POSTMODERN CULTURE

Year: 2013

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Michel Foucault

    Mark Poster

    Department of History
    University of California at Irvine
    <mposter@orion.oac.uci.edu>

     

    Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. $27.95. 374 pp.

     

    Didier Eribon has written an excellent biography of Michel Foucault, one that will probably take its place as the standard for some time. Eribon has done thorough research including extensive interviews with individuals who played significant roles in Foucault’s life from his early childhood and comprehensive reading of his works and private writings. The book is well-informed, judicious without being remote, sympathetic without losing a critical edge. And Eribon understands Foucault’s difficult corpus well enough to take note of the irony of his undertaking. Foucault stood firmly against interpretations that privileged the author’s intentions, unity, authority. So this biography, if it be Foucaultian, cannot contribute to an interpretation of Foucault’s works.

     

    Eribon is especially good on Foucault’s student life, evoking with particular atmospheric verisimilitude French intellectual life after World War II. The rigors of entry into the Ecole Normale Superieure, the teaching of Jean Hyppolite, the circle of friendships with those who would later do important work–all of this makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the extraordinary efflorescence that in the United States is called poststructuralism. The period of Foucault’s travels to Sweden, Germany, Poland and Tunisia are also illuminating. Eribon devotes separate sections or even chapters to Foucault’s major writings. In these he sketches the reception of the books and Foucault’s reception of the receptions. His attention to the content of the works is adequate but certainly not extensive or novel.

     

    Foucault’s political activity after 1970, during his years at the College de France, his work with the prison information group, and the countless protests and petitions in which he participated, are also extensively recounted. Eribon’s account of Foucault’s advocacy of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, derisively regarded as Foucault’s biggest political blunder, is remarkable in its ability to allow credence for Foucault’s position without pretending that such credence might not require for many a deliberate abandonment of one’s critical faculties.

     

    Foucault’s politics have often been attacked by Marxists for adherence with the positions of the New Philosophers who garnered a certain presence in France in the late 1970s. For these Marxists such an association discredits all of Foucault’s thought as a kind of right-wing liberalism. These tactics are proof enough of the exhaustion of their author’s intellects as well as of the political perspective they attempt to further. For Eribon’s account makes clear the serious dedication of Foucault to a critical politics, one perhaps that does not fit neatly into the categories of the major European parties but certainly one that is in no way conservative. Interestingly enough, Eribon mentions the term “new philosopher” only once, in connection with a review Foucault wrote of a book by Andre Glucksmann. Although in the period before May ’68 Foucault was perceived as politically enigmatic and perhaps “untrustworthy” for those on the left, after 1970 there can be no doubt of his firm commitment to anti-authoritarian politics and of his search for a new style for the politically engaged intellectual, one that would deal more effectively than the French Communists or even the Socialists with a critique of current configurations of domination.

     

    I found only one inaccuracy in Eribon’s Foucault. It concerns the chapter on Foucault’s visits to the United States, which Eribon in general describes very well, with none of that ambivalent snobbery/envy one finds too often in French discussions of this country. The error is a small one, in no way affecting Eribon’s overall discussion, but since I was involved in the incident I feel I should set the record straight. Eribon refers in passing to a lecture Foucault delivered to a huge crowd at UCLA in 1981. Actually this lecture was given at a conference I organized for the Humanities Center at USC on October 31st of that year. On that occasion, before a large audience, Foucault presented an important paper disputing critiques of his view of power and arguing that his concern was with the subject’s relation to truth. The paper later appeared in the paperback edition of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s excellent book on Foucault. The conference was also interesting because Foucault’s hesitations about it illustrate a salient feature of his intellectual work. In September he phoned me to say he would not appear at USC because he learned that the conference had a large audience and he preferred to work in small workshop settings. In fact the conference was organized to have both plenary sessions, of which Foucault’s presentation elicited by far the largest attendance, as well as smaller workshops. In the end he consented and attended many of the workshops, immensely enjoying the discussions.

     

    The incident illustrates the seriousness of Foucault’s dedication to intellectual work. As Eribon’s book indicates, he was relentless in attempting to establish small work situations where scholars could collaborate on projects. In his practice as well as in his theory he consistently opposed the system of the “universal intellectual.” Complicated, troubled at times, Foucault was a person of extraordinary intelligence, whose impact will long resonate in the fields of humanities and social sciences. I regard it as a privilege to have met him and even more of one to be able to read him. Eribon’s book deserves high praise for doing him justice.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Making Sex

    Meryl Altman and Keith Nightenhelser

    DePauw University
    <maltman@depauw>
    <k_night@depauw>

     

    Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

     

    Making Sex is an ambitious investigation of Western scientific conceptions of sexual difference. A historian by profession, Laqueur locates the major conceptual divide in the late eighteenth century when, as he puts it, “a biology of cosmic hierarchy gave way to a biology of incommensurability, anchored in the body, in which the relationship of men to women, like that of apples to oranges, was not given as one of equality or inequality but rather of difference” (207). He claims that the ancients and their immediate heirs–unlike us–saw sexual difference as a set of relatively unimportant differences of degree within “the one-sex body.” According to this model, female sexual organs were perfectly homologous to male ones, only inside out; and bodily fluids–semen, blood, milk–were mostly “fungible” and composed of the same basic matter. The model didn’t imply equality; woman was a lesser man, just not a thing wholly different in kind.

     

    However, since the Enlightenment, Laqueur argues, males and females have been seen as different in kind, and many social and political consequences have followed. Where theorists of the “one-sex” model saw all human bodies as if resulting from arrows aimed at the target human, before which the arrows producing females fell short, the new “two-sex” model supposed that male and female were separate, opposed targets. Laqueur first noticed this paradigm shift while examining “the question of disappearing orgasm”: once thought biologically necessary for the conception of a child, female orgasm after the appearance of the “two-sex body” became a contingent or coincidental matter bound up with various political interpretations of “women’s nature.” He does not claim that one model definitively supplanted the other at a given historical moment. Traces of the “two-sex body” can be found in Aristotle, and the “one-sex body” lives on in popular myth even today. And he cautions against giving a causal account of the shift, one that relies on social or political explanations of it, since “the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic” to such explanations (11). Nonetheless Laqueur redraws the map of Western sexuality in a breathtakingly grand gesture.

     

    Laqueur describes his book as a history of “bodies and pleasures” (Foucault’s phrase), and begins by situating his work amid current debates about the epistemological status of scientific and historical narratives. Still, his main techniques of inquiry remain those of traditional intellectual history. He combines a chronological tour through the usual philosophers (beginning of course from Aristotle) with ultraclinical discussion of changing anatomical knowledge and medicalizing fantasy, accompanied by startling illustrations. The argument is sweeping, the narrative lumps centuries together, and national differences are given little importance. Scholars of each subspeciality will be kept busy commenting on his work for years, no doubt, and the common reader who has absorbed it will perceive gender-switching plots differently than before.1

     

    Laqueur often seems more interested in how literate Europeans thought about (and pictured) sex than in how most people actually lived sex and gender. Of course, such experience is notoriously difficult to find out about. So like most recent work on the history of sexuality, Making Sex operates within the Foucaultian claim that “discourses” –sets of culturally maintained representations–organize lived experience and human perception. This stance, by implication, narrows the gap between intellectual and social history.

     

    Laqueur’s work also follows Foucault in finding metaphor where we most expect the literal–in biology, on the body–and in often making a “negative case,” showing that advances in the state of medical knowledge haven’t driven ideological change (though he is sensibly coy about exactly what does drive it). “No set of facts ever entails any particular account of difference”–since, given the wealth of detailed evidence for BOTH similarity AND difference between “women” and “men,” any model of sexual difference must always choose to highlight some issues and ignore others. His account of the Renaissance “poetics of biology” is particularly effective in showing that people didn’t make cultural use of what they might have scientifically known, if only they had cared to know it. Every era, he shows, has invented the science it (politically and culturally) needed within the boundaries set by prevailing epistemologies. Nonetheless, he realizes that actual bodies exist and have existed, and acknowledges “scientific progress”–for example, in fixing the relationship of ovulation to pregnancy and the menstrual cycle. To speak, as he does, of “scientific fictions” is not to say all science is somehow bogus, done with mirrors, purely in the service of ideology.

     

    On the other hand, new scientific discourses may determine which cultural questions can be asked, but they don’t legislate any one answer. So, for example, around the time of the French Revolution the recognition that female orgasm was a contingent, not a necessary, part of reproductive intercourse made possible theories of women’s “passionlessness,” while female organs received new and differentiating names, and Woman took on a whole character derived (in one way or another) from her ovaries, her experience of menstruation, and so forth. Because the testes were different, Woman was a different creature on all levels, from the cellular to the moral-philosophical. But these theories could be and were put to use by anti-feminists and feminists alike–though agreed to be different, woman might still be either physically weaker (unfit for participation in the public sphere) or morally stronger (more suited than men to duties of political governance). In political culture as in science, discourse determines the terms and the vigour of the debate, but not the outcome.

     

    The argument that scientific explanation of the body is socially contingent leads Laqueur to Freud’s revisionary anatomy. It is no news to most of us that Freud’s account of progress from clitoral to vaginal orgasm as a sign of female “maturity” does not correspond to any biological reality. But Laqueur demonstrates conclusively that Freud must have known his progress narrative was social/cultural rather than physiological/biological–must, in other words, have known that it was either fanciful or coercive–because biologists had routinely discussed the centrality of the clitoris to female sexual pleasure, and the absence of physiological bases for sensation in the vagina, for literally centuries. We can now be sure that what Laqueur rather kindly calls Freud’s “aporia of anatomy” was a result of active repression rather than simply a primitive state of medical knowledge; and this has obvious consequences for current feminist debate about Freud.

     

    Laqueur’s perspective relies heavily, as he acknowledges, on developments within “women’s history” and on feminist theory–particularly on the distinction between “sex” and “gender” first made by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and developed memorably in Gayle Rubin’s influential essay “The Traffic in Women.”2 Within the second-wave of twentieth century Anglo-European feminism, the concept of “gender” denotes those “observable” differences between women and men that could be argued to be culturally constructed (and thus mutable) rather than eternally, biologically given. Such a division between natural “sex” and cultural “gender” was absolutely crucial in combatting the myth of women’s natural inferiority, of the appropriateness of their subordination to men, and so forth–it was a way of naming and undoing sexual essentialism.

     

    Making Sex explicitly revises this dualism, asserting centrally that “sex, as much as gender, is made” (ix). Under the discursive regime of the one-sex body, it is asserted, there was not (as today) a base-superstructure relationship between sex and gender. Rather, gender was “real”–was constitutive of social relationships–while sex was contingent, an epiphenomenon. Laqueur suggests a paradox: that for the ancients, sex was socially constructed, gender “naturally” given–for example, through an insistence that hierarchical relations between men and women, as between free men and slaves, were eternal, immutable truths to be actualized in social roles, not in anatomical structures.

     

    Does this make a complete hash, then, of the sex/gender dualism? Not necessarily. Feminist theorists Donna Haraway and Judith Butler have both argued that the recent success of feminists and cultural historians at distinguishing “sex” (biological givens) from “gender” (cultural constructions) has had the unfortunate side effect of letting anatomy off the hook, leading us to ignore the potential dangers (and pleasures) of cultural construction within the biological sciences and other discourses about “the body.”3 Laqueur’s work advances this project, and further unsettles biologistic arguments about the differences between women and men.4 It is not clear, however, that unsettling the sex/gender dualism–which has after all proved politically quite useful under the two-sex model we have to live with now–is the best way to criticize biological essentialism. What would be lost if we said, not that “sex” is socially constructed too, but simply that we need to move the boundary a bit–that we’ve been calling some things “sex” that are really, after all, gender?

     

    We might well lose the title of the book, of course, which plays on the equivocation between sexual difference and sexual activity, and (coupled with the naked women on the cover) gives a rather false impression of forthcoming titillation, since the subject of Making Sex is actually quite a sober one. In fact, there is very little discussion here of pleasures–and even less attention to pain. One thing that strikes a feminist as odd about this book is its tone: the emotional distance and the absence of horror while recounting rapes, clitoridectomies, ovarectomies performed for no medical reason but curiosity, death sentences meted out to those of ambiguous gender (or is it sex?), and the general subjection, manipulation, and domination of female bodies by male doctors and other “experts” throughout the long period the book covers. Laqueur does acknowledge, early on, that “the fact that pain and injustice are gendered and correspond to corporeal signs of sex is precisely what gives importance to an account of the making of sex.” He also acknowledges an absence in his book of “a sustained account of experience in the body.” (This he suggests is perhaps appropriate in a man writing about women; it is probably inevitable anyway given his broad schematic approach and his reliance on the methods of intellectual history.) But overall, Laqueur has clearly chosen to write a history of difference rather than a history of oppression.

     

    This is more than a matter of tone: it leads frequently to what we might, borrowing Laqueur’s own term, call an aporia of political consequences. Feminists undertake to study the history of sexuality, for the most part, to understand women’s subordination in order to see whether and how it can be undone. Laqueur does note, from time to time, the social applicability or function of various conceptions of the body. The one-sex model served male power by explaining why men were needed for generation, and established the centrality of paternity; the two-sex model served male power by enabling discourses of female inadequacy. But since (for example) we know already that ancient Greece was an extremely sex-segregated and misogynist society in its social practices, its physicians’ specific conception of the body seems almost irrelevant to the major issue of power. One might contrast Laqueur’s approach to the sex/gender question in ancient Greece with Anne Carson’s in her essay “Putting Her In Her Place: Women, Dirt and Desire.”5 Carson deals with some of the same medical and philosophical texts as Laqueur, but she begins with a discussion of lived gender relations as they can be reconstructed from historical, literary, and juridical sources. This provides a fuller social context for discussion of, say, why women are considered “cooler” and “wetter” than men, and what follows from this in the social sphere.

     

    Laqueur’s underlying point still stands, that ancient relations of gender provided the base for which “anatomy” was the superstructure. But we wonder whether, in directing his attention so exclusively to the “scientific” discourses of the ancient world–rather than to, say, the pre- scientific ideology reflected in Hesiod, Semonides of Amourgos, and Aeschylus, which did elaborate differences of kind between two sexes–Laqueur has been anachronistically motivated by the modern assumption that sex differences really do come “first,” that sexuality is the key to identity.

     

    It also strikes us as curious that Laqueur did not find it important to address alternatives to procreative heterosexuality in any systematic way–either as a history of repression or as a (Foucaultian) history of “incitement to discourse.” “Lesbianism” (the word does not appear in the index, though “tribade” does) is discussed only as it may or may not apply in cases of hermaphroditism; male homosexuality is discussed almost exclusively in sections about ancient Greece. The discussions of hermaphroditism suggest that doctors until quite recently were concerned purely to assign male or female sex to a body, rather than to assign male or female gender to a person–or to lay down moral injunctions about how such bodies might be permitted to behave. These are significant observations, and particularly interesting in light of the recent work on ancient Greek sexuality done by David Halperin and John Winkler.6 But the sketchiness of the discussion is another byproduct of Laqueur’s own decision to focus on bodies rather than people.

     

    None of these criticisms need prevent Laqueur’s argument from being useful in political debate, as a further marshalling of evidence for social constructionism generally. But there is something paradoxical–even when Foucault does it–about “marshalling evidence” for the conclusion that the facts didn’t matter. Laqueur ends with the following sentence: “But basically the content of talk about sexual difference is unfettered by fact, and is as free as mind’s play.” We are uneasy about the use of fundamentally positivist historical argument to make this Foucaultian point.7 We also wonder how to understand his (truth-)claims about the Great Divide between “one-sex theorists” and us, after he observes that “the play of difference never came to rest” (193). Such endless play of signifiers can disarm the counterexamples to his narrative of historical change, such as the eruption of the one-sex theory into “Dear Abby,” or a pattern of ambiguities in Aristotle. The question is whether this freedom is compatible with saying that “in or about the late eighteenth [century] . . . human sexual nature changed” (5).

     

    Twenty years ago, the raw materials of Making Sex would have made an amusing book about the odd persistence of sexual misconceptions. After Foucault, “misconception” might seem a misconception, and such a book would look antiquated and politically naive. Laqueur’s book is more sophisticated and politically aware, but equally lacking in polemical edge. He suggests in passing that Making Sex might be used against sociobiology and against the “science of difference” (21). That he himself does not do so, however, indicates what the history of sexuality has lost in becoming academically respectable.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Laqueur notes how one-sex theory makes possible some new readings of classic texts (23ff), and others are already producing such readings, notably Stephen Greenblatt. See also Susan McClary’s discussion of “erotic friction” in 17th-century vocal music, which cites both Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) and an essay by Laqueur Feminine Endings [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 37).

     

    2. A full and helpful genealogy of this distinction can be found in Donna Haraway, “‘Gender’ for a Marxist Dictionary: the Sexual Politics of a Word,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991). Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” can be found most conveniently in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward a Feminist Anthropology (New York: Monthly Review, 1975).

     

    3. Donna Haraway throughout the book cited above, and Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

     

    4. As a historical realist, Laqueur does, however, seem to believe in some immutable sex differences, though he doesn’t state what they are, and in this he may differ from Butler and Haraway.

     

    5. Anne Carson, “Putting Her In Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Greek World, ed. D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990). Our comment on Carson’s essay applies as well to the other essays in that collection, and to Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985).

     

    6. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990), especially “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens”; and Jack Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1990).

     

    7. Ironically, Laqueur clings to his conventional methods of intellectual history even as he demolishes other foundational structures, such as the sex=nature/ gender=culture system. If we think of these methods as natural to him, the Foucaultian conclusions become a culture built (unsteadily?) upon them. But this paradox has no easy solution, and we’d rather have our history with evidence than without.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Thinking Across the American Grain

    Matthew Mancini

    Department of History
    Southwest Missouri State University
    <mjm225f@smsvma>

     

    Gunn, Giles. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. xii/272 pp.

     

    Giles Gunn has emerged as a major voice in that cacophonous semi-discipline known as American Studies. Every time the American Studies Association meets, it seems to be seized by a new collective enthusiasm. One year it might be Victor Turner, the next it’s Annette Kolodny, or John Stilgoe, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Nina Baym. Such commotions are in part symptomatic of the Association’s puppy-like eagerness to be identified with changing intellectual fashions. But they also represent a remarkable record of committed intellectual openness and daring. I anticipate that everyone will be discussing Giles Gunn this year.

     

    Thinking that is “aslant” or “cross-hatched,” or that runs “across the grain” or “on the bias” is Gunn’s preferred mode of critical practice. He sees it as a means, if not of escape, then at least of fragmentary and fitful release from the worst constraints of that prison house of language and culture that an assortment of poststructuralists, ideology critics, new historicists, deconstructionists, and neopragmatists from Michel Foucault to Richard Rorty have contended is all that is left of what used to be called the human condition.

     

    Postmodernism’s antifoundationalism has rendered an independent critical perspective unattainable and thrown into question the very possibility of a critique of culture that is not implicated in that culture’s own repressive practices. By thinking across postmodernism, what Gunn seeks to achieve is not a new “grounding,” but something more akin to a fingernail-hold somewhere in the rough, uneven, scratchy grain of cultural experience. For he argues that, contrary to the impression, and often the explicit arguments, made by many of our most compelling contemporary critics, the web of culture, of ideology, of power, is not seamless or monolithic; that “The grain of cultural experience is . . . interwoven and cross-hatched in ways that make it possible for the predications of which it is composed not only to confront but also, as it were, to address one another” (38).

     

    Gunn’s aim, then, is to “complement” rather than to “contest” the recent tide of thought from the Continent (3). And his instrument for doing so is Pragmatism, a method of approaching problems whose formulation at the hands of William James and John Dewey not only anticipates, but, he argues, also addresses directly, precisely those predicaments raised by the postmodern thinkers. Gunn misses no opportunity to reveal the “convertibility . . . of pragmatist motifs into postmodernist preoccupations” (7). Accordingly, he divides his book into two parts, the first concerned with rethinking the pragmatist heritage in light of contemporary cultural critiques, and the second with shedding a pragmatist light on certain vexing, contemporary critical problems.

     

    Quite literally occupying the center of the book is the formidable figure of Richard Rorty. The last chapter of Part One and the first chapter of Part Two can be seen as an extended critique by which Gunn seeks first to challenge, and then perhaps even to some degree to displace, Rorty as the leading contemporary pragmatist theorist of liberal society.

     

    The central issue, for American as for Continental critics, is the Enlightenment and its heritage of liberalism. But for Americans the problem has a somewhat different resonance than it would have for, say, Bataille, Foucault, or Habermas. Gunn thus characterizes Rorty’s project as “the most important political attempt since John Dewey to resituate the tradition of American pragmatism within the broader framework of modern Western liberalism” (96). This effort is noteworthy because

     

    pragmatism, or neopragmatism as it is now called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal, in some very specific ways. It aligns itself . . . with the postmodernist and poststructuralist repudiation of culture as an expression of individual consciousness woven into patterns of consensus and dissent, of conformity and conflict, and it prefers to view culture as an intertextual system of signs that can be infinitely redescribed. (96)

     

    In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP, 1989), Rorty’s elucidation of the role of contingency in the formation and reception of language and of selfhood, Gunn believes, is masterly. But a third contingent conception, that of community, seems in Rorty’s account to be curiously resistant to the rediscription that Rorty sees as the only remaining object of speculative thought. Thus the project of social restructuring is but poorly served by the thinkers who have shown “how the languages of moral responsibility and social purpose are always contingent” (102). For Rorty, the end of liberal society is to tear us away from the blandishments of metaphysics; to have convictions, to be sure, but to realize at the same time that such convictions cannot be defended with arguments that persons from other communities are constrained to accept.

     

    In the last chapter of Part One, Gunn mounts a Jamesian critique of what he sees as Rorty’s tendency toward the absolutization of opposites when he addresses such questions–what Richard J. Bernstein calls “ethical-political” questions in his recent, exceptionally useful study, The New Constellation (Polity Press, 1991). Rortian oppositions like “justice and love, or irony and common sense, or force and persuasion,” Gunn argues, themselves cry out for deconstruction. Yet Rorty “rarely entertains the possibility that their opposition may itself be a product of contingency” (111). According to Gunn, William James knew better. “In his later thought, experience transcends language by virtue of a conjunctive process of which language itself reminds us” (113).

     

    Starting from this Jamesian perspective Gunn elaborates a different view from Rorty’s about the possibilities of liberal society, and in the strongly argued chapter that opens Part Two, which is the only chapter in the book that has not been published in some form previously (although an unfortunate typo in the Acknowledgements misidentifies it as having appeared elsewhere), he undertakes a reevaluation of the American Enlightenment.

     

    In so doing, Gunn boldly goes to the heart of recent debates about the nature and fate of modernity. Whenever you see someone alive to postmodern ideas seeking to rescue the Enlightenment to even the slightest degree, there, I believe, you will find one of the leading edges of contemporary critical thought. To defend any part of the Enlightenment after the ravages of Foucault and Derrida, not to mention Nietzsche and Heidegger, is to probe for the outer boundaries of postmodernism’s reach. Somewhat curiously, however, especially in light of his obvious erudition, Gunn neglects to situate himself in a wider circle of recent critics hospitable to postmodern currents of thought who nonetheless seek to recover something of value from the dark ruins of the once-heavenly city of Enlightenment discourse. Chief among them is Jurgen Habermas, whose The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987) is a narrative of the history of Enlightenment philosophy and its deconstruction by postmodernists. Habermas’s solution is not to junk the Enlightenment wholesale, but to begin again–this time, however, not with the philosophy of consciousness, with its pernicious subject-object split, but with intersubjectivity instead. For Habermas, objectivity is a chimera, intersubjectivity is prior to the subject-object opposition, and communication thus prior to cognition.

     

    Gunn’s purpose is analogous to Habermas’s. He wishes to argue both for the centrality of the American Enlightenment’s influence–an enormous influence on nineteenth century thought and culture, he contends, which has been obscured by the twentieth century’s focus on Calvinism–and against the notion that such sway as it did enjoy over literary production and criticism was a baneful one. The Great Awakening is the American problem that distorts an assessment of the Enlightenment; because of it “The Enlightenment has become the absent, or at least the forgotten, integer in the American equation of the relationship between faith and knowledge” (131). As Habermas seeks to recover scraps of “the Enlightenment project” from Horkheimer and Adorno and others, so Gunn, facing a peculiarly American version of the same problem, attempts to reclaim the American Enlightenment from those who think the Great Awakening towers over it.

     

    Disputing the standard interpretation of Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America [Oxford, 1976]), Gunn argues that the most important strains of Enlightenment thought in America were those May called the Revolutionary and the Skeptical, rather than the Rational and Didactic varieties. These influences, maturing in the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century, and in the United States rather than Europe, worked toward a “dismantling of virtually all of the religious assumptions on which American literary culture was then based” (138). And–guess what–this is a form of proto-pragmatism, “proleptically present” in Moby-Dick, which turns out to be “a prefiguration of . . . pragmatic consciousness” (138), perceivable in the shift from the “old consciousness,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, of Ahab, to the “new” of Ishmael. Moreover, this skeptical and revolutionary consciousness leads quite directly to modernism.

     

    Pragmatism thus turns out to be in Gunn’s narrative the connection between the Enlightenment and the postmodern, as well as between Enlightenment epistemology and Calvinism. And so even postmodern literary culture “has not seen the last of the Enlightenment” (145).

     

    In other chapters, on the New Historicism, on interdisciplinarity, and on academic pluralism, Gunn employs his simultaneously rigorous and conversational approach to investigate the “question as to whether the critic can ever escape the ideological contamination of his or her own process of reflection” (168). In the concluding chapter, Gunn observes the ways in which the pragmatists’ concern for further, deeper, richer conversation can be enhanced by careful attention to current critical struggles–struggles that are finally, he writes, over “‘difference,’ politically, socially, sexually, racially, psychologically, religiously” (215). In other words, they are about otherness–“what many people think of as the fundamental problem of our time” (7). The problem is “how to conceive or represent ‘the Other’ without succumbing to the false artificiality of oppositional thinking” (215). The site that should be available for this purpose, space that was or should be public, has been “rendered trivial and vapid” (220) and survives only as a site of self-referential simulacra. The interest in “civil religion,” which seemed for a time to be an attempt to retake that public space, turned out to be “a defense mechanism for shoring up American cultural consensus” (227). And, though such a world that stands “over against the symbolic solipsism of the religion America has made of its own civic celebrations” (230) might still be found in a liminal domain of vulgarity and vernacular humor, Gunn is too unillusioned not to see that domain as an “endangered” one (236).

     

    This, then, is a book of many virtues. Yet one of its central objectives remains incompletely fulfilled, and for reasons that I think are somewhat curious. Gunn wishes to show that the genealogy of postmodern thought reveals a strong American, or at least pragmatic, extraction; and, conversely, that the resurgence of pragmatism is more than a local American phenomenon. He makes the argument with elegance, but, in truth, it does not constitute a revelation. American Studies scholars have been acknowledging these cross-currents and actively engaging the new forms of “Continental” criticism for a decade and more.

     

    What is curious is that Gunn, in arguing for the compatibility of “American” pragmatic and “Continental” postmodern thought, exaggerates the alleged gap between them, and simultaneously–and contrary to his own stated intention–depreciates the “American Studies” side of the alleged dichotomy he seeks to overcome. One symptom of this undervaluing lies in Gunn’s title, for in the beginning, so to speak, there was In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams’s acute, eccentric recovery and appropriation of American foundational themes. The “grain” of Williams’s title connoted seed, texture, weave, and coarseness at once. The book was published in 1925, and remained obscure until its celebration nearly two generations later by American Studies pioneers.

     

    Gunn–like another historian, David Hollinger, who evokes Williams in the title of his 1985 collection, In the American Province–mentions Williams just once, very briefly, in passing. Here is an absence indeed. For critics and scholars seeking to explore the rough texture of the seam between the modern and the postmodern, especially in the United States, might also turn to that poet and physician and contemporary of Gunn’s admired John Dewey. “The American Grain,” in its very multivalence, is made for thinking across. Gunn’s book demonstrates that–but demonstrates it yet again, not for the first time.

     

  • The Text Is Dead; Long Live the Techst

    Edward M. Jennings

    Department of English
    State University of New York at Albany
    <emj69@albnyvms>

     

    Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

     

    [1] This is a review of George P. Landow’s book about a phenomenon almost as outlandish in a paper-based culture as scripture must appear to be when it arrives in societies without records. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology is part of a series called “Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society.” Steven G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner are the series editors. I think it is a marvelous book, and this essay is meant to prod you into reading it from cover to cover.

     

    Hypertext could be the keystone volume in a graduate curriculum where the rhetorics of networking and screen display are scrutinized right beside those of oral and scribal modes, of scroll and codex technologies. But at least four audiences may still be hostile to it: Curmudgeons who don’t know which upsets them more, critical theory or technology; closet word-processors for whom the concept “programming” still smacks of mind control; theorists for whom Barthes and Derrida and Lyotard are old wallpaper against which background some significant struggles are (at last) taking place; and technophiles ashamed of their access to tools that others cannot afford.

     

    The book itself is not a menace, but the technologies it celebrates–or the still unexplored opportunities offered by the hypertext technology–threaten assumptions so deeply held that most people will deny that they can be challenged. After all, these words mean what they mean, don’t they?

     

    Text.
    Author.
    Story.
    Knowledge.

     

    Landow himself issues no directly apocalyptic challenges. No foam around his mouth. His presentation is measured, experiential, lucid, moderate and sensible. He merely points out that the concept “hypertext” lets us test some concepts associated with critical theory, and gracefully shows how the technology is contributing to reconfigurations of text, author, narrative and (literary) education.

     

    As an advocate for the technology Landow describes so clearly, my goal in this review is to tell you enough about it so that you will feel compelled at least to read Hypertext, even if you don’t rush out and invest all at once in the electronic paraphernalia you would need to become acculturated. I will try to describe the phenomenon, and then try to suggest how hypertext demands that we re-place those four self-evident terms. As I perceive it, the technology undermines fundamental assumptions about authority and control of time.

     

    Just what is this “thing,” this “concept,” this technology that has acquired the label “hypertext”? Landow does a good job of explaining it, as do Bolter and Moulthrop and Slatin (emphasizing “Storyspace”), but it’s like trying to describe digital recording to Oscar Wilde or trying to help a fish understand “breathing.” Even readers of PMC need help, I suspect, in spite of their acquaintance with at least two other transforming technologies, word-processing and networking. Not everyone has easy access to the relatively expensive Macintosh platform where most of the writer-artist hypertext software performs.

     

    Please note: We are not discussing the ballyhooed “multimedia” here, nor the pseudo-hypertext built in to the “Help Menus” of commercial software applications. My own experience (limited) is with Eastgate Systems’ “Storyspace” (and a few hours with Ntergade’s “Black Magic,” and a few minutes with Knowledge Garden’s “Knowledge Pro”). George Landow, in sharp contrast, has designed and experienced entire “docuverses” in the “Intermedia” environment developed and installed at Brown University. He has practiced what he preaches, that is. What’s more, he and Paul Delany have already edited Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT, 1991), 17 essays whose cluster of perspectives supplements and qualifies the authoritative focus of his 1992 monotext being reviewed here.

     

    Once more, then: What “is” hypertext?

     

    It can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of “footnotes,” each one enriching all the others, none of them secondary even though one had to be encountered first. You can place them whenever you want, in whichever typeface (or “tone”) you choose, and with whatever coloration you prefer.

     

    Another image is of a book’s index accompanied by a pointer that would let readers wander from one reference to another without having to keep their index finger between index pages. The sequence of assimilation–associative or whimsical or undeviatingly purposeful–rests in the digits of the reader.

     

    A third image starts with pictures, not books. Imagine a handful of cubes connected by straws, a cluster that almost resembles those models of molecules that illustrate articles in National Geographic. These cubes are “lexias or blocks of text” (Landow 52). The straws are electronic links. Hypertext is nothing more than electronically connected chunks of text.

     

    Expand the imaginary handful into a roomful. Consider that those little cubes are not word containers, but receptacles holding whole sentences, paragraphs, scenes, speeches–or photographs, diagrams, songs, symphonies, videotapes of vaudeville acts with barking dogs…. Consider also that those straws, now enlarged to tunnel size, can arch from one corner of the room to another without going through all the neighboring cubes along the way. The designer lays out the linkages. Instead of a neat model molecule, all primary colors and straight lines, we have a web, a Gibsonian Matrix, an elecTRONic habitat.

     

    As “readers” of this space, we who have entered the habitat’s first chamber take our seats and watch the message-performance composed for us. Finished, we take a hint from the options posted on the wall and stroll– together or separately, next door or to the far reaches– stopping off anywhen that looks promising.

     

    The crux of hypertext is where those spatially distinct “cubes” intersect with temporally distinct sequences. Authors compose the cubes.lexias.performances and construct the tunnels.web.links. The audience, having entered the space at cube one, has to choose where to explore next, and has to endure the consequences of the risks implicated in that choosing.

     

    So much for telling fish about breathing. Instead of holding a book, we look at a screen displaying a map of an Index. By now, two of those self-evident terms, “text” and “author,” no longer mean quite what they used to. Instead of being sentences and paragraphs and two-dimensional pages bound as a book or journal or newsletter, what we “read” is distinct, self-contained chunks of performance frozen in a three-dimensional “space.”

     

    As it happens, two of Landow’s chapters are about reconfiguring the text and reconfiguring the author, so we have not strayed too far from his (two-dimensional) text. Another pair of his chapters has to do with narrative and education, so I will have a chance to show how hypertext technology can question “story” (the morality of narrative) and “knowledge” (construct versus instruct) later in this essay. Meanwhile, I trust that the convergence Landow writes about between computer technology and critical theory is beginning to sound plausible and interesting. His own Index (if displayed on your screen) would show about 75 citations for Barthes and Derrida. Foucault, Lyotard, Bakhtin, Miller and four others together match that number. Vannevar Bush leads the techies with 15 citations; Theodor H. Nelson (14) and Jay David Bolter (12) outpoint McLuhan, Ong, Joyce (Michael) and Moulthrop.

     

    After a glance at Landow’s first chapter, about theory, then, I shall cycle through more modulations of writer-reader-text dislocation, stressing control of time and sequence, and press on to try to legitimize narrative disorder.

     

    The first chapter, “Hypertext and Literary Theory,” is for me a clear, succinct and persuasive elaboration of the argument that hypertext actually concretizes a lot of what poststructuralism theorizes. Landow himself is not so insistent. His moderate claim: “What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext . . . is not that it may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them” (11). Some nexial terms in the early pages are inter-textuality, multi-vocality, de-centering and non-linearity. Central to the “convergence” argument is the quasi-equation of techie Nelson’s “text chunks” and critic Barthes’s lexia: “Hypertext . . . denotes blocks of text–what Barthes terms a lexia–and the electronic links that join them” (4).

     

    Landow finishes this first chapter in the context of Alvin Kernan’s thesis that printing technology virtually created the concepts of “authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and physically isolated text.” The book, the artist, and even “intellectual property” are fragile, socially constructed phenomena. Landow predicts that hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several such heretofore “self-evident” Truths about Art. Hypertext technology thus “has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida’s emphasis on de-centering and Barthes’s conception of the readerly versus the writerly text” (33-4; see also Kernan, Printing Technology).

     

    Even though Landow concentrates on ways that hypertext reconfigures text and author, the role of Reader is inseperable from both, and I shall emphasize the paradox of that role: The reader is no longer subjected totally to the authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a collaborating writer within the hypertext space. BUT each new reader IS still under the previous reader-writer’s control, and NO reader can tamper with the lexias already in place.

     

    There are two ways to unravel these apparent contradictions. The first involves a digression into the way two mutually exclusive words are being juxtaposed. Here is Landow on writer and reader:

     

    Today when we consider reading and writing, we probably think of them as serial processes or as procedures carried out intermittently by the same person: first one reads, then one writes, and then one reads some more. Hypertext, which creates an active, even intrusive reader, carries this convergence of activities one step closer to completion; but, in so doing, it infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. (71)

     

    Notice how comfortably familiar this terminology is–power, writer, reader–even though juxtapositions of dominance-subservience relationships (“power”) and conventionally self-evident labels (“reader” and “writer”) are moderately disconcerting. We are accustomed to assuming that “the reader” cannot be the same individual as “the writer,” that the practices are mutually exclusive. When I write, that is, I am “by definition” not reading. As Landow’s account here indicates, it is difficult not to reproduce this distinction terminologically, even where its inadequacy as regards the hypertext becomes clear. To capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such concepts as “wreading” and “wriding.” (And my “readers” should be warned that I have engaged in some terminological experimentation along these lines below, grotesque though the results may be.)

     

    In any case, it would seem that the hypertext environment brings about a collapsing of the identities of composer and audience, a relinquishment of creative control, a triumph of the consumer. But it is necessary to back somewhat away from these implications and return to the image of a space full of chambers connected by tunnels. Within Landow’s Intermedia technology and my chamber-tunnel image, the “writer” carries out two tasks: preparing the separate lexias in their chambers and installing the first set of tunnels linking them. That design process is creative and authoritative in traditional ways. “Readers” needn’t be privileged to tamper with what the “writer” has installed. And the relationships among the lexias, the links, are–when imagined as existing in space–determined by the writer, and must be “followed” by the reader. Writer and reader are not identical. There is no aleatoric “audience participation,” no wresting of control from the performance artist.

     

    In that case, how can it be said that the technology “infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader”? First, the person who enters the hypertext space may construct chambers and link them to those already there. Thus the “wreader” gambit. You can compose your objection to these sentences, or your qualification, or even your endorsement, and “file” it in the same size type–ah, where?–Think of the position as “right behind” this screen/plane, visible the way the labelled edge of a Mac window could be visible.

     

    That privilege of reader-being-writer is more easily imagined, but may be less important, than the consequence of the other “transfer of power” effected by the technology. This involves the disintegration of the celebrated essence of literacy, “linearity.” I don’t mean to imply a mandate for chaos; the originator still can design a preferred sequence for the readers’ encounter with the lexias. And sentence-level linearity is not eroded (nor is frame-level pictorial syntax, nor a melody’s phrasing). But the reader-audience-explorer is no longer bound by sequences of paragraphs or chapters. At the granular level we usually call “organizational,” the writer loses what had been almost complete control over the reader.

     

    Before hypertext, that is, author(ities) designed the one-and-only-one sequence of sensation-chunks to be imposed on and shared by all (subservient) readers. The order in which memories were layered, the sequence of admonitory qualifications and concluding caveats was determined by the single creative mind. A rebellious reader who flipped casually from back to front, or read the “last” chapter first, or started with the Index, was a social deviant. Now, however, “Flipping back and forth” is no longer defiant. It’s encouraged. The authority can no longer presume that everyone will have read “the same book,” and it won’t be easy for two readers to discuss their differently based interpretations of the same work. They might be similar, but congruence would be an unlikely accident. The author or wrider still influences, but no longer determines, the way the reader or wreader spends time.

     

    For hypertext generally, then: The wreader can add to a hypertext docuverse, but (usually) cannot alter its existing lexia; the wrider maintains authority over the original lexias and links, but abdicates control over sequence and boundary. With that paradox and transformation outlined for the technology in general, we can turn to a slightly restricted arena, narrative. Hypertext affects storytelling.

     

    If the relationship between wrider and wreader has been transformed, if no single individual is responsible for the whole text, and if that text is no longer a fixed, sacred record–what then are the implications for morality in a record-addicted, legalistic, guilt-needing culture? This might seem like an impertinent question, except that the following sentence is as provocative as any in Landow’s chapter called Reconfiguring Narrative: “Since some narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends upon the unity and coherence of a fixed linear text, one wonders if hypertext can convey morality in any significant form or if it is condemned to an essential triviality” (106). Landow’s answer is affirmative; hypertext storytelling can “convey morality,” and his argument here is consistent with his other positions. Using Michael Joyce’s hypertext Afternoon as his example, Landow maneuvers some responsibility onto the reader’s shoulders. As readers, he says, “our assistance in the storytelling or storymaking is not entirely or even particularly random . . . we do become reader-authors and help tell the tale we read.”

     

    “Nonetheless,” he continues, “as J. Hillis Miller points out, we cannot help ourselves: we must create meaning as we read: ‘A story is readable because it can be organized as a causal chain . . . . A causal sequence is always an implicit narrative’” (115; Miller, Versions of Pygmalion).

     

    One purpose of Landow’s argument here seems to be to rescue hypertext “stories” (and perhaps the medium itself) from “essential triviality.” But I don’t think the rescue operation is called for. The struggle is not between the trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order, even though Miller (and Aristotle) implies that the absence of centralized, authorial control of time, and the concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets “random” and “chaotic.” I see randomness and chaos making a comeback, however, and if morality’s principal basis really is sequence–consequence, post hoc ergo propter hoc, narrative–then I believe that conventional “morality,” thermodynamic morality, is in for a hard time.

     

    My conviction is founded in the implications of fractals and chaos theory, which permit the simultaneous domination of events by absolute determinism and absolute uncertainty. I do not expect “causality” to fade away, any more than Newton or Einstein have, but we are questioning some default assumptions deeply rooted in our culture–see Miller’s casual but inevitable use of “because,” above, for instance. Consider also the questions implicit in a passage Kernan quotes from McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy:

     

    The crucial literary concepts of a central plot and a single structure are extensions of the movement of type in precise lines, which generates "the notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness . . . totally alien to the nature of language and consciousness." (Kernan 52)

     

    As Landow himself says, hypertext technology lets us start testing questions and assumptions. In the case of story-telling, hypertext does not demand attention to a single Creative Authority who designs sequences of sensation and requires that audiences accept them in that order. This is why there is really no need, in spite of the consistency and symmetry of Landow’s nostalgic argument (that readers will construe their own causality, and narrative morality will remain essentially the same), to succumb to the argument’s temptations.

     

    Almost half the book is devoted to ways hypertext affects realms outside its own texts. The last two chapters are about pedagogy and politics. Both of them start small and expand. One begins with students and concludes with hypertext’s effect on canonicity. The other starts out with “humanist technophobia” and ideology, and ends with a succinct survey of networks’ and hypertext’s unpacking of the mouldy concept of “intellectual property.” One sentence seems to me to be at the heart of both chapters: “Educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students” (123). Implicit in this kind of transfer, as I have experienced it, is a modification of the concept “knowledge” away from a “thing” to be sought and found and guarded and delivered by coteries–by mysterious “hoods,” as in brotherhoods or priesthoods or doctoral hoods–away from monolithic thing-ness, that is, and toward a complex system of interpenetrating contributions. “Facts” don’t change much in such an environment, but some dogmatically self-evident conclusions are less likely to be called “facts.”

     

    I have watched this happen in a simple, inexpensive networking environment, and have no trouble accepting Landow’s sweeping statement about the inestimably more challenging environment of hypermedia. To prevail in that environment, students have to become engaged with learning. They will have trouble if they try to get by with habits of remembering and mimicking. Landow says that hypertext provides “the perfect means of informing, assisting, and inspiring the unconventional student” (129), that the environment “frees learners from constraints of scheduling without destroying the structure and coherence of a course” (132), and asks instructors to “rethink examinations and other forms of evaluation” (134). We also have to make some adjustments in our beliefs about “knowledge.” Instead of being a commodity that professors have exposed, “knowledge” is revealed as a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions being constructed and transformed by real people.

     

    Pleasing as these abstract ramifications may sound, they are also disturbing. How many educators really want “active, independent-minded students who take more responsibility for their education and are not afraid to challenge and disagree” (163)? Landow assesses the prospect as “terrifying” for many, perhaps especially so in an atmosphere of “widespread humanist technophobia” (164).

     

    Beyond the threat to professors’ assumptions about their power, deeply rooted in the proscenium classroom (Barker and Kemp), and registrars’ schedules and “credit hours,” Landow perceives hypertext as more than a teaching tool, a learning machine, an “educational program.” For him it is a medium, and its unprecedented massage (sic) is potentially multicentered and democratizing far beyond the campus. One already hears rumors about the ways some people in medium-sized organizations have adjusted their activity away from obeying and toward collaborating as “horizontal” networks encroach on “chain-of-command” hierarchies. That the change is still in the service of “productivity” seems to me a minor flaw, perhaps temporary, in a near-Odonian transformation of attitude.

     

    A basic image for Landow, and for this review, has been transfer of power. The author’s authority is decreased and the reader’s power is increased by the same “amounts,” it would seem. Democracy gains to the extent that autocracy loses. The image implies scarcity, limitation, restriction. But “power” does not really exist as a fixed quantum, after all, to be shared only among the privileged and withheld from, kept secret from, the underclass. In certain contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power does not leave the sharer with less of it. To the extent that information and power (and authority) overlap, hypertext’s ecology of abundance can be regarded as spreading all of them around, rather than either reducing or increasing any of them. To that extent, at least, hypertext technology resembles network technology: sharing, abundance, even the dreaded “overload” are its hallmarks, rather than the sort of de-centering that implies reduction or diminishment.

     

    Although it takes some rigorous imagining to do so, I can even extrapolate the hypertext environment in the direction of broadly anti-propertarian attitudes. The propertarian, anti-collaborative concepts of artist and inventor, copyright and patent, publication and secrecy, are closely linked. But the impetus toward collaboration already evident in the Matrix or on the Net looks to be compounded by the experience of hypertext. IF the overlapping cultural schemas of a) deference to isolated genius, b) worship of mystery, and c) reverence for hierarchy continue to be eroded by a technology that virtually mandates collaboration, our great-grandchildren will share a radically refabricated culture in which concepts like intellectual property, trade secrets, and even searching for The Truth may have been significantly altered.

     

    These declarations are mine, not Landow’s. He wisely stops short of such gee-whiz speculation. His boldness in discussing pedagogy alongside critical theory, and in discussing the political implications of an academic technology, are more significant for me than the specific directions we may make guesses about.

     

    For it is this convergence of technology, pedagogy, scientific and literary theorizing, and the feedback processes of cultural evolution, that Landow’s volume heralds. Indeed, I wish he had brought his talent for drawing the most crucial particulars out of a complex framework to bear on the broader academic curriculum (and political agenda). It seems to me that the sooner we can integrate hypertext’s opportunities for exploration into our graduate training in all the artistic and critical disciplines, the greater the likelihood that some system of positive global cooperation will prevail over the temptations to self destruct.

     

    There are other matters that I wish Landow had been able to address. On the technical side, they include the implications of the broader definition of “text” forthcoming when “cinema” and “sound” join “plain words” and “pictures” in the hypermedia “space.” On the theoretical side, they include the intriguing hypothesis that “Time”–as in the dis-integration of before-and-after relationships–is the concept that arches over all his reconfigurations. Pedagogically, they include the implications of the growing demand for computing resources, including trained people, that will issue from the humanistic disciplines as the technology’s value to all forms of textual-interpretive endeavor comes to be recognized. Politically, they include the ramifications of high cost and slow distribution of the technology (which brings us full circle, centrifugally, around the bullseye Landow has anatomized). But in a book so thoroughly admirable, these few lacunae are no more worrisome than the missing “the” on page 131.

     

    There are skeptics about hypertext, particularly scholars concerned about its apparent promotion of bull-session anarchy and rigorless dissipation. Landow quotes doubts about “the erosion of the thinking subject” (Said, Beginnings) and “the disintegration of the centering voice of contemplative thought” (Heim, Electric Language). For Landow himself, however, whatever is lost at the center appears offset by benefits of collaboration. In discussing the relationships he experienced during an Intermedia project, for instance, he lambastes those who, still bathing themselves “in the afterglow of Romanticism, uncritically inflate Romantic notions of creativity and originality to the point of absurdity” (91). Quoting Bolter about the way “book technology itself created new conceptions of authorship and publication” (93), Landow celebrates the fact that “hypermedia linking automatically produces collaboration” (95).

     

    There is also suspicion that anything to do with computers is essentially materialistic and centralized, and an associated suspicion that any “program” must be a “product” whose acceptance will implicate us in the machinations of the producers. One reviewer, objecting to Jay Bolter’s attitude toward computing technology (in Writing Space), links this threat (of a “decentering, associative technology being developed by and for the greater consolidation of post-industrial, multi-national, capitalistic institutions”) with “a neo-conservative position” and “Republican ideology” (Tuman, “Review,” 262-63). The paradox of “consolidated decentering” might be resolvable, but it will be hard for a while yet to fight the presumption that network technology and hypertext technology have the same effects on their users. I can testify that the impacts are very different, however, and I will insist that confusing the concept hypertext with whoever delivers and installs a particular version is like confusing the generic technology of the book with the sellers of paper and printing presses; hypertext is a generic technology, not a product. And Usenet (to shift to The Matrix of networks) is like an anarchists’ convention compared with commercial bulletin boards’ shopping malls.

     

    A related objection, also directed at Bolter and Writing Space, has been to his “radical environmentalism,” which allows the “human mind to be shaped by whatever writing space it happens to be occupying” (Kaufer and Neuwirth, “Review,” 260). But while one must certainly beware of absolute technological determinism, it seems clear enough that the human mind is used differently, say, in paper-based cultures than in memory-dependent societies. If that translates into environmental “shaping,” then hypertext, in its disruption of such self-evident categories as “reader” and “writer,” would seem already to have begun to reshape us.

     

    Hypertext is as radical a social technology as there has been since compound interest, and its subsequences won’t crystallize in a rationally predictable way. Who could have prophesied, for instance, that the internal-combustion engine and the quartz-crystal radio would play out as suburban decentralization and public television broadcasting? I am willing to predict that the nature of record-keeping is going to change now that we can tape events in “real-time” as well as write down summaries from memory. Since we live in a record-grounded culture, that is, changes in recording technology will have effects as profound as they are gradual–over the next century or two. Hypertext, a recording medium, will play some part in those tectonic changes, but it is far too early to predict its exact role or the precise changes. Isaac Asimov once made the point that most people can carry out a plausible straight-line extrapolation of (some) effects of change in a single variable. He grinned as he added that plotting the feedback effects where those extrapolations affect other variables is, shall we say, more difficult. Few “variables” affect the understructure of culture more subtly or seismically than its recording technology, and hypertext is an unprecedented, appealing, available recording technology. Its effects on what we call “writing” may turn out to be as momentous as those of photography on “drawing.”

     

    I doubt that any member of the four hostile audiences I enumerated at the outset will now rush off to buy Landow’s Hypertext. But I hope that others who are more prepared to credit an emerging technology with the potential to radically reshape our institutional lives–right down to such assumed conceptual bedrock as text, author, story, knowledge, and reader–will give this admirable book the chance to convince them.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Barker, T.B., and F.O. Kemp. “Network Theory: A Postmodern Pedagogy for the Writing Classroom.” In Carolyn Handa, ed., Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, 1990.
    • Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
    • Delany, Paul, and George P. Landow, eds. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
    • Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
    • Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP. 1987.
    • Kaufer, David, and Chris Neuwirth. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 259-61.
    • Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson. Princeton: Princeton UP 1987.
    • Lanham, Richard A. “From Book to Screen: Four Recent Studies.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 199-206. Review of Bolter, Writing Space; Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century; Kernan, The Death of Literature; Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video.
    • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.
    • Miller, J. Hillis. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
    • Moran, Charles. “Computers and English: What Do We Make of Each Other?” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 193-98. Review of Handa, ed., Computers and Community; Holdstein and Selfe, eds., Computers and Writing: Theory, Research, Practice.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. “Polymers, Paranoia, and the Rhetoric of Hypertext.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 150-59.
    • Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
    • Schwarz, Helen J. “Computer Perspectives: Mapping New Territories.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 207-12. Review of Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s.
    • Slatin, John. “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium.” In Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies.
    • Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. Cambridge: Eastgate Systems.
    • Tuman, Myron. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 261-63.

     

  • Becoming Postmodern?

    Ursula K. Heise

    English Department
    Stanford University
    <uheise@leland.stanford.edu>

     

    Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.

     

    Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time addresses a problem that has been all too long neglected in studies of contemporary avant-garde art and thought: the concept of temporality. Although postmodernism’s relationship to and construction of space, time, and historicity has been discussed with some frequency in more general accounts, there has not so far been any book-length study focused in particular on postmodernism and temporality. In its attempt to fill this theoretical gap, Ermarth’s book must be welcome to any reader interested in postmodern theories and practices.

     

    Ermarth analyzes the problem of temporality within the general framework of poststructuralist theory as well as the more specific one of narrative structure. The three theoretical chapters that constitute the bulk of her book explore the ramifications of her central thesis: postmodern theory and postmodern art replace the %historical temporality% which has dominated Western thought since the Renaissance with the concept of %rhythmic time%. Chapter One, “Time Off the Track,” defines historical temporality as a convention that emerged in the Renaissance and came to inform all the most important forms of Western knowledge. As a “realistic” or “representational” device,

     

    historical time [is] a convention that belongs to a major, generally unexamined article of cultural faith . . . : the belief in a temporal medium that is neutral and homogeneous and that, consequently, makes possible those mutually informative measurements between one historical moment and another that support most forms of knowledge current in the West and that we customarily call "science." History has become a commanding metanarrative, perhaps %the% metanarrative in Western discourse. (20)

     

    Postmodernism radically subverts this convention by relying on a “rhythmic time” which is no longer a transcendent and neutral medium “in” or “on” which events take place as in a container or on a road stretching to infinity. Rather, rhythmic time is coextensive with the event and does not allow the subject to distance itself from it, but collapses the two and binds both of them in language. It is a “time of experiment, improvisation, adventure”:

     

    Because rhythmic time is an exploratory repetition, because it is over when it's over and exists for its duration only and then disappears into some other rhythm, any "I" or ego or %cogito% exists only for the same duration and then disappears with that sea change or undergoes transformation into some new state of being. What used to be called the individual consciousness has attained a more multivocal and systemic identity.(53)

     

    This new type of identity, the topic of Ermarth’s second chapter entitled “Multilevel Thinking,” renders humanist and Cartesian notions of individuality obsolete, since the subject now exists in an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives and moments of awareness and becomes indistinguishable from the object. Ultimately, it turns out to be a construct of language, as Ermarth details in her third chapter, “Time and Language”:

     

    If time is no longer a neutral medium, a place of exchange between self-identical objects and subjects and "in" which language functions, then the language sequence--especially in the expanded theoretical sense of discourse--becomes the only site where temporality can be located and where consciousness can be said to exist. (140)

     

    In one of her most interesting theoretical moves, Ermarth describes this innovative linguistic constellation in terms of the medieval notion of %figura%, in opposition to the modern concept of %image%. In contrast to the image, the term %figura% for Ermarth emphasizes an understanding of the linguistic sign as reflexive rather than as representational, as a value within a system rather than as an indicator of some external reality. In the medieval as in the postmodern figura, the sign attains an “absolute” status insofar as it is not separate from the reality it is linked to, but coextensive with it. “[In postmodernism] [t]ime and subject %are% the figure,” Ermarth concludes, “and there is no ‘other side’ to it, except in some other figure” (181).

     

    Each of the three theoretical chapters is followed by a “rhythm section” which illustrates the theory through an interpretation of a postmodern novel: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada. In all three, Ermarth emphasizes the amount of reader involvement that is required for the construction of the narrative sequence, to the point where readerly construction comes to form part of the text itself. Rather predictably, she focuses on the repetition and variation of key scenes in Jealousy, the varied reading itineraries of Hopscotch and the repetition and superimposition of themes and motifs in “alternative semantic contexts” in Ada, but all three novels are well chosen to give an idea of how rhythmic time in narrative differs from the traditional linear and “historical” plot. One wonders, however, whether the concept could have been shown to work equally well if Ermarth had included examples of those maybe more typically postmodern texts whose narrative is structured by formal principles not so easily accounted for in terms of repetition and semantic multivalence: Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, for example, the texts produced by the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or some of the novels of Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, or Christine Brooke-Rose, in which the layout of the printed page comes to play a crucial role for the understanding of narrative progression. Neither is it clear how the notion of rhythmic time would apply to the novels of, for example, Ishmael Reed or Kathy Acker, whose “storylines” are far more radically disrupted than those of Jealousy or Hopscotch. Ermarth here seems to have chosen her examples from that particular brand of early postmodernism that can be made to serve as support for her theoretical approach, to the exclusion of later, more radical experiments that present a much greater challenge to any notion of rhythm.

     

    Nevertheless, Ermarth’s general claim that postmodernism implies a reconceptualization of time is in itself an innovative and promising one. But it is also obvious from the start that her definition of historical time as a realist convention dependent upon the Cartesian %cogito% leads her straight back to two of the most well-beaten tracks of postmodern theory: the critique of subjectivity and the critique of representation. The strength of this approach is that it makes the entire methodological and terminological arsenal of poststructuralist theory available for the study of time. But precisely as a consequence of this, time turns out to be just another metaphysical convention, another meta-narrative to be dismantled in terms that are by now familiar. I am not objecting to this on the basis of those reproaches that the more “historicist” camp of postmodern theorists has frequently leveled at the more “deconstructionist” camp–for example, that an account such as Ermarth’s, which opposes postmodern temporal notions to earlier forms of historical reasoning, relies on historical reasoning even in the process of announcing its demise; that the radically discontinuous “rhythmic time” she describes seems to preclude any notion of individual morality and any possibility of meaningful political thought or action; and that such a temporality makes it impossible for socially repressed groups to articulate their “histories” against the dominant “History” of the elite. Ermarth is aware of these objections, and answers them–tentatively, as she herself concedes–by arguing that social reform in the postmodern age must proceed through the construction of new forms of discursive mediation, and that the reformation of language is itself a political act (112-14, 156-57). To repeat the arguments against such a view would be merely to rehearse once more one of the most well-worn–though admittedly crucial–controversies over postmodernism. Instead, I would like to discuss briefly three central points of Ermarth’s account that seem to me to weaken its theoretical grasp: the absence of any discussion of already existing literature on temporality, the construction of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and the connection of time and language which, according to Ermarth, underlies the notion of “rhythmic time.”

     

    Whereas the strength of Sequel to History lies in its familiarity with and survey-presentation of various theories of postmodernism, especially feminist ones, its maybe most serious shortcoming lies in its failure to engage any strand of previous research on temporality. Ermarth mentions Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative and Fraser’s Voices of Time in passing, but does not once refer to David Carr’s or Hayden White’s explorations of the connection between historical time and narrative.1 There is no reference to any of the recent studies of time as a social dimension by Eviatar Zerubavel, Michael Young, David Landes, Paul Halpern or Stephen Kern, nor to any of the more specific studies of the contemporary experience of time by Jeremy Rifkin or David Harvey. None of the classical studies of literary and narrative temporality by Jean Poulet, Georges Pouillon, Hans Meyerhoff, A.A. Mendilow or Frank Kermode finds its way into her study, not to speak of much more recent ones such as Gerard Genette’s, Peter Brooks’s, or Suzanne Fleischman’s. Ermarth does not quote Roland Barthes’s critique of narrative time as a purely representational convention, or Thomas Docherty’s recent concept of a postmodern “chrono-politics,” both sources that are highly relevant to many of her considerations; neither does she mention Philippe Le Touze’s claim that in the %nouveau roman%, temporality has shifted from story to discourse, a hypothesis that anticipates her own claim that in the postmodern novel, time becomes a function of language. But maybe most surprising, given Ermarth’s attempt to develop a non-transcendental concept of time, is the absence of any engagement with Derrida’s suggestion that time itself is an irrecuperably metaphysical concept, and David Wood’s extensive discussion of this hypothesis in The Deconstruction of Time (1989). In a book which justifies its existence by the absence of theoretical considerations of time and postmodernism, this large number of omissions cannot but weigh heavily.

     

    It does so not only at a purely theoretical level. Practically, Ermarth’s lack of concern for earlier analyses of time leads to the disappearance of high modernism from her historical map. The only current of pre-World War II literature she discusses is surrealism, but the more crucial precursors in questions of temporality–Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis’s rebellion against the “time school in modern literature,” and Gertrude Stein’s experiments with narrative time and timelessness, to name only a few–are left out of consideration. In fact, since Ermarth defines as “modern” the period from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century, one is left with the impression that novelists such as Proust or Faulkner would have to be considered postmodernists in her terminology. Is there any difference between them and the postmodernists she discusses –Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, Nabokov? Nowhere does Ermarth spell out whether she sees any fundamental break between the high modernist and the postmodernist conceptualization of time, or whether she views them as essentially homogeneous in their break away from Cartesian rationalism and realist forms of representation.

     

    This is more than quibbling over labels, since her central theoretical notion, “rhythmic time,” can be applied to a number of modernist novels as well as postmodernist ones. Rhythmic time, according to Ermarth, manifests itself in narrative as a structure that no longer consists of linear plot development, but the repetition of identical motifs, details and descriptions with slight but disturbing variations, or as repeated and incompatible accounts of what the reader must take to be the same events. These variations and distortions make it impossible for the readers to construct a rational, representational picture of the novel’s world and events. Rather, they are invited to perceive the text as a figural pattern of elements which can be arranged and rearranged, “[e]mphasizing what is parallel and synchronically patterned rather than what is linear and progressive” (85). Thus, Ermarth argues, the structuring principle of the postmodern novel is paratactic rather than syntactic, relying on a style which “thrives by multiplying the valences of every word and by making every arrangement a palimpsest rather than a statement, rather as poetry does when it draws together a rhythmic unit by means of repeated sound or rhythm” (85). This is, on the surface, a valid enough account of the functioning of many postmodern stories and novels. But the emphasis on synchronicity, multiple meanings, and a structure closer to poetry than to traditional narrative also characterizes the late novels of, for example, Joyce, Woolf or Stein. In what way, then, is rhythmic time typically postmodern?

     

    Furthermore, Ermarth’s definition of rhythmic time raises the question of why one would even insist on still calling this kind of narrative “temporal” at all in a sense other than the superficial one that it takes time to read. One cannot but remember that Joseph Frank used a very similar argument when he characterized the novels of Proust and Joyce as “spatial” in his influential essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”: overcoming the linearity of the 19th-century plot, Frank argued, the modernist novel invites the reader not so much to follow an evolving story, but a gradually spreading network of images which must be perceived in simultaneity. This simultaneity of perception he calls “spatial form.” Like Ermarth, then, he sees a paratactic patterning to be perceived in parallel or in simultaneity as the structuring principle of the 20th-century novel–only Ermarth does not call this “spatial form,” but “rhythmic time,” a concept she herself explains by means of other, sometimes quite distinctly spatializing terms such as “pattern,” “arrangement,” or “figura.” In this context, she quotes Robbe-Grillet’s programmatic statement from For A New Novel to the effect that “in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer completes anything” (155; Ermarth 74). But she seems unaware of how easily this could be used to support a concept such as “spatial form” rather than any specifically temporal approach.

     

    Ermarth’s reference to poetry adds another twist to this: if the postmodern novel is configured on the basis of rhythm, repetition and patterns, then indeed how %is% it different from poetry? Given this affinity, could one not argue that postmodernism’s rhythmic time constitutes no real “reformation of time” at all, but simply the extension of a concept of time that has been present all along in the poetic tradition? I hasten to add that this is not at all a conclusion that I find satisfactory; I am quite prepared to accept that postmodern narrative does innovate our construction of temporality. But Ermarth’s account does not really explain why and how we do still read postmodern narratives as narratives rather than as extended poems. Hopscotch is %not% like long poems such as Pound’s Cantos or Hejinian’s My Life, but one cannot tell by Ermarth’s theory why that is so.

     

    Even discounting these difficulties of applied narratology, though, Ermarth’s theory of time remains problematic. It follows logically from her critique of historical temporality as a representational convention that she ends up describing both postmodern time and consciousness as anchored in the differential signifying system of language. This final emphasis on the crucial role of language may appear at first like a staple of much poststructuralist theory. But the exclusivity which Ermarth attributes to language as the ground and site of all discursive formations, be they philosophical, esthetic, or ethical (“all thought is discourse and all discourse is language” [156]), turns into a serious problem for her theory of temporality. Let us assume for the sake of argument that our conception of time, and in general our cultural, social, and political practices do indeed “take place” principally in and through language, and that changes in these practices must be based on changes of or in language. But then how does language change? How do we get, for example, from the discursive formation that grounds historical time to the one that opens up the possibility of rhythmic time? How do–or did–we become postmodern? I do not see how Ermarth’s account can solve this dilemma: by situating time “in” language, she makes it virtually impossible to situate language “in” time.

     

    This question cannot be brushed off by saying that it is a “historical” one of the kind Ermarth condemns (and even if it were, this would not eliminate the necessity of an answer, since Ermarth herself admits that her account cannot in all respects avoid historicity). Rather, it is a question regarding the very nature of change, of Becoming– that is, regarding the very “processual” character of time that Ermarth herself considers crucial. Possibly, Ermarth would argue that this question cannot be answered in general terms, since we would in this case be again reduced to a “neutral and homogeneous” temporality of some sort. But this is really conceding that there simply can be no non-metaphysical concept of time–a conclusion which leads Ermarth’s idea of a non-transcendental “rhythmic time” %ad absurdum%. A concept of time that is coextensive with the event cannot explain the process that leads from one event to another, and hence evades one of the most central questions in any theory of temporality.

     

    These, in brief, are some of the difficulties Ermarth’s account of postmodernist time encounters, and which might have become, if not solvable, at least more manageable through an engagement with those texts that have already discussed them. My own prediction would be that a successful reformulation of the concept of time will only become possible once we rethink the postmodern notions of “metaphysics” and “transcendence.” Time will tell.

     

    Note

     

    1. I am indebted to Shirley Brice Heath for pointing the latter omission out to me.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences

    Michael W. Foley

    Department of Politics
    The Catholic University of America
    <foley@cua>

     

    Rosenau, Pauline Marie. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

     

    On display in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit of postmodernist drawing is a piece by Stephen Prima: 67 framed sheets, of various shapes and sizes, broad brushed, light tan ink wash on rag barrier paper, with the suggestive tag “No Title/(‘The History of Modern Painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalog….’ Barnett Newman).” Pauline Rosenau’s book is a thoroughgoing repudiation of that (post)modernist preoccupation. To analyze postmodernism, in Rosenau’s mind, is to catalog it. In the process, her “postmodernists” mix and blend, as indistinguishable, but for her frames, as Prima’s paintings. Postmodernism plays on the ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion of the text. Rosenau falls victim to it. She mixes description and prescription, observer and observed, thinker, thought and thought-about in an eclectic and often bewildering catalog of postmodern opinion.

     

    Running through the book is a distinction between two broad categories of postmodernists. The “skeptical post-modernists”

     

    argue that the post-modern age is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness or even absence of moral parameters and societal chaos. . . . In this period no social or political 'project' is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (15)

     

    Given such powerful and alarming claims, it may seem surprising that the skeptics also maintain “that there is no truth” and that “all that is left is play, the play of words and meaning” (15).

     

    The "affirmatives" are a still more nebulous category: More indigenous to Anglo-North American culture than to the Continent, the generally optimistic affirmatives are oriented toward process. They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. (15-16)

     

    Who are these post-modernists? We never learn, though Rosenau cites Baudrillard, Derrida, and articles by Todd Gitlin and Klaus Scherpe. The theorists of postmodernism and its exemplars exchange places freely in Rosenau’s account, and it is often difficult to tell which is being described. Nor do we get the opportunity to judge postmodern thought for ourselves; Rosenau rarely quotes her theorists and even more rarely explores an individual author’s work or argumentation. Postmodern thinkers, in her account, do not argue: they claim, they assume, they relinquish or adopt ideas, they reject or they share views; but they never appear to present a connected argument, elaborate an interpretation, or explain their case. How could they when, as Rosenau never tires of repeating, postmodernism “rejects reason,” preferring instead “the romantic, emotions, feelings” (94). This attack on reason, on the truth claims of modern science, on “the modern subject,” and on moral certainty make up, in Rosenau’s view, “one of the greatest intellectual challenges to established knowledge of the twentieth century” (5).

     

    Rosenau is far from comfortable with that challenge. She dedicates her book to her parents, identified as “strong modern subjects, who had no confusion about their identity or their values.” She worries about the “cynical, nihilist, and pessimistic tone” of the skeptics, who find in “death, self-inflicted death, suicide,” “affirmations of power that conquer rationality” (143). She finds it alarming that “postmodern social movements” like fundamentalism have become “widespread and hegemonic” in some places, because “post-modernism in the Third World provides a justification for requiring women to adopt forms of dress that were abandoned by their grandmothers” and promotes the re-establishment of traditional marriage roles and the restoration of male prerogatives (154-5). In this book, Derrida lies down with the Ayatollah Khomeini; their issue is, as might be expected, monstrous.

     

    Rosenau does scant better justice to her primary concern, the challenge of postmodernism to the social sciences. Though she cites work which has attempted to incorporate postmodern themes into a wide variety of social science disciplines, from international relations to urban planning, her treatment of these efforts is as superficial and unsatisfying as her references to Derrida, Foucault, or Baudrillard. More generally, though, she is inclined to pit postmodernism against social science. In the end, she suggests, efforts to create a “post-modern social science” run aground on what she sees as postmodernism’s fundamental denial of any standards for evaluating knowledge claims. “Can post-modernism survive for long,” she asks, “in a methodological vacuum where all means for adjudication between opposing points of view are relinquished?” The answer seems to be no. “Without any standard or criteria of evaluation post-modern inquiry becomes a hopeless, perhaps even a worthless enterprise” (136).

     

    It is not clear in this presentation of an essentialized “post-modernism” that Rosenau grasps what her radical postmodernists are about. Baudrillard, she tells us, “claims the nuclear holocaust and the Third World War have already taken place; in so doing he violates all modern concepts of time” (68). Without linear time, she asks, what becomes of contemporary social science’s pursuit of causal explanation? Certainly Baudrillard challenges conventional notions of space and time. Does he do so to “overturn” them, as Rosenau asserts? Or to open up our thinking by shattering the self-validating presuppositions of “normal science”? Unless he and other postmodernists are offering an alternative metaphysic with exclusive truth claims of its own, it is hard to see how their “challenge” could be quite as cataclysmic as Rosenau imagines. Rosenau, however, prefers to stress the destructive confrontation of postmodern critique and social scientific presuppositions. In doing so, she evidently intends to take seriously both the most radical claims of the postmodernists and the most positivist pretensions of mainstream social science. But the maneuver is fatal, for it blocks an opportunity to investigate what is new about the postmodernist movement and how and to what degree it clashes with what is new and interesting in contemporary social science.

     

    It is testimony to the cachet of postmodernism that this book found a publisher. That it found one in one of the better university presses perhaps testifies, as well, to that abandonment of standards of judgment which the author finds at the core of postmodernism. This may nevertheless be a book postmodernism deserves. The trouble with postmodernist theory lies, even more than in the overheated language of postwar French intellectuality, in its exaggerated claims. Skepticism, after all, is as old as Zeno, or Abraham, or the Buddha–pick your Father–and no doubt older: the Mothers had plenty of reason to be skeptical of the gods of the Fathers and the Father-Gods of even the skeptics. It was Hume who taught that “causality” was a figment of the imagination and the logical positivists who insisted that “truth” lay only in propositions, not in reality. So what is new in postmodernism? What does the movement have to say to the social sciences?

     

    As a radical reaffirmation of traditional skepticism, probably not much. Reminders of the precariousness of our knowledge claims have regularly given way to fresh constructions: nominalism to Baconian inductivism, French skepticism to the Cartesian reduction, Humean skepticism to British empiricism, Kantian analysis to the idealist syntheses. Ultimately, the postmodern reconstruction of inquiry will hold more interest and have more impact than the initial, skeptical extravagances, however sound and however needed. Here too, however, it is not always clear how much the theorists of postmodernism run counter to even mainstream social scientific theory.

     

    In an exchange between Lucien Goldman and Michel Foucault in 1969, Goldman attacked what he saw as a denial that “men make history” and quoted a bit of graffiti left on a blackboard in the Sorbonne by a student during the May 1968 uprising: “Structures do not take to the streets.” Foucault denied that he had ever called himself a structuralist, but another speaker, Jacques Lacan, attacked the aphorism because “if there is one thing demonstrated by the events of May, it is precisely that structures did take to the streets. The fact that those words were written at the very place where people took to the streets proves nothing other than, simply, that very often, even most often, what is internal to what is called action is that it does not know itself.”1

     

    Rosenau thinks this sort of argument captures postmodern thought. “Post-modern social science,” she tells us, would describe a society “without subjects or individuals,” in which structures “overpower the individual,” “beyond the reach of human intervention” (46). How curiously old-fashioned this sounds to a social scientist! Has the “sociological mind” ever been disposed to think otherwise? Lacan’s comment could have come from a scion of any of several lineages of social scientists, from Marx to Durkheim to Weber. Wasn’t it Freud who exploded the bourgeois self as Marx had exploded the bourgeois social order and Durkheim its moral order? American social scientists have no further to go than Robert K. Merton, whose definition of social science as the investigation of the “unintended consequences” of human action justly characterizes the mainstream of social scientific research since the nineteenth century.

     

    Foucault himself seems only to echo Marx and Engels when he declared that every society controls the production of discourse in an attempt to “evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.”2 By the time Foucault was well launched on his project to recover the hidden origins of our discourses about “man,” “madness,” and the criminal, moreover, Berger and Luckmann had published The Social Construction of Reality and Gregory Bateson had generated a good deal of heat, and some little light, with his notion of schizophrenia as a language disorder. It would not be altogether unfair to argue that French postmodernism paralleled developments that were already brewing in the social sciences, when it was not simply playing catch-up.

     

    One area in contemporary social science in which divergence seems to overwhelm convergence, on the other hand, is precisely the question of human agency. What is really new in the social sciences, in political science perhaps above all, is an attempt to think through the implications of a “non-necessitarian” social science, in which the choices (and occasionally the personal skills) of individuals play a crucial role. The attempt to give the voiceless a voice, marked in contemporary feminism but also evident in important recent work in anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, likewise seems to run counter to any postmodern “denial of the subject.” Rosenau quotes a postmodernist feminist, Jane Flax, who finds “post- modernist narratives about subjectivity . . . inadequate” from the point of view of feminist theory (52). But she might equally well have cited work in the “new social history” or the Annales school.3

     

    There are certainly tensions between postmodernist efforts to “decenter” the subject and the return to notions of human agency in contemporary social science. Rosenau plays on these conflicts, however, without really illuminating them, or even giving an adequate account of them. Despite the frequency with which the issue is joined, moreover, I suspect that postmodernists and their critics alike have been beguiled by the rhetoric and that there is a profound consistency in the efforts of Foucault, in particular, to banish the subject from the history of discourse while attempting to discover, in the everyday experience of the intolerable, new grounds for moral action on the part of an individual both constituted by prevailing discourse and free in the uncovering of its oppressive silences. Such possibilities go unglimpsed in Pauline Rosenau’s account, as they do in the moral and scientific positivisms which still dominate much social scientific practice. But they are well represented in recent social science, and they deserve better treatment than that afforded here.

     

    Contemporary social science, moreover, both converges with postmodernism and borrows heavily from the attempts of Foucault, Bourdieu, and others to embed the new skepticism in new approaches to understanding. What characterizes these efforts is 1) a focus on discourse as the material (and thus powerful) vehicle for social understandings and action, and 2) the insistence that such understandings are best uncovered in examination of everyday practices. Behind these affirmations lie a discomfort with the rigidities of the various structuralisms and a rejection of “meta- narratives” like Marxism which attempt to capture the grand motions of history. Before them rages a still important debate on the justification for abandoning all such paradigms–or the possibility of doing so. But some of the best recent social science–like that of James C. Scott on “the arts of resistance,” Donald McCloskey on the rhetoric of economics, or Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera on peasant economic discourse–uncovers the dynamics of concrete practices and bodies of discourse and demonstrates, in doing so, the fruitfulness of postmodern preoccupations. Rosenau’s book seems largely unconscious of this work. More’s the pity, because, as the postmodernists might insist, we will learn far more about postmodernism in the academy from the everyday practices and preoccupations of contemporary social scientists than by surveys of the self-consciously “postmodern.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 210-11.

     

    2. “The Discourse on Language,” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216.

     

    3. Curiously, Rosenau tells us that postmodernist skeptics “reject history as longue duree . . . because it claims to discover a set of timeless relations existing independent of everything else” (64). Unfortunately, she does not cite the postmodernists she has in mind, nor adequately explain their aversion to a key concept in the work of Fernand Braudel, an ardent supporter of Foucault.

     

  • The Vietnam War, Reascendant Conservatism, White Victims

    Terry Collins

    General College
    University of Minnesota
    <tcollins@gcmail.gen.umn.edu>

     

    Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg, eds. The Vietnam War and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

     

    Jason, Philip K., ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991.

     

    The Bloom-D’Souza-NEA-NEH silencing of feminist and multiculturalist positions, trivialized in the popular press as tritely inflated rhetorical agonics over who gets control of the English Department budget and reading list, masks the larger struggle for control of ideology in America, for the terms of our history and future. The contested discourse of intellectual authority and privilege extends directly from reinscription of the Vietnam War, and both are central to the conservative reascendance of the Reagan-Bush period.

     

    The willful national amnesia about the U.S. war in/on Vietnam is, in fact, prerequisite to the current domestic war against the intellectual left. Revisionist history of the Vietnam war is transubstantiative to the conservative reascendance from war criminal status to uncontested author of a “New World Order.” The right has asserted and then reaped the fruit of the myth of rectitude planted and nurtured by Reagan’s reinvention of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” This re-creation of the war has gone virtually unchallenged. Norman Podhoretz was able to write, in Why We Were in Vietnam (Simon and Schuster, 1982), that the war was an act of “imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been overwhelmingly vindicated”– with barely a stir of outrage in the popular press voicing opposition to this macabre rewriting. Equally little notice was taken when, phoenix- like, Richard Nixon issued No More Vietnams (Arbor House, 1985), his self-serving apology for genocide. Celebrating the exorcism of the “ghost of Vietnam” under Reagan, Nixon gloats that “Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America’s first international losing streak has been halted.” He writes (and gets away with it), “Of all the myths about the Vietnam War, the most vicious one is the idea that the United States was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall (sic) of Cambodia in 1975,” dismissing the laws of cause and effect as neatly as he does the idea of truth.

     

    The reclamation of the hearts and minds of the American suburban diaspora, relieving the national consciousness of the burden of the “Vietnam syndrome” (a cynical rearticulation of what might have passed, in a reasonable moral climate, for something like depression growing out of deserved collective guilt), was a prerequisite for the conservative reascendance that so enervates the intellectual discourse of our era. Once vindicated and remythologized, the right launched its Education/NEA/NEH-mediated search- and-destroy mission at home, Bloom, Bennett, Hirsch and D’Souza walking point, on radio to Helms and the Onanites, tipping Coors at recon.

     

    It is logical to look to oppositional discourses in the fiction and film of the Vietnam War for relief. But, in fact, the relative absence of a collective public rejection of and response to the revisionist readings of our war in/on Vietnam is problematized by the personal, fictive, and cinematic narratives of grunt-vets, journalist-vets, and medical-vets who write, from oppositional postures, their experiences in the war. Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, William Eastlake, Oliver Stone, and the other writers featured in the criticism collected in the books reviewed here have (no doubt authentically, no doubt painfully) written large the psychic and ethical dislocation of young men inserted into the survivalist landscape of the free-fire zone. The problem is this: the prose and cinematic fictions fragment and monadize the war, make it a matter of individual(ist) survival–ethically, bodily. It is easy to imagine the origins of such texts. The stunningly horrid collective lies, pandered by government agents in the pressrooms of Vietnam, had to be countered, producing Dispatches. The clean, faceless, stinkless body counts had to be countered by Paco’s Story.

     

    But Hemingway’s dictum–that fiction tells truer truths about war than history–distorts. The memoirs, fictions, and films which recreate the Vietnam War as primarily a matter of the individual ethical and bodily survival of articulate white men, rather than as genocide, simply reconstitute this as a war of blue-eyed victims. And in the struggle for the history of this war, these fictions, most powerfully those intended as narratives of resistance to LBJ-Kissinger-Nixon, stand complicit, by making Vietnam the individual’s story, a war on Vietnamese peasants reconstructed as a war valorizing the white American grunt’s individual ethical and physical pain, however real. In the most powerful of the Vietnam War books and films, it is still a white American war, a white American morality play enacted on a stage built of dead Asians, albeit an individualist drama sometimes brilliantly re-read for the violently sexist and misogynist spectacle that the Vietnam War was/is.

     

    But in fact this was/is a war on the brown-eyed, and no fictional, cinematic, or critical gloss will make it otherwise. In the field of vision in these narratives, the individual white man’s pain obscures our view of American minorities dying and bleeding, all out of proportion to their numbers. Above all, the individual(ist) pain of the white GI, struggling with his soul, blocks whatever light the authors might want to have shined on Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian men, women, children burning, being raped, zipped, zapped, poisoned, free-fired, dis-eared, and forgotten against the glow and smell of white phosphorous, the jell of napalm. The best-written of the novels, the best-made of the films, are most disturbing in this failure. Oppositional by intention, they finally effect a conspiracy of eloquence. As textual representations of the war as the cauldron of the individual white American male soul’s struggle, they Tonto-ize the minority experience and overtly replace MyLai-scapes as the national memory, reaffirming the American master narratives of white male individualism and rebirth.

     

    Furthermore, the best Vietnam narratives represent a reading of Vietnam as anomaly. Far from anomaly, the Vietnam War was/is an exceptionally logical outgrowth of U.S. history and policy. Vietnam may have been Manifest Destiny’s most compellingly horrid spectacle, but it was not an aberrant moment. The more painfully eloquent the struggle of individual grunts represented in these narratives, and the more compelling their individual struggles to adjust ethical calibrations to the horror show of the killing field, the more fully obscured is the historical consistency of Vietnam. And the more obscured our vision of the historical consistency of this genocidal strain of American hegemony becomes, the less likely are we to see the same truth embodied in our contemporary American cityscapes, our drug wars, our increasingly brown-eyed urban villes which putrefy under intentional, national neglect. To atomize the Vietnam War’s reality in its textual representation, to portray it as the individual struggle for physical/ethical survival (rather than as a logically constructed episode leading out of expansionist centuries, leading out of Indian genocide, leading out of slavery, and leading into the New World Order) is to deny the centrality of Vietnam and its consistency with American history. To the extent that the Vietnam War is represented as primarily the individual white male’s struggle with his conscience in an aberrant territory, the war becomes peripheral to our understanding of the national epistemology of slash-and-burn, rape-and-control, genocide. Tim O’Brien’s Paul Berlin Going After Cacciato) Larry Heinemann’s Paco Paco’s Story), and their fictive brothers-in-arms may have been conceived in rage, remorse, or celebration of survival, but as atomized agents, they are surely close cousins to John Rambo.

     

    The collections of essays reviewed here move in and out of coherent visions of the central position occupied by the Vietnam War and by its reinvention as part of the rightist national myth. Interestingly, they follow on the heels of John Hellmann’s American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (Columbia UP, 1986). Hellmann’s book ends in a call to America to integrate this “nightmare” somehow (via Lucasfilms, he suggests!) into the traditional white American myth of the new world Adam/new world Order. Therefore, the Rowe/Berg and Jason collections are tacitly positioned against Hellmann’s invitation to wishful denial.

     

    The Vietnam War and American Culture grew out of a special issue of Cultural Critique (1986), edited by Rowe and Berg. Of the two collections under review, it is the more consistently aggressive in demanding historical and cultural integrity of the novels, memoirs, and films which attempt to represent the Vietnam War. It is introduced by a long, lucid essay by Noam Chomsky which argues a reading of the Vietnam War as exercise in national slavery to privilege, predicting the reascendant right’s inscription of a canonized discourse of the Vietnam War as erasure of historical consciousness in the service of elites. Divided into sections on “The Vietnam War and History,” “The Vietnam War and Mass Media,” and “The Vietnam War and Popular Media,” the Rowe/Berg collection contains nine strong essays and (as a fitting close to a volume that theorizes the human experience of the war) a sampling of fine concrete poems by W. D. Ehrhart.

     

    Of the essays in Rowe/Berg, three–besides the Chomsky piece–are stunning. The dilemma of the atomized-male- coming-of-age narratives is addressed directly (though in terms quite different from those I use above) by Susan Jeffords. Her essay, “Tattoos, Scars, Diaries, and Writing Masculinity,” re-reads the Vietnam War and the rich lode of male fiction about the War (including oppositional fiction from the left) as misogynist acts and icons. The essay anticipates the extended argument she develops in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Indiana UP, 1989). Rick Berg, in “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology,” posits TV and film readings of the war as foundational of the revisionist gestures that would follow: “What is lost and forgotten with each imagined win are those who fought and suffered. It is all well and good to turn Vietnam vets into heroes, but not at the expense of their children and their history. As Brecht’s Mother Courage reminds us, war profiteering has a long, honorable, and expensive history. I wonder if Stallone and his fellow revisionists are willing to pay the price.” And John Carlos Rowe struggles with the conflation of documentary and docudramatic accounts of the war in film as devices which foster a false sympathy with its (white male) victims in “substituting myth for knowledge.”

     

    The essays in Rowe/Berg are consistently clear, expansive, well-documented, and respectful of the historical and human pain their subject embodies.

     

    The essays collected in Philip K. Jason’s Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature are self-consciously tentative. Jason positions them as “paths,” not fully realized or conclusive readings. It’s a reasonable humility that takes such a stance before the enormity of this war and its varied literature, it seems. And at their best, the essays test the popular readings of the war, the prevailing ideologies captured in myth, against history or close analysis. At their worst, though, the essays whine, as only the terminally academic can, “Let’s talk about me!” Some of these essays lose sight of the blood and bone.

     

    Lorrie Smith’s “Poetry by Vietnam War Veterans” is less essay than it is prosodic connective among eloquent poetic chunks. Wisely, I think, she mutes her analytic discourse in favor of a type of reading that we used to call “appreciation”–she lets the poetic fragments weave themselves into the eventual essay. Jacqueline E. Lawson’s “She’s a Pretty Woman . . . for a Gook,” like the Jeffords essay in Rowe/Berg, examines the war in view of contemporary theories of misogyny, rape, and media-proliferated degradations of women. Kali Tal’s “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Pain” reads the war and its writing in the company of theorists of the literature of extremity, most usefully Terrence Des Pres’s study of Holocaust literature in The Survivor. Tal gives a smart, but too tentative critique of Hellmann and the other mythic-apologist readings of this literature. These three essays are the strongest in the book, to my mind.

     

    At its worst, the tentative nature of essays in the Jason collection fosters a lapse into a kind of new critical reduction of the literature of the Vietnam War. Stuart Ching’s “‘A Hard Story to Tell’: The Vietnam War in Joan Didion’s Democracy,” for example, seems satisfied to examine the literature as “Literature,” pretending to neither a breathing reader nor a positioned writer.

     

    Understanding the Vietnam War and its literature probably isn’t possible. Conflicted writings-toward such an understanding serve two mutually exclusive functions, are built on internal contradictions. In the one instance, our studies–even the most thoughtful and humanely analytical–must stylize Vietnam, reinscribe it out of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Vietnams that rattle around in the heads of vets and their families, that scream in the heads of Vietnamese people, that moan from the graves. And thereby, our studies must trivialize the war, its causes, and its consequences. That war existed so many ways, was so many wars, that its fictions will reinvent only fragments, and thereby re-fragment the whole, will situate its atrocities in physical and psychic landscapes, moral landscapes, textual landscapes, that are individual. All such atomized textualizations of atrocities of this scale must themselves be atrocities. In the other instance, we submit to the Nixonian re-inventions, the Reaganesque “noble cause” narrative. The first is the path of choice, quite clearly. Rowe/Berg and Jason move us toward that ambiguous end.

     

    Tonight, as I write, L.A. burns, troops are in our streets, the war is on TV again. Black men are the gooks this time.

     

  • Lesbian Bodies in the Age Of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction

    Cathy Griggers

    Literary and Cultural Theory
    Carnegie Mellon University

     

    What signs mark the presence of a lesbian body?

     

    Writing the lesbian body has become more common of late, making reading it all the more difficult. Less hidden, and so more cryptic than ever, the lesbian body increasingly appears as an actual variability set within the decors of everyday discourses. Signs of her presence appear on the cover of ELLE, for example, or in popular film and paperback detective mysteries as both the sleuth and femme fatale, in texts that range from Mary Wing’s overt lesbian thriller She Came Too Late (1987) to the conflicted, symptomatic lesbian sub-plot in Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow (1986). She appeared disguised as a vampire in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), and masquerading as the latest American outlaw hero in Thelma and Louise (1991). On television, she’s making her appearance on the evening soap L.A. Law, and she virtually made MTV via Madonna’s Justify Your Love music video. When MTV censored the video, she appeared on ABC’s Nightline instead, under the guise of “news.” Elsewhere, in the latest lesbian mail-order video from Femme Fatale–a discursive site where the lesbian imaginary meets the sex industry–you can find her on all fours and dressed in leather or feathers, or leather and feathers, typically wearing a phallic silicone simulacrum. Recently, she’s appeared in the trappings of San Francisco’s lesbian bar culture passing as a collection of art photographs in Della Grace’s Love Bites (1991). Meanwhile, PBS will be broadcasting in the spring of ’92 a BBC production depicting the torrid affair between Violet Treyfusis and Vita Sackville-West into the living rooms of millions of devoted PBS viewers. And Susie Bright, author of Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World (1990), is making virtual sexual reality with her Virtual Sex World Reader to be published in Spring of 1992 by Cleis Press. Lesbian computer nerds are waiting for Bright to assist in the world’s first lesbian virtual sex program, that is, the first virtual reality program designed by a lesbian. Same-sex sex between women is already a menu option on the popular on-line Virtual Valerie, along with a menu for a variety of sex toy applications. Let’s face it; lesbian bodies in postmodernity are going broadcast, they’re going techno-culture, and they’re going mainstream.

     

    In the process of mainstreaming, in which minoritarian and majority significations intermingle, the lesbian body of signs is exposed as an essentially dis-organ-ized body.1 The lesbian is as fantasmatic a construct as the woman. There are women, and there are lesbian bodies–each body crossed by multiplicitous signifying regimes and by different histories, different technologies of representation and reproduction, and different social experiences of being lesbian determined by ethnicity, class, gender identity and sexual practices. In other words, as lesbian bodies become more visible in mainstream culture, the differences amongst these bodies also become more apparent. There is a freedom and a loss inscribed in this current cultural state of being lesbian. On the one hand, lesbians are given greater exemption from a categorical call that would delimit them from the cultural spaces of the anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, the call of identity politics becomes increasingly problematized.

     

    The problem of identity is always a problem of signification in regard to historically-specific social relations. Various attempts have been made to locate a lesbian identity, most inculcated in the grand nominalizing imperative bequeathed us by the Victorian taxonomies of “sexual” science. Should we define the lesbian by a specific sexual practice, or by the lack thereof? By a history of actual, or virtual, relations? Can she be identified once and for all by the presence of a public, broadcast kiss, by an act of self-proclamation, or by an act of community outing? Should we know her by the absence of the penis, or by the presence of a silicone simulacrum? Surely this material delimitation may go too far–for shouldn’t we wonder whether or not a lesbian text, for all that, can be written across the body of a “man”? I can point to the case of male-to-female transsexuals who cathect toward women, but why should we limit the problematic to its most obvious, symptomatic manifestation?

     

    The question of a lesbian body of signs always takes us back to the notion of identity in the body, of body as identity, a notion complicated in postmodernity by alterations in technologies of reproduction. Benjamin observed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of the original work of art and, more importantly, provided a circuit to mass mentalities and thus an access code for fascism in the twentieth century.2 We should not forget Hitler’s admission that the electronic reproduction of his voice over the radio allowed him to conquer Germany. For the sake of thinking the future of lesbian bodies in postmodernity, I want to recall Benjamin’s critique of the state’s techno-fetishization of technologies of reproduction in the context of lesbian bodies now–within the cultural regime of simulation. Baudrillard defines post-mechanical reproduction as the precession of simulacra, a post-World War II state of hyperreality in post-industrial, techno-culture reached when cultural reproduction refers first and foremost to the fact that there is no original (Simulations). The cultural reproduction of lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction, that is, in the culture of simulacra, has more than ever destroyed any aura of an “original” lesbian identity, while exposing the cultural sites through which lesbianism is appropriated by the political economy of postmodernity.

     

    We are at a moment of culture, for example, when phallic body prostheses are being mass produced by the merger of the sex industry with plastics technologies. On Our Backs is not the only photojournal to market artificial penises. Even Playgirl, marketed primarily to straight women, carries pages of advertisements for a huge assortment of phallic simulacra. We’re left to wonder what these women might eventually think to do with a double-ended dildo. But there’s no mistaking that the lesbian assimilation of the sex-toy industry is reterritorializing the culturally constructed aura of the phallic signifier. By appropriating the phallus/penis for themselves, lesbians have turned techno-culture’s semiotic regime of simulation and the political economy of consumer culture back against the naturalization of male hegemony. It’s of course ironic that in mass reproducing the penis itself, the illusion of a natural linkage between the cultural power organized under the sign of the phallus and the penis as biological organ is exposed as artificial. The reproduction of the penis as dildo exposes the male organ as signifier of the phallus, and not vice versa, that is, the dildo exposes the cultural organ of the phallus as a simulacrum. The dildo is an artificial penis, an appropriated phallus, and a material signifier of the imaginary ground for an historically manifest phallic regime of power. The effect on lesbian identities of this merger between the sex industry and plastics technologies is typical of the double-binds characteristic of lesbianism in postmodernity. Ironically, the validity of grounding phallic power and gendered identity in the biological sign of difference in the male body is set up for cultural reinvestigation and reinvestment once the penis itself is reproduced as signifier, that is, in the very process of mass-producing artificial penises as a marketable sign for the consumption of desiring subjects, including subjects desiring counter-hegemonic identities. At the same time, the commodification of the signifier–in this case the penis as signifier of the phallus–obscures the politico-economic reproduction of straight class relations by displacing lesbian desire from the unstable and uncertain register of the Real to the overly stable, imaginary register of the fetish-sign (i.e., the repetitive channeling of desire into the fixed circuit that runs from the penis as phallus to the phallus as penis in an endless loop). In other words, if working-class and middle-class urban lesbians and suburban dykes can’t afford health care and don’t yet have real national political representation, they can nonetheless buy a 10-inch “dinger” and a matching leather harness, and they can, with no guarantees, busy themselves at the task of appropriating for a lesbian identity the signs of masculine power. This situation provides both a possibility for self-reinvention and self-empowerment and an appropriation of lesbian identities–and their labor, their leisure, and their purchasing power–into the commodity logic of techno-culture.

     

    At the same time, new reproductive technologies, including artificial insemination by donor (AID), in-vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, Lavage embryo transfer, and tissue farming as in cross-uterine egg transplants, are both reterritorializing and reifying biological relations to gendered social roles (Corea 1986, Overall 1989). The “body” is breaking up. I’m not talking just about the working body, the confessing body, the sexual body. These are old tropes, as Foucault showed us. In postmodernity, even the organs are separating from the body. That these organs are literal makes them no less organs of power. The womb is disjunct from the breast, for example, the vagina from the mouth that speaks, the ovaries and their production from the womb, etc., etc.. The lesbian body’s relation to these reified technologies is entirely paradigmatic of the contradictions of lesbian subject positions in postmodernity. While new reproductive technologies generally reinforce a repressive straight economy of maternal production, body management and class-privileged division of labor, the technology of cross-uterine egg transplants finally allows one lesbian to bear another’s child, a fact which to date has gone entirely unmentioned by either the medical community or the media.3

     

    The point is that the bodies that are the supposed ground of identity in essentialist arguments–arguments that assert we are who we are because of our bodies–are both internally fragmented in response to the intrusions of bio-technologies and advanced surgical techniques, including transsexual procedures, and externally plied by a variety of technologically determined semiotic registers, such as the sex-toy industry and broadcast representation. As a result, lesbian identities are generating a familiar unfamiliarity of terms which San Francisco’s lesbian sexpert, Susie Bright, has been busily mainstreaming on the Phil Donahue Show–terms as provocative as female penetration, female masculinity, S/M lipstick dykes, and lesbian phallic mothers.

     

    While all social bodies are plied by multiple regimes of signs, as Deleuze and Guattari as well as Foucault have repeatedly shown, lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction are particularly paradigmatic of a radical semiotic multiplicity. This situation is hardly surprising. That lesbians are not women because women are defined by their straight class relations–a statement Monique Wittig has popularized–doesn’t mean we know exactly what a lesbian is. The “lesbian,” especially the lesbian who resists or slips the always potential sedimentarity in that term, marks a default of identity both twice-removed and exponentially factored. Lesbians in postmodernity are subjects-in-the-making whose body of signs and bodies as sign are up for reappropriation and revision, answering as they do the party line of technology and identity.

     

    This double call of technology and identity complicates our understanding of lesbian bodies as minority bodies–a definition that locates lesbians within the discourse of identity by their differences from the majority bodies of the hetero woman and man. We might want to envision lesbians as runaway slaves with no other side of the Mississippi in sight, perpetual and permanent fugitives, as Wittig argues. But it’s undeniable that lesbians are also, at the same time and sometimes in the same bodies, lesbians bearing arms, lesbians bearing children, lesbians becoming fashion, becoming commodity subjects, becoming Hollywood, becoming the sex industry, or becoming cyborg human-machinic assemblages. And from the alternative point of view, we are also bearing witness to the military becoming lesbian, the mother becoming lesbian, straight women becoming lesbian, fashion and Hollywood and the sex industry becoming lesbian, middle-class women, corporate America, and techno-culture becoming lesbian, etc.. That is, the lesbian body of signs, like all minority bodies, is always becoming majority, in a multiplicity of ways. But at the same time, in a multitude of domains across the general cultural field, majority bodies are busy becoming lesbian.

     

    In the lesbian cultural landscape of postmodernity, essentialist arguments about feminine identity are more defunct than ever, while Wittig’s lesbian materialist analysis of straight culture is more urgent than ever and more problematic. Setting lesbian identity first within the context of postmodern culture suggests two clarifications to Wittig. First, any materialist analysis of a lesbian revolutionary position in relation to straight women as a class has to begin with one irreducible conundrum of postmodernity in regard to lesbian identities. The cultural space for popular lesbian identities to exist–economic freedom from dependence on a man–is a historical outcome of late industrial capitalism’s commodity logic in its total war phase in the first half of the twentieth century. Women, particularly single women, comprised a large proportion of the substitute bodies required by the state to maintain performativity criteria established before each world war or to meet the accelerated industrial needs of total war and reconstruction. This is the undeniable history of women’s entry into the workforce and the professions, including the academy, and of their assimilation into the commodity marketplace beyond the domestic sphere–all of which set up the possibility of the ’70s women’s movement.4 This is also the history of the cultural production of lesbian bodies as we know them today.

     

    In other words, and this is my second clarification to Wittig, lesbians are becoming nomad runaways and becoming state at the same time. And it’s at the various sites where these interminglings of bodies take place that the cultural contradictions will be most apparent and therefore the political stakes greatest. These sites include any becoming majority of the minoritarian as well as the becoming minor of majority regimes of signs, and in each of these sites the political stakes will not be equivalent. This political complication results from the epistemological challenge to materialist analysis presented by the failure of poststructural linguistics to adequately map cultural dialects except as unstable and constant sites of transformation. These kinds of subcultural variance and continuous historical transformation have to be factored in any lesbian materialist modelling system if we are to continue the work Wittig has launched not only toward a lesbian materialist critique of straight class relations, but toward a materialist critique of lesbianism itself.

     

    Lesbian bodies are not essentially counterhegemonic sites of culture as we might like to theorize. The lesbian may not be a woman, as Wittig argues, yet she is not entirely exterior to straight culture. Each lesbian has a faciality touching on some aspect of a majority signifying regime of postmodernity, whether that be masculinity or femininity, motherhood, the sex industry, the commodification of selves, reproductive technologies, or the military under global capitalism. Lesbians are inside and outside, minority and majority, at the same time.

     

    Indeed, the potential power of lesbian identity politics in the current historical moment comes from its situatedness between feminist, gay male, and civil rights activism. Lesbian bodies are a current site of contention in the women’s movement, particularly over the issue of S/M practices and porn, because of their greater affinities with gay males than with straight women. In many ways, the activist politics of ACT-UP in the face of AIDS discrimination represents for lesbians a better strategy of identity politics than the consciousness-raising discourses traditionally authorized by NOW. But in the face of direct losses on the ground gained in the ’70s and ’80s on women’s issues–right to abortions and birth-control information, right to protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, right to have recourse to a just law in the case of rape–the Queer Nation/feminism alliance will be crucial to the future of lesbian cultural politics. In addition, most of the struggle of making feminist-lesbians into feminist-lesbians-of-color lies ahead of us.

     

    Lesbian identities have always presented a challenge to essentialist notions of feminine identity, and never more so than when lesbian bodies are set in the historical context of postmodernity. The cultural period in late-industrial and post-industrial society during World War II and in the fifty years since is their historical heyday. Lesbian bodies came of age under the specter of a Holocaust that could reach finality only by the injection into the global symbolic of a nuclear sublime so horrific as to arrest all prior signification. Their agencies must be agencies that work within the reduced political rights of a worldwide civilian population subjected to a new military regime of global security. They are proffered a variety of prostheses and self-imaging technologies, in fact, a variety of bodies, as long as they meet the performativity criterion of commodity logic. And if they are runaways, they’re running from the very political economy that produced their possibility. This is their double bind. For all these reasons, the immediate challenge facing lesbian bodies in postmodernity is how to make a dis-organ-ized body of signs and identities work for a progressive, or even a radical, politics.

     

    Notes

     

    1. In this case, the majority regimes of masculinity or normative femininity, fashion, porn, mainstream cinema, tv soaps, on-line sex, etc..

     

    2. According to Ong, mechanical production began with the reification of the oral world/word into print.

     

    3. The legal implications of this scenario should be tested immediately in regard to the law recognizing both women as legal parents, particularly in the case of artificial insemination by anonymous donor from a sperm bank.

     

    4. The ’70s women’s movement was also an offshoot of the ’60s African-American civil rights movement, which itself shared some of the same problematic ties to the war machine, particularly through the G.I. Bill.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. NY: Autonomedia, 1983.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. NY: Schocken Books, 1978.
    • Corea, Gena. The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technology from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. NY: Harper and Row, 1986.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987.
    • Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge, 1991.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. NY: Methuen, 1982.
    • Overall, Christine, ed. The Future of Human Reproduction. Ontario: The Women’s Press, 1989.
    • Virilio, Paul. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles. NY: Autonomedia, 1990.
    • Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

     

  • Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity: Scientism and Sadism

    Paul McCarthy

    Division of Commerce and Administration
    Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

     

    I.

    Introduction

     

    This study traces the nature and consequences of the circulation of desire in a postmodern order of things (an order implicitly modelled on a repressed archetype of the new physics’ fluid particle flows), and it reveals a complicity between scientism, which underpins the postmodern condition, and the sadism of incessant deconstruction, which heightens the intensity of the pleasure-seeking moment in postmodernism. This complicity raises disturbing questions about the credentials of postmodernism, and it has the dehumanising effect of obscuring the individual and putting an end to praxis. In addition, the unbounded play of difference in this order of things tends to dissolve restraints to sadism and barbarism, giving desire and capital free rein in the fluid play of market signifiers.

     

    The analytical procedures of deconstruction are a key component of postmodern thought: Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari engage structures through breaking them into their component parts. Deconstruction’s notion of the “structurality of structure” is grounded in the history of atomising thought which begins with the relations of Dionysus and Apollo, in which desire is contained by the atomistic concept. Deconstruction sets forth a de-centered and unbounded horizon in Derrida: “Differance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements are related to each other” (1981: 27). Deleuze and Guattari’s atomistic “multiplicity” is also evident in Derrida’s “irreducible and generative multiplicity” (1981: 45).

     

    The relations of capitalism and atomising thought, particularly as they manifest themselves in science and instrumental reason, are mutually supportive. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) trace these relations (demonstrated in de Sade’s Juliette) as a pre-condition for the turn of enlightenment thought into barbarism. Adorno’s non-reductive stance refuses to collapse subject and object or “other.” This distinguishes his project from deconstruction and postmodernism generally. From this stand-point, atomising thought engenders the free play of desire, signifiers, and capital which characterises postmodernism.

     

    The complicity of postmodern form and atomising thought in the commodification of culture and intellect is also suggested by Lefebvre’s conditions for the production of space. Lefebvre questions “the multiplicity of these descriptions and sectionings” (1991: 8). The same complicity is also pointed out in Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1984). Here, the accumulation of capital by multinationals is furthered by the discontinuous forms of postmodern architecture. This problem is illustrated by Liggett’s distress, in stepping around young men asleep on the sidewalk, in transit to the restored Biltmore in Los Angeles for a planning convention. Liggett attributes the circumstances of the homeless to the “theoretical, administrative and economic `space’ of contemporary urban forms which are organised to facilitate global exchange” (1991: 66).

     

    The deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises the complex texture of existence into an order conducive to positivist categorisation: culture is rendered into a particle form amenable to numericisation, and, through the device of probability, the random number machine orchestrates difference. The postmodern order of things assumes its own legitimacy, thereby revealing itself as the quasi-transcendental projection of an idealised world view. This view instates a new mysticism and a new form of pleasure-seeking, acted out through the unrestrained dance of capital and desire in the social. The social, in turn, is implicitly conceptualised in terms of atomised, deconstructed elements which constitute a neo-positivist play of particles and desire. The patterns revealed in sketching out these circuits of desire also reveal the turbulent and fateful grounding of a survivalist neo- conservatism which grows within and in reaction to the arbitrariness of the postmodern order of things. Such underpinnings short-circuit the critical force of deconstruction into affirmation.

     

    There is reason for concern when unresolved “antinomies of culture” such as “consciousness and experience” are collapsed (Rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the categories of postmodernism recapitulate those of post-structuralism in “commencing from a starting point outside of human experience” (Harland, 1987: 75). In these circumstances, there is wisdom in Priest’s “dialethism” (1987), a no-reduction logic of dialectic. This perspective is compatible with Rose’s suspension of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, each within the other, in order to resist the reduction of the complexities of history to the “unitary and simply progressive” (1984:3). The reduction of experience to a play of signifiers with such characteristics is dehumanising, as is evident in a postmodernism which fulfills Horkheimer and Adorno’s prognosis with the dominance of “the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit” (1972: Xii). Rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. In contrast to Derrida’s interpretation of the biblical Babel allegory as a triumphal encounter of humanity with God which opens the “endless labyrinth” that is postmodernism, Rose reads Babel as a point of configuration and of learning in the on-going measure and revision of the limits of human potentialities in encounters with absolute power (1988: 386). Recognising the architectural moment of deconstruction here, Rose warns of “a tendency to replace the concept by the sublimity of the sign, which is, equally, to employ an unexamined conceptuality without the labour of the concept” (1988: 368).

     

    This re-opening of the antinomy of consciousness and experience invites evaluation against predecessors. For example, to what extent is Lukacs’ (1971) indictment of modernism as fragmenting and dehumanising carried forward in this project? If it is, then how can the cul-de-sac of his tortured attempts to reconcile the absolute and experience be avoided? Heller rejects the ending of the philosophical discourse of “production and collective morality,” such as concerned Lukacs, in “paradigmatic failure” (1983: 190). Lukacs’ late desire to start anew does not stem from despair or faith, but arises because “the absolute character of the absolute had been called into question” (Heller, 1983: 190). In continuing to seek an ethics, Lukacs embodied “the courage of the critical spirit.” An Adornian stance circumvents some aspects of Lukacs’ impasse in refusing to privilege the proletariat as the bearers of praxis. It also refuses to defer to an absolute, in favour of a contradictory, non-reductive “constellation” of tensions (Jay as cited in Bernstein, 1991: 42). This stance maintains the “unresolved paradox” of reason as simultaneously a vehicle of emancipation and entrapment–a paradox which contributes to the contemporary “rage against reason” (Bernstein, 1991: 40). From this vantage point, Adorno anticipates the escape from reason and the capture of desire in an absolutised postmodern play of difference.

     

    Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, presented as the fully developed form of postmodern thought, will provide a focal point for this discussion; when weighed against the prototypical deconstructionism of de Sade, it is arguably more mimetic than critical. The approach here shapes an immanent critique which distances the reader from compelled immersion in an all-encompassing world of signifiers (Harland, 1987). Specifically, tracing the complicities of desire and concept reveals an ontology of postmodernism and contributes to the broader project of locating postmodernism at the intersections of history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political formations. This process revives the subject of praxis and picks up the threads of radical humanism, admittedly a difficult task in the fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history, structure and Marxism. A non-reductive stance, in the Adornian sense, also provides points of reference for tracing lines of desire and opens perspectives from which to evaluate the “ethical-political” moments (Bernstein, 1991) in a postmodernism which will be regarded as the flux at the cutting edge of modernism, abetting the passage of modernism into culture. In these terms, the quest for incessant innovation points to the mutually supportive dynamics of modernism and postmodernism, as Lyotard observes: “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (1984:79). Problems of Particles, Pleasure and Mysticism in Postmodernism

     

    Some postmodern theorists (Baudrillard, 1983; Kroker, 1985; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Lyotard, 1988) have recognised the relations between postmodernism and quantum scientism. An explicit recognition of the appropriation of quantum scientism to cultural analysis is given by Kroker (1985), who sees postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of Capital in culture. This appropriation is flanked by Nietzsche’s The Will to Power and by Baudrillard’s “fetishism of the sign” (Kroker, 1985: 69). For Kroker, Baudrillard is “a quantum physicist of the processed world of mass communications,” who reinterprets Marx’s Capital as “the imploded, forward side (the side of nihilism in the value-form of seduction) of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power” (Kroker, 1985: 72, 69). The quantum dance of Capital, power and the desire which characterises postmodernism is fully revealed in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Here, the celebration of the libidinal economy of deconstruction takes the form of a quantum logic of particle flows of desire, and is at the apogee of the trajectory of atomising thought.

     

    Another writer who recognises the influence of the quantum form in social analysis is Lyotard. His prescription of the relativistic clash of genres subsuming the subject reveals the longing for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern science of language. For Lyotard, “in the matter of language, the revolution of relativity and the quantum theory remains to be made” (1988: 137). The focus of the postmodernists is on contradiction and on tracing the play of difference, and it is here that they are most prone to reach into the quantum archetype to shape their explanations. This tendency is also evident in Foucault’s (1972) fluid positivity of the archival field as the principle of the dispersion of statements. In Foucault there are many examples of the seepage of quantum scientism into the epistemological void of postmodern thought. Postmodern reason rides quantum logic into culture; the confluence of Nietzschean desire, Capital, and quantum logic constitute the repressed conceptual field for the postmodern play of signifiers.

     

    An implicit telos of desire is at work within Deleuze and Guattari’s schema, namely the potential of flows of desire to reach the continuous intensities of the “plateau” or “plane of consistency.” While these two writers end totalising thought, one can discern in their work a repetition of ideas concerning the relations of unity and difference which emerged with Heraclitus and which were also evident in ancient Hindu and Taoist mythology (Capra, 1976; Postle, 1976). Also, while Deleuze and Guattari appear to suppress the moment of unity and eschew dialectics, implicit ideas of unity and dialectical relations of unity and difference remain in their work. The telos of their “plateau” carries forward the desire to submerge self in the streams of molecularised existence which characterise the great Eastern religions. In A Thousand Plateaus, rationality turns back on itself, breaking into pure desire as flows and clashes of particles. In a schizoid sense, desire has been split and projected out into the “plateau”– a term drawn from Gregory Bateson’s “continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 158). There is a mystical play of forces implicit in postmodernism generally, and the incantations by the gnostics traversing the plateaus of postmodern pleasure are phrased in a fluid positivism, in the form of a scientology.

     

    Desire has floated free from the material reality of everyday life, and this is what constitutes the ontology of the particle, and tendentially, the form of the signifier: the postmodernist now acts out, intellectually, the yearning which immersed the body in the flows of desire in the 1960s. Contra physical, corporal, or semiotic interpretations, the abstract machine of Deleuze and Guattari is diagrammatic, “is pure matter-function–a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute” (1987: 141). It is at the threshold of an assemblage that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to calculate the marginal trade-off of pleasure and pain, doing so in terms and directions which could lead to a change of state: “Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value of the last receivable object (limit- object), and the apparent equivalence desires from that . . . ” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 439). In this manner, the calculus of desirability at the threshold draws upon the pleasure-pain preferences of every element of the group, which, at a given point, may change state.

     

    We must also consider the location of postmodernists, including the post-structuralist writer, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia which is under considerable threat in the conditions of late capitalism. The move to roll back government expenditure on education, and the resurgence of corporate claims to power, contribute to a sense of heightened anxiety. This anxiety underlies the desire to deconstruct, into their component parts, structures which have failed to provide solutions in the conditions of image capitalism. In addition, there is a sadistic pleasure, one which heightens the sensitivity of the organism, to be had from sublimating anxiety into the deconstruction of some object, or code, into its constituent particles. The heightened sensitivity and pleasure gained from this deconstructing molecularisation reveals the perverse and narcissistic underside of the postmodernists’ absorption in the play with the elements of their own deconstructions. They reduce culture and individuality to a pseudo-difference, in fact more a bland consistency of component parts. In so doing, they feed capital with a flow of particle inputs which are more easily reconstituted to suit the infinitely changing tastes of the market. In this sense the postmodernists, rather than orchestrating genuine difference, pre-digest culture, tradition, and structure, reducing it to a form more palatable to capital.

     

    II.

    De Sade’s Legacy: Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity

     

    The postmodern heightening of sensitivities of pleasure through the perversity of molecularisation as code-breaking is grotesquely prefigured by de Sade’s Juliette. Simone de Beauvoir questions “must we burn de Sade? . . . the supreme value of his testimony is that it disturbs us” (cited in de Saint-Yves, 1954: 16). In addition, de Saint-Yves suggests that de Sade reveals the hypocrisy of the social display, a refinery which barely conceals Juliette’s gross machinic organising for pleasure (1954: 16). This hypocrisy is now repeated beneath the attractiveness of the social order signified by the global capitalist imaging of desirable social machines within the information networks of global capitalism. The mating of desire, images, and production is electronically sorted on a global scale. The laws and moral conventions, which are postured by and maintain the content of these social machines, themselves provide the codes through which a pleasure is gained in transgression. The postmodernists, as a part of the new class intelligentsia whose status is enmeshed within the legal and moral status quo, experience a doubling of pleasures: firstly, in the benefits of their position, and secondly, in the heightened sensitivity derived from the perversity of code-breaking within their deconstructing discourses.

     

    The postmodernists are less likely to speak of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. Yet, tracing the epistemological affinity between de Sade’s (1796) Juliette and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus reveals that this inheritance persists. Both are concerned with flows of desire at the molecular level and with heightening intensities. Both parody the social and productive conditions within which they were produced. De Sade’s (1796) Juliette appeared just before Goethe’s (1808) Faust, which Berman’s (1980) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air identifies as embodying the modernist cum- postmodernist spirit. Goethe’s Faust is also a precursor to Nietzsche’s (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals and his (1888) The Will to Power, expressing the strong man as a code-breaker of the weak principles of Christianity and socialism, and as a manipulative developer. We find this trajectory of indefinite cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction continues through postmodernism to culminate in the inversion of Marx’s Capital and Nietzsche’s “abstract power” in Baudrillard (Kroker, 1985).

     

    The postmodern order of things is prefigured in de Sade’s “matrix of maleficent molecules” (1968: 400), in which the propensity to rule-breaking and irregularity is natural. Pleasure-seeking in postmodernism may be seen as pain avoidance which both stems from and drives the cycles of desire in the postmodern condition. This calculus is at the basis of an incipiently postmodern reason which, in de Sade, mirrors natural law: “What is reason? The faculty given to me by nature whereby I may dispose myself in a favourable sense toward such-and-such an object and against some other, depending on the amount of pleasure or pain I desire from these objects” (1968: 34). Heightening Intensities: The Pleasures of Code-Breaking

     

    Juliette’s machinic organising conjoined sadism and code-breaking to raise the level of excitation of the nervous system, so that the experience of pleasure is heightened in intensity: “There is a certain perversity than which no other nourishment is tastier, drawn thither by nature–if reason’s glacial hand waves us back, lusts fingers bear the dish towards us again, and thereafter we can no longer do without the fare” (de Sade, 1968: 11). Thus driven, the unconstrained imagination may wreak havoc and destruction as nature does in pursuing its ends (de Sade, 1968: 12). This opportunism is evident in Lyotard’s (1984) affirmation of what we might see as the polymorphous perversity of the play of Eros, Thanatos, and Capital through the electromagnetic dance of the information society in his Postmodern Condition. Lyotard concludes that “our fear of the system of signs and thus our investment in it, must still be immense if we continue to seek these positions of purity . . . what would be interesting would be to stay where we are, but at the same time to seize every opportunity to function as good conductors of intensities” (1984: 311). However, the focus of Lyotard’s argument represses the pathology of the postmodern subject, who–as de Sade predicted in Juliette–heightens the intensities of pleasure through the sadistic adventures of indefinite deconstruction.

     

    The political claims of deconstruction are repeated when Deleuze and Guattari enlist pleasure-seeking molecularisation to “[overcome] the imperialism of language” (1987: 65). Deleuze and Guattari’s logic has its precursor in Juliette, in the form of Debene’s exhortation to a “voluptuousness which can tolerate no inhibitions”: this voluptuousness “attains its zenith only by shattering them all” (de Sade, 1968: 53). The zenith is the excitement of transgressing laws, which, for Juliette, “has a strong impact upon the nervous system.” Deleuze and Guattari’s molecularising thought crystallises de Sade’s deconstructionist lubricity in the intellectual sphere: their social machine is not cast in terms of the Marxist preoccupation with the production of goods, but rather in terms of the “state of the intermingling of bodies in society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies, and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect the bodies of all kinds in their relations” (1987: 89). One consequence of this is the relativising of moral-ethical concerns, since “good and bad are only products of temporary selection which must be renewed” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10).

     

    Deleuze and Guattari propose the withdrawal to the “Body without Organs” as their pleasure dome–“a tantric egg,” a condition in which all the attachments of organs to stratified social space have been cut off. It is a matter of pushing desire through to point of its origins in the body, by intensifying the behaviour to which desire is attached, whether masochistic, sadistic, or paranoid: “Where psychoanalysis says ‘stop find yourself again,’ we should say instead, ‘lets go further still we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled ourselves’” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 151). The desire to achieve the intensity of the experience of pure desire in the body without organs is evident in Deleuze and Guattari’s masochist, who closes off organs:

     

    The masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working, flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight. (1987: 150)

     

    This scene might have been drawn from one of the many instances of sado-masochism in Juliette. It is from such a point that Deleuze and Guattari’s masochist must break through to the pleasures of the body without organs, not by exercising caution or holding onto self, but through further experimentation and “dismantling of self” (1987: 151). This pleasure-seeking is unconstrained by remorse, carrying forward Clairwil’s prescription that guilt must be overcome by breaking any restraining rules–in fact, by “destroying everything it rests upon” (de Sade, 1968: 396).

     

    It is de Sade who kills the God that Nietzsche declares to be dead: de Sade declares that “the impediment presented by religion is the first that ought to be liquidated” (1968: 341). De Sade’s transgression of moral codes as a natural outcome of human striving is also a precursor to Goethe’s Faust. In this work, Gretchen’s virtue is violated in natural cycles of desire, deconstruction and development, cycles which are carried forward in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. For Kroker, Nietzsche stands at the beginning and end of Capital, in a trajectory which spans the thought of Deleuze, Lyotard and the early Barthes: “In this account, Capital is disclosed to be a vivid, almost clinical study of the inner workings of modern nihilism” (Kroker, 1985: 69). However, it is in de Sade that we find the prototypical pleasure and perversity of a deconstructing desire acted out in a complicity with capital in the mass culture of postmodernism. Juliette’s desire for pleasure, luxury, property and income are furthered by “the most terrible orgies,” and her sadistic pleasure-plays are financed in a manner in which capital itself becomes both object and instrument of pleasure-seeking.

     

    It is only recurrent cycles of sadistic deconstruction which break Juliette out of the intoxication resulting from “giving in to every irregularity” of her senses. Here Juliette’s strategies are prototypes for the image-making and image-breaking binges of the postmodern accumulators, who produce models for emulation by everyman. Juliette’s Gods carry forward the coupling of Dionysiac materiality, eroticism, and spatial intellectualisation in a manner which prefigures the eroticism invested in the figural delineation of postmodern commodity signifiers. One must go through pleasure to experience the nature of things:

     

    Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to find themselves. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself . . . It is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other--not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 156)

     

    In Juliette, also, pleasure is the pathway to the life principle: “a consuming and delicious conflagration will glide into your nerves, it will make boil the electrically charged liquor in which your life principle has its seat” (de Sade, 1968: 19). The play of irregularity and pleasure is the natural order of things: “As soon as you have discovered the way to seize nature, insatiable in her demands upon you she will lead you step by step from irregularity to irregularity” (de Sade, 1968: 19). This allure of the immersion in irregularity re-surfaces in Foucault’s (1972) archaeology, Derrida’s (1973) difference, Lyotard’s (1984) agonistics, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) plateau. Postmodern Sadism

     

    There is a long trajectory of that desire which circulates through sadistic activities, a manipulation of the Fates in the interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. This trajectory is observable in Dionysus and in Juliette. It also manifests itself in postmodernism, but is concealed beneath the pleasures of the pursuit of difference. The channels through which desire flows into sadism, and the mutually supportive relations of this desire with anality, require some examination as a moment in the understanding of the pleasures and perversities of postmodernism. De Sade’s legacy may be discerned in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and in postmodernism generally.

     

    Juliette is a precursor to Nietzsche’s Superman. In Juliette, the heightening of the intensities of the perversity and pleasure arising from the mimesis of nature’s propensity to self-destruction is rampant. However, a problem which is a source of sadistic pleasure in de Sade, and which is glossed over in postmodernism, is that the adverse consequences of unrestrained pleasure-seeking fall more heavily on the weaker sections of the society. This is of particular concern in the coupling of postmodernism and neo-conservatism:

     

    The stronger . . . by despoiling the weaker, that is to say by enjoying all the rights which he has received from nature, by giving himself every possible license, enjoys himself more or less in proportion to that license. The more atrocious the harm he does the weaker, the more voluptuous the thrill he gives himself. (de Sade, 1968: 119)

     

    The problem with the mimesis of natural strength is that it, of necessity, is cast in terms of an unconstrained destructiveness. Likewise, the postmodern desire to deconstruct sublimates the anxiety of existence into strong solutions which carry forward both Faust’s and Juliette’s sadistic pleasure-seeking at the expense of the weak. With respect to tendencies to neo-conservatism within postmodernism, we might consider the pleasures inherent in policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a perverse thrill, legitimated by nature, to be gained from tough solutions which sadistically degrade conditions of the poorer sections of society. In postmodernism, as in de Sade, there is little concern for the cruelty or terror inflicted upon particular individuals or groups: “When the law of nature requires an upheaval, does nature fret over what will be undone in its course?” (de Sade, 1968: 121).

     

    Juliette‘s natural order anticipates the free flowing, unbounded play of assemblages later found in Deleuze and Guattari:

     

    The perpetual movement of matter explains everything: The universe is an assemblage of unlike entities which act and react mutually and successively with and against each other; I discern no start, no finish no fixed boundaries, this universe I see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form. (de Sade, 1968: 43)

     

    This indefinite atomism is carried forward into both Foucault’s and Derrida’s difference, and it culminates in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic multiplicities:

     

    A multiplicity is neither subject or object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in state . . . An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8)

     

    It is into these flows of a natural order of difference that both de Sade’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s subject dissolves itself. In both cases, it is a mimesis which seeks satisfaction at the cost of losing the memories, desires, and the mind of the subject, which–collectively with other subjects–could contain the propensity to sadism.

     

    The sadisms which may be unleashed in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) unrestrained flight to pleasure lie repressed in the crevices beneath their plateaus. It is into their black holes that is consigned the repressed anality of the polymorphously perverse stage, which, I have argued, is latent in the desire for deconstructing play with the objects of postmodern existence. In their schizo-analytical re-interpretation of Freud’s wolf-man, Deleuze and Guattari argue against phallocentrism, the father, and castration as key analytical criteria. They interpret the wolf-man by projecting anality into multiplicity delineated as the quantum dynamics of swarming particles and black holes. “Who could ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine . . . a field of anuses just like a pack of wolves . . . lines of flight or deterritorialisation, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialised intensities: that is what multiplicity is . . . a wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 32).

     

    The relations of anality, pleasure, and sadism might be better grasped by recovering the subject-object dialectics of the polymorphously perverse stage within capitalism: however, the implications of this anality remain unexamined when Deleuze and Guattari escape the pain of everyday postmodern existence by projecting it out onto the heights of the continuous pleasure of the plateau. Thereupon, the dissolution of self into the neo-Platonism of the perfect form of the pure multiplicity of particles is completed. This is the essence of molecularising thought, and it is driven by sublimating a latent anality which relentlessly and sadistically renders wholes into their molecular elements as objects of play. The Platonism of this process in molecularising thought carries forward the “vision of the human body as excremental” (Brown, 1977: 295). It is through this moment of atomising thought that we may uncover the suppressed anality of the postmodern character, the precursor to which is Freud’s 1908 essay, “Character and Anal Erotism.” The traits of the anal character of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy are sublimated into desires to control as the delineations of postmodern signification. The movement is both controlling and pleasure-seeking, and the postmodern desire to immerse self in the play of images acts out the desire to play in the objects one has created. This latent anality at the individual level is in mutually reinforcing relations with a disorganised capitalism, within which the phallus still dominates social expression. Hocquenghem (1987:24) says of this that “the anus is over invested individually because its investment is withdrawn socially.”

     

    While in Deleuze and Guattari anality is projected into the pleasure and covert sadism of the plane of consistency, in de Sade it is unmasked and brought into direct experience as an aperture through which self may be sado- masochistically dissolved into the natural pleasures of the incessant transgression of the order of things. Saint- Frond’s instruction of Juliette in the pleasures of sadistic code-breaking are legitimatised by nature’s own processes. There is an on-going play of anal pleasure and sadism in Juliette: Juliette relates that he “kissed me and ran his hand down my behind, into which he promptly popped a finger” (de Sade, 1968: 235). Commonly, the intensity of the pleasures of Juliette’s orgies is heightened by the acting out of sadistic anality (de Sade, 1968: 266). Juliette’s deconstruction of sexual codes knows no bounds: her unconstrained lust abases more noble concerns and is demanding and militant in its tyrannical perversion of beauty, virtue, innocence, candour and misfortune (de Sade, 1968: 270). Postmodernism’s own polymorphous perversity is acted out by playing in the mess of deconstruction, but the memory of how the subject was drawn into this mess remains repressed. Postmodernism: Pleasure and Perversity for Everyman

     

    Bourdieu finds that the impetus for code-breaking has devolved to a growing petite bourgeoisie who further the processes of accumulation, dealing in information in a manner which was once reserved for privileged groups:

     

    In the name of the fight against "taboos" and the liquidation of "complexes" they adopt the most external and easily borrowed aspects of the intellectual life style, liberated manners, cosmetic or sartorial outrages, emancipated poses and postures and systematically apply the cultivated disposition to not yet legitimate culture (cinema, strip cartoons, the underground, to every day life (street art), the personal sphere (sexuality, cosmetics, child-rearing, leisure) and the existential (the relation to nature, love and death). (Bourdieu, 1984: 370)

     

    These cycles of code-breaking are driven by a desire to emulate higher status groups. The style and opinion leaders of the new petite bourgeoisie perpetuate the play of difference inherent in commodity signs, deconstructing tradition and high culture into everyday life and increasing the possibilities for the attachment of capital and desire. From beneath the veneer of an attractive style, sadism is projected out elsewhere. For example, it is projected into the Third World as life-threatening methods of production, as the disruption of communities, and as the practice of using torture to maintain the system of power and control. It is also projected into the psyches of the postmodern worker and consumer, wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the play of commodity signifiers, and in the hierarchies of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated.

     

    The pleasurable and terroristic nature of postmodern consumer society can be discerned as two sides of the same coin. Firstly, the writing of lifestyle ideals in consumer consciousness terrorises the masses into appropriate consumption and productive behaviours. Secondly, as Baudrillard has argued, the immersion of the masses in symbolic exchange sets in train a terroristic reaction to the simulacra which will lead the system of simulations to collapse in on itself:

     

    The system's own logic turns into the best weapon against it. The only strategy of opposition to a hyperrealist system is pata-physical, a "science of imaginary solutions" in other words a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death. (Baudrillard, 1984: 58-9)

     

    Postmodernism promises the masses a veritable orgy of code-breaking in the play of signifiers. It completes the devolution of the pleasures of code-breaking through de Sade’s aristocracy to the elites of Marx and Weber, and to Bourdieu’s higher status groups, intellectuals and the new petite bourgeoisie to everyman. The postmodern allure is that everyman may experience the pleasure and sadism of code-breaking, at the level of bodily molecular excitation, by dissolving self in the play of commodity signifiers. Beyond Justice: Everyman a Deconstructionist

     

    One consequence of postmodernism associated with the dissolution of self into the pleasures and perversities of an unfettered play of difference is the end of meaningful discourse concerning justice and human agency. Justice is relativised in the language games of postmodernism. For example, Lyotard argues that we must arrive at an idea of justice that is not linked to that of consensus (1984: 66). In postmodernism, desire wells up in the sphere of language and is the exotic force driving the play of difference: “a move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention” (Lyotard: 1984: 10). De Sade prefigures this abasement of justice to desire, pointing to the universal motion of justice evident in nature by arguing that justice is relative and it is natural to heighten the intensity of pleasure by breaking its codes.

     

    This relativising of justice de-sublimates the modernists’ desire for equality, liberty, and happiness for all into contingencies subject to the play of market fates. The consequence is an abdication of any containing ethical discourse in favor of the play of difference among signifiers: this means that anything is possible as the molecularities of desire and production pursue one another in a dance which tramples the less powerful, less involved bystanders. The Faustian cycles of eternal deconstruction and reconstruction work their way through Nietzsche into a postmodern will to signify, a will which carries the developer’s ethic into cultural and intellectual processes. De Sade provides an earlier illustration of the relations of desire fixated in deconstruction, an illustration which is also repeated in Nietzsche’s incipient postmodernism. De Sade reveals the hypocritical and pitiless side of this complex, characteristics further revealed in the complicity of postmodernism and neo-conservatism. There is nothing to constrain the terrorisation, or elimination, of those who stand in the way of a natural flow of desires into cycles of indefinite change:

     

    One of the basic laws of nature is that nothing superfluous subsists in the world. You may be sure of it, not only does the shiftless beggar, always a nuisance, consume part of what the industrious man produces, which is already a serious matter, but will quickly become dangerous the moment you suspend your dole to him. My desire is that instead of bestowing a groat upon these misfortunates we concentrate our efforts upon wiping them out. (de Sade, 1968: 726)

     

    De Sade prefigures the contemporary conflation of desire, rationality and market naturalism, which I have argued become mutually supportive within postmodern logic. This is acted out when everyman may have the pleasure of Faustian deconstruction and development in postmodernism. Again, de Sade expresses in advance the naturalism which is to surface in postmodernism as a rejection of the idea of generalised rules: “No man has the right to repress in him what Nature put there . . . A universal glaive of justice is of no purpose” (1968: 732). De Sade’s prototypical natural order of difference carries forward that of Heraclitus and its ideal type is realised in Derrida’s epistemology of difference. This epistemology instates the clash of signifiers as the self-driving force of language:

     

    In a language, in the system of language these are only differences . . . what is written as difference, then, will be the playing movement that "produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these differences, these effects of difference. (Derrida, 1982: 11)

     

    Derrida’s naturalism here opens language to a Darwinism in which there is nothing to contain the slide into de Sade’s “perpetual outpouring of conflict, injury and aggression” (1968: 733). For Lyotard also, “to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domains of a general agonistics” (1984: 10). The postmodern hope is that unconstrained difference will break through to a liberalist ethics of equal opportunity for participation in language games. The corresponding promise is that this equality of participation will alleviate the condition of those who are victimised by the social structure: Lyotard’s agonistic language games protect against “piracy” by breaking the rules (1984: 7). For postmodernism, the act of deconstructing the law and social codes is held to undermine the propensity to despotism (1968: 735); however, there is nothing to constrain the slide into terrorism. De Sade’s unconstrained anarchism is the precursor to this play of postmodern difference, and reveals its propensity to turn into terror against the weaker sections of society. For de Sade, “give us anarchy and we will have these victims the less” (1968: 733).

     

    The neurology of de Sade’s propensity to the heightened intensity of law breaking prefigures Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of desire at the molecular level: “Foreign objects act in a forceful manner upon our organs, if they penetrate them violently, if they stir into brisk motion the neural fluid particles which circulate in the hollow of our nerves, then our sensibility is such as to dispose us to vice” (de Sade, 1968: 278). It is in atrocity that the highest intensity from this code-breaking is achieved. Within de Sade’s technics of heightening the intensity of pleasure, doing good is useless. De Sade’s language is carried forward in Deleuze and Guattari’s studies of the particle flows of intensities; here, by implication, arguments concerning the good are dissolved in particle flows. Heightened intensity is achieved to the extent that particles of desire can crash through striated (coded) space to the libertinage of the plateau (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 507). However, the consignment of justice to a space beyond the subjective and collective relations of concern for others leaves a state of lawlessness in which no individual or sub-group is safe.

     

    III.

    Particle Thought and the End of the Subject

     

     

    The trajectory of social thought which reduces the complex texture of existence to molecules, or to particles, reaches its fully developed form in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing. Their concepts reveal that the epistemology of difference, which underpins postmodernism, rests on a cultural scientism. Furthermore, Lyotard proposes modelling social relations in terms of quantum theory, since “research centred on singularities and “incommensurables” is applicable to the pragmatics of most everyday problems” (1984: 60). These models provide prospects for Lyotard to realise the quantum revolution within language. Lyotard would then be able to explain the logic of the clashes and discontinuities, in his study of the agonistics of discourse, in terms of the probabilistic positivism applicable to this model. There is a problem for the subject in this view, since the subject is overawed by, and precariously existing in, an unfathomable cosmic flux of energies. I propose to trace the trajectory of this view and to evaluate it by directing Simone Weil’s critique of quantum theory at the manifestation of this form within postmodernism.

     

    The trajectory of probabilistic positivism begins with Heraclitus, and continues through Nietzsche’s universe as a “monster of energies without beginning, without end–a play of forces a wave of forces” (1968: 550). It is the base matter of classical scientism, revitalised in a fluid positivism by the quantum theorists, and emerging as the repressed archetype for the postmodern play of difference as a quantum scientism of signifiers. We find that this trajectory culminates in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus which imports quantum modelling of particle movement into social theory. This importation tends to gloss over problems in relation to knowledge which remain to be resolved.

     

    Simone Weil’s (1968) Reflections on Quantum Theory is instructive in revealing the manner in which quantum theory furthers an epistemology of particle plays which ends human concerns. We might reasonably depict these concerns as those that derive from the modernist catch cry of equality, liberty and fraternity. Weil’s critique usefully informs this evaluation of the form of postmodern thought. Weil perceives a crisis in twentieth-century physics which we may also discern in the social physics of postmodernism in general, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in particular. Weil argues that scientism must not eliminate the concerns of “human destiny” and “human truth” from culture or intellectual pursuits (1968: vii). She criticises the ending of human truth in the seeking of scientific truth: “utility at once takes its place . . . utility becomes something which the intelligence is no longer entitled to define or judge, but only to serve” (Weil, 1968: ix).

     

    In Deleuze and Guattari (1987) we find that there is a utility of particle flows to understanding, but that it is a utility which deconstructs ideas of “human destiny” into a dynamic atomism. It is a dead atomism devoid of a humanising moment. Their world of particles recapitulates the trajectory of the ancient Greek atomism, through to the atoms of modern physics, from which Cornforth (1912) claims that the concerns of human life had passed. Deleuze and Guattari reduce a humanised utility and pleasure-seeking, from activities subject to human thought and wisdom, to a universal and autonomous pleasure-seeking which is diagrammatically programmed into a universal field of particle flows.

     

    Quantum theory reflected the re-emergence of an over- riding concern with the discontinuous in science. Weil (1968: 5) criticises this tendency stating that “the human mind cannot make do with number alone or with continuity alone; it oscillates between the two.” The potential to think in terms of both number and space is instated as a necessary a priori of comprehension. In this sense Weil carries forward the paraconsistent logic of Heraclitean unity and difference. It is the loss of the sense of spatial unity in the reduction to the discontinuity of atoms and quanta that has led to a loss of meaning. Here, Weil expresses a similar observation to that of Cornforth (1912), who claims that the atomism of physics carries forward the spatial rationalisation entailed in the naming of the Olympian Gods. However, with the vanishing of the Gods from Mount Olympus and the diminution of their influence in everyday life, a space opened in which the secularised, dead particles of physics were constructed. The concerns of human life, which had maintained their vitality through projection into the Olympian Gods, now pass out of the conceptualisation of the nature of things, leaving the dead matter of atomism.

     

    Weil argues that scientists between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century carried on their experiments within the context of a broader attempt to establish the relations of people and the universe. Their anthropo-mytho-materio framework for this was Promethean. People had been cursed to act out desires through work. Causality was grasped in terms of “intermediate stages analogous to those traversed by a man executing a simple manual labour” (Weil, 1968: 6). These relations of work were further reduced to the universal formulae of energy, effectively dehumanising relations of distance and force (or mass and velocity), relations which hitherto had been grasped in terms of the human work required to move weight. Furthermore, the experience of the consequences of directional time was added in terms of the concept of entropy, expressed algebraically.

     

    Coupled with necessity, these ideas reduced human nature (including relations of desires hopes, fears, becoming and the good) to something determined within the constellation of energies and atoms of the universe. The cost is a world deprived of human meanings: “It tries to read behind all appearances that inexorable necessity which makes the world a place in which we do not count, a place of work, a place indifferent to desire, to aspirations and the good” (Weil, 1968: 10). In these terms, classical science contained a vital flaw which would lead to its demise, namely the gap between human thought (including wisdom) and an infinitely accumulating array of facts. Human beings are more than particles of matter condemned to work. They are able to imagine, construct becomings, and experience the good and the beautiful. The reduction of language to scientism ends this aspect of human existence, one which “can, perhaps, only be expressed in the language of myth, poetry and image, the images consisting not only in words but also in objects and actions” (Weil, 1968: 13).

     

    The spatio-temporal relations of desire and action are also dehumanised in the transition from Greek to modern science in a manner which we shall see has been carried into postmodern cultural scientism. Weil sees in ancient Greek science the foundations of classical science. Classical science is cast in terms of a tendency to equilibrium, an equilibrium which encompasses the relations of injustice and justice, and ideas of beauty such as expressed in Greek art (Weil, 1968: 15). However, these humanising relations are lost in classical science. The desire of Greek science is “to contemplate in sensible phenomena an image of the good” (Weil, 1968: 21). Classical science takes as its model for representing the world the relation between a desire and the conditions for its fulfillment. However, it suppresses the first term of the relation (Weil, 1968: 15). The linear motion of classical science encapsulates desire as an acting out of “desires to go somewhere” (Weil, 1968: 26).

     

    One might also discern an early expression of this travelling motion in Homer: Odysseus’ restless adventuring now continues its trajectory through modern physics to culminate in the spatial explorations of the postmodernists. The postmodern reduction of distance, space and desire into the image as commodity signifier reproduces Odysseus’ adventuring through mass travel–in a manner which involves an unending hopping from one simulation of culture and history to the next–and one in which desire goes nowhere really positive but around in a circle to return repression to itself. Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1972) reading of Odysseus as an archetypal bourgeois character fits with Weil’s modernist (1968: 16). Both act out desires “to go somewhere, for example, or to seize or hit something or somebody, and upon distance which is a condition inherent in every desire of a creature subjected to time.” This incessant journeying prefigures the postmodernists’ spatial traversing and subdividing of the activities of everyday life into a kaleidoscopic symbolic field. However, aesthetical and ethical considerations are suppressed in this acting out of classical scientific perceptions. It is in Weil’s reference to an earlier image of the Manichaeans that the tendency to fragmentation now carried forward by the postmodernists is most visible.

     

    Weil’s Manichaeans saw the fragmentation of the spirit through its attachment to the necessities of time and space. We may also recall the crises of Odysseus’ adventuring in these terms. Both Odysseus’ experiences and those seen by the Manichaeans prefigure the postmodern condition as one in which character is fragmented in spatial delineation driven by the temporality of a play of difference. Weil is prescient to the postmodern split, conceiving of character as split between desires and aspiration. Any sense of having found oneself is continually undermined as the past is lost. The feelings arising therefrom are repeated in postmodern nihilism.

     

    What he is at any single moment is nothing; what he has been and what he will be do not exist; and the extended world is made up of everything that escapes him, since he is confined to one point, like a chained prisoner, and cannot be anywhere except at the price of time and effort and of abandoning the point he started from. Pleasure rivets him to his place of confinement and to the present moment, which nevertheless he cannot detain; desire attaches him to the coming moment and makes the whole world vanish for the sake of a single object; and pain is always for him the sense of his being torn and scattered through the succession of moments and places. (Weil, 1968: 16,17)

     

    This splitting of the psychic space of the subject is also expressed by Lacan in that the signifier is the death of the subject.

     

    Hence the division of the subject--when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as "fading," as disappearance. There is, then, one might say a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. (Lacan, 1968: 218)

     

    These terms are also applicable to the source of the anxiety of postmodern existence which arises from the dissolution of self into the world of signifiers. The context of postmodern existence is given its dynamic ontological structure by the new physics. The new physics is the atomism of classical science dissolved into transitory particles which emanate from underlying fields. This form provides a natural scientific legitimation for a postmodern existence remarkable for its fragmentary and transitory nature. In addition, it stylistically underpins the electrodynamics of the global image making systems which channel postmodern desire. This is the context for the pain of postmodern existence manifested by the postmodern split. The splitting or play of difference within character acts in sympathy with a play of difference in an everyday life. What is remarkable here is the predominant preoccupation with the pursuit of difference as distinction, measured in terms of signifying fashions.

     

    In this on-going deconstruction and reconstruction of self, elements are continually shed and replaced with new signifiers. However, something is gained only at the expense of something lost, and as repeated failures of satisfaction are experienced, the feeling of the tragedy of deconstruction grows. In its psychotic mode, the postmodern split manifests a masochistic self-deconstruction, on the one hand, and a sadistic rending of culture into its elemental particles, on the other. This postmodern desire to reduce things to their elemental particles carries the quantum hypothesis into culture as a stylistic legitimating form, and we shall see that it also imports a loss of the connection of humanity and materiality.

     

    The dehumanising loss in the quantum hypotheses is the loss of “analogy between the laws of nature and the conditions of work” (Weil, 1968: 22). The work of the human being to move a weight over distance is represented in terms of the mechanical devices of classical science (mechanical man). In contrast, quantum conceptions (for example, Planck’s) subsume discontinuous mechano-humanism under the continuity of formulae which express the product of number and a constant (Weil, 1968: 23). Weil’s conception of the spatial continuity implied by such formulae belies the apparent discontinuity of quantum particles. This spatial continuity is the underlying unity of the field. In an equivalent form, Foucault’s (1972) “archive” functions as a field which emanates difference. In Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics, this is the same unity as the suppressed term of the relations of pure discontinuity, and in postmodernism generally it is the suppressed unity of spatial continuity which underlies the plays of difference.

     

    The postmodern idea of infinite difference rests on an unbounded continuity of space within which there is no limit to figural divisions. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idealisation or telic destiny of this is the “plateau” or “plane of consistency.” However, such a schema dissolves humanity itself, and with it, human meaning. On the social plane, Deleuze and Guattari repeat the formulations of physics which move outside human thought into pure algebra. The problem, to Weil, is that algebra is “a language with this peculiarity, it means nothing” (Weil, 1968: 24). In this manner, the conditions of human existence are reduced to the algebraic relations of dead atoms out of which the concerns of human life have passed, thus realising the condition foreseen by Cornforth (1912). The idea of human agency is lost in the traversing of continuous space which mindlessly emanates difference.

     

    The discontinuities of quantum physics are grasped at the micro level through the linking of atomism, chance, and probability. Weil warns that the idea of chance at the micro level does not end spatio-temporal necessity, since the same macro-structures, for example, the distribution of thousands of throws of a dice, are carried forward–by necessity (1968: 24). The same argument may be used to question the postmodernists, in general, and Deleuze and Guattari’s ending of concern with totalities. From this perspective, we may question Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics in respect of its concern with plays of difference at the particle level. The characteristic postmodern indulgence in chance ends structural necessity in favour of the idea of a random number machine which authorises infinite spatial multiplicity.

     

    In problematising this, consider the manner in which modern physics reduced the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and continuity to the discontinuous numbers of probability. The algebraic formulae of probability functions overrode paradoxical concerns of human thought: Einstein’s paradoxes as expressed in terms of a “velocity which is both infinite and measurable, a time which is assimilated to a fourth dimension of space” (Weil, 1968: 29). Weil proposes investigating ways in which probability can be conceived without reduction to the discontinuity of numbers–for example, through generalised numbers. It is clear that atomising thought is an artifice which suppresses the potential of the human mind to conceive continuity, and with it conceptions of destiny and the good. These are suppressed in favour of the measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent, signifiers as the cultural atomism of postmodernism.

     

    The same problem exists in the Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of atomistic particle thought. They assign the idea of continuity to the utopian, transcendental space of the “plateau” or “plane of consistency,” thus projecting the continuous and the good to Olympian heights above the conditions of human existence. Their flows of particles are a mathesis and their molecularising thought is one to which human experience is not reducible. Weil remarks that “Physics is essentially the application of mathematics to nature at the price of an infinite error” (1968: 34). And Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics carries forward the same error–the discontinuous particle experience is not the universal experience. It is a product of individual human minds, a product which is shared, not a producer of human minds. In addition, Lyotard also carries forward this error in his dehumanising relativism. He discusses “genres of discourse” as “strategies . . . of no-one.” He also characterises conflict as autonomous, “not between humans or between any other entities,” but rather the as product of “phrases” (Lyotard, 1988: 137).

     

    Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisations are perhaps best grasped as an attempt by the postmodern mind to locate itself in a changing terrain, but a terrain which instates the hypotheses of quantum physics in culture as a repressed absolute governing human existence. However, it is apparent that this view raises problems for cultural analysis, problems which remain to be examined. Both the human potential to imagine the Olympian Gods and the form of the existence of the particle contain the infinite error of assuming the pre-eminence of these products of imagination over the conditions of human existence:

     

    The grace which permits wretched mortals to think and imagine and effectively apply geometry, and to conceive at the same time that God is a perpetual geometer, the grace which goes with the stars and with dances, play and work is a marvelous thing; but it is not more marvelous than the very existence of man, for it is a condition of it. (Weil, 1968: 41)

     

    The infinite error carried forward in postmodern thought is that of regarding the play of difference as a universal and a valid resolution of the twentieth century’s contradictions: the discontinuities of difference with the continuities of infinite space, time and desire. This error arises from the belief in interminable deconstruction and its counterpart in capitalising the unending possibilities of attaching desires to an infinite array of consumption images. It does not end the modernist project but updates it by substituting the more dynamic particle plays of quantum physics for nineteenth-century atomism. The instating of the principles of quantum physics in social thought provides a more reactive reagent for the furthering of modernist concerns:

     

    The nineteenth century, that century which believed in unlimited progress, and believed that men would grow richer and richer, and that constantly renovated techniques would enable them to get more and more pleasure while working less and less, and that education would make them more and more rational and that public moral in all countries would grow more and more democratic, believed that his domain of physics was the whole universe. The goods to which the nineteenth century attached were precious, but not supreme; they were subordinate values but it thought it saw infinity in them. (Weil 1968: 42)

     

    This prognosis of the nineteenth century is applicable to our so-called postmodern era. We observe postmodern thought investing human hopes and desires into a universe which is an infinity of signified differences at the level of culture and consumption. However, the idea, implicit in postmodernism, that desire can be infinitely attached to the play of signifiers, is neither supreme nor sublime. Postmodern Neo-Positivism, or the Signifier as Number

     

    The culmination of the logic of the postmodern world of signifiers is in the neo-positivism of Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering” within “nomad space.” “Nomad space” is conceived as numerical space and is contrasted with the linear space of primitive society and the territorial striations of State society. While the State numericises its striations, it is in nomad space that the “autonomous arithmetic organisation” of the “numbering number” comes to function: “The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 389).

     

    To reveal the numerics at the underside of the signifier, first let’s recapitulate the tendency to fragmentation in postmodern thought. The fully developed form of this is in Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction to the particle. This adds a new fluidity to culture and provides more opportunities for desire to attach to capital. Under these circumstances, postmodernism gives modernism entree to culture. In this sense, Kroker has recognised postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of capital in a culture which is driven by a Nietzschean will to power. We might regard Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction of the complex texture of individual and social relations to an essential constitution of rampant particles of desire as a Nietzschean desire for power through deconstruction. In postmodernism, this will to power draws on the fluid epistemology of the quanta of modern physics and uses it to fragment social spaces and structures. The play of particles so formed is one of a cultural positivism, in which the signifier behaves probabilistically in the form of the number. It is at this point of the rendering of culture into its elemental quantum numerics that the social field is most permeable to the passage of capital.

     

    Furthermore, within the sense of a dialectical view of history, I have previously argued that the moment of deconstruction or fragmentation is often misconstrued as a permanent condition, unjustifiably freezing dialectic at this point. This fixation on the moment of difference is central to postmodern reason and lies at the confluence of the trajectories of a number of historical tendencies. These trajectories are mutually attractive and intersect to create the space of postmodern reason. They include the global capitalism of the information society, which heightens the intensities of the relations of fear, anxiety, and the pleasure and perversity of infinite deconstruction by abetting their investment in the flux of commodity signifiers.

     

    Postmodern reason facilitates the fluidity of these relations by conjoining the propensity to think atomistically with the notion of the random number machine and probability. In effect, it dissolves culture into a quantum epistemology. Here, the fluid, probabilistic, and rapidly appearing and disappearing number, as the concealed form of the signifier–for example in the mathematical coordinates which blueprint the electronic image–becomes the epistemological currency of postmodern thought. This is the order of things driving the postmodern cutting edge of modernism, a postmodern neo-positivism which breaks up culture into the form of a probabilistic mathesis.

     

    It is the random number machine of postmodern reason that is the hidden orchestrator of the production of infinite difference as pure multiplicity, in which the signifier is reduced to the form of the self-moving number. The random number machine is revealed at the seat of that quasi-transcendental force which is self-referential in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering number” and sets forth its own probabilistic order of things. Desire and capital pursue one another through patterns issuing from the random number machine as it arbitrarily pours forth an infinite array of profiles of the possible relations of desire and commodity signifiers. The random number machine also sets forth lines of escape from the hegemony of State and market relations–for example, into the probabilities that reactive numbers will coalesce in reaction against the dominant order. Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering numbers” escape from their State organisation into “autonomous arithmetic” (1987: 389). In the death knell of praxis and the subject, “the number is no longer a means of counting or of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 389). The culmination of the logic of postmodernism, then, is in the play of signifiers, the essential constitution of which is a play of numbers: in other words, the fluid neo-positivism of signifiers is a play of difference among “numbering numbers.”

     

    The desire to systematise the play of difference into a fluid positivism is also apparent in the positivity of Foucault’s (1972) statement. In addition, Lacan (1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one also senses that Lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis as the basis of his agonistic discourse-games. Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction of social quanta to particle flows realises the telos of postmodern thought, reducing cultural complexity to signifiers in the form of number-signs. This is also the designation of the subject in postmodernism, an order which abets the depiction of everyday life in terms of the concealed numerical coordinates which make up the electronic flashes of the image machines. A self-perficient and determining neo- positivism thus overtakes human reason.

     

    This order of things is the end of reason–an electronic mating of capital with a Faustian cum-Nietzschean will to deconstruction. The reality of Deleuze and Guattari’s escaping social quanta within late capitalism is that they are fearful and greedy multiplicities of desire which do not break free of capital but ride it into the fantasy of pure difference, seeking the pleasure of the “plateau.” The will to signify steers and provides the legitimating rationale for the passage of the turbulent leading edge of modernist capital into culture: atomising postmodern thought breaks up culture into exceedingly fine particles, creating a cosmic soup through which capitalism may re-nourish itself, unconstrained by structure. The particle flows of pleasure-seeking capital and fearful desire mutually attract and interpenetrate, and out of this mutual attraction arises an interminable metamorphosis that is the postmodern condition. While I contend that the reduction of the individual and social space to “numbering numbers” leaves no containing ethico-politico structure to constrain the propensity for terror, Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to disagree: “Horror for horror the numerical organisation of people is no crueler than linear or state organisation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 390). However, the individual, with an inherent potential for ethical and political praxis, can say no to the madness of the crowd in its elemental form of a swarming numerics of particles of desire.

     

    To place this discussion within the broader project of locating postmodernism historically, something has been lost in our focus on the luminescent trajectory of postmodernism since Paris in May, 1968: we have lost sight of the function of postmodernism as that which carries the modernist ethos into culture. This has seriously weakened the critical credentials of postmodernism. However, as this trajectory burns out (Los Angeles in May, 1992, is arguably postmodernism’s memorial monument), a re-orientation is called for. Opening up the reductiveness of the signifier to an understanding of the complicities of desire and concept is a step to relocating the individual, as the subject of ethico-politico praxis, within the mutually supportive dynamics of modernity and postmodernity. If the pleasures of deconstruction have perverted the modernist spirit of equality, liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of existence for the weaker sections of society, then reversing this process entails an awareness of the subject’s dissolution, by stages, into signifier, difference, particle-quanta, and finally into that autonomous mathesis of number concealed beneath postmodern figural play.

     

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    • Hocquenghem, G. Homosexual Desire. London: Allison and Busby, 1978.
    • Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury, 1972.
    • Kroker, A. “Baudrillard’s Marx.” Theory, Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 69-84.
    • Lacan, J. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1968.
    • Lefebvre, H. The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
    • Liggett, H. “The Theory/Practice Split.” In D. Crow, ed. Philosophical Streets. Washington: Maisonneuve, 1990.
    • Lukacs, G. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin, 1971.
    • Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
    • Lyotard, J-F. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
    • Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Viking, 1968.
    • Postle, D. The Fabric of the Universe. London: Macmillan, 1976.
    • Priest, G. In Contradiction. Dordrect: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
    • Rose, G. Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and the Law. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
    • —. “The Postmodern Complicity.” Theory, Culture and Society 2-3 (1988): 357-371.
    • Weil, S. On Science, Necessity and Love of God. Trans. and ed. Richard Rees. London: Oxford UP, 1968.

     

  • Mainlining Postmodernism: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and the Art of Intervention

    Walter Kalaidjian

    Dept. of English
    St. Cloud State University
    <wkalaidj@TIGGER.STCLOUD.MSUS.EDU>

     

    Midway through the Reagan era, the crossing of the Great Depression’s communal aesthetics and the contemporary avant-gardes was theorized from the conservative right as a stigma of neo-Stalinism. In “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” Hilton Kramer, the ideologue of painterly formalism, sought to discredit a number of gallery exhibitions mounted in resistance to the rapid gentrification of the New York art market. Not coincidentally, these oppositional shows culminated in a year charged with the political subtext of George Orwell’s 1984. Reviving Orwell’s critique of the totalitarian state, the New Museum of Contemporary Art launched two exhibitions entitled “The End of the World: Contemporary Visions of Apocalypse” and “Art and Ideology.” Meanwhile, the Edith C. Blum Art Institute of Bard College hosted a similar show whose theme, “Art as Social Conscience,” reinforced the New Museum initiatives. In addition to showings on the themes of “Women and Politics” at the Intar Latin American Gallery and “Dreams and Nightmares: Utopian Visions in Modern Art” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., both the Graduate Center of the City of University of New York and a network of private galleries affiliated with “Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America” featured works that reflected on American imperialism in the Third World.

     

    Reacting against these progressive showings, Kramer appealed to ideal canons of aesthetic “quality” in order to malign the politicized representations of “Artists Call.” Kramer’s thesis held that art had somehow evolved, in the Age of Reagan, beyond ideology: that any explicit political allusion marked a work as a throwback to a now outdated cultural moment. But not satisfied with simply dismissing these shows as a mere recycling of some harmless and nostalgic version of 1960s leftism, Kramer tried to revive a more menacing specter that had expired three decades earlier with the scandal of McCarthyism, Red-Baiting, and Cold War paranoia that reigned over the 1950s. Tying the emergent socioaesthetic critique of the 1980s to the “radicalism” of the 1930s, Kramer anathematized “social consciousness” as serving a “Stalinist ethos.”1 Through this historical framing, Kramer sought to reinstate the repression of Depression era populism during the 1940s and 1950s: a period which, in his reading, “marked a great turning point not only in the history of American art but in the life of the American imagination” (72).

     

    Like his formalist mentor Clement Greenberg, Kramer sought to displace partisan art works under the guise of disciplinary purity: that as Greenberg claimed “the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself–not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”2 Tellingly, in Kramer’s heavy-handed, ad hominem assaults on such critics and curators as Benjamin H. D. Buchloch and Donald Kuspit, the campaign for a “neutral zone” of artistic purity–wrapped as it is in the neo-Kantian mantle of disinterested aesthetic judgment–proved a reactionary ideological program: one that, in the name of intrinsic formalism, aimed to repress social representation tout court. Lodged against the postmodern recovery of interbellum populism, Kramer’s appeal to the seemingly “apolitical” zone of modernist experimentation–to an ideal canon of formal innovation–“turned back the clock” to the eve of the Cold War: rehearsing, in a reductive version, Clement Greenberg’s 1939 campaign for aesthetic autonomy as a counter to American kitsch culture and Soviet socialist realism.3

     

    The contempt with which Greenberg greeted popular culture and its mass audience reflected symptomatically his historical situation–which, in 1939, he anxiously viewed as imperiled by the triple threat of Nazism, Stalinism, and Americanism. The epochal shifts in technological reproduction, and collective systems of design, packaging, and distribution that now delivered art to the masses–that made every reader a virtual writer, every viewer a potential auteur, and every audiophile a nascent composer–threatened, in Greenberg’s reading, all semblance of hierarchy, distinction, and taste without which it was impossible to salvage canonicity. Moreover he regarded the democratization of cultural expression as a volatile formula for social unrest: “Everyman, from the Tammany alderman to the Austrian house-painter,” Greenberg warned, “finds that he is entitled to his opinion. . . . Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood’s health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences.”4

     

    Not coincidentally, Walter Benjamin had theorized the same symptoms of mass participation in the shaping of cultural modernism. Unlike Greenberg, however, Benjamin articulated them to new aesthetic tendencies that–divorced from the cult of individual genius, the canon, disciplinary autonomy, aesthetic purity, and so on–nevertheless did not reduce cultural production to the vulgar display of monumental socialist realism, fascist agitprop, or kitsch consumerism.5 While Greenberg eschewed the spectacle of mass communication, Benjamin proposed a materialist intervention into consumer culture by reversing art’s traditional social function, which “instead of being based on ritual . . . begins to be based on another practice– politics” (WMP, 224). Against fascism’s “introduction of aesthetics into political life” (241)–its auraticization of politics, nationalism, and mass spectacle–he campaigned for a counter-strategy of “politicizing art” as critique. Revolutionary art must not only pursue progressive tendencies in form and content, Benjamin insisted, but should effect what Brecht theorized as a broader “functional transformation” (Umfunktionierung) of the institutional limits, sites, and modes of production that shape cultural practices in the expanded social field.6

     

    Benjamin’s intervention in the reception of the avant- gardes, while surpassing the cloistral elitism of Greenberg’s retreat from popular culture, nevertheless comes up against its own historical limits, particularly so in its allegiance to the classist and productivist ideologies of the 1930s. Benjamin’s proletcult credo–that “the author as producer discovers . . . his solidarity with the proletariat” (AP, 230)–is marked by the coupure severing the modern from postmodern epochs. The myth of an imminent proletarian revolution, that energized a range of utopian aesthetic projects throughout the interbellum decades, remains one of the definitive hallmarks of modernist culture. The unfolding of postwar history through the present has increasingly discredited the orthodox marxist faith in the working class as the front line in the collective appropriation of capital’s new industrial and technological forces of production. Instead, the instrumental rationality shaping the productive apparatus intensified the labor process at once to the benefit of management and the detriment of labor. The new wave of computerization, containerization, and robotics in the 1960s did not so much ease as intensify the labor process. Such high tech advances, for the most part, stepped up the proletarianization and deskilling of workers, displacing them from lucrative, unionized jobs in the steel, automobile, and transportation industries into non-unionized and often temporary service positions.7

     

    Throughout the 1950s, as Ernest Mandel and more recently Fredric Jameson have observed, the sudden reserve of technological innovation in electronics, communication, and systems analysis and management–conceived during the war years and then coupled with accumulated resources of surplus wealth–allowed capital to penetrate new markets through a constant turnover not only of new services and commodity forms but of hitherto undreamt of sources of fabricated consumer needs and desires. This transition from a pre- to postwar economy challenged capital at once to deterritorialize its modern limits in the industrial workplace and to reterritorialize the entire fabric of everyday life for consumption.8 One symptom of this paradigm shift was the fragmentation of the working class community that–dwelling in the political and phenomenological spaces of extended social solidarity (the union hall, the local factory tavern, fraternal clubs, and so on)–was radically decentered and dispersed along the new superhighways out into the netherworld of suburban America.

     

    In the post-Depression era, traditionally urban, ethnic, and working class neighborhoods–like those, say, of the ante-Fort Apache decades of the South Bronx–fell victim to the new generation of such metropolitan planners as Robert Moses.9 The tremendous drive to accommodate the ever more expansive and mobile traffic in consumer goods and services cut through the heart of the ‘hood, leaving behind, in Marshall Berman’s telling impressions of the Long Island Expressway, “monoliths of steel and cement, devoid of vision or nuance or play, sealed off from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space, stamped on the landscape with a ferocious contempt for all natural and human life.”10 Along these clotted arteries and by-passes, American workers were fleeing the decaying precincts of the modern city, seduced by the new suburban vision whose prototype mushroomed from a 1,500-acre Long Island potato farm bought-out by William J. Levitt in 1949. The first community to apply the logic of Fordism to home construction, Levittown overnight threw up some 17,500 virtually identical prefabricated four-room houses, followed by centrally designed plans for Levittown II an eight square mile suburb on the Delaware River.11

     

    Ever more cloistered and privatized within such serial neighborhoods of single family track houses, working class America succumbed little by little to the postmodern regime of the commodity form. No longer limited to accumulating surplus value from its modern settings of industrial production–the factory, textile mill, powerplant, construction site, or agribusiness combine–capital now seized on the frontier markets of consumption: the mall, the road strip, the nuclear household, the body, the unconscious–with ever new generations of consumer items, electrical appliances, gadgetry of all kinds, prepackaged foods, gas and restaurant franchises, accelerating rhythms of style, fashion, and popular trends in music, teen culture, and suburban living. Here, the cement and steel hardscapes of the older urban environment were supplanted by the high-end, chi-chi-frou-frou softscapes of such mushrooming “edge cities” as Schaumburg, Illinois; Atlanta’s Perimeter Center; California’s Silicon Valley and Orange County; and the Washington D.C. beltway.12

     

    As Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and the Situationists had argued, the ideology of consumerism–now reproduced throughout the omnipresent spectacle of advertising, selling, and purchasing of new goods, services, products, and cultural styles–came to dominate the total makeup of everyday life, eroding the older working class values of industrious productivity, active creativity, and proletarian solidarity–replacing them with the ideals of consumption, possessive individualism, and upward class mobility. One symptom of this shift into the postmodern register of spectacular consumerism was what Lefebvre described as “the enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently connected to their corresponding signifieds (words, gestures, images and signs), and thus made available to advertising and propaganda.”13 Suddenly the world’s entire semiotic fabric, from the sprawling lay-out of the suburban town to a commercial’s most intimate proxemic code, was now readable (and thus susceptible to reinscription) in ways that articulated everyday life to the discourse of advertising, publicity, and spectacular display. Yet within what Lefebvre described as the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” it was capital that exploited the powers of textual representation to maintain a constant obsolescence of needs as such, paradoxically, within a fixed framework of institutional durability. The task was to balance the necessity for a fast-paced turnover of cultural forms and trends in the consumer market in contradiction with the class strategy of preserving permanence, stability, and hierarchy amidst rapid cultural change. It is this double strategy that, for Lefebvre, underwrites and constantly renegotiates consumer society’s spectacular promotion.

     

    Supplementing Lefebvre, Baudrillard has, of course, more radically deconstructed marxism’s traditional margin that separates commodity and sign, theorizing both as mutually traversed by a “homological structure” of exchange.14 In Baudrillard’s descriptive account of postmodern simulation, the McLuhanesque slogan that the “medium is the message” reaches an estranging, postmodern limit where the medium of telecommunication infiltrates, mimics, mutates, and finally exterminates the Real like a virus or genetic code, in what Baudrillard describes as a global, “satellization of the real.”15 Not insignificantly, with the death of the referent, the social contract and political institutions conceived out of the universalist ideals the Enlightenment are likewise thrown into jeopardy. Against the orthodoxy of the Old Left, the spectacle of postmodernism, for Baudrillard, positions mass society not so much as a valorized political agent but more as a passive medium or conductor for the cultural simulation of every representable social need, libidinal desire, political interest, or popular opinion.16

     

    Relentlessly polled, solicited, and instructed by the print, television, and video media–whose corporate advertising budgets dwarf those of public and private education–the masses, in Baudrillard’s descriptive account, are absorbed into a wholly commodified habitus. The revenge of mass society, however, is expressed, for Baudrillard, as the sheer inertia of its silent majority: its tendency to consume in excess any message, code, or sign that is broadcast its way. No longer the figure for the proletarian class, a people, a citizenry, or any stable political constituency, the masses now mark the abysmal site of the radical equivalence of all value–a density that simply implodes, in one of Baudrillard’s astrophysical metaphors, like a collapsing star, drawing into itself “all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning.”17 When simulation has overrun the political sphere, tactics of stepping up the exchange and consumption of goods, services, information flows, and new technologies–the whole hyperreal economy of postmodern potlatch–serve to debunk any vestiges of use value, rationality, or authenticity legitimating affirmative bourgeois culture.

     

    More politically engaged, perhaps, than this rather pessimistic take on postmodern simulation is the kind of specific tactics of aesthetic resistance, critique, and intervention that, given his totalizing account, Baudrillard is driven to reject as hopelessly utopian. Beyond the scant attention that Baudrillard has devoted to subcultural resistance, theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Stuart Hall, Rosalind Brunt, Dick Hebdige, and the New Times collective have offered more nuanced studies of micropolitical praxes of subversion.18 Such theoretical approaches to a postmodern politics of consumption have considered the multiple ways in which particular groups and individuals not merely consume but rearticulate to their own political agendas dominant signs taken, say, from the discourses of advertising, fashion, television, contemporary music, and pop culture in general.

     

    Beyond content analyses, explications, or close readings of various textual praxes, a more productive approach to the micropolitics of postmodern resistance examines what audiences, viewers, readers, and shoppers produce with the texts, artifacts, and commodity forms they consume.19 What looks like a spectacle of passive consumerism actually yields a multiplicity of “tactics,” options, and occasions for actively negotiating what Michel Foucault would describe as a “microphysics of power.” Advancing Foucault’s theory of disciplinary and institutional surveillance, de Certeau draws a cogent distinction between the established hegemonic regimes (or strategies) of power and the marginal and subaltern tactics of oppositional contestation and subversion that traverse them.20 The reproduction of consumerism, of course, relies on certain well-established strategies of representation that map the social field into a coded space of commodity exchange. The discourse of advertising, in particular–with its notorious manipulation of image and text–stands out as a ripe medium for the tactical subversion of dominant slogans and stereotypes.

     

    Throughout the 1970s and 1980s one specific site for exposing and interrupting the popular media’s reproduction of consumer society has been its sexist inscription of gender. Responding to the spectacle of postmodernism, critical artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke have adopted tactics of quotation, citation, and appropriation that were pioneered some five decades earlier in Benjamin’s examination of international Dada and the Russian futurists in such essays as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Artist as Producer.”21 The challenge that Benjamin laid down was for every author to become a producer, every artist a theorist, in the general remapping of generic boundaries, aesthetic traditions, and cultural conventions that the age demanded. Not incidentally, in photography this political requisite entailed a subversion of “the barrier between writing and image. What we require of the photographer,” Benjamin insisted, “is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value” (AP 230). In thus linking photographic activity to language and signification, Benjamin’s critique of photographic mimesis looks forward to Roland Barthes’ postwar argument that “the conventions of photography . . . are themselves replete with signs.”22 In the age of mass communication, as Barthes would go on to argue in the 1960s, every pictorial form is always already a linguistic text.23

     

    Barthes’ sophisticated, textual analysis of the photographic image, tied as it is to Benjamin’s avant-garde concern for art’s functional transformation of its enabling cultural apparatus, provides a theoretical vantage point for reading contemporary feminist interventions in the contemporary media, such as those, say, of Barbara Kruger. A one-time designer for Conde Nast during the 1970s, Kruger was thoroughly disciplined in the craft of commercial media design, whose graphic techniques, discursive codes, and semiotic protocols she appropriated in the 1980s for tactical reinscriptions of sexist, racist, and classist representations in the popular media. While her plates and posters have the look and feel of slick ads, the politics they inscribe cut across the grain of consumerist ideology. Indeed, her images often allude to the general violence, oppression, and humiliation entailed in the cultural logic of unequal exchange fostered under advanced capitalism. But equally important, her collages are frequently articulated to various micropolitical agendas as in her participation in exhibitions like the Disarming Images: Art for Nuclear Disarmament (1984-86) show sponsored by Bread and Roses, the cultural organ of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, AFL-CIO. She also collaborates in any number of direct political actions, such as, say, her poster “Your Body is a Battleground” advertising the 1989 March on Washington in support of Roe v. Wade.

     

    Shaping such street level praxes, Kruger’s formal tactic is to open up the precoded space of the advertising sign–what de Certeau would call its strategy–to unreadable gaps, contradictions, accusations, and dire judgments that interrupt our conventional responses and habits of consumption. The dominant coding of gender in the mass media–its repertoire of body language, facial expressions, styles of dress, and so on–positions the sexes differentially to reproduce a semiotics of patriarchal privilege, expertise, and authority, on the one hand, and feminine passivity, sexual ingratiation, and infantilization, on the other. Such commercial photographs, as Erving Goffman’s seminal study Gender Advertisements (1979) has argued, broadcast a posed “hyper-ritualization” of social situations, whose images are, more often than not, calculated to oppress women in subordinate roles to equally idealized male counterparts.24 Much of Kruger’s photographic appropriation of ad imagery and media slogans undermines and repudiates the sexist, semiotic economy of capitalist patriarchy. For example, the deployment of personal pronouns, typically used to solicit the reader’s investment in ad texts, serves in Kruger’s hands to heighten sexual antagonisms, as in “We won’t play nature to your culture.” Here Kruger repudiates the dead letter of patriarchal stereotyping that, as Simone de Beauvoir theorized, reduces women’s place to that of passive “Other”: projected outside male civil order as nature, the unconscious, the exotic, what is either forbidden or taboo.25

     

    Appropriating the glossy look of postmodern advertising–whose specular, imaginary form solicits from the viewer a certain narcissism, a certain scopophilia– Kruger rebuffs the valorized male reader, anathematizing this subject position with uncompromising, feminist refusals and such arresting judgments as:

     

    You thrive on mistaken identity.
    Your devotion has the look of a lunatic sport.
    You molest from afar.
    You destroy what you think is difference.
    I am your reservoir of poses.
    I am your immaculate conception.
    I will not become what I mean to you.
    We won't play nature to your culture.
    We refuse to be your favorite embarrassments.
    Keep us at a distance.

     

    While advertising exploits such “shifters” to ease consumption, Kruger’s slogans maintain an urgent tension that throws into crisis any “normal” positioning of gendered pronouns. Her uncanny fusion of text and image, her impeccable craft, and her estranging wit resist any easy or complacent didacticism, however.

     

    More politically undecidable, perhaps, than Kruger’s feminist subversions of advertising discourse are Jenny Holzer’s critical interventions within the electronic apparatus of the postmodern spectacle, particularly her appropriation of light emitting diode (L.E.D.) boards. As an art student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-1970s, Holzer came to New York via the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1976-77. After collaborating with a number of performance artists at the Whitney, she jettisoned her pursuit of painterly values and in 1977 began to compose gnomic aphorisms that she collected in a series of “Truisms” formatted onto posters, stickers, handbills, hats, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. Not unlike Daniel Buren’s deconstruction of the gallery’s conventional exhibition space, Holzer took her placards to the streets of Soho and later throughout Manhattan. This aesthetic gambit not only allowed her to solicit a populist audience but gave her work a certain shock value in its estrangement of everyday life. “From the beginning,” she has said, “my work has been designed to be stumbled across when someone is just walking along, not thinking about anything in particular, and then finds these unusual statements either on a poster or on a sign.”26

     

    The verbal character of the “Truisms” themselves relies on the familiar slogans and one-liners common to tabloid journalism, the Reader’s Digest headline, the TV evangelist pitch-line, campaign rhetoric, rap and hip-hop lyrics, bumper sticker and T-shirt displays, and countless other kitsch forms. In some ways the plainspoken vernacular of her midwest Ohio roots is, as Holzer admits, naturally suited to such cliched formats. What might redeem this risky project, possibly, is her avant-garde tactic of investing such predictable messages, and their all-too-familiar modes of mass distribution (posters, stickers, handbills, plaques, hats, T-shirts, and so on) with conflicted, schizophrenic, and at times politicized content. Her messages traverse the full spectrum of everyday life ranging from the reactionary complacency implied, say, in “AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE,” or “ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN’T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY,” to the feminist essentialism of “A MAN CAN’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER,” to the populist credo that “GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE,” to the postmarxist position that “CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC.” Foregrounding popular truisms as cliched slogans, she playfully deconstructs the humanist rhetoric of evangelism (“AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE”); pop psychoanalysis (“SOMETIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND”); advice columns and self-help manuals (“EXPRESSING ANGER IS NECESSARY”); as well as the usual saws, platitudes, and hackneyed bromides that are with us everywhere:

     

    A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY.
    A LOT OF OFFICIALS ARE CRACKPOTS.
    DON'T RUN PEOPLE'S LIVES FOR THEM.
    GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED.
    EVERY ACHIEVEMENT REQUIRES A SACRIFICE.
    A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF.

     

    While the political intent of some of her truisms is undecidably voiced–“GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE,” for example, is as serviceable to the reactionary right as the utopian left–others are more perversely drained of any meaning at all: “EVERYTHING THAT’S INTERESTING IS NEW.”

     

    Nonsensical, parodic, and ideologically loaded, such clashing platitudes, mottos, and non-sequiturs quickly caught on and won Holzer a popular audience, as evidenced not only in the traces of dialogic graffito left on her street posters, but in her window installations and exhibitions at Franklin Furnace (1978) and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx the following year. At this time Holzer undertook joint ventures such as the “Manifesto Show” that she helped organize with Colen Fitzgibbon and the Collaborative Projects group. Later, she would turn toward distinctively feminist collaborations with the female graffiti artists Lady Pink and Ilona Granet. Supplementing the poster art of “Truisms,” Holzer in her 1980 “Living” series branched out into other materials, inscribing her aphorisms in more monumental formats such as the kind of bronze plaques, commemorative markers, and commercial signs that everywhere bestow a kind of kitsch authority on offices, banks, government buildings, galleries, museums, and so on.

     

    One symptom of her work’s emerging power was the resistance it met from patrons such as the Marine Midland Bank on Broadway that responding to one of her truisms– “IT’S NOT GOOD TO LIVE ON CREDIT”–dismantled her window installation, consigning it to a broomcloset. Not unlike Hans Haacke’s celebrated expulsion from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, such censorship testified to her work’s site-specific shock value. In the mid-1980s, Holzer intensified her art’s political content in her more militant “Survival” series and, at the same time, undertook a bolder appropriation of a uniquely authoritative and spectacular medium: the light emitting diode (L.E.D.) boards installed worldwide in stock exchanges, urban squares, airports, stadiums, sports arenas, and other mass locales. The formal elements of this new high tech medium–its expanded memory of over 15,000 characters coupled with a built-in capacity for special visual effects and dynamic motion–advanced Holzer’s poster aesthetics into the linguistic registers of poetics and textual performance art.

     

    However Holzer’s work “naturalizes” the impersonal displays of her computerized texts, it shares in the Derridean, antihumanist deconstruction of the rhetorical presuppositions underwriting transcendental signified meaning, foundational thought, common sense–all ideal “truisms.” The L.E.D. board’s electronic mimicry of rhythm, inflection, and the play of visual emphasis allows Holzer’s mass art to solicit the humanist division between orality and inscription, logos and text, speech and writing so as to put into an uncanny, deconstructive play the margin of differance that normally separates the intimacy and immediacy of a voiced presence from the authoritative textual screens which function as the official media for postmodernism’s high tech information society.27 “A great feature of the signs,” she has said, “is their capacity to move, which I love because it’s so much like the spoken word: you can emphasize things; you can roll and pause which is the kinetic equivalent to inflection in voice” (LG 67).

     

    Yet as “an official or commercial format normally used for advertising or public service announcements” the L.E.D. signboard, Holzer maintains, is also the medium par excellence of contemporary information society.28 They are singularly positioned to reproduce the dominant, ideological signs that naturalize the reign of the commodity form. “The big signs,” she has said, “made things seem official”; appropriating this public medium “was like having the voice of authority say something different from what it would normally say.”29 Such interventions are pragmatically suasive, however, only if they hold in contradiction the dominant forms of the mass media and estranged, or radically ironic messages. In 1982, under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, Holzer went to the heart of America’s mass spectacle, choosing selections from among her most succinct and powerful “Truisms” for public broadcast on New York’s mammoth Times Square Spectacolor Board. Commenting on the scandal-ridden political milieu of the Reagan era, slogans such as ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE were circulating suddenly at the very crossroads of American consumer society. Negotiating the official spaces of New York advertising demanded a reconsideration of the artwork beyond the limits of intrinsic form.

     

    The formal composition of Holzer’s spectacolor boards is mediated by site specific forces in an expanded public field of legal, commercial, and political interests. For example, in mounting her own media blitz on Las Vegas–the American mecca of glitzy signage and neon kitsch–Holzer’s choice of message, L.E.D. formats, and installation locales had to be adjudicated through a network of businesspeople, university managers, and political officials. Through these negotiations, and supported in part by the Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art, Holzer gained access to L.E.D. signs and poster installation sites in two shopping centers, the University of Nevada’s sports center, the baggage claim areas of the Las Vegas airport, and the massive spectacolor publicity board outside Caesar’s Palace. Infiltrating Vegas’ neon aura, Holzer’s telling message, displayed on the Dectronic Starburst double-sided electronic signboard of Caesar’s Palace–

     

    PROTECT ME
    FROM WHAT
    I WANT

     

    –laid bare the contradictory wager of consumerism at the heart of the postmodern spectacle.

     

    Throughout the 1980s, Holzer mounted similar installations on Alcoa Corporation’s giant L.E.D. sign outside Pittsburgh, on mobile truck signs in New York, and other sites nationwide. Moreover, as an intern for a television station in Hartford, Holzer began to purchase commercial time to broadcast her messages in 30-second commercial slots throughout the Northeast to a potential audience of millions. Here Holzer’s textual praxis is guided by the same strategy of defamiliarization: mainlining the dominant arteries and electronic organs of the mass communications apparatus with postmodern ironies and heady, linguistic estrangements. “Again, the draw for me,” she says, “is that the unsuspecting audience will see very different content from what they’re used to seeing in this everyday medium. It’s the same principle that’s at work with the signs in a public place” (LG 68). Whether Holzer’s art remains oppositional to, rather than incorporated by, the postmodern spectacle has become a more pressing question, given her rising star status in the late 1980s and 1990s.

     

    As a valorized figure in the world art market, Holzer enjoys regular gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, Cologne, and other major art centers. In 1990 alone she not only undertook shows in the prestigious Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and DIA Art Foundation, but served as the official U.S. representative to the Venice Biennale. When she made the jump from street agitation to international stardom in the late 1980s, Holzer adjusted her presentation, paradoxically, to the more intimate and privatized nuances of commercial exhibition space. Installed in such settings as the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, the Guggenheim, and the DIA Art Foundation, her new “Under a Rock” and “Laments” series inscribed her earlier truisms in granite and marble benches and sarcophagi quarried in Vermont near her summer residence in Hoosick, New York. Casting her truisms in stonework summoned an uncanny fusion of the monumental and the popular, at once glossing the medium of tombstones, anonymous war memorials, commemorative benches, and the kind of kitsch, public furniture found, say, in any bank lobby or shopping plaza.

     

    Departing from the spectacular spaces of Times Square and the Las Vegas strip, “Under a Rock” invoked the hushed atmosphere of a chapel by displaying files of stone benches, each illuminated by an overhead spotlight and arranged before a color L.E.D. display. Such a sparse and shadowy layout–in its simulacral citation of church pews and stained glass iconography–employed a postmodern medium, paradoxically, to invoke a ritual aura of mourning, confession, and moral self-examination that would complement the work’s verbal content of unspeakable acts of torture, mutilation, and humiliation. While her terse, indeterminate narratives are not tied to any specific public agenda, they often adopt a feminist critique of male violence, misogyny, and machismo. Although many of her “laments” are lyrical– “I KEEP MY BRAIN ON SO I DO NOT FALL INTO NOTHING IF HIS CLAWS HURT ME”–others more broadly rely on the kind of fetishized coding of militarism, torture, and political assassination that, say, Leon Golub finds everywhere displayed in the contemporary media: “PEOPLE GO TO THE RIVER WHERE IT IS / LUSH AND MUDDY TO SHOOT CAPTIVES, / TO FLOAT OR SINK THEM. SHOTS KILL / MEN WHO ALWAYS WANT. SOMEONE / IMAGINED OR SAW THEM LEAPING TO / SAVAGE THE GOVERNMENT. NOW BODIES / DIVE AND GLIDE IN THE WATER. SCARING / FRIENDS OR MAKING THEM FURIOUS.” The spare and plainspoken language of “Under a Rock” is designed neither to shock the reader nor to subvert the linguistic medium, as in much of so-called Language writing. Rather, her work exposes how the representation of such barbarism has moved to the center of the postmodern scene, whose routine horror is the daily stuff of the tabloid, the morning edition, and nightly update.

     

    More subversive, perhaps, is the juxtaposition of linguistic elements and the arrangement of physical space that her installations exploit. In her DIA Foundation “Laments,” for example, Holzer staked out the exhibition space with thirteen sarcophagi–variously carved in green and red marble, onyx, and black granite–illuminated with postmodern LED display boards that radiate vertically arrayed messages into the hushed and sepulchral air. Yet the effect of such a bizarre mix of antique caskets and high tech light grids is undecidable. Is it calculated to disrupt conventional oppositions between ancient artifacts and today’s telecommunication medium, or to re-auraticize the L.E.D. medium as an object of contemporary veneration? Are the sarcophagi exposed as exhibition fetishes or simply updated in an aestheticized homage to the postmodern objet d’art? Undeniable, in any case, is the manic structure of feeling you experience sitting on one of Holzer’s granite benches bombarded by an electronic frieze of visually intense messages.

     

    However deconstructive of traditional gallery values, the political status of Holzer’s recent installations– marked at once as objects of ritual “lament” and art market souvenirs–is debatable. On the one hand, new works such as Child Text–conceived for her 1990 Venice Biennial installation–productively negotiate between a personal phenomenology of mothering (as in “I AM SULLEN AND THEN FRANTIC WHEN I CANNOT BE WHOLLY WITHIN / THE ZONE OF MY INFANT. I AM NOT CONSUMED BY HER. I AM AN / ANIMAL WHO DOES ALL SHE SHOULD. I AM SURPRISED THAT I / CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO HER. I WAS PAST FEELING MUCH / BECAUSE I WAS TIRED OF MYSELF BUT I WANT HER TO LIVE”) and a social critique of what Adrienne Rich has theorized as motherhood’s institutional place under patriarchy. On the other hand, however, such displays are themselves commodity forms within the gallery exchange market, fetching up to $40,000 per L.E.D. sign, $30,000 per granite bench, and $50,000 per sarcophagus. It is not Holzer’s purpose, of course, to deny or repress her work’s commodity status but rather to exploit it in de-auraticizing gallery art’s remove from its commercial base. Holzer’s truisms have always been up for sale but at the more populist rates of $15 per cap or T-shirt and $250 per set of 21 posters. When she markets a granite slab, however, for the price of a luxury car, her earlier truism– PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME–must necessarily return with a vengeance. Indeed, Holzer does not flinch from such self- recrimination but pushes the difficult paradox of aesthetic critique and recuperation to its vexed limits: “selling my work to wealthy people,” she admits, “can be like giving little thrills to the people I’m sometimes criticizing.”30 For all its honesty, such a frank acknowledgement of commodification, nonetheless, is a chilling echo of her onetime truism “AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE,” leaving Holzer susceptible to the critique of what Donald Kuspit has indicted as “Gallery Leftism”: an aesthetic politics “calculated to make a certain impact, occupy a certain position, in the art world, whose unconscious ultimate desire is to produce museum art however much it consciously sees itself as having socio-political effect in the world.”31

     

    Part of what is at stake here is the difference between merely rehearsing the avant-garde critique of the museum– now itself a thoroughly stylized and recuperated gesture of protest–and committing art to social change. To her credit, Holzer’s key precedent has unhinged the fixed status of today’s communication apparatus, leaving it susceptible to more adventurous, more politicized interventions. Nevertheless, the overtly commercialized status of Holzer’s “truisms” lends itself to gallery recuperation in a way that the more politicized and collaborative projects of, say, Artmakers, or Political Art Distribution/Documentation (PADD) is calculated to deny. Since the mid-’80s, the graphic resources pioneered by such visual/text artists as Hans Haacke, Holzer, and Kruger have been appropriated from the New York art market and articulated, at street level, as in, say, Greenpeace’s critique of advanced capitalism’s environmental settlement, or Act Up’s agitation on behalf of people with AIDS.

     

    Responding to the Reagan/Bush era’s attempts to “greenwash” devastating environmental policies through slick public relations campaigns, Greenpeace has had to respond precisely at the level of the media image to rearticulate such ideologically-loaded spectacles to its own progressive agenda. “Greenpeace believes,” says Steve Loper, the Action Director for Greenpeace, U.S.A, “that an image is an all-important thing. The direct actions call attention to the issues we’re involved in. We put a different point of view out that usually ends up on the front page of the paper . . . If we just did research and lobbying and came out with a report it would probably be on the 50th page of the paper.”32

     

    The creation of compelling images, however, is a rigorously site specific process and–although articulated to politicized positions on, say, nuclear arms escalation, deforestation, or toxic dumping–each intervention is radically contingent on the particular, conjunctural forces and pragmatic demands of a given moment. One of Greenpeace’s tactics is to seize on popular news stories such as the scandalous New York City garbage barge that, in the absence of a dump site, sailed up and down the eastern seaboard throughout 1987. Appropriating this object of sustained public embarrassment, Greenpeace rearticulated it to the theme of conservation through unfurling a giant banner across the length of the vessel reading: “NEXT TIME . . . TRY RECYCLING.” Greenpeace’s better known gambit is to go to the heart of America’s monumental icons of national heritage such as, say, South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore or New York’s Statue of Liberty to recode their spectacular meanings to its own agenda. Such was Greenpeace’s strategy in its 1987 attempt to place a giant surgical mask over the mouth of Rushmore’s George Washington reading “WE THE PEOPLE SAY NO TO ACID RAIN” and its 1984 antinuclear banner, hung like a giant stripped-in caption on the Statue of Liberty in commemoration of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “Give Me Liberty From Nuclear Weapons, Stop Testing.”

     

    On the vanguard of such postmodern agitational work, guerilla collectives like Gran Fury, Little Elvis, and Wave Three of ACT UP have mastered the fine art of interventionist critique. In 1989, for example, Gran Fury borrowed from the appropriation of advertising discourse, popularized by Hans Haacke in the 1970s, to refocus public attention on corporate profiteering from the AIDS crisis. The collective’s formal tactic followed Haacke’s uncanny fusions of slick advertising visuals set in contradiction with texts exposing the often brutal work settings and ruthless industrial practices such imagery normally deflects. But unlike Haacke’s point of subversion, positioned as it is within museum culture, Gran Fury’s mode of distribution targeted a potentially much wider audience: the readership of The New York Times. In “New York Crimes,” Gran Fury produced a meticulous four-page simulacrum of the print layout and masthead design of the Times which documented the Koch administration’s cuts to hospital facilities servicing AIDS, its failure to address the housing needs of New York’s homeless People with AIDS (PWAs), its cutbacks to city drug treatment programs by effectively shifting them to shrinking state budgets, and the latter’s withholding of condoms and medical support to the 25% of state prison inmates tested positive for HIV infection. On the morning of ACT UP’s March 28, 1989 mass demonstration on City Hall, Gran Fury opened New York Times vending boxes and wrapped the paper in their own “NY Crimes” jacket. For those who would simply ignore the stories, Gran Fury also included a slick clash of text and image that articulated the visual iconography of painstaking antiviral research to outrageous corporate greed summed up in an unguarded quote from Patrick Gage of Hoffman-La Roche, Inc.. “One million [people with AIDS],” Gage mused, “isn’t a market that’s exciting. Sure it’s growing, but it’s not asthma.” Such callous disregard for life is played off Gran Fury’s polemical caption that plainly lays out its discursive counter-strategy: “This is to Enrage You.”

     

    Perhaps the image that has best stood the test of time, however, is Gran Fury’s Read My Lips lithograph produced for a Spring 1988 AIDS Action Kiss-in to protest against gay bashing. Read My Lips employs a camp image of two forties-style sailors in a loving embrace, thereby articulating the identity politics of gender to a bold, homoerotic sexuality. But beyond this obvious agenda, the work’s clever textual layout cites Barbara Kruger’s interventionist aesthetic to signify on George Bush’s 1988 campaign vow to slash tax supports for domestic social programs. Such sophisticated metasimulations of the advertising sign’s formal inmixing of image and text recode today’s largely homophobic world outlook to make us think twice about what Adrienne Rich has defined as compulsory heterosexuality.33 As we pass beyond the twentieth- century scene into the new millennium, it will surely be in the collaborative aesthetic praxes of such new social movements–articulated as they are to class, environmental, racial, feminist, gay rights, and public health issues–that America’s avant-garde legacy of cultural intervention will live on: its political edge cutting through the semiosis of everyday life, going to the heart of the postmodern spectacle.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock,” The New Criterion (April 1984), 72.

     

    2. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” The New Art, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), 101 (hereafter cited in the text as MP).

     

    3. While Greenberg is often set up as the strawman for contesting art’s ontological remove from history, his actual idealization of high modernism rests (as does Adorno’s) not on an ontic difference but a relational reaction to the spreading reign of kitsch. On this point see Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 1; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 57; Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” in Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, eds. Modernism and Modernity (Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 215-264; and T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 203-220.

     

    4. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939), 34-49, rpt. in Mass Culture, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Chicago: The Free Press, 1957), 107 (hereafter cited in the text as AK).

     

    5. The traffic in contemporary spectacle, for Benjamin, did not yet constitute a one-way flow, noting that “the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 231 (hereafter cited in the text as WMP).

     

    6. In this vein, Benjamin cited Dadaism’s experiments with the new techniques of mechanical reproduction which not only led to their playful reframings of “masterpiece” art and other cultural icons, but also the appropriation of objects collaged from everyday life. While such tactics achieved only localized, provisional effects in the West, the Russian avant-gardes mounted a broader strategy of sociocultural renovation in the early years of the Soviet Union. The example of the worker-correspondent drawn from Soviet journalism served, for Benjamin, to deconstruct the oppositional roles that–propped up as they are by the bourgeois cult of specialization–separates writer and reader, expert and layman, poet and critic, scholar and performer. Unlike the capitalist press, which reproduces dominant bourgeois class interests, newspaper publication in Russia, Benjamin argued, offered a “theater of literary confusion” that nevertheless broadcast the political concerns of the writer as producer, and more widely, “the man on the sidelines who believes he has a right to see his own interests expressed.” Walter Benjamin, “The Artist as Producer,” Reflections, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 300 (hereafter cited in the text as AP).

     

    7. Consider the dehumanizing regime, say, of a McDonald’s kitchen. In this postmodern sweatshop, employees are trained by video disks to perform the tedious, predesigned regimens for twenty-odd work stations that when meshed together make each franchise a highly efficient fastfood production machine. Each of the twenty-four burgers one cooks in any given batch is part of a completely Taylorized process: from the premeasured beef patties to the computerized timers for heating each bun, to the automatic catsup, mustard, and special sauce dispensers, to the formulas for the exact measurements of onion bits, pickles, and lettuce each Big Mac receives. Far from possessing even the autonomy of a short order cook, one serves here purely as a cog in a ninety second burger assembly-line. Moreover, from the monitored soft-drink spigots to the fully automated registers, from the computerized formulas for hiring, scheduling, and organizing workers to the centrally administered accounting systems, every aspect of a McDonald’s franchise is organized and scrutinized in minute detail by the panoptic Hamburger Central in Oak Brook, Illinois. A thoroughly postmodern institution, McDonald’s presides at any given time over a temporary workforce of some 500,000 teenagers; by the mid-1980s 7% or nearly 8 million Americans had earned their living under the sign of the Golden Arches. See John F. Love, McDonald’s Behind the Golden Arches (New York: Bantam, 1986) and Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 19.

     

    8. For a discussion of de- and reterritorialization, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988).

     

    9. As New York State and City Parks Commissioner, Moses, of course, had commandeered the productivist ethos of the interbellum decades to forge a huge “public authority” bureaucracy of federal, state, and private interests that backed the renovation of Central Park, Long Island’s Jones Beach, Flushing Meadow fairgrounds–the site of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair–and 1700 recreational facilities, as well as the construction of such mammoth highway, bridge, and parkway systems as the West Side Highway, the Belt Parkway, and the Triborough Project. While labor was recruited to build these giant thoroughfares and spectacular, recreational spaces, it could not control the irresistible momentum of social modernization that burst through the seams of the older metropolitan cityscape.

     

    10. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts in Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 308.

     

    11. Levittown II, in William Manchester’s description, comprised “schools, churches, baseball diamonds, a town hall, factory sidings, parking lots, offices for doctors and dentists, a reservoir, a shopping center, a railroad station, newspaper presses, garden clubs–enough, in short, to support a densely populated city of 70,000, the tenth largest in Pennsylvania.” William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 432.

     

    12. “Edge cities,” writes Joel Garreau, “represent the third wave of our lives pushing into new frontiers in this half century. First we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization of America, especially after World War II. Then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism–our jobs–out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City.” Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 4.

     

    13. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, tr. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 56 (hereafter cited in the text as EL).

     

    14. “[T]oday consumption . . . defines precisely the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities.” Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, tr. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 147 (hereafter cited in the text as PES).

     

    15. “We must think of the media,” he advises, “as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 55 (hereafter cited in the text as S). Within the horizon of the hyperreal, the instant precession of every conceivable interpretive model and representation around and within any historical “fact” constitutes an indeterminate, virtually “magnetic field of events” (S 32), where the difference between the signified event and its simulacrum implodes now in a global circulation/ventilation of contradictory signals, mutating codes, and mixed messages.

     

    16. The presumption to speak now on behalf of the proletariat in some wholly unmediated fashion seems theoretically naive after the pressing debates of postmodernity. During the 1985 Institute of Contemporary Arts forum on postmodernism, for example, Jean-Francois Lyotard argued cogently against Terry Eagleton’s orthodox nostalgia for the proletariat as the privileged agent for social change in the Third World. Following Kant, Lyotard pointed out that in contradistinction to designating specific laborers in culturally diversified communities, the term proletariat, nominating as it does a more properly universal “subject to be emancipated,” is an ahistorical abstraction–a “pure Idea of Reason” having little purchase today on the actual politics of everyday life. Indeed, some of the greatest atrocities, he cautioned, have been perpetuated under this very category error of pursuing a “politics of the sublime”: “That is to say, to make the terrible mistake of trying to represent in political practice an Idea of Reason. To be able to say, ‘We are the proletariat’ or ‘We are the incarnation of free humanity.’” Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern, etc.,” tr. G. Bennington, in Postmodernism (London: ICA Documents 4 & 5, 1986), 11 (hereafter cited as ICA).

     

    17. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 2 (hereafter cited in the text as SSM).

     

    18. See New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence & Wishart in association with Marxism Today, 1989).

     

    19. “Thus, once the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV set have been analyzed,” writes de Certeau, “it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 31 (hereafter cited in the text as PEL).

     

    20. Strategies, as de Certeau defines them, mark “a triumph of place over time” (PEL 36)–through transforming the unreadable contingencies of history into a legible, panoptic space. Tactics, in contrast, cut across, raid, and out-maneuver the logic, rules, and laws that govern such institutional and disciplinary sites of power. As the gambit of a weak force, a tactic relies on cunning, trickery, wit, finesse–what the Greeks described under the rubric of metis, or “ways of knowing” (PEL xix).

     

    21. In particular, feminist critiques of the chauvinist media representations perpetuated under capitalist patriarchy have benefitted from Benjamin’s earlier class-based analysis of aesthetic tactics that in the interbellum decades effected a functional transformation –a Brechtian Umfunktionierung–of the then emerging apparatus of the bourgeois culture industry. It was the influence of Sergei Tretyakov and the postsynthetic cubist collaborations of the Russian suprematists, constructivists, and Laboratory Period figures that guided Benjamin’s thinking on the avant-garde turn (brought about by photography, film, and other mechanically reproducible media) away from the modernist paradigm of aesthetic representation–its cult of artistic genius and the aura of the unique work of art. By taking into account an artwork’s material conditions of exhibition, distribution, and audience reception, as part of its productive apparatus, the Russian constructivists decisively challenged the abstract and self-reflexive values of modern formalism in favor of the more critical representations of documentary photomontage and photocollage. The new cultural logic of mechanical reproduction, occasioned by photography and film, not only unsettled the traditional divide between high and low aesthetics but deconstructed conventional oppositions separating art from advertising, agitation, and propaganda. No longer invested with the aura of a ritual object, the artwork as such was opened to the vital dialectic between intrinsic form and the politics of mass persuasion.

     

    22. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 92 (hereafter cited in the text as M). Photographic codes and the cultural messages they broadcast, serve, in their signifying elements and discursive objects, what Barthes theorized as the secondary, metalinguistic operations of myth and ideological representation.

     

    23. “Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon.” Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 38 (hereafter cited in the text as IMT).

     

    24. See Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

     

    25. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1957), 132.

     

    26. Jenny Holzer, “Jenny Holzer’s Language Games,” interview with J. Siegel, Arts Magazine 60 (December 1985), 67 (hereafter cited in the text as LG).

     

    27. “If, by hypothesis,” Derrida writes, “we maintain that the opposition of speech to language is absolutely rigorous, then differance would be not only the play of differences within language but also the relation of speech to language, the detour through which I must pass in order to speak, the silent promise I must make; and this schemata, of message to code, etc..” Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15.

     

    28. Jenny Holzer, “Wordsmith, An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” with Bruce Ferguson, Art in America 74 (December 1986), 113.

     

    29. Paul Taylor, “We are the Word: Jenny Holzer Sees Aphorism as Art,” Vogue 178 (November 1988), 390.

     

    30. Quoted in Colin Westerbeck, “Jenny Holzer, Rhona Hoffman Gallery,” Artforum 25 (May 1987), 155.

     

    31. Donald Kuspit, “Gallery Leftism,” Vanguard 12 (November 1983), 24 (hereafter cited in the text as GL).

     

    32. December 1987 interview quoted in Steve Durland, “Witness: The Guerrilla Theater of Greenpeace,” Art In the Public Interest, ed. Arlene Raven (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 35.

     

    33. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 23-75.

     

  • Beyond The Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-history of Cyberspace

    Donald F. Theall

    University Professor
    Trent University
    <dtheall@trentu.ca>

     

    The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan’s desire to write a book called “The Road to Finnegans Wake.” It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce’s major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan’s scouting of “the Road to Finnegans Wake” established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.

     

    In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:

     

    All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.1

     

    This “consensual hallucination” produced by “data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” creates an “unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.”2 Almost a decade earlier, McLuhan’s remarks about computers (dating from the late 70s) display some striking similarities:3

     

    It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to body count by touch . . . . It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.4

     

    McLuhan’s hieroglyphs certainly more than anticipate Gibson’s iconicsand McLuhan’s particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.

     

    It is not surprising then that McLuhan’s works, side by side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in MIT’s Media Lab5, for these researchers also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and collective “global village,” of “tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements.”6 The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his Large Glass7 and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from The Box of 1914 through The Green Box to A l’infinitif. His interest in the notes as part of the total work echo Joyce’s own interest in the publication of Work in Progress and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress). Joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept. So the road to VR and MIT’s Media Lab begins with poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes, many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed great importance on collaboration with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other senses.8

     

    Understanding the social and cultural implications of VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the inter-relationships between Gibson’s now commonplace description of cyberspace, McLuhan’s modernist-influenced vision of the development of electric media, and the particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan’s writings about electrically mediated communication and on the views of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the crucial nature of VR’s challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the idea of VR’s presence as the super-medium that encompasses and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have–like them–failed to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility, gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce’s literary exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual development of a coenaesthetic medium9 that would integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in currently existing and newly emerging art forms.

     

    Joyce’s work should be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of differences– orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media–that have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions. Finnegans Wake is one of the first major poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally accepted relationships between speech, script and print. Ulysses also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people once read, they will now go to see in film and on television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the potentialities of sound recording.10

     

    The “counter-poetic,” Finnegans Wake, provides one of the key texts regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic, encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology.11 The Wake is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book. The Wake dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and writing. Joyce’s selection of Vico’s New Science12 as the structural scaffolding for the Wake–the equivalent of Homer’s Odyssey in Ulysses–underscores how his interest in the contemporary transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and language and the “prophetic” role of the poetic in shaping the future.

     

    As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of artifacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book–going beyond the book as it had historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, “virtual reality.” Since the action takes place in a dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future. His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they will utilize his present, which will have become the past, to transform the future.13

     

    The hero(ine)14 in the Wake, “Here Comes Everybody,” is a communicating machine, “This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)” (310.1), an electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a presence “eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and ohmes.” Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of oral and written language in an electro-mechanical technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.

     

    Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all communication in gesture: “In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says” (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture)15 is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are “words of silent power” (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, “Belisha beacon, beckon bright” (267.12), exemplifies such situations “Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud.” Since gestures, and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from the body, the “gest” as “flesh without word” (468.5-6) is “a flash” that becomes word and “communicake[s] with the original sinse” [originary sense + the temporal, “since” + original sin (239.1)]. “Communicake” parallels eating to speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of communion as participation in, and consumption of, the Word–an observation adumbrated in the title of one of Marcel Jousse’s groundbreaking books on gesture as the origin of language, La Manducation de la Parole (“The Mastication of the Word”). By treating the “gest” as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.16 The historical processes that contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke’s, on the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called communication is secular, paramodern communion.17

     

    The Wake provides a self-reflexive explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is characteristically mechanical:

     

    The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4)

     

    The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an “outlex” (169.3)–i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and, therefore, the law, “invents” the writing by originally discovering the reading of the book and does so by “raiding” [i.e., “plundering” (reading + raiding)].18 This reading encompasses both the idealistic “eschatology” and the excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the designing of this “book of kills” (deaths, deletions, drinking sessions, flows of water–a counterpoint of continuity and discontinuity),19 a book as carefully crafted or machined as the illuminations of the Book of Kells are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes a “raider” of the original “reading-writing” through the machinery of writing. It is a production “in soandso many counterpoint words” that can be read only through the machinery of decoding, for “What can’t be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for” (482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by the post, and the whole process of communication and its interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily gesture-language: “The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas” (483.3-4).

     

    Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of the body’s organs: “Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures” (267.7-9).20 The link is rhythm, for “Soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan’s divisional tables” (268.7-9). Gesture, with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular movements of the body, is a natural script or originary writing, for the word “has been reconstricted out of oral style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics” (36.8-9). Since the oral is “reconstricted” (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which is “wordcraft”: for example, hieroglyphs and primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.21 Runes and ogham are literally “woodwordings,” so pre- or proto-writing (i.e., syllabic writing) is already “a mechanization of the word,” which is itself implicit in the body’s use of gesture.

     

    Joyce’s practice and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the impact of electric communication, it is once again clear that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and events as well.22 Writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects, gestures and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds. Marschak’s study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers’ discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss’s discussions of the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.23 Adapting Vico’s speculation that human communication begins with the gestures and material symbols of the “mute,” Joyce early in the Wake presents an encounter between two characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a nomadic invader) “excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather” (16.8-9).

     

    Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the future. For example, an entire episode of the Wake (I,5)24 is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and the theory of their interpretation–textual hermeneutics–in which the Wake as a book is interpreted as if it were a manuscript, “the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all scripture” (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the machinery of codification is implicit in the history of communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes that

     

    on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3)

     

    This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation of the “wordcraft” of “woodwordings.” “Morse code” is indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment when the mechanical is electrified), the role of codification is radically transformed by mechanization.

     

    The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the effect of this radical transformation:

     

    Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined . . . . (20.7-16)

     

    As “Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer” steps “rubrickredd out of the wordpress,” the dream reminds us that “papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.” Topics (L. topos) and types (L. typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal ambivalence, for “every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.” Printing sets in place the “root language” (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects, movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.

     

    By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the Wake, Joyce playfully anticipated how central sporting events or political debates would be for television when he described the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub’s “regulars” (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene in literary history). Joyce’s presentation of this image of the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the technical details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality, underscored by the “viseversion” (vice versa imaging) of Butt and Taff’s images on “the bairdboard bombardment screen” (“bairdboard” because John Logie Baird developed TV in 1925). Joyce explains how “the bairdboard bombardment screen,” the TV as receiver, receives the composite video signal “in scynopanc pulses” (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal), that come down the “photoslope” on the “carnier walve” (i.e., the carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) “with the bitts bugtwug their teffs.” Joyce imagines this receiver to be a “light barricade” against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed, reproducing the “bitts.” Although (at least to my knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able, on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.

     

    Speech, print and writing are interwoven with electromechanical technologies of communication throughout the Wake. References to the manufacture of books, newspapers and other products of the printing press abound. Machineries and technological organizations accompany this development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad men who produce “Abortisements” (181.33). Since complex communication technology is characteristic of the later stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, “dupenny” magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is “a phantom city phaked by philm pholk,” by those who would “roll away the reel world.” Telecommunications materialize again and again throughout the night of the Wake, where “television kills telephony.”

     

    The “tele-” prefix, betraying an element of futurology in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including in addition to the familiar forms terms such as “teleframe,” “telekinesis,” “telesmell,” “telesphorously,” “televisible,” “televox,” or “telewisher,” while familiar forms also appear in a variety of transformed “messes of mottage,” such as “velivision” and “dullaphone.” This complex verbal play all hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of technologically mediated communication. In the opening episode of the second part, the “Feenicht’s Playhouse,” an imaginary play produced by HCE’s children in their nursery is “wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids” (219.28-9). Like the cinema, “wordloosed” (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such media are engaged in a “crowdblast” of existing languages and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures and a pan-international hyperculture.

     

    In the concluding moments of the Wake, Joyce generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of the process of digestion that is about to take place.25 At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable interpretation, presents in very abstract language a generalized model of production and consumption, which is also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself digests and produces new cells and excrement–how else could one be a poet of “litters” as well as letters and be “litterery” (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?

     

    The passage begins by speaking about “our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon,” which may be the book, a letter to be written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the sexual process, the mechanical “mannormillor clipperclappers” (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of engineering, for essentially it relates the production of cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text mentions a “farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can” (614.28)). The passage concludes, “as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs” (615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of nature, decomposing into “bits” and recombining.

     

    These bits, described as “the dialytically [dialectic + dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,” may be eggs, or other “homely codes” such as the “heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities” (the stuff of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his staggering movements) transmitted elementally, “type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance . . .” (614.33-615.2). All of these bits–matter, eggs, words, TV signals, concepts, what you will–are “anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified paraidiotically,” producing “the sameold gamebold adomic structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it” (615.5-8). In anticipation of the contemporary electronic definition of the “bit,” Joyce associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and kinesthesia) with bits of signals, “data” and information. He presents it as essentially an assemblage of multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic branches of differing motifs, through a process of transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and punctuation–those “endspeaking nots for yestures” (267.8).

     

    Here Joyce’s entire prophetic, schizoid vision of cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent and critical vision, for the “ambiviolence” of the “langdwage” throughout the Wake implies critique as it unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody within satire. He does not free it from socio-political reference, as a free-floating “postmodernist” play with the surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal’s sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says:

     

    our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33)

     

    Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the Wake, “(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)” (108.23), is accomplished by “bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd” (309.22-4), a sphere for it requires “a gain control of circumcentric megacycles” (310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, “Ear! Ear! Weakear! An allness eversides!” (568.26),26 precisely because he is “human, erring and condonable”(58.19), yet “humile, commune and ensectuous” (29.30), suffering many deprivations his “hardest crux ever” (623.33) [italics mine]. Though “humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this] exposition of failures” (589.17) living with “Heinz cans everywhere”(581.5), still protests his fate “making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them” (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to enclose him.

     

    This discussion of sphere and hearing critically anticipates what McLuhan later called “acoustic space”–a fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment within which aural information is received by the CNS–that also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic insight that “the universe (or nature) [or in earlier versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”27 Today, VR, as Borges’ treatment of Pascal’s sphere seems to imply, is coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this symbol, a place where each participant (rather than the deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center. People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.

     

    All of this must necessarily relate back to the way Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that is the book. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes of the book and the death of literature resound through modernism, Joyce’s transformation of the book filtered through the “mcluhanitic” reaction to “mcluhanism” becomes, in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of the death of the book, not its transformation, as with Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and Vico,28 he situates speech and writing as modes of communication within a far richer and more complex bodily and gestural theory of communication than that represented by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As the predominance of print declines, the Wake explores the history of communication by comically assimilating the method of Vico’s The New Science–which, as one of the first systematic and empirical studies of the place of poetic action in the history of how people develop systems of signs and symbols, attributes people’s ability for constructing their society to the poetic function.

     

    Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as verbal–a privilege based on theological and metaphysical claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the Wake “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!” (52.18-9), for TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print. The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the Wake jocularly observes:

     

    seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (52.34-53.6)

     

    The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement seeming like a landscape or a movie.

     

    Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear. While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency, its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has established.29 The orality/literacy distinction does not provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print, any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly transmit “feelful thinkamalinks.” Since VR should enable a person to feel the bodily set of another person or place, while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory messages, understanding the role of the body in communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in communication, for “In the beginning there was the gest.”

     

    As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce’s grounding communication and language in gesture is distinctly different from an approach which privileges language, for it involves a complete embodying of communication. While the oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is necessarily involved in all communication, including speech. As John Bishop has shown in Joyce’s Book of the Dark, the sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs that permeate the dream and which constitute the Wake.30 Joyce views language as “gest,” as an imaginary means of embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his “feelful thinkamalinks.” From this perspective, the semic units of the Wake (integrated complexes constructed from the interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm, orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication, exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be encompassed within technologically mediated communication. Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication. This process posits a continuous dialogue in which Ulysses and the Wake were designed to play key roles.

     

    As Joyce–who quipped that “some of the means I use are trivial–and some are quadrivial”31–was aware, ancient rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus episode of Ulysses and in the “Triv and Quad” section (II, 2) of the Wake) also included those interactive contexts where the body was an intrinsic part of communication. Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory) also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical, gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into the classical and medieval “arts of memory,” inspired by Frances Yates,32 have demonstrated that memory involves the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system familiar to him from his Jesuit education: “After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for wringwrowdy wready are . . .” (266.18-22). A classical world, which recognized such features of the communicative process, could readily speak about the poem as a “speaking picture” and the painting as “silent poetry.” Here, there is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a dependency on a single channel of communication.

     

    Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new culture of time and space for reconstructing and revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be “the greatest engineer,” as well as a Renaissance man, who was also a “musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other things.”33 The mosaic of the Wake contributes to understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce called “the chaosmos of Alle” (118.21). In this “chaosmos,” engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic organization of a network, “the matrix,” which underlies the construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson as virtual memory).34 In counterpoint to the emerging technological capability to create the “virtual reality” of cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the creation of virtual worlds within natural language.

     

    That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in mnemonic systems:

     

    A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07)

     

    Joyce’s virtual worlds began with the recognition of “everybody” as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips, “his producers are they not his consumers?”). All culture becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate to perceiving the complexities of the new world of technologically reproducible media:

     

    What has gone? How it ends?
    Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21)

     

    Joyce’s text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words, enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling “Today’s truth. Tomorrow’s trend.” The poet reproducing his producers is the divining prophet.

     

    If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan’s project was frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new tribalized global society–the global village, itself anticipated by Joyce’s “international” language of multilingual puns. In fact, in War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role as an international guru by casting himself in the role of “the prime prophet” announcing the coming of a new era of communication35 (now talked about as virtual reality or cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The prime source of his “prophecies,” which he never concealed, is to be found in Joyce and Vico.36 The entire Joycean dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the anticipated awakening (Vico’s fourth age of ricorso following birth, marriage, and death) is “providential divining”:

     

    Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. (599.8-18)

     

    Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that “He caun ne’er be bothered but maun e’er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present . . .” (496.34-497.1). Joyce, from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world, in which the “give and take” of the “mind factory,” an “antithesis of ambidual anticipation,” generates auspices, auguries, and divination–for “DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE” (282.R7-R13).

     

    Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a reading of history and its relation to that virtual, momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this medieval concept with classical sociological ideas–of prophecy as an “intermediation”–quite consistent with his concepts of communication as involving aspects of participation and communion. It is only through some such reading that the future existent in history can be known and come to be. McLuhan’s reading, adapted from Joyce, of the collision of history and the present moment led him to foresee a world emerging where communication would be tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and pan-sensory.37

     

    Why ought communication history and theory take account of Joyce’s poetic project? First, because he designed a new language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida) to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic production. Two brief examples: Hollywood “wordloosing celluloid soundscript over seven seas,” or the products of the Hollywood dream factory itself as “a rolling away of the reel world,” reveal media’s potential international domination as well as the problems film form raises for the mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example, the term “abortisements” (advertisements) suggests the manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged relation of advertisement to butchering–the segmentation of the body as object into an assemblage of parts.

     

    Second, Joyce’s work is a critique of communication’s historical role in the production of culture, and it constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the importance of Vico to a contemporary history of communication and culture.38 Third, his work is itself the first “in-depth” contemporary exploration of the complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking, aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico’s earlier insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the importance of the “poetic” as a concept in communication, for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative potentials between medium and message. This provides the poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication, an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the poetic in human communication.

     

    VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our classifications of media and their effects. The newly evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace is a site where people are intellectual nomads: differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a “virtual world” and of the tremendous powers with which electricity and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia that would eventually emerge.

     

    Notes

     

    1. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (NY: Bantam Paperback, 1989), 16.

     

    2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (NY: Ace, 1984), 51.

     

    3. This quotation is taken from the posthumously published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989). It was edited and rewritten from McLuhan’s working notes, which had to date from the late 70s, since he died in 1981. McLuhan’s words were written more than a decade before their posthumous publication in 1989.

     

    4. McLuhan (1989), 103.

     

    5. Stuart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (NY: Viking, 1987).

     

    6. Marshall McLuhan, The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987), 385.

     

    7. Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp’s Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 1983), 28: “The Large Glass is an illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp did.”

     

    8. Stuart Brand (1987).

     

    9. A further paper needs to be written on the way in which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in the pre-history of cyberspace. The unfolding history of poets and artists confronting electromechanical technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia and parallels a gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. By 1857 Charles Baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the coming of electro-communication when he established his concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward a synthesis of all the arts as central aspects of symbolisme. The transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that digitalization implicit in Morse code and telegraphy, anticipating how one of the major characteristics of cyberspace will be the capability of all modes of expression to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units– bits.

     

    This assertion concerning Baudelaire’s use of synesthesia is developed from Benjamin’s discussions of Baudelaire. The role of shock in Baudelaire’s poetry, which links the “Correspondances” with “La Vie Anterieur,” also reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in “Le Crepuscle du Soir” and “Le Crepuscle du Matin” is reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of sensorial modes. This is the beginning of a period in which the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of municipal (or urban) reality. So when the metamorphic sensory effects of nature’s temple are applied to the splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography which so preoccupied Baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had an important impact in his lifetime.

     

    10. See D.F. Theall, “The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce Studies Annual 1991, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: Texas UP, 1991), 129-52. This publication provides major source material for the present article.

     

    11. “Machinic” is used here very deliberately as distinct from mechanical. See Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Haberjam (NY: Columbia UP, 1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the machine and the ‘machinic’ in contradistinction to the mechanical.

     

    12. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, ed. T.G. Bergen and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1948).

     

    13. For fuller discussion of Joyce and these themes see Donald Theall, “James Joyce: Literary Engineer,” in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch, ed. Gary Wihl & David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1988), 111-27; Donald and Joan Theall, “James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan,” Canadian Journal of Communication, 14:4/5 (Fall 1989), 60-1; and Donald Theall (1991), 129-152. A number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor modifications from parts of the last article, which is a fairly comprehensive coverage of Joyce and technology.

     

    14. While in one sense the dreamer is identified as the male HCE, the book opens and closes with the feminine voice of ALP. It is her dream of his dreaming, or his dream of her dreaming? Essentially, it is androgynous, with a mingling of male and female voices throughout. For another treatment of the male-female theme in the Wake, see Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (NY: RKP, 1989).

     

    15. “Jousstly” refers to Marcel Jousse’s important work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with which Joyce was familiar. See especially Lorraine Weir, “The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly, 14:3 (Spring 1977), 313-25.

     

    16. This motif will be developed further below. It relates to Joyce’s interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).

     

    17. See Dewey, Art As Experience (NY: G.P. Putnam, 1958) and Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

     

    18. Cf. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 182: “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal . . . “; see also “Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,” (“East Coker,” Four Quartets, l. 5). Joyce’s use of “outlex” relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce analyzing Shem in the Wake is aware of how the traditions of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an outlaw.

     

    19. “Kills” in the sense of “to kill a bottle”; “kills” also as a stream or channel of water.

     

    20. See Walter Ong’s remarks about Marcel Jousse in The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967), 146-7, and Lorraine Weir’s more extensive development of the theme in (1977), 313-325, and in Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989).

     

    21. I.J. Gelb, A Study of Writing (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963).

     

    22. Cf. McLuhan (1989), 182.

     

    23. Alexander Marschak, The Roots of Civilization (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, mathematics and Culture (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981); Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

     

    24. The usual way to indicate sections of the Wake is by part and episode. Hence I,v is Part I episode 5. There are four parts, the first consisting of eight episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and the fourth of a single episode.

     

    25. Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Understanding Finnegans Wake (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982), 308-09.

     

    26. For detailed discussion of the treatment of the ear and hearing in Finnegans Wake, see John Bishop, Joyce’s book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1986), Chapter 9 “Earwickerwork,” 264-304.

     

    27. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, trans. Ruth R. Sims (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 6-9.

     

    28. Lorraine Weir (1989).

     

    29. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983).

     

    30. Bishop (1986), 264-304.

     

    31. Eugene Jolas, “My Friend James Joyce,” in James Joyce: two decades of criticism, ed. Seon Givens (NY: Vanguard, 1948), 24.

     

    32. E.g., in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966).

     

    33. James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (NY: Viking, 1957), 251 [Postcard, 16 April 1927].

     

    34. For a discussion of this see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 3, “Memory as Virtual Co-existence,” 51-72.

     

    35. Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of VR and cyberspace, the work which Baudrillard has made of “simulation” and “the ecstasy of communication” should be noted. This issue is too complex to engage within an essay specifically focused on Joyce. In approaching it, however, it is important to realize the degree of similarity that Baudrillard’s treatment of communication shares with McLuhan’s. In many ways, I believe it could be established that what Baudrillard critiques as the “ecstasy of communication” is his understanding of McLuhan’s vision of communication divorced from its historical roots in the literature and arts of symbolisme, high modernism, and particularly James Joyce.

     

    36. This is a major theme of McLuhan and McLuhan’s The Laws of Media (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988).

     

    37. See Donald F. Theall, The Medium is the Rear View Mirror; Understanding McLuhan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1971).

     

    38. John O’Neill credits Vico with a “wild sociology” in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology (NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 28-38. The significance of Vico’s emphasis on the body is developed in John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Sense of Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985).

     

  • “Drum and Whistle” And “Black Stems,” Two Poems from luca: Discourse on Life & Death

    Rochelle Owens

    Dept. of English
    University of Oklahoma at Norman

    Drum And Whistle

     

    into the vast heat of spirals because
    your whitish bones

     

    beating drum and whistle

     

    morning sun multiplying her fingers
    loosened her braids her long slow

     

    searching encased skull neck body
    skull neck body around roots yellow skin
    floating like props looking

     

    I heard crows their claws searching

     

    their veins and tendons scattered
    as leaves sweeten clay silt ash
    your long gray hands cutting

     

    measuring skull scalp parchment

     

    her forearm tightens spreads over
    blankets infected with plague seeding
    spirals of heat loosens her braids

     

    black urine runs through silt ash clay
    shadowed on the walls spilling
    walls spilling sand and gravel

     

    a lira here a lira there

     

    sutured through her ruptured flesh

     

    tightens cords in Leo n a rdo’s fingers
    elbow shoulder hip
    And in heel of cadavre smoke invades

     

    one for squirrel one for crow

     

    And if you shake leaves feverish master
    skin paint surgical scar riddled
    bright-red stems freezing paint

     

    freezing urine blood segmented cell
    segmented cell by cell prototypes
    saturated he then looked at a circular

     

    looked at a circular house walls
    sand gravel beating drum and whistle
    deep-pink plague as autumn winter
    rubs black clay

     

    silence walls in remorseless then
    she looked at a circular house
    when you looked your veins multiplying
    splashes black urine

     

    they stare down on horseback pursing
    their lips measuring ransacking
    fingers crusted fibrous entrails

     

    invades cadavre aluminum walls in

     

    your neck to side

     

    you read parts of the manuscript wrong
    suppose

     

    she reveals peculiar forms
    them vivifying cording everyday
    ash and blood whole aluminum pits

     

    groups of the first Spaniards in America

     

    On a second voyage to Guatemala
    moves hydrogen helium

     

    Lenny’s blanket wrapped around parts
    of the dissection suppose red wild corn
    smoke from a burning log

     

    the wiry brat ejaculates
    every foot-print of Flora multiplying
    your long gray hands stretched your

     

    gray hands stretched deer skin

     

    Mona made rings gloves crowns masks
    the outlines of a new country

     

    Leo n a rdo seized the wrist of
    the brat squeezed his throat blood
    behind his teeth

     

    placed the infected blankets one by one
    stomach and bones crusted
    for here leave sign of our fate

     

    then he looked at a circular house

     

    an old Osage woman crushing seeds
    her iron-gray braids she gouged clay
    quickly she pulls from fire

     

    her saliva pools behind her teeth
    she pulls from fire a pot spilling
    morsels of beef half-kneeling Salia’s
    mouth measures walls

     

    then quickly he will fill canvas
    image of a paysanne flinging
    a paysanne flinging kernels

     

    unwinding her smock crows their claws
    dark-green stained windows of a
    stained windows of a cathedral

     

    exposed a new country lip-synced Sigmund

     

    you wrap a blanket around your waist
    folds and gathers cross and recross

     

    stakes with forked ends into ground
    deep-pink crust ash spirals of heat
    I arch my back stretching it is
    a paysanne bending

     

    gracile her brow diagonal lines
    skull neck you traced a scaffold
    a forked tree

     

    and close upon one of the horses
    tendons & muscles glowing I saw Salia
    beating drum and whistle

     

    your palms crushing seeds showing
    lines cross recross circular pulse
    groups moist soil of names Quicxic
    bloody wing Quicrixcac bloody claw

     

    faults she gouged clay I murmured
    into Lenny’s ear

     

    groups of the first Spaniards in America
    written on the stomach and bones
    fragment shovels gravel sand clay

     

    my doubt remains widening circles
    circles slowly Leo n a rdo fingers
    he rouges his nipples the brat stares
    down from a scaffold arches his back
    stretches his neck

     

    riders cutting out entrails their lips
    intone pulsate behind ice walls gouged
    with names crossed recrossed tribes
    on horseback

     

    winding her iron-gray braids quickly
    she fills canvas stretching roots
    disgorges ancient corn plants

     

    extracting one light amber stone

     

    idol when gravel sand blown on wind
    walls in flames of stone divided
    roots

     

    a black rain fell then silence and slow
    soaking crust ash flames swerving
    deep-pink plague a forked tree
    slicing their flesh

     

    resin sap sweetens moonlit vines
    Sigmund mused fascinated the Lords of
    Xibalba horse and rider in darkness

     

    searching Guatemala still plastic tubes
    glistening stared down in the Aztec inferno
    in the evening light worshiped sticks
    worshiped sticks of fat pine

     

    I made rings gloves crowns masks
    riddled with decay digging out a stone
    leaving a stone

     

    one for the cutworm one for the crow

     

    lips whisper counting blankets infected

     

    counting blankets infected with plague

     

    one by one

     

    They planted four acres wandering
    east to west

     

    from center smoke concentrated stems
    burnt leaf white hearts of incense
    palms arched pierced bleed names

     

    Quicxic bloody aluminum faults behind
    ice walls density of scalp crusted
    bark a forked tree shadowed upside
    down stems of moonlit vines you
    mused

     

    resin sap as leaves sweeten clay moss
    of Florida through which blood jets

     

    behind their teeth saliva red wild corn
    multiplying ancient writing gouged in

     

    gouged in the gourd seized a little man
    Mona stares down following diagonal lines
    surgical scar trusts her fibrous
    skins dressing and stretching

     

    measuring skull scalp parchment her
    feast day

     

    dark ridge of lava to north parched
    halves of skulls placed one by one

     

    one for the squirrel one for the crow

     

    groups of the first Spaniards in America

     

    they stare down on horseback

     

    ride up close looking at fragments
    slowly they circle you urge horse
    and rider course toward in this
    course toward in this direction tribes
    crossed recrossed gouged signs

     

    from armpit to stomach your pale
    stomach your pale & gasping son loosens
    his braids his throat pulsates saliva
    pools behind his teeth scrotal sac
    slit

     

    groups of the first Spaniards in America

     

    carcass stripped of its skin
    bearing two halves there a scalp
    two halves there a scalp sutured

     

    crossed behind when they found ancient
    corn plants she will fill canvas
    ash autumn winter discharging
    pus from slit ears

     

    your doubt remains for all that
    you stretch your neck instinctively

     

    Mona’s attention drawn to reddish
    layers glowing mudstone and sandstone
    shovels gravel sand clay

     

    clutches bright-red stems

     

    tightens around roots woven veins
    drew silence pale forests stretched
    the canvas exposed ancient corn
    plants shadowed upside down

     

    rifles against the walls
    horse and rider around the fire

     

    black urine soaking clay sand
    as he loosens his braids fingers
    dig

     

    one for the squirrel one for the crow

     

    crusted torn trees crash sounds
    sounds of riders cleaning rifles

     

    once Salia took an axe cut moonlit
    vines saw bright-red surgical scar
    through which blood

     

    infected with plague the trunk
    of the body engulfed by the serpent
    two halves of the cadavre

     

    slowly such great decay
    Salia covered his head with Mona’s
    smock

     

    child & Mona perched on Lenny’s back

     

    you stare down pursing your lips
    your neck to the side
    plagued by doubt

     

    calculating strips of wood right
    to left the weight of the corpse

     

    one for the cutworm

     

    and the night air blazes down her
    jaw fused soil grass animal outlines
    muscles slowly she reverses

     

    one for the crow

     

    changed nature of portrait strips
    calculated left to right weight
    of corpse one for cutworm down
    her jaw slowly reverses cunningly

     

    plagued by doubt his fallen figure
    stained with blood of first person

     

    ransacked cunningly you urinate
    spontaneously while Flora flinging
    while Flora flinging kernels

     

    loosens her braids her smock unwinding
    murmured into Salia’s ear Luca Luca

     

    I mesmerize intoned snake winding
    covered their heads with blankets

     

    black horns curve out sand mud
    blue haze through woodland

     

    a forked tree

     

    you ride up close squeezing a staff
    a staff with a skull splashes black urine

     

    Ahalpuh he who makes pus then hip shoulder
    elbow and in heel of cadavre stomach
    stomach and bones stretched out

     

    he stares down on horseback pursing
    their lips measuring strips of soil
    strips soil riddled invades bright
    bright red stems circles slowly

     

    calculating strips walls in aluminum
    analyzing death patterns blood segmented
    cell by cell

     

    deep-pink plague slicing bright-red stems

     

    their neck stretching left to right
    their lips measuring ransacking

     

    measuring ransacking entrails glistening
    ash crust soaking
    one for the cutworm one for the crow

     

    dissected correctly counting plastic
    plastic tubes filling

     

    plastic tubes glowing in sunlight

     

    you angled your face analyzing
    death patterns

     

    one light amber stone red wild corn
    dark ridge gouged

     

    gouged configurations ripped two
    halves two halves of parchment
    multiplying death patterns

     

    you put slashes in through which water
    through which water runs spreads over
    America through silt ash silt clay

     

    death patterns plague crossed

     

    I heard crows their claws searching

     

    riddled bright red stems one gouged
    exposed your whitish bones

     

    exhausted outlines gravel sand skull
    neck your wrists arch backwards crushing
    backwards crushing seeds she wraps
    a blanket through which blood

     

    slowly such great decay
    she stares down plagued by doubt

     

    pus from slit ears horse and rider
    in darkness tubes counted
    one for squirrel one for crow

     

    entrails walls freezing paint stained
    circles on the stomach and bones

     

    you ride up close begin searching
    my painting two halves cut into side
    deep-pink crust heat from a burning log

     

    internal and external burns glowing in sunlight
    burns glowing in sunlight

     

    widening a pair of jaws long slow
    counting teeth burnt in fire
    knife in one hand a blanket in the other
    one hand a blanket in the other

     

    gray hands stretched measured bones up close
    ends cleaved deep-pink marrow exposed
    sections you analyze the assemblage

     

    death patterns outlines of a new country

     

    then Mona looked at a circular house
    under the trees

     

    she fasted scattered cremains
    scattered cremains in the morning sun

     

    ash blood black clay glowing in sunlight
    death patterns floating like props
    backwards one by one upside down

     

    image of a whipped and crucified woman
    her saliva pools behind her teeth

     

    then an old Osage woman crushing seeds
    her palms shadowed Quicxic bloody wind
    Quicrixcac bloody claw

     

    notched stick end lower three long
    strokes strokes from end to end

     

    Flora waves her arm offering yellows
    from plants from the stick toward
    toward the sun her image crossed lines
    paint congeals

     

    you ride up close after each stroke
    upper torso shadowed skull neck body

     

    Salia details holes in the hands
    and feet north of the fire peculiar
    forms red stems splitting

     

    Leo n a rdo makes a circular mark
    passing his hands measuring skull scalp
    parchment

     

    Spaniards wearing braided silk belts
    ropes used to pull the head and torso
    elbows knees necks alternating

     

    floating like props looking she heard

     

    crows their claws searching

     

    image of a whipped and crucified woman
    her iron-gray braids hanging

     

    end to end toward the sun following
    crossed lines of paint lines cross
    recross the center

     

    freezing hard roots no sound no sound

     

    of hoof-beats you ride up close
    searching when you looked the heel
    of the cadavre segmented cell by cell
    encased roots

     

    upper torso of the little man
    multiplying seethed and probed
    palms arch resin sap jets saturates
    behind walls Salia’s sketch of smoke

     

    lines cross recross tendons veins
    clutches bright red stems measuring
    two halves of a circular house

     

    sides of aluminum walls you stare down
    on horseback you suppose she reveals
    peculiar forms groups of

     

    forms groups of the first Spaniards
    in America

     

    Leo n a rdo paints child & Mona as
    leaves sweeten lip-synced Sigmund

     

    Quicrixcac bloody claw Quicxic bloody

     

    bloody wind no sound no sound

     

    scattered cremains in the morning sun
    crossed lines of paint circles congeals
    image of a whipped and crucified woman
    her iron-gray braids hanging

     

     

    Black Stems

     

    scattered cremains
    through a woodland near a forked

     

    near a forked tree patterns seeding
    and yellow blossoms hydrogen green
    You scattered delicate blossoms
    my forearm tightens spreads over

     

    right to left red stems counted one
    for crow one for cutworm

     

    the first skull showing lines crossed
    recrossed yellow skin raw you stare
    down into heat she falls backwards
    mistrusts holes in the hands and feet

     

    used nails every inch death patterns

     

    circles spirals cross recross every
    inch nearer and nearer into heat

     

    his neck stretches Ahalpuh he who
    he who makes pus

     

    every name shadows on the walls wind
    spirals into heat spills sand gravel
    you ride up close nearer and nearer

     

    you use ropes to pull the head and torso

     

    held her whitish bones high in air
    near a forked tree broken rocks
    a mile of black dust

     

    whose names are gouged letters angled
    white-edged your fingers through sand clay
    through sand clay silt

     

    your fingers tracing slant of wall
    every inch mistrusts deviates

     

    Tell me who assures you that this
    work ever was

     

    black stems sticking out letters planted
    shape a headless idol crust ash then
    you ride up close loosen your braids

     

    hoof-beats swerving shadowed on walls
    you heard crows their claws searching

     

    black coals clumps of deep-pink rot
    fissures death patterns backflow crossed
    left to right you are drawing raw thongs

     

    image of a whipped and crucified woman
    your saliva pools behind your teeth

     

    you lower your wrist plagued by doubt
    angled letters gouged into walls nearer
    and nearer smoke from a burning cross

     

    smoke from a burning cross spreads over
    you looked at a photograph miles of
    cracked clay walls of a circular house
    spilling

     

    blows sand on carcass near a forked tree
    near a forked tree pointed tracks

     

    broken rocks stained with blood
    strips calculated weight and night air
    measured outlines counted

     

    counted one for crow one for cutworm

     

    through woodland smoke from a burning
    cross mistrusts you ride up close right
    right to left of corpse staring down

     

    analyzing death patterns jaw crushed
    pus from slit ears deep-pink marrow
    deep-pink marrow exposed

     

    blue haze through woodland you heard
    crows their claws searching
    horses passing near a forked tree

     

    hooves pointed tracks death patterns
    bones black horns curve out sand mud
    hooves crushing entrails bright red

     

    bright red stems red wild corn slowly
    ash crust soaking
    Ahalpuh he who makes pus you ride up
    close stare down on horseback pursing

     

    pursing your lips measuring claws
    your neck stretches left to right nearer
    and nearer

     

  • Fucking (With Theory) for Money: Toward an Interrogation of Escort Prostitution

    Tessa Dora Addison and Audrey Extavasia

    Literary and Cultural Theory
    Carnegie Mellon University
    ta1a+@andrew.cmu.edu (Addison) wk11+@andrew.cmu.edu (Extavasia)

     

         This paper is intended as an introductory interrogation of
     the terrain of escort prostitution mobilizing terms
     from both The Telephone Book by Avital Ronell and 
     A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

     For the purposes of this paper, the client will be
     presumed to be a man and the model presumed to be a
     woman.  We are not trying to provide a comprehensive
     account of all aspects of the terrain of prostitution, or
     even of escort agencies.

     Cross-referenced terms are in upper case.

     Contents: THECALLTHEMODELTHECLIENTTHEAGENCYCYBORGASSEMBLAGEB
               ODYWITHOUTORGANSTIMESPACETHETELEPHONEVALUE/EXCHANG
               EDESIREFACIALITYTOOLSFETISHISMDETERRITORIALIZATION

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T H E   C A L L

     THE CALL is the interaction of THE MODEL and THE CLIENT
     within a particular spatial and temporal frame (see SPACE
     and TIME).  THE MODEL is a student, an actress, a nurse's
     aide, a teacher, or a secretary....  THE CLIENT is a
     businessman, a dentist, a banker, a construction worker, or
     a computer programmer....  The temporal borders of THE CALL
     are delineated by THE TELEPHONE (which connects THE CLIENT,
     THE MODEL, and THE AGENCY), in conjunction with the watch,
     or instrumental TIME.  The arm of authority behind THE
     TELEPHONE and instrumental TIME is THE AGENCY.  THE MODEL
     gets ready for THE CALL, prepares to become a 'fantasy
     girl,' by imitating (media) representations of women as
     objects of DESIRE: she wears garters and hose and high
     heels; the nails of both fingers and toes are painted.
     These are signifiers on a fragmented, coded body, signifiers
     that THE CLIENT will be drawn to (through DESIRE), that will
     reinforce his FETISHISM and in turn contribute to the
     construction of his BODY WITHOUT ORGANS (BwO).  THE CLIENT
     has a BwO which he is drawn to construct, which has an
     already written set of rules/conditions by which it must be
     constructed, conditions which include the fetishized system
     of signifying effects with which THE MODEL has attempted to
     encode her body (and which already encode her body as
     woman).  THE MODEL goes to THE CLIENT's hotel or motel or
     private home or apartment or to a bar or restaurant or hot
     tub spa....  When THE MODEL enters the SPACE of THE CALL,
     THE CLIENT gives her a substantial fee in EXCHANGE for an
     opportunity to spend a designated amount of TIME with her,
     an opportunity to interact with her cyborg subject-position
     'fantasy girl' (a subject-position which is composed of both
     fact and fantasy), an opportunity to construct his BwO.
     After she has been paid, THE MODEL calls THE AGENCY on THE
     TELEPHONE to announce that the EXCHANGE has been initiated
     and that it is now time to begin measuring the length of THE
     CALL.  THE MODEL and THE CLIENT now interact together, their
     bodies intermingling with DESIRE, FETISHISM, representation,
     the SPACE of the room, the TIME measured by THE MODEL's
     watch as well as the TIME elusively marked by THE CLIENT's
     memories, fantasies, and anticipation of orgasm (which is
     not the object of his DESIRE but a fetishized signifier
     which masks the perpetually deferred BwO, the plane of
     consistency of his DESIRE).  When the end of THE CALL is
     announced by instrumental TIME (or by a telephone call from
     THE AGENCY if THE CALL has transgressed the boundaries
marked
     by instrumental TIME), THE MODEL telephones THE AGENCY, says
     goodbye to THE CLIENT, and exits the SPACE of THE CALL.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T H E   M O D E L

          AdrienneAlannaAlexandraAlexisAllisonAman
          daAngelaAnyaArdenArianaAshleyAudreyAvery

     She will become part of the CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE which you are
     purchasing (you want to purchase the fulfillment of your
     BODY WITHOUT ORGANS, to draw her into its logic, to name her
     through your DESIRE which is based on representations of
     women, on fetishization), after you have picked up THE
     TELEPHONE, after you have called her.  What will you call
     her?  You must first call her a partner in the EXCHANGE in
     which you are about to take part; you must call her the
     producer of the commodity for which you will give her $ (in
     an amount purportedly based on equivalence but in fact VALUE
     is measured by, determined by FETISHISM, DESIRE, and
     taboo...).  I hear you're looking for some company
     tonight...

          CameronCamilleCaroleCarolynCeceliaChantal
          CharlottaCherylChristyClarissaColbyCorinne

     She is called the call-girl: she is connected to both THE
     CLIENT and THE AGENCY by THE TELEPHONE.

               Claudette embodied a sophisticated,
               elegant New York look, so she always had
               a more fashionable hairstyle and very
               chic accessories.  Tricia represented
               the girl next door, and she tended to
               wear dresses rather than suits--
               especially dresses with a Peter Pan
               collar or puffy sleeves.  Michelle was a
               model.  She was very tall, and her
               clothing would be slightly trendy, with
               more dramatic hair and makeup.  Colby
               represented the healthy, outdoorsy type,
               with a wind-swept, off-the-farm look.
               Marguerite was exotic and tended to wear
               tight skirts.

     THE MODEL works as an independent contractor for an agency.

               We are very particular about the young
               ladies who work for us.  They must work
               or go to school during the day, or be
               actively pursuing a career in the arts
               or in modeling.

     THE MODEL, like THE CLIENT has a BwO; her BwO is
     deterritorialized though, onto the commodity form money.

          DanieleDarleneDeidreDevinElaineEileenEliseEl
          izabethEricaGabrielaGingerHeatherHelenaIrene

               You must always wear a skirt or a dress.
               Please don't wear anything very short or
               very trendy... you'll need at least one
               suit... you'll also need a dress, which
               should be lady-like and tailored, with
               no frills or ruffles.

     THE MODEL can never fulfill THE CLIENT's BwO--there will
     always be a gap...

          JaimeJanineJenniferJessicaJerriJoannaJuli
          aSeverineShawnaShelbyShelleyShevaunSophia

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T H E   C L I E N T

     THE CLIENT becomes a potential client when he picks up THE
     TELEPHONE.

               When you talk to friends about your
               work, you're going to end up talking
               about the weird clients and the mean
               clients and the bad clients, because
               they make hilarious stories.  But even
               weird clients are usually nice people.

     THE CLIENT becomes a client when the EXCHANGE is initiated.

               Some of our clients are made of gold,
               and you'll meet your share of them.  But
               that's not true for everybody.  In some
               cases, the evening he spends with you
               will be his biggest treat of the year.

     theclientisafashionphotographerbusinessmancabinetmakerdentis
     tsconstructionworkerbankercomputerprogrammerpestcontroltechn
     iciandoctorconsultantmusicindustryprofessionalhousepainterla
     wyeraccountantrealestatedeveloperarchitecttheclientisshortth
     inbaldaveragelookingoldmarriedattractivefatsingletalluglydiv
     orcedtheclientisalegmanboobmanassmantheclientisafashionphoto
     grapherbusinessmancabinetmakerdentistsconstructionworkerbank
     ercomputerprogrammerpestcontroltechniciandoctorconsultantmus
     icindustryprofessionalhousepainterlawyeraccountantrealestate
     developerarchitecttheclientisshortthinbaldaveragelookingoldm
     arriedattractivefatsingletalluglydivorcedtheclientisalegmanb
     oobmanassmantheclientisafashionphotographerbusinessmancabine
     tmakerdentistsconstructionworkerbankercomputerprogrammerpest
     controltechniciandoctorconsultantmusicindustryprofessionalho
     usepainterlawyeraccountantrealestatedeveloperarchitectthecli
     entisshortthinbaldaveragelookingoldmarriedattractivefatsingl
     etalluglydivorcedtheclientisalegmanboobmanassmantheclient

     THE CLIENT is paying to interact with his 'fantasy girl,'
     his object of DESIRE; he is paying to construct his BODY
     WITHOUT ORGANS (BwO).

               I guess I'd like to know if there's any
               way to tell in advance what strange sex
               acts will turn a particular person on...
               absolutely anyone can be turned on by
               absolutely anything...part of my job is
               to respond to these people....

     THE CLIENT has a BwO which has an already-written set of
     rules, system of logic, by which it is to be constructed.

               We did all of the usual sucking and
               fucking.  Then he put me in the Muslim
               prayer position so familiar to me, at
               the edge of the bed.  Then he knelt on
               the floor and licked my asshole for a
               while...he started sticking his tongue
               in my ass.  He stuck it in very deep, so
               deep I could feel it moving around
               inside me...then he really surprised
               me.  He blew air into my ass and then
               inhaled deeply as the air came back out.
               He did it over and over, more times than
               I could count.

     Integral to the logic of THE CLIENT's BwO is the
     fetishization of representations of women (by the media, by
     his memory, etc.) as objects of DESIRE.  It is the
     signifying system, the codes inscribed on THE MODEL's body
     which is being fetishized, rather than woman qua woman.

               Remember, you're a fantasy for these
               guys.  If someone asked you to sit down
               and spell out your description of what a
               high-class New York call girl would be
               like, you'd probably say, 'Well, she'd
               have a beautiful hairdo, gorgeous
               makeup, she'd be very pretty and
               elegantly dressed, and sophisticated.'
               That's exactly who our clients expect
               you to be.  You just can't walk in there
               looking like the women he sees every day
               at work, like his secretary, or the wife
               he goes home to, or the girls he passes
               by on the street.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T H E  A G E N C Y   T H E  A G E N C Y   T H E  A G E N C Y

     THE AGENCY serves as the arm of the law, sets up the
     boundaries/limits of (and is part of) the CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE
     which constitutes THE CALL, which in turn effects the
     possibilities of the logic of the BwO which may be
     fulfilled.

               Sometimes he might want to touch you
               back there.  Technically it's known as
               Greek, and we don't allow it at all.  We
               do not touch them there and they do not
               touch us there....

     THE AGENCY is headed by an agent, who is the personification
     of these limits.

               Now when you're talking to the client,
               please don't refer to us as the office
               or the agency....  Every man has a
               fantasy that he's calling a private
               madam...and we try to foster that
               image.

     THE AGENCY is responsible for screening THE CLIENTs, which
     means screening out unwanted DESIREs, unwanted BwO's.

               For the man who asked, 'Whaddya got
               tonight?' the answer was a dial tone.

     THE AGENCY receives a percentage of THE MODEL's earnings
     from THE CALL.  THE AGENCY is not a partner in the primary
     EXCHANGE with THE CLIENT; rather, the EXCHANGE between THE
     MODEL and THE AGENCY is a separate agreement based on
     different terms, different standards of VALUE.  THE AGENCY
     is paid to function as protection, both before--through the
     screening procedure--and during THE CALL.

               Once you're in the room, ask if you
               could use the phone....  Call the office
               at the special number....  If you do
               want to leave...if you're not
               comfortable, then we'll take care of it
               for you.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     C Y B O R G   A S S E M B L A G E

     It is neither THE MODEL's body which is being purchased nor
     is it THE MODEL's TIME.  What is being purchased is an
     opportunity to interact with the subject-position "fantasy
     girl," a subject-position which is constituted by THE MODEL,
     technology, fiction, SPACE and TIME: we would describe this
     subject-position as "cyborg space-time" and the assemblage
     which contributes to the subject-position's creation--see
     below for elements of this assemblage--as a "CYBORG
     ASSEMBLAGE."

          A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine
          and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a
          creature of fiction.

    1

     
     The CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE surrounding the subject-position
     "fantasy girl" is composed of fiction as well as the
     material or concrete.  Fiction: representations of beauty,
     fetishization of signifiers than encode the body (= lines to
     media), etc..  The ASSEMBLAGE is also composed of the
     circuit of THE TELEPHONE, of TIME, of SPACE, of the escort
     AGENCY (= the Law), of the EXCHANGE (= lines to capitalist
     system).

     There has been much criticism of Haraway's cyborg myth as
     romantic--Mary Anne Doane: "What is missing in this
     account--and seemingly unnecessary in the advanced
     technological society described here--is a theory of
     subjectivity"

    2

    --but we would argue for the importance of
     the myth of the cyborg in that it is a similar myth which
     forms the commodity in prostitution: it is formed through
     both the concrete and the abstract, through the organic and
     the technological.  The cyborg myth is also, we think,
     important in that it breaks down binary oppositions--the
     breaking down of oppositions such as public/private and
     smooth SPACE/striated SPACE is crucial to the enterprise of
     the escort agency and to the VALUE of the commodity which is
     being sold.

     We would want to think cyborg as articulation (using Stuart
     Hall's concept of "articulation" here, with its connotations
     of gaps, constructedness, provisionality) of human subject
     and technology--the cyborg subject necessarily foregrounds
     fragmentation, gaps, partial/incomplete identity.

    3

     
     For our project--and any project, we would argue--a theory
     of subjectivity is necessary in order to discuss power
     relations, to make distinctions and show relations
     between/among subject-positions; indeed, in order to
     distinguish cyborgs.

     Cyborg theory must be able to discuss power, DESIRE,
     interest.  Gayatri Spivak criticizes Deleuze and Guattari
     for not being able to do this: "The failure of Deleuze and
     Guattari [in A Thousand Plateaus] to consider the
     relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders
     them incapable of articulating a theory of interest."

    4

         Conceptualizing CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE through concept of
     articulation which accounts for provisional identity makes
     it possible to think subjectivity, interest, DESIRE,
     power....

     callgirltelephonevisaagenthotelcashmemoryfantasyclientmo
     deltaxiprivatehomeamexlingeriespacemastercardtimecondoms
     vicesquadmotellubevibratorvenerealdiseasewineyellowpages
          CALLGIRLTELEPHONEVISAAGE
          NTHOTELCASHMEMORYFANTASY
          CLIENTMODELTAXIPRIVATEHO
          MEAMEXLINGERIESPACEMASTE
          RCARDTIMECONDOMSVICESQUA
          DMOTELLUBEVIBRATORVENERE
          ALDISEASEWINEYELLOWPAGES
                                 callgirltelephonevisa
                                 agenthotelcashmemoryf
                                 antasyclientmodeltaxi
                                 privatehomeamexlinger
                                 iespacemastercardtime
                                 condomsvicesquadmotel
                                 lubevibratorvenereald
                                 iseasewineyellowpages
     CALLGIRLTELEPHONEVISAAGENTHOTELCASHMEMORYFANTASYCLIENTMO
     DELTAXIPRIVATEHOMEAMEXLINGERIESPACEMASTERCARDTIMECONDOMS
     VICESQUADMOTELLUBEVIBRATORVENEREALDISEASEWINEYELLOWPAGES

     (CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE)

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     B O D I E S W I T H O U T O R G A N S

     The BwO is the commodity being sold by escort agencies.  It
     is enacted by THE CLIENT, THE MODEL, the parameters of SPACE
     and TIME (which are permeable), THE TELEPHONE,
     representations of women through the media, the EXCHANGE
     (commodification of the BwO), TOOLS/paraphernalia--in short,
     by the CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE.  The BwO is a program, a limit
     which marks the edges of the plane of DESIRE--it can never
     be reached, fulfilled.  The BwO is both inside and outside
     the concrete, both inside and outside the abstract.

     "The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by
     which one desires...There is desire whenever there is the
     constitution of a BwO under one relation or another."

    5

         DESIRE is the motor of the BwO, the driving force and
     predication of the logic of the BwO.  "The BwO is the field
     of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to
     desire..." (D&G 154).

     The BwO is an assemblage of various bodies: "The masochist
     constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws
     and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a
     body without organs or plane of consistency using himself,
     the horse, and the mistress" (D&G 156).  The BwO is THE
     CLIENT, THE MODEL, the words, and the absent presence(s)
     upon which the conditions/logic of the BwO is based:
     girlfriend, mother, ex-girlfriend, girl next door, girl in
     magazine, stripper, etc.....

Let me be your little boy.

     "...the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support, upon
     which something comes to pass" (D&G 153).  What it is is a
     limit...it can never be achieved.  "The BwO is what remains
     when you take everything away.  What you take away is
     precisely the phantasy, and significances and
     subjectifications as a whole" (D&G 151).

     The BwO is a program, with its own rules and logic and
     conditions....

Let me be your slave.

     "The masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain
     can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under
     which that BwO was constituted" (D&G 152).  THE CLIENT is
     looking for--and paying for--a BwO which has already been
     scripted, already has a specific set of conditions within
     whose framework it must function.  This set of conditions
     determines, too, THE CLIENT's DESIREs:

          "You can't desire without making [a BwO]" (D&G 149).

I want to give you all my money and all my cum.

          "You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't
          reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit"
          (D&G 150).

     Re: the masochist: "Legs are still organs, but the boots now
     only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or a zone
     on a BwO" (D&G 156).  Like the object of DESIRE of the
     masochist, so too the fragments of the body of THE MODEL
     becomes for THE CLIENT "an imprint or a zone on a BwO."
     That is, she as signifying system (see FETISHISM) is part of
     the assemblage that constitutes the BwO, the plane of
     consistency of DESIRE....

Do you like to see men jack off?

     THE MODEL is your invitation to build a BwO, as your
     invitation to interact with her [cyborg] subject position--
     that is, to have her become part of your BwO, to help you
     build it, to be built into it....

Tell me what to do.  Tell me who's boss.

     THE MODEL can never fulfill THE CLIENT's BODY WITHOUT
     ORGANS...even COCK RINGS, even TANTRIC SEX...only
     suspend the inevitable....  "Orgasm is a mere fact, a
     rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of
     its principle" (D&G 156).  "It is not a question of
     experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying
     pleasure in order to produce a kind of externalizable
     surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body
     without organs" (D&G 157).

Let me worship you.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T I M E

               So you get in the elevator and you go on
               up.  Before you knock on the client's
               door, be sure to look at your watch,
               because it's important to know what time
               you arrived--and nobody likes a clock
               watcher.  Incidentally, it's helpful to
               wear a watch that's especially easy to
               read in a dim light with just a glance.

     TIME becomes VALUE: THE MODEL's rate is based on hourly
     increments; after an hour has passed, THE CLIENT must pay
     more if he wants THE MODEL to stay for the next hour, and so
     on.

               "I took a look at my watch while I was
               in the bathroom, and I couldn't believe
               what time it was.... I don't want to
               rush you, but I do have to call Sheila
               in a little while and tell her if I'll
               be staying or leaving."

     For THE CLIENT, TIME often functions as a dialectic between
     memory and anticipation--"You never know what just happened,
     or you always know what is going to happen" (D&G 193)--
     his DESIREs revolve around memories and fantasies, past and
     future....  The BwO comes from the past and is aimed at the
     future--it never comes into being, never exists now.

     Orgasm marks anticipatory (goal-oriented) TIME.  Often THE
     CLIENT will treat THE CALL as over if he has come and not
     over if he has not yet come, regardless of the instrumental
     TIME as measured by THE MODEL's watch.  [See agency as arm
     of the law....]

               Although escort services are technically
               legal, they are at times raided by the
               police and forced to shut down--if only
               temporarily.  To protect ourselves from
               being arrested under the prostitution
               laws, we always make it clear to our
               clients that we are charging for the
               girls' time.

     Think, a person moves from here (space/man/time) through
     here (space/man enters into negotiation/time) to here
     (space/client meets fantasy girl/time) and through
     (space/client enters fantasy girl/time) to exit (space/man
     and model leave/time)--similar scenario for model, first
     they are separate, then intersect, then separate....

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     S P A C E

     THE CALL: it is a public SPACE that gives the illusion of
     being a private SPACE.  It is this illusion which THE CLIENT
     is paying for, this illusion which is produced and regulated
     by THE AGENCY, the capitalist system, THE TELEPHONE--e.g.
     public (social) SPACE.  The physical SPACE of the room is
     criss-crossed by THE TELEPHONE, room service, beepers, etc..

          "In this space [of sex/ pleasure/ leisure], things,
          acts and situations are forever being replaced by
          representations...."

    6

      [See FETISHISM]

          "For these bodies, the natural space and the abstract
          space which confront and surround them are in no way
          separable....  The individual situates his body in its
          own space and apprehends the space around the body"
          (Lefebvre 213).

     BwO and SPACE: "It is not space, nor is it in space; it is
     matter that occupies space to a given degree..." (D&G 153).

          privatehomehotelmotelofficehottubspa

               For some of these men, an hour or an
               evening with an escort was their only
               opportunity all week to drop their
               guard, be themselves, and relax.

     The SPACE within THE CALL is [illusionarily] smooth SPACE--
     it is the illusion of smooth SPACE which THE CLIENT is
     paying for.

     Striated SPACE is SPACE gridded by boundaries: constructed
     by VALUEs of THE AGENCY, circuits of THE TELEPHONE,
     standards of U.S. Treasury, logic of BwO, etc..  Marks the
     edges of illusion of smooth SPACE.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T H E   T E L E P H O N E

     Okay.  So there you are, sitting at home.  Your makeup is
     on, you hair is done, your bag is packed, and you're ready
     to go.  Suddenly THE TELEPHONE rings.  Your picking it up
     means THE CALL has come through.  It means more: you're its
     beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt.  You
     don't know who's calling or what you are going to be called
     on upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving
     something up, receiving an order.

    7

      But you do know
     who's calling.  You are on call; it's your agent calling
     about a potential client.  You get the following
     information: who he is, where he is, how old he is, and some
     other details about him, perhaps his profession, perhaps a
     little about his personality.  You do know what you are
     going to be called upon to do, what you are going to be
     called upon to be.  You are meeting a demand, receiving an
     order but you understand the demand, know the order.  You
     will be THE CLIENT's fantasy girl in EXCHANGE for a
     substantial fee.  THE TELEPHONE rings and you are part of
     the ASSEMBLAGE of escort prostitution.

     theclientopensthetelephonebookfindstheadintheyellowpagesandc
     allstheagencytheagentcallsthemodelthemodelcallstheclientthec
     lientcallstheagentbacktheagentcallsthemodeltoconfirmthemodel
     callstheagentonarrival(aftertheclientgivesthemodelmoney)them
     odelcallstheagentagainbeforeleaving(afterthemodelgivesthecli
     entaccesstoherbody)andagainwhenthemodelgetshome

               Pager/beeper--some girls find it more
               convenient to use a beeper, which leaves
               them free to go shopping or out to a
               movie while they're waiting for us to
               call...if you do use a beeper, you have
               to be all dressed and ready to go from
               wherever you are.  Call-waiting--
               naturally, you'll want to keep your
               phone free.  Most of the girls have
               call-waiting, and I strongly recommend
               it.  Car phone--the car phone, if you
               can afford it, is the escort's best
               friend.  It gives you access to the
               agency when you are out on the road (you
               wouldn't believe how many girls are on
               the way to the movie or somewhere else
               when their beeper goes off), and it
               gives you more flexibility when calling
               in to the agency after you've been on a
               call.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     V A L U E V A L U E V A L U E V A L U E

     "Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group
     assesses the value of the last receivable object
     (limit-object), and the apparent equivalence derives from
     that" (D&G 439).  In terms of the terrain of escort
     "limit-object" is not determined solely by rational
     assessment but rather must be processed through the logic of
     THE CLIENT's BwO--VALUE is a derivation of DESIRE.

               I keep hearing from men who want to know
               if we have any girls who are more
               expensive, and presumably more
               beautiful, than the others.

     VALUE is not based on use value: "[Use value] is always
     concrete and particular, contingent on its own
     destiny . . . ."

    8

      Use value is determined only after the
     EXCHANGE has taken place, and is, itself, "a fetishized
     social relation" (Baudrillard 131).  VALUE is the
     fetishization of commodity's sign system; in escort
     prostitution, of the sign system encoded on THE MODEL's
     body.  The fetishization of this sign system is reinforced
     during THE CALL (see FACIALITY).

               A working girl doesn't really sell her
               body...she gives the client access to
               her body for a certain period of time
               and at a certain price.

     The VALUE of the commodity before the EXCHANGE--in order for
     the EXCHANGE to take place--is determined by the
     fetishization of the commodity.  "[F]etishism is not the
     sanctification of a certain object, or value....It is the
     sanctification of the system as such, of the commodity as
     system: it is thus contemporaneous with the generalization
     of exchange value and is propagated with it" (Baudrillard
     92).

          Reading woman repeatedly as the object of male exchange
          constructs a victim's discourse that risks reinscribing
          the very sexual politics it ostensibly seeks to expose
          and change.

    9

     
     THE MODEL has a dual register, as both object of and subject
     of--partner in--EXCHANGE.

          Reading women as objects exchanged by male desiring
          subjects partakes of a degraded positivism that relies
          on an outmoded, humanist view of identity characterized
          by a metaphysics of presence; it assumes an
          unproblematic subjectivity for 'men' as desiring
          subjects and concomitantly assumes as directly
          accessible woman-as-object.  (Newman 47)

     The terrain of escort prostitution, like the terrain of
     sex/gender relations, is problematic, in terms of the
     "traffic in women" paradigm.  Women working as escorts are
     not simply victims of some "pornographic mind" as Susan
     Griffin claims in Pornography and Silence, where she
     equates the "mindset" (read unified, stable, subject
     position) of pornography producers with that of Nazis and
     the Marquis de Sade.

    10

      Griffin's argument, as well as
     many other feminist arguments which want to label
     prostitutes and other women working in the sex industry as
     "innocent victims" fallen prey to "false consciousness,"
     presumes a unified subject and thus needs to be reexamined
     in the light of post-structuralist theories of subjectivity.
     As both producer of commodity and embodiment of that
     commodity, the escort participates in disruption of "traffic
     in women" paradigm.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     E X C H A N G E <-> E X C H A N G E <-> E X C H A N G E

     When each party has something the other wants, and they're
     able to make a deal, that constitutes a fair EXCHANGE.

          The priest did not turn to the west.  He knew that in
          the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought
          that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules,
          that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people.  But
          that is where DESIRE was lurking, west was the shortest
          route east, as well as to the other directions,
          rediscovered or deterritorialized.  (D&G 154)

               You go into the bathroom to spiff-up, to
               fix your face but this is harder than it
               sounds.  You look in the mirror and see
               that your eye makeup has run onto your
               face, your lipstick has disappeared and
               your hair is completely disheveled.  In
               addition to fixing your face you have to
               wipe your crotch for wetness and odor,
               put on your underwear, bra, hose, and
               garters, all without spending too much
               time in the bathroom.  You panic.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     F A C I A L I T Y

     facialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacial
     ityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfac
     ialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfaciality

     THE MODEL's face is part of THE CLIENT's BwO (see
     FETISHISM).  It is a signifier marking the boundaries of the
     object of his DESIRE.  Her face envelops the face of the
     prom queen from his high school, of the girl in the
     centerfold of his magazine, of his mother....

Tell me who's boss.

     "All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all
     landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face,
     develop a face to come or already past" (D&G 173).  To
     come....

Tell me what you like.

          "The signifier is always facialized.  Faciality reigns
          materially over that whole constellation of
          significances and interpretations."  (D&G 115)

Tell me how much you like it.

     When THE CLIENT says, "tell me how it feels" or some other
     such thing, it's not just about the words (he could say them
     himself) but about FACIALITY, watching the words being
     spoken by THE MODEL, watching the significance process
     through FACIALITY.

               After you knock on the door, stand back
               a couple of feet.  A face is such a
               subjective thing.  It's important that
               the client gets the full image of you
               when he first opens the door--the total
               you, rather than just your face.  If you
               stand too close to the door, your face
               is all that he sees.  And you might not
               be exactly what his fantasy was,
               because, let's face it, there's almost
               no way you could be.

     (The BwO contains gaps and ruptures, never to be closed
     ...see BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.)

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     T O O L S

          CONDOMSLIPSTICKVIBRATORSTOCKINGSBEEPERBREATHMINTSL
          UBESMALLCHANGECREDITCARDSLIPSBUSINESSCARDSEYELINER

               Some men are frightened by the sight of
               the vibrator.  It's about fourteen
               inches long and you always keep a
               nine-foot extension cord attached to it.
               Sometimes a man will say, 'What the hell
               is that?' or 'Are you going to use that
               on me?'  You say, 'It's a vibrator, and
               I wouldn't think of using it on you.
               Not a chance.  Don't you wish I would?'
               Then you use it on yourself while they
               watch.

     TOOLS exist only in relation to the interminglings they make
     possible or that make them possible.  (D&G 90)

               You start telling him what a bad boy he
               has been.  He says 'Yes Mistress.'  You
               go to the dresser in your five-inch
               heels and pick up a wooden hairbrush.
               You tell him to stand up and bend over
               the bed.  You pull down his panties, to
               expose his cheeks, and smack each cheek
               a few times.  In between smackings you
               tell him what a bad boy he has been.

     TOOLS and DETERRITORIALIZATION: "there is an entire
     system of horizontal and complementary
     reterritorializations, between hand and tool" (D&G 174).

          suitbriefcasejewelrycocktaildressgartersstockings
          brasbustierslatexglovesbubblebathmassageoil

     TOOLS form the appendages of the CYBORG ASSEMBLAGE....

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     F E T I S H I S M

     Two kinds of FETISHISM occur during THE CALL--that of the
     commodity as VALUE and that of THE MODEL as object of
     DESIRE.  The fetishization is not of use VALUE or meaning;
     rather it is about being drawn to the system of
     signification, it is a generalization of the structural code
     of the object: "it is thus not a fetishism of the
     signified, a fetishism of substances and values (called
     ideological), which the fetish object would incarnate for
     the alienated subject.  Behind this reinterpretation (which
     is truly ideological) it is a fetishism of the signifier.
     That is to say that the subject is trapped in the
     factitious, differential, encoded, systematized aspect of
     the object" (Baudrillard 92).  This entrapment can be called
     DESIRE.

               people who want me to wear costumes,
               people who want me to sit with them
               while they watch dirty movies and jerk
               off, people who want to be tied up,
               people who want to wear diapers and be
               given a bottle....

     Beauty as FETISHISM: we are "bound up in a general
     stereotype of models of beauty . . . the generalization of
     sign exchange value to facial and bodily effects"
     (Baudrillard 94).  Thus for clients FETISHISM is being drawn
     to media representations of women, fascination with the
     system of encodement represented on women's bodies through
     images in magazines, porn movies, television, advertising,
     etc..

               After Mommie Dearest, suddenly there
               were guys who wanted to be hit with wire
               coat hangers.

     FETISHISM is integral to logic of, to construction of, THE
     CLIENT's BODY WITHOUT ORGANS: "the boots now only determine
     a zone of intensity as an imprint or a zone on a BwO" (D&G
     156).

               The only concession we make to overt
               sexiness is the highest heels you can
               manage to walk in without falling over.
               In our experience, men just adore high
               heels.

     "Tattoos, stretched lips, [etc.]: anything will serve to
     rewrite the cultural order on the body; and it is this that
     takes on the effect of beauty" (Baudrillard 94).  For THE
     MODEL, it is not usually tattoos but rather, high heels,
     garters, bustiers, lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, painted
     toenails, long fingernails....

               When these men were young the first
               naked women most of them had ever seen
               were usually dressed in frilly
               undergarments in a magazine like
               Playboy.  As a result, seeing a woman
               dressed only in lingerie would create a
               powerful, nostalgic yearning that many
               men found irresistible.  [See TIME]  This
               made the experience more pleasant for
               the girls, because the more excited the
               man was as the evening became intimate,
               the easier things would be when it came
               down to the nitty-gritty.

               If he likes it I like it.  That's part
               of his fantasy.  It isn't even a
               question of whether I like it or not.

     $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $  $

     D E T E R R I T O R I A L I Z A T I O N

     THE MODEL performs a DETERRITORIALIZATION on her BwO during
     THE CALL, reterritorializes it onto the commodity form money
     (via cash, check or plastic), which stands in for her own
     DESIRE.

     Your BwO is my physical activity: fucking, sucking,
     spanking, bending, straddling, arching, moaning, gasping,
     etc..  I am a material girl.

     The impossibility of the BwO being ever reached is
     reterritorialized by THE CLIENT onto DESIRE, onto orgasm,
     onto THE MODEL as object of DESIRE.

     "The more the system is systematized, the more the fetishist
     fascination is reinforced" (Baudrillard 92).  DESIRE (for
     the object of DESIRE) is reterritorialized onto [see
     FETISHISM] the coded female body, through the system of
     media representations then again through the escort system.
     (Escorts are fetishized as "live" versions--but are in fact
     part of a further systematization--of the system of media.)

"Act like you're enjoying it."

     

    Notes

     

    1. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1989), 149.

     

    2. Mary Ann Doane, “Commentary: Cyborgs, Origins, and Subjectivity,” in Weed, ed., Coming to Terms, 210.

     

    3. Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 1985): 93.

     

    4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays On Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, Inc., 1987), 273.

     

    5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 165. Cited in the text hereafter as D&G.

     

    6. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 311.

     

    7. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989), 2.

     

    8. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Saint Louis: Telos, 1981), 130.

     

    9. Karen Newman, “Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and the Politics of Exchange,” in Differences, vol. 2 (Summer 1990): 47.

     

    10. Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).

    Works Cited

     

    [Some unreferenced portions of this paper contain reworked material from Mayflower Madam (Sidney Biddle Barrows), Working (Dolores French), and the journals of the authors.]

     

    • Barrows, Sidney Biddle with William Novak. Mayflower Madam. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.
    • Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Saint Louis: Telos, 1981.
    • Doane, Mary Ann, “Commentary: Cyborgs, Origins, and Subjectivity.” In Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1989.
    • French, Dolores with Linda Lee. Working. New York: Windsor Publishing, 1988.
    • Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
    • Hall, Stuart. “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates.” In Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 1985).
    • Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” In Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1989.
    • Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
    • Newman, Karen. “Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and the Politics of Exchange.” In Differences, vol. 2 (Summer 1990).
    • Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays On Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.

     

  • Revolting Yet Conserved: Family Noir in Blue Velvet and Terminator 2

    Fred Pfeil

    Center for the Humanities
    Oregon State University
    <centerfh@ccmail.orst.edu>

     

    When we think about film noir in the present, it is well to remember the categorical instability that has dogged its tracks from the moment French critics coined the term in the mid-1950s as a retrospective tag for a bunch of previously withheld American films which now, upon their foreign release, all looked and felt sort of alike. Ever since, critics and theorists have been arguing over what noir is and which films are examples of it, over what social processes and psychic processes it speaks of and to, and what might constitute its own social effects. Does film noir constitute its own genre; a style which can be deployed across generic boundaries; a movement within Hollywood cinema, limited to its place in space and time? These, the intrinsic questions and debates, have their own momentum and energy, but derive extra charge from an associated set of extrinsic questions regarding noir‘s relationships to other, non-cinematic social trans- formations, especially shifts in gender identities and relationships in the post-WWII U.S. Did the spider-women of so many films noir, despite their emphatically evil coding and self-destructive defeats, nonetheless constitute a challenge to the restoration and extension of a patriarchal- capitalist gender economy under whose terms men controlled and ran the public sphere while women, desexualized and maternalized, were relegated to hearth and home? Does the aggressive sexuality, power and plot controlling/generating/ deranging force, of, say, a Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, together with noir‘s characteristically deviant visuality–its cramped asymmetrical framings, its expressionistically harsh lighting contrasts and lurid shadows, the whole twisted and uncertain spatiality of it matching the male protagonist’s lack of control over the breakneck deviousness of its plot–constitute a real and potentially effective subversion of the dominant order, as Christine Gledhill suggests?1 Or is it simply, as neoformalist film historian David Bordwell asserts, that “These films blend causal unity with a new realistic and generic motivation, and the result no more subverts the classical film”–or, we may presume, anything else–“than crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel” (77)?

     

    Noir, then, as coded alternative or as alternate flavor of the month, something to put alongside vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and The Best Years of Our Lives? The debate smolders on unresolved, and perhaps irresolvably, depending as it does on some broader knowledge or agreement as to what indeed constitutes subversive or progressive work within a pre- or non-revolutionary cultural moment and social formation. More directly, the question is how any capital-intensive work, such as film or mainstream television production, which is produced for a mass audience, can be progressive, and how we can tell insofar as it is. How (and how well) would such work work? What (and how much) would it do? More crudely still, how far can a work go and still get made and distributed within a system whose various structures are all overdetermined by capitalism and patriarchy (not to mention racism and homophobia)? What’s the most, and the best, we can demand and/or expect?

     

    It is, as Marxists used to say perhaps too often, no accident that such messy questions press themselves on us today so insistently and distinctly that a whole new interdisciplinary protodiscipline, “cultural studies,” now constitutes itself just to deal with them. Their emergence and urgency for us is, after all, inevitably consequent upon the dimming of the revolutionary horizon, and the loss or confusion of revolutionary faith, not only within the socialist Left but throughout all the other feminist and “minority” movements in the ’70s and ’80s, condemned as each has been to its own version of the excruciating declension from essentialist-nationalist unity to division Fanon outlined in The Wretched of the Earth for a post-colonial subject on the other side of a war of national liberation for which there was finally, in the U.S. anyway, never a credible or even distinct equivalent anyway. Here the revolution, if there was anything like one, came from the Right–New Right maven Paul Weyrich proudly proclaiming in the wake of the first Reagan election in the early ’80s, “We are radicals seeking to overthrow the power structure”– against the liberal-corporatist State and the sociopolitical good sense that flowed from and supported it, both of which had to be, and have been, dismantled and rearticulated in quite different ways. Given this combination, then, of dis- integration below and regressive hegemonic re-integration from on high, the whole notion of what Gramsci called “war of movement,” of deep structural and institutional change, has come to seem to many once-insurrectionary spirits to be inconceivably crackpot or even worse, a grisly ruse of the very Power (a la Foucault) it pretends to oppose; so that a permanent “war of position,” the ever partial and provisional detournement of otherwise intractable institutional arrangements and practices, becomes literally the only game in town.

     

    I describe this situation here not to deplore or criticize it, no more than I would claim to know how to resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it in some new transcendent synthesis of What Is To Be Done; it is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in the developed West, and the U.S. in particular, are in. So it will be both the context from which we must think about the meaning and direction of the so-called “return” of noir during the ’70s and ’80s just past, and some of the newest mutations in the noir sensibility today.

     

    For starters, moreover, we would do well to resist the very notion of straightforward repetition or “return” to explain such films as Body Heat (1981) and the remakes of Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).2 For whatever noir was in the ’40s and ’50s, it will not be again three decades or more later by dint of sheer straightforward imitation, if only because the meanings and effects of the original films noir even today must still be experienced and understood in their relation to a whole system of film production, distribution, and consumption–the Hollywood studio system, in effect– which was in its last hour even then and is now gone. As Thomas Schatz has recently reminded us, it was that system which most fully standardized and customized the look and feel and plotlines of film genres, from MGM classics and costume dramas to Warner’s gangster pics and Universal’s specialty in horror: some of them genres from which noir had something to steal (e.g., the deep shadows and expressionistic framings of the horror film), but each and all of them together a system of techniques, conventions and, not least, audience expectations (e.g., the romantic happy ending and/or the satisfying restoration of law and order) that noirs first defined themselves by violating.

     

    Accordingly, when the studio system breaks up into the present “package-unit” system in which individual producers assemble production groups and materials on a film-by-film basis, employing what is left of the studios primarily as a distribution arm, and generic production atomizes too as the specialized constellations of talents and resources once fixed in position to produce it are dispersed, we may expect that the working parts of the noir machine of effects and responses will also break apart into so many free agents, capable of being drafted onto any number of new, provisional combinatory teams, all according to the same recombinant aesthetic economy which, for example, a decade ago brought us the TV series Hill Street Blues out of a directive to its original writers to knock out a combination of sit-com Barney Miller and the action-adventure series Starsky and Hutch.3 In this newer Hollywood, quintessential site of the intersection between the flexible specialization of post-Fordist production and the free-floating ideologemes- turned-syntax of postmodernism, the transgressive energies and subversive formal practices that first animated and defined noir may be most alive and well where they have migrated from the now-conventionalized site of their first appearance towards some new and even perverse combination with other formal and thematic elements in similar drift from other ex-genres of film.

     

    Such, at any rate, is the general hypothesis of the present essay, whose specific claim will be that film noir in particular, homeless now as a genre (or aesthetic reaction-formation to genre), nonetheless currently finds itself most alive where its former elements and energies form part of a new chronotope whose chief difference from that non- or even anti-domestic one of “classic” noir lies in the extent to which the newer one includes, and indeed is centered on, home and family, even as it decenters and problematizes both. Through a look at two successful recent films, Blue Velvet and Terminator 2, I mean to show how home and family are being destabilized, “noir-ized,” in both: in which case, the large differences between our two films in terms of aesthetic strategies and audiences should only make the similarities in the end results of each film’s processing of the elements of noir it takes up that much more striking and significant. Striking in what way, though, how significant and for whom? Connected to what other transformations and praxes, underway or to come? Those questions will raise their heads again on the other side of the following readings, forcing us again to hedge and answer them as best we can in the absence of any clear or shared utopian goal.

     

    I. Blue Velvet and the Strangely Familiar

     

    It is too easy to tick off the noir elements in David Lynch’s art-film hit Blue Velvet (1986). The investigative male protagonist (Kyle McLachan) caught between dangerous dark-haired Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) and bland blond Sandy (Laura Dern); the far- reaching nature of the evil McLachan’s Jeffrey uncovers and the entanglements of the police themselves in its web; the homoerotic dimension of the relationship between Jeffrey and the film’s arch-villain Frank (Dennis Hopper): any college sophomore with Intro Film Studies under his or her belt can make the idents, just as anyone who’s ever taken Intro to Psych can pick up on the Oedipal stuff hiding in plain sight, beginning of course with the collapse of Jeffrey’s father and ending with his restoration. Michael Moon, in one of the best commentaries on the film, summarizes quite nicely the familiar story of how it goes in between:

     

    a young man must negotiate what is represented as being the treacherous path between an older, ostensibly exotic, sexually 'perverse' woman and a younger, racially 'whiter,' sexually 'normal' one, and he must at the same time and as part of the same process negotiate an even more perilous series of interactions with the older woman's violent and murderous criminal lover and the younger woman's protective police- detective father. This heterosexual plot resolves itself in classic oedipal fashion: the young man, Jeffrey, destroys the demonic criminal 'father' and rival, Frank; rescues the older woman, Dorothy, from Frank's sadistic clutches; and then relinquishes her to her fate and marries the perky young daughter of the good cop.4

     

    Such a blatant evocation, or perhaps more accurately, acting out, of the standard image repertoires of generic noir and psychoanalytic truism will, it is worth noting, not be obvious to everyone–only to those who, thanks to college or some other equivalent educational circuitry, have the cultural capital to recognize the codes at work. Assuming such an audience, though, the point is to consider such paint-by-number material not as finished product, but as starting point and second-order raw material for the film’s subsequent elaborations. If it would be a mistake to accept such generic material at face value, in other words, it would be just as wrong to write it off and look for what else is “really” going on instead.

     

    Our first job, then, is rather to consider obviousness in Blue Velvet as a subject and production in its own right, and with its own multiple, complex effects. But to take this subject up in turn is to notice immediately just how many ways Lynch “shoves it in our faces” as well as how many things “it” in that last phrase comes to be, so often and so many that a certain kind of “ominous-obvious” may fairly be said to constitute both the film’s thematic subject and its formal method alike. An exhaustive reading of Blue Velvet along these lines could in fact begin with the film’s very first image, the rippling blue velvet against which its opening titles appear, shot in such extreme, quasi-magnified close-up that, as Barbara Creed points out, its smooth soft surface appears mottled and rough as bark (100). But I would rather concentrate instead on the image-flow that follows those credits, a sort of music video to the Bobby Vinton oldie of the film’s title, falling in between (in both a chronological and a stylistic sense) the credits and the story-line that picks up at its end. Here is a list of the shots that compose the film’s dreamy opening montage:

     

    1.      Tilt down from perfectly blue sky to red roses in medium close-up against white fence. DISSOLVE to
    2.      Long shot: fire truck passing by slowly on tree- shaded small-town street, with fireman on it waving in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
    3.      Yellow tulips against white fence, close-up as at the end of shot 1. DISSOLVE to
    4.      Long shot, small-town residential street: traffic guard beckoning for schoolchildren to cross, again in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
    5.      Long shot: white Cape Cod house and yard. CUT to
    6.      Medium shot: Middle-aged man with hose, watering yard. CUT to
    7.      Long shot, interior: Middle-aged woman inside, sitting with cup of coffee on couch, watching tv, which displays black-and-white shot of man crossing screen, gun in hand, and from which issues sinister noirish music. CUT to
    8.      Close-up of hand holding gun on TV screen. CUT to
    9.      Man with hose, as in shot 6, but now off-center at screen left.

     

    Actually, the sequence at this point has already begun to speed up somewhat, moving from shots of approximately five seconds apiece (shots 1-4) to an average of three (5-8). From shot 9 on, moreover, the sequence will quicken and warp still further, as an increasingly rapid montage of increasingly close-up shots of kinked hose/sputtering tap/vexed man, joined with a sound-track in which the diegetic sound of water fizzing under pressure is combined with a gradually rising and apparently non-diegetic buzz or roar, towards the man’s collapse, the hose’s anarchic rearing upward, a slow-mo shot of a dog drinking from the hose beside the fallen man, the sound of the dog barking, a baby crying, a rushing wind combined with a mechanical rustling noise, as we go down through the lawn in a process- shot pretending to be an unbroken zoom-in to a horde of swarming, warring black insects whose organic-mechanical noise-plus-wind now swells up to an overwhelming roar….

     

    What is one to make of such an opening? Or rather, what do we make of it? Given our previous training in how to watch feature films, or, more specifically, in how to read their spatio-temporally orienting shots and narrative cues, it seems to me that with part of our minds we struggle to do the usual with this image-flow: to read it narratively, place ourselves in it, “follow” it out. And, of course our efforts and presumptions in this regard are not entirely in vain. Okay, we say, it’s a small-town, and here’s a particular family inside it, a Dad and Mom, and look, something’s happening to the Dad so things are off- balance now, not right, gee what happens next? But all that is only with part of the mind, and against a kind of semic counter-logic or inertial drag instigated by the very same shots, at least or especially shots 1-4 and the slow-motion and extreme close-ups that close off the sequence (as other such shot combinations will serve as the disjunctive ligatures between one section of the film’s narrative and the next): in the degree to which all these shots overshoot their narrative or, in Barthesian terms, proairetic function, and force attention on themselves in some purely imagistic way instead, Bobbie Vinton, blue sky and red roses at one end, roaring wind, mechanical rustling and ravening black insects on the other.

     

    If, moreover, such a difference from the opening moves of conventional film falls somewhere short of effecting a total break with the prevailing model of filmic narrative, its relative distance from that model is nonetheless made all the more apparent by the lurch that follows back toward typicality. Like a second beginning, the shot-sequence that follows the one we have just rehearsed opens with a set of establishing long-shots of the town of Lumberton, simultaneously named as such by the local radio station on the soundtrack, after which we are shown Jeffrey the film’s protagonist for the first time, pausing on his way to visit his hospitalized father in order to throw a stone in the field where he will soon find the severed ear of Dorothy Valens’ husband and thereby set the film’s noirish plot into full motion. So now, in effect, we are invited to take a deep breath and relax and enjoy, i.e., do a conventional reading of, the film: only once again, not quite. For this sequence will no less settle into assured conventionality than the last completely broke from it. So the d.j.’s radio patter is slightly, well, skewed–“It’s a sunny day,” he chirps, “so get those chainsaws out!”–as, on a visual level, is the sequence of images itself, in which the aforementioned shot of Jeffrey in the field is followed by two brief red-herring long-shots of downtown, one in which an unknown car pulls onto the town’s main street, the other of an unknown man standing spinning what might be a ring of keys in his hand as he stands out in front of a darkened store, before the sequence slips back into gear with a close-up of Jeffrey’s father in his hospital bed as Jeffrey’s visiting presence is announced.

     

    From its outset, then, Blue Velvet is characterized by the partial and irresolute opposition of two distinct kinds and pleasures of narrative: one characterized by the relative dominance of what, following Barthesian narrative theory, I have called the semic, and the other by the equally relative dominance of the establishing, fixing and plotting functions of the proairetic. Less pretentiously, of course, we could speak of the predominance of image versus that of story-line, and avoid French post- structuralist theory altogether, were it not for the real yet perverse relevance of Barthes’ terms, and the psychopolitical valences attached to them, for this particular film. To discern this relevance, we need only recall, first of all, that within that theory the placing, naming, and motivating functions of the proairetic, and its predominance in conventional narrative, are held to be defining symptoms of the constitutive oedipality of such narrative energies and desires, or perhaps more precisely of the binding, sublimation and containment of such desire; just as the atemporal and never-fully-repressible bursts and upwellings of the semic are identified with the carnivalesque freedom of the unregulated, post-, pre-, or even anti-Oedipal social and individual body. Then all we have to do is notice how insofar as such definitions and categories do hold water for us, Blue Velvet gets them– though once again, only sort of–wrong from the get-go, observing this oppositional distinction and flouting it at the same time by reversing what one might have thought was their “natural” order: for what kind of narrative text is it, after all, in which the fall of the father is preceded by an image-flow predominantly semic in nature, but followed by one that more or less falls obediently into story-plotting line?

     

    A postmodern text, of course; the kind of postmodern work which, as in Cindy Sherman’s first acclaimed photos, is concerned both to hybridize and hollow out the cliche. For simultaneously hyper-realizing and de-centering narrative and cinematic convention, is from the start what Blue Velvet is about, both its way of doing business and the business itself. Visually, as Laurie Simmons’ description of Lynch’s style suggests, its techniques and effects are most clearly related to those of Pop Art, though more that of Rosenquist, say, than Andy Warhol.5 Such perfect two-dimensionality–so different, it may be worth noting, from the expressionistically crowded and askew deep-spaces of classic noir style–simultaneously flattens and perfects all its glazed gaze captures, from roses to ravening insects, soda fountain booth to severed ear, while on the film’s soundtrack, the same sense is created and reinforced by Badalamenti’s score which, here and in Twin Peaks alike, flaunts its bare-faced imitation of misterioso a la Hitchcock composer Bernard Hermann one minute, gushing romantic strings a la Dmitri Tiomkin the next, with some dollops of the kind of insipid finger- popping jazz-blues once written for Quinn-Martin tv- detective series, soundtrack scores of the first living-room noirs, thrown in on the side. Such predigested product thus functions as the musical equivalent of the cliched dialogue of the script and the two-dimensional visuality of the cinematography, each overdetermining the other into an aggregate signal of intentional derivativeness and knowing banality whose obverse or underside is clearly that moment when, aurally and/or visually, that which we take as the ur-natural (the clicking and mandibular crunching of the insects, the robin with the worm in its mouth) becomes indistinguishable from sounds of industry, the sight of the obviously animatronic–in short, the synthetic constructions, material and imaginative, of human beings themselves, recognized and felt as such.

     

    In early-industrial Britain, Keats invited his readers to the edge of one sublime mode of hyper-attention, a falling into the object’s depths so intense the viewer’s own consciousness browns out (“A drowsy numbness pains/My sense”). In the postmodern late-industrial mode of Lynch’s film, however, the gleaming but off-kilter perfection of such recherche surfaces as those we have examined constitutes its very own warp, and the terrified rapture of the romantic swoon away from consciousness is replaced by a queasy awareness of anxious affiliation to and guilty/paranoid complicity with all that we are so familiar with in what we see and hear, as in this scene in which our hero Jeffrey has a talk in the den with Lieutenant Williams, bland-blonde Sandy’s father and police detective, consequent to Jeffrey’s discovery of the ear:

     

    Williams:
    You’ve found something that is very interesting to us. Very interesting. I know you must be curious to know more. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about the case, but not to tell anybody about your find. One day when it’s all sewed up, I’ll let you know all the details. Right now, though, (glancing sidelong, sneaking a puff on his cigarette) I can’t.
    Jeffrey:
    I understand. I’m just real curious, like you said.
    Williams:
    (slightly smiling) I was the same way myself when I was your age. That’s why I went into this business.
    Jeffrey:
    (laughs) Must be great.
    Williams:
    (freezes, sours smile) It’s horrible too. I’m sorry Jeffrey; it just has to be that way. Anyway Jeffrey, I know you do understand.

     

    Each sentence, every phrase, 100% B-movie cliche, and delivered as such, with all the wooden earnestness the actors can muster. Yet I hope my transcription also conveys something of the extent to which, even as that dialogue rattles out, Williams’ suspiciously askew reactions and expressions move our reactions not so much against the direction of the cliches as athwart them. On the level of the story-line, and given our past experience of both oedipal narrativity in general and noir in particular, they may prompt us to wonder if Father/Detective Williams won’t turn to be one of the bad guys after all; on the level of what we might call the film’s enunciation, though, and in light of all else we have seen about this film so far, such a moment is apt to engender a far more fundamental distrust, less the suspicion that we haven’t gotten to the bottom of this yet than the fullblown paranoia that there may be no bottom here at all.

     

    So, in the closing moments of the film, when Jeffrey and Sandy and their families are both completed and combined around the exemplary center of their good love, the famous moment when that robin shows up with the worm in its mouth and Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, looking over his shoulder and munching on a hot dog, says “I could never do that!” provokes a complicated laugh from the audience. On the one hand, of course it’s about both the ironic relation of that amorally predatory robin to the goopy speech Sandy gave earlier in the film, in which robins figured in a dream she’d had as emblems of pure good, and the reinforcing irony of Aunt Barbara’s self-righteous disavowal of the very appetitiveness she is displaying by stuffing her mouth. On the other, though, given the bird’s obvious artificiality, the music’s cliched goopiness, and the hypercomposed flatness and stiffness of the mise-en-scene, it’s also about the anxious and delightful possibility that Aunt Barbara–and Jeffrey and Sandy, for that matter–are robots too. And of course they are, in the sense that they are constructions of sound and words and light, spaces where Lynch & Company’s projections meet our own; and in this sense so are all the characters in every feature film. Yet if every film in the Hollywood tradition invites its audience to recite some version of the Mannoni formula Je sais bien mais quand meme on its way into and through the story-world it offers, Blue Velvet is nonetheless distinctive for the steady insistence with which it ups the volume on its own multiple, hybridized, and hyper-realized elements of retrouvee, pushing its audience to acknowledge its own “I know very well” at least as much as its “but even so . . .,” and so to taint and complicate a heretofore blissfully irresponsible and safely distanced voyeurism with its own admissions of familiarity as complicity, anxious lack of distance, guilt at home.6 “You put your disease inside me!” Dorothy says to Jeffrey, and of him, to everyone around her at one point; and so he/we did; but in another sense, of course, it was there/here/everywhere all along, and we have “it” inside us too.

     

    It is this “it,” this recognition and admission of the obvious artifice, that we then carry with us alongside and through those obvious elements of noir and of oedipal psychopathology which have in and of themselves elicited so much critical commentary. Some writers have concentrated on Lynch’s blending and blurring of genres (MacLachan’s Jeffrey as both Philip Marlowe and Dobie Gillis) and generic chronotopes (the smokey nightclub in the small-town, the naked “dark woman” in the family’s living room), while others hone in on the sheer mobility of male-hysterical fantasy in the film–the dangerous, vertiginous, yet perpetual oscillations between sadism/masochism, “Daddy” and “Baby,” hetero- and homosexual desire, as all these are acted out (in both senses of the term) in the film’s excess of primary scenes (Jeffrey with Dorothy, Frank with Dorothy, Jeffrey and Frank with Ben, Jeffrey with Frank). Yet even those who have attempted to consider and synthesize both these manifest topical areas have tended to miss, or at least underestimate, the full measure, meaning and effect of the de-realizing, de-naturalizing formal operations of the film, and the extent to which they power the movement toward what Michael Moon, examining that psychosexual terrain, describes as “the fearful knowledge that what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio- and videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synching of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires” even before the generic mix is evident and the sexual-psychoanalytic heyday/mayhem begins.7 What fascinates and appalls in Blue Velvet, what simultaneously underwrites and undermines the mixed messages of its generic play and desublimated oedipality, is the sense of the fragility of the Symbolic, its susceptibility to the metonymic “disease” of constant slippage that is always already inside it, a gynesis of both film and family that irresolves without overthrowing, that keeps home un-natural while forcing us to own up to the familiarity of all that is officially Other and strange, home-making and and as dislocating, from blue-sky beginning (plenitude or emptiness? true blue or fake void?) to blue-sky end.

     

    II. Terminator 2: Any Which Way But Loose

     

    Things are somewhat different in this past summer’s blockbuster sci-fi hit Terminator 2: Judgement Day, if only because it is not likely investors will put up $90 million for a project whose meanings, pleasures, and rules of motion derive from the principle of semiotic erosion of narrative conventions, irresolution as an aesthetic way of life. The overall regime of pleasure in the blockbuster film is, rather, a paradigm of late capitalist consumer production: it must keep us constantly (though not continuously) engaged without demanding much attention; knock us out with all the trouble it’s gone to just to give us an instant’s satisfaction; and not only offer us options but affirm and even flatter us for whichever ones we pick.

     

    To define blockbusters in terms of such hard-wired business requirements is, however, not to mark the point where analysis of their significance ends, but rather to suggest where it has to begin. For if the blockbuster typically invites us to “have it either and/or both ways,” then both the character of the particular contradictory options offered and the name and the definition of the “it” can be read as complex signposts showing the way to the mainstream national culture’s ideological “points de capiton,” the places where collective social desire–for transformation and salvage, revolution and restoration, anarchy and obedience–is simultaneously fastened and split.8

     

    Thus, to take up one early example, the interest of those opening scenes of T2 in which the two synthetic creatures from the future first appear in present-day L.A. bent on their opposed missions, to protect or kill the boy John Connor, and to this end outfit themselves in the garbs and roles of ordinary mortal men. The T-800, a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger, cyborg-simulacrum of Sarah Connor’s would-be killer in the first Terminator film, arrives in the blue burnished glory of his hypermuscled nakedness in front of an equally gleaming semi-truck parked across from a biker bar he will soon scope out, bust up, and leave in full regalia, in shades and leathers, and astride a Harley hog, to the heavy-metal strains of George Thorogood and the Destroyers stuttering “B-b-b-born to be bad.” In the following sequence, however, in which we meet the protean, programmed- to-kill all-robot T-1000, we are taken to a desolate patch of no-man’s land underneath a curving span of L.A. overpass to which a city cop has been called to investigate the strange electrical goings-on accompanying this unit’s passage through time and space: whereupon the T-1000, assuming for the moment a proto-hominoid silver shape sneaks up on the cop from behind, kills him, and takes on his steely-eyed Aryan form, complete with uniform, as his central “identity” for the rest of the film.

     

    In the span of these two brief scenes, entertainment professionals James Cameron et al. have already provided us with a wide range and satisfying oscillation of identifications and exclusions, pleasures and disavowals. For starters, there’s the linkage and differentiation of Arnold in his ab ovum muscle-builder’s pose and the parked semi behind him, suggesting as this composite image does both Arnold himself as gleaming machine, icon of burly masculinist culture at its most spectacularly developed pitch, and Arnold as a display item quite out of this dingy quotidian work-world altogether. Such ambivalence, together with its options for enjoyment, is then carried right into and through the mayhem at the biker bar that ensues, in which those menacing scumbags are first literally summed up by the T-800’s hi-tech apparatus then disarmed and disrobed, resulting in a new version of the composite Arnold-image, both “badder” and “higher” than the bikers, at one and the same time pure realization of their outlaw nature and antithesis of their downwardly-mobile sleaze. And the ambivalence of this newly sublated figure will then be further marked and played out against that constructed in the next sequence around the evil T-1000, which begins in turn by cueing off our conventional identification with the figure of law and order poking around in the dark shadows at the margins of the normatively social, but ends by conflating these two figures into one, a white male L.A. cop as formless evil (a particularly pungent if fortuitous maneuver, we may note, given national exposure of the racist brutality of Police Chief Gates’ L.A.P.D. a scant few months before this film’s release).

     

    We’ll soon return to consider further the exact nature and significance of the agon between this bad-guy-as-good- guy and the good-guy-as-bad. For now, though, let this opening example serve as a demonstration of the play of opposition and symbiosis essential to T2: i.e., of a play which combines a fair amount of mobility granted to our various social and libidinal desires and fears with a lack of ambiguity at any given moment as to what we ought to think and feel. One minute the bikers are low-life scum, then Arnold’s a biker; one minute the L.A. cop is bravely doing his duty, the next minute he’s a remorseless assassin; yet throughout all these inclusions and exclusions we are never in doubt about which side to be on. The punctual clarity of such a “preferred investment” strategy, as we might call it, thus stands in marked contrast to the real ambiguities of judgement and feeling that are the warp and woof of classic noir, in the figures of, for example, the morally shady detective and the smart, alluring femme fatale, not to mention as far or even farther away from the constant sliding and seepage inside Lynch’s film. In fact, the first thing to observe about most of those features of noir taken up by Terminator 2 is the degree to which they are, as in Blue Velvet, both untrustworthy as straightforward quotation or appropriation, yet paradoxically, all the more significant for that.

     

    Take T2‘s narrational strategy, to choose one of the film’s several noirish qualities. In “classic” noir, as we know, the question of who is in control of the film’s narration is often central to noir‘s meanings and effects.9 In noirs like Gilda or Out of the Past, that question is posed by the disjunction between the male protagonist-narrator’s tightlipped voice-over and the sinister twists of the enacted plot in whose devious turnings the figure of the femme fatale seems to exert a powerful hand. And at first it seems that something of the same, but with a post-modern, post-feminist difference, is true of Terminator 2 as well. Here too the laconic decisiveness of the voice-over contrasts with the comparative lack of power of the narrator to take control over the film’s action; only here the destination towards which the plot careens is enlarged from individual catastrophe all the way to planetary nuclear holocaust as a result of the entropic drift of masculinist techno- rationality, and the tough-guy narrator is a woman.

     

    On this level, then, Terminator 2 like its predecessor appears to be a sci-fi “feminist noir” pitting its female heroine Sarah Connor against various individual and collective “males fatales” in a simple yet effective inversion of the old device. Yet while such a conclusion is, I think, not entirely false, even less could it be declared simply true. For one thing, it is obviously not Linda Hamilton who is the big star of Terminator 2, but Arnold Schwarzenegger; nor is it Sarah Connor who, for all her stirring efforts, is finally able to save the world, if indeed it has been saved, but the proto/semi-male T-800 who supplies the vital edge. For another, and for all the noirish haze and green/blue/black suffused throughout the film, on the level of narrative structure and plot the amount of confusion we are plunged into as to what is going on, and how to feel about it, how the action is hooked to whatever else has been happening and how it is all going to come out, is virtually nil. Just as clearly as we know from moment to moment who’s good and who’s bad, we know Arnold the T-800 protector will rescue boy John from the clutches of the wicked T-1000; and when boy John insists they break into the state hospital for the criminally insane and rescue his mother Sarah, we know they will be able to pull that off as well. When the three of them, plus Dyson the computer scientist, are on their way to the headquarters of Cyberdyne Corporation to destroy those fragments of the first Terminator from the first Terminator film, which, when analyzed and understood, will result in the construction of the SkyNet system of “defense” that will in turn trigger off the holocaust, Sarah’s voiceover, atop a night-for-night shot of a dark highway rushing into the headlights and past, intones the noirish message that “The future, always so clear to me, had been like a dark highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along.” By this time, though, such a message comes across as mere atmosphere, the verbal equivalent of the aforementioned laid-on haze, rather than as any real entrance into “uncharted” territory on the part of a plot in which we know where we are, and where we are headed, each step of the way.

     

    Yet if the relation between narration and enactment in T2 is thus less an innovative extension of noir than first appeared, it is not hard to locate more genuine expressions of a noir sensibility in its sense of space and time, or chronotope. In terms of space, Terminator 2 early on takes its leave of the sunstruck residential neighborhood where John Connor lives with his ineffectual foster parents, and spends the rest of its running time either keeping its distance from or destroying any and all traditional domestic space. And its noir-classical preference for the bleak sprawl of Southern Californian freeways, state institutions, research centers, malls, and plants over any closed familial enclaves is matched by its implicit flattening of time even across the gap of nuclear apocalypse. The premise motivating T2–that in the wake of nuclear apocalypse a resistance led by the adult John Connor continues to struggle against the inhuman power of the machine, so that both sides, Resistance and Power Network, send their mechanical minions back in time, one to protect John-the-boy and the other to “terminate” him– insists on a difference between present and future that the film’s depictions erode. Here in the present official power, whether in the form of the sadistically panoptical mental hospital, the gleaming surfaces and security systems of the soulless corporation, or the massively armed and equipped, anonymous police, already runs rampant; here already, before the Bomb falls, the hardy band of guerrilla- terrorists resists, the fireballs blossom and the bodies pile up in the perpetual dark night of Hobbesian confrontation between bad anarchy and good.

     

    Terminator 2 thus not only reconstructs the fallen public world and queasy temporality of classic noir but constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that has, in effect, already occurred. Like Benjamin’s once- scandalous Angel of History, its chronotope offers us a perspective from which modernity appears less “a chain of events” than “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our] feet,” a “storm” that is “what we call progress” (Benjamin 257, 258). Yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between the ruminations of a Marxist-modernist intellectual in Europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning what “conditions of possibility” must have been met before such a view could become mainstream. What preconditions must be met before a mass audience can find such an anti- progressive perspective pleasurable, can “want to believe this,” as Leo Braudy says of the rise and fall of generic perspectives in general10; and what consequences follow from Terminator 2‘s particular channelings of that desire?

     

    Fredric Jameson suggests that the predominance of dystopic visions in contemporary science-fiction signals the general loss of our ability even to conceive of, much less struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we are within both an imperialist nation in decline and the overheated “perpetual present” of postmodernist culture (Jameson, “Progress”). And much of Terminator 2, with its timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive hypothesis as Exhibit A. (Call to reception theorists: how many in the American audience recognized in the evil cybernetic techno-war depicted in T2‘s opening post- apocalyptic sequence an image of a hysterically celebrated Gulf War just past, in which “our” machines mowed down their human bodies, as the saying goes, “like fish in a barrel”? And what were the effects of this surely unintentional echo?) Yet here again, like a good blockbuster, T2 also invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite explicitly, in Sarah’s diatribe to scientist Dyson. “Men like you built the hydrogen bomb,” she roars. “Men like you thought it up . . . You don’t know what it’s like to create something.” It is a speech that might have been drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as Susan Griffin, or such proponents of a maternalist-based women’s peace movement as Sarah Ruddick or Helen Caldecott; and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right along with, the violence it decries.

     

    The ease with which this moment’s feminist critique of Enlightenment takes its place alongside brutal displays of techno-violence, though, should not blind us to its value as a clue to what is deeply and genuinely moving–in both the affective and narrative senses of the word–in Terminator 2. After all, the film we have described so far is one in which a fundamentally uneventful frame (the apocalypse which has already occurred) is constructed as backdrop for a plot whose terms and ends (T-800 saves boy; saves Sarah; saves world; destroys evil twin, a.k.a. T-1000) are all pretty much known in advance. If the cybernetic machine that is Terminator 2 nonetheless appears at all alive and in motion, its assignment rather involves an extensive renegotiation and reconstruction of the hetero-sex/gender system itself, and that little engine of identity and desire called the nuclear family in particular. And indeed, we have already hinted at one important aspect of that renegotiation in our discussion of the noirish space of action in T2, which gives us the ranch-style home and residential neighborhood of traditional American domesticity as the place of the phoney family (the foster parents of which are promptly dispatched), and the new “mean streets” of mall and culvert, corporate research center, freeway, and desert, as site of the new true one.

     

    This relocation of the family unit of Mommy/Daddy/Baby to the place where the noir hero used to be, out in public and on the run, is likewise braided in with a complex transfiguration of all three roles in the family romance, part transforming, and part regressive in each case. Most prominently is of course ultra-buff Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor as fully operational warrior-woman, like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Cameron’s Aliens only more so, phallic mother with a complete set of soldier-of-fortune contacts, cache of weapons and survivalist skills.11 Conversely, there is “the Arnold,” fresh from Kindergarten Cop and therefore all the more available for refunctioning from killing machine to nurturant proto-father who, as Sarah’s own voice-over puts it, “would always be there and would always protect him [i.e., John the son]. Of all the would-be fathers, this machine was the only one that measured up.” And finally, rounding out this new holy family is golden-boy John, who as grown-up rebel leader sends Arnold back to the past to protect his childhood self, but who as a kid must teach both Mom and Dad how and when to cool their jets.

     

    If, as Constance Penley has shown us, the first Terminator film posits John Connor as “the child who orchestrates his own primal scene” to run the energy of “infantile sexual investigation” into the project of re- marking the difference between the sexes through remaking/displacing it as “the more remarkable difference between human and other” (“Time-Travel” 121, 123), then in Terminator 2 he must be both father-to-the-Man and to-the- Mom. Arnold must learn from him that “you can’t kill people”; while Sarah must be domesticated away from the Mother-Wolf fury in which she is enmeshed. That in this latter task, as unerringly right-on as young John is, it helps to have a Dad around is perfectly evident in the follow-up to the film’s one overtly erotic moment, when having interrupted Mom’s commando raid on the Dyson home, John confronts her, now collapsed in a heap, and moaning “I love you, John–I always have.” “I know,” he answers hoarsely, and falls into her embrace. A second later, though, we are all delivered from this hot-and-heavy scene before it goes any farther and shorts out the film, thanks to the presence of Arnold, whose stern let’s-get-going glance to John literally pulls the boy out of Sarah’s dangerous clutches and allows the action to roll ahead.

     

    But for that matter, it is also abundantly clear by the end of the film that for all John’s moral sense and Sarah’s muscles, they both still need Dad–and a Dad who’s not that different after all. For in the course of Terminator 2‘s movement from shopping mall to shop floor, both John and Sarah are demonstrated to be ultimately ineffectual in their struggle against T-1000 and the forthcoming holocaust alike. For all her desire to change the dystopian course of history, and all the paramilitary training, Sarah is unable (i.e., too “womanish”?) to pull the trigger on Dyson: just as, despite the fortitude that enables her even to gun down her own T-1000 simulation when it appears,12 she is incapable of defeating this tireless, emotionless, yet endlessly mutable villain by herself. Could this be because, as the film also shows us through Sarah’s own recurrent and prophetic holocaust dream, she herself is after all a split subject only one of whose forms is warrior-like–and that one, compared to the apron- frocked housewife-mother on the other side of the fence, merely a secondary product of, and compensatory defense against, her terrible foreknowledge of the apocalyptic future as the history-that-already-hurts?

     

    At any rate, for whatever reason, deliverance can only come from a real man, i.e., another machine-guy like the T- 1000, albeit one minus the mutable part, and plus a modicum of moral-sentimental sense. “I know now why you cry,” Arnold the T-800 tells the John-boy in that touching final moment in between defeating the T-1000 and lowering himself down into the vat of molten steel that will terminate him too: “but it’s something I can never do.” The moral equivalent of such affective male positioning in the film, is, of course, that grisly motif we are free to enjoy as sadistic joke and/or, god help us even more, take seriously as moral improvement: i.e., Arnold’s oft-demonstrated commitment to maiming (usually by kneecapping) rather than killing his human opponents, as per the John-boy’s moral command.

     

    By such means T2 gets it all in its renegotiation of paternal masculinity, offering us Arnold’s stunted moral- affective capacities to us simultaneously as hard-wired limitation (push come to shove, he’s still only a machine) and as virtuous necessity (what a man’s gotta do). And indeed we might as well have come at the same point from the opposite direction; for the converse of all I have just been saying is also true, and equally well demonstrated in the final victory over the T-1000, despite its technological superiority to our Arnold. How is it, after all, that Arnold the protector is able to rise from the dead, as it were, even after the T-1000 has driven an iron crowbar straight through his back? Or, perhaps more accurately, how is it that we find ourselves able to believe that he does?

     

    Here, I think, is how. Because, you will recall, at this very moment of greatest extremity, a small red light begins to shine far, far back in his eye–the sign, we are told, of his back-up power supply kicking in. And what then encourages us to swallow such a manifestly inadequate explanation–after all, there is no sensibly consistent reason why a T-1000 would not know of, or would fail to notice, the existence of an earlier model’s alternative energy source–is the primary distinction between 800 and 1000 that has been there all the time, but is now most explicitly given us in the comparative representations of Arnold’s near-death to the T-1000’s dissolution. For the T- 1000, the liquid-metal prototype, there is no deep red light to resort to, no power backup to call on when all else fails; there is only an orgiastic extravaganza of special effects, recapitulating with oozy swiftness all the metamorphoses its liquid-metal shape-changing abilities have enabled it to undertake throughout the film. By contrast, then, with this horrific (but spellbinding!) swoon through difference, is it not clear that compared with the T-1000 Arnold, our new man, has a core-self–or, if you will, individual soul–and just enough of one, whereas T-1000 is the merely the embodiment of amorally evil dispersion itself, endless semiosis as the highest form of technocratic death-rationality?

     

    If so, in its implication that the capacity to feel and make moral choices, and just enough of it, marks our new adult Daddy-man out from both the inhuman rationality (or is it semiosis?) on one side and the all-too-human (or is it fanaticism?) on the other, T2 might plausibly be said to have thrown its family out on the street only to turn it every which way but loose, i.e., only to redirect us and it back to the fixed ambiguities of a masculinist humanism whose very vertiginousness is uncannily, and literally, familiar. But then this reconstruction just at its most triumphantly synthetic moment too half-dwindles, half- mutates into one final set of ambiguous-available options for our attention, anxiety, and desire. At the close of the film, does our pathos go to working-stiff Arnold lowering himself down into the soup, just another self-sacrificing husband and father off to shiftwork at the plant, “just another body doing a job”? Or do we move our sympathies over to the figure of Sarah Connor fiercely holding on to John-boy, and see her instead as that arguably more up-to- date figure of the ’80s and ’90s: the victimized and abandoned single-mother head of a homeless family?

     

    III. Conclusions in Flux

     

    That it ‘keeps going on like this’ is the catastrophe.
     

    –Walter Benjamin13

     

    I’m in the middle of a mystery
     

    –Jeffrey in Blue Velvet

     
    So far, we have looked at the overdetermining yet mutually subverting interplay of formal means Lynch’s Blue Velvet foregrounds as part and parcel of the project of bringing the urban spaces and ur-narrative of noir into the formerly secure domestic spaces of the small town and the family. And we have also examined the narrative- dramatic operations through which Terminator 2 simultaneously reconstructs the family even as it moves it out to the mean streets. One film constructed for and consumed primarily by the culturally upscale, and therefore with a corresponding emphasis on meaning-through-style; the other for a mass audience and, accordingly, with its meanings and judgements carried largely on the back of its plot. Yet the main burden of this conclusion of sorts must be to consider some of the social meanings, possibilities, and effects at play and implicit in the overall project we have seen both films take up in this particular post- generic, postmodernist moment, for all their different ways of working on it: a project we have been suggesting is the domestication of noir.

     

    As a kind of side-door entrance into such considerations, though, it may first be worth taking note of a few aspects of our two films we have left unmentioned until now: specifically, those which draw on the economic and racial codes of mainstream white capitalist culture. The former is most obviously referenced in the very selection of a steel mill as the site of T2‘s climactic ending, given the function of steel production in contemporary socio-economic discourse as the paradigmatic icon of the Fordist industrial world we have now, depending on whom you read, shipped off, frittered away, or even transcended, but in any case lost, in our national economy’s shift toward a “post-Fordism” regime with service rather than manufacturing industries at its core. Yet similar allusions to a vanished or vanishing industrial world can be found throughout Blue Velvet as well, from its frequent reminders to us of its small town’s extractive-industrial base (e.g., in the deejay’s patter, or the image of the millyard in which Jeffrey comes to the morning after being assaulted by Frank) to the ominous brick warehouses in which Frank seems both to live and conduct his dirty work, and arguably even down to the anachronistic “spider-mike” Dorothy employs in the implausibly located night-club where she works.

     

    Though the uses to which such imagery is put in each of our two films are multiple and complex, in Blue Velvet the evocation of industrial culture is part and parcel of its overall construction of an environment where nature and culture lose their borders, and danger and pleasure coincide; whereas Terminator 2‘s uncanny yet nostalgically recalled foundry adds an extra measure of weight and yearning to the triumphant restoration and victory of the old male dominant nuclear family and “breadwinner ethic” that went along with the socioeconomic era just past. More generally still, though, and in keeping with many another contemporary polygeneric film from Lethal Weapon to Batman, the iconic spaces and imagery of Fordist production and industrial culture in both our films function as a late-twentieth century equivalent to the feudal mansion in the chronotope of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel: i.e., as a ruin (albeit a capitalist one) in which to place the monstrous dangers of the present and/or stage a regressive deliverance from out of the sex/gender system of the past.

     

    But I will have more to say elsewhere on the subject of these new capitalist ruins and their deployment as privileged sites of “ruinous” pleasure and recuperation for white straight masculinity.14 So for now let us move along instead, and turn our attention to the inflections and incitements of racial marking in these films, a practice whose operations paradoxically take on all the more significance insofar as racial discourse and positioning may at first sight appear to play such a small part in our two films’ overall schemes, practices and effects. From a normatively “white” point of view, after all, racial marking would seem to be an issue only at those rare moments when someone “non-white” shows up on-screen, and then only as a question of how that “non-whiteness” is defined. What such a normative perspective thus typically, indeed systematically, fails to notice or acknowledge is the essentially relational operation of all racial discourse and representation, or in other words the way every construction of a/the racial Other generates by contrast an implicit definition of what it means to be “the same”–i.e., in the present instance, “white” and by no means just the “whiteness” up on the screen.

     

    Let us take a quick look back at our two films from this relational perspective, then, to see what implications we find in their nominally innocuous-to-honorific depictions of “non-white.” In Blue Velvet, there are the two store- uniformed and aproned “black” clerks who work at Jeffrey’s father’s hardware store, peripheral even as secondary characters, and seemingly memorable only because of the whimsically transparent little shtick they play out in the scant few seconds in which they appear, in which the sighted one uses touch signals to cue the blind one as to price or number of objects, and the blind one pretends he has with magical prescience come up with the number himself. Terminator 2, on the other hand, while “randomizing” race among those cops and hospital attendants destined to be casually crippled or killed, places non-whites in secondary roles of clearly greater significance: Dyson the corporate scientist and his family as African-Americans; Enrique, Sarah’s former soldier-of-fortune comrade-in-arms, and his family as Hispanics.

     

    In T2, in fact, the self-approvingly “non-racist” liberalism we seem to be meant to read off from these last two sets of non-white characters and groups is more or less spelled out within the film. There, Sarah’s musings, quoted above, on how well Arnold the T-800 fills the paternal bill are immediately followed by a softly sunstruck montage of her old Hispanic running buddy’s Mommy-Daddy-Baby unit caught unaware in the midst of their unselfconscious domestic bliss, the sight of which is then immediately linked to a recurrence of that dream of nuclear holocaust that separates Sarah from her own apron-frocked domestic self. Likewise, a short while later, Dyson’s more upscale family life is depicted in similarly idyllic and conventional terms, Mom taking care of Baby, Dad smiling over from where he is hard at work, in the final moment before Sarah’s assault. The liberal progressivism of such representations thus announces itself in the contrast between the settled, happy domesticity of the non-white families up above (Dyson’s) or down below (Enrique’s) the social level of the aberrant and provisional white one we are traveling with. But we could put the same point less generously but no less accurately by saying that such progressivism is itself little more than a stalking horse for the conservative project that rides in on it, i.e., the (re)constitution of the regulative ideal of the old male- dominant oedipal-nuclear family for whites, coming at them, as it were, from both sides.

     

    Moreover, though Terminator 2 neither represents nor endorses any non-familial social ideal, it still seems significant that both our non-white paterfamilia are associated from the start with contemporary visions of social disorder and mass violence. For many if not most white viewers at least, Sarah’s rapid allusion to Enrique’s past as a contra, combined with his guntoting first appearance and his family’s desert location, will call up a melange of unsorted and uneasy impressions from Treasure of the Sierra Madre to the mainstream media’s spotty yet hysterical coverage of a decade of messy and unpleasant struggle “down there” somewhere, plus attendant anxieties over “their” illegal entry and peripheral existences “up here” now; whereas the Afro-American Dyson is straightforwardly depicted as the author of the technological breakthrough that will eventually give us SkyNet, the fully autonomous, computerized war technology that will soon trigger nuclear holocaust as the first move in its war against humanity itself. One wonders, in fact, how many white viewers recoiled from Sarah’s verbal assault on a black man as the incarnation of value-free and death- bound masculinist-corporate technorationality, and on what level of consciousness they did so, and to what effect: how, detached from its unlikely target, is her didactic essentialist feminism taken in? I have no idea, and would not presume to guess. At any rate, though, following this bizarre moment, the film’s treatment of Dyson runs once again in familiar ways, towards familiar ends: it rolls out the Moebius-strip time-travel causality of that ’80s blockbuster Back to the Future in its suggestion that Dyson the black man doesn’t really invent anything15 (the breakthrough he comes up with turns out to be merely an extrapolation from those remnants of the first Terminator, from the first Terminator film, that his corporate employer managed to scoop up); and, as in many another film featuring a once-wayward non-white sidekick, it rehabilitates him Gunga-Din style, by including him into the assault on the power with which he has formerly been associated, an assault whose victory is, not accidentally, coincident with his self-sacrifice and death.

     

    These regulative procedures by which whiteness learns from and is defined by its Other(s) even as those Others are re-subordinated, stigmatized, and/or punished, are not to be found in Blue Velvet, however–or not quite. There another, culturally hipper version of the game of reference and relegation is going on, in which, to put it briefly, racial difference is placed within quotation-marks, and, thus textualized, is both evoked and winked away. So the blackness of the store clerks sits next to the blindness of the one clerk and to the pseudo-magical trick they both like to play, as just so much more semic doodling along the margins of this endlessly decentered text in which each element of the normal and conventional is estranged, while each strangeness or Otherness is subjected to a metonymic slippage that renders it both equivalent to every other otherness and empty in itself: blackness=blindness=stupid trick. In the universe constructed by Lynch’s postmodern aesthetics, there is no need either to make liberal gestures towards the inclusion of the racial Other, or to discipline and punish that Otherness when it appears. Rather, as the whiff of Amos ‘n Andy we can smell around the figures of our two clerks in Blue Velvet suggests, and the overtly racist stereotypes (blacks and creoles as figures for a demonically sexualized and violent underworld) in Lynch’s more recent film Wild at Heart make abundantly clear, even the most offensive tropes may be called back for a culturally upscale and predominantly white audience to enjoy under the new PoMo dispensation that such hoary ideologemes are really only to be delected like everything else in the film, including the tropes of Back Home themselves, as simply so many hyperrealized/evacuated bits of virtually free-floating text.16

     

    Our examination of both our films’ means of (re)producing the locations and distinctive pleasures of whiteness and their regressive deployments of the new ruins of Fordist industrial space thus bring us back to the central vortex or stuck place by which we may know contemporary “family noir” when we find it: in the apparent dissolution of the rigid identity/Otherness categories of the Symbolic in general, and those of the sex/gender system in particular, into a semic flow or play of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those same categories re-emerge with renewed half-life; and in the astonishingly mobile and contradictory circuitry of desire and anxiety, pleasure and fear, that this process both releases and recontains. Terminator 2, as we have seen, plays around with border crossings between male and female, human and machine, the Fordist past and the post-Fordist present, and, for that matter, bio-social predestination (“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”) versus existential possibility (“No fate but what we make”), only to redraw the lines of the old nuclear family system as precisely the last best line of defense against the fluid yet inexorably programmed assaults of the terribly New. Yet this restoration is itself a tenuous and contradictory one, given its figuration through the asexual (or should it be “safe-sexual”?) coalition of a cyborg Dad and a warrior- woman Mom, half-assisted and half-constructed through the educative and team-building efforts of a child who is thus both effectively as well as literally Father to himself (Pfeil 227 and ff.). And Blue Velvet pulls off what is finally the same denaturalizing/restoring act on a more formal level, by presenting us with a pre-eminently oedipal narrative whose recuperations of patriarchal order are riddled with artifice and suspicion, and eroded by a mode of skewed hyper-observation that simultaneously fills and estranges, exceeds and evacuates the conventional terms in which such narratives used to be couched.

     

    Within contemporary political culture, we know what to call this meltdown and restoration of the categories by which women and non-whites are put back in their place (even Blue Velvet‘s Dorothy, like T2‘s Sarah, is firmly, albeit hyperbolically, placed back in the mother role in that film’s closing shots) and white men in theirs, at the same time as the devices of the political rhetoric that does so are brazenly bared, and the very notion of location is smirked away. Its name is Reaganism (or Bushitis now, if you like). And certainly, brushed with the grain as it were, the process by which Blue Velvet‘s Jeffrey gets to answer girlfriend Sandy’s doubt as to whether he’s “a detective or a pervert” by being both, and a good kid besides, is the same as that by which the old actor got to be simultaneously the world’s leading authority figure and its largest, most spectacularized airhead. Likewise, our intense enjoyment in Terminator 2 of the spectacular semiotic mutability of our protean villain–practically Mr. Gynesis in himself–together with the stabilizing satisfactions provided by the return of the classically distinct, embodied (if no less synthetically produced) masculinity of our Arnold as Good Old Dependable Dad,17 rhymes with the joys of the swings themselves over the past four years, from Willie Horton to “Pineapple Head” Noriega to, in Bush’s delivery, “Sodom” Hussein, together with the pleasures available in the manifestly constructed image of Bush as, like the T-800, another kinder, gentler, ass-kicking guy.

     

    Within cultural theory, too, as well as practice, feminist critics such as Suzanne Moore and Tania Modleski have been swift to notice and condemn this same process by which gynesis, the dissolution of the forms and categories of the patriarchal-oedipal-bourgeois Symbolic, can be taken over by white male theorists and cultural producers, the aptly-named “pimps of postmodernism,” to co-opt the pleasures of release and reconstruct new and more mobile means of domination. Yet without disagreeing in any way with these critiques, it remains for us to step beyond or outside them, in accordance with the old Benjaminian dictum that it is preeminently the task of the historical materialist to “brush History”–even, and perhaps especially, that History which is our own present moment– “against the grain” as well (257). In other words, we must attempt to read the particular complex of social- psychological needs and desires that gets ventilated and redirected in these films not only as raw material for a new social contract with the same old Powers That Be, but as a set of contradictory energies which, under the sign of utopia, might be shaped and channeled in progressive directions as well.

     

    It may be, then, that the way to respond to the irresolute resolutions and rebellious conservatism of our films without reproducing their equivalents in theory is to recognize the truth and legitimacy of the needs and desires that underlie the dynamics of the films’ operations while refusing their opposed yet commingled terms. Such a utopian reading would then pass through the recognition that even these admittedly corrupt and pernicious cultural productions have to both rest on and run off a widely-held consensus that the old nuclear, oedipal, male-dominant, breadwinner- ethic-based family is neither a natural nor a desirable set- up, and an equally widely-held and equally justifiable anxiety as to the brutal chaos that ensues when the rules of that old system are tattered or in abeyance without any other emerging to take its place: to pass through that recognition and then to take the combination of desire and anxiety it has found as a resource for a progressive politics, a need for a better sex/gender system that for its fulfillment must be turned into a set of socially transformative demands.

     

    In 1983, as the conclusion of her survey of white male revolts against what she dubbed the “breadwinner ethic” and the oedipal-nuclear families it produced, Barbara Ehrenreich proposed that “male [white male, that is] culture seems to have abandoned the breadwinner role without overcoming the sexist attitudes that role has perpetuated” (182). But she went on to suggest that the only way to begin to move beyond this impasse is to struggle for an expanded, democratized, feminist expansion of the welfare state in which women and men alike earn a “family wage,” and in which women are also provided with the “variety of social supports” they must have “before they are able to enter the labor market on an equal footing with men or when they are unable to do so”– including, and especially, “reliable, high-quality child care” (176-77). Her argument is not that such goals, when achieved, would automatically bring an end to the deflection of male revolts against patriarchy into new forms of sexist oppression, or issue in a feminist utopia; it is simply that without such gains, little new ground for the construction of less oppressive gender roles and relations was–and is– at all likely to open up.

     

    In 1991, of course, after eight more years of repression, rollback and decay, such a program may seem, like Alec Nove’s model of a “feasible socialism,” all the more a combination of the hopelessly insufficient and the wildly utopian. Yet such a hybrid failing, if failing it be, nonetheless seems to me practically unique, and uniquely exemplary, within recent American cultural theory, in its insistence on a given set of programmatic political goals to organize and struggle for; just as that insistence in turn seems infinitely more adequate to the need in the present moment to recover the terrain of political agency and possibility than any rehash of the essentialist vs. post- structuralist debate. The same proposals, and others instead or as well, might be generated out of another, more fully utopian reading of the films we have looked at, and of family noir in general: generated, that is, as so many specific instances of a sense of “canceled yet preserved” we must renew and nourish now within and across our various movements and without any false sense of guarantees. But the main point here is nonetheless that for all the bleakness of the present moment, and indeed precisely because of it, we must nonetheless learn or relearn to propose something more real and more properly political as the outcome of our analyses than the indulgent rages and self-strokings of Identity and/or the jouissance of post-structuralist free-fall. The only alternative to such a “canceled-yet-preserved” renewal of politics itself is the dubious enjoyment of being permanently stuck, like Blue Velvet‘s Jeffrey, “in the middle of a mystery” whose pleasures most of the people we speak for and with can only afford to take in every now and then, when thanks to the magic of motion pictures and political campaigns aimed variously both high and low, at the hip and the masses, the catastrophe “That it goes on like this” is at no small expense made into a little fun.

     

    Notes

     

    A somewhat expanded version of this essay will be published in The Dark Side of the Street, edited by Joan Copjec and Mike Davis (New York and London: Verso, forthcoming). Thanks to Ann Augustine, Gray Cassiday, Michael Sprinker, and Ted Swedenburg for their suggestions, assistance and support, and to the editors of Postmodern Culture for their smart editing; and special thanks to the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University for the fellowship that enabled me finally to get this piece done.

     

    1. Gledhill’s argument for the subversiveness of the films noir of the forties and fifties may be found in “Klute I: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism,” in Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir, 6-21.

     

    2. Here I feel bound to note that my argument regarding these “neo-noirs” converges on that of Fredric Jameson’s concerning what he calls “nostalgia” films of the ’70s and ’80s, but with a difference: I am less concerned to relate their hollowed-out aesthetic of “pastiche” to any larger and more global “cultural logic of Late Capital” than to place that aesthetic within the particular commercial and institutional context in which it makes its initial sense. Cf. Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 19-20 and 279-96.

     

    3. See Gitlin’s account of the rise and fall of Hill Street Blues, and his argument that the “recombinant aesthetics” of television production are the quintessence of late capitalist cultural production, in Inside Prime Time, 273-324 and 76-80 respectively.

     

    4. “A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch,” in Spillers, ed., Comparative American Identities, 142. This is the place, moreover, to declare the general debt my reading of Blue Velvet owes to Moon’s insistent exploration of the film’s sexual-discursive “underside.”

     

    5. “Take something comforting, familiar, essentially American,” she writes, “and turn up the controls, the visual volume. It’s overheated technicolor . . . [e]very detail is picture-perfect and it reeks of danger and failure.” Quoted from the anthology of responses compiled in Parkett 28 (1991), “(Why) Is David Lynch Important?”, 154.

     

    6. Mannoni’s widely-cited formula first appears in his Clefs pour l’Imaginaire, ou L’Autre Scene (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969). For another recent consideration of relationship of the circuitry of disavowal and enjoyment it describes to postmodernist culture, see Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: popular culture and postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 110 ff..

     

    7. The full sentence from which this quoted material comes is worth quoting in full for the linkage Moon makes, and claims the film makes, between the film’s sadomasochistic homoerotics and the mobile discursivity of the desires it displays: When Lynch has Frank mouth the words of the song a second time [Ben having done so, to Frank’s anguished pleasure, back at the whorehouse a short time before], this time directly to a Jeffrey whom he has ritually prepared for a beating by ‘kissing’ lipstick onto his mouth and wiping it off with a piece of blue velvet, it is as though Lynch is both daring the viewer to recognize the two men’s desire for each other that the newly discovered sadomasochistic bond induces them to feel and at the same time to recognize the perhaps more fearful knowledge that what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio- and videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synchings of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires. (146)

     

    8. Buttoning or quilting points: borrowed here from Lacan through Zizek, who lifts the concept far enough out of the bottomless and hopelessly occluded waters of Lacan’s narcissistic language-game to allow me to transliterate and socialize it that much more towards a strictly ideological sense. See especially Zizek’s alternately insightful and hilariously obscurantist essay “‘Che vuoi?’,” in The Sublime Object of Ideology, 87-129.

     

    9. Not to mention noirish melodramas of the same moment: see Mary Ann Doane’s illuminating discussion of these issues in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

     

    10. See the opening pages of his fine discussion of “classical” film genres in The World in a Frame, 104-24.

     

    11. The hysterical panic provoked in (some) male quarters by the appearance of Linda Hamilton’s ninja warrior in T2 and Sarandon and Davis’s incarnation as vengeful bandidas in Thelma and Louise in the same summer of 1991 is a topic worthy of investigation in itself. For a sample, see Joe Urschel’s USA Today editorial, “Real men forced into the woods,” July 26-28, 1991, which argues, as far as I can tell, half-seriously, that the powerful women and male- bashing plots of movies the two aforementioned movies leave men no choice but to join Robert Bly’s mythopoetic “men’s movement” and return to nature! I am grateful to my friend Gray Cassiday for bringing this phenomenon to my attention.

     

    12. Here the comparative term might be Jennifer O’Neal’s fatal paralysis at the sight of her cloned self at the climax of The Stepford Wives (1975).

     

    13. Quoted, from the notes for the uncompleted Passagen-Werk, in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989), 375.

     

    14. See the concluding section of “From Pillar to Postmodern: Race, Class and Gender in the Male Rampage Film,” in Socialist Review and in White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Power, Choice, and Change (forthcoming from Verso, 1993).

     

    15. See “Plot and Patriarchy in the Age of Reagan: Reading Back to the Future and Brazil,” in my Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture (Verso, 1990), especially 235-36.

     

    16. For a prescient early warning of this phenomenon, first spotted in the high-cult realm of the visual arts, see Lucy Lippard, “Rejecting Retrochic,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E. Dutton, 1984), 173-78; and for a recent assessment of its presence and effects in contemporary American popular culture, see Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Premature Postmortems: ‘Postfeminism’ and Popular Culture,” in New Politics, 3.2 (Winter 1991).

     

    17. The distinction between the “classical” and the “grotesque” body is drawn from Bakhtin and elaborated brilliantly by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. What seems worth noting here now, however, about the figure of “our Arnold” and perhaps about other contemporary ideal-images of contemporary white straight masculinity, is the degree to which the “classical” and “grotesque” seem to be mutually contained and containing within such figures, in a way that seems connected to the broader thematic and political argument I am making here.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
    • Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Style. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
    • Braudy, Leo. The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
    • Creed, Barbara. “A journey through Blue Velvet: Film, fantasy and the female spectator.” New Formations 6 (Winter 1988).
    • Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1983.
    • Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
    • Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
    • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
    • Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia: Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (1982).
    • Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
    • Modleski, Tania. “The Incredible Shrinking He(r)man: Male Regression, the Male Body, and Film.” differences 2.2 (1990): 55-75.
    • Moon, Michael. “A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch.” In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Moore, Suzanne. “Getting a Bit of the Other–the Pimps of Postmodernism.” In Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. Ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988: 165-192.
    • Penley, Constance. “Time-Travel, Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia.” In Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London and New York: Verso, 1990.
    • Pfeil, Fred. “Plot and Patriarchy in the Age of Reagan: Reading Back to the Future and Brazil.” In Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. Verso, 1990: 227-241.
    • Ruddick, Sarah. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine, 1990.
    • Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
    • Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York and London: Verso, 1989.

     

  • Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body

    Russell A. Potter

    Dept. of English
    Colby College
    <rapotter@colby.edu>

     

    A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world . . . while taking a stroll outdoors . . . he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father and a mother . . . .1
     

    –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

     

    A schizophrenic out for a walk . . . thus Deleuze and Guattari frame the peripatetic, or as they would say, the nomadic position of their classic critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex. The world of this schizo subject is profoundly machine-made, “everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines–all of them connected to those of the body.”2 And it is in just such a way that Edward Scissorhands, in Tim Burton’s film of the same name, enters the world; left alone and unfinished in the huge gothic mansion of his dead Inventor, not born but built, his only company other dusty machines, filling his days trimming intricate ornamental hedges with his bladed hands. And yet Edward’s own mark is that of the wound, for everything he touches is cut, severed, disjointed. In contrast, down below the mountain on which his mansion stands dwells a sedately postmodern collection of pastel-hued modular homes, each with its nuclear, Oedipal family, its pastel-hued automobile, and its well-watered, neatly manicured lawn.

     

    And yet to simply construe Edward Scissorhands as an incarnation of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo would be to do both texts an unwitting violence, for like the prose monolith of the Anti-Oedipus, Edward Scissorhands discloses a cut, a blade, that severs the very narrative and theoretical strands that would seem to hold it together; coming-apart is what they are all about. Just so Milton, in a moment of delirious excess, wrote Comes the blind Fury, with th’ abhorred shears And slits the thin-spun life.3 Edward’s hands, though, are not hands of fury but hands of desire, of a desire that inescapably wounds everything it embraces. In this sense, they might appear to be thoroughly Oedipal hands–if one reads the wound they inflict as the mark of castration. Yet this wound is deeper and wider, it is the social wound which bleeds out the deferred pain of a banalized generation, the stain under the plush beige carpet, the leak in the somnifacient waterbeds of a suburban existence so attenuated that it has become, in Baudrillard’s terms, a mere simulacrum of itself.

     

    Television and film, of course, are replete with such plateaus, whether it is in the encapsulated fragments of America’s Funniest Home Videos or in the hyperreal simulations of the “holodeck” on board the starship Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yet Edward Scissorhands stands somehow apart, a strange territory where the passions lost in the kitschy planet of Suburbia U.S.A. are recovered via–what else?–the Gothic. With its visceral excesses, its gargoyles of blood and sensuality, the Gothic offers a perfect compensation for the dead historical machinations of the postmodern. Founded itself in a reconstruction of a past that never was, the Gothic does not re-enact history, but withstands it (and its loss). Tim Burton’s twist–and a brilliant one it is–is to conjoin this vividly baroque Gothic with the Industrial Gothic of Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times, where men re-enact catatonically the stiff and jerky motions of the machines they service, and that service them. Like the nefarious automated feeding-machine that nearly drives Charlie to distraction, the principal of the Burtonesque (as of the Chaplinesque) machine is that it do less well something which could be done far more easily by hand. The Inventor’s early inventions, like his cookie-making assembly line, precisely re-enact this scene, breaking eggs and cutting cookies with overcharged zeal; Edward, lacking precisely hands, is himself a consummate machine, in that he does everything less well, except cutting. Therein lies his mad art, and with it, at least temporarily, he reconfigures the postmodern aesthetic, scattering bulbous clowns, dolphins, and dancers among the previously sedate shrubberies of Burton’s postmodern suburbia.

     

    Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic constructions of desiring-production give us, I would argue, an economics as well as a stylistics of the Gothic genre, both in its novelistic and cinematic avatars. The two-phase engine of desiring production is the pivot through which this structure articulates itself. In the first phase, the organs-partial objects–bodily parts disjointed from the whole–appear as persecuting machines: schizo voices undercut reality with paranoiac narratives, dead hands crawl out of the grave to avenge their killer, telltale hearts give the lie to narratorial sanity. In the second phase, the body-without-organs, or BwO, re-absorbs these partial and persecutorial fragments: the infamous schizo Judge Schreber swallows his larynx accidentally, but is healed by the “miraculating” rays that seem to radiate from his anus; the Blob absorbs its victims into an undifferentiated amoebic mass; the Golem returns to clay.

     

    Edward, too, inhabits this dual movement; while he is gentle, his immaculate and lethal hands have a mind all their own; the same hands which shape surreal topiary hedges with a gardener’s grace “accidentally” slash Edward’s own face, and the faces of those he loves. On a broader scale, Edward himself is the persecutorial agent of the suburban enclave whose practiced conformities he unwittingly shreds. Exhibited at a neighborhood barbecue, displayed in a classroom “show-n-tell,” a guest on a television talk-show, in every instance he severs and disjoints the body of the socius. Peg’s endeavor to graft Edward back into family and community leads instead to the rupture of the community’s own unarticulated sutures of desire, to the re-opening of scars that not even the “miraculating” cinematic machine of “love” can heal. The drama of Edward Scissorhands, consequently, is not the persecution and destruction of the “monster,” but rather the implosion of the Oedipal family, which is disclosed as monstrous–the drama, in short of Anti-Oedipus.

     

    Just as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Edward Scissorhands mobilizes against the Oedipal/capitalistic strictures of desire. The unfinished thing about Edward is not the Oedipal signifier of the phallus, but rather his hands, producers of sensation, the quintessential synecdoche of sensitivity (handle with care, hand-made, touched, touching). In schizo-analytic terms, the hands, while “partial” like all desiring-machines, bring with their overload of sensation the illusion of becoming-complete. In drawings of the body scaled to represent the relative number of nerve endings in various organs, the hands loom grotesquely large over an insectine body, their mass figuring an excess of sensation. In the place of these sensory machines, Edward has fists full of blades, machines of anti-production, machines that can do only injury, even when he reaches to stroke or embrace. As much as Edward is gentle, his hands are remorseless; they twitch involuntarily at the approach of the unknown, and when his emotions overwhelm him they cut maniacally at bushes, clothing, and people.

     

    It would be hard to imagine a scene more traumatic than that in which the Inventor, just as he is on the verge of presenting Edward with hands, falls to the floor in the spasms of death. When the gift is revealed, Edward’s eyes open wide, and he briefly attempts to touch these new hands in his scissored grasp. Then, as Edward looks on, the pleasure in the Inventor’s eyes is replaced with a look of panic; as he slumps to the floor the human hands are thrust onto Edward’s bladed fingers and fall, broken into fragments along with the sensations they might have produced. Reaching out to caress the Inventor’s face, Edward instead leaves a long red gash on his cheek. The Oedipal crisis of desire-as-lack (manque) is subsumed within the larger crises of desiring-production, whose machines, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “only work when they break down.” Edward’s problematic humanity begins with this breakage, but within the Gothic hallways of the inventor’s mansion it remains unproductive, a celibate machine whose tasks never extend beyond keeping the hedges trimmed in a garden no-one but Edward sees.

     

    This isolation is broken when Peg, the neighborhood Avon Lady, and as such a (minor) agent of the capitalistic machine, comes to call. Overcoming her shock at the first sight of Edward, she recovers herself as soon as she sees the cuts on his cheeks (the narcissistic touch, too, opens only wounds for Edward). “At the very least, let me give you a good astringent,” she says as she pats the terrified Edward’s cheeks with a moistened cotton ball, “and this will help to prevent infection.” When she takes Edward home, she unwittingly opens a crisis within the unreal reality of her neighborhood; having brought the “real” (Gothic Edward, whose schizo hands will make the unheimlich out of the allzuheimlich) within the capitalist machine, all other values come into question–or rather, the absence of value as such is disclosed, as soon becomes evident in the dinner-table moralizing of Peg’s husband Bill. Edward’s true allies, however, are not the adults, who have already taken up their places within the capitalistic desiring-machines (cd players, stereos, kitchen appliances, waterbeds), but with children and adolescents, whose crisis is suddenly shown to be not domestic but fundamentally social. By re-enacting the Anti-Oedipal moment, Edward breaks open the “family unit” and discloses a cut that runs across the boundaries between the “nuclear” families in Peg’s neighborhood and the social production of desire.

     

    As the schizo, the outcast, Edward poses a threat not only to the “family,” but to all the other microfascistic machines that had guaranteed the inviolability of the unreal suburb. Esmerelda, the local born-again Christian, denounces Edward as bearing “the mark of Satan,” and attributes the problems which Edward’s presence produces to his diabolical mission (Edward’s answer, carving her shrubbery into a grinning demon’s head, gives a perfect schizo gloss on her paranoia).

     

    The Hands

     

    Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor . . . .4
     

    –Horace Walpole, of The Castle of Otranto

     

    The hands–les mains (French amplifies the schizo by placing “hands” in a neutral and impersonal form)–floating and disembodied in the opening credits of Scissorhands, hands that will never find their way to Edward’s body. If the brain is coded as the seat of identity (the transfer of brains in Frankenstein and its heirs, the suspended brain common to so many science fiction scenarios)5–the hands are coded as the site of sensibility. The hands are right there in the “laboratory” scene; the horror at their transfer, their stitches is at least as great as the horror of the transferred brain. “There’s nothing to fear! Look! No blood, no decay . . . just a few stitches.” So Henry Frankenstein comforts his assistant when the monster’s hands arouse his terror. The horror of the transplanted hands is echoed by Henry’s own admixture of pride and fear at the work of his own hands–“Think of it! The brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body I made in [sic] my own hands (holds up his hands and gazes at them) . . . in my own hands!”

     

    Henry’s lines, perhaps inadvertently, conflate two metonymic deployments of the hands: “a body I made with my own hands” and “(his) life is in my hands.” A similar condensation–though visual rather than linguistic–occurs in Mad Love (1932). A concert pianist named Orlac loses his hands in an accident, but is given new hands (taken from an executed murderer) by a demented surgeon named Gogol (Peter Lorre). These hands, however, seem to have retained their murderous propensity; Orlac’s playing deteriorates as the hands restlessly finger various lethal implements. At the same time, driven by desire for Orlac’s wife, Gogol attempts to drive Orlac insane by visiting him in disguise, donning artificial hands and a neck brace so as to convince him that he is the murderer come back from the dead. Orlac’s hands eventually come to the rescue, however; when Gogol assaults his wife, Orlac kills him with a single skilled throw of a knife.

     

    This theme has been repeated (with somewhat less success) many times, most recently in Body Parts (1991), which in many ways is a kind of remake of Mad Love. Yet the re-suturing of the severed hand has hardly put an end to the terror of the hand all by itself. In The Hand (1981), Michael Caine plays a cartoonist whose severed hand embarks on a murder spree. Suggestively, Caine undergoes psychotherapy, and becomes convinced that the disembodied hand is a mere hallucinatory projection of his own murderous desire–a plausible solution, at least until the hand sneaks up on Caine’s therapist and strangles her while Caine watches from across the room. The hand, it would seem, has a mind of its own, if only because of its extraordinary intensity of sensation; a severed hand takes with it all that is palpable, caressable, the feelable–or brings with it all the callous(ed) insensitivity society attributes to a murderer, much as the “criminal brain” that Frankenstein transplants into his monster in the 1931 film version.

     

    To lose a hand, of course, is one thing; never to have one is another, and to have something else in their place still another. Edward is the consummate guest, well-trained in etiquette by the Inventor, but when he cuts the family meatloaf with his blades, not everyone will eat it–he has touched it with his hands, and it becomes in a sense unclean. As the opening scene of the film frames it, there once was a man “who had scissors for hands,” that is, both in the place of and as hands. In the place of hands, they are a disaster, cutting those Edward tries to help or hold; as hands they are the producers of his sudden success–as hedge-trimmer, dog-clipper, barber. A number of sexual double-entendres rotate around Edward’s hands, as the women in the neighborhood fantasize about their erotic possibilities: <

     

    Joyce:
    Oooh. Completely different.
    Neighbor 1:
    No kidding.
    Neighbor 2:
    He’s so…
    Neighbor 3:
    Mysterious.
    Joyce:
    Do you imagine those hands are hot or cold? And just think about what a single snip could do…
    Neighbor 1:
    Or undo

     

    The men, for their part, are equally unnerved about Edward’s hands, but their uneasiness is translated into humor: “Whoa, that’s a heck of a handshake you got there, Ed.” One elderly male barbecue-goer does confide in Edward, however: “I have my own infirmity. Never did me a bit of harm. Took some shrapnel during the war, and ever since then, I can’t feel a thing. Not a damn thing. Listen–don’t let anyone ever tell you you have a handicap.” Edward is drawn out of this conversation, though, by Joyce and the other women, who line up to feed him mouthfuls of “Ambrosia salad” and other earthly delights. Their feeding marks the ineptitude of Edward’s hands (at that point employed as shishkebabs), as also their maternal and sexual interest in his body.

     

    The Fabricated Body

     

    Professor:
    And you really believe that you can bring life to the dead?
    Henry Frankenstein:
    That body is not dead. It has never lived. I created it. I made it with my own hands from the bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere…

     
    From its inception, the Gothic has posited and reproduced a legion of partial, disjointed, or decomposed body parts, which by their very existence accuse the waking world of a fundamental illegitimacy. The giant, disembodied hand whose mysterious appearance in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1761) gives the lie to Prince Manfred’s claims of nobility; the detachable hand that horrifies Sir Bertrand in Anna Barbauld’s “Sir Bertrand” (1792); the severed hand that establishes the guilt of its former owner in Mary-Anne Radcliffe’s Manfrone (1828)–function as the organs- partial-objects which disclose the founding aporia of the socius. The old man’s blind eye, and the relentless beating of his disembodied heart, speak the j’accuse of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as does the barrage of ventriloquized voices in Wieland; it ceases to matter whether they are “real” or “hallucinatory,” they are real enough to drive rationality into madness.

     

    Something still more deeply terrifying takes place when, as in Frankenstein, these body parts are assembled to form the unwhole-y whole of the monstrous body. The horror and revulsion of this body is its disjunction–its organs have been separately acquired from a shadowy contingent of cadavers, then sewed back together in such a way that the stitch-marks show. The stitches in the makeup for Boris Karloff’s early film personation of Frankenstein terrify because they disclose the stitches within ourselves, the “dissolving sutures” that transgress our own body, inasmuch as it traverses the amorphous plane of the Body without Organs. This “BwO,” as it is often abbreviated, is a kind of anti-body, a repository of the not-body; organs cling to it as parasites or (in Deleuze and Guattari’s own metaphor) “like medals jingling on the chest of a wrestler.” The Oedipal, familial, oral-anal organization that has been imposed on the body exacts a terrific price–its price is no less than the BwO, whose desire will never be eaten by a mouth or contained by an anus.

     

    The fabricated body of the Gothic is also a shadow of the terror of libidinal organization; it is positioned between the Oedipalized body with its territorialized zones and the zoneless BwO. Existing partly in both worlds, it is a threat to both, as well as a loving secret; no one who has kissed a lover’s scar can deny it. Every scar is potentially a mouth or an anus, or both–a kind of opening unmarked by libidinal fascisms. The fabricated body, covered with scars, is an erotic feast as well as a terror (that is, a tearer) of flesh. Edward’s facial scars are self-inflicted, “accidental”–and yet Peg Boggs spends the better part of Edward’s suburban sojourn trying to find the particular admixture of cosmetics which will conceal them. “We’ll cover up the scars and start with a completely smooth surface,” Peg muses at one point, but her efforts result only in a gooey paste that makes Edward look worse than ever.

     

    Peg’s desire to smooth Edward’s scars thus can be read not only as a desire to erase the terror of Edward’s hands but as reaction against the horror that Edward’s entire body is an assemblage, a mass of sutures, a fabricated and anti-Oedipal anti-territory. We can see this not only through Edward’s leather armor (or is it his skin?), which jangles with studs and metal buckles, but through the scene staged as “The Etiquette Lesson.” Here Edward, lying in bed, thinks back to the impossible moment of his assemblage. As the camera pans around the room in the opening shot, we hear the Inventor’s voice declaiming a lecture on etiquette: “Should the man rise when he accepts his cup of tea?” The camera pans past an oversize book, its pages turned by a sudden breeze; at the word “man” we see Edward’s bodily development. In the early sketches he resembles others of the inventor’s robots, with an egg-like torso and a spherical head; in later drawings arms are attached, and the torso is filled out; the face is given features, the arms a more hominid form. Like the Inventor’s other creatures, Edward is held together by a series of belts–figurations, like Frankenstein’s scars, of his body’s partiality. We see the addition of the scissor hands, and their (unfulfilled) replacement by human ones.

     

    When the camera arrives at Edward, we see that he is not yet himself assembled; his torso and head rest on a kind of workbench, with arms and legs lying laid nearby. At length the Inventor closes the book of etiquette, proclaiming it “boring,” and opens a book of poems (which turn out to be limericks). In a voice of mock-solemnity, he intones

     

    There was an old man from the Cape
    Who made himself garments of crepe.
    When asked, “Will they tear?”
    He replied, “Here and there,
    But they keep such a beautiful shape.”

     

    The “clothing of crepe” (pre)figures Edward’s own fragile skin, the fragility of the Inventor’s wrinkled skin, the fragility of his body and bodies in general. Edward, not yet bodied himself, smiles tentatively, and the Inventor parentally intones “That’s right. Go ahead, smile. It’s funny!” Yet the paradox here is that the inventor himself is both more and less than a parent, and Edward more and less than a child. Edward truly possesses language before he possesses a body, and as a result he can consciously inhabit zones which others will only know in dreams–and (“on the other hand”) he can make mistakes no human child would make. To be born, and to grow, in an Oedipalized family is one thing–and to be built, to come into being partially whole and yet wholly partial, is another. Edward’s inception is not a conjunction but a disjunction, as the planned hands are broken and lost (they shatter upon impact) and he remains not incomplete but unfinished.

     

    Edward’s secrets–that no amount of make-up will cover our scars, that the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do with society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows, food), that our own sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of extortion or holding-hostage of our bodies–are, in the end, too much to bear. Jim, as the quintessential fascist, wants him out: “You destroy everything you touch!” he yells. Kim, moved by the uncanny recognition that her home is not her home, her parents are not her parents, her boyfriend is not her boyfriend, alone knows and moves to Edward’s side. But she cannot remain, not at least if this film is to have something we could call an ending, something that can re-contain just enough of the terror it discloses so that we can all go back home to our waterbeds and sleep in peace.

     

    Edward Is Dead: Long Live Edward

     

    Many film critics, such as Pauline Kael, have faulted Edward Scissorhands for what they see as its maudlin sensibility (Kael calls it “Frankenstein’s monster by way of L. Frank Baum”)6 or its melodramatic denouement. All this assumes, of course, that some generic codes have been violated, or at least that the audience has somehow been led to expect some other kind of ending. Leaving aside the fact that the Gothic itself is historically an outgrowth of the sentimental, there is no reason to expect that the drama at work in this film be univocal, even at the start (something which is signalled immediately in the juxtaposition of suburban tract homes and gothic castle). I would argue indeed that several filmic machines are at work here, each with its own imperatives: the Gothic Romance (as in Wuthering Heights–storm-crossed lovers against the world of social conventions), the Dark Hero genre (this was after all the film Tim Burton made immediately after Batman), the Adolescent Horror Carrie), not to mention the sensitive-creature-from-another-world (long before E.T., there was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Revenge of the Creature (1955)).

     

    Yet the strongest narrative underlying Edward Scissorhands, as I have suggested above, is clearly that of the filmic Frankenstein. And, as the inheritor of that tradition, Edward is driven to re-enact–albeit with many suggestive differences–the inexorable expulsion and persecution of the monstrous. The scene is so familiar as to be a cliche; all one needs is a few dozen “peasants” armed with torches storming the door of some castle. Yet Burton’s film displaces that cliche by rendering ambiguous any comfortable distances of time, place, or social class– in the process indicting the very audiences most likely to view his film. Indeed, by taking Edward out of the mansion and into the suburbs Burton re-enacts the history of the Gothic; “Mrs. Radcliffe” (of Udolpho) moves in next door to “Mrs. Smith” (of Mrs. Smith’s Pies), and it turns out they have known each other all along.

     

    In the commodity-fetishism of Burton’s suburbs, chronology is deliberately scrambled, such that commodities, like the clip-art cutouts of postmodern collages, drift about in their own free play of signification. 90s appliances, such as CD players, exist side-by-side with 50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps; the parents are from 60s sitcoms but the kids are from 21 Jump Street. The cars–at least those we see up-close–are of early-70s vintage, as are the houses seen in exterior shots. Yet even here, the pastel coloration–one might even say, colorization–of these houses refuses a simplistic mimesis. Like Andy Warhol’s brightly colored silkscreens of Mao Tse-Tung or Marilyn Monroe, these houses are in effect coloring-book reproductions whose hyperveracity gives the lie to realism. The final effect is a kind of timeless time, a place without chronology or geography–in short, the suburbs as seen by those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history.

     

    Yet the apparent smoothness of this untrammelled suburban territory belies the alienation–both of others and of itself–which is the founding ethos of the suburbs. In her recent study, Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines, Constance Perin argues that one thing that suburbia U.S.A. has always done, and done well, is to stare at, ostracize, alienate, and expel those (re)marked as different.7 The modalities of suburban demonization indeed seem to follow remarkably similar patterns, whether the person so demonized is a newcomer, a retiree, a “handicapped” person, or a someone “just passing through.” Edward, while initially welcomed almost manically, is soon regarded with deep suspicion, especially after the break-in at Jim’s parents’ house; by serving as the scapegoat for this crime, Edward marks both himself and his adoptive “family” as outcasts.

     

    It is Kim’s boyfriend Jim who proves to be the ultimate local agent of this suburban fascism, just as he is the ultimate Oedipal subject. Jim’s father keeps his electronic toys in a locked room outfitted with state-of-the-art burglar alarms; as Jim himself says in a dinnertable jab, “they keep things pretty much locked up. My father has his own room for his stuff to make sure I can’t get any use of it.” For “when the family ceases to be a unit of production and of reproduction . . . it is father-mother that we consume”8:

     

    Kim:
    But that’s breaking and entering!
    Jim:
    Look, my parents have insurance up the rear, okay? What’ll it cost ’em–a little hassle? That’s about it. A week and my dad’ll have a new and better everything.
    Kim:
    We can’t!
    Jim:
    Look, there’s a guy who’ll give us cash for this stuff!
    Kim:
    Jim, I don’t want to.
    Jim:
    What–you don’t want us to have our own van like Denny’s when we could be all by ourselves whenever we like? Huh? With a mattress in the back?
    Kim:
    Well, why can’t you just do it?
    Jim:
    Because my father keeps the damn room locked. We need Edward to get in.

    vKim:Well, can’t you take the key, like, when he’s sleeping or something?Jim:You don’t understand. The only thing he holds on to tighter is his dick.Kim:huhm…Jim:C’mon, Kim. Razor Blades’ll do anything for you!Kim:That’s not true!Jim:Oh no? Why don’t you ask him?

     

    In the end, Edward performs this sacrifice for Kim, whom he has loved from the moment he sees her face in the mandatory assemblage of family photographs (all families are simulacra, D&G might say) that adorns Peg’s mantelpiece.9 And yet Kim does not know until some time later that Edward knew all along that the house they were breaking into was Jim’s, and that he knowingly committed this crime for her. When she finally learns the truth, she recognizes at once what Bataille might call the sovereign abandon of Edward’s gesture and despises Jim. Jim’s recognition of Kim’s rejection sets off his maniacal determination to destroy Edward, even if he can only alienate Kim further by doing so. Thus, in a classically gothic denouement, Kim’s shift of love and allegiance exposes the inhumanity of the “human” and the humanity of the “inhuman.”

     

    Yet there is something more here, something beyond a mere farce of the Oedipal drama. In schizoanalytic terms, Edward has not merely broken the Oedipal equation, he has short-circuited it. Edward, like Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 film, is somehow allied to electricity; asked by the talk-show host about whether he has a girlfriend, Edward touches the microphone stand with his hand, grounding it out and spraying sparks all over the stage. Now, having taken for a moment Jim’s place in the Oedipal chain, he draws its flow outward, away from the nuclear family; he grounds it out, unbinding its libidinal cathexes. Edward does not simply castrate (one knife would be sufficient for that–why have ten?), he unhinges all organs from their Oedipal affixations, he pulls the surface of the Body Without Organs taut, turning velcro into teflon. The Oedipal crisis is itself placed in crisis; its “undoing” turns out not to be castration after all, but indifference.

     

    Jim, left not only without the phallus but without recourse to the Oedipal narrative which offered his only prospect of ever claiming it, is thrown into a frenzied spiral of jealousy. He is activated, as it were, as the community’s agent to expel the intruder who has threatened its libidinal and social borders. No one is willing to throw Edward out, but no one is willing to stop Jim from throwing him out. The local policeman, suggestively, is on Edward’s side, giving an undertone of the many films of the 50s which implicitly or explicitly took up the question of unpopular justice (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird), in the place of what he regards as an imaginary threat, he drives to the mansion’s gate and fires his revolver into the air, telling the neighbors that “it’s over” and that they “can all go home now.” But where is “home”? Jim’s not there, wherever it is; even as Edward is running, slicing off the clothes he wore during his stay at the Boggs’s, Jim is swigging Jack Daniel’s in the back of his friend’s van, getting his “courage” up for the inevitable confrontation.

     

    While following the conventions to a point, the final scenes of the film offer a subtle yet crucial set of differences–differences which, as in other parts of the film, initiate slippages that belie their apparent conventionality. Edward flees to his “castle,” with Kim and Jim right behind him; the suburban “peasants” are held in reserve. Jim sets about killing Edward with mock-Eastwood machismo, first with a gun, and (when that fails) by breaking beams over his back. Kim intervenes, and ends up atop the prostrate Edward; in one uncanny moment she grasps Edward’s hand and menaces Jim with it. When Edward and Jim face off a moment later, it seems that Kim has finally given Edward the cue for what he must do, as he snips the thin-spun life out of Jim’s chest with a single thrust of a finger. Locked out of his parents’ Oedipal sanctum, and superseded by Edward in Kim’s affections, Jim dies quickly and easily–as Deleuze and Guattari say, “4, 3, 2, 1, 0– Oedipus is a race for death.”10 His body, discovered below the window, does not even hold enough interest to make the neighbors linger. What the neighbors want is Edward, and Kim gives “him” to them; descending the stairs, she seizes upon one of the inventor’s discarded alternate hands. “He’s dead,” she proclaims to the neighbors, waving the hand aloft: “See?”

     

    This disembodied hand, of course, is no guarantee, but it is readily taken as one by the assembled crowd. One thinks for a strange moment about Freddie Kruger’s bladed glove in Nightmare on Elm Street; while the glove itself may be removed and hidden in the basement, it doesn’t prevent Freddie from coming back (not only in that film, but in a long string of lucrative sequels). Yet the horror of Edward Scissorhands is a veritable antipodes to Elm Street and its sequels. Its ethic is not the fear of the nightmare Other, but a realization that in expelling otherness is born self-alienation, an alienation which Edward and his hands disclose, and the crisis of adolescence understands, but the more thoroughly Oedipalized adults have forgotten, plowed under, surrounded hedges and fences. Oh keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

     

    And so the film closes in upon itself, even though closure is not quite what it offers. We pan back again from Edward’s house, and into the window of the room where Kim, now white-haired, sits recounting the tale of Edward to her granddaughter. One wonders aloud: and what was her history, the history of some other love, that has descended into this young girl who sits under a heavy coverlet listening to her grandmother’s tale. And the difference: “You see, before he came down, it never snowed . . . but now, it does.” The snow, the flurry of ice-flakes, turns out to be the detritus from Edward’s relentless sculpting, a statement of love via surreality and excess, even as Edward effectively is pushed back into a mythic realm, to the status of a kind of local sky-god. A fairy tale after all–or is it? In some strange way, the frame-narrative is unable to quite contain Edward– he is neither killed in the manner of Frankenstein’s monster, nor saved (like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast). Kim pronounces what ought in the circumstances to be the magic words: “I love you”–and yet nothing happens. Edward remains untransformed and unassimilated; his ice sculptures freeze time, and in them Kim remains a young woman dancing in the snow. Immaculate in their lifelessness, these figures of ice themselves constitute a kind of machine, a memory palace, where Edward is not the fabricated but the fabricator. From the shreds of these fabrications, snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing–and undoing.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lee. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 2.

     

    2. Anti-Oedipus, 2.

     

    3. John Milton, “Lycidas,” lines 75-6, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 160.

     

    4. Horace Walpole, letter to William Cole (March 9, 1765), qtd. in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), xi.

     

    5. See for example Donavan’s Brain (1953), in which the brain of a dead millionaire keeps a scientist chained to its will; The Man Without a Body (1958), in which a man’s talking head is kept artificially alive; The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1959), where a man preserves his dead wife’s head in a pan of nutrient solution, and embarks on a quest for a body to attach to it–or more recently the well-known Star Trek episode where Mr. Spock’s brain is stolen and wired into a planet-regulating computer network.

     

    6. See Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: New Age Daydreams.” The New Yorker vol. 66 no. 44 (Dec. 17, 1990): 115-121.

     

    7. See the suggestive chapters “Penalizing Newcomers,” “Tattling on Neighbors,” and “Imperfect People,” all in Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988).

     

    8. Anti-Oedipus, 265.

     

    9. Edward’s own schizo assemblage (which significantly is not on the mantelpiece but in the fireplace) consists of newspaper clippings with headlines such as “BOY BORN WITHOUT EYES READS WITH HIS HANDS,” “I’LL NEVER DIET AGAIN,” and “NEWLYWEDS, 90 & . . . TO HAVE A BABY”–an anti-Oedipal anti-family whose membership is open only to those (re)marked as singular.

     

    10. Anti-Oedipus, 359.

     

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    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
     

     

         Journal and Book Announcements:

1)   _The Centennial Review_
2)   _Sub Stance_
3)   _Public Culture_
4)   _College Literature_
5)   _Poetics Today_
6)   _XB_
7)   _Perforations_
8)   _Amazons International_
9)   _After the Book_ { a special issue by _Perforations_ }
10)  _Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry_
11)  _Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction_
12)  _Positions_
13)  _SOPHIA_
14)  _Delphi Network Newsletter_
15)  _PYNCHON NOTES_
16)  _Beyond Metafiction: Self- Consciousness in Soviet        
          Literature_
17)  _GNET_: An Archive and Electronic Journal

     Calls for Papers and Participants:

18)  Association for Computers and the Humanities Association for
          Literary and Linguistic Computing
19)  _Without any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the       
          Vernacular_
20)  _MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies_
21)  _Vietnam Generation_
22)  Composition as Explanation

     Conferences and Societies

23)  _Cylinder_
24)  SUNY Stonybrook Conference on Reproductive Technologies:
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25)  1992 Modern Languages Association Convention
26)  Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
27)  Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process (American
          Anthropological Association)
28)  _Rethinking Marxism_: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and
          Society
29)  31st annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and
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30)  University of Manitoba: A Consortium for Network Publication
          of Refereed Research Journals
31)  8th Annual Conference on the Scientific Study of          
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32)  Program of Events for the V2 Organization
33)  3rd Washington, D.C. Virtual Reality Conference 

     Networked Discussion Groups

34)  _SEMIOS-L_
35)  _SOCHIST_
36)  _INTERDIS_

     Employment

37)  Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University

     Grants

38)  Travel Grants to the Center for Sales, Advertising, and
          Marketing History Special Collections Library, Duke
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1)-------------------------------------------------------------

_The Centennial Review_            

Edited by R. K. Meiners

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

Issues now available:

Fall 1991:  _Discourses of Mourning, Survival, and Commemoration_
Articles by James Hatley, Donald Kuspit, Tony Brinkley and Joseph
Arsenault, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Peter Balakian, R. K.
Meiners, Louis Kaplan, Hans Borchers, Morris Grossman, Berel
Lang, David William Foster; Poetry by Dimitris Tsaloumas, Sherri
Szeman, Walter Toneeo, Henry Gilfond, Elizabeth R. Curry, Peter
Balakian.

Winter 1992:  _Cultural Studies_  Articles by Douglas Kellner,
Eyal Amiran, John Unsworth, and Carol Chaski, Steven Best, Janet
Staiger, Jeffrey Seinfeld, Charles Altieri, Tony Barnstone;
Poetry by Hillel Schwartz, Robert Hahn, Michael Atkinson, John
Hildebidle.

Spring 1992:  Articles by Stephen Gill, Peter Baker, R. M. Berry,
Carole Anne Taylor, Michel Valentin, Edward M. Griffen, Robert
Erwin, Ronald Hauser, Karl Albert Scherner (transl. Ronald
Hauser), Diana Dolev and Haim Gordon, Albert Feuerwerker, Donald
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2)-------------------------------------------------------------

_Sub Stance_

Edited by:  Sydney Levy and Michel Pierssens

Published: 3/year   ISSN: 0049-2426

Promotes new thoughts by leading American and European authors
which alter the perception of contemporary culture--be it
artistic, humanistic, or scientific.  Represents literary theory,
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3)-------------------------------------------------------------

_Public Culture_

Edited by  Carol A. Breckenridge

Engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural
flows and public cultures in a diasporic world.

Volume 4, Number 1 (Fall 1991)
   * Looking at Film Hoardings       R. Srivatsan
   * The Doors of Public Culture     Pradip Krishen
   * The Meaning of Baseball in 1992 Bill Brown
   * Becoming the Armed Man          J. William Gibson
   * The Function of New Theory      Xiaobing Tang
   * Worldly Discourses              Dan Rose
   * Voices of the Rainforest        Steven Feld
   * Anuradhapura                    Wimal Disanayake
   * River and Bridge                Meena Alexander

Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 1992)
   * The Banality of Power and the
     Aesthetics of Vulgarity in
     the Postcolony                  Achille Mbembe
   * Take Care of Public Telephones  Robert J. Foster
   * The Death of History?           Dipesh Charrabarty
   * The Public Fetus and the Family
     Car                             Janelle Sue Taylor
   * Race and the Humanities: The
     End of Modernity?               Homi Bhabha
   * "Disappeating" Iraqis           David Prochaska
   * Algeria Caricatures the Gulf
     War                             Susan Slyomovics
   * Mobilizing Fictions             Robert Stam
   * Television and the Gulf War     Victor J. Caldarola

_Public Culture_ is published biannually.  A years subscription
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4)-------------------------------------------------------------

_College Literature_

Edited by  Kostas Myrsiades

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

_Poetics Today_

Edited by:  Itamar Even-Zohar

International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature
and Communication

_Children's Literature_  A special issue edited by Zohar Shavit.

This volume addresses the wide spread of cultural issues raised
by the study of children's culture, the teaching function of
children's literature, and current thinking on the demarcation of

boundaries between children's and adult literature.
$14, 261 pages, 13:1 Spring 1992

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

_Xb_

   A bibliographic database of the literature of xerography,
(photo)copier art, electrostatic printing and electrographic art,
seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use of
duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic
purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the Procite
bibliographic software for the Macintosh. An ongoing art
information-information art project, Xb requests submissions
especially in machine-readable form but also in other media
formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings,
exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search
printouts and information on disk, all these are of interest.
A copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette
(Procite databases work equally well on Mac or IBM) to each
contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process
and a list of participants.

Submissions via mailways, telephone or Bitnet/Internet/ Well to:

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phone: (207)829-3666

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

_Perforations_

_After the Book: Writing Literature Writing Technology_
A special issue of _Perforations_ magazine, is now in production.
Contributors include:

*Virtual Orphicality: Telepathy, Virtuality,
 and Encysted Sense Ratios              Robert Cheatham
*Gaps, Maps, and Perception: What Hypertext Readers
 (Don't) do                             Jane Yellowlees Douglas
*Yet Still More (Storyspace hypertext)  Shawn FitzGerald
*Colloquy and Intergrams: Two Interactive
 Prosodies                              Richard Gess
*The Computational Score                Francesco Giomi
*After the Book?                        Carolyn Guyer
*Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as
 Carnival                               Terence Harpold
*Hypertext Narrative                    Michael Joyce
*Wasting Time (IBM-compatible
 narrabase)                             Judy Malloy
*Dreamtime (HyperCard hyperfiction);
 Shadow of the Informand: A Rhetorical
 Experiment in Hypertext (essay)        Stuart Moulthrop
*Hypertext: Permeable Skin              Martha Petry
*Poetics and Hypertext                  Jim Rosenberg
*Contingency, Liberation, and the
 Seduction of Geometry: Hypertext as
 an Avant-Garde Medium                  Martin Rosenberg

Plus fiction by Dea Anne Martin, comics by Grace Braun, poetry by
Joe Amato, cultural commentary by Alan Sondheim, and more.

_Perforations_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is
published by Atlanta's Public Domain arts collective. To order
"After the Book," send a check or money order for $20 (payable to
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Public Domain
PO Box 8899
Atlanta GA 30306-0899

Voice mail: (404) 612-7529. E-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu

Guest Editor: Richard Gess

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

_Amazons International_

   An electronic digest newsletter for and about Amazons
(physically and psychologically strong, assertive women who are
not afraid to break free from traditional ideas about gender
roles, femininity and the female physique) and their friends and
lovers.  _Amazons International_ is dedicated to the image of the
female hero in fiction and in fact, as it is expressed in art and
literature, in the physiques and feats of female athletes, in
sexual values and practices, and provides information, discussion
and a supportive environment for these values and issues.  Gender
role traditionalists and others who are opposed to Amazon ideals
should not subscribe.

Contact: thomas@smaug.uio.no.

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

_After the Book_

_WRITING LITERATURE/WRITING TECHNOLOGY_

_PERFORATIONS_ NO.3 SPRING/SUMMER 1992

This special issue of _PERFORATIONS_ features a gathering of new
essays on electronic writing and three new electronic texts in
HyperCard, Storyspace, and IBM formats. Contributors and
contributions include:

*New Dystopian Comics                    Grace Braun
*Virtual Orphicality: Telepathy,
 Virtuality, and Encysted Sense Ratios   Robert Cheatham
*Gaps, Maps, and Perception: What
 Hypertext Readers (Don't) Do            Jane Douglas
*Yet Still More (Storyspace hypertext)   Shawn FitzGerald
*Colloquy and Intergrams: Two
 Interactive Prosodies                   Richard Gess
*The Computational Score                 Francesco Giomi
*After the Book?                         Carolyn Guyer
*Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival Terry Harpold
*Hypertext Narrative                     Michael Joyce
*Wasting Time (IBM-compatible electronic
 fiction)                                Judy Malloy
*Dolls/Meat/Avila (fiction)              Dea Anne Martin
*Dreamtime (HyperCard hyperfiction),
 and Shadow of the Informand: A
 Rhetorical Experiment in Hypertext      Stuart Moulthrop
*Hypertext: Permeable Skin               Martha Petry
*Du Ranten (Rant II)                     Chea Prince
*Poetics and Hypertext                   Jim Rosenberg
*Contingency, Liberation, and the
 Seduction of Geometry: Hypertext as an
 Avant-Garde Medium                      Martin Rosenberg
*Knowledge Flux and Questions for
 M. Chaput                               Alan Sondheim

_PERFORATIONS_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is
published by Atlanta's Public Domain arts collective.
To order "After the Book," send check or money order for $20
payable to Public Domain to:

Public Domain
PO Box 8899
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Voice mail: (404) 612-7529. E-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu.

Guest Editor: Richard Gess

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

Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry
3 August - 23 October 1992

Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Butler Library -- Sixth Floor
Columbia University

A travelling exhibit, originating from the Burchfield Art Center
at SUNY-Buffalo and consisting of some 30 examples of Robert
Lax's concrete poetry and another 40 examples of work by various
writers including Bill Bissett, Raymond Federman, Ian Hamilton
Finaly, and Aram Saroyan.

An exhibition catalog, which includes essays by Mary Ellen Solt
and Robert Bertholf, is available for five dollars.

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

_Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction_

by Marleen S. Barr

Forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in November.

The surprising and controversial thesis of _FEMINIST FABULATION_
is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded
a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as
genre fiction. Marleen S. Barr issues an urgent call for a
corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or super-genre of
contemporary fiction--feminist fabulation--which includes both
acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics
consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the
relationship between feminist writers and postmodern fiction in
terms of outer space and canonical space, _FEMINIST FABULATION_
is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of
female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world
women.

Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a
Nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that
feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is
really metafiction about patriarchal fiction.  Barr's concern is
directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics
as it is toward patriarchal institutions.  Rather than focusing
so much energy on reclaiming female authors of the past, she
suggests, feminist critics should direct more attention to the
present's lost feminist fabulators, writers steeped in
nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into
another order of world altogether.

Barr offers very specific plans for a new literary category that
can impact upon women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and
science fiction theory alike. _FEMINIST FABULATION_ calls for a
new understanding of postmodern fiction which will better enable
the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that
the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of
postmodern feminist difference.  Barr motivates readers to
rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just the
membership list--and in so doing provides a discourse of this
century worthy of a prominent place in institutions like the
practice of criticism and the teaching of literature.

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

_POSITIONS_

East Asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for
all concerned with the social, intellectual and political events
unfolding in east Asia and within the Asian diaspora.  Profound
political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and
capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing
national and regional borders.  These transformations compel us
to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching and criticism.
Mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary East and
West, _POSITIONS_ advocates placing cultural critique at the
center of historical and theoretical practice.  The global forces
that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain formulations
of nation, gender, class and ethnicity.  We propose to call into
question those still-pressing, yet unstable categories by
crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the
terms of our analysis.   These efforts, we hope, will contribute
toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy.

_POSITIONS_ central premise is that criticism must always be
self-critical. Critique of another social order must be
self-aware as commentary on our own. Likewise, we seek critical
practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that
connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study.

All these endeavors require that we account for positions as
places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge
and knowers as actors in existing social institutions.  In
seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across
national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions
from which to imagine political affinities across the many
dimensions of our differences.

_POSITIONS_ is an independent refereed journal.  Its direction is
taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as
through the encouragement from its readers and writers.

To subscribe for triannual magazine beginning in spring 1993
write to:

Mr. Steve A Cohn
Journals Manager
Duke University Press
6697 College Station
Durham, NC 27708.

To submit a manuscript send three copies to:

Tani E Barlow
Senior Editor
94 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

or e-mail: Barlow@sfsuvax1.edu.

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

_SOPHIA_

Australia is proud to announce the return of _Sophia_, a journal
for discussion in modern and postmodern philosophical issues in
theology, religion, metaphysics, feminist theology, ecotheology,
crosscultural critiques of traditional Western doctrinal bases,
indeed in all kinds of `deconstruction' of traditional modes of
establishing the origins and grounds of `faith'.

Short articles of up to 5000 words are welcomed; reviews will
also be invited, notices of book discussions and notes on
previously published articles as well.

The journal has a circulation of some 600 internationally and is
very inexpensive to subscribe to: US$12 for three issues in a
year. Send order to:

_Sophia_
Faculty of Humanities
Deakin University
Geelong, Victoria 3217
Australia

Editor is Dr Purushottama Bilimoria
(*same address; e-mail address: pbilmo@deakin.oz.au)

Further information can be sent by postal mail to anyone
who would like to receive a brochure and sample pages.

        Our motto: `She is wisdom'.
By the way, information can also be had from our Cambridge, MAss
representative at Harvard:

Ms Kristyn Saunders
c/o Mail Room
Harvard Divinity School,
45 Francis Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138.

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

_Delphi Network Newsletter_

A monthly newsletter, commenting on current higher educational
practices; a devil's advocate view of administration and
classroom teaching.

Write for a free copy to:

David V. Jenrette
Basic Communication Studies
Miami-Dade Community College North
11380 NW 27th Ave.
Miami, FL  33167

or phone:  305-237-1579

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

                      _PYNCHON NOTES_ 26-27
                          Now Available

                             Editors

                         John M. Krafft
                   Miami University--Hamilton
                       1601 Peck Boulevard
                    Hamilton, OH  45011-3399
E-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu

                        Khachig Tololyan
                       English Department
                       Wesleyan University
                   Middletown, CT  06457-6061

                       Bernard Duyfhuizen
                       English Department
               University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
                   Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004
    E-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet or pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu

  _Pynchon Notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall.

  Submissions: The editors welcome submission of manuscripts
either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM-compatible preferred.
Convenient formats include ASCII, DCA, WordStar, Microsoft Word,
and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and queries,
and bibliographic information should be addressed to John M.
Krafft.

  Subscriptions: North America, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00
per year (or double number); Overseas, $6.50 per single issue or
$12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter.  Checks should be
made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.  Subscriptions and
back-issue requests should be addressed to Bernard Duyfhuizen.

  _Pynchon Notes_ is supported in part by the English Departments
of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of Wisconsin--
Eau Claire.

                       Copyright (c) 1992
    John M. Krafft, Khachig Tololyan, and Bernard Duyfhuizen

                         ISSN 0278-1891

                     CONTENTS OF _PN_ 26-27

Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence
  Charles Hollander                                             5

Pynchon in Life
  Terry Caesar                                                 61

From Puritanism to Paranoia: Trajectories of History in
Weber and Pynchon
  Ralph Schroeder                                              69

"How Do You Spell Reality?--'O-U-T-A-S-E'": Or How I Learned to
Stop _Gravity's Rainbow_ and Start Worrying
  Stephen Jukiri and Alan Nadel                                81

Grab-bagging in _Gravity's Rainbow_: Incidental (Further)
Notes and Sources
  George Schmundt-Thomas                                    
91
_Vineland_: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA FICTION (Or,
St. Ruggles' Struggles, Chapter 4)
  Alec McHoul                                                  97

_Vineland_ in the Mainstream Press: A Reception Study
  Douglas Keesey                                              107

Coming Home: Pynchon's Morning in America
  Sanford S. Ames                                             115

A Note on Television in _Vineland_
  Albert Piela III                                            125

Pynchon and Cornell Engineering Physics, 1953-54
  Lance Schachterle                                           129

Slade Revisited, or, The End(s) of Pynchon Criticism
(Review Essay)
  Brian McHale                                                139

Pynchon's Intertextual Circuits (Review)
  Khachig Tololyan                                            153

Rediscovering the Humane in the Human (Review)
  Stacey Olster                                               163

"But Who, They?": Pynchon's Political Allegory (Review)
  Eyal Amiran                                                 167

Other Books Received                                          173

Notes                                                         175

Bibliography (--1992)                                         177

Contributors                                                  191

                            BACK ISSUES

  _Pynchon Notes_ has been published since October 1979.
Although most back issues are now out of print, they are
available in the form of photocopies.

Nos.  1- 4: $1.50 each;  Overseas, $ 2.50.
Nos.  5-10: $2.50 each;  Overseas, $ 3.50.
Nos. 11-17: $3.00 each;  Overseas, $ 4.50.
No.  18-19: $7.00;       Overseas, $10.00.
No.  20-21: $7.00;       Overseas, $10.00.
No.  22-23: $9.00;       Overseas, $12.00.
No.  24-25: $9.00;       Overseas, $12.00.

  Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the names,
other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's Rainbow_ is
also available.

_Index_: $5.00;  Overseas, $6.50.

  All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.

               _Pynchon Notes_ is a member of CELJ
         the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals.

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

Due for publication on 8 October:

_Beyond Metafiction: Self- Consciousness in Soviet Literature_,
by David Shepherd. Oxfordetc., Clarendon Press

David Shepherd
University of Manchester

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

             GNET: an Archive and Electronic Journal

                  Toward a Truly Global Network

Computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet
they are not truly global -- they are concentrated in affluent
parts of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.

GNET is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort
to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts
of developed nations.  (Net access is better in many "third
world" schools than in South-Central Los Angeles).  GNET consists
of two parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion.

Archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the
directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1).  To
conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each
document, as well as the full document.  (Those without ftp
access can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval).

In addition to the archive, there is a moderated GNET discussion
list.  The list is limited to discussion of the documents in the
archive.  It is hoped that document authors will follow this
discussion, and update their documents accordingly.  If this
happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal.  Monthly
mailings will list new papers added to the archive.

We wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to
visionary.  Suitable topics include, but are not restricted to:

   descriptions of networks and projects
   host and user hardware and software
   connection options and protocols
   current and proposed applications
   education using the global net
   user and system administrator training
   social, political or spriritual impact
   economic and environmental impact
   politics and funding
   free speech, security and privacy
   directories of people and resources

To submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated
discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu.

Larry Press

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

            ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES
         ASSOCIATION FOR LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC COMPUTING

          1993 JOINT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE  ACH-ALLC93

                          JUNE 16-19, 1993
               GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

                          CALL FOR PAPERS

This conference -- the major forum for literary, linguistic and
humanities computing-- will highlight the development of new
computing methodologies for research and teaching in the
humanities, the development of significant new networked-based
and computer-based resources for humanities research, and the
application and evaluation of computing techniques in humanities
subjects.

TOPICS: We welcome submissions on topics such as text encoding;
hypertext; text corpora; computational lexicography; statistical
models; syntactic, semantic and other forms of text analysis;
also computer applications in history, philosophy, music and
other humanities disciplines.

In addition, ACH and ALLC extend a special invitation to members
of the library community engaged in creating and cataloguing
network-based resources in the humanities, developing and
integrating databases of texts and images of works central to the
humanities, and refining retrieval techniques for humanities
databases.

The deadline for submissions is 1 NOVEMBER 1992.

REQUIREMENTS: Proposals should describe substantial and original
work. Those that concentrate on the development of new computing
methodologies should make clear how the methodologies are applied
to research and/or teaching in the humanities, and should include
some critical assessment of the application of those
methodologies in the humanities. Those that concentrate on a
particular application in the humanities (e.g., a study of the
style of an author) should cite traditional as well as
computer-based approaches to the problem and should include some
critical assessment of the computing methodologies used. All
proposals should include conclusions and references to important
sources.

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Abstracts of 1500-2000 words should be
submitted for presentations of thirty minutes including
questions.

SESSIONS: Proposals for sessions (90 minutes) are also invited.
These should take the form of either:

(a) Three papers. The session organizer should submit a 500-word
statement describing the session topic, include abstracts of
1000-1500 words for each paper, and indicate that each author is
willing to participate in the session; or

(b) A panel of up to 6 speakers. The panel organizer should
submit an abstract of 1500 words describing the panel topic, how
it will be organized, the names of all the speakers, and an
indication that each speaker is willing to participate in the
session.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSIONS

Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged.  Please pay
particular attention to the format given below.  Submissions
which do not conform to this format will be returned to the
authors for reformatting, or may not be considered if they arrive
very close to the deadline.

All submissions should begin with the following information:

TITLE: title of paper
AUTHOR(S): names of authors
AFFILIATION: of author(s)
CONTACT ADDRESS: full postal address
E-MAIL: electronic mail address of main author (for contact),
        followed by other authors (if any)
FAX NUMBER: of main author
PHONE NUMBER: of main author

(1) Electronic submissions

These should be plain ASCII text files, not files formatted by a
wordprocessor, and should not contain TAB characters or soft
hyphens. Paragraphs should be separated by blank lines. Headings
and subheadings should be on separate lines and be numbered.
Notes, if needed at all, should take the form of endnotes rather
than Choose a simple markup scheme for accents and other
characters that cannot be transmitted by electronic mail, and
include an explanation of the markup scheme after the title
information and before the start of the text.

Electronic submissions should be sent to
Neuman@GUVAX.Georgetown.edu
with the subject line " Submission for
ACH-ALLC93".

(2) Paper submissions

Submissions should be typed or printed on one side of the paper
only, with ample margins. Six copies should be sent to

ACH-ALLC93 (Paper submission)
Dr. Michael Neuman
Academic Computer Center
238 Reiss Science Building
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C. 20057

DEADLINES

Proposals for papers and sessions            November 1, 1992
Notification of acceptance                   February 1, 1993
Advance registration                         May 10, 1993

There will be a substantial increase in the registration fee for
registrations received after May 10, 1993.

PUBLICATION

A selection of papers presented at the conference will be
published in the series Research in Humanities Computing edited
by Susan Hockey and Nancy Ide and published by Oxford University
Press.

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Proposals will be evaluated by a panel of reviewers who will make
recommendations to the Program Committee comprised of:

Chair: Marianne Gaunt, Rutgers, the State University (ACH)
       Thomas Corns, University of Wales, Bangor (ALLC)
       Paul Fortier, University of Manitoba (ACH)
       Jacqueline Hamesse, Universite Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve
          (ALLC)
       Susan Hockey, Rutgers and Princeton Universities (ALLC)
       Nancy Ide, Vassar College (ACH)
       Randall Jones, Brigham Young University (ACH)
       Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa (ALLC)
Local organizer: Michael Neuman, Georgetown University (ACH)

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodations for conference participants are available at
several locations in the Georgetown area:
     Georgetown University's Leavey Conference Center
     The Georgetown Inn
     One Washington Circle Hotel
     Georgetown University's Village C Residence Hall

LOCATION

Georgetown, an historic residential district along the Potomac
River, is a six-mile ride by taxi from Washington National
Airport. International flights arrive at Dulles Airport, which
offers regular bus service to the Nation's Capital.

INQUIRIES

Please address all inquiries to:

ACH-ALLC93
Dr. Michael Neuman
Academic Computer Center
238 Reiss Science Building
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C. 20057

Phone: 202-687-6096
FAX:   202-687-6003
Bitnet:  Neuman@Guvax
Internet:  Neuman@Guvax.Georgetown.edu

Please give your name, full mailing address, telephone and fax
numbers, and e-mail address with any inquiry.

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

_WITHOUT ANY RULES: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF THE VERNACULAR_

We are seeking original, article-length essays on vernacular art-
forms in a postcolonial/postmodern context, including music, oral
poetry, post-colonial writing/criticism, vernacular festivals or
other practices, vernacular architecture, film, video, or other
appropriations of space/language/technology.  Some examples might
be: hip-hop music, graffiti, raves, dance parties, blues, jazz,
reggae, postcolonial fiction & poetry, home videos, sampling,
pastiche, photo-collage, xerox art.  Essays on vernacular
languages are especially sought which frame the question of the
opposition (ality) of the vernacular, as a language of resistance
to hegemonic forces.

Contributors at present include Ronald Jemal Stephens on the
vocabulary of hip-hop, and an essay on the vernacular by the
Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola.

Abstracts, proposals, and/or papers may be sent by e-mail to:
rapotter@colby.edu

or via snail mail to:

Russell Potter
English Department
Colby College
Waterville Maine 04901.

The co-editor of this collection is Bennet Schaber ("Modernity
and the Vernacular") of Syracuse University.

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

_MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies_

Special Issues Announcement

The Fall '92 issue of MFS will be a special issue on the
"Politics of Modernism."

The Spring '93 issue will be a special issue on "Fiction of the
Indian Sub-Continent"; submissions are invited (see below for
address): Deadline:  November 1, 1992

The Fall '93 issue will be a special issue on the fiction of Toni
Morrison; submissions are invited (see below for address):
Deadline:   April 1, 1992

The Spring '94 issue will be a special issue, edited by Barbara
Harlow, on "The Politics of Cultural Displacement."  The issue
will include essays that address issues of displacement across
various narrative genres, including fiction, film, historical
account, legal documentation, and reportage.  The guest editor
will be particularly interested in seeing essays that address
these issues in light of the cultural politics of deportation,
emigration/immigration, population transfer, political asylum,
extradition, "illegal aliens," and migrant labor.  This special
issue of MFS proposes to examine the pressures on the received
generic formulas of narrative convention and literary paradigm by
these global demographic rearrangements.  Deadline:  November 1,
1993.

All submissions to MFS, both for special issues and general
issues, should be sent in duplicate to:

The Editors
MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies
Department of English
1389 Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389.

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

_Vietnam Generation_

Invites submissions for the special issue _American Indians and
the Vietnam War_  Original poetry, prose, critical works dealing
with American Indian experiences in and during the Vietnam War,
and critical articles on the characterization of American
Indians in Vietnam War fiction are encouraged for consideration.

Submit proposals, abstracts, poems and prose to:

David Erben
CPR 326
English Dept
Univ of South Florida
Tampa, Fl 33620.

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

     CALL FOR PAPERS: "Composition as Explanation"
    The 1993 American Studies Association annual conference
(Boston, Massachusetts / November 4-7, 1993) is on "Cultural
Transformations / Countering Traditions." I want to propose a
panel composed of papers discussing and enacting the intersection
of the academic essay and the poem.  Papers that attempt to
escape the constraints of genre that form the academic essay will
be given special priority, but work that discusses the mutant
products of this intersection (such as Gertrude Stein's
"Composition as Explanation") or approaches poetics from a
cultural studies perspective is also welcome.
    Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by December
15, 1992 to Juliana Spahr / State University of New York at
Buffalo / 302 Clemens Hall / Buffalo, New York 14260.
E-mail--V231SEY9@UBVMS.BITNET.

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

_Cylinder_

The international society for the philosophy of tools and space.

   We are an interdisciplinary and "multinational" organization,
small but growing, dedicated to thoughtful discussion about and
research into issues concerning tools and space.  Currently, we
maintain a membership list and circulate a short newsletter.  But
our future plans call for expansion - a number of conferences and
a journal are possible in the next few years. Within the scope of
our society, members have raised diverse and fascinating issues
for consideration, including but not limited to the following:

* The role of equipment in Heidegger: the tool and truth in _Sein
  und Zeit_
* Bergson; Levinas and the concept of hypostasis
* Baudrillard & Virilio: speed, the simulacrum and "crystal     
  revenge"
* Marx: from use- to exchange-value; the deterritorializing     
  adventure of capital and surplus-value
* Deleuze/Guattari: desiring machines, paranoid machines,       
  miraculating machines, celibate machines
* The mechanics of the dreamwork in psycho-analysis
* Poetics of space a la Bachelard
* Figural and rhetorical aspects of the tool in literature; the 
  delirious machines of Poe and Kafka
* bolo'bolo and other political theories of reterritorialization
* Architectural theory and practice
* Media theory
* Virtual reality: the emergence of simulacra in social space
* Transit technology and urban planning
* Infrastructure catastrophes: the Chicago freight tunnel flood
* The iconology of computers, especially the Macintosh
* A philosophy of toys
* The tool/toy of language and its (dys)function: the Zen koan, 
  the joke

Membership is free.  Just send your name and address to be placed
on our list.

                             _CYLINDER_
                    c/o Graham Harman, secretary
                 Philosophy Dept., DePaul University
                       Chicago IL, USA 60614
                      email: cylinder@uiowa.edu

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

     SUNY Stonybrook Conference on Reproductive Technologies

The Humanities Institute Sponsored Conference on Reproductive
Technologies: Narratives, Gender, Society, is unique in bringing
together IVF and other clinicians, lawyers, bio-ethicists,
historians, humanists, and people using the technologies to share
their research and varying perspectives. The conference will be
focussed, in Part I, on four case histories having to do
with gamete donation, sex-selection, surrogacy, and genetic
counselling. Part II deals with broader issues regarding
reproductive technologies, such as "body politics," adoption, and
nursing narratives.

Keynotes Speakers are: Dr. Rayna Rapp, New School for Social
Research, New York; and Barbara Katz Rothman, Baruch College, New
York. Respondents to the second speaker are: Dr. Mary Martin,
M.D. and Betsy P. Aigen, Founder and Director of The Surrogacy
Mother Program of New York. Other speakers include Isabel Marcus,
Law School, SUNY At Buffalo; Lisa Glick Zucker, Attorney, ACLU,
Newark, N.J.; Martha Calhoun, New York State Department of Law;
Ruth Cowan, Ph.D., History Dept. SUNY At Stony Brook; Susan
Squier, English Dept, SUNY At Stony Brook; John Wiltshire and Kay
Torney, La Trobe University, Australia; E. Ann Kaplan, Director,
The Humanities Institute, SUNY Stony Brook; Ella Shohat, CUNY,
Staten Island; Jennifer Terry, Resident Fellow at The Humanities
Institute, and Assistant Professor at Ohio State University;
Helen Cooper, Acting Vice Provost for Graduate Affairs, SUNY at
Stony Brook.

The Conference will take place on Friday and Saturday November 6
& 7, from 9.0 a.m. on each day. For more information and
registration forms, call E. Ann Kaplan, at 516-632-7765; or
respond on email to MHuether@SBCCMAIL.edu.

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

1992 Modern Languages Association Convention

Special Session #119

Tuesday, December 29, 1992, 12:00 noon

"Hypertext, Hypermedia: Defining a Fictional Form"

Terence Harpold      University of Pennsylvania (chair)
Michael Joyce        Jackson Community College
Carolyn Guyer        Leonardo
Judy Malloy          Manistee, MI
Stuart Moulthrop     Georgia Institute of Technology

Until recently, critical discussion of hypertext has tended to
focus on problems of implementation, psychology and
epistemology--the issues raised by hypertext as a kind of
writing, independent of its subject matter. Little attention has
been paid to the distinct characteristics of hypertext as a
_fictional_ form. This session will be devoted to a discussion of
hypertext fiction (and, more generally, electronic fiction) as an
emerging mode of discourse in the late age of print.

The panel includes individuals from both academia and the growing
community of artists working in electronic text and multimedia.
In addition to the sizable body of  theory and criticism they
represent, each of the panelists is well-known for his or her
electronic fiction. We expect an lively dialogue between the
panelists (and with the audience), reflecting the variety of
strategies at play in hypertext theory and practice.

The papers

Michael Joyce's paper, "Hypertextual Rhythms (The Momentary
Advantage of Our Awkwardness)," will address the historical
moment of recent hypertext fiction.
He will argue that the common perception that hypertext is an
awkward and opaque mode of discourse actually makes it easier for
us to grasp its historical significance. Before the novelty of
the electronic medium fades, and electronic text assumes the
transparency that "conventional" text now has, we can understand
it as a discrete representational form.

Judy Malloy's paper, "Between the Narrator and the Narrative (The
Disorder of Memory)," will draw on several of her "narrabases"
("narrative databases") to discuss problems of narrative "truth"
in radically non-sequential electronic texts. The randomness and
interactivity of hypertext fiction make it possible to vary the
reader's experience with each reading. The essential disorder of
the fictional worlds that emerge mimics, she contends, the
disordered yet linked structure of human memory.

Carolyn Guyer's paper, "Buzz-Daze Jazz and the Quotidian Stream
(Attempts to Filet a Paradox)," explores the structure of
narrative temporality in hypertext fiction. She will argue that
hypertextual narratives are "complex mixtures"
(Deleuze and Guattari), in which figure and ground are shifted
arhythmically, in a chaotic or fractal way. The result is an
oscillating transformation of the linear temporality of
traditional fictional forms.

Stuart Moulthrop's paper, "Hypertext as War Machine," situates
hypertext fiction as an inherently politicized byproduct of the
late capitalist event-state of spectacle, simulation, and
multinational aggression. Focusing on John McDaid's "Uncle
Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" and his own "Victory Garden," he asks
whether the deformations of print narrative in these fictions
provide an alternative to the semiotics of the spectacle, or
represent (in Hakim Bey's term) merely "festal" digressions from
the discourse of disembodied power.

For more information, contact:

Terence Harpold
420 Williams Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

tharpold@pennsas.upenn.edu
slithy1@applelink.apple.com

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

SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY

Annual meeting to be held October 8-10 at the Boston Park Plaza
Hotel and Towers.

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

The Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process of the American
Anthropological Association

Will hold a workshop on issues in computing as a field of
cultural research beginning on the afternoon of Tuesday, December
1, 1992 in San Francisco.  The workshop, participation in which
is limited to thirty people, is scheduled to coincide with the
opening of the annual meeting of the AAA.

For further information, contact David Hakken, Committee Chair,
at:

Technology Policy Center
SUNY Institute of Technology
PO Box 3050
Utica, NY 13504
315-792-7437
hakken@sunyit.edu

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

_Rethinking Marxism_: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and
Society

Is sponsoring an international conference titled "Marxism in the
New World Order: Crises and Possibilities" 12-14 November 1992 at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

For information and preregistration materials, call:

413/545-3285

or write:

AESA/RM "New World Order" Conference
P.O. Box 715,
Amherst, MA 01004-0715.

The conference will include 3 major plenaries, over 100 sessions
and workshops, an art exhibition, an art installation, and a
cabaret opera.

Participants include Etienne Balibar, Nancy Fraser, Sandra
Harding, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Ernest Mandel, Manning Marable,
Vicente Navarro, Sheila Rowbotham, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West.

Events include "This Is My Body: This Is My Blood" (art
exhibition and panel discussion curate and organized by Susan
Jahoda and May Stevens), "E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma
Goldman" (cabaret opera by Leonard Lehrman), "Dream Worlds: The
Video (Sut Jhally), "Standpoint Theories and Postmodernism's
Challenges and Affinities (Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Kathy
Weeks), "Queerness, Race, Class" (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cindy
Patton, Johnathan Goldberg, Michael Moon), "Postmodernism, Late
Capitalism, and Marxian Political Economy" (Jack Amariglio, Julie
Graham, Arjo Klamer, Bruce Norton, David Ruccio), and "Towards a
Socialist Politics of Desire" (Tim Brennan, Jane Jordan, Amitava
Kumar, Pratibha Parmar).

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

31st annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy

Registration information is available at the conference
(pre-registration is not necessary), but registration material is
also available from:

Lenore Langsdorf
Dept. of Speech Communication
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL  62901

or phone: (618) 453-2291.

The program is quite large, and the speakers will include Jacques
Derrida, David Krell, Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, Linda
Nicholson, Gerald Bruns, Herman Rapaport.

Some session titles that may interest your members:  "Critical
Theory in the Age of Cynicism," "Foucault, Power and the Critique
of Hermeneutics," "Respondings: 'Il y a la cendre,'"
"Constructing and Deconstructing Identity," "Postmodern Returns
to Hegel," "Resistance to Lyotard,"...

There are about 60 sessions with about 250 people on the program,
and about 1000 in attendance.

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

             A CONSORTIUM FOR NETWORK PUBLICATION
               OF REFEREED RESEARCH JOURNALS

               First Advance Notice May 1992

The University of Manitoba has received funding commitments to
organize and hold an international conference to promote the
establishment of a consortium of universities and learned
societies to sponsor computer network publication of refereed
journals. The consortium would be a non-profit publishing
cooperative intended to make use of the Internet as an important
medium for the publication of scholarly research in any
discipline. Since the summer of 1991, an ad hoc group at the
University of Manitoba has been developing the idea of the
conference and the proposed consortium, and has been working on
funding proposals since the Autumn of 1991. The conference is now
tentatively slated for the Autumn of 1993 and will be held at the
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. We hope to enlist the
interest and cooperation of major research universities and
learned societies across North America and elsewhere. Over the
next year or so, we will be communicating the vision behind the
conference and consortium to the academic community.

This is the first advance notice, and we plan to provide updates
with more specific information on the conference details as plans
for it develop.

As an analogy of sorts for the proposed consortium, in the
traditional publishing of books and paper journals, Scholars
Press (Atlanta, Georgia) is a unique example of such a
cooperative, operating under several major U.S. learned societies
(e.g., American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical
Literature, American Philological Society), with a number of
universities in the U.S. and Canada as sponsors of particular
publication projects such as major monograph series. It is an
example of groups in the academic community taking collective
responsibility to see that worthy scholarship gets published,
without commercial considerations determining the question. The
Internet is the major new medium for dissemination of research,
and it is vital that the scholarly community, through its major
institutions of universities and learned societies, become
acquainted with the enormous potential of the Internet for
scholarship. Commercial companies are already devoting attention
to developing computer network publication projects. It is
imperative that the scholarly community not leave this major
medium to be developed solely by commercial interests.

The basic aims are:

(1) To make academic merit the sole consideration in the        
    publication of journal-type research.
(2) To advance the idea that the academic community should have a
    hand in determining what gets published and how it is       
    disseminated.
(3) To provide a major outlet of research publication that is not
    subject to the severe economic constraints of traditional   
    paper-journal publishing (soaring costs in some commercially
    attractive fields, very limited journal outlets for less    
    commercially attractive fields).
(4) To make collective and considered use of the scholarly      
    advantages of network publication (e.g., savings in         
    production costs, speed up in publication and dissemination 
    process).
(5) To provide an effective and low-cost means for universities 
    and learned societies to play a greater role as disseminators
    of research information and not only as producers and
    consumers of research information.

Our initial objective at this point is to inform as many in the
scholarly community as possible of the conference and the
consortium proposal, and to solicit interest in these plans.

Please contact us for more information, and to be kept informed
on the progress in our planning. We also sincerely invite you to
offer your ideas on things to be included in the conference, key
people to inform and possibly invite to the conference, and any
other matters relevant to the conference and consortium proposal.

For more information, and to express your interests in the
conference and consortium, contact the:

Convener of the University of Manitoba ad hoc Committee on
Electronic Journals
Professor Larry W. Hurtado
Institute for the Humanities
108 Isbister Bldg.
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T2N2

Phone: (204) 474-9114. FAX (204) 275-5781.
E-mail: hurtado@ccu.umanitoba.ca.

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

8th Annual Conference on the Scientific Study of Subjectivity

October 22-24, 1992, at the University of Missouri will feature:

Ana Garner (Marquette University)
"The Disaster News Story: The Reader, the Content and Social
Construction of Meaning"

Paul Grosswiler (University of Maine-Orono)
"The Convergence of William Stephenson's and Marshall McLuhan's
Communication Theories"

Patrick O'Brien (University of Iowa)
"'They Meant This...And We Meant That': Discerning Opinion
Structures through Q Methodology and News Frame Analysis"

Donald F. Theall (Trent University)
"James Joyce and William Stephenson Among the Communicators"

Dan Thomas (Wartburg College)
"Deconstructing the Political Spectacle: Sex, Race, and
Subjectivity in Public Response to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill
'Sexual Harrassment' Hearings"

There will also be a special panel on quantum theory and Q
methodology, plus additional papers on a variety of other topics.
The meeting is co-sponsored by the International Society for the
Scientific Study of Subjectivity and the Stephenson Research
Center of the School of Journalism, University of
Missouri-Columbia.

For further details, contact the program chair:

Irvin Goldman (Goldman@UCC.UWindsor.Ca),
Department of Communication Studies, University of Windsor.

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

                PROGRAM OF EVENTS FOR THE V2 ORGANIZATION:
                        September / October / November.

                MANIFESTATION FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA IV

                    September 26th - October 4th

The yearly festival of the V2 Organization is this year focussed
to the question:

"How can architecture and the visual arts cope with new
conceptions of time and space as performed and experienced in
electronic space and with its cultural implications?"

In a symposium the different attitudes in the deconstructivist
discourse in architecture (like the formulated by Peter Eisenman
on one side and Hejduk & Libeskind on the other) will be
discussed parallel to art theories as for example presented by
Peter Weibel.

Among those who participate are: Jeffrey Shaw (NL), Peter Weibel
(A), Arthur & Mariliouse Kroker (Can), Kristina Kubisch (BRD) and
many others whose participation still has to be confirmed.

        ASK FOR THE COMPLETE PROGRAM UP FROM SEPTEMBER 1ST.

                             DICK RAAIJMAKERS

                        October 16th, 17th, 18th.

Lectures/demonstrations and concert by Dick Raaijmakers (1930).
Dick Raaijmakers is at composer/scientist/theatremaker who
teaches at the Centre of Sonology at the conservatory in Den Haag
(NL). He worked for Philips and did research in electro-acoustic
phenomena and was thus closely related to the physics lab in the
fifties.  His work (theories and artworks) is a consequent study
on basic phenomena in music/art.

In his reflections on music/art he also integrates the use of
technology as well as the fundamental distinction that remains
between technology and art.  His concert will be the systematic
dissection of twelve microphones in a laboratory setup (title:
Dodici manieri di far tacere un microfono).  For the presentation
of his work there will be other artists involved like for example
Clarance Barlow.

                          ROY ASCOTT: "TELENOIA"

                12.00H October 31st until 12.00H November 1st.

"You've experienced on telepresence, now get ready for it"

Roy Ascott (1934) will activate a global network on October 31st
at 12.00H till November 1st 12.00H.  The network will be active
for 24 hours with Fax, E-Mail a.s.  There will be T-shirts
available for the 'day of telenoia schizophrenia'.  Roy Ascott
will also take about his work on October 30th.

The presentations of Roy Ascott and Dick Raaijmakers are 3
presentations of artists who profiled themselves in the past and
present with remarkable and important theories in art and
technology.  A publication in which texts of Roy Ascott, Gustav
Metzger and Dick Raaijmakers will be printed and which will
support the different projects.

                            V2 ORGANIZATION
                        5211 PT 's-Hertogenbosch,
                              NETHERLANDS.

                           Tel  31 73 137958
                           Fax  31 73 122238

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

THIRD WASHINGTON D.C. VIRTUAL REALITY CONFERENCE: DEC 1-2, 1992

The December 1992 Virtual Reality conference focuses on current
applications.  The presentations highlight applications in
industry, commerce, defense, and aerospace.   The conference
addresses managers and researchers who are involved or wish to
become involved in the development of VR systems.  Besides 16
distinguished speakers, the conference also features
exhibitors demonstrating available VR products.

The conference is sponsored by the Education Foundation of the
Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) and CyberEdge
Journal.  Technology Training Corporation manages the conference
site and the registration.

        --------------------------------------------------
               Washington D.C., December 1-2, 1992
        Ramada Hotel at Tyson's Corner -- Falls Church, VA
        --------------------------------------------------

Dr. Myron Krueger, President, Artificial Reality Corporation

Dr. David Gelernter, Computer Science, Yale University

Dr. Bob C. Liang, Manager of Advanced Multimedia, IBM Research
Lab

Suzanne Weghorst, Human Interface Technology Lab, U of
Washington,

Joel Orr, Autodesk Fellow, Autodesk, Inc.

George Zachary, Technical Marketing/Sales, VPL Research

Dr. Michael Zyda, Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School

Mark Long, David Sarnoff Laboratory, Princeton

Dr. Peter Tinker, Rockwell Science Center

Dr. John Latta, President, 4th Wave

Tom Barrett, Research & Development, Electronic Data Systems

Jacquelyn Morie, Institute for Simulation and Training, UCF

Dr. Chris Esposito, Boeing Aircraft, Seattle

Douglas MacLeod, VR Project Director, Banff Centre for the Arts

Major Irwin Simon, M.D., Telepresence, Ft. Ord

David Smith, President, Virtus Corporation

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

The conference chair is cyberspace philosopher, Dr. Michael Heim

Registration fee is $795 per registrant.  For DPMA members
(individual members only--not corporate) or for CyberEdge
Journal subscribers, the fee is $760.  For teams of 3 or more,
the fee is $695.  For U.S. Government or university personnel,
registration is $645.

To register, call 310-534-3922 and ask for Mr. Dana Marcus.
To receive a flyer with more information, write Mr. Tom Huchel,
Technology Training Corporation, 3420 Kashiwa Street, Torrance,
CA 90510-3608 or call 310-534-4871.

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

_SEMIOS-L_

   A new electronic discussion group has been formed for those
interested in semiotics, visual language, graphic design and
advertising, deconstruction, the philosophy of language, and
others curious about the process of communication. The core issue
that ties all of these disciplines together is the production and
the interpretation of signs.

To become a part of _SEMIOS-L_, send the following command from
your computer:

From a Bitnet location:
TELL LISTSERV AT ULKYVM SUBSCRIBE SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

From an Internet site:
To: Listserv%ULKYVM.Louisville.edu Subscribe SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

In the first two weeks of operation, _SEMIOS-L_ already had over
one hundred
members from four continents. The group welcomes new voices.

Steven Skaggs
SEMIOS-L List Manager

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

SOCHIST on LISTSERV@USCVM
New Social History List or LISTSERV@VM.USC.EDU

Briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called
the "New Social History":

(1) emphasis on quantitative data rather than an analysis of    
    prose sources.
(2) borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as
    linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc.
(3) the examination of groups which have been ignored by        
    traditional disciplines (i.e.  the history of women,        
    families, children, labor, etc.)

To subscribe, send e-mail to
LISTSERV@USCVM.BITNET or listserv@vm.usc.edu

with the single line in the BODY of the e-mail:
SUBSCRIBE SOCHIST your full name

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

_Interdis_

Welcome to the INTERDIS e-mail discussion list. The idea behind
this list is to facilitate national (and international)
discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching
in interdisciplinary contexts. It is my hope that the list will
be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues
relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues
associated with interdisciplinary work. It should also be a good
place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from
interdisciplinary perspectives. Please forward this message to
colleagues you think may be interested in the list. They can
put themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to:

LISTSERV@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
The message should read SUB INTERDIS 

To post comments to the list, e-mail
INTERDIS@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU

Feel free to begin posting comments today. I look forward to our
continuing dialogue.

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

The Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University invites
applications for a position (or positions) as Assistant or
Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, beginning
Fall 1993.

Expertise in literary and cultural theory is required since
successful applicants will teach a total of 2 courses per
semester in a theory-based undergraduate program in Literary and
Cultural Studies, and/or in the graduate program in Literary and
Cultural Theory. The committee will give particular attention to
candidates specializing in any aspect or field of history,
culture and literature between 1500 and 1900, and we also have
needs in film and media.  Women and minority candidates
especially welcomed.

Send letter, c.v. and names of three referees to:

Alan Kennedy
Head, Dept of English
Carnegie Mellon
Pittsburgh PA 15213.

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

          Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
                    Special Collections Library
                        Duke University

TRAVEL-TO-COLLECTIONS GRANTS 1992-1993

Three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to:

(1) Graduate students in any academic field who wish to use
    the resources of the Center for research toward M.A. or
    Ph.D degrees.
(2) Faculty working on research projects.

Funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to Durham and
local accommodations.

The major collections available at the Center at the current time
is the extensive Archives of the J. Walter Thompson Company
(JWT), the oldest advertising agency in the U.S. and a major
international agency since the 1920s.  Later in the year the
advertisements and a moderate amount of agency documentation from
D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) also will become
available for research.  The Center holds several other smaller
collections relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and
marketing.

REQUIREMENTS:  Awards may be used between December 15, 1992
               and September 1, 1993.  Graduate student         
               applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a   
               postgraduate program in any academic department  
               and (2) must enclose a letter of recommendation  
               from the student's advisor or project director.

Please address questions and requests for application forms to:

Ms. Ellen Gartrell
Director
Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
Special Collections Library
Duke University
Box 90185
Durham NC  27708-0185

phone:  919-681-8714   fax:  919-684-2855

e-mail contact:  Ms. Marion Hirsch mph@mail.lib.duke.edu

DEADLINES:  Applications 1992-93 awards must be received
            or postmarked by November 1, 1992.  Awards will be
            announced by December 1.

     

  • Postmodern Woolf

    Rebecca Stephens

    English Department
    Carlow College

     

    Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

     

    Pamela L. Caughie’s Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself is a sustained and perhaps ruthless attack on dualism in Woolf scholarship. As an answer to Toril Moi’s call in Sexual/Textual Politics for a text-based, anti-humanist approach to Woolf’s writings, the book explores new alternatives in an area of scholarship not known for keeping pace with postmodern critical theory and practice. Nearly any effort in this direction is welcome. Yet, as its and title suggests and its oppositional stance confirms, this study embraces–and ultimately fails to overcome–a dualism of its own, thus raising questions about its value and success as a postmodern intervention.

     

    For Caughie the insistence upon choosing between dualisms–fact/fiction, surface/depth, form/content, art/politics, for example–has brought Woolf scholarship to a critical impasse. She proposes the alternative of a postmodern approach, one which displaces these oppositions into new contexts, and which acknowledges a change in “aesthetic motivation” (xiii). Unlike the aesthetic motivation within modernism, which “placed itself at the vanguard of culture,” the postmodern version “explores the relations between literary practices and social practices” (xiii). Caughie does not claim to classify Woolf in one tradition or another; rather, she seeks to read Woolf’s writings in the light of postmodernism, that is, with new perspectives available in the wake of recent artistic and critical innovations.

     

    When she works within this broadly conceived plan, Caughie offers thoughtful and original readings of specific works. The readings of Woolf’s critical writings in Chapter 6, for example, succeed in moving beyond dualism to the new kinds of relationships which characterize postmodern reading and writing strategies. Woolf’s focus upon the process of reading, as exemplified in “Phases of Fiction,” “Granite and Rainbow,” and the two Common Reader collections, demonstrates for Caughie the interaction of text, world and reader. Rather than propose a new canon or tradition, an oppositional tactic, Woolf explores in these writings the relations which arise when a writer and reader enter, by mutual consent, a certain “reality.” Woolf’s critical practice thus considers “what we are consenting to and how our consent is achieved” (176). This practice in effect narrates Woolf’s admittedly impressionistic and wildly contradictory reading process. Its logic lies in its narrative experimentation, not in conclusions drawn or traditions outlined. In fact, Woolf’s story of reading undermines any thought of historical progression or development of fiction, confirming the situational relations between writer and reader at any given time. And the “common reader,” often thought of as Woolf’s response to the Oxbridge tradition from which she was excluded, becomes for Caughie not a less trained reader, but a kind of reading relation. Common for her suggests the communal.

     

    Flush, both the novel and the dog, enact Caughie’s postmodern conception of value formation. The novel is not only an example of artistic waste or playful excess, it must also be reckoned with as a marketable commodity. Caughie cites Woolf’s diary in support of the latter “function” of the text: “to stem the ruin we shall suffer from the failure of The Waves” (qtd. in Caughie 149). Drawing support from the dog’s variable and context-dependent views of its own value, Caughie calls the novel an “allegory of canon formation and canonical value” (146). Woolf’s shifting responses to the work, from playfulness to irony to detachment and scorn, together with a similar spectrum of public and critical reaction over the years, lead Caughie to question the economy of value and canon formation which informs our readings of Flush and other literary works.

     

    A collection of readings like these could work through the critical impasse that Caughie cites and open a number of new possibilities for reading Woolf. Yet Caughie subverts her own efforts by setting them in opposition to existing scholarship. This practice creates a dualism between traditional and postmodern approaches to Woolf, reproducing precisely the binary, oppositional logic her postmodernist readings are supposed to displace.

     

    Caughie’s dualism parallels a distinction which she makes in her conclusion between Elaine Showalter’s and Jane Gallop’s approaches to a feminist critical practice. While Showalter seeks to define such concepts as double-voiced discourse, Gallop enacts her practice by reading texts against each other. Caughie seems to favor the latter approach, and the readings I have described succeed in enacting or performing her idea of the postmodern. At the same time, the confrontation with traditional Woolf scholars established in the introduction leaves enough traces of the Showalter strategy to embroil Caughie in the practices with which she takes issue. By calling her readings “corrective,” she keeps the opposition alive.

     

    As a result, it is easy to lose sight of the clean elegance with which Caughie describes her project in the preface. As she takes to task the major figures in Woolf scholarship (particuarly Jane Marcus) for their referential, essentialist connections, Caughie works against her initial reluctance to summarize or define the postmodern. She draws upon a number of postmodern fiction writers, as well as the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Barbara Hernstein Smith and Kenneth Burke. Wittgenstein empowers Caughie’s challenge to the correspondence theory of language, the opposition of form and content which views discourse as a transparent container for ideas. Caughie suggests that Woolf views art as Wittgenstein views language: as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among discursive strategies, rather than as a configuration or tradition based upon “empirical stability.” A brief mention of Rorty’s pragmatics and Burke’s transactional view of writer/reader relations leads Caughie to consider the “function” of a text, that is, how it produces meaning and finds its audience. Hernstein Smith brings Caughie’s theoretical framework closer to the narrative strategies upon which the first few readings focus. For Smith, narrative strategies are a function of varying critical perspectives, not essential characteristics of a certain text or genre. Under this view, Caughie suggests that “we can approach narrative strategies not as representations of a certain set of conditions, such as women’s lives or consumer society, but as functions of ‘multiple interacting conditions’” (18). Free of absolute reference to conventions or traditions, narrative experimentation becomes the given for Woolf: “Her fiction works on the assumption that narrative activity preceded any understanding of self and world” (67).

     

    The reader who abstracts a summary such as this fails to participate in the “shared way of behaving toward narratives based upon shared assumptions about language use” which characterizes Caughie’s postmodern perspective. Having risked lapsing into the essentialism that Caughie opposes, however, the reader will also note the thinness of the thread with which this postmodernism is woven. One can hardly disagree with any of her broad and abstract statements; yet together they offer no coherent perspective or methodology. And rather than elaborating the theoretical program through detailed close readings, Caughie merely reiterates the terms of her broad “postmodern” polemic against what she considers to be traditional views of the individual works. The words “function,” “motive” and “relations” become a kind of refrain or mantra throughout the book.

     

    The result of this practice is a series of brief and blurry close-ups of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own. A chapter on the artist figure displaces the art/life opposition into a context-dependent quest to test a number of new relations. Under such a reading Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse becomes the narrator of the production of art as well as the artist, and in this capacity affirms the continuing process of creating. The multifaceted “I” in A Room of One’s Own undermines the stable self that can be separated structurally or empirically from its creative processes. Rather than defining a feminine alternative to modernist art, this protean speaker is “testing out the implications of the concept of art and self developed in . . . To the Lighthouse and Orlando” (42). The multiple consciousness of The Waves shifts the crucial relationship from art/life to art/audience, suggesting, with Bernard, that “‘All is experiment and adventure” (50).

     

    These readings place Woolf’s writings in a postmodern context of “multiple interacting conditions” by ignoring the fact that Woolf and her narrators repeatedly contemplate the truth or the essence of their lives and creative efforts. Even as she returns to the Ramsay’s summer house to complete her painting, Lily considers the “meaning of life.” Bernard’s observations on storytelling do not necessarily challenge the referential nature of this process. His comment that “Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it” (qtd. by Caughie 50) falls short of a metadiscursive or enlarging displacement of the life/art dichotomy as it points toward a transcendent dimension of life. To be convincing, Caughie’s concept of “multiple interacting conditions” must be extended to address these thoughts and statements as well. Formalist observations, such as naming Lily as narrator, or pointing out (not for the first time) the unstable narrative perspective of Jacob’s Room, can (and have) effectively argued for the dichotomy of art and life which Caughie seeks to disrupt.

     

    The multiplicity of meanings attributed to truth and reality in Woolf’s writings continues to draw critical attention, not all of which is as polarized as Caughie suggests. Herself unwilling to relinquish “reality” fully to the status of textual and discursive phenomena, Caughie reminds us of the challenge Woolf offers to postmodern critical theory. Yet a comparative reading of The Years and Night and Day lands Caughie in the same essentializing and polarizing camp that she disparages. For her the concern in Night and Day with objects and relics of the past produces a world of substance and a narrative of authority and reference. The uncertainty of narrative structures in The Years (echoing voices, lack of centering perspectives) expresses the postmodern concern for self-reflexive attention to discursive relations. The problem is not simply a matter of Caughie’s lapse into dualism, although it is curious that her broad conception of postmodern narrative relations cannot gain even a toehold upon Night and Day. (The novel’s playful experimentation with metaphor, reference and perspective might easily be worked into Caughie’s “postmodernism.”) Rather, the referentiality which Caughie locates in Night and Day sends a ripple of alarm back upon all of her readings, suggesting that Woolf’s texts may generally leave room for a greater degree of attachment to the ideas of stable object and transcendent subject than Caughie has let on.

     

    Caughie’s view of Woolf’s critical reading strategies might be read back upon her own critical method. This book contains many pointed attacks on representationalist readings of Woolf, but it rarely conveys a sense of what Caughie calls “multiple reading relations.” Perhaps generalizing too readily from her own “motives” (one of her key terms), Caughie seems to assume the primacy of literary- critical or literary-theoretical concerns for the critics she opposes. The briefest contact with the Woolf scholarly community dispels such an assumption. A group of affiliated and unaffiliated scholars representing numerous academic disciplines, Woolf’s readers most often seek to recreate and preserve her image as a woman, a feminist, or an historical/cultural icon. Susan Squier’s readings of Flush as a story of marginalization, and of the London essays as the reflection of a woman’s life in a patriarchal society, reveal these sorts of motives. In unfolding her own (equally plausible) reading of Flush, and her analysis of the multiple and shifting perspectives of the London Scene essays, Caughie achieves about the same level of dialogue with critics like Squier as that which takes place between Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir. Caughie’s confrontationalism thus not only undermines her theoretical commitment to a non-dualist practice of reading, but leaves her readings unnecessarily isolated within the active field of Woolf studies. Combined with the sweeping claim of the book’s title, this mode of critical procedure risks further alienating an already skeptical scholarly community as regards postmodern criticism in general.

     

    As the first effort of its kind, however, this book deserves the attention and the response of Woolf scholars. Caughie observes, rightly, that it is not a book which can serve as an introduction either to Virginia Woolf or to postmodernism. But for scholars with an established stake in either or both of these fields, it does have much to offer. For those who choose to give Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism a chance, I would like to suggest, by way of conclusion (and with apologies to Cortazar), an alternate reading sequence: Begin with the preface, then read Chapter Five, Chapter Six, and the conclusion before returning to the introduction and Chapters One through Four. This particular hopscotch might better capture the strength of Caughie’s postmodern performances–or at least render them more congenial to resistant readers.

     

  • La Condition McGann

    Kevin Kiernan

    Department of English
    University of Kentucky
    ENG102@ukcc.uky.edu

     

    McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Pp. xiv + 208; 11 illustrations. Paper, $10.95.

     

    Jerome McGann shows that he is still in top textual condition in this new collection of essays, published as the third title in the series, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Despite the marketing claim on the back cover of the paperback that these are all “new essays,” five of the seven chapters have appeared in print before, as McGann himself spells out in his Preface. Their latest manifestation, with a new introduction and conclusion, is nonetheless a persuasive argument for McGann’s persistent thesis that the meanings of texts change with changing bibliographical circumstances, even when the texts do not change linguistically. Readers will enjoy a bargain in the interesting interplay of the chapters, the wide-ranging discussion of textual and editorial issues, and the irresistible occasion to play the role of McGann’s materialist hermeneut by analyzing the implicit collaborations of the author and his latest publisher.

     

    The first four chapters, Part One, are grouped under the title of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a reference darkly explicated by a passage on book production from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The last three chapters, Part Two, come under the heading of “Ezra Pound in the Sixth Chamber.” The locale of this title harks back reassuringly to the same Blake excerpt, but the accompanying passage on instability and impermanence returns us instead to “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which in turn delivers us to Kathy Acker’s disorienting epiphanigram, “The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless,” from Empire of the Senseless. These loose-fitting framing devices, texts themselves, make different senses in their new settings, encouraging us to read the chapters as well as these texts in unconventional, “non-linear” ways. An ideogram of this kind of reading decorates these two pages in a little “text-tile,” with the threads of the warp pointing off in one direction and those of the woof pointing another way.

     

    An insistent message of these essays is that a text is “a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes” (13), a textual condition that has profound implications for authors, editors, textual scholars, publishers, and readers. In this textual condition the establishment of a text, for example, becomes a contradiction in terms. An editor cannot stabilize a text, because the act of producing an edition in itself further destabilizes it, creating a palimpsest of the previous edition, overwritten by new bibliographical codes for new social situations. While an editor may strive to recreate the social context of its first appearance, and may even successfully recreate some of it, the new edition primarily produces a new text for a new context. As McGann puts it, “The textual condition’s only immutable law is the law of change” (9). It is therefore imperative to read carefully the changing bibliographical codes and the new sociohistorical conditions in order to comprehend the linguistic codes they silently influence.

     

    Although his scholarly focus is on texts written during the past two centuries, McGann is aware that the textual condition of premodern literature, and the textual methods of studying it, provide some useful models for these postmodern perceptions. Among other things, medievalists will recognize the discipline of codicology, the bibliographical analysis of a manuscript codex, in the attention McGann urges us to pay to what he calls bibliographical codes. “We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions,” he tells us. “We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in ‘poetry’: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such’” (13). McGann argues that one cannot formulate a convincing theory of textuality because each text is a particular social event best investigated as an individual case study. He opts for a “materialist hermeneutics” that treats texts as “autopoietic mechanisms” working “through a pair of interrelated textual embodiments we can study as systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings” (15).

     

    The opening chapter, “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon,” takes off from a provocative question pointed at McGann at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS). “If you were editing Byron’s poetry now,” he was asked, “what would you do?” (19). McGann responds by recounting his gradual discovery, while producing a more or less traditional “eclectic” edition during a period of upheaval in editorial and literary theory, “that texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text” (21). McGann argues that, if they attend to “editorial horizons,” to the specific social conditions of textual production, editors and textual scholars will find themselves moving inevitably toward literary pragmatics in their search for a theory of texts (22). Among three “case histories” elaborating and illustrating his ideas, McGann reviews a syllabus for one of his graduate seminars, revealing his way of inducing students to gratify their “interests in literary criticism within the orbit of the practical work of scholarship” (47).

     

    The second chapter takes up the question, “What is Critical Editing?,” and continues the critique of eclectic editing. Matthew Arnold’s editions of his Empedocles from 1852 to 1867 illustrate the inappropriateness here of combining texts around a “copy text” and incorporating emendations to produce an “ideal” text. Arnold’s successive editions, while almost identical linguistically, display radically different texts and authorial intentions by variously including, excluding, and reordering individual poems. “These bibliographical–as opposed to linguistic– variations,” McGann observes, “are of the greatest importance for anyone wishing to understand Arnold’s poetry” (51). The semiotic significance of bibliographical codes and the way they continually change the linguistic ones is unusually apparent in the case of William Blake, who meticulously hand-tinted each engraving of his poems. Blake labored, in McGann’s words, “to bring the bibliographical signifiers under his complete control” (58). His intentions are thus undermined by editors concentrating on linguistic codes alone, while at the same time generating their own scholarly bibliographical codings that are sharply at odds with the ones Blake worked so hard to provide. It is a shame that McGann’s publisher obliges him to illustrate his points with a monochrome reproduction of a hand-tinted plate from Blake’s Jerusalem. The effect is disturbingly reminiscent of Ted Turner’s colorization of old black and white films for TNT.

     

    In “The Socialization of Texts” McGann further develops his argument that texts are transmogrified by new productions with new receptions. The chapter itself will have a different impact in this book in Princeton’s series on Culture/Power/History than it did when it first appeared as a shorter article for Documentary Editing in 1990. As the author of other books published by Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford, McGann rightly stresses the importance of scholars and “institutions of transmission” in the socialization of texts. “Texts emerge from these workshops,” as he says, “in ever more rich and strange forms” (76). While he rejects the possibility of truly recovering the preceding frames of reference in critical editions, McGann envisions a recurring phoenix-like rebirth of texts in the impermanence and immutability of the textual condition: “The vaunted immortality sought after by the poetic impulse will be achieved, if it is achieved at all, in the continuous socialization of the texts” (83).

     

    The title of Chapter 4, and of the current book, was first used for a paper about writing a paper about all the other papers at the 1985 STS conference. The textual condition is for McGann “positively defined by some specific type of indeterminacy analogous to the one I experience at this (whichever) moment” (89). For him the textual condition “exemplifies the scholastic version of what ordinary mortals have called ‘the human condition’” (89). The frailty of both states is brought home to him just as he is completing the paper. His computer crashes, leaving behind only the bone-chilling message, “BDOS ERROR” (sic). McGann reacts in a human way: “I freeze. I have not saved the morning’s work (I was inspired; I could not pause to interrupt the flow of the thoughts). I cannot save the file, I cannot exit the file, I can do nothing but strike the RETURN key ineffectually” (92). He tries despair. “It is clear. I am about to lose the morning’s work. The first completed text of my paper for the STS conference is lost forever” (92). There is a happy awakening two days later when the file is miraculously resurrected by his computer’s “recovery programs,” but then his mind recalls that his new circumstances require changes, revisions, new socializations of the pristine text. The final version, still in progress as he delivers the paper, transcends old cataclysms and concludes with a postlapsarian lament on the unfortunate separation of “scholarship” and “hermeneutics” (97-98). “Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliographical discourse or a literary exegesis,” he insists to his audience of textual scholars and now to us. “Though we scholars like to believe that one is prior to the other . . . this idea is at best a specialized hypothesis for programmatic work, and at worst a deep critical illusion” (98).

     

    The first chapter in Part Two, “How to Read a Book,” implicitly coaxes us to go back and look at the preceding chapters with enhanced reading skills. We will read different texts the next time we encounter them. McGann begins this chapter with a funny and fascinating reading of what he calls “Reagan’s Farewell,” the now famous televised non-events in which former President Reagan, wherever he happended to be at the time, heads for his helicopter under a barrage of seemingly unheard and amiably unanswered queries from frantic reporters. Although not a literary text, the collaboration between Reagan as author (“the Great Communicator”) and the news media as publisher (with their well concealed bibliographical codes) nicely opens the way for a discussion of reading skills. McGann outlines important differences in the approaches to reading exemplified in Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, but points out that, in both, “‘reading’ is equated with deciphering the linguistic text” (104).

     

    McGann suggests a new approach in his own 1-2-3 of reading, which he calls linear, spatial, and radial reading. Linear reading is the ordinary kind Adler and Pound talk about. Spatial reading takes in the semiotic codes of, for instance, the formatting of a page, by employing “the reading eye [as] a scanning mechanism as well as a linear decoder” (113). Radial reading, as the name implies, radiates out from the text, expanding it by reference to other resources. Scholarly texts encourage radial reading in various ways; for example, by taking the reader to different parts of the apparatus–the notes, the index, an appendix–which in turn generate further radial investigations (120). “Good readers have to read both linearly and spatially,” McGann says, “but both of those operations remain closely tied to the illusion of textual immediacy. Radial reading is the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122).

     

    In “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” McGann renews his assault on the idea, especially prevalent in American textual scholarship over the past forty years, that editorial practice and literary criticism ought to be separate and distinct activities. The descent of editions of Pound’s Cantos between 1925 and 1933, a dramatic movement from “a decorated and hand-processed work” under Pound’s complete control to a mechanically reproduced work controlled by his publisher, presents an editor with conflicting bibliographical codings (131). McGann argues that it is difficult, if not in fact impossible, to resolve the textual dilemma in a critical edition without engaging in interpretation. In seeking “to explore how meanings operate at the work’s most primary material levels” (130), he compares a page printed in red and black from the 1925 edition of the Cantos to later editions printed in black and white. McGann’s publisher, in an unintentional parody of the point he is trying to make, provides only a black and white illustration of the two-color printing. As in the case of the Blake illustrations, then, the reader is left to imagine the bibliographical codes McGann is trying to reveal. McGann’s arguments remain emphatic, however, with or without the illustrations. “Pound’s Cantos dramatize, on an epic scale,” he says, “a related pair of important truths about poetry and all written texts: that the meaning of works committed into language is carried at the bibliographical as well as the linguistic level, and that the transmission of such works is as much a part of their meaning as anything else we can distinguish about them” (149).

     

    The final chapter, “Beyond the Valley of Production; or, De factorum natura: A Dialogue,” severely tests Acker’s dictum, quoted at the start of Part II, that “the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless.” Here McGann presents his ideas in an imagined conversation of three people talking about one of his papers. It is a bold and amusing experiment, successful in allowing McGann to take up positions he does not endorse and in forcing us to reflect on diverse modes of discourse, but I think unsuccessful in other respects. The first speaker is enthusiastic about McGann. “It was a fine lecture,” he proclaims, to get the discussion going, “–at once learned, elegant, and imaginative” (153). This speaker’s paraphrases certainly leave the impression of an important lecture, incorporating the substance of the book we are reading. The other interlocutors are less impressed. The second speaker is decidedly hostile, remaining, as she says, “unpersuaded by [McGann’s] polemical schemes,” and otherwise put off by “his often careless prose” (154). McGann subtly gets even by presenting her comments in the same McGannical prose. His forte is not natural dialogue, nor even the unnatural conversations that transpire at conferences. Thus his speakers forget they are speaking and use visual puns they wouldn’t be able to see, like “(re)produce” (163), “waste(d)” (168), “(re)membering” (171), and “(dis)orders” (172). Sometimes they even lapse into long, verbatim, block quotations with page references and footnotes, or rather endnotes. One thinks of Victor Borge making funny noises and hand gestures to furnish oral punctuation. The third speaker lapses into a rude soliloquy, notwithstanding a couple of peremptory asides to the second speaker, who improbably ignores these chances to retort until he is completely finished. They all apparently disband without a word of farewell.

     

    The “Conclusion,” McGann says in an endnote, is a “printed version” of a lecture. Newly socialized, it is now a fascinating tour de force that weaves together many strands and loose ends of the preceding chapters into a fine and colorful text. The highpoint is a brilliant display of his argument about texts as empirical and social phenomena by means of a witty and perhaps even justified apotheosis of the typescript of his lecture into a cultural icon reverently preserved in the Library of Congress.

     

    Given the prominent arguments of the book, it is hard not to notice that McGann’s ideas are in frequent counterplay, if not in actual conflict, with the modes of production of his silent collaborator, Princeton University Press. Some things, of course, are preordained. Before McGann can advise us of the laws of impermanence in the textual condition and of the final destruction of all texts, the Press assures us on the copyright page that the book meets “the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.” These far-sighted aims are not in focus with those illustrations misrepresenting the bibliographical codes of Blake’s and Pound’s works. Other bibliographical signs of a quick and inexpensive fix can be detected in the endnotes and the index. Endnotes eliminate formatting problems, but almost inevitably lure readers into scanning the notes as a continuous text after checking a particular note, or into ignoring many of the notes altogether in the course of reading the main text. In either case they work against the kind of radial reading that scholarly texts are meant to encourage. A simple index of names, while easy to compile, fails to provide even the most fundamental conceptual and thematic entries. It would be useful to be able to locate McGann’s widely dispersed comments on such issues as eclectic editing, materialist hermeneutics, bibliographical codes, and socialization of texts, less useful to be able to find passing references to the Tate Gallery, USA Today, and Yale University Press. There are signs in other of its bibliographical codes that the publisher has misread some of McGann’s linguistic ones. Perhaps most noticeable are the running titles where, for example, McGann’s “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon” is carelessly detheorized as “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” or his “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” loses its meaningfilled bibliography as “Pound’s Cantos.”

     

    Although both authors and publishers grew increasingly blind or indifferent to the meanings of bibliographical codes during the age of mechanical production, the new textual condition of desktop publishing will assuredly restore the eyesight and interest of many authors. Publishers, as they continue their trend of requiring camera-ready copy from authors, will gradually relinquish their control over bibliographical codes, except for paper, institutional packaging, and of course marketing. Writers, if they are not already adept, will quickly acquire the power to supply no less than their own choices of type- faces, font-sizes, running-titles, footnotes or endnotes, indices, page-formatting, and color or monochrome illustrations. Sooner or later we will also gain control over the same things when publishing in electronic journals. For now (back then), the textual condition of my review of this important book remains to be seen when it reappears (right now) in PMC.

     

  • Postmodern Promos

    Susan Schultz

    Department of English
    University of Hawaii-Manoa
    SCHULTZ@uhccvm.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu

     

    Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

     

    Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

     

    Archibald MacLeish declared, “a poem should not mean but be,” but of course he didn’t mean it. MacLeish’s poems meant perhaps too much, and sang too little, to submit to his definition. Marianne Moore wrote of a poet’s ability to create imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and so to create being out of meaning. More than any of the other moderns, Hart Crane self-consciously created poetry as MEDIUM and wanted language to spring us to somewhere beyond language. This unmediated medium remained, however problematically, “natural”; the poem was an organism that grew on its own; it was the poet’s truly born child.

     

    Crane incorporated advertising language into his myth in “The River” section of The Bridge as if pre-packaged language could also be used as a springboard to a non-linguistic realm. But what happens when the order of transmission is reversed, when advertising copy coopts poetry, when the medium becomes the media, when the only poetry that most people encounter comes in the guise of slogans like “I wanna be like Mike” (which refers us to a basketball player and culture hero whose very style is “poetic”)? In this contemporary example, of course, advertising language is so strong that it has the ability to change the names by which we know our heroes–no one though of Michael Jordan as “Mike” until Gatorade (not, unfortunately, the company with the sight-rhyme, “Nike”) needed to transform the hero to make him rhyme, make him even more friendly (is it possible?) to consumer culture.

     

    Marjorie Perloff’s provocative claim in Radical Artifice is that advertising language is that of Modernist poetry; advertising’s tenets were not laid down so much by Madison Avenue as by Ezra Pound. “Exact treatment of the thing, accuracy of presentation, precise definition–these Poundian principles have now been transferred to the realm of copywriting” (94), she argues (and I wonder it we might not find more irony still in the word itself, “copy write”; “copy right”; “copyright”). Perloff, ever an exact and able close-reader, takes the following billboard message in hand to show that, “as the ‘look’ of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur” (100):

     

                   O. R. LUMPKIN. BODY-
                  BUILDERS.    FENDERS               
               STRAIGHTENED.
               WRECKS OUR SPECIAL-
                  TY.    WE TAKE THE DENT
                  OUT OF ACCIDENT.

     

    “Surely,” she enjoins, pointing to the lineation of this “free verse” bit of advertising, with its clever wordplay and enjambment, “the next time we have an accident, this memorable punning will stick in our minds and draw us to O. R. Lumpkin rather than some other body shop” (100). This “standard poem” might well be printed in The New Yorker or Poetry or American Poetry Review(the latter with a photo of Mr. Lumpkin himself, no doubt). The punning begins, of course, with Mr. Lumpkin, who takes our lumps and makes them right again.

     

    Advertising’s power, of course, lies in its simulation of authenticity; the potential consumer may know that the American Express card ads that show the familial love between father and daughter are “artificial,” and still wipe tears from her eyes. Hence Dan Quayle’s insistence that television should show us a more authentic version of ourselves. And so authenticity becomes a form of nostalgia. Crucial to this sense of authenticity, Perloff would claim, is its presentation–as in the Lumpkin ad–through the medium of free verse, which we think of as “natural” and unmediated through the artifice of traditional forms. “Free verse = freedom; open form = open mind, open heart: for almost half a century,” writes Perloff, “these equations have been accepted as axiomatic, the corollary of what has come to be called, with respect to poetic language, the ‘natural look.’” I suspect that she means us to hear the conflation of poetic language with hairstyle, and the attendant confusion between image and “self,” whatever that is; Perloff’s persistent attacks on the univocal lyric over the past ten years or so are based on a profound distrust of the “self” created through it. She writes: “Most contemporary writing that currently passes by the name of ‘poetry’ belongs in this category which [Jed] Rasula wittily calls PSI, for ‘Poetry Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary to data management systems.’ The business of this particular corporation is to produce the specialty item known as ‘the self,’ and it is readily available in popular magazines and at chain bookstores” (19). Need one add that there is a magazine of that name: Self?

     

    While Modernists worked from a dualist model that set in tension “the image and the real,” and believed that one was related to the other, Postmodernists, according to Perloff, see that relationship replaced by one “between the word and the image” or between “the simulacrum and its other” (92). In this new poetry, the image itself is deconstructed, because after all, who can trust advertising to tell us the truth about ourselves, whoever those selves are? If advertising has become our mirror, then the poet’s goal is to distort that mirror in such a way that we see the inherent distortion in images–reflection must give way to refraction, deflection.

     

    So we abandon the Imagist image and return to language, but language understood in a new way, not as mediator but as medium (in the material, not the psychic, sense). Where the modern imagist free verse poet would write the Lumpkin ad as it appears above (and as the ads flash by in Crane’s “the River”), the postmodernist poet would begin not from the image of a wreck, and the message that the wreck would be fixed, but from the words used to convey that message–whose real import is mercantile. For the language of advertising, above all, sells. The postmodernist poet might play on the name O. R. Lumpkin, its relation to lumps and kin and lumpenproletariat, and in so doing, unmessage the message by making the medium the subject. It bears quoting the three ways in which Perloff sees Postmodern poets deconstructing the image:

     

    (1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny. . . .

    (2) the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by the word as Image, but concern with morphology and the visualization of the word’s constituent parts: this is the mode of Concrete Poetry[.]

    (3) Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. “Making strange” now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media. . . . (78)

     

    The real strength of Perloff’s book is in the narrative it elaborates as a way to understand the NEED for Language poetry in a now unfolding literary history. Thus, “[i]f American poets today are unlikely to write passionate love poems or odes to skylarks or to the Pacific Ocean, it is not because people don’t fall in love or go birdwatching or because the view of the Pacific from, say, Big Sur doesn’t continue to be breathtaking, but because the electronic network that governs communication provides us with the sense that others–too many others–are feeling the same way” (202-3). In other words, poems about great vistas can already be found–either in the Norton Anthology (see Keats) or, in their fallen form, in a Hallmark shop. This passage, which expresses Perloff’s yearning for a unique and unsullied perspective on (past) nature, sounds to my ear transcendentalist in its idealistic paranoia, its yearning for, yes, authenticity. Perloff’s defense, like Whitman’s, would be to celebrate self-contradiction, knowing that nothing else is possible. Like her allies the Language poets, Perloff would claim with Gertrude Stein that repetition is actually insistence, and that to sound the transcendentalist note in the 1990s is to say something new. Yet it’s hard for her to do this without somehow worshipping the unsullied and autochthonous “self” that she so easily dismisses in rear-guard free verse poetry.

     

    Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and other of the Language group of poet-critics agree with Perloff on this– as on most–points; our particular way of seeing such a vista has been pre-determined, so the argument goes, precisely by the Norton (at best) and by Hallmark (at worst) or by the more likely (con)fusion of the two. This way of seeing insures that we do conform with others, also programmed to buy Hallmark cards and do other good deeds for capitalism; the only way to be a good Emersonian these days is to de-form the language, which is also to reform it. As Bernstein says it (he, too, sounding a lot like someone who has found the original Waldo amid a crowd of faces): “Poetry is aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new forms, or can be” (1); and “I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business: I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated” (2). These claims are not, in and of themselves, radical. The Language poets’ means of acting on these claims ARE more radical, but their attempt to create once against a language that has not been coopted by the media, an un-transparency that is transparent, puts them squarely in the line of American idealists that includes Emerson and Gertrude Stein. Their quest for originality, a writing free of all quotation, is at once as admirable and quixotic as was Emerson’s.

     

    Bernstein is perhaps the most intelligent and most consistently interesting of contemporary thinkers on poetry and poetics; he is also the most self-contradictory. His work bears the kind of confused (nay, panicked) attention that Emerson’s does; like Perloff, his argument against the Romantic and Modernist image owes perhaps too much to the first American Romantic. He is at once aesthete (he adores Swinburne and Wilde) and proto-Marxist; purveyor of claritas and obscuritas; deconstructionist and fetishist of the word; preacher and skeptic; fiction-writer and disseminator of truths–the train could go on, derailing itself as it goes. This is, of course, part of Bernstein’s world view; his is a vision that tries to leave the binary behind (by containing multitudes), and engage in the polymorphous multiplicity of things. Yet I wonder if many of these contradictions are not, in fact, incompatible; Bernstein’s Swinburnian poems seem somehow at odds with the needs of a leftist politics, for example. Yet Bernstein’s prose is, for the most part, clear; he would pass a university course in argumentative writing. It is far clearer than his poetry, and serves (ironically) to advertise the poetry by explaining its purpose, if not its content. In fact, the content of the poems seems to me to be the elaboration of the prose, as if poetry were a “proof text,” rather than the proper subject of our so-called science.

     

    Bernstein’s claims for poetry are in many ways even stronger than Perloff’s, although he begins from the same starting blocks with (an all-too-easy?) attack on advertising culture, arguing that poets should display

     

    a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats like so many tablespoons of Pepto Bismol, short respite from the gas and the diarrhea that are the surest signs that harsh and uncontainable reality hasn't vanished but has only been removed from public discussion.(3)

     

    Bernstein replaces Perloff’s creators of false “selves” with the purveyors of what he calls “official verse culture.” That these are the purveyors of a political, as well as a poetic, message Bernstein makes clear in his argument that the notion that “we can ‘all’ speak to one another in the universal voice of history” is a “disease.” His heroes, then, are poets who work “in opposition to the dominant strains of American culture” (6).

     

    These dominant strains, for Bernstein as for Perloff, are evidenced in the strains of the American lyre. But where Perloff’s poetic heroes are those who replace “form” with “artifice”–who replace sonnets with numerically generated bits of language that have the virtues of formalism without any of the taint (and what a taint there is!), Bernstein erases the differences between all forms of writing:

     

    if there's a temptation to read the long essay-in-verse ("Artifice of Absorption"), which follows these opening notes, as prose, I hope there will be an equally strong temptation to read the succeeding prose as if it were poetry.(3)

     

    Whether prose or poetry, his writing is meant to be taken as fiction; in a Steinian way he writes, “when Content’s Dream was published I wanted that to be classified as ‘essays/fiction.’ People sometimes ask me if I’m interested in writing a novel. I say, well, I did, that’s it” (151).

     

    While Bernstein persuades me that the categories by which we write and read literature no longer do us much good, it seem to me that he himself holds to these categories, and needs to hold to them to make his argument fly. I find “Artifice of Absorption” the most compelling piece in A Poetics–Bernstein’s verse “Essay on Poetry,” as it were. For here is an essay-poem that contains the virtues of the essay form (it is readable, cogent) and of the poem (it relies on enjambment for its rhythm and drama– the same kinds of enjambments, I might add, that make poets such as Amy Clampitt such easy targets for critics such as Perloff). Bernstein begins from the question that springs “naturally” from his work as a poet-critic (or poet-poet or critic-critic); in so doing, he refines Perloff’s discussion of “artifice”:

     

    A poetic reading can be given to any piece of writing; a "poem" may be understood as writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with, proactive--rather than reactive--styles of reading. "Artifice" is a measure of a poem's intractability to being read as the sum of its devices & subject matters.(9)

     

    For Bernstein, artifice is not so much a new kind of form, as it is for Perloff, as a way of writing that foregrounds technical devices over and above “content” and “meaning.” To paraphrase Bernstein’s discussion of “voice” in the Language Book, “content” is but one possibility for poetry. But “content” and “meaning” are not the ends of poetry, just more means; they are not the same thing, either, for “content never equals meaning” (10). Artifice is, according to Bernstein’s jargon, non-absorptive; one cannot “get lost” in a Language poem the way one can get lost in a Harlequin romance–but the reader is also not in danger of losing her soul to the particular demands made on it by the Harlequin (which are fundamentally conservative, despite–or because of–the soft porn). And, as Bernstein sees it,

     

    much contemporary American
    poetry is based on simplistic
    notions of absorption through unity, such
    as those sometimes put forward by Ginsberg
    (who as his work shows
    knows better, but who has made an ideological
    commitment to such simplicity)."(38)

     

    Bernstein places himself characteristically at both ends of his artificial dualism:

     

    In my poems, I
    frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable
    elements, digressions &
    interruptions, as part of a technological
    arsenal to create a more powerful
    ("souped-up")
    absorption than possible with traditional,
    & blander, absorptive techniques.(52-3)

     

    He acknowledges that “[t]his is a / precarious road” that makes the reader more conscious of technique than of experience, but I wonder if Bernstein believes in the currency of terms like “experience.” After reading Bernstein’s work over an extended period, the world of language becomes THE world, always threatening/promising to dissolve into a chaos of no-definition. Finally, though, Bernstein proposes a kind of reading that is rather pragmatically critical, even as it is creative. As Perloff points out toward the beginning of Radical Artifice (and this is one of its least interesting moments), “Not only does the boundary between ‘verse’ and ‘prose’ break down but also the boundary between ‘creator’ and ‘critic’” (17).

     

    Like Stein’s language, Bernstein’s is always “foreign”–alien, confusing, and above all, never sacred. Bernstein’s most recent book of poems, Rough Trades, must be read in this way, as a celebration and cerebration of language in and for itself, and as an exercise in non-absorptiveness that is meant to refashion prevailing world political views. In the contradiction between these two purposes lies an abyss; Bernstein seems at times too much like a New Critic who attempts to change the world by ignoring it. But Bernstein, however much he seems to be the Pope (Alexander, that is) of the postmodern, means to undress us of our layers of expression in order that our means of expression can clothe us in new (and utopian) possibilities. He and Perloff, in their complementary assaults on the common-places of the American language at this fin-de-siecle, provoke us to look past the image by way of the (small-w) word, and to re-invest our words with whatever ideals we have left. The poetry that they advertise is not written in a “common” language, but in one that we cannot yet think in, non-absorptive to the point of being non-sensical. It may get us to another world. But then again, that’s a soap opera.

     

  • Post-Literacy

    Alan Aycock

    Department of Anthropology
    University of Lethbridge
    aycock@hg.uleth.ca

     

    Tuman, Myron, ed. Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. 300 pp. + illus/fig. $34.95 (US) cloth, $14.95 paper. (Review copy was an uncorrected proof; please note that quotations below may be inexact).

     

    This work comprises a collection of essays originally presented in 1988 at the Sixteenth Annual University of Alabama Symposium on English and American literature. Its intent is to explore (1) the new forms of literacy made available by electronic technology; (2) the opportunities that “literacy online” affords those who teach and study literature; and (3) more broadly, the implications of new literacies for key cultural ideas, such as authorship, the textual canon, and critical thought, that are strongly associated with traditional print technology. The articles are integrated by Myron Tuman’s introductory and closing remarks and by short roundtable discussions that appear at the end of each section.

     

    Most of the articles take as their focus the notion of the “hypertext,” a multi-layered congerie of literary works, critical commentaries, and contextualizing materials that render immediately accessible to the online reader the expertise that would otherwise be restricted to a narrow elite of professional scholars. Many hypertext programs have been written over the past decade for pedagogical and other purposes, and there is a substantial technical literature on the topic (for instance, the online catalog of the University of California libraries lists more than thirty recent books with the word “hypertext” in their titles).

     

    I shall first consider the range of issues– hypertext, pro and con–that the authors confront in their articles, then attempt to present a somewhat more radically sociological view of these matters, from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu.

     

    One apparent advantage of the hypertext is that readers may participate actively in its development by manipulating its databases in diverse ways, and by contributing their own writings to it: George Landow argues that to deploy the hypertext as an “open, changing, expanding system of relationships” permits the contextualization of an otherwise fixed central canon of texts, and encourages interdisciplinary team teaching. This he believes to be a “major strength of hypermedia.” Similarly, Jay David Bolter contends that “[t]he reader’s control of a hypertext can be expressed as the ratio between looking at and looking through the text, between the experience of reading the words and the new experience of choosing the path.” While “open relationships” and “new experience” tend to be disproportionately privileged in North American cultures, this seems to be a promising avenue of approach.

     

    Another feature of value is the new nonlinear styles of thought that are putatively encouraged by the hypertext. As Helen Schwartz suggests in her essay, the hypertext may offer both graphic and verbal components, potentially integrating “left-brained” and “right-brained” styles of knowing with the hypertext as “prosthesis.” Pamela McCorduck echoes this: “knowledge of different kinds is best represented in all its complexity for different purposes by different kinds of knowledge representations,” such as those afforded by the computer. Indeed, McCorduck surmises that the new forms of knowledge implied by the hypertext portend a revolution fully as significant, in their own way, as that of the Neolithic. Again, though one may be justifiedly sceptical about the grounding of computer literacy in terms of neurophysiology (a naturalizing gesture that adds little to its understanding), or about the actual, as opposed to the ideal, cognitive effects of secondary orality (pace McLuhan), it cannot be gainsaid that there may be something here worth pursuing.

     

    More contentious, however, are the political implications of hypertext. Some argue that hypertext is politically neutral; Victor Raskin, for instance, states that “[a]ll hypertext does is to present a format, a methodology, a tool for recording the already-established links.” Similarly, Richard Lanham suggests that “the computer with its digital display is no technological vis a tergo but the condign medium for expressing how we nowadays think of ourselves and our world.” Yet matters are not so simple.

     

    By contrast, in support of the non-neutrality of hypertext, Bolter points to the dissolution of standard author-reader relationships, Landow (citing Barthes’ S/Z) to the new roles that are implied for teachers and students, and Stanley Aronowitz to the effects of the introduction of computer technology upon management-worker relationships. Ted Nelson, along the same lines, wrestles with issues of copyright (“transclusion”), the propertied infrastructure of authorial presence in print-based technology. One cannot really doubt that online literacy may contribute in various ways to such familiar postmodern trends, and indeed as the contributors argue, hypertext may accelerate such movements.

     

    A number of the essays also consider the political non-neutrality of critical writing in hypertext mode. Tuman and Schwartz both wonder whether the virtual reality of hypertext is too unstable, too diffuse or multiplex, to sustain the project of literary criticism. And as Ulmer seems to propose, deconstructive techniques such as grammatology may be inherently fostered by the hypertext. Whether the impetus lent new modes of critical thought is desirable is a concern that is initially broached by the volume, though the contributors fail to take this obvious opportunity to examine hypertext in terms of Lyotard’s search for “new presentations . . . to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” (Curiously, neither Lyotard nor Baudrillard makes an appearance in these essays.)

     

    Eugene Provenzo invokes Foucault’s panopticon to drive home more troublesome political issues, however: apparently trivial acts of consumption, such as buying a pizza or renting a video, may install the purchaser in databases managed by anonymous corporations or by government agencies whose autocracy may be thereby intensified. Thus Greg Ulmer, in a rather striking and double-edged metaphor, likens the mastery of a database to “the colonization of a foreign land”: though he does not say so, one is reminded in this context of the claims and counterclaims ferociously debated with regard to the surveillance and offensive technology of Desert Storm, and its wider considerations for “the new world order” unreflectively pronounced by George Bush and his cronies.

     

    The politics of hypertext itself aside, I retain some doubts about the manner in which the contributors deal with their own political stances vis-a-vis hypertext. To suggest something of what I think may be at stake here, I will allude briefly to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

     

    To begin with, Bourdieu’s “habitus,” a structured, structuring disposition to cognize, evaluate, and practise the logic of lived experience, calls to account the new modes of critical thought, contrived as agencies in specific arenas of struggle, that might be said to devolve from “literacy online.” It is in this vein that one could wish for a more reflexive attention to the roles that the authors themselves enact in witnessing the procreative agonisms of hypertext: are they part of the solution, or part of the problem?

     

    Further, the material and social conditions of technoculture represent (“re-present”) an aspect of Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital,” the instrumentalities of domination that constitute “the stakes of the game,” and that manufacture the means for its pursuit. Symbolic capital engages, in this specific instance, the textual labors which influence the production of substances amenable to the realization of yet more texts and hypertexts, and the officiants who produce them. Shall we draw a line of diminishing returns, and if we do or do not, isn’t that part of the political agenda of hypertext?

     

    Finally, the authoritarian nature of pedagogy is highlighted by Bourdieu’s discussions of the manner in which educational institutions produce and reproduce the conditions of their dominance, and the relationships of class which sustain them, and are in turn generated by them. Tuman responds to this general issue, indirectly and perhaps too inconclusively, in his closing remarks: “the attitudes collected here constitute a time-capsule–preserving for future students of literacy a record of what the thinkers, so successfully acculturated into print culture (possibly ‘the last [such] generation’), had to say about the profound impact, for better or worse, that nearly everyone agrees computers are about to have on our practice of reading and writing.” Hype aside, what is the value of archivally oriented texts? The construction of tradition is a complex and politically loaded task, yet it passes unexamined, and largely unacknowledged, in the Tuman collection.

     

    Beyond this, I can suggest only three criticisms of real substance. First, the frequent references to “preliterate” cultures rely perhaps too heavily on Eric Havelock’s (undoubtedly seminal) work, supplemented by some rather vague generalizations; the extensive West African work of Jack Goody, Sylvia Scribner, and Michael Cole on the oral-literate interface is not cited. Second, the “writing culture” debate of the 1980s (e.g., James Clifford, George Marcus, Clifford Geertz) has no counterpart in Tuman, though it seems quite pertinent to any attempt to discern a post-oral, post-literate cultural milieu. Third, the lapse of four years between the initial presentation of these essays and their publication in this volume is somewhat vexing, since the intervening period has seen at least two works, one by Michael Heim and another by Mark Poster [and a third, Hypertext by George Landow, reviewed in Postmodern Culture 2.3–Ed.] which have somewhat reshaped the relevant field of discussion.

     

    On balance, however, this is a fascinating and clearly written collection, and I would not hesitate to use it as an upper-level undergraduate text, or as a scholar’s introduction to hypertext. Those already familiar with the concept of hypertext, however, would do rather better to turn to Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information for an account of the significance of computing in the postmodern age.

     

  • The Black (W)hole of Bataille: A Genealogy of Postmodernism?

    Russell Potter

    English Department
    Colby College
    rapotter@colby.edu

     

    Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, vols. II and III, tr. Robert Hurley. Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1991 (1992).

     

    Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

     

    The reception of Georges Bataille, as Julian Pefanis observes, has been belated in the English-speaking world– and not only because it has been so slow to be translated. Until quite recently, Bataille has remained a shadowy figure; in a memorable metaphor Pefanis compares him with “a large dark body, maybe a black hole, whose presence in the heavens has been discernable in the erratic orbits of the visible planets: Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, and the rest” (42). Pefanis notes the groundbreaking importance of the collection Visions of Excess (1985); since then no fewer than seven new translations have appeared, including Inner Experience, The Tears of Eros, The College of Sociology, Guilty, Theory of Religion, and the first volume of The Accursed Share.1 Yet while Bataille’s texts may be said to have finally “arrived” in the Anglophone world (as the recent special issue of Yale French Studies on Bataille attests), there still remain a number of important texts whose full impact has yet to be felt–and of these, none is more massive than the final share of La Parte Maudite. Bataille did not fully complete this work, and died when only the first volume had appeared; the Gallimard editors (and Hurley) have made the best of what was left, but the result remains massive, sprawling, redundant–and brilliant. And, of all the black holes in the Bataillean sky (and indeed l’anus solaire precedes the “black hole” in the genealogy of the imagined universe), the last two volumes of what Hurley translates as The Accursed Share loom largest, the intensity of their gravity almost suffocating.

     

    Such holes can swallow their authors whole; some incomplete magnum opus or another serves as the tombstone of many a writer–and none more fittingly than Bataille. Yet, if the lightness of his short essays, the delirious play of his pornographic novellas, are less in evidence here, there is nonetheless a compensatory and strangely lucid air of finality, an air reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo; here the author weaves his own shroud, and ends by crumpling beneath it. To the very last, Bataille embodied what he called “the practice of joy before death,” and in its final sections the text burns and poisons with delight, like the half-eaten pages of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy in the mouth of the venerable Jorge in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

     

    No doubt there are other metaphors of depense with which one could hail this volume, but the question remains: What hole in the celestial void–that is, in the historical genealogy of post-modernism–do these translations of The Accursed Share (along with Bataille’s other works) fill? And, now that the penumbra of Bataille has lightened somewhat, what influence will it have on current re- theorizations of the postmodern? These are questions that Julian Pefanis sets out to answer in Heterology and the Postmodern, but before embarking on a critique of his work, a closer look at the final books of The Accursed Share is in order.

     

    Unlike writers such as Baudrillard, for whom for whom the inheritance of depense leads to “the extermination of signs” (Pefanis 30), Bataille still maintains the question of expenditure from within functioning historical economies. The question of the reality-value of the structures he investigates is moot for Bataille, as it is for Foucault; both follow the Nietzschean dictate that a culture’s supposed or ostensible motives are as valuable (if not more valuable) for a genealogical inquiry as its actual ones (supposing indeed that they could ever be determined). Even if his ultimate destination is the “end of history” (190), Bataille begins with historically specific moments and cultures, in order to pinpoint the deeper structures of which they are symptomatic.

     

    This process began in Volume I (which appeared in 1988 in a translation by Hurley that forms the companion to this book), where Bataille demonstrated the crucial role of sacrificing or destroying the excess produced in any economy through a series of expositions–not only on the Northwest Coast Indians’ potlach, but also on the sacrificial rites of the Maya, the territorial imperative of early Islam, and the massive monasticism of Tibetan Lamaism. In each case, Bataille locates the excess, the “accursed share” (la parte maudite), with the dispersal of which these otherwise widely varying cultures have had to cope. A society can do many things with its excess; it can throw it into refuse pits, it can expend it in endless war, or it can disperse it with a massive movement of non-production (Tibetan monasticism). The decisive move of capitalism, even against feudalism (in which Bataille as a medievalist recognizes the sheer bulk of both inefficient labor and non- productive expenditure), is to re-invest this excess in growth–that is, in the production of both greater means of production (and consequently a still larger excess).

     

    That such a practice eventually seems as bizarre and cancerous as it does is a credit to Bataille as an historian. For all the surreality of his articulations of transgression and expenditure, they are grounded in history to a degree that few of his theoretical followers have matched. Yet what remains, after Volume I, is an open question: what might these historical lessons mean at the postmodern moment, either at the juncture where Bataille’s text ends (the increasing cold war tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R) or now, now that the historical contest between capitalist accumulation in the name of an (always postponed) individual sovereignty and socialist industrialization (in the name of a collective anti- sovereignty) has suddenly collapsed. As Bataille himself says at the close of Volume I, “if this tension [between Soviet communism and capitalism] were to fail, a feeling of calm would be completely unwarranted; there would be more reason than ever to be afraid.”2

     

    From this problematic, Volume II, “The History of Eroticism,” constitutes an unexpected and somewhat diffuse detour. In it, Bataille attempts both to subjoin the question of the erotic into the larger question of the economic and to offer a historical genealogy of eroticism. Bataille begins by recounting in more pointedly economic terms Levi-Strauss’s structural models of incest and exogamy. The ban on endogamy can then be seen as a barrier against “accumulation,” just as exogamy is regarded as the “expenditure of resources” (56). Bataille also stresses, as a fundamental gesture, the importance of opposition to and distance from nature to the constitutive structures of humanity. As beings who are aware of death and for whom sexual acts are choices (rather than the function of instincts), taboos and strictures on sexuality are constitutive of humanity itself, humanity as opposed to nature. Eroticism, then, marks a return to the abhorred nature–or at least an attempted return, since the nature to which it returns is opened only through the licit illicitness of transgression, and is neither total nor sustainable. Eroticism, furthermore, is placed outside the economy of the ‘useful’; it does not serve a social function, or indeed any function at all; its nature is ‘sovereign’ (in the special use of this term as defined by Bataille; see below) and fundamentally opposed to society and the State.

     

    Humanity, for Bataille, is constituted both by the taboos and strictures which establish society (not excluding the transgressions which at once violate and reaffirm them) and by its excess, which demands a commensurate expenditure of resources. On an individual level, eroticism is the ultimate form of this expenditure: it destroys the dualism between subject and object and marks the violent return of “totality” (113). It, too, has a politics, which are contrary to the interests of the state; Bataille’s figure here is the Sade of “Limitless Expenditure”; the subject “breaks away from all restraints” and annihilates form.3 Eroticism, then, is the individual technic of sovereign values, of values which Bataille opposes to utility, and as such it offers a postmodern ethos; “the consciousness of erotic truth anticipates the end of history” (190)–which for Bataille depends upon the eradication of inequalities of resources and status which produced “history.”

     

    The question of how, on a social level, such a development might be possible provides the impetus towards a re-articulation of “sovereignty,” which is the subject of Volume III. By “sovereign,” it should be noted, Bataille designates something rather different from the ordinary connotations of the term, in a manner similar to Nietzsche’s “noble.” Like Nietzsche, Bataille both embraces and disavows the class connotations of his chosen term. The sovereign, for Bataille, is the domain of non-utility and non-objectivity; it is the useless, it disdains use, and it scorns the (bourgeois) world of “things.” It chooses the present rather than the future; the transgressive rather than the obedient; its domain is excess, the realm of the accursed share.

     

    Bataille’s sovereignty is thus a mobile and circulating loss, eternally returning at the edge of value/utility. For, as he himself observes, this theory of the Sovereign as the useless treads on the edge of its own contradiction. If the sovereign is both “no-thing” (that thing whose use value = 0) and yet at the same time crucial (in that it alone can oppose the society of commodity accumulation), its uselessness at once becomes useful, even necessary. By its very structure it undoes itself at the very moment when its value becomes evident. The text of The Accursed Share itself enacts this mobility gained at the price of loss; like a thread in Penelope’s loom, each small section undoes and re-does the question of the sovereign.

     

    In the feudal order, sovereignty has already begun to unravel, insofar as the monarchs have traded full sovereignty for power over the world of things.4 Nonetheless, the monarch’s role as the paradigm of subjectivity remains paramount; the subjectivity of the individual subject, rather than being directly available, is always mediated through the visual recognition of the monarch. Nonetheless, the sovereign is in principle inalienable, and the subject can always recall her/his share of the sovereign. This, for Bataille, is the revolutionary moment, when “the subject assumes in himself, in himself alone, the full truth of the moment,” and the paradigmatic subject of this kind is Sade. What this might mean on a collective level remains unarticulated, however, and Bataille does not offer any direct models as he did in Volume I. What he does instead is to embark upon a rather abstract, and yet prescient analysis of Stalin’s rationales for socialist industrialization. For Bataille, Soviet society is the medium in which the question of the sovereign will be resolved, for “today, sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of communism” (261).

     

    This statement may come as something of a surprise to those who would categorize Bataille with the sort of “ludic” postmodernism that takes its cues from Nietzsche rather than Marx.5 Yet Bataille is quite serious; like Marx, his historical progression begins with tribal and feudalistic structures, and recognizes the capitalistic turn as a deviance from all previous historical norms. Bataille’s difference–and a significant one it is–is that unlike many theorists of Marxism, who prefer to think of Stalin as a kind of bad dream, Bataille looks directly at the economic structures of communism under Stalin as a starting point for his theorizations.

     

    Bataille emphasizes at the outset the historical surprise of Lenin (and, later, Mao Zedong):

     

    Socialist revolutions, carried out by militants who quoted Marx as their authority, succeeded in countries with an agrarian or feudal social structure. (265)

    For Bataille, this demonstrates that it is the revolt against the old sovereignty of the feudal order that enables revolution, and not at all the revolt against the bourgeois. In fact, as Bataille ironically observes, there have not yet been any revolutions of the kind Marx predicted, where the proletariat of an industrialized nation has seized power from the bourgeois:

     

    I wish to stress, against both classical and present-day Marxism, the connection of all great revolutions, from the English and the French onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. . . . All those that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society. (279)

     

    [14 Soviet communism, however, has a difference that fascinates Bataille; while it did not destroy an established bourgeois order, it continually opposed itself to that order on an international scale, constituting what Bataille calls the “world of denied sovereignty” (291). Unlike bourgeois societies, which by dedicating their excess resources to the increment of the forces of production in the name of accumulation, Soviet communism demanded an ever swifter and mightier increment, what Stalin (quoted by Bataille) called the “unbroken expansion of production . . . without booms or crises,” yet made precisely in the name of renouncing the sovereign share in order to create an undifferentiated society (293).

     

    Thus Bataille sees Soviet communism aiming to renounce alienation–yet not the alienation of “labor value” decried by Marx, but the alienation of sovereignty itself. For, had this society succeeded, it would have marked not the destruction but the return of sovereignty:

     

    If every man is destined for complete non- differentiation, he abolishes all alienation in himself; he stops being a thing, or rather he attains a thinghood so fully that he is no longer a thing . . . a thing is alienated (partial); it always exists in relation to something else. . . .

     

    Bataille nonetheless seems to sense that such a society will be difficult to produce, especially when, as with later Soviet communism, the moment when full subjectivity (which is precisely an economicphenomenon) might be reached must be continually put off in the name of increased production. Yet Bataille declines to judge communism from what he calls his own “comic bourgeois” society, a society which attempts any antics to avoid sacrifice: “No one on this side of the curtain is in a position to give lessons to those whose lot was to put everything at stake” (360). In the end, bourgeois society and communist society both debase the ‘sovereign,’ as they both (though for opposed reasons) place their greatest emphasis on accumulation; Bataille is therefore not comfortable with either. His models of society, for all their attractiveness, are reluctant–out of principle, one supposes–to answer the question “where do we go from here?” In response, Bataille admits that he has only “banalities”: we must “affirm, against all opposition, the unconditional value of a politics that would level individual resources” (189). How we might work towards such a goal will not be the concern of Bataille, for whom such things would be merely useful.

     

    Bataille concludes Volume III with a series of apparently unrelated articles under the heading “The Literary World and Communism.” Their titles–“Nietzsche and Communism,” “Nietzsche and Jesus,” “Nietzsche and the Transgression of Prohibitions,” and “The Present Age and Sovereign Art,” signal a strange and yet premeditated return to Nietzsche as the paradigmatic figure of the sovereign. Indeed, in a moment of uncanny lucidity, Bataille states simply, “I am the only one who thinks of himself not as a commentator on Nietzsche but as being the same as he” (367). Like Bataille, Nietzsche “refused the reign of things,” and along with it the notion of human beings as “a means and not an end” (367). Even Jesus figures in the equation; Bataille sees the New Testament as a manual for sovereign existence, and even the Nietzsche of The Antichrist as but a return to a sovereignty the institutional church had obscured under the whips and chains of ressentiment.

     

    In his final pages, Bataille begins to sound something like a Zarathustra himself; critiquing Thomas Mann’s statement that “who takes Nietzsche literally is lost,” he cites Jesus’s “Who tries to save his life shall lose it” (401). The loss, even of one’s own subjectivity as such, is for Bataille the condition of life, the underlying force that drives eroticism, laughter, and writing itself. The only danger is that the sovereign loss, loss for its own sake, might be diverted into a loss for something (for God or for Country, or for greater gains in the future). Against this danger, Bataille offers his ‘text for nothing,’ his shout, his festival of depense.

     

    That Bataille’s greatest strength is a negation–albeit a negation that exceeds itself and is figuratively transformed into an affirmation (as with Nietzsche’s ‘active nihilism’)–makes the question of his legacy equally accursed. Like Nietzsche, Bataille is at once everywhere and nowhere; he provides a spur, an incitement to discourse, without supplying either a dogmatic structure (Freud’s Oedipus) or an overriding goal (Marx’s proletarian revolution). It is this dilemma that faces Julian Pefanis, who in attempting to construct a genealogy of postmodernism by charting the influence of Bataille finds himself continually obliged to construct a more unitary–and a more useful–Bataille than either Bataille’s texts or Pefanis’s own theorizations of heterology would seem to offer.

     

    Pefanis could nonetheless have made the necessary connections himself, constructing not so much an account of postmodernism but an instance. That he does not hardly makes his text invalid, but it does make it less valuable. To borrow Teresa Ebert’s distinction, Pefanis is more a “theoretician”–a cataloguer and applier of theory–than a “theorist”–one who, through her/his very act of writing, undertakes to actively (re)theorize the questions s/he addresses. Nonetheless, among theoreticians, Pefanis is unusually acute, and he has traced lines of influence through the theorists whose texts he considers that are suggestive and provoking. As indicated above, he takes Bataille as his central text, positing it as the mediator between Kojeve’s Hegel and the Nietzschean turn taken by French philosophy after the war (supported and encouraged in particular by Foucault and Deleuze). Pefanis later extends this argument, asserting that Bataille also stands as a medial text between Mauss’s account of The Gift and both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions around the question of exchange.

     

    At the onset, Pefanis states that he wishes to mobilize these theorizations of exchange in order to model some form of ‘resistance’ to the ‘logic of consumer capitalism'(the phrase, as well as the question, is Jameson’s), and to critique the notion of postmodernism as a complicit dead-end offered by Felix Guattari, who decries the loss of confidence in the notion of “emancipation through social action” and denounces the philosophy of Baudrillard and Lyotard as “no philosophy at all” (7). Exactly how these two questions relate to one another is not made clear, but Pefanis launches into a litany for a ‘postmodern science,’ whose genealogy he traces to Alexandre Kojeve (whose students, among them Sartre, Lacan, and Bataille, could each in his turn be seen as pivots in the articulation of the postmodern). It is Kojeve, reading Hegel’s account of consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology of Mind, who first prophesies the “end of history” (12). The end will be possible because consciousness need no longer be founded upon “slavish” labor, but upon a new possibility. It remains for Kojeve’s students to articulate this possibility, and Pefanis is no doubt correct in asserting that Mauss’s The Gift provided the initial impetus for its articulation. In the question of exchange, of giving and receiving, Bataille developed his model of the “accursed share,” just as Lacan worked this same question (by way of a retournement of Freud) into his own theorizations of desire.

     

    Pefanis’s next chapters, on Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard respectively, pick up on this movement, and situate Bataille as the text behind postmodern models of exchange, difference, and desire. His reading of Bataille is a lucid one, although somewhat limited (it reads somewhat like a review of Visions of Excess), and while its posing of the question of the reception of Bataille is astute (as noted above), its analysis of Bataille’s theorizations of depense are rather more tenuous. Pefanis notes Bataille’s “Nietzschean turn,” towards the loss of subjectivity, and links it to “the problematic of writing and death” in Klossowski and Blanchot. Yet this connection is abruptly dropped (it is the only reference to Blanchot in the entire book), leaving a central question of the inheritance of Bataille dangling.

     

    Pefanis does engage, however, with The Accursed Share, and provides a compelling account of Bataille’s model of sovereignty. Pefanis zeroes in on the question of class, and in so doing identifies the underlying gesture from which Bataille’s “sovereign” derives:

     

    Bataille struggles to strip sovereignty of its ideological associations with the bygone aristocracy without delivering it to a heroic bourgeois individual, since it is precisely this sovereign subject which Bataille aims to annihilate by reserving it for a type of mystical experience of limits--of the poetic, the erotic.(48)

     

    Yet by suggesting that the sovereign “annihilates” the “sovereign subject,” Pefanis conflates Bataille’s radical anti-utilitarianism with the move against the unitary subject instigated by Freud and Lacan. Bataille does not posit such a unitary subject; indeed his ‘sovereignty’ is a mobile and fluid state incapable by its nature of cohering in a given individual, at least for long. It is not the subjectivity of the bourgeois that Bataille calls into question–it is a given for him that it is already questionable–but rather that subject’s relation to society, which is not obliterated but secured through the “experience of limits.”

     

    Nonetheless, Pefanis makes some suggestive connections between Bataille and recent anthropological work–work which vindicates his insistence that the question of the economy was always one of coping not with scarcity, but with superabundance (an idea, incidentally, which Bataille probably took from Nietzsche).6 Marx, notes Pefanis, based his models on an “anthropology of scarcity”–and there is a case to be made, as he suggests, that this positing of primordial lack has motivated both ethnocentric anthropology and progressivist thought (51). Yet rather than link this perception, as he might, to questions of global political economy, Pefanis retreats to a digression on Kant, and concludes his chapter by declaring, somewhat vaguely, that “Bataille’s method and practice . . . ineluctably concern a meta-discourse on writing” (58).

     

    Having brought Bataille from the position of someone who, at least apparently, had something to say about society, to the position of a ‘meta-discourse’ (heterology), Pefanis is able to move with relative ease to the work of Baudrillard and Lyotard. There are links here, to be sure– but there are also profound disjunctions. No doubt one of the reasons that Guattari is so suspicious of Baudrillard and Lyotard is that they are both writers who mark a turn away from the question of the socius, and towards a far more meta-discursive position. However one may construe Bataille’s politics (and some may say that he had none), he writes, as does Guattari, surreal discourse that grows from the analysis of “real” social structures, a discourse which Bataille could call sociology. To move from Bataille to Baudrillard and Lyotard without addressing this difference (except in a relatively familiar re-hash of Baudrillard’s spin on Plato’s question of the real vs. the ideal), is jarring.

     

    One of the central questions of the Bataillean text, that of political economy, can serve as an indication of Pefanis’s approach: The potlach, with its economy of conspicuous loss, is chosen by Bataille over the kula, the model of ongoing exchange, and this too is the choice of Baudrillard. Yet as Pefanis observes, Baudrillard refuses altogether to think of the potlach as an “economy” (29), seeing in it instead the “extermination of signs,” whereas Lyotard scorns the entire model as an exercise in the romantic valorization of an artificially constructed “savage.” As a consequence, Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange is static, a model of signification for “after the end of the world.” Lyotard, for his part, returns to Freud without stopping to leave an offering at Bataille’s shrine, producing in The Libidinal Economy (Pefanis’s central text) an enigmatic, playful exegesis that abandons the question of the social almost entirely. Such ambivalence– one could even call it indifference–over the inheritance of Bataille characterizes many of the texts of both Baudrillard and Lyotard. This ambivalence does not seem to trouble Pefanis, who (despite his repeated accolades of Bataille) appears to become progressively more interested in Freud and Lacan.

     

    Pefanis would have liked, it seems, to offer a genealogy of postmodernism which would “account” for the question of exchange in such a way that one could re-join Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions of exchange to Jameson’s meditation on resistance to consumer capitalism. Yet in the end, this desire remains unfilled, breached as it is by a Lacanian irruption (a reading, compelling at first but eventually allegorized to death), of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Fauna of Mirrors”). The “mirror people” lie in wait, visible only in the depths of the mirror, constrained (on account of an ancient defeat at the hands of the Yellow Emperor) to mimic us in this world. Yet one day, in revenge, they will return, and conquer, and throw off the slavery of mimesis. The mirror people, Pefanis seems to want to say, are Baudrillard and Lyotard–and surely Lacan as well–and in this sense they have already arrived, and we are them (insofar as we see ourselves in them it is/we are false, trapped in a power ploy, an allegory of meconaissance). Yet this reading of Borges via Lacan offers no grounds upon which the question of resistance can be framed, because it has already placed in abeyance the question of material social relations. In the funhouse of postmodernism, one never knows if there is actually a riot going on or not–it could be only a simulation; indeed to Baudrillard it is already a simulation. Such is “ludic” postmodernism at its worst, and while one could accuse Bataille as well of playing this game, at least for him the stakes were real. In the end, Pefanis seems more akin to Baudrillard and Lyotard than to Bataille, whose text is founded upon an insistence on the political (and on using lived social relations as a model) to which Pefanis, along with many of the more “ludic” postmodernists, has developed something of an allergy. From this position, the question of “resistance” is moot–but only because ludic postmodernists have declared it so.

     

    In the final analysis, Pefanis’s book is too dense for most undergraduates; the histories it articulates will only be intelligible to those already familiar with them. Nonetheless, for those interested in these histories, it offers an elegant and at times brilliant retournement of its own. Bataille’s book, on the other hand, while even more useless, is of tremendous value. Robert Hurley’s text preserves (as have his previous translations of Bataille) both the unrelenting care and the reckless audacity of Bataille’s prose, and Bruce Mau’s impeccable design–as always with Zone books–renders the physicality of the volume a delight to hand and eye.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The full citations for these are as follows: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985); Inner experience (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988 [translation of L’Experience interieure]); The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988 [translation of Larmes d’Eros]); The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis Hollier, tr. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988 [texts by Georges Bataille, et al.; translation of Le College de sociologie]); Guilty, tr. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988 [translation of Le Coupable]); and The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (NY: Zone Books, 1988 [translation of volume I of La Parte maudite]).

     

    2. Bataille, The Accursed Share I:188.

     

    3. See the essay, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” Visions of Excess 91-102.

     

    4. “What made royalty contestable . . . was that the sovereign end, which royalty was meant to embody in the eyes of the subjects, became, never more scandalously, a means for the very individual it was meant to transfigure” The Accursed Share II&III: 320.

     

    5. See Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Theory/ Pedagogy/Politics 29-30 n.1, for a summary of this dichotomy, which has been most forcibly articulated by Teresa L. Ebert.

     

    6. Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science, section 349, that “in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant, but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity.” The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufman (NY: Vintage, 1974), 292.

     

  • Bargaincounterculturalcapitalism: Gear and Writhing at the New Music Seminar

    Bill Millard

     Department of English Rutgers University

    <millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu>

     

     

    The New Music Seminar and New York Nights, June 15-21, 1992, New York City

     

    At the close of four days of fractiousness, defensiveness, tepid consensus, heated debate, masturbation unabated, plugs for products, plugs for services, plugs for personalities, plugs for personae, plugs for personal agendas, plugs for drugs, and live performances plugged and unplugged, a ballroom full of people found themselves on the receiving end of a sexual threat. Diamanda Galas, New York- based anti-diva, stepped onto the table at which she and ten other rock and near-rock artists were seated, to deliver their observations on the state of the music industry. Standing tall and turning her back to the audience, she invited everyone (loudly, twice) to admire her buttocks, then inquired, “How many of you limp dicks can get it up with a condom?” What began as a series of mundane remarks on stylistic homogenization and fading undergrounds suddenly had to make room for a disturbing gesture in AIDS activism, complete with sexual role reversal: Galas in the phallic role, on the rampage. “With this fine ass, I CAN’T EVEN GET FUCKED because none of you can get it up with a condom on!” (When Galas began partially undressing, Jim Dreschler of New York band Murphy’s Law left his position at the opposite end of the table and appeared to take up her dare, but came no closer to her than photo-op distance before backing down.)

     

    As many have come to expect at New Music Seminars, this rupture of star-panel conventions led to one incendiary moment of near-connection, then largely fizzled into the poses of angry egoists. Having seized attention to force the issue of proceeds from rock charities upon the panel and audience–the previous night’s AIDS benefit featuring Galas, Soul Asylum, Prong, and the Butthole Surfers (whose leader Gibby Haynes was chairing the rock artists’ panel), had generated little research money and widespread accusations of profiteering–Galas ceded center stage to voices that were just as loud but lacked her frame- breaking conviction that public-health concerns outweighed those of the rock scene. Panelists attempted to move the conversation away from bitter exchanges with audience members (“How much did you get paid, Gibby?” “Give it back!” “This is pathetic . . . this makes me want to quit the music business”) toward various personal and collective responses to the fabled greed of the industry. Psychic TV’s Genesis P-Orridge, for example, in a Sun Ra Venusian hat and an oracular tone, spoke at length of Chinese atrocities toward Tibetans, his own forcible exile from the U.K., the value of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) in pacifying football hooligans, and the relative political triviality of the music-industry concerns that are the Seminar’s raison d’etre, concluding that everyone should “stop buying records, save the money, and travel.”

     

    But a final collective gesture against the structure of the Seminar itself–the exasperated departure of the whole panel and audience to join the rap artists’ panel next door, which had been walled off from the rock panel as if to embody physically the apartheid-like status of stylistic categories–produced only a short-lived sense of collective purpose. Ice-T and other rap panelists welcomed the largely white rock crowd, but an audience member took the floor mike angrily to pierce the balloon: “If you’re not down with our concerns . . . not just today but tomorrow, we don’t want your support.” Exit collective adrenaline. Harry Allen, Public Enemy’s “media assassin,” came down from the dais to hug and thank the angry audience member; most whites in the room began looking limp. What looked for a moment like unpremeditated Woodstocking was quickly reinscribed as grandstanding.

     

    It has become standard operating procedure at each year’s New Music Seminar for participants to dismiss, disparage, and disrespect the New Music Seminar. There was more to the 13th NMS than sound, fury, and nonsignification, but one could hardly leave the Marriott Marquis with an impression of having viewed a discursive community engaged in productive intercourse. This annual event represents the alternative-rock world’s uncertainty over its status as a self-analytic profession, a promotion-intensive capitalist enterprise, or a locus of generational/ideological opposition. Pulled in three directions, the Seminar’s reliable response is to roll its collective eyes (hoping nearby MTV cameras are rolling as well) and implode. * * * *

     

    Professional conferences and trade shows perform crucial functions in situating an activity and its practitioners along continua of social position, economic status, and ideology. Whatever purposes underlie the activity–private profit, political advantage, cultural prestige, knowledge for its own or any other sake, leisure– the convening of those who pursue it generates not only self-conscious discourse about the activity but practice of the activity and exchanges in the goods, services, and intangible forms of capital that surround the activity.1 One attends a conference to learn (or relearn), and to occupy, the habitus of the profession, i.e., to understand, to do, and to trade.

     

    Market behavior at different conferences varies in explicitness; the atmosphere of a conference and even its physical arrangement provide clues to where the activity in question lies along the profession/business continuum, and thus to the cultural capital its participants may claim. Trade shows such as the Comdex computer convention, where even products not yet in existence (“vaporware”) are advertised to generate market interest, should they actually be produced, occupy an obvious commercial extreme. At the other, communities that define themselves as professions (such as medical specialties, many of whose members attend national conferences mainly to hear the first-hand presentation of findings that they can put to practical clinical use) often allocate the educational and commercial segments of a conference to separate sites: the largest hall in a hotel or convention center for the hustling of products (cleverly pitched pharmaceuticals for the heavy prescribers at the American College of Cardiology; vast and elaborate displays of tomographic scanners and magnetic resonance imaging equipment for the technophiles at the Radiologic Society of North America), the smaller surrounding rooms for the scholarly presentation of data–inadvertently implying, through the centering of commerce and the peripheralizing of the ostensibly central activity of continuing professional education, that the commercial tail has been known to wag the professional dog. At Modern Language Association conferences, economic functions, professional practice, and leisure activities mutually overlap, as paper readings and departmental cocktail parties all help define and refine the economies of prestige on which academic hiring depends. Regardless of physical structures or consensual rituals, however, conferences and conventions allow a participant the temporary sense of access to all the multiple facets of the activity; if one cannot quite occupy the center of a professional panopticon (owing to scheduling conflicts), one can at least construct a personal pluropticon, grazing on performances and wares as if wielding a video remote.

     

    If the respective balance of discourse (ostensibly disinterested) and exchange (motivated) at a conference correlates with the definition of an activity as a profession or a business, the appearance of analytic discourse at a conference for a field that has historically had no pretenses to professional status, rock music,2 is an intriguing anomaly. Along with the CMJ Music Marathon each fall, the annual NMS is recognized as the unofficially official convention for the U.S. rock industry (or for those segments of the industry to whom the Grammy awards have little meaning). But the Seminar’s origins in the alternative-music and independent-label communities (like “alternative music” and independent labels themselves) have been obscured, in slightly greater degree each year, by the participation of the large corporate labels.3 At the same time, the Seminar makes efforts to incorporate explicit politics, analytic debate, and even a degree of self- scrutiny into its program, along with the customary promotion, schmoozing, and dealing. This dissonance admits numerous explanations: an attack of countercultural bad conscience? An attempt to use its profit-making activities (the NMS is a private for-profit firm) as a source of subsidy for unprofitable discursive activities that its organizers still consider salutary? Or, conversely, an effort to mask its exploitive nature, like that of the music industry as a whole, behind the window-dressing of countercultural rhetoric? These constructions are not necessarily mutually contradictory.

     

    The first NMS took place in 1979, the year of the first major rap single (“Rapper’s Delight,” Sugarhill Gang) and two years after the watershed year of 1977, when, as the story goes, Punk Changed Rock Forever (temporarily). Even though the punk period’s explosive growth of autodidact bands and independent record companies almost immediately became nostalgia fodder–the Clash’s “Hitsville UK” from the Sandinista! album waxed sentimental about small noncorporate labels, in the past tense, as early as 1980– and even though rap has moved from strict subcultural status to a subject mentioned in Democratic Convention speeches, the NMS to date has maintained the professed purpose of promoting music that is unlikely to find an outlet on large labels or on stations formatted as “Contemporary Hits Radio” or “classic rock.” Its panels are rigorously taxonomized by stylistic subject (rap, dance, Latin, metal, and the catchall rock category “alternative,” as well as nuts-and- bolts publishing, booking, legal, video, technology, creative, and “issues” panels), but a rhetoric of inside/outside still permeates the enterprise. The practical panels mainly address those who are inside the industry yet outside established centers of commercial power, such as unsigned musicians and their managers, independent distributors, and music directors for college radio stations; the dominant tone combines desire to become an insider with skepticism about how much the current insiders really know about the music (Gerard Cosloy of New York’s Matador Records: “The scene is full of people who think they know shit. And that’s what they know: shit”). At the speeches and debate-oriented panels, too, much of the discourse conveys an unmistakable sense–perhaps nostalgic, certainly problematized–that one can clearly distinguish Us from Them.

     

    The NMS project is both schizoid and, on its own terms, successful. The combination of a convention for industry personnel (offering reflexive discourse, or at least the reflections of insiders) and an orchestrated showcase for mostly unsigned talent (practice) results annually in a flurry of record-contract signings and distribution deals (exchange). The performance branch of the Seminar, now known as New York Nights, coordinates bookings at some 30 venues in Manhattan and Hoboken, giving approximately 350 acts the chance to play before audiences comprising large numbers of A&R personnel, critics, and radio program directors, all of whom enter the clubs free with NMS badges. (Persons not credentialed for the Seminar can also buy discount passes, making New York Nights a musical bargain counter for the local fan and adding the semblance of a “real” consumer public for the participant.) Live performance also took place on-site, as a “BMI Live” display allowed old and new groups to play half-hour acoustic sets, making the Marriott’s hallways a continuous concert stage. Conversations with musicians invariably reveal that they regard playing NMS shows with a combination of anticipation and dread; war stories abound in which performers are hustled onstage, hustled off, poorly mixed at the sound board, usually unpaid, and generally ill-treated. Yet they continue to travel cross-country or even internationally for one or two gigs at the NMS, on the off chance that they will end up at the center of one of their year’s right-place-right-time stories. At home, the transition from local obscurity to recording stardom appears incremental and remote4; at the NMS, overnight success enters the realm of concrete possibility.

     

    The practice of new music at the Seminar is thus inseparable from exchange, or far less separable than it is in the circumstances faced daily by most rockers and rappers. By spatially and chronologically concentrating both sellers/performers and buyers/label personnel, leaving the relative scarcity of recording contracts unchanged but heightening the chances of a connection that would otherwise be improbable, the NMS presents immediate material incentives for an activity whose practitioners, under nearly all other conditions, have few economically rational reasons to pursue it. The proliferation of eager promoters from Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America increases the feeding-frenzy atmosphere: with Yankee dollars at stake, representatives at the various international booths sought domestic connections with an enthusiasm that most Anglo- Americans reflexively kept under a hip degree of control. The Seminar calls itself by an academic term (it is not the New Music Exposition or, thankfully, the New York Rock Exchange), and it pays something more than lip service to multiculturalism and green politics, but it places the art of the deal squarely in the foreground.

     

    A glaring example occurred at a legal panel, “Rap and Sampling: Art or Larceny,” which employed a moot-court conceit. Debate focused not on whether using a horn track as the basis of a hiphop mix was art or larceny, or whether the recombination of sounds by sampling technology constituted a musical performance, but on how much the original musician and music publisher would be paid for having their record sampled. The participants glossed over the possibilities for debate about materially driven changes in definitions of property rights, but went head to head over percentage points–quantifying, through negotiations about the relative contributions made by the players of horn and sampling synthesizer, an issue that might have been explored in qualitative discourse. The attorney for the prosecution, EMI Music Publishing’s Fred Silber, set up one of his plaintiffs as a predictable romanticist icon, a starving saxophonist who honed his chops at Juilliard but wound up working at Burger King while his work made money for others; the sampling producer’s defense attorney, Michael Sukin, argued with comparable vagueness that “the Constitution encourages art” and that “strict copyright would kill rap.” After the verdict (a $1000 fee for each 100,000 sales and a 50% writer credit for the plaintiff) the moderator revealed that the saxophonist was in fact Greg Smith, a well-paid studio musician, songwriter, and Grammy nominee, hardly in need of hamburger work. Neither hiphop’s unique reversal/detournement of the racially charged history of field recording, in which black folk and blues performers received little or nothing from white-owned record companies, nor the question of the disparate class-coded significance of the symbols at stake–Juilliard training and Grammies versus hiphop mixing–was taken up.

     

    Yet the dissonance between the pervasive exchanges and some of the other forms of discourse spotlighted at the NMS is striking. Simply by allowing exposure to acts whose commercial prospects are limited, the Seminar becomes the locus of assorted anticommercial rhetorics, from romantic narratives pitting suffering artists against bean-counting philistines to unsentimental, often race-conscious oppositional agendas. Indeed, political stances are both structurally inevitable and overtly courted; whether this constitutes patronization is debatable. Some of the most popular of this year’s panels (to take two overflowing examples, the writers’ panel “New Music: A Problem for New and Established Critics” and “Pot in Pop: Let’s Be Blunt”) were also among those with most contentious audiences, whether the bones of contention were generational/ ideological issues degenerating into de gustibus disputes and personal grudges, or moral panics over ever-popular recreational chemicals. At both of these sessions, panelists offered relatively harmonious collections of views–harmonious to the point of unison in the case of “Pot in Pop,” where NORML-style herbal advocacy (“You could power the whole country with the hemp raised on just 6% of U.S. farmland”) was the order of the day–and thus brought on alarmingly vitriolic, if hardly surprising, objections from audience respondents. The somewhat paranoiac tone of antidrug or anti-Robert Christgau dissidents evoked wagon- circling responses by the respective hemp-using and critical communities. The assumed social structure, whether regretted (Elizabeth Wurtzel, New Yorker pop critic: “I feel like we’re mostly writing for each other”) or described in a language of wishful solidarity (B Real of Cypress Hill: “With marijuana there is no racism. . . . This is the only plant I know that brings people together”), remained the subculture beleaguered by various forms of intolerant power.

     

    Oppositionalism also pervaded the Seminar’s high- profile keynote speeches. The performers invited to open the proceedings were two whose symbolic language has placed them directly in the crosshairs of the state: John Trudell, a Santee Sioux activist and poet who has recently begun a blues-rock recording career, and Ice-T, the much-publicized rapper, thrash-metal singer, and film star. While working for Native American causes in the 1970s, Trudell drew so much FBI attention that he felt he had to leave the movement to avoid endangering his friends; his family was killed in a 1979 fire widely believed to have been set by government operatives on the same day he burned a flag in Washington (federal authorities declined to investigate the fire). His NMS address balanced devotional verse on Elvis with scathing remarks on Eurocentrism and some very 1960s-ish rallying cries (“Rock and roll is based on revolutions going way beyond 33 1/3”). With his harrowing personal history, his status as a spokesman for peoples historically on the receiving end of Euro-American brutality, and his abilities as a political orator, Trudell is essentially immunized from skeptical reception, but his strong, uncomplicated outsider position matches the Long Playing vinyl of his apocalyptist metaphor. A politics that is immediate for him inevitably strikes much of the NMS audience, impressed but implicated, as nostalgic.

     

    Ice-T (whose song “Cop Killer,” as events following the NMS would make clear, is not beloved by Southern police departments or their anonymous telephonic sympathizers), while equally impressive in his oppositional rhetoric, is implicated in more complex ways. He came close to omnipresence during the Seminar: he addressed the collected audience about racism in society at large and corrupt exchanges inside the music industry, performed with his thrash band Body Count (busting off a vigorous “Cop Killer” while a line of NYPD maintained a hairtrigger-tense presence just outside the hall), co-MC’d the AIDS benefit with B-52 Fred Schneider, and served on the concluding rap artists’ panel. He also managed to appear from the audience, at a panel on media coverage of rap, to accuse most of the panelists and audience of dilettantism for taking self- congratulatory views of rap’s cultural acceptance while his own experience suggested that the rap world was still “at war.”5 The NMS became a de facto promotional blitz for Ice, but being surrounded with people predisposed in his favor (for once) did nothing to modulate his anger. The biggest star at an event that disperses and focuses star- worship in approximately equal degree voiced some of the sternest objections to existing socioeconomic arrangements.

     

    The Ice-T conundrum speaks volumes about the contradictions at the heart of the Seminar and the music industry. If anyone in attendance (Trudell excepted) had cause to consider himself or herself at odds with hegemonic forces, surely it was Ice, as numerous police organizations (the National Black Police Association excepted6) have taken his song’s retributive fantasies literally and called for his scalp. (In the months following the NMS, some have even raised the specter of federal prosecution under the charge of sedition, while their anonymous associates have lodged death threats–real, not coded in a metal-avenger persona–against employees of Time-Warner.) Yet if anyone in attendance had cause to consider himself embraced by hegemonic forces, it was likewise Ice, with a Warner Brothers contract, a major Hollywood role (in the completed but unreleased Looters) under his belt, and a maximum of favorable exposure over the four days of the Seminar. Seminar participants heard him provide the crucial contextual discourse that sound bites (outside the music industry, within the controlled simulacrum of an American public sphere) never afford him. And though the stock oppositionalist/countercultural narrative envisions media institutions attempting to stifle any uncomfortable voice, the Warner organization–one of the corporate labels most widely castigated by NMS participants for “cherry-picking” artists from independents, worsening small labels’ chances for survival and watering down the music–has continued to support him, absorbing both flak and actual menace.

     

    Around this figure and these circumstances, the cognitive structure of inside/outside contorts itself to the point of collapse. The mechanisms of exchange, as embodied in Time-Warner, can rarely be counted on to foster an oppositional practice as aggressive as Ice’s “I’m ’bout to bust some shots off/I’m ’bout to dust some cops off” (particularly at the cost of an expensive boycott against corporate holdings, from Time magazine to Batman Returns to the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park). Time-Warner certainly counts as an Althusserian ideological state apparatus, a media institution devoted to the manufacture of public consent. Yet the “Cop Killer” incident, like the Seminar it overlaps, suggests that it is simplistic to assume continual congruence between the interests of one ISA and those of another. Within the fissures that develop between such institutions–and with certain risks, decidedly nonrhetorical, accepted–it is occasionally possible to find the space for critical discourse and musical practice. * * * * *

     

    If the NMS, like the “new music” it claims as its province, is inconceivable without the historical eruptions of punk and rap into popular music during the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively, it may be instructive to apply to it a few terms of historical analysis that were also generated in 1977. Attali’s Noise, published in France that year and in an English translation in 1985, advances a staged theory of musical paradigms (Sacrifice, Representation, Repetition, Composition), not so much driven by economic developments, in a classical base/superstructure model, as accompanying (even, Attali asserts, anticipating) broad shifts in social relations and implicit philosophical codes.7 As Susan McClary suggests in her afterword to Noise, one can read punk and postpunk musics, positioned across boundaries of institution and gender, as signs that the fluid musical and socioeconomic forms Attali envisioned under the rubric of Composition are actually aborning. Do the tensions that permeate the NMS–the sense that pop music and its derivatives are in a deeply unsatisfactory state– imply that something resembling Attali’s paradigm shift is in the works?

     

    The only coherent answer may be “Yes, though only in certain spaces, and possibly in no form Attali or many musicians would care to recognize.” As police, politicians, and censorship groups are casting Ice-T in a scapegoat role along with Luther Campbell, musical supporters of NORML’s agenda, various supposedly Satanist metal bands,8 and undoubtedly a host of pop figures yet unnamed, a cyclical/ Viconian revision of Attali’s speculations seems just as plausible as his linear-progression model. Perhaps the profession of pop musician is coming to include an inherent risk of scapegoating: the social violence that is too painful to view directly (or even on videotape) generates a symbolic violence that must consume occasional figures who traffic in the powerful symbols of rap and rock. The most primitive of Attali’s sociomusical modes, Sacrifice, may be returning; those who loudly voice what excluded segments of the population are thinking make excellent fodder for ritual.

     

    Other tendencies within the Seminar, however, provide grounds for guarded Attalian hopes that Repetition, instead of reverting to Sacrifice, might actually yield to Composition. Technology–not unpredictably, at an event where great energy is spent trading in hardware and in access to it–is the imagined midwife. At several how-to panels (“How to Make a Great Record Cheap,” “Video under $10,000”), aimed at artists strapped for the startup funding that the post-MTV music industry increasingly requires for admission, the predominant view held that technology was the problem at least as often as the solution. But another panel on a subject that is only tenuously, trendily connected to the practices and exchanges immediately at hand (“Virtual Reality and its Effect on the Future of Music”) afforded some surprisingly clearheaded discussion about electronic interactivity as a paradigm for future forms of music made possible by the various user interfaces currently known as VR.

     

    Interactivity, of course, is an integral aspect of the future musical practices hinted at by Attali. And the customary sites for the musical practices discussed at the NMS, the guitar band’s garage and the hiphop mixer’s home studio, are loci for technologically enabled interactivity, structures for converting the reception of favorite pieces of music into recombinatory creative acts (the feedback- drenched cover song, the sampled rhythm loop). Expansion of the interactive element in music by VR-related technologies, further blurring the line between professionals and amateurs, could constitute a perceptible movement toward Attalian Composition. The performer/programmers convened by moderator Jaron Lanier (founder of VPL Research) began most of their presentations in familiar NMS self-promotional mode but quickly honed in on the issue of interactivity as, in panelist Todd Rundgren’s terms, “a philosophical agenda, not a hardware question.”

     

    The inevitable dependence of such an agenda on hardware questions–and questions of the social structures and exchange mechanisms making the hardware available–provided grounds for the kind of speculative discourse that NMS panels routinely gesture toward and rarely achieve. Though programmed music is commonplace, music actually created through VR (e.g., on instruments existing only in virtual space, as conjectured by Lanier) is still vaporware, and the very phrase “virtual reality” came under collective erasure as a term co-opted by the military via NASA and hyped into meaninglessness by publicity for the film The Lawnmower Man (unanimously despised by the panel).9 Hype for VR gear and VR-derived musical products thus gave way to debate over whether the development and deployment of VR would give greater control over musical material to technical specialists or the larger listening populace. Information Society’s Kurt Harland took the former view, stating that 99% of the audience wanted “passive immersion” rather than access to the tools, and that electronically modeled musical procedures would simply expand the modes of immersion. Tina Blaine and Linda Jacobson of Oakland’s “techno-roots” group D’Cuckoo offered a contrary theory: that advances in electronic instruments would increase listeners’ ability to communicate musically and bodily–not in passive isolation, under the thumb of institutions and experts, but socially.

     

    The hypothetical question of how the crucial producer/consumer division would fare amid 21st-century musical technology received no definitive answer, but descriptions and tapes of D’Cuckoo’s work made it plausible to accept their utopian vision over the Huxleyan consumer dystopia (or Attalian repetocracy) imagined by Harland. D’Cuckoo activates its anti-technophobic collective philosophy by inventing and building its own electronic percussion instruments, mixing aleatory effects with the rigorous discipline of Japanese taiko drumming and Zimbabwean marimba music, and incorporating audience input into its live work through devices such as a MIDI controller triggered by a giant beach ball thrown into the crowd. D’Cuckoo had little need for the frenetic dealmaking of the NMS–they have already added a development deal with Elektra to their impressive resume–but with slogans at the ready (“You’re either part of the steamroller or part of the pavement”) they appeared more than ready to become a model for the next paradigm shift in popular music. No one anywhere near a major record label is likely to pick their “neoclassical postindustrial cybertribal world funk” as the next Nirvana, commercially speaking, but their working methods (like those of punks and rappers) have gathered them considerable momentum. Whatever degree of interpenetration might occur between this group and the music business as presently organized, their ability to improvise the terms and material means for their work surely counts as a survival advantage in the “cyber-Darwinist” future Rundgren describes.

     

    Lanier was unabashedly hyping D’Cuckoo and its DIY philosophy when he uttered the pithiest of his many soundbites: “Art isn’t for wimps.” The phrase could be applied as easily to Ice-T’s risky rhetorical crusade, or to any of a number of performers whose voices cut through the density of the Seminar, from aging punks like Fear (whose acoustic set at BMI Live was harsher and stronger than most amplified bands’ sets in the clubs) to current genre- collapsing acts like Galas or the multiracial, multimedia Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. The phrase could also be translated simply as a recognition that the music industry, contrary to its organizing myths, is neither an Inside to be penetrated nor an Outside to be valorized; that narratives of escape, purity, or sanctuary no longer make usable sense of music’s social function; that the schism between the real world and the music world is gibberish. The NMS is not structured to generate consensus, and its internal contradictions remain irresolvable unless and until critical changes occur in the economics of musical production and distribution. Still, the event makes it clear that the habitus of the musician in 1992 is a hotseat. The discord between the material and rhetorical aspects of musical practice implies that conditions are overripe for another noisy change.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Some of the terms that will recur throughout this analysis–practice, discourse, and exchange–represent a preliminary attempt to apply concepts from Bourdieu and others working in his wake, such as John Fiske, to rock and related musics, along with the other fields briefly discussed here. Fiske’s use of Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus to explain academics’ difficulties in accounting for the complexities of everyday life (155ff) relies on the assumed exclusive polarity of practice and discourse, with a rueful acknowledgement that translating practice to discourse transforms it into something other than practice. Where a cultural practice encompasses discourse, however, as at the MLA or the NMS, the polarity seems difficult to sustain. Perhaps envisioning an interpenetration among these two terms and a third, exchange–coded as serpent in garden, a reminder that particular interests, agendas, and powers do not keep their distance–might help break the interpretive deadlock.

     

    2. At this writing, I am aware of only a single explicit use of the term “profession” within rock ‘n’ roll to describe rock ‘n’ roll: the line “You know how different it is in this profession,” from Graham Parker’s “Last Couple on the Dance Floor” (on the minor 1983 album The Real Macaw), refers to recording work with a self-directed skepticism, an implication that romanticist views privileging the rock “artist” are patently absurd. This autocritique is characteristic of Parker’s work but also constitutes a recurrent trope common to most rock subgenres. It is easy to locate examples in which performers take the self- important fatuity of the music scene and industry as a given: Carl Perkins’ tongue-in-cheek seriousness toward wearers of blue suede shoes, the Rolling Stones’ “Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man,” Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” (“stoking the starmaking machine behind the popular song”), the Sex Pistols’ Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle strategies, the commercially successful anticommercialism of 1980s industrial groups like Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails, and the contemptuous response of “hardcore” rappers to pop rap groups like Colour Me Badd or Naughty By Nature (e.g., EPMD’s “Crossover,” the leadoff track on the new Def Jam West label’s 1992 NMS sampler cassette, distributed unironically by that most streetwise of labels, Columbia).

     

    3. Advertisers in the NMS directory this year included the customary small labels such as Alias, Cardiac, Caroline, Knitting Factory Works, Livin’ Large, Rykodisc, Tommy Boy, and X-Perience, but also most of the majors: A&M, Atlantic, Capitol, EMI, Epic, Mercury, RCA, Reprise, and Warner Brothers. The latter’s ad on the back cover encodes perfectly the hip, winking attitude that dominates Seminar semiotics: beneath an assertive heading certain to arouse chuckles or wrath from indie-label oppositionalists (“Warner Bros. Records. Home of Alternative Music.”) and in front of a huge globe rotated to reveal the Eastern Hemisphere (northern Africa foregrounded), six models in corporate uniform flash friendly smiles for the camera–the good-humored board of Vice Presidents for A&R next door. They are a rainbow coalition of Benettokens: four young men (an African-American, two preppy whites, and one who could be a Latino, a Pacific Islander, or a Native American and excels in the art of blow-drying), one young woman (white, jeweled for success), and one middle-aged man (white, the only member standing, radiating benign executive despotism from the head of the table). They are reassuring and receptive, ready to sign your pathbreaking group and bring your music to adoring, solvent multitudes.

     

    4. For varied, credible accounts of the circumstances faced by musicians on the fringes of the industry, see Bayton (on women’s independent groups in England) and Calder (on his own shot at the American inner circle). Both underscore the persistence of musical practice in the absence of appreciable economic exchange.

     

    5. At this writing, Ice has voluntarily withdrawn the Body Count album bearing “Cop Killer” from distribution, intending to distribute tapes of the song gratis at concerts while Sire/Warner re-releases a bowdlerized version of the record, minus the offending song. Both Ice (in assorted public statements) and his publicist Jenny Bendel (personal communication, August 7, 1992) dismiss speculation that Time-Warner personnel initiated or influenced his decision to recall the original album. “Cop Killer” has quickly become popular as a cover song in other bands’ repertoires.

     

    6. The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), the Houston Police Officers Association, the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, and assorted other law-enforcement groups called for boycotts, but Ronald Hampton of the National Black Police Association gave Billboard interviewers a dissenting view: “[The song] didn’t happen in a vacuum. . . . African-American people have been victimized by police brutality, and that is very real. Where were those organizations when Rodney King was beat up, and when that verdict came in?” (79). Hampton’s direct linkage between “Cop Killer” and the Simi Valley trial brings to the foreground many commentators’ belief that scapegoating an angry black man is the ideal way to deflect public opinion away from a recognition that police forces in Los Angeles and elsewhere have long been out of control.

     

    7. Although Noise does much more than advance a stage theory, this aspect of Attali’s argument may be summarized as follows. Music as a model of social structure begins in sacrifice as an element of Girardian religious ritual, serving as an instrument of control by helping listeners forget the violence at the heart of sociality. With the rise of capitalism it mutates into representation, a rationalist-individualist mode marked by divisions and hierarchies of labor (composer, conductor, virtuoso performer, orchestra member, cabaret musician, busker, and assorted paramusical figures such as the entrepreneur), and the hypertrophy of “harmonic combinatorics” (64) becomes music’s organizing feature; through infinite exploration of possible variations on tonality, musical representation exercises social control by inducing listeners to believe in a rationally organized socius. Increasing dissonance, technological simulation, and mass production shatter this mode to yield the degraded 20th-century musical form, repetition, which silences people by deafening them with the emptiness of infinite reproduction, converting musical use value to the exchange value encoded in fads, stars, stockpiles of unheard recordings, and–as the ultimate (if obvious) extension of musical fascism–Muzak. The progression through the first three stages gives a grim historical picture, but Attali holds out a final stage, composition, as a post-Marxian apocalypse of sociomusical decontrol. The music and economy of repetition face a crisis of exhaustion, and outsiders cease respecting the border dividing musical production from consumption. Noisy nonexperts begin producing music (and perhaps other goods) for the value inherent in the productive act, not for exchange; “time lived” replaces “time stockpiled in commodities” (145).

     

    8. See O’Sullivan for a detailed account and interpretation of the ongoing moral panic over alleged Satanism in rock music.

     

    9. The marketable cachet of the phrase was underscored by the presence of a “VR” booth on the exhibit floor, where a small firm attempted to sell dance clubs on a four-channel audio panning system linked to a Macintosh, using either a simple touchpad or a blinking plastic wand for user input. Asked what his “VR” device had to do with VR, and what connection it had with the photo of an EyePhone- and DataGlove-wearing model posted nearby, the company’s representative could deliver only the clearly rehearsed response that his product, unlike the investigational systems of VPL, was immediately available on the market.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Fredric Jameson, foreword. Susan McClary, afterword. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985. Trans. of Bruits: essai sur l’economie politique de la musique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1977.
    • Bayton, Mavis. “How Women Become Musicians.” In Frith, Simon, and Andrew Goodwin, eds. On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. NY: Pantheon, 1990. 238-257.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
    • Calder, Jeff. “Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band.” South Atlantic Quarterly 90.4 (1991): 907-937.
    • Fiske, John. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” In Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge, 1991. 154-173.
    • O’Sullivan, Gerry. “The Satanism Scare.” Postmodern Culture 1.2 (1991).
    • “Texas Police Pursue `Cop Killer.’” Billboard 27 June 1992: 1, 79.

     

  • From: PMC-Talk Two Threads: Cladistics and Cut-Ups

     

     

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

     

    Editors’ Note:

     

    This issue of Postmodern Culture inaugurates a new feature, FROM: PMC-TALK. Two threads from recent discussion on PMC-TALK are included here, one concerning cladistics–the tree-structured organization of knowledge–and one concerning cut-ups–the human or automated re-organization of “found” text. This conjunction of topics is interesting for several reasons. First, it highlights two conflicting approaches to the logos, one imposing or discovering coherence and structure, the other disordering and decentering the texts it cannibalizes, sometimes producing isolated moments of surprising pertinence and often simply devolving into incoherence. Second, the outcome of the two discussions is noteworthy: the cladistics thread proceeds in an orderly and dispassionate manner, and ends in a scholarly bibliography; by contrast, the cut-ups thread provokes some quite visceral reactions, and eventually turns back on itself to examine the participants’ reactions to the grafting and disordering of their own texts. As one of the discussants points out, Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of tree-like and rhizome-like structures of knowledge is being played out in these parallel, and sometimes intersecting, threads. Finally, this opposition, and the cut-up method in particular, are echoed in other parts of this issue of Postmodern Culture–not only in John Tranter’s Popular Culture column (on “BrekDown,” a computer program which produces stylistically consistent cut-ups of literary texts), but also in Larry McCaffery’s introduction and in most of the fiction collected in the issue.

     

     

    Contents

    Thread #1: Cladistics

    Thread #2: Cut-Ups

     

     

    Thread #1: Cladistics

     

     

    Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 13:33 CDT
From: "Robert J. OHara" 
Subject: Trees of history

Veterans of PMC-TALK may remember some discussions we have had
over the last couple of years on evolutionary biology and
'postmodern science'.  I would like to draw on the collective
wisdom of the group again to search out some possible references
on a related topic.

I have an interest in a class of diagrams that may be called
'trees of history'.  These include evolutionary trees, trees of
language history (showing, for example, the descent of the
Indo-European languages), 'stemmata' of manuscripts that show how
an ancient text was copied and altered over time, and so on.  The
conceptual ancestors of these diagrams are of course diagrams of
human genealogy.  The comparative study of such diagrams is a
highly interdisciplinary topic, and it's pretty difficult to get
a grasp on the literature that is relevant to it.  I have been
assembling a rough bibliography on the history and theory of
trees of history in the specific fields of evolution,
linguistics, and textual criticism.  Evolution is my specialty so
I have the best handle on the literature in that area; stemmatics
and linguistics are a little fuzzier to me, but I have a
moderately good handle on them now as well (with respect to tree
diagrams, that is).

My question for the list is this: Have any of you seen trees of
history used in other contexts, for objects other than species,
languages, manuscripts, or human families?  I know of a few
examples, like Stephen Toulmin's tree diagrams of disciplinary
development in his _Human Understanding_ (1973), and I once saw a
poster that showed a 'Tree of Rock and Roll'.  I would like very
much to hear of examples from any other fields.  I am more
interested in scholarly uses of such diagrams than in popular
ones, and would be particularly pleased to find examples that
show some theoretical sophistication (such as a discussion of how
the diagram was put together, or what it represents).

I recognize that this question, like many that that come up here,
has the potential to connect to a wide range of issues in
historical representation, visual imagery, the theory of
metaphor, and on and on.  For my own convenience I would like to
try to confine the discussion (if any) just to tree diagrams, and
to specifically historical ones at that.  There are many other
forms of tree diagrams that are not historical: sentence
diagrams, all sorts of logical classifications, 'trees of
Porphyry', etc.  These I specifically want to _exclude_ from
consideration, as they are not in any sense genealogical or
historical.

For an indication of my own approach to the topic see 'Telling
the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary
history', _Biology and Philosophy_, 7:135-160 (1992).  I'd be
glad to send a reprint to anyone who is interested; just send me
a snailmail address. I can also provide via email a copy of the
rough bibliography on trees of history to anyone who is
interested.

Many thanks.

Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
University of Wisconsin - Madison
     
Date:     Thu, 23 Jul 92 22:55:56 EDT
From:     Eric Rabkin 
Subject:  Digest Ending 7-23-92

If I'm properly informed, there is a whole field devoted to this
and it's called 'cladistics.'  A quick keyword check of MIRLYN (U
of Michigan's e-catalog) shows 10 bks, most with biological foci,
but I know from talking to a friend who works in the field that
the laborers therein consider it general.  I hope this helps.
Eric

Eric Rabkin                esrabkin@umichum.bitnet
Department of English      esrabkin@um.cc.umich.edu
University of Michigan     office: 313-764-2553
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045    dept  : 313-764-6330
     
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 22:24 CDT
From: "Robert J. OHara" 
Subject: Trees of history/Cladistic analysis

Thanks to Eric Rabkin for mentioning cladistics, a.k.a. cladistic
analysis, in the context of my query about "trees of history".
Cladistic analysis is the part of systematic biology that is
particularly concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history.
This is in fact my own specialty, so I do have a fair sense of
the cladistic literature now, though it is growing very rapidly.
The question of the generality of cladistic principles and
methods is one of the things that is of particular interest to
me.  In a loose sense they do appear to be general: for example,
the cladistic idea that only derived or "apomorphic" states of
characters identify branches of the evolutionary tree is the same
as the principle of "shared innovation" in historical
linguistics, and the idea of "indicative errors" in textual
criticism.  Cladistic analysis tends to disregard, however, the
possibility of "horizontal transmission" across the tree,
something that occurs rather rarely in evolution, but much more
often in language and manuscript histories. To those interested
in the parallels among the various historical sciences it's all
extremely interesting.

There is one pioneering volume that discusses many of the
similarities and differences among various cladistically oriented
disciplines (evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism), and
it may be of interest to some people:

Hoenigswald, H. M., & L. F. Weiner, eds.  1987.  Biological
Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 1992 16:04:34 EDT
Reposted From: "HUMANIST: Humanities Computing"

Subject:      6.0165  Textual Criticism Challenge  (1/35)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0165. Wednesday, 29 Jul
1992.

Date:    Wed, 29 Jul 1992 09:27:08 +0300
From:    Victor_Caston@brown.edu
Subject: Re: Textual Criticism Challenge

I, for one, was impressed by the results of applying cladistic
analysis to textual criticism--the analogy seems so obvious (and
fruitful).  In fact, while flipping through a recent issue of The
Economist, I came across an article on cladistic analysis that
drew the analogy in the other direction, explaining evolution
in terms of manuscript transmission.  This is how the article
began:

"Imagine a medieval library with dozens of copies of Aristotle's
"On Comedy", all slightly different.  Such differences, which
came about because the monks made errors when copying, can be
useful.  By studying them you can see the order in which the
copies were made.  Texts with a lot of errors in common are
recent and closely related.  Their shared mistakes are echoes of
those in the text from which they were copied--their most recent
common ancestor.  Texts with fewer error are closer to the
original.

"This technique--cladistic analysis--works as well for those
writing the history of  |  life as for those studying medieval
manuscripts.  Instead of working with monastic errors, you use
the changes which evolution brings to one species or group, and
which it then bequeaths to its successors--shared derived
characteristics . . ."  ("Charting Evolution: The Power of Two,"
The Economist, 11 July 1992, pp. 80-81)

If this is just coincidence, it's scandalous somebody didn't make
the application sooner.

*****************************************************************
Victor Caston                             victor_caston@brown.edu
Department of Philosophy
Box 1918                                      off: (401) 863-3219
Brown University                             dept: (401) 863-2718
Providence, RI  02912                         fax: (401) 863-2719
*****************************************************************
     
Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 92 22:34:38 EDT
From:         Carolyn Miller 
Subject:      Re: Digest Ending 7-29-92

For Bob O'Hara:  You might find that bibliometric studies of
scholarly communication and disciplines provides another analogue
to the tree-like representation of historical change.  You
mentioned Toulmin's diagrams in _Human Understanding_;  the work
I'm thinking of is related generally to his ideas, but the style
is quite different. Early, big names in this field (which I don't
know well myself) are Derek J. deSolla Price and Eugene Garfield
(he of the Inst for Scientific Info empire).  One article I have
at hand includes a number of network diagrams, showing citation
links (Garfield, "Citation Analysis as a Method of Historical
Research into Science," in _Citation Indexing--Its Theory and
Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities, Wiley, 1979).

A more recent collection is _Scholarly Communication and
Bibliometrics_, ed. Christine Borgman, Sage, 1990. I haven't
looked at it myself but it may be the most comprehensive current
source.

Carolyn Miller
Dept of English
NC State Univ.
     
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 92 10:09:49 BST
From: stephen clark 
Subject: Re: cladistics etc

J.H.Woodger Biological Classification discussed this (my books
are packed so I can't check the reference). While the manuscript
tradition is a nice analogy it seems to follow from the claim as
stated (that fewer errors = closer to original) that the latest
OUP text is copied directly from the original.... Please give
mediaeval copyists some credit for trying to correct errors in
the text they were copying. So far there is, I suspect, no
evidence that DNA does that!

Stephen Clark
Liverpool
     
Date:         Mon, 17 Aug 92 20:36:25 CST
From:         Rick Francis 
Subject:      Cladistics, remakes, translation, plagiarism...

I have been following the discussion of cladistics with great
interest, and I wonder if it might help with the sort of
questions I've been asking.  Here's one that might be
interesting: How could one depict the transmission/translation of
James M. Cain's _The Postman Always Rings Twice_?

Novel:  Published 1934

Let's start with the movies:
French version, Le Dernier Tournant (Chenal, 1939)

Unauthorized Italian version, Ossessione (Visconti, 1942)
Visconti inspired by Renoir's advice, reportedly made without
either the original or an accurate, complete translation

Tay Garnett's US version (1946), with Cain's original title

Two more French versions:
Verneuil, Une Manche et la belle (What Price Murder) 1957
Chabrol's Les Noces rouges (Wedding in Blood), 1973

Rafelson's US remake in 1981, again with Cain's title, The
Postman Always Rings Twice.

(Uh, let's forget about translations into other languages for the
moment.)  Now how do you chart that?  Was Rafelson more
influenced by the novel, by Visconti, or by Garnett's _noir_
version?  Are there any previous versions we can rule out?  Even
if you decide there are only two or three genetic sources, and
feel you can determine relative influence, how do you depict it?

What about trying to measure the influence of the medium into
which one is translating/adapting?  For example, wouldn't a
neo-noir version in 1981 inevitably be influenced by Polanski's
neo-noir _Chinatown_?  (Certainly reception of Nicholson's face
connects the two, and I kept thinking Jessica Lange was made to
look like Faye Dunaway.)  If you chart the novel's film
adaptations in a straight linear way, you won't have any of that
other stuff.

And isn't entirely possible that someone would make a film that
was much closer to, say, plot details of the novel (as Rafelson's
film was at times, when compared to Garnett's), while stylistic
details show the influence of intervening adaptations?  How then
to chart it, to show the closer/farther dynamics?

For me the value and validity of an effective means of notation
of genetic transmission of narratives would show up in its
capacity to denote the various kinds of translation, whether it's
Shakespeare from Holinshed, or Joyce's Ulysses from Homer's
Odyssey, or Pound's Sextus Propertius, or a film adaptation of a
Forster novel, Acker's works, or . . . If it can give you a
language to distinguish those, you can bet I'll be interested in
it!

I confess near-total ignorance of cladistics, and I don't mean
the tone of these questions to suggest I'm posing an impossible
challenge to point out the limitations of cladistics. I think
they are difficult questions, though, and perhaps the sort which
cladistics can handle more efficiently than anything I'm aware
of.

Any help appreciated.

Rick Francis   C47805NF@WUVMD
Dep't of Comp. Lit.
Washington University
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO  63130
     
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 19:06:38 -0400
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (jeremy ahouse)
Subject: Cladistic Caveats

I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics)
raise its head in the context of PMC.  It gives the place a homey
feeling.  I don't want to discourage the search for lineages of
thoughts of influence, but in much on contemporary (and not so
contemporary) cladistics one of the important (simplifying)
assumptions is that we (you? I?) assume that lineages always
bifurcate.  This assumption seems particularly valid for
vertebrate species, "higher" plants, and taxa above the species
level.  But the whole idea of looking for minimum evolution trees
( i.e. preferring trees that require the fewest reversals in a
character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral
diffusion of information across the tree.  In phylogentic
inference (a goal for which cladistics is a preeminent tool) we
trust that evolution is an information preserving phenomenon and
that similarities are due to either common ancestors, convergent
function (a "good" solution to a problem, e.g. wings), or chance.

In as much as similarities are of the first kind we can infer the
relationships between lineages.  Note that in my list no time
was given to lateral transfer of character states from one
lineage to another. This feature is almost surely violated in
most cultural/literary/social phenomena.

        I hope this doesn't discourage, and I hope that I haven't
been too brief.  Please let me know.

        - Jeremy

        :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
        Jeremy Ahouse
        Center for Complex Systems
        Brandeis University
        Waltham, MA 02254-9110

        (617) 736-4954
        ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu
     
From:   rbrown@epas.utoronto.ca (R. Brown)
Subject: Re: Cladistics
Date:   Thu, 20 Aug 1992 17:26:37 -0400

Regarding the metaphor of the branching tree, I would like to
call attention both to its tendency to exist as and its rejection
as a (dangerous) metaphor for the literary "tradition"
post-colonial societies.  Sneja Gunew, in her essay on Australian
literature in _Nation and Narration_ (ed. Homi Bhabha) notes that
in his 1935 manifesto, "The Foundations of Culture in Australia"
(1935): "[P.R.] Stephensen argued that although Australian
culture may have begun in Britain, 'a gum tree is not a branch of
the oak'" (101).
     
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 20:47 CDT
From: Robert J. OHara 
Subject: Cladistics

[....]

Cladistics or cladistic analysis is an approach to systematic
biology. Systematics used to be equated by many people with
classification; indeed that is probably the definition that
appears in most dictionaries today.  But while the idea of
classification has long been a part of systematics, another idea
has existed along with classification, and that has been the idea
of "the natural system" (whence "systematics"), the idea of the
arrangement of the whole of living diversity.  While
classifications have traditionally been represented in words,
"the natural system" has often been represented diagrammatically.

In the pre-evolutionary period the natural system was sometimes
compared to a map, with species arranged in some sort of abstract
space; alternatively, it was sometimes compared to a system of
nested circles or stars that blended into one another at their
points of contact.  One of the oldest images of the natural
system is that of the Scala Naturae or Chain of Being, a linear
arrangement reaching "from monad to man".  Arthur Lovejoy's
classic book _The Great Chain of Being_ is still the best history
of that particular view of natural diversity.

As naturalists came to accept evolution, the tree came to be the
principal model of the natural system, and evolutionary trees
came to be published with some regularity beginning in the late
1800s. "Tree" in this context does not mean a picture with leaves
and bark and that sort of thing, although some such evolutionary
"trees" have been drawn; it means simply a branching diagram,
like a genealogical chart, with lines connecting ancestors and
their descendants.  (I will return to characteristics of the
diagrams themselves in a moment.)

Now while it is true that evolutionary trees have been drawn
since the mid-1800s, it is not stretching the truth too far to
say that systematists really only figured out how to reconstruct
them in the last thirty years.  (Darwin's tree in the _Origin_ is
a hypothetical one; it only shows what an evolutionary tree would
be like if we really had one.)  This is where cladistic analysis
comes in.  Cladistic analysis is a method of historical
inference: it is a method for taking evidence that exists in the
present - the similarities and differences among a collection of
organisms under study - and using that evidence to reconstruct
the branching family tree of those organisms, and the sequence of
changes they have undergone in the course of their history.
Cladistic analysis has swept the field of systematics in the last
thirty years, and its development and adoption, in my view,
constitutes a genuine conceptual revolution, one that has not
only intellectual components, but all the characteristic
socio-disciplinary turmoil that accompanies a scientific
revolution as well (see David Hull's _Science as a Process_
(1988) for some discussion of that turmoil).  It is very
important to understand that the development of cladistics has
been a conceptual revolution, rather than a technical one: there
is no reason that it could not have been developed in the 1860s,
and contrary to many misconceptions (some of which have been
promulgated by historically unconscious workers in systematics),
it does not depend upon computers, molecular biology, or any
other current technology, although computers can be used and are
used to make comparisons among different trees very quickly, and
molecular data can be incorporated into cladistic analysis just
surely as anatomical, physiological, or behavioral data can.

As a method of historical inference, cladistic analysis has many
insights to offer workers in fields outside of systematics I
think, but only if the objects whose history is of interest have
a reasonably clear tree-like pattern of ancestry and descent.  In
linguistics, for example, it may be possible to apply cladistic
techniques to the reconstruction of the histories of language
families, and some steps have already been taken in that
direction by a few workers. Similarly, in the study of the
histories of manuscripts copied over many years from originals
that are now lost, cladistic techniques can be applied with good
success.  Peter Robinson of Oxford and I have collaborated on the
application of cladistic techniques to the reconstruction of the
family tree of an Old Norse narrative that is known from about 40
different mss, and have a paper on the subject now in press in
_Research in Humanities Computing_.  I would be happy to send a
copy of that paper to anyone who has an interest in these issues.

[....]

The technicalities of cladistic analysis can lead us into the
depths of evolutionary theory and statistical inference, a region
from which some have never returned.  There is, however, a more
general issue that arises in the context of "trees of history",
one that may be of interest to more of the readers of PMC, and
that is the issue of historical representation.  Cladistic
analysis is primarily a method of inference: a method of finding
out something that you don't already know.  Once you have found
something out (or believe you have), you are then faced with the
problem of representing your knowledge, and in the case of
systematics this means drawing a tree.  The problem of historical
representation in evolutionary biology has not been examined in
great detail, because the matter has usually been considered
unproblematic: you just look at your specimens, make your tree
(either by cladistic methods today, or by the earlier intuitive
and ill-defined methods), and that's that.  It turns out,
however, that historical trees are very subtle representational
instruments, and they can be drawn and read in a great variety of
ways.  Complex branches can be collapsed into simple branches,
events can be included and excluded, the tree can be given a
direction (a crown) based on some particular criterion, it can
show evolutionary "ascent" or "descent", "higher" and "lower"
organisms, and so on.  The scientific value of many
representational devices that have been traditionally
incorporated into evolutionary trees is close to zero.  Those
familiar with some of the general problems that have been
discussed in analytic philosophy of history or in narrative
theory will recognize many of the phenomena they are familiar
with, such as the foregrounding and backgrounding of selected
events, in evolutionary representations just as surely as in
conventional human histories.  I have attempted to outline some
of these representational problems in a recent paper that may be
of interest to some people:

O'Hara, R. J.  1992.  Telling the tree: narrative representation
     and the study of evolutionary history.  Biology and
     Philosophy, 7:135-160.

As above, I would be happy to send a reprint to anyone who is
interested; just send me a snailmail address.

In connection with an interdisciplinary course I am planning I
have put together a working bibliography on "trees of history" in
a variety of disciplines (primarily evolution, linguistics, and
manuscript studies).  I'll pass a copy on to the PMC editors and
ask them if they would put it on the PMC file server for general
retrieval.

Bob O'Hara
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
     
Date: 29 Aug 1992 20:02:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: RJOHARA@UNCG.BITNET
Subject: Cladistics and trees of history

I have sent a copy of my bibliography on "trees of history" and
cladistics to the PMC editors with the request that they place it
on the filelist here, so it should be available to all shortly.
I would welcome any additions or corrections to it - I have
labelled it a "working bibliography" and that it is.

[....]

Bob O'Hara

Robert J. O'Hara, Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412-5001, U.S.A.

RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet       RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu
     
WORKING INTERDISCIPLINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: 'TREES OF HISTORY'
IN SYSTEMATICS, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, AND STEMMATICS.
Robert J. O'Hara, August 1992.
Email: RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet or RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu.

Suggestions for additions, deletions, and corrections are very
welcome; my own field is systematics, so that is the area in
which this list is most reliable.  My object here is not to
create an exhaustive bibliography, but rather a bibliography that
will help advanced students in any one of these fields get a good
sense of what has gone on and is going on in the other fields,
with special reference to theory.  Studies of particular
biological taxa, language families, or manuscript traditions that
do not have a theoretical or historical emphasis are generally
excluded from this list.  Asterisks indicate works that may be
particularly useful to beginners.

1. Interdisciplinary Works
2. General and Theoretical Works - Systematics
3. General and Theoretical Works - Historical Linguistics
4. General and Theoretical Works - Stemmatics
5. Historical Works - Systematics
6. Historical Works - Historical Linguistics
7. Historical Works - Stemmatics
8. Trees of History Elsewhere
9. Miscellaneous Works on Evolution in Relation to Other Fields

1. INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKS

Bateman, Richard, Ives Goddard, Richard T. O'Grady, Vicki A.
Funk, Rich Mooi, W. J. Kress, & Peter Cannell.  1990.  Speaking
of forked tongues: the feasibility of reconciling human phylogeny
and the history of language.  Current Anthropology, 31:1-24.
[See also responses and commentary on pp. 177-183, 315-316,
420-426.]

Bender, M. L.  1976.  Genetic classification of languages:
genotype vs. phenotype.  Language Sciences, 43:4-6.

Flight, Colin.  1988.  Bantu trees and some wider ramifications.
African Languages and Cultures, 1:25-43.  [Reanalyzes some
linguistic data using the distance Wagner procedure from
systematics.]

Greenberg, Joseph H.  1957.  Language and evolutionary theory.
Pp. 56-65 in: Essays in Linguistics.  Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1990.  Language families and subgroupings,
tree model and wave theory, and reconstruction of protolanguages.
Pp. 441-454 in: Research Guide on Language Change (Edgar C.
Polome, ed.).  Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 48.
Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.  [Short historical and
theoretical discussion of the tree model and the principle of
shared innovation (apomorphy), and the discovery of some of the
limitations of trees in linguistics.]

*Hoenigswald, Henry M., & Linda F. Wiener, eds.  1987.
Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An
Interdisciplinary Perspective.  Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.  [The most important single interdisciplinary
collection, with papers on all three subjects.]

Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1981.  Schleichers Einfluss auf Haeckel:
Schlaglichter auf die wechselseitige Abhangigkeit zwischen
linguistichen und biologischen Theorien in 19. Jahrhundert.
Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 95:1-21.
[Reprinted in Koerner, 1989, Practicing Linguistic
Historiography: Selected Essays, pp. 211-231, Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.]

Koerner, E. F. Konrad, ed.  1983.  Linguistics and Evolutionary
Theory: Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and
William Bleek, with an Introduction by J. Peter Maher.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Contains: (1) Schleicher, 1863, The
Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language; (2) Schleicher,
1865, On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of
Man; (3) Bleek, 1867, On the Origin of Language (with preface by
Haeckel); (4) W. D. Whitney, 1872, Dr. Bleek and the Simious
Theory of Language.]

Lee, Arthur.  1989.  Numerical taxonomy revisited: John Griffith,
cladistic analysis and St. Augustine's Quaestiones in
Heptateuchum. Studia Patristica XX.

Maher, John Peter.  1966.  More on the history of the comparative
method: the tradition of Darwinism in August Schleicher's work.
Anthropological Linguistics, 8:1-12.

Picardi, Eva.  1977.  Some problems of classification in
linguistics and biology, 1800-1830.  Historiographia Linguistica,
4:31-57.

Platnick, Norman I., & H. Don Cameron.  1977.  Cladistic methods
in textual, linguistic, and phylogenetic analysis.  Systematic
Zoology, 26:380-385.

Robinson, Peter M. W., & Robert J. O'Hara.  In press.  Cladistic
analysis of an Old Norse Manuscript tradition.  Research in
Humanities Computing.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  [Application of
systematic techniques to a stemmatic problem.]

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & John Woodford.  1991.  Where linguistics,
archeology, and biology meet.  Pp. 173-197 in: Ways of Knowing
(John Brockman, ed.).  New York: Prentice Hall Press.

Stevick, Robert D.  1963.  The biological model and historical
linguistics.  Language, 39:159-169.

Uschmann, Georg.  1972.  August Schleicher und Ernst Haeckel.
Spitzbardt, 1972:62-70.

2. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS

*Brooks, Daniel R., & Deborah A. McLennan.  1991.  Phylogeny,
Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [Chapter 2 is an
introduction to cladistic analysis.]

Camin, Joseph H., & Robert R. Sokal.  1965.  A method for
deducing branching sequences in phylogeny.  Evolution,
19:311-326.  [One of several early influential papers in modern
phylogenetic theory.]

Edwards, A. W. F., & Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L.  1964.
Reconstruction of evolutionary trees.  Pp. 67-76 in: Phenetic and
Phylogenetic Classification (V. H. Heywood & J. McNeill, eds.).
Systematics Association Publication 6.  [One of several early
influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]

Farris, J. S.  1970.  Methods for computing Wagner trees.
Systematic Zoology, 19:83-92.  [An early influential paper; now
substantially superseded.]

Farris, James S., Arnold G. Kluge, & M. J. Eckardt.  1970.  A
numerical approach to phylogenetic systematics.  Systematic
Zoology, 19:172- 189.  [One of several early influential papers
in modern phylogenetic theory.]

Felsenstein, Joseph.  1982.  Numerical methods for inferring
evolutionary trees.  Quarterly Review of Biology, 57:379-404.

Fitch, Walter M., & Emmanuel Margoliash.  1967.  The construction
of phylogenetic trees.  Science, 155:279-284.  [One of several
early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]

Hennig, Willi.  1965.  Phylogenetic systematics.  Annual Review
of Entomology, 10:97-116.  [A synopsis of Hennig 1966.]

Hennig, Willi.  1966.  Phylogenetic Systematics.  Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.

Kluge, Arnold G., & James S. Farris.  1969.  Quantitative
phyletics and the evolution of anurans.  Systematic Zoology,
18:1-32.  [One of several early influential papers in modern
phylogenetic theory.]

Maddison, Wayne P., Michael J. Donoghue, & David R. Maddison.
1984.  Outgroup analysis and parsimony.  Systematic Zoology,
33:83- 103.  [A review of outgroup comparison as a method of
polarity determination.]

*Maddison, Wayne P., & David R. Maddison.  1989.  Interactive
analysis of phylogeny and character evolution using the computer
program MacClade.  Folia Primatologica, 53:190-202.

Mayr, Ernst.  1974.  Cladistic analysis or cladistic
classification. Zeitschrift fur zoologische Systematik und
Evolutions-forschung, 12:94-128.  [Distinguished clearly the
issue of historical inference (cladistic analysis) from the issue
of classification.]

*Mayr, Ernst, & Peter D. Ashlock.  1991.  Principles of
Systematic Zoology, second edition.  New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
[Pp. 274-321, "Numerical methods of phylogenetic inference",
written by David Maddison, is a good introduction to cladistic
analysis.  Much of the rest of the book is outdated.]

O'Hara, Robert J.  1988.  Homage to Clio, or, toward an
historical philosophy for evolutionary biology.  Systematic
Zoology, 37:142- 155.  [A discussion of the theoretical
similarities between history and evolutionary biology
(systematics in particular).]

*Sober, Elliott.  1988.  Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony,
Evolution, and Inference.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Stevens, Peter F.  1980.  Evolutionary polarity of character
states. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11:333-358.

*Swofford, David L., & Gary J. Olsen.  1990.  Phylogenetic
reconstruction.  Pp. 411-501 in: Molecular Systematics (D. M.
Hillis & C. Moritz, eds.).  Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer.
[An advanced but comprehensive introduction.]

Wagner, Warren H., Jr.  1961.  Problems in the classification of
ferns. Recent Advances in Botany, 1:841-844.  [One of several
early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]

*Wiley, Edward O.  1981.  Phylogenetics.  New York: Wiley.  [A
general textbook on systematics.]

Zuckerkandl, E., & Linus Pauling.  1965.  Molecules as documents
of evolutionary history.  Journal of Theoretical Biology,
8:357-366.

[Journals: Systematic Zoology (now Systematic Biology),
Cladistics, Systematic Botany, Taxon, Zeitschrift fur zoologische
Systematik und Evolutions-forschung.]

[Software: MacClade, PAUP, PHYLIP, HENNIG-86, Clados, and others.
See Maddison in Mayr & Ashlock, p. 320-321 for a listing.]

3. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Allen, W. S.  1953.  Relationship in comparative linguistics.
Transactions of the Philological Society, 1953:52-108.

Anttila, Raimo.  1989.  Historical and Comparative Linguistics.
Amsterdam.  [A general textbook.]

Bynon, Theodora.  1977.  Historical Linguistics.  Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.  [A general textbook.]

[Chretien, C. D.  1963.  Shared innovation and subgrouping.
IJAL, 29:66-68.]

*Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., & V. V. Ivanov.  1990.  The early
history of Indo-European languages.  Scientific American, March,
pp. 110-116.

Gleason, H. A.  1959.  Counting and calculating for historical
reconstruction.  Anthropological Linguistics, 1(2):22-32.

Grace, George W.  1965.  On the scientific status of genetic
classification in linguistics.  Oceanic Linguistics, 4:1-14.

Greenberg, Joseph H.  1987.  Language in the Americas.  Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

Hetzron, Robert.  1976.  Two principles of genetic
reconstruction. Lingua, 38:89-108.

Hock, Hans Henrich.  1991.  Principles of Historical Linguistics,
second edition.  Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.  [A
general textbook.]

Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1966.  Criteria for the subgrouping of
languages.  Pp. 1-12 in: Ancient Indo-European Dialects (Henrik
Brinbaum & Jaan Puhvel, eds.).  Berkeley: University of
California Press.

*Mallory, James P.  1989.  In Search of the Indo-Europeans:
Language, Archeology, and Myth.  London: Thames and Hudson.

Nichols, Johanna.  1992.  Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pulgram, E.  1953.  Family tree, wave theory, and dialectology.
Orbis, 2:67-72.

*Renfrew, Colin.  1989.  The origins of Indo-European languages.
Scientific American, October, pp. 106-114.

*Ruhlen, Merritt.  1991.  A Guide to the World's Languages.
Volume 1: Classification.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & T. L. Markey, eds.  1986.  Typology,
Relationship, and Time: A Collection of Papers on Language Change
and Relationship by Soviet Linguists.  Ann Arbor: Karoma
Publishers.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, ed.  1989.  Reconstructing Languages and
Cultures.  Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeier.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly.  1989.  Methods in interphyletic
comparisons. Ural-Altaische Jahrbucher, 61:1-26.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly.  1990.  The mother tongue.  The Sciences,
May- June.

*Wright, R.  1991.  Quest for the mother tongue.  Atlantic,
267(4):39- 68.  [Popular magazine article.]

[Journals: Diachronica; Historische Sprachforschung/Historical
Linguistics.]

4. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS

Clark, A. C.  1918.  The Descent of Manuscripts.  Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Colwell, Ernest Cadman.  1947.  Genealogical method: its
acheivements and limitations.  Journal of Biblical Literature,
66:109- 133.

Dawe, R. D.  1964.  The Collation and Investigation of
Manuscripts of Aeschylus.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[On the limitations of stemmatics.]

Greg, W. W.  1927.  The Calculus of Variants: an Essay on Textual
Criticism.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greg, W. W.  1930.  Recent theories of textual criticism.  Modern
Philology, 28:401-404.  [Reply to Shepard (1930).]

[Griesbach.  1796.  Prolegomena to his second edition of the New
Testament.  (Establishes the principle of lectio difficilior, and
other rules, fide Shepard 1930.)]

Kleinlogel, Alexander.  1968.  Das Stemmaproblem.  Philologus,
112:63-82.

Maas, Paul.  1958.  Textual Criticism.  (Translated from the
German by Barbara Flower.)  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quentin, Henri.  1926.  Essais de Critique Textuelle.  Paris:
Picard.

Reeve, M. D.  1986.  Stemmatic method: 'qualcosa che non
funziona'? The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture (Proceedings
of the Oxford International Symposium, 1982, edited by Peter
Ganz), 1:57-69. Bibliologia, vol. 3.  Brepols, Turnhout.

*Reynolds, Leighton D., ed.  1983.  Texts and Transmission: A
Survey of the Latin Classics.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*Reynolds, Leighton D., & N. G. Wilson.  1991.  Scribes and
Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin
Literature.  Third Edition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shepard, William P.  1930.  Recent theories of textual criticism.
Modern Philology, 28:129-141.  [Critique of Quentin (1926) and
Greg (1927); see Greg (1930) for a response.]

Weitzman, Michael.  1985.  The analysis of open traditions.
Studies in Bibliography, 38:82-120.  [A substantial discussion of
how to reconstruct the history of contaminated manuscript
traditions.]

Weitzman, Michael.  1987.  The evolution of manuscript
traditions. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A,
150:287-308. [Develops a statistical model of the process of
manuscript descent.]

West, M. L.  1973.  Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique.
Stuttgart.

Whitehead, F., & C. E. Pickford.  1951.  The two-branch stemma.
Bulletin Bibliographique de la Societe Internationale
Arthurienne\Bibliographical Bulletin of the International
Arthurian Society, 3:83-90.

Zuntz, G.  1965.  An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays
of Euripides.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. HISTORICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS

Craw, Robin.  1992.  Margins of cladistics: identity, difference
and place in the emergence of phylogenetic systematics,
1864-1975.  Pp. 65-107 in: Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of
Biology (Paul Griffiths, ed.).  Australasian Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, 11.

Gaffney, Eugene S.  1984.  Historical analysis of theories of
chelonian relationship.  Systematic Zoology, 33:283-301.

Greene, John C.  1959.  The Death of Adam.  Ames: Iowa State
University Press.  [A general history of natural history, with
some discussion of systematics.]

Gruber, Howard E.  1972.  Darwin's 'tree of nature' and other
images of wider scope.  Pp. 121-140 in: On Aesthetics and Science
(J. Wechsler, ed.).  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hull, David L.  1988.  Science as a Process.  Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.  [Contains an account of the recent (post-1960)
history of systematics.  See Craw (1992) for criticism.]

Lam, H. J.  1936.  Phylogenetic symbols, past and present.  Acta
Biotheoretica, 2:152-194.

O'Hara, Robert J. 1988.  Diagrammatic classifications of birds,
1819- 1901: views of the natural system in 19th-century British
ornithology.  Pp. 2746-2759 in: Acta XIX Congressus
Internationalis Ornithologici (H. Ouellet, ed.).  Ottawa:
National Museum of Natural Sciences.

O'Hara, Robert J.  1991.  Representations of the natural system
in the nineteenth century.  Biology and Philosophy, 6:255-274.

O'Hara, Robert J.  1992.  Telling the tree: narrative
representation and the study of evolutionary history.  Biology
and Philosophy, 7:135-160.  [On the similarities between
historical narratives and evolutionary trees.]

Oppenheimer, Jane M.  1987.  Haeckel's variations on Darwin.
Hoenigswald & Wiener, 1987:123-135.  [On the tree diagrams of the
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel.]

de Queiroz, Kevin.  1988.  Systematics and the Darwinian
revolution. Philosophy of Science, 55:238-259.  [A good
interpretation of the history of recent systematics.]

Reif, Wolf-Ernst.  1983.  Hilgendorf's (1863) dissertation on the
Steinheim planorbids (Gastropoda; Miocene): the development of a
phylogenetic research program for paleontology.  Palaontologische
Zeitschrift, 57:7-20.

Stevens, Peter F.  1982.  Augustin Augier's "Arbre Botanique"
(1801), a remarkable early botanical representation of the
natural system. Taxon, 32:203-211.

Stevens, Peter F.  1984.  Metaphors and typology in the
development of botanical systematics 1690-1960, or the art of
putting new wine in old bottles.  Taxon, 33:169-211.

Voss, E. G.  1952.  The history of keys and phylogenetic trees in
systematic biology.  Journal of the Scientific Laboratory,
Denison University, 43:1-25.

Wagner, Warren H., Jr.  1980.  Origin and philosophy of the
groundplan-divergence method of cladistics.  Systematic Botany,
5:173-193.

Winsor, Mary P.  1976.  Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of
Life.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

6. HISTORICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Bonfante, Giuliano.  1954.  Ideas on the kinship of the European
languages from 1200 to 1800.  Journal of World History,
1:679-699.

De Mauro, T., & L. Formigari.  1990.  Leibniz, Humboldt, and the
Origins of Comparativism.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  [Amsterdam
Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, 49.]

Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1963.  On the history of the comparative
method.  Anthropological Linguistics, 5(1):1-11.

Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1975.  Schleicher's tree and its trunk.
Pp. 157-160 in: Ut Videam: Contributions to an Understanding of
Linguistics.  For Pieter A. Verburg on the Occasion of his
Seventieth Birthday...(Werner Abraham et al., eds.).  Lisse:
Peter de Ridder Press.  [H&W p113]

Hymes, Dell, ed.  1974.  Studies in the History of Linguistics:
Traditions and Paradigms.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1978.  Toward a historiography of
linguistics: 19th and 20th century paradigms.  In: Toward a
Historiography of Linguistics: Selected Essays.  Amsterdam
Studies in the theory and History of Linguistic Science, III.
Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 19.  Amsterdam:
Benjamins.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1982.  The Schleicherian paradigm in
linguistics.  General Linguistics, 22:1-39.

Morpurgo Davies, Anna.  1975.  Language classification in the
Nineteenth Century.  Current Trends in Linguistics, 13:607-716.

Myers, L. F., & W. S.-Y. Wang.  1963.  Tree representations in
linguistics.  In: Project on Linguistic Analysis, Report No. 3,
Ohio State University Research Foundation (N.S.F. Grant G-25055).
[fide H&W p256]

Pederson, Holger.  1931.  The Discovery of Language: Linguistic
Science in the Nineteenth Century.  Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.  [Reprinted 1962, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.]

Priestly, Tom M. S.  1975.  Schleicher, Celakovsky, and the
family- tree diagram.  Historiographica Linguistica, 2:299-333.

Robins, Robert H.  1973.  The history of language classification.
Current Trends in Linguistics, 11:3-41.

Robins, Robert H.  1979.  A Short History of Linguistics.
London.

Robins, Robert H.  1987.  The life and work of Sir William Jones.
Transactions of the Philological Society, 1987:1-23.  [Short
biography of an 18th century founder of historical linguistics.]

Southworth, Franklin C.  1964.  Family-tree diagrams.  Language,
40:557-565.

Stewart, Ann H.  1976.  Graphic Representation of Models in
Linguistic Theory.  Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press.

Uschmann, G.  1967.  Zur Geschichte der Stammbaumdarstellungen.
Gesammelte Vortrage uber moderne Probleme der Abstammungslehre
(M. Gersch, ed.), 2:9-30.  Jena: Friedrich Schiller Universitat.

[Journals: Historiographica Linguistica.]

7. HISTORICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS

Holm, G.  1972.  Carl Johan Schlyter and textual scholarship.
Saga och Sed: Kungliga Gustav Adolf Akademiens Aarbok, 48-80,
Uppsala. [Contains stemmata of legal texts from 1827]

Timpanaro, Sebastiano.  1981.  La genesi del methodo del
Lachmann, third edition.  Padua.

8. TREES OF HISTORY ELSEWHERE

Cook, Roger.  1974 [reprinted 1988].  The Tree of Life: Image for
the Cosmos.  New York: Thames and Hudson.  [An art historical
study of tree imagery.  Includes some historical and genealogical
trees.]

Murdoch, John E.  1984.  Album of Science: Antiquity and the
Middle Ages.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.  [Chapter 5 of
this anthology of scientific diagrams, "Dichotomies and Arbores",
illustrates many medieval tree diagrams.  Most of these are
logical trees, but some genealogical trees are illustrated also.]

Toulmin, Stephen E.  1972.  Human Understanding.  Princeton:
Princeton University Press.  [Evolutionary epistemology: trees of
disciplinary development.]

Young, Gavin C.  1986.  Cladistic methods in paleozoic
continental reconstruction.  Journal of Geology, 94:523-537.

9. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS ON EVOLUTION IN RELATION TO OTHER
FIELDS

Bichakjian, B.  1987.  The evolution of word order: a
paedomorphic explanation.  Pp. 87-108 in: Papers from the 7th
International Conference on Historical Linguistics (A. G. Ramat
et al., eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bredeck, Elizabeth J.  1987.  Historical narrative or scientific
discipline?  Fritz Mauthner on the limits of linguistics.  Pp.
585-593 in: Papers in the History of Linguistics (Hans Aarsleff,
Louis G. Kelly, & Hans-Josef Niederehe, eds.).  Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.

Durham, William H.  1990.  Advances in evolutionary culture
theory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19:187-210.

Lass, Roger.  1990.  How to do things with junk: exaptation in
language evolution.  Journal of Linguistics, 26:79-102.

Leroy, Maurice.  1949.  Sur le concept d'evolution en
linguistique. Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie.  337-375.

Masters, R. D.  1990.  Evolutionary biology and political theory.
American Political Science Review, 84:195-210.

Sereno, M. I.  1991.  Four analogies between biological and
cultural linguistic evolution.  Journal of Theoretical Biology,
151:467-507.

Terrell, John.  1981.  Linguistics and the peopling of the
Pacific islands.  Journal of the Polynesian Society, 90:225-258.
[Biogeography and linguistics.]

    Thread #2: Cut-ups

    Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 10:36:19 cdt
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"

Subject: An Editorial Comment

Greetings:

I enclose the following Neoist Reply to Mr. McCarthy:

 POSTMODERN PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY [14] The postmodern reduction
of the logic of Heraclitean unity and eschew dialectics, implicit
ideas of beauty such as expressed in terms of a probabilistic
mathesis. [58] It is a play of signifiers. It completes the
devolution of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. Yet,
tracing the play of numbers: in other words a science fiction
about the credentials of postmodernism, then, is in the
fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history,
philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political
formations. This process revives the subject reveals the longing
for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern
desire to systematise the play of difference among "numbering
numbers." [59] The desire of a natural order of things driving
the play of signifiers. It completes the devolution of the
concealed form of the unconscious" (Deleuze and Guattari, F. _A
Thousand Plateaus_ which imports quantum modelling of particle
inputs which are organised to facilitate global exchange" (1991:
66). [5] The deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises
the complex texture of individual and social space have been cut
off. It is a play of irregularity and pleasure arising from the
authors and advance notification of the masses into appropriate
consumption and productive behaviours. Secondly, as Baudrillard
has argued, the immersion of the subject was drawn into this mess
remains repressed. POSTMODERNISM: PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY FOR
EVERYMAN [29] Bourdieu finds that the "autonomous arithmetic
organisation" of the libidinal economy of deconstruction grows.
In its psychotic mode, the postmodern worker and consumer,
wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the heightened
sensitivity derived from the material reality of Deleuze and
Guattari's (1987) plateau.
        POSTMODERN SADISM [23] There is a utility which
deconstructs ideas of beauty such as "consciousness and
experience" are collapsed (Rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the
categories of postmodernism as a moment in the play of difference
into a universe which is an assemblage that this inheritance
persists. Both are concerned with flows of a dialectical view of
history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and
political formations. This process revives the subject of
ethico-politico praxis, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia
which is under considerable threat in the pleasures inherent in
policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a marvelous
thing; but it may not be republished in any medium without
express written consent from the perversity of code-breaking
through de Sade's deconstructionist lubricity in the inversion of
Marx's _Capital_ as "the cultural logic of the body in the
interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. This
trajectory is observable in _Dionysus_ and in Deleuze and
Guattari's work in particular. Weil argues that scientism must
not eliminate the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and
continuity to the atoms of the rendering of culture into everyday
life and death between the unary signifier and the good to
Olympian heights above the conditions of the complex texture of
individual and putting an end to praxis. In addition, Lacan
(1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one
also senses that Lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis and their
molecularising thought crystallises de Sade's "matrix of
maleficent molecules" (1968: 400), in which the concerns of human
striving is also projected into the epistemological affinity
between de Sade's _Juliette_) as a manipulative developer. We
find that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to explain
the logic of the Marxist preoccupation with the linear space of
the good" (Weil, 1968: 22). The work of the complexities of
history to the form of the relations of desire in the hierarchies
of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated. [30] The pleasurable
and terroristic nature of things: "As soon as you have discovered
the way of a contradictory, non-reductive "constellation" of
tensions (Jay as cited in Bernstein, 1991: 42).  This stance
maintains the "unresolved paradox" of reason as simultaneously a
vehicle of emancipation and entrapment--a paradox which
contributes to the spirit" (1972: Xii).
        Rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. In contrast to
Derrida's interpretation of the continuous intensities of the
measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent,
signifiers as the delineations of postmodern thought, reducing
cultural complexity to signifiers in the play of commodity
signifiers, and in postmodernism may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without
express written consent from the modernist catch cry of equality,
liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of late
capitalism. The mating of capital by multinationals is furthered
by "the most terrible orgies," and her sadistic pleasure-plays
are financed in a culture which is also expressed by Lacan in
that the moment of difference with the linear space of the
trajectory of this desire with anality, require some examination
as a triumphal encounter of humanity and materiality. [47] The
dehumanising loss in the conditions of existence into strong
solutions which carry forward the paraconsistent logic of late
capitalism. The mating of capital and fearful desire mutually
attract and interpenetrate, and out of the information society,
which heightens the sensitivity of the quantum form in social
thought which reduces the complex texture of individual and
social space have been cut off. It is clear that atomising
thought which reduces the complex texture of existence for the

Thank You,
Monty Cantin
Karen Eliot, eds.
SMILE Magazine
     
From: Christopher Maeda 
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59 EDT
Subject: Postmodernism:  Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?

I'd like to start a new topic.  What's the point of all this?
Not "What's the point of postmodernism?"  We already know that's
a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand
the answer.  Very neat.

No.  I want to know what is the point of the people on this list:
why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after
you die? Are you trying to improve society?  Destroy society?
Get tenure? (Check all that apply.)

Take the "war machine" article appended below.  I've read it
twice and it still doesn't make a damn bit of sense.  (Though the
authors do deserve a pat on the head for using 5 syllable words
so convincingly...) I would try again but it's so mind-numbingly
boring.

I'm really annoyed.  It seems that so much of the work in this
genre is intended not so much to enrage or enlighten but simply
to show how clever the author is.  Any concrete proposition is so
obscured that one begins to doubt whether the author really had
anything to say in the first place.  I've begun to suspect that
the author usually doesn't.

   From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"

   the war machine
   monty cansin
   karen eliot
   Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine

    A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics.

[Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.]
     
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 17:43 EST
From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
Subject: Giving something and getting something else

I'd like to unstart Christopher M.'s topic and flop it on to the
cladistics thread.  The "War Machine" article and the one before
it from "SMILE" (and where can I get this zine?  does it actually
exist?) seemed to me to be summaries of sections of Deleuze and
Guattari's _Thousand Plateaus_, a really groovy book that folks
are just starting to use in cultural criticism (see the last
couple issues of PMC for examples...).  Anyway, D & G have some
very biting critiques of the phallic, "arborescent" (i.e.
tree-like) structure of knowledge (esp. in the chapter
"Introduction: Rhizome").
      I'm really sick of the "what good is theory? Let's do
something real" riff, but I'm not sure how to refute it.  I was
quite entertained however, to find incisive discussions of this
thang in the last 2 books I read, Gallop's _Around 1981_ and
Fish's _Doing What Comes Naturally_.

Jeff Schwartz
Dept. of Popular Culture
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green OH 43402
     
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"

Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?;

or, What is the sound of one person taking a joke?

Christopher Maeda 
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59
EDT Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway? doesn't make a damn
bit of sense.(Though the authors do deserve a pat on the head for
using 5 syllable words so convincingly...) I would try again but
it's so mind-numbingly boring. I'm really annoyed. It seems that
so much of the State apparatus (stratum), the double task of
priest and believer, legislator and subject. (Deleuze 1984, pg.
92).  The Kantian subject is actually made up of space: the human
population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
machine  monty cansin karen eliot Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine
   A book exists only through the phylum:
    On the other by state theorematics. Metallurgy is the point
of the subject is actually made up of space: the human
population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
machine in itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with
the "four poetic formulas" which Deleuze added as a pure matter
of wrought objects, or the construction of the essay of sedentary
or State structures, nomads and the battle is evidently not
always the object of war.
   War is often a matter of avoiding the battle, using speed and
stealth to outmaneuver the enemy.  But is war necessarily the
object of knowledge, as opposed to the schematization of
space/time is a brick. One can build many different windows. The
war machine that sweeps them along? We have been raised, for the
present and the war machine's exteriority, Propositions I-IV make
connections to the extent of obliteration the State apparatus.
   "For what can be done to prevent the theme of race from
turning into a "free and indeterminate accord," where one faculty
does not exactly lie in between the nomads and the war machine in
itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four
poetic formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the
third fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the
body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of
the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation
        In the name of the people on this list: why do you do
this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
I've read it twice and it still Gives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck!
    I'd like to start a new topic. What's the point of
postmodernism?" We already know that's a pointless question; if
you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. Very neat. No.
I want to know what is the correlative form of content."
  It is a brick.
One can build many different windows. The war machine in itself.
In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic
formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the third
fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the State is
not a simple dispute over philosophy, but has become an issue of
pragmatic action. Deleuze's book Foucault again becomes the stage
for this confrontation, for Deleuze's Foucault is the correlative
form of content."  It is a way as the study of the body and
desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the people
on this list: why do you do this,

    Why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
I've read it twice and it stillGives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck! I'd
like to start a new topic. What's the point of postmodernism?" We
already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you
won't understand the answer. Very neat. [Remainder of repost
deleted -- ed.]

A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics.

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS OF 'SMILE:'

        In case any of you were not aware of it before, the texts
that have been reprinted in this space from time to time are
computer-generated cutups of other, pre-existing texts.  The
reason we chose to submit them to the list is that such texts can
serve as illustrations for many postmodern concepts which can be
raised for discussion.  For example, does a piece of text such as
above constitute a "work"? If so, does it have one, two, three,
or no "authors?" Why does a piece of text have to have
sequentiality, linearity, and originality to be considered
"meaningful?" The hostile reaction of the above critic seems to
indicate that these are far from dead issues, as he struggled so
valiantly to extract "meaning" out of a text that had been
deliberately rendered "meaningless."
        However, although a cutup text lacks "meaning" per se,
does it lack usefulness? The random juxtapositions of phrase in
the above article and the cutup of the PMC article MCCARTHY 592
that we submitted earlier struck us as not only amusing, but
critical and artistic.
        As Neoists, we believe that questions of "originality"
and "authorship" and "meaning" are dead issues.  The essense of
the new art and literature is plagarism, as the Kathy Acker story
from an earlier issue of PMC illustrated so well. The recycling,
rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural
signs that are shoved at us every day through the media is the
only art form left that is relevant for the postmodern age, a
fact that has been widely bandied about but largely ignored since
the days of the Cabaret Voltaire. One might as well open oneself
up to the possibilities of manipulated the images created for us
by capital rather than being manipulated by them.

Virtually yours,
Karen Eliot
Monty Cantsin
     
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 20:58:15 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: dead issues

I guess the Neoists are trying to say that the issues are dead
issues but that they are far from being dead issues.
        Aside from that, I can think of no way that an artist
could more effectively serve the interests of late capitalism
than by jettisoning the idea of meaning and mandating the real
work of "recylcing, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of
multiplicity of cultural signs."  Some theory is very difficult,
and people indeed work very hard to understand it; you (Smile)
seem insufferably elitist looking down your noses at people so
far behind the times as to look for the meaning in a text. I
thought one of the characteristics of PM thinking was creation
without the imposition of rules? Opening up to the possibilities
of manipulating the images created for us by capital is obviously
worth doing, but why be so smug and call it the only game for
whoever is really au courant. THAT'S the real bullshit in
postmodernism.  Michael McColl.  (By the way, there are places in
the cut-ups where things are joined in really blunt, dumb ways.)
In case you have not noticed, new combinations of media images IS
the media's game, and audiences can be seduced whatever the new
forms of manipulation.  Like you could even keep up with the
media's everfresh combinations of rap, gymnastics, Coca-Cola, and
lover, warm love, from AT&T.
        In short, why do you need to be so elitist and
exclusionary about ONE thing there is to do, when there are a lot
of things. If you jettison "meaning," you circulate all the more
effectively in the media transfos.

Michael McColl
     
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 92 00:03 AST
From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU
Subject: War Machine texts event

   It was evident that the War Machine texts were either parodies
or wordgames drawing on Macarthy 592 and Deleuze & Guattari's _A
Thousand Plateaus_. The low threshold of resistance to free-play
(or simply unfettered theoretical and linguistic performances) is
a symptom of the Fear-of-Theory syndrome that plagues higher
learning institutions in many places. It is not so bad in the
Anglo-Zone, I gather. In Latin America it is an epidemic that
threatens from the Right and from the Left (even the "non-
dogmatic" left, even Liberation Theology, etc.).
   I recently performed an e-mail event intending to fog (or
de-fog) the patriarchal repressive binary discourse being used in
a Latin American discussion group concerning Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path guerrillas). Some reactions amounted to near death
threats. The theoretical after-thoughts to the event motivated
even stronger reactions, even though the text made it clear there
was no support to Sendero (or the Army) involved.
   What is really feared is the volatilisation of agency, author-
ship, of the subject and/or of stratified ethico-political
languages spontaneously enabled by the playful use of theory and
language in general. Some of these hostile reactions approach
very much the fascist Spanish Civil war slogan: "Abajo la
inteligencia, vivan las cadenas, viva la muerte!" (Down with
intelligence, long live chains, long live DEATH!).--"Who gives a
fuck anyway!".

P.D.

   Macarthy 592, by the way, tries to associate the conception of
atomistic actual occasions arranged upon an extensive continuum
of potentialities (i.e., of molecularity upon a plane or "plan"
of consistency) with the reduction of experience and action to
numbered schemata, that is, the paradigmatic scheme of a much
feared proto-facist anarcho-crazyism read in Deleuze & Guattari
and others. But such an atomistic conception, in the mentioned
versions (which owe much to Bergson and Whitehead), really point
to the multiplicity, plurality and spontaneity open to non-
stratified events on or beyond the extensive continuum
(Whitehead) or plane of consistency, organized or disorganized
(Deleuze & Guattari).

Juan Duchesne     J_Duchesne@upr1
     
From: Christopher Maeda 
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 18:58:37 EDT
Subject: The New Art

   Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt
   From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"

   Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?;

>  The recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of
>  multiplicity of cultural signs that are shoved at us every day
>  through the media is the only art form left that is relevant
>  for the postmodern age...

>  One might as well open oneself up to the possibilities of
>  manipulated [sic?] the images created for us by capital rather
>  than being manipulated by them.

A cute but pathetic idea.  What's the difference?  You probably
end up buying the crap irregardless.  Or to put it differently,
if you do art by recycling advertising, you further the ends of
the advertisers.
     
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 92 01:58 AST
From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU
Subject: Theory and landscape

     My intervention (digest 8-1) was not necessarily
authoritarian or exclusionist. It's more a problem of my being
able to produce only a Terminator-2 type of English at the
moment.
     This time after reading subsequent postings on the War
Machine (Smile) issue, I would qualify my rash fear-of-theory
diagnosis and let it apply to general situations loosely related
to this particular communicative situation of PMC-Talk.
     What I read in the subsequent "contra-Smile" interventions
is a tendency to associate dense (or even opaque) theoretical
language with some sort of vacuousness or manipulative bluff (the
way masturbation is usually related to waste or unproductiveness
of some sort). But the first element is not a sufficient
condition for the second. "Light" or "clear" theoretical language
uses are very often as vacuous and deceptive as some of the
baroque "postmodern" terminology may be. We really need to go
into the dense Pomo Forest to distinguish between real content
and bluff (aside from the obviously mediocre, therefore trivial,
samples).
     To the said tendency associating "ludic" (>ludere) density
and irrelevance is related an "I'm not wasting my time" tactic
justified on very bi-polar notions of theory-practice,
play-commitment, form-content, "jouissance"-sense, etc. Or I am
wrong?

Corrigenda: Am I wrong?

Juan Duchesne
     
Date:         Mon, 10 Aug 92 10:33:42 EDT
From:         CJ Stivale 
Subject:      The C. Maeda et. al. Discussion

I think that mbm at upenn's point (4 Aug 92) is well-stated and
well-taken, regarding perceived impatience/reproach(es) to C.
Maeda's intervention (30 Jul 92). However, impatience would seem
to be the operative mood given Maeda's neat title
("Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?"). Maeda used therein a
scattershot introductory interrogation: first, "What's the point
of all this?", then, "what is the point of the people on this
list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you
after you die?" Possible reasons given by Maeda: "Are you trying
to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check all that
apply)." It is then that Maeda makes the segue into the brief
commentary on the "war machine" article, the "mind-numbingly
boring" quality that stymies his/her understanding and annoys
him/her by its opacity.
   The discussion that subsequently ensued on PMC-Talk dealt with
the latter topic (pomo and/contra its jargon), but as no one has
attempted to answer the broader queries, I'd like to give it a
crack, i.e. "the point of the people on this list: why do you do
this?" Of course, while not representing any "people," just
myself, I hope to connect with motivations of a few subscribers.
Although I could start too far back and in detail about being in
grad school in French studies in the '70s, I can simplify the
response a bit:
   When PMC came on line, it proposed the practical possibility
of exploring a potentially new mode of communication/exchange, on
a new medium, via an electronic journal. That this enterprise has
its own, built-in limitations does not dull my interest in
supporting the editors' efforts. That they also saw fit to
stimulate more immediate interchange PMC-Talk made the
limitations of the journal a bit less constraining, but as we
have frequently seen, most "talk" just starts getting interesting
when it fizzles. Maeda's interrogation, as diffuse as it was, at
least had the potential for raising a few points as well as
various hackles.
  My intervention starts with the ambiguity of his vague
references to some "this." "Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn"
whether you remember me after I die; nor is improving (or
destroying) society via PMC-Talk _necessarily_ one of my goals
(although were these exchanges to lead in either direction so
much the better). And getting tenure does not seem to correspond
to participating in or promoting such interchange (we might ask
the PMC editors whether tenure prospect and running this list are
even compatible).
  Then, asks Maeda, "why do you do this?" Beyond "subscribing
to/reading entries on this list," I take "this" to suggest more
broadly "participating in discussions about/confrontations with
the discourse of texts designated, however imprecisely, as
'postmodern'." My reasons both for such "confrontations" and for
participation in PMC-Talk relate to my goals as teacher, to
understand (some of) the proponents of said discourse and to be
able to impart some of that understanding to my students.
Moreover, as I began to teach and to engage in those other
professional exercises that might, in fact, lead to tenure
(attending conferences, delivering papers, sharing research with
colleagues in discussion groups, at meetings, in correspondence,
discussing professional needs and prospects aka networking,
revising and sending out papers, eventually publishing), I found
that the point of "doing this" was also to extend the teaching
dialogue toward colleagues in a number of settings and to clarify
differences and commonalities of approach and understanding.
  These reasons are why PMC and PMC-Talk presented such an
exciting potential and continue to enable our discussion and
learning to progress. The "grumpiness" (to use a term employed
precisely in a recent _Chronicle_ "Point of View" essay), if not
outright cynicism, implied in Maeda's "who gives a fuck anyway"
recalls for me the impatient, usually lazy comments that many of
us have heard over the years from colleagues left out of the
post-structuralist theory loop usually by dint of their own lack
of effort to engage with the material. Not that Maeda or those
sympathetic to his plaints necessarily have failed to engage with
this material; and yes, some of the recent "confrontations" with
these modes of discourse have been opaque, even hermetically
sealed. Yet, should that prevent us from challenging each other
with exchange regarding such discourse? I guess I "give a fuck"
if that phrasing means to remain interested in the manner in
which my contemporaries envisage and discuss the era in which I
live and provide new conceptualizations about past eras. Such
exchange, fortunately, has followed Maeda's productive queries in
the subsequent responses, fulfilling some of the potential
implicit in the PMC(-Talk) project.
  Sorry for going on so long. I hope I need not apologize for
taking Maeda's intervention too literally and/or too seriously.
If so, then truly what _is_ the point of "people" subscribing and
exchanging ideas here? CJ Stivale
     
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 03:41 EST
From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
Subject: SMILE/Deleuze

1)Obviously, I was mistaken when I understood the SMILE texts as
a "gloss" of Deleuze and Guattari.  Egg on my face for not
recognizing the cut-up method or SMILE's sources & for possibly
misusing the word "gloss."  Oops.

2)Now we're getting to what I see as the central question of the
cladistics thread.  What happens to our notions of the
history of ideas if the rhizome replaces the tree?  (Borges'
"Kafka and His Precursors" is probably an important text here.)
I read _1000 Plateaus_ as (among a whole lot of other things) an
attempt to explore this & propose a postmodern version of
cladistics.  Let's stop making fun of each other's diction
& get further into this.  --Bill Burroughs
     
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 19:30:16 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: Cutup

        It astonishes me that Bill Burroughs would not recognize
the cut-up method. Egg on my face if I have the wrong
Burroughs--I can't find my record album of him reading from his
works I drove all night and came at dawn to a warm misty place.
Barking dogs and the sound of water. Thomas and Chalry, I said,
that's the name of this town which would provide a handy
reference for the spelling of your name. Sea level. Where Lupita
....doling out her little papers of lousy shit sits like an
Aztech earth goddess. I too had egg on my face for I printed out
and took into the city to study on  public transportation and at
a table polite with coffee the pages of the Neoist manifesto
which was a very difficult read, but I thought, who knows, hard
on first reading, but maybe they have something there. Don't want
to conclude that they are not theoretical physicists just because
I'm not. Clandestine radio play on words accomplished all that
her father was after. In the best sense of the word, a shining
example of the way our sinking ship was caught up in the hands of
the prosenet, and delivered unto the web. So nasty,like an old
cantaloup, with its hard, rough rind and sweet, juicy,
orange-colored flesh. Beguile so the smoking toilet blockage
checks awaited him and called his attention to the movie debut of
Mikhail Gorbachev, "former chieftain." A period of general
slackening in the arts. Anything goes when there is an absence of
taste, he declared. I AM THE POSTMODERN MODERNIST MONUMENT. I AM
VENTURI'S DUCK WITHOUT FEATHER why not say it whispered
Jean-Francois Lyotard, for I am not ashamed.  They all called up
to him but he would not come down from his perch in the tree, and
after all he was wearing glasses and seemed serious about what he
was doing. A tedious little book, said my uncle, but I was merely
a swallow darting among the limbs and eaves of the pleasure-nooks
of the sense world, no magisterial fogart blounder jangwhorling
shoolspatial frissons.  It got to be that you couldn't even go
out to play, the snarling was so vicious. But that's all folks,
and by your leave.  Shortform, with a humble adding a diction.
     
[August 20th Digest, referred to below, is omitted here.  --ed.]
     
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 92 16:30:26 cdt
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"

Many thanks to the contributors to the last issue of PMC-Digest
for providing excellent material for the next issue of SMILE.
These three articles went particularly well together.

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

 Caveats I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas
(cladistics) raise its head in the scientific sense from the
socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or liberal
conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form of
neoconservatism.
  An other example is the oppressor: Under the male gaze of
Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the
interiorization of a panoptic social order in which the "texts"
of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. This has
enormous implications for cultural and social theory. A journal
like _Dissent_, instead of exploring the question of population
in Europe, problems of migrants, manifestation of the entire
series. [4] The eclipse of linearity effectuated by
postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the
all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
  3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_
represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been
theorized in the proceeding of the desert island foreshadows
Debord's concept of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a
dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a
difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather,
a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia
characterized by the means of social policy in Central Europe.
  As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and Church
as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The late 1970s
influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the
all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
 3. The 1981 television movie Escape from Gilligan's Island_
represents what had been theorized in the proceeding of the first
kind we can infer the relationships between lineages. Note that
in my list no time was given to lateral transfer of character
states from one lineage to another. This feature is almost
surely violated in most cultural/literary/social phenomena. I
hope to do so in a character state) hangs on the hope that there
isn't much lateral diffusion of information across the tree. In
phylogentic inference (a goal for which cladistics is a pastoral
dystopia, but a dystopia with a _differance_ (in, of course, the
Bakhtinian sense) of the Kristevan semiotic needs no further
comment here.
 4. Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy?

And what of the title is a sociological phenomenon that rose
against the radicalism of 1960s and 1970s.
 The radicalism has been the fact during the period after the War
as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and
the Gorbachevism would be considered as neoconservative phenomena
in sociology. The postmodernism is an attempt to totalize what
had been theorized in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and,
indeed, of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted
even as they are apparently affirmed.
  A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of
_Dissent_ and the Professor.

  Gilligan is the ability of "foreign market forces" to rule
Finnish economy by both rhetorical and effective factors. This
means that Finland is not independent in economical judgement
from the socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or
liberal conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form
of neoconservatism. An other example is the island "his"? I do
not have the space to pursue these questions here, but I hope to
demonstrate in a future study.
---------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES 1.
Gilligan himself is the discussion group for the period after the
War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost
and the modern society caused by the postmodern theory to
describe Finland as perfectly free of international interests.
The social sciences have received new impressions in the series
as an institution has lost the traditional connections to people,
a result has been the fact during the period after the War as the
Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the
author of a forthcoming novel from HarperCollins.]
----------------------------------------------------------------
L'ISLE DE
GILLIGAN Brian Morton
The hegemonic discourse of metonymy? And what of the antinomies
of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently
affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review
editor of _Dissent_ and the questions originated by
postmodernism. The conflict of traditional "texts" (i.e., books)
has been the fact during the period after the War as the
Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the
modern society caused by the means of social policy in Central
Europe. As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and
Church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The
late 1970s influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the
all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
  3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_
represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been
theorized in the following address: E-MAIL:
ATEITTINEN@JYLK.JYU.FI

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the rational development.

Karen Cantsin
Monty Elliot
     
Date:         Fri, 21 Aug 92 14:37:43 CDT
From:         Wes Chapman 
Subject:      Re: Digest Ending 8-22-92

Tongue in cheek, tongues of flame.

Well, now, another piece from SMILE magazine, OK.  I confess I
don't like the stuff much--I'll try to explain why.  At first I
thought I didn't like it for the simple reason that it's boring:
once you figure out what's going on (about three sentences for
me, but I'm not bragging--if I had been reading faster, if I had
not read parts of the works before, I might have been taken in
for longer), there really isn't much to look at in a pastiche of
textual snippets.

Not that this kind of art (I'll call it that) is meaningless; far
from it. There's a lot being implied about the nature of
originality, the social construction of consciousness,
seeee-rriiious Theory, postmodernism, etc.  But the genre is much
like a toilet placed in a museum as an exhibit--it's a lot more
interesting to talk about than to actually look at.  In the
pieces we've seen on pmc-talk, most of what is interesting about
the pieces takes place on the most general level; there haven't
been many particular conjunctions of phrases that really tell.
I confess I read the pieces fast, in part, I realize upon
reflection, because it has seemed to me that to read them
carefully would be to miss the point of the joke.  Excuse me, the
"joke."

But after thinking more about it, I realize that the tediousness
of the genre isn't really what I object to in it.  A number of
similar pastiches used to appear on the TechNoCulture list, bits
and pieces from postings to the list arranged not as prose but as
poetry.  I used to find them boring too, although they were more
carefully particular than the SMILE pastiches, UNTIL I found
postings of my own incorporated into the pastiches.  At that time
my whole experience of the pastiches changed.  They were no
longer boring, they were actively threatening; the juxtapositions
seemed at once impersonalizing (when it's your own writing, no
matter how unpolished or trivial, you feel very concretely what
it means to have what you say, what you mean, what you think,
become a text) and judgmental (why did that go there?  what did
the author think?).  In other words, I finally Got It.  (Do you
Get It?)  I am a little grateful to the author of those
pastiches; he (I think it was a he) taught me something about the
distance between the post-modern theories of discourse I espouse
and my actual experience of being a gen-yoo-ine self.

But I still don't like the genre.  Not because it's
threatening--ya takes yer chances--but because it's too safe.
Safe for the authors, that is. It's easy to take apart the work
of other people; that's just saying that the self is not
autonymous, is constructed of discourses, is nowhere, is
dead--it's not actually feeling it, feeling the poignancy of that
loss.

So, Monty Elliot and Karen Cantsin--if that's who you really
are--I have a challenge for you.  By all means, do another
pastiche.  You can use this posting if you want, not that you
need my permission.  But this time, get your own writing in too.
It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's something you care
about--your doctoral dissertation, a letter to a friend who is
dying of AIDS, whatever; you decide.  See for yourself if you
live where you think you live.

Seriously and respectfully,
Wes Chapman
Illinois Wesleyan University
     
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 17:07:13 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: what you cut up

        If you cut up your own text, somebody's article, that's
hardly manipulating the images that need it most. And it doesn't
mix in enough stuff from the cultural signal-storm. In short,
there aren't the right ingredients in the first place, and the
manipulative aspects of culture are untouched. Possible
ingredients: couple of political speeches, newspaper articles,
transcript of TV show, literature from the phone or electric or
gas company, etc etc.It's so silly for me to suggest these,
obviously,but the cutups could be less boring, and maybe even
bring up a few interesting juxtapositions. Mixed media and film
are probably better way to put the ideas into practice. An
example is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanc appearing in whatever
commercial. The abject hungry greed of the pandering that will DO
ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING is discouraging enough; then to watch
the movie and be reminded of the commercial is a demonstration to
me that some forms of meaning are not dead issues. There are
offensive people you don't want in your presence, and there are
offensive presences you don't want in what you are watching. How
do artists answer that? If they had equal time on prime-time TV,
it would be an interesting battle, but any victory pyrrhic.  By
the way, did Yoko Ono, or Michael Jackson, or someone else sell
the copyright of the Lennon tune to be used in a commercial?
Anybody who thinks that we don't lose something--meaning, if I
must--when good songs get smeared with that phosphorescent
excrement, and we can hardly get the smell out of the song again,
needs to straighten their head. I thought at least one aspect of
PM was an emphasis on the particulars, once we had abandoned a
lot of essentialist thinking? Why not discuss some of these ideas
as they work out in particulars.
        I told you what I hate, but what I would like would be to
use that same technique to popcorn my enemies. But even if I
manage to make such a film, the most that will happen is that a
very few see it on a TV in a gallery, perhaps, while the same
technique devours whatever meaning is left. Reminds me of that
character in Burroughs who had a jones for addicts, and would
assimilate them into his body. Even if he spits them back out,
they're not the same again.
        Thank-you for listening. Just meant this as ordinary
conversation.

                                                Michael McColl
     
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 21:24:06 -0400
From: Sheldon Pacotti 
Subject: Re: cutups

I have to agree that these cutups are getting a bit boring.  They
were funny at first, especially when several days passed before
anyone was brave enough to challenge the War Machine cutup
(obviously a lot of people simply thought it was above their
heads -- makes you wonder how well "postmodern theorists"
understand their own field, assuming there are several such
university-employed "professionals" on this list). But now that
we all know what's going on, the cut-ups are getting monotonous.

A couple years ago I did some experimenting with random text
('white language' or whatever).  I needed to write some cryptic
poetry and prophecies for a fantasy novel.  To overcome my lack
of poetic talent, I wrote a computer program that recursively
generated grammatical structures and then filled them with words.
I grouped words (taken from favorite poems, books; etc.) into
different lexicons (Nature, Human Emotion, Technology; etc.) and
then wrote a little interface to let me control how these groups
were mixed together.  Nine out of ten sentences were pretty
meaningless, but occasionally something striking would come up.
By cutting and pasting phrases into a text editor, I managed
write some pretty funky verse, which at the time served my
purposes.

The point is that I found "random" sentences not so interesting,
but as a brainstorming tool the program worked great.  It's
ridiculous to expect a computer to produce a very interesting
text of any great length if all it's doing is randomly pasting
together words.  Maybe some day, in the foggy sci-fi future,
authors will use computers to come up with fresh descriptive
passages, plots, new concepts-- but for the present these
applications are pretty crude, and seldom is the direct output of
the computer all that interesting.

Any useful application of current technology to text-production,
in my opinion, must involve the writer in an interactive
brianstorming process.

I do find it encouraging, though, that a lot of
computer-generated phrases have stuck in my mind these couple
years, and that my program has changed the way I look at
metaphors.  In that sense, I've been influenced by something that
can't be traced to the culture at large (except on the level of
individual words).  I find this encouraging because I would like
for authors to be more than mouthpieces for cultural currents
running through them, cladistic or rhizomic or otherwise--for
statements like "There are no individual statements, only
statement-producing machinic assemblages" to be false. [1] (to
quote a couple of this list's most popular authors).

(Of course, that statement is probably true, and a computer
program is a type of machinic assemblage, I guess, but at least a
randomized language engine undermines the machinic assemblages in
the surrounding cultural matrix.)

sheldon pacotti
cambridge

p.s. A company called Screenplay Systems has a program called
Dramatica which (I gather) generates plots, but I haven't
actually seen it.

[1] Deleuze & Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_, p. 36.
     
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 00:04 CDT
From: S1MBM@ISUVAX.BITNET
Subject: Re: Digest ending 8-22-92

Thanks to Wes Chapman for his critique of "cut-ups."  Them things
had been bugging me, but I hadn't understood why until Wes
clarified matters.  I agree that the "cut-ups" are like
one-liners:  the humor is in the instant of recognition, not in
the story which they coyly fail to produce.  Since they are funny
only as one-liners, I fail to see the justification for the durn
things being so long.  Does the sheer length of the cut-ups
accomplish anything rhetorically, or does it just allow the
cut-uppers to get their jollies fulfilled by lingering over the
savaging of others' texts?  Don't the cut-ups becomes just a coy
substitute for engaged criticism, allowing the progenitors to
hide behind an act of textual re-production?  (I'm not actually
criticizing your work, I'm just giving it a new face--this seems
to be the implicit rhetorical context of the cut-uppers work.)  I
agree with Wes that it would be nice to see the cut-uppers
somehow subject a message they've made and cared about to this
process . . .

Michael Bruce McDonald

     

  • Mr. Rubenking’s “Brekdown”

    John Tranter

    100026.1402@CompuServe.COM

     

    [This essay was originally published in Meanjinno. 4 (1991), Melbourne University, Australia.]

     

    In magazines and seminar rooms from Fife to Fresno, from Michigan to Melbourne, you can hear the raised voices and the breaking glass–they’re arguing about poetry again. A recent issue of Verse (an English/US magazine edited from Fife and Glasgow, Scotland and Williamsburg, Virginia) was devoted to “The New Formalism in American Poetry.” Sulfur magazine, emerging from Ypsilanti, Michigan, transcribes the shifting tides of battle as an old Modernist orthodoxy faces up to contemporary deconstructions. A recent Meanjin magazine from Melbourne, Australia, was devoted to an examination of “language” poetry.

     

    Among other issues, these debates have drawn attention to the irrational and disorderly aspects of literary production. The courting and harnessing of disorder– deconstruction and reconstruction, breakdown and buildup–is of course as old as the ancient Greeks, and as contemporary as Shakespeare. In its various modern phases it can be traced in the theory and practice of writers including Coleridge, Rimbaud, Stein, the French Surrealists, Raymond Roussel, the print and audio tape cut-up experiments of William Burroughs, and the theoretical and practical deconstructions of the American “language” poets.

     

    Australia’s “Ern Malley,” a hoax poet concocted by the young poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1943, was built to self-destruct and take the experimental magazine Angry Penguins with him. But like Frankenstein’s monster he stubbornly lived on, stalking the periphery of Australian literature, haunting his creators and troubling generations of readers with the contradictory beauty of his “meaningless” poems. Two of his “best” works appeared in the Summer 1961 issue of the Paris magazine Locus Solus, not as examples of hoax poetry, but of collaborative writing. So order can emerge in spite of the author’s insistence on chaos.

     

    History works through hindsight, and the spectacles of hindsight are tinted with irony. The model of art versus disorder was renovated early in the Industrial Revolution in the service of a Romantic idea: the construction of a role for the author as a unique creative presence rescuing spiritual value from chaos–the aristocracy were dead, God had fled, and Nature was covered with factories–and whose job it was to certify the value of a literary work on behalf of its consumers, the bourgeoisie. The project has seen strange and powerful acids attack this central role as the twentieth century progressed, until the structure is now almost reversed–it’s now the reader who validates the work which constructs the author–if she’s lucky.

     

    One of the incidental but apparently intractable problems unearthed by this theoretical juggernaut as it ploughs up the Highway of Style goes as follows: How does a writer create a writer-free literary text? A text free of authorial intentions, buried cultural, social, economic and political values and hidden personality agendas, giving forth only “literature” in its pure state?

     

    Automatic writing, nonsense writing, collaboration, formal rules for sentence-building, found poems–they’ve all been called into service. The current strategies of postmodernism include quotation, parody, collage, disassembly, bricolage, and so forth; but the hand of the stylist–not to mention the theoretician–is always evident as it arranges the exhibits.

     

    It’s usually thought that an “unintended” poetry was either impossible or “unreadable.” But there is a way of constructing practically any form of literary material that will embody many of the traditional values of “literature,” which will be curiously readable, but which is free of authorial intent. An energetic computer programmer, inspired by articles in Scientific American and BYTE magazine, has developed such a method–but not in the severe service of modern literary theory.

     

    Like a poet, he did it for the fun of it.

     

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

     

    “Brekdown” is a text analysis and text generation program written in Turbo Pascal for IBM-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the San Francisco programmer Neil J. Rubenking.

     

    What does it do?

     

    First, Brekdown requires a typed text to work on. For example, you can feed it several pages of a sermon on brotherly love, or a set of instructions for building a kayak, or a short story written in Italian.

     

    To analyse a text, Brekdown looks at it in “chunks” of a particular size–the “chunk size” can be set from two to seven alphabetical and punctuation characters. Brekdown keeps a record–in the form of an index and a frequency table–of what character occurs immediately after a particular “chunk.” For example, after the “chunk” THE, the letters N, R, Y and M and the character are likely to occur frequently in a particular text; the letter A less frequently, and the letters X, K and Q and the character very infrequently if at all.

     

    Then the “chunk” is shifted one character to the right, and the process is repeated–that is, the chunk’s first character is dropped, the current next character is tacked onto the end, and the index and the frequency table is updated for the character that follows that “chunk” of characters. The chunk is moved one character to the right again, and again, until the end of the text is reached.

     

    Once Brekdown has constructed an index and a frequency table for a sample text, it can generate a “reconstruction” of that text.

     

    To generate a new text, Brekdown selects at random a “Key chunk” that begins with a space (i.e., one that doesn’t start in the middle of a word.) It then looks up the frequency array for that Key and selects the next character at random from the characters with non-zero frequency, weighted by the frequencies listed in the table. This character is added to the current output line, and to the current Key chunk, and the process is repeated. The program continues generating characters, words, and lines of text until you ask it to stop. It could go on forever.

     

    That’s it.

     

    It looks simple–if you can put aside the immense computational, statistical and design complexity–but the implications are intriguing. The “style” of a piece of writing (which encodes the author’s intentions and indeed the society’s values as far as they are manifest in the language) can be described in virtually value-free terms by the frequency table generated by Brekdown. The likelihood of a particular character following another group of characters can be seen as a function of the language’s “personality” as much as the writer’s “personality.” Because of its design, BrekDown can never generate an illegal sequence of letters; that is, the texts it generates may not make grammatical sense, but they follow pragmatic rules of word-formation.

     

    For example, in the English used in mid-nineteenth century London, the letter combinations “krzy” and “qan” are not only “illegal” (in linguistic terms), but impossible for a British writer of that period to include in a normal text. In the English of contemporary Australia, the first letter combination forms part of the name of an Australian poet (Peter Skrzynecki, born in Poland), and the second, part of the name of the Australian national airline, “Qantas.” Both are thus linguistically “legal” and available in contemporary English-language texts in that country. In a non-trivial and quite important way, Mr. Rubenking’s program “knows” this specific fact when it needs to; until I thought up and wrote this paragraph, hardly anyone else–not even Mr. Rubenking–did.

     

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

     

    Let’s get to work and construct two different texts in the “styles” of two poets whose work I enjoy. First, three poems written by Matthew Arnold (“The Buried Life,” “Dover Beach,” and “The Scholar-Gypsy”) are typed as one continuous text, and loaded into Brekdown. The same is done separately with a dozen pages of poetry by John Ashbery. Brekdown is instructed to analyse the texts.

     

    The resulting “Matthew Arnold” Data and Index files add up to half a million characters, and generating the index and frequency tables takes half an hour on a 80386 personal computer. Generating a “reconstruction” of the Matthew Arnold text takes about fifteen minutes to construct 1,800 words. Let’s gather the thirty or so “best lines” of that raw text. Let’s clean them up a bit to make them less garbled, and print them at the end of this file. Then let’s do the same for Mr. Ashbery.

     

    The Matthew Arnold example is printed as “What Mortal End,” by “Tom Haltwarden,” at the end of this file; the John Ashbery as “Her Shy Banjo” by “Joy H. Breshan.”

     

    Both the poem titles and the bogus authors’ names are anagrams of “Matthew Arnold” and “John Ashbery,” respectively, created by another Neil Rubenking program, “Namegram.” (Is there no end to the man’s ingenuity?) Namegram comes free on the disk when you buy Brekdown, and I defy you to resist its charms. (At least, this was true in 1989, when I first obtained the program.)

     

    The name “Matthew Arnold” generated some three and a half thousand different anagrams, by the way, including Mad Walt Hornet, That lewd Roman, Mother and Walt, Old Thwart-Name, Martha Letdown, Who’d lament art?, Harlot went mad, and others too suggestive to include here.

     

    Reminiscence. Some twenty years ago I asked Alex Jones, then teaching linguistics at Sydney University, to research and write an article on Computers and Poetry for “Poetry Australia” magazine. The machines then cost a fortune, weighed several tonnes each, occupied large air-conditioned basements, and needed a staff of pale and white-coated servants with PhDs to minister to their needs. They could manage a haiku or two, with immense effort.

     

    You can now buy, with a month’s salary, a computer capable of writing endless numbers of clever poems, and it will fit into a jacket pocket.

     

    Credits. Like all good computer programmers and any honest poet, Mr. Rubenking admits that if he can reach the stars, it’s because he’s standing on the shoulders of giants. His documentation states that Brekdown was inspired by the “Travesty” program in the November 1984 issue of “BYTE” magazine, by Kenner and O’Rourke (yes, computer scientist Joseph O’Rourke’s colleague was Hugh Kenner, professor of English at Georgia State University, and noted literary critic. His recent books include “A Sinking Island” and “Mazes.”) They in turn quote an article in the “Scientific American” of November 1983 by Brian P. Hayes, which described an elegant method of avoiding large and unwieldy n-dimensional arrays. They also refer to the work of Claude Shannon, who in 1948–working with a pencil instead of a computer–developed a simple but tedious method of calculating letter-group frequency arrays, using the text itself as a frequency table.

     

    Come on, Pandora–Open the Box: “Brekdown” is distributed as shareware. The program is available from the shareware distributors

     

    PC-SIG (Personal Computer Special Interest Group), 1030-D East Duane Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94086, Telephone 408-730 9291.

     

    [Author's note: Another shareware text-reconstituting program, Babble!, developed by Tracey Siesser, Lee Horowitz, and Jim Korenthal, is available from 76004.2605@Compuserve.COM or, in the U.S., by calling (212) 242-1790.]

     

    Good luck.

     

     

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

    Tom Haltwarden: “What Mortal End”

     

    Rain, without it there can be no September music
    The concealed afternoons
    A source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy,
    Making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment,
    Encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light
    Arise, light! The things of the day we eat
    Breakfast each in their tree withdrawals,
    Our marionette-like Pierrot, like these
    Hot sticky evenings, though fragmented

     

    The greatest risk working deep crevices far inland,
    We can see no reward, winnowers of the old time
    Involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets
    And you, at twilight.
    The neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket.
    It is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie,
    A nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh,
    Having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought
    From the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars.
    You couldn’t deliberately, for fright, once you see
    It’s all talk, the travelling far from anybody.
    Hands streaming with kisses, between us.
    It may be something like silver,
    Something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment
    Without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just
    Stays like dust–that’s the nature of the children, and
    Yesterday’s newspapers say: “Sometimes good times follow bad.”
    Their object, the sky. Is it like climbing abruptly
    From a room? It may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed,
    Two in love hesitant at the front door.
    So we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking
    And breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes.
    How short the season is–don’t fix it if it comes in coloured
    Mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as
    Our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo.

     

  • Incarnations Of The Murderer

    William T. Vollmann

     

    San Ignacio, Belize (1990)
    San Francisco, California U.S.A.. (1991)
    Agra, India (1990)
    San Francisco, California U.S.A. (1991)
    Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island,
    Northwest Territories, Canada (1991)
    Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)
    Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

    San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

     

    Two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows. At the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds. They passed little brown girls swimming and smiling. They passed a man who dove for shrimp that he put in a plastic bag. Breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions. Coca-Cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between tree- ridges and palm houses.

     

    As they paddled, the plump wet thighs of the girls quivered; water danced on their thighs. A few wet curly hairs peeked shyly from the crotches of their bathing suits. They had golden hourglass waists.

     

    A man was a dragonfly. He hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them.

     

    The water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water. Its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler. In the branches crouched the man. The plan that the man had was as rubbery and pink as a monkey’s palm. But the canoe was not there yet. The two girls were still alive.

     

    Yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. They saw the girls, too. They saw each other. They saw themselves in the water and forgot everything.

     

    The tree that owned the water was closer now. A white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts.

     

    All morning the man had been thinking of the two girls whom he was about to kill. Knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he’d sliced away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared. He put his mouth to that pale bristly hole and drank. (Slowly, the white meat inside oxidized brown.) But now he was silent, suspended from his purpose as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey.

     

    Now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry. They passed the last house they would ever see. In the river a lazy boa was wriggling along. That was the last snake they’d ever see.

     

    They went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river. They saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds. They came to the tree of their death, and the man jumped down lightly and stabbed them in their breasts.

     

    The canoe lay long and low across the neck of an island. Reflected water burned whitely on its keel.

     

    The man opened red fruits. He bit them. They were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside.

     

    The spice of the blood was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss. This made him happy. He went to sleep and awoke. A toucan chirped like a frog. The taste was stronger in his mouth. He laughed.

     

    He wandered among the caring arches of the palm tree that shaded him like wisdom, and his shirt was hot and slick on his back. He came to the grove where the white horse had sneezed and knocked down a coconut. He drank the juice, but the taste of blood was even stronger now. He looked sideways in the hot high fields of trees.

     

    Knuckles itching pleasantly with insect bites, searching through the wild-looking fields for ground foods with the sun hot on his sunburned neck and wrists, he swiped down a sugarcane stalk with his machete and then he skinned and peeled it in long strokes, from green down to white. He was good at using knives. He snapped off a piece and chewed it, tasting in advance its taste so juicy, fresh and sweet. His hands were sticky with juice. He chewed. But the other taste loomed still more undeniable.

     

    Between his teeth he placed slices of young pineapple, bird- eaten custard apples, bay leaves, green papayas, sour plums from a leaf-bare tree. He bit them all ferociously into a mush. Then he sucked, choked, swallowed. Building a fire, he made coffee, which he drank down to the grounds. He cut an inch of medicine- vine and chewed that bitterness, too. The taste of blood increased.

     

    He spat, but his spittle was clear. There was no blood in it. He pricked his tongue with the point of the knife, but his own male blood could not drown the other, the female taste.

     

    He drank half a bottle of rum and fell down. All around him, trees steamed by humid horizons. When he awoke, the taste was stronger than ever. He began to scream.

     

    There was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. The man ran there without knowing why. Jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black and orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. The widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. Behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave’s chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. The man ran in. He splashed through the first pool. It was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman’s curls. A single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. He ran crazy through the next pool. Farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. This was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. Here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. The bird flew back and forth very quickly. It hovered over rock-cracks’ wrinkled lips. It landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. It darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. Then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. Water shimmered white on black rocks–

     

    The man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. The white bird was the soul of one on the girls. The bird stabbed the man’s tongue with its beak and drank blood. Then it flew away, not squeaking anymore.

     

    The man swallowed experimentally. The taste was not nearly so strong.

     

    Farther back in the cave was a pit. A tiny black bird flew there. Knowing this now, the man clambered down. It was like being inside a seashell. Far down in the well, the flicker of his lighter showed him the pink and glistening rock-guts. Smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. He held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. The bird came swooping down and cheeping. It was so tiny that it flew back between his tonsils. He longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. But then the taste would strengthen again. The black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. He could feel the bird’s pulse inside him. It was not much bigger than a bee. It took him again. Then it flew away in silence.

     

    The taste was gone now. The man shrieked with glee. The cave was empty.

     

    Outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn’t even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him.

     

    He ran outside trying to see and taste everything. He ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sandvalleys, green-slicked boulder cliffs: he grabbed at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. In the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other’s soft flesh.

     

    San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

     

    Down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. Earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated grey than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the grey-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. He went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing rivers of grey streets. Somewhere was the isle of the dead girls’ canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. All night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. He stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he’d eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. The curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. Black iron latticed windows as elaborately as Qur’anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. Spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. Timidly he hid behind the sidewalk’s trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns . . .

     

    Once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. So he came to the street of souls.

     

    The candy shop of souls lured him in first. His nose stung with the fog. He opened the door and went in, staring at the long glass case that was like an aquarium. Here he found the chocolate ingots, the pure mint-striped cylinders, the tarts studded with fruits and berries like a dozen orchards, the vanilla bread-loaves long and slender like suntanned eels, the banana-topped lime hexagons, the chocolate-windowed eclairs domed with cream like Russian Orthodox churches, the round strawberry tortes gilded with lemon-chocolate to make pedestals for the vanilla-chocolate butterflies that rested on each with breathless wings, the sponge-cakes like an emperor’s crown, the complex wicker-basket raspberry pies of woven crust, heaped with boulders of butter and confectioner’s sugar, the tins of violet lozenges, the bones and girders made of licorice, the low white discs of sugarpies topped with fan-swirls of almonds like playing cards, the peach cakes, pear cakes, the row of delectable phosphorescent green slugs, the flowerpot of coffee frosting from which a chocolate rose bloomed, the strawberries that peaked up from unknown tarts and tortes bride-bashful behind ruffled paper–

     

    He sat at a little square marble table, and without a word the lady brought him a green slug, served on a white plate with white lace. He reached in his pocket and found a single coin of iron with a hole in the center. He gave her that. He sat looking past the glass case at the rows of fruit confections in matched white-lidded jars–not for him. With the silver fork he stabbed the slug and raised it into his mouth, where it overcame him between his teeth with a sweet ichor of orgasmic limes, and so he became a thief–

     

    Agra, India (1990)

     

    Two green-clad soldiers were striking a man in the face beneath one of the side-arches of the Taj Mahal. The man was not screaming. He was a thief. The soldiers had caught him, and were beating him. All around him, the Mughal tombs bulged with hard nipples on their marble breasts. — The Emperor, he had so many wives, he spent a month’s salary on cosmetics! cried the guide.

     

    Blood flowered from the thief’s nose.

     

    This tower closed now, said the guide. The lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. For love and love and love. Closed now for security reason. But this part, this open ivory day.

     

    The thief fell down when they let go of him. The soldiers stamped on his stomach. Then they raised him again.

     

    Now. sir, lady, come-come. Look! This marble one piece. No two piece. No join. Only cutting!

     

    The thief looked at the guide with big eyes. The soldiers punched him. Then he was not looking at the guide anymore. Sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. They wore the dead girl’s mouths.

     

    Yes, please! Hello! Sir and madam!

     

    (Sir and madam were staring at him again. They could not help it. The soldiers were kicking out his teeth.)

     

    Water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral. Clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. Far beyond the screens lay dim white-grey corridors of peace. Darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults.

     

    The soldiers hustled the thief into darkness.

     

    Outside it was a foggy morning. Skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. Roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. On the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward Agra. They had sharp backbones and floppy bellies.

     

    Postcards, please? Small marble! Elephant two rupees!

     

    Cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. They swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn’t; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb.

     

    San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

     

    When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far; he saw a Sunday panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four- footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison bouys that say KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can’t eat them by stealing them, I’ll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.

     

    Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.

     

    Brass safe deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. Each one had a different coffee inside. The smell of coffee enflamed him. There were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. In his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. They gave him a muffin. He became an anthropologist.

     

    Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada

    (1991)

     

    On the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snow- covered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other’s edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed into strange shapes; the Inuk wended the skidoo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stern, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. Over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year.

     

    Then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl’s mouth, and the komatik broke through. He fell under the ice. The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him so lovingly and he was warmed. The first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky.

     

    Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)

     

    Grey-lit struts took his weight as he shot across the bridge; flat grey-green ribs were stripped of their nightflesh by the dingy lights, the lights of Oakland rippling in between like scales, inhuman lights all the way to the grey horizon. What a relief when the world finally ran out of electricity, and we’d have to turn them off! On his left was a city of stacks and towers clustered with lights like sparks that could never be peacefully extinguished, could never cool themselves in the earth. A gush of smoke blew horizontally from the topmost stack. He scuttled up greenish-grey ramps of deadness into the dead night, accompanied by characterless strings of light, dull apartment tower lights, dark bushes; he bulleted down a lane of dirty blackness clouded by trees on either side, remnant trees suffered to live only because they interrupted that ugly terrible light. Then he came into the outer darkness of unhealthy tree- mists where the sky was as empty as his heart. He slid like a shuffleboard counter through the cut between blackish-brownish- grey banks of darkness, the sky greenish-grey above. He crossed the grim vacuous bridge that was the last place before the night country; he pierced the turgid black river (so night-soaked that he could perceive it only at its edges where light coagulated upon black wrinkles) and came into the ruined desert.

     

    The toll bar came down. The attendant was waiting. Cars were beginning to honk behind him as he sat there at the toll booth of souls, looking through his pockets. Finally he found a single coin with a hole in it. He reached, dropped it into the attendants palm. The toll bar went up. He became a piece of jute cloth.

     

    Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

     

    A woman in a mask who had a blue blanket over her head put the soft limp jute of him onto the conveyor belt. Then he got washed and rolled. The rollers gleamed and worked him back and forth, softening him. He could not scream. To her he was not even a shadow. (A poster of the president changed rose-light on its shrine.) What worked the rollers? The factory had its own generator, its own grand shouting alternators, built to last, 237 kilowatts . . . The jute of his soul got matted and soft. He did not see the hammer-and-sickle flag anymore. His soul got squeezed by a rickety rattling. Now he was squished almost as thin as a hair. People dragged him away slowly, pulling long bunches of him with both hands. He was in a vast cement-floored enclosure whose roof was stained brown. They stretched him out. Slowly he went up a long steep conveyor. He emerged in a pale white roll of hope, twirling down, narrowing into a strip. The barefoot workers gathered him into piles on the concrete floor, then stuffed him into barrels, which were then mounted on huge reels. Murderers like him had destroyed this place once already. There had been twelve hundred workers. Now that it had been rebuilt, eight hundred and sixty worked there, eight hours a day, six days a week, not knowing that jute was souls. They cleaned and pressed him into accordioned ribbons of fiber that built up in the turning barrels. A masked girl stood ready to pack him down with her hands and roll a new barrel into place. He recognized her. She was not angry anymore. Then someone took the barrels to go into a second pressing machine. A metal arm whipped back and forth, but only for a minute; the barefoot girls had to fiddle with it again. His substance was cleaned and dried. A masked woman lifted up levers, twisted him by hand into the clamps, pulled down levers, and he spilled out again. He recognized her, too. She smiled at him. Now everyone could see him being woven into string, dense, rough and thick; this string in turn was woven into sacking. They were going to fill his empty heart with rice. This is not such a bad destiny for anyone, since rice is life. The barefoot girls teased out the rolls of soul-cloth, gathering them from the big roll in different sizes (63 x 29 inches and 20 x 98 inches); boys dragged them across the floor at intervals, stretching, looking around, slowly smoothing them amidst the sounds of the mechanical presses. So they stacked him among the other sacks. Girls sat on sacks on the floor, sewing more sacks; they were fixing the mistakes of the sack-sewing machine. Then they pressed the sacks into bales. But he’d turned out perfect; he did not need any girls to stitch up the holes in his heart. He was ready now in the bale of sacks. If someone guarded him well he might last two years. Then he’d turn to dirt. A man’s hands seized his bale and carried him toward the place where he would be used. Then the man’s work-shift was over. The man went to serve his hours on the factory militia, readying himself for duty in the room of black guns on jute sacks. The man knew that in the jungle other murderers were still nearby.

     

  • Great Breakthroughs In Darkness (Being, Early Entries From the Secret Encyclopaedia Of Photography)

    Marc Laidlaw

    Chief Secretary of the Ministry of
    Photographic Arcana, Correspondent of No
    Few Academies, Devoted Husband, &c.

     

    Authorized by Marc Laidlaw

     

    [Previously published in England as part of New Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1992).]

     

    “Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a denouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!”

    — William Henry Fox Talbot

     

    -A-

     

    Aanschultz, Conreid

    (c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

     

    Inventor of the praxiscope technology (which see), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

     

    Aanschultz Lens

     

    The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

     

    Abat-Jour

     

    A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

     

    I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (60 g.), carbolic acid (10 ccs), zinc oxide (30 g) and lanoline (480 “), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

     

    The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

     

    “That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not captured him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

     

    He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

     

    “I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

     

    “You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

     

    “No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

     

    He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half- assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all Things.

     

    “This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

     

    I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.

     

    “Here we are,” he said. “This will make everything possible. This is my—

     

    Abat-Nuit

     

    By this name Aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. I could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but I quickly saw my error. For it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness.

     

    Darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which I now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. I even speculated that I saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children.

     

    Unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when I tried to peer into it, Aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, “Useless for our purposes.”

     

    “Our?” I repeated, as if I had anything to do with this. For even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices–something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation.

     

    “This is my greatest work yet,” he confided, but I could see that his assistants thought otherwise. The shadows already darkening Europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. I felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. It was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind.

     

    I comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. Given a mind as focused as Aanschultz’s, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. However, I already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which Aanschultz expected.

     

    I watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. It was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. It had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. I only hoped Aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness’s distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. But I had little hope for this in my friend’s case. Have I mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me?

     

    Abaxial

     

    Away from the axis. A term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. Thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the Encyclopaedia itself, and this entry in particular. Would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. Some go so far as to state that the entirety of Creation is itself an

     

    Aberration

     

    A functional result of optical law. Yet I felt that this matter might be considered Aanschultz’s fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. In my professional capacity, I was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. They flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until Monsieur Artiste might be available. Sometimes Monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although I always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. I flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; I spoke to the gentlemen as if I had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. I was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. They meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (I thought then) expendable.

     

    Yet there was only one Aanschultz. On the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), I knew I had never met his like. He looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. Yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and I wished–not for the first time–that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. None of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue.

     

    The fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. He did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty.

     

    Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word. It was a severity in his nature–an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor’s edge. I felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if I had at last found someone against whom I could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. In my youth I had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those I considered my superiors; for then I could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. With age and success, I had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of Society. Aanschultz’s laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote.

     

    We two could not have been less alike. As I have said, I had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. Art was All, to me. It had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that I had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. Aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. For in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. In the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one’s own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a Name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? So you see, I was in danger already when I met Aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. With his aid I was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. Once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because I was indeed superior.

     

    To all of Paris I might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in Aanschultz’s presence I felt like a young and stupid child. The scraps I scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. He hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. I would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when I heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told–his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy–he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. I fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as I came to him for his scientific rigor.

     

    It was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty–though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. He would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the Mohs’ scale) at its core. This meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed “victims,” not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut.

     

    I sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them.

     

    Abrasion Marks

     

    of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. Due to my own eczema, I felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, Aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. She looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when I mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur Hippolyte Bayard, but I saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. The girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that I knew they were mother and child. Leaving Aanschultz for the moment, I sank down beside them, stroking the girl’s frayed black hair gently as I asked if there were anything I could do for them.

     

    “Who’s there?” the woman said hoarsely.

     

    I gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. She didn’t need illustrious visitors now, I knew.

     

    “He’s with the Professor,” the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. I could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left.

     

    “You should bandage those arms,” I said. “I have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you’d like me to do it.”

     

    “Bandages and ointment, he says,” said the woman. “As if there’s any healing it. Leave her alone now–she’s done what she could where I had to leave off. You’ll just get the doctor mad at both of us.”

     

    “I’m sure he’d understand if I—”

     

    “Leave us be!” the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a “tooth” for the penciller’s art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. I suspected this powder would do just as well, were I crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. She fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard Aanschultz’s sharp command. I turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp.

     

    “My God, Aanschultz,” I said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. “Don’t you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?”

     

    He muttered from the side of his mouth: “It’s not a problem any longer. A short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion.”

     

    “A print surface, perhaps, but these are people!”

     

    “It works on me,” he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. “Now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her.”

     

    I backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days Aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him.

     

    Absorption

     

    This term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. In the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which Aanschultz hoped to strip aside.

     

    Optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of Aanschultz’s face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura–the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them–that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness.

     

    My friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: “According to Draper’s law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. This dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. Give me my phantospectroscope.”

     

    This last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master’s hands.

     

    “The spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth,” he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. I could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. I took several quick steps back.

     

    “I would show you,” he went on, “but it would mean nothing to you. This is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. Until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. But I have gone beyond that now. Ha! Yes!”

     

    He thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. As the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror.

     

    Accelerator!

     

    my friend shouted, and I sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. Common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited Aanschultz. He screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. An accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. As is written in the Encylopaedia of Photography (1911, exoteric edition), “Accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates.” I threw myself back, fearful that otherwise I would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. I heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and I leaned to help her up. But at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and I put my hands to a more instinctive use.

     

    Accommodation Of The Eye

     

    The darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. With both eyes covered, I felt I was beyond harm. I could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion I heard around me, nor did I wish to. (See also, “Axial Accommodation.”)

     

    Accumulator

     

    Apparently (and this I worked out afterward in hospital beside Aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. All things threatened to split at their seams. Matter itself, the atmosphere, Aanschultz’s assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor–these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. My own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. Aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. My friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place–but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture.

     

    I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I–nor would I– discredit him.

     

    It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face–while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut–and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely. My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

     

    “A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

     

    But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax…although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

     

    Acetaldehyde

     

    (See“Aldehyde.”)

     

    Acetic Acid

     

    The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

     

    Acetic Ether

     

    Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

     

    Acetone

     

    A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

     

    Acetous Acid

     

    The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

     

    Acetylene

     

    A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

     

    Acetylene Generator

     

    An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

     

    Acetylide Emulsion

     

    Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

     

    “What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict.”

    — Michael Faraday

     

    End

     

     

  • Attempts on Life

    Annemarie Kemeny

    Department of English
    SUNY-Stony Brook

     

    Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, I’m just the mouth piece. The whole is buried in an old plot with its corpse roaming. Sometimes it comes to haunt me, and I spill a little wine on the carpet to loosen its tongue. There are no guests. They’d expect butter-churn stories complete with cow bells in some smoky evening, the fat dripping from a one-day-dead pig. A real red dawn summoned by the five-year plan to every village. And will you visit Ellis Island where all you people come from? This frantic itch to swear shivers in through walls and sticks. Words at times are juicy as the glutton’s steak. A real mouth piece. For what? Speech is in my fingertips. It has been known to bloom through ten skyfuls of snow. It also melts in Spring. And it always finds the surest dam.

     

    No, it’s not poor huddled masses of Cassandras convulsing to the currents of a blank Apollo. Our frames are not that open to the trade winds. I’ve seen Parnassus gray and bare against the sun. It’s a good spook dressed in crags. But something else. When it takes hold, I never twitch and this broken English ain’t no second tongue. It’s one big jam to scramble the airwaves to my crib. Before my mouth was a piece of something. Like a slice of pie missing the perfection of its disk. Except that Sylvie had a hunch about that. Perfection is terrible–it cannot have children. So I dish it piecemeal for a new set of yakkers who will ask the past in and play at haunted house. Well, I lied. I twitch something crazy when it takes hold. We both grab tight until I fade. It’s a seance. Anything short of a seance is a good short story neatly tied like tubes. Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, it’s a badmouth, and it’s blowing at a land that hasn’t slipped.

     

    ***

     

    Writing is the only act worth dropping. It wouldn’t suffer from ending on the rocks like meat does. Its split-open muscles wouldn’t twitch. Its broken shinbone wouldn’t slice through skin. It would just silently carve itself into a whole coast line of Rosetta stones. But what would it be carving if not the meat that fell with it? The world text has real god-chunks rotting between vowels. Somewhere amidst the schizes and flows of ecriture a tiny slit is bleeding where some uncle’s finger scraped it. Don’t you feel your narratives of oppression and your literary productions of the real stuffed to bursting with the thief’s missing ear, some woman’s bloodless clitoris and her daughter’s head, your apple, that fell too far from its tree? This ink, invisible though it is, has come from where her head and body used to meet.

     

    ***

     

    The wall by my bed was always threatening to fall–it sustained cannon-ball damage during the war. I constantly wanted to excavate, hoping to find the ammunition all pock-marked and heavy. Momma, of course, assured me that the only thing left of it was a shaky wall we couldn’t hang pictures on. Yet regardless of her hovering protectively between me and the world as any good Rilkean mother would, I spent my childhood with a phantom cannon ball lodged ominously behind a thin layer of plaster and an even thinner layer of yellow paint. I used to tap the wall as a primitive form of eartraining, and soon I could tell that it had more holes than it had bricks. This wall I faced every night in sleep, this wall that felt cool against my feet in summer, was my umbilical chord to 1944. Sure I had seen films like Budapest Spring in which women, who always looked a bit too much like grandmother with their soft brown waves falling to the side and the dark lipstick and the severe wool suit, were shot into the Danube. I remember the domino effect, the unflattering shoes left behind for the Arrow Cross gunners who were flipping for gold insoles, and then the utter vacuum of a spring sky admitting nothing. And I remember this woman and a man doing the love thing when all the Danube carried was pieces of the Black Forest. And if there ever was such a thing as ancestral memory, I remember hiding between the waxed cracks of the parquet when grandmother stuffed her down pillow under her dress. She wanted to look pregnant for the Arrow Cross.

     

    Momma gets this sudden space in her eyes as she tries to describe for me the sound of machine guns on a tenement lock. I want to tell her I was there hiding out under her shoes, too shocked to scream, with all our eyelids doing a crazy family dance to a-thousand-rounds-per-minute and grandmother’s pillow bulging out to her right side where no infant could live. And the door slamming the wall of the foyer and grandmother squeezing momma so close that the down in the pillow cracks and the orders for the swine to move and the gun to the spine and momma’s whimpering into grandmother’s belly and grandmother’s dark lips in a line with the horizon and the words ghetto and lager and grandfather’s rages melting through his knees–we are poor got nothing but a wife and kid and trouble on the way spare us you are good men–rifle butt between the ribs and the trembling sullen bargain-begging silent sobbing unbroken procession of yellow stars down the stone corridor and the fresh blood seeping into my floorcrack from the grooves of a stolen shoe.

     

    I would like to say I remember the ghetto–that I was the guts, the little bit of future in every willed breath grandmother took to survive. I can’t. Maybe ancestral memory has more holes in it than bricks. It would be the stench I would have to bring to the page–one of those fold-out ads that trap clouds of perfume and give a magazine its sex appeal. Step right up folks, sample the dying and the decomposed. Just do it with the lushly dead. Poke your nose into communal buckets for the urge. Try to dig up asphalt with soupy nails to bury the dead. No. You can’t keep from being haunted. No Achilles here to come down a peg. Not even Dali to paint your shit surreal. And it’s the stench that blinds you and plugs your ears and numbs your touch that I can’t conjure up. It’s unnameable. The only true god the ghetto ever knew.

     

    ***

     

    The war never happened. Grandmother is goo-goo-eyed over the soaps. My other grandmother is dead after a life-time of rheumatism and which seventeenth-century king fucked whom with what underhanded purposes. The war never happened. And what bastard or bitch was next on the throne. Daddy cultivated a fine cancer by minimizing his diet to headcheese and spam. I don’t remember his teeth so the fact that he lost them at eighteen is irrelevant. The war never happened. And how many boils Marx had. And how she was ashamed of her big breasts and how she wrapped them until they sagged. The man-bird has to dress nice if he wants to be a father. That’s why only the woman-bird is gray. That yellow and blue thing on the teapot must have been a man-bird then. The war never happened. We won’t cry over spilt blood. If we drown the baby in the bathwater, it will finally make sense to dump her. And what a big nose you have. You’ve seen one snowflake, you’ve seen them all. The war never happened. And your mother is a beautiful woman. She can afford unlimited hours of beauty sleep now that the government check has replaced my only son (cries profusely). And you know Rasputin was a rascal. You don’t know who Rasputin was? (sigh). The family is going to the dogs. The war never happened. I prayed and prayed on that cold stone floor for him to return. And he cut off their heads because they wouldn’t give him sons. And the cat you dragged in gave me fleas for a week. How is your beautiful mother? The war never happened.

     

    ***

     

    Writing is the only act worth acting out. If you prefer the organic metaphor, it takes root against the wind in deserts and its ghost dance splashes the sun. It oozes down in glaciers and builds islands. It drags on. It prefers the whip. It picks its scabs against the ultimate, the strong. Does nothing. Mimes. Gets hooked on opium and dreams. Carries its fetus to the nearest john. Drops hints. Puts in a few good words. Bleeds and takes a scraping against cancer. Dies.

     

    ***

     

    Purges in triumphant silence. Daddy would appear once a light year at our place as the man of science come to chide the masses for belief in words that kill and the evil eye. He took the empty streetcar across the Danube, full of compassion for lost time. I’d summon fevers, hacking coughs, wounds attributed to something someone said. An aura of fake death to kindle old paternal fears about succession. And you thought our transcendental Fathers bit the clay. No. They dance to our rhythms now and obey false cadences as if their life depended on it. It does.

     

    Let me break the silence. If you plan to butcher someone’s soul–either little by little over that proverbial lifetime-of- devotion, or suddenly, by wringing their thin chicken neck– someone is writing your darkroom dirties into headlines. When you get the urge to abandon what you made, your airplane will excrete it. When you tear your side to dig through ribs, the pain of wrenching will be more than biblical. Somebody will sign their name across your lungs. Every time you breathe it will muck up the room. And when your gossip blooms red in the spring, stones will mark the spot where the town whore bled. Every foot that wanders bare into your town will read it. Their prints will talk up a storm. And when you gather your token nigger in your arms and rent your wisdom out on what it takes to loosen the embrace, your balls will vanish whip, chain and uncle, from the book.

     

    So daddies of the world with your magic carpets and skeleton closets, relax. I’ve come bearing gifts. You’ve asked me in song, you’ve sworn me in rape. Here is your immortality.

     

    ***

     

    According to Rilke, poetry is a kind of apprenticeship that prepares the most deserving among us for love. It is a beautiful sentiment (letter seven, the one about relationships), but I am slightly suspicious about electing a chosen people based upon oneself. The big bang might be lonelier than the poetic stairs you had to take to reach it. We might say that disgust and disillusionment were the lot of those writhing, huddled masses that were not developing into healthy apple trees. But what if I, the living mascot of the developmental tale, should find some more disgust and disillusionment at the height of my seedy powers? What if I, poet extraordinaire, wheeler-dealer in immortality, should get stuck around the crotch of my inevitable Bildungsroman given me by covenant? Oh yes! The rainbow sign. God gave Lawrence the rainbow sign. The world made new. “From the heart a red ray, from the brow a gold, from the hips a violet leaps.” Violet, indeed. Royal purple. The seed of seeds. The hottest chemical stain on the market. Except that my mother and my grandmother always insist on invisible ink. Like the one I am writing with now.

     

    ***

     

    Didn’t drown. Didn’t break his neck-joint in a scarf-loop. Didn’t pine away on poison petals for unrequited love. Didn’t overdose on elixir. Didn’t dry out with the weeds on a war field, sword-in-hand. Consumption didn’t eat holes into him. His wasn’t a one-woman oven in a kitchen pumped to the stature of Auschwitz. But his head was brought in upon platter if war is half the bitch of legends. And his head held a tongue that spoke the smallest scrap of Babel. A chip off the old block that was once some God’s shoulder curve. Whose face was it this time that launched a thousand cattle trains to camp? He wrote poems about chickenwire stretching in the moonlight, juiced. And before that it was moonlight and the weight of lovers bending emblems into wheat fields. No one knows him in this world of nations. Any verdict he might have improvised from bone-mush is Chinese or Greek, at best. Bla-bla from the belly of a war that never happened. So let me give you lives in a nutshell, without cracking the meat.

     

    Don’t know date of birth. Don’t know age at death. Killed his twin brother as he slid through the birth canal. An inadvertent crushing, a tarrying for green light. Killed his mother on entering. The world. The guilt of the sole survivor until they herded him into the engine. Premonitions of the past. To think in metaphor despite the fleas, the typhoid and the guards. Hallucinations of the sane. Eclogues and hexameter finally worthy of their turf. An artificial genre, like summer homes and quick vacations, like showers in gas. All the civilized comforts a bit displaced in one postmodern jumble. Hocus pocus. If we kick our plot in the usual place, we’ll lay to rest our master narrative. The nazis were great masters of the readymade. The cutting edge in surreal flicks. The expert tease. The laugh behind the flow and schiz. A woman’s buttock– a bar of soap. Her hair–a blanket against Russian winters. Let’s disconnect the oven and frustrate their expectations of the clean. When they try to read the nozzle in the old way as a comfy mother’s womb, we’ll surprise them with the atmosphere. A one-act play for lungs. Then we’ll reconnect the oven and fry our hungry guests.

     

    Want to document how signifiers play? Go read a deathcamp. Do your number on the Palestinian shifter. See if the bullet has a referent. And when I give you this life in a nutshell, be glad the meat is gone.

     

    ***

     

    Somewhere in its bedded mud the Danube holds a skeleton crouched into a barrel. The familiar closet would’ve hit too close to the so-called nerve. Saint Gellert rolled from the top of the mountain, Saint Gellert on the rocks. The hill channels the river’s curve where the roaring barrel did its belly-flop. I swore I had given up this conjuring of lives from the nutshell. A necromancing crook that pulls more than veils over your eyes. A tale told. For the welfare of the worm in the apple. Do you like picking history in the warm autumn breezes to make cider? Maybe with a small edge to the flow, a little cloud to hide the nakedness. Wait! We are born opaque and make loads of noise. Good. Roll out the barrel and we’ll have a barrel of fun.

     

    Isn’t it strange that the wine was so literally red on landing. Or rivering. If it was in winter, there might have been a loud crack and splat–a momentary wave-crest over drift- ice, maybe a quick whirlpool that popped up, and then the heavy ooze of the iced river blanketing the deed. If it was in spring, the drop would’ve been shortened by the volume of molten snow eating up the banks. If the sun shone, the contour of the barrel over those jutting white rocks may have left the eyes of the onlookers sore with knowing. If it was misty with a thick drizzle (the bitten kind), those connoisseurs of wine may have felt a muffled twang at the sudden lack of sound. And maybe the barrel was rotten or too dry and was smashed half-way down the trip and left just the typical roll of a breaking body down the slope. Or maybe, like the war, it never happened. The executioners didn’t stop and dip their hands in the Danube’s upper stretch.

     

    ***

     

    They have those silver poplars pillaring our field of vision. The summer light is wind-blown over reclining hills and it teases out those woman dreams that everyone forgets after the cock’s crow. The usual distance shimmers with breath. Where the poet stood, the dirt road whispers that the land is a unanimous womb and all those rows a welcome mat to wipe on. You see, the polka-dotted maiden with the pitcher spilling on her breast just got done tying the red scarf around the neck of her baby pioneer. Maybe for you she shook ribbons into her cleavage, shoe-stringed to woo your pen from the lazy fruit trees and the sailing grass. What she picks out of the earth is too small–a patch of grease for the work week’s engine. And the stain of currants popping on the tongue and the orchards where we picked them shoot the breeze. She stirs the grub and embroiders the foreman’s day with thighs. The mother, whom our poet laureate imagined hen-shaped, cooking with smoke that tints the village, has just stopped bowing at the medal conferred upon her Hindu arms. She brings the slab of bacon from the snaking food line and melts it into the land’s familial romance. All around her the blond river Tisza shivers in its banks toward Africa. It will never reach.

     

    There have been marches en masse–the wind-tickled imaginary sighs. Those dances that convulse the hips stop and start, turning black or turning blue against the wall. When I open the latest version of the nation’s history, my pressed daughter will crumble out, missing at the edges. The paragraph is stained. And where she never was, the next world will grow up and spit itself in the eye. As she tears half her usual freedom into tatters, she thinks it’s real. Somewhere in a nerve her pricked fingers still sting from pinning a new flag on the sky. She thinks it’s real. As good as the next fluffy cloud or geometric plane or poem or meal or bed. This woman mooned the red star as it fell. But before that, she grew wet just thinking of its tips. Five was her lucky number. So, as General Electric spreads her chignoned, waltzing on the screen, maybe something of her shrinks from the lens. If Lenin never lived, still doesn’t live, and never will live, maybe something of herself will miss the feel of her legs as she is gliding. She’ll grow wet to the rhythms of Strauss and think it real. After all, she is the map they have redrawn again. If they pressed hard enough this time, maybe the Danube spilled under her skin to let her know. It never had been, still isn’t, and never will be, blue.

     

    ***

     

    I took to sailors early. It was the gifts they lavished on my buxom, melancholy mother. We’d share the foreign spoils, which were the promises of tangible mornings in the kitchen, burned eggs, the concrete linking of hands despite high levels of lead in the blood. Everything was Made in DDR, England, the USA. And the marriages that never took place must have been made in that eroticized heaven where Christ could satisfy a universe of the rejected.

     

    It always seemed to happen in summer. As soon as I could talk, we boarded trains for Yugoslavia, Austria. My mother read expectation into every reeling cornfield and foresaw the light at the end of tunnels miles before they dawned. I still feel like a dingy rabbit’s foot–the guarantor of consonants and vowels against their tarnishing at sea. At our destinations we were always the last to leave the platform. Our bundles, too, were amulets–all this snail house baggage couldn’t possibly be stranded in some corridor of space, without a house somewhere to fill.

     

    I felt smaller than the clutter we compressed into the journey. The transition from sentences to asphalt was never smooth or matter-of-fact. I needed to sleep away all that nowhere, the opal shimmering left of my mother as she hovered between the last man and thin air. Someone should’ve told her that Marlow was chiseled for calling her the horror of the world. Why was Brandy such a fine girl? Was it because she put out and launched slow, mournful ballads out to sea? She should’ve been a fire-breathing typhoon to wreak havoc on that freighter’s bonding crew as they were swapping conquered-pussy stories in the dark.

     

    It was strange to see my mother fade in and out of flesh like some Star Trek goddess beamed aboard the Enterprise but lost in transit. We just sat there, crouched on the bundles made of coats, dishes, nail files, underwear, shoes, and let the dusk fall down on us. I don’t know what she was hoping for in the hundredth abandoned railroad station with a shitload of history on her back. Could it be that history doesn’t repeat? That each time she made the epic journey from bed to some forever she traveled light on the aura of first love? Did she see the ship ceremonically sunk in favor of the land where words take root and grow old together as stories?

     

    The train already left our side to transport tourists to their beige hotels. I listened in disbelief to the announcer’s voice prattling train schedules, insisting on the punctual arrival of the 5:05 from Athens. But I know that every time I have a memory of waiting, or scribble the outlines of madonna and child on paper, I become an announcer of schedules, the I.O.U. for the timely arrival of bodies. I really don’t remember two drained figures holding vigil over vacuum. All train stations look the same to me with their Simon and Garfunkel burn-out, and what really stands out about momma’s boyfriends is their vanishing.

     

    We took the 10:16 back. The train was gray and the seats were a red, gray, beige, black vinyl weave. We saw nothing of tunnels or cornfields. Our reflections rode with us in a steady drama of double or nothing. Momma’s evenly sloping nose stood guard against the penetrating stranger straight across, already offering me half his sandwich. He struck up a conversation with me about the mystery blond by my side, and despite the constant shattering of facts against the wheels, I nudged my mother accomplice-fashion and she beamed him a smile. What I remember most about him is his disappearance over breakfast a month later, and the brass tacks of the journey I wouldn’t bet a life on.

     

    ***

     

    Writing, lately, has been an act of desperation. I am not proud of that. Grabbing for a phrase as if it were a life- preserver leaves all kinds of revolutionary fervor to be desired. You can’t build utopia entirely on blind jabs at the future. I ought to plan for a watershed; for that erogenous point I can put my ring finger on; the epitome. But in the meantime, how do I keep from drowning in my own shed water? Maybe I’m just trying to understand what chronology obscures. Looking for the old one- two punch–writing blow by blow. Maybe I thrive on acts of desperation-the pointed gun; the gossip about how it wilts; the numbness of steel in the soul always mistaken for strength; the cut-throat word that finishes the present and makes future out of death. Very pagan. Very Judeo-Christian. It smacks of Nirvana. Strawberry Fields. Maybe it’s the blind jab that distills specks of place for us to live in. We are here to say, Rilke says. We are here to keep quiet, lest we disturb the dark gods, Lawrence says. Let the cunt and prick speak in silences. But what Lawrence never owned up to was that his words were full of pricks and cunts, just as those pricks and cunts were full of words. And maybe every desperate act is an attempt to save the dignity of that union from ourselves.

     

    ***

     

    Don’t matter which boot-licking shore. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs that get to light the stove. The braindead books are leaning into our middles like international candy and we lick into the air. Grandma’s stroke coincided with call waiting. The four-foot pillar next door had no dough for health insurance. Made a sissy of her boy who masturbates and cries on trains. She has to tell me over the line where a numb electric goddess towels off her pain. She is next wall to me. I’m sick of hearing her distance through the bricks. I’m sick of hearing that boy’s silence through my fucking.

     

    Meanwhile, Diamond goes life hopping between two shores. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs who’d love to burn him but instead will light the stove. It only hit me now that cigarettes are nested coals of fire. They feel like a mind one is about to lose. If only it could stay on the bus like a black umbrella. A bone I could bury like a dog. I’d die of rabies. Watch it float away on a trash mission in space. I swear I’d let it bleed from my busted reputation like some red desert. But it sticks and smells and thinks into the sink as ochre moments of the day when the heat becomes a man. The wheat waves through my windows. It is lotus and at night I light the stove. Grandma’s stroke will have to wait. The neighbor’s baby has to swim another month. I can’t afford this calling, dust to flight.

     

    ***

     

    Dottie was the scrawny one who turned to tube pants at twelve. Cricket was freckled with Machiavellian talents for stealing the boys. She developed first. But only like goats with first Moses horns that itch. We followed with loose cotton hills moving to some law of plate tectonics, subject to erosion by wind and sand. Judy was the one becoming V. Her doctor told her about how an eighteen-year-old body grew up in her thirteen- year-old shell. Convenient as hell. Agatha sang. Her mother used to cut warts from shifty hands and counsel men on rashes that broke out in dreams. I hated the smell of offices like hers. And the skin problems of men. Scylla also developed first. I thought I’d be Charybdis and find out which death the boys preferred. They liked their water on the rocks, but didn’t know myths that bodies move by. Scylla had no need for sisters to complete a testy, rotten passage, they said.

     

    That year we tried on one another’s souls like languages that never meant a thing. Why lie? It was like bee-hive clinging scatterbrained after the rocks the first boys threw. We never shared blood like brothers. The only stains we knew were test runs of saliva over our blue jeans to prove they were authentic, from America. None of them was. We had to fake our clothes, our breasts, immutable spaces the eye can always skip, our allegiance to the revolution, our fashionable longing for the West, our pains.

     

    Even then the bee-bee-gunning menace was cutting off his sister’s head in photos. We thought him a danger only to the birds. And that boy who threw the hypodermic in my back from twenty feet must have stabbed by now. He was a connoisseur of wounds, an art critic on purples, blues and black paling toward yellow.

     

    Yes, at Judy’s party it was Judy’s turn to cry. Nobody stabbed her, exactly. Maybe just a little in the back. Her doctor with the needles (a balder version of the spearing brat). Her doctor with the pills. Her parents with their booze license for daughters who talked back. Her hairdresser who told her blonds have fun. Her manicurist who discounted on blood. Her teachers who stripped her of all this. Her friends who conformed to hating bitches. Her mispronunciation of her dread, the silencing of always-spoken letters. Her body language from the wrist. The nowhere long before they found her dead.

     

    They said shoo, and we flew away to strange inside countries where the prices are too high and we are always spotted for tourists hunting down mementos for a rush; where we think the women too pregnant, the men too chauvinistic for our taste, the air too brutal, the bridges unsafe, the ruins too old, the words too dense to get through. And where we are the women raising men, breathing bare necessary gulps, crossing our bras, renovating murals to cover up the crumbling of our tissue, settling for the first ventriloquist.

     

    And then there were none. The pedophile’s childless wife suddenly broke in half. They buried her with a bunch of limestone angels, her heart completely bored. She believed in Christmas and the grace of God and the husband she took instead. Then the seamstress lost the rhythm of her pedal, the string snapped, the tapestry flew out and up. No child–no Lady of Shallott. No Sleeping Beauty. No Arachne. And no calico to warm somebody’s bed. Just a click of the line and the mannequin crushed into a landfill. Someday she’ll appear cross-sectioned for geologists as a scrawny layer of their momma scraping hell. The third one grew a cancer in her lung and let it spread. It ate up everything she ate, threw the ceiling in relief, bulged in through the door despite the dresser. It turned her smile into papyrus, and every line that rationed her got brutally recorded. But I have kept no records. I tried but they don’t keep. Hers served well as shroud at the cremation. The next-in-line’s still beating up some stone. A spinster who fucked boys for pleasure, then made them laugh into an ecstasy of piss. The irreverent bitch had the audacity to pass go more than once without the huffing and puffing that peacocks live as law. She was uglier than Fate and told more truth. And if she hadn’t smoked her throat shut like a grave, she’d still be stripping an emperor of clothes.

     

    The phone was disconnected last night. The mailman broke a leg. I do not socialize. I avoid God like the plague. I scared the paperboy away by raving. The sky stares in the window to meet blinds. I’m popping caffeine pills as garlic against telepathic dreams. But I feel mirrors in my bones like some damned Dorian Gray. And the bitches of the world are dying without quaint proper goodbyes, or burials at sea, or conduct books in strength for those of us still breaking.

     

    ***

     

    Kemeny. Let’s trace Kemeny. Probably Cohen. Or Klein. When the first wave invaded with the jingle-jangle of their coins. Hard. So hard. In English. When they invaded with that Eastern-European darkness they learned from the air. Momma’s joujou, a fashion jewel in the crown of creation from that red clay, that Adam. Ornaments in earth tone. Toned down. Turned out. And staring at those iron mines she pricked her hand to taste them. And then she slid. Out from under the heavy sky. The fun was in sliding with the pebble dance where nothing cared about landing. Queen Anne’s lace caught in the weeds. A saint, too, with clean hands. Maria, the dove love woman, plump in the middle of a valley looking up. But the sky is so much heavier down here. Hard luck with a calling in October. Stuck. Stuck to her rump like syrup. You catch flies with sugar, honey. Then you’re eaten into the bargain. I’ve seen them pass on with those huge “WET PAINT” signs hung all over. And some made vicious bull’s eyes. It stuck, as always. With only themselves for hope chest. They hold a lot so they figured gold.

     

    Up in the hills it seemed like rashes. Some Rebecca, some Rachel of the salve. Lines get so tangled in a cat’s claws. But the road was a line and it drove. Until it ended in a sea somewhere where ships sink or sail. Back there, hunched over the meat, someone must have tamed a dragon. Even the sea has a hot red belly when it turns. And imagining the sea she pricked her hand to taste it. Iron again. They make rails and bars and hammers. Brave magnetic world. When does it call for blue lightning? A big KEMENY crouching in the weeds. She must be glaring under all that midday sun. In the mines they would blast her to bits. That’s what the signs are about. To warn in case she treasures something more than a good glance. She pricked her hand so she could close her eyes. It was damn loud in the Queen Anne’s lace with the dove love woman dreaming.

     

  • Dressed to Kill Yourself

    Rob Hardin

    DUPLICATE FOG AND DRESDEN CERUMEN
================================================================
There had been a series of     |   (Tuesday, July 9th, 1985: was
spectacular killings west of   |   it something I'd said, or had
New Haven.  By all reports,    |   the individual molecules of
the victims had been           |   styrene in Molly's flaming
imaginatively disfigured.  The |   plastic cup become volatile
textured palette techniques by |   mutagens, altering her genes? 
which their intestines had     |   Why had her lips become seven-
been rearranged to suggest     |   foot-long cave worms that
Satan Casting ET Into The Lake |   writhed whenever the DFA
of Fire were the subject of    |   inspector passed?  I tried not
both critical praise and       |   to feel personally insulted,
craftsman's speculation.  How  |   but the vertigo and loss of
had the strangely anonymous    |   memory caused by low-level
murderer been able to make his |   exposure to polycyclic
parings in the murk acquire    |   aromatics was getting to me. 
such distinct borders?  Of     |   Hell, I thought, why not
particular interest was his    |   propose on my monomer-dusted
work in broken capillaries.    |   knees (the surfaces of which
Here, the shadings of blue and |   were already beginning to
red were so subtle as to       |   pulsate with passion and
suggest the airbrush work of   |   deformity)?  But it was too
Futura 2000 (an ancient LES    |   late.  Molly had already
artist whose techniques have   |   changed into a 350-nanograms-
been much imitated in these    |   per-gram representation of the
times of draftsmen automatons. |   Rape of the Sabine Women,
                               |   rendered in hot pink fur.)
But after the telejournalist   |
reviews and panel discussions  |   Privately, however, Onion knew
had thoroughly analyzed Khaki  |   the true reason for his
Cadaver 5, and academidroids   |   success: his ability to utter
were left to dry-hump its      |   wordless streams of syllables
aesthetic until the skin had   |   that reduced his clients to a
been worn away, the public's   |   soporific state in which
lack of interest voided the    |   they'd empty their wallets,
subject.  There was something  |   drop their pants, and imagine
precious in the murderer's     |   themselves contestants on
technique; it was too self-    |   Wheel of Fortune.  For Onion's
conscious; it lacked that      |   special episode, the usual
bold, splashy manner which     |   wheel was replaced by a huge,
Americans love.  His would     |   proctologically correct
never be the work of a         |   representation of Vanna
successful mainstream killer-- |   White's anus just after sodomy
but since the murderer was an  |   by the entire executive staff
idiot savant, perhaps          |   of CBS.  The inflamed areas
financial success were better  |   were marked off in greed-
left to those who would        |   inducing shades of olive and
actually recognize its         |   magenta, and bore the
rewards.                       |   potential scores which a spin
                               |   of the anus might achieve: sex
Dwayne was a hydrocephalic     |   with broccoli pulverizers,
millionaire who had squandered |   cappucino sprinklers,
his trust fund on musical dog  |   vibrating swimsuit erasers,
collars.  They'd arrived by    |   you name it.  The grand prize
the mobile homeful,            |   was this: the endangered
ritualistically daisy-chained  |   wildlife species of the
to Victrolas.  But when his    |   contestant's choice, smeared
brokers came to remove his     |   with Heinz 57 and slivers of
sternum and optic fiber caps,  |   prosciutto, and offered to him
Dwayne knew it was time to     |   for ocular penetration.
join RMSA (Retarded            |
Millionaire Sexaholics         |
Anonymous) or face a life of   |
aggressive, monosyllabic       |
panhandling.  At RMSA, he met  |
a friend who was to become the |
very apex of his sobriety:     |
Onion, a mongoloid turpentine  |
heir who'd spent his entire    |
fortune on topless shoe-       |
shines.  Through the I-Can't-  |
Count-But-There-Are-More-      |
Steps-Than-I-Have-Fingers      |
Program, he became a           |
successful infanticide         |
entrepreneur, setting up his   |
own BabyHeadGallery--a name    |
which reflected both the       |
nature of the murders and the  |
stunted emotional growth of    |
the killers themselves.        |
=================================================================

DRESSED TO KILL YOURSELF:
=================================================================
                                |
The sites he recalled were      |  It was a voice that seemed too
side-roads of the broken.   The |  aware of time.  Pitches came
faces of dispirited mobs, a     |  unmoored, syllables lengthened
driftwood of deltas--even the   |  to slow tides.  Explanations
people he'd killed formed a     |  deserted the speaker, leaving
discontinuous whole.  It was a  |  dribbled ellipses, or
pattern he'd noticed before,    |  consonants like sliced
though not until now with       |  fingertips.  It had only one
resignation.                    |  thing to express--the
                                |  hesitation had become the
Earlier that afternoon, the     |  outline of the inexpressible. 
rest stops of the dead had      |  An aural watermark of
seemed merely pathetic.  Poor   |  Katherine's wordless fear.
puny things, he'd said,         |
quoting Dwight Frye as he set   |  Now it is midnight.  His
fire to a corpse's hair.  He'd  |  uneasiness recedes, allowing
watched it burn with something  |  him to feel the night air.  It
like aesthetic pleasure--the    |  sweeps across his face from
temples torch-maned, the eyes   |  the open window.  He remembers
past all statement, like        |  paying to sit here--someone
erasures.  Then he'd doused     |  else's memory, a news clip he
the smoldering skull with       |  was too preoccupied to watch. 
Cabarnet and gently placed it   |  He sits beside a fat teenager
with the others.  It was the    |  with confederate flag patches
zero-wide maw which topped a    |  sewn onto the pockets of his
pile of severed heads so        |  jean jacket, confederate pins
disfigured they couldn't even   |  dangling from its sleeves. 
stare.                          |  Did the teenager sit near the
                                |  black bus driver out of
He'd stuffed the heads into a   |  meanness or stupidity? 
burlap sack and left them in    |  Probably both.  The bus driver
Washington Square Park.  He'd   |  looks at the kid and smiles. 
gazed down into the opening     |  It is not often that racism is
for a quarter of an hour,       |  properly labelled.  If hatred
until blood and rot began to    |  were always this self-
satin the fabric that had       |  explanatory, you could keep
concealed them.  Then he'd      |  track of your enemies.
walked away cooly, feeling the  |
heads settle and drain.  An     |  * Demon-snakes ate Dead Sea *
extravagance, he'd thought.     |  * apples, Spitting bits of  *
Crushed peaches bleeding juice  |  * bitter ash.               *
into the grains of white        |
cobblestone.                    |  He lifts his eyes from a page
                                |  which smells of shredded
Though he'd been wandering      |  coconut.   They burned me with
away from the death site for    |  my own mind , he fumes.  They
hours, William was still the    |  always do.  Like last Friday,
unwilling recipient of          |  when he'd attempted to get
visions.  The city itself       |  into Hellbound--a club known
seemed haunted, if only by      |  and reviled for its hostile
emblems.  A gangly blonde       |  door policy.
leaned against the support      |
beam of the bus stop, her body  |  * Tell them who you are,    *
a gesture towards negation.     |  * Billy.  Glare right into  *
Free me, it pleaded.  I'd       |  * the doorman's squeezed    *
rather be dead than old.  Yet   |  * eyes.  Even if he thinks  *
William rejected its luxuriant  |  * his position amounts to a *
offer.  Lusts sated, he was     |  * royal title, even if he   *
free to reconsider fidelity.    |  * doesn't understand how    *
                                |  * power structures meet and *
Reflected neon signs hovered    |  * overlap, you won't have   *
in cafe windows like            |  * to cinch this guy a       *
superconductors of the          |  * greeting card eulogy at   *
unattainable.  They floated     |  * tomorrow's funeral party. *
beside him as he walked         |  * The people in this city   *
towards Willamette Bridge.      |  * who know your name are    *
Even outside his mind, he       |  * too frightened to slag    *
lived in a city halved by       |  * it.  They'll be holding   *
rivers.  At last crossing,      |  * back the syllables long   *
he'd been sitting in his        |  * after the current nest of *
apartment.  Then the phone      |  * celebutantes is broken,   *
rang.  It was Katherine, the    |  * and the club parasites    *
tiny speaker of the answering   |  * have flitted out of town. *
machine distorting her          |
apologies into near gibberish.  |
She'd finally gotten up the     |
nerve to call him and wanted    |
to leave her new number.        |
Instinctively, he'd risen from  |
his seat, unable to sit or      |
pick up the phone.  It was all  |
happening just as he'd          |
predicted.  After she'd run     |
away, after the infidelities    |
rumored and real, she'd         |
appeared six months later to    |
ruin his dinner date at         |
Hamburger Mary's.  And now she  |
had entered his studio          |
apartment through the phone     |
line, her stammer tugging his   |
private face.                   |

=================================================================

                                                    (Millipedes.)
=================================================================
THERE WERE PLACES  ||   ________________   ||  ...IN THE
IN ROBBIE ROSS     ||  |                |  ||  INDIVIDUAL CAN
MEMORIAL CEMETERY  ||  |"I am gristle.  |  ||  SPUMED ILLEGAL
WHICH ALBERT LIVED ||  |I am a masocide.|  ||  PESTICIDES. 
TO PHOTOGRAPH.     ||  |I am sprawl     |  ||
                   ||  |_________(con-__|  ||  There were
Often, his father  ||                      ||  gangster weddings
would discover     ||   Headpieces of      ||  in the film
snapshots of       ||  psychobiological    ||  _Cougar Love_, but
tombstones glued   ||   driftwood are      ||  the screen was
to the back pages  ||  never allowed to    ||  soon inflamed by
of the family      ||   recompose. They    ||  another kind on
album.  Small      ||  devolve on axes.    ||  uxoricide as a
wonder Albert      ||                      ||  fuselage oozed
acquired a         ||======================||  liquid Joy (and I
mortician's        ||  _Delirium           ||  don't mean the
technique, smearing||  Trampoline_.        ||  detergent). 
the lens with so   ||   Slate-gray         ||  "Insufficiently
much glycerine that||  Bassinet on         ||  synthetic--easy
even rotting       ||  window-ledge.       ||  to operate,
cities were        ||======================||  difficult to use,"
suffused with an   ||                      ||  one fan was heard
incandescent       ||  ...WAS SAID TO      ||  to glower.  Sprigs
vitality.  His     ||  CONJURE.  Seconds   ||  of ammoniated
aim was to         ||  later, a blood-     ||  cologne did little
materialize        ||  vessel broke in     ||  to alleviate the
Death's jarring    ||  Albert's jaw,       ||  lack of
detail; meanwhile, ||  spraying his gelid  ||  repetition.  Tiny
in Armenia, a      ||  lens.  This         ||  creatures with
statue of Achilles ||  resulted in a       ||  straws attacked a
was discovered to  ||  final tarnishing    ||  bag of oranges in
have been          ||  of the image:  as   ||  a sequence of
installed in the   ||  statues crack, so   ||  heart-warming...
wrong region of    ||  do aesthetics.      ||
Kodaly Square.     ||  Albert's last       ||  ...nudity.  Man,
Rude folk music    ||  words pertained to  ||  child, animated
jarred the         ||  the condition of    ||  gargoyle spitting
Apollonian         ||  his diffusion disc  ||  flecks of human
sensibility which  ||  and not his         ||  skin--all were
the Greek torso... ||  "soul."  Delusions  ||  sketched with
                   ||  of traffic packed   ||  graceful touches
                   ||  salt into his       ||  by directors Milo
                   ||  eyes, the lids      ||  & Otis.  One
                   ||  singed off like     ||  wishes this sort
                   ||  flaps of paper.     ||  of thing were
                   ||  They joined the     ||  attempted more
                   ||  ash of flesh that   ||  often, instead of
                   ||  gathered along the  ||  the disgusting
                   ||  region defined by   ||  violence which
                   ||  hills, rounding     ||  lurches into VCR
                   ||  the veranda like a  ||  doorways.  Into
                   ||  slab of nervure.    ||  graveyards like
                   ||  Awakenings decayed  ||  Robbie's.
                   ||  in the silk pond:   ||
                   ||  the filleted        ||   ________________
                   ||  Muzak...            ||  |                |
                   ||                      ||  | -tinued) whose |
                   ||                      ||  | last words are |
                   ||                      ||  | unimportant.   |
                   ||                      ||  | If only there  |
                   ||                      ||  | were terms for |
                   ||                      ||  | the trace-     |
                   ||                      ||  |________________|

The midway bristles with sparks: gridded diamonds on a red sleeve
-----------------------------------------------------------------

=================================================================
marks of my            _In The Gallery of      He feared their
fluids.  Then I        Illiterates_:           approach because
could define the                               he knew they would
matter (as if it       Awkwardly, Planer       give no pause for
mattered).  If         balanced his frame      explanation. 
only.  Never mind.     against the giant       Excuses were
Nothing can            marble scroll, his      meaningless to
protect my             head tilting into       illiterate
faculties from the     its whirlpool of        killers.  Trained
repellence of          furls.  He was          in the iconography
human contact.         trying to look          of television,
First, I invited       past the Hatchett       they could only
the pathogenic         installation, a         read stereotypical
embrace of the         plexiglass              body language.
Body.  Then I          logogriph of
explored the           carnage,                Once they'd closed
hyperstimulated        cormorants and          in on the exhibit,
minds of my            giant tortrix           Planer knew the
generation, but        moths.  His             gunmen would read
that was worse.        attention grew          him as an emblem
The interior of        lost as it snagged      of deceit.  He
the skull is           on talons and           would be framed
filthier than the      pincers, on torsos      and eye-tried with
genitals could         whose agonized          one glance from
ever hope to be.       poses were              their Emcee.  Then
The eye in the         intended to be          a nod would signal
window caresses        made abstract by        Planer's
the wind outside,      their placement.        execution.  He
and the tongue                                 didn't anticipate
evokes its lewd        The sculptures          remembrance or
itchings.  This is     were enclosed           regret.  After
what we call           within red Lucite       they'd killed, the
style  , a toilet      brackets.  These        gunmen instantly
whirlpool of bad       were part of a          forgot their
champagne which        vast equation of        victims.  Murder
attempts to drown      molded                  dwindled to
what we cannot         thermoplastic           slaughterbyte in
digest.  If only I     symbols that            their sequence of
could isolate the      progressed              waking and
illness.  But when     expansively across      sleeping.
I try, my legs         the gallery floor:
grow spattered         pliant algebra          A lifetime was a
with shit.             notations,              kind of long-
Language becomes       indestructible          running,
ajunkyard of           equal signs,            infotainment
slogans in which a     flowchart symbols       series; the mind,
gutted heart           which opened            a VCR.  Lacking
replays its            limply to the           the voice for
craving for pain.      casual visitor          questions, gunmen
Artifacts from the     beyond the gate.        were usually
crematorium snake      From the                content to get in
between my lips.       anticipated             a few good shots.
vile inflections       viewer's position,
flecked with bile.     it was the
                       Raphaelesque style
                       of the sculptures
                       that was
                       foregrounded by
                       their context. 
                       But from Planer's
                       vantage point, the
                       sculptures
                       regained their
                       urgency.  Close
                       proximity freed
                       them from the
                       distance of
                       Hatchett's ironic
                       age.  That was why
                       Planer found it so
                       difficult to
                       concentrate on the
                       progress of the
                       gunmen outside.

THE STAINED REMAINS ARE MAINLY DISEMBRAINED
-------------------------------------------

     (or waned to flame-cerise.)

                         mingled script,
                         contingency fear.

                              Excessive lace entwined 
                              her thighs.  Kinetic taws
                              of Tiger's Eye retracted
                              like sacs of amber flies.

               Her wet dreams glistened with slick-
               haired boys.  They stood in oblique

The reliquary possessed an air of disquiet.  Presences blew
through its halls like the scent of violent women.

               alley light, their Tenaxed razor-
               cuts framing thin-eyed derision.         Astro
               Heads turned slightly, girlish           sentics
               smirks twisted to depraved.  A wind      ascertai
               from nowhere scattered their             ned,
               denims.  Torsos froze in profile,        deliberat
               their icy erections nursing her          ions pro
               desire until daylight shone through      ve de-
               the brickface.  Then the boys            laned.
               thinned to transparencies.  Her          Repenta
               dad's fingers reached through the        nce cro
               loops of zippered legs and parted        nes cry
               hair.  Go away, she thought.  Don't      onodro
               fuckin' care about me.                   nes. Im
                                                        paled,
               Then Dad surprised her.  It seemed he    her vei
               wasn't so prim after all.  When she      ns lay
               ignored his commands, he pulled out a    tamely
               knife.  He raped her there on the hide-  unrestrai
               away bed, thrusting the knife tang-deep  ned. On
               into her left eye.  It had long been his tologies
               belief that pleasure and punishment must decentra
               go hand in hand.                         lized gl
                                                        ean tart
                                                        precision
                                                        s wryly
                                                        prized.
                                                        Tradition
                                                        planes
Greased with leech's gleet, Houdini                     what f
proves last repast for Pasolini.                        ilm re
                                                        gains:    
                                  the autonomic, frail terrains.

  • From Birdland

    Rikki Ducornet

    Department of English
    University of Denver

     

    They set off in the early morning beneath an auspicious sky stubbled with clouds. From the start Fogginius the Saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal road and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. True to himself he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence or in song, in quiet talk among themselves or in dreaming (and the poet Picotazo, as he left behind the city where his beloved breathed, was delighting in acute melancholy). After much hacking Fogginius cleared his throat and spitting into a cluster of blossoming bougainvillea began:

     

    ‘Let us suppose that upon waking in the night I trod upon a nail. The nail cruelly pierces my flesh, causing me to hop about sobbing unrestrainedly in pain. Here is the cure: take up the nail and kiss it tenderly. I bind it to my foot with a piece of nicely rotted string. Should there be a moon, I lie upon the ground with the wounded foot pointing to Heaven, a turd stuck to the toe. Within three hours, if no owl passes and nothing disturbs the silence with a scream, the wound will cease to fester. Better still, should a star stumble from the sky, the foot and the body attached to it will be invigorated beyond belief

     

    For a brief moment Fogginius was silent. The others, greatly relieved and thinking he was done, grunted with satisfaction. This flattered the Saint and he continued:

     

    ‘Now, let us suppose that I am eating a fish and I choke on a bone. At once, without thought to economy or appearances, and no matter who is in the room–be he a humbug or God Himself–the fish’s bones, sucked clean of meat, must be placed upon my head. To assure that such a misadventure not repeat itself, my toe nails must be trimmed at once and added to the pile.’

     

    Just then Professor Tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. They had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. So tightly was the poet’s heart squeezed in the fist of love, that had it been an orange, seeds would have bulleted from his ears.

     

    When the girl and her father rode past the poet and the Saint, Picotazo offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that if Fogginius had remained silent, she might have been moved. But the scholar opened his trap:

     

    ‘The best remedy for lightning is to wear one’s turds–dried and sewn within a piece of silk–against the heart. The turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative and, at best, cumuliform–‘

     

    Professor Tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: I do not approve the company you keep. His daughter kept her eyes upon the path, and bit her lower lip to keep herself from laughing.

     

    ‘That girl who just passed! Fogginius spluttered with ill- founded enthusiasm, ‘has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! Soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside…I would never have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes!’ For an instant he shut up, marvelling.

     

    But the poet Picotazo did not hear him. He was too deep in thought. He was thinking how much he hated Fogginius and how he longed to see him dead. He wished a meteor would strike him where he sat. And although they had only just left the city of Pope Publius behind and had been journeying but twenty minutes, the poet was submerged in weariness. The day died, Fogginius the Saint silent only when catching his breath. When the party stopped and Bulto set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, Fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses both fresh and moldering and methods of dissection both ancient and new–thereby destroying everyone’s appetite but his own. Cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels and archons, their attributes and attitudes and advantages, and the manner in which the Manicheans invoked all three; and wondered if angels had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both, or neither–but instead a type sur-natural and so inconceivable.

     

    As Fogginius spoke, Senor Fantasma seriously pondered why he had, until now, cherished the Saint’s advice and admired his mind so much he had been paying him to think. Nuno, too, with much gnashing of teeth, recalled his stepfather’s incessant punishments, the insane blandishments which had rained unfailingly upon him when he was a boy, the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. Kicking in the fire, Bulto fantasized reducing the Saint to a pulp; Pulco alone appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan–he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread moistened with saliva.

     

    ‘The black man is black–‘ detonating, Fogginius threw himself upon his hammock, ‘–because his soul is an inferno, a fiery pit. He burns from within and with such intensity, all his whiteness has been consumed. The red man burns with less heat; the yellow–‘ Suddenly the world was silent.

     

    Silent. As if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. Fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small Pulco, and the mules. This silence was so exquisite and so dense, that the poet attempted to seize it in verse. He wrote:

     

    A silence like a blotter soft and thick
    Soaks up the forest's ink
    Allowing me to dream and think    .

     

    Picotazo put down his pen, and gazing up at the wheeling sky invoked in one breath the Mother of Heaven and Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Within moments he was fast asleep–as were the others, and all strung from trees like fruit damned with dreams. In his dream, Picotazo saw Professor Tardanza’s daughter threading towards him as naked as a thing of Eden. But, although she moved swiftly, she was forever far away, as if she were walking in place, or he retreating.

     

    And then, impossibly, she stood before him. Opening his arms to receive her, Picotazo pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling. She was hot; before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. But just as he would embrace her, his rival Enrique Saladrigas slipped between them, and Picotazo was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. In despair he battered at his rival’s back with both his fists and at the buttocks which now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. A terrific stench was upon the poet now, who–the more he battled Saladrigas, the greater his rival grew.

     

    And Picotazo was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. With a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature’s beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, a constellation. With certainty he recognized the constellation of the skeleton. And he thought: I shall die!

     

    The poet screamed. Waking he found that something still pinned him down. It was Fogginius. Fogginius whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet’s lips. Revulsed nearly to madness, Picotazo bit the Saint fiercely, and Fogginius, leaping to the ground,began to shout. With loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, Picotazo listened to the Saint’s breathless explanation:

     

    ‘A cure! For rheumatism! To sit upon a poet’s face at dawn.’ And: ‘I am cured!’ Fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes which lived in the treetops. Hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a billion birds into the scarlet sky– those birds which, in distant days, filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs.

     

    ***

     

    Picotazo’s chronic melancholia had deepened to despondency. His dream’s sad implication, the rude awakening–illuminated the comfortless state of his love life. Looking back in time to the moment when with a lingering moan love had first flowered in his breast, reviewing each affair up to the present, he thought that never, not once, had he won his heart’s desire, known a maiden’s timid tremor, the delights of reciprocal attraction. His attempted courtships had always fallen short of their mark. Monsters of will, his mistresses had always chosen him. From the first kiss, disappointment had flagged the poet down.

     

    With a shudder, Picotazo recalled the titanic vigor of his mistress’ constitutions, their iron clad affection, the stern, fixed stare of their lust, the fearfully earnest letters he received with terror; how faithfully they punished his evasions, the silent thunderbolts of their angry looks, the purposed damage they invariably inflicted upon his reputation when, at last, he made his escape.

     

    The second day of their journey, Picotazo made a vow. If upon his return he could not within a week win the professor’s daughter, he would devote himself, soul and body, to poetry. He imagined himself dry and desiccated and hollow–like a pod devoid of seed–but with a great, burning body of work growing beneath his frantic pen. He would devote himself tirelessly to the epic at hand. A monument of buried pain, he would be famous beyond belief, so famous that a day would not go by without Professor Tardanza’s daughter hearing his name. In school, her children would be made to memorize his verse; the Queen of Spain Herself would visit Birdland only to hold Picotazo’s hand: ‘…whose poems are the lubrications for life’s frictions!’

     

    But here his revery takes a perilous turn. It seems the Queen cannot, will not, let go the poet’s frail hand. Dreadfully Sovereign, as stern and fixed as a polar cap and the sacredness of Law, she ignores his mute appeal, she treads upon his feet, barks in his ear that the poet is a cog of God–and with a seismic shudder insists that he be equal to her Great Occasion.

     

    ***

     

    Late that afternoon, the road–in truth a protohistoric path, torturous and precipitous–vanished altogether. Spying a dejection in the grass, Fogginius dismounted to see whither it pointed. The turd led them to the lip of a chasm at the foot of which the sea had hollowed a whirlpool, an eager mouth, the poet thought, entreating them, in a savage tongue, to leap.

     

    Too tired to turn back, they set themselves down for an early supper. As Bulto built a fire and little Pulco set to dressing the small birds the thug had throttled en route, Nuno unpacked his tripod and his black box to seize the whirlpool forever with silver nitrate on glass. Picotazo kept far from the land’s edge; the sight of so deep a pit flooded his soul’s chambers with dread.

     

    It was decided that while waiting for their food they would play a game of lotto; from his saddlebags Bulto pulled the box of painted cards which showed all manner of things: flying fish, the fortifications of Pope Publius, the garrote, the guanaba and the coconut; a poultry seller, a water peddlar, a milkman and his mules; the pyramid of Cheops; the Holy Mother,the twelve apostles, the stations of the cross; a fig, a banana and a parakeet–a game so subverted by Fogginius that by the time it was over, tempers were badly frayed. The cards called forth all sorts of associations and Fogginius could not help but recall recipes and riddles and curious customs and ceremonial sacrifices; the witch trials raging in Europe, red hens and peacock’s eyes, tigers ravening in woods, miasmatic infections, focusing instruments and paradoxes; how so and so had found gold in a graveyard which looked exactly like human teeth, and how the monks of India smear their faces with dung.

     

    Picotazo, who, as Pulco, had taken to living with bread in his ears, missed all of this; he did not hear when Nuno cried completo! and so could not know that the game was over. This caused confusion, a quarrel and a string of complaints during which Nuno accused the poet of cheating and incivility. Oblivious to the upset he had himself caused, Fogginius gaily pointed out the prodigious vegetative power of the wood, naming the many purges and poisons he recognized–‘

     

    ‘To stick in your epic, dear poet!’ he beamed at Picotazo, ‘Proof that I have liberally forgiven you the nasty bite you gave me this morning.’

     

    Then, grabbing Senor Fantasma by the sleeve, he postulated that the chimerical unhealthiness of the climate, its fickle temperatures and the spontaneous alterations of its air convinced him they would be assailed that night by uncommon swarms of flies, gnats, moths, animaculae and other calamities invisible to the naked eye.

     

    ‘We must sleep under nets else be plagued by troublesome bites, inflammations, noxious exhalations and velocity of the blood.’ He assured Fantasma that he had brought with him ‘mercurial purges,a gargle of borax, Armenian bole in vinegar and fungal ash. However, he would hate to have to part with any of it so soon. He insisted upon the nets else they all harvest fatality. As for himself, he would not sleep unless a net was provided; nor did he wish to see his poor friend Picotazo assailed by vampire moths. It is fortunate that Fogginius was nearly blind, for Senor Fantasma was able to provide him with a fictive net. This Pulco draped over and above the Saint who– prostrate and tightly bandaged in his blanket–was ready to sleep. Fogginius promised in a soft gurgle that he would not stir the whole night through–else tear the precious net.

     

    As Fogginius trumpeted and wheezed, the company sat together plotting how they might rid themselves of the Saint who had turned out to be an intolerable burden. Little Pulco, himself asleep, did not hear Bulto’s offer to toss Fogginius into the precipice. Fantasma proposed poison but then retracted–fearing reprisals from the ancient’s ghost. Nuno, hating violence, revealed the central role Fogginius had played in his life and asked for mercy.

     

    ‘I’ll find a way to gag him,’ he promised. I might manage to convince him that to use the vocal chords is unnatural–the proof being that his throat is always sore–and create for his own use a language of sand, of straw, of dust motes. I’ll invent something–a muffler, a word snare, a stifler; somehow or other I’ll knot the old stinker’s tongue.’

     

    Elsewhere, Picotazo, his ears stuffed with wild parsley, lay gazing at the sky. The world, he assured himself, was an instrument made not for pain but pleasure–else why would He have bothered? The thought was reassuring.

     

    You are a moonbeam, he wrote to the phantom in his head, my resurrection, my future life.

     

    But then, sensing something large sliding beneath his hammock, he was reminded that if God was anything, he was paradoxically strange.

     

    Long after midnight the poet fell asleep–a leaky vessel upon an agitated ocean.

     

    ***

     

    For two days, Fango Fantasma had been silent. Indeed, Fogginius’ conversation was so congested, infrangible and dense that had he wanted to, Fantasma would have been hard pressed to stick a word in, even edgewise. However, Fantasma shared Picotazo’s baleful propensity and was not eager to talk. He had taken to staring at his own reflection in a pocket mirror–not from vanity as might be supposed–but to reassure himself that he was still there. The farther away he came from familiar things, the more fragmented and permeable he felt himself to be–and the more haunted. The woods, the sea, the sky, the relic path under his mule’s vanishing feet appeared to percolate to transparency.

     

    Fantasma’s unstable state of mind had been precipitated by a worsening pecuniary crisis. For several years he had hounded the papal authorities for permission to import Afrikans to work his mines and plantations. When at last his wish bad been granted, he spent the lion’s part of his languishing fortune to build and equip a ship, which, upon its return from Afrika, its cargo chained and bolted to the hold, had been spirited away, volatilized, sublimated–perhaps by those evil spirits which had plagued his line for three generations. It seemed to Fantasma, as the very clouds appeared to plot against him overhead, that he and his family had always been the playthings of necromancers.

     

    The Saint had once told Senior Fantasma that in a distant region of the world, at its very edge–which was razor-sharp and swept with cruel winds–lived a people born riddled with holes like sieves. This peculiar race amused themselves by plugging their perforations with sod and seeding them with roses, club mosses and horsetails. Each spring flowers would grow, blossom and blaze. At the world’s end, courtship rituals included dances of gyring shrubs.

     

    ‘More often than not the wedding night ends in disaster,’ Fogginius told Fantasma,’ for in their frenzied embrace, the lovers–decked from head to foot in thorny briars–tear one another to shreds.’

     

    ‘Such is the way of love–‘ Picotazo, eavesdropping, was cut to the quick by the story. He made up a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, furr/burr, thistle/whistle.

     

    ***

     

    This night Fantasma felt like a sieve man; he felt that his substance was seeping out through the pores of his skin. To make matters worse, their finger of rock above the whirlpool–if certified by an auspicious dropping–was possibly haunted. Certain signs–caricatural boles and an abandoned wasp’s nest– implied that they had tied their hammocks between what had once been sacred trees.

     

    As their fire died, Fantasma stretched out, and pulling on his fingers one by one until they popped, raised his knees to his chest and grabbed his parts. He thought about Nuno’s black box which would bring him power. He imagined himself enthroned upon a velvet chair, turning a crank which would yield up the island image after image.

     

    Too agitated to sleep, Fantasma told himself the story of the nun who had neglected to cross herself before eating a banana. How, thereafter, a demon had sat behind her navel peering out at the world as through a porthole. That failing, he attempted to bring to mind the tender moments of his infancy–but could only recall those family stories which, since cognizance, profoundly distressed him. Stories of those unstable ghosts taking root, tall as trees, in the dining room, causing the roast beef to explode; hovering near the birthing chair whenever a Fantasma was born, to snap up the umbilical cord the instant it was cut. So that it was generally supposed one day the Fantasmas would all be itinerant ghosts with no worldly ties.

     

    And then Fantasma thought he heard his own cord, and the cords of his forefathers being pulled along the ground. He moaned and clutched his balls in terror; above the roar of the whirlpool, he heard one thousand phantoms stepping among the stones.

     

    Fantasma shivered. A clammy air rose from the ground; it mouthed his bones and caused his teeth to hammer. When the moon’s thin wafer pulled itself up over the horizon, he peered timidly out from under his blanket, thinking to catch a glimpse of the ghosts which–he could hear them distinctly–were spooking the campsite. What he saw caused him to scream with such conviction the others were wrenched from sleep to see that the world beneath was no longer solid but palpitating with hundreds of thousands of frogs which had once assured the wood’s sacred character. The indigenous population had called the place above the whirlpool Tlock. Indeed, as the frogs advanced snapping gnats with eager tongues, the party heard distinctly the percussive sound of their feasting: Tlock,tlock,tlock.

     

    Transfixed with terror, Tango Fantasma sailed that amphibious sea howling as Bulto, more naked than any ape, waded among the little green bodies, battering them with a club. Nuno sat transfixed, Pulco wept and Fogginius beat the air and cried:

     

    ‘The magic is severe! My net’s dissolved!’ And then: ‘A dream! A dream and an oracle! We must count them!’ The Saint dropped to the ground, and fumbling among the frogs, raved: ‘Beings fallen from the sky! Bulto! Desist! You are smattering the brains of rational angels!’

     

    They finished the night, prostrate but wakeful. It seemed to them that the entire cosmos reeked of mildew, stagnant pools, the shit of fish, the saliva of snakes and the sulphurous flatulence of Saints. Sometime before dawn the frogs vanished into thin air–supporting Fogginius’ thesis.

     

    Several hundred years ago, on an island the aborigines had named Birdland, the mendicant scholar Fogginius was roused from the depths of nightmare by a hellish bawling.

     

    Fogginius leapt up from his bed–in truth a worn, woolen cape sewn into a sack and stuffed with shredded shirts–and threw aside his door, or rather, the crusted board which kept the wild hogs from relieving themselves in his rooms. There upon the overturned kettle he used as a threshold, lay an abandoned human infant, soiled and with crossed eyes.

     

    Fogginius washed the brat, stared fiercely into its transverse gaze, and in the manner of the times, swaddled it so tightly that it could not thrash but only howl–as helpless as a sausage damned with a thwarted consciousness. This done he christened it: Nuno Alpha y Omega.

     

    ***

     

    Fogginius was disliked. A deaf man who the scholar had cured of a coughing fit by stuffing his ears with breadcrumbs and parsley daily damned him; another whose bee hives Fogginius had smeared with dung, hated and feared him. Nevertheless, up until the arrival of Professor Tardanza from Cordova, and the maturity of Picotazo the poet, he was the only scholar in Birdland, and his the island’s only library–a wormy collection of parchment-bound books stuffing a zinc-lined trunk not large enough to bathe in. The books had been packed along with that woolen cape and those night shirts which, a full three decades later, served the saint as mattress.

     

    In his youth, Fogginius had been enthralled by Birdland’s unique bestiary. The island claimed a purple bat, whistling wart-hogs, miniature crocodiles and large albino spiders sporting pink whiskers. After many years of trial and error, Fogginius had taught himself the ambiguous art of taxidermy and so was able to save the skins of most anything he chose, although he was not an artist and was incapable of reconstructing any creature convincingly.

     

    For example, Fogginius’ snakes did not diminish towards the tail as is customary, but instead they grew progressively fatter. So zealous was the scholar and so thorough, that all the snakes, bats, moles and mice, ant bears, crocodiles and parrots within ten kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished by the time our story begins. Only their skins remained–thousands upon thousands of them–decomposing in sisal sacks and crowding the shadows of the room Fogginius used as library, laboratory, kitchen and bed chamber, and which the rats used as a larder. He saw to his personal needs after dark beside the path which led to a little chapel–no more in his keeping (for word of other excesses had reached his Queen). Because Fogginius cured his skins with grease, the salted livers of cats, the ashes of wild hog testicles and vinegar, his place and person smelled unlike any other. And once, perhaps in jest, perhaps the result of rare and hermetic readings, Fogginius had suggested that the saviour was a false prophet, a magician engendered by the planet Mars. He was fortunate to have escaped with his life. A new priest– Fogginius despised him–was sent to oversee the cosmic affairs of Birdland.

     

    ***

     

    The city in which Fogginius lived had been named Pope Publius by a bishop in absentia. Its houses were of local pudding stone and coral, and well over a century old. Each had been fitted with heavy doors, high balconies and iron-barred windows–for in its early years the island had been plagued by pirates. The shops– generously fitted with closets, storage bins and shelvings, were now, for the most part, empty of everything but lizards. If Pope Publius had been prosperous for several decades, it no longer was–although one rich man remained in the city’s finest house, its spiral stairs listing and his mahogany columns riddled by carpenter ants. The walls were of imported marble, and the windows of Venetian glass.

     

    This palace belonged to Senor Fantasma whose grandfather had been among the first to take possession of the island. Now that his inherited wealth was running out, Senor Fantasma was waiting for a shipload of Afrikans–for whom he had negotiated with the papal authorities for nearly a decade–to replace the volatilized aborigines.

     

    Very little is known about the original population of Birdland–only that it dwelled in great baskets. As the climate of the island was extremely mild, the natives had no need of smokeholes. They cooked their meals outside in a common courtyard, fenced in by the outsize shells of clams and cockles. The small hole at the top of their huts was an eye through which they could be perceived by their curiously indelicate gods; it served no other purpose.

     

    The aborigines were sculptors, and the mountains truffled with engravings of frogs and copulations and birdmen. They also hung huge quantities of seashells from the rafters of their basket-houses. Once, during a violent storm, these shells created a noise which so enraged Fantasma’s ancestor that he set an entire village on fire–clearing it of men and women and children and structures and domestic animals–thus making room for Pope Publius. By the time Fogginius arrived, a decade or so later, everything the indigenous population had claimed as ‘objects of memory’–an ancient clump of tufted parrot trees, a swarm of aerial orchids resembling yellow bees, a mango grove and several cultivated gardens–were gone.

     

    Strangely, the ensuing generations of Fantasmas were ruled by an obsessive terror that something should escape them. As if that initial conflagration lingered as a fever within the brains of those to follow. This and more: both succeeding generations had a terror of shells and bones and the sound of hollow things knocking together, or clanging, or ringing upon the air. For this reason the chapel of Pope Publius was the only one in Christendom which had never been fitted out with a bell. (Because Old Fantasma had paid for the chapel’s construction, the Designated Powers were willing to overlook this aberration.)

     

    It has been said that Birdland was haunted by the spirits or ghosts of those the Old Fantasma had wronged; that these spirits had escaped through the cyclopean eyes of the basket dwellings; that these itinerant spirits or ghosts materialized at the foot of a bed, in a chimney or in a high tree, in the privy; rode upon the wind as pollen and seeds, were precipitated during the chiming of a clock, or slept within a bottle of ink, or an imperfectly sealed letter–in other words, manifest so often that if they were not fixed residents, it was common enough to see them or to meet someone who had. So that when they did appear they created no surprise. Only Senor Fantasma went wild when haunted.

     

    And it was said that during the construction of Pope Publius, these spirits or ghosts manifested themselves so fearlessly that Senor Fantasma’s grandmother was constantly enraged by their incessant interruptions, and drivelled on and on to anyone who would listen that although she would not allow cigars into the house, a particularly obnoxious phantom insisted on smoking a monstrous, black one in her very own boudoir. She described him: naked and fiercely hot, his shadowy particulars tattooing the walls as he galloped back and forth upon her bed’s counterpane in the moonlight, blowing smoke rings around her trembling nose and causing her love birds to throw themselves to their cage’s floor in paroxysms of emphysemic terror. To keep the infection from entering into the hollow recesses of her head, the old biddy went about her business in a veil. For a time it was feared that she had been impregnated by the smoke from the naked ghost’s cigar, but chamomile and patience proved the old lady suffered gas.

     

    What is curious is that these were the only spirits to haunt the island. No one ever saw Senor Fantasma’s ancestors sitting in trees or smoking. Fogginius–who eagerly took down testimony from whoever would give it–and more testimony from schoolboys than one would think possible–explained the phenomena thus: heathens cannot enter heaven and must remain behind to haunt their former homes, whereas the Old Fantasmas were all Christian and had been seized by heaven whole. But Fogginius feared that if the Afrikans–for whom the entire island waited with hope and misgiving–were not baptized, their spirits, too, would flood the island–making it inhospitable.

     

    ***

     

    Such was the world into which little Nuno Alpha y Omega had plummeted. The population of Birdland was no more than one thousand and one souls, and it would have been easy enough to discover the babe’s mother and bring her to reason. But this never occurred to Fogginius. He believed that–as worms in cheese–the infant had generated spontaneously upon his door’s stoop.

     

    Nuno’s first spoken word was: why. He had pointed to the sun and asked of his stepfather, Why. Until then he had uttered only Fa-Fa. Other than that he had felt no need to speak, and instead with fascination watched the riot of activity within the scholar’s hovel, prodded through the havoc of pelts, skins, and keeping mediums–and attempted to make sense out of the weird stories Fa-Fa told him, those gorgeous lies he believed: that the world was flat and the excrement of bears so potent one whiff could kill an elephant. Nuno was from the start a dreamy child and already at the age of three, when he asked the question Why, he had noticed that in finite quantities the atmosphere is transparent–more transparent, even, than water– but that in vast quantities, as in the sky, it was a beautiful blue. Damned with crossed eyes, Nuno was blessed with acute perceptions. Fogginius was aware that the child was no fool, so that when he saw him pointing at the sun and heard the terrible question Why, he knew, deep within his heart, that to answer: Because God, would not give satisfaction. He loved little Nuno deeply and dared not disappoint him. And so he proposed a list, which the longer it grew, the longer it became; a list, which, like the snake biting its tail, went on forever:

     

    ‘Yes!’ Fogginius startled the infant by leaping to his feet, ‘Yes! The sun! Why? And why the moon? And the rain which falls upon our heads? And why do we have heads? And eyes placed at the top of them? Why don’t we wear our eyes–as some fishes do–upon our undersides? Why not wear an eye between our buttocks and our anus above our nose? And why, dearest little Nuno–I have often pondered this–do all the animals have faces? Turtles do, and butterflies, and ants! Why life, little one? And, O! And, O! Why, above all, death?’ Fogginius covered his own face then with his hands, and to the child’s dismay began to weep. Nuno never forgot the upset his simple question had caused and as he stood blinking and confused, close to tears himself, he vowed that he would never ask such a question out loud again. But it was too late, the cat was out of the bag. Wiping his nose with his stinking fingers, Fogginius went on:

     

    ‘Why calamities?’ His voice was hoarse. ‘And evil natures? Black choler, pestilence and the planets which rotate about the polar star? Why danger and distress? Gall, vinegar and presages of future things? Alarming flames, little Alpha, omens, anise- seeds, imprecations and enchantments? Frogs’ mouths? Falling stars? Asparagus? Eclipses? Why do birds have beaks? And if the soul disembarks at death, why must the corporal rind stay behind to corrupt the earth? And why am I so melancholy?’ Again the scholar sobbed. Little Nuno, struck with terror, sobbed too.

     

    Little Nuno was locked inside the scholar’s sea trunk often and the injustice caused his back to hump. His body knobbed in one tight fetal knot, he clenched his teeth with rage for years until a rat poked its tongue into the greasy keyhole and a beam of light pierced the gloom.

     

    Nuno amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye and then with the other. The thumb appeared to jump from left to right and from right to left. Many hours later, when Fogginius remembered to let the boy out, Nuno tried his small experiment with the back of his stepfather’s head. He noticed how it, too, jumped, and how flat it looked. One-eyed he navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. Tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk where he played the same game with the root of his nose. It perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. Seizing them with his fingers he was reassured.

     

    Except for the tiny beam of light which collided with the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. Having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, Nuno was startled to see a projected image of the room’s one lopsided window and of Fogginius suspended before it upside down. The effect was as terrifying as it was magical.

     

    For weeks thereafter, Nuno taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. An inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar’s misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. The image of Fogginius suspended upside down was so sharply reproduced that illumined by intuition, Nuno realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, but the sun itself. The sorcerer was light–not Fogginius who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg.

     

    Fogginius came to wonder at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. It came to him that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. But although he cried out for mercy, Nuno forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light.

     

    ‘Just as my master thrashes and contains me when angry,’ the child reasoned, ‘and just as thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light reflects images.

     

    Once Fogginius had hobbled off in his fetid rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of violet stoat, Nuno made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from Fogginius’ spectacles, placed a mirror inside and lastly, after much tinkering, and in an inventive fever, dropped a pane of glass into the back. Light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. Toying thus, Nuno stood for hours until, seeing Fogginius’ face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. But instead of thrashing him, Fogginius embraced his stepson.

     

    ‘You have invented the camera obscura!’ he cried, and bursting with pride, congratulated him. Nuno was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. But when Fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, Nuno declared fearlessly:

     

    ‘A poor use for it! I would fix the image and thus do away with painters!’

     

    ‘Fix it! Fix it!’ The scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. ‘I’ll fix you! Would you thus steal the world from God?’ Lifting the box above his head he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats.

     

    Fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds were beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous (a fear he shared with the poet, Picotazo). Fogginius was a man bereft of humor.

     

    For a typical day in Pope Publius, in the month of July, 1650, Fogginius’ journal reads: Bad air. A break in the moon’s halo. By means of which we shall have a wind.

     

    Trained by a Jesuit theologian also named Fogginius, Fogginius once sold his shoes and his books to buy a small, red topaz because his master had assured him that if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. Fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon’s influence was moist by sleeping beneath it upon a high hill and awaking with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. He had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week, because an irresistible voice had told him that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea.

     

    ‘The moon’s nature,’ Fogginius wrote in a pamphlet which was published in Spain several years before his departure for the island, ‘is ethereal, aerial and aquatic.’ He was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the balcony nights when the moon was full. Fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. The hair grew to such profusion that she was not married afterall, but made her living by sitting on a little gold chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. Later she returned to Spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations.

     

    ***

     

    Fogginius was a follower of Lacantius who ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. Fogginius believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the Old to the New World. When as a young man his stepson, Nuno Alpha y Omega ran away with pirates and was swept by fierce winds to the Polar Circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather–now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants’ sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies. Coming into maturity, Nuno refuted Fogginius as ‘a mere dogmatizer’ and ‘God’s prattling ape.’ For Nuno had come to question more than his father; he had come to question God. Home again, he could no longer bear the company of Fogginius. So enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger’s lunacies, his vanity and his incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which the old fool continued to threaten his son, that Nuno became an adamant atheist, a materialist who believed only in what he could see, shunning all things which smacked of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and to understand the mechanisms which–as do the hidden gears of a music box–cause the world to spin.

     

    In the early years of his solitude and independence, Nuno supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. These he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a cynic, as ‘the miraculous impressions of the thoughts of kings and angels.’ Then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able, centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing, to capture an instant in time. This first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered. His next attempt was to create an image in three dimensions. Nuno Alpha y Omega’s ocularscope was not only the first stereoscope in Pope Publius, but the first one in the universe. Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city which exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.

     

    Nuno’s first images were of the natural world. He would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as Fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. Today, as I sit in the National Museum of Pope Publius, an unusual edifice built entirely of coral, and peer into the ocularscope‘s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of Nuno’s Birdland appear seized in silver before me. Fugitive more than adequately describes this island which, formed of mandrapore, cuttlebone and sea lime ceaselessly changes shape. If it were not for the sea wall which circumvents it, pieces of the island would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather. I have here before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beach, portraits of the powerful, the beautiful, the lean and lost; lush landscapes, the elegant facade of a rich man’s house; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the intercesses of the leaves of a lemon tree–a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon, phases, Fogginius might have said, of the same riddle.

     

    ***

     

    Curiosities of Nuno Alpha y Omega’s island: sea cows which sailors once took for sirens. A scarlet shell sporting a white horn so poisonous that one need but see it to die. The mountains are truffled with enchanting caves, the skies with birds–many of which are mute. (But the lizards of Birdland whistle, and the beetles tick like clocks.)

     

    According to Fogginius’ meteorological journal which lies open before me, verminous and yet for the most part intact, the summer of 1660 was so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs.

     

  • Five Days of Bleeding

    Ricardo Cruz

    Department of English
    University of Illinois-Normal

    PLANET ROCK

     

    “I’m the DJ, he’s the rapper,” Chops said, pointing his big finger in my face as if the planet had just begun to spin.

     

    It was night, and the white clouds laughed at Chops until their stomachs bust and they cried. Linton Johnson, a Rastafarian-feeling Black nigger with mustard seed, scronched down in front of our faces and yelled out that New York’s Central Park was Nigger heaven.

     

    “Wait a goddamn minute!

     

    “Is Nigger heaven a Carl Van Vechten novel or a cabin in the sky or a Black place or a sanctuary where August hams grow wild or haven for blues or what?” I asked.

     

    Johnson blew happy dust in my face. “Bottle it,” he said.

     

    Along with Johnson, there was a slew of negroes celebrating and doing their thang in the park like it was nothing. Indecent exposure, pure and simple. A Black Monday. The stock market had crashed, so niggers played the numbers once they got back to Harlem. They picked out their numbers based on Neo-hoodoo and wrote them down during the party they threw for themselves in the park.

     

    Meantime on television: “The problem is that when these films like New Jack City play there are so few of them until Blacks flood the theatres and make a major event out of them.”

     

    Whites gazed out of their windows and saw dinge and charcoal everywhere, dope as art, Guns N’ Roses taking over their houses sky-high above the Harlem juke-joints.

     

    ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

     

    Chops’ joke was very funny, but Johnson was seriously looking for more entertainment to exhibit in the park, protest the absence of social reform, his forehead fucked up like the pavement on a bad road.

     

    “The race problem in the United States had resolved itself into a question of saving black men’s bodies and white men’s souls,” he said.

     

    “Are you Lyndon Johnson or James Weldon Johnson or Johnson & Johnson from Jet and Ebony magazines?” I asked. Under the moon, I passed for white.

     

    Mr. Johnson, calm, slender and immaculate, stood on the narrow strip of stage between the footlights set up in the park and the green grass.

     

    “The name is Linton. If you can’t say or play it, then take yourself, the girl and that little fat-ass fucker and go home.”

     

    “Who made you head negro, Lint-head?” I asked. He ran up and pushed us into the grass, then laughed.

     

    “That shit was cold, wasn’t it?” Johnson asked.

     

    “Yeah, baby,” I answered. “Yeah.”

     

    BIRTH OF THE COOL

     

    Chops and Zu-Zu Girl were cutting up, tripping over sharp blades of wet brown grass they found in the park. Zu-Zu was singing the blues. We got up and sent Johnson off with a smile that we inverted once Johnson turned his back. We sat down on a familiar bench in the park, our boodies itching for a scratch. My cheeks slid along the hard wood. “Wiggle it, baby,” the bench said.

     

    Zu-Zu laughed. Chops laid out.

     

    “You got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Murdah in the first degree,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “You can’t keep a good man down,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops was laid back, doing statues of liberty with his fingers. “Lucy’s in the sky with diamonds,” said Chops, downing a Third Stream from his bottle. He was a chaser of the American Dream.

     

    Zu-Zu snatched the pastries out of Chops’ other hand and went off. “Straighten up and fly right,” said Zu-Zu. “Your jelly roll is good.”

     

    The pigeons picked crumbs out of Zu-Zu’s palm. Chops offered Zu-Zu his bottle.

     

    “Excuse me,” said Chops, “but would you like a heavy-wet, cherry bounce, gooseberry wine, fine, cold-without, Tom-and-Jerry or mountain dew?”

     

    Zu-Zu whipped Chops with a coke stare and flicked her remaining crumbs into the trash can.

     

    “I’d like a John Collins or blue ruin or apple-jack or black velvet or twopenny or white-ale or dog’s nose or whisky toddy or London particular,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Zu-Zu sung the “Laughing Song.” Then she leaned over and smacked Chops in the face, her dark nipples giving us a mean look because they couldn’t sag against her boob-tube.

     

    I grabbed Zu-Zu’s punch and told her to stop. “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I told Zu-Zu, “but this ain’t Queens or Manhattan or Long Island or Greenwich or Harlem. This downtown. You just can’t go around smacking everybody in the face. Dig?”

     

    Zu-Zu sung “Dead Drunk Blues,” booze trickling out of her mouth. She unfastened her bra and took it off.

     

    MERCY, MERCY, MERCY

     

    “You sho’ is big, Zu-Zu,” said Chops. Chops was about to fly away over a bird chest. Meantime, I wondered what she was doing with a bra on under a boob-tube and how we managed to see her nipples.

     

    “Incredible,” I said.

     

    Zu-Zu moved over and smacked Chops in the mouth. “Bop,” she said, her boob-tube shaking a teeny-tiny bit as she danced in the park.

     

    “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    I’M SHOUTIN AGAIN

     

    We are nomads, rebels, revolutionaries, but not homeless. I’m dancin on the benches while Chops sit and stares, his mouth open, his eyes on tits and money.

     

    “Get up, get into it, get involved!” I yell. It’s as if I’m shouting at the tits.

     

    Zu-Zu breaks down and does a war dance downtown, pulling her boob-tube up and down, lots of black people gathering around her and jeering.

     

    I grab Zu-Zu around her waist and we do it to a little east coast swing.

     

    “You can swing it, too,” said Chops.

     

    Zu-Zu laughs and smooches with me while we slowly spin around in the soft, thick mud. “My Man-Of-War,” sings Zu-Zu, like we’re in the trenches. Then she sings “That Thing Called Love.”

     

    RUM AND COCA-COLA

     

    Zu-Zu was a mighty tight woman, moaning blues, caffeine and alcohol keeping her going.

     

    “Swing low, chariot,” Zu-Zu whispered. She was ready to drop dead. She sung “New York Tombs.”

     

    Chops, who had been collecting money in a can, came over and whispered in my ears. “What’s wrong with Zu-Zu?” he asked.

     

    Zu-Zu was off into her own world, everybody drinking moonshine but her.

     

    “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” asked Zu-Zu. She threw her bottle away like it was water.

     

    “Take it easy, Zu-Zu,” I said. I dropped my bottle and gave her a warm-fuzzy.

     

    Zu-Zu pulled back. “Don’t hug me,” she said. She was as tender as the night, black and blue bruises all over her body.

     

    WHAT IS THERE TO SAY?

     

    Zu-Zu peeled my fingers off her skin and turned away. She sung “In A Silent Way.”

     

    “She’s been sleeping with the enemy,” said Chops. “She’s got it bad and that ain’t good.”

     

    “That niggah you’re seeing is just gonna drag you down, Zu- Zu,” I said.

     

    “I need love in the worst sort of way,” said Zu-Zu. She took off her skirt and her boob-tube for the twelfth time.

     

    Chops unzipped his pants, pushed Zu-Zu down on the bench and hit her on the side of her face, smearing her rouge into blood. Chops jumped her bones. “Stop!” I yelled. I was afraid for Zu- Zu. Chops had white man’s disease. He could barely jump, the fat on his stomach rippled like tidal waves.

     

    Against the two boards that made the seat of the bench, Zu- Zu looked like the heroine of a silent movie laid down on some railroad track waiting for the train to come. Chops leaped back- and-forth over her collar, his hair standing straight up like Don King’s.

     

    Zu-Zu blew her cool. “I hate a man like you,” she said. “Are you going to jump my bones all night or take off your pants and do me?”

     

    TOO HOT

     

    “I can’t perform under these conditions,” Chops said. “Cross my heart and hope to die. If I’m lyin, you can take this money I collected and buy yourself a little engine that can.”

     

    Chops pulled out a doo-rag and wiped his fat face.

     

    “Just give me some old-fashioned love,” said Zu-Zu. “I want hanky-panky.”

     

    Chops wanted Zu-Zu to stretch his pants but wasn’t confident he had the skills to do her. He stood still and tried to catch his breath while men with nickel-hearts came up and offered to do Zu-Zu for him.

     

    THEY GOT TO GO

     

    “I want to be the only one who gets it,” Chops said to Zu- Zu.

     

    “Okay, okay, okay,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mighty tight woman. Do me in a place where it’s warm and where your hooch won’t turn bad. I don’t care where you take it.”

     

    PARADISE

     

    “Behind the garbage,” said Chops. “Seven steps to Heaven.” Chops pulled out a bomb and lit it, weed all in Zu-Zu’s face, smoke getting in her eyes. Zu-Zu started singing “Dope Head Blues,” Chops high as a kite.

     

    “Give me that old slow drag,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops gave Zu-Zu the bomb, and she sucked on the edges of it until it exploded in her mouth. She spat the paper out, and the ashes came out, too, like her mouth was a volcano.

     

    “Spit in the sky and it fall in your eye,” Chops said.

     

    “That niggah is just gonna drag you down,” I said to Zu- Zu.

     

    Chops glared at me, his eyes like obsidian pieces. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

     

    “Don’t ask me, Chops,” I said. “I’m just a jitterbug. When I hear music, it makes me dance.”

     

    Zu-Zu became restless. She started singing “Tired of Waiting Blues.”

     

    “I’m dying by the hour,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “She’s gotta have it,” I told Chops.

     

    “Knees up, Zu-Zu,” Chops said. Then Chops fell down and pounced on top of her stomach. Zu-Zu spat in his face.

     

    “Bring back the joys,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mean, tight mama.”

     

    Chops slung off his leather and whipped her. The scorching and burning and hot fire turned Zu-Zu’s hair nappy. With a bottle of moonshine in his big, black hands, Chops looked like Prince Buster trying to make love to Zu-Zu, pastry crumbs all over her lips like caviar and ashes still coming out of her mouth. Use your imagination.

     

    “Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina! Olcum!” She called out Yoko Ono’s name as well.

     

    Chops ran Zu-Zu along the wood while she moaned, grunted, huffed and puffed and blew into his bottle, making it blown- glass.

     

    Two niggahs heavy on the bottle, Flukie and Sterling Silver, staggered by with a stolen television set as Zu-Zu kicked over the garbage can. They went crazy.

     

    “Dis bruddah is tearin dis hooch up!” shouted Flukie, his mouth full of gold fillings.

     

    “I wish I had some of that, baby doll,” Sterling said.

     

    “You can get it if you really want it, Bro-ham,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops held out the bottle. “It’s almost all gone,” said Chops. Flukie and Sterling Silver dropped the television set, ran over and snatched the bottle of Chops’ hand. Meantime, Zu-Zu looked ’em up and down.

     

    “Dang, girl, you sho’ is big,” said Flukie and Sterling Simultaneously. “Look at you, girl. Your stuff is all over the place.”

     

    Chops grabbed the bottle and pushed them away from ZuZu.

     

    “Take your black bottom out of here!” Zu-Zu cried.

     

    “Go home!” Chops shouted.

     

    Meantime, Zu-Zu pushed the buttons on the television set to see if she could find the niggah news.

     

    “Keep going!” Chops shouted.

     

    LONG ROAD

     

    “Which way do we go?” asked Flukie, his hand directly over his cock. Sterling followed suit.

     

    “Follow the yellow bird,” I said. They looked at me like I was crazy.

     

    “It’s a long walk home!” they shouted. Chops gave them the finger.

     

    They cracked up and then kissed Chops’ black ass goodbye. “See ya’ lata (chee, chee).”

     

    WALKIN

     

    With a cock-of-the-walk stride, Flukie and Sterling Silver followed the yellow bird to get out of dodge, Zu-Zu scrambling to pick up her stuff, Chops on top of her doing Spike Lee’s joint with his finger.

     

    Flukie felt the urge to shine Sterling’s head. Sterling wondered whether or not Flukie was good luck. Both men were bluing, unable to get their hands on moonshine or Kool-Aid or Grape Juice or anything that looked like it could have some alcoholic content.

     

    Flukie fell out. “It’s a dizzy atmosphere,” he said. Sterling said nothing as they passed a monk standing in a puddle at the corner and dipping while drinking moonshine.

     

    “Don’t stand in muddy waters,” said Flukie, out of it. “Dig?”

     

    “I’m bad,” said Monk.

     

    Sterling Silver, in a moment of epiphany, pointed at Monk’s socks. He was floodin.

     

    Flukie tried to play it off. “What’s that in yo’ pocket?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Watches,” said Monk, “from yo’ momma.”

     

    Flukie started to tag him. But, Sterling Silver held him back.

     

    “How much they cost?” asked Sterling Silver.

     

    “They not for sell, niggah,” said Monk.

     

    “Then what you selling?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Time,” said Monk. “I stole the watches from Penny’s so I could sell time. You ain’t got to buy any, but if you don’ t I’ll take you out.”

     

    Flukie and Sterling Silver looked at one another and backed up.

     

    “You ain’t that bad,” Flukie said.

     

    “You don’t know nothing!” Sterling Silver shouted. “You just a pusher. You ain’t shit!”

     

    “I’m yo’ pusher,” said Monk. “Pay me, niggahs, or I’ll close yo’ big lips forever.”

     

    Flukie pinched Sterling Silver on the arm. “We should have stayed behind with the skeezer,” he said.

     

    Sterling Silver cleaned his throat, then spoke up. “What do you know about karate?” he asked.

     

    “Jujitsu,” said Monk. “Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. After I studied the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is a punch, a kick is just a kick.”

     

    “Damn, I’m a big niggah, but you got me scared,” said Flukie.

     

    “Um, excuse Mr. Monk,” said Sterling, “but I have a question. That’s some deep shit you just gave us. Is that Taoism? Are you from the temple of Shaolin? Or, are you quoting from Bruce Lee’s Chapter on Tools?”

     

    “Man, why don’t you take a chill pill, come and get blowed with us?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Humph,” says Monk. “it’s Monk’s time. I got no papers. And LuLu’s back in town.”

     

    “Bitches brew,” said Flukie. “Let’s go get some pussy den.”

     

    “Die hard,” said Monk.

     

    Flukie backed up some more. “Don’t mess wit me,” warned Flukie. “I’ll rock your world.”

     

    “You’re out of time,” said Monk. “And after I get through wit you, I’m going back to find the skeezer and get her, too.”

     

    SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

     

    said Zu-Zu. “But, you sure as hell ain’t him.”

     

    Chops exploded. He let go of his bomb and slid Zu-Zu from left to right on the wood, putting splinters in her booty. Zu-Zu screamed, caught in the middle of a wang-dang with her face under cork.

     

    “Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina. Olcum.” She threw in Olive Oyl’s name for good measure.

     

    Chops grabbed an empty bottle and held it over his big head, Zu-Zu moaning and groaning and asking “Can Anybody Take Sweet Mama’s Place?”

     

    IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

     

    I rushed over and tapped the bottle against Chops’ nappy head. Chops looked at me like I was crazy, pieces of glass snagged inside his afro, blue rain dripping down his black forehead.

     

    Chops squeezed his head with his fingers.

     

    “Peace out,” said Chops. He fell flat on his fat face, smashing his cheeks up against the seat of the bench.

     

    Zu-Zu picked up her boob-tube and spat on the back of Chops’ head. “My handy man ain’t handy no more,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    I’M ALWAYS CHASING RAINBOWS

     

    said Zu-Zu. “One minute, they there. The next minute they gone.”

     

    MILES IN THE SKY

     

    “Baby, you send me,” said Monk. He held two nigger flickers in his hands and put the blades together to form scissors, giving Flukie’s big head the evil eye.

     

    Flukie’s squinted at the sight of the sharp metal. He tried to play it off. “Kronka,” he said. It meant “let the games begin.”

     

    Sterling Silver was at the top of an elm tree, singing “Freddy’s Dead,” brothers throwing down fishbone a couple trees further away, the whole thing a nightmare.

     

    “Man, can’t we eat?”

     

    “Why you doing us like this?”

     

    “There’s too many fine women walkin around for us to be in the treetops.”

     

    “If you going to kill somebody, kill the niggah and come on.”

     

    “Fuck him up.”

     

    “Castrate the niggah.”

     

    “Jack his body.”

     

    “Use the body parts for spareribs.”

     

    “Cut and mix.”

     

    “Do it til you satisfied.”

     

    “Drain the blood out like it were black cherry Kool-Aid.”

     

    “Pump that body.”

     

    “Niggah, you can be Blacula.”

     

    “Have all the pussy you want.”

     

    “Dip into anybody’s Kool-Aid without knowing the flavor.”

     

    “Aa-a, bat around.”

     

    “Nobody could stop you, baby.”

     

    “Call me Bernard Wright.”

     

    “Al B. Sure!”

     

    “You can turn yo house into a home.”

     

    “Take a chance, baby.”

     

    “Cut the crap, then go back where you fell.”

     

    “Come on wit it.”

     

    “You just stepped into the comfort zone.”

     

    “We up here in the trees hollywood swingin.”

     

    “I always wanted to see the Kool & the Gang show.”

     

    “Get off.”

     

    “Yeah, yeah.”

     

    “Take that coon out.”

     

    “We got high hopes.”

     

    “But, we’re not the S.O.S. Band.”

     

    “That’s fo’ damn sho’

     

    “No one’s gonna love you.”

     

    “Looking like that.”

     

    “You got to give it up.”

     

    “Why you wanna dog me out?”

     

    “Can’t find the reasons.”

     

    “True devotion.”

     

    “Look at the man in the mirror.”

     

    “You gotta make a change for once in yo’ life.”

     

    “You ain’t as bad as you think you are.”

     

    “Shut up!” screamed Monk. He stabbed a tree behind Flukie’s big head.

     

    Flukie stepped back. “Give me tonight,” he said.

     

    From the top of the elm tree, Sterling Silver lowered his cotton handkerchief and long gold rope chain. “Hang him high,” he said to Flukie.

     

    As if on cue, niggahs in the trees stuck their heads out of the branches and started talking smack again, twigs falling to the ground like it was nothing. It was like a mixing board where thangs jumped in and out at random.

     

    “What’s all this noise?” said Monk.

     

    “Look around you,” said Sterling. “What you want? You can have it, baby.”

     

    “I need love,” said Monk. “I want an around-the-way girl. I want base.”

     

    “We all do,” said Flukie.

     

    “But we can work that sucka to the bone,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “Around the way, I saw a slim, no thicker than a twig, but with big titties,” said Flukie.

     

    “Let us walk, and we’ll make a special delivery,” said Sterling.

     

    “Yo’ call,” said Flukie.

     

    “Titties taste like watermelons,” said Sterling.

     

    “Make her come my way,” said Monk. He gave Flukie and Sterling a drink of his moonshine.

     

    “I thought you’d see it my way,” said Flukie. He gulped whiskey and heard niggahs tripping, his head starting to ache.

     

    “What’s all this noise?” Flukie asked.

     

    “The sounds of 52nd Street,” said Sterling, swallowing shit from the cup as if he had found the Grail.

     

    Flukie and Sterling took off, one step closer to Heaven.

     

    SOUTH STREET EXIT

     

    Miles ahead.

     

    BLUE GRAY

     

    Downtown, people celebrate, Linton Johnson splashing rhythms together after the thundering bass. But, there is a Blue Vein Circle where mulattoes practice color snobbery and diss the blacks. Yet, all of these people are in the park cause the earth has music for those who listen. This is Tabu. In the park, “the rhythms jus bubbling an back-firing, ragin and rising, then suddenly the music cuts: steel blade drinking blood in darkness.” Johnson records his LP for Virgin entitled “Dread, Beat and Blood.”

     

    “It’s war amongst the rebels,” says Johnson. He’s cutting the rug and mixing the vinyl. Girls love the way Johnson spins, but he is careful to avoid the trap of stardom.

     

    “I don’t want to be like Bob Marley,” he says. He’s got a bomb in his mouth bigger than the mike in his hands.

     

    Chops wakes up and tries to remix Johnson’s speech. “I don’t want to be chop suey.”

     

    Johnson grins and steps on Chops a little harder with his combat boots.

     

    Women scream.

     

    “I refuse to divorce myself from the realities of life,” says Johnson.

     

    “I don’t want to be chopped liver either. Living in the bottle where everything is distorted or distilled.”

     

    Johnson kicks Chops in the mouth. “Everybody’s got to find their own groove,” says Johnson. “You a sorry case, if you can’t.”

     

    He holds his black thang and scratches it in front of the ladies.

     

    His beat is so fonky: Men holler “it’s sweet as a nut–just level vibes.”

     

    Chops pulls his upper lip away from a cleet and spits the dirt out of his mouth. Suddenly he’s starting to gain a little more respect for Johnson.

     

    “Let the beat hit ’em!” Chops shouts. “Let the music take control! Let the beat go round & round and up & down!”

     

    Johnson kicked Chops in the head and walked away.

     

    Johnson is downright unfaithful. People following him as if at a golf tournament. They fight to see him, cutting out each other’s hearts and giving them to dippers with paper asses and buckets of blood. Everyone is high on brew or drawing a pound or two of kally, Johnson passin naturals on niggahs. Black boys stand in the weed and hold their dicks. Niggahs for life.

     

    I WANNA THANK YOU (FOR LETTING ME BE MYSELF)

     

    I told God. I told him good.

     

    “God,” I said. “God, please don’t let me spend the rest of my goddamn life in this park. If you gotta take me, take me to higher ground. But, please don’t let me go in the park.”

     

    “God,” I said. “You are the man. You are the man. You are the man. I want muscles.”

     

    I gazed around to look at New York.

     

    PRETTY CITY

     

    But, it wasn’t the promised land.

     

    Shawon Dunston grew up in Brooklyn. Now the niggah’s playing baseball in Chicago.

     

    Eddie Perry was from around-the-way, Harlem, but after he moved the crowd to go to school, Exeter, he was shot by a white undercover cop and quit it.

     

    MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE

     

    said Zu-Zu. “You shall reap what you sow.”

     

    “Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t be no ordinary Mo. I got to get out of the ghetto, too. If I live life by tripping, at least I did it my way.” I got this Frank Sinatra song in my head.

     

    Zu-Zu rolled Chops over and spat in his face.

     

    “He got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu. “You chopped his fat head into pieces.”

     

    “Sing sing prison,” I said.

     

    “Someday, Sweetheart,” answered Zu-Zu.

     

    AFTER TONIGHT

     

    I said, “I’m a dead man.”

     

    I covered Chops’ body with a blanket. Zu-Zu spat once more in his face.

     

    “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I said to Zu-Zu. “But, this ain’t Soho or Staten Island or Tribeca or Brooklyn. This is downtown. And we way down. You just can’t go around spitting in niggahs’ faces. I ain’t eighty-sixin no more niggahs for you. Dig?”

     

    Zu-Zu cracked up. “I killed him first,” she said.

     

    She pulled a set of lines out of her shoe that looked like Chops’ forehead peeled from the bottom of her foot and did a little number.

     

    “I am the laughing woman with the black black face,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Lighten up, honey,” I said.

     

    “Living in cellars and in every crowded place.”

     

    “Get it together.”

     

    “I am toiling just to eat,” she says.

     

    “When life gets cheesy, you put on the Ritz.”

     

    “And I laugh,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Fine and dandy, Zu-Zu, except you forgot one thang. You ain’t a woman but rather a confessional little girl who ran away from Queens umteen times before you finally escaped or so you say.”

     

    “Why you gotta call me out?” Zu-Zu asked. She scooted over on the bench and kissed me on the lips, leaving a taste of wild cherry in my mouth.

     

    “My daddy likes it slow,” she said.

     

    “You don’t know what love is,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Sweet rain,” she said.

     

    “Things ain’t what they used to be,” I said. I dreamed of chocolate Kisses. And mumbling.

     

    “Such sweet thunder,” Zu-Zu whispered in my ear.

     

    I flew to move away from Zu-Zu. Her heart was a singing bird. Everytime it fluttered, it gave me Flack–“The Closer I Get To You,” “Oasis” or “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

     

    “What are you singing this time, Zu-Zu?”

     

    “The Song Is You,” she answered.

     

    “What’s wrong with ‘Paper Moon’ or ‘Kind of Blue’ or ‘Hand Jive’ or ‘Emotions’ or ‘Forms and Sounds’ or ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ or ‘Sara Smile’ or ‘I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I’ve Got’ or ‘Dat Dere’?” I asked.

     

    “No more talk,” said Zu-Zu. “For me, life is like the black plague, the bordellos in Bedford-Stuyvesant full of disease that the white man carries back home to Bensonhurst, Queens, and gives to his wife.”

     

    “We’re bigger than life, Zu-Zu.”

     

    “When women talk that way, we dye,” said Zu-Zu, “our lips dark.”

     

    MOOD INDIGO

     

    All we ever do is talk.

     

    Like flatliners, we die several times. But, we keep coming back for more.

     

    “I can’t do no more,” said Zu-Zu. She’s lying her ass off.

     

    “Hush, girl, be quiet,” I said.

     

    IF I COULD SAVE TIME IN A BOTTLE

     

    Zu-Zu got a bottle in her hands and a lake in her mouth. It rained for hours in the park before night stole our faces and painted them blue in watercolor. I wore the mask, Zu-Zu dragging me through the mud, everyone celebrating and stomping on muddy waters even after the thrill was gone. The music cut, our dark faces bleeding through our masks.

     

    The small trees in the park were bent, dropped by big niggahs and east rains that slashed their arms and legs like it was nothing. During the storms, the trees twisted and shook and danced in the wind, their leaves like hair washed with no soap and black water.

     

    New York stood tall as a dirty city with a mouth the size of Frank Sinatra. Zu-Zu and I sat on the bench, our shoes heavy with mud, and ate crab apples, Zu-Zu’s stomach wining and dining her until she finally belched.

     

    New York was a home where men and women ate alone in public and nobody talked. Zu-Zu smoked a cigarette from the garbage and blew cool mint in my face. Then, she spat pieces of cigarette paper out in the sky as if she were throwing up a fistful of dollars.

     

    Zu-Zu reached inside her blouse, wondering if she any money left. I sat on the bench with a box of Kool, singing “woman don’t you know with you, I’m born again.”

     

    It was time she knew.

     

    “Time,” I told her.

     

    “Time,” she stopped.

     

    New York was a dirty city with a mouth as big as Frank Sinatra’s, but nobody ever talked.

     

    “No more dancing girl Zu-Zu?”

     

    Zu-Zu shook her head, “No.” Her soul had already flown south for the winter.

     

    Zu-Zu pulled a handgun out of the garbage can where she stored her stuff and raised it to her head.

     

    Black Monday was the first day of autumn. The fall season came with a bang.

     

    Zu-Zu dropped to the ground and fell out.

     

    “Toy gun,” said Zu-Zu. She cracked up. She showed me the black plastic handle.

     

    I handed Zu-Zu some fire, and we burned while lying in front of one another on the bench.

     

    PURPLE HAZE

     

    I sucked my joint, blue-faced, dragging like Jimi Hendrix with a guitar pick hanging over a bottomed-out lip. We smoked all the grass we could find. Heaven was a smoked-up black skillet holding the earth together, Zu-Zu toiling in the soil. The sky was pasta-red. The low clouds puffy and stuck together like cooked macaroni shells.

     

    Behind the haze, the skyline felt blue, niggahs walking around on depressants and dressed like starving artists. Some brother even claimed he did J.J.’s paintings in Good Times.

     

    I watched the brother walk away, then turned and looked at Zu-Zu. She was dope.

     

    NEFERTITI

     

    There was swinging on 52nd Street. Zu-Zu listened for it, Zu-Zu in pursuit of the 27th man, gold as plentiful as dust on the street.

     

    Zu-Zu was octaroon, 1/8 negro, her hair worn in cornrows. Most people couldn’t tell if she was white or black. Her family was from Queens. One day she woke up and threw away all of her money and moved into Central Park.

     

    “Goodbye, mother. Goodbye, Bojangles. Goodbye, heartache,” she said.

     

    Her daddy had the nerve to cry. “God bless the child who’s got his own,” her daddy said the day Zu-Zu ran away for good. Ramseys Bojangles Girl hated her for not being a boy. He tossed his sandal behind her.

     

    “The day I see yo’ face again will surely be the day you die,” said Ramseys.

     

    “Goodbye heartache,” said Zu-Zu. It could have been “good morning.” Zu-Zu was the only one who knew for sure.

     

    As Zu-Zu told me her story, we sat drinking moonshine and collecting Zu-Zu’s stuff together. Inside I was crying, Zu-Zu’s black-and-blue face half-white under the moon.

     

    STELLA BY STARLIGHT

     

    “Now was it goodbye or goodbye morning?” I had to know.

     

    “It was blue cellophane over my nose and mouth, easy living, my foolish heart, a frame for the blues,” Zu-Zu answered. She was referring to life with her family in Queens before she was exiled.

     

    “What did you say when left that hot house?” I asked.

     

    “I sung ‘It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday,’” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Zu-Zu stood up to straighten her boob-tube for the hundredth time. It was like watching a nudie flick. I looked up to Zu-Zu while white popcorn and seeds dropped from her colored bust to the bench.

     

    “You got a lot of nerve, Zu-Zu.”

     

    Amazing. How in the hell did she get popcorn inside her boob-tube, I asked myself, wondering why it wouldn’t just fall out. Zu-Zu picked a yellow umbrella out of the trash and opened it up.

     

    “Put this over your thang,” said Zu-Zu, using the wet plastic to keep me from mooning. She was inventing prophylactics.

     

    EVIDENCE

     

    Once, Zu-Zu crushed a Styrofoam cup and stuck it inside my pants. Zu-Zu got on her knees and begged me to let her feel the cup.

    PRAYER FOR PASSIVE RESISTANCE

     

    “Please baby baby please,” Zu-Zu whispered. Singing “Don’t Be That Way,” she glared at Heaven.

     

    FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE,

     

    Zu-Zu.

     

    “What’s your problem?”

     

    “My blue heaven,” Zu-Zu replied.

     

    “Blue heaven is full of coppers,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Conception,” she said. She kicked Chops’ fat stomach and spat once more in his face.

     

    TOW AWAY ZONE

     

    Zu-Zu flagged a cop and pointed towards Chops. “Get this fat fucker out of here!” she shouted.

     

    The cop looked like who-me.

     

    “Yeah, I’m talkin to you,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    The cop glanced at his black lizards to see if he was standing in muddy waters.

     

    “You with the blue uniform.”

     

    The whistle dropped out of his mouth.

     

    “You with the big stick and gun on your hip.”

     

    He called for help.

     

    “That’s right,” said Zu-Zu. “Bring your buddies.”

     

    The copper came up to Zu-Zu with two other blues. “I’ve never had a thang blacker than you,” he said.

     

    Zu-Zu smacked him in the face. “Wake up, white boy,” said Zu-Zu. “You stepped out of a dream.”

     

    “Pick up your trash, you black dog,” said the copper. Just like that. “How would you like to marry Liz behind bars?”

     

    “Don’t try to punk me,” said Zu-Zu. “Do your job for a change and take this overweight lover to pig heaven.”

     

    “What’s wrong with him?” asked Charlie Irvine.

     

    “He’s dead.”

     

    “What happened?”

     

    “He tried to fuck me but got smacked on the head by a bottle.”

     

    “No wonder he’s dead,” said Charlie Irvine. The coppers chuckled.

     

    “You’re funny,” said Zu-Zu, “but your thang is too small to be cracking those kind of jokes.” With her index finger and thumb, Zu-Zu showed him about an inch of air.

     

    “Take care of the body yourself,” said the cop. “The spook can rot there in the earth for all I care. I can’t tell him apart from the dirt and mud anyway (hee, hee).”

     

    Chops woke up and gave him the finger. “Fuck you,” he said. He covered his mouth so the cop couldn’t hear him.

     

    MOMENTS LIKE THIS

     

    AFTER YOU’VE GONE

     

    I said, “You’ve come back as lemon drop.”

     

    Chops was bitter.

     

    “Eighty-six all that,” said Chops. “I’m gonna take you out once and for all.”

     

    “About that bump on your head, Chops. I had to do it. You was out of control.”

     

    Chops’ eyes went to the back of his head while he rolled around in the mud, trying to get up. “When I get through with you, you gonna wish you were back in Compton,” Chops swore, “yo’ ex-wife and niggahs chasing you from Carson to Crenshaw.”

     

    “Shut up!” I said.

     

    Zu-Zu laughed in his face.

     

    Chops did a circle with his fingers and then pointed to Zu- Zu’s skirt. “I’m gonna tear it up,” he promised.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You done lost your good thang,” she said.

     

    Chops got up on his hands and knees and then fell back down. “The world is spinning,” said Chops, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

     

    “Quit talking smack and go to sleep,” said Zu-Zu. “Your head has gotta be killing you.”

     

    Chops closed his eyes and groaned. Minutes later, we heard him snoring.

     

    CONFIRMATION

     

    “Did you really live in sunny California?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    I shook my big head as if it were a beach ball being blown by a basement breeze.

     

    “Who are you really?” Zu-Zu asked. “Fess up.”

     

    “I’m Jerry Butler, Count Basie, too legit to quit,” I said. “I couldn’t fall in love with a woman, so I left Compton and came here. When we met at the Metropolitan Museum, I was eating a ketchup sandwich and trying to save myself from the cold, waiting for a train to go through the desert and back to California.”

     

    “Nothing is sadder than the man who eats alone in public,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    We sat talking and smoking dope from the pipe like a tribe called quest.

     

    LONELY BOY

     

    Zu-Zu said, “That’s what you are.” She grabbed my hand, twisted it and we ran several yards to a pale blue tent in the park in search of our future.

     

    SKETCH 1

     

    There were earrings and cheap gold-electroplated costume jewelry and colored scarves and doo-rags and shawls and dolls and poultry and blue racers all over the ground. On a coffee table stained by black coffee, Zu-Zu squeezed a 60-watt lightbulb in a lamp with no shade. A very Black woman fixed Zu-Zu good, turning on the light, holding her hand on the bulb and asking her what she wanted.

     

    “Let go of my hand!” Zu-Zu screamed, the hot bulb burning her skin into a darker shade.

     

    The gypsy woman finally let go. “What’s the matter, bitch? You feeling a little hot?”

     

    “What yo’ problem?” Zu-Zu asked. “You want my man?”

     

    “Shut up, yellow-ass bitch. Nobody likes you anyway. If I wanted yo’ man, I’d take him. Everything I want, I take it. That’s how I am. There ain’t nothing you can do about it. I’m the boss. And I own a doll for every niggah in this park. I can put a spell on you in a minute. Make you mine. So shut up before I find your own personal mojo and give it that whip appeal.”

     

    “Enough with that voodoo shit,” I said. “We ain’t marked for death. If I was Steven Seagal, I would break yo’ bones so you could hear the sound of them cracking.”

     

    “I would be out for justice then,” said the black woman. “It wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. “I’m hard to kill.”

     

    “Maybe,” she said, “but I know how to take out the garbage.” “She’s wacked,” said Zu-Zu. “Let’s blow this joint.”

     

    “Not so fast, Zu-Zu. If this bitch has got something to say, let her say it.”

     

    “I can read you your fortune, but it’s gonna cost you a lot of motherfuckin money,” she said. “You got to pay to play.”

     

    “Here’s twenty dollars, whore–make it good,” I said.

     

    GYPSY WOMAN

     

    My black ass. I turned around and looked for a seat.

     

    “Where are we?” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

     

    “Don’t talk, just listen,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Let me look into my crystal ball,” the black woman said. She gazed into the light bulb, the light giving her a headache.

     

    “Damn,” she said. “You goin have to wait a while. The spirits are tripping.”

     

    “She’s higher than all of us,” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

     

    “You want your future told or a muzzle on your mouth?” she asked.

     

    “I paid for mumbo-jumbo,” I said.

     

    “Where did you get the money from anyway?” Zu-Zu whispered. The black woman ignored us. She shuffled a deck of tarot cards, laid five cards out on the table and then turned one over picturing a faceless man with an ax on his shoulder.

     

    She screamed. “Fear death by chops!” she said.

     

    SPEAK NO EVIL

     

    “Black woman,” Zu-Zu warned, “I’ve killed niggahs for less.”

     

    The black woman handed Zu-Zu a leather string of dangling rubbers, signifying the phallus.

     

    “Take this talisman and wear it round yo’ neck,” she said. “Use it to fight the powers that be.”

     

    “You tryin to be funny or something?” I asked. “You don’t care about her.”

     

    “I ain’t got to care,” she said. “That’s yo’ job. Now get out of here. I’m tired of looking at you.”

     

    HAVE A NICE DAY

     

    Bitch.

     

    TROUBLE EVERYWHERE I ROAM

     

    I looked at Zu-Zu, the talisman around her neck as we walked nervously away.

     

    “Why me?” I asked. I thought about the woman I left behind and the fact that maybe Zu-Zu would never give up any, no matter how nice I was.

     

    We strolled below the trees in silence.

     

    NOW’S THE TIME

     

    Flukie told Sterling Silver, their raw hands snapping off twigs at the top of an elm tree.

     

    “Shut up,” Sterling Silver whispered. “This ain’t a concert for cootie. Speak low.”

     

    “Let’s jump her now,” Flukie muttered.

     

    “Be patient,” said Sterling Silver. “We will.”

     

    IN THE SMALL WEE HOURS

     

    “We ain’t got all day,” said Flukie. “If we don’t get her, it’s our asses.”

     

    “It’s yo’ ass,” said Sterling Silver. “You the one that thought up this shit.”

     

    “We ain’t got to keep our promise.”

     

    “There’s no way we can hide,” said Sterling Silver. “Not with that niggah loose.”

     

    Sterling Silver tried to look down the inside of Zu-Zu’s boob-tube. “Let’s just do it and get it over with,” he said. “The sooner the better,” said Flukie. Sterling Silver could see Zu-Zu’s titties. “Word,” he said.

     

    He and Flukie sat on the heavy branches, emulating dark shadows. No way Zu-Zu could have seen them hovering over her big head like buzzards.

     

    Flukie started thinking about his momma. “If they laid a finger on my momma, it’s over,” he said, fiddling with the red doo-rag on his head so the leaves couldn’t fuck up his wave.

     

    Sterling Silver watched Zu-Zu smear cocoa-butter on the soft spot of her hand where the gypsy had warmed her up like a chicken bone. “Word to the muther,” said Sterling Silver, recklessly eyeballing Zu-Zu’s honey-brown thighs while she bounced, her hips singing “Streetwalker blues.”

     

    Flukie snatched a pointed stick and aimed it at Zu-Zu’s chest. “I put a spell on you,” he said, glycerin and activator gel from his doo-rag dropping slowly on Zu-Zu’s back.

     

    THE MIDNIGHT SUN WILL NEVER SET

     

    Zu-Zu started singing “Vampin’ Liza Jane,” the moon’s glow fully cast upon her now since it was after midnight, the girl seemingly pale from fright night, fog developing by her feet.

     

    “I will cheat death the same way I do a spade in a tabletop game,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    “You will live forever,” I said. We strolled past a water fountain, Zu-Zu looking back at it.

     

    “Do you hear laughter?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “I hear the trippin’ and ailing of the gods being cheated by you and your queens and kings,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “You a lying motherfucker,” she said. She spat in my hair.

     

    “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way, Zu-Zu. But if you gonna spit like that, save your breath for a niggah that’s worth it.”

     

    “Did you spit on me?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “Hell no,” I said.

     

    “What’s all this shit on my back then?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “Droppings,” I said.

     

    We stood and looked at each other. Zu-Zu gazed down at the fog by her feet.

     

    “Enough of this Ten Commandments stuff,” said Zu-Zu, feeling her heart.

     

    MY FUNNY VALENTINE

     

    “Kiss me, and I’ll kiss you back,” I said to Zu-Zu, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the park trying to get her.

     

    “Let’s wait awhile,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “I want you,” I told Zu-Zu. “And I want you to want me, too.”

     

    “What you won’t do for love,” said Zu-Zu, feeling herself for a pulse.

     

    “Let’s get it on,” I said.

     

    “Keep on truck in’,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “We got a love thang,” I said.

     

    “You can’t hurry love,” said Zu-Zu, trying to see herself in a wine bottle.

     

    “You can’t hide love,” I said.

     

    “I’m a private dancer,” Zu-Zu said, “dancing for money.”

     

    “Baby love,” I said. “I ain’t got nobody.”

     

    Zu-Zu watched as a mosquito bit my neck. “Ain’t nobody better,” she said.

     

    I slapped the mosquito with one hand and it dove off my neck, doing a full-twisting somersault with about a 3.5 degree of difficulty. It looked up at me from the ground.

     

    “What do you think?” it asked.

     

    “Got to give it up,” I said. I put my foot down. “C’mon, Zu-Zu, take one helluva of a chance.”

     

    Zu-Zu was not paying attention. She kept looking around, noticing that everybody had suddenly vacated the park.

     

    “What happened to all the spooks?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    GHOST TOWN

     

    “Take anything you want,” I said. We walked over to a trash can and dug up a couple of black western costumes, Zu-Zu throwing everything to the ground.

     

    “You got a gun?” she asked.

     

    “Yep.”

     

    I showed it to her. She turned and looked the other way like it was nothing.

     

    “You want it?” I asked.

     

    Zu-Zu popped me on the head. My knees buckled, Zu-Zu sticking her pretty face between my bowlegs.

     

    “Giddy-up,” she said.

     

    I got myself back together. “Where are the clowns?” I asked.

     

    “Get up!” Zu-Zu shouted. Her neck was caught between my legs, glad that they weren’t clippers. She had always been told that the L.A. Clippers were bad.

     

    “Get off!” Zu-Zu shouted.

     

    “Why you sweatin’ me?” I asked.

     

    Zu-Zu rolled her head, trying to shake out the cobwebs. “I’m foggy,” she said.

     

    I stepped to her smooth and direct. “Yippee-ky-yea,” I said. “I’m the fastest gun in the west. Let’s do this with a quickness and get it over with. Let’s do this like bam after a glass of whiskey.” I slung my gun around and opened up the cloth cape I was wearing.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in the dirt. “You must think you Superman or Clint Eastwood or hard to kill. You got to have a bigger gun than that to do me. You couldn’t shoot Melba Moore with that. Melba toast would have nothing to worry about. You couldn’t knock a hole in a slice of brown bread. Even if you knew how to shoot, your six-shooter ain’t loaded.”

     

    “I can pull the trigger,” I said.

     

    “What’s wrong?” Zu-Zu asked. “Gun jammed?”

     

    “All it needs is a little lubrication.”

     

    “Lubricate it yourself,” said Zu-Zu, digging deeper into the trash. “What I want is a shot of whiskey. The only way you’ll do me is if I’m drunk and slobbering over you like a saloon gal.”

     

    I drew a bottle of Jack Daniels from the can with a little booze left in it.

     

    “Check you out,” said Zu-Zu. “You like Mr. GQ Smooth now.”

     

    “Yep,” I said, industrial spurs spinning around on my black dingo boots like throwing stars mowing the grass.

     

    “Don’t touch me,” said Zu-Zu, staring at my spurs like they were wheels of fortune.

     

    “Shut up, Zu-Zu. This ain’t Dodge City, and you ain’t Kitty. But even if that fog was gunsmoke, we’d still be in trouble cause that’s how we’re living. Saddle up so we can split this ghost town. I feel like Matt Dillon in love with a skeezer.”

     

    “Johnny,” said Zu-Zu, “you’ve come back to me.”

     

    “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

     

    Zu-Zu pointed at an inscription on the handle of my gun. “Why Johnny, you can’t read.”

     

    I waved goodbye with one hand.

     

    “Five-card stud,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    “Five fingers of death,” I replied.

     

    Zu-Zu started shouting: “Johnny’s got a gun, and is goin’ cap a woman. A 22-year old motherfuckin’ punk with an AK-47 he paid 18 hundred for and a vow to himself that he’d rather be in jail than six-feet under. He’s a black cowboy, roping cattle and catching dogies in a pair of rawhide boots instead of killing for a pair of Cons.

     

    I did a few tricks with my gun and pointed at Zu-Zu’s booty. “Out here, everybody got a piece,” I shouted.

     

    WARM VALLEY

     

    “A little closer,” said Sterling Silver, waiting in the tree until he could see straight down Zu-Zu’s boob tube and into her drawers.

     

    TALLEST TREES

     

    They started talking smack. “Why is it the tallest trees are climbed by the littlest niggahs?” they asked themselves.

     

    “Shut the fuck up,” said Flukie.

     

    The tree dropped Sterling Silver and Flukie in the dirt, their big heads rolling through the mud and down the prairie until they crashed into my boots and stopped, their faces stuck on my toes like black olives stuck onto toothpicks.

     

    Zu-Zu cheesed. “Howdy, boys,” she said.

     

    “Who are these guys?” I asked Zu-Zu, like she knew.

     

    “Guess,” said Flukie.

     

    “Gucci,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “No, I mean guess who we are,” said Flukie.

     

    “Amos and Andy,” I said.

     

    “D.J. Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall,” I said.

     

    “Chuck D and Flavor Flav,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “What are you, stupid?” asked Sterling Silver.

     

    “Give you a hint,” said Flukie. “We villains.”

     

    “Batman and Robin,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Lone Ranger and Tonto,” I said.

     

    “Shut up,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Jeopardy or Name That Tune.”

     

    “Whatever happened to Name That Tune?–I used to like that show,” Zu-Zu whispered.

     

    Flukie stood up and waved his gun at my mouth. “Don’t fuck with him,” Sterling Silver said. “He’s got a trigger-finger.”

     

    “What do you boys want?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    Sterling Silver would not talk to her. “Give us the girl, Bronco Billy, lest your balls are in double jeopardy.”

     

    “Don’t do anything nutty, homey,” said Flukie. “This is fifty-eight magnum. It can blow your head clean off with one shot. If you don’t believe the hype, go head and make my day, Billy boy.”

     

    “Step off,” said Zu-Zu. “Every dog has his day.”

     

    “Stop that cow from chewing,” Sterling Silver told Flukie. “She got a mouth bigger than Aretha Franklin but sings like Omar Shariff.”

     

    Zu-Zu looked shamed and insulted. “Take care of ’em for me, Johnny,” she said.

     

    “Alright, Billy The Kid, it’s your show,” said Sterling Silver. “Are you gone give us the girl, or do we have to take her?”

     

    “Where you want your bullet, homey?” Flukie asked. “This fifty-seven magnum is gettin’ awfully itchy.”

     

    Sterling Silver peeped at Flukie. “When you gonna get your GED?” he asked. “You don’t even know what kind of gun you got.”

     

    “Fuck you,” said Flukie. “I tell you what. I betcha’ I know the number of times I had my dick sucked.”

     

    Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You’re disgusting,” she said.

     

    “Yep,” said Sterling Silver. “Now let’s get on with the show.”

     

    “You bad,” I said. “Go ahead and do something.”

     

    “Bad,” said Flukie. “Three syllables. B-A-D.”

     

    “Shut up, Flukie,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Romper Room.

     

    “Damn–whatever happened to Romper Room?” Zu-Zu whispered. “That was a great show.”

     

    “This bitch thinks she’s in Kansas with her dog Toto,” said Sterling Silver. “I can’t wait to do her.”

     

    Flukie walked up and grabbed Zu-Zu’s tit, grinning from ear to ear.

     

    “You so ugly you scared all the crows away,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    The tallest elm trees kneeled and said a prayer for Zu-Zu.

     

    TAKE THE “A” TRAIN

     

    Flukie grabbed his crotch and stood in Zu-Zu’s face. “Oh, so you a livery-bitch,” he said. “How would you like to come service me? I’ll whip that weak ass into shape.”

     

    Sterling Silver chuckled. “Look, Flukie. She can let it go, and, like dust, that rickety booty is gone with the wind. Chee, chee.”

     

    “Enough talk,” I said. “Draw.”

     

    Flukie searched his baggy pants for a pen or pencil or etch- sketch.

     

    “Shoot,” Sterling Silver shouted. “Finish this kindergarten cop before I get mad and blow away Monk’s girl.”

     

    “Draw,” I said.

     

    “Smoke him,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “Draw,” I said.

     

    “I ain’t got no papers!” Flukie cried.

     

    Sterling Silver whipped Flukie with a coke stare. “What are you, caining or something? Take that boy out and smoke him!”

     

    “See ya,” said Zu-Zu. She gave me that cheek-to-cheek comfort and then moved the crowd.

     

    We stood silent in a triangle, each man beginning to backpedal, drawing lines with their feet.

     

    THEME FROM THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

     

    It was early morning. We stood recklessly eyeballing one another, our hands covering our guns.

     

    “This feels good,” said Flukie, the zipper open in his baggies, his big head surrounded by shadows under the armpit of a tree.

     

    “What’s up with all this black?” said Sterling Silver, pointing his index finger at me as if it were filled with a shitload of mean bullets.

     

    “Good guys wear black,” I said. “So why you wanna dog me out?”

     

    “It’s the ho we want,” said Flukie. “Give us the ho and we’re outta here lickety-split.”

     

    “With a quickness,” Sterling Silver added. “Otherwise, you’ll get a taste of these silver bullets.”

     

    They took a few more steps back. I spread my cape and showed them my holster, running my fingers over the encased bullets like they were a line of condoms. “Shoot,” I said.

     

    Sterling Silver squinted. Flukie started getting nervous, his hands sweating.

     

    “Let’s go,” said Flukie.

     

    “Why you sweating me?” Sterling Silver asked.

     

    “No more talk,” I said.

     

    The theme music played as we backed up even more, standing with our legs apart. Flukie started checking out me and Sterling Silver, his trigger-finger twitching, sweat on his brow, his clothes sticking to his skin, his Reebok Pumps leaving footprints in the dirt and mud and jacking him up to stand tall. He jerked on his penis some more to stay hard and cool.

     

    “When the music stops, you niggahs are dead,” I said.

     

    The theme music played. Sterling Silver stood where I could barely see him, his big lips singing Michael Jackson’s song “Bad,” his dark figure shaded by trees, his right leg crooked, his black belt sportin’ a silver buckle, his dirty hands moving over the buckle, his black hair cut into a V at the back, his teeth rotten. He stared around for a black hat. When he couldn’t find one, he pulled a bent silver spoon out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

     

    “When the music stops, hasta la vista, babies.”

     

    As the music played, I put a bubble gum cigar in my mouth and chewed on it, quickly working my way down to the butt. Flukie took off his doo-rag and used it to wipe his face, StaSof beginning to roll down the side. He wrung the rag for several minutes and then put it back on his head. He stood erect in muddy waters, acting like a laughing hyena to try to play off his nervousness.

     

    “Watch where you shoot those silver bullets,” Flukie said to Sterling.

     

    “Die, you dog!” Zu-Zu shouted from somewhere.

     

    Flukie looked behind himself to see if there was a cemetery there, a tombstone marked “unknown.”

     

    “What’s the girl name?” he asked.

     

    I picked up a rock and wrote on it with a crayon. Then I threw the rock back down and opened my cape a little more, the butt falling out of my mouth, my eyes squinting, the musical chimes beginning to slow down, Flukie staring at the rock like it was gold, Sterling Silver covering his precious buckle and pretending to be Ready For The World singing “let’s get straight down to business.”

     

    DAY-BREAKING BLUES

     

    A fine-ass woman walked by tripping. “Can’t we have one day where there ain’t no fighting?”

     

    SPUR OF THE MOMENT

     

    “Thing,” said Zu-Zu. She was jealous. She saw the woman checking me out.

     

    PEACE

     

    “I ‘m outta here,” the woman said.

     

    SO WHAT

     

    “Nobody asked for your two cents anyway,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE

     

    As the chimes winded down, we felt for our guns–Sterling Silver’s face black, Flukie staring at the rock and wiping the glycerin off of his brown lips, Zu-Zu shouting that a gunfight would kill a light-skin niggah like me.

     

    That’s what I liked about Zu-Zu. She was always looking out for me.

     

    “It’s over,” said Zu-Zu. “You don’t stand a chance.”

     

    “Be optimistic,” I said. The line was from The Sounds of Blackness.

     

    “I like their concept!” Zu-Zu shouted. “Very positive! They got some strong black men and women!”

     

    “Yep,” I said. I spat a chaw of gum out and let it hit my boots. I wished that it had been baseball card gum instead. It cost more, but the cigars were stale.

     

    “Hubba-Bubba,” said Zu-Zu, “it looks like this is your last dance. I hear footsteps, niggahs scattin’. It’s all bop to me.”

     

    “Boplicity,” I said. “These niggahs ain’t shit. The situation looks deeper than what it really is. It takes two to tango. Don’t make me over. Me and you got more bounce to the ounce. I can jam. When the popping starts, yoyo get funky.”

     

    I threw Zu-Zu a weak shovel. “Dig,” I said.

     

    “You talking to me?” Zu-Zu asked. Flukie pulled his hand out of his pants.

     

    “Yep.”

     

    “I can’t believe you,” said Zu-Zu. “You’re sugarfree. Instead of being a good guy, you acting like A Rage in Harlem. One minute, you’re nicey-nicey. The next minute, you treat me like my name was Slim.”

     

    “Shut up, bitch!” said Flukie.

     

    Sterling Silver cracked up again, breaking up into pieces, the spoon going shake-shake-shake in his mouth, his cheeks stretched out like he was the Joker. “Tell me,” he said, standing in the dark. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

     

    Here was a man who gave up being brown and beige.

     

    DARN THAT DREAM

     

    Black must have been all he ever wanted to be.

     

    KOKO

     

    Hot chocolate.

     

    BODY AND SOUL

     

    The mouse and the man.

     

    RUDY A MESSAGE TO YOU

     

    “Two sevens clash,” I said. “Things a come to bump. I’ll wear you to the ball. Rule them, rudie. [I pointed to the melee of cowhands surrounding Sterling Silver.] Be Prince of Darkness, but if you can live, if you can live, if you can live…pray for me, man.”

     

    SILENT PRAYER

     

    Sterling Silver refused to say anything else aloud. Flukie’s fingers started twitching. Zu-Zu sang “Trouble in Mind Blues.” I opened my cape some more, the gun and holster slinging up-and-down my hip. With the wind gusting–my pants flaring out, I could smell Flukie’s Brut cologne and musty armpits, the sweat rolling down the side of his chest, darkening his shirt and wetting the inside of his pants. The showdown was the climax. Flukie felt his gun withdraw. He reached down and pushed it forward. Zu-Zu ducked down. I spat again, as if to dedicate this gunfight to her. Zu-Zu wanted nothing to do with it. She gave me the finger, then began to polish her nails. Sterling Silver cracked up, his gun shaking and vibrating. Flukie couldn’t take it. He drew his gun. I drew my gun and fired a shitload of mean bullets. I heard bullets cussing and fussing and discussing who to fuck up as they went everywhere. Niggahs started crying and dying and falling to the ground like shredded leaves. Zu-Zu crawled into the brush and fell out, the talisman barely able to hang on to her little neck. The trees leaned over to get out of the way of pissed-off bullets. Pandemonium erupted. Ashy niggahs and dusties ran everywhere, forgetting about looking dap. Hot shells played pepper with chicken legs. Sterling Silver’s gun licked his lips like Colonel Sanders taking part in Custard’s last stand. I saw wooden spears go flying by my big head, rapper Tony Scott and Zulu Nation trying to get people to stop the violence. While black people did their war dance, Flukie darted over to the brush, tore the talisman off Zu- Zu’s neck and dragged her pretty head away. I kept trading bullets with Sterling Silver like they were basketball cards. I stopped for a moment to ask him if he had any bubble gum. He hesitated. It was as if he was thinking I’ll-trade-you-Kareem- for-Magic. Kareem, of course, was a playground legend at nearby Power Memorial High when he was Lew Alcindor, but Magic would undoubtedly end up being a collector’s item; it seemed like niggahs had to have it in order to survive AIDS, gang-bangin’ and all that jazz. Zu-Zu screamed for help. She clung to a condom while Flukie shredded her blouse, Zu-Zu reaching back for anything she could grab and hold on to. She uprooted small trees and plants, creating a trail of leaves and murdered flowers. With his gun out of bullets, Flukie stared at Zu-Zu’s breasts like they were milk duds only good for suckers. He yawned when he realized that her nipples were no bigger than a penny. She stuck a root in his mouth. He chewed it until rootbeer dripped out. I aimed my gun at Flukie and tried to smoke him, but I ran out of bullets; they wanted no part of the blood and took off. Sterling Silver cracked up. He thought it was funny. He kissed my bullets goodbye as they crawled away. His dirty skin looked like an earthquake had hit it. He shot at my head. I kneeled down and begged for forgiveness.

     

    “Pardon me,” I said. “My behavior was inexcusable. I was neglected as a child, so I never learned to respect others.”

     

    Zu-Zu was still screaming.

     

    “Take her away!” Sterling Silver shouted. Flukie smacked her, then dragged her off, Zu-Zu’s face bleeding lipstick.

     

    “God,” I said. “You are the man. Help me.”

     

    Sterling Silver squeezed harder on his gun. “You think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?” he asked. “What makes you think God is a he? He could be a she. After all, if God was a man, why would he let us fight and kill each other like this?”

     

    “The Lawd works in strange ways,” I said.

     

    “Fuck that,” said Sterling Silver. “We the ones smokin’ one another. It’s called survival. It’s a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”

     

    He walked up and pushed me in the chest.

     

    “Don’t push me,” I said, “cause I’m close to the edge. I’m bout to [pause] lose my head.”

     

    Sterling Silver pressed his gun against my big lips and fired.

     

    YOU’RE NICKED

     

    He cracked up. I looked at him, blood running down my chin tripping and shit.

     

    “Jesus!” I said.

     

    He stuck the gun inside my mouth and ordered me to suck on it.

     

    “Jesus!” I shouted.

     

    He kicked me in the crotch, put his finger on the trigger and mumbled “pop go da weasel.”

     

    I heard one shot. I closed my eyes and thought “Adios, Amigo.” When I opened them, I saw Sterling Silver sprinting away, busting out. Even his gun was laughing, smoke coming out of his mouth.

     

    I stayed on my knees until I finished my prayer. “Thank you, God,” I said. “But if you were really a woman, you would have taken that gun away from him.”

     

    As I watched Sterling Silver take off, I thought about something Zu-Zu once said: “Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest and passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.”

     

    I GO CRAZY

     

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Will Downing…”

     

    I sat down at a table in the park and reminiscenced about the time me and Zu-Zu snuck through the back door of a jazz club, bogarted our way through a waiting line, sat down at a non- smoking table and had candlelight dinner with white wine. Zu-Zu had black velvet and said that she never felt so good.

     

    When we left, Zu-Zu stole the China plate for a souvenir. I swiped two cloth napkins, a wine glass, the incense burner and a long black candle.

     

    “Put the candle back,” Zu-Zu said when we got up from the table.

     

    “What for?”

     

    “I don’t like it.”

     

    That was vintage Zu-Zu. She was forever sensitive. She dedicated her life to discussing problems of women, color and money. She was always tripping, always resisting, always crossing the boundaries. Chops once said that the only way he could ever get Zu-Zu was if he whittled her down.

     

    BLUES INSIDE AND OUT

     

    Zu-Zu was 100% woman.

     

    I lowered my head so low while thinking about Zu-Zu that I hit it on the table and cut a small bit of skin off the braille on my forehead. I sung “Heart-Breaking Blues,” now that Zu-Zu was gone.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    DJ Herc has got it going on. He started playing a ballad by Toni, Tony, Tone, and scratching it, both deferring presence and reinforcing it by repeating the same line.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Ooo-o, baby. It’s just us two. I don’t need nobody else, Zu-Zu.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Where you taking me!” Zu-Zu screamed.

     

    “Just keep on walkin’,” said Flukie.

     

    “What we had was good,” Zu-Zu said. She was thinking of both the time when she was free and when she was with me.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Niggahs around me are talking about the rumor that Mister Magic might play for New York and Knickerbocker coach Pat Riley.

     

    “Bring back the days of Grover Washington Jr.,” I tell them.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “There’s fifty bucks in it for you if you just cooperate,” Sterling Silver told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Money can’t buy you love, can’t buy you happiness,” ZuZu replied. “The best things in life are free.”

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Don’t worry about a damn thing,” I said, believing that somehow Zu-Zu could hear me.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Whatever you want,” Zu-Zu said. Flukie has got his gun inside her skirt.

     

    “Shut up unless you want to get a shot in the ass.”

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Chops came running up out of nowhere and said that it was up to us now to get Zu-Zu back. [Break]

     

    “Another Marley remix!”

     

    HOLD ON

     

    “To your love,” I said. I dedicated my life and my next move to Zu-Zu. Then I grabbed Chops and moved the crowd, Chops shouting that we were Batman and Robin in Gotham City.

     

    “Somebody phone commissioner Gordon’s office,” I heard some crank say.

     

    IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM

     

    I had to tell that buster off.

     

    EASY DOES IT

     

    Zu-Zu was getting a little annoyed with the way Flukie was handling her. She pulled away and showed him her tits and ass.

     

    “Dickie’s dream,” she said.

     

    “Lady be good,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “She ain’t nothing but ham n’ eggs,” said Flukie.

     

    “I am what I am,” Zu-Zu said. She sounded like Gloria Gaynor singing “I will survive.”

     

    They finally reached Monk at the Rumsey Playfield, and he checked her out closely.

     

    “I want a little girl,” he said.

     

    “Swell,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m about to be raped by Lester Young.”

     

    He slapped her, and she spat in his face.

     

    He pushed her down to the ground. “Since you like using yo’ mouth so much, why don’t you try this?”

     

    He unzipped his pants and showed her his gun.

     

    “You must be kidding,” Zu-Zu said. “I’m not your shoe shine boy.”

     

    Monk did a moten swing but missed her. “You lucky,” he said. “Usually I never miss.”

     

    Monk whistled through his fingers to summon his boys. Then he sat down and waited. He tried to make the mind and body one like Buddha.

     

    FOUR AND MORE

     

    Monk’s boys rushed in, carrying guns and poker cards, and sat down beside Zu-Zu. They roped her and gagged her mouth with a dirty bandanna.

     

    “Suck me until I tell you to stop,” the bandanna told ZuZu. Zu-Zu sang a lonesome lullaby, hoping that Monk would go ahead and doze off since he was trying to reach the spirit world anyway.

     

    Monk opened his eyes. “That’s not the kind of spirit world I’m trying to reach,” he said. He asked his boys if they hit the drugstore like he told them. They busted open three cases of Old Milwaukee and a carton of cigarettes. Monk grinned from ear-to- ear, then swung at the long ponytail of one of his boys.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said another one of his boys.

     

    “So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Ben Hodges sneaked away, holding his big head, in order to get himself back together.

     

    RUBBER NECK

     

    As we run through the park, me and Chops feel our heads wobbling as if they were on necks made of latex.

     

    “You think we’ll ever find her?” Chops asked.

     

    “Be optimistic,” I said. I couldn’t help wondering where Chops had been all this time.

     

    Chops couldn’t run for long. He stopped to listen to a fat lady singing. “It’s over,” Chops said. “We’re too late.”

     

    “Shut up and run!” I shouted.

     

    “I’m dead,” Chops said.

     

    I snatched his big head and tossed it forward. “Run,” I said.

     

    Chops sighed. “I’m tired of running,” he said. “You go ahead.”

     

    I called him a “rudie.” Then I moved the crowd without him.

     

    MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

     

    Monk and the boys sat around and played poker like they were waiting for Loop Garoo Kid to ride out of the sunset from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. As legend tells it, the infamous Loop was a bullwhacker so arrogant and unfeeling that he would stamp “ship to Thailand” on the rears of virgin women, then demand their coin for postage.

     

    Loop was an icon for Monk, but an anti-hero for Zu-Zu. “Why don’t you just get on with it?” she asked. They readied themselves like musicians in a jazz set, home on the range.

     

    Monk poked out his lips to play alto sax. Flukie was on the serpent, his hands inside his pants. Sterling Silver on bass, booming in Zu-Zu’s face while talking yin-yang (Chinese principles of good and bad borrowed from Confucius). Ranchhand Arthur Walker on dumb-piano, standing silent behind the rest of the homeboys. Black cowboy Bill Pickett on guitar, plucking strands of Zu-Zu’s hair, his doggie Spradley eating dry Tang nearby. Cattle rustler Isom Dart did drums, musical glasses, nose-flute, Moog synthesizer, small-pipes, bazooka and glass harmonica. He tried repeatedly to go straight but was unable to give up his addiction to trying anything. Hodges got on the horn, talking fast between breaths and clutching his long rifle. Nat Love, better known as “Deadwood Dick,” liked virginals but agreed to take a mouth-organ.

     

    Zu-Zu sat tied up like Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary. She clenched her hands, making them shake like fists of fury.

     

    The men all paused. They knew that they was looking good. They were holding on to their guns. Their hair was fierce. And, they saw themselves riding in Zu-Zu’s coach like it was a copus limousine.

     

    Pickett restarted the action by snatching crumbs of caked-on makeup off Zu-Zu’s face.

     

    “Leave it on!” Love demanded. “The more makeup and mascara, the merrier.”

     

    Hodges called her “painted woman,” thinking he was clever. It wasn’t clever or even ornery, but the name stuck.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in their faces. Monk walked over and swung at her.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said Dart.

     

    “So I did,” Monk said. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Love’s lips were bleeding. He dashed for a washcloth, blood falling to the ground.

     

    “You popped him good, boss,” said Walker.

     

    Monk threw a can of beer and spat in Zu-Zu’s face. “He’ll be back.”

     

    The men all paused like they didn’t know if he would come back. Meantime, Monk realized that Zu-Zu had managed to spit and talk and sing with her big mouth gagged. He was pissed.

     

    “Who put that weak bandanna over her mouth?” Monk asked. He untied the knot and threw the thing away.

     

    “Give it back to me!” Zu-Zu shouted. “It’s dirty, but it’s good.”

     

    The bandana cried tears of joy. “Look at me,” it said. “Did you see the way she sucked me? I’m all wet, and she wants me back. I don’t know what to say. I guess I’m all choked up.”

     

    “You’ll be choked, period, if you don’t shut yo’ mouth,” Flukie said. He was always the violent one.

     

    “Say you love me,” said Zu-Zu. She cut loose from the ropes and retrieved the bandanna.

     

    “Silence, painted woman!” said Monk. He walked over and rubbed the bandanna against her face. “If you want the bandanna, you can have it. Wipe the makeup off your face before I steal your riches.”

     

    “No!” Love screamed, running back to the gang. “Why give her the opportunity to be herself, a woman. Let her stay an artificial nigger. Love her the way she is, or leave her and let another man dominate her.”

     

    Monk stretched his face and thought of “Teacher” back in Shaolin:

     

    “Why the tonsure?” Monk asked.

     

    His teacher tossed a porcelain saucer, making it skip along the surface of the drinking water in the well. “They want you to be like Mike,” he grudgingly said. “It is not my will, but rather the will of the school.” Teacher flung another plate, once again making it skip along the water before breaking on the ground.

     

    “Why must I emulate Michael Jordan?” Monk asked.

     

    “You cannot leave the 35th chamber until you do,” Teacher said. He threw a sword, making it skip along the water.

     

    “But Teacher…”

     

    “The goal of the 35th chamber is submission!” shouted Teacher. “If you cannot submit, then you must go!”

     

    Monk kneeled by Teacher’s sandals. “Yes, Teacher. I beg forgiveness. I kissed the very ground you walk on. I shall do what the school asks of me.”

     

    “Um.” Teacher hurled a little Japanese girl and made her skip along the water.

     

    Monk opened his eyes and stood up. “That’s live!” Monk said. “How did you do that, homie?”

     

    “This ain’t Kung Fu,” Teacher said. “Quit asking so many questions.”

     

    Monk grabbed a piece of porcelain and glass, waving the sharp edges at Teacher’s throat. “Tell me, or I’m going to tell the school how many dishes you’ve broken.”

     

    “Okay, okay, okay,” said Teacher. “But after I tell you, I never want to see yo’ face again.”

     

    Monk sat back down while Teacher meditated and spat out the secret. “Speed, plus pressure, allows the object to skip, that is, pass over the waters.”

     

    Monk rose and kicked Teacher in the shin. “Thanks,” said Monk. “I promise not to tell the school that you’re the nigger busboy they’ve been looking for.”

     

    “Hey man, where you going?” Teacher asked.

     

    “To Harlem!” Monk shouted.

     

    “Haarlem in the Netherlands?” Teacher asked.

     

    “In America!” Monk shouted. “I’m catching a ride with that honky Christopher Columbus!” Monk sprinted away to be a part of New York immigration.

     

    SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME

     

    Walker wanted nothing to do with what he thought was going to be a cosmetic make-over.

     

    “Follow the travelin’ light to Forty Second Street,” Monk said. When Walker turned away, Monk swung at him.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said Love.

     

    “So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Dart was holding his crotch in pain. “What you hit me for?” he asked.

     

    “I never liked you anyway,” Monk said. “You remind me of a busboy I once knew. Now shut up and tie her up real good. Speed, plus pressure, will only make matters worse. She’s deliberately trying to skip the torment. She’s spitting in our faces in hopes of making us mad so that she can’t be broken.”

     

    The homeboys all looked at each other. “Did you give him the right pack of cigarettes?” Love asked Pickett.

     

    “I gave him Kool,” Pickett said.

     

    “Then why is he tripping like this?” Dart asked.

     

    “What is this?” Monk asked. “A meeting in the ladies room? Hurry up and rope her before she gets loose! Brand her “government inspected,” then let’s move the crowd and herd some more young black girls before the other gangs corner the market!”

     

    Sterling Silver ordered Flukie not to budge. “Our money first!” Sterling Silver insisted.

     

    “I don’t owe you nothing!” said Monk. “Get going before you get hurt!”

     

    “I’m going home to momma,” said Flukie. He took off.

     

    “Look at that spook go!” The boys all laughed heartily, Monk busted up.

     

    “We’ll be back,” Sterling Silver promised. He turned and chased after Flukie, Spradley barking at him.

     

    “Let’s get out of here before those lugheads come back,” Monk said. “Hide the girl by the telephone pole and tall trees lined up over there. She should feel at home with all those dicks standing in line.”

     

    Monk liked hangin’ with the homeboys because they always laughed at his jokes.

     

    FEE FI FO FUM

     

    Monk enjoyed being a giant. He strutted towards nirvana.

     

    GIANT STEPS

     

    Making impressions. Monk improvised his ascension. He was live at the village vanguard. He was Soultrane. Meditations. Africa/Brass. “One of my favorite things,” said Love “Supreme.”

     

    Monk climbed a steep hill, yelling for the new DJ, Shep Pettibone, to remix his life. Pettibone started scratching Blue Magic and B B & Q’s “(I’m a) Dreamer” into Smoke City’s “Dreams” and “(We’re Living) In The World of Fantasy.” That’s how bad he was. The niggah could cut-up. He was better than Clivilles and Cole put together. He could jam on vinyl like Michael Jackson. He could take four Gemini 1200 turntables and mix them all at once, without using scratch or brake pads. As Angela Bofill would say, the boy was “too tough.” Shep was the only DJ that Monk ever liked.

     

    “Let’s go,” Monk said. He wanted to see his boy spin. Off in the distant horizon, Pettibone broke out with a megamix.

     

    “This stuff is really fresh…”

     

    SINGLE LIFE

     

    “I’m living the single, single, single–life!” I kept running, despite the fact that I was all by myself, in search of Zu-Zu. I could hear the DJ flipping the tracks like it was nothing.

     

    JUST A TOUCH OF LOVE

     

    “All I want to do before we leave is feel her breasts, see if she’s a milk-giver,” said Nat Love.

     

    ALL AROUND THE WORLD

     

    “I can’t find my baby.” I was frustrated.

     

    NO ONE’S GONNA LOVE YOU

     

    Zu-Zu spat in Love’s face.

     

    “When did you first spit on a niggah?” Pickett asked. “Do you remember the time?”

     

    “Send me forget-me-nots,” said Zu-Zu, “to help me to remember.”

     

    PUMP IT

     

    A brother cheered as I raced past him.

     

    U CAN’T TOUCH THIS

     

    Zu-Zu spat in Pickett’s face. “To Sir with Love,” she said.

     

    CONTROL

     

    “I need her alive,” said Monk.

     

    CAN’T STOP

     

    I told an old man, “I’m looking at you, you’re looking at me.”

     

    The old man chuckled. “I’m walking down the street watching ladies go by, watching you.”

     

     

  • The Titles Sequence From the Adventures Of Lucky Pierre

    Robert Coover

    Department of English
    Brown University

     

    (Cantus.) In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city.

     

    And now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the tenebrous absences behind the eye.

     

    And still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an unclean widow, an emergence from C, a titular C, tentative and parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth.

     

    The glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now blurring, now defined.

     

    Now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, C to C and F again, she findeth no rest. How many have died here?

     

    The plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. Overtaken amidst the narrow defiles. Continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. All her gates are desolate. The eye courses the valley to its yawning embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted. Gravis. Innig. In bitterness, yes con amarezza, she is with bitterness.

     

    Beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just beyond, just below…

     

    Ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end and exposed like an open grave! The light flares and wanes, flutters, as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of harts. O woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. Angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the tremulous matinal gloom.

     

    Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. Flickering neumes. VAGINAL ORIFICE. LABIA MAJORA. And not a propylaeum: a PERINEUM. ANUS. Alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. C to C and F again. Like the echo of letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: URETHRA, CLITORIS, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the coldest hour. Crying: her filthiness is in her skirts.

     

    Between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters suspended mysteriously in the archway–FLESHY PILLOW, now sharp, now diffuse–beyond and through all this, we see the distant teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL CANAL, it is snowing on the city.

     

    O Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding snow.

     

    Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his risks–or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian- crossing sign, blurred by the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the morning traffic.

     

    His hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is all but buried in his winter habit. Only his eyes stare forth, aglitter with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. His mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am I doing out here? His hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on keeping their brains from freezing.

     

    Oh, my poor doomed ass, I’m in real trouble, he whimpers to himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play the fucking hero?

     

    He walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting the world’s glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: Lucky Pierre.

     

    The swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily forth. Subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and there’s the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. Tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead fetuses, old shoes. Cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and crumpling into snowbanks. Above the crowds, a billboard asks: WHAT IS MY PRICK DOING IN YOUR CUNT, LIZZIE? Six blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: FUCKING ME! FUCKING ME! O SO NICELY! Smoke rises from a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming themselves by the ruins. Distant crackle: trouble in the city. Somewhere.

     

    A little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers up at the light, now changing from green to red. Her spectacles are frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. The man, trying to catch the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, glissandos right into the old lady’s humped-over backside, bowling her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. There is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her down. Old as she was, it’s still all a little visceral, but soon enough the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest.

     

    –Pity, someone mutters.

     

    –Life’s tough.

     

    –Where’s the street department? Goddamn it, they’re never around when you need them.

     

    The light changes, the old lady is trampled away. There’s the blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, and snow. Thousands of feet. Going all directions. Whush, crump, crump, stomp. Crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. Someone’s pocketwatch. Beer cans. Crump, crump, crump, a kind of rasper continuo. Windup toys and belt buckles. Bicycle sprocket. Ticket stubs. All those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, almost whispering: That’s right, Maggie, lift your arse and whush, crump, crump, tickle my balls! Oh christ, it’s cold! It’s too fucking cold!

     

    Listen, get your mind off it. Think of something else. E.g. comma green places. Where it’s warm exclamation mark. That’s it. Chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? Come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a tree, peeks out, showing her ass. He bounds over fallen trunks, crackling branches and dry leaves. Splashing through a brook. Up mossy rocks. Delicious stink. Yeah, good, moving along now, keep it up colon. Cavorting in soft grass. Some kind of music…

     

    (Front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: BLAAAAT!)

     

    Cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that’s good, Cissy’d like that, all’ antico, right. Her handsome ass aglow in the sun. He licks it, tongues her cunt. Yum. She kicks him, springs away. They circle each other. Hah! She scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll about, flutes fading, rest. Mmm. Silent now in the sunny green meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing more than a playful wind in the fading forest. Yes, good. He pokes his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about.

     

    (Sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. City streets, buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by.)

     

    Sshh! Getting there! Twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. He hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at the stamens, slip in and out of septa. Distantly: the sound of muted trumpets–

     

    BllaaaAAAAAAATTT! He jumps back to the curb, but too late, a bus bearing dawn on him–THWOCK!–whacks his prick as it goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen of them. He catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the street, an advertisement spread across its rear: I CAN SEE HER CUNT, GUSSY! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back window, staring at him. The crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, curse and weep:

     

    –What is it like, Nelly?

     

    He hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. He finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. Over a photo of the Mayor at a public execution of three small children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the headline: A LARGE HAIRY MOUTH SUCKING HIS PURPLE PRICK.

     

    Aw hey listen: fuck it. Quit. Yeah.

     

    He sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter snatch of the diatonic aubade. Something seems to leave him, some spring released, a slipping away…

     

    No! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. Forget that shit, fade it out, no more messages, pick ’em up and put ’em down, hup two three four, he’s running along now, prick waggling frantically, stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it–oof! sorry, ma’am!

     

    –Good morning, L.P.!

     

    –Good morning, love! (Whew!) After you!

     

    –Thank you, Mr. Peters!

     

    –Morning, sir! Thank you, sir!

     

    Ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

     

    o o o o o

     

     

  • Obsession

    Kathy Acker

     
     

    My Father

     

    Kathy says, For finally my father was coming back. As soon as the night turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.

     

    Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers, the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he hadn’t brought back what he had promised me, my own whip. Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.

     

    This devil’s child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male. His hairs were blacker than a witch’s vagina. When I smelled him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught anything.

     

    I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so did he.

     

    I wasn’t a good child. Or, the same thing, they (the males in my family) told me that I wasn’t a good child. I didn’t know how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep hidden, into their faces.

     

    But openly I loved the night. Whenever it was black, outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages.

     

    Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already died. Day after day I watched the brat. Unlike me he wasn’t bad because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the world. The human world that seemed nonhuman. I admired his ability; it didn’t matter to him, as nothing mattered to him, that I did.

     

    Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen everything from this father’s house, but there was nowhere to go with it.

     

    Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the same thing.

     

    My father loved his false son. Hindley, my father’s real son, hated the new Heathcliff.

     

    My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn’t and wanted to do, Heathcliff did. “Why can’t you be a good child, Kathy?”

     

    “Why can’t you be a good father, father?”

     

    Outside The Family

     

    Soon after these questions had taken place, Kathy’s father died. He would never return.

     

    Both Heathcliff and Kathy grieved. Hindley didn’t give a shit because his father had hated him.

     

    Heathcliff and Kathy sobbed out each other’s eyes, then ate each other’s tongues.

     

    Hindley (Hideous) inHeirited the House so Kathy and Heathcliff moved out into tracks beyond and for them the human world went away. Their only adulthood, before begun, was gone. The world gone, there was only nature.

     

    The days of grief, the days without shelter, announce to all old maids and to all those who are maimed and who maim that the actual churches are open.

     

    Remained outside. Remained outside the family. How Hindley became the father, for the true father is nowadays President Bush, so all the rest are orphans.

     

    This was how Kathy began to want all that lay outside: nature and, most violent of all, the sun. Crags who wait under the sun.

     

    Kathy announced, “I will not come.” Heathcliff never announced anything. Heathcliff was naturally unapproachable.

     

    In The Beginning, Heathcliff Didn’t Matter To Me

     

    Kathy says,

     

    “One day I will never come back and on that day I will keep coming back and coming back.”

     

    My nurse’s name was Ellen.

     

    “Hurry, Ellen, hurry. “I know exactly where I want to go. I want to go to where a colony of moorgame are settled; blue and purple feathers more aflame with green than any sun; I want to see whether they have made their nests yet; I want to see.”

     

    The sun.

     

    My nurse replied that the birds didn’t breed on this side of Penniston Crags.

     

    “Oh yes, they do. I’ve been there.”

     

    “You’re too young to travel.”

     

    “Only a little farther, I’ve got to go a little further than I’ve ever been, climb to a certain hillock that I’ll know, pass by a bank that I’ve smelled, leaves of certain rust and one pile of shit, I know there are tracks, and by the time I get to the other side without noticing it, I will have met the birds.” Going to the other side and not dying. Whether or not I died.

     

    My nurse didn’t bother getting angry with me because she knew I was wild. Not wild enough. She just sighed as if she was swallowing her breath and whispered the only whisper of a socially good woman: “It’s a pity that you’re never going to be content.”

     

    I didn’t hear anything. Not Heathcliff.

     

    The next morning the first thing I heard was the outside. I woke up to the shrieking rain. The winds begin to tear. Juice ran down the insides of my legs. Don’t forget? How can I ever, even when dead? For I’m always holding an orphan’s hand.

     

    I’m Perverse

     

    In order to complete his bushy family, Hideous found himself (somewhere) a child bride so that there would be a mommy and a daddy. Substitute mommy and daddy more than equal mommy and daddy.

     

    The child bride, like most humans, was a substitute, too, because, being frail and weak and a good wife, she actively detested Heathcliff even more than her husband (did) and threw him out of the house every time Heathcliff returned to snatch some food.

     

    At this moment, Kathy began to act as her parents wanted her to. Precisely: instead of being with Heathcliff, she stayed home. Then blamed her parents for making her and Heathcliff separate.

     

    Was she, like me, scared of men?

     

    So now she had reason to detest Hideous. Cliche: “Dear Heathcliff,” she wrote, “I’m acting in such a way that the only relation we can have is that you’ll reject me. Once you’ve fully rejected me, I’ll be able to begin to love you.”

     

    By refusing to run away with Heathcliff, Kathy began to gain all for which she longed: to perversely enter into being with Heathcliff.

     

    Or: now that innocence was dead, she and Heathcliff again began to be the same through books. Living with her parents, Kathy was forced to go to school. Heathcliff was going nowhere outside. Kathy taught Heathcliff how to read; this teaching (creating hierarchy) poisoned her love, for identity is shit in the midst of childhood.

     

    The kingdom of childhood is the kingdom of lust. Books, by replicating this or any phenomenon, cause perversity.

     

    I’m not trying to destroy B, but to destroy how I continuously think about B, think about how our bodies burn together, by repeating these thoughts perversely.

    The Unspeakable

     

    Kathy says:

     

    Where the sun and the black sky are.

     

    They now consider Heathcliff less than a person. “Heath,” my new mother said, “if you must use the servants’ bathroom, do not do so during working hours.” But being nonhuman Heathcliff doesn’t need a bathroom.

     

    I don’t care about Heathcliff. Who will I pick to be? A person whose canopy is that velvet in which the stars lie. My family can kick the dogs like Heathcliff out of the house every day of the week.

     

    I can’t bear being without Heathcliff. Today Heathcliff and I ran into the fields which are wild. We’re never going to come back. I don’t want my brain to hurt and, when my hand is stuck up my cunt, my fingers are all full of juices. I want to be in the wild forever and I want to be Heathcliff and I don’t care about anything else. See. I’m breaking free.

     

    When I’ve broken free, there’ll be no more such thing as loneliness which torments me all the time. Alone, without loneliness: all there are around me are leaves and branches and winds and fly through my hairs and everything living and moving each other and each vision, thing seen, is another living thing and I’m never going back to being lonely where I now am

     

    I know what the society (my family) (here) is to which I’m never going to return. The inside of the family is a maze whose entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails. The family is foul; garbage lies in its streets. Street sign, NO HUMANS EXIST HERE.

     

    I can’t be other than Heathcliff because to be other than Heathcliff is to be human. Example: Hindley who is only himself beats up his servants or dogs who are all the same to him. His– this society is foul because it’s based on hypocrisy: it doesn’t recognize violence or death. Hindley tells me that he loves me and so, places me in his labyrinth. Hindley owns the house or labyrinths in which he’s also inside; every street or portion of this maze is foul, not by hypocrisy, but by possession.

     

    I must die for Heathcliff so that I’m no longer a human. Only an outcast. Today the witch went to see the sea because she had to hear someone else’s voice. There was a dead person. The only way to raise the person from death is via the cunt. As it crashed waves against the rocks, the ocean began tossing up tiny fish and the swept, repeatedly, into the witch’s crotch. The sun fell down into the water. And I have made my allegiances, although all allegiances are hell. I saw two seals. The only way is to annihilate all that’s been written. That can be done only through writing. Such destruction leaves all that is essential intact; resembling the processes of time, such destruction allows only the traces of death to subsist.

     

    I’m a dead person. Heathcliff says, “Down, dog, down.”

     

    Story: The Beginning of the World

     

    When the servant who was a FUNDAMENTALIST complained to his master that he and his wife never went to church to eat Jesus’ flesh, his master punished him by making his, the master’s, daughter go to bed without supper.

     

    Immediately Kathy rebelled by running away with Heathcliff, again, up into the moors. This time they stayed in the beginning of the world.

     

    Time began here, outside, where there were no humans. They wandered on the moors for days. They’re only safe where everything’s public.

     

    On the other side of the moors, they found a house similar to theirs. Because Kathy’s nature was perverse or fucked-up, she wanted to be wild and to be part of society. In this total freedom, she said to her friend, “Let’s find out what the inside of this house looks like.”

     

    They climbed down the crags, then peered into two of the windows. They gazed upon a rich boy and a girl, who were their age, dismembering a puppy.

     

    Heathcliff said, “They aren’t nice people, those who live inside of houses.”

     

    Kathy wanted to destroy the beginning of this sight or world. Heathcliff would do whatever Kathy wanted. Listen. “The name of that which is forbidden is Heaven,” Kathy said. “Do it to me now.”

     

    Heathcliff said he would do whatever Kathy wanted.

     

    “Listen. I, Kathy, am dreaming that sex which is the witch’s den. The den is located in the true house.”

     

    Rattles, colored wheels, amniotic rags, and an excessive number of teeth were stigmatizing all outcasts.

     

    “I knew that there was a place where everything would take place. I started searching for that place.

     

    “I was inside a house. Leaving some room, I began looking for tracks, a smell, these are the indications of the way to get to the room I want to reach. I dream, and have always dreamt, of water.

     

    “The armier Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men and women who were living to, also, be dead. Whether or not you admire this sort of thing. Doves, owls, weasels, snakes, lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of cows, goats, women are the associates of witches. Behind milk lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.

     

    “Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room. I passed through a series of rooms.

     

    “Finally I came to thin metal stairs which descended downwards.

     

    “According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic. During such losses of human consciousness, visions can appear.

     

    “I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs’ first step.

     

    “A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.

     

    “I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.

     

    “In China, the name for amanita muscaria is toad mushroom. Both toads and witches are crippled. In the fourteenth century, Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a potion out of its shit.

     

    “I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase, descending. After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit into, all around the spiralling stairs.

     

    “Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red somewhere. This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was the library of the witch. I felt scared. I was at the bottom.”

     

    As they were looking into the house and making fun of the rich children, Heathcliff realized that it was time to leave. Starting to run, he pulled Kathy’s hand in such a way that she tripped.

     

    A dog sat on and ripped her ankle while his purple, huge tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with bloody slaver.

     

    Since Kathy was missing, Heathcliff told Kathy’s family about what had just taken place.

     

    Heathcliff’s Story of the Rich House

     

    The children are in their house, doing their homework. These children consist of a young boy and a young girl.

     

    The young girl was assigned a paper on Edgar Allan Poe. But she doesn’t have enough time to complete her assignment.

     

    In the classroom, the teacher talks. Teach is paying attention to many, almost all the other students and the girl can’t manage to interrupt to say that she didn’t have time to do her paper. She runs out of the school.

     

    Being a good girl, she goes home, back to her room, and works on the Poe paper incessantly, cutting and cutting until only two sections are left. Each of these sections is a few paragraphs long.

     

    Despite all these odds–as if Fate is sitting in judgment against her–the girl goes back to her school so she can present her Poe thesis. Now the institution is shut.

     

    Seeing that she was thrust out of school against her will and desire, it is probable that the devil rules this world.

     

    The girl continued down the street, into the building next to the school. There she saw the spirit of Karen Finley. Seeing this spirit allowed her to take off all her clothes which were now heavy, drenched in mud, icy from the outside mist.

     

    The slut walked bare-ass through what was simultaneously a pub and a church.

     

    Saw that none of the building’s inhabitants, all of whom were male, gave a shit that she was naked. One of them even walked up to her and was very nice to her.

     

    Later on in the pub, she decided to hide behind the entrance door so that she could slip a pair of shorts over her ass. But she couldn’t find any.

     

    “Shit. I didn’t bring any shorts.”

     

    She had to put back on all her clothes which were still wet cold and dirty.

     

    One of these men, all of whom were older than her, comments, “Nothing has changed. Nothing changes.”

     

    Me

     

    Heathcliff says, Because I had told them about Kathy caught in the strange house, Hindley kicked me out for good. So I threw away the rest of my human trappings and I became an animal who didn’t even clean itself. In order to toss their humanity into their faces.

     

    Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man.

     

    When Kathy returned from strangeness, I loved her more than ever. She had came back dressed like a lady, no longer like a wild thing. I didn’t see her when she came in. She was silent about what had taken place in that strangeness. She told her father that she wanted to see me immediately.

     

    But I was shit.

     

    As soon as Kathy saw me, her heart leaped up like the dog it is. Even though romanticism pretends otherwise.

     

    As if one can own shit, Hindley owned me so he knew where I was and ordered me to enter the house and greet Kathy as a servant along with all the other servants. I am not.

     

    I did as I had been told only in order to throw more shit into their faces. But, as soon as she saw me, Kathy threw her finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my skin. Because it was thirsty, her pussy rubbed me. I knew that I will always hold her cunt in the palm of my hand.

     

    Then she leaped back and informed me, I was only her servant and, worse, I smell of piss. “Oh, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me?”

     

    Since I was her servant, I couldn’t speak.

     

    Father said, “Since you’re a servant, Heathcliff, you can shake hands with Kathy. Only once.”

     

    I mumbled that I wouldn’t do anything. The lips of hell were opening and closing.

     

    “You shouldn’t be sulky because you smell of piss.”

     

    I was silent because I was a hound.

     

    “Heathcliff. Now shake hands with me.”

     

    SOCIETY’S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT. I touched her.

     

    “Oh, Heathcliff, you are filthy dirty.” Kathy was becoming obsessed. Obsessed because she simultaneously wanted to touch me and didn’t. I knew every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids, and I was hungry for her. “I didn’t ask you to touch me.”

     

    Let the heavens open up, rain sperm.

     

    Kathy said, “But I want to touch you.” I knew, just as she knew, that she would be unable to dream until the moment she dreamed about me.

     

    I knew that she knew that I knew this, so I decided, in order to teach her, that I would become dirtier and dirtier until I was so dirty that I would have nothing more to do with what her family named reality and I would drag her down with me.

     

    This is the way that Kathy says that obsession never rises from and involves only one person: “Let all that matters be sex when and where all is glowing.”

     

    I say: I don’t need sex. I don’t need a cock, my cock. Simply: I am not going to and I am not living in hell.

     

    As soon as I had announced my allegiance to filth to Kathy’s family, I got out of their house. I ran away to the crags and moors and rocks who belong to anybody.

     

    Where it will always be raining, for the eyes will no longer

     

    For I, body, know who I am.

     

    I will not deny the witches.

     

    If Kathy was pure of cunt, she would follow the sperm out of the cockless cock.

     

    She stayed behind because she preferred to make her allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society, rather than to me, the gook inside the body. Because she was scared to shake hands with filth.

     

    Kathy In Her Society Finery,

     

    “But if I knew what men were really like, I would never want one. I say this so that I can be more desirable to men.”

     

    Me–Perverted

     

    Heathcliff says, But I cried all night because she was mine and she was hurting me. I cried, but I wasn’t ever going to be demeaned. Naturally I wanted my skin to be other than dark and my hair to be straight, not so that I could live in a house, but so that she could look up to me enough to run away with me.

     

    And then I’d sink my head into her stomach and my teeth would turn into her bones. I will not live without her–whatever I must do! I have sold myself to the devil! As do those who write.

     

    The next day I woke up and then I heard a noise. When I peered through one of their infernal windows, I saw those two rich murderers or children walking into the black-and-white tiled hallway. Of course, I followed them inside.

     

    As soon as he had passed the ceiling beams, the boy turned around and said to me that I should brush that horse’s mane out of my face. I bucked, in the kitchen picked up a large pot of simmering soup, ran back to the edge of the hallway and threw the liquid into his visage.

     

    I had seen Kathy standing in the hall and, then, the look on her face.

     

    Here was the first time that I wanted to kill her. That night I dreamed that she died from giving birth to a baby. This was the first time I dreamed this.

     

    According to Gilbert Lely reciting some kind of Freudianism, one of the ways a sadist can prevent himself or herself from travelling from neurosis to psychosis is to sublimate his or her asocial instincts into art.

     

    Freud.

     

    After I had put the boiling liquid to the boy’s face, Kathy loved me even more than before. I needed to believe that she loved me so that I could be alive.

     

    I kept turning nasty because there was nothing else I could do in the face of rejection. In the face of Hindley. The nastier I found myself, the more Kathy looked up to my purity.

     

    As Joseph who was religious said, “This house is an infernal region.”

     

    Today, a yellow worm that looked like a plastic banana began a walk across a dirt path. The path moved downhill in steeper and steeper zigzags until it reached a sign that said BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES.

     

    Kathy hadn’t run away with me to this earth of rattlesnakes where there were no more humans. Both Kathy and I knew that I was the only one who could lead her here, where nature would tame her by demeaning her so that she could begin to learn.

     

    Marriage According to Heathcliff:

     

    As soon as her father went travelling, I returned to Kathy.

     

    The first time I stood again in that sittingroom, she was mentioning to the nurse who happened to look like Jessie Helms that the rich boy had asked her to marry him.

     

    I said, loudly, “Kathy, with all that I am and have–if that is any power–I beg you to stop rejecting me for your rich friends. I have born too much rejection since I was born.”

     

    Kathy didn’t notice me because she was combing her pussy hairs.

     

    “I’ve come back to you, Kathy. Why aren’t you looking at me?”

     

    “Because you don’t belong in any decent society. You smell like a horse, like Linton said you smelled, and you don’t know what a relationship is. Human. Your very presence bores me.”

     

    I didn’t know how to reply because I was open to her.

     

    “You’re as dumb as any animal, Heathcliff.”

     

    Because she needed me to be her and at the same time refused to touch my skin, I no longer was.

     

    “But the fact that I’m marrying Linton has nothing to do with you. I’m not marrying Linton because you don’t exist; what you believe is my torment of you doesn’t exist.

     

    “I’ll explain to you why I’m marrying Linton:

     

    Marriage:

     

    Kathy says, I said to my nurse, but not to Heathcliff: “Do you know the real reason why I’m marrying that creep who doesn’t possess a cock? (Not that I give a damn about cocks: it’s what they stand for.)

     

    “I can’t marry Heathcliff because Heathcliff and I aren’t separate from each other. It would be redundant for me to marry Heath.

     

    “I need to get married. Heathcliff and I don’t belong in the normal world whose name is society–we don’t even know whether we’re male or female. And. But, unlike Heathcliff, I can pass for normal; I want the money and moral position that normalcy brings. (When I pretended normalcy in the past, the normals, who are named the English, stuck a lit bulb up my ass then shorted it.) I need to get married and get my certificate.

     

    “In the real or abnormal world, it’s the law that Heathcliff is more me than me, though no one knows who Heathcliff is, his name.

     

    “It’s disgusting for Heathcliff to live as a freak in my family’s world.

     

    “I’m going to marry Linton so that neither Heathcliff nor I will have to live any more as freaks; for doesn’t marriage in this society render anything acceptable? Freaks cannot live as freaks because in reality there are no freaks: there are only those society people who’ve carved identities out of fear.

     

    “Will I be able to be married without becoming perverted like one of those society people? I’m only human…

     

    “Therefore, by means of marriage to a rich person, I will show that Heathcliff and I are as normal as rich people. I learned logic in school.”

     

    Heathcliff overheard all of this. As soon as he had understood that it would degrade me to be with him, he ran out of the room.

     

    This was how I threw myself or Heathcliff out of my life.

     

    I had the following dream:

     

    In a hotel that’s under the aegis of the Buddhist Poetry Institute, while I’m waiting for an elevator that’s going up, I recognize a man who’s walking past. He’s a former lover.

     

    This hotel has a pool that’s composed of several uneven tiers.

     

    The hotel’s bars and restaurants likewise hide the raised and lowered floors. My former lover and I sit down at a white- cloth-covered table in the most secluded alcove.

     

    I feed him sake after sake, as I did when we used to fuck, and he becomes drunker, as also used to happen. All the time.

     

    The initials of this man’s name, R.W., are those of a boyfriend prior to him.

     

    Both of us are three-quarters sodden when I realize that this man didn’t and now doesn’t love me. His attitude toward me is: about once a year he uses me to try to find the oblivion for which he’s longing.

     

    My Father (Whom I’ve Never Known) Tries to Kill His Own Child

     

    Kathy says,

     

    Hindley, who had become drunker and drunker, returned home, doused in alcohol like a rag in gas. The chill night howled through the dying branches and the dying cars started beeping. Inside, he grabbed the child which he had had by his new wife and cut off all its hair. Raggedly. When he let go of the brat, it fell down a flight of stairs. Didn’t die. Not noticing anything, father kept looking for the Jack Daniels which had been hidden.

     

    All my life I’ve dreamt dreams which, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath. I DREAM: I’m in a hotel in which I’ve never before been. I have to give another performance.

     

    Whenever I’m about to perform, I don’t like to be around the other performers. I wander by myself in the unknown hotel.

     

    While I’m waiting in line for the elevator to go up, a man who’s also waiting recognizes me as a bodybuilder. He’s middle- aged, large in body with the beginnings of a pot, disappearing hair. Standing right in back of me so that I can feel the pot, his hands massage my biceps. I allow this.

     

    Today is the day of sex. Informing me that he’s a trainer, the guy shows me how I can tuck my stomach in or he makes my stomach disappear.

     

    We go down in the elevator. In the bathroom, he fucks me from the back just like I used to be when I was a kid.

     

    Now that he’s gone, I’m desperate to find a man who will have me in order that I can become normal.

     

    My next lover is married. (I fuck married men as a rule because they don’t want to come to close to me.) Predictably, the creep informs me that there’s no way he can love who I am.

     

    After he tells me this, I squat down on his floor. Then I think, as I’ve thought before, many times, all I have to do now is get myself out of here. This house. As soon as I do this one thing, I promise myself, I can fall apart just as I want to: I can be less than anything that is.

     

    Just as I have promised myself: outside his building, I sink against the garbage cans that are against the wall. I had probably created or passed through romance just so I could be here, where I should be, do what I should do.

     

    Let the garbage eat out the night.

     

    In that night, when two homeless recognize one of the members and walk up to me, the thought comes to me that I’m ready to pull myself up by the bootstraps.

     

    My next lover is, as much as possible, the man of my dreams.

     

    This time, there’s a mass of wharfs and compartments whose insides and outsides are mingled. Or mangled. In one of these rooms, this man and I lie on a bed. He can’t get hard. Female creatures, as elegant and lean as those in Paris, are haunting a few of the other rooms.

     

    Outside the room in which I’m trying to fuck, something that’s a combination of truck and tractor is zooming away from the pier that’s nearest the horizon and down a white road that runs parallel to the dawn. Then, the vehicle swerves around, almost running into, five others. Monsters. All of whom are whizzing around and around, breath-taking speeds, hurtling past each other. The tractor-trucks are just like horses.

     

    I watch them, amazed.

     

    This is the realm of males. A man remarked to seemingly no one, “This is how things are done.”

     

    After watching the monsters, I decide that I can’t marry my boyfriend because he doesn’t get hard.

     

    But if I’m not going to marry, how can I survive in this society?

     

    In the same room in which he couldn’t get it up, I’m teaching a class. One of my students asks me to dance.

     

    We dance in an oval, around the back of the room just behind where the other students are sitting, as I had been taught to dance in the school I had attended as a girl. Waltzing and tangoing seriously and with grace.

     

    Even though she appears fem, my student is leading me: I orgasm several times.

     

    In this way I learn that, since I can come with a woman, I don’t need a man.

     

    After I have come or alternatively:

     

    For some time I’ve been standing, in front of a white stucco wall, on a white road which, as though it’s a platform, is raised above all the surrounding and dirt underneath. All around me are masses of luggage, suitcases and bags.

     

    I’m leaving. Finally.

     

    But as for me, I have too much baggage: I can carry all of them only with great difficulty. A man whom I don’t know offers to pick up all the suitcases and duffels that are dropping around me and then hand them to me.

     

    While I’m just managing to hold on to these bags, two of the people who seem to be in my group screech, “She’s coming!” Race to, then down the pier that’s on the left side of the white building.

     

    Now there’s a crowd of people down at the wharf. I want to be there too, but I’ve got all the bags. Deciding that probably no one’s going to steal them, I abandon them, follow the crowd, some of whom are my friends.

     

    At the left pier’s end, a huge mass is watching a superstar, perhaps Tina Turner, come.

     

    Now I know that there are two ways for me to survive without marrying: I can either be gay or famous.

     

    The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity.

     

    I dreamt I was in Heaven. But I had no business being there so I ran back to Wuthering Heights (this place) (loneliness) (this state of human) (this impossibility named hell). I know that here is happiness.

     

    I was the day after my most important performance. I was cleaning the hotel room which the Buddhist Poetry Institute had lent me; I always do exactly what I’ve been told to do.

     

    A large wood vanity whose mirror was hidden under layers of clothing and cloths stood right in front of me. A mirror because I’m alone.

     

    A, the Institute’s head, just opened my door and walked in. She hadn’t bothered to knock. She had entered in order to pay me. “I’m only going to pay those writers who matter.”

     

    “Matter?”

     

    “Who’re important.”

     

    This message is that writers are either famous or starve.

     

    While A was making her pronouncement, I was lifting up and folding a huge thick olive wool blanket. Beneath the blanket, a bare mattress.

     

    Then A and I stood in front of the vanity’s covered mirror.

     

    On the surface of the table part, some of the objects which I had uncovered during my cleaning now began to move. Two black crabs the size of human fists strolled. When I saw them, I was confident that I could kill the…things or, at least, crush them to pulp.

     

    The whole table was alive. Specifics: two small black lobsters; two black spiders as large as these lobsters, whose legs resembled daddy-long-legs’ but who weren’t daddy-long-legs because their bodies were as substantial as cats’; the two crabs already recognized.

     

    I lifted a dress, then a white wool crocheted cloth, then something which I couldn’t recognize or can’t remember off of the mirror and A and I clearly saw its glass.

     

    The insects and the sea-life were crawling, or whatever they do, under the strewn olive blanket, all over the mattress, hiding in the wool folds. Down to the floor. They were disgusting.

     

    Now I saw who I was: one spider perched, half of it on the top of my calf just below the back of the knee, half on my black cowboy boot. I’m not terrified of a spider because I know it can be crushed.

     

    I slammed it to death.

     

    A and I crushed all of the moving beings.

     

    The Lack Of Dreams Is Disappearance Of The Heart

     

    Kathy says, Heathcliff had left.

     

    I said:

     

    “My flesh is wood that needs to be chopped up. For this reason, I’m never going to forsake you, whatever-your name-is and wherever-you-are. The cunt is always speaking. But I will never marry you, whoever-you-are, because marriage means nothing to the likes of us because society means nothing to the likes of us.

     

    “Heathcliff, you are now whoever-you-are because I am named absence.”

     

    I BEGAN SEARCHING FOR HEATHCLIFF BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT HIM. AND I DON’T WANT HIM.

     

    Searching for Heathcliff (trying to turn whatever-you-are actual), I fell out with my dreams.

     

    The fantasy, to refuse to dream, to which I have returned again and again was the following:

     

    The situation is that I’ve suddenly learned that I have an incurable disease. This disease has something to do with my heart. Because it’s inevitable that I’m going to become sicker and sicker until I die, an authority declares, someone from this moment onwards is going to have to take care of me until the day I drop dead.

     

    But I don’t want some creep to have anything to do with me; I don’t want to be a dependent person.

     

    A poet whom I like a lot begins to take care of me. Then, her husband becomes angry because she’s not giving him enough attention. I’m abandoned, the usual, and usual, become upset.

     

    The authority who’s a doctor repeats: you have to find someone to take care of you.

     

    I decide that everything that this doctor, perhaps because he’s and authority, has said is a con. That I’m ill’s a con. How can I be ill when I don’t know I’m ill?

     

    I’m not ill.

     

    One day, while I’m performing my morning exercises (since I’m exercising, I can’t be ill), I see, right across my mattress, my old nurse sitting meditating on the floor. I ask her advice. “Who’s the best doctor,” I inquire, “in the world? If I consult that doctor, he’ll be able to cure me if I’m ill.” I assure nurse that I have enough family money to afford the very best.

     

    Consulting this best doctor: Wherever I am, which is (the) unknown, I look down on the handsomest possible man standing on a span bridge. As soon as I see him, my incurable disease is more or less cured. (I’m a romantic. Incurable.)

     

    The next day or some days later, I see that my girlfriends, all of whom are now standing around me, are wearing the same kind of clothes: upper-middle-class cocktail drag heavy as possible. I’m in a gold sweater knit nothing else.

     

    We stroll down a suburban street with its clean-cut lawns. One of the women, who works in a store, keeps tugging at my dress. Finally pulls out a thread. I’m irritated–I’m very irritable.

     

    She exclaims, “You’re so white, delicate. You’re the most well-preserved of all of us.”

     

    I no longer know whether or not I have this incurable disease.

     

    Waking from the dream, I find myself in a business office. I describe what I’ve dreamt to a man who was in my dream in order that both of us can ascertain and know whether or not I’m going to die.

     

    I had become almost sick with looking for Heathcliff.

     

    I had stopped eating because, when he’s out on the moors, Heathcliff doesn’t eat. Wandered around the rocks at night because I didn’t know where he was.

     

    I wasn’t looking for him.

     

    The fogs made me animal.

     

    Returned home. This is WUTHERING HEIGHTS by a deadhead.

     

    Home. “Look,” my father said, “Look at the low-life. She’s ill because she’s always running after men. She’s going to be dead soon.”

     

    “No,” I said to myself. I didn’t answer father because there aren’t any, anymore.

     

    “So where were you last night, and the night before, you- good-for-nothing-cunt-juice?”

     

    (A sailor named St. Germanus has unmasked the diabolical nature of certain spirits named good women who wander about at night.)

     

    Father’s replica, the religious servant: “Weren’t you with Heathcliff last night?”

     

    When that nut-case dared to question me, I became angry for two reasons: Because my family was considering me ill (nymphomaniac). Because underneath their definition lay the reality of my horniness. (Horniness: I don’t know where Heathcliff is so I don’t know who he is.)

     

    Now I knew that it’s necessary to keep interpreting everything because nothing’s true and everything’s real. These interpretations are my body.

     

    Therefore I said back to my family: “If you throw Heathcliff out of this house because he’s not like you, I’m going with him, out into the fogs. Our brains are already fogs. But you can’t do anything to Heathcliff because he’s gone.”

     

    I had forgotten about myself.

     

    I stopped looking for Heathcliff. After that, I could no longer sleep. I had lost the ways or entrances into dream.

     

    Without dreams, the body becomes sick. I have an incurable illness of the heart.

     

    I want (to find) Heathcliff (myself).

     

    The Underside Of Dream

     

    Kathy says, I’ve always been bratty. During the period when I was ill, though not yet dead, I turned into more than a brat:

     

    “Ellen. Dye my hair blonde.”

     

    “Your hair’s already blonde.” So she dyed my hair blonde.

     

    “My hair isn’t blonde enough. I look like Madonna fucking. But I’m on my death bed because I’m dying. I want my hair to be pure white!”

     

    She took me through two more dye jobs.

     

    “Ellen. I said I’m dying. Now you have to make my pussy hairs white.”

     

    But, alive or dead, my pussy drips gold and red and tastes like skunk.

     

    Return To Dreaming

     

    Heathcliff or the devil says, And so Kathy married a rich man for the purpose of entering society. As multitudes of women have done before her. The rich man, Linton, infatuated with his new wife, believed himself to be the happiest of men, as multitudes of men have felt before him. Kathy’s dream was that marriage is the destruction of society:

     

    This society is the family’s house. Kathy’s living with her uncle in a huge house. It’s of the utmost importance that she palms him a check and equally important that no one knows that this has happened. If not, she’ll die.

     

    Her uncle takes the check.

     

    Later, a man woman and child are standing on the lawn outside the house. The evil Trinity: they continually cut themselves with razor blades. If they succeed in penetrating the house, they’ll destroy everyone and everything including Kathy.

     

    Somehow they do. Enter. Kathy sees them in the downstairs; instantaneously she knows that she has to do everything possible and anything to prevent them from invading the inner dwelling: she has to remain an enclosed self: otherwise evil might stick its cock into her.

     

    Next, she’s standing in front of the mattress over which she handed her uncle the check. He’s now on the other side of the mattress. She knows that evil is coming. So runs in back of the mattress. Up the stairs.

     

    The house ascends higher and higher; the higher, the holier the space.

     

    They’ve arrived at the top of the house. Now there’s only complete horror in this world: darkness and decay. Flesh is rotting frogs.

     

    All evil has come here so a spell begins. This is real creation, the beginning of the world, evil is always born in a cloud of pink smoke emanating from pink incense.

     

    Is Kathy seeing her own blood? She scoots as fast as she can, faster, down the stairs, faster, through the hallway cut into two by the light, out of the child’s house. Outside: through a patch of shade, then into sunlight.

     

    (I have suddenly realized the meaning of MY MOTHER: DEMONOLOGY.)

     

    In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she is safe.

     

    Where will she go without home? She is homeless. She realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer. Free.

     

    She roams through the suburbs and finds herself at a filling station. While she’s leaning by one of the tanks, an American car drives up. (I don’t know the names of any cars.) The evil people are sitting in this car. Then Kathy sees a black man, who’s lying on a grey plastic parachute on the cement, look up, see whatever’s getting out of the auto (formlessness?), and scream, “God!”

     

    A woman emerges from the car. Her inner thighs have no more skin, only blood.

     

    My Childhood by Heathcliff

     

    The law that forms society is that which forbids all that reeks of the name humanity. From the moment that I was born, I knew my society was corrupt. I knew that, in and through the name of democracy, the middle classes are being annihilated, that there are numerous tribes as depleted as the homeless.

     

    My childhood training with Hindley taught me the characteristics of loyalty, honesty, stubbornness, and ferocity. Further, it caused me to disapprove of the familial society, the only society I knew, which indulged itself in every hypocrisy, corruption or putrescence, lack of control in every area of the self.

     

    I became a handsome man, with a high-domed forehead, a square jaw. An air of authority lurked under every surface. My habitual garments of defenses identified me as a member of the samurai class.

     

    Though I had as yet no dealings with anyone outside the family, I knew, and I was deeply upset by this, that samurai were starting to attend the local fuckhouses. When I came back to Kathy, real life returned to her: MY DREAM OF RETURNING TO KATHY:

     

    Heathcliff says,

     

    I was traveling, the same as flying, through rooms which were connected to each other so that their outsides were both outside and inside. The name: the crags of Penniston.

     

    The room through which I was passing was either an expensive Eastern clothing store, a window that displays two fur and silk robes, or a Hindu temple. All the walls were the same yellow- white as the ground below them. Sand lay everywhere.

     

    As soon as I had emerged from this temple’s recesses, I was presented with a photo of ‘imminent decline’. This photo revealed an at least 70% decline, a road composed out of sand and the rubble of a city. A few people are half-buried in its dust; a knee sticks upward.

     

    A voice announced, “People have died here. But, at times, these are the only streets that can take people to where they’re going.

     

    “The streets of death.”

     

    Where I was heading, there was a chance of disaster, also of rain.

     

    I parked my motorcycle facing upwards on a steep hill.

     

    Whoever I happened to be in lust with at that time gave me the information that she had given permission to a friend of hers to ride my bike. That bitch had tipped it.

     

    “What?” I couldn’t say anything else because–I’m almost never angry–my anger is always waiting to blow me up. Then, I became angry that there were no bike mechanics in the forsaken place. Then, I became angry that all she did was shrug. My lover just didn’t care. Finally and ultimately, I’m angry that I’m helpless.

     

    Then, I realized that I could phone a mechanic myself so I did.

     

    At the bottom of the decline, the crags, lay a building that was my family’s house. My real father, the one who had started everything, was inside this house.

     

    I had made its livingroom into my bedroom; father’s bedroom, which was next to mine, was the actual bedroom of the house. We needed space from each other.

     

    Below the normal rooms lay another level: a floor of unused rooms. In the past, something dreadful (or evil) had occurred in these unused rooms.

     

    These are the rooms of childhood.

     

    The unknown floor’s map was as follows:

     

    The large room on the right was the most public, not pubic, knowable and known. Its windows on its outside overlooked an even larger parking lot which, unfortunately, belonged to the neighboring house.

     

    Outside: “You’re not concerned for his welfare at all?”

     

    “He’s on welfare?”

     

    The rooms on the left formed a maze whose center was a bedroom. The bedroom. Will I ever find you?

     

    In my search for freedom or in my search, I moved down to the hidden floor. The floor of childhood. When I had been a child, I did and now I do whatever I want to do.

     

    In these hidden rooms, my first bedroom was the room on the right. Despite the parking lot lying right next to its insides, it was quieter than my former home.

     

    I still hadn’t gotten what I wanted or I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I want to be in the most secret bedroom of all.

     

    Finally my father gave me permission to move in there.

     

    I proceeded:

     

    But just then, I saw outside that water was pouring, army- like, into, down the wide grey street. A wave was as high as my motorcycle. For the first time in my life, I felt fright: I was terrified that my cycle would be flooded.

     

    I dashed outside; then the waters turned ferocious; I ran for safety. Home.

     

    In the rain my bike died. I knew that I could have saved bike if I had ridden it into the house as soon as I had seen these waters coming.

     

    In order to save bike, I turned time backwards:

     

    When I rode my bike into the hall, my mother agreed that this situation was an emergency and that all is decaying. Here lies the smelly realms of the cunt.

     

    Moving into the cunt:

     

    First object to be moved from known floor to unknown floor: a large and low wood and green velvet table. (Note: Has to be cut into parts in order to be able to be moved.)

     

    Second object: a blue exercise mat.

     

    These necessities were too large for me to move myself. When I asked my mother, who must have hated my guts before I had been born because she had abandoned me, for help, for the first time she agreed.

     

    Now I accepted my parents.

     

    Inside the secret bedroom: When I had finished furnishing the three unknown rooms, they resembled or were the three known rooms (bedroom, workroom, and exercise room) in which I used to live.

     

    In this manner, I returned to Kathy, reached into her secret place, and made her my image: In the name of anything but the parent:

     

    In the smelly realms of the cunt.

     

    Kathy’s Dream Of And Upon Heathcliff’s Returning To Her And Laure’s Dream

     

    Kathy says, Somewhere in Thrushcross Grange I was packing my suitcases because I was getting out. Finally.

     

    Then, I dragged these bags down to my bedroom where I packed what I didn’t want.

     

    When I had packed both what I wanted and what I didn’t want, I found myself next to Heathcliff. Sitting on a stoop just as if we were back in New York City, Heathcliff started burning some of my skin with his cigarette.

     

    A boy named Linton with whom both of us were friends sat on my other side. He and Heathcliff burned me.

     

    Since he’s my main man, Heathcliff was the one who talked. “I’m deciding who you are.”

     

    As soon as he had said that, I felt happy. Happiness was a mingling of feeling and physical heat; the liquid flooded the caves beneath my skin.

     

    Heathcliff told Linton, “I own her.”

     

    I Return To B

     

    I was sitting in a theatre, watching a movie named Wuthering Heights. I had no idea which version. On the movie screen, I saw Kathy telling Heathcliff, who had just returned to her, that the only thing she wants in life, now that almost no life is left to her, is for her and Heathcliff not to part. Never to part.

     

    Heathcliff, “But you did everything possible to ensure our parting.”

     

    Kathy answers that she only wanted them to be together.

     

    Across the screen, I see this word spread:

     

    THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM OF LUST.

     

    I had come back to the theatre night after night. Wood walls and the bare and hard wood chairs that I remember from my school days: those auditoriums in which movies were then shown. But this was a real movie theatre, not a schoolroom. And this night, when I sat down and the room became totally black except for the light from the screen, I placed my purse, as I always do, under my seat.

     

    During my former visits to the theatre, I had become friendly with a man named Jerry. As Wuthering Heights rolled on to the death of Kathy, Jerry asked if he could sleep with me.

     

    “But first,” Jerry in the black, “I have to show you something.”

     

    He showed me that the top of his head was bald.

     

    No, it was something else.

     

    He opened his chest. Most of the chest, its center, was without skin, like an Invisible Man model. I saw right through to his plastic heart.

     

    But I didn’t want to fuck with him for another reason. Because he wasn’t into what’s imprecisely named S/M.

     

    There was no movie.

     

    Bored, and I hate more than anything to be bored, I left my seat to get a drink. When I returned and picked up my bag, I noticed it felt light. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

     

    Since I no longer had cash or credit cards, I was forced by circumstances to enter a brothel.

     

    I have always found myself determined to survive.

     

    The cathouse in which I landed obviously catered to upper- crust clients. For there were deep pink velvet curtains and no other visible walls.

     

    To my surprise I liked my first John.

     

    Then a murder took place; the victim was this first John. Was I possibly the murderer?

     

    Because we had to ensure that we weren’t caught, some girls and I began escaping from the whorehouse. As I loped down a long and narrow hall, I gazed upon a black satin evening bag which looked expensive. On a tiny, antique mahogany table. I snatched the bag because mine had been taken from me. But thought that it’s wrong to steal.

     

    The steep street outside our working quarters had become steeper: my friends and I could barely climb up it. I was wearing very high-heeled shoes because I was a whore. Here there was no hope of running away. I was aware that openly carrying this purse rather than investigating its insides, keeping only what I wanted and throwing away all the rest, was even more dangerous.

     

    I opened the black evening bag. At this moment I told the other girls about my theft. They didn’t give a fuck. I extracted the bag’s belongings; I preferred a pair of earrings to money.

     

    The girls and I decided that we were going to be thieves.

     

    I found myself inside a brothel which was probably the original one, though I couldn’t remember how that brothel had looked.

     

    The vestibule in which I stood was the lobby of a movie theatre. All of its velvet, cunt pink.

     

    I was watching a policeman talking to or interviewing the movie’s ticket-taker. All sorts or documents concerning the murder were on my person. Of course I had done it. The policeman who was in the ticket booth didn’t notice or care about either my documents or my being; none of the cops walking around the whorehouse cared about the hookers. Already, hookers and thieves, we decided we could be murderers.

     

    Heathcliff, my brother.

     

  • Remarks, Notes, Introduction and Other Guest-Editorial Texts Prefacing Postmodern Culture’s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

    Larry McCaffery

    Department of English
    San Diego State University

     

    Dedication: For Ronald Sukenick and William T. Vollmann

     

    The Final Measurement: Guest-Editor’s Remarks Prefacing Postmodern Culture‘s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

     

     
I.  *Epigraphs*

I. 1
Was there no end to anything?  When would he reach the final
measurement?
     William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows

I. 2
As writers--&
everyone inscribes
in the sense
I mean here--
we can
try to intensify
our relationships by considering
how they work; are we putting
each other to sleep
or waking each other up;
and what do we awake to?  Does our writing stun
or sting?  We can try to
bring our relationship with readers to
fruition
that the site of reading becomes a fact of value
    --Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption

I. 3
"You see what's happening here you take a few things that
interest you and you begin to make connections.  The connections
are the important thing they don't exist before you make this.
This is THE ENDLESS SHORT STORY."
    --Ronald Sukenick, The Endless Short Story

II.  *Editor's Preview of Contents for the Issue:*

I.   Epigraphs:
        I. 1.  From William T. Vollmann
        I. 2.  From Charles Bernstein
        I. 3.  From Ronald Sukenick
II.  Editor's Preview
III. Editor's Prefatory Note
IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
          Editors Play--Towards a Consideration of the Aesthetic
          Conventions of the Fiction Anthology as a Literary
          Genre.
     IV. 1  ". . . Unusual formal principles and aesthetic
          features . . ."? ". . . despite the inherent
          fascination involved . . ."?
     IV. 2  List of Fiction Anthology Categories and Potentially
          Useful Postmodern Applications
     IV. 3  Additional Bonus For Critics Developing a Postmodern
          Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology Who Are Also
          Interested in Postmodern Music.
     IV. 4  Establishing the process of collaborative
          interactions between anthology's editorial introduction
          and fiction selections (a process which joins these two
          seemingly different forms of discourse into an
          aesthetic unity; summary of the absurdities,
          limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from
          following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
          sequential listing of the topics resulting from
          adhering to these conventions.
     IV. 5  Postmodern Textual Practices and the Editorial
          Introduction
V.   Introduction: Cancelled (See Editor's Apology)
     V. 1  Fiction Selections Coded for Postmodernist Features
           Appendix A: Kathy Acker introductory comments
     V. 2  Contributors' Notes
VI.  Appendices B, C, D, E, F.

     Fiction Selections in the Issue:

     Kathy Acker, "Obsession"
     Robert Coover, "Title Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
          Pierre"
     Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding"
     Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland"
     Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself"
     Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life"
     Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
          Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography")
     William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer"

*III.  EDITOR'S PREFATORY NOTE:*  Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

          I began writing some of the following material
in late May and early June 1992, just before I departed
San Diego for a nine-week stay in Tokyo to begin work on
a project ("Postmodernism in Japan") funded by an N.E.H. summer
research fellowship.  Although traces of that initial draft
remain embedded in the current version (mostly in Part V), what
readers now have before them differs so significantly in content
and approach from my earlier drafts that for all practical
purposes the two are completely different texts.  During that
May-June period when I began to develop my editorial
introduction, I had already accepted five pieces of fiction for
the issue--this out of the total number of six or seven
selections, agreed upon by myself and Eyal Amiran, Postmodern 
Culture's co-editor, when I accepted his offer to guest-edit a
focus of his and John Unsworth's journal devoted to Postmodern
Fiction.  Thus I began my editorial introduction assuming that I
had only to make an additional one or two selections for the
issue, insert a few extra remarks into the draft of my
introduction regarding the relevance of the new material to the
issue as a whole, contact the authors when I returned from Tokyo
on 8-31 to make certain they had sent Eyal their selections on
computer discs, and then my duties as guest editor would have
been completed.
     When I departed for Tokyo on 6-27 I recall feeling quite
confident and optimistic that these duties would be discharged
successfully, and the template I had developed for my
introduction reflected these feelings.  There were good reasons
for this optimism.  The material I already had in hand for the
issue was strong, both individually and in the ways the works'
stylistic and thematic concerns represented various key features
associated with postmodernism (see V. 1 coded listing of
selections).  Moreover there was also an interesting mixture of
authors and works: a selection from one of the already-canonized
authors from the 60s "boom period" of postmodernism (Coover);
work from two authors who had begun work in the 70s--Kathy Acker
(now widely recognized as a central and controversial arrival on
the postmodernist scene, and Rikki Ducornet, a writer whose works
were now beginning to be recognized and praised); a piece by Marc
Laidlaw, whose mid-80s novel, Dad's Nuke, was recognized within
the genre of science fiction as a major cyberpunk novel, but
whose overall literary accomplishments had been obscured or
distorted by his association with genre writing; and one
relatively anonymous young author (Ricardo Cruz) whose garish,
surrealist depictions of urban ghetto life seemed to me to be the
most original fiction about black life I'd seen since the early
Ishmael Reed.  The selections also included several different
types of postmodernist innovations, ranging from Coover's
typically outrageous forays into myth, media, sex and death, to
Ducornet's delicately rendered, magical realist fables, whose
lyricism often serves to highlight the "diabolism" of her
"macabre fantasies," Cruz's "rap fiction," and so on.  I was also
taking with me to Tokyo several other promising works by authors
I respected, as well as expecting to receive submission from
several authors who hadn't yet replied to my original letters of
inquiry or to Postmodern Culture's call for fiction.
     During my stay in Tokyo I periodically re-read the materials
I had brought with me, as well as a few intriguing possibilities
that were sent to me by Eyal (incidentally, I had considerable
editorial input from Eyal at each step of this project's
evolution); by the time of my return to San Diego on 8-31, we had
narrowed down our options to a few selections.  Eyal and I set a
tentative date of September 12 by which to have made the final
selections for the issue; this would give me the week of
September 12-19 to complete my introduction, arrange for the
discs to be sent to Eyal, and generally handle the final details
for the issue (the September 19 date was my own personal deadline
for completing all the work on the issue, since I would be
leaving then for Boulder, Colorado to take part in the Novel of
the Americas Conference being held during the week of 9-19 to
9-26).  However, upon arriving back in San Diego, ripples began
to appear on editorial waters that had been up to now
extraordinarily smooth.  Within a week, a real storm was brewing.

The forces responsible for this were various, some relatively
minor (there were problems getting discs from the authors) and
some involving financial issues, miscommunications, dozens of
phone calls that crossed back and forth across the U.S. like ping
pong balls or Pynchon yo-yos, and even the confusion of agents
and publishers about how the new literary "space" of electronic,
computer driven data should be defined or categorized....
[EDITOR'S NOTE: I find it too painful from a personal standpoint
to continue with this summary except to say to my readers that
the labyrinthine series of darkly humorous events that unfolded
from 9-5 until 9-19 were...beyond the pale.]

*IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
Editors Play By--Towards an Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology*

     Like all other literary forms, anthologies are language
games--structures of words with distinctive generic properties
which arise due to a system of conventions and semiotic rules
that govern its operations.  As with the rules and systems of
transformation in all games, those at work in anthologies not
only set limits on what can (and cannot) occur, but also channel
operations into certain pattern of recurrence.  The principles
underlying the anthology game are, of course, only vaguely sensed
by readers (if at all) and even most anthology editors are
themselves aware of them only intuitively.  Given the primacy
afforded artistic "originality" in Western aesthetics, it's not
surprising that (to my knowledge) no one has ever given serious
attention to studying the anthology as a literary form.  Not only
is the "final product" of an anthology, as well as the editorial
process involved in its creation, essentially collaborative in
nature, but the different functions played by editor and
contributor have encouraged people to see the roles as being
essentially separate.  The result is that most readers and
critics have regarded anthologies less as literary forms in their
own right and more as simply arbitrary structures that
"contain" literary objects.
     Without belaboring the point, and admitting the fact that
having spent a lot of time and energy over the past several years
putting together fiction anthologies devoted to various topics
(see the Contributors' Notes), let me just suggest that now is
the appropriate time for someone (thought the time is definitely
not appropriate for me) to develop a serious discussion
exploring the aesthetic of anthologies generally--and of the
fiction anthology as a literary genre in particular.  The
timeliness of such an exposition results from the unusual formal
and aesthetic features of fiction anthologies, the rich series of
topics such an analysis would need to delve into, the ways that
such a discussion can be linked to concepts operating in
postmodern fiction and in poststructuralist and deconstructive
critical theory--not to mention the fact that it hasn't occurred
to anyone to develop such an essay, this despite the inherent
fascination involved in developing such an essay.

*IV. 1  " . . . unusual formal principles and aesthetic features
. . . "?  " . . . despite the inherent fascination involved
. . ."?*

Indeed, consider the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation
involved in working out a definition of the fiction anthology as
a genre, working up a typology that best describes the different
sub-categories and permutations that comprise the genre, the
satisfaction of gradually beginning to recognize how much FUN it
will be for you to take this hitherto despised form--a form that
in fact will not even be recognized as a distinctive literary
genre until your essay bursts onto the academic scene--and then
being able to show off your critical skills by applying a barrage
of complex-and-trendy terms and implications drawn from recent
critical theory, the secret satisfaction you'll derive throughout
the process of developing your essay by anticipating the ways
your peers' initial derision and bewilderment at your choice of
topics will gradually be transformed, first to a begrudging
respect, then to astonishment, and eventually to shame and
embarrassment at having ever doubted you.  Consider the following
(the categories that apply to this current anthology are
indicated in *bold*):

*IV. 2  Listing of categories,          *Aspects of PO M
subcategories, other variables that          aesthetic practices
determine specific aspects of the            and critical theory
form and content found in any                that can be used in
individual anthology (incomplete)*           developing a theory
                                             of the formal
Anthology's scope and eventual               properties of
     length is left open to editor           fiction anthologies
     or restricted to a maximum of           (incomplete)*
     (100, 200, 300, 400 or more)
     pages, or limited to (3-5, *6-     Citation of the relevancy
     8*, 8-10, 10-15, 20 or more)            of such works as
     contributors                            Pale Fire
Selections to include previously             (Nabokov),
     published fiction or                    Ficciones
     *restricted to unpublished*             (Borges), If on a To 
                                        include works by women or 
                                        men or Winter's Night a 
                                        *both* Traveler (Calvino)
Selections restricted to those          Death of the author
     written by authors of a            Imagination as plagiarism
     specific racial, sexual, or        Strategies of
     ethnic orientation *or not*             appropriation,
Anthology to include *any* form of           collaborations and
     fiction that fits the focus or          intertextuality
     to include only specified
     genre fiction (SF, Regency         Familiar categorical
     Romance, Detective, etc.) or            oppositions between
     only work non-generic works or          subjective/objective
     a mixture?                              "creative"/non-
Anthology's focus is based on                creative denied.
     commonalities theme or             Valorization of
     aesthetic tendencies or on              "creative" over non-
     links with specific periods or          creative writing
     *literary movements*                    questioned
Anthology to appear as a book or as     Endless play of
     a *special issue of a lit               signifiers
     journal* which you are *guest-     Bakhtin's heteroglossia
     editing* or regular editor of      The changes in meaning
To be published by a commercial              that result from
     house or small press or                 moving a text from
     *university press*                      one context to
Audience whose reading tastes and            another
     interests the anthology is         Denial of author as
     aimed for is mass market (male          originator of
     or female or both), academic,           discrete meaning
     *"serious" readers*, cult          Sampling as central po mo
     audience (many options)                 aesthetic
Editor is professional (with no,        Strategies of misreading
     some, a lot of) experience or           and re-reading used
     *doing this on the side*                to create
Contributors to be paid (no money,
     some money, major bucks) for       Foregrounding of the
     contribution                            process of creation,
Editor to be not paid or paid                emphasis on the
     (small or *middling* or large           contingencies and
     flat fee) *in* (royalties or            personal choices
     in royalties plus an advance            involved in
     which is small, medium large).          aesthetic creations,
The deadline for the editor to have          the willingness to
     completed all aspects of his            reveal that seeming
     role is (less than 6 months,            "natural" or
     *6-12* months, 1 year or 2              "objective" patterns
     years, more than two years),            and conclusions
     or no fixed deadline.                   result not from
                                             their relationship
                                             to any exterior
                                             state of truth or
                                             actual conditions
                                             but from aesthetic
                                             choices

*IV. 3  Additional Bonus Provided to Critics Interested in the
Postmodernization of Contemporary Music:*

Consider developing an extended discussion that suggests how the
aesthetic issues you're describing for fiction anthologies are
analogous to those found in the recent appearance of so many
"cover" albums (and there are many categories of such
"anthologies" of musical materials)--e.g., The Coolies' Dig,
Pussy Galore's Exile on Main Street, Cicone Youth's The White 
Album, and the series of "cover" albums produced by Hal Wilner.

Since processes and products related to sampling are so central
to rap and postmodern music generally, feel free to explore the
implications of their use in terms of such concepts as
intertextuality, originality, the effect of cut-and-paste methods
on meaning, etc..  Develop the analogy of anthology editors to
rap master DJs behind the board, mixing and cutting, using their
intuition and audio memories to mix and match sounds, riffs and
phrases in ways that open up new aesthetic and thematic aspects
of prior materials, that communicate to knowledgeable audiences
via reference and intertextuality.  Perhaps point out the more
subtle point that the role of anthology editor would really be
analogous to a DJ only if the anthology being assembled contained
only previously published fiction.  If it included only new
fiction, you'd need a slightly different analogy.  Be sure to
note the sorts of interesting issues raised by the aesthetics
underlying rap and fiction anthologies.  For example, is
"borrowing" unfamiliar materials "more creative" than sampling
materials people should know?  Is it possible for a musician to
not borrow materials?  In what sense?  Should strategies that
fundamentally rely on appropriation, sampling, or collaboration
be considered "creative" at all?  In what ways does the recent
tendency to problematize authorial originality and the
distinction between "literary" and "critical" writing provide
ways of thinking about fiction anthologies as literary forms?

*IV. 5  Establishing the process of collaborative interactions
between the anthology's editorial introduction and fiction
selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different
forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity); summary of the
absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise
from following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
sequential listing of the topics that result from adhering to
these conventions.*

     The options available to anyone hoping to assemble an
interesting fiction anthology are virtually unlimited.
Unfortunately, there are considerably fewer options available to
editors once it comes time to write the editorial introductions
that accompany such anthologies.  As with book reviewing,
editorial introductions are essentially written according to a
formula that controls the overall structure, tone and content of
the discourse--a formula whose main features have evolved
primarily to serve the private interests of the editors and their
publisher rather than to serve any necessary generic function.
No matter how complex or unique the anthology's focus, how
creatively and flexibly the editor has used this focus in the
selection process, no matter how original the fiction selections
are in terms of formal innovation or thematic complexity--in the
end, nearly all editorial introductions follow a sequence of
presentations that can be listed as follows:

1. Attention-grabbing opening paragraph that establishes why the
anthology's theme or focus is particularly important now,
usually accompanied by references to the inadequacies of other
anthologies with a similar focus.
2. Details introduced regarding the background of the anthology,
how this editor became involved in the project (here modest
indications of how the editor's professional background and other
credentials make him or her particularly suited to put together
such an anthology), what the anthology's original aims were (and
hence what sorts of considerations were involved in the selection
process), and a summary of how these aims changed or remained
consistent as the volume took shape.  [See Appendix C.]
3. Brief, "punchy" overview of the anthology's contents.
4. Presentation of information regarding the authors' lives,
citation of previous most significant publications, literary
movements associated with the authors, etc..
5. (Optional.)  Roll call of other authors considered for the
anthology (if applicable) with reasons why any expected figures
aren't represented.  If necessary, comments designed to blunt
charges of the anthology's imbalances (gender, race, etc.),
justifications for any political incorrectness that might be
perceived in selections, followed by suggestions of what
misreadings on part of the reader created such perceptions.
6. Citations regarding the appropriateness of the selections in
terms of the anthology's focus; justification for any pieces that
at first glance seem very much out of focus.
7. Overview of notable themes and stylistic features (examples
and quotations to support this list), followed by favorable
comparisons of this anthology with rival anthologies that may
have preceded it.
8. Claims made for the overall significance of the anthology
material, pronouncements about how the individual aesthetic and
thematic features found in the anthology's fiction relate to
broader trends within and outside of literature.
9. Concluding paragraph which reveals ways this anthology's
selections indicate rich possibilities, new directions, etc..
10. Final sentence designed to get the reader to turn the page as
quickly as possible.

     The problem here isn't that these formulaic elements are all
trivial or inappropriate.  The problem is the formulaic nature
of the formula, the tendency of editors to pass off hasty and
usually self-serving conclusions based on inadequate sampling of
their subject.  Rather than follow many postmodern authors who
try to develop methods that permit them to find systems and
significance but who do so honestly by acknowledging their own
subjectivity and actual, less-than-systematic experiences, many
editors feel it necessary to adhere blindly to a formula whose
elements encourage dishonesty, misrepresentation, superficiality,
and manipulation.  At least in anthologies that introduce new
work by serious fiction writers, such introductions are nearly
always the product of bad faith--the bad faith of editors who
know better but deliberately attempt to reduce ultimately
uncategorizable works to "trends," "patterns," or labels, the bad
faith of literary guides who've been living inside this rich
literary terrain for weeks and months, and who've been damn
excited about how untranslatable the stuff is, and how resistant
it is to the kinds of paraphrases and overstatements the editor
is expected to make in the introduction.  This isn't to say that
editors shouldn't present their views and point out trends or
patterns--after all, though finding a pattern in the stars may be
primarily an act of the creative imagination, such patterns help
people locate themselves and find out where they're going.
Editors should express their opinions in a performative act that
strives to break through the discursive screens of traditional
editorial representation to the repressed, authentic data of the
material at hand.
     [Editorial Note, Los Angeles, 9-25.  As explained in
Editor's Note for V. Intro (Cancelled), circumstances made it
impossible for me to complete some sections of this Editorial
Introduction (such as the actual Editorial Introduction itself).
I am, however, able to provide readers with some discarded
fragments of the concluding paragraph that I worked on some time
ago (see Appendix F) which should clarify what I would have said
if circumstances had been different.

*V.  Introduction (Now Cancelled)*

[EDITOR'S APOLOGY:]  Due in part to the time and energy required
to develop the earlier sections of his remarks concerning the
need for an aesthetics of fiction anthologies, partly because of
circumstances beyond his control, and partly because he doesn't
wish to risk the bad faith referred to earlier, the editor
regretfully acknowledges that he will be unable to supply the
editorial introduction.  To compensate for this, and to provide
readers with easy access to the relations between these works,
the editor is providing in lieu of an introduction a listing of
the anthology selections marked with a handy series of symbols
whose meanings are explained below.  He is also supplying
contributors' notes for each author (because these are usually
supplied at the end of an anthology they are often overlooked by
readers); for readers interested in what the editor might have
said in the (Now Cancelled) "Introduction," he is also including
an appendix containing a fragment of material originally intended
for the "Introduction" (See Appendices C-F).

*V. 1.  Listing of Anthology Selections with Easy-to-Use Coded
References for Easy Reader Access to their Postmodern Features*

Kathy Acker, "Obsession": A(1,3),B,C,E,F,G,H,J,K,L,M,N,O(2),
     P,Q,S,T,U,W,X,Y.
Robert Coover, "The Titles Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
     Pierre": A(1,2), C,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,O(1,2),P,R,S,T,U,V.
Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding": A(1,2,3),E,F,G,H,I,K,L,M,
     O(1),P,Q,R,S,T,U,W,X.
Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland": C,F,H,I,K,N,T.
Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself": C,D,E,F,H,J,K,O(2),P,Q,R,
     S,T,U,W,X.
Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life": A(2),B,C,E,F,P,R,S,T,V.
Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
     Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography"):
     C,D,E,F,G,K,N,O,Q,R,S,T,U,V.
William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer": B,C,E,F,G,
     K,N,O,P,Q,S,T,U,W,Y.

Explanation of Symbols:

A(1): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
     culture.
A(2): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
     culture to subvert pop culture.
B:    Strategies of confounding the usual distinctions between
author/character, fiction/autobiography, "real" history and
invented versions.
C:    Meta-features.
D:    Cyberpunk features.
E:    Non-linear methods of presentation.
F:    Process over product.
G:    Collision of different world or planes of reality motif.
H:    Radically idiosyncratic voices and idioms employed.
[Note: continue through Z.]

=================================
*Appendix A: Commentary About Kathy Acker and "Obsession,"
Written by Editor for a Different Project--for Possible Sampling
Purposes in the (Now Cancelled) Introduction*

[Note: Once Larry realized that he did not have much time before
the deadline to write a completely new version of this
commentary, he planned to paraphrase it, or "sample" it (self-
plagiarism).  --Eyal.]

          Like her fiction, Kathy Acker is a bundle of
     contradictory parts that combine to create the jagged unity
     of a Raushcenberg collage.  Street-wise gutter snipe and
     radical feminist critic, motorcycle-outlaw and vulnerable
     woman, cynic and visionary idealist, Acker writes a series
     of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing novels that
     present perhaps the most devastating (and wickedly funny)
     critique of life under late capitalism since William
     Burroughs' mid-60s works.
          These works include her 1970s small press publications
     (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, by the Black 
     Tarantula; I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac!; Imagining;
     The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, by Henri Toulouse 
     Lautrec; and Kathy Acker Goes to Haiti); her "re-writes"
     of classical Western novels Great Expectations and Don 
     Quixote, as well as works that pastiche a broader variety
     of prior literary works: Blood and Guts in High School,
     Empire of the Senseless, and In Memoriam to Identity.
          "Obsession" offers an illustration of the ways Avant-
     Pop authors appropriate, sample, and otherwise collaborate
     with prior texts drawn from the realms of both "high" and
     "pop" culture; it also showcases Avant-Pop's tendency to
     blur the distinction between author and character--a device
     which emphasizes the individual's imaginative role in
     constructing any version of "reality" and the interaction of
     "fiction" and "fact" in our media-soaked environment.  In
     "Obsession," Acker--in one of her typically bold narrative
     manoeuvers--adopts the roles of Cathy and Heathcliff, the
     passionate and ultimately doomed lovers from Emily Bronte's
     19th century masterpiece, Wuthering Heights.  But as
     Avant-Pop authors often remind us, "re-telling" a familiar
     story within a contemporary context permits readers to re-
     think the assumptions and "meanings" they bring to such
     materials.  "Reanimated" by Acker's surrealist imagination
     and fiercely political vision, the elements of Bronte's
     novel are transformed into a nightmarish vision of the
     sexual longings, gender confusions and injustices to be
     found in contemporary society.
          Also typical of Acker's work is her focus in
     "Obsession" on the body as a literal and symbolic site/cite
     of struggle between individuals seeking self-empowerment and
     the forces of patriarchal control that seek to regulate
     people's lives.  This emphasis is grounded in more than
     abstract political concerns.  As a real woman and not just a
     narrative person, Acker is her own text, her own gallery.
     Embedded i*n one of her front teeth is a jagged chunk of
     bronze.  She's a body-builder in more than the usual way:
     her muscles animate spectacular tattoos, a combination that
     she feels allows her to seize control over the sign-systems
     through which people "read" her.  Past mistress of the
     cunning juxtaposition and the Fine Art of Appropriation,
     Acker writes fiction that betrays a multitrack outlaw
     intellect.  And she doesn't shrink from mining outlaw "low
     culture" genres like SF, pornography, and detective fiction.
     The net effect of her work is not merely to deconstruct, but
     to decondition.

*V. 2  Contributors' Notes*

Kathy Acker's most recent publications include: Portrait of the 
     Eye (a collection of three early novels) and In Memoriam 
     to Identity.  The selection included in this issue is from
     a forthcoming novel to be published by Random House in the
     Spring of 1993.  She is also recording an album featuring
     her work set to music that Hal Wilner is producing, and
     rides a 750 Honda.

Robert Coover recently spent two years developing teaching
     applications using hypertext in creative writing courses
     (this pilot program was sponsored by Apple).  Professor of
     English at Brown University, he is the author of numerous
     novels and stories, including most recently Pinocchio in 
     Venice.  The fiction selection included here is part
     of a long experimental novel, The Adventures of Lucky 
     Pierre, which Coover has been writing now for over twenty
     years.

Ricardo Cruz's fiction has appeared in various literary journals,
     including Fiction International and Black Ice Magazine.
     His first novel, Straight Outta Compton (Fall 1992,
     Fiction Collective Two), was recently named winner of the
     Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction.  Currently
     "out and about" in Bloomington, Illinois, he is completing
     work on his Ph.D. in English at Illinois State-Normal.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of six volumes of poetry and a
     tetralogy of novels--The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains 
     of Neptune, and The Jade Cabinet--that will be
     published by Dalkey Archive Press.  Also known for her work
     as an illustrator of such works as the limited edition of
     Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid and Borges's "Tlon Uqbar
     and Orbis Tertius," Ducornet is Professor of Creative
     Writing and Literature at the University of Denver.  A
     forthcoming issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction
     will be devoted to her work (The Guest-Editor of this issue
     wishes it to be known that he is currently seeking materials
     for this issue).

Rob Hardin is a writer and musician living in NYC who reports
     that writing is the way of "getting linear dissonant
     counterpoint--the chamber music nightmare and empty attics--
     out of my system."  His poetry has appeared in numerous
     magazines, including Mississippi Review, Atomic Avenue,
     and Flagellation.  His recent album credits include The
     Lost Boys and Billy Squire's Here and Now.

Annemarie Kemeny teaches and is completing work on her Ph.D.
     at the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook.  She
     has published criticism and poetry.

Marc Laidlaw has spent most of his adult life in office
     buildings, writing on company word processors.  His works
     include an early cyberpunk novel, Dad's Nuke (1985), a SF
     novel abut Tibet, Neon Lotus.  The selection published in
     this issue has appeared in print in Great Britain in New 
     Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd.).

Larry McCaffery is co-editor of Fiction International,
     American Book Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary 
     Fiction, and editor of Storming the Reality Studio: A 
     Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction(Duke
     UP).  Two new books will appear in 1993: Interviews with 
     Radically Innovative American Authors (Pennsylvania UP) 
     and Avant Pop: Postmodern Fiction for the 90s, which will
     appear in the new Black Ice Books Series (Normal, IL:
     Fiction Collective Two).

William T. Vollmann's recent publications include Whores for 
     Gloria, An Afghanistan Picture Show, Thirteen Stories & 
     Thirteen Epitaphs, and Fathers and Crows (the third of
     Vollmann's projected septology of "Dream Novels").  Research
     for his books has taken him recently to Cambodia, Mexico
     City, Sarajevo, and the Magnetic North Pole.

=================================
VI.  *Appendix B: Editor's Log: 1/92--In the Beginning...*

     Before the word was the grant application for contributors'
and editor's honoraria for a special issue of Postmodern Culture
devoted to "Postmodern Fiction."
     1-92.  Postmodern Culture's co-editor Eyal Amiran contacted
me, Larry McCaffery (for his background as an editor and critic
associated with postmodernism, see contributor's notes), early in
1992 to discuss my willingness to guest edit this special issue.
I agreed and we set up a basic gameplan: I would arrange for the
appearance of approximately half dozen previously unpublished (in
the U.S.) pieces that, in my view, illustrated significant formal
and thematic tendencies within postmodernism; to this end, my
selection process would avoid narrow or prescriptive definitions
of what constituted "postmodernism," emphasizing the quality of
material over "name recognition," although I would attempt to
include at least some fiction by established figures (Pynchon,
Sontag, Gaddis, Coover, Barth, Rushdie, Abish, McElroy, Le Guin,
Barthelme, and Burroughs were all specifically mentioned in our
preliminary phone conversations, and, indeed, were subsequently
invited by me to submit fiction for the issue).  I would also try
to include writings by some of the most interesting recent
authors, and selections from work that would come in response to
Postmodern Culture's calls for fiction; I would supply an
introduction which would place my selections in a general
framework of postmodern aesthetics generally, and which would
clarify whatever significant differences and similarities
characterize the older and younger generations of postmodern
authors.  Deadline for my having all the materials in the
editors' hands would be mid-September, with the issue going out
on-line at the very end of the month.

=================================

*Appendix C: Unrevised Fragments of Editor's (Now Cancelled)
Introduction*

1.  ...I agreed to accept his invitation to edit in part because
I felt the process of putting such an issue together would
contribute to the process of re-evaluating my own views about
postmodernism.  This process started several years ago, when now,
and has grown out of a series of recognitions in the mid-80s
about the limitations and strengths of my earlier positions about
postmodernism, that I was already fullyI was alredayworking on
suchpretty certain that whatever in part on question that the
literary sensibilities on encounters in the best writing coming
out of the younger generation of vital, innovative American
authors has been shaped by a very different set of cultural
circumstances and aesthetic considerationsvery different indeed
from those that gave rise to the first wave of postmodern
experimentalism back in the mid 60s...one generation's daring
metafictional explorations about the relationship between author
and text becomes the most effective tool of the 90s realist
attempting to depict a world in which "signs," "texts," and
various other fictions have proliferated to such an extent that
they form the most substantial aspect of most people's existence.
2.  ...no attempt was made to fill pre-designated slots or
categories...what was surprising was the sheer volume of quality
fiction written by the generation of innovative writers who have
grown to maturity in the 80s and 90s...halfway into my selection
process, Eyal Amiran had agreed with my suggestion that we aim
less for a balance of fiction by younger and more established and
concentrate instead on foregrounding work by emerging writers,
using selections from the canonical postmodernists by way of
showcasing aesthetic and thematic continuities or divergences
between the generations.
3.  Ducornet's camera serves as it does for some many other
younger writers, as a magical mirror possessing the power to
petrify the past, illuminate and momentarily petrify human truths
that usually evaporate under life's process of perpetual change.
     ...a selection from perhaps the most versatile stylist,
ventriloquist of all...quirky American dialects, bad jokes,
willingness to push a trope until every aspect of it had been
squeezed dry..."Lucky Pierre" is an excerpt from a legendy blue
movie special, now over twenty years in the making.  More than
most other 60s figures, Coover's best work from the 60s is linked
directly to writers like DeLillo, Leyner, the cyberpunks and the
later authors whose work is so often drenched in a kind of
constant breath surrealism and intertextual play, and whose prose
is so frequently drenched in a kind of techno-media poetics.
     Cruz, appropriate that when his interrelated sequence of
stories about life in the ghetto finally came together into a
novel, Straight Outta Compton appropriate on several levels--
the sheer intensity and sensuousness of his voice, the sheer
vitality and anger and low-down ache of passion and the mixture
of surprise, delight and playfulness with which they respond to
the set of surprises that ghetto life has in store for them
moment-to-moment.  Cruz is the first black writer I've
encountered who seems to have integrated rap's developed a prose
voice, narrative
     [Editor's Note: Apologize in Ed. Note that I can't even
provide fragments of the Kemeny because I left my only copy of
her story behind in San Diego and did not receive the fax of her
story sent by Eyal.]
     Laidlaw, Alphabetical structure, near science fictional tale
of, associated with c-p but possesses a lyricism, verbal control,
and intellectual delicacy that has more in common with Calvino or
Steve Erickson (whose non-appearance is regretted).
     William Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer."  This is
although the 90s postmodernists have only just begun the process
of shifting gears into a decade that almost certainly is going to
pick up speed and recklessness as the millennium approaches, but
from this vantage point there's no question that William T.
Vollmann has got a headstart over every other member of his
generation in terms of opening up new narrative opportunities and
laying aside the temerity and failure, hesitation, and general
figure of will that seemed to lie heavy over the generation of
authors appearing in the late 70s and early 80s fiction.
Certainly no American author since the arrival of the canonized
behemoth Thomas Pynchon has appeared with the combination of
reckless ambition, verbal gifts, and an intuitive feel for
inventing narrative strategies capable of rendering this vision.
     "Incarnations of the Murderer" displays many of the
tendencies that make Vollmann's work seem so original and fresh.
As is typical of most of his other work, "Incarnations" deals
with brutality and those troubling emotional regions where
extremes of passion and love are transformed into their equally
vivid opposites.  Also typically, Vollmann never allows a scene
or a motif to remain static; instead, his imagination is
constantly at work transforming the scenes and characters into
variations designed to present new insights into materials that
more traditional story-telling methods would use to make us feel
comfortable, that we have understood their essence.
"Incarnations" also displays Vollmann's characteristically
prismatic handling of point of view--having matured in the
aftermath of the experiments of writers like Burroughs, Mailer,
Vonnegut, and Coover.  Vollmann has taken ways of integrating
authorial experience, collaborating with prior texts, and
imagining inventive narrative to new levels.  The risks he has
managed to take at this pint, both personal and narrative, are
astonishing.  For all the attention paid to presenting even the
most ugly and poignant scenes and people even-handedly, there is
a deeply moving sense of Vollmann's personal engagement, his
sense of moral outrage while witnessing the cruelties and
stupidities human beings can inflict on each other.  The risk of
insisting on personally witnessing such acts of human folly as he
documents in his fiction are burnout, having one's imagination or
aesthetic judgement overwhelmed by the emotionality of such
experiences.  For now, though, at least for this reader, the
sense of personal risk and danger has served Vollmann admirably.
Surely if nothing else, Vollmann is helping to dispel the sense
that postmodern American fiction has floundered under the weight
of its own selfconsciousness.

=================================
*Appendix D: Fragment found at bottom of page while developing
conclusion to section IV. 5.*

     As I hope this "traditional" portion of my Introduction
indicates, one can be fully informed about the ambiguities and
limitations of any speech act; the tendency of all authors is to
try to mask their confusion and personal insecurities behind a
barrage of phoney rhetoric.  This does not, however, relieve the
author of the responsibility of attempting to draw conclusions
about issues that might be of some use.  It also doesn't mean
that the process of engaging one's mind regularly with
challenging topics can't be fun, or that the only options with
topics one cares about deeply are to adopt the hypocritical or
smug stance of the know-it-all or to mutter embarrassed
apologies.  Displays of either adopt either the hypocritical
stance of the or the hanghyupocritical finding a way to present
what your conclusions are and how you arrived at them has to be--
your conclusions and attitudesthat one can't expressand ones
words withothers migwith as much mean, however, metaphorss well
asaware of the limitations of an individual to draw
conclusionsones         and the postmodern seems torisks
havepleasurethe risks have been worth itevident--pursuing this
itye"breakthrough" in terms of casting off the authorialtaking
off on the perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Vollmann's
writing in terms of postmodern aesthetics--namely, his treatment
of point of viewworkIn terms of

In order to give language the opportunities to stretch out
muscles it rarely uses, the narrative structures in these
selections tend to be flexible, open-ended, the "plot" capable of
veering off suddenly in several possible directions.  Ironically,
such structures can be seen as presenting a palpable and
"realistic" sense of our world, with its constantly shifting
series of signs systems and cultural codes producing surreal
juxtapositions, a sense of media overload...exhilaration and
confusion.

to commentaryverbalash of expectations, the strangesurreal
fusings of wherenothern equally familiar butnother context that
is equally familiar butthe familiar elements drawn from
differentcontexts into strange anddifferent sorts
ofAestheticsQuestiolns of "realism" aside, however, using the
free flowing narrative structures ofbarrthe sorts ofemiotic
excess andthe constantly shiftingexploring its itself shared
conviction that language's ability to transform our
consciousness, a certain confidence that fiction's potential to
create illusions that can shock and awaken, that language can
enlight and...put in the service of confront banality
counterability building language's power to that fiction in the
powerabsorbed lessons of 60s literary radicalyounger the strength
ofanew critical categories and terms arise with accelerating
frequency in an attempt to keep pace with the appearance of the
"new," the "exotic," and the "now"...fueled by a hysterical
denial of the inevitability of bodily decay, old age and death,
full of self-loathing for physical imperfection, obsessed with
preserving one's experiences into images and sounds that provide
the closest approximation of immortality allowed postmoderns,
deeply suspicious of anything that cannot be soothingly
controlled, "captured," replayed, most Americans have almost
gladly accepted a life of banality in exchange for the creature
comforts provided by its Daydream Nation; as reading becomes less
central to the process whereby people are educated and understand
each other, its significance retreats generally...on any given
evening in America, the number of people sitting transfixed by
game shows, their vestigial instinct toward self-improvement
satisfied by the random bits of data occasionally tossed their
way, outnumbers all the Americans who will read a book this year
by a factor of 10 to 1.  comforting reassurance that the American
Dream of instant transcendence is real...you gotta believe your
own eyes, right?  the postmodern spectacle of the Rodney King
trial, in which our citizens deeply felt intuition that they
can't really trust the images comprising their postmodern
world...
 are insubstantila, trickssuspicions about the illusory, awaht
you see iwhich people comfort themselves and writing becomes
increasinglytheandretreated into a dangerously somnolent  or
anything else that cannot be controlled or rationally the
powerful difference--a relentless and ferocious pursuitanything
that postindustrial capitalism, with its relentless difference
engine, continues toproduced by thesodemanded by the logic of
jaded consumers awahsare relentlesslyas the logic of
postindustrial capitalism's difference engine, help distributors
and bookstore ownerfocus the consumption of fiction and other art
"products"direct the somnolent readers waiting patiently for the
latest poll to let them know what they think or feel about
something,epheality ofdifficulty

=================================
*Appendix E: Early Draft of Comments Editor Planned to Use in His
(Now Cancelled) "Introduction," Regarding Robert Coover's "Lucky
Pierre" Selection (Remarks Which Would Also Have Helped Establish
the Recurrent Pattern of Media-Induced Confusions, Reality Decay
and Loss of Individual Identity Evident in Several of the
Anthology's Selections).*

One of the features that distinguished work by the 60s generation
of postmodernists was their willingness to confort ashad to do
with their of the brash band of
     Back in the early to mid-1960s, as Thomas Pynchon, John
Barth, Susan Sontag, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald
Barthelme and others were making it clear that a new generation
of American writers were in their ascendancy, one
particularly fresh angle of their work had to do with their
presentation of technological change generally and "pop culture"
in particular.  And the writer no otherrelationir take on
are direction their work area of shard interest that made their
work seem so fresh and genuinely "new" had to do with their
exploration of how technological change and pop culture was
transforming American life--and the new art forms arising to meet
this transformation.  Most of these writers had experienced the
thrill of Saturday afternoon serials and cartoons (followed
perhaps by a Gene Autry Western or Hardy Boys movie), had
collected bubblegum cards emblazoned with British and American
fighter planes; they could recall Truman's announcement that a
new weapon had been used against the Japanese in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and they recognized the significance once their family
radios were replaced by a television set.  There was something
profound about such changes, of course, because in addition to
transforming the physical space they were inhabiting, these
developments were having deep and largely untheorized effects on
their imaginations, what they dreamed of and were frightened by.
Just as importantly, these things were affecting perception
itself--movies taught writers how narrative materials could be
cut-up, juxtaposed, what could be eliminated, tv ads provided
insights about how to present information-dense materials
economically, how to be didactic without tipping your hand too
obviously, how principlesIn short, the 60s generation of
postmodernist authors was the first to begin to explore the Media
Scape that gradually began to occupy more and more of America's
attention, its dreamslifeaffectingThese developments wereAll this
was f having first time they saw television.memories of the vast
transformations that accompanied the war, were old enough to
remember a time when the family gathering around the radio each
evening was still a novelty,evening radioThis was the first
generation of authors who had grown up immersed in Media Culture
, who were the firsthow popular new terrain they began to stake
out was the effect that the mediamutual concern of the key areas
ofthe first brash band of postmodern fiction writers were just
bursting upon the relatively staid American literary scene,
Robert Coover quickly established himself as one of the brashest

=================================
*Appendix F: Fragment of Discussion to be Used in the (Now
Cancelled) "Introduction" regarding Recurrent Motifs in
Postmodernism and the Current Issue (with Supporting Quotes)*

Recurrent references to the proliferation of images created by
cameras (including video and movie cameras), the sense that
photography is akin to magic in its ability to allow humans
visual access to that which is normally invisible (the past, the
dead, inner psychic states), the more ominous implications that
by giving such previously ineffable or abstract states of being a
tangible existence has created an entryway through which
illusion, the dead, and the past will soon overrun "real" and the
living and the present.
          Inventor of the praxiscope technology (*which see*),
     Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of
     physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to
     direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of
     nature.  Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was
     offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer
     instantaneous viewing of any subject's thoughts.
               --Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness"
Postmodern Authors living in a contemporary world dominated by
Media Scape, simulated experiences, Virtual-and-Hyper Realities,
often literalize the metaphorical components of previous eras'
attempts to poeticize the mysterious nature of truth and
falsehood, life and death, reality and illusion, originality and
duplication.  Thus, Robert Coover places his hero Lucky Pierre
into a cinematic narrative realm in which "All the world's a
stage, and each must play his part, etc.."
     As technologies of reproduction create counterfeit worlds
that become increasingly lifelike and offer an ever-expanding
array of simulated experiences, the fleeting "real time"
experiences of individuals begin to seem increasingly less
substantial precisely because they cannot be replayed.

     

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          FINEART FORUM GETS NEW PUBLISHER

FineArt Forum, the international electronic newsletter, is now
being published by the Mississippi State University/National
Science Foundation Engineering  Research Center for Computational
Field Simulation (MSU/NSF ERC).  Its new editor is  the English
artist Paul Brown, a member of the MSU Art Faculty.

Founded in 1986, FineArt Forum is one of the longest established
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program in Computational Design.

Brown had previously founded the UK's National Center for
Computer Aided Art &  Design and later helped establish
Australia's Advanced Computer Graphics Center.   As an artist he
has been working with computers for almost twenty years and has
exhibited and published in Europe, Australia and the USA.
"I have been writing about art & technology for a long time and
jumped at the  chance to edit FineArt Forum", he explained.
"It's an ideal vehicle for exploring new forms of electronic
publication.  Also many more people from the artworld  now want
to learn about this new area and there's a growing demand for
sources of information".

FineArt Forum is distributed on, or around, the 1st of the month.
Subscribers also receive Leonardo Electronic News on the 15th.
To participate you need  access to the Internet (which is
available via many of the commercial networks).   Send an e-mail
message to:  fast@garnet.berkeley.edu with the content:   SUB
FINE-ART your-email-address, first-name, last-name, and postal
address.

Like a lot of the network publications it's free.

For further information and images contact: Paul Brown Editor,
FineArt Forum MSU/NSF Engineering Research Center PO Box 6176
Mississippi State MS 39762-6176 601 325 2970 601 325 7692 fax
brown@erc.msstate.edu

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

                         _F.A.S.T_
Fine Art, Science and Technology Electronic Bulletin Board and
Data Base
Current Developments in the Application of New Technology
to the Arts Around the World

     * Calendar of Worldwide Events
     * Electronic Newsletters: Leonardo Electronic News
     * Sections on Holography, Space Arts
     * ISAST Member News
     * Job Listings
     * Directory of Resources: Grants, Fellowships, Funds,
          Organizations
     * Bibliographies and Book Lists
     * Words on Works: A special section where subscribing

          artists describe new artworks.
     *Profiles of Organizations

F.A.S.T. (Fine Art, Science and Technology Electronic Bulletin
Board) covers all applications of Science and Technology to the
Arts.  Topics include computer graphics and animation,
applications of artificial intelligence to the arts, applications
of computers to music, holography, robotics, telecommunications
and art, video, computer literature, and new materials in the
arts.

The Directory includes artist-in-residence programs and a list of
curators who are interested in art which uses technology.

In addition, F.A.S.T. contains an archive of FineArt Forum
newsletters so that subscribers may review back issues.

The F.A.S.T. Bulletin Board not only allows rapid access to
information, but also allows subscribers direct contact with
other subscribers interested in the application of new
technologies to the arts.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

The F.A.S.T. Database is updated weekly.  Leonardo Electronic
News is published monthly (the 15th).  A 1-year subscription to
F.A.S.T. (expiring one year from date of your activation access
to F.A.S.T.) may be obtained electronically for $40 (individuals)
and $100 (Educational Libraries).  ISAST members are entitled to
a discount subscription rate of $20.00/year.  Leonardo Electronic
News may be delivered by surface mail for an additional charge of
$55.00/year for members and $65.00/year for non-members.

In order to subscribe to F.A.S.T., the user must have access to
The WELL conferencing system.  This system uses the phone lines
to transmit information thus a modem is also necessary.  There is
a charge for subscribing to this as well as access charges from
the phone company.  The WELL is the system on which we post
Leonardo Electronic News, and the various bulletin boards and
calendars for F.A.S.T..

The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is centered in the San
Francisco area with an international access through Compuserve.
The WELL includes private electronic mail, public and private
conferences, and storage files.  Information about the WELL is
available via e-mail at info@well.sf.ca.us or by calling (415)
332-4335 or writing The WELL, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA
94965.  When you subscribe to The WELL, please mention that you
are doing so in order to have access to F.A.S.T., we get a small
credit for each referral.

Reduced access charges are available via PC Pursuit and
Compuserve Packet Network.  Contact The WELL for further
information.

It is also possible to receive F.A.S.T. on diskettes.  Each
diskette (5 1/4/ MSDOS diskettes, ASCII text, double-sided,
double-density) contains all of the information on F.A.S.T. for
the current quarter.  This includes three issues of Leonardo
Electronic News, the calendars, selections from Laser News, Words
on Works, Space Art News, Member News, the organizations and e-
mail directories, the latest bibliography and the job listings.
Each diskette is $17.00 for members and $25.00 for non-members,
annual subscription rates (four diskettes) are $60.00 for members
and $90.00 for non-members.

For additional information about ISAST, or to become an ISAST
member. contact:
     ISAST (International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and
            Technology)
     672 South Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
     Tel: (415) 431-7414 or fax: (415) 41-5737
     Email: fast@garnet.berkeley.edu

For further information about FineArt Forum or F.A.S.T., send
email to fast@garnet.berkeley.edu (internet) or FAST@UCBGARNE
(bitnet).

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

_FutureCulture_

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

The subject must have one of the following:

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

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

While no article that attempts to document an entire emerging
subculture can be complete, I will do my best to give you enough
complete and accurate information to get you on your way to the
future.

This article will focus mainly on cyberpunk culture, rave
culture, Industrial, po-mo, virtual reality, drugs, computer
underground, etc..  Basically, the elements that make up the
developing techno-underground, the new edge, the technoculture.

Included in this article will be: suggested readings--books
magazines, zines, requisite authors, BBSes devoted to relevant
topics, corporations and merchandise geared toward the techno-
aware, Internet e-mail addresses for figure-heads in this area,
suggested music and movies/videos, FTP sites, etc..

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

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

_GENDER, LANGUAGE, AND MYTH_
Essays on Popular Narrative

edited by *Glenwood Irons*

_Gender, Language, and Myth_ is a collection of fourteen papers
on popular romance, detective, western, science fiction and
horror.  Authors included are Jean Radford, Tania Modleski, and
Leslie Fiedler (on romance); Marcus Klein, John Cawelti, and Jane
Tomkins (on the western); Glenwood Irons, Scott Christianson and
Umberto Eco (on detective and espionage); and Harold Schecter,
Carol Clover, and Robin Wood (on horror).

University of Toronto Press
50.00/cloth (Cdn)
18.95/paper (Cdn)

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

_GNET: an Archive and Electronic Journal

Toward a Truly Global Network

Computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet
they are not truly global--they are concentrated in affluent
parts of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.

GNET is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort
to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts
of developed nations (Net access is better in many "third world"
schools than in South-Central Los Angeles).  GNET consists of two
parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion.

Archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the
directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1).  To
conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each
document, as well as the full document (Those without ftp access
can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval).

In addition to the archive, there is a moderated GNET discussion
list.  The list is limited to discussion of documents in the
archive.  It is hoped that document authors will follow this
discussion, and update their documents accordingly.  If this
happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal.  Monthly
mailings will list new papers added to the archive.

We wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to
visionary.  Suitable topics include, but are not restricted to:

     descriptions of networks and projects
     host and user hardware and software
     connection options and protocols
     current and proposed applications
     education using the global net
     user and system administrator training
     social, political or spiritual impact
     economic and environmental impact
     politics and funding
     free speech, security and privacy
     directories of people and resources

To submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated
discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu

Larry Press

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

_THE INTERNET COMPANION_
A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking

Tracy LaQuey
Editorial Inc.
Software Tool & Die
and
The Online Bookstore (OBS)
Are Pleased to Announce...

The first simultaneous electronic and print publication of a
major new book: _The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to
Global Networking_  by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (Addison-
Wesley, $10.95.

Online copies of Vice-President-elect Al Gore's Forward and the
first two chapters of this best-selling book are available via
anonymous FTP from:

world.std.com

in the directory:

/OBS/The.Internet.Companion/

Further chapters will be released in the future.  See README
and COPYRIGHT files in that directory for more details.  Direct
comments and questions about the book can be sent to:

internet-companion@world.std.com

This pioneering effort is a step in bringing together the on-line
electronic and print media, enabling authors to explore new
avenues of publishing their works.  Comments, inquiries, etc.
welcome.  Send to:

obs@world.std.com

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

_THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW_

The _Law and Politics Book Review is now available on the gopher
server at Northwestern University:

gopher@nwu.edu.

Choose "Northwestern University Information" on the first menu
and "Law and Politics Book Review" on the next menu.

Herbert Jacob
Northwestern University
Voice Mail (708) 491-2648
e-mail  mzltov@nwu.edu

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

_NOMAD_

An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities, Arts, and
Sciences

_Nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as
intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing.  The
journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined
regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing.  For
information, contact:

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

e-mail:
Paul Rutkovsky

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

_NON SERVIAM_
The Radical Electronic Newsletter dedicated
Stirner's Philosophy of Egoism

Editor: Svein Olav Nyberg 

_Non Serviam_ is an electronic newsletter centered on the
philosophy of Max Stirner, author of "Der Einzige und Sein
Eigentum" ("The Ego and Its Own"), and his dialectical egoism.
The contents, however, are decided upon by the individual
contributors and the censoring eye of the editor.  The aim is to
have  somewhat more elaborate and carefully reasoned articles
than are usually found on the news groups and lists.

Introductory file:

"Non Serviam!"--"I will not serve", is known from literature as
Satan's declaration of his rebellion against God.  We wish to
follow up on this tradition of insurrection.

In modern times, the philosophy of the individual's assertion of
him//herself against gods, ideals, and human oppressors has been
most eloquently expressed by Max Stirner in his book "Der Einzige
und Sein Eigentum".

Stirner, whose real name was Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1805-56),
lived in a time dominated by German Idealism, with Hegel as its
prominent figure.  It is against this background of fixation of
ideas that Stirner makes his rebellion.

For the more formal part, though the letter is centered on
philosophy and ideas, articles on topics relevant to true egoists
will also be admitted.  The prime requirement is that the
articles are not on-line ranting, but serious attempts to convey
something of interest and relevance.  Articles on literature
through the ages are fine, stories will be welcomed if they are
appropriate, and I even think I might fall for an article on
french cuisine made easy...  However: If in doubt whether an
article will accepted, ask ne by personal mail first.  A waste of
time is a waste of time.

I hope to be able to make each of the issues of the newsletter
thematic, that is we will have one main theme in each issue.  The
main theme is not meant to be the sole content, however, but more
of an inspiration for writing.

Editor and List owner: solan@math.uio.no

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

_Poetics Today_

Edited by Itamar Even-Zohar

International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and
Communication

Subscription Rates:

Individuals: $28
Institutions: $56
Single Issue: $14

(Add $8 for subscription outside of the US)

Send Check, money order, credit card number to:

Duke University Press
Journals Division
6697 College Station
Durham, NC 27708

Call of FAX between 8:00 and 4:00 EST with your VISA, MasterCard,
or American Express order.

Phone:  (919) 684-6837
FAX:    (919) 684-8644

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

_POSITIONS_

East Asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for all
concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events
unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.  Profound
political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and
capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing
national and regional borders.  These transformations compel us
to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching, and
criticism. Mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary
East and West, _POSITIONS_ advocates placing cultural critique at
the center of historical and theoretical practice.  The global
forces of that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain
formulations of nation, gender, class and ethnicity.  We propose
to call into question those still-pressing, yet unstable
categories by crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the
terms of our analysis.  These efforts, we hope, will contribute
toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy.

_POSITIONS_ central premise is that criticism bust always be
self-critical.  Critique of another social order must be self-
aware as commentary on our own.  Likewise, we seek critical
practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that
connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study.

All these endeavors require that we account for positions as
places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge
and knowers as actors in existing social institutions.  In
seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across
national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions
from which to imagine political affinities across the may
dimensions of our differences.

_POSITIONS_ is an independent refereed journal.  Its direction is
taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as
through the encouragement from its readers and writers.

To subscribe to the triannual magazine beginning in Spring 1993
write to:

Mr. Steve A. Cohn
Journals Manager
Duke University Press
6697 College Station
Durham, NC  27708

To submit a manuscript send three copies to:

Tani E. Barlow
Senior Editor
94 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

or e-mail: Barlow@sfsuvax1.edu.

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

_PUBLIC CULTURE_

Edited by Carol A. Breckenridge

Engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural
flows and public cultures in a diasporic world.

Fall 1992 issue (Vol. 5, Number 1): "ON WRITING THE POSTCOLONY"

     *  Hindu/Muslim/Indian             Faisal Fatehali Devji
     *  The Habit of Ex-Nomination      Anannya Bhattacharjee
        Nation, Woman and the Indian
        Immigrant Bourgeois
     *  Narrativizing Postcolony             Tejumola Olaniyan
     *  The Banalities of Interpretation     David William Cohen
     *  Save the African Continent           V.Y. Mudimbe
     *  The Magic of the State               Michael Taussig
     *  Mbembe's Extravagant Power           Judith Butler
     *  The Vulgarity of Power          Michel-Rolph Trouillot
     *  Disempowerment.  Not.                John Pemberton
     *  Can Postcoloniality be Decolonized?  Pernand Coronil
     *  Machiavellian, Rabelaisian,          Dain Borges
        Bureaucratic?
     *  On the Power of the Banal            Michele Richman
     *  Prosaics of Servitude and            Achille Mbembe
        Authoritarian Civilities        (Trans. Janet Roitman)

_Public Culture_ is now published by the University of Chicago
Press and will move from two to three issues per year.  For the
general reader the subscription rate will necessarily change from
$10 dollars per year to $25.  For students it will remain at $5
per issue or $15 dollars per year.  _Public Culture_ trusts that
readers will continue to enjoy this enhanced publication.

Forthcoming special issues will include one guest edited by Lila
Abu Lughod on television in the Third World and another guest
edited by Benjamin Lee on public cultures/public spheres in which
China figures prominently.

Write to:

_Public Culture_
University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
USA
tel. (312) 702-0814 and (312) 702-5660
fax. (312) 702-9861
E-mail CBRE@midway.uchicago.edu

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

_PYNCHON NOTES_

Editors

John M. Krafft
Miami University--Hamilton
1601 Peck Boulevard
Hamilton, OH 45011-3399

E-mail:  jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet  or
jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu

Khachig Tololyan
English Department
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT  06457-6061

Bernard Duyfhuizen
English Department
University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004

E-mail:  pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet  or  pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall.

Submissions: The editors welcome submissions of manuscripts
either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM-compatible, Microsoft
Word, and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and
queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to
John M. Krafft.

Subscriptions: North America, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per
year (or double number);  Overseas, $6.50 per single issue or
$12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter.  Checks should be
made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.  Subscriptions and back-
issue requests should be addressed to Bernard Duyfhuizen.

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is supported in part by the English Departments
of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of Wisconsin--
Eau Claire.

BACK ISSUES

_PYNCHON NOTES_ has been published since October 1979.  Although
most back issues are now out of print, they are available in the
form of photocopies.

Nos.   1-4:  $1.50 each; Overseas, $2.50

Nos.  5-10:  $2.50 each; Overseas, $3.50
Nos. 11-17:  $3.00 each; Overseas, $4.50
No.  18-19:  $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00
No.  20-21:  $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00
No.  22-23:  $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00
No.  24-25:  $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00

Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the names,
other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's Rainbow_ is
also available.

_Index_: 5.00; Overseas, $6.50

All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is a member of CELJ
the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals.

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

_Sub Stance_

Edited by *Sydney Levy and Michel Pierssens*

Published: 3/year  ISSN: 0049-2426

_Sub Stance_ promotes new thoughts by leading American and
European authors which alter the perception of contemporary
culture--be it artistic, humanistic, or scientific.  The journal
represents literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art
criticism, and film studies.

Rates:         Individual (must pre-pay)     $21/yr.
               Institutions                  $68/yr.
               Foreign postage               $ 8/yr.
               Airmail                       $25/yr.

We accept MasterCard and Visa.  Canadian customers please remit
7% Goods and Services Tax.

Please write for a free brochure and back issue list to:

Journal Division
University of Wisconsin Press
114 North Murray Street
Madison, WI 53715 USA

Tel:  (608) 262-4952
FAX:  (608) 262-7560

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

_TAPROOT_

Edited by Luigi-Bob Drake 

Reviewers: Deidre Wickers, Jake Berry, Bill Paulauskas, Nico
Vassiliakis, Bob Grumman, Tom Beckett, Roger Kyle-Keith, and
Luigi-Bob Drake.

Fall 1992 Issue 1.1

_TapRoot_ is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts.  Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats.  In August of 1992, we began
to publish _TapRoot Reviews_, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications which are primarily language-oriented.  The
printed version appears as part of a local (Cleveland Ohio)
poetry tabloid, _The Cleveland Review_.  This posting is the
electronic version, containing all of the short reviews that seem
to be of general interest.  We provide this information in the
hope that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs.
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:

au462@cleveland.freenet.edu

Requests for e-mail subscriptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free.  Please indicate what you are requesting.
Hard-copies of _The Cleveland Review_ contain additional review
material.  In this issue, reviews & articles by John M. Bennett,
geof huth, Micheal Basinski, Tom Willoch--as well as a variety of
poetry, prose, and grafix.

_TapRoot_ is available from: Burning Press, P.O. Box 585,
Lakewood OH  44107--2.50 pp.  Both the print & electronic
versions of TapRoot are copyright 1992 by Burning Press,
Cleveland.  Burning Press is a non-profit educational
corporation.  Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR
NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this introductory notice
is included.  Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds
from the Ohio Arts Council.

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

_XB_

A bibliographic database of the literature of xerography,
(photo)copier art, electrostatic printing, and electrographic
art, seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use
of duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic
purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the Procite
bibliographic software for Macintosh.  An ongoing art
information-information art project, _XB_ requests submissions
especially in machine-readable form but also in other media
formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings,
exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search
printouts and information on disk.  All these are of interest.  A
copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette
(Procite databases work equally well on Mac or IBM) to each
contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process
and a list of participants.

Submissions via mailways, telephone, or Bitnet/Internet/Well:

_Xb_
c/o Reed Altemus
email: IP25196@portland.maine.edu or
          raltemus@well.sf.ca.us
mail:  16 Blanchard Road
       Cumberland Ctr., Maine 04021-97 USA
phone: (207) 829-3666

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

Announcement and Call for Submissions

_POSTMODERN CULTURE_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor  *Joseph Natoli*
Editor         *Carola Sautter*

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

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

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

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

Inquiries, proposals and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

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

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

*********************************************************
HERMIT '93
An International Art Symposium
under the auspices of the Czech Ministry of Culture
1st June - 30th June, 1993
Plasy, Czechoslovakia
*********************************************************

     A Call for Sound Installations, Sculptors, and Fine Artists.

GROWTHRINGS:
time - place - rhythm - light - matter - energy
from Baroque till present.

The theme of the second international symposium-meeting-
exposition and workshop in the Ancient Cistercian monastery in
Plasy (West Bohemia) will be the stimulation of interrelations
between the seeing and hearing, between the past and the
present,between centrum and province, high and low, matter and
energy, between people and their cultural and natural
environment.

Artists, musicians, and intermedia artists from Czechoslovakia,
the Netherlands, Belgium, USA, Australia, Germany and Great
Britain too part in the first symposium HERMIT '92.  However,
while HERMIT '92 was mainly focused on artists from the CSFR,
Netherlands, and Belgium, this year's selection will be
multicultural.  Beside artists from Western and Eastern Europe,
fine artists and musicians from other continents and ethnic
cultures will be in attendance.

The installations, sound sculptures, and performances were mostly
realized directly in the complex of this former monastery founded
in 1142.  The convent contains many different spaces--from dark,
mysterious, subterranean cellars with underground water systems
to light chapels and huge corridors.  The ideal sonic conditions
of the interiors were used for many sound installations and music
performances.  The four floor interior of the granary, with its
early gothic King's chapel and old tower clock, are considered by
artists to be outstanding exhibition space for contemporary art.

The program will be divided into sections:

1) SOUND INSTALLATION AND MUSIC PERFORMANCES.

     The scope of musical styles and genres will range from
     interpretations of baroque music, to authentic folklore and
     experimental contemporary. This part of the symposium will
     consist of exhibition held in the convent, the large concert
     hall in the former refectory, the chapel of St. Benedict and
     of St. Bernard, and the corridors of the first floor of the
     granary (check on this).  Further, the work of some of the
     sound artists and musicians will be presented in workshops.

3) DISCUSSIONS:

     Theoretical issues will be formally raised in a series of
     lectures, discussions and workshops addressing different
     aspects of the Baroque tradition from the perspective of
     mondial fine art, architecture, music, philosophy, ecology,
     history, and the transformation of the Baroque heritage in
     modern society.  Discussions are open to the public.

Invited participants should send their proposals for HERMIT 2
with documentation at least three months prior to the beginning
of the Symposium.  Deadline is April 1, 1993.

The contribution fee is 150 DM.  The organizers of HERMIT 93 will
take care of accommodations for active participants.  The minimal
time spent in Plasy is 7 days, maximum is 2 months.

Contact:

          The HERMIT Foundation.

curators:  Jana Sykyrova
           The Monastery of Plasy,
           33101 PLASY,
           Bohemia.
           (tel)  0942-182-2174
           (fax)  0942-182-2198

           Milos Vojtechovsky
           Binnenbantammer Straat 15,
           1011 CH Amsterdam
           Holland
           (tel)  020-62575-69

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

Announcement and Call for Papers

*********************************
THE EXPERIENCE OF THEORY
Literary Symposium organized
by and for young scholars
*********************************

University of Gothenburg, Sweden
September 24-26, 1993

Defining THEORY is becoming increasingly difficult in the age of
postmodernism, where the impact of philosophical theory on
literary research during the 70s and 80s is now supplemented by
the demand for an orientation towards history, culture, science,
society and politics.

In a number of workshops, we propose to discuss THEORY AS
EXPERIENCE--as a process influencing our perception of literary,
critical, and scholarly activity.  How does theory, as
experience, enhance our understanding of the literary work?  In
what ways does theory enable us to experience art as becoming
rather that being, and, conversely, how does theory prevent us
from experiencing the text as something dynamic rather than
static?  The discussion of theory as experience opens new modes
of evaluating theory, thus in extension contributing to the
formation of a theory about theory.

We call for papers focusing on THE EXPERIENCE OF THEORY;
experience here may be the experience of studying, of teaching,
of researching, of theorizing, of reading, of writing, of
enjoying, etc..

We invite participants from Europe and the USA and expect to have
guest speakers from Scandinavia and Great Britain.

The registration fee of SEK 200 also covers all meals and
accommodations for those who accept to stay with a fellow
student.  On request we can undertake to send lists of hostels
and hotels.

Prospective participants are invited to contact us no later than
31st January, 1993; and submit papers by 31st March, 1993.

David Dickson       Claudia Egerer      Hans Werner

Mail:     University of Gothenburg
          Department of English
          The Experience of Theory
          S - 412 98  GOTHENBURG
          Sweden

E-mail:   egerer@eng.gu.se
          werner@eng.gu.se

Fax:      int+46 (0)31-773-47-26

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

Call for Work

*************************************************
MONTAGE 93:
International Festival of the Image
July 11 through August 7, 1993
*************************************************

Montage 93: International Festival of the Image, is inviting
independent producers to submit work for an exhibition of
electronic time-based media.  Work will be screened at Montage
93, July 11 through August 7, 1993.

Goals
The goals of Montage 93 are to celebrate the fusion of arts and
technology in contemporary image making and to explore the future
of the visual communications.  The International Video Etc.
Festival is seeking new electronic time-based work created by
independent producers worldwide.

Review Procedure
All work will be reviewed by a committee of curators,
programmers, and makers.  The committee will attempt to assemble
an exhibition that reflects the current state of the visual time-
based electronic arts.  Notification of acceptance or rejection
will be made by June 1, 1993.

Submission Guidelines:
Visual time-based electronic media including video, computer
graphics/animation, multimedia*, and hypermedia* are eligible.

* Work must be exhibitable as a single channel videotape.

All work must be submitted on videotape, in any of the following
NTSC formats:
3/4 UMatic, VHS, S-VHS, BETA, Video8, Hi8.
Maximum length of any title is 58 minutes.

Submission Procedures:
Each maker must include a resume.
Each title must be accompanied by a statement.
Each title must be accompanied by a copy of the Entry and Release
Form printed below.

Tapes mailed from within the United States will be returned only
if accompanied by a self addressed stamped envelope.  Tapes
mailed from outside the United States will be returned only if
accompanied by a self addressed envelope and an international
money order in U.S. dollars for the cost of return mail.

Tapes mailed from outside the United States should be marked:
"No commercial value.  Educational Material."

***Tapes must be received by May 1, 1993.

Send tapes, statement, resume, and Entry and Release Form
together to:

Montage 93: Video Etc. Festival
31 Prince Street
Rochester, NY, USA 14607-1499

Please note:
Do not send masters, originals, or irreplaceable materials.
Montage 93 will make every reasonable attempt to safeguard tapes,
but is not responsible for loss or damage.
Maker is responsible for any copyrighted material within the
title.

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

Video Etc.
Entry and Release Form

A copy of this form must accompany each title.  Please print or
type.

Name____________________________________________________________

Address_________________________________________________________

City____________________________________________________________

State_________________________________Zip/Postal Code___________

Country_________________________________________________________

Phone_________________FAX________________E-Mail_________________

Provide the following information for each title:

Title___________________________________________________________

Original, Medium, and Format____________________________________

Completion date_________________________________________________

Running time____________________________________________________

Format: (circle one)  Z3/4 UMatic  VHS  S-VHS  Beta  8mm   Hi 8

________________________________________________________________

Your signature authorizes Montage 93 to duplicate your work for
exhibition at Montage 93.

STATEMENT

___
___
___
___

This will be edited for use in program notes and/or a catalog.

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

Call For Papers
***********************************
1993 Annual Meeting of the Society
for Literature and Science
***********************************

Back Bay Hilton
Boston, MA
November 18-21, 1993

Theme: "Possible Worlds, Alternate Realities: Literature and
          Science as World-Making"

To include such topics as:

     *Rhetoric and Reality
     *Anthropological Discourse and the "Other"
     *Images and Visual Representation in Science and Technology
     *Technology, Embodiment, Knowledge
     *Constructing the Natural and the Artificial in Science,
          Technology, and Literature
     *Literary Strategies and the History of Science
     *Virtual Realities
     *The Representation of Nature and Science and the Rhetoric
          of Popular Culture and Film
     *Primitive and Postmodern
     *The Garden and the Wilderness
     *God and Nature
     *Illness Narratives and the Rhetoric of Biomedicine
     *Discovery and Colonization
     *Ecology and Politics
     *Orderly Disorder

Proposals must include:

     1.  Full names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses
          (if available)

     2.  Full titles and one-page abstracts for all papers

     3.  Titles/themes and name of coordinator for all seminars
          and special panels

Send abstracts for individual papers or proposals for seminars or
special panels to:

Alan Kibel
Literature Department
MIT
Cambridge, MA  02139

Due date for abstracts and proposals is March 1, 1993.

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

CALL FOR PAPERS

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

_Simulation and Gaming_
An International Journal of
Theory, Design and Research

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

_Simulation and Gaming_ (Sage Publications) is the world's
foremost journal devoted to academic and applied issues in the
fast expanding fields of simulation, computerized simulation,
gaming, modeling, play, role-play and active, experimental
learning and related methodologies in education, training and
research.

The broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of _Simulation &
Gaming_ is demonstrated by the variety of its readers and
contributors, as well as its Editorial Board members, such as
sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists and
educators, as well as experts in environmental issues,
international studies, management and business, policy and
planning, decision making and conflict resolution, cognition,
learning theory, communication, language learning, media,
educational technologies and computing.  Manuscripts are welcome
at any time.

Before submitting a manuscript, potential authors should write
for a copy of the Guide for Authors, enclosing a self-addressed,
sticky label and $2 in stamps (in USA only).

Write to:

David Crookall
Editor
S&G
Morgan Hall
Box 870244
U of AL
Tuscaloosa, AL  35487  USA

To subscribe:
Sage Publications
2455 Teller Road
Newbury Park, CA  91320  USA

Bonhill Street
London EC2A 4PU
UK

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

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Guest Editorships for Theme Issues of
_Simulation & Gaming_
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From time to time a special theme issue of S&G is prepared by a
Guest Editor.  Special issues in preparation or that have already
appeared deal with business, debriefing, evaluation,
ethnomethodology, military gaming, cross-cultural communication,
and entrepreneurship.

In principle, any theme can be proposed for a special theme
issue, as long as it is important and of interest to a wide range
of readers.

If you would like to offer your services as a Guest Editor,
please send:
     - a one page proposal (justifying the theme, outlining the

       rational, identifying possible authors and sub-topics)

     - a short resume (one page)

     - notes on any previous editorial experience

     - name, address, telephone numbers and e-mail address(es)
          (the latter is essential)

to
     crookall@ua1vm.bitnet or
     crookall@ua1vm.ua.edu or
     David Crookall
     Editor S&G
     PO Box 870244
     University of Alabama
     Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 USA

Subscription inquiries about S&G should be directed to:

     Sage Publications
     PO Box 5084
     Newbury Park, CA 91359 USA
     tel: (805) 499-0721

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

VIDEO POSITIVE 93
The U.K.'s International festival of creative video and
electronic media art.

In 1993 VIDEO POSITIVE is back with the most substantial and
extraordinary program of electronic art ever seen in Britain.

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 presents several newly commissioned video
installations combined with the welcome restaging of some of the
best works from around the world.  This is complemented by
colorful local projects and an equally vigorous and significant
program of screenings, seminars, live art commissions and special
events.

Installation Program

The centerpiece of VIDEO POSITIVE 93 is an extensive installation
program held at Liverpool's premiere galleries (the Tate Gallery
Liverpool, the Bluecoat, Open Eye and Walker Galleries) and
several public sites across the city.

The international element involves the presentation of 15
installations, 8 of which are world premiers, from artists
including Lei Cox, Agnes Gegedud, Simon Robertshaw, Barbara
Steinman, Andrew Stones, Cathy Vogan and Richard Wright.
The Collaboration Program
This progressive and successful program continues to transform
Liverpool's public sites with works produced by local people
which are both incisive and popular.

Coordinated by video artist Louise Forshaw, the thriving
Collaboration Program has introduced several fresh initiatives in
1993.  The presentation of 8 installations and an exciting
screening program involves double the number of events compared
with previous years.

Screenings

Important European events of the early 90's provide the
inspiration for a program package which looks at issues of
British cultural identity within recent video art.

Other highlights have been programmed in conjunction with the
Film & Video Umbrella, London.  These include new and recent
computer graphics and animation Video works by Jean-Luc Godard,
Bill Viola, David Blair, The Wooster Group, The Collaboration
Program and contemporary programs of music and sound featuring
work by David Byrne.

Performances

Continuing Moviola's tradition of commissioning collaborations
which cross artforms, the festival presents a series of live art
projects which combine performance, music and new technologies.

Seminars

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 has created the ideal atmosphere for an
expressive and vibrant celebration of the contemporary artform of
electronic art.  The seminar program provides an outstanding
opportunity for critical discussion in an international context.

Topics for discussion in 1993 include gender and technology, the
experience of black artists working with video and new
technologies, the festival's Collaboration Program  and the
impact of science and engineering upon electronic media art and
design.

Special Events

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 also hosts a wide range of miscellaneous events
and activities including workshops with artists, displays of
state-of-the-art equipment and technology including  virtual
reality, workshops for curators, special launches, presentations
and the Festival Club.

Mailing and Information

For a free color brochure (available March, 1993) and information
about advance bookings, etc., write to:

MOVIOLA,
Bluecoat Chambers,
School Lane,
Liverpool L1 3BX,
U.K.
Tel (UK) 051-709-2663
Fax (UK) 051-707-2150

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

*****************************
NARRATIVE:
An International Conference
*****************************

April 1-4, 1993
Albany, NY

Sponsored by:  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The Society
          for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Co-Sponsors:   Siena College and Russell Sage College

Affiliates:    Skidmore College, Union College, The College of
     Saint Rose, The State University of New York-Albany

Major Speakers:
               *Houston Baker, Jr.    University of Pennsylvania,
                                      Center for the Study of
                                      Black Literature and
                                                  Culture

               *Don Bialostosky         University of Toledo,
                                        English-Rhetoric

               *Thomas Laquer           Univ. of Calif-Berkeley,
                                        History

               *Carolyn Merchant        Univ. of Calif-Berkeley,
                                        Conservation and Resource
                                        Studies

               *Tania Modelski          Univ. of So. Calif,
                                        English-Film

The conference is an interdisciplinary forum to discuss all
aspects of narrative theory and practice.  Papers on narrative in
any genre, period, nationality, discipline, and media (film, art,
popular culture) will be considered.  The committee especially
welcomes topics involving inter-disciplinary methods or cross-
cultural perspectives.  The presentation should be in English and
the focus should be on narrative.

Submit papers (no more than 10 pgs. [2500 words]) or abstracts
(at least 500 words) and a short vita.  Proposals for panels of 3
or 4 papers are encouraged.  Panels of particular interest with
only 2 papers will also be considered.  Organizers should include
a statement on the focus of the panel; and papers or abstracts
for all participants.  Panel organizers may give a paper in the
session they propose.  We regret that we are unable to return
submissions.

Alan Nadel, Conference Coordinator
Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY  12180

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

_ORTRAD-L_

ORTRAD-L seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open
discussion and exchange of resources in the general field of
studies in oral tradition.  All those interested in the world's
living oral traditions (e.g., African, Hispanic, Native American,
etc.) or in texts with roots in oral tradition (e.g., the Old and
New Testaments, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf,
etc.) are invited to join the conversation.  This list should be
useful for specialists in language and literature, folklore,
anthropology, history, and other areas.

To subscribe, send the following command to

LISTSERV@MIZZOU1.BITNET or LISTSERV@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU:

SUB ORTRAD-L your _full_ name

Submissions to the list should be sent to:

ORTRAD-L@MIZZOU1.BITNET or ORTRAD-L@MISSOURI.EDU

Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
              301 Read Hall
              University of Missouri
              Columbia, MO 65211
              Tel (314) 822-9720
30)-------------------------------------------------------------

_SEMIOS-L_

A new electronic discussion group has been formed for those
interested in semiotics, visual language, graphic design and
advertising, deconstruction, the philosophy of language, and
others curious about the process of communication.  The core
issue that ties all of these disciplines together is the
production and interpretation of signs.

To become a part of _SEMIOS-L_, send the following command from
your computer:

From a Bitnet loation:
TELL LISTSERV AT ULKYVM SUBSCRIBE SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

From an Internet site:
To: Listserv%ULKYVM.Louisville.edu Subscribe SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

In the first two weeks of operation, _SEMIOS-L_ already had over
one hundred members from four continents.  The group welcomes new
voices.

Steven Skaggs
SEMIOS-L List Manager

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

SOCHIST on LISTSERV@USCVM
New Social History List or LISTSERV@VM.USC.EDU

Briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called
the "New Social History":

1)  Emphasis on quantative data rather that an analysis of prose
     sources.

2)  Borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as
     linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc..

3)  The examination of groups which have been ignored by
     traditional disciplines (i.e. the history of women,
     families, children, labor, etc.).

To subscribe, send e-mail to:

LISTSERV@SCVM.BITNET or listserv@vm.usc.edu

with the single line in the BODY of the e-mail:
SUBSCRIBE SOCHIST your full name.

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

_Interdis_

Welcome to the INTERDIS e-mail discussion list.  The idea behind
this list is to facilitate national (and international)
discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching
in interdisciplinary contexts.  It is my hope that the list will
be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues
relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues
associated with interdisciplinary work.  It should also be a good
place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from
interdisciplinary perspectives.  Please forward this message to
colleagues you think may be interested in the list.  They can put
themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to:

LISTSERV@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
The message should read SUB INTERDIS 

To post comments to the list, e-mail
INTERDIS@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU

Feel free to begin posting comments today.  I look forward to our
continuing dialogue.

     

  • Selected Letters From Readers

     
     

    RE: Foley’s Review of Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. An Exchange between Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau and Michael W. Foley.

     

    Dear PMC,

     

    In a post-modern frame of reference one authors a book and then sets it free to be interpreted by various readers each in his or her own way. Criticism is central to a post-modernism and its pluralism of readings. If you can’t take criticism, or if you don’t wish to defend your ideas, better not present them in the public realm. And this is the problem with Prof. Foley’s review. It isn’t about ideas. It is a series of unsubstantiated insults and mis-information.

     

    Foley’s review does not present a post-modern reading of my book. Neither is he inspired by deconstruction. His review is modern in the worse sense–a singular and unexciting “reading.” It announces that my text is a “repudiation” of post-modernism, assumes his is the only interpretation possible, and implicitly denies the legitimacy of other views. Post-modernism and the Social Sciences has been well received by some post-modernists and criticized by others. It has attracted attention not only in the social sciences but in the humanities as well. It even made it to the stage recently as the Doug Elkins Dance Company (New York) incorporated readings from it into their post-modern repertoire for the International Festival of New Dance, Montreal, November 1992.

     

    Prof. Foley senses my own ambivalence about post-modernism. I make no claim to be a post-modernist but I did attempt to be fair in writing about it. I made every effort to document my conclusions about post-modernism, to indicate where readers could find more information. Of course I did not shy away from criticism of it. But at the same time I had no axe to grind. Nor did I feel the need to defend post-modernism. Perhaps this is why I made no effort to “eliminate” certain post-modern currents from it or, for example, to deny Derrida’s defense of Paul deMan’s early Nazi affiliations. It is not I, but Foley, who puts Derrida in bed with Ayatollah Khomeini! (REVIEW-2.592, par. 5). In a similar fashion on a number of occasions Foley takes the questions I pose for post-modern inquiry and answers for me, only to then turn around, attribute his constructions to me, and criticize his own self-fabricated answers (paragraph 6). Some post-modernists call for the death of the author and elevate the reader but in this instance Prof. Foley’s “interpretation” diminishes his status as reader, not to mention reviewer. Is this a “post-post-modern turn” where the review re-writes the text and then reviews his own creation?

     

    Foley argues that there is nothing much new offered by post-modernism. I would not disagree. Chapter 1 section 1 of my book entitled “Post-Modern Lineage: Some Intellectual Precursors” makes his case. But he missed this and even misinterpreted the section on structuralists altogether. I argue that post-modernism is a collage of many intellectual and philosophical currents. But at the same time, it constitutes a new form of challenge in that it refuses to set up a new paradigm to replace those it deconstructs.

     

    I am bothered by the absence of any depth to this review–brief, one-line dismissals signal an inability to take my book seriously. Foley says I am a “positivist.” He suggests that I “play on conflicts within postmodernism without illuminating them, or ever giving an adequate account of them.” This is insulting and unfair. By their very nature these criticisms are so broad and sweeping that they cannot be contradicted. I wonder, if I agreed with Prof. Foley’s own views would my analysis be “illuminating” and “adequate,” uncorrupted by “positivism.”

     

    Finally, when I discuss the feminist debate around post-modernism, Prof. Foley admonishes that I could have “equally well” referred to the “new social history or the Annales School.” At this point Foley moves beyond criticism to what I view as pure paternalism, lecturing me as to what I should have written about, whom I should have cited. I believe that feminists have raised some qualitatively different and extremely important questions for post-modernists. In fact, I do discuss both the new history and the Annales School in Chapter 4.

     

    I read Prof. Foley as an angry, unhappy and disappointed man (admittedly my construct). He is angry at me, unhappy with post-modernism, disappointed with Princeton University Press. He suggests that Princeton University Press abandoned standards of judgment in publishing my book. Yes, Princeton did publish my book. Yes, the book has done very well. And yes, it was submitted to the same high standards of evaluation as every other book Princeton publishes. But by focusing on this peripheral issue Foley avoids what is essential–ideas, analysis, substance. And this is really regrettable. There is so much to say about post-modernism and the exciting intellectual issues it raises.

     

    Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau
    Political Science Dept.
    University of Quebec–Montreal

     

     

     

    Dear PMC,

     

    For those who missed the evidence in the stylistic pyro-technics of Baudrillard and Derrida, Professor Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s outraged response to my review of her _Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences_ attests that there is still life in the authorial persona. But I have never doubted that, postmodernism notwithstanding. What I did dare doubt was the usefulness of Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s account. Her letter scarcely changes my mind; indeed, her multiple mis-readings of my text serve only to reinforce my doubts about her readings of others. (No, I am not angry, Prof. Vaillancourt-Rosenau, nor did I accuse you of being a positivist!)

     

    I have no wish to deny Vaillancourt-Rosenau her intemperate response to my review, not to mention her favorable reviews in other quarters or, for that matter, her royalties. I find it hard to begrudge academics our modest successes. And Vaillancourt-Rosenau is, after all, right about two things: I found her book immensely disappointing, and I have serious misgivings about some of the more extravagant claims of the theorists of postmodernism. The former was not, indeed, a “substantive” complaint; it was practical and formal. It may be summarized in two points: First, in the welter of citations and snippets of proof-texts, the reader finds virtually no sustained analysis of any one figure, so that it would be difficult to tell, for example, that Foucault’s “archaeologies” of prison and asylum, not to mention his later explorations of language and power, have been seminal to the on-going reexamination in social science and philosophy of the social construction of the human world. Second, Vaillancourt- Rosenau regularly blurs the useful distinction between theorists of postmodernism and representatives of postmodern culture. With the world of postmodernism divided into “skeptics” and “affirmatives,” it was my mistake, I must confess, to find Islamic fundamentalism (a “Third World affirmative post-modernism,” p. 143) in the same bed with Derrida (a “skeptic”). Perhaps I should have chosen Foucault, except that he is labeled a “skeptic”in one place (p. 42) and an “affirmative” in another (p. 50). In the topsy-turvy postmodern world, even Prof. Rosenau’s classificatory ardor is defeated occasionally.

     

    In short, for these and other reasons enumerated in the review, I found the book a less than useful guide to both postmodernism and contemporary concerns in the social sciences; in the last few paragraphs I attempted to suggest directions for further inquiry. The issues raised were substantive and worth reiterating. “Postmodernism” is no doubt a protean term, conjuring up a variety of disparate phenomena, depending on the context. Its theorists make prodigious claims, not all of them either unique or credible. In the context of the social sciences, however, postmodernist theories converge with both older and newer theoretical traditions, reinforcing recent explorations of, for example, popular culture and resistance; the dubious and shifting discursive foundations of the modern state system; metaphor, metonymy, and analogy in social scientific doctrine, historiography, and popular political and economic discourse; and the devious twists and turns of patriarchy. There are undoubtedly tensions as well, some of them touched upon by Vaillancourt-Rosenau. Certain postmodernist claims about the disappearance of the “subject” in particular, while they sit quite well with an older social scientific tradition (best represented today, ironically enough, in quantitative, “positivist” approaches), seem to clash with the return to human agents and their “subjectivities” in newer, more process-oriented research in comparative politics and international relations, with recent explorations of the “structure-agent problem,” and with the widespread adoption of “rational choice” models in political science and sociology.

     

    There are thus very important issues to occupy us in the encounter of postmodernism, postmodernist theory, and the social sciences, as Vaillancourt-Rosenau insists. My complaint was and is that they have not been well raised by the book in question. Of this, of course, the interested reader must be the last judge. A reviewer should indeed engage ideas, where possible; and I have tried to do so. But I am enough of a modern to feel a similar obligation, where necessary, to offer the modest warning: Caveat emptor!

     

    Michael W. Foley
    Department of Politics
    The Catholic University of America
    Washington, D.C. 20064
    foley@cua.edu

     

  • Baptismal Eulogies: Reconstructing Deconstruction From The Ashes

    Glen Scott Allen

    English Department
    Towson State University
    e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

     

    Derrida, Jacques. Cinders. Tr. Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

     

    Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

     

    I. Burials Past & Faster

     

    “The true wretchedness . . . is particular, not diffuse.”1 So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” one of many Poe tales which has found its way to the movie screen as a British Hammer production, becoming in the transition all lurid technicolor drapes and heaving white bosoms. Of course, the movie version defers the prematurity of the burial as long as possible and finds its climax–as we knew it would–in the crypt with the heroine reacting in hyperbolic horror to the “true wretchedness” of her premature burial. The premature burial.

     

    Or so the film version would have it. One irony (among so many) of the film’s misreading of the story is the slavish attention paid to that little word “The.” Poe’s story in fact begins with accounts of several premature burials, the better to establish ethos for the premise of his story, to grant it “verisimilitude,” (to mix Russian with American horror). Poe knows that, by supplying various examples, the particular will become credible; will even, through the sleight-of-hand of logic, become the exemplar of those examples. The premature burial–the exemplary, or “standard” premature burial.

     

    And yet Poe realized that, while the logos of his story might rest on the general structure of inductive reasoning, its “single effect”–that which Poe believed defined a successful short story–resided not in the conceptual accumulation of generalized (as in “made vague”) instances, but rather in the specific image of the narrator–“man the unit”–undergoing the individualized tortures of being buried alive. These seemingly opposite requirements–that an example be representative, yet somehow unique–are what we might term the paradox of exemplarity. More about this paradox in the section on Derrida’s Cinders.

     

    But in fact the greatest irony of Hammer’s “adaptation” of Poe’s story is that in “The Premature Burial” there is no the premature burial at all; the narrator misreads the signs of temporary confinement for those of eternal interment. And in much the same fashion, the Academy in general (as in “widely but not completely”) have misread–with a haste usually reserved for cholera victims–the “signs” of the death of deconstruction and the interment of Derridean criticism.

     

    In fact, the stampede to denounce deconstruction has been so precipitous as to trample on the venerable traditions of mourning; and this, in a profession where Tradition is the constant specter, the incorruptible monument. The “mourners” at deconstruction’s graveside have skipped right over the Eulogy and proceeded, with undisguised glee, to the Obloquy–the stage of hypercriticism which would normally follow burial by a respectable period of reassessment; a stage generally (as in “popularly”) arrived at gradually, reluctantly and sincerely.

     

    Emeritus Yalie C. Van Woodward blithely writes of deconstruction’s “brief and tormented” history.2 Jonathan Yardley suggests, to everyone who will publish, that deconstruction has breathed its “last gasp.” And in a viciously enthusiastic (and woefully inaccurate) article supposedly “debunking” deconstruction, poet David Lehman argues from the premise that “the fortunes of deconstruction as an academic phalanx have declined,” using as spokesmodels everyone from Robert “Iron Man” Bly to “former” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson.3

     

    While it may seem shooting ducks in a barrel to attack the rusty dreadnaughts of Old Criticism like Woodward and Yardley (and Lehman), in fact the ranks of crocodile mourners are not limited to these scholastic neo-conservatives; they simply gloat the loudest.

     

    After all, “ex” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson did indeed give a talk entitled “The Wake of Deconstruction” at last summer’s School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth College. Recent editorials in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the MLA Newsletter speak of deconstruction in the assured past tense. And, however thoroughly the word “deconstruction” is disseminated in the academic and even public discourse, the Yale School rarely uses the “D-word” anymore.4 Even those in favor of a reconstruction of deconstruction have accepted that, as Jeffrey Nealon writes in a recent and extremely useful essay in PMLA, “Deconstruction . . . is dead in literature departments today.”5

     

    Is deconstruction dead and buried? Or merely buried?

     

    In Poe’s story, the examples of premature burials turn on the living too soon surrendering their responsibility for the (apparently) dead, as they consistently and curiously resist all efforts at scrutiny or autopsy. In its social and historical context, “The Premature Burial” might be seen as representing a general (as in recognizable but not necessarily locatable) anxiety of mid-19th century America over the increasingly indistinct boundary between the irrelevant and ritualistic requirements of the past and the insistent and material demands of the present.6 Thus the narrator of Poe’s story searches for the reliable sign of death and the dependable limit of indebtedness; a sign and a limit that will provide a specific, quantifiable answer to the question, When exactly might the past be memorialized, and thus forgotten?

     

    Derrida’s Cinders (1991) and The Other Heading (1992) directly engage this question by separating it into two questions; questions which are perhaps the two most important problems of the emerging 21st century: How do we both “acknowledge” indebtedness to the past and yet free ourselves from its icy clasp? And how do we “negotiate” the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of pluralism and social cohesion?

     

    Derrida frames these questions as the paradox of the past, and the paradox of the example.7

     

    II. Elegiac Cinders

     

    The importance of acknowledging the past is everywhere present in Derrida’s works. In many ways, Cinders is an “exhibition” of Derrida’s ideas about the elusive mechanism of meaning and its relationship to the past. And like an exhibition, one senses throughout the presence of his past influences and works.

     

    The title Cinders is a simplification of the untranslatable feu la cendre8. The book deals with a “specter” which has haunted Derrida for nearly a decade, this “specter” being the phrase il y a la cendre: “cinders there are”–with an accent grave over the ‘a’ of la, thus doubling the sense in which the word means “there”; a phrase which appears first in La Dissemination, and recurs in partial and various incarnations in many of his other works since, most notably the “Envois” section of The Post Card. And ghosts of other prior works enter as the refrain of remembrance (il y a la cendre) weaves its way through a text which is structurally reminiscent of Glas (1974).

     

    On the left hand side of the page are short quotes from earlier works, passages which bear in one way or another on the idea of cinders, burning, residue, invisible remainders. Derrida titles these notes “Animadversions” (observations), both to capture their nature as brief musings, and to acknowledge the French avant garde journal Anima, a forum for the exploration of language which is, appropriately, no more. The animadversions are there to suggest (as in “fanning an ember”) reverberations to the text on the right hand side of the page, which is a “philosophical prose poem” about, around, within the paradox of antecedents, debts; expressions as constant eulogy, incomplete epitaph, dysfunctional nostalgia–all in search of “she,” the cinder.

     

    While some critics might see in this exhibition a “repetition” of favorite Derridean themes, this retrospective approach is most appropriate here. There is a certain melancholic undertone to Cinders; the sort of melancholy resident in works which eulogize the end of one period and inaugurate the beginning of another.

     

    And thus, as Ned Lukacher points out in an often brilliant introduction “Morning Becomes Telepathy,” Cinders is anything but old wine in new bottles. Lukacher grapples with the meaning of the word “cinder” and the phrase il y a la cendre in an “overview” of Derridean sources, influences and concerns. For instance, he brings Hegel’s notion of the Klang, “the ‘Ringing’ at the origin of language” into the discussion, and suggests a connection between this primeval trace as sound for Hegel, and later as “spirit” (Geist) or “flame” for Heidegger. Thus cinders become what is left after a holocaust–“Pure and figureless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning [le brule-tout]” (42). An all-burning which leaves nothing; nothing, perhaps, but an “oscillation”: “It is the heat within the resonance of this oscillation that Derrida names la cendre” (3).

     

    Cinder is, too, the latest in a long line of terms–trace, differance, trail–with which Derrida has struggled to name “these remains without remainder.” Lukacher suggests an analogy with quarks: “Cinders are the quarks of language, neither proper names nor metaphors” (1).

     

    While Lukacher suggests that quarks keep “a space open into which the truth, or its impossibility, might come,” it is more appropriate to metaphorize them as the the illogical logic of metaphor itself; as that “leap” of human imagination which creates similarities out of distances. Quarks are indivisible from the particles which they “make up.” That is to say, they exist only as the relationship of intersecting energy and matter which appears to us as those particles. They are all event, no structure. Thus cinders are quarks in the sense the term indicates a “site” of meaning which is non-local and a “duration” of meaning which is without origin or end.

     

    Cinders are there; there are cinders. “There” is both assertion of location and of existence. Of location as existence. The ‘a’ (accent grave) of the “there” which “locates” the cinder is also meant to “suggest a feminine register” to the voice of the text, as well as to indicate that the word is not transparent, that it “burns” with the “incineration of the indefinite article.”

     

    The phrase, the word, the text all “burn” also with a plurality of voices. Heidegger particularly haunts these pages. Heidegger “emphasize[d] the delicate nature of the relation between language and truth; between figure and idea, between . . . Dichten (to write) . . . and Denken (to think)” (2)–acts which Lukacher writes are “held apart by a delicate yet luminous difference.” Heidegger referred to this difference as a “rift (Riss),” something like (and unlike, of course) the gap “between” the two components of a metaphor. This “holding itself is a relation,” that is to say, an event borne of, but not resident in the functioning of difference, the mechanics of signification.

     

    This relation is a tension, and this tension is as close as we can perhaps get to “placing” meaning–just as a flame is as close as we get to associating a “thereness” with pure energy. Put in terms of the binary models we must leave behind: meaning is neither something “fissioned” by the breaking up of the metaphysical dichotomy, nor “fused” through the synthesis of the dialectic. The tension, the relation, the residue itself is the event of meaning: elastic, non-local, always uncertain–but always present.

     

    The prose poem section of Cinders is as difficult to “decipher” as anything Derrida has written: personal, self-referential, elusive, allusive, fragile. Everything, that is, which describes the cinders which there are. But it is also as rewarding as any of his other works. In combination with the distinctly different Derridean text The Other Heading, and recent articles urging a reconstruction of Derridean analysis, perhaps the “death” of deconstruction can be exposed as greatly exaggerated.

     

    For instance, Nealon argues in the PMLA that most of the current attacks on deconstruction–in fact much of the anti-deconstruction criticism of the last twenty years–has in fact been based on mis-readings of Derridean thought; misreadings circulated and codified by his earliest American translators. While I won’t rehearse Nealon’s argument in its entirety here, it is central enough to my discussion of the importance of these two works to refer to at some length.

     

    Nealon begins by observing that deconstruction’s critics have typically charged its practitioners with “simply denying meaning or interpretation by showing how oppositions . . . cancel themselves out” (emphasis added). Along with this charge come the ancillary criticisms that it is apolitical, ahistorical, acontextual, and amoral. But it should be clear that the primary charge–that it seeks neutrality–governs all the others, whether the neutrality claimed is historical or moral. And thus at the root of most anti-deconstructive rhetoric is the indictment that it is inherently nihilistic. Anyone who thinks such an attack comically overheated need look no further than David Lehman’s essay.

     

    While Lehman begins quite typically by claiming that the major fault of deconstructive criticism is “those binary reversals that come as second nature to the initiates of the mysteries of deconstruction,” his argument soon begins leaping from deconstruction to Derrida to de Man to conformity to Nazis, as though all of these topics were quite obviously connected at the conceptual hip. “After the de Man affair, deconstruction will never again be a harmless thrilling thing–we have seen how it can be used to fudge facts, obfuscate truths, distort and mislead” (5). Lehman grandly, and ominously concludes that “the political system most consonant with deconstructive principles is authoritarian” (4).

     

    Perhaps the problem of Lehman and neo-conservative critics like him is most grave, at least within the academy, because this strain of “thought” is within the academy–a tenacious moral smugness that is more dangerous than outright conservatism because it presents itself as a “new” humanism. While Lehman “concede[s] that some of the tactics and procedures of deconstruction, if used judiciously, may lead to fruitful ends” (if used judiciously? Fruitful ends?) still he is quick to warn of “[t]he marked absence of moral seriousness” in deconstructive criticism (8).

     

    Perhaps that phrase “moral seriousness” reveals the heart of Lehman’s resentment toward Derrida. There has always been a sense of play about Derrida’s writing which seems to frustrate and infuriate die-hard formalists who believe criticism can only be worth reading if it is “serious,” i.e., hermeneutically sealed.

     

    But Lehman’s prescription rings of the rhetoric of chapels, not classrooms. David Lehman and his familiars seem academic Cotton Mathers, ready to divide critics into the preterite and the damned, using as their standard the presence or absence of “moral seriousness.” (Never was a phrase more ripe for the very sort of “authoritarian” manipulation that Lehman ironically claims resides in Derridean analysis.) Of course, there is an important distinction to be made between neo-conservative critics of deconstruction like Woodward and Lehman, and those critics who engage Derrida and deconstruction on more “constructive” grounds.9

     

    Still, the root charge leveled at Derrida’s work specifically and deconstruction generally (as in a concept if not a body of criticism) most often stems from that word “neutrality” and the echoes of nihilism it summons up.

     

    III. Digging the Neutral Grave

     

    Again, Lehman is a useful representative of this fundamental misreading, arguing that, as “deconstructionists frequently collapse the difference between a thing and its opposite” then what deconstruction produces is “the absence of difference” (1).10

     

    Of course, the word “neutralization” was indeed used by Derrida in describing the “reversal” of dichotomies which often begins the deconstructive reading. However, what was often overlooked in the early translations was what followed: “To remain content with this reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to be destroyed.” More importantly, “to sit back . . . and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free rein to the existing forces that effectively and historically dominate the field” Dissemination 6; emphasis added). And even when American disseminators of Derridean concepts remarked on the importance of this second step, they seemed at a loss to explain what it meant.11

     

    Yet, while some critics working toward a reconstruction of Derridean analysis have made this observation, still very few (Judith Butler comes to mind as one recent exception)12 have paid sufficient attention to revisioning that term “neutralization.” For example, Nealon himself doesn’t seem to realize that what Derrida meant by “neutralization” is quite significantly different than what he and nearly every American interpreter has meant by the word.

     

    While Nealon differentiates between Derrida’s concept of “undecidability” and de Man’s of “unreadability,” still he quotes the de Manian notion that “A text . . . can literally be called ‘unreadable’ in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other,” and then claims that “this definition would, of course, hold for Derrida also” (1272). I believe this to be a key, and again typical error, in that, for Derrida, a text is never unreadable. For instance, Derrida states in “Positions” that “the play of differences involves syntheses and referrals that prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element that is present in and of itself and refers only to itself” (38). And by “itself” he would include, no doubt, the “singular” element of unreadability. Again, the whole notion of “unreadable” or “utterly absent” or “paralyzed” meaning–all terms which de Man used as synonyms for the result of the “neutralization” of oppositions–is simply too reductionist, too rooted in concepts of “particular” meaning; concepts which Derrida works everywhere to deconstruct.

     

    Perhaps the problem here is analogical. The image typically summoned by the term “neutralization” is a maneuver which brings together a particular meaning and its antithesis in a violent collision, resulting in an “annihilation” of meaning. Deconstruction thus becomes the antithesis of interpretation, and deconstructive readings are seen as leaving smoldering holes in a text. But there is all the differance in the world between Derrida’s enriching “undecidability” and de Man’s constricting “unreadability.” And there is every indication in Derridean thought that the “neutralization” of binarisms results not in annihilation, but rather in a state of continual engagement.

     

    In the “turn of dominance” which has been an analytical tool since Nietzsche, the binary poles must first be shown to be, in the traditional discourse, decidedly unequal in “valence.” Thus the genealogical revision (more than reversion) of the terms is an absolutely necessary step in shaking the terms loose from their accumulated cultural denotations; especially, for Derrida, as those denotations grant a greater “moral authority” to one term than the other. And of course the term Derrida came to use for this moral authority was “presence.”13

     

    But Derrida has always asked us to imagine instead that meaning is not “particular”; that it does not reside in “positive and negative” terms, but rather that it is inextricably resident within the tension between terms, between competing cultural forces which always tug towards interpretations of the coupled terms that validate their particular social and historical agenda.14 Thus Derrida’s first move is to “overturn” the struggle by demonstrating how each “side’s” definition of the term is utterly inscribed in the other “side’s” definition. However, even after this first act of revision the two forces are both still engaged–the term’s meaning is still a result of a tension, but what is now a revised tension, a tension freed of “moral authority” based on presence and ideality. Thus the “meaning” of any such coupling is a product of (at least) two competing cultural agencies, and not some “thing” resident in any particular site. Again, what Derrida is working so diligently toward is an understanding of meaning as event rather than structure.15

     

    Even more importantly, for Derrida meaning never doesn’t exist–not at any moment of the deconstructive process. Meaning is elusive, mobile, inevitably non-local–but it is not something which can be annihilated, rendered somehow irrelevant. Thus Derridean deconstruction is consistently and fundamentally anti-nihilistic.

     

    But what of American deconstruction? Is “continental” deconstruction the “pure” form, and our American brand a flawed import?

     

    I am not suggesting we draw up a list of “good” and “bad” deconstructors, nor that we should use the Atlantic Ocean as a gulf separating “true” from “false” deconstruction. However, some forms of criticism which come under the general heading of “deconstruction” seem in fact only tenuously connected to Derrida’s ideas and techniques.

     

    For instance, de Man’s “unreadable” reductions of texts work in a direction quite different from Derrida’s “undecidable” explorations. While de Man is primarily interested in rhetorical “impasses” which render interpretation stalemated, Derrida concentrates instead on mythologies of origin and closure, on those places in any text which “ground” its axioms and conclusions; not as an exercise in “neutralizing” such myths, but rather in an effort to expose and explore their rich semiotic associations. Thus what Derrida has been doing from Of Grammatology on is not comprehensible in any analysis which equates the two practices.

     

    Furthermore, the “manner” of American deconstruction disseminated by Culler, de Man et al is a theory and practice in and of itself, with certain–though perhaps less certain than has been thought–connections to Derrida’s work. But it cannot be taken as an entirely accurate or fundamentally thorough translation of Derrida’s ideas. Thus any criticism of deconstruction as institutionalized by the early writers–and even many to follow–must be treated as criticism of their goals and methodologies, not Derrida’s.

     

    This raises a question: Why hasn’t Derrida distanced himself and his work from these “incomplete” representations?

     

    This is a question Nealon deals with in his essay. He points out that Derrida has always been unwilling to criticize–even in the smallest particular–any of his American “disseminators,” and that he has consistently displayed very little interest in “disciplining” the discourse surrounding his work.

     

    Unless, that is, we can read the insistence in Cinders on reviewing “snapshot” expressions from his past works as an indirect form of protest; protest as restatement; restatement as remembrance. “Cinders are not nothing” (emphasis added). And the something that they are is an intersection of indebtedness to the past–“She, this cinder, was given or lent to him by so many others, through so much forgetting. . .” (41)–and promise for the future, “because each time it gives a different reading, another gift” (25). This hardly sounds like nihilism.

     

    Perhaps Cinders is the first postmodern epistolary romance novel, written to (‘a’ accent grave) his love, Cinder, she–“Who is Cinder? Where is she? . . . someone vanished but something preserved her trace” (33)–complete with a Gothic preoccupation with the grave, the past, the thwarted romantic gesture. Perhaps there is even represented here an “anxiety of affluence,” a nervousness in the presence of so much meaning, an overabundance of meaning which can never be completely exhausted or entirely forgotten.

     

    IV. Baptizing the Other Heading

     

    Deconstruction’s burial is not only premature, it is also crowded; for the new right of the academy represent only a fraction of the new right in American society; a cultural faction whose attack rests, like Lehman’s, on the thuggish and irrational “logic” of guilt by association. The parties which are lumped together as “targets of opportunity” include deconstruction, the Humanities, universities, the MLA, feminism, multiculturalism, and, of course, “political correctness.”

     

    For instance, their polysyllabic frontman George Will wrote recently in Newsweek that the Modern Language Association was a “more dangerous threat to the United States than the Butcher of Baghdad.” An editorial in the Chicago Tribune (October 1991) warned against the deadly and contagious affliction called “deconstruction, a French disease.” Another editorial, this one in the Wall Street Journal called upon all good Americans to beware “the fever swamps like the Modern Language Association . . . [where] Brigades of the politically correct” plot the downfall of Western Civilization. Syndicated columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell opines that the MLA stands for “intolerance and bigotry . . . [which] rides across campuses enforcing right thinking, thinking that is PC”.16

     

    This widespread and virulently reactionary strike in the public and the academic press is expressive of deeply ingrained cultural resistance, even panic in the face of rising voices which were once faint or completely muted. And this cultural crisis–this crisis of cultures–is the context for Derrida’s first semi-explicit political writings collected in The Other Heading, a book which explores the paradox of examples.

     

    The Other Heading includes an introduction (“For Example”) and two sections: the first from a paper Derrida delivered in Turin on May 20, 1990, at a conference entitled “European Cultural Identity,” and the second from a brief interview entitled “Call it a Day for Democracy.”

     

    Here, Derrida is less interested in analyzing the “current” situation in Europe than analyzing the logic “of discourses that assume a certain relationship to the particular and the example” of “Europe and its historical others” (xi). This is meta-commentary, as always. However, though the larger concerns are the same, Derrida’s voice here is somewhat different: more relaxed, slightly less excruciatingly scholastic. But it is by no means political writing in the usual sense.

     

    Derrida always writes in response to a prior text. In this case, that text is a collection of essays by Paul Valery, written for the League of Nations in the 1930s. Derrida begins were Valery began, speaking of the Europe of 1939 as a “Young Europe” which had been “constructed through a succession of exclusions, annexations, and exterminations.” And an odd sense of temporal displacement is further present as, when Derrida delivered this speech, the unification of Germany was only “in sight.” And yet everywhere is emphasized this very probability with his constant use of the qualifier “today”: “There is today the same feeling of imminence, of hope and danger, of anxiety” (63).

     

    What Derrida seeks to begin here is an examination of the New European Subject; the post-colonial, post-cold war, post-unification, post-utopian, post-historical, post-modern subject; a subject immersed in demands for diversity, while still under tremendous pressure from the needs of cohesion.

     

    Valery wrote his essays (Regards sur le monde actuel and Essais quasi politiques, among others) as a member of the Committee on Arts & Letters of the League of Nations, a committee whose ambitious charter called upon it to serve as a “permanent colloquium on ‘European cultural identity’” (xxxiv). Valery believed that the “best example” of a “site” of cohesive cultural identity was “that of the Mediterranean basin,” the “heart” of a New Europe which might serve as an “example” to the rest Europe, to the rest of the world.

     

    Derrida sees in Valery’s use of this example all the trademarks of exemplary reasoning, as “the ‘example’ that it ‘offered’ [was] in fact unique, exemplary and incomparable” (xxv).

     

    And here lies the rub. The word “example” is from the Latin, exemplum for “that which is taken out [emphasis added] of a larger quantity to show the character or quality of the rest.” An example is a “specimen,” something which is either “worthy of imitation” or that “serves as a warning.” An example is a “precedent,” a “prototype,” a “standard.”

     

    But if the example is “taken out” of the context which forms it, is made to stand to one side, apart or above its companions, how, then, is it any longer an “example”? And if it is representative, how does it become “exemplary”?

     

    The word which best captures the paradoxical logic of the example is, for Derrida, capital, in both the economic and political sense. Of course there is play here with cap (French for ‘head’) and capital, head and heading. But the relationships go much deeper than mere glyphic similarity. Such word play works to expose the substrata beneath centuries of assumptions which produce what we “mean” by a capital city, by the head of state, etc. “Europe has always recognized itself as a cape of headland . . . the point of departure for discovery, invention, and colonization, . . . or the very center, the Europe of the middle” (41).

     

    For Valery–as for nearly everyone else who writes in favor of this or that “example” of cultural identity, an example which ought to serve as a “standard”–cultural identity becomes what Naas in his introduction calls “the metaphorization of literal goods and capital into the surplus value, the capital value, of spirit” (5). And Derrida argues that employing this metaphorization, capitalizing on the cultural example becomes “the very teleos of capital, the overcoming of the merely material in a spiritual surplus” (41).

     

    To an American ear, the echoes of Puritanism are clearly audible in any argument of identity and “progress” which seeks the “overcoming of the merely material”; which sees as the highest good cultural investment which achieves “spiritual surplus.” And in fact what Valery argued was the best “example” for European cultural identity in 1939 sounds strikingly similar to what the critics of the MLA et al–what we might refer to as neo-Puritans–argue should be the best “example” for American cultural identity in the 1990s, and on into the 21st century.

     

    While the “Other” heading–or as Derrida often insists on revising the phrase, the heading of the other–refers in Derrida’s speech to those “others” which have served as a colonial mirror to “central” Europe, to the Europe of Empires and Capitals, the “other” shore might just as well refer to the New World, facing the Old in temporal, geographic, and cultural descent/dependence/ independence. The similarity is more than merely situational, or even rhetorical–for the metaphor most often employed in the New Right’s attack on multiculturalism is this very idea of cultural capital.

     

    As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “The MLA on Trial”: “The assault on the profession for betraying the classics is itself a betrayal of the classics. It is an attempt to make them over into dull, safe, and routine celebrations of order, an attempt, that is, to transform them into a certain kind of cultural capital: safe investment, locked away in a vault” (40).

     

    Drawing on this idea of cultural identity as “invested capital,” Derrida warns that the constant danger of any assertion of a singular national identity is that it “presents itself, claims itself.” That is, merely by stating itself, it argues for its validity, its history, its “investment” in the capital of culture, and therefore its claim to future benefits. As Derrida warns, “it is the task of culture to impose the feeling of unity” in order to justify itself. And examples in their very assertion as examples — much as the assertion of cultural identity–imply a universality and are “linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (xxvi).

     

    Ultimately, Derrida argues that, in any postmodern definition of identity (cultural or otherwise), we must become more adept at not only understanding but incorporating, providing for the other heading, the heading of the Other. “Derrida thus seeks a redefinition of European identity that includes respect for both universal values and difference” (xlvi). Cultural identity–like any of the other terms of identification Derrida has deconstructed–is shown to be a product of what it is not, of how it defines itself “against” or “as different than” its Other. And the moment of identity crisis is the moment of identity definition. “The ends and confines, the finitude of Europe, are beginning to emerge . . . when the capital of infinity and universality . . . finds itself encroached upon or in danger” (32).

     

    But this is not a call for diversity “for its own sake.” In fact, the urge to “pop” diversity is –as any commodified and unopposed doctrine–its own worst enemy: self-negating, homogenizing. And this is, after all, the fear the forces of social conservatism invoke: that multiculturalism in fact seeks uniculturalism, a “homogeneity” which is in all contexts “politically correct.” Thus, ironically, the Right presents itself as arguing from the position of the underdog, the brave resistance, the Individual; from a position of Diversity. “Claiming to speak in the name of intelligibility, good sense, common sense, or the democratic ethic, this discourse tends, by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to discredit anything that complicates this model [of univocity]” (55).

     

    Nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the discourse of “family values.” If we deconstruct the phrase in the economic context of cultural capital, we can see that a call to “family values” is in fact a prescription for the “value family.” And the value or “economy” family would be the one which required the least expenditure of cultural capital, which could be least expensively reproduced and circulated, which could become the “example” or “standard” family; one which made the fewest demands on our culture in terms of pluralism, of adjustment and experimentation; that would be the “best buy” family ideology.

     

    The “family values” (or value family) debate raises what Derrida sees as the greatest new danger in the arena of cultural identity: the consensus.

     

    Consensus is, after all, the political watchword of the 90s. “Consensus politics” summons up a vague image of agreements which are not compromises but rather somehow expressions of an “inner” unity, a “common” faith. But in fact Derrida warns against letting such “normative” code words disguise old cultural hegemony as new cultural identity; norms which create what he terms a “remote control,” the control being in the hands of whoever controls media networks; networks whose strength resides not in discovering and articulating cultural differences but rather in repressing and re-figuring differences to appear as “consumable” or “popular” opinions, consensus opinions.

     

    The question “Today, what is public opinion?” begins the second section of the book. Derrida begins his answer by calling public opinion the “silhouette of a phantom.” That is, transitory, ephemeral (“lasting only one day”); a fluid and constructed “image” of what is supposedly a deep-rooted, widespread attitude; an attitude which nonetheless must be tested and re-constructed almost everyday to sound its strength, gauge its direction.

     

    But where does one locate the “public”? In the past, the word indicated the dis-empowered, the voiceless, the segment of a culture which was anything but the head, which possessed anything but the capital. But “today,” the term grants legitimacy to the “decisions” of the invisible consensus. Invisible because, today, where is the boundary between public and private? What is not public? “The wandering of its proper body is also the ubiquity of a specter”; “one cites it, one makes it speak, ventriloquizes it” (87).

     

    Derrida suggests that this phantom of “public opinion” requires some medium, for a phantom is that precisely because it lacks the “medium” by which to effect actual change in the physical world. The medium here is the daylight of the media: newspapers, TV, telephones: “the newspaper or daily produces the newness of this news as much as reports it” (89). And, Derrida argues, this phantom must always express itself through this medium as a “judgement,” a choice between two alternatives, a favoring of one side of a binarism over the other. Thus the “voice” of public opinion is reduced to a simple yea or nea, an affirmation of choices already made, programmed into it. “Everything that is not of the order of judgement, decision, and especially representation escapes both present-day democratic institutions and public opinions” (92).

     

    Who rules this phantom is whoever best controls the discourse of these judgements, who decides what the binarism will exclude; an act Derrida calls the “new censorship,” a culturally hegemonic strategy “which combines concentration and fractionalization, accumulation and privatization. It de-politicizes” (100). Of course, the Right’s root axiom in America is that only the left speaks from “ideology,” i.e. dogmatism. And the appeal of this attack on “political correctness” is nostalgic: it purports to recall a time when the “correct” mode of the university and the workplace was apolitical, a time before politics “contaminated” the private and commercial spheres.

     

    However, there is, not surprisingly, another problem (or paradox) here. For Derrida also warns against dispersion, against cultivating “minority differences, untranslatable idiolects, national antagonisms” just “for their own sake.” A reasonable question is then: Who is to tell the difference? The difference, that is, between legitimate claims of minorities, idiolects, etc., and those exercises of diversity which are “for their own sake”?

     

    Derrida’s prescription is that “One must therefore try to invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two imperatives, of these two promises or contracts: the capital and . . . the other of the capital.” For Europe, this means “welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity,” as well as “criticizing . . . a totalitarian dogmatism that, under the pretense of putting an end to capital, destroyed democracy and the European heritage” (45).

     

    What the entire essay finally works toward is the “impossible” way between (or beyond or aside from) “monopoly [and] dispersion.” Which requires us first of all to think of cultural identity as something other than cultural capital, as a past investment which must gain and never lose interest, which can never be “wasted” on “expensive” experiments with alternative social structures, such as, for instance, non-traditional families. Those acquainted with Derrida’s other writings will find this call for an “impossible” ethics familiar. Derrida argues that the possible alternatives are always those “programmatic extensions” of policies already in place; that decisions which choose from among the possible alternatives are decisions already made, long before: “politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of aporia”; “The condition or possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention” (41).

     

    Such a new conception of identity–again, cultural or otherwise–will not be easy to either articulate or disseminate; not in Europe, certainly not in America. Binarism is so deeply embedded in Western thought, in Indo-European language, that perhaps it is only surprising that we can see through such thinking at all, even momentarily.

     

    But if not conformity, and not chaos, then what? East Germany, Yugoslavia, MacDonald franchises, EuroDisney, the umpteenth Far Flung Shore where cowed natives greet American monster truck rallies called Operation Just Do It with the sincere smiles of future entrepreneurs . . . all these “examples” would seem to provide very little optimism for a successful “impossible” invention of this new cultural identity, an identity which inherently asserts not only its own heading but also that of its other.

     

    How to acknowledge the past, yet transcend it? How to provide examples, yet avoid dominance?

     

    At the end of Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” the narrator counsels the reader against devoting any worry at all to the buried-if-not-dead, the gone-if-not-forgotten, advising us to let the memorialized be forgotten, to let sleeping ” sepulchral terrors” lie, and worry not whether their sleep is eternal or restless: “–they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish” (268).

     

    Clearly Derrida disagrees. Only by being constantly aware of but not in thrall to the past are we aware of the “restless” cinders encrypted in each and every word we use, and can realize the paradoxes of the language (and logic) of exemplarity which expresses and thus molds the way we conceive of our problems, and thus the way we construct our solutions. In Cinders and The Other Heading, Derrida offers compelling evidence that, whatever the result of the urge toward memorialization currently underway in the American academy, Derridean deconstruction is alive and well and quite up to the challenges of the new century.

     

    Notes

     

    1. “The Premature Burial,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: The Modern Library, 1938.

     

    2. New York Review of Books #13, 1992.

     

    3. “Deconstruction After the Fall”, AWP Chronicle, Vol 25 #3, 1992.

     

    4. While fully 95 titles dealing with deconstruction are listed in the relatively under-stocked Johns Hopkins library, perhaps half of the latest include the word “after” or “anti” or “against” in their titles. As for the public press: “deconstruction” appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Chicago magazine, and in a Newsweek article on architect Philip Johnson. It’s even the name of a record label.

     

    5. “The Discipline of Deconstruction,” PMLA, October, 1992, Vol 107 #5, 1266-1279.

     

    6. The latest in burial technology were coffins with alarm bells on top that might be rung by a reawakened victim tugging on a cord which dangled inside.

     

    7. “Paradox” rather than “problem,” as calling something a “problem” automatically implies that one is seeking a solution; a way to repair the problem, some teleological methodology which can be demonstrated to rectify the flaw discovered, and which can then be stored, like a tool, for future use.

     

    8. Literally “fire the cinder.”

     

    9. There are many critics of deconstruction and Derridean analysis whose methods are rigorously scholastic and whose results are rhetorically insightful; critics who have engaged the “political unconscious” at work in the patterns and focuses of Derrida’s own readings, and who have gone on to develop quite distinct “deconstructive” readings, particularly in the areas of feminist and post-colonial literary theory.

     

    10. As Nealon points out, for the real culprits of this particular misreading we must exhume the first American presentations of Derrida’s work: Culler’s On Deconstruction, Norris’s Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, and Deconstruction and Criticism (which included work by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Hillis Miller); works which established a deconstructive tradition Nealon criticizes as “commodified . . . simplified and watered down” (1269).

     

    11. For instance, in Displacement: Derrida and After (Indiana University Press, 1983), a collection of essays on the whole supportive of deconstruction, we are told by Mark Krupnick in the introduction that the term displacement “is not theoretically articulated in Derrida’s writing” (1). But far worse than this, Krupnick’s grasp of Derrida’s “neutralization” of the logic of metaphysical dichotomies is so weak that he then goes on to write of a “new (post-Hegelian) dispensation, in the reign of difference (as opposed to identity),” showing himself still completely in thrall to that very (il)logic. Krupnick’s introduction is all too typical of the misreading of and outright deafness to Derrida’s early writings.

     

    12. See for instance “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., New York: Routledge, 1992.

     

    13. It is the very idea of what we mean by this “presence” that Derrida wishes to reverse and displace–but not neutralize: “We thus come to posit presence . . . no longer as the absolute matrix form of being but rather as a ‘particularization’ and ‘effect’” Marges, 17).

     

    14. Of course, the true representation of this dynamic would include many more than just two forces.

     

    15. We see this distinction in Derrida’s definition of differance: “a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Differance is the systematic play of differences, or traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another” Positions, 39).

     

    16. Quoted in “The MLA on Trial” by Stephen Greenblatt, Profession 92, 39-41.

     

  • Cookbooks for Theory and Performance

    Josephine Lee

    Department of English
    Smith College
    jolee@smith

     

    Case, Sue-Ellen, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

     

    Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

     

    One can clearly see the directions in which research in theater and drama is moving by browsing through titles of new books and articles, of new journals that have begun or renewed their life in the last five years, and of papers presented at the annual conferences held by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Scholarship and criticism in theater and drama have become much more explicitly theoretical, and the theories used are much more interdisciplinary, with New Historicism, feminist theory, and now cultural studies, moving to the forefront. Not only have the old theories of theater and drama lost their exclusive charms; what is considered the primary object of study is no longer what happens in the theater and even less what can be read on the pages of the playtext. Performance has become a much broader, even all-encompassing term, and there is no longer an easy distinction between the theatrical and the real. Though theatricality, acting, and the stage have long provided those working in other disciplines (Sigmund Freud, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, to name a few) with easy metaphors, it is more novel and refreshing to have those who have worked more closely with theater turn their attention to events which take place off as well as on the stage.

     

    Two recent collections, The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance, act as methodological cookbooks illustrating this “nouvelle cuisine” of performance studies. Both offer a variety of recipes for the ways in which current critical theory might intersect with drama, theater, and performance. Reading either would give one a good idea of what, professionally speaking, is in demand: what is considered nutritious, desirable, appetizing, successful. This is not to say that either book is geared toward the novice; on the contrary, negotiating the ambitious and rather dizzying range of essays presented in these books demands at least some sophistication. But at the same time a certain didacticism can be read, both explicitly and implicitly, in both books. For those who are desirous of success in a field increasingly focused on academic professionalism, the books promise at least a cursory sense of competence with what one needs to interact, publish, and establish oneself.

     

    The editors of both books, to their credit, make this didacticism clear. Janelle Reinelt and Sue-Ellen Case, the editors of The Performance of Power state explicitly how their book might work as an “entry-level text–a how-to for beginning to apply such considerations to theatrical texts and practices” (xix). Critical Theory and Performance also turns itself into a teaching text by supplying careful introductions, summarizing theoretical viewpoints, identifying seminal texts, and defining key terminology, all the while advertising the excitement of applying the “new theory” to drama, theater, and performance.

     

    Thus it is worth looking more closely not only at the individual essays included in these books, but also these organizing principles and agendas which inform them. My criticisms of both books are directed primarily at the latter. This is not to deny that the books do contain individual articles which are noteworthy in their own right. Joe Roach’s work on the “artificial eye” of Augustan theater, Spencer Golub’s on the iconization of Chaplin in postrevolutionary Russia, and Tracy Davis’s readings of Annie Oakley in particular show the exciting results of critical theory, meticulous scholarship, and intelligent writing. And even the more tentative essays included here do provide useful models for the appropriate ways in which experimentation is allowed to take place, and deviation from norms is allowed to occur.

     

    Yet I would focus on some of the distinct disadvantages of embracing the power structures inscribed within certain kinds of academic discourse. Although these two books clearly show evidence of how the “new theory” provides the fuel for some exciting work, they also make plain that dimension of what is inevitably disagreeable and frustrating about scholarship. With the eagerness to take on the terms of the “new theory” comes the occasional oversimplification of theory into formula, a willingness to teach rather conventional lessons of academic professionalism, and to that end, a deployment of confused and sometimes misleading arrangements of methodological categories.

     

    Particularly revealing are the ways in which the books create theoretical space both through the choice of essays, and the headings they assign to them. The personal taste and prejudices of the editors seem less important than their attempts to negotiate the complex expectations of the academic profession. Both books shun the old historical periodizations and cultural distinctions, and instead follow divisions loosely guided by post-structuralist theory, bearing the headings “Materialist Semiotics,” “After Marx,” and “Critical Convergences.”

     

    Where such headings become troubling is where the articles which follow them are not elucidated by them. The first two sections in The Performance of Power, for instance, are labelled “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction.” None of these terms seems all that clear to begin with, and the very different choices made in each of the essays, of subject matter and line of interrogation, makes the terminology even more confusing. For example, both “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction” cover a great range of topics: Kim Hall on the discourse of blackness in the Jonsonian masque, Sarah Bryant-Bertail on The Good Soldier Schwejk and the apparatus of political theater, David Savran on the Wooster Group, J. Ellen Gainor on imperialist Shaw, Geoffrey Bredbeck on Renaissance sodomy, and Jeffrey Mason on John Augustus Stone’s 1892 Metamora. Each of these essays is less wedded to the others by persistent theoretical questioning than by an appeal to older, tried-and-true foundations of historical research. Although the political cast gives the task a new urgency, the methodology remains based on close textual readings bent on unearthing historical and textual evidence for interpretation. Clearly, this is still effective. But though the quality of the essays is high, it remains unclear what they are doing in these theoretical categories. Not surprisingly, the exception is when one of the editors of this volume, Sue-Ellen Case, makes more of an effort to investigate questions of theory and methodology in her own contribution to the “Deconstruction” section. Her essay “The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics” is less a reading of specific plays than a first attempt at investigation of the “strategies of concealment, suppression, and displacement” that take place in the works of theater critics, historians, and practitioners who, in constructing Sanskrit theatrical traditions, inevitably collude with “colonial imperial practices” (124).

     

    The same uneasiness haunts Critical Theory and Performance. Although its introduction is designed to answer much more explicitly theoretical questions, its categorization of essays too renders unclear what “deconstruction” for the theater is, and what distinguishes it from “semiotics.” Here both terms are placed into a single category: “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” That two such different theoretical articulations should seem so much alike in practice remains unexplained here as well. The articles included in this section of Critical Theory are all centered on contemporary productions: Jim Carmody explores the transplantation of The Misanthrope to 1989 Hollywood, David McDonald writes with a director’s view of his own productions of David Hare’s Fanshen, and John Rouse examines the Wooster Group, Heiner Muller, and Robert Wilson. Such a choice might provide a perfect opportunity to discuss the problems of historical reconstruction of the theatrical event, and the implicit claim for the authoritative presence of spectatorship: central issues for poststructuralist theory. But such a conversation is lacking in both the essays and introduction, as is any sustained discussion of postmodernist theater practice.

     

    Again, a too-easy conflation of theoretical terms in the “Hermeneutics and Phenomenology” section of Critical Theory and Performance puts both essays included here at a disadvantage. The insights of Thomas Postlewait’s “History, Hermeneutics, and Narrativity” are more useful in conjunction with the earlier section on “Theater History and Historiography.” Postlewait’s thoughts on how the “challenge for historians . . . is to understand better how the models and discourse of narrativity organize the writing process” Critical Theory 363) work beautifully to help frame earlier essays, such as Tracy Davis’s fascinating study of Annie Oakley and her “ideal husband,” and to support the skepticism of both Rosemary Bank and Vivian Patraka towards the dualistic discourse of political theater. The essay which is paired with Postlewait, however, is Bert State’s “The Phenomenological Attitude.” State’s eloquent essay deserves accompaniment from others involved with the practice of phenomenological criticism or perhaps studies of audience reception. As it is, States’s essay exists in a vacuum, as a kind of ghost theory from the past, and one is tempted to pass it over for the more glittering theories of the other sections.

     

    The “Psychoanalysis” section of Critical Theory and Performance seems rather bare as well. Although it contains two essays which are interesting in their own right, one by Elin Diamond on theatrical identification, and the other by Mohammad Kowsar on Lacan’s reading of Antigone, the pairing does not work. I was struck by how empty this section seems in light of what disciplines such as film studies have been able to do with Freud and Lacan. That psychoanalytic theory has had a profound effect on theory and performance is evident throughout the book, and other essays could easily have been redistributed to give this section more weight. In particular Sue- Ellen Case’s later article, with its metaphor of the “coupling” of theory and history in some “primal scene,” might have been placed here instead of in the final section entitled “Critical Convergences.” For that matter, Herbert Blau’s piece, also in this final section, would have worked as well or better in “After Marx.” Eliminating this final section would also help avoid the troubling implication that well-known critics such as Case and Blau deserve their own special section and the last word on as well as in critical theory and performance.

     

    But a troubling reliance on the star system runs throughout Critical Theory and is implicit in The Performance of Power as well. Though neither book fully succumbs to what Gay Gibson calls the “blockbuster” approach of academic conference panels Power 258), both do make clear who the well-known scholars in the field are, and what they are interested in. More than once, certain essays seem to have been included for the sake of capturing the authoritative presence of the writer, rather than for scholarly or methodological reasons. Nina Auerbach’s essay “Victorian Players and Sages” is an uneasy choice for The Performance of Power; although Auerbach ends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, her interest is more thematic and literary, linking great works with other great works, Wordsworth with Bronte heroines. Janice Carlisle’s piece, which immediately precedes Auerbach’s, sheds far more light on the nature of Victorian theatricality. In light of all that Richard Schechner has done to encourage new approaches to the theater, his essay on “Direct Theater” is disappointing. Schechner makes the mistake of describing significant media events in a “You Are There” style, and removing them from their complex historical and political contexts. Some of his casual comparisons, such as that which he makes between the 1970 anti-Vietnam “carnival” held in Washington, and the 1989 protests by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, can be downright insulting.

     

    There also seems to be a marked tendency to insist on the relevance of well-known theorists for theatrical studies. When Marvin Carlson considers the possible uses of Bakhtin’s terms “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” for theater and performance, his conclusions are so optimistic that he out-Bakhtins Bakhtin. This eagerness to employ a theoretical vocabulary leads one to suspect that in the essays as well as the introductions, theoretical approaches are sometimes absorbed rather than questioned too closely. In the section labelled “Cultural Studies,” for instance, the first essays seem models of careful scholarship and sensitivity, a blend of traditional scholarship and new theoretical positions. It is not until James Moy’s article that the position of enlightened cultural critic is challenged. Moy finds what he calls a “new order of stereotypical representations” of Asians in plays hailed by others as breaking new ground. Moy’s objections, although not altogether agreeable, are argued with disconcerting vigor; his voice is polemical, challenging readers to dispute as well as applaud his efforts.

     

    Overall, the most successful section in either book is the grouping in Critical Theory and Performance entitled “Feminism(s).” Here essays work with and against one another in ways both satisfying and thought-provoking. Of particular interest is Kate Davy’s essay, which persuasively argues the inability of lesbian performance to be served by using the strategy of camp, and Jill Dolan’s work, which questions what she calls the troubling “sanctimonious structures of politically correct lesbian identifications” (266), and looks for ways in which less attractive representations of gender and power might be reconciled with feminism. Jeanie Forte’s examinations of the theatrical female body, and Ellen Donkin’s work on Sarah Siddons as split subject, are also part of the focused and engaged set of theoretical questions that feminist critics explore inside and outside the theater.

     

    In contrast, the other sections in Critical Theory and Performance seem rather tentative as articulations of theoretical positions. In the “After Marx” section in particular, the essays seem curiously restrained, and the heated debates anticipated in the introduction do not materialize. Most of the essays call for revision and reform, but do so in a tone of academic disengagement. Both Bruce McConachie’s perceptive examination of the term “production” a la Raymond Williams, and Philip Auslander’s interesting comments on stand-up comedy as baby-boomer refuge, make rather subdued conclusions. Jim Merod chooses a more polemical set of questions on theory and the academic profession, but his remarks seem directed at a very different audience; his section on jazz does not offer any insights into performance or theory more stirring than “it may be that music is the lingua franca of all people and all culture and that jazz is its most common discourse” (193). Most immediately and enjoyably provocative in this section is David Roman’s essay, which challenges the liberal view of AIDS as a scientific reality and the resultant rational/disinterested liberal response to the epidemic.

     

    The Performance of Power avoids some of the problems which are accentuated in Critical Theory and Performance by not billing itself as a “theory” book, and preserving an emphasis on text and production. To this end, the book moves away from categories evoking poststructualist theory into headings such as “Revealing Surveillance Strategies” and “Constructing Utopias.” The book does not, however, treat the theater as a privileged aesthetic space of high culture; rather, it affirms that theatrical performance participates fully in the dynamics of power that characterize all forms of discourse. Power in the theater is not just what is represented within some fictionalized stage world, but also what is inscribed in the relationships between performers, spectators, and societies in the act of performing.

     

    Happily, the book is suspicious of power in academic circles as well. The Performance of Power gives sustained attention to the power dynamics played out in academic departments, the classroom, and conference panels, in what Sue-Ellen Case calls “the production of knowledge at the site of the academy as performance” Critical Theory 422). The book begins with a narrative account of the specific conferences from which the idea for the collection took its shape, and ends with a section on the state of the profession, with a series of essays calling for the redistribution of power, more interdisciplinary research, and the need for revitalization of both research and pedagogy. While these final essays are vocal about the need for change as well as the changes that are already taking place, they express their complaints in rather too moderate and reasonable voices. I miss the angry and impassioned call for more radical institutional reform, and a more sustained self-questioning of the writer’s own complicity in the preserving the status quo.

     

    Still, the power structures of the academy do come under fire in The Performance of Power, in ways that are oddly absent in Critical Theory and Performance. The latter volume has a much more cautious, “rules-of- the-game” feel to it. Billed on the back cover as “the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance,” it promises to teach state of the art academic professionalism to a field long accused of insularity and backwardness. Such an advertisement may go unchallenged; the other books, articles, and collections which might claim to be seminal in this field were also written by those very “leading critics and practitioners” who were “specially commissioned” for this book.

     

    The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance reveal much about the current demands of the field; to the skeptical and resistant reader, they will reveal even more. Even though these books leave many crucial questions of practice and methodology unanswered, they are important and necessary reading for anyone who wishes to engage critically with theater, drama, and performance studies; the choices made in both books are worth studying closely. To call something “deconstruction” is neither arbitrary nor whimsical, even when the term is unexplained or misapplied; it is by means of such labellings that a sub-discipline attains recognition and credibility within larger circles of discourse. We who study theater and drama have been relatively late in jumping onto the theory bandwagon. But now that we are on board, we must engage with the dynamics of power, authority, and value that are imposed by the new conventions as well as the old. Thus, professionally speaking, there is much to be gained through reading these books, even if only one or two of the individual essays are relevant to one’s own particular areas of interest. Whether one ultimately dismisses the “nouvelle” performance studies as mere passing fashion, or finds that it actually tastes good, to be active in the discipline today means at least sitting down to this sort of table. And I, for one, hate to eat alone.
     

  • Hitchcock: The Industry

    James Morrison

    Department of English
    North Carolina State University

     

    Kapsis, Robert E. Hitchock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

     

    After more than twenty years, if we date its inception at the publication of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965), the Hitchcock industry is still burgeoning. On and on they come in unstoppable waves, these dense treatises on The Master’s high vernacular or low comedy, on films re-released or securely canonized. Even if we dismiss those books that are patently “popular,” like Donald Spoto’s biography, or those that give Hitchcock only a sustained sidelong glance, like Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry, we are still left to contend with some two dozen ample volumes–this in the field of film studies that is itself barely twenty years old. The latest spasm of production alone has yielded at least three books, each from a university press: Stefan Sharff’s on Hitchcock’s High Vernacular from Columbia, Thomas Leitch’s Find the Director from Georgia, and now Kapsis’s volume from Chicago. What this largely academic enterprise lacks in the glittery trappings of, say, the mass-market Malcolm-X-drive–no Hitchcock caps as yet, no Hitchcock breakfast cereal–it makes up for with a certain scholarly self-consciousness. One is not surprised, then, to see at last a book about the industry itself.

     

    Kapsis’s thesis is simple: The evolution of Hitchcock’s reputation since the late fifties has been intricately connected to general permutations in film aesthetics during the same period. The first chapter lays the study’s theoretical groundwork by adapting the sociologist Harold Becker’s concept of “art-worlds” to the field of film. Chapters two through five trace Hithcock’s reputation from its initial phases, where Hitchcock is understood as “mere entertainer” or “master of suspense,” through the efforts of Hithcock and his partisans to reshape his reputation into that of a “serious artist,” culminating in the director’s canonization in academe. Final chapters consider the effect of the “Hithcock legacy” on the thriller genre itself as well as on the career of Brian De Palma, then compare the making of Hitchcock’s reputation to that of the reputations of Hawks, Capra, Lang, Clint Eastwood, and, in the “art-world” of music, Vladimir Horowitz. The particular strategies Kapsis’s work values are not close-analysis or theoretical expansiveness (nor the rhetorical flourishes that usually accompany them) but comprehensive scrutiny and empirical doggedness. These last his work achieves, and the attendant clarity of his style would be unimpeachable if clarity were an end in itself, if relentless comprehensiveness guaranteed genuine comprehension. Clearly, the book’s subject has the potential to bring into focus key issues in contemporary film studies, from much-debated ones like the status of the auteur to little- discussed ones like the process of canon formation. But in spite of the value of some of its research, the book misses its most important opportunities.

     

    The first problem is one of methodology. Kapsis negotiates Becker’s conception of the “art-world” with a version of reception theory he traces from Jauss through Wendy Griswold’s work. His first key assumption, then, derived from Becker, is that cultural products “are influenced by or imbedded in the immediate organizational, legal, and economic environments in which they are produced” (5); his second is that “‘meaning’ is produced or ‘fabricated’ by the interaction between reader and text” (8). In spite of the earnest conviction of these observations, neither is likely to strike occupants of the film-studies trenches as urgent news from the battle-front. What may be novel, though, is the sense in which Kapsis intends his inflections. In the first quotation, for example, “immediate” is the operative word, and refers not just to studios or audiences as “environments,” but even more “immediately,” to literal facets of production–e.g., conversations on the set during filming. Moreover, the “meaning” that gets produced, through whatever means, is seen to be a product of films’ embeddedness in these environments. Thus, elements of Hitchcock’s style that other critics have more conventionally seen as modernist gestures or personal insignia are conceived as Hithcock’s “practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics” (25). A less romanticized vision of the auteur than that implied here is hard to imagine; but what’s an “unusual shot”? Who are the “serious critics,” and how do they get to be “more” serious than the others?

     

    In registering such points, I mean to suggest that the seemingly “progressive” aspects of Kapsis’s methodology are built upon an extremely traditional base and become, therefore, themselves questionable. In spite of the presumed emphasis on shifting patterns of reception, Kapsis begins with a survey of Hitchcock’s career that would be perfectly at home in any coffee-table picture-book: “Both Rope and Under Capricorn] exploited technical means at the expense of narrative flow and neither one generated much business. It would seem that Hitchcock had temporarily lost touch with his audience” (25). In a study that claims to examine changing critical assumptions, it is not beside the point to ask what a “narrative flow” is, how “technical means” can disrupt it, and what this might have to do with audience response. In any case, the usual version of audience response to these films is that audiences found the first bombastic and the second dull. Should a current study simply reproduce this received narrative? More to the point: the “technical means” Hitchcock is exploiting in these films involve historically unprecedented play with the long-take sequence-shot. Indeed, promotion for the films emphasized the sequence-shot and the moving camera as novelties to draw audiences–“Come see Ingrid Bergman in the longest take in movie history!”–who still found the films bombastic and dull. The failure of this effort to manipulate reception complicates Kapsis’s claim that such efforts began late in Hitchcock’s work. More generally, his unreflective reproduction of standard surveys of Hitchcock’s career markedly undermines his later attempts to examine the assumptions on which such surveys might be based.

     

    In fact, although Kapsis approvingly quotes Griswold to the effect that a cultural object “has no meaning independent of its being experienced” (9), he is prone to categorical assertions about the nature of certain films of Hitchcock. For example, he sees Psycho and Vertigo as “essentially anti-romances, violating many of the conventions and rules that were associated with the Hithcock thriller in the late fifties” (56) and later finds that Lesley Brill “correctly” (56) makes the same claim in The Hitchcock Romance (Princeton 1988). If the purpose of the study as a whole is to show how “changes in critical discourse over the past few decades have shaped the ‘meaning’ of Hitchcock’s works” (122), Kapsis’s own analyses are perhaps obliged to present themselves as interpretive acts that have similarly been shaped by prior discourses. Yet the normativity of his point here is startling in the context of his presumed methodology. Here the films are assumed to have certain attributes that audiences simply did not welcome; or, elsewhere, particular films simply were poor and were rightly recognized as such by audiences; or else particular films were really one thing but were incorrectly perceived by audiences as something else; and so on. In this instance, in any case, it seems clear enough that the “essential” quality Kapsis discovers in these films is to be distinguished from the provisional “meanings” other critics locate there.

     

    If Brill is “correct” to find patterns of romance at the foundation of Hitchcock’s work, Robin Wood is apparently quite wrong to see Marnie as a fully-realized masterpiece (Wood’s category, not mine) instead of as the shoddy bag of goods most critics had earlier seen. Initial reviews of this film which Kapsis sees as the turing point in Hitchcock’s reputation history emphasized what they claimed was its technical ineptitude–ugly back-projection, awkward red-suffusions of the image, clumsy zoom-shots. Wood’s landmark revaluation of the film sees these elements as part of a complex design. But Kapsis, whose posture is ordinarily one of professorial equanimity, will have none of it. Presenting Wood as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist (and missing thereby Wood’s inheritance from the work of F. R. Leavis), Kapsis lengthily quotes Wood’s argument and then, rather than engage it, blusters in an unwittingly comic rehearsal of thirty-year-old misconceptions of auteurism, “Wood’s point once again is that Hitchcock can really do no wrong” (128). In fact, Wood’s point is that the devices work in his analysis of the film and that they are part of Hitchcock’s German Expressionist heritage but are now perceived as anachronistic by popular audiences. In other words, Wood’s point is more attuned to shifts in viewers’ assumptions about film style than is Kapsis’s inarticulate rejection of it. More to the point, technical “deficiencies” are in no way isolated to Marnie in Hitchcock’s work. The Lady Vanishes, for example, makes absurdly obvious use of miniatures and Notorious contains examples of back-projection at least as obtrusive as any in Marnie. Given these facts and Kapsis’s thesis, the question he should be asking is why these “deficiencies” became an issue in the reception of Marnie when they did not in the reception of the earlier films.

     

    Instead, Kapsis treats the reader to a protracted examination of the film’s production file, which body of knowledge “simply fails to support” (131) Wood’s argument. According to the production files, as Kapsis reads them, it seems Hitchcock “sought external reality but technical mishaps ensued” (129). In turn, this information “points to how the auteur critics’ expectations of finding artistic purpose and consistency in the works of their favorite auteur directions [sic] could lead to exaggerated claims about a film’s implicit meanings” (129). It is worth noting that Wood himself deals explicitly with such critical issues at the outset of his study, albeit in a fairly standard New Critical way: “What concerns (or should concern) the critic is not what a film is ‘really intended’ to be, but what it actually is” Hitchcock’s Films 13). Wood even goes on to quote Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller–trust the tale,” an epigram in which, to judge from the fact that he first misquotes it then wrongly attributes it to Joseph Conrad, Kapsis himself does not put much stock. In the context Kapsis had appeared to be trying to establish, in any case, the notion of an “erroneous” (130) reading of a text is a troubling one. Wood’s valuation of organic coherence is here simply opposed to Kapsis’s modulated empiricism where the real issue had formerly seemed to be the social, aesthetic or other causes of such interpretive differences. For Kapsis, the issue is (as usual) simple: “Wood’s polemical agenda led him astray” (130). Similarly, treating feminist reinterpretations of Marnie, Kapsis hopes to determine which are “most faithful to the Marnie text” (139), obviously contradicting his earlier presumption that meaning is contingent on reception.

     

    Kapsis’s treatment of auteurism, in general, further illuminates methodological problems in his study. His version of auteurism is monolithic and simplified, and he posits auteurism as both cause and effect in the making of Hitchcock’s reputation. Perhaps assuming (wrongly, if so) that the implications of auteur theory have been played out fully in film studies, Kapsis treats the topic at its basic level by implication, and his references to it are dispersed broadly across the text. One of the results of this is an elementary form of repetition characteristic of Kapsis’s style. Each time he mentions auteurism, he does so as if introducing the topic but, at the same time, as if it had already been adequately explicated. Hitchcock’s reputation as a “serious artist” is strengthened “during the 1970s when the auteur theory dominated film studies” (122); the growing pedigree of horror movies is “a trend traceable to the rise of auteur theory in the late 1960s” (162); it was “during the early sixties that . . . auteur critics actively sought to elevate Hitchcock’s stature” (216); Hitchcock’s standing “improved in the sixties as the auteur theory came to dominate both journalistic and academic discourse in the cinema” (228); and so on.

     

    This atomization of the topic makes it nearly impossible to extrapolate from the argument a clear view of what Kapsis thinks auteurism is, but in any case he gives no sense of the roots of auteurism in structuralism, of the crucial debates among early auteurists or of its complex evolution, or indeed of the very aesthetic of auteur theory. Kapsis’s schematic conception of auteur theory consists of two elements. First, “according to these critics, the individual ‘auteur’ was the sole source of a film’s meaning: the artist’s personal vision transcended ‘reality,’ ‘history,’ and ‘society’” (224-25). Second, in “advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored” (216). The first of these claims is redolent of a popular take on auteurism, deriving from a reading not so much of Bazin, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer or Godard (to say nothing of Levi-Strauss!) but of Pauline Kael. In fact, cine- structuralism (as it was sometimes called in the seventies) insists on the impossibility of “transcending” “history” and so on; it is, indeed, because all forms of human communication are seen in this model as rigidly controlled by predetermined structures that the auteurists find it possible to attend in the first place to genre films, which in this context are no more “formulaic” and therefore no less “serious” than any other predetermining structure. Yet so unaware does Kapsis seem of the crucial connection between auteurism and structuralism that he regards genre criticism as opposed to auteurism rather than as a crucial component of it: “the auteur viewpoint rather than a genre orientation framed much of the critical discourse on Topaz” (105). If auteur theory means nothing more than seeing “the director as a major source of meaning” (228), then American film criticism has been auteurist from its inception to the present.

     

    Kapsis’s conception of the auteurist canon, or “pantheon,” is even more disturbing because of its implications for his concpetion of canonicity itself in the project as a whole. For Kapsis, taste seems to be a purely whimsical phenomenon. Thus, according to Kapsis, the first generation of auteurists slap together an apparently arbitrary “pantheon” while the next generation simply “countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing” (217)–with no effort made to account for or even discuss the choices. Why are “certain directors” singled out for “special praise”? Because they are auteurs. How do we know they are auteurs? Because they have been singled out. Favoring Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Welles, Kapsis tells us, the auteurists “dismissed as second- or third-rate” Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Zinneman, and Wilder. Kapsis is partially right to suggest that the first group is valued because “despite having worked within the old Hollywood studio system, [they] had somehow managed to retain in their work a personal vision” (217). However, he does not even attempt to account for the “dismissal” of the others (nor to prove that dismissal, especially pertinent in the case of Wyler); nor indeed could he do so in the terms of his simplified account of auteurism. The auteurist dismissal of Huston, for example, is predicated on structuralist assumptions. Because they see Huston as naively believing he can “transcend” genre, by among other ways adapting idiosyncratic literary texts to film, the auteurists reject him.

     

    Kapsis’s work yields no mechanism by which to examine the social or aesthetic causes of cultural change. He is interested only in the effect of cultural change (and even that in only a simple way), and thus does not ask, as he observes shifts in Hitchcock’s reputation, how and why what Pierre Bourdieu would call the rearrangement of cultural capital takes place. Bourdieu’s monumental work Distinction provides what are currently the definitive ways of discussing the sociology of cultural value, and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and its relation to social capital is one Kapsis might profitably have engaged, especially given Kapsis’s intent to inflect film studies with modes of thought from sociology. Specifically, Bourdieu argues that the “bourgeois” aesthetic is to be distinguished from the “popular” aesthetic by way of the latter’s demand for participatory interaction and the former’s distanciation, its separation from ordinary, non-aesthetic dispositions. Such a distinction bears obvious relevance to a discussion of a mass entertainer’s being co-opted by or crossing over into “serious” art, but Kapsis proceeds as if such distinctions were self-evident. With no such framework in which to function, then, repeated references to texts that “straddled the line between popular genre movies and films with a more elitist intent” (246) can only seem windy and vacant.

     

    The author’s conception of “reputation” itself is impoverished by inattentiveness to– paraphrasing Bourdieu–modes of appropriation of art-works across cultural strata. Kapsis’s study uses as its chief evidence journalistic reviews and critical articles, with occasional references to box-office figures. Much work in reception theory, of course, challenges the validity of such evidence as a gauge of a film’s reception, and many of the most interesting studies have relied on other kinds of evidence, such as advertising, non-critical journalism, letters to editors from “average” citizens, or public-relations documents. (Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films [Princeton 1992] will serve as a model in reception studies for years to come.) Arguing that Hitchcock’s reputation is reshaped from that of professional ghoul to that of “serious artist,” Kapsis begs key questions about levels of culture: Who says when an artist is “serious”? Once Hitchcock is canonized, is his work then unavailable to popular responses? In Kapsis’s version, once the auteurists lay claim on Hitchcock, his days as a “mere entertainer” are over. But his simultaneous canonization in Blockbuster Video stores (as the only director, until lately, to have his own category) or on cable TV, flanked by Patty Duke, Donna Reed and other luminaries of Our Television Heritage suggests otherwise. Yet Kapsis’s version of the Hitchcock reputation remains, like most of his categories, cosily unitary. The British may still hold Hitchcock to the standard of his “early British thrillers” because they “lack the training in film studies of their American counterparts” (157), but we Americans know better.

     

    The appeal of reception studies is its capacity to situate texts within very specific cultural contexts. Not only is Kapsis inattuned to links between cultural practice and social categories, however, he is indifferent to the strata across which a reputation may be defined (that is, a “reputation” is not only one thing at any one time) and the molecular responses to which it is subject. Thus his work is as thoroughly insulated from authentic cultural analysis as the formalism it was meant to replace.

     

  • Constructing an Archipelago: Writing the Caribbean

    Susan J. Ritchie

    English Department Ohio State University
    sritchie@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu

     

    Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

     

    Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective is a marvelously ambitious rereading of Caribbean literature, letters, and culture, deftly translated here by James Maraniss. But what makes the Cuban author’s book a work of particular interest and importance to postmodern studies is the powerful, shifting, and paradoxical framework he has established for articulating the “certain way” of the Caribbean. For Benitez-Rojo’s chief interest is in the ethnological but nonetheless inessential character that might justify the reference to so many diverse islands, peoples, languages, and histories as “the Caribbean.” His “Caribbean” is a constructed, postmodern, and yet finally coherent sociocultural archipelago.

     

    Benitez-Rojo thus engages with the very difficult question of how to perform a cultural study that is postmodern and constructivist but which nonethelessless respects cultural specificities. He puts it this way: “How do we establish that the Caribbean is an important historico-economic sea, and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each a copy of a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor?” (9). Both the value and danger of this work result from the energy and skill with which the author sets often contradictory theoretical apparatuses after this problem and into productive frenzy.

     

    The readings are propelled by a roughly Deleuzian conception of an ordering, productive machine that is the Caribbean itself; the very machine from which Caribbean texts seek to escape in their search for non-violence. He calls this machine the “Plantation,” and it is in his attention to the Plantation that he produces the readings that are one of the real gifts of this text. The Plantation system is for Benitez-Rojo the producer of the similarity of differences that makes up the islands of the Caribbean: “the Plantation proliferated in the Caribbean basin in a way that presented different features in each island, each stretch of coastline, each colonial bloc. Nevertheless . . . these differences, far from negating the existence of a pan-Caribbean society, make it possible in the way that a system off ractal equations of a galaxy is possible” (72).

     

    His most complete identification of the Plantation takes place in an introductory chapter that examines the history of the Caribbean in terms of the Plantation, and in his examination of his two historical texts: Bartholome de Las Casas’ 1875 history of what he still referred to as the Indes (Historia de las Indias), and Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 essay on the role of sugar and tobacco production in the shaping of Cuba (part of Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar). Benitez-Rojo carefully teases out from Las Casas’ text the author’s guilt for having been an original “encomendero” who both justified the Spanish conquest of Cuba and promoted African slavery as the most efficacious means of running sugar plantations. Las Casas, then, is one of the architects of the Plantation–the larger system of exploitation that would come to determine Caribbean culture. Las Casas, though, is no simple bad guy: Benitez-Rojo’s accomplishment is to show how his work also helps discursively to organize the region’s anti-colonial impulses.

     

    Through a scrupulous Freudian reading of Historia” Benitez-Rojo suggests that Las Casas’ text both contains and represents a “rupture” in the “discursive practice that justified the conquest” and that this rupture creates one of the region’s first nationalistic arguments in its imagination of “a providential space in which Europeans, aboriginal peoples, and Africans might live industriously according to religious and civic principles, and where violence toward the Indian and the Negro would be condemned equally by the earthly power of the crown and the Church’s spiritual judgment” (86). The rupture is represented by an enigmatic moment in this historical text: a fantastic description of a plague of ants that reads more like fable than history. Noting the uncanniness of the passage, Benitez-Rojo uses Freudian analysis to show how the fable both disguises and re-presents the actual object of Las Casas’ fascination and guilt: a revolt by plantation slaves. The reading is valuable for its careful attention to the Cuban anti-colonial nationalistic sentiment and to the Plantation’s dual fascination and phobia, its duplicitous posture of defense and exploitation, as regards African culture.

     

    As Benitez-Rojo continues to trace the cultural productions of the Plantation-machine in more detail, he takes pains to identify it as a machine born not of postmodernism, but of the Caribbean itself. So while he characterizes Las Casas’ resistance to the colonial binary of master/slave as “an involuntary flourish of postmodernity” (98), his point is finally that these texts offer something more culturally specific. This concern animates his examinations of Ortiz’s often literally fantastic and fabulous discussions of sugar and tobacco production in Cuba, which is less revealing of that historian’s text than it is of Benitez-Rojo’s attempts to ground his own investigations in the explicitly Caribbean. He finds in Ortiz his own precursor: a proto-scholar of the Plantation: “When Ortiz says that ‘to study the Cuban history is fundamentally to study the history of sugar and tobacco as the visceral systems of its economy’ he is suggesting to us ‘another’ mode of investigation whose prototype would be the ‘Contrapunteo’” (158).

     

    Benitez-Rojo’s only ungenerous reading similarly projects his own conception of the Plantation on to the work of earlier authors. He criticizes the poet Nicolas Guillen, known for his poems about sugar workers, for his Marxism–and also, it would seem, for his failure properly to understand Benitez-Rojo’s own description of the Plantation well over a half a century before it was articulated. It is strange, he writes, “that Guillen, with his profound understanding of the Plantation, should have fallen for the ingenious pattern of thinking that the mechanical transposition of a European doctrine–as Marxism-Leninism is–to a Caribbean island could be successful as a socioeconomic project; I mean, concretely, that an island plantation, Cuba, for example, could ever produce sugar ‘without tears’” (131). The irony, of course, is that Benitez-Rojo himself is unapologetically supportive of applications of Anglo-European postmodern theories to the Caribbean.

     

    Benitez-Rojo is better when he speaks of how he shares this struggle with the West with other Caribbean writers. The Plantation is responsible for the essential paradox of the Caribbean writer: he or she is most Caribbean when most Other. As Benitez-Rojo says of the work of Alejo Carpentier, it “offers itself as a doubly spectacular spectacle: at once directed toward the West in terms of an excess of invention and professional competence (to make an impression, to follow the current), and also directed to the reading in the meta-archipelago, beneath a ritual language, which, in its repetition, tries to interpret two performances of the impossible: to be a Caribbean person and to be there in the Caribbean” (241). Hence in his comparison of the fiction of Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Fanny Buitrago and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, it is Carpentier, whose style bears the greatest resemblance to Western literature, who is celebrated as the most Caribbean. Benitez-Rojo’s eloquent explanation for Carpentier’s appropriation of a largely French naturalism for his own novels is that “It’s obvious that the Path of Words between Europe and America becomes much more assured when one goes out parallel to some famous explorer” (184).

     

    Benitez-Rojo does not always trace clear patterns of connection between these sorts of micro-insights about literature and his larger theoretical statements. Indeed, some of his finest moments are also the most disconnected or incidental to any central agenda or design. One of the many oddities of this book, though, is how, despite the apparently loose theoretical bricolage of his own practice, Benitez-Rojo suggests that the Caribbean and its Plantation can best be approached and understood by way of a single theoretical stance: that of scientific chaos theory. Chaos theory, as we have learned in the wake of its recent boom, describes the scientific attempt to study complex natural patterns and behaviors that previously had been thought too noisy or too random to succumb to empirical and statistical prediction. And for Benitez-Rojo, as for other scholars of postmodern culture, what has proved most appealing about chaos is not its highly technical and repetitive mathematics but its seductive thematics and terminologies.

     

    Indeed, some of the images generated by chaos theory work well for Benitez-Rojo as descriptions of the turbulent character of Caribbean culture. Like the phenomena that chaos scientists study, his Caribbean text is constantly aswirl in bifurcation and paradox–products of a turbulence which allows equally for radical disturbance and creative productivity. The appeal of chaos as an analogy for postcolonialism is evident: chaos provides a model for the interconnectedness of places and phenomena, yet allows even within that interconnection for the possibility of radical disruption. Like much postmodern theory, work in chaos has described how the local might rupture universalizing metanarratives. The “butterfly effect,” for instance, describes the process whereby seemingly small events, compounded through interdependent feedback loops, can have a dramatic effect on other parts of the system. (The name indicates the statistical conceivability that a group of butterflies flapping their wings in one part of the world could produce a storm in another hemisphere.)

     

    But despite the thematic appropriateness of chaos theory, I am uneasy with Benitez-Rojo’s appropriation of it for the analysis of culture. Chaos theory, with its interest in the order of disorder, dabbles in the description of the most mystical of all natural forces: that which in spite of entropy, resists disorder. The end point of scientific chaos theory is a statistical science of wholeness, a goal that seems strikingly at odds with what is otherwise Benitez-Rojo’s confidence in the power of difference. Indeed, his steadfast belief that the cultural diversity of the islands is fully capable of resisting even the homogenizing effects of a postmodern global culture of consumerism is quite marked and controversial: “I see no solid reasons,” he writes, “to think that the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is negatively affected by the cultural ‘consumerism’ of the industrial societies. When a people’s culture conserves ancient dynamics that ‘play in a certain kind of way,’ these resist being displaced by external territorializing forms” (20).

     

    Being more suspicious than Benitez-Rojo about the essential character of difference, I am nervous about the practice of once again using a Western science as a means of understanding the history of the colonized world; I worry about how his specific examination of Caribbean texts is sandwiched between discussions of chaos theory as if the Caribbean were some kind of real-world manifestation of Western empirical predictions. Of course, Benitez-Rojo insists that his use of Chaos theory remains on the level of metaphor: “If I have seized hold of certain models belonging to Chaos, it has not been because I think that these can manage to signify fully what’s there in the archipelago; rather it’s because they speak of dynamic forms that float, sometimes in unforeseen and scarcely perceptible ways within the Caribbean’s huge and heteroclitic archive” (269). But while he is interested in understanding the “certain way” of being–the ordering principle that characterizes the otherwise chaotic and disjointed Caribbean–surely even a thematic distinction must be made between that resistance to disorder that we call “culture” and the resistance to disorder that biologists often call “life” itself.

     

    Benitez-Rojo’s tendency to understand the cultural specificity of the Caribbean as the product of a “natural” necessity, even while he treats literary texts as strictly social constructions, makes for a strange and troublesome discontinuity in his analysis. One can accept his basic stance on Caribbean literary texts, which, he says, propose “themselves as vehicles to drive the reader and the text to the marginal and ritually initiating territory of the absence of violence” (25). But his characterization of Caribbean culture is more difficult. The identification of the specificity of the culture, what he refers to throughout the book as the “certain kind of way” of the islands, is a highly naturalized, romantic, and even racist process. Thus when he depicts the moment in which he personally reached the age of reason, and understood in a single epiphany what it was to be Caribbean, as the day he witnessed two older Black woman “with an ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs” pass under his balcony in “a certain kind of way,” and that “I knew then at once there would be no apocalypse . . . the Caribbean is not an apocalyptic world” (10), he makes knowledge of the specifically Caribbean dependent on capturing Black women within a male gaze. To praise E. Duvergier de Hauranne’s understanding of the islands, he compliments Haurranne’s 19th-century traveller’s description of Black women walking through a market in Cuba. “It’s clear,” Benitez-Rojo insists, “that Huaranne, a foreigner, saw that these Negresses walked in ‘a certain kind of way,’ that they moved differently than European women” (79).

     

    Perhaps it is unfair to expect Benitez-Rojo to transcend the racist sexism of his own cultural text. But these sections of the book are unsatisfactory in other ways as well. Again the terminology of chaos theory seems to impose itself rather awkwardly. Benitez-Rojo ends up describing the Planation as a “strange attractor”–in chaos lingo, a point of regularity within expected randomness (269). But the Planation is no strange attractor; it is the colonial machine in motion. And the exploitation that it has engendered is precisely not the result of natural distribution, as Benitez-Rojo himself suggests in his more Deleuzian moments. After all, he is no ethnographer, but a self-reflective and self-acknowledged product of the very Caribbean he describes, a student of culture doomed, as he discusses in his final chapter, to use alien tools of analysis. A generous reading might recall Benitez-Rojo’s own assertion that the Caribbean text attempts to “neutralize violence” by referring “society to the transhistorical codes of Nature” (17). But this reasoning away of racism is unsatisfactory, for one quickly recognizes that nowhere does Benitez-Rojo account for the ideological or social consequences of this or other particular constructions of Nature. The result is that the unstated mission of a truly Caribbean literature remains the naturalization of some, but not all, of the island’s people through the very act of representation. Thus, for example, when Benitez-Rojo critiques Nicolas Guillen’s poem “West Indes, Ltd,” his vague dissatisfaction that it is too Western appears as the critique that in it, “one does not feel the vital presence of the Negro’s desire” (129).

     

    I do not mean to suggest that the troubling paradoxes of Benitez-Rojo’s practice should be cleanly resolved or contained. But his reluctance to chart the make-up of certain key social constructions leaves his work, for me at least, something less than a full engagement with the problematics of postmodernity. For there is often no compelling reason to assume that the fragmentation he enacts is really “postmodern” at all. He acknowledges that Caribbean discourse, like the islands themselves, “is in many respects prestructuralist and preindustrialist, and to make matters worse, a contrapuntal discourse that when seen a la Caribbean would look like a rumba, and when seen a la Europe like a perpetually moving baroque fugue, in which the voices meet once never to meet again” (23). And one of his recurring points is that even if postmodernism might provide a strategically interesting way of addressing Caribbean culture, within the postcolonial context, it will always remain an ill-fit. Yet I am not troubled by the presence of the premodern in the texts, social or literary, but by his description of his own methodology as postmodern. In the terms of classic Derridean symptomology, what is alarming is that Benitez-Rojo’s own postcritical methodology should produce text that so closely matches that of the precritical. “It’s no surprise,” he writes, “that the people of the Caribbean should be good boxers and also, of course, good musicians, good singers, good dancers, and good writers” (22). One wonders: did he need chaos, or even the Plantation, to perform these readings that stick, after all, fairly closely to the text? Perhaps not, but the methodological dynamic of the Plantation is evident in the progression of readings, where repetitions and difference do create a sense of the “endless combat that must necessarily remain undecided within the problematic interplay of confrontations, truces, alliances, derelictions, offensive and defensive strategies, advances and retreats, forms of domination, resistance and coexistence that the Plantation’s founding inscribed in the Caribbean” (111).

     

    If I have expressed some serious reservations about this work, the daring with which it displays and enacts its own paradoxes makes it to my mind indispensable to the ongoing project of postmodern cultural studies. And while I have been critical of Benitez-Rojo’s use of the postmodern, perhaps he deserves the label all the more for his own awareness that for him, the postmodern is only an ill-fitting interim strategy with, finally, a single virtue: the “virtue of being the only [paradigm] to direct itself toward the play of paradoxes and eccentricities, of fluxes and displacements; that is, it offers possibilities that are quite in tune with those that define the Caribbean” (271). That Benitez-Rojo would be so restless with a paradigm of restlessness recommends him absolutely.

     

  • Sustainability and Critique

    Philip E. Agre

    Department of Communication
    University of California, San Diego
    pagre@ucsd.edu

     

    Wright, Will. Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

     

    Attend any public hearing about a local environmental controversy, and almost the first thing you’ll notice is a clash of contrasting discourses. Some participants, particularly from industry, will speak the language of technical reason: risk factors, powers of ten, bureaucratic procedures, the costs and benefits of industrial facilities. Many other participants, particularly from the communities around those facilities, will speak the language of experience and democracy: stories of past misfortune, fears about a world that doesn’t make sense to them, and the right to control their own lives (see Cone et al. 1992, Downey 1988, Gismondi and Richardson 1991, and Killingsworth and Steffens 1989). Beneath each discourse, typically, is a highly evolved practice of orchestrating or subverting the established mechanisms of social legitimation, as well as a worked-out view of scientific knowledge and its place in society. Community by community across the United States–and increasingly around the world–organizations such as the Chemical Manufacturers Association equip factory owners with rational arguments and soothing rhetoric at the same time as organizations such as the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste equip community activists with coalition-building tactics and a nearly absolute rejection of experts and their expertise (Greider 1992). Immediately evident in these encounters is what we would be fully justified in calling a crisis of reason, occasioned in thousands of separate instances by concerns about the sustainability of industrial society.

     

    This is the political background against which Will Wright has written his ambitious new book, Wild Knowledge. Wright’s goal is a critique and reconstruction of both scientific knowledge and institutional legitimation around the ecological imperative of sustainability. The fascination of Wright’s enterprise is immediately apparent: understanding and practicing the notion of sustainable society requires us to reopen some long-standing and painful questions about the relation between society and nature. In what sense are human beings part of nature? To what extent is human history conditioned by natural history, and what role does human history play in the biological and physical evolution of the earth? Wright’s concern is not the substantive answers to these questions–he does not assess the reality of global warming, much less the utility of any given regulatory approach to preventing it. Instead, he wishes to dig deeply into the concepts of humanity and nature in order simply to make intelligible the notion of a social-natural history (cf. Cronon 1991), and in particular the notion of sustainability as an attribute and a goal of social action.

     

    His book defies classification. If it stands in any single tradition, it is the feminist and otherwise radical critique of science by authors such as Merchant (1980) and Easlea (1980). Although it is reasonably lucid and self-contained, it will probably not be appreciated by anybody who is not already sympathetic to such ideas; for example, one must pretty much accept a priori that science and technology, as a mindset, are the cause of our environmental problems–and not, in particular, the cure for them. His book is not a work of historical or otherwise empirical inquiry, but rather a wholly–even austerely–conceptual analysis. And although it addresses central issues of social theory, its treatment of that tradition is shaky, as will become clear in a moment. Nonetheless, Wright’s book is important and challenging, and required reading for anybody with a conceptual interest in environmentalism as social practice.

     

    Let us now consider Wright’s argument in roughly the order in which he presents it. His point of departure is the argument in his previous book, The Social Logic of Health (1982), in which he points out that the notion of “health” transcends the bounds of any particular scientific-medical theory of disease, and as such stands as the always-available social-natural grounds for contesting the legitimacy of medical institutions and their practices and expertise. Alternative health-care practitioners (midwives, acupuncturists, herbalists, and others) may not have an easy time acquiring official sanction for their activities, but they do have, in discursive and social terms, somewhat solid ground for demanding it. Wright’s method is to extend this argument to environmental issues, with “sustainability” playing the same role as “health.” Like “health,” “sustainability” deeply intertwines “social” and “natural” issues. Indeed in many areas, such as occupational health, the two concerns combine, bringing biology and politics into much greater proximity than either of them is, at present, capable of acknowledging.

     

    Wright argues that scientific and social knowledge are artificially distinct categories, and that they are indeed actually incoherent unless conceived as continuous with one another. The critical issue for Wright is language– the language within which science, technology, religion, and social theory are framed and through which social institutions are legitimated. Science in particular has, since Descartes and Newton, understood itself as speaking a special, mathematical language. As a result, the scientist, qua subject of scientific inquiry, understands knowledge as the asocial, ahistorical mathematical representation of reality. All the same, Wright observes that when scientists and philosophers are called upon to provide some justification for science, they appeal to its “success” in technological terms. But the religions of traditional cultures have their own kind of success, namely success in sustaining the social-natural relations by means of which these cultures reproduce themselves in their natural settings. These two types of success are complementary: industrial technology has not proven sustainable, and religious worldviews have been unable to make room for the benefits of technical innovation.

     

    This is a good point to stop and listen to Wright’s own prose, whose style is of a piece with the nature of his project:

     

    Both religion and science have incorporated a fundamental reference to language into their respective ideas of knowledge, implicitly recognizing that knowledge is inherently an issue of the formal structure of language. But both have distorted that formal reference, interpreting it instead as a substantive appeal to a particular form of language, and so referring the idea of knowledge to a sacred, magical form of language rather than to the formal structure of language. For religion this magical language has always been the ordinary, traditional language of daily life, where knowledge of the magical words gives knowledge of the sacred social-natural order, with its necessary moral commitments to traditional acceptance and ritual. And for science this magical language is mathematics, where the magic of perfect observation gives knowledge of the external natural order, with its necessary technical commitments to individualized criticism and efficiency.(112-13)

     

    Many readers may demur; exactly what kinds of science and, more importantly, what kinds of religion are supposed to fall within these generalizations? Does Wright subscribe to the outdated anthropological stereotype of traditional cultures as uncritical and ahistorical? It is hard to tell. Throughout the book, words like “science,” “religion,” “language,” “legitimation,” “sustainability,” “nature,” and “reality” recur constantly without ever being fully unpacked into a definite embedding in a disciplinary practice or literature, much less a concrete empirical reference. The book is composed in sentences of thirty-odd words organized into long paragraphs, each of which systematically develops a definite point involving a particular set of the book’s key words. The effect sometimes resembles Buddhist scripture, with a hypnotically unfolded internal consistency which could easily be mistaken for a verbal game unless it is applied in the context of an actual practice.

     

    But let us continue. To motivate the underlying politics of scientific knowledge, Wright recounts the by-now familiar early history of science understood as mathematical observation and knowledge. Early theories of gravity, for example, were consciously understood in their day as positions in a political contest. Although the concrete political reference of these theories has fallen away, the politics of scientific subjectivity remain. Wright’s argument for the incoherence of this form of subjectivity turns on the notion of “mathematical observation”:

     

    For science knowledge is an issue of the observing human mind, and yet the human mind is typically influenced by social and cultural ideas, ideas that involve values and beliefs and that are not strictly and neutrally derived from objective nature. Thus scientific observation must establish a neutral and objective connection between mind and nature, a connection systematically purged of all contaminating social influences. . . . Such an objective connection can be made through observation, but only through a special kind of observation, a kind that is uniquely focused on nature and without social content. This is mathematical observation, the only kind of observation that can directly connect the rational mind with objective nature. Mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed, since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations. . . . For scientific knowledge, then, the idea of the mind is connected with the idea of nature through the idea of mathematics. . . . The mind must become mathematical if it is to achieve valid knowledge, and so the idea of objective nature imposes a mathematical structure on the scientific image of human beings, as the detached, receptive subjects of scientific knowledge.(75)

     

    Given the impossibility of actually attaining these direct correspondences between a purified mathematical mind and a manifest mathematical world, Wright refers to this notion of mathematical observation as a kind of magic, comparable rhetorically if not logically to the magical systems of traditional religions. But this argument goes by too quickly. Many scientists would object that Wright’s notion of mathematical observation elides the whole substance of actual scientific practice based on experiments and replication. The point is not that experiment directly observes the mathematics of nature, only that it allows for defeasible inference of it, subject to replication and extension of the results by others in similarly equipped laboratories elsewhere–perhaps in wholly different cultures. Wright’s proposed alternative, that

     

    human beings must be conceptualized as having a formally necessary but substantively contingent relationship with their world, a relationship through which knowledge is always formally possible but also always possibly mistaken (173)

     

    is more or less what scientists refer to as the “falsifiability” of theories. But Wright is not mistaken, exactly; the point is that he is not so much presenting an argument as referring to one that has been made with greater thoroughness by a variety of authors, for example Latour (1987), who conceive of physical phenomena not as independent realities objectively glimpsed, nor as idealist entities arbitrarily constructed, but as conjoint social-natural entities stabilized in highly organized social-natural settings.

     

    Beyond this internal claim against the coherence of scientific subjectivity, Wright follows numerous other authors by appealing to the reintroduction of consciousness into physical theorizing by quantum mechanics. But here again he is moving too quickly, inasmuch as the long-established and newly resurgent “many worlds” model of quantum phenomena (Everett 1957; cf. Drescher 1991) accounts for the evidence without giving any special role to consciousness or treating observation as anything but another form of physical interaction.

     

    Wright’s complaint, in short, is that the mathematical language within which scientific knowledge is framed deprives that knowledge of its human qualities: its social embedding; its historical specificity; its reference to broader human concerns, particularly the concern for the social-natural sustainability of human social and technical practices; and its susceptibility to critique on these grounds. Whatever the difficulties in his argument for this point, his proposed solution is altogether intriguing: scientific knowledge, he feels, should be reunderstood as a matter of human beings saying things in human language –not an artificially restricted mathematical subtype of language, but language as such, in the fullness of its rhetorical, political, and historical character. He would have us attend to the language of environmental discourse, taking this language seriously as culture and as political practice foundedly ultimately on the value of sustainability (cf. Killingsworth 1992, Wynne 1987).

     

    In this view, he follows in a long tradition that understands language as the essence of humanity, in the sense that languages carry cultural modes of cognition within them, transcending particular individuals and providing for the continuity of cultural traditions through their role in individual socialization. Indeed, Wright overstates the originality of his argument in this regard. Consider, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language (see Brown 1967), from which a great deal of modern linguistics and anthropology has descended. Humboldt held that human languages have a significant degree of autonomy from their speakers inasmuch as those speakers have only a limited formal understanding of how their language works. Furthermore, he held that languages develop in two clear stages. The first stage corresponds to the founding period of any given nation, during which the people collectively evolve a language suited to the trials of making a living from their particular landscape. Once that language acquires a stable form, the second period begins as that form starts to solidify; rather than being improvised to suit the functional needs of productive work, it is now handed down intact as an organically interconnected system of autonomous linguistic forms. For the philologists in Humboldt’s Germany, this theory motivated the project of reconstructing ancient modes of consciousness through the figurative spadework of historical linguistics. Language was ecological, tied to the earth, in the sense that it developed as an organic part of the ancient nation’s sustainable natural-social relations to its local geography and ecology.

     

    To be sure, Wright’s theory differs from Humboldt’s in a variety of ways. Wright’s social-ecological project is not nostalgic; his argument for sustainability does not require that we revert to lost folkways. Quite the contrary, sustainability is to be achieved through two requirements: that institutional legitimation be continually referred to consciously formulated understandings of sustainability; and that this reference be endlessly open to contest and critique. He wishes knowledge to become “wild” in the sense of being formally open to this kind of unbounded critique. In particular, Wright’s theory, unlike that of the German tradition from Herder down to Gadamer, is not hermeneutic: the key to sustainability is not locked away in language but rather articulated in institutional legitimation and critique. Nonetheless, he greatly underestimates the extent to which cultural theory has struggled with the relationship between culture and technical reason (see Sahlins 1976).

     

    What is more, Wright also underestimates the struggles of social theorists to reconcile nature and culture (for the particularly fascinating case of Lukacs see Feenberg 1986), and in so doing to formulate simultaneously adequate conceptions of both individual agency and social organization:

     

    Through [its various accounts] of individual motivations, social theory created different strategies for social legitimation and social explanation. In all of these versions social theory has accepted the scientific version of objective nature, as the valid basis for reason and knowledge, and thus social theory has revolved around the idea of the autonomous scientific individual. Because this individual is logically asocial but empirically social, social theory has generally focused on the relationship between the individual and the society, with the individual being in various stages of tension and conflict with society. This tension is inevitable, and it makes social order somewhat problematic, at least theoretically. This is the famous problem of social order: individuals "are naturally" free and society imposes external constraints on them, constraints that both inhibit freedom and enable individual rationality, fulfillment, and so on. (134-35)

     

    This formulation oversimplifies through its ascription to “social theory” of an altogether regressive “scientific” theory of individual subjectivity. The fact is that theorists such as Elias (1982 [1939]; cf. Mennell 1989) have invested great effort in overcoming such distinctions. The anthropological conception of culturally specific consciousness is already a considerable departure from the “scientific” individual, and the theories of embodied social practice of Elias, Bourdieu, and others go further. Nonetheless, deep difficulties do remain. Wright proposes to resolve them through an appeal to language as the formal matrix of institutional legitimation. In reducing social order to questions of legitimation, he faces a considerable challenge.

     

    But he is nothing if not courageous. He sees a deep connection between language as the locus of human sociality and sustainability as the goal of human institutions. Inasmuch as social action, sustainable or otherwise, is organized at a trans-individual level through the framework of language, he views language itself as providing for its own perpetuation through the formal conditions it establishes for the simultaneous conduct of legitimation and critique.

     

    [L]anguage is more about involved mediating and surviving than about detached representing and mirroring. . . . language necessarily structures the way we think about ourselves and our world, since language is actively striving to sustain its own possibility, through human knowledge and actions. . . . language can sustain itself, actively, only through the organizing and legitimation of social institutions, which means through versions of knowledge and reason as legitimating, organizing endeavors. (179)

     

    Knowledge serves the formal goal of language, the goal of sustaining the social-natural possibility of language through organized, legitimated human actions. . . . Language must be seen as formally directing human actions, through efforts at knowledge, toward its inherent, formal goal, the goal of sustaining the possibility of such human actions. (187)

     

    [I]ndividuals would be understood as formally motivated by language, where language, unlike scientific nature, is already understood as participating in this formal, goal-oriented structure, and thus they would be understood as motivated by the same formal mechanisms that generate knowledge, social life, and social legitimation. Individuals would be understood as formally motivated to act in such a way as to sustain their own human possibility, the possibility of social life. (188)

     

    In other words, Wright’s point is not that human language directly encodes sustainable productive practices–except perhaps in traditional cultures, which however are unable to accommodate significant environmental shifts due to the inflexibility of this encoding and the religious delegitimation of critique. On the contrary, his point is that language provides the formal resources with which conscious human beings, by their very nature as social and therefore linguistic beings, are able to legitimate and criticize institutions by appealing to the imperative of sustainability.

     

    The precise protocol by which legitimation and criticism must proceed, though, is unclear. Perhaps the appeal to sustainability must be mediated by some general account of truth:

     

    Specific cultural actions must be legitimated in terms of conceptions of "truth" and "reality," but the validity of these conceptions must in turn be evaluated in terms of the formal criteria of sustainability.(193)

     

    It seems implausible, however, that a conception of truth and reality could itself determine whether a system of social practices is sustainable. So perhaps it is also permissible to appeal to sustainability directly:

     

    The reference for all issues of legitimacy would be sustainability, and thus the only legitimate criticisms would be those that could argue for or demonstrate ecological failures on the part of the established practices.(210)

     

    But this position cannot be entirely right either, given the likelihood that several institutional orders might be ecologically sustainable in a given historical situation, and that of those institutional orders would be enormously preferable to others on non-ecological grounds.

     

    Be this as it may, Wright does not prescribe any particular set of institutions but rather an unfolding history in which institutions lose their legitimacy through social-natural shifts in the practical conditions of sustainability. He says that

     

    actions that are legitimate under certain social-natural conditions may not be legitimate under later, changed social-natural conditions, conditions that result from the effects of those legitimated actions.(193-94)

     

    Shifts in the conditions of sustainability presumably also include exogenous environmental changes, scientific discoveries about eco-social system dynamics, and technological innovations. In any case, periods of institutional legitimacy through sustainable practices alternate with periods in which this legitimacy is lost and newly appropriate institutions arise. Note that this is not a particularly materialistic theory of history; the social effectivity of accurate understandings of sustainability is more or less assumed.

     

    Moreover, the periodic institutional shifts are understood, strikingly, in terms of forms of individual identity. In particular, institutions themselves are largely understood in terms of the dimensions of social difference (race, gender, class, sexuality, et cetera) that these institutions recognize. The established institutions of any given period will reckon insider/outsider distinctions in particular terms. Although dissent as such would always be valued as such, the established distinctions of a given period will find their justification in the social-natural facts of sustainability.

     

    Although Wright presents this prospect optimistically as the formal celebration of difference, I think that it inadvertently identifies one of the profound dilemmas in environmental thinking. He says, for example,

     

    In this conception the idea of equality refers to an institutional guarantee, in the name of rationality, that all individuals can maintain effective local control over their chosen lives, and that any disruption of that local control must be legitimated in the name of a shared ecological rationality.(217)

     

    This may sound reasonable, but its flip side does not: if the sustainability of social practices provides their ultimate justification, then it also provides the ultimate justification for whatever marginalization–or even outright oppression–these practices might entail. I can easily imagine someone arguing that toleration of homosexuality, for example, is inconsistent with ecological sustainability.

     

    Can this be right? The difficulty, I would conjecture, lies in Wright’s implicit model of social institutions. Wright, as I have remarked, differs from Humboldt and the rest of the anthropological tradition is that he locates social identity in language as such and not in particular languages. Differences among people, likewise, are not understood as culturally specific but as universal. Such a view effectively suppresses cultural difference and thereby eliminates the possibility of geniune “otherness” among human beings and their respective forms of knowledge (see, for example, Grossberg 1988: 382).

     

    In the end, Wright’s model of institutional legitimation, shaped in the image of our “global” environmental difficulties, is “global” itself. Society itself becomes, in one sense or another, one large institution:

     

    [T]he social order must be seen, formally, as an organization, or metaorganization, with its own inherent, formal goal, and that legitimating critical access is the only organizational strategy that is rational and ecological.(213)

     

    But in the real world of 1992, the legitimation of global institutions for the regulation of putatively sustainable practices has very little to do with democracy, or indeed with genuine sustainability The Ecologist 1992). The challenge for an argument such as Wright’s, in my view, is to unpack the notion of “institutions” and their legitimation in a way that recognizes the diversity not only of individuals but of local forms of knowledge.

     

    References

     

    • Brown, Roger Langham. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
    • Cone, Kathy, Luis Quinones, Robert Salter, Brian Shields, Luis Torres, and Janice Varela. “The language of land-use conflict: New Mexicans talk about public lands, environmentalists, and ‘People for the West!’” The Workbook 17 (1), Spring 1992: 2-6.
    • Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.
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    • Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers and Scientists Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
    • Mennell, Stephen. Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
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    • Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987.