as for its intellectual and perceptual richness and the intensity of its writing. In a short review it is only possible to sketch the main points of Tofts’s analysis and critique of cyberculture, and to indicate a few of the pre-histories of the cyberworld that he proposes in his attempt to situate our cultural moment within a problematic of permanence and change. I will try to give a sense of the book’s broad contours, particularly as they relate to Tofts’s conclusions regarding the role of machines, memory, literacy, and writing in cyberculture. Special emphasis will be placed on Memory Trade‘s last chapter, which offers an important discussion of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a work which, published on the eve of World War II, helped to accelerate the emergence of cybernetics.

     

    I do not wish to give the impression that the other chapters of Memory Trade are lacking in interest: Chapter One, which treats the current landscape of cyberphilia, cyberhype, cyber-revisionism (including panic-oriented theorists of cyberculture such as Arthur Kroker or Paul Virilio) and those who are hyping up the text; Chapter Two, on the history and theory of “the technology within”–writing, gesture, hieroglyphs, and hypermedia; and Chapter Three, which examines various aspects of memory in the age of digitalization, including the art of memory and mnemonics, machinic and technological memories, databases, and Gregory Ulmer’s conception of chorography. While each of the first three chapters makes a definite contribution to the literature, the fourth inaugurates a particularly compelling piece of pre-history. Here, Tofts explores the implications of Joyce’s Wake–published just nine years before Norbert Weiner’s announcement of the cyberworld in Cybernetics (1948)–for an understanding of our contemporary scene. He stresses the importance of Joyce’s having declared himself “the greatest engineer” to comprehending how his assemblage of the Wake as a literary machine aids our understanding the new post-electric world in which cyberculture is emerging–the world of “modernity’s wake.” Tofts examines Joyce’s concern with the “abcedminded[ness] of writing (FW 18.17); its dramatization of “memormee” (FW 628.14) as a phenomenon rooted in the differences and repetitions of this “commodius vicus of recirculation” (FW 3.2); and its navigation of the multi-dimensions in which “we are recurrently meeting… in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture” (FW 254.25-8). Tofts discusses how the Wake already appears to be participating in the debates of the late information age. On his reading, the Wake is nothing less than a literary machine for generating permutations of “verbivocovisual” language (FW 341.19) under the impact of “electracy” (MT 72). As such, it prefigures many contemporary discussions of writing, memory, repetition, difference, play, and the ecology of sense in the closing decades of this century.

     

    It should be noted that Memory Trade is not primarily a book about Joyce, but a book that uses Joyce’s vision to understand these new phenomena and to critique the debate and discussion which have ensued. Virtually all the major contemporary figures associated with the cybercultural wars are discussed, critiqued or noted: writers professionally involved in cyberspace (e.g., David Rushkoff, Mark Dery, Gary Wolf, Erik Davis); academic communication theorists of orality and literacy (McLuhan, Ong, Havelock, Goody, Marvin); academic theorists of hypertext (Landow, Bolter, Heim); professional hypers of hypertext (Ted Nelson, Nicholas Negroponte); structuralist and post-structuralist theorists whose work impinges on hypertext and cyberculture (Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Cixous, Barthes, Lyotard); panic oriented theorists of cyberculture (Kroker, Virilio); and feminist theorists of the posthuman and the cyborg (Harraway, Hayles). Tofts advances the possibility that a theoretico-practical stance illustrated in the work of such creative practitioners as Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce and by such theorists as Gregory Ulmer and Donald Theall is shaping a new understanding of the digimediamatrix and its relation to what Tofts calls “cspace”–a term whose pronunciation (identical with space) stresses the presence of the history of writing in the emergence of hypermedia.

     

    In his third chapter, entitled “The Literary Machine,” Tofts raises the possibility that the process of our becoming cyborgs began with the very invention of alphabetic writing. To write such a pre-history requires producing “plausible narratives which make links between disparate, achronological moments” and, like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, involves “risk-taking and creative serendipity and flights of fancy.” Memory Trade achieves this end by locating a series of affinities between and among the new productions of hypermedia, Joyce’s Wake, a number of Borges’s tales, and Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the “ideal book.” The latter’s introduction to A Thousand Plateaus underlies Tofts’s complex and compelling argument of the inter-relation of the production and products of literacy with the production and products of cybertech’s electracy. The epigraph for the last chapter of Memory Trade, linking the Joycean project quite appropriately to SF, comes from Philip Dick’s Sci-Fi novel, Galactic Pot-Healer, in which Dick, who admired the Wake‘s treatment of dream and memory, describes a “mysterious” book given to the protagonist, Joe Cartwright, as “a peculiar book… in which, it is alleged everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.”

     

    The connection between Joyce and Sci-Fi is important to Tofts’s work, which seeks to ground the problem of virtuality as it appears in discussions of cyberculture in particular moments of the history of the technology of writing, so that the past moments of ancient Athens and of Egyptian hieroglyphs can be seen as coexisting in the present phenomena of hypertext and hypermedia. A discussion of Derrida’s deconstruction of Socrates’ critique of writing in the Phaedrus and Plato’s more devastating condemnation in the Seventh Letter demonstrates among other aspects that contemporary technofear (e.g. Kroker’s “technopanic”) began with the introduction of alphabetic (phonetic) writing. By this point it becomes apparent that memory has a complex role in Tofts’s work, for Derrida’s privileging of writing radically “inverts the Socratic/Platonic negation of writing,” for writing “is already within the work of memory.” Beginning with Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” and Derrida’s reading of that essay, the treatment of memory in Chapter 3, “Total Recall” (the title of the film made from Philip Dick’s SF story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), encompasses such diverse topics as: Platonic and Aristotlean mnemonics and the role of the memory theatre in the history of rhetoric; Bruno’s memory system, “technognosis” (Erik Davis), memory machines, and data cartography; the practitioners of the art of memory as eidetics–whose contemporary activity culminates in “the invention of imaginary or virtual space”; and the relation of architectonics and architecture to artificial reality construction.

     

    The book’s title, Memory Trade, reflects its concern with the links between historic and contemporary approaches to hypomnesis. As Tofts explains: “while the perception of memory as something machinic and infallible appears to us very modern, it was something well-known to the ancients. Hypomnesis, or extended memory, formed the basis of the rhetorical art of memory that underpins our contemporary fascination with powerful mnemonic technologies” (MT 61). Relating Frances Yates’s seminal work, The Art of Memory, and Giordano Bruno to psychoanalytic and postructuralist discussion of the writing machine of the psyche, Memory Trade lays the groundwork for placing a multiplex understanding of memory and its relation to concepts of space and time at the very core of the emergence of cyberculture.

     

    Tofts considers immersion to be one of the most essential characteristics of virtuality. He asserts that Gregory Ulmer’s chorography is to hypermedia what the art of memory is to the oral tradition. Chorography, which Ulmer describes as “the history of place in relation to memory” simultaneously “recognizes the importance of virtuality in the context of place.” The new world of immersion in information is for Tofts “the frontier of chorography,” a frontier which, as Ulmer and others have argued, is fundamental to Greco-Roman and Euro-American aesthetic theory (MT 73). The link is that the practitioners of the art of memory were eidetics with the ability to see verbal constructs as if they were visible–the ultimate ideal of immersion (Tofts, Ulmer). Memory Trade, therefore, can query Gibson’s coinage, for it becomes clear that Gibson does “not have a copyright on consensual hallucination” (MT 74). Early in his work Tofts posits the concept of cspace (space/cyberspace), which permits a satirically ambivalent critique of cyberspace. Cspace is an ambivalent metasignifier that rhetorically “mimes the concepts it seeks to designate.” Behind cspace is Tofts’s recognition that cyberculture’s central concern with its mediated apprehension and understanding of the world actually emerges with the advent of the alphabet and literate societies, so that cyber-enthusiastic concepts of virtual space and hyperreality (such as Heim’s ‘electric writing’) are really technologically transformed types or incarnations of Havelock’s “abcedarium.”

     

    The myths of difficulty and incomprehensibility supplemented by the concerns of intellectualism and elitism have continued to surround Joyce’s writings, particularly Finnegans Wake, even though those myths should have been dissipating over the last two decades as his works became more familiar and their relevance to the culture of the everyday world has become apparent. Joyce’s Ulysses, because of his major revisions in the last years before publication, and particularly his Finnegans Wake, consciously became the earliest major exploration of the impact of the wake of electricity on codes, writing, and memory as well as on mass media and and popular culture. Therefore, while Tofts’s selection of Joyce’s Wake as the major focus of the final chapter of Memory Trade may seem initially perverse, it proves most illuminating, yielding through the exploration of the percepts and affects generated by Joyce’s “feelfulthinkamalinks” (FW 613.19) a new, powerful critical deconstruction of cyberspace, cyberculture, and hyperspace. It serves as well to clarify the impact of Joyce on a wide variety of important writers of the latter half of the century.

     

    For example, Jacques Derrida claims to have spent thirty-five years of fascination and ressentiment with Joyce’s Wake. Deleuze’s earliest work stresses the importance of Joyce in the development of transverse communication and parallels his fascination with nonsense in his analysis of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense; Julia Kristeva’s La révolution du langage poétique uses Joyce together with Mallarmé as one of its focal points; Joyce further provided the beginning point for Umberto Eco’s theoretical writing in The Open Work and remained a persistent presence in his semiotic theories; and Marshall McLuhan continually stressed the essential nature of Joyce’s Wake to his study of media and communication. To the degree that in varying ways the work of such theorists has impinged upon the same issues as those traversed in contemporary discussions of writing, extended memory, cyberculture, and hypermedia, a reconsideration of Joyce as a particular moment in the pre-history of cyberculture should be of vital assistance in our understanding of such phenomena and their pre-history. Joyce dramatically underlines how various moments and events which precede the age of cybernetics and computer networks are an intrinsic part of the culture of the digimediatrix.

     

    Tofts’s reading of the Wake is consistent with, but also extends and deepens, the recent work of other Joyce scholars. He sees the Wake as “a literary unicum that marks a transitional moment in the age of print literacy as it converges with electronic digitalization” (MT 87). Confirming what I argued in Postmodern Culture in 1992 and in James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics, he notes that “The Wake uncannily provides us with a history of the evolution of our emergent cyberculture and offers us a premonitory sampling of how it may function as an integrated whole or social machine” (MT 87). Memory Trade traces how the “abcedminded[ness]” of Joyce’s Wake, rooted in its polysemy, is the “nanotechnology of literacy, super-charged micro-machine capable of generating ‘counterpoint words’ at the speed of thought” (MT 90). It then explores the new electrification of language as exemplified in Joyce’s analysis of television as “the charge of the light barricade” (FW 349.10), noting that Joyce not only anticipated Wiener’s association of energy and information, but also anticipatorily fused the linguistics of Jakobson, the mathematics of Mandelbrot, and the game theory of von Neumann.

     

    Moving on to a consideration of the Wake as a “verbivocovisual presentement,” Tofts argues how the centrality of synaesthesia in Joyce’s work is a logical outcome of the “inclusive, immersive medium” that he has constructed, a medium which itself follows from the Joycean insight that the poetic provides an ecology of sense for human communication. The Wake being one of the most “garrulous and written” books in English thus goes beyond Ong’s “secondary orality” to a pre-post-Derridean “secondary literacy,” incorporating the sensory interplay of sight, sound, and touch. Consequently the centrality of “the babbelers” (FW 15.12), the “turrace of babel” (FW 199.31), and their “pixillated doodler[s]” (FW 421.33) is examined as a factor of the “too dimensional” (FW 154.26) dramatization of the activities of space, time, and memory in the technologization of the word within a poetic history which is introduced by Joyce as being a “commodiusvicus of recirculation.”

     

    Memory Trade‘s conclusion, reinforced by its analysis of Joyce, overtly confirms Stuart Moulthrop’s view that hypertext “differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a return to or a recursion to an earlier form of symbolic discourse” (MT 116). The Wake, using Vico’s strategy of poetic history, blends past, present, and future. It manages both to represent the machinic, web-like social matrix within which our post-mass-mediated culture has taken shape, and to show that that machinic, web-like matrix was always already figured in earlier “technologizings of the word.”

     

  • An Academic Exorcism

    Michael Alexander Chaney

    Department of English
    Indiana University, Bloomington
    maxchi@aol.com

     

    Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

     

    Academic Keywords is that rare sort of polemic that consoles with humor as it enrages us with personal accounts and persuasive analysis of the current crisis in higher education. Provocative and conversational, urbane and intelligent, this is a volume that almost defies traditional categorization. Visually, the book resembles what its redoubtable subtitle announces it to be–a dictionary of keywords essential to expanding our understanding of the unfolding crisis in academia, particularly in the humanities. Entries both long and short cogently define new and often dispiriting trends, such as outsourcing, America’s fast-food discipline, company towns, and Responsibility Centered Management. Other entries trenchantly recontextualize more familiar terms like merit, faculty, and tenure in order to reverse what the authors denounce in their preface as a “vocabulary that reinforces various forms of false consciousness” (vii). As part of this effort to update our taxonomies of academia’s problems, Nelson and Watt include larger, full-length essay entries on sexual harassment, the corporate university, and affirmative action “to redefine familiar terms for each new generation, to rearticulate them to new conditions” (viii). The result is a compelling incrimination of corporatization as the source of our present academic woes.

     

    Unfortunately, while the authors eloquently describe corruption and exploitation at all levels of the university, their dictionary is not counterbalanced with a lexicon of improvement or recovery beyond terms that many academics and administrators would read with a twinge of concern if not discomfort–terms such as union, collective bargaining, strike. And yet, Nelson and Watt anticipate this criticism. They explain in their preface that the book is no panacea but a wake-up call meant to “examine present conditions” and to show “that academia is indeed a workplace more than an ivory tower” (x).

     

    What most distinguishes this book from others similar to it (Nelson’s Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis; Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English; Michael Bérubé’s The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies) is the way in which the act of naming itself becomes not only a tool for recovering knowledge but also an effective and entertaining means of linking seemingly unrelated symptoms of academia’s hard-to-diagnose illness. Although the book predictably follows an alphabetical order, there is an unrelenting unity that governs each entry. A paragraph from the introduction explains this unity while demonstrating in a final hyperbolic flourish the rhetorical force of these linkages:

     

    The multiple crises of higher education now present an interlocking and often interchangeable set of signifiers. (8)

     

    Conversation about the lack of full-time jobs for Ph.D.s turns inevitably to the excessive and abusive use of part-time faculty or the exploitation of graduate student employees, which in turn suggests the replacement of tenured with contract faculty, which slides naturally into anxiety about distance learning, which leads to concern about shared governance in a world where administrators have all the power, which in turn invokes the wholesale proletarianization of the professoriate (8). In any other dictionary there is no similarity between one entry and the next except for those phonetically-spelled pronunciation keys in parentheses. Not so in Nelson and Watt’s, though curious parentheticals full of schwas and umlauts abound. Theirs is a primer which, like Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary(1911), defines divergent topics with a yoking interpretive purpose that ranges from the serious to the satiric.

     

    Without question, it is on the subject of university corporatization that we find the authors achieving a level of indignation comparable to any radical manifesto. But even the book’s most apocalyptic moments are softened by a sense of humor and an understanding of opposing views. After presenting these issues at the University of Chicago, the authors report that a “distinguished faculty member there rose to say, ‘Well, you’ve heard Mulder’s version of the story; now let me give you Scully’s’” (xii). This comparison to the X-Files conspiracy-obsessed radical is very revealing. Although the book has no conspiracy to uncover, it describes the “multiple, uncoordinated forces working to alter higher education for the worse, not the better” (xii) in essentially Mulder-esque terms, making it easy for the reader to imagine administrators and university business advisors as colluding aliens bent on world domination. Perhaps it is the subtle and comprehensive way that corporatization works that facilitates alien invasion analogies. Throughout the book, the authors refer to the unnamed agents of university denigration as “forces” governed by concomitant material changes in American society prizing corporate efficiency and profit over community and academics.

     

    Every entry touching upon problems in the profession hinges upon the impending threat of corporatization. In “Academic Departments,” a definition follows that seems virtually free of corporate attacks. Yet the effects of fractured departments split between theoretical disputes and petty differences cause individual department members to embrace what Nelson describes in Marxist terms as a sense of “entrepreneurial disciplinarity” (20), which in turn shatters any hope of that department being an academic community and leaves it vulnerable to corporate infiltration. In the same entry, Nelson suggests that departmental divisiveness is a consequence of exploitative hiring practices that trickle down a universal acceptance of dishonesty from the administration: “A department that sustains high salaries for tenured and tenure-track faculty by ruthlessly exploiting adjunct faculty with Ph.D.s is hardly well-suited to be honest about any of its other differences” (21).

     

    The term “accountability” is similarly disentangled from any “timeless Platonic form” and redefined as a “strategic term deployed in specific social and political contexts” (37). The authors argue that the current popularity of the word has less to do with keeping the outside world informed of the duties and important pursuits of researchers and teachers than with keeping bureaucratized accounts of faculty output and cost effectiveness. Justifying the authors’ insistence on interpreting fashionable university lingo in economic terms is the academic habit of invoking “apprenticeship,” which retains historical economic connotations, as a paradigm for the role that graduate-student teachers play in academia. The relevant entry in Academic Keywords calls this usage sharply into question, showing that student teachers are not adequately instructed on how to better perform their teaching duties as are other apprentices, nor are they adequately compensated as inchoate professionals should be. In a useful chart comparing the rate of pay increases among Bloomington plumber, carpenter and graduate apprentices, Stephen Watt (in several entries initials indicate single authorship) uses the predictably bleak increase in graduate pay to underscore the “inherent inadequacy of the metaphor of apprenticeship” (70).

     

    The book makes frequent and compelling use of such charts to bolster its rhetorical campaign. There are charts tracing the median level of debt for a range of graduate students, the change in faculty appointments nationwide (showing the decrease in tenured positions), and even a list of the top twelve ways in which academic freedom for faculty is undermined and curtailed. Facts, statistics, citations, and charts abound. Nelson and Watt have done their homework and are not afraid to spell out just how disastrous things are.

     

    How disastrous? In “Faculty,” the authors aver that “over 40 percent of the nation’s faculty of higher education in 1997 were part-timers” (138). In the same entry, part-timers are referred to as university cash cows and compared to Mexican factory workers and migrant fruit pickers. Elsewhere, in “Part-Time Faculty,” statements from underpaid and devalued Ph.D.s forced to travel the highways to different schools paying meager wages and offering no benefits provide sobering evidence of the job crisis. Many of these part-timers have children. Many are published researchers and talented teachers, which refutes the self-deluding myth many tenured professors embrace that “underpaid teachers are underpaid because they are inferior” (204).

     

    Indeed, much of the book has been generated by the authors’ principled opposition to the profession’s mistreatment of part-timers. Moreover, the authors, both renowned English professors, excoriate English departments in particular, as it was this field that proved to administrators throughout the country that almost all introductory courses could be taught by instructors without Ph.D.s: “Indeed, many courses are taught at a profit” (57). Nor is Nelson reluctant to implicate his own institution, which “earns a profit for [the University of Illinois] of about $8,000 for each freshman composition course taught [….] So the yearly profit on freshman rhetoric is about $1,200,000, and the profit on introductory courses is about $1,500,000” (93). According to the authors (in a clever entry on “Cafeterias”), this urge to sacrifice quality education for better revenues is linked to the corporate tactic of outsourcing. The practice of replacing tenured faculty with part-time instructors is shown to be a direct outgrowth of the profitable replacement of salaried dietitians, cooks, and cafeterias with fast-food counters, food courts, and minimum-wage workers, a development that transpired gradually in most American colleges and universities starting in the late 1970s. Neither the quality of the food nor that of the instruction has weighed heavily on university administrators as they have carried out these changes. And though the administrative determination to build profit centers within the non-profit entity of the university by outsourcing, downsizing, and reducing costs seems at this stage irreversible, Nelson and Watt offer several direct and concrete mandates for resistance.

     

    The most sensible solution Nelson posits is that “disciplinary organizations need to set minimum wages for part-timers” (203). Additionally, he calls for an “annual ‘Harvest of Shame’ listing all departments and institutions paying less than $3,000 or $4,000 per semester course to instructors with Ph.D.s” (203). A more militant suggestion is that “faculty members and administrators from those schools should be barred from privileges like discounted convention room rates and barred from advertising in professional publications” (203). Nelson goes on to consider even more serious sanctions that would disqualify those associated with the Harvest of Shame from publishing in journals and receiving health care benefits.

     

    Like his rallying cries for collective action and unionization, these recriminations force us to ponder the feasibility of such responses. For instance, how effective is the existing list of censured institutions published by Academe? Who are the disciplinary organizations that would implement these sanctions? And after all, isn’t the real problem, according to the facts set down by Nelson and Watt, that part-timers and many adjuncts are not socially part of the more permanent teaching staff, and thereby fail to garner the financial and professional sympathy of other instructors necessary before any collective action may take place? How can we make tenured faculty and administrators care about part-timers? Simply to call for collectivization before outlining the motives for doing so on the part of higher paid faculty seems, to me, to skip several steps in the solution. And any kind of national representation would naturally involve regulating what schools pay all of their employees from the highest paid athletic coaches and administrators to physical plant workers and TAs. As with all collective bargainings, the initial phase of wage balancing will prove to be the most slow-moving and painful, as Nelson himself attests in a personal chapter-entry on his dealings with the Teamsters and his predictably unwilling faculty peers (during the strike that is the subject of his Manifesto of a Tenured Radical). Nelson and Watt seem content to allude to some imaginary middle wage for all faculty, without inquiring too closely into the problem of wage scales in a capitalist economy.

     

    Ultimately, and not improperly, Academic Keywords leaves the task of working out a plan of action to its readers. The book’s objective is not to dictate a fully formed agenda, but to inform and to raise consciousness: to shock us out of our apathy. And this it does to superb effect; it is a book that can raise hairs on the back of your neck. If academia were a summer camp, then Academic Keywords could be its campfire tale, horrifying us with the brutal facts of the recent past and the plausible approach of an even more brutal future.

     

    But there is another side to this book. It would be a mistake to conclude here without mentioning the incredible humor that enriches Academic Keywords. Indeed, I find myself resisting an urge to simply quote entire sections which read like slice-of-life stand-up comedy… Like, did you hear the one about the moonlighting professor? After repeated sightings of him working in a men’s clothing store at the mall, the concerned department head set up a sting operation to catch the aberrant scholar “patting down a suit on someone else’s shoulders” (179). The mall-lighting professor was found to be working his second job forty hours a week. Or, did you hear the one about the distinguished English professor at a formal department dinner who celebrated too early? With his colleagues seated around him, “he made a series of profound pronouncements and then passed out face forward into the first course” (19). Afterwards the others “lifted him up, wiped him off, and propped him up as best they could” (19). What is so hilariously disturbing about these jokes is that they are true, and each anonymous professor mentioned is probably someone we have heard of, whose works we have read, whom we may even know. More abundant than their narrative tales are the one-liners that the authors interweave into their prose with an admirable acumen. Some of these jibes work to offset the depressing subject matter. When describing the ultra-conservative constituents of the National Association of Scholars, Nelson refers to them as “specimens of that vanishing but still aggressive species, the confrontational white male wearing a bow tie” (182). In the section on graduate employees and cafeterias, the last few lines of the entry imagines a university with a certain corporate booth in the food court: “By the way, the Disney booth is manned by an English Ph.D. who earns $5.15 an hour” (78). The introduction includes a strange advertisement listing the corporate university’s principles of governance with the heading “MOBILE OIL BRINGS YOU MASTERPIECE CLASSROOM THEATRE” (6). The first nine so-called principles farcically delimit all faculty rights and freedoms in favor of student consumers and university supervisors; the tenth generously promises faculty the “full academic freedom to accept these principles or to resign” (6). It is a truism of comedians that making light of serious troubles is not only a powerful coping device but also a way of creating agreement through humor that these serious troubles exist–which not so coincidentally is the self-declared purpose for the book set down in its preface.

     

    In closing, I find it difficult not to propose a few items to consider (which is not inappropriate in a review of a book that steadfastly demands reader response). While reading, I found myself recalling a very unpopular economic answer to the current muddle, one that is the oldest and perhaps the most pacifistic answer to any economically motivated turmoil. That answer is the same one offered by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations that counters any kind of intervention on the grounds that the market will always organically correct itself. Is it only blind faith that impels me to think that universities passing off an inferior education will experience an eventual decline in revenues which will in turn force them to employ a better paid supply of instructors? Many prospective students and parents are deluged with brochures touting impressive faculty-student ratios. May we not collectively force these resources to include accurate listings of part-timer-student ratios? No matter how unpopular this laissez-faire view, I refuse to believe that there is no longer a need in this country for a quality education. After all, McDonald’s did not erase the existence of family restaurants or neighborhood diners as critics expected, just as malls never obliterated privately owned specialty shops and clothing stores.

     

    Regardless of how centrist my position may seem, I feel empowered in whatever stance I take after reading this book, since as the authors so justly emphasize, informed discontent naturally breeds hopeful action. I recommend this book highly, but also hope that we in the academy do not make the same mistake with this issue as we do in so many others–by speaking only to each other–and so, instead of encouraging professors and administrators to read Academic Keywords, I strongly recommend the book to parents and students.

     

  • Of Tea Parties, Poverty Tours, and Tammany Pow-wows; or, How Mr. Clinton Distanced Us All from Pine Ridge

    H. Kassia Fleisher

    kass.fleisher@colorado.edu

     

    Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian.New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

     

    The week I sit down to read Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (which Yale UP plans to re-issue in paperback in September), President Clinton takes a “poverty tour.” He stops in rural areas of Kentucky’s Appalachia and Mississippi’s Delta, as well as urban areas like East St. Louis and the Arizona-Mexico border.

     

    He also stops at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He is the first president to visit any Indian reservation since Calvin Coolidge.

     

    The tour is designed to bring attention to the rural poverty that frequently goes unremarked in United States culture–sort of a “Boyz in the Wood” to counteract the more commonly mythologized, and demonized, “Boyz in the ‘Hood.” Clinton also wishes to introduce his new poverty-fighting program, known as “new markets.” At each stop, he recites the mantra of third-world-type entrepreneurial aid: tax credits for businesses investing in poor areas; debt guarantees for businesses investing equity in those areas; and enhanced funding for non-profit organizations that make small loans in poor areas. These investments will benefit both rich and poor, Clinton notes: “The only way you can keep the economic recovery going is to have new people working and new people buying” (23). The poor–considered “under-consumers”–are needed fuel for continuing the economic burn.

     

    It’s the same logic applied by global villagers to the developing world. The aid program is analogous to the sort offered poor countries, even as the tour itself is analogous to Clinton’s trip to Africa. But, as The Economist warns from the distance of its London offices, the tour may serve primarily to divert public discussion of exactly how it is that eight years of economic growth have failed to affect certain regions. Indeed, it doesn’t help much to throw cash (as President Johnson did in the 60s) or private-sector guarantees (as Clinton proposes) at areas that lack infrastructure and educational institutions, especially in an age when Wall Street craves high-tech goodies with fat rates of return.

     

    And especially at Pine Ridge, which The Economist titles “The Hardest Case” (24). The Economist, which frequently indulges an impulse to critique American society, provided in its July 10 issue a separate article to discuss the profound economic challenges that face Pine Ridge, the poorest county in the United States. Their coverage is remarkable because none of the major network broadcasts provided much footage or information about the visit to Pine Ridge–an appalling failure, since in the days prior to Clinton’s visit, American Indian Movement members had been staging demonstrations in the nearby town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. Two men had died; those deaths weren’t being investigated; and Russell Means was behind bars again.

     

    Sounds like news. But the networks flashed the requisite photo-op of Clinton being feted by ceremonial drummers (The Economist couldn’t help but print it too), and covered instead the visit to East St. Louis, where celeb Magic Johnson was on hand to crow about potential profits in the inner city.

     

    Clearly then, what’s been going on in recent weeks at the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation paints a picture of Indianness–and whiteness–unpalatable to the media and their primary consumers. In June, Ronald Hard Heart and Wilson Black Elk were killed in Whiteclay, a town with a population of only 22 people–all of whom must be brilliant entrepreneurs, since they somehow manage to post annual liquor sales of $3 million. The sale of alcohol is illegal on the reservation, where–in The Economist‘s white, econometric terms–3 in 4 people are unemployed, 2 in 3 live below the poverty line, 1 in 3 is homeless, and alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome are rampant. Lakota leaders have long wanted the Whiteclay booze supply shut down; when Nebraska officials claimed jurisdictional problems and failed to investigate the deaths, activist tempers flared. Two days of marches to Whiteclay were staged just prior to Clinton’s visit, probably in hopes that the national lens would focus on the Whiteclay problem. But, as The Economist points out, “The influence of the liquor stores seems a parody of the president’s desire to attract small businesses to deprived areas” (25). Doubtless the networks suspected their white, middle-class viewers would not appreciate the irony.

     

    Even The Economist blames the Lakota for their own persistent poverty. The article recites the history of the theft of the Black Hills, and explains, “The Lakota Sioux [sic] go to great lengths to teach each generation this history and their culture, so that even the few who graduate rarely tolerate life beyond the reservation, choosing to return to a place where the average age of death is 45. It is a source of pride” (25). Plus, it seems that the Lakota pridefully refused to accept financial compensation for the Black Hills, preferring foolishly to continue to press for ownership.

     

    “The ability to adapt and reinvent yourself,” the article begins, “is a hallmark of American success, the admired requisite for triumphing over the odds. The Pine Ridge Reservation exemplifies the extreme opposite: the tragic consequence of defending a way of life in impossible circumstances” (24).

     

    The ability to adapt and reinvent yourself. Philip Deloria might ask, “But how is this sense of self constructed?”

     

    The day I sit down to write this review, I take my coffee with National Public Radio, which informs me that the Nez Perce tribe has settled their suit against Avista. The utility company built the Lewiston Dam some decades ago in northern Idaho, beyond the Nez Perce reservation, and had subsequently removed it, but too late. Fisheries that belonged by nineteenth-century treaty to the Nez Perce had been ruined; the Nez Perce claimed that millions of fish had been lost. A mediator proposed a $39 million compromise, and both sides signed.

     

    This is important news in itself, news European Americans need to understand: Native Americans have been successfully using the judicial system to enforce old treaties that give them control of vast resources, allowing them to act at times as a sovereignty within a sovereignty. Consequently, the country is headed for a constitutional crisis far more complicated than that old, nagging states-rights problem ever was.

     

    But the local-affiliate reporter is more distracted by another angle of his story. The negotiation, he reports, was very “unusual.” Officials from Avista came to the reservation to meet, talk, and attend ceremonies in a sweat lodge; Nez Perce leaders went to Avista’s plant to understand better the unique concerns of a utility company. This “cultural” and “spiritual” contact permitted the opposing sides to understand the “human” elements of the negotiation and act as “neighbors.”

     

    Now, that’s groovy and all, but again, a particular portrait–of Indian cooperation, and spiritual and cultural “nobility”–is privileged over the story of Indian sovereignty. The reporter decides to ignore the real story here, which is that Indians are legally–“savagely”?–kicking butt in court.

     

    In the United States, then, in 1999, Native Americans are still “seen” by mainstream culture as variously invisible, noble, and savage. Deloria explores the history of the noble/savage opposition, but argues that another factor–that of relative “distance” from the national mainstream of power–must also be understood as dramatically affecting the cultural construction of Native Americans.

     

    Deloria begins with the Boston Tea Party, “the first drumbeat in the long cadence of rebellion through which Americans redefined themselves as something other than British colonists” (2). He reminds us that the night before the tea was to be seized legally by British officials–the Sons of Liberty had refused to permit its unloading, by way of protesting the import tax–the tea was dumped into the harbor by a mob of rebel colonists.

     

    Who were dressed as Indians.

     

    The question for historians has been, why the Indian dress? Deloria notes that it can’t be that they hoped to intimidate officials, shift blame, or disguise their identities. The work of the “mob” was witnessed by large crowds of supportive townspeople and guards who must have known who the masqueraders were–since a mob of “real” Indians hiking hundreds of miles to attack the harbor would surely have caused mass terror. Instead, Deloria says, the tea party costume was deliberate, and the tea party itself was “street theater and civil disobedience of the most organized kind… plotted and controlled by elites” (2, 28).

     

    And, he reports, there were many other instances of colonial Indian play. In Philadelphia, the Tammany society was formed by John Dickinson, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and David Rittenhouse; like Boston’s leaders, these were elite men “well positioned not only to define the general nature of the Indian, but also to construct… national subjectivity” (27). Tammany was a fictitious Indian saint for whom a biblically proportioned–and utterly false–legend was created: Tammany had fought the devil for possession of his land; then become a great hunter, later graciously relinquishing his hard-won hunting and fishing rights to William Penn; and then–ever thoughtful–had burned himself to death to spare his family the burden of his aged self. Philadelphians dressed as Indians and annually celebrated and re-sacrificed King Tammany on an annual feast day, May Day, the start of the Schuykill fishing season. All this, Deloria says, by way of encouraging fertility (new life after death); by way of democratizing British restrictions on hunting and fishing (which in England was limited to the sport of gentlemen); and, most importantly, by way of developing a national identity. The vast abundance of game on the American continent was celebrated as egalitarian, and, Deloria notes, “through Indianness, Tammany members tied the act of hunting to political and social control over the landscape”(19).

     

    Deloria traces the Tea Party and the Tammany Society back to European history. These community events were clearly intended to create a specific meaning, the power of which was drawn from traditions of carnival and misrule. Carnival was a celebration of abundance, fertility, and bodily function, a wintry season of overconsumption that involved social disruption, disguise, transvestism, reversals of gender and hierarchical social roles (vestiges remain in Mardi Gras and Mummers Parades); while misrule was a tradition of blackface, masking, and ritual burning that involved charivari parades, which ridiculed persons who posed a threat to moral economies or social custom. Carnival and misrule (and here Deloria cites Bakhtin) served as potentially transformative opportunities to subvert and, at times, to sustain political order–useful tools for the work of separating from British rule. Not surprisingly, Puritan Bostonians took more to the shaming practices of disobedience, while Quaker Pennsylvania and other middle states indulged mummer madness.

     

    By way of differentiating from the crown, then, proto-American leaders utilized familiar rituals. But they needed a new “historical tradition” that could provide uniqueness to the emerging nation’s sense of self. “We construct our identity,” Deloria writes, “by finding ourselves in relation to an array of people and objects who are not ourselves” (21). Conveniently, the colonists discovered themselves to be in relation to the aboriginal peoples they had encountered in “The New World.” Deloria argues that the United States began almost immediately to use Indianness in an attempt to create this unique national self, appropriating a false Indian “heritage,” and Indian “history,” that had the secondary benefit of justifying the very real appropriation of Indian land. While Philadelphians portrayed themselves as the heirs apparent to both Tammany’s lands and his nobility, Bostonians appropriated a bit of intimidating savagery.

     

    All of which fueled the now-familiar division between real and ideal Indians. King Tammany and the white Indians had little to do with contemporary, actual Natives, who by 1776 tended to care little for the colonists’ efforts to create a separate national self, and at times fought alongside the British.

     

    Thus does Playing Indian provide a fascinating examination of American identity formation. Deloria would agree that, as The Economist suggests, the United States has from the beginning had to reinvent itself to triumph over the “odds” encountered in nation-formation–odds which were doubly challenging for America, confronted as it was not by one enemy, but by two: the crown, and the aborigines. Deloria cites D. H. Lawrence’s assertion (in Studies in Classic American Literature, 1924) that, for America, the “long and half-secret process” (1) of identity-formation is “unfinished” (3). For Deloria, Lawrence exposed “a string of contradictions at the heart of familiar American self-images… locating native people at the very heart of American ambivalence” (3). Playing Indian reveals the secret (Indian) part of the nation-building process, and suggests that America will remain unfinished until it has reconciled the dilemma of “wanting to savor both civilized order and savage freedom at the same time” (3). Indianness was “the bedrock” (186) of the national subjectivity built by white males “on contrasts between their own citizenship and that denied to women, African Americans, Indians and others” (8). Indianness was “one of the foundations (slavery and gender relations being the other two) for imagining and performing domination and power in America” (186). America’s resulting identity was “both aboriginal and European and yet was neither,” which ambivalence “prevented its creators from ever effectively developing a positive, stand-alone identity that did not rely heavily on either a British or an Indian foil” (36).

     

    Playing Indian also provides a fascinating examination of cultural constructs of Native America, particularly in Deloria’s application of (among others’) Todorov’s work on “distance,” and Said’s work on Orientalism. We know colonists made good use of the Enlightenment’s old noble-savage dichotomy, but, Deloria says, American colonists also developed a useful us-and-them division:

     

    [T]hey imagined a second axis focused not on Indian good or evil, but upon the relative distance that Indian Others were situated from this Self-in-the-making.... Along with the positives and negatives of the noble savage, then, we need to consider the distinction between Indian Others imagined to be interior--inside the nation or society--and those who are to be excluded as exterior.... The matter can get extremely complicated, for both interior and exterior Others can take on positive or negative qualities, depending on the nature of the identity construction in which they appear. (21)

     

    In a footnote he adds, “Indians could, for example, signify civilized colonial philosophe (interior/noble), fearsome colonial soldier (interior/savage), noble, natural man (exterior/noble), or barbarous savage (exterior/savage)” (203).

     

    While the noble/savage dichotomy has remained fairly consistent, the distance between the “inside of the nation” and the Indian Other has shifted with the sands of political necessity. “The practice of playing Indian,” Deloria writes, “has clustered around two paradigmatic moments–the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life” (7). The modern period is flush with forest-romping, drum-whacking men’s groups; a strangely profit-driven New Age “spirituality”; Order-of-the-Arrow Boy Scouts; and “hobby Indians,” whites who in the 60’s traveled to pow-wows to dress, dance, and trade as–and with–Indians. The modern period, then, has birthed an interior/noble Indian–perhaps a good thing in its encouragement of potentially positive cross-cultural economies and understanding.

     

    But still. What effect does the noble/savage/interior/exterior conundrum–even today’s kinder, gentler version–have on Native Americans themselves? Deloria examines several cultural “bridge figures” from the past:

     

    Throughout a long history of Indian play, native people have been present at the margins, insinuating their way into Euro-American discourse, often attempting to nudge notions of Indianness in directions they found useful. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unfolded, increasing numbers of Indians participated in white people's Indian play, assisting, confirming, co-opting, challenging, and legitimating the performative tradition of aboriginal American identity. (8)

     

    Deloria discusses these bridge figures sympathetically, as people who saw little choice but to re-appropriate the appropriation, and use this potentially damaging rhetoric to help their people as they could.

     

    Questions remain. Deloria touches on gender issues, but his explication is incomplete, and his most important interrogation is relegated to a footnote. As Deloria reports, Indianness was often gendered (see the much-deconstructed Vespucci Discovering America, in which Jan vander Straet painted America as an Indian woman) and Indian play was used to enforce white female domestication (see the history of the Camp Fire Girls). But given intersections of race/class/gender/sexuality, exactly how interior are white women? It would be equally useful to examine the exterior-ness of women of color. Here, and elsewhere, our quadrant may have to become three-dimensional. Historically, Indian play was the purview of white men, often elite; so what do we make of elite white women like Helen Hunt Jackson, a nineteenth-century activist on behalf of natives, without appropriating mythologies and without “going native”? Is it possible that, given the complexity of women’s own situations, women worked as particularly successful bridge figures? In 1880, Jackson wrote to Henry Dawes, “I quite agree with you that even the shadow of a suspicion of what is technically known as ‘lobbying’ should not rest on a woman: and… nothing would induce me to do so. But would it not be possible for me, in a quiet and unnoticeable way–(now at the Capital)–to make opportunities of reading a few statistics–a few facts, to men whom it is worthwhile to convert?” (Mathes 150). This is the plaint of an interior white-elite but exterior woman who, despite (because of?) her exterior-ness, attempted to operate as a bridge figure.

     

    Likewise missing among Deloria’s “string of contradictions at the heart of familiar American self-images” is the profound contradiction of democracy versus capitalism. As President Clinton has all but said, contemporary federal Indian policy seems now to consist primarily of forced entrepreneurialism–which is to say, a forcing of one dominant economic structure onto another, possibly very different structure. This current movement has the potential to produce social alteration as total as that of the Indian Reorganization Act, which aided assimilation by forcing an unfamiliar governing structure on tribes. Yet entrepreneurialism is happening quietly, without public debate, without an “Act.” Mythology is necessary to support even a silent policy. Does entrepreneurialism arise from an interior or exterior, noble or savage construct? And if, indeed, we do construct identity in relation to others, where is the white Appalachian located on the interior/exterior axis? Racially, he’s interior, but by class he’s exterior. To convince American taxpayers that the badlands of Pine Ridge and the hills of Kentucky are both part of the same (exterior/them) third world– this will take some doing. How will that construct operate successfully? Or will it?

     

    And while Deloria’s audience often seems to be academics (most of whom are white/male/elite), he does not address questions of white activism. He notes that the primary Indian policy dilemma has been the question of whether to destroy Indians or to assimilate them; and that this is “a decision that the American polity has been unable to make or, on the few occasions when either policy has been relatively clear, to implement” (4-5). As he suggests, the United States could have settled on a purely genocidal policy; this decision might even have resulted in the formation of a stronger national identity. But the U.S. remained ambivalent about the peoples it displaced. Native resistance does deserve the lion’s share of the credit for providing the persistent thorn in the paw of Indian policy. But is not the American left also partly to–blame?–for this unresolved policy? Deloria might criticize–justifiably–the left’s tendency to exploit native issues by way of performing a cultural critique that presents no real threat to its own economic status. But how should we advise those among the radical left (assuming this is not an oxymoron) who wish to support indigenism? What should white activists be doing to revise this Indian-based U.S. identity? How can–or should–white anti-racists support the work of native identity-formation?

     

    Regardless of how these interrogations proceed, it’s clear from such disparate sources as National Public Radio and The Economist that Deloria is correct: Indianness is a rhetorical bank account–well-funded, profitable, and available for borrowing whenever the interior-nation needs it. Until the rhetoric is altered, perhaps, attempts to bridge the cross-cultural whitewater will do little to help Ronald Hard Heart and Wilson Black Elk; little to help the “hardest case” of Pine Ridge. Indeed, President Clinton has now expressly codified this reservation and its people as a third world (i.e., exterior from our national first world) country (without noting that country’s sovereign right to the Black Hills). Clinton was willing to make-exterior these “under-consumers” (them) in order to justify the appropriation of funds necessary to finance “new markets”–new sources of income for the CEOs (us) who support his leadership. And an Idaho utility company’s CEOs (us) have an equally urgent financial incentive to make-interior the Nez Perce, to “go native,” sit in a sweat lodge, and graciously embrace the wonderful interior/noble natives (us, for now) whose fish the CEOs have killed–which natives have graciously accepted $39 million for their trouble. National Public Radio is happy to play (Indians-R-us) along, clucking their tongues and asking why all of our CEOs don’t do business in this charming way. Which gets them out of having to critique the historical power grid that caused the fishkill in the first place.

     

    What all of us, including the editors of The Economist and NPR, could learn from Deloria’s book is that even as the United States grapples with the difficulty of a continually “unfinished” national identity, Native Americans face the struggle of cementing a national identity of their own, one free from outsider construction, and perhaps one updated from the “traditional,” addressing contemporary issues (economic and technological, for instance) in freely chosen terms. Deloria’s Playing Indian may be the first drumbeat in what promises to be a long, and long needed, rhetorical rebellion.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • “America’s Emerging Markets.”The Economist 10 July 1999: 17.
    • Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
    • “The Hardest Case.” The Economist 10 July 1999: 24-25.
    • Mathes, Valerie Sherer, Ed. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879-1885. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.
    • Nadvornick, Doug. “Nez Perce Indian Tribe.” Morning Edition. Natl. Public Radio. 20 July 1999.
    • “The Pockets of Poverty World Tour.” The Economist 10 July 1999: 23-4.

     

  • Postcolonial Reading

    Mark Sanders

    Department of English and American Literature
    Brandeis University

    Society for the Humanities
    Cornell University
    ms248@cornell.edu

     

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

     

    Marx could hold The Science of Logic and the Blue Books together; but that was still only Europe; and in the doing it came undone.

     

    —A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

     

    “As I work at this at the end of a book that has run away from me, I am of course open to your view. You will judge my agenda in the process…. You work my agenda out” (357-358). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason addresses an “implied reader” several times toward its end, inviting a response (cf. 421). We are deep in the ultimate chapter, on Culture, where the “this” refers to questions of cultural politics. By analogy with Marx, who, envisioning a reader for Capital,1 “attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism,” Spivak asks her implied readers–hyphenated Americans, economic and political migrants from the decolonized South–to “rethink themselves as possible agents of exploitation, not its victims” (357, cf. 402).2 The persistent call, voiced in Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), for the migrant to the North to distinguish, in terms of victimage and agency, between him- or, especially, herself, and the citizen of the postcolonial nation, is reiterated in Critique. But by the time it includes its implied author and reader in the exhortation, “let us want a different agency, shift the position a bit” (358, cf. 402), Critique has given its reader to work out more than an agenda, an itinerary of agency in complicity. It has also blazed an intricate trajectory on reading. The latter is what my essay endeavors to work out.

     

    The Preface to Critique begins:

     

    My aim, to begin with, was to track the figure of the Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant. After 1989, I began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant's position. Today, with globalization in full swing, telecommunicative informatics taps the Native Informant directly in the name of indigenous knowledge and advances biopiracy. (ix)

     

    To track the composite figure Spivak names the Native Informant is not simply to trace and analyze its outlines as it emerges in colonial or postcolonial discourse. Finding that the Native Informant reveals, in its trail, a dispropriable “position,” a borrowed one not strictly anyone’s own, the tracker herself performs the figure, and is, in turn, performed by it. Giving shape to the tracker, this mimetic tracking engages the trace of the other which sends this book on its way.3 The writer, in other words, conjures up a reader. The result of figuring, and taking up, the “(im)possible perspective of the Native Informant” is an interventionist writing that is quasi-advocative in its conduct. Amplifying and deepening Spivak’s thinking, Critique revises major published texts to go with considerable new ones by her. Cut into four long chapters–headed Philosophy, Literature, History, Culture–and a small appendix on The Setting to Work of Deconstruction, it reframes such well known essays as “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” “The Rani of Sirmur,” and “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” so that, in addition to being key interventions in colonial discourse studies and postcolonial studies, they add to the wider critical idiom by developing insights in ethics and reading gained from a thinking of postcoloniality. Among its surprises is the insistent, and at times cryptic, conversation with the later writings of Paul de Man (to whom Critique is jointly dedicated) on irony, allegory, and parabasis, which she deploys in terms of a disruptive speaking- and reading-otherwise. What emerges is an ethics of reading, of the making of a reader; and, from that, a way for writer and reader to acknowledge and negotiate discursive, and socio- and geopolitical situatedness as complicity. Herein resides the book’s particularity. Those whose passion lies in staking out a “position” in the field will be uneasy with its performance of positional dispropriability.4 No position is “proper” to one side, and all are appropriable by the other: the Native Informant leaves in its tracks a colonial subject turned postcolonial turned agent-instrument of global capital (cf. 223 n42). This is the larger itinerary of agency in complicity mapped by Critique, of which it repeatedly advises its declared implied reader. Of more than equal interest are the book’s less overt lineaments, the underlying implications, as it produces them for interception by a reader or reading less declaredly implied, of this postcolonial reading.

     

    A Critique of Postcolonial Reason begins by shadowing Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement and its foreclosure of the Native Informant. The import of such foreclosure is ethical, and affectively tagged in ways that psychoanalysis allows us to think when it opens the ethical in the dynamics of transference and counter-transference (107, 207). Turning to the psychoanalytic lexicon–Critique “sometimes conjure[s] up a lexicon-consulting reader for the new cultural studies” (x)–Spivak finds foreclosure set out by Freud and Lacan as a rejection (Verwerfung) by the ego of an idea, and, along with that idea, the affect connected to it (4). To imagine the (im)possible perspective of the Native Informant in Kant, and in the other “source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation” (9), is thus to respond not only to a failure of representation as a lack of, or limit to, knowledge, but also to a disavowal that is ethical in character.5 The main point of using the psychoanalytic concept-metaphor of foreclosure is to register an unacknowledged failure of relation, one amounting to a denial of access to humanity: “I shall docket the encrypting of the name of the ‘native informant’ as the name of Man–a name that carries the inaugurating affect of being human…. I think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man–a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation” (5-6). To be a native informant is to speak, after a fashion. The native informant’s role in ethnography, Spivak’s source for the term, is to provide information, to act as a source and an object of knowledge. When this is the function of the native informant, an ethical relation is impossible, for, strictly speaking, the investigator has no responsibility for the informant. Yet a ruse is perpetrated that he or she does. In this sense, the ethnographic designation “native informant” crosses out this impossibility but does not cancel it. The mode of reading proposed and performed in Critique strives to preserve this impossibility-under-erasure.

     

    As an alternative to foreclosure, Spivak proposes a “commitment not only to narrative and counternarrative, but also to the rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative” (6). How are we to explicate this typographic matrix? In order to do so, we have to enter (more briefly than can do it justice) Spivak’s reading of the placement of the Native Informant in the Critique of Judgement, in which “he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflexive judgement, which allows freedom for the rational will” (6). In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” in the first part of the Critique, the terror of a certain “raw man” stands in, metaleptically, as a precursor to rational subjectivity. That “raw man” is as yet unnamed. In the “Critique of Teleological Judgement,” the second part of the Critique, Kant names him. There the New Hollander (Neuholländer, or Australian Aborigine) and the inhabitant of Tierra del Fuego (Feuerländer) illustrate how, without making reference to something supersensible–such as the concept “Man”–one cannot easily decide “why it is necessary that men should exist.” This, Kant writes in parentheses, is “a question that is not so easy to answer if we cast our thoughts by chance on the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” (qtd. in Spivak 26). Kant’s Fuegan, according to Spivak, “is not only not the subject as such; he also does not quite make it as an example of the thing or its species as natural product” (26). Calling her reading of Kant “mistaken” (9), Spivak deliberately breaks with conventions of philosophy–for which Kant’s “raw man” would be an “unimportant rhetorical detail” (26)–by figuring, on a minimal empirical basis (little more than the fact they existed), the perspective of the New Hollander or Fuegan.6 This perspective is (im)possible–bracketing the “im” puts impossibility under erasure without submitting to the ruse of canceling it–in that it answers to a call as one would reply, having not actually been asked for an answer, to a rhetorical question.7 The Kantian text appears to summon a native informant and his perspective only to guard against their arrival as anything but that which confirms, through ideational and affective–and hence ethico-political–foreclosure, the European as human norm. The Native Informant enjoys “limited access to being-human” (30). Spivak bets on the name “native informant” as what encrypts the “name of Man” and which continues, “[a]s the historical narrative moves from colony to postcolony to globality… [to] inhabit… us so that we cannot claim the credit of our proper name” (111). With this self-implicating history of the present, the double task of the reader is at once to bind herself to the possibility of the Native Informant’s perspective as a “narrative perspective” (9), and to dramatize its foreclosure by resisting the ruse of simply canceling its impossibility. Here that double task is taken up typographically by bracketing the “im.” Elsewhere the reader employs other strategies.

     

    In Spivak’s reading of Kant, and in her reading of Hegel which follows it, typographics give way to prosopopoeia–“[a] rhetorical figure by which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting” (OED). Weaving her text from loose ends of the empirical and the philosophical, Spivak fancies, from the trace of the unacknowledged foreclosure of their perspective, the New Hollander and the Fuegan as “subject[s] of speech.” In order to operate them as perspectives of narrative, a rhetoric of prosopopoeia, which necessarily involves a counterfactual “if,” is the minimally requisite strategy for entering an affective vein, and hence for opening the possibility of an ethical relation:

     

    But if in Kant's world the New Hollander... or the man from Tierra del Fuego could have been endowed with speech (turned into the subject of speech), he might well have maintained that, this innocent but unavoidable and, indeed, crucial example--of the antinomy that reason will supplement--uses a peculiar thinking of what man is to put him out of it. The point is, however, that the New Hollander or the man from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgement in the world of the Critique. (26)

     

    Spivak’s Critique mimes that of Kant, trying to figure the foreclosed perspective. If, in terms of a logical matrix, the ethical would have been broached by a non-foreclosure of affect, with that foreclosure already in place, the restoration of affect can only be figured counterfactually. That is why Spivak insists that the New Hollander or Fuegan, as she has him assume a narrative perspective, figures not a coming to speech but rather the Native Informant’s foreclosure. Like some works Spivak analyzes in the chapter on Literature (112-197), such counterfactual quasi-advocacy must stage as “mute” the projected voice of the other. The performance must be of a failed ventriloquism. The one, momentary, deviation from this counterfactual rhetoric in Spivak’s reading of Kant, and the most moving moment in her explication, takes place in a long footnote: “[Kant’s] construction of the noumenal subject is generally dependent on the rejection [Verwerfung] of the Aboriginal. In German the two words are Neuholländer and Feuerländer…. I took these for real names and started reading about them…. One tiny detail may give Kant’s dismissal the lie: ‘…. [the] name [the Fuegans] gave themselves: Kaweskar, the People’” (26n-29n). Roughly legible as a claim to the “name of Man,” this trace of self-naming, taken from one writer quoting another, a sign of the makings of a narrative perspective to be reconstructed by a reader, indicates a limit of this book, and the threshold of another: “I cannot write that other book which bubbles up in the cauldron of Kant’s contempt” (28n). But could anybody write such a book? The footnote cites linguistic competence and disciplinary and institutional obstacles, but other formulations appear to preclude “that other book” entirely. The reasons for this take us to the heart of the practice of reading that animates Critique, its principal contribution to a critical idiom–like Marxism, a “globalized local tradition” (70)–in ethics and reading.

     

    The intuition which guides Spivak is that, since the reader takes up, quasi-advocatively, the position of Native Informant in responding to Kant and the other philosophers, she cannot help but figure him as a reader. This tendency is, however, “mistaken”: “there can be no correct scholarly model for this type of reading. It is, strictly speaking, ‘mistaken,’ for it attempts to transform into a reading-position the site of the ‘native informant’ in anthropology, a site that can only be read, by definition, for the production of definitive descriptions” (49). In other words, in a necessary but fractured reversal of foreclosure, the reader can projectively broach affect, but cannot restore the foreclosed perspective. This is different from noting that, reading Hegel’s reading of the Srimadbhagavadgita, “an implied reader ‘contemporary’ with the Gita” (though not a Hindu reader contemporary with Hegel) can be reconstituted from the text’s structure of address: “[s]uch a reader or listener acts out the structure of the hortatory ancient narrative as the recipient of its exhortation. The method is structural rather than historical or psychological” (49-50). Whereas “strategic complicities” (46) obtain between Hegel’s argument and the structure of the Gita in how each positions a reader, Kant’s text in no way addressed, or let itself be addressed by, the Native Informant. Kant’s text does nothing to open the possibility of affective or ethical relation. To imagine the Native Informant as reader, in Kant’s case at least, is “mistaken,” and all that a reader can be taught is to mime his moves of foreclosure. In the case of Hegel, and the implied reader of the Gita, however, “I am calling,” writes Spivak, “for a critic or teacher who has taken the trouble to do enough homework in language and history (not necessarily the same as specialist training) to be able to produce such a ‘contemporary reader’ in the interest of active interception and reconstellation” (50). This is not the same as asking, and answering empirically, such questions as: For whom was he writing? Who is the audience? If “history” can assist with “active interception and reconstellation,” it is clear from Spivak’s proviso that “the method is structural” that any history must be answerable to an analysis of the address-structure of the text, with its own openings and foreclosures. Anything else can lead to wishful thinking. Spivak provides an alternative to the banal and potentially harmful empiricism of “information-retrieval” (114, 168-171), and to unproblematized advocacy on behalf of the “silenced.” Her method at once acts as a corrective to such contemporary tendencies in criticism, and makes it possible for us to see them as one-dimensional articulations of an original critical impulse, one for which she, by contrast, emerges as one of today’s most profound interpreters. To read is to figure a reader; to go out of one’s self, perhaps to make out a “contemporary reader,” more often than not to figure a “lost” perspective that cannot be made out (65). This account of reading, scrupulously drawn from engaging the text of postcoloniality and its philosophical precursors, adds both to an older notion of reading as a process of imaginative projection, and to a more recent idiom which attends to a process of dispropriative “invention,” as instantiation of the ethical, in writing and reading.8

     

    Closing her section on Kant, Spivak associates the perspective of the Native Informant, as reader, with thematics of parabasis, irony and allegory: “To read a few pages of master discourse allowing for the parabasis operated by the native informant’s impossible eye makes appear a shadowy counterscene” (37). In another of her splendid long footnotes, Spivak “recommend[s] de Man’s deconstructive definition of allegory as it overflows into ‘irony’… which takes the activism of ‘speaking otherwise’ into account; and suggest[s] that the point now is to change distance into persistent interruption, where the agency of allegorein–located in an unlocatable alterity presupposed by a responsible and minimal identitarianism–is seen thus to be sited in the other of otherwise” (156n, cf. 430). These remarks direct us to some of the most difficult passages in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Concluding his reading of Rousseau’s Confessions, at the end of the final chapter in Allegories, de Man borrows from Schlegel to recast allegory in terms of parabasis and irony: “the disruption of the figural chain…. becomes the permanent parabasis of an allegory (of figure), that is to say, irony. Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration” (300-301). Parabasis, literally a stepping-aside, refers to the intervention of the chorus in Greek drama, and to the intervention of the author in theatre contemporary with Schlegel. Glossed as “aus der Rolle fallen,” parabasis is thus (in one sense) an interruption of the figure in performance, of an assumption of a role. It is, in other words, what fractured prosopopoeia does, stepping aside when a voice or reading-position is attributed to the Native Informant. Allegory, in one of de Man’s formulations, is what disrupts continuity between cognitive and performative rhetorics. In Rousseau’s Confessions, confession produces truth (cognitive) by disclosing the deeds of the one confessing, but undermines itself as confession when this cognitive truth functions as excuse (performative) (280). De Man’s remarks on allegory, irony, and parabasis can be linked to his coinage and explication of “ethicity,” where the disruption of rhetorical modes appears as a disruption of two value systems.9 The disruption in confession turned excuse between the systems of truth and falsehood, and good and evil, is an instance of the disruption leading de Man to a rhetorical redescription of the moral. In rhetorical terms, the disruption generates an imperative referential in its bearing:

     

    Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems.... The ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective.... The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative but is the referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others. (206)

     

    Spivak takes up the referential moment as response to an imperative. By imagining the Fuegan, her reading of Kant performs the empirical, or “ideological,” transgression that de Man diagnoses in Schiller’s reading of The Critique of Judgement (16). In so doing, Spivak takes from de Man the opening provided by ethicity, which, at the end of Allegories, is set out in the vocabulary of allegory, irony and parabasis. The word “allegory” comes from the Greek: allegorein, from allos, other + agoreuein, to speak publicly. “Speaking otherwise” is Spivak’s activist rendering. To speak–or read–otherwise in the name of the referential (not necessarily the empirical, since the figure is, strictly speaking, “unverifiable”), projected as the (im)possible perspective of the Native Informant, is to perform the parabasis necessary to disrupt the inscription, in Kant onwards, of the Native Informant.10Interrupting informatics (cognitive, epistemic), by exposing the ideational and affective foreclosure of humanity (performative, ethical), the reader brings to light an “ethicity” which gets ethics going by bringing the agent before an imperative. Animating the reader with alterity, this imperative comes from elsewhere, from an other. This is how allegory is produced and staged as postcolonial reading.

     

    In the most traditional of terms, works of narrative fiction and lyric poetry are understood to involve the reader in a process of imaginative projection and identification. Attention to this process underlies the emphasis placed in Critique on the teaching of literature, and its ethical implications (an issue not taken up much by commentators, but always apparent to her students at Columbia, where Spivak directed my doctoral work). Set down in an idiom of their own, Spivak’s intuitions as a critic resonate with an impulse that has animated criticism for a long time in its formulations of the relation between beauty and goodness; between the imagination, exercised by poetry, and ethical conduct. To invoke Percy Bysshe Shelley, “[a] man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others…. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause” (488). The turn toward a de Manian thematics of allegory coded in terms of irony as permanent parabasis gives Spivak and her readers a set of concepts for making sense of what, if one kept to the idiom and concerns of a Percy Shelley (whom Spivak briefly invokes [355n]), would amount to an interference of two systems or codes of value: beauty and goodness. In this instance, the interference would be operated by an ironic interruption of the “main system of meaning” by the Native Informant’s perspective. If putting oneself imaginatively in the place of another is indispensable to ethics, it is inevitable for a reader; if there is an opening for the ethical in reading, and for the ethical to open from reading, it is this. Spivak’s point of intervention is to teach the reader to experience that place as (im)possible, as in the case of the figure she calls the Native Informant, and, in so doing, to acknowledge complicity in actuating the texts and systemic geopolitical textuality that make it so. Goodness-coding disrupts beauty-coding (cf. 146). The critical reader steps aside, introducing the bracketed “im” or figuring a more or less muted prosopopoeia, and passes through, as she must, the aporia of this impossibility. Spivak’s setting to work of this project in the teaching of literature is well enough known not to rehearse her readings of Brontë, Rhys, Mary Shelley, and Coetzee in the chapter on Literature. In order to anticipate the book’s reframing of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” I will, however, note how, although never absent, the emphasis appears to fall with added gravity on the ethical rather than on the epistemological dimension of literary figuration. This can be observed in passages added on Mahasweta Devi’s novella, “Pterodactyl,” in which an advocacy-journalist in search of a story joins with Indian “tribals” in their work of mourning the passing of the creature. There the rhetoric of thwarted prosopopoeia is framed ethically as well as affectively: “The aboriginal is not museumized in this text…. This mourning [of the pterodactyl] is not anthropological but ethico-political” (145). To gloss this in terms of Shelley altered by way of de Man, Spivak’s attention to the affective plotting of goodness-coding is, in the more recent analysis, at least as strong as truth-coding in disrupting beauty-coding.

     

    This shift in emphasis comes through powerfully in the chapter on History. The version of “The Rani of Sirmur” included there opens, in another partaking in the work of mourning, with a quasi-transferential “pray[er]… to be haunted by [the Rani’s] slight ghost,” and a “miming [of] the route of an unknowing” becomes a “mim[ing of] responsibility to the other” (207, 241). Pointing to an ethico-affective supplementation of the epistemic, these additions to “The Rani of Sirmur” lead us to an altered reading of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In the latter, we get a disruption, in the semantics of “representation,” of the codes of truth and goodness, or broken down more specifically, in the German of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, of the epistemic, the aesthetic (as darstellen), and the ethico-political (as vertreten) (256ff, 260, 263). Portrayal can amount to a self-delegating “‘speaking for’” (Arnott 83). To separate these senses, and to expose their interested conflation, as Marx did when he wrote about tragedy being repeated as farce, is to operate an ironic parabasis. Critique presents these involved theatrics, along with the rest of the essay’s intervening matter (on Foucault and Derrida, Subaltern Studies, sati) as a “digression” on the way to the “unspeaking” of the anti-colonial activist Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, after her suicide, by other women of her social class (273, 309). A coda to earlier versions of the essay,11 this unspeaking is now a portent for the (middle-class) woman of the South becoming, along with the postcolonial migrant, the agent-instrument of transnational capital (310, cf. 200-201), manager in a neo-colonial system which, enlisting feminist help (252, 255f, 259, 269, 277, 282, 287, 361, 370n), employs credit-baiting to conscript into capitalist globality the poorest woman of the South (6, 220n, 223n42, 237, 243n70). This is how the book tracks the itinerary of the Native Informant, and how the implied reader–also the “newly-born… woman as reader as model” in “a new politics of reading” (98-98n137)–is concatenated by it in a position of complicity. When Critique adds Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s corporate-employed great-grandniece to the chain, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is resituated in a history of the present written on her unspeaking. Yet the “digression” remains indispensable to discerning the deeper current on reading underneath the Native Informant’s itinerary structuring the book. Although, as Spivak observes, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was “a figure who intended to be retrieved” (246), and the survivors interpret her suicide, we are not dealing, in isolation, with epistemic coding, or with ethico-political coding alone, but with the permanent disruption of these and other codes in the writing Bhubaneswari left on her body. The reader does not know, or have to know, but rather stands aside when others, ignoring the disruptive noise of other codings, claim to know.

     

    We can, on the one hand, as it has always invited us (247), read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as irony in the classical mode, as eironeia, a Socratic questioning in feigned ignorance, provoking the law to speak12–as it inevitably has, ruling that of course the subaltern can speak and in the same breath contradicting its statement with vivid acts of foreclosure (see 309; Outside 60-61). On the other hand, Socratic irony can itself be thought in a de Manian vocabulary of “permanent parabasis,” as a disrupting of the script of informatics through a performance of the (im)possible perspective that mimes its foreclosure of that perspective. If this disruption produces an imperative, Spivak’s injunction in response appears to be: find the disruption of value systems and work at it; intervene there. Such an ethics or politics of reading may thus be another gloss on what, from her readings of Marx, and Deleuze and Guattari, Spivak refers to in other essays as the coding, recoding, and transcoding of value, a topic which continues to puzzle her ablest interpreters.13 Involving economic, cultural, and affective codes implicated in gendering (103ff, cf. Outside 281-282), and thus entering territory not explored by de Man, this is where, by analogy with the factory worker, whom Marx taught to think of himself not in terms of identity (see Outside 61ff), but as an agent, the implied reader-agent can acknowledge and negotiate complicity. Although not working out the details, Critique provides clues, in the form of concrete suggestions, that help its reader to find such links in intuitions about reading and the ethical. One, from the chapter on Culture, is the proposal that “a different standard of literary evaluation, necessarily provisional, can emerge if we work at the (im)possible perspective of the native informant as a reminder of alterity, rather than remain caught in some identity forever” (351-352). Another, from History, in response to UN efforts to “rationalize ‘woman,’” concerns “women outside of the mode of production narrative”: “We pay the price of epistemically fractured transcoding when we explain them as general exemplars of anthropological descriptions…. They must exceed the system to come to us, in the mode of the literary” (245-245n). Postcoloniality urges a training of the agent as reader in the literary–where the literary is that which, while it inevitably performs a referential function, is “singular and unverifiable” (175) in the way it evokes and invokes an elsewhere and an other, and constantly performs disruption between aesthetico-epistemic and ethico-affective codings of representation. A paradox thus appears to emerge for a reader of Critique: in order to read the book, the reader has to stand aside from the reading-position allocated her as declared implied reader; exceed her systemic placing when it risks gelling into yet another identity; and assume, where–unlocatably–she is, the (im)possible task of taking up what has been denied: the writing of an other life-script, which is not necessarily the same as one’s own autobiography. The larger project carried forward in Critique remains, as I read it, a work in progress, placed in the hands of its readers. Tracking the trajectory at a tangent, this has been my contribution toward its working out.

     

    Notes

     

    1. On the reader of Capital, see also Keenan 99-133.

     

    2. Given not only the agenda of Critique, but also the considerable Marxist reach of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” the work by Spivak taken up most widely in postcolonial studies, one can only find bewildering Neil Lazarus’s statement that: “And in the case of Spivak, I shall risk saying that she seems to me ‘more of a Marxist’ in the wider field of critical theory than she is in the narrower field of postcolonial studies: I mean that her pointedly Marxist writings seem to me to situate themselves, for the most part, as interventions into the ‘theory’ field; within the field of postcolonial studies, by contrast, it is as a feminist exponent of deconstruction that she is most visible” (12-13). Lazarus frames his book as remedying a lack, as he perceives it, of “any credible or legitimated Marxist position within the field of postcolonial studies” (12). As disturbing as the desire for legitimation, and thus for “legitimate” intellectual filiation and affiliation, is, one could, in the context of contemporary academic politics, not easily object to such a project. Yet, when establishing the presence of the (highly contestable) lack perceived by Lazarus involves an assessment of another Marxist scholar’s work in terms of visibility in an academic field instead of her substantive contribution, one cannot help asking whether the meager gains to be had from the multiplied qualifications (“more of a”; “pointedly”; “for the most part”; “most”) justify his exertions.

     

    3. Spivak had considered the title Return of the Native Informant (“Ghostwriting” 84). Another title in play was An Unfashionable Grammatology (Spivak Reader 287).

     

    4. In White Mythologies, Robert Young describes Spivak’s relation to conventions of positioning and oppositionality: “Instead of staking out a single recognizable position, gradually refined and developed over the years, she has produced a series of essays that move restlessly across the spectrum of contemporary theoretical and political concerns, rejecting none of them according to the protocols of an oppositional mode, but rather questioning, reworking and reinflecting them in a particularly productive and disturbing way…. Spivak’s work offers no position as such that can be quickly summarized…. To read her work is not so much to confront a system as to encounter a series of events” (157). Young contrasts Spivak’s attendant “taking ‘the investigator’s complicity into account’” with Edward Said’s “oppositional criticism,” his “very limited model of a detached, oppositional critical consciousness” (169, 173; the embedded quotation is in Critique 244).

     

    5. In his introduction to the recent issue of PMLA on “Ethics and Literary Study,” Lawrence Buell, who puts Spivak under the heading of those addressing “the issue of whether discourse can yield truthful or reliable representation,” merely allegorizes his own incomprehension that Spivak’s concern with ethics and reading amounts to more than a problematization of knowing when he paraphrases her “paradoxical assertion that ‘ethics is the experience of the impossible’: an ethical representation of subalternity must proceed in the awareness that (mutual) understanding will be limited’” (10). Like Buell, Neil Lazarus fixes on ideas of truth and knowing when, in a curious miming of his accusation of “one-sided[ness],” he ignores the link Spivak explores between reading and the ethical: “The central problem with Spivak’s theorization of subalternity is that in its relentless and one-sided focus on the problematics of representation as reading, it contrives to displace or endlessly defer the epistemological question–that concerning truth” (114).

     

    6. We can compare this move to that of Kwame Nkrumah, who transgresses Kant’s proscription of “anthropology” to make “the traditional African standpoint” the starting point for ethics rather than beginning with a “philosophical idea of the nature of man” (97). The difference would be that, by preserving the moment of foreclosure in Kant–one that is indeed “anthropological”–Spivak takes precautions to avoid the mere substitution of perspective that characterizes and sets the limits of nativism.

     

    7. On the “im,” Spivak directs us to “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” where it relates to a rhetorical question (Other Worlds 263).

     

    8. See Keenan, Attridge. The principal source texts would be Derrida, “Psyche,” and Levinas 99-129.

     

    9. On ethicity in de Man, see Miller 41-59, Hamacher 184ff.

     

    10. In “Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats,” thinking the feminist reader and her position is Spivak’s occasion for distinguishing between deconstruction in a narrow and general sense: “Within a shifting and abyssal frame, these [minimal] idealizations [of a work being ‘about something’] are the ‘material’ to which we as readers, with our own elusive historico-politico-economico-sexual determinations, bring the machinery of our reading and, yes, judgement” (Other Worlds 15).

     

    11. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice”; “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

     

    12. Like Socrates in Plato’s Apology (414), Spivak refers to herself as a “gadfly” (244). On eironeia, see Derrida, Gift (76), and, on irony and the question, Derrida and Dufourmantelle (11-19). I offer these notes toward an account of Spivak’s trajectory of irony as a hopeful corrective to Terry Eagleton’s trivializing remark, in his review of Critique, that “[Spivak’s] work’s rather tiresome habit of self-theatricalising and self-alluding is the colonial’s ironic self-performance, a satirical stab at scholarly impersonality, and a familiar American cult of personality” (6).

     

    13. See Young, Review 235ff.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Arnott, Jill. “French Feminism in a South African Frame?: Gayatri Spivak and the Problem of Representation in South African Feminism.” South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990-1994. Ed. M.J. Daymond. New York: Garland, 1996. 77-89.
    • Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20-31.
    • Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7-19.
    • De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
    • Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
    • —. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other.” Trans. Catherine Porter. Waters and Godzich 25-65.
    • Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. De l’hospitalité. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997.
    • Eagleton, Terry. “In the Gaudy Supermarket.” London Review of Books. 13 May 1999: 3, 5-6.
    • Hamacher, Werner. “LECTIO: de Man’s Imperative.” Trans. Susan Bernstein. Waters and Godzich 171-201.
    • Keenan, Thomas. Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
    • Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
    • Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
    • Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
    • Nkrumah, Kwame. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization. Revised ed. New York: Monthly Review P, 1970.
    • Plato. Apology. The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. B. Jowett. 2 Vols. New York: Random House, 1937. Vol.1. 401-423.
    • Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry; or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry.’” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 480-508.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.
    • —. “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120-130.
    • —. “Ghostwriting.” diacritics 25.2 (1995): 65-84.
    • —. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.
    • —. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
    • —. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996.
    • Waters, Lindsay and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading de Man Reading. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
    • Young, Robert. Review of Outside in the Teaching Machine by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Textual Practice 10.1 (1996): 228-238.
    • —. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

  • Contesting Globalisms: The Transnationalization of U.S. Cultural Studies

    Claudia Sadowski-Smith

    Department of American Thought and Language
    Michigan State University
    cssmith@msu.edu

     

    Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.

     

    Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital.Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

     

    Duke University Press’s recent publication of two cultural studies volumes on globalization plays out an interesting paradox. While both collections signal the need to study the role of culture in a world characterized by geopolitical re-alignments, they approach these changes by expanding available postcolonial, ethnic studies, and Neo-Marxist perspectives into transnational space. This review puts the two volumes into conversation to argue that a globalism which increasingly refuses to be simply colonialism/imperialism in a new guise calls for a rethinking of binaries and underlying assumptions that have routinely shaped this scholarship.

     

    Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi’s collection, The Cultures of Globalization (henceforth Cultures), and Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd’s volume, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (henceforth Politics), contribute to the burgeoning field of U.S. cultural work on globalization, which has lagged somewhat behind comparable discourses in economics, political science, and sociology. The two volumes set out to explore cultural dimensions of what they variously term “globalization” or “transnationalism.” To name a few of its most salient developments, globalization is characterized by flexible accumulation and mixed production, the worldwide expansion of free market politics, the spread of U.S. mass culture, and the denationalization of corporations and nation-states in the context of intensified border crossings by culture, capital, and people. In this understanding of globalization, the two volumes follow Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis of the world-system as a global capitalist economy and/or restrict their inquiries to the last decade of this century. Both collections also acknowledge the weakening ability of nation-states to perpetually reinforce nationalist discourses intended to forge what Benedict Anderson has termed “imagined communities,” even as their state apparatuses continue to facilitate the ongoing transnationalization of capital. Building upon this important distinction between state nationalism and statehood, Cultures and Politics set out to theorize “transnational imagined communities.” These are not so much anti-nationalist in direction but rather pose alternatives to globalizing developments which have been characterized by unevenness and inequality since the beginning of modernity.

     

    Grounded predominantly in U.S. literature departments, the editors of the two volumes recognize that cultural work on globalization ought to question the modernist division of knowledge production rather than constitute a new field of academic specialization. Perhaps as a result of the injunction to be more inclusive, the collections stand out from other works for their sheer length (393 and 593 pages respectively). Many of the contributors to Lowe’s anthology work in ethnic, area, and women’s studies as well as in interdisciplinary humanities programs, while Jameson’s book additionally includes essays from sociology, philosophy, geography, and anthropology as well as articles from culture workers not located within the academy.

     

    Cultures assembles original papers that were first presented at Duke’s 1994 Globalization and Culture conference and subsequently revised to facilitate an internal conversation among the contributors. This process as well as the inclusion of revised critical comments from the audience at the end of the collection are among the volume’s principal strengths and may also explain the time lag between the original date of the conference and the collection’s eventual appearance in 1998. In contrast, several of the articles in Lowe’s volume, which appeared a year earlier, are reprints from other publications. Judging by the endnotes of several essays, the remaining original contributions were first presented at the 1994 Other Circuits colloquium, which was sponsored by the University of California at Irvine.

     

    Apart from two exceptions about which I will say more shortly, both Cultures and Politics are similarly organized: they articulate a “Critique of Modernity” and explore “Alternatives” to the current conditions of globalization by focusing on Third-World localities. Regarding globalization as a form of U.S.-dominated neo-colonialism, specifically as an outgrowth and continuation of European colonialism, several essays articulate alternative conceptions of modernity. Others complicate the academy’s generally critical attitude toward nationalist projects. Fredric Jameson and Greeta Kapur in Cultures characterize the nation-state as a useful political structure for protecting its citizens from some of the consequences of globalization, and David Lloyd in Politics emphasizes the radical potential of insurgent nationalisms which lies in their general closeness to other, often more radical social movements.

     

    Following a general trend in cultural studies, both volumes do less to explore cultural productions than to theorize modes of resistance, in this case, resistance to hegemonic forms of capitalist globalization. Focusing on local adjustments to globalization that have the potential to become transnational, contributors to Cultures and Politics significantly overlap in the kinds of localities they explore. They converge specifically in their focus on the by now relatively familiar territories of Latin America and India, and, perhaps more surprisingly, on South Korea and China. But even though the two collections initiate their projects of transnational “imagined-community-building” from the same Third-World locations, they do so from different theoretical entry points.

     

    Jameson’s collection attempts, in the words of two conference co-organizers, to “develop a theory from/of the third world” (Mignolo 51, original italics) as “a counterhegemonic response to globalization” (Moreiras 90). To this end, Cultures sets itself explicitly within Wallerstein’s model of economic history. This model views globalization as the latest phase in the development of a capitalist world-system which originated in Europe and spread across the globe by the late 19th-century as a result of European colonialism. During its expansion, this system created centers and peripheral areas, which are generally identified with First and Third Worlds. In its emphasis on colonialism and in its investigation of peripheralized areas, Wallerstein’s model intersects with postcolonial theory so that contributors to Cultures also engage the work of well-known postcolonial thinkers such as Bhabha, Said, Hall, and Spivak. Chungmoo Choi’s and Paik Nak-chung’s contributions on South Korea are, however, instructive of the different emphases on postcolonial theory within the two volumes: While Choi in Politics relies heavily on such work to define South Korea’s “deferred postcoloniality” (471) as a consequence of its colonization by Japan and more recently the U.S. (which created conditions of internal displacement and external dependence), Nak-chung takes South Korea’s peripheral status for granted. He instead stresses that Korea’s projected reunification and its ongoing national literature debate might forge models for more innovative state structures and for a new understanding of world literature.

     

    Cultures‘ last subheading, “Consumerism and Ideology,” makes explicit the volume’s emphasis on ideologies of consumption as the most likely sites from which alternative, often transnationally structured, anti-globalization projects could arise. Leslie Sklair’s essay posits that “anticapitalist global system movements” could “challenge the TNCs [transnational corporations] in the economic sphere, oppose the transnational capitalist class and its local affiliates in the political sphere, and promote cultures and ideologies antagonistic to capitalist consumerism” (296). Alberto Moreiras’s and Manthia Diawara’s contributions specify examples of such an “exteriority to the global” (Moreiras 95). Moreiras identifies a new type of Latin-Americanist thinking which can preserve as well as constitute a regionalized Latin American identity, and Diawara emphasizes a West African identity whose political and cultural similarities are grounded in comparable histories and patterns of consumption, such as African markets.

     

    Rather than consumerism, Lowe’s collection highlights cultural struggles as sites from which the reproduction of global capitalism can be contested. Contributors to Politics specifically challenge what they identify as the neo-Marxist notion of an “outside” to global capitalism; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, for example, sets out to transform this concept into a more heterogeneous site of intervention, into “something that straddles a border zone of temporality… something that also always reminds us that other temporalities, other forms of worlding, coexist and are possible” (57). In her introduction, Lowe similarly replaces the search for an “outside,” which, she argues, tends to subsume the cultural under the economic, with a recognition of cultural sites that arise “historically, in contestation, and ‘in difference’ to it” (Lowe 2).

     

    Somewhat crudely put, then, if Jameson’s collection represents the transnationalization of theories foregrounding “class” as a fundamental dynamic of social change, Lowe’s volume illustrates the transnationalization of “race.” In his contribution, her co-editor David Lloyd argues that Wallerstein’s approach to globalization needs to be complicated by theories of “vertical” integration “revolving around the term racism” (176). In general, contributors to Lowe’s collection provide the kind of focus on gender and race that is somewhat missing from Jameson’s anthology. Perhaps also in reaction to similar critiques by conference participants articulated at the end of the volume, Jameson concedes in the introduction that his collection does not include essays on “the conflicted strategies of feminism in the new world-system…; or the politics of AIDS on a worldwide scale; the relationship between globalization and identity politics, or ethnicity, or religious fundamentalism” (xvi). If they make reference to “race”-based analyses at all, contributors tend to characterize ideas of cultural difference as “more traditional” and in need of materialist analysis (Jameson 70-71). Readers are left to conclude the need for work such as Lowe’s collection, which she characterizes as a feminist, antiracist revision of both Marxist and neo-Marxist work.

     

    Their different approaches to globalization also affect the types of alternatives the two volumes eventually develop. Whereas Jameson’s volume emphasizes transnational theories “beyond the level of the nation-state” (Sklair 296) that stress consumerism as the main site of intervention, Politics focuses on cultural “linkings of localities that take place across and below the level of the nation-state” (Lowe 25, my emphases). “Class”- and “race”-based approaches to transnational community-building, then, articulate differently the ongoing breakdown of distinctions between the “global” and the “local” by identifying either entire regions or more local geographies as transnational sites of contestation. Noam Chomsky’s contribution to Jameson’s volume illustrates the neo-Marxist emphasis on regionalization (the formation of various supra-national regions that are marked by unequal relationships with each other) within the global world-system. He argues that the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan have been able to maintain their hegemonic positions, largely gained as a result of colonialist undertakings, by instituting various forms of market protectionism for their own economies. At the same time that they thus undermine official ideologies of capitalist modernization, these countries, however, relentlessly subject other nations in the periphery to the doctrines of free trade, thereby weakening their state apparatuses and ensuring their continuing subalternization. Alternative globalisms, in this model, may take the form of transnational struggles within or across various subalternized regions, and linkages between regions would emerge from the similarities of their peripheral positions.

     

    Focusing on the feminization and third-worldization of labor by transnational corporations, Aihwa Ong’s contribution to Politics, in contrast, privileges transnationally-connected, but more localized forms of intervention. She understands the local-global re-configuration of capital to require an exploration of how globalization effects the constitution of localized subaltern identities. Critiquing Wallerstein’s model for its notion of a homogeneous periphery, Ong emphasizes that the TNC workforce in the Third-World countries of Mexico and Asia is engaged in heterogeneous work situations. Rather than desiring to challenge the industrial system in terms of a common class consciousness, Ong argues that TNC workers envision change in the form of improved selfhood. She therefore suggests re-conceiving TNC “workers’ experiences as cultural struggles” (86).

     

    In addition to Ong’s emphasis on connections between subaltern struggles in various re-colonized locations, in Politics‘s sub-section “Unlikely Coalitions” Lowe identifies cross-nation, cross-race cultural practices of Third-World communities in the U.S. and Britain as further sites of contestation. In my opinion, this section constitutes one of the most valuable contributions to transnational cultural studies because it keeps transnational work “at home” and anchored in the problems of racialized groups in the First World (i.e., those below the level of the nation-state). Intended as a rethinking of relationships between African Americans and Japanese (Americans), George Lipsitz’s article on African American soldiers joining the Japanese army during the Asia Pacific War actually ends up illustrating that racialization by a common enemy alone cannot constitute a productive basis for transnational affiliation. Intending to show similarities in the position of African Americans and Japanese vis-a-vis imperialistic undertakings by the U.S., Lipsitz indirectly lists as many reasons why Black Americans should not have supported the Japanese struggle against the U.S. Other contributors to Lowe’s volume, however, point out that meaningful forms of solidarity need to combine struggles against racialization with materialist struggles against the ongoing restructuring of global capitalism.

     

    As both Lowe and Ong argue, this restructuring similarly effects the proletarianization of women of color and the exploitation of women in the Third World. In her interview with Lowe, Angela Y. Davis thus envisions a Third-World feminism that bases its cross-ethnic community-making on politics, rather than on the specific identities of racialized communities and their members. Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s essay on the British organization “Women Against Fundamentalism” (WAF) puts Davis’s admonition into practice. This organization’s conception of political activism moves beyond U.S. notions of cross-racial solidarity, which have predominantly been based on the similarities of cultural nationalist struggles and the “internal colony” model. WAF unites Black and South Asian Britons in their feminist struggles against both the racism of the British state and the patriarchal control of women’s minds and bodies that is central to religious fundamentalism in their home communities. These struggles also call for the recognition of shifting subjectivities–for example, the acknowledgement that members of an ethnic/national minority can simultaneously be oppressed in Britain and be oppressors in their home countries.

     

    Even though neo-Marxist and “race”-based cultural studies approaches thus differ with respect to their theoretical entry points into alternatives to globalization, Jameson’s and Lowe’s collections end up providing many of the same insights into the workings of global capitalism. The charges against Neo-Marxism–that its expectations of a Third-World supra-regional community-building based on class consciousness have not come true–can be similarly levelled at “race”-based models. Solidarities among interconnected re-colonized localities or cross-race, cross-nation “unlikely coalitions” have hitherto also not been able to seriously challenge the modes of global expansion. Most importantly, in their insistence on seeing U.S.-dominated globalization exclusively as an outgrowth of European colonization, the two volumes’ approaches to transnationalism reify well-entrenched First World-Third World, colonizer-colonized binaries. The increasingly more permeable global-local nexus is recast in other dichotomous terms, where the First World becomes identified with the global and the Third World (or Third-World communities in the First World) with the regional or local. While Manthia Diawara in Jameson’s volume, for example, theorizes a supra-regional West African identity that can resist the global homogenization of cultures by emphasizing regionally-specific, pre-capitalist forms of consumption, contributors to Lowe’s collection similarly emphasize the transformative potential of “pre-modern” ethnic groups, peasants, and indigenous farmers in Latin America and the Phillipines.

     

    The fact that cultural studies scholarship has already problematized First World-Third World dichotomies by recognizing the heterogeneity of peripheries is manifest in the inclusion of countries colonized by other than European powers, such as South Korea, into both Jameson’s and Lowe’s anthologies. But at the same time that the “postcolonial” has thus become more diverse, the First World continues to be portrayed as a rather homogeneous entity, except for the recognition of Third-World (immigrant) communities within it. This view does not, for example, acknowledge various forms of European colonialization, such as the subjugation of socialist countries by the USSR after 1945 or the ongoing colonization of Eastern by Western Europe since the late 1980s. The revolutions in Eastern Europe have opened to global capitalism previously unavailable areas toward which paradigms of “democratization” and “modernization,” hitherto predominantly pushed onto Third-World countries, continue to be directed. As a result, the territory of Eastern Europe is currently being subalternized by the politics of the IMF and partial promises of inclusion into First-World organizations like NATO and the European Union.

     

    The mere expansion of cultural studies’ dualistic frameworks, however, has created the perception that the former Eastern Bloc has disappeared into either the Third or First World (see, for example, Chomsky and Hetata in Cultures). This reification of old binaries that define Second and Third Worlds only in relation to First World centers rather than to each other misses an opportunity to deconstruct both East-West and North-South dichotomies. Their interrelationship originated in decolonization and post-Second World War contexts and is currently taking on new forms. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which prefigured dramatic geopolitical changes in the countries of the former “Evil Empire,” a U.S.-dominated NATO bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosova at the same time that it continued its airstrikes against Iraq. Viewed from this perspective, Operation “Allied Force” against Yugoslavia indicated the further multiplication of “security threats” to a U.S. national interest that has been continuously redefined since the end of the Cold War. The Balkans have joined the Middle East as another key region of U.S. interest (and have thus become, as some have called it, a “New Berlin”). At the same time, so-called former communists-turned-fascists have joined “Middle Eastern terrorists” on the list of major enemies of the U.S.

     

    After the simultaneous April 1999 bombings, even mainstream news media such as CNN have begun to link the two sites with each other. Serbians have reportedly visited Iraq to learn how to defend themselves more effectively against U.S.-led NATO airstrikes, and Iraq has declared its support for Yugoslavia. This more than “unlikely coalition” is not grounded in similarities of culture or religion, and seems especially surprising since it involves an Arab country supporting the Serb suppression of predominantly Muslim Kosovars. The strongest link between the two nation-states seems to be the “punishment” they have received from a U.S.-dominated NATO for undertaking (in many other countries and contexts perfectly “acceptable”) nationalist empire-building and state-maintaining projects.

     

    The emergence of an admittedly very tenuous “cross-nation” coalition between Iraq and Yugoslavia manifests attempts to counterbalance the disproportionate influence of the U.S. on world politics, culture, and economics, but obviously does not constitute a positive course of action. Nevertheless, much remains to be said in cultural studies about the ways in which both nations have been economically, politically, and culturally peripheralized. It is precisely the regions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East that have gotten little or no attention in Jameson’s and Lowe’s volumes, other than in Homo Hoodfar’s article about Iranian practices of veiling in Politics, and in Sherif Hetata’s re-definition of the Middle East as part of the exploited “south” within a new north/south global division. Since the subalternization of the Middle East and the Balkans has been part and parcel of intensified globalization in the 1990s, the neglect of these two areas in cultural studies cannot be explained as a case of theory lagging behind the speed and subtlety with which geopolitical changes in these two regions have taken place.

     

    Often cast in terms of clashes over religious or ethnic differences, conflicts there have, however, been integrated into public debates about the future of U.S. “multiculturalism.” Generally, events in the Middle East and the Balkans are increasingly invoked (but not sufficiently theorized) to illustrate the evils of what Benjamin Barber has called “Jihad” or what has, more recently, been termed “Balkanization” if the U.S. continues on its path of “diversity.” As Sherif Hetata writes in Cultures with respect to religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and what he calls “ethnic and racial revivals” in Eastern Europe, these “have not seemed to have excited the interest of scholars in the arts and literature, in the humanities, or in gender studies” (182). What I am arguing, along slightly different lines, is that cultural studies models of globalization need to explore new forms and instances of “nonglobalism” that have emerged in these regions. These respond to a very complex web of U.S.-dominated forms of globalization of which the perpetuation of (European) colonialism is only one trajectory.

     

  • Friedrich Kittler’s Media Scenes–An Instruction Manual

     

    Marcel O’Gorman

    Director
    Foreign Language Instructional Technology Environment
    Tulane University
    ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu

     

    Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays.Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.

     

    Brigadier Whitehead, a veteran of World War II, is taping his heroic adventures at the “Battle of Palermo” on a reel-to-reel, portable tape recorder. Roving about the cluttered room, he speaks animatedly into the microphone, which is plugged into the recorder by a long wire. “As you can hear, gentlemen,” the Brigadier announces portentously, “the zero hour is approaching. Invasion is imminent. We must counter-attack right away.”

     

    Six antique phonographs, arranged in two rows, trumpet out the sound-effects of a massive artillery barrage, which the Brigadier orchestrates by running from one record player to another, extending his microphone to capture specific effects.

     

    Just arrived in Catalia when messenger drove up. I tore open dispatch. News was bad--I'd lost my battalion commander. I had to reach O Group. I grabbed the bike from the messenger, and rode off to headquarters. Suddenly, a grenade exploded. I jumped for cover.

     

    This theatrical recording session continues until a peculiar, undulating sound interrupts the narrative, enveloping the scene of virtual warfare in its electronic drone. In a blinding flash of light, Brigadier Whitehead is thrown to the floor, where he will be found lifeless, still clutching a phonograph record, his entire body bleached white by a murderous ray of light. The Brigadier is down, but the tape machine goes on recording….

     

    Thus we have, in John Steed’s words, “The swan song of one Brigadier Whitehead…. Officer, gentleman, deceased Brigadier Whitehead. He died as he lived in the thick of the battle, facing the enemy.”

     

    “An enemy without a face,” replies Emma Peel, with characteristic wit.

     

    At least, that’s how Steed and Peel sum up this perplexing scene. And puzzled viewers have to wait out the remainder of this Avengers episode to discover the enemy’s true identity. After replaying the tape recording of the scene–a cacophony of phonograph artillery drowned out by a mysterious drone–for countless suspects and experts, the following conclusion is reached about the murder weapon:

     

    Detective: “Sound of light amplification of stimulation of radiation.”

     

    Steed: “In a word, a laser beam”

     

    Peel: “A laser beam. Of course. It has a bleaching effect, and boils liquids.”

     

    Crawford: “Plus a very distinctive sound.”

     

    Peel: “Where are they used?”

     

    Detective: "All over the place: dentistry, communications, eye surgery..."

     

    and of course, they are used in military strategy; although such details were not yet public in 1967.

     

    Digital/laser technology is recorded in analog on Brigadier Whitehead’s outdated tape machine, and it is the “eye surgery” clue that eventually leads Steed and Peel to the ultimate villain, Dr. Primble, an ocular surgeon who sneaks about with a powerful laser gun strapped to the top of his “U.F.O.,” a chrome-colored sports car.

     

    Obviously, this scene has not been pulled from a bastion of the Western literary canon or from a great philosophical text. We are dealing here with a piece of pop-cultural trash, the detritus of a late-’60s Cold-War obsession with espionage, governmental conspiracy, and garishly fantastic technologies. And yet, there is still something “scholarly,” something theoretical, philosophical, even, in this scene, that invites further investigation. There is a certain intersection here of communications and warfare, information transmission and military strategy, media and artillery that permits us to view this scene as a node through which a network of discourses–historical, technological, political–all travel. I would go so far as to say that in this single scene, we might trace all the ingredients for a transdisciplinary project on the nature of media in a visual age–complete with ocular surgeon.

     

    At least that’s how I sum up the scene, investigating it through the critical magnifying glass of Friedrich Kittler’s theory and practice of criticism. Kittler’s recently published collection of essays entitled Literature, Media, Information Systems provides a wide-ranging demonstration of what his followers have known all along: “the intelligibility and consequent meaning of literary texts is always and only possible because its discourse is embedded in and operates as part of a specific discourse network” (Johnston 4). And yet, in the scene mentioned above, we are not dealing with a “literary text,” but with a television episode, specifically, an episode entitled “From Venus With Love” (1967) which belongs to the British spy series The Avengers. This all too prevalent distinction between “literary text” and “cultural detritus” moves to the background, however, when we realize that Kittler’s approach to criticism may be applied to any media scene whatsoever, from Goethe’s Faust to beograd.com, a Web site supporting Yugoslavia against NATO bombing. Of course, we must first determine what a “media scene” is exactly, and what bearing it has on literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of media. I hope to answer these questions here, through a simultaneous review of Kittler’s book and an instruction manual on how to program a project in/on the discourse network of 2000.

     

    “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”

     

    Step 1: Begin your project by describing a single situation, scene or image in which communications technologies play a crucial, or at least conspicuous, role. This will serve as the media scene for your entire project.

     

    Faust looks up from his book of magic ideograms and sighs, “Ach!“1 Stoker’s Mina Harker transcribes the sounds of a phonograph on her typewriter. Guy de Maupassant’s doppelganger joins him at his writing desk. Whether they be fictional or historical (is there a difference in this case?), these scenes or situations are the crux of Kittler’s work, the points of intersection from which he draws his transdisciplinary theses on the materiality of media. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” then, in book or essay form, is “a story woven from such stories. It collects, comments on and engages positions and texts, in which the newness of technical media has inscribed itself in outmoded book pages” (29).2 Since “outmoded book pages” are the subject of Kittler’s essays, we are not dealing, here, with scenes such as Brigadier Whitehead’s anachronistic sound studio. We are dealing instead with the pages of Goethe, Hoffman, and Balzac, pages in which communications technologies, sometimes with extreme subtlety, play a determinant role. Kittler is, after all, a “literary critic,” as he asserts time and again, almost suspiciously, in his essay “There Is No Software.” And yet, his method of critique reaches far beyond the brackets of “literature,” channeling its way through contemporary culture, philosophy, history, engineering, cybernetics, and political science.

     

    Hence, a chapter that we might expect to be a media-oriented commentary on a collection of literary excerpts, turns out instead to be a wide-ranging examination of the materiality of media where references to Goethe, Hoffman and Balzac are casually dispersed among technically complex observations on contemporary culture and its digital toys. In “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” for example, in which we may trace a network of theses, the foremost may be the following: “the technological standard of today… can be described in terms of partially connected media systems” (32). The jumbo jet, according to Kittler, is a case in point, a scene of “partial connection” that contrasts with our current utopian dream of a seamless integration of media: virtual reality, television, music, the Web, etc., all delivered over fiber optic lines. On the jumbo jet,

     

    The crew is connected to radar screens, diode displays, radio beacons, and nonpublic channels.... The passengers' ears are listlessly hooked up to one-way earphones, which are themselves hooked up to tape recorders and thereby to the record industry.... Not to mention the technological medium of the food industry to which the mouths of the passengers are connected. (32)

     

    This is not the stuff of a literary critic who writes commentary on a “story” from Goethe or Hoffman. We are dealing here with contemporary cultural criticism, media criticism, even. Or are we?

     

    Although Kittler allows himself a certain quota of McLuhanesque scenarios, his strength lies in his literary-historical perspective. Once McLuhan has been exorcised, Kittler contrasts our “partially connected” multi-media spectacle with the “homogeneous medium of writing” (38), and hence, we are instantly transported, via Foucault,3 from the jumbo jet and the Kennedy/Nixon TV debate (a contest in “telegenics”), to Goethe’s lyrical observation that literature “is the fragment of fragments, the least of what had happened and of what had been spoken was written down; of what had been written down, only the smallest fraction was preserved” (36). For us, writing is merely one medium among many, but in the age of Goethe, “writing functioned as the general medium. For that reason, the term medium did not exist. For whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters or ideograms” (36). This is quite a contrast to an age of camcorders and personal Web pages, an age in which recording technology is so independent of the body that Brigadier Whiteheads and Timothy Learys can accurately document the very moment of their deaths.4

     

    In the discourse network of 1800, then, writing is the only transmission media of the Spirit, and in the case of handwriting, writing also documents the identity of the body. In an excerpt that Kittler draws from Botho Strauss’s Widmung, the hero is crushingly ashamed of his handwriting, an uneven scrawl in which “everything is emptied out…. The full man is shriveled, shrunk, and stunted into his scribbling. His lines are all that is left of him and his propagation” (qtd. in Kittler 38). This existential angst incited by poor calligraphy is possible because Strauss’s character is living in a time before gramophone, film, and typewriter. The depth of his shame “exists only as an anachronism” (38) in a world where self-propagation is available in multiple forms–forms in which the body’s trace is not so easily discernible, separated as it is by networks of circuits that translate all identity into a stream of 1s and 0s.

     

    As long as the written word, hand-written or printed, reigned as the one, homogeneous medium of communication, Romanticism was possible. In Goethe’s time, “all the passion of reading consisted of hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines” (40). But, according to Kittler, technical reproduction provided a physical precision that rendered this readerly hallucination obsolete. With the advent of technical reproduction, the hallucinatory power of reading, that infernal Romantic struggle between writer and reader, Word and Spirit, is resolved indefinitely. Readerly hallucination is materialized in ghostly daguerrotypes, phantasmic phonograph records, and spectral cinema–the soul captured in, and radically embodied by, new media.

     

    We thus have a fragmented history of typewriter, gramophone and film. But from where does this triad emanate? How do we justify this trinity of communications over other possible permutations, e.g., “Phonograph, Telegraph, Camera,” or “Spectroscope, Typewriter, Radio”? There is no possible justification, except to say that a comprehensive history of media is not Kittler’s intent here or anywhere. Nor would he believe that such a history is useful or even possible. His method directs him to a series of nodal points that shed light on informative media scenes, without claiming to illuminate the entire history of media.

     

    The scene, then, becomes the theory itself, and the justification for Kittler’s choice of triad can thus take the form of a single, super-saturated scene. This time, Edison is the hero, or anti-hero. The scene co-stars Christopher Latham Sholes, who pays a visit to Edison (the predestined arch-developer of cinema and phonograph) with his idea of a mass-producible typewriter. As it turns out, Edison politely refuses Sholes’s offer, and the typewriter becomes the property of Remington, an arms manufacturer. Hence, film, phonograph, and typewriter cross paths in a brief constellation that justifies–more properly, generates–Kittler’s triad. A story becomes theory, and the rest is history; it drops through the filter of Kittler’s letters and ideograms. Unlike Goethe, however, Kittler doesn’t sweat it.

     

    This type of historical snapshot, or sound bite, if you please, is typically Kittlerian, and it is left up to the reader to hallucinate a cohesive thesis out of these bits. It is as if Kittler himself were presenting his research materials anachronistically. He writes essays using a word processor when he would probably be more lucid in experimental film, or more appropriately, in hypertext or some other form of digital multi-media. Then perhaps, the move from a jumbo jet, to German Romanticism, to Edison, to Lacan, would be more sensible, especially since Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine is thrown into the mix. If “the age of media–as opposed to the history that ends it–moves in jerks, like Turing’s paper ribbon” (48), then maybe our age of media would best be represented in a medium that can embody its disconnective nature. Then again, Kittler’s unconventional style, a style that makes an anachronism of the conventional essay format, is living proof that “the content of each medium is another medium” (42). Kittler’s writing style seems to wriggle uncomfortably in its print-oriented skin. Is Kittler’s writing hypertextual then? He wouldn’t be the first, but we have yet to place him beside Mallarmé or Joyce. The scene of Kittler typing an (hypertextual) essay of historical/literary fragments with dated word processing software, remains to be written and unpacked.

     

    “Dracula’s Legacy”

     

    Step 2: In the media scene that you have chosen (see Step 1), describe the role of a particular communications technology.

     

    If conventional history stands for the end of “the age of media,” then Kittler’s “jerky” version of media history threatens to sustain “the age of media,” reanimate it. The age of media is an un-dead age, for as long as we remember that media always determine the message, we will be living in the “age of media.” Leave it to Kittler then, Vampire theorist, to seek out the trace of a technologically-determined discourse system in any given media scene, and rescue that scene from the shallow grave of history. This is how Kittler, as a media theorist, fulfills “Dracula’s Legacy.” What supernatural powers does Kittler possess that allow him to raise the dead, see the unseen? Where can the trace of technology be found? The secret power of the media theorist lies, quite simply, in the following apocryphal warning from Jacques Lacan to his students: “From now on you are, and to a far greater extent than you can imagine, subjects of gadgets or instruments–from microscopes to radio and television–which will become elements of your being.” Viewed through the lens of this prophesy, any scene becomes a media scene, even when technology is not conspicuously present. The media theorist’s mandate can thus be simplified to the extreme, with Kittlerian bluntness: “Media determine our situation, which (nevertheless or for that reason) merits a description” (28).

     

    It is with this supernatural power of vision that Kittler “implicitly rais[es] the question of the degree to which technology was always the impensé or blindspot of poststructuralism itself” (Johnston 8). Kittler takes for granted that the trace of technology is discernible in any text or scene. Although he would be reluctant to accept the title, Kittler is a master of writing the trace, which Gayatri Spivak has described as “the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience” (xvi). It is one thing to proclaim the end of objectivity, the end of History and of Man, as poststructuralism has done, but quite another to make such a proclamation, accept it as an inherent element of writing, and invent ways to write that draw on this knowledge as an apriority. This is Kittler’s “post-hermeneutic”5 method (Wellbery ix). When Kittler writes media history, he does so with all the tools of poststructuralism at his disposal. Unlike many other theorists, however, he does not display the tools, or wield them about flagrantly;6 they are simply a part of his philosophical arsenal, the gears that grind away in the engine of his most apt reflections on media and culture. We can say, therefore, that Kittler does not write about the trace–he writes the trace itself. He does not write about the absence of media theory in poststructuralism–he writes the absence of media theory into poststructuralism.

     

    What strikes Kittler most poignantly, then, about the multiple film adaptations of Dracula is not that this techno-sustained legacy has allowed for “ever new and imaginary resurrections” of Stoker’s famous villain, but the fact that in none of these film adaptations do we catch a glimpse of the phonograph or typewriter that are so crucial in the novel. The role of transmission played by these devices in the novel is swallowed up by the movie projector’s ability to turn words into things, to merge human and machine. Or in Kittler’s terms, “under the conditions of technology, literature disappears (like metaphysics for Heidegger) into the un-death of its endless ending” (83). It is up to the media theorist, then, to trace the presence of literature in the discourse of technology, and vice versa. Matthew Griffin sums up this Kittlerian task quite well by stating that “Literature, which was once the realm of dissident voices swelling in a babble of languages, can now be rewritten as an effect of media technologies on the alphanumeric code” (Griffin, Literary 715).

     

    What role, exactly, do the gramophone and typewriter play in Stoker’s novel? According to Kittler (via Lacan), they demonstrate quite simply the extent to which “we are subject to gadgets or instruments” that have “become elements of our being” (143). For example, the typewriter, according to Kittler, so ingrained itself in the social evolution of Western Europe, that it radically and permanently altered gender roles:

     

    Machines remove from the two sexes the symbols that distinguish them. In earlier times, needles created woven material in the hands of women, and quills in the hands of authors created another form of weaving called text. Women who gladly became the paper for these scriptorial quills were called mothers. Women who preferred to speak themselves were called overly sensitive or hysterical. But after the symbol of male productivity was replaced by a machine, and this machine was taken over by women, the production of texts had to forfeit its wonderful heterosexuality. (71)

     

    The machine in question here is, of course, the typewriter. Paraphrasing Bruce Bliven,7Kittler observes that

     

    the typewriter, and only the typewriter, is responsible for a bureaucratic revolution. Men may have continued, from behind their desks, to believe in the omnipotence of their own thought, but the real power over keys and impressions on paper, over the flow of news and over agendas, fell to the women who sat in the front office. (64)

     

    Here, we are tantalized with the image of a cyborg woman, a woman de-sexed and empowered by a writing machine with which she is unified. We must be careful to avoid this illusion, however, since Kittler, unlike McLuhan, does not see the machine as an extension of man (or woman), but quite the opposite. And so, the female typists who write faster than most anyone can read or think are only transmission devices, extensions or reflections of the machine,8 word processors avant la lettre. They have no conscious influence on the news and agendas that they channel. This is in keeping with Kittler’s most poignant anti-McLuhanism: “it remains an impossibility to understand media…. The communications technologies of the day exercise remote control over all understanding and evoke its illusion” (30).

     

    This gender-bending or seeming cyborgism, this cultural upheaval that occurs at the hand of the typewriter, is inscribed in Stoker’s Dracula. In the concluding scene, Mina Harker “holds a child in the lap that for 300 pages held a typewriter” (70). The classical-romantic binary of femininity is interrupted by a technological variable. From now on, a woman cannot be slotted easily into the MOTHER/HYSTERIC construction, but can also fall into a third category: MACHINE. With this third term in place, the binary or even triad model is shattered. From now on, anything is possible within the circuit of female identity. Or to use Kittler’s words, “far worse things are possible,” as is proven with the case of Lucy Westenra, anti-mother, a vampiress who sucks the blood of children for sustenance (70).

     

    “Romanticism–Psychoanalysis–Film: A History of the Double”

     

    Step 3: Demonstrate that the media scene you have chosen is determined by the specific historical, technological or scientific conditions of the time in which it was created.

     

    At the center of Kittler’s collection of essays, we move from monsters to Münsterberg, a transition that gives us a more profound glimpse at Kittler’s understanding of cinema. If the Dracula films demonstrate the ability of the cinema to liquidate the soul of classical Romantic literature, this is because film can depict in moving pictures what literature could only describe in words, “and other storage media besides words did not exist in the days of classical Romanticism” (89). Through his brief “History of the Double,” Kittler demonstrates the extent to which film acts as a simulacrum of the human psyche, the poetic Spirit materialized in 24 frames/second. The doppelganger theme of 1800–a subject so prevalent in German Romanticism that Otto Rank could supply Freud with endless literary case studies of Narcissism–becomes a mere camera trick in 1900. But the camera’s trickiness, as we shall see, does not stop at the simulation of neuroses.

     

    The hero of “A History of the Double,” rather appropriately, is Hugo Münsterberg, founder of a crossbred science known as psychotechnology and producer of the “first competent theory of film”–at least according to Kittler’s formula. Münsterberg is essential to the history of media, Kittler suggests, because he “assigns every single camera technique to an unconscious, psychical mechanism: the close-up to selective attention, the flashback to involuntary memory, the film trick to daydreaming, and so forth” (100). And this allows Kittler to make the following periodic distinction on the cusp of which the Spirit of literature dissolves into mechanical technics:

     

    Since 1895, a separation exists between an image-less cult of the printed word, i.e., e[lite]-literature, on one side, and purely technical media that, like the train or film, mechanize images on the other. Literature no longer even attempts to compete with the miracles of the entertainment industry. It hands its enchanted mirror over to machines.(92)

     

    Hence, in a familiar theoretical trick of displacement, the psyche is replaced by a machine, the central nervous system by a network of communications devices.

     

    What is most interesting about this chapter, however, is not Münsterberg’s theory (it has been covered more extensively in other studies), not Kittler’s formula itself (the cyborgian theme now verges on cliché9), and not the unfashionable periodic distinction (a separation that generated enemies for Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/190010); what is most interesting is the manner by which Kittler arrives at his resolute distinction between pre- and post-1895. What might appear, at first glance, as some sort of techno-deterministic formula of history is actually a far-reaching and complex theory on culture and media. The most fascinating and important element of Kittler’s work is his ability to recognize and describe the intricacy of literary and cultural phenomena, and still manage to capture this complexity in a single image. Rather than provide a technical genealogy of film, then, or a historical narrative of its invention, Kittler lays out specific historical/technological conditions that make motion pictures possible, beginning with the period that immediately preceded film, in which the technology was not possible. And he does so by a trick of condensation, encapsulating an entire theory, a viable history of media, in the image of the Double.

     

    Hence, when Kittler refers to the fictional Doubles of Goethe and Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman (all members of Otto Rank’s Doppelganger collection), he does not stop at the uncanniness of this collective obsession with duality. He probes further into the texts in search of a common thread, a collective media scene that runs through their work and intersects with the discourse network of 1800. Naturally, he finds the trace that he is looking for, “namely, the simple textual evidence that Doubles turn up at writing desks” (87). This common denominator allows Kittler to connect the doppelganger phenomenon with writing technologies, which, in turn, opens up his study to a wider cultural phenomenon: “the general literacy campaign that seized Central Europe in [the nineteenth century]. Ever since then, people no longer experience words as violent and foreign bodies but can also believe that the printed words belong to them. Lacan called it ‘alphabêtise’” (91). Of course, Kittler mentions this campaign of a bureaucratic machine only to document its undoing at the hands of a different sort of machine, the “two-pronged” machine of film and psychoanalysis that brought the nineteenth century to a close. When the twentieth century begins, “books no longer behave as though words were harmless vehicles supplying our inner being with optical hallucinations, and especially not with the delusion that there is an inner being or a self. Along with the true, the beautiful and the good, the Double vanishes as well” (91). The nineteenth century literary fascination with the Double is brought to an end by film tricks and Freud.

     

    Kittler complexifies his media histories,11 then, by underscoring the fact that cultural phenomena are made possible by the chance encounter of various events or cataclysms, by the fortuitous meeting of disparate elements–umbrellas and sewing machines on operating tables. This is why Münsterberg is so important to him, for he was able to make the link between psychoanalysis and film, and it is these elements that bifurcate 1800 and 1900, bringing an end to Literature:

     

    The empirical-transcendental doublet Man, substratum of the Romantic fantastic, is only imploded by the two-pronged attack of science and industry, of psychoanalysis and film. Psychoanalysis clinically verified and cinema technically implemented all of the shadows and mirrorings of the subject. Ever since then, what remains of a literature that wants to be Literature is simply écriture--a writing without author. And no one can read Doubles, that is, a means to identification, into the printed word. (95)

     

    If this cut and dry equation were presented by Kittler out of hand, then it would certainly seem absurd. But the formula was not arrived at in any simple manner. On the way to this proposition, Kittler has taken us through two centuries of literature in France, England, and Germany, through optics, cybernetics, cinematography, transportation, psychoanalysis, and political science. And this list barely scratches the surface. It seems that the final equation or formula is not what really counts here, for it serves only to demonstrate the complexity of the discourse network that makes possible a single literary phenomenon of 1800, and its undoing by science and technology. Don’t be fooled; this is not an essay about the Double at all; it is a transdisciplinary journey, a careful and selective history on the interface of film and literature.

     

    The Double, then, is a sort of vehicle, or better yet, a portal through which Goethe and Fichte, Jean Paul and Hoffman, Guy de Maupassant and Baudelaire, cross paths with Otto Rank and Freud, Lacan and Foucault, and a legacy of doppelganger film-makers, including Ewers, Lindau, Hauptmann, Wegener, and Wiene. By devising a formula about the simultaneous demise of Literature and the Double, Kittler creates a story and a theory where there are none, leaving behind a distinctive trace (“the mark of the absence of a presence” [Spivak xx]) that we can only call one history of media technology among many–the rest drops “through the filter” of Kittler’s “letters or ideograms” (36). At the end of the story, Kittler is gracious enough to provide a map, just in case we were uncertain, all along, what he was up to:

     

    Without removing traces, traces cannot be gathered;.... In our current century which implements all theories, there are no longer any. That is the uncanniness of its reality.(100)

     

    “Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War”

     

    Step 4: Demonstrate that, not only is your media scene the result of specific historical or scientific conditions, but these conditions are all uncannily related in one way or another. In short, show that "everything is connected."

     

    If we were to return to our initial media scene–the one in which Brigadier Whitehead performs a wartime sound-jam on his rudimentary mixing board–and attempt to apply the steps of Kittler’s method that we have covered thus far, we might find the following observations useful:

     

    Step 1: The Avengers scene we have chosen involves a media anachronism: phonographs and tape recorders in an age of laser technology.

     

    Step 2: Storage technology is essential for solving the mystery of the Brigadier’s murder. The face of detective work is changed forever by devices that can document our every move–and document our deaths as well.

     

    Step 3: Advanced storage technology also changes the face of war by displacing it into a series of tactical strategies based on potential destruction. As the Brigadier’s demise demonstrates, war is now a staged phenomenon, a game of potentialization that can proceed without immediate corporal sacrifice. Indeed, the Brigadier is sacrificed, but at the hands of a laser, the weapon that would power virtual or “cold” warfare. “From Venus With Love” foreshadows a real, laser driven Star Wars.

     

    Step 4: In 1967, IBM released the first beta version of the floppy disk, while in Britain the ISBN numerical cataloguing system for books was introduced. At the time in which our media scene takes place, digital technology and laser reading/writing devices carry the day.

     

    Of course, 1967, the Summer of Love, also marks a time of immersive psychedelia. This brings us to Kittler’s essay on Thomas Pynchon, “Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War.” If the Avengers can have their Brigadier Whitehead, a living anachronism of war and technology, then Pynchon can give us Brigadier Pudding:

     

    Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding--that's for the New Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics... keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful.... Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. (77)

     

    Brigadiers are the products of an outmoded discourse network, destined to fall at the hands of a system of (il)logic beyond their ken. While Brigadier Whitehead narrates his highly orchestrated version of war on analog recording machines, an interloping laser beam–master device of an invisible war and the product of a discourse network of which he is ignorant–brings his instant and unpredictable death. Similarly, when Pynchon’s Brigadier Pudding, an octagenarian soldier, volunteers for “intelligence work” in World War II, he expects to be operating “in concert… with other named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death” (76). What he finds instead, is

     

    a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged itself, to differing degrees of failure. (77)

     

    Much to the dismay of the Brigadier, the mortal combat that used to determine victory has been displaced by a psychotechnological information circus. The Brigadier’s “greatest victory on the battlefield,… in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man’s land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit,” is an outmoded model. In WWII, such battlefield victories could be described as a mere diversion from the real war, a war without heroes on hilltops, a war that can only be won by near-invisible technologies (Pynchon 77). The human “wastage” of combat merely “provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world” (Pynchon 105). “To be sure,” Kittler tells us,

     

    people still believed in dying for their homeland during World War II. But Pynchon, a former Boeing-engineer, makes it clear through precise details that "the enterprise [of] systematic death" (Pynchon 76) "serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War" (Pynchon 105). That is to say, "the real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look that way--but among the different technologies, plastics, electronics, aircraft," and so on. (Pynchon 521; Kittler 102-103)

     

    This war of information management and data delivery (played out mostly in corporate boardrooms today) is discernible behind any media scene that we might conjure up in the twentieth century: “the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange” (Pynchon 258).

     

    Evidently, there is no place in the “newer geometries” of war for hero Brigadiers or chains of command; no place for predictability, sequentiality or even narratability. And the same goes for the newer geometries of literature and criticism as well. The heroic critic or narrator has been rendered impossible by the Death of the Author. Like the Brigadiers in our media scenes, readers of Pynchon who turn the pages in search of a sequential “Chain of Command” will be assailed by a whirling circus of data, an informational jambalaya suitable in a world run by non-sequential technologies. What makes Pynchon an exceptional writer, then, (and certainly not a fiction writer) in Kittler’s eyes, is his expert use of technical data that the War’s end released from secrecy:

     

    the text, as is only the case in historical novels like Salammbo or Antonius, is essentially assembled from documentary sources, many of which--circuit diagrams, differential equations, corporate contracts, and organizational plans--are textualized for the first time. (A fact easily overlooked by literary experts.) (106)

     

    Much to Kittler’s delight, Pynchon is not an Author, but a data delivery agent. His goal is not to provide an entertaining narrative, or some sort of fictional closure, but information, tout court.

     

    Just as Pynchon’s anti-hero, Slothrop, strived endlessly to make sense of the noise and nonsense of war, Pynchon’s readers must devise a way of making sense of the novel itself. We might learn a great deal from the ill-fated Lieutenant Slothrop, who, in the absence of sophisticated “data retrieval” machinery–the only means to “the truth”–is “thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologes, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity” (Pynchon 582). In the absence of all sense, overwhelmed by an onslaught of conflicting information, Slothrop invents his own rules of the game. Kittler astutely identifies this survivalist method of sense-making in the following way: “Slothrop’s paranoia within the novel corresponds precisely to a paranoiac-critical methodology that the novelist could have learned from Dali” (105). Might I suggest that there is a little Dali in Kittler as well?

     

    Through his art and writing, Dali essentially suggested (as any good paranoid would) that everything is meaningful, and that chance encounters should not be ignored as mere co-incidence. According to Dali–and the point hits home in his paintings–even the most seemingly incidental details can be of critical importance in our understanding of an event or object. For Dali, it was (among other things) the juxtaposition of pitchfork and hunched figures in Millet’s Angelus;12 for Pynchon, it was the supposed co-incidence of Slothrop’s erections with the explosion of V2 bombs; for Kittler, we might suggest that it is the “double at his writing desk,” the sigh of Faust, the typewriter in the lap of Mina Harker. In any case, Dali, Slothrop, and Kittler provide us with a method of dealing with information overload. With the Death of the Author, the End of History, and the impossibility of Truth, we might say that we are living in the threat of “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long” (Pynchon 434). The antidote, as Pynchon and Kittler seem to suggest, might be a good dose of critical or perhaps conscious paranoia, a critical methodology of the trace.13 “When the symbolic of signs, numbers and letters determine so-called reality, then gathering the traces becomes the paranoid’s primary duty” (105-106).

     

    “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars” and “The World of the Symbolic–A World of the Machine”

     

    Step 5: Having revealed that "everything is connected," submit your paranoia to reason by showing that "everything is connected" only because: a) the dual apparatus of State/Technology has made the co-incidence possible, and; b) with this power structure in place, we are destined to be the physical and psychological subjects of technologies.

     

    In Lieutenant Slothrop we have the apotheosis of Kittler’s assessment of technology in culture. Not only have the political and material technologies of war crippled Slothrop’s mind with paranoia, they have also turned his body–most specifically, his penis (a cybernetic emblem of the phallic V2 rocket)–into a strategic weapon. In Slothrop, all of Kittler’s theories on technology converge: the subjection of the body and psyche to technology; the development of new technology through war; the control of technology by the State. These are the themes or theses that recur constantly in Kittler’s essays, to the point that they produce a distinct theory, a branch, even, of media studies. Nowhere are these issues more recurrent, or more pervasively explored than in the essays “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars” and “The World of the Symbolic–A World of the Machine.”

     

    In “Media Wars,” Kittler convincingly demonstrates that the strategies of persuasion that defined military success throughout history (war “came into being only when people succeeded in making others die for them” [117]) have been replaced by “technologies of telecommunication and control” (117). The point is clear in the case of Slothrop, and perhaps even more lucid in the case of the ill-fated Brigadier Whitehead. As Foucault’s theories of panopticism have suggested, forces of command are now invisible, and their formal role has been handed over to technology. Technological apparatus and State apparatus are intricately entwined to the point of being indistinguishable. In order to illustrate this point, Kittler offers a brief history of the First and Second World Wars from a media theorist’s point of view. From the storage media of Edison (phonograph and kinetoscope) to the transmission media of Hertz and Marconi (wireless telegraphy, radio), Kittler sets out to prove, in his characteristically reductive fashion, the following equation:

     

    WWI:Storage Media :: WWII:Transmission Media.
     

    His final proof takes the following form: “Technical media have to do neither with intellectuals nor with mass culture. They are strategies of the Real. Storage media were built for the trenches of World War I, transmission media for the lightning strikes of World War II” (129). This leaves WWIII, of course, to the legacy of Alan Turing and modern computation, which has perfected the synchronization of storage and transmission media: “universal computing media for SDI: chu d’un désastre obscur, as Mallarmé would have it, fallen from an obscure disaster” (129).

     

    Once again, Brigadier Whitehead’s demise at the hands of Star Wars technology, “an enemy without a face,” is a perfect case study of storage and transmission media anachronized by a computational désastre obscur. But for a more contemporary illustration of Kittler’s equation (and more in keeping with his commitment to historical detail) we need only turn to the air strikes on Yugoslavia that are taking place as this essay is being written. At the risk of jeopardizing a lasting peace process in Yugoslavia, NATO commanders have thus far decided not to employ ground troops, a move that would surely result in human sacrifice all too reminiscent of Vietnam. Instead, American F/A jets are targeting and destroying, among other things, all radio and television transmitters in Belgrade. The war is not between soldiers, but between advanced technologies of communication: Yugoslav Power Stations (Transmission Media) vs. invisible B-52 bombers and intelligent cruise missiles (Computation Media).

     

    More than anything else, the bombing demonstrates the technological difference between this war and the Vietnam War, to which it is being repeatedly compared. While the B-52s continue their destruction of television transmitters–the technology that was truly responsible for making a tragedy of Vietnam–they have proved almost useless against a more recent media technology, the Internet. Just when William Cohen thought that the Central Nervous System of Yugoslavia had been disabled, neurons started firing in the form of e-mail and Web pages. For every B-52 gun camera that fails to provide evidence of civilian suffering in Belgrade at the hands of NATO, a Yugoslav e-mail message or Web page leaves traces of misery, affliction, and betrayal.14 If Vietnam was a TV war, this is an Internet war. The Yugoslav’s use of the Web and e-mail as weapons against the U.S. is extremely ironic, of course, considering the origins of the Internet. John Johnston explains these origins in his Introduction to Kittler’s essays:

     

    Thanks to the military need for a communications system that could survive nuclear detonations, today we have fiber optic cables and a new medium called the Internet, which, as is widely known, grew out of ARPANET, a decentralized control network for intercontinental ballistic missiles. (5)

     

    By launching an Internet counter-attack, the Belgradians are actually on a technological par with NATO. Unfortunately, bombs are more persuasive than words and digital images. The electronic traces of unsettled civilians will cease to be produced when all power sources have been destroyed in Belgrade. The moment that happens, the e-mail and Web attacks will be no more–except on hard drives, where they will exist as electronic monuments of civilian distress. This freezing is, in effect, NATO’s goal: to incapacitate the technologies of transmission in Yugoslavia, leaving them to deplete the only remaining technology of war, that of storage. Faced with a technologically dominant opponent, the only survival option for Belgradians–remnants of an obsolete war technology–is storage: entrenchment or monumentality. If only such immobilization could have been inflicted on Vietnam, or Iraq, for that matter….

     

    Of course, from a Kittlerian perspective, the very notion of “monumentality” as an option for survival begs questioning, or at least complexification. Human memory may be just another media effect, the remainder of past technologies doomed to extinction by advancements in computation, storage, and transmission. This anachronism is, according to Kittler, one of the great secrets of a self-deluding humanity: “That books, mnemotechnologies, and machine memories exist, must naturally be kept a secret, so long as memory is a quality or even a property ‘of man’…. In the name of the analphabets, the confusion between the people and the memory banks in which they land must come to an end” (“Vergessen” 111). What matters for Kittler, however, is not that we are losing our memory or our minds, but that the very notions of mind and memory have been profoundly transformed by media technologies, to the extent that “it is already clear that humanity could not have invented information machines, but to the contrary, is their subject” (143).

     

    This message, as we have already seen, was delivered rather forebodingly by Jacques Lacan, several decades before Kittler, when he told his students that they were already “the subjects of all types of gadgets” (143). But leave it to Kittler to uncover the trace of Lacan’s own subjection to gadgets, a trace that is exposed at the heart of Lacan’s theories. Kittler distinguishes between the theory of Freud and that of Lacan by pointing to the technological conditions that surrounded them. Since Freud was a subject of the telephone, film, phonograph and print, it makes sense, from a Kittlerian perspective, that his pre-computer psychological theories are rooted only in “the strict separation of transmission and storage functions,” or the separation of memory and consciousness (133). In Kittler’s terms,

     

    Freud's materialism reasoned only as far as the information machines of his era--no more, no less. Rather than continuing to dream of the Spirit as origin, he described a "psychic apparatus" (Freud's wonderful word choice) that implemented all available transmission and storage media, in other words, an apparatus just short of the technical medium of universal-calculation, or the computer. (134)

     

    The development of a computer-oriented psychology would have to wait, of course, until Jacques Lacan, who constructs the psychic apparatus not only out of storage and transmission media, but also out of computation. And hence, “nothing else is signified,” Kittler insists, “by Lacan’s ‘methodological distinction’ of the imaginary, the real and the symbolic” (135).

     

    Kittler equates the “symbolic” to computational media because it demonstrates a certain switching capability (in the digital, technical sense) of the psychic apparatus:

     

    Tombstones, the oldest cultural symbols, remain with the corpse; dice remain on their side after the toss; only the door, or 'gate' in technical slang, permits symbols "to fly with their own winds," that is, to control presence and absence, high and low, 1 and 0, so that the one can react to the other--sequential circuit mechanism, digital feedback. (143)

     

    Lacan’s “endless chain of signifiers” corresponds, not co-incidentally, to the data-processing activity of computer circuits. And the Symbolic, like the “gates” or ports on a computer, regulates the flow of the circuits.15The “discourse of the other” may therefore be renamed as the “discourse of the circuit” (135).

     

    Considering the uncanny human/machine interfacing that betrays itself in Lacan’s theories, we should not be surprised, Kittler writes, “that Lacan forbid himself from talking about language with people who did not understand cybernetics” (145). This may sound like theoretical closed-mindedness–the type that makes Luddites of some of the finest scholars. Then again, perhaps closed-mindedness is not the proper word, for Lacan is calling for an interlocutor who is versed in more than one area of specialization, and who is open to the possibility of a transdisciplinary science. Perhaps we should call it snobbery or idealism, then, for Lacan’s demands on his interlocutors are somewhat unrealistic, and based on his own desires and modes of understanding. In any case, this particular attitude, the words for which have apparently evaded me here, characterize the two final essays in Kittler’s collection.

     

    “There Is No Software” and “Protected Mode”

     

    Step 6: Having successfully practiced, and hopefully re-invented, the Kittlerian Method of Media Criticism, use your method to develop a project that aims to increase our awareness and understanding of the materialities of communication.

     

    Since, as you must agree by now, everything is connected after all, it only makes sense to point out the uncanny co-incidence (?) of the computing term “gates” (portals which regulate all circuit flow), and the name most associated with computing today, William H. Gates. Consider this man/machine coincidence as a nodal point through which many discourses pass, including Kittler’s discourse on computer hardware, and the current Microsoft antitrust trial that accuses Gates of masterminding a media monopoly. Such a monopoly, as Kittler would gladly make clear, involves more than a few icons on a computer screen; it involves the shaping of our psychic apparatus, the regulation of human communications, and the fashioning of educational institutions, political regimes, and military arsenals. Perhaps it is for this reason that William S. Cohen has been seen networking with the Microserfs in Silicon Valley. In a recent recruitment visit to the Microsoft HQ, Cohen emphasized “the military’s role in insuring global stability that allowed companies like Microsoft to prosper” (Myers A15). Gates, on the other hand, “noted that the Defense Department was Microsoft’s largest client and discussed ways the two could do even more business together in the future” (Myers A15). The irony of this catch-22 media scene is best captured, however, by a programmer who explains why she turned down a career in the military: “The Navy kept sending me letters when I was in school, offering scholarships…. But I thought, Why would I want to give up my life when I could be creating new technology?” (Myers A15). The postmodern soldier is alive and well in Silicon Valley.

     

    Those who are able to perceive an immense political network behind the Windows interface have no problem understanding Kittler’s turbulent tone in “There Is No Software.” This essay becomes all the more clear in light of the Microsoft trial, because it deals with the level of control that a computer operator possesses over the machine. In what Kittler calls a “system of secrecy,” computer and software designers have intentionally “hidden” the technology from those who use the machines:

     

    First, on an intentionally superficial level, perfect graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hid a whole machine from its users. Second, on the microscopic level of hardware, so-called protection software has been implemented in order to prevent "untrusted programs" or "untrusted users" from any access to the operating system's kernel and input/output channels. (150)

     

    All these levels of secrecy, Kittler explains, are designed to prevent the operator from really understanding media. We might know how to launch Microsoft Word and type up an essay with graphics, tables, and elaborate fonts, but, with each stroke of the keyboard or click of the mouse, do we realize what’s happening in the discourse networks of the purring, putty-colored box? This ignorance, according to Kittler, leaves us open to manipulation of the highest order. With characteristic bluntness, the final essay of Kittler’s book suggests that under the current technological conditions, “one writes–the ‘under’ says it already–as a subject or underling of the Microsoft Corporation” (156).

     

    In response to Microsoft, IBM et al., who insure that technologies are “explicitly contrived to evade perception,” Kittler makes the bold pronouncement that “There Is No Software.” This is at once a rhetorical provocation to the computer corporations, and a wake-up call for those who fail to see the man behind the curtain, or the circuits behind the fruit-colored shell that Apple has recently developed in an attempt to make us “Think Different.”16 There is no software because, no matter how user-friendly an interface might be, the “hardware continues to do all of the work” (158). The Microsoft antitrust case exists only because of Microsoft’s ongoing objective of completely hiding the machine behind a single unified graphical interface. Drawing on Mick Jagger, Kittler notes that “instead of what he wants, the user always only gets what he needs (according to the industry standard, that is)” (162).

     

    Neither Microsoft Windows nor the chips that really make it work–chips secured by Intel’s “protected mode”–can be reprogrammed or rewired to suit the needs of the computer operator. But then, who wants to do reprogramming anyhow? In an ironic, accidental (?) response to Kittler’s use of Mick Jagger, a recent ad campaign by Apple uses the Stones song “She’s a Rainbow” to promote the fashionable multichromatic appearance of the new iMac. Superficiality, it seems, is what the user really wants.

     

    Microsoft’s success in the trial, and as a business, hinges on the following hypothetical question: Do people really want to see behind the curtain? To my knowledge, the average computer-user, let alone “literary critic” (as Kittler repeatedly labels himself) does not like to unwind in the Kittlerian fashion: “at night after I had finished writing, I used to pick up the soldering iron and build circuits” (Griffin, “Interview” 731). But if we accept Kittler’s understanding of the relationship between media technologies, government, and the military, then the question about what’s “behind the curtain” becomes increasingly pressing, and it applies to more than software monopolies and circuits in “protected mode.” “It is a reasonable assumption,” writes Kittler, “to analyze the privilege levels of a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy that ordered its design and called for its mass application” (162). In short, Kittler suggests that power systems can be traced within the circuits of a computer chip. And so, those who follow Foucault’s legacy of analyzing such systems might benefit from abandoning “the usual practice of conceiving of power as a function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to construct sociology from the chip’s architectures”(162). Maybe we should take a closer look, then, at those digital pets on our laps and desks. In the least, we should start paying more attention to the materialities of communication.

     

    Conclusions and Beginnings

     

    As impressive as Kittler’s ability to “see a landscape in a bean”17 may be, we cannot expect the average computer user to pull the Pentium chip out of his/her C.P.U. and examine it for traces of fascism. In the same way, we can’t expect Kittler’s version of media criticism to remedy the “blind spot” of poststructuralism by turning critics into computer geeks (I suggest we take a grain of salt with his suggestion that students of cultural studies “should at least know some arithmetic, the integral function, the sine function,.. [and] at least two software languages” [Griffin, “Interview” 740]). What we might expect, however, is for Kittler’s work to incite a campaign of awareness that, if properly disseminated, might make us more cognizant of the networks of power and discourse that intersect on our media scenes. And by integrating not just “literary texts,” but any cultural phenomena, into our projects, then we can direct our work toward intervention on a social and technological level.

     

    The point here is not to create a Kittlerian cult, or to suggest that Kittler’s methods should be applied as the universal decryption key of cultural studies or literary criticism. In fact, I willingly admit that the 6 Steps described in this instruction manual essay hardly provide an accurate or comprehensive evaluation of Kittler’s critical methodology. All I have done is attempted to extract a working set of instructions out of Kittler’s imposing data banks. I have attempted to develop a mode of writing more suitable to, and aware of, our digital-oriented discourse network. What Kittler, as “structural engineer,” teaches us is to view texts and theories as complex discursive networks from which certain key components may be drawn out and soldered onto others like circuits on a motherboard. His role as a critic has less to do with archiving, transcription, and commentary (the duties of a critic of 1800 and 1900) than it does with programming, design, and invention: activities of intervention.

     

    To sum up, Kittler gathers code from Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, et. al. and sets it to work on the cultural cryptography of Goethe, Pynchon, et al. In the same way, we might draw on Kittler in order to program our own critical projects on the materialities of communication. Like circuit-tinkerers and the proponents of open source software, media critics might benefit from dissecting and reprogramming their own user interface, i.e., the conventional scholarly publication. We might not not end up with a new programming language to rival Microsoft DOS, but perhaps we’ll invent a more effective and interventional method for conducting research from inside the Discourse Network 2000–whatever that may turn out to be.18

     

    Notes

     

    1. In the first line of Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler suggests that “German Poetry begins with a sigh,” Faust’s sigh, that is (3). This provides him with a primal scene from which to discuss the discourse network of 1800.

     

    2. Unless indicated otherwise, citations of Kittler are drawn from the essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems.

     

    3. Foucault’s influence on Kittler is profound and pervasive, and Kittler is quick to admit this legacy. Among all discourse analysts, Foucault is the most important to Kittler “because he was the most historical” (Griffin, Interview 734). Whereas Derrida, Lacan, etc. tend to emphasize the instability of the sign, Foucault rarely abandons his archaeological digging to muse upon the shapes of the words at the surface. This devotion to the complex historicity of discourse is, according to Kittler, why Foucault is “the best to use and carry over into other fields…. [He] offers so many concrete methodologies and leaves so many historical fields open that there are endless amounts of work one can do with him” (Griffin, Interview 739).

     

    4. In spite of the flurry of rumors that surrounded the incident, Timothy Leary’s death was not simulcast on the Internet. Leary had proposed the broadcast, but resolved instead to videotape his last moments. The footage has never been shown publicly. From America’s Funniest Home Videos to the recent television broadcast of Thomas Youk’s lethal injection by Jack Kevorkian, one could easily compile a lengthy catalog of media scenes that document our contemporary obsession with cataloguing and archiving anything and everything.

     

    5. In reference to Discourse Networks 1800/1900, David Wellbery notes that Kittler’s book “presupposes post-structuralist thought, makes that thought the operating equipment, the hardware, with which it sets out to accomplish its own research program. In Discourse Networks, post-structuralism becomes a working vocabulary, a set of instruments productive of knowledge” (vii).

     

    6. As far as poststructural methodologies, Kittler prefers the rigor and simplicity of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory over the playfulness of Derrida’s grammatology. Luhmann, says Kittler, “doesn’t make a philosophical mountain out of a molehill, unlike Derrida who, with every sentence he writes, wants to have his cake and eat it” (Griffin, Interview 733).

     

    7. See Bruce Bliven, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random House, 1954).

     

    8. In his Preface to Literature, Media, Information Systems, Saul Ostrow notes that “Kittler is not stimulated by the notion that we are becoming cyborgs, but instead by the subtler issues of how we conceptually become reflections of our information systems” (x).

     

    9. One could argue that since Donna Harraway’s important and extensive study of the topic, there has been an inordinate abundance of cyborg theory in bookstores and at conferences. This has all led to a predictable formula regarding the human/machine interface and our increasing mechanization at the hands of computers, virtual reality and global networks.

     

    10. See Thomas Sebastian, “Technology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900,” MLN5: 3 (1990): 583-595, and Virginia L. Lewis, “A German Poststructuralist,” PLL 28:1 (1992): 100-106.

     

    11. This reference to “media histories” consciously echoes the title of Matthew Griffin’s excellent essay on Kittler, entitled “Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler’s Media Histories.” Like media scenes, the conspicuous plurality of Griffin’s title attempts to capture the complexity of Kittler’s historical, critical and theoretical methodology.

     

    12. I am explicitly referring, here, to The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation (St. Petersburg: The Salvador Dali Museum, 1986). Robert Ray refers to this text in The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (pp.79-80), where he gives an excellent account of how Dali’s method may be used in contemporary film criticism.

     

    13. In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, Robert Ray offers just such a methodology in the form of a classroom exercise that relies on accident and coincidence. The exercise is partly motivated by this proposition: “The [film] shot results from photography (Godard: ‘Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second’), and thus it will inevitably offer… accidental details (Barthes’s ‘Third Meaning’)” (83). This filmic version of the truth (truth equals accident or contingency) is a good antidote to Kittler’s contention that “film-goers are the victims… of a semiotechnology that deludes them into seeing a coherent and causal life story where there are only snapshots and flash bulbs” (112). The majority of film-goers, however, seem to prefer the comfort of delusion over the responsibility of organizing a series of contingencies.

     

    14. At the time this essay was written, pro-Yugoslav Web sites documenting the demise of civilians at the hands (bombs) of NATO were available at the following URL’s, among others: <http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/email/>; <http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/related.sites/>; <http://www.beograd.com>.

     

    15. Lacan’s L-Schema provides an excellent pictorial rendering of the psychic apparatus as circuit. In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Kraus offers an insightful discussion of Lacan’s model, and applies it to a critique of modern visualization.

     

    16. The ironic motto “Think Different” was the crux of Apple’s advertising campaign in their 1998-99 push to compete with Microsoft’s ability to homogenize a generation of computer users. In essence, Apple managed to hide the machine from the user many years ago, but their lack of a Gates-like marketing savvy made homogenization unattainable. Interestingly, there has been a recent backlash against all the secrecy, which is manifesting itself in the growing popularity of open source software such as Linux. Open source software gives operators a greater degree of control over the interface and general functionality of their computer systems. According to the non-profit organization NetAction, “the most basic definition of open source software is software for which the source code is distributed along with the executable program, and which includes a license allowing anyone to modify and redistribute the software” (<http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/oss-whatis.html>).

     

    17. In the opening sentence of S/Z, a text which demonstrates Barthes’s prowess as a builder of codes, he makes reference to “certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean” (3). Although he uses the example to dismiss the idea of applying a single structure to explain all narrative, the Buddhist practice aptly describes Barthes’s own use of myth to decode all of French culture. Barthes’s Mythologies might certainly be considered as precursors to Kittler’s writerly production of media scenes.

     

    18. In his interview with Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, Kittler reveals his opinion on the Discourse Network 2000: “Everyone wants to know what the discourse network 2000 looks like? I’m not in such a hurry, besides it can’t be written” (736). I would suggest that Kittler, unwittingly or not, is writing the discourse network 2000.

    Works Cited

     

    • Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
    • “From Venus With Love.” The Avengers. Dir. Roy Baker. Perf. Diana Rigg, Patrick Macnee, Philip Locke, and John Pertwee. Canal+, 1963.
    • Griffin, Matthew. “Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich Kittler’s Media Histories. New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 709-716.
    • — and Susanne Herrmann. “Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler. New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 731-742.
    • Johnston, John. “Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory After Poststructuralism.” Introduction. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
    • Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
    • —. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
    • —. “Vergessen.” Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 3 (1981): 88-121.
    • Myers, Steven Lee. “In Added Role, Pentagon Chief Is Traveling Salesman.” New York Times. 19 February, 1999, natl. ed.: A15
    • Ostrow, Sal. Preface. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. By Friedrich Kittler. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
    • Ray, Robert. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
    • Spivak, Gayatri. “Translator’s Preface.” Of Grammatology. By Jacques Derrida. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
    • Wellbery, David E. Forward. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. By Friedrich Kittler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.

     

  • Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of Social Redemption in James Cameron’s Titanic

    Patrick McGee

    Department of English
    Louisiana State University
    pmcgee@gateway.net

     

    Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

     

    –Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

     

    The epigraph above comes from the last paragraph of Benjamin’s celebrated essay on the movies. Writing on the culture industry some years later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno implied that movies could not be true works of art because the latter “are ascetic and unashamed” while “the culture industry is pornographic and prudish” (Dialectic 140). Benjamin took the more radical stand that the term “work of art” has no essential meaning; and concerning the “futile thought” that “had been devoted to the question of whether photography [or film] is an art,” he observed that the more significant question had to do with whether such inventions “had not transformed the entire nature of art” (Illuminations 227). He suggested that the work of art has only historical meaning and then proceeded to describe what constitutes the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Still, when he described “the shriveling of the aura” in the traditional work of art, he also recognized “the phony smell of the commodity” produced by the money of the film industry. He concluded that “[s]o long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art.” Benjamin was particularly disgusted by the “cult of the movie star,” which remains central to Hollywood’s promotional strategies. Nonetheless, Benjamin recognized that “in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property” (Illuminations 231). One would like to know exactly which films Benjamin had in mind, but I think it is necessary to grasp the implications of his theory of aesthetic history beyond what may have been his own aesthetic preferences in the field of cinematic art. If traditional concepts of the work of art have been called into question by the movies, then it follows that we cannot prejudge what constitutes “aesthetic value” or a “revolutionary criticism of social conditions” in the cinema. Though we should examine the function of capital in the production of cinematic art, it may also be necessary to see capital as one of the historical conditions of the age of mechanical reproduction that makes revolutionary criticism in the cinema possible. Benjamin developed the concept of the dialectical image to explain the revolutionary potential of the commodity in historical time and used this concept to analyze the revolutionary effect of a historical perception of the Paris arcades. This essay attempts to explore contemporary mass-cultural work from a similar perspective.

     

    When in the epigraph Benjamin refers to the aesthetic pleasure that the masses take from witnessing their own destruction, however, he is not talking about the movies per se but about politics, which by the 1930s in Germany and elsewhere had become almost as spectacular, almost as much of a show, as the movies. In particular, he addresses the most brutal form of politics and yet the form that lends itself most readily to the investments of aesthetic techniques and values–war. The “property system,” as Benjamin names the social arrangements of capitalist society, has impeded “the natural utilization of productive forces” that have been released by technology in the modern world; and, as a result, these forces press for an “unnatural utilization.” For example, the futurist Marinetti, one of Mussolini’s backers, expected a new art “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense of perception that has been changed by technology” (Illuminations 242). These are the material conditions not only of fascism but of the more general society of the spectacle that has been said to characterize virtually all societies in which “modern conditions of production prevail” (Debord 12). In response to the fascism that he saw aestheticizing politics in the thirties, Benjamin wanted a form of communism or historical materialism that would politicize art. This critical response to fascism in 1936 can also be applied to postmodern versions of imperialistic war, the aesthetics of which was revealed by the television coverage of the Gulf War in the 1990s. Benjamin implicitly understood that we do not seriously challenge the aesthetics of war and social domination in the society of the spectacle by retreating into tradition and the religious cult of the autonomous work of art. In the movies as one of the epitomes of mass culture, he saw a manifestation of a new kind of social perception that destroys “the traditional value of the cultural heritage,” or the “aura” (Illuminations 221). Though “the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved… [exclusively] by contemplation,” they can be “mastered gradually by habit.” The movies require “[r]eception in a state of distraction” that can inculcate habits of visual perception and feeling that could lead to acts of social transformation. Since individuals avoid the tasks of social change because they are painful even to contemplate, “art [in the age of mechanical reproduction] will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses.” The recession of the cult value of art, its aura, has put “the public in the position of the critic,” concludes Benjamin (Illuminations 240). Art is no longer “for the happy few.” The task of the professional critic is to politicize mass culture by articulating the possible meanings that can be derived from its distracted critical reception–to unfold, in other words, the unconscious political discourse of the masses.

     

    I. True Lies

     

    James Cameron’s Titanic may be called by some a work of genius and by others an assemblage of cheap thrills and romance, but in either case it is a pure product of mass culture–in fact, it is what I would call, with some degree of irony, the masterpiece of mass culture. Several reviewers have commented that, despite the visual power of the movie, the dialogue is often trite and cliché-ridden; and one could add to these criticisms the obvious fact that the plot consists of two central components that are cinematic clichés: the disaster formula (of which the sinking of the Titanic is the classic example, for the great ship has sunk on movie and television screens over and over again throughout this century) and the romance between rich girl and poor boy. In this age of gender studies and queer theory, there are no surprises in this movie, no challenges to the dominance of heterosexuality; and any gestures toward feminism are of the safe variety that have become commonplace in popular movies, including several of Cameron’s earlier action dramas. Titanic is not a departure from Cameron’s earlier work but its culmination. I will not be suggesting that everything in the movie can be reduced to the author’s intention as auteur, but clearly Cameron is the central figure behind the choreographies of violence in The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), The Terminator 2 (1991), and True Lies (1994). Still, Titanic is not strictly Cameron’s masterpiece, in the auteurist sense, because its power derives from mass culture and from a history of images that can be discovered only in retrospect. Through its evocation of the truth of the capitalist social structure, it reveals those indestructible desires that may be the only force that keeps the world from becoming the slave ship of capital accumulation.

     

    The movie is also an interpretive moment within the history of mass culture, and of Hollywood films as exemplary products of mass culture. It discloses the dialectical meaning of the images in a kind of film that has come to be one of the dominant products of the Hollywood film industry since the mid-sixties. Loosely, this kind of film has been called the “action” movie, though this term takes on a different sense from what it had before the mid-sixties, when it referred merely to westerns, war films and other movies involving some physical action. Since that time, this kind of movie has become more than a genre because it incorporates other genres into its structure. Science fiction, horror, mystery thrillers, disaster movies, crime dramas, westerns, and (in Cameron’s hands, not only in Titanic but in The Abyss, True Lies, and, to some extent, the original version of The Terminator) the passionate love story–all of these traditional film genres have tended to be absorbed into the structure of the action movie. Though the ground for this supergenre was carefully prepared by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, John Boorman’s 1967 movie Point Blank may have been the groundbreaking film that exposed the possibility of action as the pure object of cinematic representation. One of the characteristics of this movie is that the plot remains relatively unmotivated. Although the film begins with some enigmatic allusions to the background of the central character, to his involvement in a crime and his betrayal by another criminal, the revenge motif that seems to drive the action is never adequate to the action itself. The character played by Lee Marvin seems to want the money he was cheated out of more than revenge; so he goes on killing everyone who gets in his way even after he has killed the man who betrayed him; and, at the end of the film, it turns out that he has been killing the enemies of another man who mysteriously directs his actions and who actually holds the money he seeks. He never gets the money; but the implication is that the violence will continue until there is no longer anyone left to kill, anyone left to betray or to be betrayed by, anyone who can withhold the money that is the ruling object of desire in capitalist culture. The title of the movie refers not only to the Marvin character’s tendency to shoot people point blank without hesitation or remorse but to the film’s representation of violence without moral rationalization or justification. It violates the expected sensibility of its audience point blank; and, as I recall, that is how it was advertised at the time of its release. Though Lee Marvin’s character still seems human, he acts out the drive toward destruction that will later find embodiment in Cameron’s terminators. He represents the death drive of capitalist culture; and the movie itself exploits that drive as the essence of its own commodity status, of the pleasure it offers to an audience that shows itself to be hungry for images of destruction as the embodiment of its deepest social longings. This kind of action movie has become an international hit and has found some of its most sophisticated practitioners in Hong Kong, Latin America, and Europe. It embraces crime thrillers like Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972) and Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), as well as disaster films like Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). More recent and more conservative examples include John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994), and Kathryn Bigelow’s witty Point Break (1991).

     

    Since the mid-eighties, James Cameron has been one of the more successful of the action movie-makers. The two early films, The Terminator and Aliens, have a self-conscious “B-movie” look that flies in the face of the effort at detailed authenticity that characterizes films like Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). The first Terminator implicitly undermines the quest for human authenticity that lies problematically at the center of Blade Runner in both of its versions. Cameron’s machines are not simply anti-human or the creations of humans: they are the embodiment of the death drive, the end and spirit of capitalist civilization. At one point, the roommate of Sara Connor plays back her answering machine, which contains the message that “machines need love too.” The meaning of this line only takes on its real significance in Cameron’s later movies, but already in the first Terminator it is clear that the human is a simulacrum.

     

    In the future, where humans must struggle to survive the world of machines they have created, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) falls in love with a woman’s picture (Linda Hamilton as Sara Connor) and eventually, as he says, comes across time to meet the object of his desire. This is a postmodern love affair in which every reality is virtual and many possible futures can be substituted for one another through the slightest adjustment of the present. The B-movie texture of this Terminator foregrounds the constructed nature of the characters and of the terminator as the embodiment of the drive (see Zizek 22). The latter is not evil in itself but expresses the evil of instrumental reason that has come to substitute means for the goal of human rationality. He can’t be stopped by humans because he embodies their own darkest wish for the end of civilization. The only thing that can redeem the drive is love–I don’t mean love in the romantic sense, however, but a passionate desire that can transform the image of the past (Sara Connor, in this case) into the hope of the future. Sara Connor becomes what Benjamin would call a dialectical image, which, according to John McCole, is “one that results from the reciprocal relationship between two discrete historical moments” (249). Such an image is fleeting because it emerges from the rupture of temporal continuity that brings the present into the past and the past into the present. In the first Terminator, the past and the future coincide in the present: for Kyle, Sara Connor is the past; for Sara, Kyle is the future; but as the film announces at the very outset, the battle is fought in the present, the now. In my view, the meaning of the action movie, the effect that distinguishes it from other films that deploy violence such as the Bond movies, is the rupture of time, the subjection of the past and the future to a fleeting present, which “loads time into itself until the energies generated by the dialectic of recognition produce an irruption of discontinuity” (McCole 249). Although not all action movies play with time in the same way as the first Terminator, they always produce an image of human history as disruptive violence that contracts linear time into the time of the now or messianic time, from which can emerge the hope for apocalyptic social change.

     

    In my view, Aliens foregrounds the same apocalyptic desire, which is why it is less a sequel to Scott’s original Alien than to the first Terminator. Once again, even though Cameron had the budget to create a different look, he chooses to foreground the B-movie image, and thus to insist on the simulated nature of reality. No longer, as in Scott’s movie, do we have frail human flesh at war with the unthinkable phallic beast; on the contrary, the marines and a transformed Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) are almost as tough as the aliens themselves, who seem to embody the desire for self-destruction that could be the essence of postmodern culture. The real villain is not the alien culture that simply mirrors human desire but the representative of the capitalist drive for the accumulation of wealth. Burke (Paul Reiser) wants to transform the alien into a commodity; but Ripley instinctively knows that it is her own nature that she must confront in the final battle with the alien mother, her own simulated desire to be other. Like Kyle, Ripley has also crossed time, but hers isn’t a jump from the future to the past but from the past to the future. She has been suspended in space and time for fifty years and comes out of hibernation to learn (in one version of the film) that her own daughter has aged and died. She goes back to the place of her original confrontation with the alien because what has to be confronted is the image of her own desire for self-destruction. The object of that desire doesn’t become clear, however, until the final confrontation. First, Ripley’s own socially-determined maternal drive requires her to go back into the aliens’ nest in order to save the girl who has become the daughter she has lost; and, second, without taking anything away from the love she feels for the girl, this maternal drive, when she sees it embodied in the mother of the aliens as what Barbara Creed would call the “monstrous-feminine,” is precisely the image of her own identity and sexual nature that must be destroyed if she is to be liberated from the alienation of her own body, if she is to sustain the hope of ever creating a new body beyond gender oppression, a new woman. Finally, in order to defeat the alien image of the maternal body, she must become a machine, a kind of cyborg, after she crawls inside the robotic fork lift. In this battle with the alien mother on the spacecraft, the real cyborg (Lance Henriksen) turns out to be an ally because in Cameron’s simulacrum of the world everyone is already a simulacrum, or artificial person, who must confront the dark aim of the desire for death and what this desire signifies, the hope that there could be a different world, a different future.

     

    The second Terminator, which I will refer to as Judgment Day, comes after Cameron made the transition from the B-movie look in standard screen ratio (1.85:1) to the 70mm blow-up (2.2:1). He made this transition in The Abyss, which in some ways is a rehearsal for Titanic. While the scenes of the future war between men and machines in Judgment Day still have something of a B-movie look, the visual construction of this film is quite different. Though he is no Nicholas Ray or Stanley Kubrick, Cameron uses the widescreen effectively to enhance the apocalyptic tone of the film, particularly in the dream sequences in which Sara Connor stares through a cyclone fence into a playground full of children at the exact moment when a nuclear weapon goes off in downtown Los Angeles. The wider screen gives the images a greater depth and also, in my view, tends to create in the audience the feeling of being enveloped by the action that the film depicts. Although Cameron’s movies depend on fast, rhythmic continuity editing, the dream sequences allow him to introduce more intellectual editing into his work. Thus, where the first Terminator is more about tearing apart the fabric of linear time through passionate desire, Judgment Day explores temporal disruption as the threat of catastrophe that ironically opens up the historical process to the possibility of revision and redirection through direct human intervention. The meaning of the human, however, is one of the aspects of history that undergoes serious revision. If the first Terminator embodied the death drive, his avatar (T800) in Judgment Day undergoes a process of humanization that suggests the historical nature of what we call the human. The death drive that brings humanity closer and closer to the Judgment Day of self-destruction can be revised and redirected because it is not ultimately even the desire for death but the desire for what Jacques Lacan calls the Thing, something that we can never name and can only articulate by positing a goal or end as its substitute or representation. The desire for the Thing enables us to transform the death drive into a creative act of social transformation. In Judgment Day, no one crosses time for love, as in the first Terminator; but love is nevertheless the final result of crossing time because in the characters of Sara Connor and her son, John, human beings finally learn how to love the machine, the terminator, which is to say, the drive that can be redeemed by social desire. The terminator’s reappearance and the crisis of an approaching catastrophe bring about a temporal rupture that makes it possible to make up history as we go along, as Linda Hamilton’s Sara comments in a voice-over at one point. According to Benjamin, “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now” (Illuminations 261). The presence of the now, or messianic time, is what the action movie has always explored as the real meaning of history, as the effect of the dialectical image it produces on the cinematic screen. In the time of the now, as the message of the future to the past suggests, “The future is not set; there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” By learning to love the machine, we learn to love ourselves and to make ourselves into the machine that can sacrifice its drive–that is to say, its life–in order to transform its history into a narrative of hope.

     

    Before Titanic, The Abyss is Cameron’s most explicit love story in which intense action sequences and scenes that entail incredible alternations between life and death (i.e., characters die, either literally or figuratively, and then come back to life) are substituted for sex. It is also the movie whose history illustrates the problems a director like Cameron encounters in trying to produce his almost Blakean vision of the postmodern world in the framework of mass culture. There are two or more versions of Judgment Day; but I don’t find the special editions to be significantly different from the originally released version. The second version of The Abyss, originally released on laserdisc and videotape, is almost a different movie. The first half of the movie develops much more slowly and offers a more complex view of the relationship between the central couple, Bud and Lindsey Brigman (Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). They are in the process of getting a divorce largely for reasons of career or, if you will, a conflict between the different goals of their separate life histories. In other words, they embody the typical bourgeois couple of a postmodern patriarchy in which the authority of the male is gradually losing ground. Bud tries to assert his authority by reminding Lindsey that her last name is the same as his, but she quickly dispels any illusion he may have about that. Whereas the first version of The Abyss leaves it at that, the second version makes it clear that Lindsey has already had a relationship with another man, though it seems to have come to an end. Ironically, the second version is more male-centered, more focused on the crisis of masculinity; and at least one female member of the crew of the deep-sea rig expresses her loyalty to Bud and criticizes Lindsey. In a way that anticipates the structure of Titanic, these ordinary social relations are transformed by a series of catastrophes that rupture normal time. After a nuclear submarine encounters an anomalous submerged entity and crashes, a unit of Navy seals is sent to the deep-sea rig to use it as a stepping-off point for examining the damage to the submarine. Various miscalculations during a hurricane cause the deep-sea rig to lose its lifeline to the surface. The leader of the seals (Michael Biehn) develops symptoms of paranoia due to high-pressure syndrome after retrieving a nuclear warhead from the submarine. Meanwhile, Lindsey and another crew member witness an underwater entity that appears to be an intelligent alien life-form. The paranoid seal intends to destroy the aliens with the nuclear device, which leads to the most intense action sequences in the film. In the process, Lindsey drowns and is revived, and Bud employs a special breathing fluid to dive to the bottom of a three-mile abyss in order to dismantle the nuclear warhead. At one point, Lindsey and the crew think Bud is dead when in fact he has been carried into the submerged city of the aliens.

     

    When I first saw this movie, I was mesmerized by the underwater sequences, although I thought the plot and visual style resembled that of a comic-book. Nonetheless, as in all of Cameron’s movies, the acting was energetic enough to make the unbelievable believable, or at least, in my case, to enable me to suspend disbelief. The one effect that really did not seem to work were the aliens, who look like humanoid jellyfish, and their angelic underwater machines. In the second version, however, the machines somehow make more sense to me because their allegorical functions within the plot are more obvious. Cameron employs the style of cinematic realism to develop the relationship between the central characters, but his disruption of space and time by locating the story under the sea during a catastrophe transforms reality into allegory that makes the aliens into the angelic machines who give the story its constructed meaning. In the second version, as the masters of some miraculous water technology, they produce a global tidal wave that reaches to the edge of every major city and then stops. Their purpose is to teach human beings a lesson about the appropriate use of technology before mankind destroys itself in a nuclear war and winter. In the context of Cameron’s ongoing exploration of humanity as a machine that has to make itself human by directly intervening in the historical process, these angelic machines (for it is almost impossible to distinguish the aliens themselves from the machines they make) seem to allegorize the utopian possibility of what a human being could become. They manifest what Susan Buck-Morss, in a reading of Benjamin, sees as the “very essence of socialist culture”: “the tendency… to fuse art and technology, fantasy and function, meaningful symbol and useful tool” (125-26). Such a socialism, in the present context, must be a utopian image; but the poetics of mass culture in Cameron’s movies suggests this very fusion as the real possibility of the contemporary culture industry to emancipate, in Benjamin’s own words, “the creative forms… from art, just as in the sixteenth century the sciences liberated themselves from philosophy” (qtd. in Buck-Morss 125). The Abyss concludes with a deus ex machina in which the aliens inexplicably succeed in doing what God or the gods have consistently failed to do: they save mankind not so much through the suspension of nature as through its recreation by technology that has been liberated from the domination of capital.

     

    The second version of the film begins with a quote from Nietzsche: “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks also into you.” In these movies, the abyss is messianic time in which the real structure of history is revealed as the self-creation of the collective human subject. What looks back from the abyss is what humanity ought to be–not some ideal humanity but one that has learned the ethical imperative that says, according to Lacan, “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, Ethics, 319). This is the ethical imperative that opposes the morality of power, which says, “‘As far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait’” (315). The act of remaining faithful to, or living in conformity with, one’s desire is not simply an act of selfishness or narcissism because, in the Lacanian system, desire is never strictly individual: it is always derived from a relation to the other, to the cultural unconscious, which finds expression in yet another formula: “‘There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all’” (292). Though we can only know and articulate our desire as individuals, it is never simply for the individual that desire seeks satisfaction in the object but for the socius that determines the individual in his or her being. The first version of The Abyss belies this message because the alternative is between the mad soldier who would use technology to destroy all of humankind to satisfy the demands of his paranoia and the reasonable employees of corporate capital who merely want to save their individual lives and the lives of other individuals (including the aliens). In the second version, there is no middle road: either technology (as the embodiment of the death drive) will annihilate humanity as the answer to the demand for absolute satisfaction that it articulates, or it will transfigure the human condition through the realization of collective human desire that exists presently in the cultural unconscious. Desire, of course, is a process, a temporal postponement of ends, a promise of collective satisfaction that will never be realized in utopian perfection but will always be strived for as the condition of human life. In every Cameron movie, with the possible exception of True Lies, there is no escaping the alternatives between destruction and creation, death and life, formal closure and perpetual process.

     

    True Lies could be the title of any Cameron movie, but it does seem to have a special significance for the movie that bears it. When I first saw True Lies, I was disappointed and even a little shocked. The movie is extremely misogynist at times; and its style has the gleam of commodified art without, as far as I could see, any redeeming allegorical significance. The gossip, at the time, was that the movie reflected the director’s unstable marital history and suffered from the absence of Gale Ann Hurd, who may have been responsible for the feminist subtext of the earlier films. Though that may be true, the feminism in Cameron’s movies, including Titanic, are primarily responses to social context and reflect the ambivalence of that context; already in The Abyss, there is a tension, if not outright contradiction, between misogynist representations (Lindsey is frequently labeled by others as, and even calls herself, “the cast-iron bitch”) and feminist thematics (understood as theoretically unsophisticated). In retrospect, True Lies would appear to be both a politically-retrograde entertainment and a satirical critique of one of the dominant representations of the masculine subject and of gender relationships in popular movies. In television interviews, Cameron said that the movie takes its inspiration from the spy thriller, particularly the James Bond movies. To me, the movie suggests that while Bond is usually seen as a philandering loner without any domestic attachments, he is also the government man who defends the status quo and as such must ultimately embody the ideology of the normative bourgeois masculine subject. In other words, if one scratches beneath the surface of Bond’s image, one finds Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the secret agent who is also a family man. While Harry wages war against two-dimensional villains (in this case, utterly racist images of Near Eastern terrorists), the real battle is within the nuclear family between the bored wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the husband who lives only for his work. As a satire of the precursor of the action genre, the movie virtually deconstructs the Bond film to show that beneath its exotic surface it articulates the values of domesticity and patriarchal authority. Ultimately, Harry may not be that different from the sexually-inadequate used-car salesman (Bill Paxton) who pretends to be a secret agent in order to attract women: that is, the secret agent with a license to kill turns out to be the fantasy of the domestic masculine subject who cannot sexually satisfy his wife. The ending of the film, from this perspective, is doubly ironic. The condition of Harry’s return to the family in order to assume his domestic responsibilities (including his sexual responsibilities) is that his wife enters into the fantasy world of the secret agent. In this case, the feminist subtext of the earlier movies is turned on its head. The family survives because the dominant masculine subject recognizes its dependence on domestic space for its true sexual identity, and the woman who has effectively been imprisoned in that space discovers her liberation by entering the world of masculine fantasy. In the last scene of the movie, now that both husband and wife are secret agents, they encounter the weakling Paxton character again and humiliate him in public. The wedding of the feminist subject and the masculinist hero constitutes the disavowal of sexual inadequacy and domestic boredom. Though the representations of the world that the film projects are all lies, they are also true insofar as they articulate the ideological fantasies that cover the contradictions of the nuclear family as the “natural” social unit. These lies say something true without ever ceasing to be true lies.

    II. Dream Ship

     

    With the release of Titanic, all of the movies of James Cameron and all of the movies from which that work derives and to which it relates are dragged into the present, into a new constellation of historical images. (I refer not only to the action movies but to other spectacle films like Spartacus [1960] and Doctor Zhivago [1965], which Cameron has occasionally mentioned as the type of movies he was trying to emulate.) Benjamin insisted that materialist historiography cannot be satisfied with a linear history that follows “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.” “A historical materialist,” he says, “approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as monad.” Such a monadic structure is a form that blasts “a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history”; but it can also blast “a specific work out of the lifework.” The monad that produces this effect derives from the constellation that the individual work forms with a specific earlier work or works, including, as in the case of Titanic, the life of a genre. As a result, “the lifework [or, in this case, the genre] is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled” (Illuminations 263). The term translated as “canceled” here is a form of the Hegelian sublation or Aufhebung. In other words, if the movie Titanic has the effect that I am claiming for it, it sublates or virtually transforms the historical meaning of the works I have referred to or analyzed in the first section of this essay–to the extent of virtually cancelling or negating their conventional meanings as commodities or pure entertainments–and makes possible the readings I have already performed.

     

    The first image in Titanic may lead the spectator to expect a nostalgia film, which, as Fredric Jameson suggests, transforms the past into a commodity that becomes a simulacrum of historical understanding in a present that has lost the sense of history per se (Jameson, Postmodernism 1-51). I refer to the shots of the R.M.S. Titanic pulling away from the wharf while the passengers wave as the initial credits appear on the screen. These images are captured on slow-speed film and convey the hazy quality of old photographs to create the image of the “dream ship” that the central female character, Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), refers to later in the movie. This nostalgic image corresponds to what I will call, improvising on Benjamin, the historical image, i.e., an image of the pastness of the past that enters the present as a reification of time, something we can consume without disrupting the present, without disturbing our historical understanding, so to speak. Yet almost immediately, after the title appears on the screen over the image of a segment of ocean devoid of human forms, there is a cut to two small submarines (deep submersibles) on the way down to the bottom of the sea. In a few moments, the submarines flash their searchlights on the prow of the Titanic. Since Cameron filmed the actual wreckage of the Titanic with the help of his brother, who designed the mobile titanium housing for the 35-millimeter camera operated by remote control from another submarine, one can only assume that this first glimpse of the wreck is the actual Titanic. This documentary footage may not have been necessary to produce the effect of reality in this movie, but once the spectators know it is there it becomes a part of the experience. In effect, this piece of the real deflates or erases the initial dream image, the historical image, and substitutes for it an allegorical image. Again improvising on Benjamin, the allegorical image is an image of the ruins of time, an image of something that has been separated from its original context and meaning so that now we must attribute a meaning to it. It no longer signifies the pastness of the past as an object of consumption but the moral and ultimately transcendental significance of history, the moral truth that must be derived from decay and ruin. If the historical image turns the past into a commodity fetish that gives pleasure through consumption, the allegorical image moralizes history as an image of the vanity of time. It is a piece of the past that survives into the present as a message that cannot change anything but nonetheless reminds us of change itself. The whole movie pivots, so to speak, on the tension between the historical image and the allegorical image; but, though that tension is never resolved, it gives ground finally to the dialectical image as the disruptive embodiment of social contradiction that tears the fabric of time and makes possible the articulation of hope not as the resolution of contradiction or tension but as the manifestation of contradiction, its material articulation.

     

    At the most general level, Titanic as a dialectical image articulates the social contradiction between demand and desire in class society. I take these words from the work of Lacan, but I am going to give them specific meanings in the context of this discussion. In my view, since the terms “demand” and “desire” can both translate what Freud called a wish, the distinction between these two terms is a refinement of the Freudian theory of wish-fulfillment. Stated simply, demand arises out of the needs of the body that take the form of the drive in the symbolic realm of language and culture. Like the infant who has learned how to manipulate symbols in order to make the demand for food or comfort but who has not yet mastered the reality principle that requires the acceptance of postponement and partial satisfactions, the subject of demand seeks an absolute and final satisfaction, either through death, which extinguishes all needs, or through the construction of an illusion. Though for the infant and for most adults that illusion may take the form of a dream or a fantasy, on the broader social level of a class society it takes the form of value and can be associated with capital, property, the commodity, and class identity itself. In the movie, this illusion is the image of the Titanic as a dream ship, an enormous and socially totalizing commodity. This dream ship answers the social demand for a reality that works, that can fulfill all human needs, including the need for a social arrangement that allows each subject to coexist with others in such a way as to permit a life without terrible suffering and pain, and that can permit some limited free play to desire, a free play that constitutes hope. Unfortunately, such free play is also meant to coexist with the absolute satisfactions of power and privilege, which can only be realized through the accumulation of wealth and the exclusion and/or control of the other. The class system as a fantasy found one of its most beautiful expressions in the R.M.S. Titanic, the fantasy of an order in which everything and every person has their proper place and value without contradiction or conflict–in other words, without the unsolicited intrusions of desire.

     

    The ambivalent nature of the Titanic as the answer to demand discovers its limits in the two central male characters. The embodiment of desire’s subversive play in the movie is Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who defines his own allegorical significance in the first line he speaks, “When you got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” Jack is nothing but hope and desire, and ironically the Titanic answers his need for a reality that permits him the freedom to pursue desire’s enigmatic goals. For Jack, desire is an end in itself, but an end that the dream ship seems to make possible. In accepting the illusion that the Titanic offers him, Jack evades the contradiction between his desire as a form of hope and the demand for social closure and control that animates the class system, though in evading this contradiction he also remains faithful to the ethics of desire by refusing to give ground. As he says, standing on the prow of the Titanic as it cuts through the ocean, “I’m the king of the world”; but he is not referring to his power over others or to his ability to make the world and its people conform to his fantasy but to the irrepressible force of his own desire. Jack is no revolutionary; but the desire he channels is dangerous and makes possible revolutions (including the long revolution that is cultural change itself). At the opposite extreme of the social world on the Titanic is Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), the almost comically arrogant manifestation of pure class privilege. For Cal, the answer to demand can only be possession and domination of the other. The phrase that Walter Lord attributed to a deck hand (42) goes to Cal in Cameron’s screenplay: “God himself could not sink this ship!” Cal’s bombastic behavior has offended many reviewers, even the ones who like the movie; but in my view he is an essential ingredient of the movie’s constellatory structure, its melodrama. Nothing, not even God, can threaten the social order that Cal fantasizes as somehow the product of his own will. He constantly proclaims throughout the movie that a “real man makes his own luck,” though it is rather obvious that this man’s self-made character is the product of inherited wealth and privilege (which, in the end, is a commentary on the ideology of self-making itself). What Cal does make, though not in isolation as he imagines but as a member of the dominant class, is the fantasy of ownership and the natural rule of class. He treats not only his possessions but his fiancé as forms of private property and demands from Rose that she stay in her place and perform the functions for which, in his view, she has been designed and for which he has paid. I refer to this ownership and natural rule of class as a fantasy because Cal cannot see the contradictions that these social relations generate, contradictions that have the potential of destroying what seems natural and bringing about a social transformation.

     

    Desire is something different from demand, though they are intimately related to one another. Desire involves postponement and compromise, the satisfaction of needs consistent with the existence of others. Desire has these qualities because it always responds to the reality principle, which means that it takes the other into account, even to the point of identifying the desire of the subject with the desire of the other. The true object of desire can never be owned and always remains just out of reach, even though it enables the subject to satisfy its needs without succumbing to the destructive force of the drive and its demands. Jack wants Rose not as the answer to his demand for pleasure and comfort but as the condition of his desire. At least one authority on the historical Titanic, whom I heard through the barrage of media commentaries on this movie, has observed that the romance between Jack and Rose is the most glaring historical anomaly in the film. Such a relationship would have been impossible because there could have been no contact between a person from first class and one from steerage. One should always be suspicious of such historical certainties, for there are always exceptions to every rule; there are no laws without the possibility of transgressions. Yet this challenge to historical verisimilitude foregrounds the dialectic of desire that generates the contradiction between the fantasies of demand, which take the ultimate form of the commodity itself, and the displacements of desire, which in a sense dissolve the fantasies that bring desire into being. As Lacan stressed, desire is what remains after you subtract need from demand. It is the real part that derives from the imaginary whole, the satisfaction that can only leave you unsatisfied and longing for the other who always remains internal to desire itself and just out of reach.

     

    Quite simply, the passionate relationship between Jack and Rose arises from the class system and the domination of capital that makes Rose into a commodity and Jack into something like the abjected other that I will call the flaneur. The latter position is one not without some transformative power that Jack channels, a power that derives from desire itself; but ironically the condition of that desire is social exclusion and repression. Old Rose, who narrates this tale in the present, expresses the extreme limit of that repression in describing her state of mind as she boarded the Titanic in 1912. To everyone else it was the “ship of dreams,” but to her it was a “slave ship.” She is going back to America “in chains” as the chattel property of Cal Hockley. Later in the movie, Jack aligns himself with this social position after he joins Cal Hockley’s party for dinner in the first class section of the ship. As he leaves, he tells Rose that he needs to go back to rowing with the other slaves in steerage. Twice in the movie Jack is literally chained with handcuffs and even dies with the chains still dangling from his wrists. Rose has another kind of chain attached to her, one that is most fully revealed in the scene with Cal as she faces the mirror in her state room. Cal takes out the Heart of the Ocean diamond necklace and places it around her neck, seemingly as an expression of his love for her but more realistically as an estimation of how much he values her as a commodity. Earlier in the movie, Rose has demonstrated her taste for modern art (in the form of early Picasso); but in the present scene, Rose herself manifests Cal’s taste in art. In the shots of her in the mirror, she takes on the appearance of a pre-Raphaelite woman, a sort of human jewel for which the mirror functions as a frame or setting, an object that can also be possessed by Cal’s masculine gaze. If we carry this logic to its conclusion, we could say that Cal’s taste in art is more conservative than Rose’s. She prefers the modernist view that fragments and deconstructs the subject, whereas Cal identifies with an older aesthetic that reduces the subject to an object of pure beauty. While the modernist representation tries to subvert its own effect of transforming the real into an aesthetic commodity, the earlier aesthetic representation makes beauty into the ideal commodity, the pure fantasy, an art for art’s sake that ironically answers Cal’s demand for the ownership of the other. Rose is not the recipient of the diamond necklace but an extension of it, and she is enchained by her status as a commodity. Though Cal wants Rose to satisfy his sexual demand, he really wants her beauty for its own sake; that is to say, he wants those qualities of class and physical grace that mark her as an ideal trophy wife, a woman who resembles a work of art to the extent that she can be purchased and displayed as the signifier of a natural class distinction.

     

    As she ties her daughter’s body into the corset that makes it a more perfect commodity, Rose’s mother reminds her that the family money is gone and that the only thing that can save the two women from a descent into the working class is Rose’s marriage. She also reminds her of what she (the mother) takes to be the natural cause of this situation: “We’re women–our choices are never easy.” Ironically, there can be no doubt that what initially draws Jack’s gaze to Rose is precisely her “picture-perfect” beauty, corset and all. He sits on a lower deck staring up at the forbidden object of desire, the symbol of masculine class privilege, on the upper deck. Of course, Jack, the Irish-American, is immediately reminded by his Irish friend in steerage that he has no chance of achieving that object of desire and so might as well desist. His friend points out, in other words, that such desire violates the very system that calls it into being. The future trophy wife of Cal Hockley has been chosen precisely for her ability to capture and mesmerize the gaze of other men and thus to bring honor and social distinction on a man who considers himself to be, as Rose says, one of the “masters of the universe.” She is there to be looked at not just because, as feminist film theorists have sometimes argued, this is a Hollywood movie and the women in such mass-cultural works function as spectacle, as something to be looked at and consumed by the masculine gaze. The movie certainly exploits this cinematic convention, but it also discloses the source of this convention in the social system of the Titanic, a class system that contradicts itself when it becomes the condition of a desire that has the potential to undermine the system itself. The power of Jack’s gaze to consume the image of the woman as commodity derives from his marginalized status as the social vagabond or flaneur.

     

    Benjamin, in his reading of Baudelaire and the Paris arcades in the nineteenth century, identified the flaneur as a type of modern individual under capitalism, an individual who first appears in the nineteenth century but who anticipates figures of Benjamin’s own time and, as I will argue, beyond that time. Within the class system of the Titanic, the flaneur is by no means a member of the proletariat, a class position given representation in the movie by the stokers and other men who work in the red light of the boiler rooms and who are the first to die after the collision with the iceberg. Though Jack is certainly a “poor guy,” as he says to Rose, he must be distinguished, as Benjamin stressed about the flaneur, from the typical pedestrian who “would let himself be jostled by the crowd.” On the contrary, like the flaneur, Jack requires “elbow room” and is “unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure” (Benjamin, Illuminations 172; Charles Baudelaire 54). When Cal sees Jack in a borrowed tuxedo and remarks that one could almost mistake him for a gentleman, he says more than he knows. Jack may not have Cal’s social power or pedigree, but he has seized for himself some of the leisure time and the seemingly pointless existence that used to be the exclusive privilege of the aristocratic gentleman. Jack as flaneur parodies the gentleman but at the same time secretly identifies with what the gentleman has–the appearance of freedom. A figure “on the threshold… of the bourgeois class,” the flaneur moves through the commodity world “ostensibly to look around, yet in reality to find a buyer” (Benjamin, Reflections 156). Jack, after all, is an artist; and though he has not yet found a buyer, he has chosen a way of life that places hope in the aesthetic marketplace. When Rose’s mother crudely interrogates Jack about how he is able to find the means to travel, he explains that he works only as much as he needs to in order to maintain his vagabond existence. Ironically, the upper-classes who have inherited, stolen (in the ideological guise of free enterprise), or married into their wealth maintain the puritan ideal of the value of labor as the purpose of human existence. Most of the first-class passengers who meet Jack find him amusing and perhaps even enjoy the way he mirrors their own lifestyles. He shows that the image of wealth can be transformed into a commodity and then appropriated by someone who is not wealthy but who desires the image of freedom that wealth seems to make possible. Jack anticipates men like Henry Miller or, from a more socially marginalized location, Langston Hughes, who represent the survival of the flaneur in the first half of the twentieth century, men and sometimes women who could move between America and Europe and beyond, without sufficient funds or resources, and work as little as possible while enjoying an unprecedented freedom. In the second half of this century, such freedom becomes more and more difficult to achieve, perhaps because it is such a threat to the class system itself; but as the proletariat withers away as a class, a new group is emerging, perhaps something different from a class, that combines some of the qualities of the original proletariat and some of the qualities of the petty-bourgeois flaneur. I refer to the army of service workers and young people destined to be service workers, who labor in order to enjoy the pleasures of leisure time, however limited those pleasures may be. Though these people work more than they travel, they are able to function as flaneurs by continually visiting the three late twentieth-century versions of the Paris arcades: the cineplex movie theater, the television set with attached video player, and the computer. Today it is possible to travel and wander through the mazes of commodity culture while sitting still.

     

    According to Benjamin, the flaneur is “someone abandoned in the crowd.” For this reason,

     

    he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers. (Charles Baudelaire 55)

     

    As the flaneur, Jack is the character in the movie who embodies or represents the spectator. Like Jack, the spectator is also abandoned in the crowd and shares the situation of the commodity in his or her longing for a buyer, that is to say, for the social capital that would make it possible to translate the wish-demand for pleasure and happiness into a reality that would function as the fantasy of absolute satisfaction. The pleasure Jack takes from the Titanic, as he stands on the prow with his arms spread out as if he were flying, is pleasure not only in the dream ship as commodity fetish but in his own identification with the dream ship; and the spectator enjoys a similar identification with the movie Titanic as the intoxicating experience of the commodity (something that cost over 200 million dollars). This identification with the commodity gives Jack the freedom to want what the system implicitly and explicitly tells him he cannot have. In other words, the wealth of capital has created the Titanic in which it is possible for a “poor guy” like Jack to look at and long for the freedoms and pleasures of dominant culture, including the freedom and pleasure of loving someone like Rose; but capital has also created the movie Titanic, which makes it possible for the spectator to desire what Jack desires. As a dialectical image, the Titanichas been torn from its original context in which it was a wish image of early twentieth-century culture and dragged into the present in which it makes visible a dialectical transformation of the original Marxist concept of the class struggle. In the present context, it is no longer the proletariat as a class which constitutes the exclusive site of capitalism’s internal contradiction and, as such, the possibility of a social revolution that would destroy capitalism itself. Today there is no single class formation that occupies such a critical relation to the mode of production, but there is a configuration of desiring subjects which embraces people from different locations in the social system. In addition to declining numbers of industrial workers, there are underpaid service workers who include, among their ranks, many women, young people, and minorities; and there are the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, and so forth. Like Jack, these people are not just victims of commodity culture (though many of them are victims and experience brutal and unjustifiable economic oppression); they also find in commodity culture the support of their desires, the very thing that keeps their hopes alive. Jack sees in Rose as a commodity the very support his desire needs in order to reproduce itself; yet, even though the first image he takes from Rose derives as much from her status as a commodity as does the image Cal takes from her, Jack’s desire exceeds the demand that brings it into being and dissolves the illusion of the commodity so that Rose becomes for him something real, something he cannot know or control absolutely.

     

    The passion between Jack and Rose transforms the Titanic from a commodity, the dream ship as metaphor that articulates the fantasy of a closed class system without contradiction, into the collective body of social desire. Benjamin remarked at the end of his essay on surrealism that “The collective is a body, too”; but he probably did not mean to suggest that such a body can be hailed into existence by propaganda or transformed through the act of dreaming. He spoke of a “profane illumination” in the “image sphere” that makes possible the liberation of the collective body through the mediation of “the physis that is being organized for it through technology.” The nature (physis) produced by humans is the technology in which “body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge” (Reflections 192). In other words, in the realm of the image, the collective body, the sensorium or bodily ground of human perceptions, is restructured; through the transference of nerve-forces or collective desires to the sleeping parts of the social body, a new body begins to awaken; and something emerges similar to what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling,” a bodily mode of understanding that precedes conceptual understanding, “not feeling against thought but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (132). Through the passion of Jack and Rose, transfers of feeling take place that break through or explode the Titanic as a metaphor of social harmony through natural hierarchy. The condition of this explosion, however, is the pessimism that underlies all of the movie’s representations from the first images of the dream ship leaving its dock with the promise of a fulfilled social totality. As reviewers love to remind potential spectators, we know how the movie will end from the beginning; and we know that this ending is more than a tragic representation of the universal human condition. The Titanic wreck that we see at the bottom of the sea is real, even though it is nothing but an image, a representation made possible by technology. The fate of the Titanic is real because it has already happened; the wreckage is real, but the images of it become a commentary on the very technologies that bring them to the spectator, on the future of technology itself and the prospects of the culture that is based on it.

     

    Unlike most mass-cultural movies that entice us with the promise of critique and then hand us over to the dream world of capital (movies like Jerry Maguire or even a classic like Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels), Titanic becomes the object of its own critique (though not necessarily of the director’s critique), an image of the real that discloses its own technology as a piece of the real it imagines. Benjamin criticized the program of bourgeois parties for being a “bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors,” like Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. He criticized a false socialist imagination that glorifies “a condition in which all act ‘as if they were angels,’ and everyone has as much ‘as if he were rich,’ and everyone lives ‘as if he were free.’” Ironically, this could be the world of American television sitcoms. To such optimism, he opposes the “communist answer” of surrealism: “And that means pessimism all along the line…. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals” (Reflections 190-91). Cameron’s Titanic is a surrealist work of art to this extent: it gives us an image of the real as impossible. As spectators see the image of the Titanic sweep across the widescreen in a high-angle shot, they know that the image is too real to be real even if they do not know that the characters on the deck or the water curling against the sides of the hull are animated. My point is that the movie displays a reality and a sense of history as the uncanny, as a constructed image that discloses its own conditions of production not because we see the limitations of representation but because we recognize the incredible powers of technology to reinvent the past. Some of the first reviewers of the movie expressed their awe at the sheer power of cinematic technology itself. Can they really do this? Is it possible? But if the Titanic embodies within the movie the fate of the technology that the movie itself exploits in order to bring us this image, it also manifests the death drive that animates technology and that can only be redeemed by desire. Cameron has not left the terminator behind because in this movie the R.M.S. Titanic is the terminator: not a machine that looks human but a machine that frames and makes possible what we call the human. Through their passion, Jack and Rose redeem this machine by making it into the instrument and support of desire; but they cannot prevent the collision between the machine as the embodiment of the death drive and the real that it seeks to master and possess. Death–even the death of a civilization–cannot be avoided; but it can be redeemed as the support of desire.

     

    In Cameron’s script, the love story is not very original; but the movie transforms it into the poetry of the flesh and, if it works for anyone, it works for that reason. As early film theorist Rudolph Arnheim and Benjamin both understood, in movies the actor is a prop (see Benjamin, Illuminations 230). This is especially true of Cameron’s Titanic in which casting is more critical to the movie’s production of the dialectical image than the script itself. I would even argue that some of what the movie cannot say escapes the censor through the physical mediation of the actors. Kate Winslet has commented that it was a challenge for her to play the lover of a man more beautiful that she is; and this remark seems to refer to something more than conventional masculine good looks. Whether one agrees with her assessment or not, the compulsory heterosexuality that the movie does not disturb creates its own sort of self-subversion in the representation of a heterosexual love affair in which the man could not be said to symbolize the masculine heterosexual norm. I’m not suggesting that we have a covert “lesbian” romance here but that, in this movie, there is no escaping the interimplication of normative heterosexuality, patriarchy, and capitalism that find their embodiment in Cal and a point of resistance in Jack. The latter’s sexual ambivalence, or multivalence, suggests that his desire trangresses not only class but gender and sexual boundaries as well.

     

    Initially, Rose resists the appeal of Jack’s desire to her desire; but when she watches a little girl being trained, as she was trained, to be a lady, she abruptly surrenders to her own desire. Eventually, she says to Cal on the deck of the sinking Titanic, “I’d rather be his whore than your wife.” In this context, the term “whore” is a complex signifier. Benjamin saw the prostitute as a dialectical image in her own right: she is “saleswoman and wares in one” (Reflections 157). Rose doesn’t proclaim herself to be a whore so much as she deconstructs the relationship between whore and wife. She would rather be Jack’s whore because she realizes that, in this social context, the whore is only the mirror image of the wife; by inverting the relation between whore and wife, she takes possession of her own body and subverts its commodity status by giving it up to the general or unrestricted economy of desire, by which I mean an economy that cannot be reduced to a master code or system of values. Rose subverts her status as the commodity by giving herself to Jack in an act of symbolic exchange that cannot be translated into capital or any other finalized value. Before the collision, she asks Jack to draw her in the nude wearing only the Heart of the Ocean. In this scene, she virtually transforms the relationship between her body and the jewel that signifies its commodity status: she gives the term “priceless” a literal meaning by transforming the jewel into the symbol of the desiring body. She says that she doesn’t want another picture of herself as a “porcelain doll” (an uncanny remark since, at the beginning of the movie, the spectator sees the present-day image of the doll’s face in the wreckage of the Titanic). Instead, she gives her body to Jack’s gaze not only as an object to be enjoyed but as the sublime of object of desire, which, as Slavoj Zizek insists, is the “embodiment of Nothing” (Sublime Object 206). Her body becomes a sublime object not because, in drawing her, Jack’s gaze is disinterested in the Kantian sense but because her body fills his eye with the desire of the other that he tries to express in the drawing. Her body is not the symptom of his lack or need–the answer to his demand for pleasure or fulfillment–but the embodiment of desire itself; and desire is not a thing in itself but the Nothing, the desire for desire, that every thing, every commodity, tries to substitute itself for. The shots in this scene intercut between extreme closeups of Jack’s gaze, his hand drawing, and Rose’s body; then an extreme closeup of Rose’s eye slowly dissolves into an extreme closeup of Old Rose’s eye on the salvage ship in present time. And this is done as if to suggest that while the body may dissolve into age the desire that it supports continues as the absolute condition of life.

     

    Rose’s gaze has answered Jack’s gaze since in giving him her body as the sublime object she only returns his gift to her on the prow of the Titanic when, in effect, he teaches her to fly by transforming the ship itself into the support of desire. Jack originally saved Rose from suicide at the ship’s stern; but in this scene, with a red sunset in the background, he teaches her to transform her own death drive into a life force, and the Titanic, as the embodiment of the death drive, into the embodiment of Nothing, the sublime object that materializes, in the words of Lacan, “the fact that desire is nothing more than the metonymy of the discourse of demand. It is change as such.” To the extent that sublimation refers to “satisfaction without repression,” it articulates itself not through the negation of demand and the death drive that animates it but through the metonymic displacement of demand that we call desire, which seeks “not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object in itself” (Ethics 293). The sublime object is the embodiment of Nothing because it represents change in itself, change or the desire for desire as the end or purpose of life. Jack teaches Rose to see the Titanic as such a sublime object, what I have already called the collective body of social desire. Together they displace its function as commodity or the slave ship and make it into the materialization of social change. At that moment, starting from an angled side shot of Rose and Jack standing above the ship’s prow, there is another spectacular dissolve from the past to the present as the prow of the Titanic comes to rest as the wreckage at the bottom of the sea with the fading image of the lovers still visible.

     

    After this, as Old Rose continues her story, the lovers retreat to Rose’s stateroom where Jack draws her. Old Rose calls this scene “the most erotic moment of my life,” but then adds, “at least up to that time.” This last statement is important because Jack as the sublime object of Rose’s desire cannot be the end of desire but only a beginning. Rose takes the drawing and puts it in Cal’s safe with a note, addressed to Cal, commenting that now he can keep the diamond and the woman locked up together. Then the policeman-turned-valet Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner), whose job is to enforce the rule of class, comes into the room to prevent transgressive pleasures. Rose and Jack escape through the back; and though for a moment Jack wants his drawing, he leaves it behind. The drawing as the expression of desire is not allowed to become a commodified work of art. In these scenes, Jack and Rose embody a transgressive desire that cuts through and denaturalizes the class system. By ignoring these social divisions, they end up in the boiler room where the stokers, so to speak, feed the heart of the beast. Their presence in these locations is both absurd and subversive and culminates in their love-making inside what I take to be the Renault in the cargo hold. Once again escaping disciplinary agents, they emerge from the depths of the ship onto the forward well deck just minutes before the collision. At that moment, Rose tells Jack that she intends to disembark with him; and when he remarks that she’s crazy, she says, “It doesn’t make any sense, that’s why I trust it.” The Titanic has become the ship of desire.

     

    III. Sublime Terror

     

    As the articulation of a structure of feeling, the Titanic disaster in the movie takes place at the moment when desire has momentarily disrupted the order of class society. Even the lookouts and First-Officer Murdoch are appreciatively watching Rose and Jack just before they look up and see the iceberg. The latter is what Lacan would call the answer of the real to the impulses of desire. It does not invalidate desire, but it reminds us that desire does not find the end to its quest in a utopia or in a narrative of the usual Hollywood sort. It reminds the spectator that if there is to be any hope, which is the real goal of desire, it can only come from the most pessimistic vision as to the direction in which the current social order is heading. As a dialectical image, the collision and sinking of the Titanic articulates the fate of class society and thus embodies what Fredric Jameson would call the “absent cause” of contemporary culture. It is not the Titanic disaster as an actual historical event that is the absent cause but the image of its destruction as the embodiment of a social process. This process is history in the specific way that Jameson speaks of it as the “experience of necessity”–necessity itself understood not as a type of content but as the “inexorable form of events,” the formal limits of our ability to imagine and understand the meaning of the world in which we live. In Cameron’s movie, the Titanic‘s collision tears open the process of time so that we see the event not as something that took place long ago, an event in relation to which we are now in a convenient position to mourn and regret the loss of life; on the contrary, the collision takes place now and reveals the forms of temporal change from which we cannot escape. The movie shows that, in Jameson’s words, “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention” (102). Yet history is also what makes desire possible in the first place as the metonymy or displacement of demand. It wasn’t desire that drove the Titanic toward its collision with the iceberg that shattered the dream and the fantasy of the unsinkable ship; it was the demand of class society for a reality that would justify its own existence, of a configuration of power and knowledge that would express the natural authority of the ruling classes and legitimate their claim to be the masters of the universe. Desire tries to break through this fantasy; but if it is not simply to construct another fantasy and to succumb to the same drive that creates the demand for a closed and oppressive reality, it must confront the real, the absent cause as the horror that social change will necessarily entail.

     

    In other words, the Titanic cannot be stopped from meeting its fate because, as every spectator knows, it has already happened. The real question is not how do we prevent the Titanic from sinking? but how do we take hope from the violence of history? As I said before, the action movie is about hope and the desire for social change; and from the instant the iceberg is sighted by the lookouts in the crow’s nest, Cameron’s Titanic becomes an action movie. Even before the message of the lookouts reaches him, Murdoch sees the iceberg and flies into action. The music, the sound-effects, the fast editing–everything at this point contributes to the feeling that time itself has been torn open in such a way as to reveal its inner structure as the signifier of desire; and the spectators are drawn into this temporal structure and enveloped by it. I have already suggested that in the action movie the plot remains relatively unmotivated. In Titanic, the plot, though based on actual history, becomes the occasion for action sequences that are not essential to its development, though they are essential to the structure of feeling that the movie produces.

     

    When Rose and Jack come to warn Cal and Rose’s mother about the imminent danger, Lovejoy slips the Heart of the Ocean into Jack’s pocket, which leads to his arrest and detainment in the hold of the ship. For the second time Jack is in chains (the first time being when he saved Rose’s life at the stern of the ship). Now it is up to Rose to save him, a task which she undertakes after she witnesses the ethical bankruptcy of her mother and fiancé in a crisis. The mother wonders if the lifeboats will be boarded by class and worries that they may be uncomfortably crowded. Rose angrily explains that there aren’t enough boats and half of the people on the ship are going to die. Cal remarks, “Not the better half.” Revolted, and proclaiming that she would rather be Jack’s whore than Cal’s wife, Rose is off to save Jack. This action sequence hardly contributes to the documentary representation of what happened on the Titanic when it sank; but it does create another kind of effect. Rose runs through the ship, finds the ship’s designer Thomas Andrews and learns where Jack would be held, reaches him but can’t find the key to the handcuffs, runs around looking for help, almost gives up and then finds an ax, runs back to Jack and, while closing her eyes, breaks the handcuff chains with the ax. Then the two of them rush back toward the boat deck but find that the passages out of steerage have been blocked. Eventually, with the help of other steerage passengers, they break through and finally reach the boat deck. Cal finds them as Jack is trying to persuade Rose to get on a boat. Cal suggests that he and Jack will escape on another boat, though he has no intention of helping Jack. Rose gets on the lifeboat; but as it is lowered, she suddenly leaps from the boat and grabs hold of one of the lower decks. She joins Jack at the foot of the Grand Staircase, but Cal suddenly grabs Lovejoy’s revolver and starts firing at them. In an action sequence that momentarily recalls the Terminator movies, they must rush back into the hold of the ship where they have more adventures and overcome another barrier before they find their way back to the boat deck. Now obviously this is all rather contrived, but it nonetheless creates the intense feeling of temporal disruption. It resembles the sort of dream in which you rush to escape something but no matter how fast and furiously you move you get nowhere. Though the body discharges an enormous amount of energy in motion, it can’t fill the time that seems to move at a snail’s pace. Jack and Rose embody the intensity of life, the intensity of desire, in the face of a reality that hurts, that cannot be avoided or displaced but only lived through.

     

    All of these movements aim at drawing the spectators into the event and not at keeping them at a safe distance from the documented past. Cameron’s movie has been called a “quasi-Marxist epic,” while Cameron himself said, during the making of Titanic, “We’re holding just short of Marxist dogma” (Brown and Ansen 64; Maslin E18). Cameron has also said that he is uncomfortable with great wealth or great poverty and attributes “the evils of the world… to the concentration of wealth and power with a few” (Brown and Ansen 66). Cameron’s intention, however, cannot explain the global popularity of the movie, which in my view derives primarily from the formal properties of the supergenre. In effect, the form of the action movie transforms the historical disaster into a politically-charged image of violence that expresses a desire and produces an ambivalent pleasure, an image of violence that solicits and gives expression to the fundamentally ambiguous attitude of the Western and non-Western subject toward the dominant social system of the late twentieth-century global community. One could almost call it an act of cultural terrorism, though the word “terrorism” may seem inappropriate to describe the representation of an event that has no agent, of a disaster that, if it was not a pure accident, was at worst the outcome of bad judgment and bad luck. Yet one has only to compare Cameron’s movie with the more classical and, in the view of one cultural historian, modernist book, A Night to Remember, to see that Cameron has done something quite different. As Steven Biel argues, “A Night to Remember embeds a modernist event in a modernist form: fragmented, uncertain, open-ended” (Biel 152-54). Another cultural historian has identified the movie version of A Night to Remember as “postmodernist” (Heyer 130), but that term applies more properly to Cameron’s movie. However, in order to demonstrate why this is so, I will have to make a detour into the field of literary criticism.

     

    In a significant reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the literary critic Enda Duffy has explored the response of “subaltern” subjects (i.e., colonized or otherwise socio-economically exploited subjects) to images of violence, particularly as they seem to bear on the positions of women in situations of social conflict. As Duffy demonstrates, postcolonial literature from Irish writers like Joyce to the “third-world” authors of the second half of the twentieth century is replete with images of terrorist violence and the ambivalent response to it of those subjects who are either members of or identify with oppressed groups. In particular, Duffy focuses on the poem by Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” in which the author records his witnessing of the public punishment of Catholic women in Northern Ireland for fraternizing with the British army: he “stood dumb” and “would connive/ in civilized outrage/ yet understand the exact/ and tribal, intimate revenge” (qtd. in Duffy 131). The two emotions that Heaney experiences in this context combine the official attitude toward terrorism (“civilized outrage”), which one associates with the dominant state formations, and the subaltern’s feeling of complicity with such violence (“tribal, intimate revenge”), which crosses the space between public and private life and reveals the complicity of individual desires with social domination and social resistance. In the Heaney poem, women become both the objects of social revenge and the source of guilt because, as Duffy notes, they occupy a unique position in colonial or subaltern culture: they “represent both the subaltern’s fear of colonial power as the imposition of consumer culture, a culture where women’s bodies are commodities, and at the same time the site of utter abjection, where oppression seems to legitimize kinds of resistance suggestive of terrorist actions” (Duffy 139).

     

    Though the Titanic is not a postcolonial work of art, it nevertheless addresses the subalternity of gender and class identity in capitalist culture. For example, Rose represents, first, the commodified female body that is offered by her mother as a sacrifice to the class system and as the ticket of admission for herself and her daughter to the comforts and privileges of upper-class society; and, second, she represents the abject body that seeks escape from social oppression on the “slave ship” through death. As I have argued, Jack is both attracted and intimidated by the culture of the commodity that Rose embodies as she stands above him on the first-class deck. At the same time, on the stern of the ship when she tries to kill herself, there can be little doubt that Jack, even as he rescues her, takes a certain pleasure from this “intimate revenge” on the “rich girl.” As she hangs over the side of the ship in his grasp, she’s the one looking up and he’s the one looking down. Later, however, Jack identifies with Rose as another subaltern subject; and when she tries to break away from the social order into which she was born, she inspires Jack to take risks and engage in acts that are subversive of the class system. In this way, the movie constructs a position for the spectator that requires a certain identification with something like a subaltern subject–or, in this case, a class subject. As I said before, Jack Dawson is probably Irish-American; and he aligns himself with an Irish national, Tommy Ryan, and an Italian, Fabrizio de Rossi. In the movie, Tommy, after fighting his way up from steerage quarters, is eventually shot in ambiguous circumstances by the ship’s First Officer Murdoch who then kills himself, while Fabrizio heroically struggles to cut the ropes on one of the lifeboats before he is crushed by a collapsing smokestack. Dominant press reports of the sinking sometimes demonized the Italian steerage passengers, suggesting that they tried to save themselves by storming a lifeboat full of women and children, even though there is no evidence that such an event had taken place. By the early twentieth century, the Irish were leaving behind their subaltern status in American society, while the Italians and other “new” immigrants from Europe were among the new subalterns (see Biel 18-21).

     

    In other words, Cameron’s Titanic constructs an ambivalent “subaltern” view of the great ship’s destruction, one that solicits both our “civilized outrage” and sorrow at the horrific disaster and our “intimate” complicity with the “revenge” of nature or God or fate or history (depending on your viewpoint) on the brutality of class society. The agent of the terrorism that constitutes the sinking of the Titanic in this movie is the spectator. The movie’s portrayal of the class system and its inherent injustice invites the spectator’s desire to align him- or herself with the desire of Jack and Rose and to experience the disaster as simultaneously a horrific event and a condition of hope. Unlike the neutral, disinterested representations in the movie version of A Night to Remember, the destruction of the Titanic in Cameron’s movie is not an accident but a judgment. Cameron does not vilify every member of the upper-classes: Molly Brown becomes a sort of hero, and men like Astor and Guggenheim are given some dignity in death. But there is absolutely no idealization of the wealthy: though the rule of the sea that women and children be saved first is acted out, it seems not to express the heroic impulses of the rich but rather the almost mechanical operations of ideology and social habit in a context of sheer confusion and shock. The spectator, however, is not in a state of shock and can take in and comprehend the representations in the movie as spectacle. The meaning of this spectacle can be clarified by mapping onto the movie the “three modes of representing terrorism” that Duffy identifies in his historical reading of Joyce. These modes are conveniently the “realist,” the “modernist,” and the “postmodern”; and each one has particular bearing on the representation of women that I can apply to Cameron’s Titanic (with my comments in brackets): “the first erases the woman as character [the story about heroic masculinity], the second uses the figure of woman as ambivalent image [Rose as both wife and whore, symbol of upper-class privilege and embodiment of transgressive desire], and the third… provides a space in which a potential subject-after-subalternity can be imagined as woman [Rose as the survivor, the ethical subject who refuses to give ground relative to her own desire]” (133).

     

    The realist representation of the Titanic disaster (and ironically this is the most ideological view of all) is the story told in all the major newspapers in the United States after the event: it is the story of the heroic upper-class men who went down with the ship after the women had been evacuated. In this version of the events, the men had to fight a class war to save the women. According to one newspaper account, “Manhood met brutehood undaunted, however, and honest fists faced iron bars, winning at last the battle for death with honor” (qtd. in Biel 49). As Biel observes, this was social Darwinism with a twist, since, instead of the survival of the fittest, it was “‘a battle for death’ in which chivalric sacrifice for the weaker sex proved the superiority of Anglo-Saxon ruling class men” (49). This representation of the Titanic disaster is virtually subverted by Cameron’s movie-making. Yet ironically this act of subversion is brought about through the orchestration of facts, through the production of a reality on the screen that no previous movie or book could have produced. For the first time, the sheer magnitude of the Titanic itself and the horror of its sinking, including the fact that it broke in two before it plunged into the sea, gives the lie to the “realist” myth. Cameron creates an atmosphere of shock and desperate confusion that makes impossible any pretension to class heroics. If the steerage passengers were desperate, they were also the last to reach the boat deck and the first to die. Benjamin Guggenheim’s nobility is reduced to the shocked gaze of a man who cannot really grasp what is happening. Only Ida and Isidor Straus survive this demystification as they are depicted in a high angle shot clinging to each other in their stateroom bed while water rushes beneath them to the music of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

     

    The modernist representation, which achieved its purest form in the documentary style of A Night to Remember, survives here in the ambivalent image of the Titanic itself as the supreme commodity and in the self-reflexive mode of Cameron’s storytelling. The multiple viewpoints of the earlier movie can be identified with “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, that is to say, with those neutral, disinterested images that belie the ravages of time through the construction of absolute beauty. According to Hayden White, the dominant view of historical representation that arose in the nineteenth century privileged the Kantian category of the beautiful as leading to a disinterested narrative that enters “sympathetically into the minds or consciousnesses of human agents long dead” in a way that privileges understanding over judgment (67). Similarly, the purely modernist representation of the disaster makes no judgment and merely recreates the image for its own sake, as a memorable event that documents and contemplates the fundamental truth of human nature. Cameron’s movie incorporates the modernist mode but at the same time ironizes it. The movie’s frame story, for example, gives us the illusion of going back in time in order to enter the lives of those who are long dead through the testimony of a living witness. Old Rose’s storytelling not only takes us into the past but makes the Titanic itself a living memory, an image of the absolute beauty of the commodity form. Even the modernist work of art becomes a crucial figure in the film as Rose unpacks the paintings she has purchased in Europe, including one with many faces by someone named Picasso. As she contemplates it, she remarks that “there’s truth but no logic.” Rose herself comes to embody this truth when she surrenders to her passion for Jack and decides to follow him with the remark: “it doesn’t make any sense, that’s why I trust it.” This beauty is ironized, however, by the fact that Old Rose tells her story to men who ultimately seek profit, not truth or beauty. The modernist works of art, like Titanic itself as an object of disinterested beauty, become ironic signifiers of the violence of history. As the ship sinks further into the sea, there is the image of a Degas painting floating under the water. Rose herself undergoes a transformation from the beautiful to the sublime, a process that is metonymically signified by the butterfly hair comb that she finds on the salvage ship more than eighty years after the sinking of the Titanic. Though she never says anything about it to the salvage team, she falls into contemplation every time she looks at it. Eventually, we realize that she was wearing the comb on the day of the Titanic disaster and took it out when she posed for Jack’s drawing. She took it out and let her hair down, so to speak, and never put it back up again. Like the Heart of the Ocean, the comb recalls her own status as a beautiful commodity and the process of her self-transformation.

     

    The postmodern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is the fabricated story of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story that subverts the multiple perspectives of the modernist viewpoint by transforming the image of reality, which is really nothing but the commodification of the real itself, into a dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the historical meaning that articulates the past as a form of wish-fulfillment. The dialectical image is the object or goal of what Hayden White would call the historical sublime. If history is ever to be anything more than what Benjamin called the history of the victors, it must move beyond the principle of disinterested contemplation that claims to represent all perspectives in a fair and non-contradictory formal narrative. As White argues,

     

    One can never move with any politically effective confidence from an apprehension of "the way things actually are or have been" to the kind of moral insistence that they "should be otherwise" without passing through a feeling of repugnance for and negative judgment of the condition that is to be superseded. And precisely insofar as historical reflection is disciplined to understand history in such a way that it can forgive everything or at best to practice a kind of "disinterested interest" of the sort that Kant imagined to inform every properly aesthetic perception, it is removed from any connection with a visionary politics and consigned to a service that will always be antiutopian in nature. (72-73)

     

    The historical image of the Titanic is the object of seemingly disinterested contemplation, though in truth the beauty that makes this contemplation disinterested is the effect of the commodity form that erases the historical truth of the class system or the social relations that made the production of the “dream ship” possible. It is the image that answers the social demand for a monological reality that is not split by contradictory social interests. Such an image is historical in the traditional aesthetic sense that White describes: it views the Titanic disaster as a tragedy that nonetheless articulates the beauty of civilization as the expression of a timeless human nature. It attempts to reimagine the Titanic as the object of a collective wish, the dream of a harmonious class society in which everyone happily occupies or at least accepts their own social position. The allegorical image is, to some extent, the other side of the same coin. In the movie, this image emerges in the frame story of the deep sea salvage crew that is exploring the Titanic in search of the Heart of the Ocean diamond, which is now worth more than the Hope diamond. They see the wreckage of the Titanic two and a half miles beneath the sea, and the spectator sees it along with them. As an allegorical image, the wrecked ship embodies history as a destructive process that can only be redeemed by the meanings that are attributed to it in the present context. By inviting moralization as a way of making sense out of the traces of the past, the image comments on the hubris of the technological civilization that thought it could build an unsinkable ship. In this way, the allegorical image virtually domesticates the past and puts it at a distance: it articulates a memory that forgets the past as a present full of contradictory social desires. The allegorical and historical images, taken together and in isolation from the present socio-historical context, constitute such a forgetful memory that separates “‘the way things actually are or have been’” from the utopian social desire that they “‘should be otherwise.’” The dialectical image emerges as the revelation of the social contradiction between the allegorical image as moral truth and the historical image as wish-fulfillment. The moral truth of history as destructive process contradicts the belief that the past can be understood or explained without any reference to the present social context, without any form of political commitment. However, this contradiction remains invisible until the dialectical image makes the past present through, in the phrase of Hayden White, “the recovery of the historical sublime.” White finds plausible the notion that such a recovery is “a necessary precondition for the production of a historiography of the sort that Chateaubriand conceived to be desirable in times of ‘abjection’,” which is “a historiography ‘charged with avenging the people’” (81). I am arguing that, in a movie like Titanic, mass culture has ironically produced just such a historical representation, a dialectical image that avenges the people by transforming the Titanicdisaster into an image of social desire in the present.

     

    Such an image is postmodern because it rejects every master narrative (be it the capitalist myth of progress, the Marxist myth of scientific socialism, the Christian myth of otherworldly salvation, or the Hegelian myth of absolute knowledge) as a form of forgetful memory that reduces the past to the fully understandable or explainable and makes the present world an inevitable phase in a fully determinate historical process. The dialectical image is not an image of moral or historical truth that transcends time and posits an inevitable future but a transitory image that articulates the relation of a particular past to a particular present. The dialectical image weds the dream image of the past, which harbored the unconscious desire for classless society, with the unconscious social desire of the present that can only conceive of the future by drawing on images of the past that can be made to signify the possibility of social transformation. In Cameron’s Titanic, the intense passion between Rose and Jack embodies the desire for a classless society, a desire that drags the Titanic disaster into the present where it signifies the social obstacles in late capitalist culture that would prevent the realization of such a desire. Yet the image of the Titanic itself and its terrifying destruction offers a strange ground of hope. In the contemporary global economy, wealth inequality continues to increase; and while the middle classes of the so-called “first world” stagnate in their relative comfort, the lower classes of the first world and their counterparts on the other side of the international division of labor experience vicious socio-economic displacements. Yet, at the same time, the dominant ideology of the first world continues to reduce all socio-economic realities to questions of personal responsibility and refuses to recognize any form of class determination. In the culture of the United States and, increasingly, of Western Europe, class has become more and more the unsayable and the unrepresentable. Even when it is represented, the potential resentment of the victims of multinational capitalism is carefully contained by the implication that the system always has a place for those it displaces if they have the imagination to invent new ways of making themselves into commodities. (For example, in a recent independent movie from Great Britain, The Full Monty, the unemployed steel workers learn that if they can’t sell their physical labor, they can sell their bodies by taking off their clothes, a rather ironic way of resolving the crisis of working-class masculinity in the post-industrial age). So it is not difficult to see why the spectators of mass culture would find in the historical image of the Titanic a revelation of the structural truth of their own social situation. The wealthy may not be as visible as they once were; but their invisibility only speaks to their thorough domination of the current social system. From this perspective, the unambiguous articulation of the class system from the upper decks to the boiler rooms of the Titanic becomes a utopian wish image for a clarity of social vision that is anything but unambiguous in everyday life.

     

    The image of the Titanic disaster in Cameron’s movie is apocalyptic in a way that exceeds anything that one finds in the movie version of A Night to Remember. The earlier movie is obviously a source of inspiration for Cameron; and he draws a lot of material from it, especially images pertaining to the fate of the steerage passengers. More than the book on which it is based, the movie A Night to Remember shows the situation of the steerage passengers rather dramatically as they struggle to find their way to the boat deck and encounter blocked passageways defended by stewards. In one case, some of these passengers break through a barrier with an axe; but when they reach the boat deck, most of the boats are gone. In many ways, the movie A Night to Remember is far less generous in its representation of the upper-classes than is Lord’s book. The heroes of the movie are the crew members, most especially the Second Officer Charles Lightoller (Kenneth Moore), not the upper-classes. Nonetheless, while the movie A Night to Remember leans more toward the realist mode of representation than does the book, its minimalist cinematic style in black and white with very little music also embodies a disinterested modernist viewpoint that finally gives way to a rationalization of the event at the end. As Lightoller gazes out from the deck of the Carpathia at the sea into which the Titanic sank, words appear on the screen that explain how the Titanic disaster led to maritime reforms that would prevent such an accident in the future. In effect, though this movie reveals a social system that could be subject to criticism, it glorifies the technocrats of the future who will see the event as the meaningful occasion for reform. In addition to the idealization of Lightoller and, to some extent, Captain Smith, the other idealized figure in the movie is the architect Thomas Andrews who, in front of the passengers, never shows the least apprehension concerning his own fate. He is virtually the embodiment of technical reason that ultimately justifies the disaster as a means to an end, the improvement of the human condition through infinite social progress. Curiously, the movie A Night to Remember makes the Titanic disaster into a purely British representation. You would never guess from the accent of Thomas Andrews in this movie that he was from the North of Ireland or that the Titanic was built by Irish workers. In Cameron’s movie, on the other hand, Tommy, an obviously lower-class Irish character who is probably Catholic, tells Jack that the Titanic was built by 15,000 Irishmen, though he does not mention the fact that few of these Irishmen would have been Catholic in a Catholic-majority country that had not yet undergone partition. Tommy is probably emigrating because he can’t find good-paying job in Ireland. Furthermore, the musical score to Cameron’s movie uses Irish instruments and motifs that signify “Ireland” in stark contrast to the purely “British” score in A Night to Remember, including the British version of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” While the latter song may be more historically accurate, it helps to disguise the true material forces and conditions that made the Titanic possible and also made it into another symbol of the British empire.

     

    In Cameron’s movie, the spectacular use of special effects to represent the destruction of the Titanic produces an image of sublime terror that cannot be rationalized as the ground of social progress. It represents, rather, the end of the world as we know it. It is not a justification of but a judgment on technical reason and the theory of social progress that privileges it. Though Titanic reproduces the reality of the event in far greater detail than any other movie, it is nonetheless a “surreal” image, as I suggested earlier, because it gives us a reality that exceeds the system of social representations through which “we”–the collective subject of contemporary history–bestow meaning on “our” historical experience. For this reason, despite its technical limitations and flaws, A Night to Remember still seems the more realistic representation, while Titanic offers a glimpse of historical experience as something meaningless, an image of sublime terror that virtually shatters the neutral, disinterested historical viewpoint. It is meaningless not because we cannot give it a meaning but because we can only give it a meaning that comes from the outside of the event itself, that is not intrinsic to its representation. As a matter of historical fact, there were a few witnesses who claimed that the ship broke apart before it sank; but the dominant representation until the rediscovery of the Titanic in the mid-eighties was that the ship sank as a whole (Lynch and Marschall 195). This representation was consistent with the myth of the calm nobility of the upper-classes who went down with the ship, while the historical truth is so horrifying that it is impossible to imagine “calmness” and “nobility” as really being the issue. In A Night to Remember, the spectator sees the Titanic slide into the sea from a distance. In Cameron’s movie, the camera creates the illusion that the spectator is on the stern of the ship’s aft when it is perpendicular to the sea. The spectator is there as the remnant of the Titanic slowly descends; and then, in a medium long shot from the rear (not the extreme long shot of A Night), we watch the stern go under with Jack, Rose, and a few other passengers standing on it. Just before the ship sinks, a priest on the ship’s poop deck emphasizes the apocalyptic nature of these images by reading from Revelation about “a new heaven and a new earth,” an end to death, mourning, and all sadness, for “the former world has passed away.” This is a utopian image but not an image that rationalizes or justifies the horror of the event itself. On the contrary, it articulates the irrationality of history, its utter lack of meaning unless it is transformed and redeemed by the revolutionary force of social desire.

     

    With these images and with the image of the band playing the Protestant hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (American version), the movie Titanic seems almost to endorse the Christian interpretation of the Titanic disaster as the judgment of God on materialist civilization (see Chapter 3 of Biel). Some may see it that way, but I think the movie deploys apocalyptic imagery in order to support a materialist vision. I would put it this way in the context of the themes that I have already highlighted in this reading of the movie: when theology is not the illusion of demand, it is desire of and for the other. Simply put, when theology is not the institution that formulates the demand for happiness and answers that demand with the illusion of another world, it is the ethical drive that refuses to give ground relative to one’s desire, a desire that comes from the other (in the sense that desire responds to the reality principle and takes into account in its internal structure the being of others) and a desire that seeks the other (the sublime object that represents and channels desire as the quest for a meaningful life through the postponement of death). Cameron’s movie implicitly understands what Benjamin suggested in the first of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” when he linked the success of historical materialism with theology (Illuminations 253). The force that drives historical materialism as a form of social critique–a critique that, to echo Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” attempts not only to interpret the world but to change it–is desire, the same force that reveals itself in religion through the apocalyptic imagery that foregrounds not the content of the afterlife but the terrorizing violence of the end of the world as the necessary condition of human redemption. Such violence is what Jameson means by defining history as “the experience of necessity” or “the inexorable form of events.” The price of a historical vision that does not rely on a master narrative, which would guarantee the outcome of our ethical actions in the present, is the sublime terror of social change, of a transformative event that does not have a predetermined form that can rationalize its violence. In the movie, the social desire that is allegorically unleashed by the romance between Jack and Rose must confront the horror of the social change that will have to come about if they are not to give ground relative to their desire. Insofar as that desire is constituted in opposition to the class system, it cannot avoid in some form the experience of the destruction of that system, the destruction of capitalism itself,or at least capitalism as we currently know it. In Cameron’s Titanic, the destruction of the dream ship is, symbolically though not logically, the outcome of ethical desire that refuses to give ground and accept the social system or the illusion of demand.

     

    Finally, I need to explain how this violence becomes the ground of hope and makes possible the formation of the “subject-after-subalternity… imagined as woman.” Rose is the subject as survivor in Titanic, and in the symbolics of this movie this can hardly be an accident. Jack’s death, like the sinking of the Titanic itself, is symbolically necessary to this story about the meaning of survival as the historical condition of the liberated subject in the postmodern world. Just as the sublime terror of the Titanic‘s destruction in the movie can be a pleasurable experience for the spectator who unconsciously wishes for the end of the world that the great ship embodies, Jack’s death is the necessary condition for the movie’s message of hope; and though this movie can easily be dismissed as a “tear-jerker,” there is a political significance to the pleasure-in-pain that these images evoke. Jack can die because he has lived, because, as Freud put it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the aim of all life is death,” with the crucial qualification that each “organism wishes to die only in its own fashion” (38-39). The qualification, however, is critical in this case; for Jack’s desire, though it incorporates and transforms his own death drive, has to be distinguished from the death drive of the Titanic and the social system it represents. The creators of the Titanic as the sign of the class system–Bruce Ismay, who, as Rose points out early in the movie, has invested not only his money but his phallic fantasies in the Titanic, and Cal Hockley, who melodramatically represents the venality of the ruling class that requires the dream ship as the self-expression of its identity, a closed reality that they are able to own as if it were property–manage to survive by becoming the living dead, by submitting to a death drive that can never lead to any sort of hope because it mistakes the possession of power over others as the true goal of life. Historically, the real Bruce Ismay spent his life after the disaster in shame for having saved himself; in the fiction of the movie, Cal Hockley, as Rose learns, will eventually shoot himself after the stock market crash of 1929. The architect of the Titanic, Thomas Andrews, at least chooses a tragic end by going down with the ship he created in the process of saving as many people as he can. Andrews transforms the death drive that he has served into the wish for a death with dignity; but Jack is the hero of desire who brings his life to an end with something more than tragic nobility as his legacy. “Desire,” writes Peter Brooks, “is the wish for the end, for fulfillment, but fulfillment delayed so that we can understand it in relation to origin, and to desire itself” (111). Jack’s legacy is Rose’s desire–a desire that he helps to liberate from the enslavement of social demand and that constitutes an end that makes sense out of his own life and death. As he slowly freezes in the north Atlantic, Jack compels from Rose the promise that she will never let go; but, of course, the irony is that in order to keep her promise she has to let go of Jack, to accept his death, and fight for her life. According to Lacan, a subject’s desire is always “the desire of the Other” (“Écrits”312), which is to say that desire as the displacement of demand, as the quest for what Brooks calls “the right death, the correct end” (103), is never simply the possession of the individual subject but the desire of the collective subject of history. For every individual, desire takes the form of the life story; but no story, no matter how unique, is ever completely personal. Narrative is a socially symbolic act; and the stories we tell about ourselves are shaped by the stories we have read or heard or even told about others. Jack does not give Rose her desire, for desire is neither Jack’s to give nor Rose’s to receive. Jack’s death is the realization of the “correct end” of social desire in its self-reproduction, in the transformation of Rose from the sexual commodity that answers the demand of Hockley and his class into the surviving subject who “never lets go” of the desire for the right death.

     

    Ironically, the thing that comes to embody for Rose the structure of desire that shapes and determines the story of her life is the Heart of the Ocean. This diamond represents the contradiction between desire and demand, for Rose has the choice (at least, after the death of Hockley and the others who had a claim on it) to use the diamond as the immediate answer to the demand for wealth and privilege or to keep the diamond as the expression of the desire for something more, something beyond value. If I may resort to anecdote, I have been fascinated by the number of spectators I’ve talked to who were offended by Rose’s selfishness in throwing the Heart of the Ocean into the sea. In particular, my professional friends, who perhaps have greater than usual expectations of wealth and privilege, find it preposterous that anyone would pass up such an opportunity. “Why not pass it on to her granddaughter?” they say. Certainly, there is a conflict of desires here that goes to the heart of contemporary culture, which seems to posit money as the measure of all things. Rose’s story, however, is the story of a desire that never lets go; and within the frame of that story the diamond has undergone a transformation from a commodity with a specific socio-economic value to a symbolic thing that remains incommensurable. In a sense, the meaning of Rose’s life has become identical with the Heart of the Ocean. In telling the story of the Titanic that she has never told before, she explains that a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; and the diamond is the signifier of her secret. At the beginning of the movie, she asks Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), the head of the salvage team, if he has found the Heart of the Ocean, even though she still has it. The question, if you will, is not addressed to Brock Lovett the person but to the Other as the embodiment of a social demand that mistakes capital value for the meaning of life. The Heart of the Ocean is the incommensurable that is the true goal of life, the true desire of the Other, the right death, the correct end. Rose never cedes her desire but transforms her life into the incommensurable sublime object of desire by giving the Heart of the Ocean back to the sea, back to its symbolic origin. Rose discovered the diamond in the pocket of her coat (the coat Cal had put around her when the Titanic was sinking) just as the Carpathia passes by the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. It becomes the symbol of the liberation of her own desire; and in giving it back to the ocean, the final act of her social defiance, she translates her desire to infinity. The diamond is more valuable than the Hope diamond because it represents true hope or the interminable reproduction of desire.

     

    Does Rose die in her bed after throwing the Heart of the Ocean into the sea? This interpretation gives meaning to the images of her life in the photographs on the table next to her bed (that the camera tracks across) and then to the final dream image of her return to the wrecked Titanic. In a sudden dissolve, the ship regains its form before the disaster, and Old Rose becomes a young woman again as she mounts the Grand Staircase to embrace Jack while they are surrounded by the spirits of the dead who applaud their lifelong romance. I don’t think it’s important whether Rose lives or dies in the last scene of the movie, and I don’t think the meaning of her life can be summed up by her reunion with Jack’s spirit. The meaning of her life is the sublime object of desire that Jack has come to symbolize, but for that very reason he is not the object of desire as a thing in itself. As Old Rose suggested earlier in the movie, she did not stop loving after the death of Jack; and if he facilitated her most erotic experience up to the day the Titanic sank, he was not around to perform that function for the next eighty years. The meaning of Rose’s life lies in the photographs that document her decision to pursue her desires wherever they may lead and in the passionate loves that still haunt her imagination like the spirits on the allegorical ghost ship. Rose is the “subject-after-subalternity” not because she can transform the world or her position in it by a simple act of the will that need not take into account the desire of the others. She transforms the world by transforming her own desire into something sublime, something that will never be satisfied by the objects of the marketplace, be they economic, cultural, or intellectual.

     

    After seeing the movie a number of times, I continue to see an image in my mind, which signifies, perhaps, those things that have been left unresolved. Rose clings with Jack to the outside of the railing at the Titanic‘s stern, which has broken away from the rest of the ship and is perpendicular to the sea. She gazes into the face of a woman hanging onto the railing from the opposite side, a woman with whom she has exchanged glances earlier. As she looks, the other woman can no longer hold on and falls to some kind of horrifying and meaningless death. That woman has no voice and we will never know what she desires. In all probability, she is a steerage passenger. She now lies somewhere in the heart of the ocean, one of those secrets awaiting social redemption that will come, if it comes, through the temporal disruptions of messianic time. As Benjamin writes, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (Illuminations 255). Of course, the enemy is often ourselves; and it is not only the historian but every cultural producer who must protect the dead from the forgetful memories and narratives that would bury them. In this process of recovering the historical sublime, we should not automatically eliminate any producer of cultural images, including the impresarios of Hollywood when they manage to transgress their own censorship and turn the profit motive against itself. Mass culture is not just loss but a revolutionary opportunity for those who make visible the cultural unconscious that harbors the true subject of social desire.

     

    Works Cited

    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
    • —. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983.
    • —. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986.
    • Biel, Stephen. Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster. New York: Norton, 1996.
    • Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984.
    • Brown, Corie, and David Ansen. “Rough Waters.” Rev. of Titanic, dir. James Cameron. Newsweek 15 Dec. 1997: 64-68.
    • Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1991.
    • Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
    • Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
    • Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern “Ulysses.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
    • Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. 3-11.
    • Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955.
    • Heyer, Paul. Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995.
    • Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1993.
    • Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
    • —. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
    • Lacan, Jacques. “Écrits”: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
    • —. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Book 7 of The Seminar. Trans. Dennis Porter. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1992.
    • Lord, Walter. A Night to Remember. New York: Bantam, 1997.
    • Lynch, Don, and Ken Marschall. Titanic: An Illustrated History. Toronto: Madison, 1992.
    • Maslin, Janet. “‘Titanic’: A Spectacle as Sweeping as the Sea.” Rev. of Titanic, dir. James Cameron. New York Times 19 Dec. 1997: E1, E18.
    • McCole, John. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
    • White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
    • Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
    • —. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1991.

     

  • Theoretical Tailspins: Reading “Alternative” Performance in Spin Magazine

    Patrick McGee

    Department of English
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    finnegan@uiuc.edu

     

    Media and commerce do not just cover but help construct music subcultures…. Subcultural capital is itself, in no small sense, a phenomenon of the media.

     

    –Sarah Thornton, “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave”

     

    If you only talk to people who already agree with you, you are not a political organization. You’re a support group.

     

    –Elizabeth Gilbert (Spin April 1995)

     

    In the June 1995 issue of Details, Generation X was declared dead-on-arrival by the very author who had himself risen to instant fame only a few short years earlier with his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. And indeed in the years since Douglas Coupland’s Details pronouncement perhaps nothing has been assumed to be so thoroughly incorporated, so cliché, as the term Generation X. The common-sense consensus in both academic popular culture studies and subculture theory, as well as in the “alternative” youth culture industries themselves, is that Generation X is so passé, so universally un-hip, that even by remarking its passing one risks marking oneself as square beyond repair, like foolish white tourists who go to Harlem and speak nostalgically about the lost authenticity of the original 1920s Cotton Club. The word Generation X is deader than dead. Yet media images invoking the iconography of Generation X continue to proliferate in the youth culture industries, particularly in the pop music, television, fashion, and junk-food markets. With the now familiar mix of manic-paced MTV jump-cuts, a multicultural brew of post-punk haircuts, piercings and retro-seventies grunge styles, neon-streak color bursts, roller-blade grrrl-power “attitude,” and the requisite “cheese” of self-mocking irony, Pepsi’s 1997 “Generation Next” campaign typifies the current alternative youth marketing scene, except perhaps insofar as its slogan came dangerously too near speaking the signifier that dare not speak its name.

     

    It is in this cultural climate of “alternative” simulacra, or a simulacra of alternativeness, that I want to take up theoretical issues surfaced by Spin magazine from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as it sought to take avant-garde pop undergrounds and transform them, and itself, into post-avant-garde, alternative “overgrounds.” My theoretical goal is to make a first pass at “reading” Spin magazine in a Cultural Studies context, and in the process map the boundaries of Andreas Huyssen’s construction of the “post-avant-garde” as the hope of a political postmodernism. “Some hope!” you may be thinking. For many people with personal investments in youth subculture scenes Spin represents at best a laughable example of counterfeit “alternative” culture and at worst the very enemy of genuine subcultural resistance, the thing that threatens to rob a subculture scene of its essence of oppositionality.1 While I agree with much of this line of argument, I am equally suspicious of the knee-jerk refusal of any-and-everything “commercial” expressed by so many subculture members and theorists who seem to have forgotten that, as Stuart Hall reminds us, opposition to the current state of capitalist society and culture does not necessarily mean a blanket refusal of the reproductive power of the commodity and commodification (“Meaning”). Opposition to postmodern capitalism, Hall points out, does not mean refusing a priori the productive and cultural forces of mass society and mass culture. Oppositional culture, or revolutionary ideology, means critiquing current hegemonic discourses of modernity/postmodernity; it also means rethinking and reconfiguring the cultural-material forces of modernity/postmodernity at multiple local, national, and trans-national levels.

     

    Perhaps what offends most about Spin is its brashness, its haughty prior claim to cosmopolitan cultural hippness. Spin magazine, like Andy Warhol’s Pop Art interventions a generation earlier, presumes to have already obliterated and transcended those traditional boundaries between mass-cult and high art, pop culture and progressive oppositional politics. And it does so despite the fact that the contradictions of capitalist production and distribution, which fuel the worlds of Pop and mass-cult, have only become more pronounced–despite, that is, Spin‘s unlikely insistence that one can have a genuine cultural revolution and maintain a brand-name consumer lifestyle too.

     

    Realizing the unlikeliness of my own thesis, I nevertheless contend that Spin is a step in the right direction, and that Spin magazine may function as a popular progressive model–a structure of pop culture resistance. The Spin model offers a form that combines (sub)cultural opposition and mainstream fun, and it’s a form that proved itself capable of keeping pace with the shifting forces of cultural Reaganism and the New Right in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Spin model might, therefore, function as a counter-balance to the infinite adaptability presumed to be the defining characteristic of so-called “late capitalism”: its apparently endless capacity to appropriate any-and-all forms of subcultural resistance, oppositional meanings, or semiotic critique.

     

    As such, Spin magazine also offers itself as an excellent case study to explore the practical implications of Michael Bérubé’s claim that perhaps the single most important and difficult challenge for Cultural Studies critics is to think through the problematics that arise when academics theorize popular audiences and subcultures who are already theorizing themselves. This is an important challenge because, as Bérubé argues, the very “existence and autonomy of the academic professions,” which have been under relentless (and frequently successful) attack by misinformation and de-funding campaigns from the cultural and political right, depends in no small part on mobilizing popular support from the very “ordinary people” which Cultural Studies frequently writes about and for, but not to; it depends, in other words, on our ability to popularize academic theory and criticism, which means “struggling for the various popular and populist grounds on which the cultural right has been trying to make criticism unpopular” (176). This is a difficult challenge, however, because academics must carry on this struggle in a world in which, as Bérubé notes, “there isn’t a chance that academic criticism will ever be popular [and yet at the same time] the kind of criticism known as critical theory already is popular” (161). In such a context, academics must not only struggle for cultural ground that the Right explicitly targets; we must continue to build and strengthen coalitions with otherwise left-leaning mass-media culture industries, where much of the fall-out from the more explicit PC wars ultimately lands–that is, we must reach out to consumer subculture media like Spin, a magazine which in many ways is already popularizing academic criticism, but which frequently does so by rhetorically positioning itself against academic discourses portrayed as being either too “serious,” too “obscure,” or too “PC.”

     

    Such academic work is of course already being done. Indeed, for many it’s what Cultural Studies is all about in the first place. The most notable, sustained example of this kind of academic-popular criticism can perhaps be found in the pages of Social Text, which regularly brings together people from a wide range of cultural positions (people who work in various culture industries, mass media, and academic disciplines) in an attempt to forge alliances and cross the great theory/practice divide. In the Fall 1995 issue of Social Text, for example, Andrew Ross hosts a symposium on “The Cult of the DJ” in which Ross, two mass media music critics and two prominent dance music DJs discuss, among other things, the “changing role of DJs in the history of popular music” (67) and reasons for the general neglect of dance music in the mainstream music press. Though later on I will take issue with the way the term “mainstream music press” gets deployed in Cultural Studies subculture criticism, the discussion in this Social Text symposium, as well as in the more fully developed book-length symposium on alternative youth culture edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture ), suggests that the relationship between academic discourses, “alternative” artistic practices or “underground” scenes, and commercial subculture/Gen X magazines like Spin is more complex, more symbiotic and, as I hope to demonstrate here, not so problematic as many academics might be conditioned to assume. It demonstrates, for one, that one doesn’t have to dig too deep to find so-called “academic” cultural criticism lurking just below the surface of nearly everything in the Gen X scene, despite the fact that anti-academic rhetoric (bordering sometimes on outright neo-conservative anti-intellectualism) is standard Gen X fare.2 It is within this more general context of symbiosis between critical theory, Madison Avenue, and oppositional subcultures that I want to apply a few Cultural Studies subcultural models to one specific “mass-cult” medium which explicitly markets itself as “oppositional.” By working through the magazine’s structure and then taking a close look at Spin‘s coverage of Riot Grrrl in 1992 and a 1995 Diesel Jeans advertisement depicting two sailors kissing (which is an appropriation of an ACT UP/Gran Fury poster), I want to see what might happen if we try to take Spin magazine at “face-value.” What happens if I accept their unlikely marketing claims that, in the acts of consuming/reading Spin, I too can identify with, and participate in, an on-going youth-music cultural “revolution” [see Figure 1]–what if I accept their claim that, with Spin‘s help, I too can be a Riot Grrrl [see Figure 2]?

     

    Figure 1. “The Voice of a Generation: Yours.” Junk mail subscription renewal notice. Reprinted by permission of Spin.
    Figure 2. “For Girls about to Rock.” “Flash” section article in Spin April 1992: 26. Reprinted by permission of Spin.

     

    Though Spin is frequently scorned (alike by academics, its own readers, and various self-identified subculture members) as being nothing more than a slick Gen X fashion magazine pimping corporate rock and Madison Avenue to the masses of middle-class (mostly male) suburban youth, the writers and editors of Spin repeatedly defend themselves against such criticism, both directly in their writing and indirectly in their editing and design choices, insisting that Spin is a genuine organ of an on-going youth revolution even if it is brought to you by the corporate world’s latest-and-greatest, newest-and-coolest, mass marketing gimmicks. Spin‘s tenth anniversary issue, “Ten Years That Rocked the World,” for example, is framed by two essays that specifically position Spin at the forefront of an on-going Gen X youth “Revolution”–a theme that is foregrounded in the title of this special issue, which, in its echo of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, locates Spin within a longer historical tradition of radical journalism and a generationally-identified revolutionary temperament centered on images of “youth.” Both publisher Guccione, Jr., in his editorial column (“TopSpin”), and Senior Contributing Writer Jim Greer, on the back page (what used to be called “SpinOut”), tell a retrospective narrative that links the evolution of Spin magazine with the emergence of a “cultural and generational wave at the beginning of its ascension” (Guccione, Jr., April 1995, 24); both define the mission of the magazine (Guccione refers to it as the magazine’s “higher calling”) as one that has evolved from an unselfconscious rock and roll naiveté into a self-conscious mission to give voice to “Gen X or whatever we’re calling it this week” (Greer 224):

     

    [I]t was precisely our complete inappropriateness to the prevailing zeitgiest [of mid-'80s cynicism] that gave us our power and value and readership, all of which, eventually, became our conscious mission. We wrote about and for a then-disempowered generation, to which we belonged not (by now) by the citizenship of similar age, but by the universal solidarity of purpose. Our readership's culture and causes and self-defining discoveries were ours too, and so were their enemies. (Guccione, Jr. 24)

     

    Responding to those readers who repeatedly attack the magazine in “Point Blank” (the letters page) for merely exploiting the Gen X scene for commercial gain, Greer not only defends the mission of the magazine as a “rock magazine,” he also defends the magazine’s Madison Avenue commercialism as well, insisting that Spin is “more independent, both in terms of corporate structure and mindset, than most so-called independent record labels.”3

     

    These are no small claims–claims, I suspect, at which most academics and subculture members would raise a skeptical eyebrow.4 Nevertheless, I contend that, sometimes by design and sometimes in spite of itself, Spin does in fact manage to articulate what constitutes a popularized form of Cultural Studies criticism–a kind of Social Text for a particular mass youth audience as it were–in which the cultural-political meanings of youth music (not always rock) and “alternative” subculture scenes are explicitly addressed and in which issues of representation are repeatedly brought to the surface, even if academic discourses are specifically avoided. More specifically, I take issue with the kind of disgust that Dick Hebdige vents in Hiding in the Light towards the Face, the 1980s British subculture consumer magazine which likely inspired, or at least certainly influenced, the original conception and design of Spin. The first sections of this essay read Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage to address both Hebdige’s critique of the kind of facile “flat-earth” postmodernism produced by the Face and Sarah Thornton’s critique of the tendency of subculture theory to ignore the role mass media plays in the formation of youth subculture identities. The final sections engage the Diesel Jeans advertisement to question the larger tendency within Cultural Studies to read subcultural practices as models for more traditional forms of political organization.

     

    I. Generation X: A Generation By No Other Name?

     

    To say that Cultural Studies academics must get beyond their aversion towards Gen X posturing does not mean, however, that we must silence our criticisms of those who speak in the name of Generation X (including Spin), particularly since, as Andrew Ross has noted, the Generation X moment is one in which American youth are being scrutinized by a glut of journalistic and sociological hacks in the most “frankly exploitative way” since the late fifties (Microphone Fiends 4). Ross’s own take on Gen X seems to be guardedly sympathetic at best, suggesting that the crucial questions for academics writing about Gen X at this juncture are: 1) whether or not Gen X discourses can free themselves from the journalistic and sociological voices speaking from above on behalf of Generation X (even the more sympathetic ones such as Howe and Strauss’s 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?) and 2) whether or not the “subject” of Gen X can be expanded beyond the narrow voice of white, middle-class heterosexual males–what Ross refers to as “those postadolescents who were temporarily confused but [are] more likely to succeed in the long run, and thus fill the target consumer demographic with high-end disposable incomes” (3), what one of my students has referred to as “all those Reality Bites kids, the MTV Real World kids or those people on NBC’s Friends.” Whether or not some construct of “alternative” culture (call it “Generation X” or whatever) can become a touchstone for a wider and more inclusive range of youth culture formations is by no means certain. And it will take more than academics analyzing grunge, rave, gansta rap, or riot grrrls in papers with Gen X in the title and delivering those papers in conventional academic venues to forge any such multicultural alliances. If “Gen X” fails to become common-coin to a broader range of youth subjects, then academics rushing to speak about or in the name of Gen X risk merely duplicating and sanctioning journalistic exploitative discourses.

     

    It is perhaps fittingly ironic then that at the very moment a 1995 MLA Convention special session and a collection of academic essays was being prepared under the title “Generation X Culture,” Douglas Coupland had declared “Gen X” dead-on-arrival in an article published in Details, the preferred “cross-over” magazine for many Cultural Studies academics. According to Coupland, Gen X has been eaten alive by the marketing “trendmeisters,” who have taken what he believes was a genuine “way of looking at the world”–an implicitly “authentic” and “original” aesthetic perspective–and they’ve turned it into just so much more white noise (72). That the term Gen X, along with the terms “slacker” and “grunge,” has become one of the “most abused buzz words of the early ’90s” is hardly debatable, nor is the fact that Gen X has been appropriated by Madison Avenue style industries to a degree that exceeds all previous generational signifiers, such as those of the 1920s and 1960s, which have also been reductively associated with avant-garde and counter-cultural movements. What is debatable, however, is Coupland’s specious attempt to maintain his status as “author” of the concept “Generation X” based on the fact that he has penned a decent, but hardly exceptional, first-novel by the same name–a novel which I personally see as the epitome of the Gen X cliché, in which Coupland’s aestheticized middle-class male suburban angst and self-indulgent narrative posturing cancels out whatever 1990s social realism may be at work in the novel. Generation X is a novel that may arguably mark, not the beginning of the Gen X moment, but rather the beginning of the very corporate marketing appropriations he now only half-heartedly bemoans (Coupland’s own characteristically camp-ironic phrasing here is to say that it “was harsh”).

     

    By expressing my personal distaste for Coupland’s novel, I do not mean to deny the important role that the mass popularity of his novel has played in generating the cultural currency that Gen X signifiers now possess, however appropriated or narrow that currency may be. Nor do I mean to deny the very real economic, political, and cultural changes (everything that makes up the historical “reality” of the postmodern, late capitalist moment of our “accelerated culture”) that inform and shape the generational angst of Coupland’s novelistic world, however privileged and aestheticized the expression of that angst may be. Certainly I do not mean to align myself in any way with the openly hostile mass media cranks, such as David Martin in his infamous Newsweek piece, who dismissively attack self-identified Gen X twentysomethings as whiners who should just shut up and live with it.5 My objection to Coupland’s representation of Gen X is less an aesthetic judgment as it is an ideological judgement about the kinds of narrow subject positions and the historical narratives that his novel articulates.

     

    The way Coupland summarizes his novel and bemoans its mass-media appropriations in this Details article is itself enough to see the narrow focalization and ahistorical aestheticizing tendencies that make up Coupland’s Gen X world. Though his three characters presumably live on “the fringe” and work at “dreary jobs at the bottom of the food chain,” they do so because they, like Coupland, “decided to pull back from society and move there.” Though they find themselves struggling to patch together individual identities in a dramatically reshaped environment, this environment is ultimately one that is, in Coupland’s own words, a “psychic” reality more than a social or historically specific one. Coupland’s claim that the worldview his characters manage to cultivate (“simultaneously ironic and sentimental”) constituted “a new way of thinking I had never before seen documented” is merely another self-promoting throw-away comment which seeks to affirm the originality of Gen X as his baby at the same time that it attests to the representational “authenticity” of his characters as part of some larger Gen X whole–an authenticity that only gets asserted again as Coupland claims authorship in the very act of his “Gen-X-cide,” as if it were his to kill or to declare null-and-void because something called “boomer angst-transference” has reduced his characters and ideas to Madison Avenue stereotypes and media clichés:

     

    The problems started when trendmeisters everywhere began isolating small elements of my characters' lives... and blew them up to represent an entire generation. Part of this misrepresentation emanated from baby boomers, who, feeling pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own compromised '60s values, began transferring their collective darkness onto the group threatening to take their spotlight. (72)

     

    The problem with such reductive narratives, staked out in neatly packaged us/them terms, is that they have in turn become the standard line of post-Coupland mass media Gen X historical clichés. (See, for example, the “valedictorian speech” delivered by Winonna Ryder’s character in the opening scene of Reality Bites, as well as Douglas Rushkoff’s self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual, misinformed, and homophobic manifesto and introductory blurbs in The GenX Reader.6)

     

    Whether or not one believes Coupland when he attempts to set the record straight and locate the “origins” of the title of his book in the final chapter of Paul Fussell’s book Class rather than the name of Billy Idol’s punk band is really beside the point. Historically, long before there was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, Generation X was there–both as a signifier and a signified, an attitude, a pose, an aesthetic, a sensibility, a way of looking at the world, but also the economic and cultural political realities of post-Fordist capitalism and cultural Reaganism. Whenever it can be said to have arrived, Gen X was certainly as much a punk sensibility as it was the kind of neo-beat Bohemianism Coupland now (re)locates in Fussell’s X class. Fourteen years before Coupland’s novel caught the wave of media interest in Richard Linklater’s independent film Slacker, Billy Idol’s Generation X opened at the Roxy Club, and a month prior to that the Vibrators released their single “Blank Generation.” This on-going punk theme would be taken up again in 1985, the first year of Spin, by the Replacements in “Bastards of Young”:

     

    God, what a mess
On the ladder of success 
Where you take one step  
And miss the whole first rung. 
Dreams unfulfilled
You graduate unskilled
But it beats picking cotton
And waiting to be forgotten.   

CHORUS:
We are the sons of no one 
Bastards of young 
We are the sons of no one 
Bastards of young 
The daughters and the sons...

Clean your baby room
Trash their baby boom 
Elvis's in the ground
There'll be no beer tonight.
Income tax deduction
One hell of a function!   
It beats picking cotton
And waiting to be forgotten.

CHORUS:
Now the daughters and the sons....
A willingness to claim us
You got no word to name us.

     

    If there is in fact an “X sensibility” that describes “a way of looking at the world” rather than “a chronological age,” it is nonetheless a historically specific sensibility, one that is popular now because of the more general and on-going cultural and political backlash against youth, one that is not so new after all and one that’s much more complex than Coupland’s reductive Boomer v. Buster narrative suggests. One that should not therefore be limited to the privileged romanticisms of new-Bohemian aesthetes.

     

    I invoke this brief sound-bite from punk history (a kind of “roots-of-GenX” narrative) here, not to try to distinguish between “authentic” and co-opted strains of Gen X, but rather as a check to the tendency in many self-identified media and academic Gen X discourses to define Gen X as an uniquely late 80’s/early ’90s scene or aesthetic. Regarding punk, I agree with David Laing, who argues that to talk about the history of “punk rock” is really to talk about a discourse–a loose, fluid (frequently contradictory) consensus of users between 1976 and 1978 that can be found circulating in punk artifacts (records, zines), punk events (concerts, interviews, staged media hoaxes, and interventions), and punk institutions (underground, scene-specific record labels, clubs, and shops, as well as established record companies, radio stations, and the music press) (viii). If in the early 1990s a similar kind of new consensus or discourse formation emerged under the sign Generation X (even if there can be no such directly stated signifier), then one thing that seems to separate it from its punk predecessors is the lack of any clearly identifiable artifacts, events, and institutions. If there are no artifacts of Generation X but only a handful of novels and films about the lack of generational artifacts now taken up as artifacts in themselves, if with Generation X what we have is an emerging consensus that positions itself as a subculture but lacks any clearly identifiable subaltern scene, then what happens when we try to apply our tried-and-true academic questions about the mainstream’s appropriation of subcultural resistant practices only to transform their original oppositional cultural politics into trite morality clichés for middle class fashion consumers? Does it make any sense to even ask whether or not GenX-identified symbols of disaffection and dissent have been appropriated as fashion symbols? Or should we be asking instead what happens when fashion symbols of images of disaffection and dissent are taken up and disseminated by people (like Coupland) who may or may not be disaffected but who nonetheless identify themselves as part of a newly disaffected generation emerging on the scene of their imagined post-Boomer wasteland?

     

    How then, in other words, do I deal with the fact that everything I have just described and critiqued as the narrow privileged range of Coupland’s Gen X world frequently gets articulated in the pages of Spin as it presents itself as “the voice of a generation”? How do I explain the fact that, when I discussed Spin magazine and Generation X with my undergraduate rhetoric students in the spring of 1996, we ended up switching roles and I was the one defending Spin against their teacherly-intoned, ironic, and theoretically informed critiques? This essay has, in fact, largely grown out of that 1996 course, where I found myself in the unlikely position of defending Spin against my students, half of them senior English and Rhetoric majors ten years younger than myself. As part of this on-going debate, one of my students wrote an essay arguing that this whole Gen X thing is all just one big (M)TV media scam in the first place. He only half-ironically, and rather convincingly, argued that Gen X is something that was invented by the MTV-Spin-Geffen music industrial complex, that the whole thing is just so much more white noise–the projection of pop industry workers and academics in their lower thirties (he meant me) waxing nostalgic for a punk past that they never really lived in the first place: “The whole thing makes me want to barf,” he wrote. “The fact is that there is/has been an ongoing and Real punk movement since the mid seventies and it lives and thrives in the streets and in the underground–where it belongs–and this Gen X crap is just yet another attempt to appropriate and somehow control the anarchy of real punk culture.” And of course I think he’s partly right on that. The thing that interests me, however, is that Spin magazine frequently says basically the same thing, and I think my student was getting some of his arguments against Spin for exploiting and appropriating the punk scene in their cover story “Greenday: The Year Punk Broke” (Nov. 1995) from that very article. And if that’s the case, then what the heck does that mean!? What it means is you end up trying to “read” Spin by reading someone else reading Spin reading itself. Then you get thrown into theoretical tailspins–brought to you by the “Tailspinners,” which is Spin‘s name for their list of this month’s feature writers, editors, and contributors, who, not unlike the contributors in a typical issue of Social Text, are drawn from a wide range of cultural positions, including established music critics, new journalists, fiction writers, musicians, and artists, as well as pop culture academics and other public intellectuals.

     

    There is in fact another, perhaps even more significant, reciprocal chain of signification going on here alongside the example I just cited of my student’s reading of Spin reading itself: take this sound-bite from Bob Guccione, Jr.’s January 1994 “TopSpin” column specifically addressing the Gen X phenomenon, which is also where my student was getting some of his rhetorical ammunition against Spin and which pre-dates Coupland’s Details “eulogy” of Gen X by six months:

     

    This year belonged to something that doesn’t exist: Generation X.

     

    Generation X is a phantom, an hysterical hallucination of baby boomers, suddenly realizing they are no longer the life of the party.... With a speed befitting long-honed instincts of self-interest, they created the mythology of a blank generation that has inadvertently wandered onto the stage, awkward and whining, clueless as to what to do. (12)

     

    Unlike Coupland, however, Guccione isn’t just haggling over Gen X property rights under the guise of narratives about “corporate marketing appropriations” (though that may be a factor too and a legitimate critique of Spin); rather, his complaint against Boomer-sponsored Gen X narratives is aimed at the insidious side-effects they are producing: deflecting attention away from the social and economic devastation wrought by 1980s Boomer-complicit Reaganism and, most importantly for Guccione, further deflating the politically energized atmosphere of youth cultures which had galvanized around the 1992 Rock the Vote campaign. Guccione concludes his year-end editorial on a hopeful note, predicting that 1994 would be “a watershed year. Because, like it did in 1968 and 1969, America is ready to burst again.” The prediction itself turned out to be woefully off the mark. 1994 of course brought instead Newt Gingrich’s other, all-too-familiar kind of Republican revolution and ushered in the era of the Clinton compromise, and if anything, the usual academic suspects tell us, youth political apathy seems to be on the rise. Yet, Guccione’s allusion to the barricades of 1968 ironically locates Gen X once again back in the discourses of punk rock–not punk rock as my student would construct it (and as Coupland would re-construct Gen X), as an aesthetic “way of looking at the world” forever living in the wishful imaginary space of some “authentic” media-free underground streets, but rather punk rock as The Clash attempted to define it in explicitly extra-generational political terms on the back sleeve of their first single release “White Riot”/”1977”:

     

    there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as "dated romanticism"... the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled. (qtd. in Marcus Lipstick Traces 11-12)

     

    That Guccione, Jr. and Spin will repeatedly critique the concept of Generation X as a Boomer-Media-Madison Avenue phantom while at the same time marketing the magazine as the voice of a (Gen X) generation, and frequently do so in explicitly political terms, is, to say the least, a contradiction, one that’s not easy to work through. But it’s a contradiction that we will have to get used to if academics are going to, in Huyssen’s terms, “catch on” and work in the same postmodern, post-avant-garde world that has been “home” to Spin and the youth cultures and subcultures it has been reporting and disseminating since the mid 1980s.

     

    II. “Bone-Crunching Contradictions” and Theoretical Tailspins: Spin is Not Just a Magazine

     

    To live in the postmodern moment of contemporary youth cultures, according to Andrew Ross, is to live in a world in which confronting “bone-crunching contradictions” is the norm, a “daily item” (1). The particular “contradiction” that Ross uses to frame the academic/pop-cult dialogue taking place in Microphone Fiends (co-edited by Tricia Rose) is the fact that, in the opening feature page of Vibe‘s preview issue, Greg Tate launched the first major commercial magazine devoted to hip hop by hosting a “swinging assault on hip hop commercialism consciously spoken from within the belly of the Madison Avenue beast” (1). This is precisely the kind of contradiction that is both found on the pages of Spin and that constitutes the underlying logic of the magazine’s mission, design, and style–a logic that may or may not be merely another face of the logic of consumerism as we have no doubt been conditioned to assume.

     

    As a way of framing Spin‘s specific coverage of Riot Grrrl in 1992, let’s skim the surface of a few brief, relatively random samples of Spin‘s own spin on its relationship to the postmodern:

     

    Spins

     

    Everything in Spin spins off the metaphors of the word spin. There was a good deal of media flap back in April of 1985, the date of Spin‘s first issue, as to just what it meant to have another mass-circulation rock magazine enter the market. Was Spin Rolling Stone revitalized for a new emergent youth culture formation (a rock re-formation)? Is it Rolling Stone for an accelerated culture? If so, how so–as in merely having “advanced” one generation or as in having “progressed” (as in accelerating the revolution)? Or is the title of Spin merely a self-reflexive wink at a consumer culture gone mad, spinning out of control–spinning directionlessly in a world where there is no more up or down? Is “spin” a self-conscious, self-implicating metaphor for postmodern vertigo? Or, does it refer to political spin? A particular political spin or more generally the politics of spin at work in a media society, a testimony to the power of media in shaping the spin of the world? Or, is it something even larger in its philosophical implications: an entrance sign into a poststructuralist world where all meaning is relational and contingent? A world where Guccione’s editorial column is titled “TopSpin” because that’s how he both is positioned and positions himself–how he is positioned within the management hierarchy of the magazine itself, but also how he is socially positioned in terms of class, race, and gender more generally? Or, is the answer the obvious one: all of the above?

     

    “Spins” is also the title of the album review section in the magazine, which (until recently) came framed by the following “Handy Omniscient Rating System” and which is typical of Spin‘s logic of the “bone-crunching contradiction”:

     

    Green  = Go directly to your local record 
         store.  Buy this album.  
         Immediately.  Kill if you must.

Yellow = Whoa! Slow down pal! This album is 
         pretty good, but you can't buy 
         everything in the store.  Can you?

Red    = Stop it.  Put that down.  Go buy 
         something to eat instead.  You have 
         to eat, too, you know.

     

    But what kinds of critical space does Spin open up with such a gesture when the reviewers then go on to make serious critical distinctions about specific albums up for review? And exactly what irony survives when those reviews are framed by columns of advertising for these same newest CD releases? What picture is being drawn here of the reciprocal relationship between music industry advertising goals and those of Spin (an alternative music media industry) as it implicates itself in this process by drawing attention to the fact that a good review means you should go out and buy the merchandise? What does it mean, however, when each and every month anywhere from six to ten albums get the green light and another half dozen or so get the yellow? What narratives of youth poverty and affluence are being invoked here by this ironic ratings guide? How does it map out consumer categories? Here’s one possible reading of the implied ironic critique:

     

    Green  = poverty/the poverty of desire. Urban 
         kids (implicitly of color?) killing 
         for a pair of sneakers or a cd, 
         killing for the (false) "image" 
         behind some mass-produced band or 
         album.

Yellow = affluence/the boredom of getting what 
         you want. You suburban white kids who 
         can buy everything, plus the guilt of 
         knowing that your satiated poverty of 
         (false) desire is got by someone 
         else's (real) poverty.

Red    = junkie/consumerism itself as a 
         cultural psychosis. The shop-aholic 
         and the alternative music aficionado 
         collapsing into one with Spin 
         magazine as simultaneously the 
         ultimate aficionado and the 
         compulsive consumerist ideologue.

     

    In the movement from “green” to “yellow” to “red,” Spin not only offers a critique of advanced capitalism’s multiple forms of false consciousness (affecting both the haves and the have-nots), they also ground these “individual” or internalized moments of false consciousness in a deeper, cultural logic of consumer society, which, like the shop-aholic/aficionado, is driven towards a commodification of desire to the exclusion of basic social needs (“you have to eat, too, you know”). Yet, there’s still the question of gauging the end effect of Spin‘s ironic posturing and whether such irony facilitates or nullifies the possibility of any “cultural critique” taking place at all. Has Spin so thoroughly implicated itself in the advertising function of album reviews that it frees a space for critical narratives to speak themselves and, in that way, paradoxically lays bare an otherwise hidden logic of consumer capitalism? Or is the irony here (and throughout Spin more generally) merely another superficial postmodern wink at the reader that reasserts a consensus ideological space for business-as-usual in a world where “there is nowhere else to go but the shops” (Hebdige 168)?

     

    Similar sets of ironic questions can be generated by just about everything in the pages of Spin.

     

    AIDS: Words From the Front

     

    This is serious spin by Spin dropping its standard line of parodic Thompson-esque outlaw journalism. The fact that from January 1988 Spin maintained a sustained monthly discussion of AIDS under the subheading “Words From the Front” and gave it a central place in the magazine is itself somewhat remarkable and commendable. However, it may also, as does everything else in Spin, raise more questions than it answers–which, regarding AIDS discourses, sometimes is and sometimes isn’t necessarily a good thing. How, for instance, should one read Spin‘s long-running series of stories on whether or not HIV is the cause of AIDS, particularly as they take a pro-sex stance and popularize certain Cultural Studies analyses of AIDS discourses (e.g., Crimps’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism)? On the one hand, these articles appear to popularize the Cultural Studies assumption that “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it” (Crimp, “AIDS” 3). As such they may successfully deploy the discourses of pop culture journalism to deconstruct medical/scientific discourses and their authoritative claims to objective knowledge, demonstrating that, when it comes to AIDS, “no clear line can be drawn between the facticity of scientific and nonscientific (mis)conceptions” (Treichler 37). Celia Farber’s “Words From the Front” articles in particular seem to give popular voice to what Crimp describes as “the genuine concern by informed people that a full acceptance of HIV as the cause of AIDS limits research options, especially regarding possible cofactors” (“How to Have Promiscuity” 238). They certainly seem to “perform a political analysis of the ideology of science” and in doing so also take a pro-sex stance. On the other hand, one might also argue that Farber’s articles do so in a regressive tabloid fashion by celebrating Duesberg as a “maverick hero” without critiquing Deusberg’s views on the causes of AIDS, or without adequately reporting the controversy surrounding those views (as The Village Voice did when Ann Fettner characterized Deusberg’s views as a “regression to 1982” when the medical community viewed AIDS as a collection of diseases related to “the gay life style” [see Crimp 238]). Other AIDS articles written for Spin are even more suspect, suggesting that Spin‘s preoccupation with the HIV controversy may be motivated more by a need to confirm a political-medical “establishment” conspiracy against “sex” than by a genuine desire to engage in AIDS cultural analysis-activism. If this is the case (and I’m not concluding here that in fact it is), what then separates Spin‘s reporting from the kinds of exploitative reporting that Crimp finds in the pages of the New York Native, which, according to Crimp, merely trots out “the crackpot theory of the week” and exploits “the conflation of sex, fear, disease, and death in order to sell millions of newspapers” (Crimp 237-238)? Certainly the fact that Spin would run an article rehashing the “poppers theory” (Nov. 1994) in a totally unselfconscious article that makes no mention of the homophobic medical-politics surrounding this theory is cause for some concern if not outright alarm. If silence equals death, and it does, Spin is at least not silent. But the fact that silence equals death does not, of course, mean that the inverse is always true: sound does not always equal life. Sometimes sound isn’t voice, it’s just more noise, and, as ACT UP Cultural Studies analyses of AIDS discourses have all too frequently demonstrated, some kinds of noise can be deadlier than viruses. By positioning itself on the “front lines” of the AIDS War, has Spin succeeded in articulating and popularizing an ACT UP frame of reference on AIDS, as well as, in the process, popularizing Cultural Studies notions of hegemony as a “war of position,” not least perhaps in Spin‘s 1989 infamous ad-stunt/political intervention of including a free condom with one of its special issues?7 Or, has Spin merely appropriated ACT UP rhetoric as a kind of cutting-edge neo-punk style, exploiting the AIDS epidemic and PWAs as a way of furthering its own self-promoting image of Spin as front-line pop (i.e., Spin as shades of Michael Stipe)?

     

    In fact, Spin‘s relationship with the tabloid-style New York Native may be even more complex and problematic, as is made clear in Celia Farber’s outrageously off-the-mark “TopSpin” editorial on ACT UP published in May 1992. Most outrageous (it would be funny if it weren’t so dangerously misinformed) is Farber’s completely unselfconscious presumption to lecture ACT UP on the dangers of being “absorbed” by the mainstream media. ACT UP and other activists need to realize, she concludes in her lecture about the dangers of being too “entertaining,” that the mainstream media always gets the last word: “We don’t use the media: the media uses us. And the government uses the media. If AIDS activism did not exist, as a vent system for AIDS fury, the government would have reason to worry. As it is they’re grinning from ear to ear” (12, my emphasis). Talk about a bone-crunching contradiction! Who’s the “we” here? If Spin ain’t “the media” then who is? Again, if it weren’t so dangerously inane, it might be funny. I won’t bother to detail the contradictions here, except to note that it’s hard to imagine how it is that Farber, who has led the charge of Spin‘s own brand of mass media appropriations of ACT UP activism, can be so blind as to turn around and try to blame successful ACT UP media interventions for derailing some imaginary “AIDS fury” that would otherwise unleash itself, when of course those ACT UP and Gran Fury successes are themselves the only reason Farber can conjure up the signifier of “AIDS fury” in the first place.8

     

    Sex in the ’90s

     

    After ACT UP AIDS activism had lost much of its radical, alternative cachet, Spin shifted gears in 1995 and ran a series of self-identified, third-generation, sex-positive “feminist” articles under the heading “Sex in the 90s”–which again raises questions about the commodification of oppositional culture. How, for example, should one read Elizabeth Gilbert’s feature article on “feminist porn” titled “Pussy Galore” (April 1995)? Here is an article that has clearly been informed by Cultural Studies positions on the anti-porn/”pro-sex” debate within feminism–positions such as those articulated in Ross’s chapter on “The Popularity of Pornography” in No Respect, or in the Social Text special issue “Sex Workers and Sex Work.” Again, however, one might ask whether this article, or similar Spin discussions under the heading “Sex in the ’90s,” survives the seemingly masculinist framing devices that accompany it? Take, for instance, the way this article gets framed on the contents page: “Pussy Galore. Sick of the same old sleaze, feminist pornographers are getting off their backs and behind the cameras. Meet the revolutionaries in the flicks-for-chicks business. By Elizabeth Gilbert.” This blurb, along with the rest of the contents blurbs, is printed over a black-and-white still photo from an S/M film covered in the article depicting a topless woman gazing down at her outstretched feet which are being suckled by a blond submissive dressed in a teddy and collar. In small print off to the side is the following photo caption: “Toe-lickin’ good: A scene from An Elegant Spanking. See Elizabeth Gilbert’s article on feminist porn.” Of course, the first academic question is likely to be (and with emphasis), who is being invited to gaze into such a “revolutionary” porn world? Or rather, whose gaze is being invited to gaze? Do such phrases as “pussy galore,” “toe-lickin’ good,” or “flicks-for-chicks” appropriate masculinist porn-speak and rearticulate it in a sex-positive feminist-porn voice? Or are we seeing instead the limits of such acts of appropriation which have become increasingly commonplace in Gen X underground scenes and discourses? Is such a world, framed as it is here, revolutionary or merely exoticized for the titillation of male readers looking to rationalize their heterosexist porn appetites? Or, are we freed from struggling with these questions because Elizabeth Gilbert raises most of them herself in the article, as when she puts down her pen and picks up the camera to shoot some footage for a director while on the set of an S/M film, remarking in retrospect that she felt more like a tourist than a pornographer?

     

    “The A to Z of Alternative Culture”

     

    Let’s take as one final example the issues raised when one attempts to analyze Craig Marks’s multiply-ironic introduction to Spin‘s April 1993 “A to Z of Alternative Culture,” a highly eclectic, kitsch “dictionary” of what it means to be Gen X in 1993 that lists, in mock encyclopedia style, items ranging from consumer products like Snapple to “in” bands like Nirvana and TV shows like The Simpsons, as well as underground subculture scenes like rave and Riot Grrrl. Marks’s introduction to this feature offers itself up as a perfect example of Spin‘s trademark ironic style (marked by MTVish Gen X posturing):

     

    The outpouring of scribblings recently about the generation born in the ’60s and ’70s reads like a misguided conclusion to that psych experiment where twins are separated at birth to answer the nurture versus nature debate. Could it be that these profiles of you and yours are nothing but covert attempts to reduce a complex, confounded generation to its lowest common denominator, thereby making it easier to blame you for all that’s wrong with the world, and easier to exploit you when there’s a new soft drink on the market? Does the word “duh” mean anything to you?

     

    What your birthdate does provide you is common ground, a shared vocabulary. The items we've selected, when added together, do not equal your thoughts, feelings, fears, and aspirations. That's for you and your confidants to sort out. There is, though, a lexicon that develops among the members of a generation, a secret language that's so pervasive it's taken for granted. Asking a 40-year-old to comprehend a conversation between two 24-years-olds is as fruitless an exercise in code-breaking as reading the Daily Racing Form. What you'll find on the following pages is more the result of sifting through the contents of your pants pockets than of unlocking the door to your soul. We'll save that for next year's anniversary issue. (38)

     

    What does it mean when Spin, which already ironically sells itself as THE monthly tour-guide to “Alternative” scenes, publishes an A to Z tour-guide to Alternative Culture? What does it mean when the music editor then writes an introduction to this pastiche cultural dictionary by announcing that these profiles you are about to read are reductive and commercially exploitative and that such a list could never really be compiled except as a set of already appropriated mass media stereotypes of a self-identified generational youth culture that could never really exist? What does it mean when Craig Marks goes on to suggest, in a seeming reversal, that a generational lexicon is “so pervasive it’s taken for granted,” and cites as proof of its existence the fact that it lies in the shared consumer goods found in the contents of our pockets?

     

    Two months later, the editors throw into the mix, as Spin always does, that one last twirl: a reader’s response to the A-Z tour-guide to the always-already-thoroughly-appropriated-GenX-scene–a letter published by Spin further implicating Spin as it simultaneously represents, constructs, and exploits the scene that never quite yet was:

     

    Just when I thought SPIN had a clue, we get "The A to Z of Alternative Culture." Why can't people realize that the basis of an alternative culture is that it can't be alphabetized? A better title for the piece would have been "26 Steps to Becoming Trendy"--or better yet "What's out for '93."

     

    Insofar as the article at issue is a simulacra of Spin, each of these substitute titles may be read as already popularized meta-commentaries on what it means to read Spin magazine itself. Staked out here between these two alternative titles to Spin‘s alternative tour-guide, lies a wonderfully complex and illustrative debate about the relationship between popularized postmodernism and essentializing patterns in Cultural Studies subculture criticism.

     

    “26 Steps to Becoming Trendy”: Spin as Just a Magazine

     

    Of course, Spin magazine is only one of a growing number of mass-circulation pop-cult magazines which have learned, in a sense, to talk the talk of academic theory and cultural criticism. And even though I’ve invested more time than I’d care to admit in this paper and I consider myself a “fan” of Spin (whatever that might actually be), I, too, am sometimes inclined to dismiss it wholesale as so many of Spin‘s own readers do. I too am tempted to read Spin as merely a tour guide to what’s trendy–to interpret Spin according to the logic of Hebdige’s reading of the Face as a magazine that articulates nothing more than a facile, flat earth postmodernism in which everything is always already commercially appropriated, where the line between the ads and the articles isn’t just blurred, it collapses altogether, and for Hebdige it always collapses into the ad.

     

    Borrowing Jean-Luc Godard’s famous maxim “This is not a just image. This is just an image,” Hebdige reads the Face as a way of marking the differences between what he sees as “a just magazine” (Ten.8) and “just a magazine” (the Face). Comparing these two British youth culture magazines on points of design, content, and style, Hebdige maps a cultural terrain between, on the one hand, the last remnants of an avant-garde world (a three dimensional world of words capable of historical perspective and motion over time) and, on the other hand, the emergent dominance of a postmodern, post-avant-garde world (a flat depthless world of images happily fixated on its own eternally changing kaleidoscopic present). According to Hebdige, Ten.8, with its more traditional magazine style and print-dominated three-column layout, is a magazine capable of offering up “knowledge of debates on the history, theory, politics and practice of photography,” where as the Face, with its oversized “continental format,” its emphasis on photo images and a design that blurs the boundaries between article and ad, ends up offering nothing but flat surfaces: “‘street credibility,’ ‘nous,’ image and style tips for those operating within the highly competitive milieux of fashion, music and design” (158):

     

    The Face is a magazine which goes out of its way every month to blur the line between politics and parody and pastiche; the street, the stage, the screen; between purity and danger; the mainstream and the “margins.” (161)

     

    […]

     

    All statements made inside the Face, though necessarily brief are never straightforward. Irony and ambiguity predominate. They frame all reported utterances whether those utterances are reported photographically or in prose. A language is thus constructed without anybody in it (to question, converse or argue with). Where opinions are expressed they occur in hyperbole so that a question is raised about how seriously they’re meant to be taken. Thus the impression you gain as you glance through the magazine is that this is less an “organ of opinion” than a wardrobe full of clothes (garments, ideas, values, arbitrary preferences: i.e., signifiers)….

     

    As the procession of subcultures, taste groups, fashions, anti-fashions, winds its way across the flat plateaux, new terms are coined to describe them.... The process is invariable: caption/capture/disappearance (i.e., naturalisation). [...] Once named, each group moves from the sublime (absolute now) to the ridiculous (the quaint, the obvious, the familiar). It becomes a special kind of joke. Every photograph an epitaph, every article an obituary. On both sides of the camera and the typewriter, irony and ambiguity act as an armour to protect the wearer (writer/photographer; person/people written about/photographed) against the corrosive effects of the will to nomination. Being named (identified; categorised) is naff; on Planet Two it is a form of living death. (170)

     

    Hmmmmm. Smells like team Spin. What’s in Spin is out because being in Spin marks one as having already been “sold out” long enough to be included in Spin. Regardless of how frequently Spin may implicate itself in the ironic world of its own making, such acts of self-implication are themselves, however, only part of the language of simulacra… every month the world of youth cultures and pop is made anew in the pages of Spin only to be declared dead already, only in turn to be made new and declared already dead again next month. Or is it?

     

    “What’s Out For ’93”: Spin as Not Just a Magazine

     

    The Spin reader who wants to dismiss the magazine as a consumerist tour guide to what’s trendy also, unwittingly, acknowledges in his letter that one might read Spin as a way of gauging what’s not authentic alternative culture–as a guide to “What’s out.” The logic underlying such a critique reflects Sarah Thornton’s argument that (as well as perhaps Spin‘s self-conscious realization of the fact that) mass subculture consumer magazines such as the Face, however ironically scorned by people who identify themselves with underground scenes, nevertheless play a crucial, constitutive mediating role in the formation of subculture scenes and identities. In “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture,” Thornton challenges the way Cultural Studies subculture theories “tend to position the media and its associated processes in opposition to and after the fact of subculture” (189):

     

    Their segregation of subcultures from the media derives, in part, from an intellectual project in which popular culture was excavated out from under mass culture (that is, authentic people's culture was sequestered from mediated, corporate culture). In this way, the popular was defended against the disparagement of "mass society" and other theorists; youth could be seen as unambiguously active rather than passive, creative rather than manipulated. In practice, however, music subcultures and the media--popular and mass culture--are inextricable. In consumer societies, where sundry media work simultaneously and global industries are local businesses, the analytical division eclipses as much as it explains. (188)

     

    We see this kind of interpretive “eclipse” at work in Hebdige’s account of the “invariable” process he maps out regarding the relationship between the Face and the subculture scenes it covers: “caption/capture/disappearance.” In her reading of British rave scenes, however, Thornton finds that, in the mainstream as well as in niche/zine media (and everything in between), one can chart a relationship that looks more like caption/formation/caption/re-formation–a reciprocal relationship in which subcultures are not “subversive until the very moment they are represented by the mass media,” but rather “become politically relevant only when they are framed as such,” frequently by disparaging mass media/tabloid coverage which becomes “not the verdict but the vehicle of their resistance” (184). Moreover, Thornton argues that subculture theorists need to acknowledge the existence of mass media that cater specifically to counter-cultural desires of young people, what she refers to as “subcultural consumer magazines.”

     

    III. (White) Riot Grrrl: who really wants a riot right now?

     

    Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald take up a similar post-Hebdige position in “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock,” where they conclude that the limits of Riot Grrrl “revolutionary” rock are to be found in the movement’s self-imposed media black-out, some of which has remained in effect since 1992. Though they concede that Riot Grrrls have legitimate reasons to fear and loathe masculinist “mainstream” media and the gaze of academia, both of which threaten (in different ways of course) to exploit and trivialize the movement and incorporate it into various forms of cultural tourism, Gottlieb and Wald conclude that such a stance against academia and the “popular” is ultimately politically regressive and elitist:

     

    In pinning its resistance to the undifferentiated "mainstream," Riot Grrrl risks setting itself up in opposition to the culturally "popular," as well as to the political status quo; in this they echo the collegiate erudition and elitism of independent music generally. Moreover, in rejecting the popular, Riot Grrrl may preclude the possibility of having a broad cultural or political impact.... If Riot Grrrl wants to raise feminist consciousness on a large scale, then it will have to negotiate a relation to the mainstream that does not merely reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture. (271)

     

    This criticism is perhaps especially poignant when one considers that many Riot Grrrls are themselves current or former graduate students and that much of Riot Grrrl’s neo-punk “revolution” resides in the translation of academic feminist critical theory into everyday subcultural practice. For the purposes of my argument here, however, what’s most relevant about Gottlieb and Wald’s essay is not only the fact that their conclusions about the limits Riot Grrrl counter-hegemonic practices echo Thornton’s analysis of the symbiotic, constitutive relationship between media and subculture identity but also the performative criticism that their essay enacts by violating, in the acts of composition, presentation, and publication, Riot Grrrl resolve to resist incorporation in/by the gaze of both “mainstream” media and academia. This is made all the more clear when one considers the ways Gottlieb and Wald undermine their own analysis by constructing Riot Grrrl as an “original” underground that “emerges as a bona fide subculture” and then gets “discovered” by mainstream journalism and subsequently popularized (262-263).

     

    This is precisely the kind of violation for which Spin magazine is routinely vilified, again by academics, subculture members, and so-called “mainstream” readers alike. Moreover, Gottlieb and Wald’s implicit rationale for committing such a violation is identical to that which is frequently asserted in the pages of Spin as it reports and disseminates “alternative” underground scenes to “mainstream” readers–namely, “politics,” or in the words of Gottlieb and Wald, the “possibility of [Riot Grrrl] having a broad cultural or political impact.” Compare this statement to Spin‘s own coverage of Riot Grrrl just prior to the movement’s semi-official 1992 media blackout in the magazine’s “Flash” section (a series of short articles in the front of the magazine devoted to, among other things, alerting readers to new and emerging underground scenes):

     

    When asked about their inspiration, many of the women involved cite Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill. Hanna, however, doesn't exactly have mass-media savvy--she declined to speak to Spin and, with that, gave up the opportunity to reach thousands with her motivating voice. (Furth 26)

     

    To punctuate their certainly self-serving critique further, and to give Riot Grrrl the benefit of the mass media advertising plug that Hanna expressly tried to refuse, Furth concludes her brief Spin article by listing Riot Grrrl Washington D.C. contact addresses for “girl bands” and “girls interested in Riot Grrrl” (a rhetorical gesture that echoes Spin‘s monthly Amnesty International updates, which appeared on donated ad-space for 12 months in 1991-92, including an entire special issue guest-edited by Amnesty International Executive Director Jack Healey in November 1991).

     

    The bottom line from both Gottlieb and Wald and Spin‘s perspective seems to be the same: if you really want to have a progressive riot (or a cultural revolution), first you have to assemble a crowd. And you can only do that by reaching out to Others, even to those (or perhaps especially to those), who threaten to incorporate your slogans, your “look,” and your politics into their own agendas and their own practices and pleasures of everyday life; and you can only do that if you’re willing to work in the mediums of the popular. Spin sound-bite:

     

    Sinéad O’Connor: I don’t believe that rock’n’roll is only about entertainment.

     

    SPIN [Bob Guccione, Jr.]: I don't either, but it's certainly an entertainment medium. ("Special Child" 48)

     

    Or, as Elizabeth Gilbert would write in her article on feminist porn after being snubbed by a NOW spokesperson who refused to distinguish between Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. and his son who publishes and edits Spin: “If you only talk to people who already agree with you, you are not a political organization. You’re a support group.” Spin writers and editors frequently echo academic critiques of the traditional divisions between the margins and the mainstream–as they do, for instance, in an article on Stone Temple Pilots (August 1995): “As mainstream rock bands continue to emulate indie ways, they become lightening rods for ridicule. ‘Poseurs!’ cry the righteous arbiters of indie. But shouldn’t we encourage the mainstreaming of indie values?” (Azerrad 57). This is the core of Spin‘s theory of its own relationship to mass culture–this is at once its angle into the market of subculture consumer magazines and its moral mission, what Guccione, Jr. calls its “higher calling.”

     

    The arguments against Spin successfully articulating or performing any such cultural criticism should by now be familiar. Regarding Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage specifically, one might argue that Spin doesn’t perform an act of criticism by publishing a “Flash” article on Riot Grrrl and that it performs, instead, a double act of Madison Avenue mainstream incorporation. On the one hand, it appropriates Riot Grrrl interventions to serve a masculinist spectacle of rock ideology, the kind of thing that Ross defines as “some homosocial version of young, straight males out on the town, partying, and so on.” On the other hand, it appropriates an academic critique of the relationship between popular culture and mass media to serve its own self-congratulatory, self-promoting, moralistic editorial voice. One might argue that Riot Grrrl revolution is, to return to Hebdige’s phrasing, merely the latest commodity to appear in Spin‘s endless parade of revolutionary youth cultures as fashion that it deploys to better market its own self-styled image of “street credibility.” In this regard, one might note that the word “Grrrl”–which in Riot Grrrl usage performs a multi-valent intervention into, and recuperation of, the language of patriarchy, as well as a critique of the woman-centered discourses of mainstream feminism–appears on the pages of Spin as “girl.” Spin articles do give a certain voice to Riot Grrrl concerns about masculine-media appropriations: “At a recent CBGB Bikini Kill show, many guys panted at the prospect of seeing Hanna topless (she had doffed her shirt at a previous gig), turning a potential act of defiance into an oglefest.” But those same Spin articles also tend themselves to “ogle” at and invite male readers to be titillated by Riot Grrrl displays of women’s rage: “Some of the older females present saw the show as just a Poly Styrene/X-Ray Spex retread. But to the younger, less jaded Goo-girls, Hanna is the Angriest Girl. They understand. They see this scary, sexy girl, who pogos while singing about sexual abuse, as the future of punk rock–where girls can have fun for a change.” With the final sentence of the article collapsing Riot Grrrl anger into Cindy Lauper’s “girls just wanna have fun,” one might conclude that, indeed, “violation” is the appropriate word to use regarding Spin’s Riot Grrrl reporting and its diluted critical performances–that Spin’s refusal to respect Riot Grrrl’s “no” in response to its media advances constitutes a form of sexual violence.

     

    Though there is no doubt some validity to each of these claims, the problem with such arguments is that: 1) they all depend upon a return to an interpretive paradigm that constructs Riot Grrrl subculture as existing apart from and outside of the multiple levels of media (mass media, tabloid media, niche or zine media, as well as subculture consumer media, and, I would add, academic media), which are in fact the materials out of which subcultures and undergrounds are made; and 2) they presuppose that a valid, qualitative (if not quantitative) distinction can be drawn between Spin‘s violation of Riot Grrrl media black-outs and the violation performed by Gottlieb and Wald’s academic essay, which is of course only the tip of a whole wave of Riot Grrrl seminar papers that began hitting the beaches of traditional academic venues. Gottlieb and Wald tend themselves to reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture, and in the process exaggerate the anti-hegemonic resistance of the subculture, by turning to Riot Grrrl performances in order to validate academic gender-as-performance criticism while at the same time holding those performances up as a model for future feminist political strategies: “Using performance as a political forum to interrogate issues of gender, sexuality and patriarchal violence, Riot Grrrl performance creates a feminist praxis based on the transformation of the private into the public, consumption into production–or, rather than privileging the traditionally male side of these binaries, they create a new synthesis of both” (268). Making such an intellectual and political investment in a “popular” scene that refuses to engage the popular almost as a matter of policy, however, makes me wonder exactly what kind of praxis we’re really talking about here, bringing to mind Steven Tyler’s joke about rock critics: “Why do rock critics like Elvis Costello? Because they all look like him” (“Cult of the DJ” 75). But even assuming that Riot Grrrl has indeed managed (in spite of itself) to mobilize a popularized form of feminist cultural criticism centered on a Hebdigian post-modernist “problematics of affect” (and I think the subsequent mass popularity of Courtney Love and other popularized “angry womyn” Grrrl-styled “alternative” rock bands indicates that is has), I would argue that it could only do so, as Gottlieb and Wald themselves hesitantly acknowledge, in its popularized forms in the mass media:

     

    Possibly, the riot grrrl movement would have been significantly diminished had it not been for its careful coverage [in Sassy], which gave a mass audience of teenage girls access to a largely inaccessible phenomenon in the rock underground. This suggests a variation on Dick Hebdige's model of ideological incorporation in that--in this case--the media, beyond its function to control and contain this phenomenon, may also have helped to perpetuate it. Sassy's role in publicizing and perpetuating the riot grrrl phenomenon may arise from a gendered division in the experience of youth culture, with girls' participation gravitating towards the forms, often mass-market visual materials, that lend themselves towards consumption in the home. While it appropriates riot grrrl subculture as a marketing strategy, the magazine also enables riot grrrl culture to infiltrate the domestic space to which grrrls--particularly young teenagers--are typically confined. (265-266)

     

    All of which tends to circle without directly facing the more fundamental questions of exactly where Riot Grrrl performances might be said to perform and who in fact might be said to perform them, which ultimately leads to a question of who qualifies to identify themselves as part of the Riot Grrrl revolution: underground rock bands and underground zines, certainly; readers, writers, and editors of Sassy, maybe; but presumably not readers (let alone writers and editors) of the likes of The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Spin.

     

    Of course, there are important differences to note between underground scenes and mass media disseminations of underground messages and styles, between the reading spaces and reading practices of contemporary teenage girls and boys (though Hanna herself allows that boys too, like Bikini Kill’s guitarist, can be “girly boys”); however, Gottlieb and Wald’s compulsion to police the boundaries between Sassy‘s “careful,” “respectful,” and ideologically “committed” mass media disseminations on the one hand, and an otherwise undifferentiated mass of “mainstream” media dilutions on the other, seems to me to overplay all of these differences, especially given the collegiate nature of “alternative” youth cultures more generally. The overall effect of this is to exaggerate Riot Grrrl underground agency in “infiltrating” the mainstream with presumably more “authentic” Riot Grrrl articulations and to discount any empowering potential in the readerly consumption of mass media marketing appropriations of those articulations.

     

    Thornton claims that, because mass media is the stuff out of which subcultural identity is formed, we must concede that subcultures are themselves likely to be more passive than we have been conditioned to believe. The converse of this may be, however, that subculture consumer magazines (their articles and ads) are more actively subversive than we have been conditioned to assume. From this perspective, one could argue that Riot Grrrl as Gottlieb and Wald construct it not only risks “echoing the collegiate erudition and elitism of independent music generally” by positioning itself against the “mainstream,” but rather it was from the start already collegiate, erudite and elitist, and that it remained so in part because Riot Grrrl subculture identity grounded itself in limiting rather than expanding the stage upon which it would perform popularized articulations of academic feminism, which, as Gottlieb and Wald acknowledge, remains itself a largely collegiate white middle class woman’s (as opposed to “girl’s”) tradition/culture/movement. Spin writer Charles Aaron was perhaps (ironically) correct, then, when he prematurely concluded in his Village Voice article on the movement that Riot Grrrl circa 1992 would turn out to be only a white college women’s riot after all (though he might have emphasized that that’s significant in and of itself!). Aaron missed the mark, however, when he failed to see Riot Grrrl media coverage itself as a constitutive part of that subcultural resistance movement–a movement of cultural critique which (even more ironically) may have only appeared to evaporate in news photographer’s “flash” to later re-emerge (in spite of everyone) in other, more popular popularized forms.

     

    IV. Conclusion: Post-Scripts (Again): Cultural Work in the “Always Forever Now”

     

    Part of our point is that nobody owns these 
images. They belong to a movement that is 
constantly growing--in numbers, in militancy, 
in political awareness.

          --Douglas Crimp, AIDS demo graphics

     

    I want to conclude by way of a brief turn back to Hebdige’s “Post-Scripts” which make up the conclusion of Hiding in the Light–where Hebdige seems to grudgingly accept that, like it or not (and he clearly doesn’t), postmodernism is “here” to stay, so we might as well “get used to it.” Meaning, it’s time to stop complaining about the postmodern (or waxing nostalgic for those more knowable “modernist” times that never quite were anyway) and figure out how to work within it–how to “work it.”

     

    Diesel[TM]: Jeans and (ACT UP) Cultural Work

     

    So let’s begin again by taking Hebdige at face value. Let’s allow that Spin, like the Face and Vibe and other consumer subculture magazines, not only blurs the line between article and ad, it collapses it all together. And let’s allow that it all collapses into the ad. Following Thornton’s line of thinking, ads like Diesel Jeans’ “Victory” [see Figure 3],

     

    Figure 3. Diesel Jeans and Workwear, “Victory!”
    Rpt. from Spin August 1995: 3-4.
    Reprinted by permission.

     

    which was published as a full two-page spread in the opening pages of Spinin 1995, can be read as a post-avant-garde counter-cultural intervention (commercial to be sure) that does not merely appropriate “original” ACT UP signs of subcultural opposition, but in fact resemanticizes and disseminates (popularizes) those oppositional values on a scale that no subcultural articulation ever could. There are indeed multiple moments of commercial appropriation taking place here, appropriations of what traditional subcultural theories would either explicitly or implicitly define as “original” or “authentic” ACT UP oppositional signs. The ad-series slogan and logo, which appears at the bottom corner of all the Diesel Jeans shock ads, borrows directly from ACT UP subcultural styles and rhetoric. The logo features a profile face of a punk/new wave rebel whose image calls to mind ACT UP’s initial appropriation of earlier punk-rock looks; surrounding that profile, arranged like the print surrounding an activist logo, is the series slogan printed in the fashion of ACT UP protest slogans: “Number 80 in a Series of Diesel ‘How to…’ Guides to SUCCESSFUL LIVING for PEOPLE interested in general HEALTH and mental POWER.” The central image of the two sailors kissing on the dock of a World War II home-coming Victory celebration is specifically an appropriation of a 1988 ACT UP poster titled “Read My Lips” [see Figure 4] featuring two World War II era sailors in a similar pose of loving embrace and full-mouthed kiss that gets rearticulated as an in-your-(heterosexist)-face assertion of gay pride and resistance, the visual equivalent of “we’re here, we’re queer, get used it.”

     

    Figure 4. Gran Fury, “Read My Lips (boys)” (1988). Rpt. in Crimp and Rolston 56. Reprinted by permission of ACT UP. 
    Figure 5. “VD DAY!” Illustration accompanying Phil Ochs’s “Have You Heard? The War Is Over!” The Village Voice 23 Nov. 1967. Rpt. in Phil Ochs, The War Is Over (New York: Collier Books, 1971) 93. Reprinted by permission.

     

    However, this “original” ACT UP poster, which was produced by Gran Fury to promote a “kiss in” protest rally, itself borrows from similar tactics of appropriation deployed by 1960s anti-war protests. In fact, this Diesel ad bears an even more direct resemblance to Eisenstaedt’s famously staged World War II V-J Day photograph, which was itself incorporated into a 1968 Vietnam War Protest poster promoting the parodic celebration of “VD Day: The End of the War!” [see Figure 5].

     

    The Diesel Jeans “Victory” ad therefore ends up being not merely a commercial appropriation of ACT UP signs of subcultural resistance, but rather an appropriation of what was itself an ACT UP appropriation. The questions facing us, then, in light of Thornton’s critique of Cultural Studies’ tendency to romanticize and essentialize subcultural resistance are: What, if any, kinds of oppositional cultural work (including but not limited to queer cultural critique) may survive the commodification process? What other kinds of oppositional images might be for sale? Does this image of commodified queerness mark or elide the cultural-historical systems of power and social struggle that lie behind the multiple appropriations taking place? The expected “disclaimer” is clearly present in the lower left corner where a man is wearing a placard in which a sampling of the song “God Bless America” (“America, God shed his grace”) reads as a moral/religious invective against homosexuality. But it’s difficult for me to imagine that virtually all of the in-your-(heterosexist)-face activism of the “original” Gran Fury “Read My Lips” poster gets lost in the popular commercial appropriations here. In fact, when one considers that the timing of the ad proclaiming “victory” comes right on the heels of newly-elected President Clinton’s soon-to-be doomed attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military, this appropriation might be interpreted as reflecting a fuller image of the important role World War II played in the historical development of gay and lesbian identity and community in America because the photograph evokes a wider contextual image of the role World War II and post-war cultural environment in the development of contemporary gay subcultural identity and resistance. The realpolitik optimism of this ad may have been misplaced; however, the larger political successes of ads such as this and of commodified queerness more generally is not to be located in any direct influence they may have on public policy, but rather in their ability to win popular consent for the free and open expression of “outlaw” sexuality. As one reader of an earlier version said in response to someone else’s dismissal of the queer politics in this ad as merely appropriating ACT UP rhetoric as the latest image of suburban “alternative” hippness: “Yes, but that may be precisely the point. We want and need for young people to be able to look at images like this, or video images of Madonna kissing a woman, and see them as ‘cool.’”

     

    The potentially successful populist politics of this ad and similar consumer culture appropriations reveals the limitations of Crimps’s claim that ACT UP subcultural pop art interventions succeed in breaking down the barriers of mass culture and high art which earlier generations of Pop artists sought but failed to achieve. In AIDS demo graphics, Crimp credits ACT UP’s Gran Fury with having successfully circumvented “the fate of most critical art” in the twentieth century, which is to be “co-opted and neutralized” by the overriding commodity constraints of the art world:

     

    Postmodernist art advanced a political critique of art institutions--and art itself as an institution--for the ways they constructed social relations through specific modes of address, representations of history, and obfuscations of power. The limits of this aesthetic critique, however, have been apparent in its own institutionalization: critical postmodernism has become a sanctioned, if still highly contested, art world product, the subject of standard exhibitions, catalogues, and reviews. The implicit promise of breaking out of the museum and marketplace to take on new issues and find new audiences has gone largely unfulfilled. (19)

     

    Crimp claims that ACT UP’s Gran Fury delivers on postmodernist art’s failed promise to break out of the twin confines of “the museum and the marketplace” because they target their art-politics at the “streets” of AIDS activism. Though Crimp is justified in his critique of Pop as museum-bound cultural critique, in his celebration of Gran Fury he tends to fall into the reverse trap of exaggerating and romanticizing the authenticity and independence of queer subculture, much in the same way as George Chauncey does in his analysis of gay subcultures in the 1920s and 1930s, and as Hebdige does regarding punk in the late 1970s and as Gottlieb and Wald do with Riot Grrrl in the late 1980s.

     

    Cultural Studies subcultural theories, as important as they are in mapping the complexities of power relationships operating according to the “spectacle” logics of consumer capitalism, frequently fail to take full account of the constitutive role that mass media technologies play in the long history of dissatisfied people locating ruptures in the hegemonies of cultural dominants and rearticulating resistant cultural practices within those ruptures. What Spin magazine offers us, then, is a demonstration of the limits of relying on subcultures as a paradigm for political action and activism against a global system of multinational consumer capitalism. That’s the bad news. The good news is that rethinking the post-avant-garde politics of Spin may lead to new, more successful strategies of Left coalition-building between intellectuals, counter-cultural celebrities, consumer-subcultural media industries and “the people” which Stuart Hall called for in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal.

     

    When one more fully acknowledges the interdependent, symbiotic relationship between the media and subculture identity formations, the Face becomes more than “just a magazine,” even if one doesn’t yet want to call it “a just magazine.” And so too does Spin, which has from the late ’80s on increasingly positioned itself in more explicit political cultural terms and which had always been more explicitly “political” than the Face from the very beginning. But Spin may arguably be “a just magazine” as well, not because it offers up the kind of academic-friendly, rational argument and criticism that Hebdige locates in Ten.8, but rather precisely because it is able to use irony and hyperbole to mobilize an effective form of “sound-bite” criticism–because Spin manages to reach, with its Gen X posturing and hyperbolic irony, the kinds of readers that neither Hebdige nor media-phobic undergrounds ever will: those center-leaning, educated-but-decidedly-not-academic, generally-conservative-but-still-reachable mass cult readers against whom both subculture theorists and undergrounds scenes ritualistically define themselves, but upon whom they must also depend if their alternative cultural politics are going to be effective.

     

    Jeans II: Celebrating Whose Specialness?

     

    In arguing that contemporary Left pop culture academics need to rethink their relationship to commodified media technologies that shape the shapeless mass of the known world through which progressive cultural politics work, I do not mean to suggest that Spin magazine has arrived at the promised land of post-avant-garde political postmodernist practice. Rather, I’m suggesting that its appropriations of Riot Grrrl and ACT UP counter-culture have functioned progressively and that the Spin model of commodified resistance represents a viable strategy. In many ways, of course, Spin‘s appropriations do function conservatively, particularly regarding issues of race and race representations. Since the advent of Vibe (which now owns Spin), Spin appears to have abandoned its 1989 to 1993 political vision of an alliance between alternative rock and hip-hop manifesting itself under the banner of some vaguely defined multi-cultural Gen X signifier. The magazine continues to market itself as Gen X radical chic, but regarding race, Spin in 1996 and 1997 resorted to merely paying lip service to hip-hop as an imaginary post-racist ally to the (now more than ever) implicitly-coded white world of Gen X iconography.

     

    In the post-Gen X, post-punk, post-Vibe world of the late 1990s, “Gen X” ironically remains a potent signified for both Spin and its fashion-music advertisers, even though any and all explicit signifiers of Gen X have long since past being passé. Moreover, the percentage of multi-ethnic imagery associated with Gen X iconography continues to grow in inverse proportion to the rise of de facto ethnic segregation and racial conflict over the last two decades. Similar to Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage, the current proliferation of multi-ethnic Gen X signs again raises complex questions about commodified images of progressive political ideals and the resistant practices of subordinate peoples. In the construction of an explicitly multi-racial Gen X hippness, are we seeing a progressive proliferation of racial integration imagery in a neo-racist age that seems to have forgotten the brief respite of 1960s integration idealism, or are we seeing instead merely another set of “post-racist,” feel-good images that only fuel current, so-called voluntary segregationist trends by white consumers who deny the existence of racial difference and racism even as they run out to buy stylized images of urban, racially-coded hippness?

     

    The narrative logic of Spin‘s racial positioning can be seen in a Levi’s Silver Tab advertisement featured in the October 1997 issue of Swing: A Magazine About Life in Your Twenties, itself a spin-off of the Spin phenomenon. In this ad, which is typical of the Silver Tab campaign, a kitsch late ’70s family portrait that screams white-bread suburbia gets intruded upon by a moment of inter-racial “contact” [see Figure 6].

     

    Figure 6. Levi’s SilverTab,
    “Celebrate Your Specialness.”
    Rpt. from Swing: A Magazine
    About Life In Your Twenties
    November 1997: 14-15.
    Reprinted by permission of Levi’s.

     

    The authenticity of the 1970s suburban dress, the stiff poses and the sterile smiles of the family stand in stark juxtaposition to the relaxed posture, the gently mocking smile and the “alternative” street style of this urban female hipster whose punked-out afro touches the white house-wife’s do-it-yourself-perm cut. Of course, the “in joke” of the ad is that white people aren’t hip. But the deeper irony, the implied commercial message of the ad, seems to be that white people, these twenty-something college students who read Swing and Spin,can in fact purchase a kind of second-degree hippness through Levi’s SilverTab products. White people can’t be hip, but they can achieve a level of hippness by ironically acknowledging the fact of their unhippness. This is the appeal of urban hip-hop styles for suburban whites more generally, made all the more ironic here since the product is not really hip-hop attire at all but instead pretty run-of-the-mill suburban causal wear, which is perhaps also designed to sell images of economic and social uplift to a secondary market of black middle-class twentysomethings. (Note, for example, in the photograph of the black woman relaxing alone in the elegant chair that she has now lost much of her former punk/hip-hop signifiers in favor of a decidedly more assimilated, middle-class posture.) For the white twentysomething, the emotional appeal is partially located in the way that wearing an image of inter-racial integration offers the consumer a feel-good sentiment of racial harmony in the midst of racial segregation, racial tensions, and perhaps even their own race prejudices.

     

    The images of multi-racial, multi-cultural harmony are now common ad stock. But in our increasingly segregated society, it remains to be seen whether any of the progressive taboo-shattering meanings of ads like the popular Benneton’s United Colors series [see Figure 7]

     

    Figure 7. United Colors of Benneton,
    rpt. from Spin October 1996: 9-10.
    Concept: O. Toscani.
    Courtesy of United Colors of Benetton.

     

    will survive the neo-colonialist race or race essentialist meanings implied by these kinds of shock “idea” ads which are so crucial to Spin magazine’s own street-wise and “alternative” hip currency. Benneton’s United Colors ad series has become for many skeptics of political postmodernism the epitome of commercial appropriations masquerading as social protest imagery. Appignanesi and Garratt contend, for example, that Benneton’s appropriation of photojournalism and the stylized imagery of social protest “art” merely appropriates the “hyperreality” cachet of those original forms, gleaning that reality onto the unreal construct of the magazine ad page and condensing it down to the image of the Benneton product name and logo–a purely commodified image (and for Appignansesi and Garratt it is also onlyan image) of global identity and “social conscience” (138-39). In this particular ad, the scene is obviously staged and, similar to the camped-up homosexual overtones in the Diesel jeans ad, the visual racial marking is really over-the-top. The straight blond mane of the female horse and kinked and curled mane of the “black” horse is as camped-up as the applauding, beef-cake sailors or the phallic shape of the submarine with “sea-men” descending from the tip in the Diesel ad. But there is still the vexing question of whether this image of interracial contact deconstructs race as a binary black-white discourse or whether it reconstructs race essentialist myths by reifying race as a set of natural attributes? Does this image force readers, particularly young white readers, to confront their internalization of deeply entrenched racial taboos? Does it make the braking of taboos “cool” in the same way that the Diesel Jeans “Victory!” ad makes the image of homosexuality a cool transgression, or does it merely allow the consumer to trick themselves into feeling multi-cultural, “third-world hip,” or radical-chic, through their fashion purchases? The questions are easy to form. The answers, of course, are the hard part. It should be clear, however, that it is too easy and counter-productive to dismiss as appropriation the constitutive role that commercialism and commodification play in the historical, material construction of progressive cultural studies ideals: internationalism, economic justice, racial harmony, gender parity, and sexual liberation [see Figure 8].

     

    Figure 8. Ben Thornberry, photograph from ACT UP “Stop The Church” March on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, December 10, 1989. Reprinted by permission of ACT UP.

     

    Always Already the Spin Doctors

     

    Subcultural capital is, as Thornton points out, “in no small sense” constructed out of and by media and commerce–by the likes of Spin, which includes its photo spreads and fashion ads as well as its articles, editorials, and album reviews. It is equally important, however, to keep reminding ourselves that subcultural capital is at once a form of academic cultural capital as well. The cultural dollar signs may take different forms, but Gottlieb and Wald, Ross and Rose, and Social Text are all cashing in on the Riot Grrrl phenomenon, too. Though academics do so in the higher registers of subculture theoretical discourses, and only after first expressing the appropriate academic sensitivity about “who will speak for whom, and when, and under what conditions or circumstances” (Bérubé 271), we all unavoidably traffic in the spectacle of “street credibility.” As am I in this very essay. As are so many other graduate students who are trying to scramble for Cultural Studies vita credits to compete in a job market which, professors tell us with simultaneously sinister and apologetic jocularity, probably isn’t going to materialize after all. As were the hundreds of graduate students who paid $95 to deliver papers at an open-invitation Cultural Studies conference at the University of Oklahoma in 1990, which, according to Cary Nelson, only “testifies to the sense that putting a ‘Cultural Studies in the 1990s’ label on your vita is worth an investment in exploitation and alienation” (26). But Cultural Studies capital circulates beyond the traditional academic systems of credentials and rewards as well. As Clint Burnham notes in the conclusion to The Jamesonian Unconscious, Cultural Studies theory and criticism is itself being consumed by graduate students and other “alternative,” self-identified Gen X readers as mass culture:

     

    I would argue that many intellectuals of my generation read the work of Jameson, and theory in general (Jameson means something else) as mass culture; by my generation I suppose I mean those born in the late fifties or in the sixties, Generation X as my fellow Canadian put it.... [I]n this milieu, Jameson and Butler and Spivak and Barthes are on the same plane as Shabba Ranks and PJ Harvey and Deep Space Nine and John Woo: cultural signifiers of which one is as much a "fan" as a "critic," driven as much by the need to own or see or read the "latest" (or the "classic" or the "original") as by the need to debate it on the Internet and in the seminar room. You think Rid of Me is good? Check out 4-Track Demos. True Romance is more of a John Woo film than Hard Target. If you like Gender Trouble, check out Bodies That Matter. Jameson's piece on Chandler in Shades of Noir is a remix of his older essay and samples some of the comments on modernism at the end of Signatures of the Visible. (244)

     

    And this comes to us in a Duke University trade paperback that is self-consciously designed to be a simulacra of Jameson’s own Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is itself now (in)”famous” amongst critics and reviewers for its self-consciously styled presence as “a gorgeously produced 400-page document” (Bérubé 127). By the time I finished Burnham’s text, I could no longer be certain why I had originally plunked down my VISA card and paid $17.95 for this aesthetically pleasing book (no longer merely a “text”) whose marketing blurb, appearing both in the Duke University Press mail-order catalogue and on the back of the book, sounds a lot like a heady academic version of that subscription junk mail I keep getting from Spin: “Imagine Fredric Jameson–the world’s foremost Marxist critic–kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures…. In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson’s major works… by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham’s study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses,Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer.”

     

    I don’t know about you, but I definitely hear the sound of some bones crunching now–but can anyone tell me with any degree of certainty anymore who’s doing the crunching and who’s being crunched?

     

    Notes

     

    1. My position in relation to Spin and the contemporary music and subculture scenes it covers is primarily as a fan of so-called popular “alternative music,” what Robert Christgau insists should more accurately be called “college rock,” and even here I am more of a tourist and fan than a fellow traveler in any specific indie scene. I have, however, been reading Spin (or perhaps as Hebdige would have it, I’ve been “cruising” Spin) since 1986, when I was introduced to the magazine while attending a small midwestern state college by a friend from Decatur, Illinois, who read Spin with, what seemed to me then, an odd intensity to determine his position in relation to the “mainstream” and some notion of a true punk “underground.”

     

    2. In a May 1994 Spin cover story on Courtney Love, for example, Dennis Cooper will point out that Love grew up in a liberal intellectual environment and “remains an avid reader of feminist theorists like Susan Faludi, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, and Naomi Woolf” (42), but neither he nor she will articulate anything that even remotely smacks of academic criticism–even though there is clearly a long, rich history of academic feminist cultural critique and avant-garde artistic intervention associated with the name of Love’s band alone. It is perhaps true that one doesn’t need to be an academic feminist to interpret the band’s name, Hole, as a cultural critique of the hegemonic sexual ideologies of phallic domination, nor does one need to be a professor of pop culture to link the band Hole to its many punk predecessors, such as the Slits–the first all-woman punk band whose members, like so many other early punk rock musicians and contemporary “alternative” musicians, walked straight out of their university studies and into the punk “streets.” There is, however, something troubling about the way contemporary popular artists deny their academic backgrounds and intellectual influences, just as many academics, whose cultural writings may be influenced by the postmodernism they (we) encounter in pop culture, are equally reluctant to acknowledge the knowledges that they derive from their own practices as fans and consumers, though they are increasingly eager to acknowledge their pleasures. And this is true, despite the fact that both popular music artists and academics luxuriate in the art of surreptitious quotation of one another.

     

    3. Though I don’t take it up here, Spin‘s relationship to the PC Wars is particularly interesting and, as with everything else in Spin, contradictory. Both Spin and Guccione, Jr. have been very vocal concerning the censorship of pop music. In fact, in the mid ’80s when Tipper Gore and the PMRC were waging their war against youth, Guccione, Jr. propelled himself to the status of celebrity/public intellectual, regularly debating William F. Buckley and the usual cast of right-wing pundits on CNN’s Crossfire and similar news talk shows. Yet, when it comes to academics and their battles with many of these same pundits, Spin has remained uninterested at best, too often picking up anti-PC catch-phrases from the New Right along the way.

     

    4. I say my “suspicion” because I don’t personally know many academics who read Spin. If one can judge academic readership by the availability of library resources, then I would suspect that indeed very few do. Trying to research the early years of Spin proved to be a bit of an unexpected challenge. The Chicago Public Library was the only library in the state of Illinois that I could find holding Spin since its first issue in April 1985, including the University of Illinois, which is the only college or university out of the 42 state and private schools on the state-wide library computer search system that carries the magazine at all (and the U. of I. only started carrying it from 1994 on). Moreover, Spin is not indexed in The Reader’s Guide to Periodicals or any bibliographic indexes or databases that I’m aware of (with the exception of The Music Index, which started indexing Spin in 1989, but only very selectively music-specific articles). If you research Spin, you may feel like you’re in some warped version of a VISA card commercial–you’re walking around with Spin and everywhere you turn they only accept Rolling Stone.

     

    5. “The Whiny Generation,” from David Martin’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek (Nov. 1, 1993), rpt. in Rushkoff 235-37.

     

    6. On Rushkoff: 1) Self-Aggrandizing: “Exposed to consumerism and public relations strategies since we could open our eyes, we GenXers see through the clunky attempts to manipulate our opinions and assets, however shrinking” (5); 2) Pseudo-Intellectual: “Our writers are our cultural playmakers and demonstrate an almost Beckettian ability to find humor in the darkest despair, a Brechtian objectivity to bracket painful drama with ironic distance, and a Chekhovian instinct to find the human soul still lurking beneath its outmoded cultural façade” (8); 3) Misinformed: “To most of us, concepts like racial equality, women’s rights, sexual freedom, and respect for basic humanity are givens. We realize that we are the first generation to enter a society where, at least on paper and in the classroom, the ideas that Boomers fought for are recognized as indisputable facts” (6); 4) Homophobic: “We watched a sexual revolution evolve into forced celibacy as the many excesses of the 1970s and 1980s rotted into the sexually transmitted diseases of our 1990s” (5).

     

    This is not to say, however, that academics and public intellectuals aren’t guilty of similar kinds of lazy thinking. Take for example, this throw-away comment made by Frank Owen in “The Cult of the DJ” symposium concerning the mainstream music press and its refusal to cover dance music: “What I can’t understand, though, is how the current rock scene is portrayed by some rock critics as radical. I listen to a band like Pearl Jam, and I guess they’re critical favorites, but to me they sound like Bad Company. I mean, am I wrong or are they Bad Company? Why is grunge radical? What is so radical about it?” (78). Owen, who was a music editor at Spin for two years and who received an MA from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, ought to know better–making his sweeping dismissal of any and all politics of grunge in the context of this symposium on dance music DJs appear suspect, perhaps even patronizing. Certainly, he should realize that Pearl Jam isn’t just a sound but also a look, an attitude, a stance; he should realize, as Ross has noted elsewhere, that, among other things, grunge asserts “a politics of dirt… as a scourge upon the impossibly sanitized, aerobicized world of 90210” (Microphone Fiends 5). However white and middle-class the grunge phenomenon is (Ross also characterizes it as white suburban kids “style slumming with a vengeance”), there is something “radical,” or at least oppositional, about it, not least the fact that at the very moment Owen is making these comments Pearl Jam was waging its legal battle and media campaign against the monopolistic price-fixing practices of Ticketmaster.

     

    7. Though even here, when one considers the practical uses of this condom, Spin might once again be accused of promoting its own radical image rather than any substantive subcultural resistance, in this case putting hype before health; for, as a reader of an earlier version of this paper pointed out to me, one would really have to question whether or not this condom, after going through the rigors of mass circulation magazine distribution, would even be safe. (My thanks to Elizabeth Majerus for this comment, as well as for her responses to the essay as a whole.)

     

    8. Most of this nonsense seems to be just a case of journalistic sour grapes resulting from Farber having been publicly spanked by ACT UP and The Advocate which, I think correctly, denounced Farber’s 1989 Spin article on AZT as dangerously overstating her case about evidence of the drug’s risks and how that should impact the medical decisions made by people living with AIDS.

    Works Cited

     

    • Azerrad, Michael. “Peace, Love and Understanding.” Spin August 1995: 56-58.
    • Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. London: Verso, 1994.
    • Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
    • Cooper, Dennis. “Love Conquers All.” Spin May 1994: 38+.
    • Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
    • —. “Eulogy: Death of Gen X.” Details June 1995: 72.
    • Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. An October Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988.
    • —. “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 3-16.
    • —. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 237-271.
    • Crimp, Douglas, with Adam Rolston. AIDS demo graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
    • “The Cult of the DJ: A Symposium.” Social Text 43 (Fall 1995): 67-88.
    • Farber, Celia. “TopSpin.” Spin May 1992: 12.
    • Furth, Daisy. “For Girls About To Rock.” Spin April 1992: 26.
    • Gilbert, Elizabeth. “Pussy Galore.” Spin April 1995: 150+.
    • Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock.” Rose and Ross 250-274.
    • Guccione, Bob, Jr. “Special Child” (An Interview with Sinéad O’Connor). Spin November 1991: 42+
    • —. “TopSpin.” Spin April 1995: 24.
    • —. “TopSpin” Spin Jan. 1994: 12.
    • Greer, Jim. “Letter From Dayton, Ohio, Bureau.” Spin April 1995: 224.
    • Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. New York: Verso, 1988.
    • —. “The Meaning of New Times.” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Eds. London: Routledge, 1996: 223-37.
    • Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge, 1988.
    • Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
    • Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373-391.
    • Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes, England: Open UP, 1985.
    • Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
    • Marks, Craig. “A to Z of Alternative Culture.” Spin April 1993: 38-52.
    • Nelson, Cary. “Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Manifesto.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 24.1 (1991): 24-38.
    • Rose, Tricia and Andrew Ross, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Ross, Andrew. “Introduction.” Rose and Ross 1-13.
    • Rushkoff, Douglas. “Introduction: Us, by Us.” The GenX Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. 3-8.
    • Thornton, Sarah. “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture.” Rose and Ross 176-192.
    • Treichler, Paula A. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 31-70.

     

  • Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor

    Joe Amato

    Department of English
    University of Colorado at Boulder
    joe.amato@colorado.edu

    I.

     

    Imagine: Once upon a time, I left the corporate world to join the academic world, thinking the lofty latter would tower above the corruption of corporate complicity.

     

    Yup. I really thought that. Imagine.

     

    Picture this: you’re seated at a table with nine other faculty, all strangers. Five such clusters of ten fill the carpeted room–off-white walls, acoustical ceiling tiles, fluorescent lighting–and everyone boasts a terminal degree in science, engineering, architecture, law, psychology, or design. Everyone except you, that is–you hold a doctorate in English.

     

    Before you, on the table, glares a ream of white, 20 lb., 8.5″ x 11″ paper. A beaming but otherwise nondescript man looming at the front of the room announces, “You have one half-hour in which to devise a high-quality paper airplane. The team whose airplane hangs aloft for the longest stretch of time will be judged a true success–a leader in quality.” Everyone in the room chuckles. “Let’s see who the winner will be,” the nondescript man teases. And with that he props a large digital timer on the table before him, and slaps the start button.

     

    All but five of the fifty strangers in the room are men. Most are white, eight speak an inflected English that indicates an Asian upbringing. Most of the men are middle-aged, some are older, nearing retirement. Most of the middle-aged men wear trousers, oxfords, ties, rolled shirtsleeves. Most of the older men relax in three-piece suits. Most of the men sport beards. Four of the five women in the room are all business–navy or black suits, skirts just above the knee, heels, lipstick, eye liner, nail polish. The four younger men and one younger woman are, like others of your generation, dressed casually–new jeans, polo shirts, sweaters.

     

    As the timer begins its countdown, most people begin chatting, noisily, to others in their group. About their families, about the weather. One of the engineers seated at your table immediately takes command. He urges that the team proceed, first, by taking note of specific aerodynamic principles–lift, for example. He lectures the team on such principles. A few of the engineers in the group get antsy, grab a few sheets of paper from the ream, experiment by folding their sheets this way and that. The self-elected leader seems annoyed, barks a few orders. A few people in the group, intent on making progress, are willing to cooperate.

     

    But you, you’re someplace else, because you’ve been here before.

     

    II.

     

    You may have heard recently of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. The school has been splashed across the news in the past year. IIT’s College of Architecture has a worldwide reputation for housing the program that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe directed during his post-Bauhaus years. IIT: the campus Mies built, the campus that boasts Crown Hall, the campus whose buildings announce in bold the Miesian orthogonal imprint, the less-is-more flatland structures of steel and glass and high HVAC bills.

     

    And thanks to one of the largest (matching) gifts ever made to a postsecondary educational institution–120 million dollars, courtesy of two wealthy members of IIT’s Board of Trustees–a new student center is being built on campus, with leftover dollars funding much-needed building and equipment upgrades, and endowing engineering-only full-tuition scholarships (IIT’s tuition is currently $17,000 a year). The international design competition for the student center attracted all sorts of media attention, with the commission awarded finally to renowned Dutch architect and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas. Completion of the actual structure is scheduled for sometime next year, a convenient cornerstone in IIT’s ongoing effort to reset its collegial clock.

     

    I won’t be around to see the center open. I’m happy for the students, though it remains unclear to me whether the surrounding community will reap any actual material benefits from the hoopla. IIT sits on the northernmost edge of the largest public housing project in the US–the Robert Taylor Homes-Stateway Gardens complex, which houses nearly 40,000 African-American residents, most of whom receive welfare, as I once did. Directly to the north of IIT are more projects, beyond which is the frenzy of development and gentrification that marks Mayor Daley’s and the City’s efforts to move the South Loop frontier further south. As you might imagine, IIT has had a tough time responding to its location over the years. So perhaps the attention given to the new student center, and to a revitalization effort currently underway along 35th Street–the historic “Bronzeville” area, part of which has been tagged a federal “empowerment zone”–will help to invigorate neighborhoods suffering from decades of neglect, of racial and economic segregation. Hence perhaps I should be spending my time, and yours, talking about the sorts of social, political, and cultural conditions that have permitted the situation on Chicago’s south side to decline to such a degree. But I’m not a sociologist– I’m an English prof who happens to be a poet. And to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, part of my work as a poet is to help people live their lives–an ambitious agenda, to be sure, whether in poetry or in prose.

     

    My tenure with the Department of Humanities at IIT began in August of 1992. Like my former employer, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IIT hired me primarily because my undergrad math scholarship and seven years of plant engineering experience, followed by a doctorate in English, seemed automatically to qualify me to teach technical and professional writing. As an aspiring poet and a single white heterosexual male of 37, I was happy to be afforded the opportunity to live in a more “happening” environs–and in any case, I had no choice. My two-year “visiting” stint at UIUC had expired, and IIT was offering me a tenure-track position with a “3/3” teaching load–3 courses per semester. Not something one in my notoriously job-depleted profession, with my credit card debt, turns down.

     

    When I arrived at my new school, demolition of the old Comiskey Park, just the other side of the Dan Ryan expressway from IIT, was nearly complete. The new Sox stadium, standing alongside the old, gleamed across the Ryan at the projects, daring south-side African-Americans to make the trek into Bridgeport, where racial tensions have always run high, and would explode most notably of late upon the person of young Lennard Clark. On campus, things weren’t quite what I’d expected. There were rumors that budget deficits were reaching a crisis state. And IIT exuded a certain corporate ambience–reflected both in the language of my senior colleague in English (a person prone to going on about how her technical communication program is “technology-driven”), as well as in the market “savvy” of our upper-level administrators (who were just then learning to mouth the now-ubiquitous student-as-consumer rhetoric). The corporate lip-service disturbed me, not least because I thought I had left behind such thinking eight years prior, when I left my second Fortune 500 job as an engineer.

     

    III.

     

    Picture this: you’re seated at a table with five other people, all strangers. Five such clusters of five fill the carpeted room–off-white walls, acoustical ceiling tiles, fluorescent lighting–and everyone holds an undergraduate degree in engineering or business. All but two of the twenty-five strangers in the room are men. Most are younger, a few are middle-aged, two are black. Most wear shirts and ties, a few lounge in their sports jackets. The two women in the room have opted for solid-color blouses, and skirts well below the knee.

     

    You’re handed a three-ring binder, inside of which are sequenced instructions that describe a series of role-playing exercises (red, orange, yellow, green, blue tabs). Each exercise will require a high level of cooperation among members of your group. “I think we should start out by trying to–.” “Wait a minute,” the only woman in the group interrupts you, smiling but firm, “who put you in charge?” “Well, nobody,” you respond, “but someone has to be in charge, no?” You look around at the other faces in your group. Two look vaguely uncomfortable, one seems to want to follow your lead.

     

    By the end of that first day, the group has–simply by doing what you suggest–informally chosen you as its leader. At least one person in the group is not a happy camper. And after four days of working together, arguing together, and sweating together, everyone is asked to evaluate–not, as expected, the work accomplished–but one another.

     

    A four-quadrant blackboard grid is used to map personal qualities, warm/cold on the abscissa, dominant/submissive on the ordinate. Everyone has their day in the sun–or, as the case may be, gloom. Participants take turns shouting out adjectives that describe each monkey-in-the-middle, with a time-clock to make it seem either a pressing exercise, or a game show. Each adjective is chalked into a given quadrant. If you’re lucky, you might learn that you’re primarily a dominant/warm personality–excellent leadership material. If not, you might leave that intense final session, as some have been known to, in tears.

     

    IV.

     

    “Dimensional Management Training” is what they called it–part of the corporate training package I’d received while employed at Miller Brewing Company in Fulton, New York. My job with the Philip-Morris-owned brewing giant was my first after graduation, and Miller would send me to corporate headquarters in Milwaukee for a week at a crack. Days were spent in seminar rooms; evenings, gulping down mugs of beer. Most of this training was geared ultimately toward helping trainees account for theirs and others’ motivations, with the mutual goals of enhancing organizational cooperation and enlightening employees as to their latent or manifest leadership qualities. I often returned from the training seminars eager to test on-the-job my newly acquired interpersonal skills, as they called them. In this sense, such training cultivated in me the desire to lead. I guess I was lucky. In some it may well have cultivated the resignation to follow.

     

    But leadership training or no, there seemed to be little I could do to shake my new-guy status at Miller. At 26, I’d found myself stuck after four years, unable to advance beyond my entry-level engineering position with the nation’s second largest brewer. So I’d gone on the market intent, as only a former welfare recipient can be, on landing a job with Aramco. By my calculations, a mere two years in Saudi Arabia and I’d have enough cash saved to handle my father’s expenses until long after he was eligible to receive his whopping $500-per-month social security check, and his $80-per-month pension check from General Electric–the latter so absurdly low because of his decision to withdraw his severance pay after the company had laid him off, with hundreds like him, in 1969. That was the year after my folks’ divorce, the year after my old man started hitting the bottle. The way I’d figured it, me and my adolescent dreams of fortune and power, I’d have enough cash saved to live like a working-class hero.

     

    But after six months of applying, and waiting, and inquiring, the previously optimistic job placement agent wound up with a frown on his face. “They want only seasoned veterans now,” the headhunter informed me, “guys with ten or more years experience.”

     

    And so, with failed postcolonial aspirations, I applied for a senior project engineering position with the local pharmaceutical plant, Bristol-Myers Co. This plant’s claim to industrial fame was that it had at one time manufactured half of all the penicillin produced in the US. The interview went well. The person I’d be working for directly was a former West Point cadet who had that annoying habit of inserting “sir” into every other sentence. The cadet’s boss, the plant engineering manager, was a strictly-by-the-book, suit-and-tie man, very old school, with a master’s in engineering-based, Taylorized management.

     

    After exchanging industrial horror stories with the cadet–bonding–I was ushered into the engineering manager’s office by the office manager (they still used a secretarial pool there). “Please take a seat,” she instructed, nodding vigorously at the chairs across the desk from the engineering manager, who was momentarily preoccupied perusing what looked to be a budget report of some sort, all rows and columns. “Just a moment, Joe,” he said, without looking up through his bifocals. Just then I noticed that my chair sank low, so low in fact that this older man, perhaps an inch shorter than me standing, loomed several inches above me. An old trick, I thought, and gazing around the office I spotted a portrait depicting a Canadian Mountie against an alpine backdrop above the caption, “One Canadian Stands Alone.”

     

    My interview with the engineering manager was a tight-lipped affair, and I’d learned by then when to be tight-lipped myself. I even started mouthing a few “Yes sirs,” which were snapped up approvingly. But there was one final hoop-jump to go–an interview with the plant manager. The cadet was commanded to hand-deliver me.

     

    He marched me through what seemed an ancient maze of seeping and odoriferous production areas, laced with piping and crowded with chemical processing equipment, in the midst of which were constructed makeshift white-collar habitats. It was nearing lunch, and I caught a glimpse of several salary employees seated at their desks, chomping down their brown-bag lunches. When we reached the plant manager’s office, he greeted us at his office door. My escort abruptly relinquished his duties with an enthusiastic “Thank you sir,” and the plant manager whisked me past his high-heeled young secretary. I did my best not to stare at her black fishnet stockings.

     

    At first this manager seemed less officious than my prior interviewers. A not-unhandsome man of perhaps fifty, his clothes were elegantly, if conservatively, tailored: navy double-pleated trousers, white-on-white oxford, red-and-blue-checkered silk tie, silk navy jacket. He seated himself behind a large wooden desk in a lush, paneled office that, in my view, reflected his rank without pretension. I sat in a leather-cushioned chair, almost at ease. The blinds were shut, the desk lamp lighting the room with a warm, subdued glow. The plant manager was clearly taking his time. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “No thank you, sir,” I replied. He cupped his impeccably manicured hands, and finally began, casually.

     

    “What do you think of change?” he asked, smiling.

     

    Bastard. He was toying with me, and he knew I knew it. I bit my tongue, hard, struggled for composure. “Depends what kind of change you mean,” I replied, surprising even myself with my reciprocally casual tone, “organizational change, or evolutionary change, or social change, or–”

     

    He cut me off, impatient but still smiling. “Well, let me put it differently. Suppose,” he began, “–suppose you were asked by one of the production managers to retrofit a production process in such and such a way in order to increase output.” “Uh-huh,” I nodded, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Now suppose,” he continued, “–suppose this manager, a man with some twenty-five years of experience, feels that the modifications required are thus and so. As the senior engineer, what do you feel your response should be? Do you think you should yourself investigate the process to determine the nature of the modifications, or do you think you should instead follow the production manager’s lead?”

     

    Trick question, of course. Why of course no self-respecting engineer simply does what someone else tells him to do when it comes to design. And of course this asshole wouldn’t even be asking me this question unless he wanted to test my compliance.

     

    I thought about my situation at the brewery. I thought about how the Return On Investment for capital upgrades had dropped from five years to two years in the course of my short industrial life–this was change, to be sure, but it didn’t bode well for the US worker, blue or white collar. I thought about my father’s eligibility for social security, still three years off. More change, a life change that in some sense I couldn’t help but look forward to. I thought about telling this plant manager fucker to go take a good shit for himself, him and that $500 jacket and that shit-eating grin of his.

     

    “Well,” I said, “I figure that if the production manager has twenty-five years of experience, he knows what’s going on. So I’d be inclined to do things his way.” The plant manager nodded. I nodded. Everybody nodded. The job placement agent was elated. The offer came in at $34,500 per year.

     

    And when I left that job in 1984–or it left me–I was making nearly $40,000 a year. This was in Syracuse, New York. To help put this in perspective: earlier this year, in Chicago, as a full-time, tenure-track professor of English with the Department of Humanities at IIT–and with bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering, my Professional Engineer’s license, and a masters and doctorate in English–my annual salary was $36,800.

     

    V.

     

    It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that, from the start, my days with Bristol-Myers Co. were numbered. For one, ever since my first day on the job with Miller Brewing Co., I’d somehow gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a poet. I still don’t know where this impulse came from, but in my sixth year with Bristol-Myers I started looking into graduate schools. I figured that I’d get a doctorate, teach college students to support my writing. I didn’t know then what I know now about the teaching profession: it’s not only a job-and-a-half in itself, it’s also vital social work.

     

    At any rate, I’d found myself, after nearly three years at the pharmaceutical factory, wanting out of the engineering profession. I’d grown plain sick and tired of the industrial-organizational life-support system. The brownnosing chain-of-command, along with the daily shit-shower-shave routine, conspired to create a chain of veritable being, my one-and-only life strapped to the often capricious imperatives of plant production and the global marketplace. True, a few of my bosses saw me–despite or perhaps because of my outspoken nature–as management stock, attempting to lure me into the supervisory world with more money and power. But once I’d made it clear to them that I wanted to hone my technical talents only, they behaved as though I’d turned my back on the company. I found it increasingly difficult to keep my mouth shut, and they found it increasingly difficult to tolerate my open mouth. The warning memo–red-stamped “confidential”– threatened me with “termination” if I didn’t just do it.

     

    But my mouth would not close, and I was called into the engineering conference room on a bright Monday morning in April. I seated myself across the table from the engineering manager. Next to him was my new supervisor, Stan, put in charge after the cadet was canned–for incompetence brought about by excessive ass-kissing (so ass-kissing doesn’t really work after all). “Stan has something to tell you,” the engineering manager commanded. And he turned to Stan, who choked out, nervously, “We’ve decided that… we have to… let you go.” I was immediately escorted out of the plant, and told to return at four o’clock for my exit interview.

     

    Later that day, I walked through the factory distributing copies of my four-page long exit statement to anybody and everybody. Therein I explained, with quotes from Montaigne and Emerson, how I thought the company could be more fairly managed. You see, I’d seen my termination coming, and I’d planned accordingly. And like they say on the job: you plan the work, and you work the plan.

     

    VI.

     

    The second most powerful member of IIT’s Board of Trustees is former Motorola CEO, Bob Galvin. Galvin’s father, Paul Galvin, founded Motorola, the company that produces, among so many other communications-based products, the 68030 microprocessor chip that powers (as they say) the aging Macintosh on which I’m composing this essay. IIT’s Board of Trustees is in fact run by two Bobs, Galvin and his (even richer) billionaire buddy Bob Pritzker, who together are responsible for that 120 million dollar gift. For years these two have reached deep down into their endless wool-blend pockets to bail IIT’s ailing, tuition-driven campus out of the red and into black–to the tune, I believe it is, of something like ten million a year. Only thing is, in accordance with the First Law of Thermodynamics, you don’t get something for nothing. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that a variation of the Second Law—you can’t even break even—appears in the Rolling Stones soundtrack heard in Motorola’s new mobile pager commercials: “You can’t always get what you want.”)

     

    Sending IIT faculty to QCEL training at Motorola on a Saturday was part of the payback. At the time, IIT administrators were hoping Galvin might kick some additional millions their way. So they’d agreed to bus all IIT faculty out to what is known casually as Motorola’s Schaumburg “campus”–the Galvin Center of Motorola University (no shit), the company’s corporate training ground. And on a bright fall Saturday there we all were, sipping coffee, bitching under our collective breath, and ready to be indoctrinated in the company’s much-vaunted QCEL managerial philosophy–Quality, Creativity, Ethics and Leadership.

     

    It was quite an event. Several hundred phuds, most in the engineering and science fields and some with international reputations, marched through “creativity” sessions in which a trainer with a master’s degree in creativity (no shit) inculcated them in the beauty of “convergent and divergent thinking.” Or in which they were asked to work in teams to create that “best” paper airplane (i.e., Quality through teamwork, teamwork through Leadership). Or in which they were instructed in the importance of sound (business) ethics–without being asked to consider (e.g.) the ethical impact of divorcing ethics from more bracing issues of morality or politics.

     

    But the IIT-Motorola coup de grâce was the wrap-up session, in which the powers-that-be hit upon the tactic of using outstanding student leaders at IIT to impress upon faculty the inevitable necessity of QCEL training. “We students sincerely hope you faculty take QCEL seriously,” advised one especially emphatic, rosy-faced, head-shaved, undergrad ROTC engineer, “because we believe that IIT needs this sort of thinking in order to become a technical leader in the 21st century.” The ensuing faculty response was punctuated by several outbursts from senior faculty members who found the entire enterprise an insult to their professional integrity and expertise. “I have an international reputation in my field,” one distinguished research engineer rose to exclaim during the wrap-up session, “and I find it utterly humiliating that you have brought me to this place, to be lectured at by those who could very well be my students. I regard this as a distressing, if not ludicrous, development.”

     

    And if I couldn’t help but sympathize with the gent, I thought at the same time that he probably could stand to learn a thing or two about political action. I understood at that QCEL session what I’d learned the hard way years prior: to get through to the corporate mindset requires something a bit more vulgar, or of the “common people,” than solitary expressions of distress–something a bit more collective. As in collective bargaining, for one, anathema to so many academics because they think of themselves, with some (historical) justification, as necessarily independent thinkers and researchers, as free-agent intellectuals–as anything but common-cause workers. IIT is a private postsecondary institution, and it’s been only in the past year or so that the National Labor Relations Board has given some indication that it might eventually permit faculty at private institutions to unionize. Of course, union or no, it’s unlikely that intellectual freedom–and an institutional commitment to do some good in the world–will emerge from top-down enforcement of an ever-more-severe bottom line.

     

    Needless to say, QCEL fever hit IIT hard, and lickety-split we were all being asked to devise a QCEL component for each of our courses, and to attend mandatory brown-bag lunches with the purpose of brainstorming innovative applications of QCEL thinking. Some faculty took up the QCEL banner, but many of us just plain refused, calling the administration’s bluff. Most of us readily understood that QCEL, though perhaps appropriate to a workplace bound by short-term constraints of efficiency and end product, hardly suited the long-term goals of informed personal awareness, discovery, and self-critique that true education demands.

     

    And I mean, what were they going to do, fire us?

     

    It was especially difficult for those of us in the Department of Humanities, which at IIT is comprised of history, philosophy, and English. In the minds of corporate-leaning administrators, the humanities are understood as revolving around communication, and this narrow conception of what we do empowers those of us in English studies only to the extent that we’re willing to teach students how to structure effective memos, accurate lab reports, and so forth. Further, according to Motorola’s QCEL logic, communication practices–most conspicuously writing–fall under the L category, L for Leadership. Where else? We all know that the primary purpose of words is to help you gain control over others, right?

     

    In any case, IIT’s ongoing public relations effort seems to suggest that, in order to produce the finest technical leaders for the next millennium, faculty must maintain close ties with the corporation. As stated in IIT’s Undergraduate Bulletin, one of the things that distinguishes IIT is its “unique Introduction to the Professions program”:

     

    Throughout the curricula, the IIT interprofessional projects provide a learning environment in which interdisciplinary teams of students apply theoretical knowledge gained in the classroom and laboratory to real-world projects sponsored by industry and government. (7)

     

    Interprofessional projects, or IPROs, have now displaced QCEL as the newest curricular fad at IIT. The clause “sponsored by industry and government” has given many of us conniptions, and has been met with substantial faculty resistance. Some are now trying to redefine the IPRO initiative to better align it with more liberal-educational impulses. For years now, engineering education has been the subject of modest reform efforts–from expanding the curriculum to require a full five years of study, to removing undergraduate area designations (mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical, etc.) in favor of a general engineering degree. From my point of view, none of these reforms satisfactorily addresses the dearth of historical, social, and cultural thinking that characterizes most engineering curricula, curricula which have begun to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to vocational ed. But the IPROs represent a truly pernicious kind of “reform.” To insist that industry and government sponsor IPROs, to permit these latter consolidations to drive an educational mission “focused,” as it says elsewhere in IIT promotional literature, “by the rigor of the real world”: is this the best way to usher in the next millennium?

     

    VII.

     

    Picture this: it’s the spring of 1995, and Galvin and Pritzker have threatened to shut down undergraduate education at IIT unless the IIT administration and faculty manage to produce a convincing plan to increase undergrad enrollment. Thus, endless talk of IPRO’s. And to cut costs: buy-outs of tenured faculty; appointment of a new V-P without faculty input; and removal of the provost position. Of course, the provost, as the chief academic (faculty) officer, is a key player in granting faculty tenure and promotion; any problems with tenure are typically addressed to this office. When the President, with the backing of the wool-blend Board, removes the provost position from the organizational flow chart, he delegates tenure and promotion duties to himself–a non-faculty administrator. Meantime, key faculty cooperate with the development of a professional, preprofessional, and interprofessional educational package. You know–professional master degree programs (with, for instance, reduced math requirements), three-course certificate programs, and the like, programs designed primarily to credential employees while attracting tuition dollars from their employers, and marketed accordingly.

     

    It’s important to understand these institutional changes from the point of view of the bottom-feeders. At IIT, as at many universities, “bottom feeders” equals “humanities profs.” Consider: the highest paid, non-administrative faculty line in my department–which now reports to the Armour College of Engineering as a result of the 1995 disbanding of the Lewis College of Liberal Arts–is approximately $45,000 per year. Which is to say, a full (tenured) professor of history, philosophy or English, with twenty years or more experience, earns approximately $5000 less than the average starting assistant professor at IIT. Chalk up these salary disparities to those large government contracts and grants that form the staple of scientific and technological research in today’s major and minor research institutions. Wage-wise, IIT is ranked near the bottom of the nation’s twenty or so tech campuses, so even engineering faculty aren’t exactly brimming with joy. Still, a thirty-ish engineering prof drives home in his new Chevy sedan, while I drive home in my 1986 Escort (148,000 miles, and counting).

     

    This is IIT, folks–a school that had its beginnings in the Armour Institute of Technology, established in 1890. Yes, that’s Armour of meat-packing fame–think hog butcher for the world, everything but the squeal. But it’s also the IIT where Marvin Camras, “Father of Magnetic Recording,” conducted the research that led to his more than 500 patents. It’s the IIT that once boasted a linguistics program with the likes of S. I. Hayakawa on its faculty. And it’s the IIT where László Moholy-Nagy, another of Bauhaus fame, founded the Institute of Design. So whatever you make of it, it’s a school with a legacy, with a place in the postsecondary sun.

     

    Picture this: the week after our trip to Motorola U, a book appears in all faculty mailboxes. It’s entitled The Idea of Ideas, by one Robert W. Galvin, “Special Limited Edition” published in April 1991 by Motorola University Press.

     

    VIII.

     

    Motorola University Press? All right, Bob & Co.–hereafter simply Bob–I get your point. You’re a do-it-yourselfer, and your book is for the billionaire or would-be billionaire who has (of course), or wants to have (of course), everything. Like any good communications engineer, Bob begins at his beginning: he engineers communication of his ideas by fabricating a pseudo-academic press to poke fun at (academic) book-learnin’ even as it affords its wannabe author the privilege to spin his worldview in certified academic trappings.

     

    It’s a beautifully crafted book, believe me, at least insofar as its design goes. Let’s start with a few design notes, as provided by the publisher on the copyright page:

     

    Typeset in Perpetua
    by Paul Baker Typography Inc., Evanston, Illinois.
    Five thousand copies printed
    by Congress Printing Company, Chicago, Illinois.
    Soft cover is Mohawk Artemis, Navy Blue; cloth cover
    is Arrestox B, B48650. End sheets are French
    Speckletone,
    Briquette; text stock is Mohawk Superfine, Soft White.
    Binding by Zonne Book Binders, Inc., Chicago, Illinois.

     

    Design by Hayward Blake & Company, Evanston, Illinois.
    Illustration [of Paul V. and Robert W. Galvin]
    on page 6 by Noli Novak.
    Quotation on cover by Robert W. Galvin.

     

    Bob, like any civic leader who thinks global and acts local, chose wisely to patronize Chicagoland firms. Most small-press poets would be thrilled to publish a book with a spine, or a book with a print run of even a thousand copies, let alone a book of such silky smooth, hefty pages (214 of them). And the book comes with its own bookmark, folded Hallmark-card-like.

     

    That “quotation on cover” by Bob: “We can and should apply consciously, confidently, purposely and frequently, the simpler, satisfying, appropriate steps to create more and then better ideas.” Four adverbs followed by three adjectives–Bob lays it on thick. Key words for the discussion that follows (please allow for cognates): apply, confidently, purposely, frequently, simpler, appropriate and of course ideas.

     

    Reading over that cover sentence in fact brings to mind the old white-collar acronym, KISS–“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Bob wants you to know that he’s a down-to-earth, WYSIWYG kinda guy. On the bookmark we find a checklist of his handy ideas, such gems as “Set the idea target,” “Go for quantity,” “Question. Question!” and “Ignore quality. Don’t judge it ’til last.” But bromides aside, and to riff on Adrienne Rich, Bob has access to machinery that could cost you your job.

     

    Bob’s book has eight chapters: an Introduction followed by “The Idea Process: Its Role,” “Leadership,” “Purposeful Differences,” “The Customer Idea,” “Global Strategies,” “Some Outside Ideas,” and “Special Ideas.” As I’ve indicated, English studies has been understood increasingly by university administrators as writing, with writing at IIT itself subsumed under the QCEL rubric, Leadership. Hence I’ve chosen to restrict my remarks to Bob’s “Leadership” chapter–to its first subsection, entitled “The Paradox of Leadership.”

     

    “Leadership” begins with two quotes, one from Bob himself: “At times we must engage an act of faith that key things are doable that are not provable” (24). Spoken, I might say, like a true engineer. And I should know. Engineering is not about theory per se, but about how to apply theoretical principles to produce results. And this does in fact constitute, as Bob indicates, an act of faith–a faith in doing in the absence of explanation. But this emphasis on doing somewhat sidesteps the sticky matter of what “key things” get done, and who is to decide what “key things” get done, and why such “key things” need getting done–why in fact they are deemed “key.”

     

    “The Paradox of Leadership” strikes me at first glance as oddly literary, which is another reason why I’ve chosen to respond to it. Paradox is, after all, a staple of poetry, and of literary writing. Paradox is generally understood as an assertion in which apparently contradictory words, or ideas, reveal upon close examination a truth of sorts.

     

    So what exactly is the paradox of leadership? Well, Bob begins by saying that this idea “finds its expression in a series of paradoxes” (25). To put it another way, the “idea of leadership” (25) as a paradox is realized in actuality as a series of paradoxes. Here as elsewhere, the “idea of” is Bob’s modest way of formulating the idea not as abstract, but as evidenced in the particular, “real-world” example. But this constant harping on the idea of what is ultimately the whole wide real world–presumably including the idea of ideas in such a world–reveals that Bob’s commonsensical, pragmatic appeal is predicated on an idea of order.

     

    “It is neither necessary to impress on you an elaborate definition of leadership,” Bob asserts, “nor is this an appropriate time to characterize its many styles” (25). Suffice to say that leaders must have “creative and judgmental intelligence, courage, heart, spirit, integrity and vision applied to the accomplishment of a purposeful result.” “When one is vested with the role of leader,” Bob grudgingly concedes, “he inherits more freedom” (26). Yet the leader is at the same time subject to “responsibilities that impose upon” this freedom (26). Hence the first paradox of leadership: that the apparent “independence” of leaders may in fact be offset, if not checked and balanced, by the “dependence of others” on the leader (26). Powerful leaders like Bob are evidently accountable to their followers.

     

    “For one to lead implies that others follow” (26). Uh-huh. “But is the leader a breed apart,” Bob asks, rhetorically, “or is she rather the better follower?” The answer is as expected–the latter–which yields our second paradox: “to lead well presumes the ability to follow smartly” (27). So smart leaders are not entirely free, because they are responsible to others and must, as leaders, learn how to follow wisely. By this odd if obvious bit of logic, the workplace is divided into leaders and followers, but everyone is in essence a follower. Hence, paradoxically, leaders are in fact merely better followers. And thus leaders have attained their role as leaders not through politicking, or manipulation, or (gosh!) inheritance–like Bob, who “inherits” only “more freedom” (as above). Nope. Instead, a leader becomes a leader because she “learns more quickly and surely from the past, selects the correct advice and trends, chooses the simpler work patterns and combines the best of other leaders.”

     

    “Because a leader is human and fallible,” Bob over-theorizes, “his and her leadership is in one sense finite–constrained by mortality and human imperfection” (27). Yet “[i]n another sense, the leader’s influence is almost limitless,” for the leader “can spread hope, lend courage, kindle confidence, impart knowledge, etcetera etcetera etcetera” (27). In fact, the “frequency with which one can perform these leadership functions seems without measure” (27). “Again we see the paradox of the leader,” Bob concludes, “a finite person with an apparent infinite influence” (28).

     

    This third paradox reveals Bob at his most–elegiac? Leaders labor under an Olympian strain, forced to apply such infinite “influence” (power?) so frequently, and to such magnanimous ends, capable of doing so much good for others, yet ultimately frustrated by their inevitable, all-too-human demise. One wonders whether Bob–the physical Bob–harbors notions of biostasis, cloning, perhaps even network consciousness á la Max Headroom, in order to provide a personalized hereafter for his elderly, leaderly, thereby reengineered self.

     

    “A leader is decisive, is called on to make many critical choices,” and may therefore “thrive on the power and the attention” (28). And yet–here emerges our fourth and final paradox–“the leader of leaders moves progressively away from that role” (28). In fact, according to Bob, a chief responsibility of leaders is to delegate to others the “privilege” of “decision making” (28), of leading, within an institution that, through such leadership, “generates… an ever-increasing number of critical choices” (29).

     

    A key to leadership, then, is the ability gradually to convert followers into would-be leaders, spreading the upwardly mobile aspiration throughout the management and worker-bee ranks (think, e.g., of those hourly workers who make the often difficult move into supervisory positions). And this conversion process is necessary in order to cope with the decision-making demands of a larger and larger institution. So though we were given to understand in a prior paradox that all leaders are in essence followers, we are now given to understand that followers are themselves potential leaders, and that cultivating these acorns of leadership, paradoxically, is one of the chief responsibilities of true leaders. With U.S. universities graduating 90,000 or so MBAs each year, we’re talking a whole lotta acorns, folks.

     

    For both followers and leaders, this game of follow-the-leader, like all games, requires a willingness to play by the rules–requires cooperation. And cooperation is hardly the benign process entities like Bob make it out to be. Much has been written about the emergence of cooperation as a chief organizational variable, from Chester I. Barnard’s classic business treatise, The Functions of the Executive (1938)–in which authority becomes “another name for the willingness and capacity of individuals to submit to the necessities of cooperative systems” (184)–to Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), in which cooperation evolves strategically and in accordance with game-theory logic, making it applicable even to trench warfare. But I’ve never found discussions of cooperation as such to square with my experience in the trenches: information-age push-pull come to shove, your boss is likely to demand of you that you just do it.

     

    Bob wraps up his thoughts on the paradox of leadership with vague mention of “others which, if not paradoxes, at least are incongruities” (29). He states that “[e]ach one of us is at once part leader and part follower as we play our roles in life” (29). Bob concludes with the following quote from Walter Lippman: “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and will to carry on” (29).

     

    I couldn’t help but think here of Bob’s desire for a legacy–of Bob’s son Chris, in fact, himself the current CEO of Motorola, whose compensation in 1997, while a sizable two million dollars, is itself small potatoes on the national CEO scale. Paul, Bob, Chris: that’s three generations, folks–I guess it’s in the blood.

     

    In the face of which we have four paradoxes that, contrary to–conventional wisdom? popular opinion?–work successively to reinforce the logic of benign corporate leadership: (1) leaders are dependent on followers; (2) leaders are followers; (3) leaders are all-powerful but human; and (4) leaders convert their followers into leaders.

     

    In 1970 it was, for some very good reasons, Everybody is a Star. Today, for some not-so-good reasons, it’s Everybody is a CEO.

     

    That so?

     

    IX.

     

    Bob–the corporate entity Bob–is much like his book: judged by his career, his cover as multizillion-dollar corporate concern, he seems to reek of good intentions combined with cutting-edge quality objectives–good things brought to life. But when you get into his book, into his narrative of corporate expansion, you find a life-form that insists on being judged by its own criteria. As the aspiring global leader of communication leaders, Bob would be the measure of all company men and women. To lift from Eliot: in (the aging) Bob’s corporeal end is his and your beginning. Or, Be Like Bob. Yet Bob, dear readers, amounts only to the message of his medium.

     

    Now medium may itself be understood as material form, so a few words about form here: People who spend an inordinate amount of time studying texts are used to distinguishing between content and form. It’s a nice shorthand, but then too there is what Hayden White famously referred to as the content of the form, which should give some idea of the vexed nature of any form/content dichotomy. Even poets and those who study poetry often come to believe that a specific form–whether deemed “organic” or rigorously metrical–must necessarily signal, however indirectly, a specific social context, even agenda. This is because, historically speaking, one can identify formal attributes that mark the work of poets who seek, by their own account, specific social or aesthetic ends (poets, too, being political creatures). Yet formal content does not intrinsically dictate, for example, ideological content, any more than ideological content stipulates, of necessity, a given form. And the same may be said of formal material, or medium, whether black typeface on white page, or multicolored pixels flickering across your computer screen. Advertising firms today regularly appropriate artistic techniques deriving from former avant-garde practices (and, I must add, reap vast amounts of revenue in the process, unlike many of their artist-precursors).

     

    However occasionally contorted the syntax, however unpoetic the sentences and single-sentence paragraphs, Bob’s book as a book takes its lead and in some sense its imprimatur from this common public and professional confusion regarding form. Even literate readers are likely to be duped by his presentation, his appearance–at the very least, sold on the idea that he represents something of import. Yet except for the content of Bob’s material form–the soft cover, stock, typesetting, even proofreading (to the extent that I could locate no typos) that serve ostensibly as testament to Bob’s monied success–he really has nothing to say.

     

    If you read Bob carefully, his pages might as well be blank, for his is a bureaucratic tale, full of cautiously modulated sound and utterly devoid of fury, signifying that what words mean is of little importance save for the degree to which they reinforce and amplify the platitude, a good manager can manage anything–can manage even words, without really knowing how they work. In this mad pursuit of formal appearances, what signals success is the simple yet profound capacity to manufacture faith in appearances. Arranged on the page with little rhyme and all sorts of reason–or is it vice versa?–words are enlisted in the effort to ensure that even the alphabet as a communications technology will lead future leaders/readers toward the mega-objectives of corporate domination and expansion–the way things are meant to be. It’s what you do that counts, and finessing words is what those who can’t do, do. What Bob does (do) is generate billions of dollars of profit worldwide, the bulk of which ends up in decidedly few pockets.

     

    Hence corporate identity as Identity Inc.: the clothes make the man or woman, and with nice teeth, Doc Martens, discreet piercing, and unlimited credit, you too can and will attain success success SUCCESS. Content (is) for dummies, and as for you English phuds, you/had better/toe/the line/here.

     

    Hey, but this can be immensely seductive stuff, especially to an 18-year old who’s looking for a way out of financial strife, and who’s found an acceptable social slot, Professional Engineer, that appears to guarantee her a job–if she’s lucky, at Motorola. This helps to explain why so many of my engineering majors envision themselves as engineers for three or four years, with a quick move out and up and into management. Not only does this serve to redirect professional (engineering) loyalties and technical passions toward management objectives, but it satisfies Bob’s desire to see everyone as a reduced version of the CEO, committed to and dependent upon the corporate being. This is what Bob’s idea of ideas amounts to, finally, and the only paradox in sight is that this immaterial realm of ideas can be so clearly predicated on material entitlement, that a self-professed leader like Bob–the physical Bob–can reveal himself to be such a wishful and irresponsible thinker.

     

    X.

     

    In my seventh and final year at IIT, my tenure denial of the prior spring was official–I’d been fired, again, but this time with a final year under contract (the industry standard). And this time I’d been fired along with a colleague in Humanities who was also up for tenure–a specialist in African-American lit. But that’s his story to tell. The reasons why I’d been denied tenure remained unclear–to some.

     

    Even my poker-faced Chair had been caught off-guard. This typically punctual man kept me waiting twenty minutes, and when he walked into his office his expression was one of deep concern. “The news is not good,” he began. And after he handed me the President’s letter, in an envelope red-stamped “confidential,” he choked out, “It’s a shocker.” He cleared his throat, tried to be supportive.

     

    I was not shocked. I’d been here before.

     

    When I pressed him on options, he was at a loss save for making vague reference to the faculty handbook, and recommending that I make an appointment to discuss my situation with our (outgoing) V-P. (Discuss my “situation” with the man who devised IPROs?) He also indicated that I might reapply for tenure in the fall. (When the denial had come from the highest level of administration? Or beyond?) He was clearly unprepared for the news himself, uncertain who to turn to in order to establish the correct, let alone expedient, course of resistance. We left it at him getting back to me, and I asked him to inform the department of my denial (using an online discussion list I founded and ran for my colleagues). In fact most everyone in my department was either “shocked” or “stunned.”

     

    My Chair never did get back to me, and had little to say to me in my demoralizing final year. In accordance with faculty handbook standards and procedures, and AAUP recommended policies, I’d asked the President of my university for clarification–in writing–of the reasons he denied me tenure; and in the same memo I appealed his decision, whatever the reasons forthcoming. The President’s response was as expected: he conceded the “quality” of my scholarship and teaching but reiterated his decision to deny me tenure, admitting “concerns” his deans had regarding my being insufficiently “aligned with the new vision of IIT”–“specifically” with those “contributions needed” to interprofessional projects, writing across the curriculum, and technical writing programs. Naturally he concluded on an ostensibly upbeat note, wishing me “success in finding a position more closely aligned with [my] talents.”

     

    The tenure process was a closed-door affair. But I had it on good authority that I’d received the highest recommendation for promotion and tenure from all faculty committees, and that the sole opposition within my department was from my technology-driven colleague. I had it on good authority, but I’d never have it in writing–unless I sued. My mentors often advised me that my situation made for the perfect lawsuit–out of the question given my finances. But the administration clearly knew nothing of my finances, and feared legal exposure; repeated requests for the return of my tenure file were subsequently refused. When in doubt, surrender no paper.

     

    In the wake of the denials, members of my department and several committees busied themselves distributing memos of their own to the administration, memos filled with polite expressions of distress and dismay. So much writing, so many words words words–collegial sentences of moderate tone configured, no doubt, in compliance with the organizational logic underwriting IIT’s newest instructional mission. But I remained confident that, my decorous letters included, this was all a strictly pro forma gesture: if you read between the lines you would likely have concluded, with me, that my days at IIT were numbered. Academe, like industry, is all about institutional survival, and survive or no, one learns over time to read the writing on the wall. A final meeting the week of Thanksgiving between the President and all faculty committee chairs merely confirmed the administration’s adamance.

     

    XI.

     

    In the same month that I was fired, Bob Pritzker announced to a faculty delegacy that he would pull his funding from IIT if the faculty acted to remove our top administrator from his post. If you haven’t already guessed, IIT is anything but a happy campus. In a faculty survey conducted fall of 1997, no less than 60% of the respondents disagreed with the statement that the President “[i]s truthful and honest.” But if power is relational, both IIT’s President and my technology-driven colleague, albeit each in their own ways instrumental in my professional demise, were empowered by their adherence to bottom-line thinking. And my hunch is that, as it proliferates throughout academe, such thinking will continue to profit from the public’s poor grasp of ivory-tower policies and procedures, which policies and procedures are complicated further by backroom corporate incursion. Given the arcana and general mystification associated with such practices, I can hardly blame the public. So I suppose (pardon the exhortation) that it’s up to profs like yours truly to help the uninitiated to understand that tenure, whatever its inefficacies, is about academic freedom–a much maligned and commonly misunderstood term. Simply put: we faculty need such freedom if the classroom is to remain a place where even the mighty machinations of corporate Earth come under critical scrutiny.

     

    So here I am, distributing another exit statement, making my departure from yet another institution a matter of public record–my life as the eX-Files. As things stand–with my bread and butter on the line, and with students who need to be challenged to develop alternative ways to think and act both as professionals and as responsible social beings–I’ve had little choice but to continue to struggle with these urgent and conflicting realities.

     

    In the meantime, the Department of Humanities has elected its first new chair in fifteen years, and is embarking on a new undergrad major in “Professional and Technical Communication”; and the campus has hired a new “vice-president and chief academic officer”–this time with faculty input. (And I’m not quite sure what to make of the fact that, during my final semester on campus, Michael Moore used IIT’s Hermann Hall auditorium to film episodes of his new show, The Awful Truth.) But from where I’m sitting, it’s IIT business as usual, and it’s spreading elsewhere. These days there is little talk of QCEL, and “communication” seems to have become the Humanities buzzword–yet the writing-to-lead/succeed drift prevails. Even the customary teaching-research-service triad is currently under assault, with a proposal on the boards earlier this year to add an additional tenure category, “impact.” Faculty would be granted 15 points for supervising an IPRO–and 8-12 points (depending on the press) for publication of a book. (I am happy to report that some Humanities faculty are balking at this.)

     

    As part of the Introduction to the Professions program, Bob–the physical, Motorola Bob–has made occasional appearances at IIT, lecturing students about tactics and traits applicable to success (or failure) on corporate Earth. I’ve never met the guy, and I sometimes imagine that Bob and I might have something to talk about, given that, as Bob notes in his book, he served at one time on Nixon’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (Bob and Nixon, together–the mind reels.) For that matter, I’ve never met the other Bob (Pritzker), either–he chairs our Board of Trustees, is an IIT alumnus, and–as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Marmon Group, Inc.–is reputedly worth a couple of the Motorola Bobs.

     

    But I can’t talk with these guys unless they’re willing to unclip their word pagers, deactivate their cell phones, and do some real listening–and I have my doubts. One of my former students, a computer science major, attended a Motorola Bob lecture a few years ago, and was courageous enough to challenge Bob directly as to what seemed at the time ominous threats to the humanities effort at IIT. “I’m an English minor,” the student declared, “and you’ve eliminated the major in English, in History, in Philosophy.” Bob observed–quite accurately, if in apparent disregard for how catalyzing agents often come in small proportions–that those disciplines had never managed more than a handful of majors, anyway. And besides, Bob quipped, he’d managed himself to get a whole lot more reading done once he’d gotten himself a chauffeur.

     

    XII.

     

    Picture this: On the thirtieth anniversary of his father losing a twenty-year union job with General Electric, university professor with a decade of teaching and seven years of industrial experience files Chapter 7–and shortly thereafter, as incredible luck would have it in this job-depleted profession, finds gainful employment on academic Earth.

    Imagine.

     

    But wait. Academic Earth? Or corporate-academic Earth?

     

    Picture cloudy.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
    • Barnard, Chester Irving. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938.
    • Galvin, Robert W. The Idea of Ideas. Schaumburg, IL: Motorola UP, 1991.
    • IIT Undergraduate Bulletin 1998-1999. Issued April 1998.
    • White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

     

  • Love and the Debasement of Being: Irigaray’s Revisions of Lacan and Heidegger

    Krzysztof Ziarek

    Department of English
    University of Notre Dame
    Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

     

    In Écrits Lacan remarks: “Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because his task is to act in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge” (105).1 These words are quoted at the beginning of Richardson’s 1983 essay “Psychoanalysis and the Being-question,” and taken to mean that, in developing the logic of desire, Lacan attempts to mediate between Heidegger’s critique of the subject, that is, the idea of Dasein as care, and the Hegelian notion of absolute knowledge. Noting Lacan’s proximity to Heidegger in the 1950s and disputing his later assertion that the references to Heidegger were merely propadeutic, Richardson goes on to sketch a Heideggerian reading of some of the key notions in Lacanian psychoanalysis, among them, language, desire, and the Other. He suggests that Heidegger’s redefinition of language underlies Lacan’s reformulation of Saussurean linguistics and ties the notion of desire to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein. In a way what Richardson outlines, although very briefly and not exactly in those terms, is the critical project of rethinking the subject of desire through the ontico-ontological difference, that is, through the unstable and repeatedly erased difference between being as event and beings as things or entities. What Richardson’s essay does not address is the reciprocal effect that the problematic of sexual difference might have on the question of being, on the idea of a “pre-sex” Dasein as the temporalizing structure of the human mode of being. For such a reformulation of the question of being we need to look to Irigaray, whose work should be approached, I would argue, in terms of a double re-reading: on the one hand, in L’oubli de l’air and certain other texts, particularly in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray reconceives the question of being through sexual difference; on the other hand, and this is a point which Irigaray’s reception has almost completely missed, Irigaray revises Lacanian psychoanalysis and the role that sexual difference has played in philosophical discourse, including Heidegger’s own, through the prism of the ontico-ontological difference. What emerges from this criss-crossing critique is a rethinking of love and sexual difference, which reformulates the relation to the other outside the logic of both recognition and desire. As I argue in this essay, Irigaray’s double intervention into psychoanalysis and philosophy shifts the discussion of love and sexual relation away from negation and lack to temporality and embodiment.

     

    This reading I am tracing in Irigaray’s work takes Lacan’s remark from Écrits at its word and situates the Lacanian subject of desire between Heidegger and Hegel, or, more specifically, between Dasein’s originary temporality and unhomeness (Unheimlichkeit) and Hegel’s dialectics of recognition. It is important to note that, at the time when interpretations of Lacan concentrate on Kant and Hegel, Irigaray’s work pursues, although critically, a decidedly post-Heideggerian path. Of the many provocative implications of Irigaray’s Heideggerian turning of Lacan, I will focus here on her rethinking of love in the context of the debasement of being and the various forms it takes in Lacan’s Encore: knowledge, truth, certain forms of love, the good, beauty. What this approach makes possible is the articulation of Irigaray’s pivotal move from the critique of the subject of desire to the reformulation of love in terms of temporality and wonder. The significance of this reformulation of Lacan through the prism of Heidegger’s revision of temporality lies in underscoring the openings in Lacan discourse beyond the logic of desire, which remains the focus of contemporary Lacanian readings. Recent innovative approaches to Lacan have tended to elaborate the logic of desire and sexual relation either in terms of the Hegelian dialectic of desire and recognition or by way of the Kantian notion of das Ding. Zizek’s interpretations of Lacan in the context of popular culture and political ideology emphasize the dependence of Lacan’s understanding of desire and the Other on the Hegelian dynamic of recognition. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek reads Hegel and Kant through each other in order to emphasize the limit to subjectivation, the unsignifiable real which marks the gap or lack in the constitution of the subject. He illustrates how substance, the Real, and the Thing are mirages instantiated retroactively by the surplus of desire. In another influential reading, Joan Copjec reaffirms and reformulates in “Sex and The Euthanasia of Reason” the Kantian thread in Lacan, explaining the Lacanian formulas of sexuation through Kant’s antinomies of reason in order to illustrate the extra-discursive existence of sex. Although emphatically not prediscursive, sex in Copjec’s argument, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, “is still unknown and must remain so” (234).

     

    Irigaray’s work revises these arguments specifically in terms of what Kant’s formulation, at least in Heidegger’s opinion, does not thematize: temporality. For Irigaray, sexual difference signifies the limit of language not in terms of Kant’s thing-in-itself but in terms of the Heideggerian withdrawal of being. The limit then indicates the impossibility of presence marked by the ecstatic character of temporality, by the unfolding of time irreducible to the historicist conceptualization of history. In other words, Irigaray follows neither the Kantian nor the historicist route. Rather, her reformulation of love demonstrates how the logic of desire, which produces the substantialization of the (foreclosed) Real, is itself put into motion by an evacuation of temporality and a consequent “debasement” of being into things, objects, or substances. For Irigaray, the fact that the limit is not the non-signifiable real but futural temporality implies a critical change in the function of the negative: it no longer signifies negation or repression but becomes the marker of transformation, the sign of the possibility of love and ethical relation.2

     

    What I am proposing, therefore, is a turn in reading Lacan, which would foreground the issue of temporality and its bearing on the problematics of love, desire, and sexual relation–a turn that might finally open up a constructive and critical dialogue between Irigarayan and Lacanian scholars. Fleshing out the revision of the subject of desire through the Heideggerian rethinking of temporality becomes critical for such a project, because it allows us to open up the space of relating to the Other that “escapes” and revises the logic of desire dominant in current discussions of this problem. Heidegger’s revision of temporality provides a critique of both Hegel’s dialectical conception of history and the Kantian notion of the inaccessible thing-in-itself, and makes possible an important rethinking of the very dynamic of relation to otherness from within the temporal unfolding of being. The approach I outline here underscores the role of temporality and non-appropriative relatedness to the Other which Irigaray reformulates from Heidegger and Levinas. My approach also complicates the relationship between Lacan and Irigaray beyond the current feminist interpretations of Irigaray, which still underplay the importance of Heidegger for her critique. It also calls into question the refusal to engage Irigaray’s reformulations of Lacan on the part of most Lacanian critics, a disavowal that follows in part from the misrecognition of Heidegger’s import for Lacan’s thinking. I argue that the critique and contextualization of desire in relation to the temporality of para-being, which Lacan signals in Encore, makes visible unexplored proximities between late Lacan and Irigaray and allows us to address the multiple points of Irigaray’s engagement and reformulation of Lacan’s work: desire, love, the Other. It highlights the ways in which Lacan’s Encore opens beyond its own formulations of jouissance and sexual relation and points beyond the logic of desire toward the non-appropriative relation which Irigaray redefines in terms of wonder.

     

    These revisions underscore the need for an important reformulation of the current discourse on desire and power which characterize many approaches from Lacanian psychoanalysis and readings of Irigaray, to Foucault studies, and cultural and postcolonial studies. The approach that I negotiate between Lacan, Heidegger, and Irigaray, makes it possible to propose a modality of relatedness to the other that eschews the logic of the negative and of constitutive lack. To open up this perspective, desire and its entanglements with power need to be rethought in terms of the event temporality of being, through which Irigaray resignifies relationality into the non-appropriative and transformative wonder. At stake in this critique is the possibility of a relationality that is no longer structured in terms of lack and desire, power and subjection, and that remains “ethical” and non-appropriative. Heidegger sees the possibility of such freedom in the very temporal modality of human being (Dasein), i.e. in its unhomeness, or openness to what is other. The temporality of this openness ruptures the pathways of desire and makes possible an encounter with the other without confusing it with sameness or elevating it into sublimity. This reading of Irigaray’s Heideggerian intervention into Lacan and her Lacanian reformulation of Heidegger’s Dasein enables the reformulation of sexual relation in terms of a future-oriented and transformative being-two, to recall Irigaray’s most recent articulation of the problematic of sexual difference.

     

    Drawing on Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and being, I will explain how Irigaray redefines love beyond narcissism and fusion, and reworks the Hegelian labor of the negative, which remains so pivotal to Lacan’s logic of desire. This redefinition of love, however, can be carried out only in conjunction with the simultaneous reformulation of the question of being through sexual difference. Offering those revisions, Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalysis is never simply negative: it is not criticism and certainly not a rejection of Lacan but is a transformative encounter, a further elaboration of the openings which Lacan himself makes in Encore. The critique of love as a certain debasement of being, as a veiling of the temporality and finitude of existence, is obviously at the heart of Encore. Tracing an historical path from Aristotle through courtly love and the baroque aesthetic to Freud and contemporary linguistics, Lacan’s Seminar XX reappraises the questions posed in the ethics seminar in order to explore the possibility of ethical love differentiated from the ideal of the One in which Lacan sees one of the forms of the foreclosure of both the historicity and the jouissance of being–a collapse or debasement of being’s occurrence into substantiality or ideality. Repeating his own formulas of sexuation, his understanding of the work of desire and of the deceptions of love, Lacan points in Seminar XX toward the possibility of rethinking love in connection with a certain jouissance and in terms of the revised notion of being as para-being. Encore opens a path to thinking the ethics of love outside of the mirroring enclosures of narcissism and the effects of sameness associated with the idea of the One. This possibility pivots on redrawing the very notion of relation to the other into a new, non-appropriative mode of relationality which is not encompassed by desire, narcissistic or fusional love, or the labor of the negative.

     

    Recalling de Beauvoir’s hope that the future will bring new, re-imagined relations, Irigaray develops such relationality into a redefinition of sexual difference as a transformative event in which an encounter with the sexed other keeps reinventing difference and thus opens the possibility of a new future. The issues of the debasement of being and the possibility of ethical love are closely connected in Irigaray’s revision of sexual difference and form her response to Lacan’s repeated assertion that sexual relationship does not take place. For Irigaray the failure of sexual relation reflects the effective erasure of sexual difference within the cultural paradigms of sexuation: the figuration of “woman” as absence or the not-whole, as the other to “man”–which issues from the metaphysical desire for sameness and the unity of being–forecloses the possibility of exchange in sexual relation and produces the illusion of unified and universalizable experience. It is only by redefining the relation between the sexes outside of the metaphysical strictures of presence and absence, negation and unity, that it may become possible to rethink the sexuate dimension of being beyond its phallocratic debasement. Considering Irigaray in the context of Heidegger’s thought, I reappraise her redefinition of the relationality of love in terms of a rethinking of Dasein into an ethical, non-appropriative event of being-two. At stake in this redefinition of love as a non-appropriative encounter, as is the case with Lacan’s seminars VII and XX, is also the question of ethics.

     

    To illustrate these re-negotiations between Lacan, Irigaray, and Heidegger, I will focus on the implications of thinking the subject of desire as a mediation, a middle link between Dasein and being, on the one hand, and the subject of absolute knowledge, on the other. Lacan’s reading of Freud brings the question of lack and absence, reformulated as the work of the signifier, to bear on the Cartesian subject of certainty and also on the Hegelian idea of history as the manifestation of the subject’s development toward absolute knowledge. It is the structuring and grounding function of lack that dislocates the Cartesian subject and opens it onto the subject of desire, which emerges as another layer of subjectivity, constantly enveloping and fracturing the subject of knowledge. Examining various forms of love against the backdrop of the splits and lack intrinsic to subjectivity, Lacan indicates that love functions as a supplement both to the lack that structures desire and to the failure of sexual relationship. Love takes two primary forms: narcissism, a self-love described by Freud, and the philosophical-theological idea of unity which, as Lacan puts it, has to do with the One, that is, with the ideal of oneness and fusion that can be traced back at least as far as Plato’s Symposium. Against these two dominant forms, Encore (hereafter abbreviated E) signals the importance of rethinking love with respect to the failure of sexual relationship, which, Lacan insists, although articulated as a negation, marks something positive: “Yes, I am teaching something positive here. Except that it is expressed by a negation” (E 59). What fails in sexual relationship is objective; what fails is, in fact, the object or objet a, which the desiring subject keeps searching for and ascribing to the Other. “The essence of the object is failure” (E 58). One crucial historical instance of this failure of the object or of the object as failure that Lacan analyzes in Encore is courtly love, which sublimates the absence of sexual relation into poetic rhetoric. In courtly love, which seems to have had a lasting influence on European conceptions of love, love becomes the symptom of the absence of sexual relation, a compensation for the lack in the double form of idealized femininity and one’s “courtly” relation to it. Lacan’s remark that the failure of sexual relation represents something positive implies, however, that grasping this failure as lack or negativity is already a misinterpretation of the “being” of sexual relation, of the very manner in which sexes relate. It is indeed possible to regard Encore as a series of attempts to signal the positivity of the failure of sexual relation, to open the door to reimagining this failure outside the logic of supplementarity and its tendency toward substantialization of being. I would argue that Seminar XX, though at points hesitant and unclear, can be read in terms of an effort to think difference and relation beyond the various forms of negativity, logical or dialectical, in order to discern the positivity marked in the failure of sexual relation.

     

    As supplements to the failure in the “object” of love, the diverse forms of love which Lacan mentions in the course of Seminar XX produce a certain debasement of being, enclosing the subject within narcissistic desire or evacuating the temporality of being into phantasmatic objects or metaphysical ideals. An attempt to counter this “depreciation” of being, Lacan’s comments about a certain positivity manifested in the failure of sexual relationship which does not require supplements allow us to read this failure as opening a path, a different trail, as it were, to the other. These remarks indicate the need for reformulating the discourse of love into a new mode of relationality, disengaged from knowledge and desire. More importantly, they can be read as signaling the critical importance of rethinking relationality apart from the logic of negativity which underpins the metaphysical articulations of being and the cultural logic of sexuation. The ending of Encore expressly dissociates love from the order of knowledge (E 146). Since love may occur only as that something positive marked negatively as the failure of sexual relation, it does not require the support of objet a and, although related, perhaps often inextricably, to desire, does not belong to the same order or operate the same relation. Such “new” love points to a different layer of subjectivity, marked within but at the same time pointing beyond the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. Lacan does not expand on the possibility of this “may be” of love in Encore, hinting only that it has to do with the body and with a jouissance whose economy “should not be/could not fail to be phallic” or that of the not-whole which Lacan associates with the possibility of feminine jouissance.

     

    This jouissance emerging from Lacan’s remarks dispersed throughout Encore marks a certain mode of bodily being, which Lacan associates with the para-being of signifierness (signifiance) and opposes to the substantialized being and its diverse avatars: truth, knowledge, supreme being, soul, etc. (E 71). If the soul unifies the body, jouissance “writes” it, i.e. unfolds the bodily being as a certain drift and a text or texture of experience, irreducible to our knowledge of it (E 110-112). The jouissance occurs in the mode of “failing to be,” that is, it fails to be substantialized, it eschews the substantive and signified forms of being, marking itself as the positivity of this failure. Since it fails to ever be (as substantive), this jouissance cannot be known: it represents an affect or passion of para-being, a passion that has neither the positivity of presence nor the negativity of absence. This is why Lacan refers to it as a “passion for ignorance” (E 121), opposed to the passion for knowledge and working beyond the dialectic of love and hate. If knowledge works within or at least toward the temporality of presence and desire operates the temporality of absence and lack, the passion for ignorance would have to be thought in terms of a different temporality, one that cannot be explained by the logic of progress, negation, or accumulation. It is neither the positivity of the one nor the negativity of the not-whole, with its “failing,” accumulative logic of one plus one plus one. As this mode of being, the jouissance that Lacan is after is also differentiated from objet a and the symbolic, which produce semblance of being and block the path to the other (E 93-94). Such a jouissance is never properly of language (langue) or appropriate to it but, rather, operates as its inter-dit: as lalangue (E 121). Inter-said only in its interdiction, this jouissance of being finds itself prior to signification, prior to the effects of the signifier and its “stupid” logic of collectivization. This jouissance undermines the hold that truth and thought have on being, a hold that debases being into the “stupidity” of the One and the illusory permanence of substantives. As Lacan suggests, this jouissance allows us “to relegate the truth to the lowly status it deserves” (E 108). In a Heideggerian gesture, Lacan opposes to the truth the pathway, the changing and temporalizing path of wisdom offered by Taoism. Finally, since this jouissance is inappropriate for language or truth, it is linked to the fact that sexual relationship fails, that is, fails to be ever constituted. The positivity of the failure of sexual relation has to do with pathways of this bodily jouissance, with the temporality of its being, which prohibits sexual relationship, that is, lets it happen only as inter-dit, as inter-said. Inter-dit marks the different temporality of jouissance, which refracts the logic of presence and absence, and therefore fails to articulate itself in terms of the operations of negation. It is in relation to this different temporality–neither of knowledge nor of desire–that we need to rethink the failure of sexual relation.

     

    Irigaray’s Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One reformulate feminine morphology and the jouissance Lacan discusses in Encore away from the economy of the not-whole and into a new relationality of proximity, based on a critical appropriation, through the prism of sexual difference, of Heidegger’s idea of nearness (Nähe) and Levinas’s proximity, together with their explicit ethical connotations. In an important way, Irigaray’s notions of proximity and wonder, critical to her project in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter abbreviated ESD) form a response to the Levinasian rethinking of ethical relation as a radical proximity in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, a response that resignifies proximity specifically in terms of sexual difference.3 The notion of proximity developed by Irigaray, delineating an interval which cannot be crossed or thematized, is also evocative in its spatio-temporal drift of Lacan’s inter-dit: the writing in-between words or lines, both prohibited by language and representation and yet marked and thus in some way arriving in the very interdiction that forecloses its expression. Proximity inter-says itself between presence and absence, between knowledge and desire, mapping a relationality that is too close for producing either identification (sameness) or separation (negation). As Irigaray refers to it, proximity is “neither one nor two,” it has to do neither with the One nor with negation. The modality of relation which Irigaray calls proximity provides an alternative to the subject-object relation and its basis in the logic of negation with the corollary opposition between presence and absence. It is a relation that fails to “be,” i.e. fails to identify the one with the other, that, in other words, does not submit to the labor of the negative. Without either becoming present or being simply absent, proximity does not fail to mark difference, albeit otherwise, in its non-substantive, spatio-temporal drift.

     

    Lacan’s inter-dit recalls Heidegger’s distinction between logos and glossa from Introduction to Metaphysics, where logos refers to what gets said between words, as it were, and, at the same time, becomes veiled by the play of signs.4 This distinction reappears in Heidegger’s 1951 essay “Logos,” which Lacan translated into French: “Thus, the essential speaking of language, Legein as laying, is determined neither by vocalization fwnh nor by signifying shmainein. Expression and signification have long been accepted as manifestations which indubitably betray some characteristics of language. But they do not genuinely reach into the real of the originary, essential determination of language, nor are they at all capable of determining this realm in its primary characteristics” (Early 64). There is something of language beyond signification and articulation, beyond the play of the signifier and the solidifying force of the signified. Heidegger claims that signification does not determine the originary realm of language, i.e. that spatio-temporal event which in each moment has always already laid out the relationality within which signification becomes possible. This laying out of a relationality is the meaning of logos as a language “beyond” language: logos is the saying that inter-says itself in the play of significations, both marked and foreclosed by the logic of the signifier. This rethought Heideggerian logos is then non-logocentric and refers to a relationality that, within the spatio-temporal unfolding of being, fails to be either present or absent, and yet marks a certain positivity, a non-metaphysical pulsation of being which cannot be reduced to negation or lack. Still, logos cannot fail but to conceal itself within the negative logic of being, within the opposition between presence and absence. Making a distinction between words and signs, Heidegger remarks that logos is the word marked as erased between signs, the word that sinks down into and becomes concealed in language (Einführung 131). Logos then marks the rhythm in which being lays itself out, its historico-temporal unhoming, that is, its intrinsic openness onto the unheimlich. Reinterpreting truth as aletheia or unconcealment, Heidegger remarks in “On the Essence of Truth” that unconcealment happens in the midst of concealment, within the non-essence (Un-Wesen ) or pre-essential essence (vor-wesende Wesen ) of truth, which is constituted as a Geheimnis, a mystery (Pathmarks 148; “Vom Wesen” 191). The mystery at stake in Dasein is not “mystical,” but rather concerns the unhoming intrinsic to Dasein, its modality of being itself as unheimlich. Playing with Heidegger’s later remarks on the function of Ge- in Ge-stell, or the “enframing” characteristic of modern technology (note to “The Question Concerning Technology”) we could say that this mystery (Geheimnis) or concealment relates the various ways in which otherness and being-outside-itself constitute Dasein into the disclosedness of beings.

     

    As inter-dit, Lacan’s jouissance from Encore can be interpreted in terms of the concealing temporality of the logos and its Unheimlichkeit. What interdicts jouissance is its modality of para-being, its concealment from both presence and absence, its neither negative nor positive logic. If this jouissance always fails it is because its positivity has the mode of logos: inscribed into the logic of fulfillment and lack, such jouissance has always already failed. Not because it fails to fulfill the expectation and thus marks a lack but because jouissance’s logos is not of the logic of fulfillment, which presupposes presence and immediately brings with it its negation: lack. Lacan suggests that this inter-dit grants us access to a certain kind of the real which needs to be exposed (E 119), unconcealed in its logos of concealment. At stake in the inter-dit is, therefore, a different logos of relationality, a mode of relatedness that inhabits the real beyond the signification of this logos as having to do with the one, as “sayable” in terms of the metaphysical logic of being and its labor of the negative. The difficulty of exposing this real lies in its refraction of presence, a refraction which, however, cannot be mistaken for the force of negation and subsequently constituted into lack. Such real is not the inaccessible Kantian Ding, separated from language and perception, but is rather the inter-said whose “failed positivity” inlays and de-structures language. While little of this real remains accessible in terms of signification, it is hardly absent from language, continuously inlaying expression.

     

    For Irigaray, this real and its different mode of relationality takes place as the event of wonder, constituted as the fluid proximity between the one and the other: “A third dimension. An intermediary. Neither the one nor the other” (Ethics 82). This event where there is neither one nor two, where, in other words, the logic of identity and difference underpinning the subject’s relation to the other does not operate, frames Irigaray’s attempt to articulate new, so far unimagined forms of sexual relations–a new relationality of love. In order to articulate this new relationality more clearly, I will examine Irigaray’s work in terms of the effects that the ontico-ontological difference and the ecstatic temporality it encodes produce on both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. Her writings discern a certain parallel between the operations of knowledge and desire with respect to temporality and the ontico-ontological difference: both desire and knowledge end up collapsing the ontico-ontological difference and, thus, conceal the finitude of being. While the subject of knowledge effaces the temporality of being by constituting consciousness into the presence of representations, desire, as a relation structured through lack, clothes the paradoxically constitutive absence into the desired presence of objet a. Both knowledge and desire are structured in terms of the opposition between presence and absence: knowledge as the sublation of difference into presence, desire as lack or the lost presence of primary jouissance. For Irigaray, desire remains coupled with the fantasy of origin, of the original or primary satisfaction, and can only with difficulty be disconnected from the gesture of encircling or taking hold of. It seems that for Irigaray both the subject of consciousness and the subject of desire are still metaphysical, although in different ways. The first one sublates absence into the presence of knowledge and the self-presence of consciousness; the other, in Lacan’s re-reading of Hegel, foregrounds the structuring force of absence, the effect of the signifier, the lack desiring its own perpetuation.

     

    These appropriative tendencies in knowledge and desire lead Irigaray to reconceptualize love in a way that calls into question both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, this critical reformulation is developed through a reading of Descartes’ philosophy of passions, in which Irigaray points out that for Descartes desire remains secondary to wonder (ESD 77) and she comments on the conspicuous absence of wonder in Freud’s theory of passions: “[Descartes] does not differentiate the drives according to the sexes. Instead, he situates wonder as the first of the passions. Is this the passion that Freud forgot?” (ESD 80). Although Irigaray does not develop her comments on the relation between wonder and desire, the direction of her argument is clear: she considers wonder to be the first passion, prior to desire and knowledge, though not in a developmental or linear sense. Wonder can be, then, seen as parallel to that third jouissance, to the passion for ignorance, which Lacan opposes to love and hate toward the end of Encore. Freud forgets this passion because it is covered over not only by knowledge but also by the logic of desire. Preceding desire, wonder functions as the very intermediary of relations, their third term (ESD 82). Irigaray thinks of wonder as the passion in which there is no separation between body and mind, between thought and affect, between thought and action: “A passion that maintains a path between physics and metaphysics, corporeal impressions and movements toward an object, whether empirical or transcendental” (ESD 80). It becomes clear, then, that rereading Descartes,5 Irigaray is also reinterpreting the Lacanian subject of desire in relation to the bodily jouissance of being reformulated as admiration or wonder. What this rereading points to is another layer, or better, a different mode of being, beyond both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire: it is the temporality of wonder in terms of which Irigaray redefines love.

     

    To flesh out this opening of the subject of desire onto a new relationality of love beyond narcissism and the idea of the One, Irigaray reinterprets Diotima’s speech from Symposium, not only setting Diotima’s remarks explicitly against the idea of unity but also using them to distinguish between the workings of love and desire. She situates desire in the context of will, intention, and teleology, contrasting it with wonder, which describes a non-appropriative and transformative relation to the other. Tracing this distinction between love and desire, Irigaray remarks that love (eros)–the pathos that guides wonder–has the force of an intermediary but becomes stymied and declines when desires, aims, and objectification set in: “It seems that during the course of her speech, she diminishes somewhat this daimonic, mediumistic function of love, such that it is no longer really a daimon, but an intention, a reduction to the intention, to the teleology of human will, already subjected to a kind of thought with fixed objectives, not an immanent efflorescence of the divine of and in the flesh. Love was meant to be an irreducible mediator, at once physical and spiritual, between the lovers, and not already codified duty, will, desire” (ESD 30, my emphasis). As the passion of wonder, love remains prior to desire, because desire operates on the level of intention and, turning what is desired into an object or a goal, “debases” its being. Elaborating on this critical change in being, Irigaray remarks that, instead of loving one’s lover, one begins to desire one’s beloved: “In the universe of determinations, there will be goals, competitions, and loving duties, the beloved or love being the goal…. Love becomes a kind of raison d’ état ” (ESD 30). When love becomes distanced from becoming, the temporality of wonder, its jouissance, becomes collapsed into goals and reasons: family, procreation, the state, politics, production and so on.

     

    Perhaps the most important aspect of wonder is that, unlike desire, it is not constituted through lack. Wonder operates as a transformative interval, in which the other’s difference is encountered in a “positive” way, i.e. it produces a change not simply in the manner of the subject’s being but in the very mode of the relation itself. As Irigaray puts it, wonder is “the opening of a new space-time” and “a mobilization of new energies” (ESD 75). This distinction between desire and wonder is critical for Irigaray, specifically with respect to how the other’s difference becomes manifested and affects the valency of relation. Lack points to alienation; it is read negatively, as a repeatedly missed satisfaction. It could be argued that the logic of lack presupposes the idea of presence: even though lack is the effect of the signifier and the signifier never produces full presence, the very notion of lack becomes accessible via its presupposed opposition to presence. As Lacan points out, access to language is opened through the mastering of the absence of the lost object. But the paradigm of absence/presence already marks a certain forgetting of the temporality of being: the oedipal logic operates as a covering of the originary event-temporality, as a veiling of the para-being (par-être), which Lacan explores in Encore.6 If desire owes its dynamic to a lost origin, i.e., to primary satisfaction, then it is put into motion by a (mis)reading of being in terms of possession and lack–a logic that substantializes and objectifies the non-substantive spatio-temporality of being in an attempt to appropriate it. This is why in her remarks on Descartes Irigaray emphasizes the force of motion intrinsic to wonder: this force marks the non-substantive and non-essential modality of being, indicating that being is not about having or losing, since in wonder there is nothing, literally no-thing or object that could be possessed. Wonder is a modality of relatedness that does not transpire in terms of the subject-object relation, it is a disposition in which there are no positions that are proper to subjectivity or its objects. While desire is haunted by the specter of satisfaction, wonder is about jouissance without satisfaction, without objects, real or imaginary.

     

    What changes in the turn from wonder to desire is the mode of relating: from non-appropriation and proximity to relation instituted in terms of goals, appropriation, hierarchy, subordination, and command. From the perspective of wonder one could say that desire is a repetition of the missed satisfaction not because such satisfaction cannot be recovered, i.e., because it belongs to a lost past, but rather because being in its temporality is not about satisfaction or having. Lacan’s critique in Encore of the logic of presence and absence in terms of para-being indicates that desire keeps misreading its own dynamic, it keeps missing the way being works only as para-being. As a result, desire keeps knotting being into the cause of desire, a cause that remains without substance, a void. In other words, desire still reads being metaphysically, in terms of lack and absence. Desire feeds on this lack and replenishes it in order to reproduce its own circular or knotting logic. From Heidegger’s perspective, this logic is nihilistic: “In the forgetfulness of being to drive [betrieben] only at beings–this is nihilism” (Einführung 155).7 When the force, the pulsation of being becomes forgotten and what is repeatedly belabored, driven at, are objects or beings, nihilism takes over existence. Nihilism is not annihilation of beings or lack of values, but is, on the contrary, the forgetting of being in the fixation on objects, whether real, imaginary, or symbolic. These objects include values, ideas, knowledge, the One of love and the One of knowledge. It is only in relation to such objects that being can be seen as lacking. The fact that being is not and lacks in being an object or a substance to be possessed, brings desire into being–desire that wants to forget being and imagine objects in place of the non-appropriable event. At the same time, the fact that being is not, that it is no-thing, no thing or object, undoes any and all such attempts: no being or entity, because it occurs, because it is in being, can ever be an object and live up to desire. Nihilism produces its own frustration and feeds on its repetition. To undermine the hold of this nihilism, it is necessary to call into question the debasement of being’s historico-temporal event into objects–it is, in other words, to question the logic of desire.

     

    In her reformulation of wonder, Irigaray thinks para-being precisely as a counter to the appropriative, nihilistic logic of desire, and to the lack that it marks in being. To explain this, I would need to flesh out in more detail the similarities and differences in Lacan’s and Heidegger’s approaches to language. Let me just suggest here that such a comparison would disclose the possibility of rethinking the logic of the Lacanian signifier from the effect of lack to what, in Heideggerian parlance, might be called an event temporality, which operates beyond the idea of lack and satisfaction. Lacan himself gestures in this direction with his comments on para-being, on the par-être that does not appear. This understanding of temporality underpins Irigaray’s notion of wonder, to which she explicitly refers as an event: an event and advent of the other. To explain the implications of Irigaray’s idea of wonder, I will focus on two of its aspects: temporality and the sense of otherness disclosed in it, and I will do so by commenting on those two facets in Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein in Being and Time. I suggested earlier that Irigaray reads Lacan as diagnosing the “missing” link, the subject of lack, located between Dasein and the subject of knowledge. This reading allows Irigaray not only to rethink Lacan encore, as it were, through Heidegger but also to reconsider Dasein in relation to desire and sexual difference.

     

    The term Dasein refers to the specifically human mode of being in its finite temporality. It does not designate the subject but, rather, describes the pre-subjective and embodied mode of being, which comes to understand itself in terms of an open context of relations which make up Dasein’s spatio-temporal being-in-the-world. Those relations include Being-with, or Dasein’s comportments toward other human beings. In the frequently misunderstood remarks about authenticity from Being and Time, Heidegger maintains that Dasein is “authentic” (eigentlich) only in the mode of Unheimlichkeit, that is, uncanniness or, better, “unhomeness.” Dasein occurs authentically only at the moments when the temporalizing force of its finitude undermines the impersonal familiarity of its daily identifications. Heidegger calls these identifications the “they-self,” the self that comprises the realm of language, symbolic and imaginary identities: “It is Dasein in its uncanniness [unhomeness]: originary thrown being-in-the-world as ‘not-at-home,’ the naked ‘that’ in the nothingness of the world” (Being 255, slightly modified).8 The term Un-zuhause (not-at-home) makes clear that Heidegger’s notion of Unheimlichkeit places the emphasis on being “un-homed,” understood as the mode of being in which Dasein occurs as “authentic.” To put it differently, Dasein is “authentic” in an originary exposition to alterity, which means that it is its-self as unhomed toward what is other, as divested of stable or substantive identities offered in its culture. When Dasein experiences itself as “at home” in its everyday being, it has forgotten the otherness, the “un-homing” at work in its own temporal mode of being, and has covered over its originary openness to what is other. The originary opening to the other constitutes a temporal event, in which the modality of being is not presupposed or imposed but, instead, brought about and co-constituted in relation to the other. To put it differently, the shape or the form which being-in-the-world takes depends on the modality of relating to the other, on whether one does not forget that the familiarity of everyday being–with its “routine” forms of experience, understanding, and representation–takes place each moment within an originary “unhomeness.”

     

    Dasein understands itself without ever being able to articulate this understanding into a knowledge, because this understanding is “practical”: it happens as the activity of being-in-the-world in which Dasein comports itself toward things and others. What is so unhoming in this understanding, i.e. in the human mode of being, is finitude, and the de-substantializing effects of its temporality, which disclose to Dasein the fact that things are not substantive, that they are never objects, that, in psychoanalytic terms, they cannot be satisfactory in the way our desire wants them to be. Heidegger’s rethinking of Freud’s uncanny certainly indicates that the finite temporality of Dasein calls into question the logic of desire, that it forces a rethinking of the dynamic of relation to what is other. That dynamic would have to be rethought from what Heidegger calls the ecstatic temporality particular to Dasein. Heidegger writes that Dasein’s time unfolds as an always momentary complex of the three ecstasies of time: the has been (Gewesenheit or the “past”), the making present, and the coming-toward (Zu-kunft) or the future. For our purposes, what matters in Heidegger’s detailed explanation of the rise of the common concept of time out of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein9 is that ecstatic temporality provides a critique of the concepts of time and history grounded in the metaphysical opposition between presence and absence. As the name indicates, ecstatic temporality is the originary mode of being outside itself, that is, of being open to otherness: “Temporality is the originary ‘outside-of-itself’ [Ausser-sich] in and for itself” (BT 377/329 modified). Temporality means being always extended outside itself, beyond what becomes present. Dasein occurs as concerned with the “outside-of-itself,” and this concern or care, as Heidegger refers to it, takes the form, especially in his later writings, of letting-be. In other words, the possibility of letting what is other be as what it is in its difference is linked with the temporal occurrence of Dasein as an originary “outside-of-itself.” What makes Dasein Dasein, that is, what constitutes the human mode of being, is this originary extending or openness toward otherness.

     

    Dasein “understands” itself existentially in terms of its project, i.e. as a projection onto its possibilities for being, it sees itself futurally in relation to its power to be. Within this projection, the past is not a matter of re-membering or reconstructing past situations with historical exactness, but of retrieving it “existentially,” that is, as a kind of (self)interpretive acting which always already extends the present’s paths into the future. Therefore, history is primarily futural: its temporalizing matrix works as a disjoining structure, in which historical being orients itself in terms of a sheaf of possibilities. As Heidegger remarks, temporality discloses “the silent force of the possible” (die stille Kraft des Möglichen) (Sein 394) as intrinsic to the dynamic of being. This silent force of the possible indicates that transformation is intrinsic to the very dynamic of occurring: it is tied to the shape which the relation to the other takes.

     

    This transformative vector of temporality is of critical importance to understanding Irigaray’s remarks about wonder. In Heidegger, Dasein names a mode of being, which does not have a place but occurs as an interval, as a temporal project, if you will, within which the relation between the subject and the other unfolds. In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger explains that Dasein does not belong to human beings but constitutes a relationality of freedom into which humans can be “released”: “The human being does not possess freedom as property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Dasein, possesses the human being….” (Pathmarks 145). Dasein stands for a relatedness to being in which the human being can participate, a relatedness which is always tuned in a particular way, as the play of concealment and unconcealment. It is the manner in which beings become unconcealed that brings Dasein into an attuning (a Gestimmtheit or a Stimmung) in which it can be free. Stimmung, pitch or mood, cannot be understood here in terms of psychology or lived experience. Instead, it refers to what is best understood as a disposition, a disposing of relations between being, beings, and human beings. The site, the there or the Da of such a disposition is called Da-sein, there-being. Entering into this modality of being, humans find themselves within a certain relatedness where their relation to being and beings becomes disposed into either a disclosive freedom, a non-appropriative mode of relationality, or into a grasping, appropriative relation that obscures the disposition of Dasein. In Heidegger, the non-appropriative and appropriative exist in a tension, which marks the occurrence of the event or Ereignis. The notion of Dasein as a temporal project marked by the transformative force of the possible allows Heidegger to disentangle a mode of being which remains free from the Hegelian dialectic of recognition and its intricate mesh of desire and knowledge. Heidegger shows that, as such a temporal project, Dasein is in each moment “mine”; however, it is “mine” not by way of possession or identity, but is “mine” in its very force to be, in its transformative, futural vectors.

     

    I see Lacan’s remarks from Encore on para-being and jouissance as the context that allows Irigaray to introduce into this Heideggerian way of thinking a critical reformulation of Dasein into what Irigaray’s recent writings call being-two.10 If Dasein is the in-between, the fold from which the relation between subject and the Other emerges, the change Irigaray suggests is that this in-between is itself vectored as being-two. Being-two refers not to the subject’s relation to the other but to a mode of encounter, in which there is no “one” as the subject and no “other” as the object of desire: “one” and “other” only occur in the mode of being two, which does not signify the split or the lack that (un)grounds the subject but the originary openness to otherness as the possibility of the future and transformation. According to Irigaray, prior to the uneasy embrace of the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge, there is a mode of being-two, a mode of being-in-sexual-difference. In this openness constitutive of being two, otherness has the positive valency of the possibility of transformation: it is not a sign of lack or threat but of the possibility of freedom and change as the vectors of the encounter with the other. Being-two thus redefines otherness beyond the subject-object opposition on the level of knowledge, and beyond the subject-Other relation on the level of desire. If Dasein is a temporal project of possibilities-to-be, within being-two, this project is already inflected, asymmetrical; it is transformative by virtue of the other’s singularity. It is in this specific sense that I refer to Irigaray’s wonder as originary: Heidegger’s term ursprünglich, mistakenly interpreted as primordial, does not refer to a past which Dasein would somehow try to repeat or get back to but to the originary force with which each moment opens itself into the futural possibilities for being. To say that wonder is originary does not mean that it refers to an origin, to a primal moment or scene, but that it happens with the transformative force of a future-opened temporal project. If desire operates in relation to a primary satisfaction, to an idea of an original jouissance, wonder sketches a different dynamic of relation, one turned toward the future as the new.

     

    Being-two is Irigaray’s way of marking being with sexual difference and also her attempt to rethink love in terms of wonder. As she remarks in Être Deux, “The dualism of subject and object is no longer overcome in the fusion or ecstasy of the One but in the incarnation of the two, a two irreducible to the One….” (108).11 Being-two becomes the figure for a mode of being that bespeaks neither the unity of the one nor the difference between the two (or more, i.e. multiplicity), but refers to an incarnated and concrete mode of being that eschews both monism and dualism. In social and political terms, being-two sketches an economy of relations alternative to the dominant paradigm of sociality conceived as the integration of individuals into a social totality. For Irigaray universality is not produced by sublating particularity into generality but marks itself within the singularity of the event of being-two. Being-two functions an “existential,” i.e. incarnate and concrete, universal from which existence unfolds: “[w]ithout doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal” (I Love 47). This revised universality eludes the idea of totality or homogeneity and inscribes, instead, an unquantifiable proximity between the two (sexes) from which social and political relations develop. Such a “universal” remains intrinsically futural: it is not produced as unified totality but remains to be enacted, carried out and decided, futurally, as the transformative and differential event of being-two.

     

    Irigaray’s remarks about being-two allude to Lacan’s critique of love in Encore, and try to spell out a new relationality of love as the asymmetrical event of being-two beyond narcissism and the idea of the One. The unhoming (unheimlich) and transformative temporality of this event make it possible to rethink sexual relation in the following way: the failure of sexual relation becomes the mark of its event dynamic, it reflects the fact that sexual relation cannot be written, signified, or substantialized, because it is real. Sexual relation becomes “real” not in any substantive or atemporal, unreachable sense, but precisely by virtue of the silent force of the possible that it literally keeps incarnating in the event of being-two. Rethinking Irigaray’s being-two in the context of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein lets us flesh out the real in terms of its futural temporality and its forces of the possible. Irigaray would say that it is precisely love as sexual relation that enacts, as it were, and keeps incarnating the real as the transformative force of being. In being-two, the unhoming/transformative force of being becomes real. Reformulating de Beauvoir’s “one becomes a woman,” Irigaray would say that love and sexual difference become real with each pulsation of being, and they become real to the extent that the unhoming force of the encounter is not produced as lack but as the force of the possible.

     

    Conceiving being-two in futural terms as a transformative relationality can be seen as a response to the problem of the debasement of being, which Lacan’s Encore associates with the logic of presence and absence, with the opposition between being and non-being. What such a “debasement” forecloses is precisely the futural vector of the “silent force of the possible,” to recall Heidegger’s remark from Being and Time. Irigaray rewrites this force of the possible into a relationality of love, into a space of freedom and transformation marked in the proximity of being-two. Irigaray’s wonder disengages desire from the logic of lack and reformulates it in terms of the futural vector of the possible: “Desire would be the vectorialization of space and time, the first movement toward, not yet qualified…. In a way, wonder and desire remain the spaces of freedom between the subject and the world. The substrate of predication? Of discourse?” (ESD 76). Desire thought in the register of wonder has no cause, only a momentum which vectorializes relations without qualifying or substantializing them; it is desire that does not operate on lack and repetition but in terms of excess and the new.

     

    Lacan’s Encore reappraises the question of ethical love in terms of jouissance, the body, and para-being as the alternative to the phantasmatic logic of desire and the power of the One. How thin a line separates the possible ethical jouissance of para-being in our relation to the other from the domains of desire and knowledge is staged by the ending of Encore. Staged, not articulated, because Lacan clearly disengages the possibility of the different understanding of love Encore is after from knowledge, from the kind of love that knows the other as the One: “to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love” (E 146). This sentence closes the last page of Seminar XX, the page on which Lacan plays with the idea of encore as both enacting and subverting the logic of desire: “Shall I say, “See you next year”? You’ll notice that I’ve never ever said that to you. For a very simple reason–which is that I’ve never known, for the last twenty years, if I would continue next year. That is part and parcel of my destiny as object a” (E 146). The not-knowing in this remark is part and parcel of the logic of objet a, tempting with the possibility of its own impossible materialization. Lacan positions his discourse as objet a, enticing with the supposed final knowledge, desiring it yet again, encore, and making it still (encore) to come. This doubling encore can be read as the lack constitutive of the nihilistic desire to know or as a freeing encore, liberating the event (of the end of the seminar) from the logic of presence and absence into the event’s possible force of the future to be. One could say that the not-knowing Lacan mentions masks the understanding of how the futurity of being makes desire unsatisfiable; and yet desire cannot help but keep collapsing being’s event into an object. What emerges from Lacan’s performance is a distinction between two senses of possibility. In the first sense, possibility is grasped in terms of the knowledge of what it might be; possibility is either conceived in its deferred presence or enacted in its repeated lack, the two sides of the repetition of absence in desire. In the first sense, possibility is either grasped in terms of the knowledge of what it might be, and thus conceived in its deferred presence, or enacted in its repeated lack, the two sides of the repetition of absence in desire.

     

    Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference, seen as a response to Encore, explores the collapse of these two possibilities in terms of the turn from wonder to the logic of lack, lack which desire keeps repeating and knowledge tries to supplement. Both Lacan and Irigaray indicate the difficulty of keeping this difference in play, and both underscore its importance for the possibility of love and ethical relation to the other. To articulate this originary relation of wonder apart from lack and negativity, I have brought together Heidegger’s critical approach to being, more specifically, his reading of being in terms of a futural temporality opened by the critique of the subject in Being and Time, and Irigaray’s appropriation of it in her reformulation of sexual difference. The futural relationality in terms of which Dasein understands itself as being-in-the-world breaks free of the dialectical labor of the negative, at the same time that it does not entail positing the real as unchangeable or inaccessible. Such a futural-transformative modality of relatedness allows Irigaray to articulate the being-two of love as a relation in which difference marks itself neither in terms of negation nor separation but as the transformative interval, as the proximity that keeps reformulating the very parameters of relation and obligation to the other. My tiered reading of Lacan, Irigaray, and Heidegger suggests a new direction for Lacanian interpretation, one that takes neither the Kantian nor the Hegelian route but revises the question of (sexual) relation and love in terms of the Heideggerian rethinking of being through temporality. This perspective reinforces Irigaray’s critique of Hegel’s understanding of love and helps further radicalize her reworking of the labor of the negative in terms of the transformative relatedness of wonder beyond negation. It makes possible fleshing out the problem of love in radically temporal and embodied terms, as the ethical relationality of wonder distinct from the temporal logic of negation and lack. Such an ethics of wonder becomes distinguished in the “positivity” of its transformative event from the labor of negation which underlies the repetitive replaying of the possible as the deferred or missed possibility of actualization. Reading Lacan’s Seminar XX in relation to Irigaray and Heidegger illustrates how love and ethics, always encore, ride on this distinction in the vectors of possibility between lack and wonder.

     

    Notes

     

    1. I quote this remark in the slightly modified version given by William Richardson in “Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question,” 139.

     

    2. This argument underpins Irigaray’s I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History; see, for instance, 56-57.

     

    3. Irigaray’s first response to Levinas comes in “The Fecundity of the Caress” (ESD 82). In her later “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” she underscores the ethical tenor of Heidegger’s work to suggest the possibility of opening ethics beyond the relation to other human beings. The link between Levinas’s and Lacan’s approaches to ethics, at least suggested in Irigaray’s work, is the focus of a recent collection of essays Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym.

     

    4. “So finden wir denn bei Parmenides die scharfe Entgegensetzung von logos und glwssa (Frg. VII, v. 3 ff.)” (Einführung 132).

     

    5. For Descartes wonder brings with it the possibility of being overwhelmed and crushed by what is other: it marks the anxiety afflicting the subject of certainty who finds itself in the face of what exceeds the grasp of its knowledge. (I would like to thank Dalia Judovitz for drawing my attention to this aspect of Descartes’ theory of passions.) Irigaray clearly reformulates Descartes’ wonder and this revision would have to be explained in the context of her trilogy about the elements, in which one of the organizing factors is the engagement with the pre-Socratic notion of wonder and with Heidegger’s rethinking of it. For Heidegger, wonder pertains to both the affective and the intellectual registers. In What Is Philosophy?, Heidegger regards thinking, passion, and action as the axes of philosophia, whose meaning Heidegger redefines, in the context of Pre-Socratics, as the striving after that which astonishes. “The rescue of the most astonishing thing–beings in Being [Seiendes im Sein] was accomplished by a few who started off in the direction of this most astonishing thing, that is, the sophon” (51). Philosophy is not motivated by the desire to know but names as a certain relatedness or disposition (Heidegger’s term is Stimmung) in which what is astonishes–it is a question of maintaining thought in wonder of what is.

     

    6. “What we must get used to is substituting the ‘para-being’ (par-être)–the being ‘para,’ being beside–for the being that would take flight [fuir],” 44; see also 45.

     

    7. “In der Vergessenheit des Seins nur das Seiende betreiben–das ist Nihilismus.”

     

    8. The original reads: “Er ist das Dasein in seiner Unheimlichkeit, das ursprüngliche geworfene In-der-Welt-sein als Un-zuhause, das nackte ‘Das’ im Nichts der Welt” (Sein 276-277).

     

    9. The whole of Division Two of Being and Time is devoted to the discussion of temporality; for Heidegger’s revision of the idea of temporality see, in particular, sections I, II, and III; section VI discusses the “vulgar” concept of time.

     

    10. This term is the translation of the title of Irigaray’s recent book Être Deux.

     

    11. “Ce n’est plus dans la fusion ou l’ecstase de l’Un que se surmonte alors le dualism entre sujet et objet. Mais dans l’incarnation de deux, un deux irréductible à l’Un…” (my translation).

    Works Cited

     

    • Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994.
    • Harasym, Sarah, ed. Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
    • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
    • —. Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975, 1984.
    • —. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966.
    • —. Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
    • —. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986.
    • —. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.” Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978.
    • —. What Is Philosophy? Trans. and intro. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde. [NY]: Twayne, 1958.
    • Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
    • —. Être Deux. Paris: Grasset, 1997.
    • —. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History. Trans. Alison Martin. NY: Routledge, 1996.
    • —. “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
    • Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. NY: Norton, 1977.
    • —. Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1997.
    • Richardson, William. “Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question.” Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

     

  • “This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions”: What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?

    Carol Loranger

    English Department
    Wright State University
    carol.loranger@wright.edu

     

    William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appears “by wide public agreement” whenever lists of postmodern texts in English are compiled (Connor 129). Its status as a work of art seems clear. But its textual status is less clear: as yet, no effort has been made to establish an edition of Naked Lunch which would either provide readers with a reliable critical or scholarly version or, by accounting for its protean materiality as a series of unstable historical-textual events, help make a reality “the fully open, scriptible, postmodernist edition of literature” envisioned by textual scholar D. C. Greetham half a decade ago (17). Given the novel’s shiftily enduring, if cult, status as a political and artistic touchstone in American letters, the absence of a reliable edition is lamentable. But given the peculiar circumstances of the novel’s evolution, establishing such an edition poses serious editorial problems. The textual history of Naked Lunch prophesies both Jerome McGann’s rejection (on specifically textual-historical grounds) of the ideology of authorial intention, central to modern textual scholarship since Fredson Bowers, and Peter L. Shillingsburg’s post-electronic affirmation of the radical non-equivalence of “the work of art” with “the linguistic text of it” (35).

     

    What follows should be taken as a series of first steps toward a postmodern edition of Naked Lunch: an edition which, following the novel’s explicit and manifold rejections of such social (and editorial) values as “authority,” “intention,” “stability,” and “purity”–“the old cop bullshit” (NL 5)1–comes closest to capturing the mutability, aimlessness and contamination it offers in their stead–“Let go! Jump!” (NL 222). While it must account for the “work’s historical passage” (McGann 24), such an edition would not be a critical edition, in that the problem of identifying a copy text from which to identify variants may not be easily settled. The unavailability of the manuscript2 and the peculiar events surrounding the compilation of the first, Olympia Press, edition of Naked Lunch (see below) militate against deferring to Bowers’s theory of final intentions. Naked Lunch has undergone at least five significant changes in the three and a half decades since its first publication. The changes in each case have consisted of the addition or deletion of large, often self-contained portions of text. None of these changes can be considered accidental variants, since changes of this magnitude and these particular kinds were enacted by author or publisher in response to specific pressures. But neither can these changes be satisfactorily marked in each case as deliberate authorial revisions in the sense that, for example, passages in the 1909 “New York” edition of Daisy Miller can be clearly marked as the late James’s late-Jamesifying amplifications of the 1878 edition. Some of Burroughs’s additions pre-date Naked Lunch, others are mutually contradictory, and yet others were written or transcribed by third parties and were included in some editions but omitted from others, presumably with Burroughs’s blessing. Moreover, Burroughs’s history of abandoning the text to circumstance and necessity and his authorial claim to have “no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch” (NL xxxvii)–coupled with his subsequent experiments with the unauthored cut-up in the Nova books and his call for guerrilla assault on the idea of authorial ownership in The Third Mind–suggest very strongly that authorial intent is antithetical to the very spirit of Naked Lunch.

     

    Perhaps most adequate to the special problem of Naked Lunch would be the “eclectic text” McGann proposes for another heavily revised text, Byron’s “Giaour”: based on the first edition but incorporating later additions to and revisions from subsequent editions. But the eclectic text McGann imagines generally addresses smaller scale revisions than those occurring in Naked Lunch. He warns that the resulting “Giaour” will be “marked throughout by ‘accidental’ distractions–variations in styles of punctuation and capitalization” (59), but he does not suggest that additions and revisions might radically alter the implicitly coherent, stable, recognizable boundaries of the text. The distractions caused by subsequent additions to and deletions from Naked Lunch, by contrast, call into question the very assumption of textual boundaries. Moreover, “accidental” distractions in punctuation and capitalization are central elements of even the most stable portions of Burroughs’s work: the elliptical and fragmentary narrative portion, for example, features random capitalization, inconsistent spellings of common slang and standard English words, and highly idiosyncratic and variable use of punctuation and italics. Even the ellipsis, necessitated by Burroughs’s preliminary experiments here with cut-up and fold-in composition,3 appears in three- and four-point variations on a single page and without reference to any internal or external editorial standards.

     

    There are, as I’ve said, at least five distinct texts called Naked Lunch. In addition there are David Cronenberg’s 1992 film version, whose popularity on the midnight movie circuit makes it in some cases the younger reader’s primary, perhaps sole, experience of the work, and the notorious fragment “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch,” which led to the censorship of Big Table 1 in 1959 and established the as-yet unpublished work as an outlaw text. None of these versions contains all the textual material which is Naked Lunch, though all share one or more elements (see Table 1). This variety presents problems for both the reader and writer of this essay–since all are called by the same name, how to distinguish which is which?–and should, as I hope to demonstrate, be accounted for by the postmodernist edition. That four of the five versions are Grove Press publications complicates things further. For simplicity’s sake I will refer to the texts throughout this essay by the same combination of imprint and publication date used in Table 1.

     

    A glance at the table of elements might suggest that the editorial problem is not as great as I have indicated. Each of the five editions has in common a narrative composed of twenty-three “routines”4; surely the other four elements are simply paratexts: those perhaps interesting, but nonetheless secondary, supplements which Gerard Genette has identified as attaching themselves with varying degrees of tenacity to texts. Moreover, that portion of Naked Lunch which I identify as “narrative,” beginning with the untitled routine “<I can feel the heat closing in>” through “Quick…”, has not, but for the addition of two words,5 changed since the Olympia Press publication, suggesting that this text alone is Naked Lunch. The Grove 25th Anniversary edition adopts this view by limiting the text to the Olympia Press narrative.6 But Burroughs’s fabled passivity during the production of the novel–which he insists upon throughout the introductory “Deposition” (added upon the first Grove publication in 1962) and again in the routine “Atrophied Preface: Wouldn’t You?”, theorizes in essays and interviews in The Job (1970) and The Third Mind (1978), and develops as a compositional practice in the cut-up novels forming the Nova trilogy (The Soft Machine [1961], The Ticket That Exploded [1962], and Nova Express [1964])–besides anticipating Roland Barthes’s notion of the death of the author, calls into question any assumption that, in the absence of intentional revision, the authentic text is limited to that which appears in the first printing.

     

    The narrative portion of Naked Lunch consists of twenty-three routines, drawn, according to the mythology, from letters, sketches and a detective pot-boiler written by Burroughs during the Tangier period (1954-58).7 Pieces of the novel had circulated during these years among Burroughs’s circle. Some had been published in small presses as early as 1957.8 Varying reports have it that the manuscript was collated from “a mass of pages” by Burroughs with the assistance of Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin over a ten- to fourteen-day period in 1959 after Maurice Girodias offered to publish the novel as part of Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Companion Series. Sections of the novel were sent to the printer in the order they had been found, revised, and typed. The story goes that Burroughs had intended to organize the text from the galley proofs, but either Burroughs or Girodias decided that the accidental ordering of the routines worked best.

     

    My aim in referring to the above account as part of the mythology of Naked Lunch is not to contest its truth-value, but to specify its function. The story of the novel’s production is so much a part of its initial reception and continuing apprehension that it forms part of the novel’s aura. The seeds of the mythology appear in the “Introduction/Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” added on the occasion of the first American and British editions (of which more later), and the essential elements, which I include in my account, belong to accounts given by nearly all the participants in the Olympia Press publication.9 Of course, given Burroughs’s career-long, semi-ironic self-identification as a huckster, one can never be certain what actually happened. This uncertainty, too, is part of the aura of Naked Lunch. The point I wish to make by recounting the mythology is that, even before its first publication, Burroughs may be seen relinquishing authority over the novel, allowing it to begin to form itself in response to accident and environmental pressure. Burroughs’s passivity at this point, however, is as yet only partial, as can be seen by considering the amount of revision he undertook between the novel-in-progress of Big Table and the Olympia Press publication later that year (see Tables 2 and 3).

     

    A comparison of the relevant routines in Naked Lunch with their earlier “episodes” in Big Table shows Burroughs making significant changes in the text. Aside from what appear to be cosmetic changes–the numbered episodes in Big Table become unnumbered, titled routines in Naked Lunch–Burroughs makes extensive revisions of all but two episodes. These revisions most often consist of developing what were essentially brief scenes into longer routines, interpolating material from separate episodes with additional material to form longer routines, and, in one instance, dividing an episode across two longer routines. Episodes 2 and 5, with minimal revision and the addition of the “vigilante” incident (NL 8-9), are joined to become the novel’s untitled opening routine “<I can feel the heat closing in>.” Part of Episode 3 (BT 86-89) and all of Episode 4 appear with significant revision as the “Hospital” routine in Naked Lunch. The remainder of Episode 3 (BT 89-90), lacking one paragraph, appears as the closing sequence of the routine “Lazarus Go Home” (NL 73). Episodes 6 and 8 comprise much of “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” (NL 144-169), though the routine shows significant revision of these and contains an additional fourteen pages which describe the political parties at length. Episode 1 makes up only a small part of the “Atrophied Preface” (NL 229-231). Episode 9 is not text but a page of calligraphic markings suggestive of the jacket design for the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch.10 Only Episodes 7 and 10 appear to have been essentially finished at the time of the Big Table publication. With minimal revision they become the second (“Benway”) and third (“Joselito”) routines respectively.

     

    Despite the implication that there is a necessary narratological, or, at least, numerical, order to the episodes as they appear in Big Table, Burroughs’s revision changes that order significantly. Keeping the myth of the novel’s production in mind, it is possible to see the movement from active to passive authorship as it occurs. It is reasonable to assume that, as the first three routines of Naked Lunch (“<I can feel the heat closing in>,” “Benway,” and “Joselito”) are among those most complete at the time of the Big Table publication (Episodes 2, 5, 7 and 10), they were the first to go to Girodias. Episodes, which Burroughs revised more heavily, fall later in the Olympia Press narrative, depending on their time of completion. Episode 1, which would become the “Atrophied Preface,” for example, underwent the addition of some ten pages of text. Its placement near the end of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch is perhaps more indicative of the quantity of revision undergone than of any authorial decision to violate textual norms.

     

    In Big Table, Episode 1 clearly serves an introductory purpose, introducing Burroughs as author of the whole (“Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde” [NL, 230, BT 80]), laying forth the early elements of Burroughs’s viral theory of language, and prophesying the novel’s future mutations: “The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions” (NL 229, BT 79). Moved to the end of Naked Lunch and expanded theoretically, “Atrophied Preface” effectively postpones until the last moment the revelation of the theory of the novel and the arrival of the “novelist” who has produced the text and would direct our reading of it: “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point…. I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous [….] Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse” (NL 224). After Burroughs’s revision, the narrative portion of Naked Lunch begins in media res, with a monologue routine (“<I can feel the heat closing in>”; Episode 2 in Big Table) by (Inspector) Bill Lee, huckster, con-man, junkie sizing up the marks–including by implication the reader and implying that what follows–part hard-boiled detective novel, part science fiction hallucination, part social and political satire, part scholarly treatise of underworld jargon–is simply more of Lee “giving the fruit[s their] B production” (NL 2, BT 81).

     

    It is not my intention here to perform a detailed analysis of Burroughs’s revision of “Ten Scenes from Naked Lunch” into Naked Lunch, though I believe such a study would be an important addition to Burroughs scholarship. Rather, I simply want to specify the point at which Burroughs began to relinquish active control over the novel’s production to other forces, setting a precedent for future unauthored, though not unauthorized changes. The next series of textual mutations, circa 1963-84, would be authored by circumstance, even when actual words were written by Burroughs.

     

    Grove Press had begun negotiations with Girodias for an American printing of Naked Lunch as early as November 1959 and continued despite interference by the United States Post Office and seizure of the Paris edition by U.S. Customs agents (Goodman 142). The edition which Grove finally printed in 1962 contained the significant additions of an introduction, Burroughs’s “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”11 (NL xxxvii-xlviii), reprinted from an earlier essay in Evergreen Review 12; and an appendix consisting of Burroughs’s 1956 article “Letter From a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (NL 237-55) reprinted from The British Journal of Addiction.13 Both appear to have been added at least in part to appease U.S. and British censors, but remained part of the textual package long after the threat of official prosecution ended, effectively becoming part of the narrative experience. “Letter From a Master Addict,” written and published during the Tangier period, not only predates the Grove/Olympia negotiations, but also precedes the Olympia Press publication by enough years to make it an unrelated text, drawn into the orbit of Naked Lunch by the threat of obscenity charges. “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” on the other hand, was written specifically to pave the way for U.S. publication of Naked Lunch.14 As apologia for Naked Lunch the two texts offer distinctly different, though not entirely contrary, defenses for the novel.

     

    “Letter from a Master Addict” presents Burroughs as a scientist, coolly experimenting on himself and others and disinterestedly recording the results of his experiments for the public at large: “I once took two nembutal capsules (one and a half grain each) every night for four months and suffered no withdrawal symptoms. Barbiturate addiction […] is probably not a metabolic addiction like morphine, but a mechanical reaction from excessive front brain sedation” (NL 251). The fact of prior publication on drug addiction in a serious medical journal implied respectability; by adding it to the text Grove anticipated its (failed) contention in the 1965 Massachusetts Superior Court trial that, as an accurate, journalistic account of the culture of addiction, Naked Lunch was not obscene. The language of the article, together with Burroughs’s heavy use of passive constructions and medical jargon, careful attention to definition of terms, and (for botanicals) use of Latin species names, combines with its encyclopedic organization and tabulations of data to effectively imitate science writing of the day–an imitation Burroughs then undermines with odd anecdotes (“I once gave marijuana to a guest who was mildly anxious about something (‘On bum kicks’ as he put it). After smoking half a cigarette he suddenly leapt to his feet screaming ‘I got the fear!’ and rushed out of the house” [NL 250]) and irrelevant asides (“Pain could have no function for plants which are, for the most part, stationary” [NL 248]). “Letter from a Master Addict” is, arguably, one of Burroughs’s most subversive pieces of comic writing. The “scientific” language and deadpan asides both anticipate and replicate (because they are temporally prior, yet textually posterior, to) the “scientific” language and asides of much of the narrative of Naked Lunch, from the textual notes (“Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns” [NL 4]) peppered throughout the narrative to Bill Lee’s self-interrupted tall tales. The narrative voice in the narrative portion of Naked Lunch is, in places, indistinguishable from the reportorial voice in “Letter from a Master Addict,” even though the first identifies himself as Bill Lee and the second signs himself as William Burroughs.15

     

    Signed by William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” in part seconds the assertion that Naked Lunch is journalism: “Since Naked Lunch treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomachs” (NL xliv). But the “Deposition” compromises what respectability the “Letter” might attain with grotesque parody of its detached language and style: “TERMINAL addicts often go two months without a bowel move and the intestines make with sit-down-adhesions–Wouldn’t you?–requiring the intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent” (NL xlvi). “Deposition” also offers the contradictory defense that the narrative is Swiftian satire, the position John Ciardi would take in his 1965 testimony for the defense: “Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is” (NL xliv). As if these defensive motions were not enough, the “Deposition” begins with the radical step of Burroughs denying all responsibility for the text and its title: “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch. The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac” (NL xxxvii); and ends with the implication that Naked Lunch is an anti-drug tract: “So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs [….] Look down LOOK DOWN along that junk road before you travel there and get in with the Wrong Mob…. A word to the wise guy” (NL xlviii). Like the “Letter,” the “Deposition” is signed by its author but its slangy, elliptical style approaches that of Bill Lee, the voice of the narrative portion of the text. Once the “Deposition” was added to Naked Lunch it became enough part of the text to be as often cited in critical studies as the narrative itself. It is the introduction which articulates Burroughs’s (or is it Lee’s?) clearest indictment of capitalism. This discussion of “The Algebra of Need” (NL xxxviii-xl) provided the title for at least one book-length treatment of Burroughs’s work,16 occupied part of the Massachusetts Superior Court obscenity proceedings, and is remembered by casual readers who may not manage to read the difficult narrative portion in its entirety. From 1962 onward, with the exception of the Grove 25th Anniversary edition in 1984, Burroughs’s introduction and appendix, and the resulting conflation of narrative identities, remained part of Naked Lunch and subject to critical, judicial, and interpretive responses by its readers. The “I” who begins Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, ex-junkie not responsible for the text, mutates into Bill Lee, junkie-detective-huckster on the lam; mutates again to “I, William Seward,” pulling off the Bill Lee mask in the “Atrophied Preface”; and resolves itself as William Burroughs, Scientist–an avatar which actually predates any of the textually precedent selves.

     

    Despite these attempts to head off obscenity charges, Naked Lunch was banned in Boston upon publication, and bookseller Theodore Mavrikos arrested for the sale of an obscene book in 1963.17 Grove stepped in immediately, as did the ACLU, urging an in rem procedure to determine the book’s obscenity rather than a criminal procedure against the bookseller. Naked Lunch was brought to trial before the Massachusetts Superior Court in January 1965 and found obscene. Defense witnesses for Naked Lunch included writers Norman Mailer, John Ciardi, and Allen Ginsberg, and sociologist Paul Hollander. Perhaps because he had adopted all possible defense postures in the introduction and appendix, Burroughs himself did not appear at the trial, leaving it to become a fifth part of the novel, one composed entirely by collaborators, among whom would number two lawyers and a bemused judge.18 Ciardi’s and Hollander’s testimony focused on the subject of the novel’s journalistic integrity–previously canvassed in the Big Table trial–but drew largely on the newly added textual material. Mailer’s and, with one exception, Ginsberg’s testimony ignored the introduction and appendix, focusing on the artistic merits of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. Stating that “it appears that a substantial and intelligent group in the community believes the book to be of some literary significance” and therefore not “prurient […] to the exclusion of all other values” the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned the Superior Court’s verdict on July 7, 1966 (NL viii-ix). Grove issued the first paperback edition of Naked Lunch in October. The Grove Black Cat edition, which would be the most commonly available paper edition until the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld trade edition released in conjunction with Cronenberg’s film, included thirty pages entitled “Naked Lunch on Trial” (NL vii-xxxvi). This addition reprinted the full text of the majority decision of the Supreme Court as well as excerpts from the Superior Court testimony of Ginsberg and Mailer.

     

    Inclusion in the Black Cat edition of the Supreme Court decision may be considered at least partly a triumphant, allusive gesture on Grove’s part, reminiscent of Modern Library’s inclusion of Woolsey’s 1933 decision lifting the ban on Ulysses. Naked Lunch emerges from its obscenity trials part of a select group of works whose “prurience” is outweighed by their “literary significance” and “redeeming social importance” (NL viii). But the inclusion of testimony from the Superior Court action is another matter. None of the testimony excerpted in “Naked Lunch on Trial” provides compelling legal evidence for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Superior Court decision. The court was clearly nonplussed by the novel and its witnesses. Throughout the excerpted testimony, the question of the novel’s obscenity is confused with the novel’s critique of the American political and justice systems (which the court takes to be one and the same) and the very real problem of making meaning out of Burroughs’s more heightened passages. During Ginsberg’s testimony, for example, a line of questioning directed at Burroughs’s intention to be obscene quickly turns instead to a discussion of the meaning of the phrase “newspaper spoon” (NL xxii).

     

    The Court then turns to the nature of political parties described in Naked Lunch, with the judge worrying that political parties in the future may be “concerned with sex.” In a series of questions the court asks Ginsberg “What political struggles are homosexuals involved in?”; “Do you think he is seriously suggesting that sometime in the future that a political party will be in some way concerned with sex?”; and “some time in the future will there be a political party, for instance, made up of homosexuals?” (NL xxviii-ix). Ginsberg’s answers are patient and mollifying, but not helpful. At the end of the exchange the court concludes “there may be homosexuals in every political party, but I don’t think they are predominant” (NL xxix). The excerpted portion of Ginsberg’s testimony ends with a reading of his poem “Reality Sandwiches,” which can hardly have clarified matters for the court.

     

    Mailer’s testimony is similarly unhelpful. Under questioning he admits that he has “read the book, not completely, but I have read the book completely twice” (NL x) and engages in the following negotiation:

     

    MAILER: …I have written a little bit about that [Naked Lunch‘s form] to bring in–Should I read that, if you wish?

    Q: You have some notes I think?

    THE COURT: You have some notes?

    MAILER: I have some notes.

    THE COURT: You may.

    MAILER: Well, in these notes, I said–

    THE COURT: Incidentally, when did you draw up these notes? (NL xvi)After these disjointed preliminaries, Mailer, reading from the notes, launches into a comparison of Burroughs’s work with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

     

    Of the literary witnesses, only Mailer’s and Ginsberg’s testimonies are included in “Naked Lunch on Trial.” A reading of Ciardi’s testimony from the court records suggests why he was omitted. Ciardi’s testimony, like Hollander’s, restricted itself to more conventional questions of the novel’s literary and social value. Excluding this testimony, which focuses almost solely on the novel as a journalistic recounting of the addict’s experience and its value as such a document, has the effect of negating Burroughs’s introduction, which follows it, and the appendix, which imply that Naked Lunch is journalistic or scientific. The excerpts which make up “Naked Lunch on Trial” seem rather to have been selected for their comic similarity to passages in the narrative portion of Naked Lunch and edited with an eye toward retaining every hesitation, interruption, and confused utterance of the court. The typography of “Naked Lunch on Trial” replicates that of dramatic dialogues in the routines “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” and “Ordinary Men and Women” that also concern themselves with party demographics, the American judicial system, and interrogation. The reader of the Black Cat edition of Naked Lunch, then, who begins at the beginning and continues to the end of the text encounters a series of self-canceling, self-replicating routines–a hyper- or meta-reality sandwich–which foregrounds intertextuality as not just a condition of texts but as a semi-independent creator of texts.

     

    The interpretive questions raised by the testimony, especially Ginsberg’s, place in relief those routines of the narrative which explicitly comment on the nature of American legal and bureaucratic systems, in particular, the routines “Hauser and O’Brien,” “The Examination,” and “The County Clerk”–none of which appeared in “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch“–and sections of “Benway” and “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” added after the Big Table publication. Where Burroughs’s introduction and appendix limited the novel’s “social relevance” to its critique of drug addiction (and, by implication, capitalism), the selective transcript in “Naked Lunch on Trial” effectively expands its range of reference to all forms of addiction (sex, drugs, power, language, order) and implicates the most fundamental institutions of American culture in those addictions. The curious effect of the mutation engendered by the Superior Court action, then, was to rewrite Naked Lunch as a more pointed piece of political satire than it originally was.

     

    Almost one-fourth of the matter included in the Black Cat edition was produced in response to external pressures on a completed narrative whose production has been documented by Burroughs and others as itself partly accidental. Only half of this new matter was written by Burroughs, and that includes a direct statement of non-responsibility for the major, narrative portion of text. The remaining half, actual testimony from the obscenity trial, both imitates significant portions of the narrative, in form, content, and typography, and foregrounds portions of the narrative which would lead a reader to an interpretation of the narrative at variance with that offered by its putative author. The reader, moving in a (spatially) linear fashion through the text, from Supreme Court decision to appendix, is not only confronted immediately and prior to the narrative with an example of Burroughs’s themes in action but is also supplied with a quantity of contradictory interpretive matter which effectively and successively rewrites the narrative that follows. Even a chronologically, rather than spatially, linear reading of the elements of the Black Cat edition results in similar, though more programmatic, textual self-subversion. In either case, the seemingly forthright (and, from the perspective of the 1990s, quaint) binary structures written into the 1950s narrative–hip/square, outlawry/authority, investigation/addiction, etc.–unfold and overlap themselves into less certain, more recursive, more postmodern structures. Given, too, that the non-narrative material takes the form of traditional literary or scholarly apparatus which Naked Lunch incorporates into its very substance (as the narrative with its “scholarly” footnotes anticipates), one might argue that Naked Lunch implicates present and future notions of textuality and authorship in its catalogue of addictions, and academic culture in its satire of authoritarian institutions. Even the textual scholar’s desire for a stable artifact identifiable as Naked Lunch is implicated.

     

    While the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld Naked Lunch unfortunately (to my mind) omits “Naked Lunch on Trial,” it does include yet another new text. Burroughs’s “Afterthoughts on a Deposition” appears directly following his introductory “Deposition” and directly contradicts it. In “Afterthoughts” Burroughs claims that Naked Lunch is not (or is no longer) about addiction/drug abuse but rather about the current U.S. War on Drugs:

     

    When I say 'the junk virus is public health problem number one in the world today,' I refer not just to the actual ill effects of opiates upon the individual's health (which, in cases of controlled dosage may be minimal) but also to the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a hysterical reaction. The junk problem, in its present form, began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 in the United States. Anti-drug hysteria is now worldwide, and it poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere. (Grove 1992 xviii)

     

    The war on drugs, according to the new Naked Lunch, exists so that the government can extend its repression of individuals to convincing them that their ideas of freedom are dangerous to themselves and society. The logic of this passage reiterates the satire of the narrative routine “The Examination,” particularly, but also hearkens the reader to those routines previously highlighted by “Naked Lunchon Trial,” which appear now, given Burroughs’s “Afterthoughts,” to have always specifically addressed repressive governmental institutions.

     

    In the preceding pages I have limited myself to the problem of the textual boundaries of Naked Lunch, which extend beyond the limits of the narrative. Other editorial problems, such as determining the best text when there are multiple fragmentary versions available, are implied in Table 2, but would extend to comparison of all elements of Naked Lunch with prior published versions and correspondence from the Tangier period. But what then? Both Burroughs and his publishers have frequently been cavalier with the texts. Grove’s 1980 release Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, for example, omits an entire page from The Soft Machine at the end of the routine “I Sekuin,” despite having been printed from the same plates as the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine. Though the resulting routine ends abruptly even for a cut-up, nobody seems to have noticed. To attempt to stabilize the text of Naked Lunch by regularizing its typography and stylistics, removing “errors,” and relegating to a textual apparatus material deemed to be variant or external to the text proper would be a grave editorial sin. To do so would not only violate the spirit of the text and, insofar as one can guess them from Burroughs’s own statements about authors and authority in Naked Lunch and elsewhere, “the author’s original (or final) intentions” (McGann 15, 33-5), it would also have far-reaching implications in terms of how readers read, approach, and comprehend this and other literary works. Naked Lunch‘s enduring appeal arises in large part from its instability, its openness to multiple and alternative readings, and its protean ability to seem always to be addressing the addictions and oppressions of today. Despite its having a history as a text, it is not simply an historical artifact. In fact, its history has helped write it. These qualities would be lost in an edition consisting of a slimmed down narrative trailing a bulky, probably forbidding, apparatus. Popular readers, choosing the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld trade edition off the bookstore shelves, lose “Naked Lunch on Trial,” which is so central to the text’s historical self and, as I’ve argued, offers a gloss on part of the narrative. It also bears witness that the courts are often part of the “social nexus” of textual production, wherein textual authority “takes place within the conventions and enabling limits that are accepted by the prevailing institutions of literary production” (McGann 48), a view of authority the narrative portion of the novel seems to second.

     

    With Burroughs’s death in 1997, it does not seem likely that Naked Lunch will undergo any further substantial additions. However, the pattern since 1984 has been one of the publisher inconsistently deleting whole sections of non-narrative text. Clearly some effort to stabilize the whole text would ensure reliability. Shillingsburg has argued forcefully that “a work of art… is made more accessible in each of its versions by having alternative versions presented in conjunction with it” (35). That has already been the case during the forty-year history of Naked Lunch, and a reliable edition would capture, in particular, that quality of “spill[ing] off the page in all directions.” Given its author’s career-long interest in applying state-of-the-art technology to his writing, a “fully open, scriptible, postmodernist edition” of Naked Lunch would necessarily be a hypertext edition. Such an edition would initially allow the reader to move among the five existing textual elements, the Big Table and other individually published fragments, and, perhaps, the pen and ink calligraphic drawings Burroughs submitted to Grove to illustrate the U.S. edition (among other things) “in any order […] back and forth, in and out fore and aft.” But the temptation to limit that edition to the materials I have outlined here, for example in CD-ROM format, should be resisted for two reasons. First, even the most cursory reading of other Burroughs texts–most notably the Nova trilogy (1964-1967) and The Yage Letters (1963)–shows Burroughs consistently reworking material from the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. Lynch’s film begs its audience to consider Exterminator! (1973) and Burroughs’s biography as the narrative context for Naked Lunch‘s largely unrelated routines. Audio recordings of Burroughs and others reading portions of Naked Lunch and Lunch-related materials abound and are largely uncatalogued; these readings may well represent other variants. Burroughs’s oeuvre has not yet received the level of consistent textual, as opposed to interpretive, scrutiny to account completely for his rather casual approach to recycled text. Second, as the above history suggests, the text of Naked Lunch evolved in direct response to various of its readers’ and transcribers’ over-writings. Reader response is central to its being as a work of art. A truly reliable edition of the work would have to permit ongoing revision by readers, even at the risk of overwhelming the archival texts, i.e. by courting unreliability. The postmodern editor’s monumental task is to enable the “innaresting” arrangement promised by Burroughs in 1959 and fulfilled by the text for forty years. Only a fully interactive, continually augmented, electronic edition can realize this task.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Naked Lunch refer to the 1966 First Black Cat edition. When both Naked Lunch and Big Table are cited, wording, punctuation and spelling follow the Black Cat version. I retain Burroughs’s use of italics throughout. Unbracketed ellipses appear in the text. Bracketed ellipses mark my deletion of material from quoted matter.

     

    2. According to Maurice Girodias, the manuscript was seized by the French government in the 1960s. The whereabouts of the William S. Burroughs Archive, which might have included manuscript material for Naked Lunch, are not known. Goodman and Coley report that the archive, formerly housed in Lichtenstein, was sold to a private collector and possibly broken up for resale sometime during the late 1970s. See Goodman and Coley 189, 211.

     

    3. For Burroughs’s theory of the cut-up see Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind (1978). Cut-up is produced by literally cutting passages of typed script into vertical strips, then rearranging these strips with other cut-ups or inserting individual strips into uncut passages. The fold-in consists of folding a page at random, inserting the visible portion into a second page and transcribing the result as a third page of text. In both cases the resulting passage(s) receive a minimal editing for contingent sense: dismembered bits of words are joined and reconstituted as homophones, and punctuation is distributed around what can be recognized as phrases.

     

    4. “Routine” is Burroughs’s term for the individual sections of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. The term implies their comedic and sketchy character and suggests their provenance as part of an elaborate con game played on the “Rubes,” “flatfoots,” and “advertising Fruits.”

     

    5. The words are “see Appendix” (NL 30), referring readers of the narrative to elements added for the Grove 1962 edition.

     

    6. Oddly, this edition retains the words “see Appendix,” even though the appendix has been omitted.

     

    7. Dating roughly from the death of Joan Burroughs until Burroughs’s first apomorphine cure.

     

    8. See “from Naked Lunch,” Chicago Review 12 (Spring 1958): 23-30; “from Naked Lunch,” Black Mountain Review 7 (Autumn 1957): 144-48; and “from Naked Lunch,” Chicago Review 12 (Autumn 1958): 3-12.

     

    9. And recounted in the standard biographies. See, for example, William S. Burroughs, “My Purpose Is to Write for the Space Age,” New York Times Book Review (19 February 1984): 9-10, and Morgan 313.

     

    10. This contributes to breaking down the textual barrier which conventionally determines our idea of text: contemplation of the jacket becomes part of the reading experience. Burroughs will later incorporate calligraphy into the text of The Ticket that Exploded.

     

    11. The table of contents gives the title as “Deposition: A Testimony Concerning a Sickness” (my italics), while the introduction itself leaves out the first indefinite article.

     

    12. Evergreen Review 4 (January-February 1960): 15-23. Evergreen Review was a bimonthly literary and arts publication of Grove Press.

     

    13. The British Journal of Addiction 53.2 (1956): 119-131.

     

    14. See Joe Maynard and Barry Miles, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-73 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1978): 113.

     

    15. This conflation of identities merely continues that begun with Burroughs’ earlier, more naturalistic “journalistic” account of drug addiction, Junky (1953), authored by “William Lee.”

     

    16. Eric Mottram’s William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo: Intrepid Pr., 1971).

     

    17. Details which follow are drawn from Michael Barry Goodman’s account of the trial in Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981).

     

    18. A portion of a letter from Burroughs to defense lawyer Edward de Grazia was read into the record and is included in “Naked Lunch on Trial.” It addressed the relationship between literature and scientific investigation.

     

     

    Table 1
    Naked Lunch Variations
    Olympia
    1959    		 Grove
    1962    		 Grove Black Cat[a]
    1966    		 Grove 25th[b]
    1984    		 Grove Weidenfeld
    1992
    _____ _____ Naked Lunch on Trial _____ _____[c]
    _____ Introduction/
    Deposition    		 Introduction/
    Deposition    		 _____ Introduction/
    Deposition
    _____ _____ _____ _____ Afterthoughts
    Narrative Narrative Narrative Narrative Narrative
    _____ Appendix Appendix _____ Appendix

     

     

     

    Table 2
    Revision from Big Table to Naked Lunch
    “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch“[d] Naked Lunch (pagination identical for all Grove editions 1963-84)
    Episode 1 (79-81) “Atrophied Preface” (229, 230-31)–13+ pages additional material
    Episode 2 (81-86) <“I can feel the heat closing in…. “> [1-8]–minimal revision.[e] This section also includes Episode 5 plus 1 1/2 pages additional material
    Episode 3 (86-89) “Hospital” (64-68)–two paragraphs switched; 8 1/2 pages additional material, including 6 pages from Episode 4 (largely dramatic dialogue between Benway, nurse, Limpf, diplomat, and tenor)
    (89-90) “Lazarus Go Home” (73)– 4+ pages additional material
    Episode 4 (90-95) “Hospital” (56-61)–minimal revision
    Episode 5 (95-104)[f] <“I can feel the heat closing in…. “> (9-20)–minimal/no revision
    Episode 6 (105-111) “Islam Incorporated…. ” (144-148, 152-53, 158-59)–additional material on 147, 148-52 including Sample Menu); Two paragraphs from Big Table are deleted, the only deletion which occurred. This section also includes Episode 8 and 14+ pages additional material
    Episode 7 (111-129) “Benway” (21-45) entire; minimal/no revision[g]
    Episode 8 (129-131) “Islam Incorporated…. ” (164-67)–no revision.[h]
    Episode 9 (132) Dust jacket calligraphy for Olympia Press edition?
    Episode 10 (133-137) “Joselito” (45-50)–entire, minimal/no revision

     

     

    Table 3
    Re-Ordering of Episodes from Big Table in Naked Lunch
    Naked Lunch Routines, in Order of Appearance Episode from Big Table
    <“I can feel the heat closing in…. “> 2 (81-86); 5 (95-104)
    “Benway” 7 (111-129)
    “Joselito” 10 (133-137)
    “The Black Meat” _____
    “Hospital” 3 (partial) (86-89); 4 (90-94)
    “Lazarus Go Home” 3 (partial) (89-90)
    “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” _____
    “Campus of Interzone University” _____
    “AJ’s Annual Party” _____
    “Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” _____
    “The Market” _____
    “Ordinary Men and Women” _____
    “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” 6 (105-111); 8 (129-131)
    “The County Clerk” _____
    “Interzone” _____
    “The Examination” _____
    “Have You Seen Pantopon Rose?” _____
    “Coke Bugs” _____
    “The Exterminator Does a Good Job” _____
    “The Algebra of Need” _____
    “Hauser and O’Brien” _____
    “Atrophied Preface: Wouldn’t You?” 1 (79-81)
    “Quick” _____
    Jacket? (Olympia Press only) 9

     

    Notes to Tables

     

    a. The narrative portions of Grove 1962, Grove Black Cat, and Grove 25th appear to have been printed off the same plates and bear identical pagination; likewise, the appendices of Grove 1962 and Grove Black Cat. Since Grove Black Cat contains the most additional text, all citations are to that edition, unless otherwise noted.

     

    b. The 25th Anniversary edition was a limited edition reproduction of the 1959 Olympia Press edition with an introduction by Jennie Skerl.

     

    c. Subsequent printings of this trade edition have restored “Naked Lunch on Trial.”

     

    d. Big Table 1 (Spring 1959): 79-137.

     

    e. Revision limited to corrected spelling, individual words changed, altered punctuation.

     

    f. Reprinted from Evergreen Review Autumn 1958.

     

    g. Despite omitting the Appendix, the 25th Anniversary edition retains Bill Lee’s recommendation that we “See Appendix” (30).

     

    h. This forms part of a larger discussion of the political parties of the Interzone, which was of so much interest during the obscenity trial (162-9). Additional material includes a statement of Burroughs’s viral theory of language in nascent form (163-4).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. NY: Grove, 1966.
    • —. Naked Lunch. NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992.
    • —. “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch.” Big Table 1 (Spring 1959): 79-137.
    • — and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. NY: Viking, 1978.
    • Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997.
    • Goodman, Michael Barry. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981.
    • — with Lemuel B. Coley. William S. Burroughs: A Reference Guide. NY: Garland, 1990.
    • Greetham, D. C. “Editorial and Critical Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism.” Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993: 9- 28.
    • McGann, Jerome. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
    • Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. NY: Holt, 1988.
    • Shillingsburg, Peter L. “Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable, Electronic Texts.” Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993: 29- 43.

     

  • Editors’ Announcements

     

     

    New Co-Editor

    With this issue, PMC welcomes Jim English, who joins Lisa Brawley as co-editor of the journal. This welcome is more properly a welcome back, as Jim served as review editor from the journal’s founding to 1996. Paula Geyh, who succeeded Jim in that role, will continue to oversee the review section. Assisting us will be Lisa Spiro, who has replaced Anne Sussman as managing editor. Deepest thanks to Anne for her years of service to the journal, and to Stuart Moulthrop, who concluded his tenure as co-editor in May.

    PMC Essay Prize Winners

    We are pleased to announce the winners of the PMC essay prize for Volume 9. This prize is a five hundred dollar award given to the author of the most outstanding essay to appear in the journal in the previous volume year. Winners are selected by the PMC editorial board. The prize for Volume 9 is shared by Terry Harpold, for “Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet Metageographies” (9.2, January 1999), and Jed Rasula, for “Textual Indigence in the Archive” (9.3, May 1999). Congratulations to them both.

     

  • New Editor

    New Co-Editor

    With this issue, PMC welcomes Jim English, who joins Lisa Brawley as co-editor of the journal. This welcome is more properly a welcome back, as Jim served as review editor from the journal’s founding to 1996. Paula Geyh, who succeeded Jim in that role, will continue to oversee the review section. Assisting us will be Lisa Spiro, who has replaced Anne Sussman as managing editor. Deepest thanks to Anne for her years of service to the journal, and to Stuart Moulthrop, who concluded his tenure as co-editor in May.

    PMC Essay Prize Winners

    We are pleased to announce the winners of the PMC essay prize for Volume 9. This prize is a five hundred dollar award given to the author of the most outstanding essay to appear in the journal in the previous volume year. Winners are selected by the PMC editorial board. The prize for Volume 9 is shared by Terry Harpold, for “Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet Metageographies” (9.2, January 1999), and Jed Rasula, for “Textual Indigence in the Archive” (9.3, May 1999). Congratulations to them both.

     

  • Notices

     

     

     

    Volume 10, Number 2
    January, 2000     Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

     

    Publication Announcements

    • Situationist International Anthology
    • Conspire
    • New Observations Magazine

    Conferences, Calls for Papers, Invitations to Submit

    • Quarterly Review of Film and Video

    General Announcements

    • RTMark
    • Poetry Nozzle

     

  • Utopian Ironies

    David Schuermer

    Department of English
    University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale
    dschuer@wko.com

     

    Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.

     

    In reviewing Andrew Ross’s Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, I am reminded of a simple statement Herbert Gans makes at the very beginning of his 1967 study The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. Addressing himself to the nature of community life in one of the first post-World War II suburban developments in America, Gans remarks that “people have some right to be what they are” (vi). It is not surprising that this statement comes to mind. Ross is quite aware of Gans’s study and makes good, albeit brief, use of it. Well he should, since his own book is also a study of community life, and though it is a much less formal study than Gans’s, it is one that seems to arrive at just about the same conclusion regarding the relationship between our “built environments” and the lives we lead. Ross notes early on that “Gans took up residence in Levittown… to find out what difference a place really makes. GI suburbia had become the preferred punching bag of critics of the mass-produced life in the postwar years… [and Gans] took issue with this view, which he characterized as an elitist perception on the part of urban intellectuals” (220). The typical urban intellectual whom Gans was attempting to rebut was someone like Lewis Mumford, urban historian and author of the magisterial The City in History, who believed that the American suburb was fast becoming a “low-grade uniform environment from which escape was impossible” (486). In Mumford’s view, the city presents a rich opportunity to nurture social diversity, which is crucial to the maintenance of democracy in a free state. The suburbs, on the other hand, present a threat to democracy. They segregate people by class and income, and this segregation breeds intolerance. Worse yet, the suburbs breed gullibility. As Gans notes, urban intellectuals and city planners are critical of the suburbs for fashioning a uniform and “gullible, petty ‘mass’ which rejects the culture that would make it fully human” (vi). The typical suburban citizen is gullible because he is the victim of mass production, “conforming in every respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis” (Mumford 486). Ironically, what Ross finds in the Disney-developed New Urban town of Celebration–a manufactured environment that makes Levittown look positively quaint by comparison–is the same thing that Gans finds in Levittown: it isn’t such a bad place to live after all.

     

    Neither seems to be producing low-grade and gullible automatons; indeed, both harbor quite a bit of democratic free spirit, however homogenous the class and economic status of their inhabitants, and in spite of the corporate and market manipulations which brought them into being. Yes, Ross will discover the residents of Celebration are implicated in a market-driven experiment which attempts to sell the idea of “community” as if it were so many loaves of bread, but if we avoid the urge to treat these people as unwitting co-conspirators in their own market manipulation–in other words, as unwitting co-conspirators in some kind of inexorable corporate takeover of democratic values–we can learn something about what it means to develop something called “community,” a slippery term at best. We might learn, indeed, that we find “community” in some of the damndest places. Enter Disney.

     

    Does the new town of Celebration offer a way of life worth celebrating? Ross takes a sabbatical from his position as Director of American Studies at New York University and moves to this newly developed suburb of Orlando, the home of Disneyworld, to find out. The Celebration Chronicles is the record of his year-long stay, and he is quite frank about his intentions. His is not the formal piece of sociological analysis that Gans produced:

     

    Neither a journalist nor a social scientist by training, I had not angled for juicy headlines–there were enough out there already–nor had I aimed at an objective or statistical survey of the town–Celebrationites had been surveyed enough already. This book, like the hybrid nature of this community, is supposed to be a cocktail of personal and public observations, laced with those ingredients of analysis that seemed most true to my experience of the town’s residents and employees. (320)

     

    Although Ross eschews the more scholarly approach, his book is much more than a collection of anecdotal observations of people and place. He manages to identify and discuss, in detail, the key notions and characters who inform the New Urban debate. In this regard, his book serves as a more than useful introduction to the student of popular culture. He is particularly good at discussing the troubling issues of personal liberty and private property when framed within the context of marketing and the “production/consumption” of class values.

     

    At first blush, his Celebration experience would seem to be all about conformity and the maintenance of class boundaries. It is surely all of that, but it is also about property value and how the pursuit of property value jumpstarts a surprising degree of civic involvement. When put to the test of protecting their property value, Celebration residents appear to be anything but docile and gullible. To his credit, Ross does not patronize his subjects. He represents real people fighting real battles to control and define their community. And although they may not define that community in such a way as to convince Ross to move in with them–they actually suggest he stay and become the headmaster of their school–in the end he must acknowledge that something is working right in Celebration, in spite of its corporate origins and implication in Disney’s world of make-believe “imagineering.” Along the way he is able to unpack the ironies and contradictions that are bound up in the New Urbanist movement, for convincing people that community values can be packaged and sold is one thing, but creating a space in which these values can be developed is quite another.

     

    I. New Urban Origins

     

    Fingering Disney as a corporate villain is nothing new. Ross notes that Disney bashing has become something of a cottage industry among critics of popular culture.1 Rather than level another blow alongside the Disney bashers from afar, he decides to go native and extend the neighborly hand of friendship, noting that “there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon map of the ‘New Yorker’s View of the World’” (5-6). A creature of the urban landscape (downtown Manhattan where he lives and works), Ross samples the best New Urbanism has to offer and chronicles his experience. Yet what could have been a high-handed academic dismantling of Disney and upper-middle class homeowners who have been duped into buying instant community and civic values when in fact they are simply enhancing Disney’s investment portfolio, becomes instead a complex tale of evolving community identity, fraught with the contradictions which emerge when the pursuit of wealth conflicts with the pursuit of civic ideals and personal freedom. Thus Ross finds complexity where a skeptical academician might least expect to find it–among the well-manicured lawns and tightly woven realty covenants of Celebration.

     

    Make no mistake about it: what drew Andrew Ross to Celebration was its status as a highly visible, and vulnerable, symbol of a corporate-sponsored New Urbanism–a heady brew and eclectic gathering of trendy postmodern architecture, contemporary urban design theory, corporate investment strategy, and old-fashioned social climbing. It is clear that he arrives in town the skeptic, if not the cynic. What is surprising, however, is that he finds a real community emerging as the unintended by-product of Disney’s well-crafted, one might almost say, suffocating, business plan. Ironically, the suburban conformity that people like Mumford rail against provides an opportunity for civic involvement that may well be beyond the reach of any number of jaded Manhattan sophisticates who have given up fighting City Hall. The New Urbanism, it seems, succeeds in spite of itself. It may be that residents of Celebration become a community only when they perceive their property values to be threatened, but nonetheless, they do forge a common bond and end up exhibiting those civic virtues which social scientists and New Urban town planners applaud.

     

    What is the New Urbanism? If one is going to write about Celebration, then one must write about New Urbanism because Celebration is its most visible symbol. Ross does a good job unpacking its historical, architectural, and commercial origins. The New Urbanism movement is an attempt to transform the out-of-control development of the American suburban landscape. Its founding figures, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, have embraced commercial residential development opportunities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, with a moral fervor, hoping to use market forces to their advantage, in order to, as Duany has said, “attack [the] enemy on [its] terms” (77) and, as Plater-Zyberg has said, “improve the world with design, plain good old design” (78). The bedrock principle of the New Urbanist movement is the belief that architecture and the organization of space have the power to influence social behavior; that, in short, the “built environment” can create democratic utopias. It is also a movement built upon a certain amount of nostalgia, for the New Urbanist architect and town planner are attempting to recapture the ambience of the New England colonial village–town centers, green space, interconnected walkways–where people shared space intimately and nurtured social relations conducive to the free exchange of ideas perhaps best exemplified by town hall meetings. At least, that is the myth. As architectural critic Michael Sorkin has noted, however, such a reading of New England social space conveniently ignores an environment that also made room for the notorious Salem witch trials. Nonetheless, the New Urbanist is battling a real demon: an ever-developing suburban sprawl which is consuming the natural environment at a prodigious pace and populating the landscape with one commercial strip after another, dotted with an occasional shopping mall in a vain attempt to manufacture public space in the context of commercial space. All of it, of course, is tied together by the automobile, which has added a cruel velocity to modern life. Clearly the automobile is implicated in the suburban sprawl. It carries people from one space to another, stringing out the social experience and mapping a community with no center and no edge. The New Urbanism may be described, in the end, as an attempt to create space with an identifiable center and edge–in short, to create “community” through the manipulation of space.

     

    Early on, Ross points out that this search for an urban center and edge can be traced to architect Charles Moore’s 1965 article in the influential architectural journal Perspecta, entitled “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” There Moore writes about the lack of a public realm on the West Coast, in particular, in the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, he claims, lacks an urban focus or center. He argues that “the houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. [The houses] are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached…. This is… a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity… ” (59). In Los Angeles there is little sense that a people have taken possession of a place and chosen to celebrate that place by marking its center. To identify a place and mark its center is self-consciously public act where people come together to celebrate a place for particular reasons, the marker then becoming the symbol of their shared values. Astonishingly–at least it seems so to us now, having been inundated in over three decades of Disney commercial hype–Moore identifies Disneyland as one of the few real public spaces in Los Angeles, one of the few spaces where one can find a center and edge, and thus “one of the most important pieces of construction in the West” for “it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable” (65). We may trace Disney’s new town of Celebration to Charles Moore because he was the first to point out that Disneyland was a self-conscious attempt to create an interactive public space amid the disconnected suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. Moreover, Moore notes, when we enter Disneyland, we agree to play-act, and we agree to be watched while play-acting. In short, we agree to be self-consciously public in our behavior and to conform to shared expectations. And we agree to buy a ticket for the experience: we agree to pay for the public life we are missing out on elsewhere. Just like Celebration.

     

    The bulk of Andrew Ross’s book, it seems to me, works out the complex implications of such a theatrical arrangement when it is translated to the Disney-built town of Celebration: what, indeed, he asks over and over, are the relations that exist between public and private performance when they are tied to property value? He unpacks the uneasy relationship that Celebrationites have with the media, design professionals and culture critics who patronizingly level a charge of “bogus living” at them. He finds the charge to be inaccurate: “I watched as some kind of provisional public sphere, built on blunt opinion, common sentiment, and the stoic pursuit of civic needs, pushed its snout into the moist Florida air. It was fresh, cranky, and fraught with all the noble virtues and sorry prejudices that contend in the republic at large” (314). This cranky civic virtue most revealed itself at two key moments during his stay.

     

    II. Agreeing to Disagree

     

    Although the book arranges itself chronologically, from Ross’s arrival in 1997 to his departure one year later, it pays special attention to two important community crises. Both crises offer an opportunity for Ross to reflect upon the tension between freedom and order that is inextricably bound up in the development of a utopian community. Residents soon discover that the chance to build a community of their own will require regulating their conduct and perhaps curbing their liberties in order to protect their property value. They also discover that they can come together and agree to disagree with what Celebration has to offer.

     

    The first crisis is the wide-spread recognition that the houses of Celebration are poorly built. It turns out that Celebration was built upon the backs of unskilled migrant labor because that was the only labor available in the booming Orlando construction economy. How ironic that Disney was victimized by the very economy it was attempting to take advantage of, by the very laborers it was willing to exploit for profit. But then Ross’s chronicle is nothing if it is not ironic, for it continually evokes the arch irony that Disney, a company which perfected the art of bringing dreamlike order and beauty to disordered and ugly realities–witness almost any “classic” exercise in Disney sanitization, from Pocahontas to The Hunchback of Notre Dame–found itself, in Celebration, mired in the unseemly, and often embarrassing, real-world complexities of suburban development. The result? Pricey upscale homes with leaky roofs and pipes, cracked foundations, chimneys out of plumb, and doors that won’t close. Complaints are so widespread that residents organize a Homeowners Association to bring pressure against Disney. And thus a Celebration “community” begins to form–not as the product of market strategy and New Urban design, but rather, in opposition to corporate ineptitude, inefficiency, and greed. (Ross notes that in 1996 Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of Disney, earned $97,600 an hour while many Celebration construction workers earned little more than minimum wage, and Haitian workers earned 20 cents an hour making Mickey Mouse t-shirts. Here, and elsewhere, although Ross refrains from convenient “Disney bashing,” he is certainly not above cuffing them around a bit, and deservedly so.)

     

    Unfortunately, this new-found “community,” born of opposition to the Disney “community-builders,” soon finds itself facing a prickly dilemma: going public with their complaints in an effort to pressure Disney into action runs the risk of damaging property value. Prospective buyers (those who would complete the development project and thereby secure its market value long into the future) would certainly shy away from upscale homes with leaky roofs and yards that didn’t drain. The common interest in protecting property values prevails. The residents keep quiet, and thus begins a long private battle with Disney which is ultimately resolved, but not without significant frustrations along the way. Nonetheless, the brouhaha over construction provides the first real evidence that something like a community was indeed forming, albeit not in the way Disney had envisioned or the residents would have wanted.

     

    Herein lies the charm of this book. It is generous and big-hearted in its account of people trying to make their experiment in New Urban living work. It could have been a cynical and satirical evisceration of upper-middle class values, class snobbery, and corporate hypocrisy. Instead, it explores the contradictions, disappointments, and complexities inherent in managing one version of the “good life”–from both the residents’ and Disney’s point of view. In the process it lays waste the myth that there is anything so simple as the “good life,” even if one can afford to buy it or bring together the best minds in urban design to plan it. That is nowhere more evident than in the second crisis, and clearly, from Ross’s point of view, the most compelling crisis: the (mis)management of the Celebration school. Ross’s narrative of the school crisis takes up almost the middle third of the book, and well it should, because the Celebration school was billed as perhaps the single most attractive characteristic of this New Urban environment.

     

    Once again, we find ourselves up to our eyebrows in irony: “Improbably for a town built to evoke old-time values, this school ha[d] been frontloaded with every bell and whistle from two and a half decades of progressive educational reform” (124). The majority of residents had moved to Celebration for the school, and Disney had promoted their “school of tomorrow” aggressively, making it the centerpiece of their marketing strategy. It turns out, however, the majority of residents weren’t quite ready for such reform. The new Celebration school would employ non-traditional testing and grading practices, and in the process expose the fundamental gap between what educators and the general public believe to be true about education. Education professors, by and large, are opposed to competitive testing, rote memorization, and reward and punishment; parents, on the other hand, particularly upwardly mobile, professional parents–the kind, in fact, most likely to buy a home in Celebration–tend to be interested in quantitative results and discipline. Their position is straightforward and difficult to counter: they believe they are living proof that traditional education works because they have been successful enough to buy into an upscale community such as Celebration, thus they conclude that what worked for them will work for their children.

     

    Ross, it seems to me, is at his best when addressing the complexities involved in this discussion. He quite rightly, I believe, points to the fundamental issue at work in school reform, “that education serves best when it shapes the world anew rather than tailors itself to the status quo of the ‘real world’” (167), but he is generous enough to acknowledge that, although non-traditional education might make a Celebrationite’s child a better person, it won’t necessarily get that child into a prestigious college. And getting into the right college, finally, was the measure of pedagogical success for the majority of parents in Celebration. They organized and made their feelings known. They rallied in the face of a perceived threat to their children’s welfare–a noble undertaking indeed–and they did so effectively, much to the chagrin of Ross. In the course of one year, the progressive curriculum and pedagogy would be revised, and 23 of 53 faculty would leave the school, faculty who had been recruited to implement the progressive curriculum and pedagogy. Out of this disappointment, however, emerges a new sense of political empowerment, for Celebration residents end up backing one of their own residents as a reform candidate for the county school board. Civil disagreement, it seems, can be both dispiriting and ennobling.

     

    The outcome of the school crisis may have disappointed progressive educators, but it couldn’t have disappointed many social scientists or New Urbanist town planners, since Celebrationites were stepping forward and practicing the very civic involvement these people had hoped they would. Like the construction crisis, the education crisis proved to be another test case in community involvement and civic responsibility, and one the Celebrationites would pass. The fact that the majority of Celebrationites (both parents and non-parents, since property value doesn’t distinguish between parents and non-parents) chose to turn their back on progressive educational reform and an innovative curriculum in favor of the more orthodox emphasis on quantitative results (what Ross refers to as “the iron law of the GPA”) and the passive instructional methodologies of the traditional classroom clearly disappoints Ross. He notes that “methods like authentic assessment and cooperative learning are not exactly new, but for many Celebration parents… they could just as well have been lifted from a therapy manual for psychiatric counselors” (125). However personally disappointed Ross might be in the parents’ uninformed opposition to progressive educational reform, in the end, his disappointment is quite beside the point. The point is the parents exercised their right to be what they wanted to be, and put into practice the very civic virtues town planners had hoped to see. Remember Gans here: “People have some right to be what they are.”

     

    III. The Value of Valuing Property

     

    Perhaps an equally important point to be made, however–and one which Ross makes quite clearly–is that even the struggle over the school, which was largely driven by parental concerns over SAT scores and college admissions, was also to a significant degree about property values. Families across the land often look to buy into a “good” school district, and the families of Celebration proved to be no different. Ross notes that realtors in Central Florida believe “the value of homes in [the] region can vary by over 15 percent depending on the test scores of the local school” (147). What makes the families of Celebration different–and what Ross finds so dispiriting–is that they have an opportunity to build a “good” school from the ground up, yet they balk at educational reform, and in part justify it because of their concern for property value.

     

    In Celebration, community is a commodity–but that proves to be a curiously bittersweet phenomenon. Although the notion of “community” is all too often bundled into the package of amenities the housing industry has to offer, it can take on a life of its own. True enough, the community Disney was selling was not the community the residents bought, but the residents could have no way of knowing that, and neither could Disney. Both were victimized by the dynamic unpredictability of a market economy, if “victimized” is even the right word here. In the end, it seems to me, Ross chooses not to characterize the Celebration residents as victims–either of their own blind pursuit of property value or of Disney’s profiteering which masquerades as “imagineering”; likewise he chooses not to vilify Disney, although as already noted he is not afraid to criticize them. In the end, both stumble into “community.” If the measure of a community is the extent to which its members engage in the identification and debate over a set of core values–those things which they claim to share when they mark out a place for themselves and call it “theirs”–then Celebration measures up as a community. This, it seems to me, is Ross’s overall impression of Celebration, and it is an encouraging one. Not that property value came for these Celebrationites to be the measure of all things, but that they were able, even in this defectively “imagineered” space, to assemble, identify a center (however contentious), and forge a community bond through the enactment of civic virtue.

    Note

     

    1. Let the following passage from an article entitled “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories” by Scott Schaffer serve as an example of one of the more enthusiastic examples of Disney bashing: “The Walt Disney Company co-opts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the Company’s own, and sells them to Disney’s customers as markers of American political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. This co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the Disney Company’s products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the ‘Small World’ of the Disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the Disney Company’s transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify American imperial power” (1).

    Works Cited

     

    • Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967.
    • Moore, Charles. “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 9/10 (1965): 57-97.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961.
    • Schaffer, Scott. “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories.” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996).
    • Sorkin, Michael. “Acting Urban: Can New Urbanism Learn from Modernism’s Mistakes?” Metropolis 18.1 (August/September 1998): 37-9.

     

  • Near Collisions: Rhetorical Cultural Studies or a Cultural Rhetorical Studies?

    Brad Lucas

    Department of English
    University of Nevada, Reno
    brad@unr.edu

     

    Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.

     

    The thirteen essays in Thomas Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies discuss connections between the practices that constitute rhetorical studies and those that constitute cultural studies. Like any convergence of pathways, this book offers a place where travelers with different agendas and histories can meet and exchange ideas, but true to its metaphor, the intersection is also a locus of accidents, collisions, and wrong turns.

     

    Of course, to begin such an enterprise, we would need to articulate not only a working definition of “rhetorical studies,” but also one of “cultural studies.” Working definitions of rhetoric are, at best, contingent upon rhetoric’s uses and the particular communities that claim its rich tradition and various branches of knowledge.1 Rhetoric has been envisioned as an artful skill and a means of persuasion. It has also been conceived in terms of its dialectic counterpart: as an epistemological tool, as a means of knowing. A range of definitions emerges not only from the classical tradition, but also from the newer conceptions of rhetoric that position it in a postmodern age. Edward P. J. Corbett defines rhetoric as traditional “instances of formal, premeditated, sustained, monologue in which a person seeks to exert an effect on an audience” (3), whereas Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg offer the following possibilities for rhetoric: “the practice of oratory; the study of the strategies of effective oratory; the use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade; the study of the persuasive effects of language; the study of the relation between language and knowledge; the classification and use of tropes and figures; and, of course, the use of empty promises and half truths as a form of propaganda” (i). Among academics, as among the general public, rhetoric continues to mean any number of things. But while At the Intersection allows for this slippage in the term, it establishes some constraints by directing most of its discursive traffic toward those conceptions of rhetoric that have most relevance to communication studies.

     

    But if rhetorical studies represents an uncertain or unstable sort of “discipline,” cultural studies often seems to escape the notion of discipline altogether. Perhaps this is its strength. According to Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, cultural studies is more than an interdisciplinary enterprise: it is “actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary…. Cultural studies draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project” (2). There is more to cultural studies than mere disciplinary mobility, however. Cultural studies is often self-reflexive, radically political, subversive of dominant institutions, and transnational in loyalties. With clear methodological attention to local conditions and particular contexts, cultural studies does not discriminate as to its object of study: in its most inclusive conceptions, it treats everything as a potential text to be read within the confines and discourses of various contextual configurations. While rhetoric pretends to hold court over any facet of existence that involves language and persuasion, cultural studies seems to claim all dimensions of being in the world as fair game for analysis, interpretation, and critique. Clearly, any discussion that brings rhetoric and cultural studies into play is bound to be messy: the intersection is busy, and traffic from both directions has the green light, so to speak.

     

    Given these considerable difficulties, At the Intersection holds together with a surprisingly clear progression and conceptual unity. Fortunately, Rosteck acknowledges the particular scope of the essays, stating that the collection “emphasizes ‘textual’ approaches rather than either production-based studies or more anthropological perspectives on ‘lived culture’” (ix). Moreover, he asserts that At the Intersection aims to instigate discussions about rhetorical studies and cultural studies, rather than to lead to definitive conclusions or offer the final word on either project (or their possible combinations). He highlights the difficulties of bringing rhetoric and cultural studies into focus, but suggests common ground between them:

     

    both aiming to reveal the relationship between expressive forms and the social order; both existing within the field of discursive practices; both sharing an interest in how ideas are caused to materialize in texts; both concerned with how these structures are actually effective at the point of “consumption”; and both interested in grasping such textual practices as forms of power and performance. (2)

     

    What drives most of the essays is not a desire to synthesize the two into some ur-discipline; however, the possibility of a “cultural rhetorical studies” is offered as an “ideal relationship […] of mutual critique and transformation” (22). Rosteck explains that, taken as a whole, these discussions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies explain some of the costs and benefits of disciplinarity, the political dimensions of such studies, and the ever-pressing questions of methodology (3-20).

     

    Each of the book’s essays is worthy of attention. In many respects, At the Intersection provides something for everyone, a convergence of roads of interest: studies of cultural artifacts, from tourist sites to popular film and works of art; discussions of theory and practice for rhetorical or cultural studies; and the disciplinary concerns of communication studies. Ultimately, the intersection of these audiences holds the greatest potential, and in many respects At the Intersection highlights the obstacles cultural studies faces in attempting to maneuver through the disciplinary entrenchments that beleaguer higher education.2 The collection is organized in two sections: “Part I: Reading the Popular and the Political: Converging Trajectories of Textuality, Method, Context,” and “Part II: Envisioning the Alternatives.” A review of these essays according to their approach or merit could convey a better sense of the collection’s content, but the progression of the discussions is itself rhetorical, and of course, it reveals much about Rosteck’s assumptions about language, audience, and culture in general.

     

    Carole Blair and Neil Michel’s “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial” begins the collection–with a readily identifiable cultural studies approach–by investigating the Astronauts Memorial at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Their initial analysis implements the rhetorical tools necessary to “read” the cultural text as a memorial, and takes additional steps to specify how it reflects (literally and figuratively) the ideology of NASA and invokes the larger tropes of the American space race. Blair and Michel are self-reflexive about their critical practice and the recursive nature of their methodology. However, when they cannot account for the lack of viewer/audience interest in the memorial, they re-assess the Visitor Complex within the larger context of sightseeing in Florida, which radically alters their initial rhetorical reading of the site. They see rhetoric as largely indifferent to cultural studies’ concerns about audience reception or authoritative readings, and they attempt, with some success, to overcome that weakness here by coupling their reflexive methodology to audience analysis.

     

    In “Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology,” James Arnt Aune addresses the impact of new communication technologies on public discourse. In his study, he draws on late twentieth-century political discourse ranging from that of figures such as Newt Gingrich to the rise of popular narratives reflected in the work of cyberpunk writers William Gibson and Allucquere Rosanne Stone. Aune sees “the new world information order” as an ideal site for the methodological intersection between rhetoric and cultural studies: rhetorical studies is formidably well suited to analyzing political discourse, while cultural studies is better able to manage issues of gender, desire, and performance in relation to popular media (85). Aune also suggests hopefully that a new understanding of class might emerge from this disciplinary hybrid, a paradigm better able to assess the transformative potential of the “universal class” being produced by information-based culture.

     

    Stephen Mailloux’s “Reading the Culture Wars: Traveling Rhetoric and the Reception of Curricular Reform” takes Syracuse University as his object of rhetorical analysis, wherein he traces the debates over the undergraduate ETS (English and Textual Studies) major within the larger context of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. Mailloux couches the discourse surrounding the ETS curriculum as a replay of classical philosophy-rhetoric debates: Plato and the proponents of absolute truth at odds with the relativism of the Sophists. Mailloux argues for further studies of the interconnection between language and ideology, calling for a better understanding of rhetoric’s crucial role in politics. More importantly, he sees the negotiation of politics as a significant challenge for any future work in rhetoric and cultural studies, and he envisions “reception narratives” such as his essay playing “a prominent role in a cultural rhetoric studies wishing to avoid the pitfalls of various orthodoxies on both the Cultural Right and Left” (114). Aune’s and Mailloux’s contributions, taken together, suggest ways in which a cultural rhetorical studies might be useful for approaching binary oppositions in public discourse.

     

    In perhaps the weakest contribution to At the Intersection, Barry Brummett and Detine L. Bowers attempt to fuse rhetorical and cultural studies in “Subject Positions as a Site of Rhetorical Struggle: Representing African Americans.” Drawing on what they dub “subject position theory,”3 Brummett and Bowers argue for only three possible types of subject position, and offer the insight that “some subject positions, especially those concerning race, are constructed in so damaging and repressive a manner that they are best understood as object positions” (122), thereby undermining the attempts of bell hooks (and others) to re-cast the terms for critical discussions of race. Brummett and Bowers seem to believe that before they arrived on the scene little attention was directed to the way subject and object positions are discursively created. Their attempt to describe the process of discursive construction leads them to propose a dubious taxonomy of textual characteristics (authority, narration, anonymity, and noise), and then, by way of illustration, to perform a rather obvious reading of the film The Air Up There, whose narrative of an African man recruited to play basketball for an all-white school makes it hard to miss the objectification of “the Other.” From their perspective, such interpretations would not have been possible without a cultural studies approach, because critical studies4 “is only lately emerging from a preoccupation with the alleged determinisms of class, race, or gender to grasp the essentially rhetorical concept of texts as sites of struggle, in which signs and reading strategies are used by people toward competing suasory ends” (136). Clearly, from this vantage point, rhetoric has always already been cultural studies, and incorporating the race/class/gender triumverate is all that’s required for a cultural rhetorical studies of the future, albeit one that remains, in the final analysis, rhetorical studies.

     

    Taking a detour from the near collisions of rhetoric and cultural studies, Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling reflect on their own critical practices in “American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude.” By focusing on “the pragmatic attitude,” they question the causes, motives, and consequences related to criticism itself, and explain that the goals motivated by the pragmatic attitude are aligned with the goals of American cultural studies. With detail and clarity, they articulate their working assumptions about the pragmatic critic: she or he (1) assumes that reality is socially constructed; (2) privileges local knowledge, everyday experience, and folklore; (3) begins criticism with a dense text; (4) “plays” with that dense text; (5) seeks patterns in intertextual connections; (6) looks for “artful texts” or the “artful dimensions” of a text; and (7) “wants to make a difference in the world” (140-51). Mechling and Mechling take their pragmatic attitude to a critical reading of the film Braveheart to question the historical epic romance and the discourses of both masculinity and nationalism; by doing so, they situate the film’s market success in the historical moment of its release and reception. Their approach “interrogates all positions, including those of cultural studies critics and of rhetorical critics practicing ideological criticism” (166). This attitude is perhaps the most fruitful approach born out of the intersecting branches of rhetorical and cultural criticism.

     

    Celeste Michelle Condit likewise interrogates the historical dimensions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies in “The Character of ‘History’ in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies.” She is careful to acknowledge her specific focus on the field of (speech) communication and its uses of rhetoric, illustrating the two dominant camps of “neoclassical” and “critical rhetoric” in the field. More importantly, she moves into a provocative discussion of a materialist conception of language, in terms of which historical narratives must be seen as “more than simply products of the ideological agendas of narrators” (177). By acknowledging the exigencies and material forces that constrain history, Condit argues for attention to historical narratives as “meaning-full” cultural practices situated in the time-stream of past, present, and future. Condit’s contribution to this collection is perhaps one of the most useful and compelling, for it offers a theoretical consideration that has direct impact on methodologies for both rhetorical studies and cultural studies.

     

    The positioning of Henry Krips’s “Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Gaze” in this collection is somewhat enigmatic, but this in no way detracts from the strength of his discussion on its own. While it’s not altogether clear how this essay contributes to the larger discussions of rhetorical and cultural studies, it certainly offers a clear example of a critical approach that is transdisciplinary and rhetorical, one that can change the way we look at the world. Bringing together “screen theory,” Lacan’s notion of the gaze, and Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Krips weaves a cogent analysis of text-audience dynamics and the ideological dimensions of criticism. In some ways, Krips bypasses congestion at the intersection: rather than simply discuss cultural studies and rhetorical studies, he utilizes both. Thus, section one is neatly framed with dynamic readings of texts, from the current trends in memorial studies to more traditional art criticism.

     

    While the character of the book’s first half is difficult to determine–and perhaps rightly so–its second half clearly addresses the possibility of fusion, of coalition, and of a transdisciplinary venture that might go by the name of “cultural rhetorical studies” (but which is emphatically not a “rhetorical cultural studies”). This section begins with an essay by Cary Nelson–a figurehead for American cultural studies and longtime critic of disciplinary turf battles and political quibbling in the academy. Nelson recounts the origins of cultural studies and its reliance on close readings of texts, reaffirming the value of such readings in departments of English, rhetoric, and (speech) communication. Nelson also highlights the role of language and “linguisticality” in cultural studies, using the field of English to illustrate the perceived threat of cultural studies to literary studies. To resolve such conflicts and further dialogue between these–and other–areas of study, Nelson calls for a return to a “rhetorical analysis that focuses on historically delineated struggles over meaning and form” (224). Doing so would allow participants to bring together various texts and discourses situated within temporally aligned frames of reference, and this rhetorical struggle over meaning is what Nelson sees as the proper domain of cultural studies.

     

    The struggle over meaning, however, promptly becomes the struggle for domain. Thomas Rosteck’s contribution to his own collection, “A Cultural Tradition in Rhetorical Studies,” suggests that there has always been a critical attention to culture in rhetorical studies, and he focuses on excavating “this latent cultural tradition” through selected essays, and on identifying common ground in the history of modern rhetorical criticism. His exemplary models of rhetorical criticism–those with sustained concern for matters related to culture–can serve a “cultural rhetorical studies” in the future, one that can surpass the problems he envisions with cultural studies itself. The essay that follows includes, among other commentary, a rejoinder to Rosteck. In “Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies,” John M. Sloop and Mark Olson contest Rosteck’s assertion that rhetorical studies has always already been doing the work of cultural studies: they see such moves as undermining the potential of cultural studies (251). Consequently, Sloop and Olson offer a thorough discussion of “culture” in its various configurations in communication circles, cautioning against the politicizing of rhetorical studies and the damaging effects of conflating cultural studies with rhetorical studies. Taken together, these two essays indicate the degree to which cultural studies stands as a threat to communication studies in terms of its self-definition and its future practices–an emerging theme that returns in the book’s concluding essay.

     

    Bruce E. Gronbeck’s “The Triumph of Social Science: The Silent Language as Master Text in American Cultural Studies” traces the work and influence of Edward Hall in the context of American intellectual circles, the Old Left, and social science. As a “master text,” Gronbeck claims Hall’s The Silent Language opened up criticism to temporal and spatial orientations for different societies, and articulated a notion of “interpersonal space” (278-79). Gronbeck illustrates how Hall influenced American cultural criticism into the present era, though Hall’s influence is often neglected as such. Gronbeck’s attention to the romance and pitfalls of dichotomies, particularly the camps of rhetoric-as-political-analysis and cultural-studies-as-ideology-and-politics, leads him to conclude with an appeal for the power of dialectic in dichotomous conflict (289).

     

    Patrick Brantlinger’s “Antitheory and Its Antitheses: Rhetoric and Ideology” explains how such dichotomous dialectic plays out in theoretical circles. In what should be a companion piece to Condit’s discussion of history, Brantlinger focuses on the use of theory, or, the “trends and ‘-isms’” that “came to be called just ‘theory,’ in the singular” (292). In a careful elucidation of the theoretical and anti-theoretical impulses in “theory,” Brantlinger argues that the dominant tendencies in theory work toward either rhetoric or ideology (which echoes Mailloux’s platonist-sophist debates), explaining how theories about–or against–theory came to be theorized and continue to thrive. This compelling discussion could serve as a fitting end to the collection, offering insight for the future and leaving questions to generate further discussion.

     

    However, what in fact concludes At the Intersection is a nod to the past and an appeal to tradition–an essay that uses, as a point of departure, a barroom disagreement at a communications conference as a problem to be mediated. In “Courting Community in Contemporary Culture,” Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing attempt to find a middle ground between (1) what they see as rhetoric’s reliance on structures and institutions and (2) cultural studies’ resistance to such systems of hierarchy and power. They do so by synthesizing the work of Kenneth Burke and Victor Turner, thereby offering a unifying vision of not only structure and communitas but also community and fragmentation. Drawing attention back to the importance of ritual and oratory, they rally for the most pressing issue facing rhetorical and cultural studies today: the fragmentation of community. They call for a new interdisciplinary space to address this issue; however, this locus appears to be bigger and better than either rhetoric or cultural studies: “The first task, somewhat ironically, is for these two fields to move beyond their own split to an interdisciplinary community as a collective base of operations” (341). The obvious answer is that the resolution-space in question is indeed cultural studies, as it has already been conceptualized and envisioned. However, considering their initial concern for “barroom antipathies” at their professional conferences, for Frentz and Rushing it seems that, like some bartender’s call to “take it outside,” any negotiation or compromise must necessarily take place outside their discipline–leaving communication studies, and its traditions, intact.

     

    As the capstone to this collection, Frentz and Rushing’s conclusions are at once gratifying and disturbing. While time may prove “interdisciplinarity” to be mere fashion (doubtful), it is difficult to argue against it at this historical moment. Within the disciplinary boundaries of communication and mass-media studies–not to mention virtually all other fields in the humanities and social sciences–there is a growing consensus that interdisciplinary work can yield great epistemological rewards, enable political engagement, and foster a sense of praxis in the academy. While it threatens existing structures of academe, cultural studies also opens new vistas of possibility for those of us who operate within those structures.

     

    Frentz and Rushing’s piece nonetheless makes a fitting end to the collection in one respect. While the book makes important contributions to general questions of theory and method, as well as offering some fine cultural-rhetorical analyses of specific texts, its emphasis ultimately is on cultural studies’ past and future impact on communication studies. At the Intersection is probably more compelling and provocative for scholars who reside in departments of communication than for others across the disciplines, but given its perhaps overambitious aims, it does a fine job. It will serve as a useful guide through one of the many disciplinary crossroads made possible by the advent of cultural studies.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The roots of rhetoric run deep in Western civilization, roughly 2500 years to the Athenian polis and the lineage of thinkers beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Almost from the outset, rhetoric has been counterposed to dialectic, or the philosopher’s method of inquiry. The practitioner of rhetoric has been valued either as a person of high morals who speaks on behalf of Truth, or as an opportunistic relativist out to persuade audiences based on whatever “truths” are at hand. Over the centuries, rhetoric has been expanded and collapsed, watered-down as well as extrapolated for a variety of causes, and today its position in the academy is shared by several disciplines, and many of rhetoric’s academic configurations are contingent upon its uses. Of course, rhetoric still holds ground in departments of philosophy and classics, and in English departments, rhetoric is paired with composition studies all too often as a mere subsection of English-literary studies, rather than a discipline itself. (Ironically, the “belles lettres” that became literature emerged from 19th century rhetoric.) In departments of (speech) communication, rhetoric often refers only to public discourse, and rhetorical analysis is considered a disciplined methodological approach to texts ranging from public speeches (for the more classically trained) to mass media studies (for later scholars widening the aperture for notions of “public” and “speech”). There are numerous organizations and agencies that have emerged working to bring the various arms of rhetoric into one place.

     

    2. The contributors to this collection are all written by scholars with positions in the academy. Working against such bias is a crucial part of the cultural studies project, and this largely goes unnoticed by the editor or contributors.

     

    3. The uncritical, unflective, and reductive labelling of several critical approaches under the rubric “Subject Position Theory” is indicative of the writers’ overall presumptiveness and inability to reflect on their own positions of power.

     

    4. Brummett, in Rhetoric in Popular Culture, prefers the term “critical studies” over “cultural studies,” not for any particular reason, but for “the sake of convenience” (71).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.
    • Brummett, Barry. Rhetoric in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
    • Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
    • Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg. “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-16.

     

  • The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity

    Matthew Abraham

    Philosophy and Literature Program
    Purdue University
    MAbra68114@aol.com

     

    Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge, 1998.

     

    Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems attempts to bring together developments in neuroscience, linguistics, logic, computer science, the philosophy of science, and poststructural theory in an effort to locate unifying themes in these exciting fields. Cilliers seizes on “complexity,” a term used to describe large-scale, non-linear interaction of nodes or agents in a dynamic environment, as a way to discuss possible structural resonances among the brain, natural language, artificial intelligence, deconstruction, and the legitimation of knowledge in contemporary society. By means of this ambitiously interdisciplinary approach, Cilliers hopes to overcome certain persistent simplifications in the thinking of both representation and organization.

     

    Cilliers introduces the terms “distributed representation” and “self-organization” (or “self-organized criticality”) to improve upon the standard analytical and rule-based methods of understanding complexity. He takes up the “connectionism” attributed to neural networks as a model for the contingency and dynamism of complex systems such as those of the brain or of natural language. Connectionism treats the interactions of the nodes within it as a dynamic whole, each individual node working in concert with all other nodes of the network to adapt continually to environmental changes. This is in stark contrast to the rule-based descriptions of complexity which, imposing the rigidity of principled behavior on the nodes, cannot account for the contingency of environmental conditions and localized adaptations. Through distributed representation, Cilliers circumvents the shortcomings of the rule-based understanding of complexity because he is able to demonstrate that distributed representation is not representation at all, but rather the recognition of localized contingency. Each node interacts in concert with the other nodes of a neural or language network because each node acts and reacts as a system, not individually. This interaction is further explained through self-organization. A complex system, able to organize its individual nodes or agents through concerted action, does not have a central organization center but has the capacity to self-organize at local sites where environmental changes are detected.

     

    Cilliers, following Saussure and Derrida, recognizes the complexity of natural language in terms of both its stability and its evolutionary capacity. Discussing natural language’s ability to instantiate meaning through a system of phonetic or graphical differences, he claims that while language users are bound to certain language rules, they are nonetheless free to adjust those rules and hence to influence the evolution of the language. This seemingly contradictory statement finds its theoretical underpinnings in Saussure’s concepts of the signifier and signified, where signification involves mental representation and the enactment of this representation through the utilization of the signifier in either spoken or written language. A language user has to choose among a host of socially sanctioned signifiers to represent a mental state. As Cilliers observes, “The system of language transcends the choices of any individual user, and therefore has stability” (39). But while he recognizes the constraints of social conditioning and common culture that temper any “free play” of language, Cilliers conceptualizes language as less the closed system described by Saussure than the open one of Derrida. Derrida, by denying the metaphysics of presence, claims that meaning cannot be generated outside of language and hence “where there is meaning there is already language” (43). Drawing in particular on the Derridean notions of différance and trace, Cilliers tries to show that natural language is a complex system which adapts dynamically over time and across multiple environments through a system of phonetic and graphic difference. Because language is constituted by nothing more than relationships, there are traces of other signs inherent in every sign. Language, through difference and deferral (hence différance), self-organizes signs through distributed representation.

     

    Cilliers uses his discussion of natural language as a segue into a consideration of artificial intelligence as a complex system. In a chapter entitled “John Searle Befuddles,” Cilliers asserts that Searle’s contention that artificial intelligence does not possess intentionality and hence cannot be called intelligence at all is untenable. Cilliers briefly summarizes Searle’s views on artificial intelligence through a description of “The Chinese Room Experiment,” in which an English man, unfamiliar with Chinese, is provided with a rule book describing how to translate Chinese symbols into meaningful sentences. To the outside observer, the man appears able to “speak” Chinese as well as he can speak English, when in fact he is only following a rulebook. Searle contends that a computer, similar to the man in the experiment room, is simply following rules and cannot be truly said to think. In the absence of intentionality, Searle asserts, thinking cannot be said to have occurred. Cilliers rejects Searle’s pronouncement on the ground that it leaves intentionality undefined and does not consider that there might be different forms or modes of intentionality corresponding to different agents, such as the human brain and the computer. Cilliers also reiterates certain key points from Derrida’s critique of Searle in “Signature Event Context,” strongly endorsing the former’s reading of Austin’s speech act theory over the latter’s, which would hold that the context of a speaker’s utterance can be relied upon to anchor its meaning. For Cilliers, Derrida’s elaborate mockery of any such rule-based description of language contains crucial insights for discussions of complexity, for it both unseats the code as the ultimate arbiter of rules and dislodges context as the master precept of the code.

     

    Cilliers’s considerations of complexity with respect to neural networks, language, and artificial intelligence provide him with a theoretical base upon which to discuss the postmodern condition. Incorporating insights gleaned from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Cilliers asserts that postmodern societies meet all of the ten criteria for a complex system:

     

    1. Complex systems are comprised of a large number of elements.
    2. The elements in a complex system interact dynamically.
    3. The level of interaction is fairly rich.
    4. Interactions are non-linear.
    5. The interactions have a fairly short-range.
    6. There are loops in the interactions.
    7. Complex systems are open systems.
    8. Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium.
    9. Complex systems have histories.
    10. Individual elements are ignorant of the behavior of the whole system in which they are embedded. (119-120)

     

    By analogy:

     

    1. Postmodern societies have millions of agents operating within them at any one time.
    2. These agents fulfill their functions in a number of dynamic and multiple roles (teacher, consumer, parent, child, etc.).
    3. In a postmodern society, the interactions between agents and and mechanisms of the societal system are extremely rich and diverse.
    4. Social relationships in postmodern society are non-linear and asymmetrical with respect to power. It is within these asymmetrical power relationships that people operate as teachers, students, consumers, and citizens.
    5. Individuals interact on local levels. Although interactions on one level affect those on another, there is no “metalevel controlling the flow of information” (121).
    6. All interpretations are local, contingent, and provisional. In this situation, paralogy and dissensus rather than homology prevail.
    7. Open systems such as the social interact with other open systems such as the ecological.
    8. Social disequilibrium characterizes the postmodern condition.
    9. Although the concept of history is dismissed as a grand narrative in the postmodern, local narratives tell the histories of individuals and groups.
    10. It is impossible for an individual to have a complete understanding of the operations of the entire social system in which he or she lives and interacts. (6-7)

     

    Cilliers uses his analogy between complex systems and postmodern societies to dismiss the notion that postmodernism sanctions an “anything goes mentality” in which relativism reigns supreme. Instead, Cilliers asserts, postmodernism leads us to new ethical horizons and committments. He draws upon Lyotard to emphasize this point:

     

    The breaking up of the Grand Narratives… leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion. Nothing of this kind is happening: this point of view, it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost “organic society.” (The Postmodern Condition 15)

     

    As Cilliers states, “A careful reading of Lyotard shows that his understanding of the individual is formulated in such a way as to counter the idea of fragmentation and isolation that could result from a dismissal of the grand narrative” (115). He goes on to argue that individuals constitute part of a vast social scene where each enters into an “agonistic network” in which discourses compete for legitimacy. Within this framework, paralogy and dissensus rather than homology and consensus “supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes” (The Postmodern Condition 15). Cilliers compares paralogy to self-organized criticality by which “networks diversify their internal structure maximally” (117).

     

    Ultimately, Cilliers is most intrigued by the Lyotardian concept of justice within the postmodern condition. Through the work of Cornell and Derrida, he outlines four criteria for “responsible judgment” in the wake of postmodernism and complexity:

     

    Respect otherness and difference as values in themselves.
    Gather as much information on the issue as possible, notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to gather all the information.
    Consider as many of the possible consequences of the judgment, notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to consider all the consequences.
    Make sure that it is possible to revise the judgment as soon as it becomes clear that it has flaws. (139-40)

     

    These four criteria could very well be called a “postmodern ethic.”

     

    Cilliers’s book provides a sympathetic yet rigorous reading of poststructural theory in the wake of the rapid advances in complex system research and understanding. Cilliers’s interdisciplinary approach to the concept of complexity will allow literary critics, philosophers, and scientists to reach across their respective disciplines and to appreciate the application of their disciplinary perspectives in new and exciting arenas. This book has taken an innovative and important first step down the path of critical scholarship on the subject of complexity and postmodernism.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, Event, Context.” Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-23.
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1979.

     

  • Past, Present and Future: New Historicism versus Cultural Materialism

    Jürgen Pieters

    Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory
    University of Ghent, Belgium
    jurgen.pieters@rug.ac.be

     

    John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998.

     

    One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory–a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”–has been the extraordinarily rapid institutionalization of the twin movements of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism within literary studies. Proclaimed by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 as a novel reading method that would shy away from the critical deficiencies of both the traditional historical school and the various formalist movements by which it was replaced, the New Historicism as it was practiced by Greenblatt and many other Anglo-American Renaissance scholars gained the immediate interest of those who had become dissatisfied with the stringent textualist ideology upheld by most American deconstructionists. Part of the attraction of the New Historicism was the double promise which it contained for practitioners of theory who wanted to move on instead of returning to the practical–i.e. untheoretical–paradigm that had been dominant in the heyday of New Criticism. To these critics, the New Historicism seemed to have it all: not only was it based upon the best of post-structuralist thought (Foucault, Derrida, de Certeau, Barthes and so on), it also applied that thought to the broad investigative field for which it was initially devised–not just to the self-deconstructive rhetorics of canonical literary texts. As Greenblatt himself once put it, post-structuralism in its deconstructive guise “was not only the negative limit but the positive condition for the emergence of New Historicism.”1

     

    As a consequence of this double promise, then, the New Historicism was embraced by many. It became the hotly debated subject of conferences, articles, studies, and special issues of academic journals. From 1985 onwards, a number of critical collections were published that attempted to combine the practical and the theoretical focus inherent to the object of their attention.2 Most of these included, on the one hand, a number of practical pieces in which the New Historicist reading method was applied and/or tested, and, on the other, a number of theoretical articles which reflected upon the critical axioms that, from the beginning, had served as the conceptual basis of the method. Most of the latter, written mainly by scholars supportive of the New Historicist project, were meant as a contribution to the ongoing elaboration of the method under scrutiny.

     

    Despite this gradual proliferation of critical attention, however, it has taken quite a while for the first book-length monograph on New Historicism to appear. In 1997, Manchester University Press published Claire Colebrook’s New Literary Histories, a mainly theoretical survey of the movement’s affiliations with the work of contemporary theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Michel de Certeau. One year later, Colebrook’s study was followed by the book under review here, John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In contrast to that of Colebrook, Brannigan’s study is characterized by an attempt to couple theoretical analysis to practical reading. While the larger part of it is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, the book also contains four “applications and readings,” in which Brannigan analyzes several literary texts–Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a number of poems by Tennyson, and Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The purpose of these applications is not only to describe and illustrate the preferred reading tactics of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, but also to lay bare the critical constraints with which their readings have to cope. Ideally, the latter aim is prepared for in the preceding, theoretical half of the book, which is intended to give the reader an idea of the genesis and the development of both movements and of the critical dilemmas surrounding them. Brannigan concludes his book with two briefer chapters which consider the future of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.

     

    Brannigan’s work, a critical introduction initially aimed at a general audience of students and other non-specialist readers, suffers both the positive and the negative consequences of its generalist purpose. On the one hand, the study is well written and the central line of its argument is a clear one; on the other hand, some points of the author’s exposition seem to be in need of further qualification. The title of Brannigan’s monograph is a sufficient indication of the central argument its author wants to make: while New Historicism and Cultural Materialism are two critical practices that are obviously related, both in terms of methodology and of subject-matter, they are nevertheless better kept distinct. In outlining the central differences between the two movements, Brannigan in part modifies and elaborates upon views that have been proferred elsewhere. As he sees it, the distinction is not merely a matter of geography–Cultural Materialism being, as some would have it, the British “brand” of the American-based New Historicism–but mainly a question of how one conceives of the aims and tasks of critical-historical academic praxis: while New Historicists are mainly concerned with the extent to which literary texts lay bare the existing power relations of which they are themselves a product, Cultural Materialists prefer to make clear the way in which these same texts may serve as sites of subversion and dissidence, as places, to use Alan Sinfield’s description, where a culture exposes its own faultlines.

     

    If Brannigan is to be believed, the latter option is an unrealistic one to New Historicists: according to them, subversion is always contained by the power which it is supposed to undermine, if only because it results from the very framework set up by that power. “[W]ith its insistence that there is no effective space of resistance,” Brannigan writes, “new historicism often makes for grim reading” (8). Cultural Materialists, so he goes on to argue, are “slightly more hopeful” (10): the space of resistance that Brannigan finds lacking in the work of their American counterparts is opened up in the space of critical reading itself–indeed, critical reading is that space. Brannigan suggests that what Cultural Materialists argue is not, simply, that authors of literary texts are (by definition, as it were) highly critical of the culture which surrounds them–that they read the history of their own day against the grain; what they argue is that a reading of these texts along the lines of the Cultural Materialist project can make clear that things in history could have turned out differently. (To continue the analogy, one could say that New Historicists prefer to give us a clue as to why things in history went the way they did.)

     

    In outlining his general distinction between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, Brannigan rightly points to their different contexts of origination. In contrast to the American New Historicism, British Cultural Materialism was largely influenced by a tradition of (neo)Marxist historicist critics, the most important of whom, Raymond Williams, coined the term in his Marxism and Literature. From the example of Williams, Cultural Materialists also derive their firm and explicit political commitment: according to them criticism, whether or not it finds its object in the past, needs to make a difference now, in the present moment from which the critic speaks and writes. Even though a similar commitment may be found to underlie the reading practice of a number of New Historicist scholars, theirs is obviously a far less overtly political project. Brannigan does not make this point, even though he asserts (rightly so, I believe) that the chief theoretical influence behind the New Historicism is the work of Michel Foucault, a thinker no less politically inspired than Williams. In several interviews, Foucault has made clear that his work–particularly the work on the “analytics of power” that has been of such an importance to New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose–serves similar political goals as that of the British New Left. Brannigan, however, does not make this point in outlining Foucault’s impact on critics like Greenblatt, and I think that it’s a pity that he doesn’t. As I see it, an elaboration of this issue could have enabled him not only to differentiate more sharply between the projects of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism (after all, at its best New Historicism can be considered as an example of the non-interpretive, radical positivism Foucault attempted to devise in The Archaeology of Knowledge), but also to adjust his biased view of Foucault’s work. The portrait which Brannigan offers of Foucault (and, by extension, of the French critic’s influence on his American disciples) is largely reminiscent of that to be found in Frank Lentricchia’s well-known critique of Greenblatt’s New Historicism.3 In Lentricchia’s view, the fatal flaw running through Foucault’s oeuvre returns unchanged in Greenblatt’s inaugural Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Like his major source of inspiration, Lentricchia asserts, Greenblatt reduces history in all its complexity to a plethora of unmarked manifestations of one overarching phenomenon: power. Brannigan follows suit: “By explaining a wide range of different cultural and social forms as the functions of one single mode of power,” he writes, “Foucault imposed a monologic view of power relations on the past, and new historicists are heirs to Foucault’s faults as much as they are heirs to his innovations” (53).

     

    Taking over his views uncritically, Brannigan fails to notice that Lentricchia’s reading of Foucault’s theory of power is based exclusively on Discipline and Punish, a book which has been criticized by its own author for entertaining a too totalitarian, repressive theory of power that hardly leaves any room for the possibility of resistance. However, in subsequent works (the History of Sexuality most notably, but also in other, for the most part posthumously published, essays) Foucault has tried to find new ways of thinking about power relationships that stress the inherent (not necessarily dialectic) connection between domination and resistance. In my opinion, it is this new, non-repressive theory of power that has been fruitful in Greenblatt’s attempt– primarily to be found in Shakespearean Negotiations–to find novel ways of analyzing the complex (and, indeed, often complicit) position that works of art can be said to take up within social formations.4 In line with the principles of Foucault’s later work, Greenblatt emphasizes the productivities of power as well as its prohibitions. Arguing that power works as an anonymous force that makes some things possible while making others impossible, he does indeed point to the fact that at times power structures seem to produce their own subversion and later contain it. But Foucault does not propose this mechanism as a universal historical phenomenon or as an intentional one, as Brannigan seems to suggest (as if power produced its subversion simply in order to contain it). While I share, in part, Brannigan’s critique of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning as an example of the monologism which New Historicism was meant to overcome, I would argue that his reading of Greenblatt’s entire work as a monolithical project fails to notice the conceptual evolution it has clearly undergone between Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations. Brannigan is no doubt right in reminding us that it would be mistake to consider this evolution–as some would–in terms of a development “from new historicism to cultural poetics,” yet it is a pity that the reminder is not accompanied by a further (and better) analysis of the actual development. To some extent, one could say that such an analysis is prevented by the central argument which Brannigan uses to draw a firm opposition between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists. The argument–the former stress the impossibility of true subversion, while the latter emphasize the possibility of change–also forecloses a contrastive analysis of the work of the two key theoreticians behind both practices: Foucault in the case of New Historicism, Williams in the case of Cultural Materialism. Again, Brannigan points to the irony that Greenblatt for one has been formally taught and influenced by both, yet this piece of knowledge remains inert too. Possibly, an analysis of the exact “position” of Williams and Foucault within Greenblatt’s work might have resulted in a clearer understanding of New Historicist practice itself and of its relationship to British Cultural Materialism. Since Williams’s humanism is hard to reconcile (theoretically at least) with Foucault’s radically anti-humanistic stance, one could try and elaborate the hypothesis that Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is marked by an attempt (a necessarily failed one, at that) to combine these two sources of inspiration. The difficulty in reconciling their approaches, I would say, becomes clear in the conflict between a view in which the signification of literary texts is determined by the discursive formation to which they belong (Foucault) and a view in which literature presents a critical view of the society out of which it comes (Williams). Greenblatt’s book, I believe, offers instances of both views without making explicit the methodological option for either.

     

    What Brannigan’s book makes sufficiently clear is that the latter discussion finally boils down to the question of how one decides to read texts that have come down to us from the past. New Historicists tend to treat texts as things to be described in their own right, as “positivities,” to use Foucault’s term. Theirs is a truly historicist practice in the sense that they try, however problematic the attempt in itself may have become, to see things “as they were.” Cultural Materialists, Brannigan argues, prefer to take an explicitly “bifocal” perspective that is as much concerned with the present from which these texts are read as with the past from which they come. It is this double perspective that allows them, finally, to hold a plea for literary texts as sites of dissidence. What Brannigan does not stress sufficiently, I believe, is that to Cultural Materialists the question is not whether these texts functioned as critical and political instruments at the time of their production, but whether they can be seen, from a distance, to articulate problems that contemporary readers could not have foreseen. One of the theoreticians to have developed a reading-method that allows one to focus upon texts as sites of dissidence is the Althusserian critic Pierre Macherey, whose work has had a significant impact upon Catherine Belsey’s brand of Cultural Materialism. Unfortunately, Brannigan does not mention Macherey in his discussion of Belsey’s work. This omission contributes to my conviction that at points the format which Brannigan has been asked to adopt has unnecessarily limited the scope of the book as a whole. The author of an introductory volume addressed at the general student of literary theory cannot explore critically each and every road that can be opened for investigation. In the particular case of John Brannigan’s book this is all the more a pity, for the best parts of the book–the truly critical parts–make clear that its author can well be considered an expert in the field.

     

    Notes

     

    1.Personal electronic communication, June 26, 1997.

     

    2. The most important of these are Dollimore and Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare, Howard and O’Connor’s Shakespeare Reproduced, Veeser’s The New Historicism and The New Historicism Reader, Wilson and Dutton’s New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, and Cox and Reynolds’s New Historical Literary Study.

     

    3. First published in Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police and later collected in Veeser’s The New Historicism.

     

    4. It is interesting to note how closely Greenblatt’s definition of “social energy” resembles that of Foucault’s pouvoir in the first part of the History of Sexuality. For an elaboration of this resemblance see my “The Foucauldian Legacy Revisited: Stephen Greenblatt on ‘the Circulation of Social Energy’” (unpublished paper).

    Works Cited

     

    • Cox, Jeffrey N. and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
    • Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985.
    • Howard, Jean E. and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
    • Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
    • —, ed. The New Historicism Reader. London and New York, Routledge, 1994.
    • Wilson, Richard and Richard Dutton, eds. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. London: Longman, 1992.

     

  • Veiled and Revealed

    Nezih Erdogan

    Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture
    Bilkent University
    nezih@bilkent.edu.tr

     

    Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism.London and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.

     

    When feminist studies, as it developed in the Anglo-American world, turned to Third World countries, it produced a discourse which put an emphasis on the situation of women oppressed in male-dominant societies marked by backwardness. This discourse regarded women of the less democratic, less learned, unstable, and poverty-stricken societies as deprived of the possibilities and channels of power which are elsewhere accessible to Western women. This “backwardness,” which became a recurrent theme, is of course sustained by a silently conducted comparison between underdeveloped or developing countries and industrialized ones. Such a comparison betrays a difference which remains central to the discourse disseminated by mainstream feminist practices: it re-introduces the “West and the rest” opposition, thus constructing the sovereign Western female subject endowed with all the privileges and powers reserved solely for her.1 This opposition also brings us back to the problems posed by postcolonial theory in its analysis of how “Orientalism orientalizes the Orient.”

     

    Postcolonial theory, which has offered a most productive critique of Orientalism and colonial discourse, nonetheless seems to have overlooked the fact that any careful study of the colonial subject as constituted by colonial discourse needs to insert the terms of sexual difference into its field of investigation. For example, although the work of Edward Said has established the still influential paradigm of postcolonial studies, it has its limitations in demonstrating how sexual difference operates in the production of Orientalist discourse. It is important to see that the power of colonial discourse stems from how it positions woman.

     

    As Paul Feyerabend suggests in another context, controversial movements and fields of knowledge may serve as medicine to one another. One may say that feminist studies, especially overseas, is in need of a medicine that could be provided by postcolonial theory, and postcolonial theory could in turn benefit from feminist studies. At this point, Meyda Yegenoglu’s Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism comes as a most rewarding read. Its virtue does not only lie in the ways in which it exemplifies interdisciplinary study (which it impeccably does), but also in the way it draws a framework which makes possible a previously unavailable discussion.

     

    From the onset, Yegenoglu develops a dialogue with other writers of postcolonial theory ranging from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha, from Partha Chatterjee to Gayatri Spivak, and with feminist writers including Elisabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Vicky Kirby. Aiming to “map the field,” she opens with a discussion of the conceptual tools at hand. Thus, in the first chapter, she gives a lucid depiction of the post-structuralist scene–a difficult and demanding job. Yegenoglu clearly demonstrates the limitations of the pertinent theoretical works and the extent to which she will utilize them. Then she moves on to define a field of investigation for the specific purposes of her project: the problem of the Third World woman.

     

    Can one feel at ease with this identification of such an object of study? Just as the infamous question of Freud, “What does woman want?”, causes the woman to disappear (that is, for example, all the possibilities of her self-expression) and brings about a construction of her as produced by man (hence, the woman as symptom of man), any inquisition of the Third World woman entails a double erasure: first in terms of sexual difference and second in terms of colonial othering. Thus Yegenoglu resists the temptation of speaking of this “not yet discovered” object, and instead sets out to delineate the conditions of its objecthood. She repeatedly warns the reader against the double illusion that we can know the woman and that we can know the Third World woman. The illusion is in reality the effect of the colonial discourse which serves to conceal the impossibility of its very object.

     

    Take, for instance, her brilliant analysis of Lady Montague’s letters on the Turkish women of the Ottoman Empire. The harem has served for the Orientalist as a fantasy stage and the Muslim woman as the anchor which structured this space, enabling colonial discourse to operate on a number of levels. In the past three centuries, the “enslaved woman” was perceived as a sign of the backwardness of Muslim society, in contrast with the situation of the Western woman, who was then heading for emancipation. As Yegenoglu shows later on in the book, the woman also represents the space that is to be colonized. However, Lady Montague’s portrayal of the Turkish woman runs counter to the well-established image promoted by Orientalism: the harem is actually a space of self-fulfillment for the Turkish woman, who is way ahead of the Western woman. She is learned, knowledgeable, and has access to the means of power. Lady Montague’s letters may give us an idea about the accuracy and the tendency of the Orientalist narratives in circulation at that time. Her benevolence for the Turkish woman is in conflict with what a great majority of Orientalists have produced in the name of objective truth. But is benevolence not an inverted form of malevolence? Isn’t Lady Montague, by negating the reiterated (mis-)conceptions pertaining to Muslim society, actually re-asserting the terms of Orientalism? Yegenoglu eloquently shows how Lady Montague’s text, although it contradicts a great number of contemporary colonialist narratives, nonetheless reproduces colonial discourse in exemplifying the “unity in diversity” of Orientalism. One may even argue that such contradictions are the strength of colonial discourse. The power of looking at others benevolently requires the power of voicing the truth on behalf of others. This is what Yegenoglu refers to as the “regime of truth” of Orientalism. The truth of the Turkish woman does not come from herself but from the Western woman; it is she who holds the power of articulating, disseminating, and controlling the conditions of (her) truth.

     

    Lady Montague describes a scene of intimacy in the harem and expresses her wish that a certain English gentleman were there with her, seeing, without being seen, what she was allowed to see. This is one of the crucial moments of Colonial Fantasies: it offers an instance of how sexual difference and colonial discourse are mapped onto each other. Here, Yegenoglu does not only show that Lady Montague’s text is in effect patriarchal–that she assumes the desire of the masculine, the desire to see the (truth of) woman–but she also links masculine desire with the Orientalist’s desire to know what is hidden from him. The sight of woman is thus symptomatic on a wider scale in Orientalism, since scopophilia–which lends colonial discourse its dynamic–involves the “knowing” and “unveiling” of the “East” and “woman,” which are mutually constitutive in the eyes of the Western subject. Colonial Fantasies places special focus on the veil, which structures the very colonial fantasy around which it revolves. The veil serves in this book as the emblematic case for the textual and administrative operations of colonialism, which can be primarily observed in the demand to know the Orient. Interestingly, as the Biblical expression has it, “to know” means a sexual penetration whose resonance can be traced in military invasions, Orientalist studies, scientific expeditions, and even artistic productions. Yegenoglu examines the struggle between the Algerian woman and French colonialism over the veil in this connection. The Frenchman would not feel content until he lifted the veil that stood for the land that had already been taken over; only then would he be able to see it as a space where he could exercise power–the veil stands in the way of the colonizer who is at pains to turn land into flesh and flesh into land.2 One witnesses the same logic at work in a variety of practices today: in soft-porn films that recurrently set their scenes in Eastern countries where the European male character seduces the native woman wearing the chador, or in the situation of female students in France and Turkey who are not allowed into classrooms with their headscarves. The Oriental is feminized and the land (read: truth) is sexualized. Here, one is tempted to look to the possibilities offered by the verb “reveal.” It means both “to make known, disclose,” and “to re-veil.” Every unveiling is a re-veiling; knowing the truth of woman, lifting her veil, is a re-inscription of a prescribed knowledge, i.e., the knowledge of the Western sovereign subject, on her body. Yegenoglu does not suggest that beyond the conflicts over veilings and unveilings there lies a naked truth of the woman/the Oriental; on the contrary, she makes clear that there is no such truth, that such a goal would lead us astray, and leave untouched the crucial question of how the truth of the other is inscribed and represented and by whom.

     

    Departing from Said’s assertion that Orientalism is a joint venture, in the final chapter of her Colonial Fantasies, Yegenoglu explores the ways in which colonial discourse is co-produced by the colonizer and the colonized. Yegenoglu seeks to show how certain movements in Muslim societies that emerged as antitheses to colonial discourse eventually reproduced its effects. Yegenoglu cites the adventures of nationalism in Turkey and Algeria, which have developed contrasting attitudes towards the question of the veil. At this stage of her analysis, she not only provides a historically and culturally specific context for the relationship of resistance and mimicry, she also draws our attention once again to the central role the woman plays against this backdrop. Nationalism emerged as a resistance against the hegemony of the West, and it propagated the virtues of a national(ist) identity as opposed to the identities imposed by the West. When it comes to constructing a national identity, it was thought necessary to embrace the values of the West (e.g., modernization, secularism) and produce a resistance to it at the same time. In the Turkish case, Islam was seen as an obstacle on the way to the “level of the contemporary civilizations” (read Western civilization); therefore Ataturk silently (and less silently) maintained a distance between religion and the reforms he aimed to institute. In the Algerian case, however, Islam was seen as a means of constructing a nationalist identity and resisting the colonialism of the French, who saw the native’s religion as something to be thrown out in order to operate efficiently in this country. The veil as the symbol of backwardness, as an obstacle brought in by religion, was to be lifted in Turkey, whereas it was defended desperately as the symbol of resistance against the French in Algeria. What is important to understand, warns Yegenoglu, is that both attitudes derive from the same sexual economy. And what is more important, she continues, is to understand that although they may appear to present alternative responses to Western colonialism, they both reproduce the same discursive effects. This is one of the strongest points of Colonial Fantasies: it provides an insight into the deep structures as well as the psychic mechanisms of Orientalism’s capacity for generating diverse, even contradictory images.

     

    Western civilization has been remarkably effective in effacing the traces of its operations; culture is what enables this effacement. Culture is a process of neutralization, naturalization, and universalization; it is the place where things seem natural precisely as opposed to cultural; where they seem as they should be. Culture thus masks its own ideological force. It has been the chief task of cultural studies to provide insight into these functions of culture. However, due to the slippery ground of difference, any critical approach to culture runs the risk of reproducing its terms rather than coming to terms with them.

     

    Colonial Fantasies vigilantly points out such dangers awaiting the practitioners of postcolonial/feminist studies. Yegenoglu refuses to assume and thereby legitimize any fixed positions in the discourse. If she were to speak from the point of view of the Third World woman, then she would tacitly address a reader in search of a native informant. If she were to take up the position of the mainstream feminist of the Anglo-American world, then she would re-affirm the sovereign female subject of the West. Both positions seem to be available in Yegenoglu’s text; yet neither are sites of identification for the reader. In effect, there are here no stable sites of identification; rather, Yegenoglu moves from one position to another only in order to deconstruct their oppositionality. Fittingly, in her final chapter, Yegenoglu provides a powerful account of how she herself refuses to be the native informant, delivering the truth of women in Muslim society. Thus Yegenoglu demonstrates that it is possible to read the mind of Orientalism without perpetuating its signs.

     

    Notes

     

    1. See, for instance, Vicky Kirby’s critique of feminists’ approach to genital mutilation of African females in “Kopma Noktasinda Feminizm ve Klitoris Sunneti” in Oryantalizm, Hegemonya ve Kulturel Fark, Fuat Keyman, Mahmut Mutman, and Meyda Yegenoglu, eds. (Istanbul: Iletisim, 1996) 183-233.

     

    2. In this context, see Mahmut Mutman’s excellent analysis of how the media veiled Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War: “Pictures from Afar: Shooting the Middle East,” Inscriptions 6 (1992): 1-44.

     

  • Brecht Our (Post-) Contemporary

    Steven Helmling

    Department of English
    University of Delaware
    helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

     

    Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method.London and New York: Verso, 1998.

     

    Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre is daunting for almost every possible reason. Besides its sheer bulk, the difficulty of its themes, and its notoriously demanding prose style, there’s the vast scope of the cultural materials it takes on. Nothing cultural is alien to Jameson, as Colin McCabe once put it (in words quoted on the back cover of Brecht and Method). One of the strengths, indeed a condition, of Jameson’s encyclopedic achievement is a programmatic dispassion toward his subject matter, an eschewal or renunciation of polemic so unemphatic that many readers miss it. Jameson’s work is never uncommitted, but the sorts of inquiry he undertakes aim to open possibilities that polemical reflexes, for which the only question is for-or-against, generically foreclose.

     

    Nevertheless, throughout what Terry Eagleton has called Jameson’s “curiously unimpassioned” corpus (74), there are seams of warmer feeling, when Jameson touches on figures he particularly admires–Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes, and Gissing, to name a few. He has often enough indulged this impulse at book-length; hence there’s a special category or genre of work within his oeuvre, which, without losing critical measure, nevertheless functions as a celebration of and hommage to writers who are especially important for him. His first book, Sartre, is an example; Marxism and Form likewise celebrates the canonical figures of Western Marxism (and insinuates Sartre into their company). A cooler, but unmistakably appreciative, survey occupies The Prison-House of Language (the pages on Barthes and Lacan are especially warm); Late Marxism renews and expands the Adorno chapter of Marxism and Form. The most conflicted, and therefore the most interesting case is the book on Wyndham Lewis, in which Jameson advocates for a literary achievement committed to a politics he abhors.

     

    Brecht and Method belongs in this special category of Jameson’s “appreciations” or homages. And yet this new book also belongs in a category of its own–for I’m tempted to declare it the most unusual work within Jameson’s corpus. Jameson’s writing, for all its difficulty and despite the above-noted dispassion, has always been very dramatic: it generates a continuous anxiety about critique’s, revolution’s, or socialism’s ambitions and possibilities, their possible success or failure, enacted in his own “dialectical sentences” as a chronic self-consciousness about his own project’s success or failure. His topic, whether a problem or a figure, has invariably been a vehicle and a model of our (your, my, Jameson’s, everyone’s) entrapment in the prison-house of “ideological closure,” and of our efforts to break out. Throughout his career, Jameson stipulates this “mimetic” or performative ambition for “dialectical writing” as such, under whatever names (theory, critique, scriptible). In his homages, the celebrated figure (Adorno, Lewis) appears in unavoidably heroic colors, and the rhetoric takes on the “stoic” and “tragic” accents Jameson has praised in the prose of Lacan (Ideologies of Theory 98, 112). Such a rhetoric seems tailor-made for Brecht–politically partisan avant-gardist, cathexis-object for Cold War passions, refugee in America from Hitler during the war, state-sponsored dramaturge to the Stalinist GDR after it (this last, I expected, an especially potent theme, for few critics are as alive as Jameson to the ironies of “success” in the fields of cultural production).

     

    So I’d assumed Jameson’s Brecht was foreordained to a certain angst-charged treatment. But Jameson surprises us again, with a book almost–what to call it? tranquil? serene?–in its assurance of and pleasure in Brecht’s interest and relevance, his “usefulness,” Jameson avers, for us, whether we ever realize it or not. The book’s ease and brevity–a mere 180 pages in 20 bite-sized chapters–present the reader with (by Jamesonian standards) an uncharacteristically low-pressure reading experience. As for tone, Jameson’s usual accents of the “stoic” and “tragic” are gone–so much so as to tempt recourse to the word “comic,” if we stipulate that comedy needn’t mean laughs. Brecht at least has laughs (Jameson, no), but if “comedy” seems an anomaly in this connection, that only attests the extent to which Brecht’s art manages to circumvent, or dialectically outleap, the stale binary of comedy/tragedy. And as if in some bodily sympathy with or methexis in the Brechtian gestus or “method,” Jameson’s own prose here seems for once to have left behind his chronic preoccupation with the danger of critique’s unavoidable stylistic or textual effects devolving into mere Weltanschauungen or ideologies (here the stale binary is “optimism/pessimism”).

     

    This is why Brecht and Method seems to me a book unlike any of Jameson’s other writing. For once, anxieties programmatic elsewhere in his work are gone. They are apparently not, at least in connection with Brecht, “useful,” and “usefulness” is a motif sounded from Brecht and Method‘s opening sentence:

     

    Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new and unexpected value of his posterity (let alone for his “postmodernity”), as rather for his usefulness–and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold-War market-rhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days. (1)

     

    Useful, Jameson explains, in the way that Brecht judged drama, or learning things, or Stalin (!) useful: useful as provocation to new thought, as substance of new experience, useful above all as (that eminently useful thing) pleasure. Brecht’s assumption that useful things will normally afford some degree of pleasure helps motivate the (by Jamesonian standards) uncomplicated pleasures of this unique Jamesonian text.

     

    Hitherto, Jameson has been chronically wary of pleasure, or at least of the ideological uses to which it is put, especially in the discourses of theory. Plaisir, jouissance, dérive, íntensité: such watchwords of blissful consummation usually figure, in Jameson’s quotation marks, as symptoms of a premature and unearned utopianism, a sort of “infantile leftism” of theory generally, and of “The Ideology of the Text” (see the mid-’70s essay of that title) in particular. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983) Jameson worked to redeem Barthesian plaisir and jouissance from the naïveté of Barthes’s more libidinous disciples, by infusing it with the angst, terror, and dread of “the sublime” (shortly to become a key theme of the crucial “Postmodernism” essay [1984]). In Brecht and Method, “the sublime” itself is reconfigured as encompassing, not oppositional to, the ridiculous. Brecht’s power to conflate the revolutionary apprehension of history with farce becomes a kind of sublimity (an effect not, however, unique to Brecht: think of Joyce’s “Ithaca,” Pound’s Hell cantos, Eliot’s “Mrs. Porter and her daughter / Washing their feet in soda water”).

     

    Elsewhere in Jameson, the effect of such a conflation of binaries would be to augment the angst of both; here the gesture affirms an aplomb that is as much Jameson’s as Brecht’s. As usual, Jameson’s own corpus provides a theorization of this new Jamesonian textual effect. In the 1977 essay “Of Islands and Trenches,” Jameson opens a space for the “neutralizations” of antinomic ideological closures (stale binaries), to enable “the production of utopian discourse.” I don’t call Brecht and Method a “utopian discourse,” nor does Jameson call Brecht’s work utopian, but “neutralization” will do as a characterization of the book’s unprogrammatic program.

     

    Or I should rather say, its “method”–in senses the book develops from its very title on. A long if shaggy tradition (from, say, Pascal and Swift, to, say, Hans Gadamer and Sandra Harding) has indicted the ideology of “[scientific] method” as a content-neutral procedural program, thereby guaranteed to produce unbiased, objective “truth” in its results. (Positivism, as someone joked, is a game whose first rule forbids you to know what you’re talking about.) Marxism’s claim to be a “science” has always defied this supposedly non-partisan premise (though too rarely in a way to assimilate hermeneutics, as Jameson urges it should in Marxism and Form). Jameson recalls Lukacs’s effort, in “What is Orthodox Marxism?”, to deploy the notion of Marxism as a distinctive method of open-ended inquiry against the threat, under Stalin, of its calcification into dogmatism. In Jameson, as in his models, “method” (however named) must be autocritical, must question its own presuppositions, and distrust its results even as it elaborates them: it must anticipate and resist their reification and attempt, however impossibly, their dereification in advance. Operatively, this effort should enact that “unity of theory and praxis” that can figure for us here as one of Marxism’s longest-standing “neutralizations” of a sterile binary. And the locus for all this, not merely the model but the substance of Brecht’s “method,” is of course his practice as playwright, dramaturge, activist, and impresario. Jameson understandably shies away from talk of Brecht’s “aesthetic,” and he suggests that drama, since it is performance- rather than text-based, is generically more resistant to the reifications and (some of the) other liabilities of the aesthetic that the term has come to connote in the usages of recent theory.

     

    All of this matters because orthodoxy and dogma are terms so often mobilized against Brecht’s “didactic” achievement. Jameson cites the Horatian ut doceat, and remembers that Brecht’s urge to teach has long disqualified him from validation as “modernist,” to the extent that modernism proscribed didacticism (compare dismissals of Pound on similar grounds), or indeed, discursiveness itself (Eliot’s denigration of “meaning” as a lure, like the meat the burglar brings for the watchdog; cognate suspicions of any meaning or sense legible by the codes of a received semiotic still inspire, and encumber, the higher-brow cultural productions of postmodern “theory”). We’ve already seen Jameson, in the sentence quoted above, warding off any conjuration of a “postmodern” Brecht; likewise the question of Brecht’s modernism barely ripples the surface of the text. (Mo/pomo: another binary neutralized.) Rather, Jameson dissolves the complaint of Brechtian “doctrine” itself, daring any complainant to specify, on any issue, a particular Brechtian dogma, let alone a system of doctrine or a doctrinal cast of mind more generally. (Brecht’s detractors make this point negatively when they dismiss Brecht as a failed dogmatist, his “doctrine” falling short of systematic consistency, and lapsing into mere plumpes Denken.) Rather, Jameson insists, Brecht’s “method, and even his dialectic” (Brecht and Method 25) is an un- and anti-systematic, un- and anti-doctrinal “pragmatism” among whose choice gambits is to “turn a problem into its solution, thereby coming at the matter askew and sending the projectile off into a new and more productive direction than the dead end in which it was immobilized” (Brecht and Method 24)–a “method,” please note, inverting Jameson’s own usual method, which is to problematize what had hitherto passed for at least working solutions. Not that Brecht doesn’t problematize–the point of the famous (too-famous) “V-effect” (from the German Verfremdungseffekt: Jameson explains that the usual translation, “alienation effect,” misleadingly assimilates Brecht’s term to Marx’s Entfremdung). Jameson translates Verfremdung, with an eye on Shklovsky’s ostranenia, as “estrangement,” and stimulatingly operates some “Estrangements of the Estrangement-Effect.” The point here is that “estrangement” provides another “neutralization” of Brecht’s supposed dogmatism problem, for if the ruse of dogma is to internalize itself in the subjectivity of the addressee, the V-effect tends the opposite way. “Estrangement,” we might say, proves to be not only “interpellation[‘s]” conceptual opposite, but also its specific antidote.

     

    So “doctrine,” too, is “neutralized,” and therewith Brecht’s “ideology.” We evoked above Jameson’s “neutralization” of the Weltanshauung impasse, usually locatable on a continuum with ideology; Jameson here prefers to speak of Haltung and gestus, and he posits early in the book a Brechtian sinité, a Chineseness of bearing or “persona” (Jameson here declares a heavy debt to Anthony Tatlow), “paradigmatic of the expansion of Brecht’s work into that ultimate frame of the metaphysic or the world-view”:

     

    Hermeneutics of belief, hermeneutics of suspicion: the option is suspended when the Tao itself opens up around a secular and cynical Western writer like Brecht, who cannot be assumed to believe in this immemorial “world-view”… but takes it as what Lacan would call a “tenant-lieu,” a place-keeper for the metaphysics that have become impossible. Thus, not a “philosophy” of Marxism exactly (for such a philosophy would immediately fall back into the category of degraded world-views… ), but, rather, what such a philosophy might turn out to be in a utopian future…. Yet Brecht’s theatricality saves his sinité even from this provisionality…. (Brecht and Method 12)

     

    Above I tried “tranquil,” “serene,” even “comic” as possible characterizations of this book’s unique Jamesonian effect or affect: perhaps I can now propose “Chinese” as the (admittedly recherché) mot juste for what Jameson, with a finely calculated diffuseness, variously evokes as “the Brechtian”: an “idea of Brecht,” a “general lesson or spirit” not identifiable or simply coextensive with the written corpus itself. Its usefulness, Jameson urges, is nothing less than that of “offering Marxism its own uniquely non-Western–or, at least, non-bourgeois–philosophy in the form of a kind of Marxian Tao…” (Brecht and Method 30). The projection of “our” tradition’s ideological binaries onto Chineseness “neutralizes,” even estranges, the charge intrinsic to them in a Western habitus of psychology, thus enabling their function as if (in the Althusserian formula) “without a subject”: that Brecht’s Chineseness is an elected rather than a native affinity promotes rather than vitiates this effect (an instance, you might say, of “problem” made over into “solution”).

     

    We hear less and less nowadays of the “without a subject” problem or project, as if this utopian aspiration of a generation ago has been tacitly dropped as unworkable. Jameson’s implication is that Brecht met this predicament long before theory did, and negotiated it better, and in still “useful” ways (on which, more later). I have just indicated how Jameson projects all this under the rubric of “doctrine”: “Doctrine” is the first of the three headings under which the book’s twenty brief chapters are gathered. The second is “Gestus,” a term which has long encoded for Jameson that Barthesian “writing with the body,” that penumbra of textual effect or affect exceeding the mere words on the page (see the opening sentence of Sartre) that has been Jameson’s quiet, career-long (and mostly unnoticed) heresy, in our age of the linguistic turn, against the orthodoxy of nothing-outside-the-text. Brecht’s working methods–workshop, collaborative, the whole process from composition through final performance best envisioned as continuous rehearsal (perpetual revolution by other means)–his gestus as writer and dramaturge, in short, similarly sublates Brecht’s own subjectivity into the work. The book’s third section, headed “Proverbs,” implicates similar motivations and/or effects in Brecht’s penchant for (reinvented) folk- and peasant-forms, in which something like a collective voice submerges the individuality of a particular speaker–an effect as salient in Brecht’s poems (since Romanticism, the normatively most “subjective” of genres) as in his playwrighting–and, Jameson’s closing “Epilogue” suggests, as characteristic of Brecht’s embrace of the modern as of his penchant for settings suggestive of “Chinese” remoteness (Asiatic despotism).

     

    Jameson’s almost nostalgic evocations here of Brecht’s sense of the modern (the human scale and heroic mystique of Lindbergh’s “The Spirit of St. Louis”), sheerly as writing, make an interesting contrast with similar passages in Fables of Aggression: Jameson’s prose here evokes not only the Brechtian impersonality, but also something of the nostalgia for the personality itself of Brecht’s greatest Anglophone emulator of the ’30s, W. H. Auden, in contrast with the Lewis-like energy and Luciferianism inflecting Fables of Aggression. The “Epilogue” to Brecht and Method is a prime example of Jameson’s power as a writer to offer hommage in the evocation less of a verbal style (Brecht’s, Lewis’s) than of a whole authorial body language or scriptible–“sentences,” as Jameson once characterized it, “whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (Ideologies of Theory 21).

     

    That remark was prompted by the example of Barthes, and Barthes’s constant presence throughout Brecht and Method makes a good note to close with, not least because Jameson argues that by way of Barthes, Brecht has had his impact on “theory” no less than on theater. Not merely that Barthes’s Mythologies is satirical “very much in the tradition of Brecht,” nor even that it “paved the way for the triumphant entry of the estrangement-effect into French theory” (the “denaturalizations” of Mythologies as estrangements distinctly Brechtian in their humor no less than in their political point). Brecht’s mobilization of theater “as the very figure for the collective and for a new kind of society… in which the classic questions and dilemmas of political philosophy can be ‘estranged’ and rethought” (Brecht and Method 11) transmitted itself first of all in the example of Brecht’s own “theoretical” writing, more recently by way of Barthes, to the practice of “theory” as the present generation has known it.

     

    Indeed, in what I take to be the most elusive and difficult pages in the book, Jameson massages the “proairesis” of S/Z into something rich and estranged to a degree exceeding any Verfremdung of Brecht’s that I can recall. (If Mythologies seems, yes, Brechtian, S/Z is very clearly, or very obscurely, something else altogether.) Jameson assimilates “proairesis” to “autonomization” (one of the richest motifs of his work of the past decade), a de-linking or de-motivating of coincident features or effects that he registers sometimes as a loss (as with the famous parody/pastiche binary in the “Postmodernism” essay), but at other times as a gain (as here, when the “becoming-autonomous” of familiar associations permits their dissociation–or defamiliarization, or estrangement–into new configurations). In this very specific case, Jameson projects the Barthesian “proairesis” as a delinking of “agents” from their “acts”–a way of putting it that would seem to owe much to Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic metaphor.” Whereas Kant (Lukacs’s type of the bourgeois philosopher) reposed all virtue in our assent to the categorical imperative to own our acts (choose our fate, enjoy our symptom), Brecht and Barthes, Jameson suggests, aspire to a syntax in which “acts” are, as it were, their own agents–or rather, projectable in a hermeneutic which contrives to bypass the problem of their agency altogether.

     

    This is not merely to reprise, but to reinvent the now-passé prospect of a radical defamiliarization of the ideology of the bourgeois self, and I regret the extent to which my brief sketch refamiliarizes it again. Jameson’s beautifully evocative prose evades, as mine cannot, those familarizations, in the process enacting the utopian impulse specific to “theory” itself, of a writing not reducible to the property of the writer. And (at the risk of making it sound familiarizing), it collects a useful sense from those pages of S/Z, the most impenetrable in the book, in which verbs in the infinitive become, by fiat, “names” (“What is a series of actions? The unfolding of a name”). And by elaborating a single instance in which Brechtian “methods” project themselves into applications never more than merely latent in Brecht himself, Jameson here makes the case, proposed at the outset of the book, for Brecht’s continuing “usefulness.” It’s a usefulness predicated on the continuing rehabilitation of modernism in Jameson’s work of the 1990s,1 that “uneven development” whereby the still-modern, in our postmodern time, emerges as more modern than we. A cognate hope for the continuing potencies of an uncanonized, still-fresh, modernism animated the book on Lewis–but in a very different key: the reinvention of Lewis needed ingenuity in its evocation and evasion of Lewis’s retro-ness (not to mention his rightist politics). The “relief” of these predicaments in Jameson’s meditation on Brecht’s centenary gives us a new register of the Jamesonian scriptible as well as new senses of, and uses for, Brecht our post-contemporary.

     

    Note

     

    1. See my “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0,” PMC 9.2 (January 1999).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. London and New York: Verso, 1986.
    • Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

     

  • Grotesque Caricature: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as the Allegory of Its Own Reception

    Stefan Mattessich

    Department of English
    Loyola Marymount University
    blzbub@msn.com

     

    Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. Warner Brothers, 1999.

     

    Such was the fashion, such the human being; the men were like the paintings of the day; society had taken its form from the mould of art.

     

    –Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists”

    It is a historical fact that irony becomes increasingly conscious of itself in the course of demonstrating the impossibility of our being historical.
     

    –Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”

    “He was like a father.”

     

    –Nicole Kidman1

     

    Stanley Kubrick’s final movie was released last summer to almost universal disappointment.2 Except for those accounts that read like copy produced by a hired public relations firm, the critical appraisals were more or less the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a “decorous gavotte… more studied than a fashion shoot” (J. Hoberman in The Village Voice, 59); “portentous” and “bizarrely devoid of life” (David Denby in The New Yorker, 86); “the work of an artist who long ago stopped paying attention to the world around him” (Stuart Klawans in The Nation, 42); “generic and hokey, like a tendentious art house version of a holiday television commercial” (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 22). The film has been variously called ponderous, soporific, passionless, sex-phobic, sexist, frozen, and dead. These varied sources of critique all claim that Kubrick has violated an organic principle–linked to metaphors of sexuality, development, internal consistency, and verisimilitude–in the choices he makes. This trope of a violated organicism remains active especially when the critic understands Eyes Wide Shut in the context of Kubrick’s other work. For the claim is not that Kubrick has made another cold or lifeless, sterile or impersonal film and demonstrated once more his disinterest in psychological realism (this has always been in evidence), but that the trait of coldness in this case fails to live up to the Kubrick standard: Eyes Wide Shut fails because it is not internally consistent with his corpus as a whole. Thus Michiko Kakutani can center her critique on the bad choice of an “intimate, emotional material fundamentally at odds with the director’s cool, visual intelligence and lapidary style.” The two principal characters, Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman), are “not meant to be caricatures like the blackly comic characters in ‘Strangelove’ or faceless cutouts like the astronauts in ‘2001.’ They’re supposed to be fairly ordinary, albeit privileged, New Yorkers: a doctor and his wife who live in an art-filled apartment on Central Park West–yuppies who like to smoke a little pot before bed.”

     

    The problem with Eyes Wide Shut, in other words, is that it imports the techniques of caricature into the intimate space of realism, and this grotesque conjoining both offends sensibility and exposes as a precondition for sensibility itself that the two modes remain distinct. The film doesn’t “work”; it proceeds, as David Denby says of Cruise’s Bill, “without purpose,” wandering aimlessly through an “indistinct” landscape where “everything seems wrong,” because of a fatal hesitation between the merely stereotypical and the three-dimensional, the type and the person, dream and reality, and also between the abnormal and the normal (86). Denby, for instance, writes that watching it “we experience no special violation of the normal–the normal is vaguely and dispiritedly ‘off’ from the beginning” (86). This “off” quality resembles neither drama nor comedy; it denies not only the norm, and not only deviation from the norm, but also the “special violation” of the normal that disciplined art is said to give us.

     

    I’d like to start with this “special violation” as I explore the curious way that Eyes Wide Shut prefigures its own (mis)reception precisely in the “bad” choices Kubrick makes. That Kubrick expected his final filmic caricature to be misrecognized, I argue, can be inferred even from the film’s title, in which a failure to see is inscribed within perception itself. A sensibility that accepts caricature as a mode only if it clearly cues the reader to its specific non-realist functions misses the fact that caricature has often worked without such cues. That is, caricature has always been grotesque in the sense that it combines forms (think of Goya’s monsters and animalized faces in the Los Capichos and Disasters of War series) and blurs generic boundaries (think of the “Flaubertian irony” in Madame Bovary that comes from applying caricature to realist subject matter).

     

    Historically, caricature has also gone hand in hand with social and political critique, utilizing techniques of exaggeration, typecasting, and catechretic abuse to satirize the pretensions of the ruling classes. In Britain, caricature played a conspicuous cultural role during the American War in the late 1770s, and then again during the wars with France beginning in the 1790s. And in nineteenth century France, caricature flourished particularly around the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870.3 Its privileged target in this period was the bourgeoisie and its cultural pretensions, which shifted gradually from a self-idealizing romanticism to a fetishizing realism of the downtrodden and dispossessed. By the the time the bourgeoisie began to consolidate its power in the 1850s, both romanticism and realism bore the stigma of philistinism. In response, writers and artists honed caricature into a weapon against this new romantico-realist hegemony. In “The Essence of Laughter,” published in 1855, Baudelaire distinguished between an “ordinary comic” quality at work in representations of social manners or inter-personal situations, and an “absolute comic” quality which elevated particular examples of humor (caricature, commedia dell’arte, English pantomime) into the more exalted function of genuine critique. As Paul de Man writes of this essay in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” the “absolute comic” designates not a relation between subjects (“man and man”) but between the subject and the material discursive element by means of which he comes to distinguish himself from the non-human world.4 This relation implies an internal fracture of the subject, a double-minded negotiation of, on the one hand, an experience given in its chaotic or unbound totality, and, on the other, the linguistic medium of the latter’s conversion into intelligible events or forms. Language turns this two-fold ironic subject into a sign, a category, a meaning which is prior to its empirical determination. The absolute comic “experience,” according to de Man, is therefore predicated on the impossibility of projecting a self into the world before its encounter with language, and hence before its enmeshment in the problems of reflection and reason. It implies a necessarily inauthentic relation of the self to its experience that makes possible a process of interminable demystification of those structuring discourses at the heart of the “real.”

     

    For de Man as for Baudelaire, social rationalization can be observed only in a mode of strange self-implication. What makes caricature a modern cultural form is the way it takes aim at those authentic gestures that cover over or deny the event of a deeper rationality so dexterously concealing itself in the non-rational, the immediate, or the experiential. Caricature, as an art form rooted historically in a fascination with physiognomic and/or pathognomic classifications of people into types, uses categories to destabilize categorization itself as one trait of a bourgeois sensibility; it blurs the lines of differentiation and upsets the language-world that makes identity–as a site stabilized over and against what it is not–possible. It’s therefore ironic to suggest that Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is grotesque for the way it juxtaposes the generic simplifications of caricature with the psychological and emotional depth of realism. For realism has always been a target of caricature insofar as those depth-effects entail the possibility of an authentic position for the subject and the world that subject inhabits. Thus in choosing to mix drama and comedy, Kubrick draws far more solidly on historical precedent than critics seem willing to grant.

     

    For Eyes Wide Shut is indeed a caricature in the more precise sense of the absolute comic: its structure at a fundamental level is the relation between self and world-as-discourse, the self as it comes to the forms of its own self-presence. Baudelaire characterized this delimitation in terms of a fall, both the Fall and more literally the falling down that envelops the subject in its own facticity and hubris. As de Man puts it, “The ironic, two-fold self… constitute[d] by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling… from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification” (214). This knowledge, which again yields no authentic understanding, inscribes the subject in a repetitively “self-escalating act of consciousness” (216) that generates a more and more fictive sense of its universe. The subject refuses a “return” to the empirical world in favor of its own progressively ironic fictions about the world; it exacerbates the difference between the real and the fictive in order to maintain the maladjustments of that demystified knowledge.

     

    This excessively fictive and maladjusted world constructed at the expense of the real describes the “off” overdetermination of Eyes Wide Shut, although the film involves an additional claim about the already fictive nature of the real world set off against it.5 That is, it draws us as viewers from the side of the real into a fiction that then presents us with the fiction of the real. It caricatures the two central characters, couples, marriage, ordinary ’90s yuppies, and also dramatic form, iconic movie stars, and finally itself as a movie inscribed in an institutionalized practice of production and consumption. It caricatures that empiricist pragmatism with which we, as critics, artists, or consumers, look upon the world without seeing its discursive nature, or look at a text without reading its specificities in terms of an ironic self-implication in the world that text represents. This peculiar involvement of the spectator in the flat, aimless, affectless space of Eyes Wide Shut helps to account for the discomfort implied in the various dismissals of the film–the way it hits home in the very untimeliness of its odd representations. Some critics have suggested that Kubrick was mistaken not to have set the film in the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Traumnovelle or alternatively to have updated it with details appropriate to the contemporary New York it portrays. Yet, the estranging anachronisms of its setting, no less than its stilted dialogue, its hermetic and generic interiors, its random or pointless plot twists, work to thwart the aesthetic categories which require of narrative art that it seduce its viewers via identification and dramatic unity. By disrupting these narrative expectations, Kubrick guarantees its judgement as a bad movie, but unlike most bad movies, not before it questions our own assumptions about contemporary society and the role and function of art in it.

     

    Eyes Wide Shut speaks to us about that society in the ways it fails as narrative. It is an allegory in the standard connotations of the term: i.e., in its thinness, its lack of substantiality, its second degree relation to more primary symbolic and expressive forms, its essential artifice. Allegory implies not modes of description and perception that secure an objective rendering of a world closely linked to the subjectivity of the perceiver, but an intertextual deviation into conventional figures, types, and rhetorical modes that is deliberately awkward vis-à-vis the standards of romantic or realist representation.6 Eyes Wide Shut, as an allegory, therefore works by not working, by focusing “’90s yuppies” in the lens of a caricature recent culture has tended to accept only when its objects are two bit hoods (Sterling Hayden in The Killing), sociopathic punks (Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange), failed writers (Jack Nicholson in The Shining), low class Irishmen (Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon), Marine drill sergeants (Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket), or various other socially marginal types populating Kubrick’s movies. That Bill and Alice might not make appropriate material for caricature implies a substance to the life they exemplify that Kubrick denies them just as he denies the characters of his previous films the possibilities of class mobility or social success. One of the most timely aspects of Eyes Wide Shut, then, is the wrench it throws in the increasingly rigid and mystified class machinery of American life in the ’90s–one symptom of which would be our desire to locate authenticity in the experience of people like Bill and Alice. Eyes Wide Shut exposes the fiction at the heart of that experience. The film conjures “fashion shoots” and “holiday television commercials” because it reads the world it depicts not as exceptional to these spectral aberrations but as modeled on them. No wonder, then, that art plays such a conspicuous visual role in the film. Almost every wall has paintings on it (and of all kinds, classic and modern, figurative and abstract): in apartments, in mansions, in doctor’s offices, in hospital foyers, in department stores. Bill and Alice “take their form from the mould of art,” and in this they verge on a caricature that draws attention to the film’s own mediated and rendered form. That their lives are also rendered by Kubrick is a literal truth as well as a figurative one; thus art in the film signals the intention of its own fictiveness to tell the story of a life that cannot take itself seriously because seriousness has become ideological, a mystification of the discursive medium in which that life unfolds.

     

    The film’s interest in the mediations of discourse is revealed in a number of details. First, it situates sex, sexual pleasure, and the sexualized body in highly conventional settings. We see the idealized female nude dressing up in a boudoir, peeing in a bathroom, slumped unconscious after overdosing on an eight ball in a rich man’s house, auscultated in a doctor’s office, dead in a morgue. Such scenes comment on the conventional way of seeing–rooted in the notions of perspective, determined by social and economic practices of the production and consumption of prestige, essentially masculine–at work in art, film, and advertising. This way of seeing is in turn linked to modes of social organization (the family, corporate back rooms, hospitals) that not only represent but elicit the body in the service of the reproduction of an expressly specular power. Likewise, the desire felt or articulated by the characters in the film is never separable from this reproduction, never more than the empty expression of an inwardness that has shrunk to an abstract point in the spectacles of that power. Desire here is not a substance but a structural effect, a symptom of a rationality whose form (transcendent, biunivocal) mirrors that of satisfaction (orgasm) itself, which is a transcendence (of will or consciousness) and also a “coming together” (as in the Lacanian formulation, “There is something of One” in the sexual relation [Feminine Sexuality 138]). Sex isn’t an act but a meaning in the film, albeit the meaning of action itself, and this sort of insight can only “come” at the expense of narrative conventions themselves uncritically assuming that meaning–through a fiction that subverts its own rational and orgasmic form.

     

    A second indicator of a discursive interest in the film occurs in the reaction Bill has to Alice’s articulation of her desire. The pot-smoking scene between Cruise and Kidman has been referred to by critics as the crucial moment of the film. Alice’s fantasy of a naval officer who stirs in her a profoundly erotic (and potentially destructive) passion holds down the one chance for a “free” desire capable of escaping its discursive straitjacket. Unlike Bill, who never speaks his desire or figures out what he (or anyone) wants, Alice’s disclosure feels genuine and constrains one to read the film in one of two ways: either it’s about the disruptive fantasmatic power of her desire, or it’s about rational Bill’s surprise that his wife could have such a fantasmatic desire in the first place. But these readings lead to the impasse of an inter-subjective logic which the film as a whole works resolutely to undermine. By granting Alice a psychological depth in this scene, one has to take seriously both Bill’s naivete and the drama of unconscious drives threatening to tear their marriage apart. (Most critics didn’t get beyond these interpretations and the double binds they suggest.) If one assumes, however, that the film intends to caricature the couple and their marriage, one discovers the trope of non-relation that governs the scene and that Kubrick announces in a shot of Alice looking at herself in the mirror as her husband caresses her. Critics have pointed out the lack of chemistry between Bill/Cruise and Alice/Kidman, in spite of their “real” status as a couple outside the film. But none of them consider this either as an intentional abyssal effect or an effect tout court that marks the film and asks to be read. Bill’s and Alice’s dislocation from one another indicates the caricature at work and the social critique that goes along with it. The film fails to take either Alice or Bill seriously in this moment because in fact its logic is that of an intrasubjective encounter with the discursive limits of narrative, social power, and the medium of film itself (signaled, most obviously, by the self-consciously hand-held camera that watches Kidman as she relates the fantasy).

     

    The story that unfolds from this scene, then, turns not around Bill’s tortured recognition of the sado-masochistic, jealous, and obsessive underworld of desire which the film literalizes during his subsequent Walpurgisnacht (the film is not psychoanalytic in the sense that it dramatizes psychosexual urges and repressions, and as such it could not in fact work if it were set in Vienna at the turn of the century). Rather, it turns around that limit where the fictive nature of “real” life becomes apparent. This is why we are watching Tom Cruise the star (for instance, of that Reaganite watershed and fascist fable Top Gun), not a doctor named Bill, wander the generic streets of downtown New York (an effect Kubrick curiously highlights for us by oblique references to the rumors of Cruise’s homosexuality). Cruise was chosen for this role to be the vehicle of the film’s commentary on an expressly spectral and reactionary social period exemplified by the glamour of movie stars. Bill/Tom is wandering through the fiction of his own allure, the fiction of a desire for power and in power that Kubrick links to a paternal metaphor when the pot-smoking scene is interrupted by a phone call announcing the death of an important patient, a nameless uptown New York patriarch. Bill/Tom leaves, tortured by black-and-white images of his wife fucking a naval officer, and pays his last respects with maybe the most bizarre gesture of the entire film: he places his hand on the dead man’s head and bows, while the latter’s hysterical daughter throws herself at him with wild declarations of love.

     

    This–rather than the pot-smoking scene–may in fact be the signal moment of the story, since it inaugurates the subsequent delirium at a decidedly comic, even absurd, register. Bill/Tom’s aimless quest is not intelligible as a psychological drama but as a search for the Law (of the Father) which structures that drama in its conventional forms. Bill/Tom’s search for the Law is ultimately futile; Kubrick withholds it from him (as both Bill and Tom, since the actor seems at times manifestly at a loss for what emotions to express) and from us, as we search the film for the principle of narrative intelligibility, the mark of symbolic difference stabilizing subjective and dramatic forms, the (political) economy of desire, and the pleasure principle of spectatorship. The loss of meaning that the film sustains is not, therefore, tragic or Oedipal, not that negation or beautiful dialectical death making possible a unification at the level of the idea. The form of that loss is double and ironic: a loss of loss itself, a loss of that “special violation of the normal” which redeems us in our normality through the function of a catharsis. What is lost, in other words, is the normal as the precondition for a transgression. What remains is a film without any transgressive intensity at the inter-subjective level, presenting a number of possible readings, none of which can be taken seriously, even that of the non-serious itself. This is why Sydney Pollack’s millionaire articulates the abyssal logic of the film by telling Bill/Tom that the scene of sacrifice at the orgy had been staged, thus reducing even that abyssal logic to a content which then loses its ability to frame what happens. This lack of substantiality, this double and ironic intention, in fact reveals itself at nearly every point in the film where intertextual reference is active or where tropes of symmetry and inversion are used. Such, for instance, is the pun at work in the Russian’s costume store, where Bill, looking for the mask he will wear to an orgy that will turn out to be fake (on more than one level), finds a “real” orgy taking place between two Asian men and the costume store owner’s daughter. The result of such ironies is not so much vertigo as estrangement and deflation, an inability on the part of the viewer to find the Law or mark of difference that would resolve either the narrative or our spectatorship into a clear meaning.

     

    Few of the critics of Eyes Wide Shut, I suspect, will be moved by the foregoing interpretation to revise their initial negative judgments. Even if the film’s allegorical structure can be demonstrated, it remains a failure, a broken narrative machine that doesn’t manage to persuade the viewer of the cultural timeliness of its interpellations, or of the value for culture of such ironic modes in the first place. In the ’90s, it no longer seems enough to turn the lights on the audience and expose its desire for symbolic order as I am suggesting Kubrick has done–much in the same way, for instance, that Robert Rauschenberg did in New York during the 1965 premiere of Merce Cunningham’s now infamously controversial dance piece, Winterbranch.7 Indeed, another semantic element of resistance to a double and ironic approach in the initial responses by critics to Eyes Wide Shut was a tendency to situate the film in the cultural parameters of a bygone time, the ’60s or early ’70s. J. Hoberman writes, “Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated–as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up–if not weirdly anachronistic” (59).

     

    This tactic to periodize Kubrick by way of dismissing the film’s ironic specificities as dated throwbacks to a time of cultural experimentation that no longer bears on the present underscores the interpretive stake in the film’s allegory of its own reception–that is, of the way that its critics reproduce the same discourses (symbolic, romantic and realist, natural, authenticating) that allegory undermines. The same problem of a form that establishes itself at the expense of an empirical world (and its reference points in narrative) which I have discussed in terms of caricature recurs here at a more distinctly temporal register. By locating and containing the allegory at work in Eyes Wide Shut as an anachronistic exhibit of the now periodized ’60s, one assumes a temporal structure in history that, not coincidentally, allegory itself undoes and challenges.8 To turn the light on the audience, to make reception a component of art or of its interpretation, to assert irony as the trope of a (discontinuous) time, engenders today a very pronounced boredom and even hostility in cultural circles. But the disavowal of this discontinuity–and it can work by rejection or by the kind of fetishism observable in the current retro interest in styles and music of the ’60s and ’70s–combines two cases of cultural misprision: on the one hand, it assumes an historical movement which is causal and successive (we have “outgrown” the conceptual and anti-humanist indulgences of the ’60s and embrace a newly serious focus on the realism of our emotional lives); and on the other hand, it blinds itself to the insight, articulated in criticism by writers like Paul de Man, that history itself has become a limit-concept, impossible except precisely in the modalities of performative reading. For de Man, temporality and history are distinct from one another. The former is a cognitive (or tropological) category implying the ideological determination of an event which happens in a mode of non-dialectical contradiction. This contradiction is felt as a force or “power” that resists any meaning and, as such, cannot occur in a temporal mode. It is historical, however, because it locates the singular point (or limit) of the real within its synthesis as an (intelligible) event. History may not be temporal, then, but time is the allegory of history to which every reader inevitably submits.9

     

    To periodize the moment of this allegory and this sense of history (which is, on my account, what a critic like J. Hoberman can be said to do when he disavows the “druggy” aspects of Kubrick, or Antonioni for that matter) is to miss the historical sense of that moment. It amounts to a negation of the ’60s and a clear symptom of an ideological closure at work in the ’90s (a closure that is not innocent even when it finds a voice in people whose stated aims are progressive and critical). The reception of Eyes Wide Shut takes on its greatest interest when it comes to be understood as one example of a cultural trend to distance the ’60s and repress the ironic, contingent, and critical energies the ’60s generated. The last twenty years of American cultural life have been a time marked by precisely this kind of repression, and at many political, social, and economic levels. Eyes Wide Shut attempts to speak of this repression in its “art house” portentousness, to give it shape and resonance for Americans now. For what we see empirically blinds us to the rationality of our social existence in a late capitalist dispensation and to the discourses that underpin its deep abstraction. Those discourses are pragmatic, psychological, and privatizing in nature–neo-liberal might be the right word–and their amazing intractability to critique today demands strangely asynchronous artifacts and statements precisely such as Eyes Wide Shut: repetitions, ironic provocations, returns to the recent past where, in effect, our blindness has been keeping us awake.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Quoted by Jack Kroll. Kidman, of course, is referring to Kubrick.

     

    2. A welcome exception turned out to be Lee Siegel’s very good chastisement of the critics in the October, 1999 issue of Harper’s. He astutely analyzed the refusal to see (or read) the movie as a symptom of an “art-phobia” which resists or even prohibits the production of art that does more than “reflect [one’s] immediate experience” (77). Although his notion of art seemed at times a little too uncritically “high,” it did allow him to raise important questions about the critics’ unwillingness to see the irony and doubleness at work in the film’s representation of contemporary life.

     

    3. See Judith Wechsler’s book A Human Comedy for an account of the prevalence and functions of caricature and satire during these periods. Baudelaire makes a similar statement about 1830 and 1848 in his essays on caricature.

     

    4. Baudelaire’s term for that to which the absolutely comic subject relates is “nature,” understood by de Man as “precisely not a self” (213), and as such an intrasubjective and discontinuous space of reflection where the subject encounters the materiality of language as that element of categorization and self-identity prerequisite for an understanding of one’s existential place in the world. As such, the absolute comic entails an irony about the empirical and inter-subjective world of experience as an already rationalized space that has been naturalized. On my reading, this sort of irony works to expose in this experience the abstraction it conceals and as such constituted for a writer like Baudelaire a critical apprehension of bourgeois life.

     

    5. De Man makes it clear that the ironic subject of his discourse in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” differentiates its fictive universe from the empirical world and holds to this distinction by way of asserting the priority of its fictions. The fictive and the real are irreconcilable, and this remains the precondition for insight into the mystifications to which that subject is always prone. The nuance I would like to add here is that the fictive register also makes possible a demystification of the real as already a fiction, that utopic space of a rationalized society in a capitalist mode of production that Baudelaire, for instance, knew one could only understand (after, say, 1848) through the elaboration of discourse and the materiality of language.

     

    6. I am thinking here of de Man’s reading of Rousseau in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” and in particular his reading of Julie’s garden in La Nouvelle Heloise. The representation of this garden runs through traditional topoi of gardens and suggests not a close observation of nature (or the expression of intimate correspondence between the subject and nature) but a deliberate deployment of conventions, types, and traditional figures. De Man sees in the literary antecedents of this representation, and in how explicitly those antecedents are marshaled by Rousseau, the presence of an allegorical rather than a symbolic or “Romantic” mode. Like Julie’s garden, Eyes Wide Shut concerns itself, over and against that Romantic mode, with a discursive mediation that envelops not only characters in the story, or the story itself, but its spectators in the real world it allegorizes.

     

    7. Winterbranch, Cunningham’s most famous succes de scandale, was a bizarrely disjointed, random meditation on the numerous ways his dancers could fall down. Rauschenberg, who was responsible for lighting the show, decided to leave the dancers in darkness (with the exception of Cunningham himself, who carried a flashlight) and douse the audience in a white glare. Meanwhile, a musical score by La Monte Young, which consisted of screeching and grating noise, filled the theater. The audience reacted with outrage. The event, occurring some time before de Man wrote on Baudelaire in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” or worked out in print his sense of the irony in the German word Falle (signifying both fall and trap), nonetheless seems indebted to his particular line of reasoning.

     

    8. For de Man, once again in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” allegory implies an “ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future” (226). Allegorical duration, like irony (curiously distinguished but also linked to allegory in a “knowledge” or insight that is “essentially the same” [226]), targets the assumption of a temporality organized according to successive self-present moments (or periods). It grasps the present in its essential negativity as the place of an historical implication that is more radical for the displacement of empirical categories it entails.

     

    9. Another way of putting this would be to say that, although between time (as cognitive and tropological) and history (as singular and performative) there is an “absolute separation” (Aesthetic Ideology 134) and no possibility of a dialectical mediation, history only appears in the tropes which signify a subject’s fallen status within the allegories it constructs. De Man mentions Jauss’s theory of reception in this regard, arguing against his contention that reception can be the model of the historical event. My own sense of this problem is that indeed reception can be exemplary in this fashion, with the important qualification that the structure of its exemplarity be precisely that of allegory itself. The singularities of history are inaccessible except in the languages or discourses that convert them into temporal events, and the ethical question of respecting those singularities unfolds nonetheless in acts of language and reading that repeat (rather than reproduce) the violence of their repression. The goal, it seems to me, is to hear in one’s language the echoes of its own historicity.

    Works Cited

     

    • Baudelaire, Charles. “Some French Caricaturists.” Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvet. London: Penguin, 1972.
    • de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.
    • —. Aesthetic Ideology. Trans. A. Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
    • Denby, David. “Last Waltz.” The New Yorker 26 July 1999: 84-88.
    • Hoberman, J. “I Wake Up Dreaming.” The Village Voice 27 July 1999: 59.
    • Kakutani, Michiko. “A Connoisseur of Cool Tries to Raise the Temperature.” The New York Times 18 July 1999: AR1.
    • Klawans, Stuart. “Old Masters.” The Nation 9 August 1999: 42.
    • Kroll, Jack. “Cruise and Kidman: Our Friend Stanley.” Newsweek 22 March, 1999.
    • Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Trans. J. Rose and J. Mitchell. New York: Norton, 1982.
    • Siegel, Lee. “Eyes Wide Shut: What the Critics Missed in Kubrick’s Last Film.” Harper’s October 1999: 76-83.
    • Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy. U of Chicago P, 1982.

     

  • Otherness

    Tamise Van Pelt

    Department of English and Philosophy
    Idaho State University
    vantamis@isu.edu

     

    As half of a signifying binary, the “Other” is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.1 In the twentieth century, this Platonic mix of ontology with alterity informs the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who is countered by Simone de Beauvoir, who influences feminist philosophers, who influence theorists of political, racial, and sexual identity–forming a great chain of inquiry into being.2Additional philosophical perspectives on Otherness abound, and Hegel (via Kojève), Heidegger, and Sartre all present important statements on alterity. In this century, Jacques Lacan’s place in the history of alterity is unique, however, because Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Specifically, Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds–a problem grounded in solipsism rather than narcissism.

     

    Unlike his contemporaries, Lacan postulates a gap between an Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject and the ego. These twin decenterings imply Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary registers, since the “decentering of the Subject” is another way of saying that the Subject and the ego inhabit disjunct registers. Likewise, the disjunction between the symbolic linguistic Other and the imaginary mirroring other signifies a decentering of the former from the latter. Taken together, these two decenterings articulate a post-humanist subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of the “Other” as a person, particularly a person who is marginal or subversive in some way. This conceptual disjunction between theories of a humanized Other and Lacan’s radically alterior Otherness suggests a gap between the two approaches. Ironically, though, discussions that humanize the Other frequently cite Lacan, so it seems valuable to ask why.

     

    Lacan’s rhetoric in and of itself invites his readers to overlook his decentering of the Other. Sometimes Lacan refers to the symbolic Other as the big Other and the imaginary other as the little other, but for the most part Lacan simply uses capitalization to distinguish the Other from the other. Though no reader would misread “Subject” for “ego,” the much subtler rhetorical distinction between “Other” and “other” can easily be missed–especially if readers don’t supplement the explicit discourse of alterity with the implicit discourse of the registers. Since Lacan discusses the Other topically without any explicit reference to the registers, his readers are often called upon to supply the implicit theoretical context. Envision the fate of the casual reader of Lacan who, interested in British literature, picks up Seminar VII on ethics to read “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis.” This reader sees: “In many cases, it seems that a function like that of a blessing or salutation is for the courtly lover the supreme gift, the sign of the Other as such, and nothing more” (152). Lacking the implied but unspecified discursive context of the registers, this reader can easily take Lacan’s “sign of the Other” to be a token received from an “Other” person. Only familiarity with Lacan’s theory of the registers allows his reader to grasp the intrapsychic “sign of the Other” as a decentering connection with the signifier in the unconscious that the courtly lover mis/takes for transcendence. Similarly, when Lacan writes in Seminar II that “the obsessional is always an other” he is talking about the obsessional’s ego-involvement, not the obsessional’s loss of identity. Again, Lacan’s point assumes the registers, allying the obsessional with the rhetorically explicit “other” and alienating the obsessional from the discursively implicit “Other.” Lacking the framework of the theory of the registers, a reader would be hard pressed to unravel either of these Lacanian invocations of alterity.

     

    The currency of the idea of the Other in theory generally makes the reading of the decentered Other in Lacan even more difficult. The contemporary idea of the Other rooted in area studies inscribes itself in theories of race, class, and gender and reinscribes itself in post-colonial theories of national identities, both placed and displaced. Consequently, a plethora of critical discourses use the term “Other” to signify quite differently than Lacan. In identity politics, the decentering of the Subject can lead to an equal and opposite reaction: a centering–an entification–of the Other as object, an “it” denied the status of a “Thou.” Thus, readers familiar with theoretical discourses defining Otherness as race or class or gender or nationality see Otherness as attribute rather than alterity.

     

    Since alterity is crucial to an understanding of Lacanian Otherness, and since the Other of contemporary theory means many things to many discourses, it will be useful first to distinguish the Other of identity theories from the decentered Other of Lacanian analysis. With this Lacanian decentering of the Other in mind, I then want to explore the way two theorists of identity deploy Lacanian Otherness: Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the registers that distinguish otherness from Otherness in his reading of colonialist novels; Judith Butler disputes the validity of the distinction between the registers on which Lacan’s decentering of the Other is based. In dialogue with theories of identity, Lacanian theory insists on the radicality of Otherness, an alterity that has frequently been obscured by the residual humanism implicit in the construction of the Subject as a political entity. Finally, this overview of Otherness will examine the relationship between the decentering of the Other and phallic discourse to argue the value of a politics that listens for the Other rather than speaking on its behalf.

     

    The Other in Theories of Identity

     

    Many contemporary theories of identity use the Other as half of a Self/Other dichotomy distinguishing one person from another. For instance, pointing out an oppositional racial distinction, Terry Goldie’s “The Representation of the Indigene” states: “At least since Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘not-self’ for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves” (233).3 Racial selves rather than subjects are at issue here in Goldie’s distinction between white people and black people. The same interpersonal dichotomy of race appears in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory”:

     

    Troubled by the nagging contradiction between the theoretical justification of exploitation and the barbarity of its actual practice, [colonialist fiction] also attempts to mask the contradiction by obsessively portraying the supposed inferiority and barbarity of the racial Other, thereby insisting on the profound moral difference between self and Other. (23)

     

    Here, an implicit humanism enters the anti-humanist discourse on race, imported by the idea of the racial “self.” Similarly, Goldie discusses the racial distinctions between the Self and the Other in terms of specific attributes, saying that “[p]resumably the first instance in which one human perceived another as Other in racial terms came when the first recognized the second as different in colour, facial features, language” (235). Now Goldie makes the previously implicit humanism explicit, but not without reason. In critiques that explore inhumanity, humanizing the Other makes a political statement. This statement, in turn, reminds us that the discourse of political rights and the discourse of humanism are twin intellectual legacies, two branches of the tree of Enlightenment knowledge.

     

    Discourses of gendered selves parallel discourses of racial identity in the tendency to humanize the Other. Thus, a parallel distinction appears in feminist discourses discussing woman as Other, particularly those discourses opposing patriarchy. Where political rights are at issue, discourses refer both to woman as an Other human being and to the Subject as a political entity, a theoretical move that unifies the “Subject” as a person subjected to the law of the land. For instance, adopting the language of oppositional feminism, Raman Selden4 generalizes about feminist theory: “In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of ‘other’, ‘colonised’ by various forms of patriarchal domination” (249). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex emphasizes the humanism that is at stake in the Self/Other dichotomy, writing of the Biblical Genesis: “… humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him… He is the Subject, he is the Absolute–she is the Other” (xxii); this “expression of a duality… of the Self and the Other” is socially and historically pervasive, de Beauvoir points out (xxii). Of de Beauvoir’s and Virginia Woolf’s feminisms, Selden continues: “Being dispersed among men, women have no separate history, no natural solidarity; nor have they combined as other oppressed groups have. Woman is riveted into a lop-sided relationship with man: he is the ‘One’, she the ‘Other’… and, à la Virginia Woolf’s ‘looking glass’, the assumption of woman as ‘Other’ is further internalised by women themselves” (210). Here, Selden’s analysis of the woman’s internalization of her attributes parallels Goldie’s analysis of black identification above, and both invoke a discourse on Otherness that has Platonic rather than psychoanalytic roots.

     

    National identity, too, presents itself in terms of Selves and Others, adopting the plural construction characteristic of discourses about identity. Here, Homi Bhabha discusses the post-colonial condition: “[The Derridean entre] makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist, histories of the ‘people’. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others” (“Cultural Diversity” 209). Similarly, Xiaomei Chen concludes a discussion of “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse” with the following analysis that treats East and West as implicit human agents:

     

    … it seems imperative that we at least attempt to find a reasonable balance between Self and Other, between East and West, so that no culture is fundamentally privileged over its Others. Perhaps the realities of history cannot allow such a balance to be fully realized. Indeed, it is even necessary to affirm that these master tropes are necessarily veiled by the fictional. What must be stressed here is then even imagining such a balance–surely one of the first requirements of a new order of things–can never be possible without each Self being confronted by an Other, or by the Other being approached from the point of view of the Self in its own specific historical and cultural conditions. (89)

     

    The idea here, that Otherness is both agentic and a matter of point of view, is taken up by Judith Butler in a discussion of sexual identity when she writes in Bodies that Matter that “gay and lesbian identity positions… constitute themselves through the production and repudiation of a heterosexual Other” (112). As Butler’s analysis shows, Otherness can be relative, making the interpersonal dichotomy of Self and Other endlessly reversible.

     

    Judith Butler’s critique of the “exclusionary logic” of the Other as it signifies in the Self/Other binary of identity points toward the limited usefulness of oppositional constructions. Lacanian logic, moreover, demonstrates the intrapsychic resistance that manifests when just such signifying binaries as white/black, West/East, or heterosexual/homosexual merge with a fixed, imaginary ego identity. Like intrapsychic resistance, political resistance has a use, particularly where brute survival is at issue. However, resistance denies the epistemological fact that in order to replicate the Self/Other signifying difference–in order to shape a foundational symbolic distinction–both terms necessarily implicate each other. In many of the discussions above, Chen’s “fundamental privilege” is less the issue than foundational, epistemological privilege. Civilized, superior Western white male heterosexual colonizers are foundationally privileged; we know in advance and without appeal to specific circumstance or historical context that this is so. Foundational difference makes a truth claim about the world; foundational difference prescribes positions, inscribes hierarchy, proscribes recombination. In and of themselves, such differences are descriptive at best, their insistent fixity rendering them insufficient for the analysis of dynamic problems, whether the problems are intrapsychic, social, or political. Discourses that align the Other with the marginal or with the subversive avoid a confrontation with complexity, just as JanMohamed’s exemplary redistribution of the attribute of “barbarity” from colonizer to colonized, above, stops short of an inquiry into ego identification as a transitive process. Allied binaries and binary realignments only build a thicker epistemological foundation.

     

    Thick epistemology is vulnerable epistemology. As JanMohamed’s portable barbarity points out above, multiple binaries align and realign, attributes can be assigned and reassigned. Infelicitous combinatories undermine foundational privilege, whether the claim of privilege operates as an entitlement or an accusation. So long as there is an investment in the foundational signifying difference, the emergence of the combinatory’s undesirable elements will arouse resistance. For instance, Melville Chater’s paean to the new South African Union in a 1931 edition of The National Geographic sets up and reinforces a typical colonialist foundational distinction between hard-working, intelligent whites entitled to the prosperity they enjoy and lazy, superstitious blacks (who presumably have what they have “earned” as well). When Chater’s foray over the veldt discovers a “forlorn scene” of “dismal shacks, where some frowzy men and women and a plethora of dull-faced children [lounge] in the sunshine,” he rescues his foundations: “Yet they [are] whites, or, rather, ‘poor white,’ representing a South African aspect of that retrogressive type which is found in many lands” (441). When this relativizing of whiteness seems inadequate to explain “so formidable a number as 120,000 to 150,000” poor whites, Chater attributes the deterioration of the poor whites to “that too-easeful existence, based on slave help and game aplenty” (441). Having inadvertently tainted the white superiority he has constructed as the outcome of white hard work by the insertion of slavery into his discourse, Chater reasserts his foundation: in a stunning attempt to purify white superiority, he redistributes a poor white squatter to the black half of his equation by comparing the squatter’s language to that of “the American ‘black-face’ comedian”(441). Chater’s inadvertent denaturalizing of blackness has stumbled upon a blackness constructed by whites for white entertainment. He has entered the territory of the combinatory of combinatories, the Lacanian unconscious–the Lacanian Other.

     

    A more contemporary and purposeful recuperation of race from the stasis of foundational difference is effected by Honduran comedian Carlos Mencia, who jokes that Los Angelinos meeting someone from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala inevitably ask “Now, what part of Mexico is that?” Mencia exposes the exclusionary work of the foundational binary that identifies race in Black/White terms with a logic that reintroduces the combinatory: If you’re white, you’re white in L.A. Go to Miami and you’re still white. If you’re black in L.A., go to New York and you’re still black. Referring to himself, Mencia points out that in L.A. he’s a Mexican. “If I go to Miami, I’m a Cuban. And if I go to New York, I’m…” He gestures to the audience who respond “Puerto Rican.” “See,” he concludes, “You know what I’m talking about.” Shunted off to the racial unconscious by a foundational Black/White race-ism, Mencia’s own race must be articulated by indirection. Thus, the unary signifier “Hispanic” remains in the linguistic Otherness and only enters the joke obliquely, as a signifier for another signifier–[Hispanic]/Mexican, [Hispanic]/Cuban, [Hispanic]/Puerto Rican. Mencia’s comedic tactic parallels the strategy Benita Parry praises in Bhabha’s post-colonial theory: Bhabha “show[s] the wide range of stereotypes and the shifting subject positions assigned to the colonized in the colonialist text” in order to liberate “an autonomous native ‘difference’” from the binary European/Other (41).4 Similarly, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter works with the exclusionary logics of both male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to open up the combinatory expressions of sexual orientation these foundational binaries preclude. Since these latter examples of linguistic identity have ventured into the territory of complex Otherness evocative of Lacan’s theory of the registers, this is a good point at which to distinguish clearly the doubling of alterity in the symbolic and the imaginary.

     

    There is no Other of the Other:
    (but there is an other of the Other)

     

    The journey that eventually leads Lacan to the aphoristic insistence that “there is no Other of the Other” (there is no meta-language beyond language) begins with a denaturalization of paranoid psychosis. The ideas Lacan forms during his medical training lead him to counter the prevailing psychiatric view of psychosis as a biologically-based personality trait by positing a developmental phenomenology he only later finds in Freud. Interested in folies à deux, and especially as such madness manifests in women’s “inspired” speech and writings, Lacan is very much a man attuned to the surrealist 1930s.5 What he writes for medical journals he revises for surrealist journals, but his interest is consistently in the otherness of the other–an interest that culminates in mirror stage theory. The interpersonal here seems undeniable. Lacan writes about the crime of the two Papin sisters. He writes his thesis on the psychotic Aimée’s attack on a famous French actress. Moreover, Lacan’s many references to Hegel’s struggle for recognition between the Master and the Slave certainly imply an agon between people rather than a contest within. Lacan’s mirror stage essay points out that a pigeon matures via an encounter with another of its own kind. Even the mirroring moment can be read as involving the infant and the mother. All in all, early on, Lacan seems deeply involved with the interpersonal, the social, even the cultural.

     

    Read against the retrospect of his later interests, mirror stage theory appears to be Lacan’s failed attempt to explain the dynamics of an intrapsychic alterity in interpersonal terms. Not until his theory of the registers does Lacan achieve the post-humanist position he seeks. The dominance of a formative phenomenology in the earlier essay gives “The Mirror Stage” its interpersonal slant. In the theory of the registers, by contrast, the phenomenal is folded within the structure of language and intrapsychic structure is irremediably fissured with the gaps between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Since none of the registers is confluent with the others, Lacan avoids the problem of a seamless solipsism. He avoids a tabula rasa subjectivity passively constructed from without as well. So, it is not experience but experience’s imagistic residue that figures in the imaginary register. It is not the many instances of communication with other people but language as a whole that signifies in the symbolic. Nor is the model without constraint since the real is always there as an unimaginable, unsignifiable limit on what would otherwise constitute a psychic en abîme of mirroring or signification without end.

     

    Models of the psyche necessarily inform analytic praxis, and Lacan’s theory of the registers is his attempt to come to grips with the theory/practice gap. While Schema L as the sketch on Lacan’s chalkboard is not the model on the analyst’s couch, there is an intriguing and ambiguous family relationship between the two. Though the terms may be the same, the contexts differ, and working across the contextual divide can make Lacan’s theory appear to contradict itself, rendering straightforward terminology paradoxical. The problem of discussing alterity is made all the more difficult for Lacan because he continually engages the divide between the interpersonal situation of analysis in practice and the intrapsychic dynamics that underwrite whatever interventions analytic practice makes. Practice motivates the transition from mirror stage theory to register theory as the latter is announced in Lacan’s manifesto on the function of speech and language in the Freudian field. His paper takes issue with non-Lacanian forms of analysis that he finds therapeutically inadequate precisely because of their emphases on the interpersonal. Increasingly, Lacan insists that analysis must be a process in which the analyst creates a therapeutic context where the analysand’s intrapsychic processes are the only processes in play. The cadaverous, “dead” position of the Lacanian analyst is meant to deconstruct analysis as humanistic interaction. Thus, Lacan’s discussion of Otherness must be read with special attention to context for three reasons: because Otherness is a term that Lacan himself doubles in his structural theory of the registers and in his dynamic theory of desire, because it is a term that defines an intrapsychic process and determines an interpersonal practice, and because it is a signifier shared by the discourse of analysis and by everyday language.

     

    Since the idea of otherness is a term whose name–“the other”–remains the same but whose implications change, Lacan provides many interpretations of otherness. Some of the examples contrast the other with the Other and emphasize the distinction between the registers. In his second seminar, for instance, he compares the “radical Other” as one “pole of the subjective relation,” with the “other which isn’t an other at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation which is always reflexive, interchangeable” (321). Bearing in mind that Lacan is discussing a subjective rather than an intersubjective relation, and that the reflexive coupling of other with ego is an intrapsychic phenomenon for which another person is, at best, a prop or a pretext, consider this elaboration of the analyst’s alterity: the analyst “partakes of the radical nature of the Other, in so far as he is what is most inaccessible” to the extent that the analyst’s own ego is “effaced” and the analyst’s resistance is not aroused (324). The analyst’s refusal to play along with the game dictated by the ego of the analysand throws the analysand back into a confrontation with the intrapsychic gap between the other and the Other, since expecting to confirm the former the analysand encounters the latter. So, “what leaves the imaginary of the ego of the subject is in accordance not with this other to which he is accustomed, and who is just his partner, the person who is made so as to enter into his game, but precisely with this radical Other which is hidden from him” (324). Without another person to play along with the habitual imaginary game, the subject looks to the intrapsychic Other. If the analysis is successful, the Other will yield to the subject its Truth.

     

    Appropriately, one of Lacan’s exemplary readings of radical alterity occurs in his Seminar III on psychosis, where he presents an analytic case study exploring the speech of a paranoid young woman. In this reworking of his analytic roots, Lacan presents a clear decentering of the imaginary other from the symbolic Other. The disjunction is evident in Lacan’s redefinition of psychotic projection–which might seem to be classically imaginary–as a mechanism that has been “placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject” and returns “from without” (47). Lacan’s patient is a “girl” who tells him about her “run-in in the hallway with an ill-mannered sort of chap,” a married man who was also the illicit lover of her neighbor. While passing her in the hall, the man had devalued her by saying a dirty word to her. But she herself had spoken to him first, saying “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” [the charcutier, who specializes in pork]. He had responded: “Sow!” In his analysis, Lacan’s own response to the girl is a mistake, he admits. He interprets. He shows his analysand that he understands her comment “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” as a reference to pork, and by doing so he “enter[s] into the patient’s game… collaborat[ing] in [her] resistance” (48). Though he does not explicitly articulate his failure in terms of the registers, the distinction is clear. Lacan, through his display of “understanding,” has reinforced the patient’s imaginary at the expense of asking, symbolically, why there is something in the patient’s speech to be understood. The analytic question is: “Why did she say, I’ve just been to the butcher’s and not Pig?” (48-49).

     

    Lacan goes on to insist that the interaction between the girl who might have said “Pig!” and the man who calls her “Sow!” is not an instance of his maxim that in speech the subject receives her message in an inverted form. In other words, here, the message should not be constructed as a symbolic exchange since the message at issue “is not identical with speech, far from it” (Sem III 49). The girl herself is enmeshed in the desire of her neighbor and the neighbor’s lover, a desire of which she is censorious to the point of wondering whether it is possible “through taking legal action, to get them into hospital” (49). She had been friends with the neighbor until the love affair interrupted the friendship; afterwards she intruded on the couple while they were dining or reading or “at their toilet” until they threw her out. So Lacan rereads the conversation’s intrapsychic implications: “Sow, what is that? It is effectively her message, but is it not rather her message to herself?” (49). The analysand’s ego has met her alter ego in the hallway; the moment is a mirror.

     

    Lacan connects this case study to his schema of subjectivity:

     

    … Is it the reality of objects that is at issue? Who normally speaks in reality, for us? Is it reality, exactly, when someone speaks to us? The point of the remarks I made to you last time on the other and the Other, the other with a small o and the Other with a big O, was to get you to notice that when the Other with a big O speaks it is not purely and simply the reality in front of you, namely the individual who is holding forth. The Other is beyond that reality.

     

    In true speech the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first. (50-51)

     

    Having thus clarified the impersonal nature of the big Other, Lacan notes that in the paranoid insult, the Other is not in question since the patient doesn’t recognize the Other “behind him who is speaking. She receives her own speech from him, but not inverted, her own speech is in the other who is herself, the little other, her reflection in the mirror, her counterpart” (51). Though she seems to look at another person, the girl sees only herself.

     

    The distinction Lacan makes here between the Other and the other, between the symbolic and the imaginary, involves the pact of language. Part of the process of recognition for the Subject as a subject involves the risky business of addressing the absolute Other beyond all that is known. Addressed to another person, the very Otherness of speech puts that person in a position to be recognized by the speaker and to recognize the speaker in return because both speakers share a symbolic commitment of which neither speaker is the origin. Committed speech is discourse, which for Lacan “includes acts, steps, the contortions of puppets, yourselves included, caught up in the game… An utterance commits you to maintaining it through your discourse, or to repudiating it, or to objecting to it, or to conforming to it, to refuting it, but, even more, to complying with many things that are within the rules of the game” (51). With these relationships between the registers, alterity, discourse, and the pact in mind, I want to return to two discourses on identity and Otherness that address Lacan’s register theory directly–one by invoking it, another by repudiating it–in order to explore the link between discourse and symptom.

     

    Discourse, Symptom, and Otherness:
    “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

     

    The following two examples of the discourse of identity theory–Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” and Judith Butler’s “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”–offer critiques engaging Lacanian Otherness. As critiques, these essays are discourses about discourses, meta-discourses in which Otherness signifies. Because meta-discourses offer levels of complexity, symptoms appear in such discourses as deflections of the discursive flow as such. Briefly, the Lacanian symptom, like the letter in the “Purloined Letter,” is “a fourth element, which can serve… as signum” (Sem I 280). The symptom operates to link the imaginary and the symbolic into signs which figure against the real of “the organism as ground” (280). Slavoj Zizek points to the element of repetition involved in the Lacanian symptom, identifying the symptom as “a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency… if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates” (155). This element of consistency conferred by the symptom is characteristic of what Lacan calls the “narcissistic Bildung” of the ego and relates to the repetitious character of empty speech. Since theoretical terms easily empty themselves of meaning (as theory’s opponents tirelessly point out), the “Other” may mark a symptom in a discourse of identity.

     

    In this first encounter between identity theory and Lacanian analysis, Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the Lacanian registers to make a distinction between forms of colonial discourse. A useful error–possibly a symptom–occurs in JanMohamed’s essay at the point where the discourse of post-colonialism disrupts the discourse on the registers forcing an either/or choice between irreconcilable constructions of Otherness. This error provides a helpful comparison to a similar error in Butler’s chapter, an error productive of a symptom at every level of Butler’s discourse, from the literal, to the paradigmatic, to the interpretive. Since from the analytic point of view both the error and the symptom locate discursive truth, both JanMohamed and Butler tell the truth about the encounter between theories of identity and the Lacanian registers.

     

    The registers appear as unified and unifying descriptive categories when Abdul R. JanMohamed writes “I would argue that colonialist literature is divisible into two broad categories: the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’” (19). Next, JanMohamed goes on to transcend the categorical in a sophisticated contrast between the work that aggressivity does in the ‘imaginary’ text and the work that mediation and problematization do in the ‘symbolic’ text. Having employed a Lacanian discourse to frame his discussion of the colonialist novel, however, JanMohamed writes that some “symbolic” novels are “conceived in the ‘symbolic’ realm of intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity but are seduced by the specularity of ‘imaginary’ Otherness” (19-20). This sudden collapsing of the distinction between the registers in the error “‘imaginary’ Otherness” is jarring to any reader familiar with Lacan. Abdul R. JanMohamed has broken the law!

     

    Since JanMohamed’s essay provides exemplary instances both of discursive creativity and of discursive failure as they impact the relation between the writer and his reader, I want to review the sequence above in two ways. First, I will look at the interpersonal symbolic law of discourse that, once invoked, binds writer to reader in an intrasubjective and impersonal pact. The writer’s thesis invokes Lacan’s discourse of the registers and asks the reader to be bound by the pact that this discourse constitutes. This is a symbolic pact par excellence since neither the writer nor the reader originate the discourse but both agree to be bound by its rules in order to allow the possibility of a meaningful exchange, in order to agree on the terms by which they will produce meanings together. Since the writer has selected a Lacanian discourse, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ cease to be overdetermined signifiers in the linguistic unconscious. ‘Imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ now invoke a set of relations defined by Lacan’s discourse, a discourse in which these terms signify in quite specific ways. Because and only because he has involved his reader in this pact of the registers, JanMohamed is free to explore the implications of the encounter between Lacanian theory and the colonialist novel. As the writer elaborates the particulars of the work of the imaginary in the colonialist novel, the reader can appreciate JanMohamed’s insight because the reader sees the colonialist novel in fresh and interesting ways and because the fruitful encounter between the Lacanian imaginary and colonialist fiction reveals new and unforeseen implications of the imaginary register itself. Creativity thus requires the law; creativity is paradoxically both bound to the law and unbound by it.

     

    The moment JanMohamed writes “‘imaginary’ Otherness,” he breaks the law of Lacanian discourse and cancels his pact with the reader. Until the violation occurs, the reader is bound by the pact called “Lacanian discourse”; “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “Otherness” hold out the possibility of meaning-making (though they do not guarantee it). At the breaking of the pact, the terms cease to be terms within a discourse; released from the pact they are signifiers only. Lacking their discursive support, “imaginary” and “Otherness” thus signify randomly. Because he has broken his Lacanian pact with the reader, the reader has no possible way to grasp what JanMohamed might be trying to signify by “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” No context can stabilize what fractured discursive syntax has set free. Since signification outside the pact is idiosyncratic, the effect of the broken pact is to change “imaginary” and “Otherness” into random markers that preclude creativity in both the writing and the reading. The markers come and go–in and out of the linguistic unconscious–for reasons that may or may not be related to the colonialist novel, the stated project at hand. Once the pact has been broken by the writer, the reader can always declare the discursive failure an accident and continue as if the pact were still in place–but the reader is now on alert and any additional error will render the text indecipherable in terms of its stated project.6

     

    Besides the rupture of interpersonal give and take between writer and reader, the collapse of this fruitful contact between the discourse of the colonial novel and Lacan’s discourse of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay signifies intrapsychically as the deformation of one discourse by another. If repeated, “‘imaginary’ Otherness” becomes a symptom rather than an error, and the essay manifests a subjective encounter with Otherness far beyond its post-colonial critique. Consequently, the discursive symptom provides a profitable alternative to the sterile fusion of Lacanian theory with the discourse of post-colonialism. Because Lacan’s distinction between the registers implies a decentering of Otherness that JanMohamed cannot maintain while simultaneously committed to a post-colonial construction of Self and Other, the reader is moved to ask why there is a symptom in the discourse at this point. It seems that the entified Other appears here as the symptom of a post-colonial commitment that runs deeper than the Lacanian discourse to which the writer is ostensibly committed. Since the Other of humanism cannot signify save by suturing the gap between the imaginary other and the symbolic Other, this is precisely what JanMohamed does. The repressed post-colonial humanism returns in the symptomatic fusion of “‘imaginary’ Otherness.”

     

    The discursive symptom manifest in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s essay signifies psychoanalytically because he intends to use the Lacanian registers to frame his exploration of the colonial novel. A very different discursive symptom arises in Judith Butler’s influential critique of Lacanian analysis, Bodies that Matter, a critique in which she doubts that the registers signify at all. Here, a fusion of Lacanian registers pervades Butler’s discussion of “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” While both Butler and JanMohamed effect symptomatic erasures of the Lacanian other, the symptomatic erasure in Butler manifests distinctively–as an inability to accurately quote Lacan’s own text in spite of her extraordinary scholarly rigor.7 The misquotations enter her discussion from the moment Butler denies the distinction between the registers, but the symptom is prefigured by her insertion of Lacan’s structural theory of the registers into his essay on the mirror stage.

     

    Butler’s chapter conflates psychoanalytic models that are theoretically and historically distinct–both Freudian models and Lacanian ones, and this conflation lays the theoretical groundwork from which the symptomatic misquotations arise. Thus, Butler reads “On Narcissism” against The Ego and the Id, though the former belongs to a mid-Freudian model that differs significantly from the last “entified” model of a psyche composed of Id-Ego-Superego. Similarly, Butler uses Lacan’s mirror stage essay to argue for the imaginary nature of the phallus in “The Signification of the Phallus”–even though the former essay provides a coda to Lacan’s early phenomenal and developmental model of the psyche while the latter condenses a portion of the seminar on desire, a seminar reflecting Lacan’s structural theorizing at its strongest. As we have earlier seen, though mirror stage theory and register theory do share signifiers, their variant theoretical models constellate variant signifieds; if the terms remain the same, their meanings have structurally altered. However, the alteration fails to make its way into Butler’s critical assimilation of the latter model to its predecessor.

     

    Butler’s most overtly symptomatic collapsing of the Lacanian registers reveals itself in her persistent error in directly quoting the text of Lacan’s early seminars. Like JanMohamed, Butler substitutes the symbolic Other for the mirroring other. It is as if, having merged mirror stage theory with register theory, Butler is literally unable to see a significatory difference between the two. As a result, Butler continually fails to distinguish the imaginary other from the symbolic Other, a collapse of terminological distinction equivalent to suggesting there is no difference between the Subject and the ego. Since the distinction within alterity is so central to Lacanian theory generally and to his model of the Subject of the unconscious specifically, other and Other are definitional. Moreover, the other and the Other draw a precise and consistent distinction between the mirroring imaginary and the symbolic treasury of signifiers. By continually effacing the imaginary other with the symbolic Other, Butler indeed does what she explicitly states as her essay’s goal: she “rewrit[es] the morphological imaginary” (72) though the rewriting is far more literal than her subheading implies.

     

    Where Lacan speaks of the body finding its unity “in the image of the other” with a small o (Sem II 54), Butler rewrites “in the image of the Other” with a capital (75), and where Lacan writes “the imaginary structuration of the ego forms around the specular image of the body itself, of the image of the other,” small o, imaginary other (Sem II 94), Butler again revises to “the image of the Other” with a capital O (76), collapsing Lacan’s straightforward structural distinction and begging the issue of structural difference. Butler perpetuates the error in her own discussion, commenting that “the specular image of the body itself is in some sense the image of the Other” (76) and that the “extrapolating function” of narcissism is the “principle by which any other object or Other is known” (77). There is no small irony in Butler’s symptomatic misquotation of Lacan given her rigorous inclusion of parallel phrases from both French and English texts, and carefully documented citations from both the French and English seminars.8 But as Lacan points out, the unconscious is always visible, right there, literally spelled out in the symptom in the text–and Butler’s text proves no exception to this Lacanian rule.

     

    The symptomatic disappearance of the imaginary other in Butler’s thoroughgoing critique of the mirror stage essay parallels the conflation of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay. In JanMohamed’s criticism, the symptom arises at the moment of discursive incompatibility between the post-colonial paradigm of Self and Other and the Lacanian distinction between an other and the Other as the unconscious locus of language. Is there a similar discursive rupture in Butler’s argument? Looking more closely at Butler’s actual text may be helpful here. The substitutions begin in citations in which Lacan specifically mentions the body in connection with the registers–so Butler’s central concern in Bodies that Matter and her theory of performativity are both at stake when the misquotations begin. Her page-long explication of Lacan’s mirror stage theory in which five symptomatic substitutions of the symbolic Other for the imaginary other occur also addresses the body, specifically the “organs [that] are caught up in the narcissistic relation” (76-77). The following page of text, on which the symptomatic substitution occurs three more times, argues that the previously generic “organs” may be “the male genitals” (77), and if so, Lacan’s mirror stage theory grounds itself on a specifically masculine narcissism. Butler concludes that the narcissistically engaged masculine organs now condition and structure every object and Other, and as a result, the “extrapolating function” of narcissism raised to an epistemological principle becomes phallogocentric. In short, a phallic imaginary is masculine and any explanatory function such an imaginary might serve is inherently phallogocentric. Therefore, it is from Lacan’s phallogocentrism that Butler’s lesbian phallus liberates us, providing a subversive substitute for the hetero/sexist Phallic Signifier that she herself has taken great pains to introduce into the Lacanian imaginary register.

     

    Here, more explicitly, is the problem. Lacan theorizes that there is a privileged signifier in the symbolic register and that this privileged symbolic signifier is the phallus. Butler wants to argue against the real of the body, wants to argue that the body is “a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (2). Thus, Butler’s theory of materialization stops short of the radical constructionist claim that the body is only a symbolic construct. She finds an appealing alternative to constructionism in Lacan’s early theory where the imagined, alienated body appears in the mirror. This Lacanian mirroring replication supports Butler’s theory of materialization. But Lacan did not stop with his mirror stage theory, and though he once situated the body helpfully in the imaginary, he later positioned the phallus in the symbolic register–where Butler very much needs it not to be if her argument for a projective materialization of a phantasmatic phallus is to succeed. Consequently, a collapsing of Lacanian paradigms and issues ensues.

     

    After arguing for the imaginary nature of the penis, Butler goes on to suggest that Lacan has simply renamed the penis the phallus (80); further, that the penis is the “privileged referent” to be symbolized by the phallus (84); and finally, that the relationship between penis and phallus (and by implication between imaginary and symbolic) is the relationship of signified to signifier (90). But issues of significatory slippage are not issues of reference, nor are they issues of meaning, and this series of conflations simply reiterates the earlier fusion of psychoanalytic models, creating a theoretical pastiche against which Butler then argues with great sophistication and subtlety.9 Given the persistent insertion of the symbolic into the imaginary, and the assimilation of the symbolic construct phallus to the image of the penis, it is not surprising to hear Butler conclude that “if the phallus is an imaginary effect, a wishful transfiguration, then it is not merely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called into question, but the very distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary” (79). But just whose wishful transfiguration does Butler’s text demonstrate, we may want to ask, since the symptom, Freud tells us, marks the location of the wish and it has clearly been Butler’s wish to do away with the distinction between the registers all along. Since Butler’s critique merges Lacan’s phallic discourse of desire with his theory of the registers, I next distinguish betweeen these two in “The significantion of the phallus,” Lacan’s most controversial essay. Returning the phallic signifier to the symbolic register, in turn, shows how the signifying phallus generates a post-humanist Otherness.

     

    “Man’s [sic] desire is the desire of the Other”

     

    Lacan’s hypothesis of the phallic signifier offers a many-layered theory of unconscious Otherness at odds with any conscious marking of any human being as an “Other.” While the Lacanian unconscious locates power in Otherness, the phallic signifier, by contrast, locates power in subjectivity. Unlike the unity of the imaginary imago, which provides a simple referential image of an other, the symbolic phallic signifier constrains Otherness by buttoning a signifier, an identification, and a discourse together into one neat package. In the wildly overdetermined signifying multiplicity of the symbolic register, the phallus provides a determined and determining force. It is precisely the phallic propensity for self-replication that inseminates the reproduction–the reiteration as Butler calls it–of the Subject. What is at issue in Lacan’s polemic “The Signification of the Phallus” is the predominant role of this phallic signifier as the Aufhebung of signifying difference per se. Since this is a far more complex idea than either the decentering of the Subject or the gap within alterity, we will proceed slowly. Lacan insists that seven years of seminars have brought him to the conclusion that he must “promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of the signified” (284); he must insist on the priority of the marker over its meanings. Freud’s discovery, which predates Saussure’s retroactive linguistic explication of it, “gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications: namely that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark” (284). Thus, the active, agentic function of language resides in mark-making, and signifying is an active rather than a reflective process.

     

    That a subject is the product of a linguistic unconscious should not be taken as evidence of this subject’s “cultural” construction (284), nor should a subject be seen as the product of an “ideological psycho-genesis” (285). Lacan sees Horney’s feminist social-psychological analysis as the latter and dismisses all such “question-begging appeal to the concrete” (285). Appeal to the concrete is beside the Freudian point. The only laws that interest Lacan are the laws that govern the other scene of the unconscious, the laws of combination and substitution–of metaphor and metonymy–by which signifiers generate the “determining effects for the institution of the subject” (285). Lacan goes on to define the Other as that by which he “designate[es]… the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes” (285). The logic of the signifier is thus anterior to the production of meaning, the “awakening of the signified” (285)–suggesting that meaning is discovered rather than made wherever the unconscious is in play.

     

    Lacan next invokes his theory of the registers to reiterate his argument for the symbolic character of the phallus as a privileged signifier. The phallus of Freudian doctrine cannot be assigned to the imaginary register because it “is not a phantasy” (285). Nor is it constrained by the biological real of “the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes” (285). “For the phallus is a signifier,” Lacan concludes, having made his case for the location of the signifying phallus in the symbolic register. But it is a signifier with a difference from other signifiers. The phallus is a signifier that can “designate as a whole the effects of the signified” (285). We can tell that a phallic signifier is present by its effects. And what are these effects? The linguistic fate of the speaking being is to be unable to articulate need save as a demand that empowers the Other as a repository of love. The residue of inarticulable need returns from this Otherness as desire.

     

    Need/demand/desire. Lacan reiterates the relationship between the three: “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second” (287). Thus, while real needs can be satisfied, imaginary demands may persist–opening a gap generative of desire. This intrapsychic formula for desire leads Lacan to think relationally, and so he goes on to rework the role of the Other in terms of the sexual relation. Now, the sexual relation is rendered enigmatic because it is “doubly ‘signifying’” and ambiguous because of “the Other in question.” The ambiguity arises here from the fact that the Other has a place in both the discourse of the registers and the discourse of desire. Here, moreover, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal seem utterly and ambiguously mixed. Thus, “for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love, but… they must stand for the cause of desire” (287). Subject/object/Other meet Subject/object/Other Lacan seems to be saying–weaving a double discourse of the intrapsychic with the interactive.

     

    Since the sexual relation seems to involve the signifying phallus irretrievably in the interpersonal beyond of signification, I want to review the intrapsychic dynamics of this crucial Lacanian concept. First, Lacan has repeatedly told us that the signifier is binary–and he has exemplified this binary signifier in paired relations such as day/night, and red cards/black cards. The sexed (reproductive) relation is binary as well, feminine/masculine. Next, however, Lacan tells us that the phallus is a “privileged signifier,” a signifier of the sexual relation that we are to take in the “literal (typographical) sense of the term” (287). And how is this literal phallic pictogram of “the sexual relation” written? F Thus, Lacan concludes, the phallus is “equivalent… to the (logical) copula” (287). In the larger context of Lacan’s discussion of the binary symbolic signifier, the phallus is the foundation signifying as such. The phallic signifier, the foundational difference in and of itself, is rendered latent by the emergence of the signifying binary terms. “The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance” (288); thus “reproduction” disappears leaving behind the signifying difference “female”/”male” or “race” disappears from the foundational distinction “black”/”white.” Where has the phallus gone now that the paired terms appear? It is retained as the bar separating the terms, a signifier rendered inarticulable by the terms it leaves behind, yet simultaneously a signifier imperative to their signifying difference.

     

    To those who feel this reading of “The Signification of the Phallus” constitutes a recuperation of an irreparably phallogocentric discourse, I can only say that Lacan’s logic of the phallus captures the foundation in foundational thinking vividly. As a result, this phallogicentrism provides an extraordinarily valuable analytic tool. For me, the phallogicentrism of the essay is a discourse separable from the essay’s 1950s-style cultural discourse on the role of the man and the role of the woman in the comedy of intercourse. When Lacan begins to read the cultural “relation between the sexes” (289) in the essay’s concluding polemic against Melanie Klein, he lapses into a heteronormative construction of sexed Love that ends with an apparent affirmation of Freud’s intuition that there is “only one libido” and it is masculine. On first reading, years ago now, this section of the essay struck me as irrecuperably sexist and heterosexist–though it is imperative here to point out that the Freudian libido has nothing (no thing?) in common with the Lacanian imaginary. I can only note with some amusement that I found penciled in my margin of this concluding section “time for a lesbian deconstruction.” On this account, Judith Butler has read my desire. Now, since Butler has returned, I want to bring back theories of identity for one last encounter with Lacanian Otherness.

     

    “The unconscious is the discourse [emphasis mine] of the Other”

     

    The widespread insistence that Lacan’s brief écrit on the phallus is about dominance (and only dominance) rather than difference exemplifies the kind of foundationalism Lacan indicates by the phrase “having the phallus.” Moreover, folding this foundation back into an imaginary identification–presuming that one is oneself the “Other” of a Self/Other binary–is an instance of “being the phallus.” Gayatri Spivak notes just such a phallic politics of identification in “the fierce turf battles in radical cultural studies in multiracial cultures as well as on the geo-graphed globe, where the only possible politics seems sometimes to be the politics of identity in the name of being the Other” (159). Preferring the symbolic to the imaginary (as Lacan himself does), Spivak applauds those who stand up for the rights of groups with whom they are not primarily identified. Playing the F card (whether the phallic investment is in sex, race, class, or nation) may well be the solution to putting one’s own identity concerns on the table–both for Lacan and for his critics–but in terms of the registers, this solution refuses the encounter with the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. Instead, the primarily identified analyst understands rather than listens; knows in advance rather than finds out. Consequently, phallic foundationalism is a tactic with which Lacan does not agree, though it is a tactic to which he is not himself perpetually immune, especially when he is caught up in polemics over the practice of psychoanalysis.

     

    In matters of politics more generally, Lacan remains skeptical, feeling that those who oppose oppression today will, once empowered, commit the very oppression they accuse. He compares the idealistic reformer to Hegel’s belle âme. The beautiful soul lives “(in every sense, even the economic sense of making a living) precisely on the disorder that it denounces” (Écrits 126), enabling us to “understand how the constitution of the object is subordinated to the realization of the subject” (80). More briefly and cynically put, the entified “Other” may be no more than a pretext for the subject’s speech, or tenure. By contrast, analysis shows the way in which “identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject” (80). It is precisely because the subject is not the same as the ego identity that interpersonal misapprehension can trigger the anxiety of intrapsychic Otherness. Since the gesture of disowning Otherness is so very protective of identity, it seems counterintuitive to own alienation when it appears. At the moment of alienation the subject has not merely reached its boundaries, it has exceeded them. Grasping onto fixed identity as an anchor with which to master the impending decentering is only logical–yet mastery is ineffectual, and “analysts have to deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission is universal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of its ambiguity” (Écrits 81).

     

    Since Lacanian analysis supports neither the discourse of categorical identity nor the rhetoric of blame that so frequently accompanies it, it might appear that Lacan has little to offer political analysis, especially where issues of identity are foremost. However, I believe that neither the otherness of hostile objectification nor the Otherness productive of alienation alone offers the resource for political critique that examining the disjunction between the two affords. Carlos Mencia’s joke points to the alternative, to the location of politicized difference in another scene that addresses the phallic investment itself rather than the terms by which that investment is veiled. Analysis can indeed locate the political in another scene that is both a decentering of the subject and an exposé of the epistemology of a fixed or fixable Otherness. If ego identity is the certainty from which the subject is decentered, then “the art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until their last mirages have been consumed” (Écrits 43). If “psychoanalysis… reveals both the one and the other [the individual and the collective] to be no more than mirages” (80), then analysis seems at odds with the Platonic emphasis on a Self/Other binary though not with identity politics as a whole. Where identity is at issue, Lacan insists that “it is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (165). Regarding alterity, Lacan’s register theory would have us withhold our demands and acknowledge our desires as our own so that we can better listen for the discourse of the Other–if the Other’s Truth is what we genuinely desire to hear. And what is Truth? “Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as knowledge only by setting ignorance to work a real crisis in which the imaginary is resolved, thus engendering a new symbolic form” (296).

     

    Since the engendering of a new symbolic form was very much at issue in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, I draw one final example of the political use of decentered Otherness from N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of the Conference proceedings in her recent book How We Became Posthuman (50-83). The Other’s Truth emerges through Hayles’s analysis, even though her argument for the dangerous supplementarity of embodiment to information theory is, at least in part, a rejection of Lacan. The role of Otherness here is all the more compelling because the discussion illustrative of alterity is not an application of Lacanian terms to cultural texts. Rather, Hayles’s reading of the substitution of one signifier for another recovers a woman held under erasure by the same mark-effacing mechanism at work in Mencia’s comic replications of ethnicity.

     

    The woman in question appears in a photograph taken at the 1952 Macy Conference, the meeting at which psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie made his last ditch attempt to insert subjectivity into the debates defining information as universally portable, disembodied data. Unlike Kubie, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and the other intellectual luminaries, the woman sits with her back to the photographer. The position of her hands and body suggest that she is typing. Though the picture’s notation identifies her as Janet Freud, Katherine Hayles points out that she is in all probability Janet Freed, who appears throughout the Macy transcripts as “assistant to the conference program” (81). In the substitution of a famous man for an anonymous woman Hayles has all she needs to propound a feminist reading of the photograph as evidence of woman as “Other,” marshalling the remaining conference materials in support of this gendered difference. But such a reading would betray a phallic investment in gender, and Hayles does not yield to the temptation to play phallic politics with Freud. Instead, she turns her attention to another error: a handwritten note dating the photo of the 1952 Conference as “1953.”

     

    By holding the 1952 meeting under erasure, attendees distanced themselves from the hostilities erupting in its wake. At that conference, the dueling paradigms of homeostasis and reflexivity met head to head over the issue of scientific objectivity. The dominant group of intellectuals, including the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch (credited as one of the fathers of the neural net), propounded an idea of information founded on assumptions of a detached observer safely distanced from the observed. Arguing against McCulloch was the hard-line Freudian analyst Lawrence Kubie, who insisted on the implication of the observer in the observation. The stand-off between the two paradigms and their champions exceeded the conference. A subsequent exchange of demands testified to the otherness of theory as a mirror of the ego identity of the theorist: McCulloch offered a fiery denunciation of psychoanalysis; in response, Kubie set fellow psychoanalysts the task of secretly observing McCulloch out of “concern” for the scientist’s emotional health. Though the vehemence of this exchange suggests an irreconcilable face off, both sides of the debate revolved around a single axis of argument informed by a series of signifying oppositions: objective/subjective, dispassionate/affective, empirical/reflexive, rational consciousness/ unconscious motivation–the thick epistemology of the 1950s.

     

    These are the oppositions across whose boundary conference organizer Frank Fremont-Smith could not effect rapproachment, perhaps because Kubie had angered the other participants by seeing their positions as “resistance” to his own (Hayles 70-73). The aggressive emotional charge attached to psychoanalysis could account for the phonemic association that replaced the name of Fremont-Smith’s assistant Janet /Fr/eed by that of the trouble-making /Fr/eud. The double displacements of name and of conference date bequeath their textual challenge to Katherine Hayles in her search for the Truth of the Other of information articulated by Janet Freed’s return from the repressed. Here is Hayles’s analysis:

     

    “Take a letter, Miss Freed,” he says… A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction, a resource diverted from other possible uses, because he is not the one performing the labor… Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, she knows that words never make things happen by themselves… On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied… (82-83)

     

    Having refused the easy politics of labeling Freed the Other, Hayles discovers in Janet Freed the Truth of embodiment, at the same time evoking a powerful feminist statement from the paradox of Freed’s visible invisibility. In the rich multivocality of Otherness, Hayles hears Janet Freed speak for a class of labor as well as for her gender: Freed’s erasure by the proponents of abstracted information suggests that free-floating information feels intuitively true only to men of a certain class who are “in a position to command the labors of others” (82). Finally, in allowing Janet Freed’s Truth to call into question the very desire for decontextualized information itself, Hayles uncovers a paradigmatic politics informing the 1952 Macy Conference on Cybernetics.

     

    In all, N. Katherine Hayles’s analysis demonstrates the multi-discursivity of the Other’s Truth; when asked to speak, the Other has a lot to say. As a result, Hayles practices a Lacanian politics of close listening. What she hears in the Truth of the decentered Other is the encounter between the discourse of desire and the discourse of the registers; thus, Janet Freed appears in disappearing beneath the waves of conferees’ affect, beneath the sediment of their theoretical language. Because Janet Freed speaks, because Hayles listens, we find in their analytic encounter one final Lacanian Other. Janet Freed returns as the authentic subject of interpersonal exchange, the Other of whom the analyst must be perpetually innocent. Lacan speaks of this “authentic Other” as another subject to be appreciated for its alterity, its capacity to surprise. This authentic Other is available to any subject who is willing, like the Lacanian analyst, to annul the resistance of her intrapsychic other and to accept the anxiety aroused within her intrapsychic Otherness. Then the vital encounter between two authentic subjects can aim “at the passage of true speech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answer one doesn’t expect, which defines the terminal point in analysis” (Sem II 246).

     

    And the terminal point in this discussion…

     

    Notes

     

    1. For a discussion of otherness in Plato’s Sophist see “Non-Being” in Stanley Rosen’s Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image, 269-290.

     

    2. See de Beauvoir’s note on Levinas in the introduction to The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989) xxii. The note is interesting because de Beauvoir contains Levinas’s discussion of radical alterity as absolute contrariety by insisting it is written from a masculine point of view that disregards “the reciprocity of subject and object.” However, for Levinas, as for Lacan, subject and object are decidedly non-reciprocal–the point Lacan expresses by distinguishing the imaginary register of the image from the symbolic register of the radical Other. Levinas reconsiders the idea of alterity in Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), trans. Michael B. Smith. See, particularly, the concluding essay by that name.

     

    3. Fanon himself does not hypothesize the term Other in Black Skin, White Masks, but rather draws upon and critiques a number of analysts and philosophers who do including Jean Veneuse, Sartre, and Lacan.

     

    4. See also Homi K. Bhabha’s detailed study of post-colonialism and alterity in “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism,” chapter three in his collection The Location of Culture.

     

    5. An entertaining account of Lacan’s early interests and of his overwhelming reliance on case studies involving women can be found in Catherine Clément’s “The Ladies’ Way” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, 53-101.

     

    6. It might seem that a reader innocent of Lacanian discourse might be a “better” reader of JanMohamed’s essay, since the naïve reader would not discern the discursive impossibility of the “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” But in discourse as elsewhere, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Since the naïve reader has no discursive pact with the writer, what passes for reading is an extra-symbolic exercise in idiosyncrasy. Lacking the pact, “reading” would be a species of parasitic narcissism held together–if it is held together at all–by the reader’s imaginary identification with the writer, a mirroring instance of “reading” as “writing.”

     

    7. Butler is an astute critic of psychoanalysis and has, throughout her career, raised significant issues about psychoanalytic theory. Her article “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse” offers Butler’s characteristically precise analysis of psychoanalysis’ and feminist theory’s implications for each other. See Feminism/Postmodernism 324-40.

     

    8. The irony of Butler’s reading and its notable omission of the imaginary other is emphasized by her apt focus on Lacan’s most emphatically structural of the early seminars, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.

     

    9. Reducing Lacanian theory to a unified field as Judith Butler does supports binary notions of subject and symbolic Other, turning Lacan’s intrapsychic model into an interpersonal model and rewriting Lacan in the terms of theories of identity more discursively assimilable to a paradigm of performativity. This interpersonal model is clearly politicizable and compatible with the kinds of Foucauldian and deconstructive political impulses that characterize Butler’s own theory of “performance as citation and gender as iteration” (Whitford, cover). Politically, then, Butler needs to situate the point of infinite substitution within a dualistic imaginary to accomplish her own theoretical goals. Thus, the imaginary, in Butler’s analysis, is regarded as a field that functions in a structurally unproblematic way.

    Works Cited

     

    • Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
    • Bhabha, Homi K. “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
    • —. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 206-209.
    • Brenkman, John. “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 396-456.
    • Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
    • —. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
    • —. “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 324-340.
    • Chater, Melville. “Under the South African Union.” The National Geographic Magazine 59.4 (April 1931): 391-512.
    • Chen, Xiaomei. “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse.” In Identities. Ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 63-89.
    • Clément, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
    • de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage, 1989.
    • Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.
    • Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, eds. Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
    • Fink, Bruce. “The Subject and the Other’s Desire.” In Reading Seminars I and II. Ed. Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. 76-97.
    • Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis; New York: Norton, 1953-73.
    • —. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” SE XIV. 73-102.
    • Goldie, Terry. “The Representation of the Indigene.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 232-236.
    • Greimas, A.J. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H.Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
    • Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 338-396.
    • —. Foreword. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory by A. J. Greimas. xvi.
    • JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 18-23.
    • Lacan, Jacques. De la Psychose Paranoïaque dans ses Rapports avec la Personnalité. Thèse de Doctorat en Médecine de Paris. Paris: Le François, 1932.
    • —. “Discourse of Rome” or, more formally, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.” Écrits, A Selection. 30-113.
    • —. Écrits, A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1977.
    • —, with Henri Claude and P. Migault. “Folies simultanées.” Société médico-psychologique, 21 May 1931. Annales médico psychologique 1 (1931): 483-90.
    • —. “Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre.” Ornicar? 26/27 (1983): 26-36.
    • —. Introduction. Écrits. 44-54.
    • —. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits, A Selection. 1-7.
    • —. “Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des soeurs Papin.” Le minotaure 3/4 (1933): 25-28.
    • —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1991.
    • —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1991.
    • —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 1955-1956. Trans. Russell Grigg. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1993.
    • —. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 28-54.
    • —. “Seminar VI: Le désir et son interpretation (1958-59).” Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Ornicar? 24 (1981): 7-31; 25 (1982): 13-36; and 26/27 (1983): 7-44.
    • —. Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
    • Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
    • Levinas, Emmanuel. Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
    • Mencia, Carlos. The Tonight Show, NBC, August 8, 1997. <http://www.nbc.com/tonightshow/tsw/tstswss080897.html>
    • Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 36-44.
    • Plato. Sophist. Plato: Collected Dialogues. Bollingen Series LXXI. Trans. F.M. Cornford. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.
    • Rosen, Stanley. Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
    • Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
    • Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Third Edition. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1993.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Acting Bits/Identity Talk.” Identities. Eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 147-180.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992.