Year: 2013

Consuming Megalopolis

Jon Thompson

Department of English
North Carolina State University

Celeste Olalquiaga. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Even while proclaiming an interest in the vast and gaudy landscape of kitsch rejected by high culture, a good deal of postmodern criticism remains highly theoretical, committed to analyzing written texts and content to refer to the world of mass culture rather than actually study it. One of the strengths of Celeste Olalquiaga’s Megalopolis is that it investigates a wide variety of contemporary practices, many of them invisible to less perceptive eyes, seeing them all as social texts that say much about contemporary existence. Megalopolis is written in a clear, often lyrical style that finds its inspiration in the weird but compelling landscape of postmodernity, a landscape of telephone sex advertisements, malls, docudramas, SF movies Blade Runner and RoboCop, but also low-budget 50’s and 60’s futuristic fantasies), AT&T advertisement campaigns, comic books, cyborgs, World Fairs, Latin American or Latino home altars, snuff films, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, Brazilian carnival parades and the Chilean punk subculture.

Given her thesis that we are living in the ruins of modernity, and that identity and history, as traditionally understood, have virtually ceased to exist, Olalquiaga ranges across this “culturescape” of fear and loathing and desire with considerable authority and aplomb. Yet her argument is not primarily negative. Against those who have argued that postmodernity is a kind of endlessly recurring capitalistic nightmare, she sees other possibilities. Central to her argument is the practice of consumption. To Olalquiaga, consumption has been a misunderstood activity, wrongly associated with passivity, unfreedom and tyranny, making the human subject an object worked upon by the imperatives of capitalism. It is this notion of consumption that Olalquiaga wants to rehabilitate:

Avoiding a rationale for consumption based on functionality (that is on possible use), postmodernism sponsors consumption as an autonomous practice. . . . The purpose of this book is to describe how such an apparently finite project as postmodernism, understood as the glorification of consumption, does in fact enable the articulation of novel and contradictory experiences."(xvii)

Running through her analyses of contemporary practices, whether they are Latino home altars or low-budget SF movies, is this pivotal point: in a world dominated by the corporate message that commodities make the man, consumption can be an ironic activity, even an ironic mode of self-consciousness. If done right, consumption can involve a recognition of commodity fetishism itself, and thus a recognition of the entire way in which capitalism as a system attempts to co-opt and control subjects.

This argument is extended across five brief, but suggestive, chapters. Chapter one, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” examines the fate of the body in postmodern societies. Despite the cult of the body in the West, Olalquiaga contends that what we are witnessing is not its triumphant deification, but instead its demise, what she calls “the vanishing body.” State-of-the-art projective technology (videos, TV, computers, etc.), postmodern architecture, hi-tech prosthetics, the ongoing fascination with cyborgs, AIDS, and of course electronic sex: for Olalquiaga, all of these developments point to the inescapable condition of “psychasthenia,” or the inability of an organism to locate the boundaries of its own body. The fragmentation and disappearance of the body means that increasingly, identity is not dependent upon organic being.

This case is further developed in Chapter two, “Lost in Space,” in which Olalquiaga argues that the technology of instant communication precipitates the loss of temporal continuity: “The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void” (19). Quite literally, then, the body is lost in space. One symptom of this near disembodiment is the space age iconography of the 50s and 60s, and its recent “reincarnation” in retro fashion. Whereas once this space-age iconography expressed some hope in regards to technology and its effects, the postmodern version is ironic at best. Retro fashion now is “a parodic attempt to breach some contemporary fears, most notably the replacement of the organic and human by the technological” (34).

In Chapter three, “Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street,” Olalquiaga turns her gaze to religious kitsch, particularly the religious kitsch that has been recycled by artists. This raw material is not merely faddish, but is instead used to fashion artistic artifacts that sacralize the secular and replace a transcendental emphasis with a political one (for example, the sanctification of contemporary femininity). For Olalquiaga, this “colonization of religious imagery” (53) does not involve a domestication of either its ethnicity or its politics. Rather, “the absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it” (53). Thus “Holy Kitschen” symbolizes the transformative possibilities of all marginal elements absorbed into appropriated systems.

Chapter four, “Nature Morte,” performs an autopsy, as it were, upon the postmodern fascination with melancholy, corpses, ruins, decay. Examining a variety of artistic practices (photography, dioramas, multimedia exhibits, fiction, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, and fake science exhibits), Olalquiaga explores the ways in which the bizarre and the grotesque allow for the recovery of a sense of death that is lost to our culture. Yet this melancholic aspect of postmodernism is not elegiac: “More than a lamentation for what is lost, this melancholic sensibility is deeply embedded in the intensity of the loss–not seeking to reconstitute what is gone, but to rejoice in its impossibility” (58). As a self-conscious form of naturalism, this nature morte aesthetic recognizes deadliness as the only coherent expression of postmodern experience, and thus exposes the reifying effects of “deadly discourses” (69), that is, the discourses or systems that pretend to an objective status.

If postmodernity has become a kind of giant, grotesque mortuary, as Olalquiaga suggests in Chapter four, this vision receives considerable qualification in her fifth Chapter, “Tupincopolis: The City of Retrofuturistic Indians.” The primary object of analysis here is “Tupincopolis,” a Brazilian carnival parade exhibit of an imaginary retrofuturistic Indian metropolis, a cross between the exoticism and flamboyance of Indian primitivism and the postmodernism associated with the world of Japanese high-technology. What interests Olalquiaga is the way in which the composition of elements within the parade works to humorously carnivalize both postmodernism and primitivism. The parade thus comes to represent the “third world’s” creative re-accentuation of “first world” ideology, particularly its mythical identification with technology-as-progress and its persistent mythologizing of Latin Americans as primitive. Tupincopolis, then, provides a paradigm for cultural change in the postmodern age. Rejecting models of cultural change that emphasize imposition, Olalquiaga maintains that cultural change is not “a matter of simple vertical imposition or ransacking, but is rather an intricate horizontal movement of exchange” (76).

In one sense, Megalopolis can be read as a sustained meditation on the failure of modernity and the cultural mutations that are filling its void within postmodernity. Olalquiaga elaborates this position by developing a number of related themes throughout the book. Like Baudrillard, Olalquiaga privileges the notion of simulation. Where modernity depended upon the notion of contexts, of objects and events seen and understood within specific and recognizable environments, postmodernism collapses the boundaries between reality and representation. “Intertextuality” replaces “indexicality”: “Simulation here will be understood as the establishment of intertextuality instead of indexicality. In other words, rather than pointing to first-degree references (objects, events) simulation looks at representations of them (images, texts) for verisimilitude” (6). Within postmodernity, subjects live their lives at a second remove: things tend to be lived through representation rather than directly. Experience comes to us now as highly encoded, increasingly available only through electronic representation; yet this vicariousness is experienced as real.

Megalopolis describes a world in which an image culture shatters the verbal culture of modernity, reconstituting “language” and power hierarchies. Artificiality and extreme emotion fill in, or more accurately, become substitutes for the relentless allusiveness and emptiness of this decontextulized, thoroughly intertextual world. In a world deprived of affect, the postmodern sensibility “continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality attributed to other times and peoples” (40). Images, icons, styles, and subcultures are endlessly recycled. For Olalquiaga, postmodernism becomes personified as a sort of thief. Like its production-less economies which reassemble rather than produce, it filches, pilfers, and steals. Postmodern culture is thus vicarious, voyeuristic, cannibalistic, and at times, “melancholic” (to the extent that it is doomed to merely repeat the styles and icons associated with a modernist culture). Space age retro, for example, “provides the melancholic parody” (34) of the cold efficiency of a high-tech existence. While one may wonder if “melancholic parody” is an oxymoron or is, as she suggests, a necessary way of coping with cultural fears and anxieties, Olalquiaga wants to make another point: to her, the endless circulation of simulations suggests that cultural imagery is endlessly adaptable to new contexts and desires–and this ability is to be celebrated rather than simply mourned as a sign of the loss of cultural specificity. And it is this emphasis on self-conscious, knowing celebration that defines for Olalquiaga postmodernity’s finest achievement as it continues on in the ruins of modernity.

In the final analysis, it is difficult not to agree with Olalquiaga’s micro readings, many of which are brilliant in their sheer interpretive power. Disagreeing is doubly difficult inasmuch as from the very first page she explicitly allies herself with, and celebrates, illusions, inconsistency, and contradictions as inescapable facts of postmodern life. Yet it seems to me that Olalquiaga’s theoretical argument is vitiated by its hyperbolic rhetoric. (“If the fragmentation of contemporary identity is reproduced in referential absence and the pleasures of pain are induced by a pornographic technology, it should come as no surprise that the body has been rendered totally vulnerable” [10].) All too often a particular truth is generalized into the universal condition: bodies are already cyborgs, cities are the wastelands of modernity (what of the cities that are not romantically ruinous?), the nature morte aesthetic describes the deadliness and decadence of postmodern existence (at least in the U.S. and Europe) in which subjects are compliant bodies, “not seeking to reconstitute what is gone” (58), embracing the impossibility of physical or cultural integrity, happily adrift in the detritus of obsolescent technology. Olalquiaga’s argument for a creative consumerism is suggestive, but in its unqualified form it comes perilously close to suggesting that shopping can be redemptive, that shopping is itself a kind of postmodern heaven. To this reader anyway, the notion of creative consumption as a way of life or end seems limiting, since no matter how the commodity is revalued, the socio-economic system that delimits the horizons of so many remains in place (not to mention the fact that many people simply cannot afford the acts of creative consumption Olalquiaga valorizes). After carnival, the disenfranchised go back to whatever lives they led before carnival.

In its widest extension, this point may be elucidated by examining the title of the book. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. The blurb on the back of the paperback edition glosses megalopolis as “the biggest of cities, but also a city in ruins”; yet the subtitle, “Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities,” points to a broader base of experience, one unrestricted by urban experience. Olalquiaga’s argument is comprised of a good many claims which undergo this same slippage–claims which have their basis in the urban experience but quickly become indicative of contemporary existence, everywhere. Time and again, her rhetoric transforms insights true of many North American and European cities, and their cultures, into general statements about the human condition at large. Because of their seemingly universal scope, these statements can command, at best, qualified assent. “Between a future in ruins and a past that is but a costume for another personification,” writes Olalquiaga, “contemporary culture is stuck in an allegorical present, unable to return nostalgically to the past or advance hopefully into the future” (35). Is all of contemporary society really stuck in this cultural time-warp? And is Brazil’s “good” postmodernism (its carnivalization of hi-tech postmodernism) the only truly viable alternative? Is our world really one megalopolis? Is the entire world really enmeshed in, critically or otherwise, Olalquiaga’s postmodernist illusions? To my mind, Olalquiaga uncovers the questions crucial to any serious analysis of contemporary culture, but she doesn’t always answer them.

Despite these limitations, few books can compare with Megalopolis‘s trenchant, lucid, and sensitive readings of Western urban cultures, and the practices and structures of feeling that constitute them. Like the best science fiction, a form repeatedly invoked by Olalquiaga, Megalopolis changes the way you think about contemporary urban culture.

September 25, 2013
Deuteronomy Comix
Stuart Moulthrop

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
sm51@prism.gatech.edu

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. Bantam Spectra, 1992. 440 pp. $10.00 paperbound.

Late in his critique of the cyberpunk vogue, Andrew Ross turns his attention to what may be its ultimate expression–Cyberpunk: the Role-Playing Game. Here, he suggests, we may find the national pastime and true mythology of Cyberpunks-in-Boy’s- Town, a socializing ritual for aspiring dystopians. “The structure of the game,” Ross observes, represents “an efficient response to the cyberpunk view of survivalism in a future world where the rules have already been written in the present. True to the adaptational educational thinking from which roleplaying games evolved, the education of desire proceeds through learning and interpreting the rules of the play, not by changing them” (160). The game of Cyberpunk, as Ross sees it, offers not the differance of deconstruction, not the paralogies of postmodern science, not even the “euretics” of an Age of Video. It promises a new world order that looks suspiciously familiar, a bored fast-forward into a “future” that is actually a repeat loop grafted neatly onto the past.

Yet as Ross points out, William Gibson’s own myth of artistic origins stands at odds with this circularity. In an early short story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” Gibson’s protagonist suffers semiotic hauntings, visions not so much from Spiritus Mundi as off the covers of Amazing Stories. Much like the nation itself in the grip of Reaganoma, Gibson’s sufferer finds himself caught in a pernicious revision of history. His 1980 is steadily replaced by another 1980, one that seems to have been projected from 1925. He finds himself falling into the American future imagined by his grandparents, a world of flying-wing airliners, shark-finned bubble cars, and perfect Aryan citizens of Tomorrowland. The only thing that saves the poor man from complete psychic collapse is dystopian therapy: a crash diet of pornographic video and hardcore journalism, which reminds him that the utopian visions of science fiction’s Golden Age have no claim upon the world as we know it.

If we can read “The Gernsback Continuum” as an origin story for cyberspace fiction, then this kind of writing seems to set itself against the old utopian project of science fiction, insisting that we move not “back to the future” but instead (as the New Wave once had it) straight on from the confounded present. Novels like Gibson’s Neuromancer, Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, and Rudy Rucker’s Wetware describe social upheavals triggered by rampant extension of current technological development. They thus offer an important corrective to the militarist saga-mongering of Star Wars and other forms of recycled space opera. Yet the cultural politics of science fiction do not arrange themselves in neat dialectical patterns. The utopianism of the Gernsback era had its moment of sincerity before it was commandeered by Hollywood jingoes; and as Ross demonstrates, the dystopian refusal of the cyberpunks turns all too easily into an apology for the military-entertainment complex.

This seems clear in what may be the culmination of the cyberspace project, Gibson and Sterling’s alternate history novel, The Difference Engine. Though these writers had earlier fled the Gernsback Continuum, in this work they fall headlong into the clutches of a far more evil empire, Great Britain’s circa 1855. In the world of The Difference Engine, Lord Byron has somehow avoided exile and death at Missolonghi, and under his dictatorship the Industrial Radical party has set up a savantocracy using gear-driven mechanical computers for panoptic social control. As an exploration of “difference” on the level of technics, the book is admirable. But in its very project The Difference Engine falls back into the same mode retro which the younger Gibson once condemned. Ursula LeGuin remarked a long time ago on the affinity of certain American science fiction writers for the ethos of the British Raj. Fleets of battle cruisers, voyages of discovery and conquest, the inhuman Other: all are fetishes of the 19th century transferred to the 21st or beyond. In their own way, Gibson and Sterling take us back to that racist, jingoist “future” at full steam; and of course this reversion is entirely consistent with the dystopian logic of cyberpunk. The Difference Engine moves to the rhythms of Catastrophism, that nastiest form of Darwinian theory which argues that natural (or social) history consists of punctuated equilibriums. According to this doctrine, all organisms and organizations follow a sequence running from irruption through expansion to apocalypse. All things must pass, suddenly and dramatically. We thus leave the Gernsback Continuum only to end up in Darwin Land, an imaginary space where chaos and autopoeisis replace any vision of social or human potential.

It may be that all attempts to imagine the future launch us inevitably back into the past; all our engines of difference may work toward the same purpose, namely the justification of class and economic interests on which technophile culture depends. Yet the concept of cyberspace–a social order founded on broadband communication, hypertextual ediscourse, and systematic simulation– suggests at least the possibility of a genuine cultural divergence. In the final analysis Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash does not deliver on this vision any better than earlier works of its kind; but if The Difference Engine represents the fruition of the cyberspace/cyberpunk enterprise, then Snow Crash may represent a limit case. This is a novel in which cyberpunk very nearly becomes something more interesting.

In his epilogue, Stephenson explains that Snow Crash was originally intended as a graphic novel or upscale comic book, though it changed during its development into a more traditional print product. Yet in at least one sense of the phrase, Stephenson’s novel is indeed a comic book: that is, its main narrative concern lies with the struggle of Hiro Protagonist and his sometime ally Y. T. (for “Yours Truly”) against the sinister machinations of an Evil Emperor Wannabe, one L. Bob Rife. Mr. Rife, who seems to amalgamate H. L. Hunt, L. Ron Hubbard, and H. Ross Perot (with hints of Bob Dobbs and Fu Manchu), aspires to World Domination. But this is by way of afterthought, since his first priority is control of information:

When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control information no matter where it is--on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads.(108)

L. Bob Rife, “Lord of Bandwidth” (who sounds chillingly like Perot in this passage), has made the ultimate cybernetic connection between “the animal and the machine,” as Norbert Wiener used to say. If information is proprietary, and if he can control it on his company’s hard disks, then why shouldn’t he be able to secure it in his programmers’ heads? It turns out that L. Bob has perfected a technology for turning human brains into the equivalent of hard disks, using a virus that restructures the cerebellum. So the epos of Snow Crash unfolds (at least initially) as a straightforward Manichaean contest between the champions of free discourse and the conspirators of mind control. Like all the cyberspace novels, its main theatre of operations is the cybernetic frontier, the interface between mechanical information systems and the human mind.

But it would be unfair to describe Snow Crash as just another superhero/supervillain faceoff, even though it unabashedly tells the story of how our Hiro saves the world. Snow Crash is “comic” in another sense as well. Like Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson conjures up a post-traumatic world order. The setting for Snow Crash is a postnational, postrational America, a chaosmos of strip malls and housing developments known as “burbclaves.” But these entities differ radically from the suburbs of today. After the de facto collapse of the U.S. government (for reasons never stated but easy enough to guess), the nation fragments into Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs), which are suburban city-states functioning as sovereign countries: The Mews At Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear Run, Cinnamon Grove, New South Africa. In Stephenson’s world, the post-cold-war collapse of communism has generalized into a global implosion of community. Here one’s social allegiances lie not with governments but with franchises. Police and judicial services are provided by chain outfits (MetaCops Unlimited; Judge Bob’s Judicial System) and defense becomes the purview of corporate mercenaries (General Jim’s Defense System, Admiral Bob’s National Security). The Mafia handles pizza delivery. Individual citizens affiliates with their chosen burbclaves. Hiro carries the bar- coded passport of the original meta-nation, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, enabling him to seek asylum in any of thousands of convenient locations worldwide.

This vision of the near future has its shadowy sides, but unlike Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson eschews the darkness of film noir in favor of black humor. Snow Crash may be the first genuinely funny cyberpunk novel, invested with the same dire zaniness that animates Dr. Strangelove, Gravity’s Rainbow, andElektra Assassin. Stephenson has Kubrick’s eye for the absurdity of terror weapons, Pynchon’s knack for turning jokes into profundities (and back again), and Miller and Sienkiewicz’s taste for apocalyptic dementia. His comic genius puts him on a par with all these worthies. Yet Stephenson’s black humor has been upgraded for the new world order, in which the focus of evil is not a General Ripper, Captain Blicero, or Colonel Fury (who have been displaced by General Jim and Admiral Bob) but L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, keeper of the information highway. The application to our times seems clear enough. Now that we no longer have to fear the Bomb quite so much, we can try to stop worrying and love the NREN.

It might be appealing to read Snow Crash as self-satire or camp, a novel of liberation that liberates us from the pretentiousness of liberation novels. Stephenson’s main inventive principle does seem to be a species of irony. We might call it metastasis, a trope of displacement that sets everything in the book beside itself. “Meta” worlds abound in Snow Crash: an Afrocentric burbclave called Metazania, a police franchise called Metacops, and above all The Metaverse, which is Stephenson’s version of consensual hallucination or cyberspace. The Metaverse is metastasis (or metathesis) in its highest form: an alternative to the Meat-verse of physical reality, a rather large world made cunningly to serve the information trade. Functionally the Metaverse is very similar to Gibson’s cyberspatial Matrix–it is a virtual universe in which human agents can manipulate representations of data within a consistent spatial metaphor. But no doubt because he writes from the nineties instead of the eighties, Stephenson does a much better job of imagining the texture of this virtual environment. Gibson’s Matrix is usually a vague or abstract affair, evoked as “lines of light” or some other stylized geometry. The Metaverse, by contrast, features a fully elaborated urban landscape. Its primary attraction is a great Street embracing the 10,000-kilometer equator of a bigger-than-Earth sized virtual planet. This whole business, down to the size of digital living rooms and the gait of digital strollers, is mediated by rules “hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group” (23). Anyone who has regular dealngs with today’s ACM may find this the funniest joke in the book.

But there is finally something troubling about the Metaverse, something which suggests a limit to Stephenson’s metastases, a point at which the novel fails to send itself up. The purpose of irony is generally held to be difference or antithesis, a play of double senses that undercuts the ostensible message. Yet as we have seen, any difference that makes a difference is hard to come by in cybernetic fiction. The same might be said of Stephenson’s metaworld. It is, after all, dominated by a grand boulevard or Street. So the architecture of the Metaverse is strikingly like that of the old Meatverse–both are strip developments organized as a linear array of reduplicating sites laid out in apparently endless paratactic sequence. They are both what one commentator has recently called “Edge Cities,” phalanges of development driven by an impulse to extend along a gradient of relative economic opportunity (see Garreau).

This fundamental linearity is underscored by the primary drama that unfolds in the Metaverse: a prolonged chase scene on virtual motorcyles in which Hiro and his adversary move along linear vectors at thousands of kilometers per hour, but where they remain more or less within the confines of the Street. This chase scene is duplicated on a larger scale in the non-virtual sections of the book, where Hiro makes a long roadtrip from Los Angeles to Alaska through the Pacific Coast megalopolis, the actual Edge City of the early 21st century. The primary difference between the Metaverse and physical reality thus seems to be not logical or ideological but merely economic:

In the real world--planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer. . . . That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.(24)

So Stephenson’s cyberspace offers no practical alternative to the world of the burbclaves and the shattered mosaic of (dis)enfranchised society. The Metaverse is simply a happy hunting ground for next-generation yuppies: those rich, hip, well-connected legions of Young Virtual Professionals. Stephenson’s meta-move is essentially delusive–and to recognize this is to reach the point at which Snow Crash unfortunately stops being quite so funny. In Stephenson’s imagining, the computer is not an engine of difference after all, but only an alternative medium for the same hegemonic institutions, the same uncritical devotion to linear thinking. Nothing is “free” in the Metaverse. Hiro is able to operate with unusual liberty because he was one of the original designers of the system, but even he has to pay his way by marketing gossip and low-level industrial espionage. Social and economic conditions in the Metaverse mirror those that take place elsewhere in Stephenson’s world, and events in virtual reality follow the same relentless logic as actual events. Which brings us to the most important aspects of Snow Crash: its plot, its medium, and the interaction between the two.

To say that the book presents a contest between good and evil, tyrants and defenders of liberty, is to miss an important subtlety. What this book is really about is a struggle against viral language. The evil genius L. Bob Rife uses two apocalyptic weapons in his campaign to dominate the human race. The first is a cybernetic virus called Snow Crash, which infects digital processors in much the same way that current computer viruses do. However, Snow Crash causes infected machinery to display a version of itself in binary form, multiplexed into random on-off bursts or “video snow.” Adept computer programmers who have internalized the conversion of binary code to units of expression can become infected with Snow Crash if they view the apparently random display–making the crucial (and fortunately fantastic) connection between the machine and the animal. Once infected, the programmers’ brainstems malfunction and they fall into a vegetative coma. Snow Crash also has a non-cybernetic twin, a biological virus spread through prostitution and illegal drug use (of course), whose effects on the brain are less destructive but similarly sinister. People infected with the biological Snow Crash become capable of speaking in tongues and of understanding an Adamic command language which bypasses rational functions. They turn into programmable human robots, cultist zombies in the thrall of L. Bob Rife.

To defeat these (literally) mind-boggling threats, Hiro Protagonist and his allies have to overcome both the biological and the cybernetic versions of the Snow Crash virus. Along with a great deal of mindless violence, this task involves Hiro in historical research (performed hypertextually in the Metaverse) concerning a historical referent for the Biblical story of Babel. It turns out that Snow Crash began as a “metavirus” which caused the infected brain to infect itself with other viruses. This evil agency was apparently transmitted to ancient Sumer from a source in outer space. The antidote to the Sumerian outbreak was “the nam-shub of Enki,” an incantation that literally “changed the speech in men’s mouths” (202), breaking down the neural connections that enabled victims to understand glossolalia, thus rendering them invulnerable to further incantatory programming. After the Babel event, as Stephenson tells it, the linguistic faculty was shifted from the brainstem into the cortex, where it diversified into all the variations of post-Adamic language. Babel was thus not a divine punishment for human overreaching, but a liberation from the first great campaign of cybernetic tyranny.

It was also, crucially, the beginning of bibliocentrism as we know it. According to Stephenson’s myth (which reads like a cross between After Babel and The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross), a group of Hebrew scholars led a reform of literary practices throughout the Semitic world. Stephenson identifies these figures with the Deuteronomists of Biblical history, important figures in the cult of the Torah. Stephenson credits the Deuteronomists with “a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance” (374). Needless to say, this doctrine and the nam-shub of Enki hold the keys to defeating L. Bob Rife. The Sumerian incantation reverses the effects of the biological virus, and the concept of informational hygiene saves the Metaverse from the digital form of Snow Crash. It inspires Hiro to write SnowScan, an anti-viral program that searches for the Snow Crash code, eradicates it, and puts in its place the following message:

IF THIS WERE A VIRUS YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE; HOW'S YOUR SECURITY? CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION(428)

Subsequent consultations, of course, are on a fee-for- service basis. Hiro’s antiviral program replaces a virus with an advertisement, thus redeeming the Metaverse in every sense of the word–and incidentally converting Hiro from a penniless genius into a Meta-Bill Gates. In effect, Hiro becomes the founder of New Deuteronomy, Inc.. His security service will purify the Book of Protocols according to which the Metaverse is constituted by ensuring that it is replicated exactly on every iteration, free of impurities that might harbor invasive or opportunistic memes. As David Porush has suggested, Snow Crash can thus be read as the triumph of book culture over the threats of cybernetic programming and viral language: in other words, a true liber/ratio.

But we began by observing that liberation in the fiction of cyberspace is usually not what it claims to be. To go boldly toward the virtual frontier often leads us where we have all been before: in this case right to the heart of western logocentrism, the holy Book. To a certain classically liberal way of thinking, there is no doubt nothing wrong with such a recursion. If one assumes that the function of art is to trace out great circles, reliably returning to what we have always already known, then a book like Snow Crash deserves praise as proof that literacy can survive the assaults of popular culture and computing, that it can thrive in a world of comic books and cyberspace. But to a more critical reader– perhaps one like Ross who wants to save the concept of the alternative or utopian in science fiction —Snow Crash must be a disappointment.

The letdown is all the more severe because Stephenson makes it clear that the novel we now have before us started out to become something distinctly different. Stephenson says that he and the artist Tony Sheeder first intended to create a graphic novel using computer-generated images. This leads one to wonder why the nature of the project changed as it evolved. What aspect of the conceptual structure of Snow Crash demanded expression in print? That question becomes all the more salient if one considers another curious remark in Stephenson’s epilogue: “I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless from a practical viewpoint” (440). This statement is extremely suggestive, especially in the context of a novel that explores the connection between the animal and the machine, the meat and the meta. What would have happened if Snow Crash had turned out not to be a conventional novel, but had emerged instead as some form of metafiction– perhaps in electronic form?

The conjecture I am about to make possibly represents a misreading of Stephenson’s remark about his computer work on Snow Crash; but even as misreading, the conjecture opens up an interesting set of questions. Why does Stephenson describe his electronic work as “coding”? If all he set out to do was produce digital graphics, then presumably he would have spent his time drawing, scanning, transforming, and editing bitmaps. The products of this work would have been images, not alphanumeric strings or “code.” Unless one sets out to create one’s own computer-graphics tools (an unlikely intention for a Macintosh user like Stephenson), then the work involved in graphics production should not involve many hours of code writing. What else might Stephenson have been up to?

Suppose that the abortive digital format for Snow Crash was not a series of printed panels intended for conventional bound publication, but instead a network of screens linked together by some graphic navigational scheme–in other words, an electronic hypertext. If this were the case, then the change of media, the reversion to the more traditional format of the book, might be very important indeed. It might suggest that Snow Crash is in more than one sense a defense of the book and its ethos: not just the story, but the embodiment of a New Deuteronomy. It might thus provide a limit case for the fiction of cyberspace, a point at which it is possble either to stay within print culture or to explore alternatives.

Whether or not he ever had other notions, Stephenson has taken the more conservative option, which is indeed the preference of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. Nor can he really be blamed for this choice. Snow Crash as written would not make a very good hypertextual fiction. Not only is the book’s world overwhelmingly two-dimensional and linear, its plot demands an exact and unvarying sequence of events. There are several complications and partial reversals, but all of these serve the general underlying logic, which specifies that Hiro must vanquish Rife and his henchmen and Save The World. This headlong rush toward singular closure is what a comic book is all about, after all–even when, as in the Death of Superman, that singular outcome annuls the usual order of things. Had Stephenson been programming Snow Crash as what Michael Joyce calls a “multiple fiction,” he would have had to allow for more than one outcome. He would have had to present permutations of the story where everyone’s linear ambitions–hero’s, villain’s, anti-hero’s –come to confusion. In short, Stephenson would have had to imagine outcomes where the defenders of the Book do not triumph, where informational hygiene does not win out, and the Metaverse goes unredeemed.

So why didn’t Stephenson do this? Perhaps it never entered his head: I have no real evidence that Stephenson ever considered producing a hypertext. Nonetheless, it seems clear that this book could not have been written in that medium. Literary structures like multiple fiction are not altogether consistent with informational hygiene, the conception of data (or language) as a controlled substance. If the power of the book resides in its cult of exact replication, then to admit the possibility of narrative variations is at least implicitly to threaten that old word order.

Of course, writing in an electronic mode does not necessarily promote utopian or post-hierarchical forms of disourse. Consider William Gibson’s recent foray into digital composition, his conceptual artwork Agrippa. Far from opening up to permutation, this text actually erases itself after a single reading, locking the reader out of its imaginary space (see Quittner). As Joyce points out, even multiple fictions as we now know them usually consist of “exploratory” texts in which the range of variation is strictly limited, hence at some level deceptive. So perhaps the hypertextual enterprise must also go where everyone has gone before, namely to a Disneyverse of delusive referendum where every apparent difference traces back to some determinist engine. Yet as Henry Jenkins has shown, there are signs even in non-interactive contexts that a more “participatory” cultural front may be emerging. Ambiguous or polysemic forms like the graphic novel (as in Moore and Sienkiewicz’s abortive Big Numbers) imply a fraying or complication of traditional, monolinear narrative. Forms like hypertext suggest that the language virus may be capable of even more radical outbreaks. For if our narrative forms embrace inconsistencies and contradictions, then they are no longer adequate defenses against memetic invasion. If the protocols of the imaginary world advertise their own contingency, then what is to stop someone not authorized by the Association for Cosmological Machinery from further interventions–which are in fact facilitated by the ease of copying and modification inherent in electronic media?

The best way to pre-empt such uprisings is to keep throwing the Book at us, which is what Neal Stephenson and most other writers in the cyberpunk line continue to do. Both in its medium and its message, Snow Crash militates against any departure from traditional discursive authority. Like virtually all mainstream cyberspace writers (and in contrast to figures like William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker), Stephenson delivers our favorite kind of linear entertainment: a “slam-bang-overdrive” sort of fiction, as Timothy Leary duly blathers on the back cover. As a form of entertainment, this sort of novel is always essentially self-serving; but what it serves up in this case is an unfortunately limited view of the possibilities for virtual culture.

So long as we continue to imagine cyberspace and other forms of artificial reality from within headlong vehicles such as Snow Crash, we will always find ourselves somewhere on the Street. The Street, we might remember, only looks like a straight line. In fact it is a circle that runs all the way around the planet and comes back to the place it began, back to the same old future so neatly packaged for us in dystopian novels and films. The Street, Gibson reminds us, finds its uses for everything. But perhaps we should now ask, of what use is the Street?

References
- Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
- Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
- Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1985.
- Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1990.
- Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Joyce, Michael. “Selfish Interaction or Subversive Texts and the Multiple Novel.” The Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook. Ed. E. Berk and J. Devlin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. 79-94.
- LeGuin, Ursula K. Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
- Porush, David. “Why Cyberspace Can’t Be Utopian: The Positive Discourses of Irrationalism in an As If Universe.” Presentation. Society for Literature and Science Conference, Atlanta, GA: October 9, 1992.
- Quittner, Josh. “Read Any Good Webs Lately?” Newsday. June 16, 1992.
- Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. New York: Verso, 1991.
- Rucker, Rudy. Wetware. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
- Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net. New York: Morrow, 1988.
- Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: The Science of Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
September 25, 2013

Introducing Mail Art: A Karen Elliot Interview with Crackerjack Kid and Honoria

Honoria
honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

Hubener: Karen Elliot is the founder of Plagiarism and the
1990-1993 Art Strike. Crackerjack Kid has been active in
mail art since 1978 and is the editor of Eternal Network,
an illustrated mail art anthology scheduled for publication
in 1993 by University of Calgary Press. Honoria, a.k.a.
Mail Art Kisses for Peace, Touriste, and Fake Picabia
Sister, hails from Austin, Texas where she is the MailArt
editor of ND Magazine. All three artists are active
networkers who use both the international postal system and
electronic mail links to distribute information, concepts,
and sometimes a surprise wrapped in an enigma.

Karen Elliot (hereafter KE): Well, Crackerjack Kid, they say you
compare mail art to Crackerjack candy--that you like putting
a surprise in everybody's mailbox. Who have you surprised
lately, and who in turn surprises you most often?

Crackerjack Kid (hereafter CJK): I could say that nothing in mail
art surprises me anymore, but it does. D. Peepol of Akron,
Ohio once mailed a lunch bag of black, sooty, perfumed dust
and while I was opening it, the contents spilled over my lap
onto the furniture and floor. A small tag remained in the
sack with the startling announcement: "These are the last
mortal remains of my dear aunty Sarah." Shmuel in
Brattleboro, Vermont is only an hour down the road from me
and yet s/he regularly sends add-on objects like driftwood,
pistachios, walnuts, cryptic coded postcards, and most
recently, a 3-D paper monoplane which arrived in an official
plastic USPS "body bag." Among the most unusal items I've
mailed are navel stamps and a sourdough bread baguette I
carved into a phallus. I stuffed it into an oversized
Crackerjack box for the John Bennett and Cathy Mehrl mail
art marriage show.

(H) One of the weirdest pieces of mail I received was a pop-up
hand made splatter-painted paper sea skate from Kevin in
Atlanta. Somehow our correspondance evolved into sending
each other fish. It became pretty challenging after the
first dozen or so fish images. He even sent me some cut out
ads for efficiency apartments. I sent him a photo of dried
out, ugly as sin, cat-fish heads hanging on a Texas barbed
wire fence. I found a souvenir of Florid, a wooden paddle
in the shape of a fish, the toy kind with a rubber band and
ball attached. I haven't sent it to him yet because our
corresponding fishing hole gradually dried up. I still
send him a bait fish every now and then and when he's in the
mood (maybe now, after artstrike) he'll get a reel and
flop some more fish on the postal scales. Another long term
correspondent in Indiana sends naive brightly colored
drawings on envelopes with each letter. One of them was
called mother bar-b-ques the cat. These don't have the
verbal shock value of Cracker's examples but if you saw
them you'd agree on their dramatic weirdness levels. But
let me tell you about the most relaxing piece of mail I ever
received. It was from a correspondent in Oregon, a
liscenced massage therapist. He suggested flirtatiously
that he and I engage in a mail fantasy. I told him I was a
prude but would have a fantasy as long as it wasn't a sex
fantasy. I told him I could use a licensed massage
fantasy. He wrote back asking what scent of oil I wanted
and what music. I answered rose with a hint of citrus and
that Mozart clarinet thing and he sent me a full body
massage description in anatomical detail ending with a
secret for turning on the parasympathetic nervous system and
a $5 off coupon.

(CJK) Both Honoria and I could go on forever about wacky mail
because the sacred and profane are so commonplace in the
mail art mailstream. There aren't any rules guiding what
can and can't be sent. Short of mail fraud, mailing bombs,
drugs, or dirt from Canada, most everything gets posted.
There was a mail art show in California with a conceptual
theme titled, "Test the Post Office." Objects mailed
included an addressed water filled balloon. Someone sent a
fifteen feet long garden hose with over a hundred one cent
stamps on the hose surface. A sly mail artist tested the
honesty of the postal system by laminating and addressing a
ten dollar bill; it arrived safely for the show in Los
Angeles.

(KE) You're planning on opening mail art here in this studio loft
in SoHo. So am I right to assume you're having a "mail art
opening?"

(H) Oh, most definitely! The public will open the mail that's
accumulated at this address over the past three months. We
decided to let the public take the unopened mail art off the
walls and replace it with their own offerings. There are
tables all over the studio with materials for making mail
art. Our show, is just one of several dozen other mail art
shows and projects which simulateously carry on every month.
You can get the newest mail art show listings by writing to
Ashley Parker Owens (73358 N. Damen, Chicago, IL 60645).
Her "Global Mail" is a newsletter of international mail art
events that's published three times yearly in January, May,
and September. There are numerous other trade zines,
bulletins, and mainstream magazines which regularly post
mail art show listings, but I'm most impressed by the sheer
volume of projects and shows in her publication. By the
way, PMC readers can reach CrackerJack Kid via email (see
list at end of interview). He also edits a mail art zine
entitled Netshaker. Annual subscription is $12.00 payable
by check or money order at PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755.

(KE) But where are the people you invited? Aren't mail art shows
supposed to be public events--places where mail artists can
have a "coming out" and expose their secret, intimate,
hidden mailstream corresponDANCES!

(CJK) Well Karen, I like how you accented Dances because that's
just what mail artists do, they DANCE to an off-beat,
underground chant called "Gift Exchange." Someone once said
mail art was Christmas in the mailbox everyday of the year,
but we're here to let the public cut in on the dance. Our
show in part recalls the first mail art exhibition, The New
York Correspondance School Show" curated in 1970 by Marcia
Tucker at the Whitney Museum. That show incorporated the
work of 106 people, all individuals who had mailed art to
Ray Johnson. The irony was that Johnson's work wasn't
present because he asked his correspondents to submit their
work to him instead. We've invited everybody in New York
City to this show who has the last name Elliot, or
Johnson--in honor of you and especially Ray Johnson who is
the father of mail art. Of course anybody else is welcome
to send mail art too.

(KE) Holy Akademagorrod! Didn't Ray Johnson do that once--I
mean, call everybody named Ray Johnson in the NYC phonebook
to a New York Correspondance School Party?

(H) Not exactly Karen, but Ray Johnson did have a "Michael
Cooper, Michael Cooper, Michael Cooper Club." There were
two Michael Coopers who knew each other, and there was a
third Michael Cooper that Johnson knew. Johnson arranged to
have all the Coopers meet each other. Johnson has arranged
a lot of meetings. His mail art goes back to the
mid-forties and quite a few people in the art and non-art
world have had at least a mailing or two, fragmentary
riddles that add to his mythic legend.

(KE) What does he mail?

(CJK) Cartoon characters like his bunny head, correspondence,
mailings from previous works, and multilayered collages.
Ray Johnson is a pun shaper who finds words within words and
he's a master of wit who often mixes images with texts. But
the best way to experience Ray Johnson is to interact with
him by dropping something in his mailbox. His address is 44
West 7 Street, Locust Valley, New York 11560.

(H) Also, a lot of pictures of Ray Johnson are sent throughout
the network with invitations to intervene upon them. I
received Ray Johnson's high school picture once from Italy.
I cut it in half and put it in two TV sets and sent it back.
How many Ray Johnson bath tubs are there? That's a very
popular project. You usually add yourself to the zeroxed
pile of networkers taking a bath with Ray Johnson. One
imagines the rubberstamp pad ink dissolving off the artists
making a colorful bathtub ring.

(CJK) Ray Johnson is also notorious for his institutional
inventions. In the 1973 "Death Announcements" section of
The New York Times, Johnson announced the demise of his New
York Correspondence School, which was shortly thereafter
reborn as Buddha University. Numerous Johnson inspired Fan
Clubs grew under the rubric of the NYCS. I mentioned the
Michael Cooper Club, but there was also the Shelley Duvall
Fan Club, Marcel Duchamp Fan Club, the Blue Eyes Club and
it's Japanese equivalent, "the Brue Eyes Crub." Johnson's
network of mail art contacts has expanded in recent years to
include phone calls which range from informative to
mysterious. Ray called me one evening two months ago to say
that the first New York Correspondence School meeting took
place in a Manhattan Quaker Meeting House. I was telling
Ray how spirited mail artists interested me, mail art that
shakes, rattles, quakes, and rolls--artists who I'm fond of
calling "netshakers." Johnson said his meeting at the
Quaker House was just a meeting of friends, but he hoped
that the people whould go into religious convulsions and do
Quaker shaking.

(KE) I understand Johnson's importance to mail art, but is there
an association between Ray Johnson and the selection of this
space for your mail art show?

(CJK) Yes, in an oblique way I chose the NYC location over the
Emily Harvey Gallery and Jean Depuy loft because this is
where Fluxus master George Maciunas lived for awhile.
Maciunas and Ray Johnson knew one another. From 1960-61
Maciunas ran AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue, a performance
space not far from where we are now. It's been said that
SoHo started due to Maciunas's establishment of the first
SoHo cooperative building at 80 Wooster Street. Johnson
performed a "Nothing" at Maciunas's AG Gallery just before
it closed in July 1961. Maciunas is credited as one of the
founding members of Fluxus.

(KE) What's Fluxus?

(CJK) Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas and a small
group of artists started a new "tendency" or intermedia
perception--George Maciunas named it Fluxus. Fluxus implies
"the state of being in flux, of movement, ephemerality,
playfulness, and experimentalism. This fluxattitude
resulted in numerous publications, feasts, and Fluxfests.
One of those performances occured here when Maciunas married
Billie Hutching on February 25, 1978. Wedding guests and
the "wedding train," performed Flux Cabaret.

(KE) So Maciunas and Johnson were both Fluxus artists?

(CJK) Yes, although if Maciunas were alive today, I doubt he or
Johnson would agree on any close interconnection through
their work. Neither Mail Art or Fluxus are movements as
much as they are tendencies. Maciunas, unlike Johnson or
most of the Fluxus artists, had an anarchistic, utopian
vision whereas Johnson's mail was actually correspondence
art, an intimate, personal exchange between an individual or
small group of people. It was the American Fluxus artist
Ken Friedman who took mail art out of the personal realm and
into the international paradigm in which Fluxus artists were
engaged. Friedman's 1973 Omaha Flow Systems established
the mail art ethic for shows like this one we're having.
Friedman brought his Fluxus background to mail art in the
pursuit of open, democratic, interactive exhibitions which
encouraged viewers to participate. Interaction with
audiences has always been a Fluxus characteristic.

(KE) Let's return to mail art shows for a minute. What shows
have you entered, Honoria?

(H) My favorite mailart activity is entering mail art shows by
submitting small pieces of art at the request of another
networker in response to their chosen theme. I ended up
painting hundreds of postcard sized figures and skeletons in
response to the shadow project(s) commemorating the people
vaporized by the WWII atomic explosion on Hiroshima. I put
some of them on a black poncho and wore them to a Day of the
Dead celebration in Austin and danced to cojunto music. You
never know where mailart will go or send you. I used to
work in an isolated and local competitive market (fine) art
environment. Now I feel the flow of art & ideas in and out
of my studio room is part of a huge global art studio where
we get together to gossip, philosophize, show each other new
unfinished work, and communicate fresh ideas. The mailartist
to mailartist communication uses all kinds of shortcuts that
artist-to-general public, or even informed art historically
astute public will not get. Our jargon, in-jokes and
creative playfulness are as slippery as freshly licked glue
on the back of a 50 cent stamp about to be placed on a
recycled envelope bound for Japan. For instance, everyone I
know outside the network thinks plagiarism is a naughty
deceit. Within the network Plagiarism is an art movement.
In fact, there have been festivals of plagiarism. Recycling
other artists images is a basic concept in mail art.

(CJK) Appropriation, sorting, and shuffling written texts is also
a very corresponDANCE kind of improvisational jazz you'll
find in the mail art network. Indeed, name sharing and
detourning strategies began surfacing in mail art back in
the early 1970s. Dadaism, Nouveau Realisme, Futurism,
COBRA, Fluxus, and Situationalism have all played varied
influential roles in the mail art mailstream.

(H) Now Karen, just between us girls, I want to know if you've
been catching this drift? I've noticed a renewed interest
in the actions and representations of women in the network.
Jennifer Huebert (POB 395, Rifton, NY 12471) just collected
mail from women networkers who attended congresses in 1992.
I'm looking forward to reading other people's views. In a
huge network full of pseudonyms and correspondents who don't
speak each others languages I think it's odd, but fun, to
examine the yin/yang aspect of it all. One networker is
named manwoman.

(CJK) Yeh, I know ManWoman! S/he's a Canadian Pop Artist, a
musician, poet, and a shaman who has an on-going project to
restore the sacred, mystical significance of the ancient
swastika--before it was denigrated by National Socialism.
S/he believes in dreams and can analyze their symbolic
significance. When I told ManWoman that Cathyjack and I
were trying to have a child, S/he sent me a fertility chant
which, low and behold, WORKED within a week after I received
it in the mail. That makes ManWoman more than just a
charming individual--S/he's a very kind, gentle soul, a
sage. There's a certain charismatic aura and mystery in
meeting such people through the mail--pseudonyms like
ManWoman and Michael VooDoo help to create an unpredictable,
unusual postal pantheon.

(H) I have deduced from my correspondence that some mail artists
perceive Honoriartist as a male. Maybe it's due to my
fertile imagination (although to my knowlegdge my mail has
never been responsible for a pregnancy) plus my connections
and art collaborations with transvestites. Then there's all
this collaborating going on between many artists. However,
in the process of the historification of mailart someone
will get interested in who is actually who and what sex they
are. I am quite content 2 be both or more.

(KE) I can certainly understand reasons for creating fictive
monikers, but judging by both of your comments it seems that
fact is often stranger than fiction in mail art netland.
Now, on to a final question or two. Readers of PMC have
seen sporadic Networker Congress and Telenetlink Congress
listings in their electronic forum throughout 1992. You
(C.J. Kid) and Reed Altemus have called attention to
yourselves as facilitators of these congress events. What's
this congress biz all about?

(CJK) 1992 was the year of the World-Wide Decentralized Networker
Congress, otherwise known as METANET, or NC92. The
Networker Congresses were first proposed by Swiss conceptual
artist H.R. Fricker in "Mail Art: A Process of Detachment,"
a text presented in March 1990 for my book Eternal Network:
A Mail Art Anthology (to be published in Dec. 1993 by
University of Calgary Press). In early 1991 Fricker met
with fellow Swiss artist Peter W. Kaufmann and together they
drafted an invitational flyer entitled, Decentralized
World-Wide Networker Congress 1992. The congress call went
out to anybody, "Wherever two or more artists/networkers
meet in the course of 1992, there a congress will take
place." The Networker Congresses, like the Mail Art
Congresses of 1986, grew into a huge forum of 180 congresses
in over twenty countries.

(KE) Sounds like an enormous project. How was it organized?

(CJK) H.R. Fricker and Peter W. Kaufmann sought active, creative
input from networker artists on six continents. American
artists Lloyd Dunn, Steve Perkins, John Held Jr., Mark
Corroto, and I joined Fricker and Kaufmann early (summer
1991) in the development of the NC92 concept and served as
active "netlink facilitators." Final drafts of the
Networker Congress invitations included netlink contacts
from Africa, South America, North America, Asia, Europe and
Australia.

(KE) Is it fair to assume that the networker artist has grown out
of the mail art phenomenon?

(CJK) I think so. The Networker Congresses were based on the
acknowledgment that a new form of artist, the networker, was
emerging from international network cultures of the
alternative press, mail art community, telematic artists,
flyposter artists, cyberpunks, cassette bands,
rubberstampers and stamp artists. The year-long collective
work by networkers of NC92 represents the first major effort
among artists to cross-over and introduce diverse
underground networks to each other. Until this moment
countless marginal networks, often operating in parallel
directions, were unaware of one another. Mail artists that
network have a sense of what intermedia and interactivity
involve--it's a consciousness which branches outward. One
could say that mail art's evolution was based upon
intermedia--the mailstream merging of zines, artist stamps,
rubberstamping, correspondence, sound sculpting with audio
cassettes, visual poetry, and artists' books. Communication
concepts have been the medium and message that mail artists
use to bind together these divergent forms of expression.
Today, forms like stamp art have become genres unto their
own, with proscribed criteria often veering towards
normative art standards more than the spirit of a process.
I read somewhere in Lund Art Press that the most successful
intermedia forms eventually cease to be intermedia. These
creative forms evolve into the qualitative characteristics
of techniques and styles and will finally become established
media with names, histories and contexts of their own.
Indeed, the rarity of mail may come to pass with the
continued escalation of postal rates. This may encourage
more qualitative standards within the mail art network.

(KE) Well Cracker--Can I call you Cracker? (Crackerjack nods his
head)--what's wrong with qualitative standards?

(CJK) Hey Karen, didn't you know that when you're really good
they call you crackerjack? Really though, for me, the
thrill of the process is being inventive, taking yourself
somewhere you haven't been before. It can certainly go
stale if you don't know when to let go, when to hold back
from too much mail. Burnout in mail art is rampant. I'm
not a statistician, but to get a focus on what my mail art
activities involve each year, I set about tallying all my
in-out going mail for 1992. It revealed some startling
figures to me. Not including hundreds of email message,
I've sent out over 1,150 mail art works and have received
1,250 pieces in return. These figures state that I usually
answer most of the mail that I receive. It also shows that
with all of my international mailings, I spend, on the
average, about $1.20 postage on each item of mail art I
send. That makes for an expensive passion! I might want to
cut back. I might want to reconsider the investment of my
time and energy, or I might decide to conserve the time,
energy, and money for those I feel return the same
intensity, joy, and playfulness of dialogue. The bottom
line is that there are personal criteria for entering and
leaving mail art. You definitely receive what you are
willing to give and you quickly find out what your threshold
for tolerance is.

(KE) Let's return to the networker congress concept. What kinds
of congresses were there in 1992?

(H) I was invited to a place I'd never heard of called Villorba,
Italy by a long time correspondent, Ruggero Maggi, who sent
me some wonderful kisses when I did my kiss show. I went to
congress with the Italians and wow, am I glad I did. Long
philosophical talks on the lawn of the beautiful Villa
Fanna, videos of many networkers, performances, poetry,
hours of exchanging, making, sending artworks, food, wine,
joy, laughter, howling at the moon, walking barefoot in
mudpuddles.... Well, you can just imagine it took the wind
right out of my mid-life crisis. This congress was
dedicated to the great mail artist A. G. Cavellini and they
just made his archive into a museum. We just don't have
time to get into Cavellini and the philosophy of "don't make
Art make PR" and self-historification etc..

(CJK) Among the scores of other congress themes were John Held
Jr.'s Fax Congress, Jennifer Huber's Woman's Congress,
Miekel And & Liz Was's Dreamtime Village Corroboree, my own
Netshaker Harmonic Divergence, Rea Nikonova and Serge
Segay's Vacuum Congress, Bill Gaglione's Rubberstamp
Congress, Mike Dyar's Joseph Beuys Seance, Guy Bleus's
Antwerp Zoo Congress, and O.Jason & Calum Selkirk's Seizing
the Media Congress. There were also numerous, on-going
networker projects including Peter Kustermann and Angela
Pahler's global tour as "netmailmen performers." Throughout
1992 Kustermann and Pahler travelled, congressed, lectured,
recorded a diary, and hand-delivered mail person-to-person.
Italian mail artist Vittore Baroni helped create and record
a networker congress anthem, Let's Network Together, and
American mail artist Mark Corroto produced Face of the Congress networker congress zine.

(KE) So how do you think all these NC92 congresses worked? Did
they succeed or fail?

(CJK) I think they were remarkable! Most of the organizers of
NC92 congresses have been active international mail artists.
They have emerged from the networker year of activities with
a deeper awareness of intermedia involvement in global
network communities, and a realization that "I am a mail
artist, sometimes." While many mail artists visited friends
in the flesh, others, unable to travel, "meta-networker
spirit to spirit" in the NC92 Telenetlink Congress, a
homebased telecommunication project conducted with
networkers using personal computers and modems. Serbian and
Croat mail artists established networker peace congresses,
one such congress taking place in a village where a battle
raged around them.

(KE) Our on-line readers would probably like to know what your
Telenetlink Congress was about. Can you briefly state your
objective?

(CJK) My objectives were to introduce and eventually netlink the
international telematic community with the mail art
mailstream. I began forming an email list of
telecommunication artists which I compiled from responses to
my numerous NC92 Telenetlink postings on internet, BBS',
electronic journals, and Usenet Newsgroups. I began
Telenetlink in June 1991 by participating in Artur Matuck's
global telecommunication project Reflux Network Project.
There I served as an active netlink between the telematic
community on one hand, and the mail art network's
Decentralized World-Wide Networker Congress, 1992. Where
these two projects intersected there were informal on-line
congresses in which the role of the networker was discussed.
Conceptual on-line projects such as the Spirit Netlink
Performance drew in crowds of participants at the Reflux
Network Project link in the Sao Paulo Bienale.

(KE) Haven't mail artists and telematic artists interacted
through collaborative projects using mail and e-mail?

(CJK) It comes as no surprise that pioneering telematic artists
like Fred Truck, Judy Malloy, and Carl Loeffler were once
quite active in mail art's early years, but efforts to
combine both mail art and telematic forms were never fully
approached. My Telenetlink project was the first home-based
effort to interconnect the telematic and mail art worlds.
By netlinking both parallel network worlds, I found many
common tendencies; internationalism, interest in intermedia
concepts, respect for cultural diversity, humor,
ephemerality, emphasis upon process art rather artifact,
humor, global spirituality unencumbered by religious dogma,
utopian idealism, experimentalism, and interest in
resolution of the art/life dichotomy. Prior to Telenetlink
there were mail artists such as Mark Block (U.S.), Ruud
Janssen (The Netherlands), and Charles Francois (Belgium),
whose efforts were aimed at introducing mail art through
their own private Bulletin Board Services, but netlinking
mail art and the telematic community through mainframes on
internet hadn't been explored. Fewer than four dozen mail
artists are actively using computers to explore
communicative art concepts, but that number is rapidly
changing now that computer technology is more affordable.
Still, some mail artists view their form as more intimate,
tactile, expressive, and communicative than
telecommunication art. Other mail artists regard computers
with mistrust, suspicion, even fear. Likewise, I have heard
telecommunication artists view mail art as a primitive,
slow, outmoded, form of expression. I prefer to think of
telematic art and mail art as useful tools for creative
communication. It's not a matter of one form being superior
to another. I think the time is right for mail artists and
telematic artists to get acquainted--to netshake--to
telenetlink worlds. Here's a list of telecommunication
artists who use mail art and email as intermedia forms. I
think this is the best way Honoria, Karen Elliot, and I can
help PMC readers learn about mail art--to experience the
direct contact.

(KE) Well, I think that's a good way to come full circle in this
discussion. To know mail art and telematic art is to
experience it. Thanks Honoria and Crackerjack for opening
up some possibilities to interconnect network communities.

Telenetlink contacts

Reed Altemus:

IP25196%PORTLAND.bitnet

George Brett:

ecsvax!ghb@uncecs.edu

Burning Press:

au462@cleveland.Freenet.edu

Anna Couey:

couey@well.sf.ca.us

Crackerjack Kid:

Cathryn.L.Welch@dartmouth.edu

Keith DeMendonca:

keithdm@syma.sussex.ac.uk

FaGaGaGa:

ae705@yfn.ysu.edu

Pete Fisher:

Pete.Fischer@stjhmc.fidonet.org

Joachim Frank:

joachim@tethys.ph.albany.edu

Bob Gale:

bgale@well.sf.ca.us

Matt Hogan:

m91hogan.acs.syr.edu

Honoria:

honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

Hubener:

72630.2465@compuserve.com

Judy Malloy:

jmalloy@garnet.berkeley.edu

Artur Matuck:

am4g+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU

Paul Rutkovsky:

prutkov@mailer.cc.fsu.edu

Scot Art:

Scot.Art@f909.n712.z3.fidonet.org

Uncle Don:

DPMILLIKEN@amherst.edu

September 25, 2013

Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design
Kathleen Burnett

Communication, Information & Library Studies
Rutgers University
burnet@zodiac.rutgers.edu

While the study of the temporal and spatial distanciation of communication is important to the concept of the mode of information the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. For the issue of communicational efficiency . . . does not raise the basic question of the configuration of information exchange, or what I call the wrapping of language.

–Poster, 8

Hypertext/Hypermedia

What distinguishes hypermedia from other modes of information is not that it is computer-driven–after all, the browsing and retrieval mechanisms of Vannevar Bush’s memex were non-electronic–nor that it is interactive, since the entire history of oral communication, whether electronically mediated or not, might be characterized as interactive; nor even that it includes navigational apparatus such as links and nodes, which might better be thought of as symptoms than causes, or buttresses rather than groundwork. What distinguishes hypermedia is that it posits an information structure so dissimilar to any other in human experience that it is difficult to describe as a structure at all. It is nonlinear, and therefore may seem an alien wrapping of language when compared to the historical path written communication has traversed; it is explicitly non-sequential, neither hierarchical nor “rooted” in its organizational structure, and therefore may appear chaotic and entropic. Yet clearly, human thought processes include nonlinear, nonsequential, and interactive characteristics which, when acknowledged by traditional information structures, are not supported. In fact, one might characterize the history of information transfer as a tyranny against such characteristics, that is, a tyranny against the rhizome.

Hypermedia might be understood as one manifestation of the struggle against this tyranny. In current parlance, hypermedia is used to describe both applications which make use of navigational tools such as links and nodes to form “texts” or databases, and the organizational principles of such “texts” and databases. Hypertext is also used to denote these same meanings. When a distinction is drawn between the two, it normally focuses on content–“hypertext” is used to refer to hyper-structures consisting exclusively of written texts, while “hypermedia” denotes similar structures built around multiple media. Others have noted the artificiality of such a delineation. “Text” is also used as a synonym for a “written work” or “book” which may or may not be limited to alphanumeric characters. A “text” may included charts, graphs, illustrations, photographs, and other visual media in its expression of meaning. Why then should a “hypertext”–which has the potential for incorporating an even wider range of expressive media (sound, animation, etc.)–be limited to alphanumeric characters in its expression?

A more useful differentiation might be drawn along structural rather than contextual lines. Hypertext demonstrates “traits that are usually obscured by the enforced linearity of paper printing”; it is text–only more so–because it participates in a structure that resonates asynchronous and nonlinear relationships. Hypertext is a kind of weaving–“text” derives ultimately from the Latin texere, and thus shares a common root with “textile”–a structuring with texture–web, warp, and weave, allowing for infinite variation in color, pattern and material; it is the loom that structures the “text-ile.” Hypertext is the organizational principle of hypermedia. Hypermedia is the medium of expression of a given hypertext structure. When that medium mirrors the singularity of the print medium of alphanumeric text, it may be properly called either “hypertext” or “hypermedia”; when the medium reflects an “intertwingling” (Nelson 31) of what we understand as separate “media” in the analog sense of the term, it should perhaps be referred to as “hypermedia,” but might equally be acknowledged as “hypertext.” Neither hypertext nor hypermedia is an object, rather the former is a structure, and the latter a medium, of information transfer.

Historical Context

All electronically mediated exchange participates in hypertext, though the degree of participation varies enormously. Some electronically mediated exchange is “hypertextual” only to the degree that it is virtual–that it consists of a series of switches or codes (binary or otherwise) which are, in and of themselves, unreadable (and, therefore, nontextual), and which contain “pointers” to their reconstruction as meaningful exchanges. The switches or codes are “nodes” which are “linked” to a “textual” form which, at any given moment may exist only “hypertextually.” Electronically mediated exchange is therefore paradigmatically different from other modes of information precisely because it participates in the organizing principle of hypertext.

In The Mode of Information, Poster proposes a concept which plays on Marx’s theory of the mode of production:

By mode of information I similarly suggest that history may be periodized by variations in the structure in this case of symbolic exchange, but also that the current culture gives a certain fetishistic importance to 'information.' Every age employs forms of symbolic exchange which contain internal and external structures, means and relations of signification. Stages in the mode of information may be tentatively designated as follows: face-to-face, orally mediated exchange; written exchanges mediated by print; and electronically mediated exchange.(Poster 6)

Poster’s periodization suffers from the coarseness of any totalizing metaphor. While he stresses the trans-historical nature of his classification of symbolic exchange, the metaphor is only as effective as it is historically informed. As outlined, the third stage–written exchanges mediated by print–is not only Western in its bias, but fails even within this bias to recognize a rather large chunk of history–the manuscript period (circa 4th century AD through the mid-fifteenth). An examination of the influence of the mode of information on social structure can only be enriched by the recognition of the impact of mass-production, in the form of the mechanized reproduction of written language, on that structure. It is impossible, however, to understand the full significance of this impact, either historically or theoretically, unless its contextualization is carefully discerned. For example, contrast these two very different experiences of the introduction of the hand-press and its effects on social stratification.

The pre-Reformation Church was able to maintain a restrictive social stratification largely because of its ability to control the production and comprehension of written communication–those who could read and write belonged to a privileged elite, while those who could not had to be satisfied with acquiring their information from those who did. Through most of the Medieval period and well into the Renaissance, the Church was able to control the size and membership of the elite through two mechanisms: Latin education and limited distribution of written communication. The latter was facilitated by production limits imposed by the rigorous and time-consuming process of hand-copying, which in turn limited the supply of reading material. Without supply, the demand for education was kept to levels that the Church could manipulate and control. The introduction of the hand-press in the mid-fifteenth century was accompanied by a precipitous erosion of that control which led decisively to the Reformation. Once reading material could be produced in large quantities in a relatively short period of time–500 to 1000 copies of an average-length manuscript could be produced by a printer owning two hand-presses within the space of less than a month, as compared to the production of a single copy of a manuscript, which could take up to a year–in other words, once the non-elite were able to acquire material to read, they began to do so. Printers, recognizing the commercial potential of this new market, began to produce material in the vulgate, which in turn expedited exponential growth in the educated population, since it facilitated the process of self-education. As this population grew, demands for equity in education across social classes escalated. The earliest signs of this movement are evident in the growth of the popular and self-help literature markets, and the introduction of mass communication, across time and distance, over which the Church could ultimately exercise little effective control (Eisenstein).

Contrast this experience with that of the introduction of a hand-press in colonial Massachusetts in 1660 for the express purpose of propagating the gospel among the Indians, who had no written language. The social stratification which existed within the tribe prior to the introduction of the press was anchored in the individual’s ability to communicate with the spiritual realm and was maintained through oral mediation of the ritual culture. After the introduction of the press, the very foundations of that stratification were undermined. A schism developed between those who subscribed to the gospel, and thus to the notion of a single god, and those who continued in the old beliefs. Since the introduction of the very act of written communication was inextricably tied to the new religion, many who did not endorse the Christian faith simply refused to acknowledge the new mode of information.

Clearly the introduction of the hand-press in this context did not have the effect of popularizing written communication that it had in western Europe on the eve of the Reformation. While differences in the social structures of the two cultures might be cited as the major contributing factors in this differentiation, the privileged status of chirography in pre-Reformation Europe clearly at least served to buttress the social structure of that culture, while the absence of any form of written culture in the case of the Native American tribe equally served to buttress a quite distinct social structure. Both structures were undermined by the introduction of a new mode of information, but in very different ways. While a totalizing metaphor may be put to effective use in an account of this differentiation, Poster’s four-stage delineation is simply too coarse to serve. Clearly, a distinction must be drawn between a culture which partakes only of oral exchanges and one in which oral exchange is coupled with some form of written exchange. Equally clearly, a similar distinction needs to be drawn between written exchanges mediated by chirographic writing and written exchanges mediated by typographic writing. The latter of these could be further subdivided into two stages: the first mediated by hand-press reproduction, and the second by machine-press reproduction. The importance of this latter distinction is borne out by the study of the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century Europe following the introduction of the mechanized press (cf. Altick and Eisenstein).

Between Poster’s third stage–written exchanges mediated by print–and his fourth–electronically mediated exchange–lies much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for although he does at one point acknowledge the nineteenth century origins of electronically mediated information systems in the telegraph and photography (19), his analysis of such systems is limited to the telephone, television advertising, databases, computer writing and computer science. The inclusion of the machine-press production stage suggested above accounts for a large share of the information technology of the nineteenth century, but the end of that century and the first half of the next, it seems to me, several quite distinct modes of information transfer have emerged which may help to provide a bridge from written exchanges to electronically mediated exchange and, particularly, to multimedia exchange mediated electronically.

We might group the various non-computer modes of information available in the twentieth century in a variety of ways; I would like to propose one such classificatory scheme based, as is Poster’s, on the wrapping of exchange:

verbal media:

telegraph, radio, telephone

visual media:

visual arts media (painting, sculpture, etc), photography

combinatory media:

offset printing, film, television, video

The first group fits neatly into Poster’s progression, since it participates in the wrappings of language. Historically, it is characterized by progressively orally mediated electronic exchange, which might be seen as an inversion of the pattern found in the Poster’s earlier stages. The fit of the second and third groups into Poster’s schema is more problematic because, despite his statement that the study of the mode of information “must include a study of the forms of information storage and retrieval, from cave painting and clay tablets to computer databases and communications satellites” (7), his pre-electronic mediation stages are all decisively characterized by their participation in the wrappings of language. Nonetheless, visual means of communication and information transfer have always existed–from cave paintings to religious icons to Gothic cathedrals to paintings, sculpture, and other visual arts media. The information-poor, one might even argue, have historically relied on the visual media as their primary mode of reproducible information transfer. Certainly this was true in Western Europe before the growth of literacy, and even today scholars point to the democratizing effect of television.

Also evident in the development of twentieth-century modes of information is a ever-increasing trend toward synchronous combinatory media. This January, AT&T announced the release of its first videophone, the latest manifestation of a trend which began with film and has progressed through television, video, and in the last few years, developments in multimedia computing. The design of synchronous combinatory exchange is necessarily unlike that of written exchange. The organizing principle of combinatory exchange in its simplest form is synchronicity rather than sequence (which is essential to all forms of written exchange). Both forms are linear to some degree– both rely on a time-line of expression. In written exchange, linearity is an overt feature of the expression. In the case of synchronous combinatory exchange, linearity is only covertly present since the elements of a synchronized combinatory expression must be aligned in time. In an analog environment this alignment creates a singular linear expression. In a digital environment, on the other hand, the expression may be multiple, may consist of a multiplicity of lines.

While historicism clearly must inform such a totalizing metaphor as Poster’s “mode of information,” Poster’s objective is equally clearly trans-historical:

the stages are not 'real,' not 'found' in the documents of each epoch, but imposed by the theory as a necessary step in the process of attaining knowledge. In this sense the stages are not sequential but coterminous in the present. They are not consecutive also since elements of each are at least implicit in the others. The logical status of the concept of the mode of information is both historical and transcendental. In that sense the latest stage is not the privileged, dialectical resolution of previous developments. In one sense, however, a sense that Marx anticipated, the current configuration constitutes a necessary totalization of earlier developments: that is, one cannot but see earlier developments from the situation of the present. The anatomy of the mode of electronic information . . . necessarily sheds new light on the anatomy of oral and print modes of information . . . . I prefer to consider the present age as simply an unavoidable context of discursive totalization, not as an ontological realization of a process of development.(6-7)

Theorizing

From within this context of discursive totalization, other possibilities suggest themselves. In A Thousand Plateaus (1970), Deleuze and Guattari propose a different history of written exchange. “Writing,” they claim, “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (4-5). Their history is delineated in terms of types of books. There are three types of books, the first being historically the earliest and the third the most recent, but all three are coterminous in the present. The first type they describe as the root-book. The root-book “imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do” (5). The second type is the radicle-system, or fascicular root book. “This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development” (5). The approximate characteristics of Deleuze and Guattari’s third book type–the rhizome–clearly indicate a departure from the book as printed codex to electronically mediated exchange:

1. and 2. principles of connection and heterogeneity; 3. principle of multiplicity; 4. principle of asignifying rupture; and 5. principles of cartography and decalcomania.(7-9)

The significance of this taxonomy for this discussion is that its classification, unlike Poster’s, is entirely media-independent, gaining its meaning, so to speak, from a delineation of structure or design.

The root-book roughly corresponds to written communication prior to the development of the paste-up technique (which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as assemblage; 4) in the early part of the twentieth century. Its history is one of linear production. In its earliest form, the writing of the root-book was synonymous with its publication. Today, the production of the root-book is still characterized as a linear process consisting of five steps: 1. writing of a manuscript; 2. submission/editing of the manuscript; 3. the composition of the manuscript in type; 4. the proofing of the type sheets; and 5. the dissemination of the publication. The production process for the radicle-system book is much lengthier, requiring the addition of at least two additional steps, the first, the mock-up or layout stage normally falling between the second and third root-book steps; and the second, the paste-up stage falling between the third and fourth steps in the production of the root-book. In its earliest manifestations (and still today in the certain fine-printing and vanity publishing circles), the production of the root-book is characterized by oneness and stability. Even in its more recent manifestations, the root-book strives to be an exact replica of the author’s words, a representation or signification of an individual’s thoughts. Even as the production process has fragmented (through the intervention of editors, publishers, printers who are not the author), it has maintained its linearity. Likewise, the publication has retained its insularity and rootedness.

In contrast, the design of the radicle-system book is fragmented and multifarious, and while representation is still employed as an element, it is only one of many couched in layers that problematize its signification. Interestingly, the technology which initially enabled this kind of production was photography. The production process is less emphatically sequential, the organizing principle being collage or assemblage which allows for alteration and reorganization at almost every stage of the production process. In some cases this process has extended even to the composition of the manuscript itself, as in the case of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up texts, or, in a less mechanical implementation, in the poetry and critical writings of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Deleuze and Guattari describe a third type of book:

A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether . . . . Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers . . . . The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.(6-7)

Telecommunications systems are rhizomorphic, as are computer networks. Think of maps you have seen and descriptions you have heard of the internet–a rhizome. If we accept the rhizome as a metaphor for electronically mediated exchange, then hypertext is its apparent fulfillment, and Deleuze and Guattari’s “approximate characteristics of the rhizome”– principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and cartography and decalcomania–may be seen as the principles of hypertextual design.

Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity

The principles of connection and heterogeneity state that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be” (Deleuze & Guattari 7). In this sense a rhizome is very different from a tree structure, where the order is fixed by a hierarchy of relationships. Cognitive jumps, which must be mechanically forced in an hierarchy, are intuitively sustained in a rhizome. A rhizome is the only structure which can effectively sustain connections between different media without giving hegemony to language. Many current relational and flatfile multimedia database applications support the storage of multiple forms of media, and some will even display different types contiguously, but keyword searching is the only mechanism provided for cross-type searching. Like film and video, they support synchronous display (but then, so can the book, albeit with limitations), but they do not support nonverbal access. Traditional hierarchical database structures are even more problematic in their support of nonverbal expression. Meaningful formation of hierarchies across media boundaries can be accomplished only through the use of language, since hierarchy is itself a creation of language, and therefore, language is the only universal tool available within an hierarchical structure. A rhizomorphic structure, on the other hand, does not rely on language for its ordering, although many of the linkages in a given structure may be linguistic.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages (7).

Hypermedia design is rhizomorphic in its sustenance of heterogeneous connection, because there is no systemic hierarchy of connection. The perception of connectivity is entirely left to the user, though the pre-existence of particular connections may foster varying user perceptions of overall structure. At its most political, connectivity is a democratizing principle. It functions as a structure of individuation since at any given moment the “center” of any rhizomorphic structure is the individual’s position in relation to that structure. Distinctions between author and reader, constituent and politician, even intermediary and end-user disintegrate as the reader participates in authorship, constituent in polis, and end-user in the search itself. At its worse, connectivity inspires anarchy. Witness (as we all did) the impact of limited connectivity (exclusive of the important element of interactivity) via the broadcast of a videotape of the arrest in the case of the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.

As the distinctions between participant/viewer, author/reader blur, the concept of authorship itself will be problematized. All paths through hyperspace are equally valid to the individual traveller. As the “reader” negotiates hyperspace he/she becomes a navigator–traversing established links to pre-existent nodes; but also an explorer–creating new links to previously known, but unrelated territories; a pioneer–venturing forth into uncharted realms; and a visionary–imagining and giving shape to the as-yet unknown.

Principle of Multiplicity

Act so that there is no use in a centre . . . .

–Stein, 63

A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature . . . . An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, much as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines.

–Deleuze & Guattari, 8

Hypertextual design is able to support non-hierarchical thinking and cognitive jumping because it recognizes the diversity of multifarious modes of information. Information may be structured hierarchically within a hypermedia system, but only to the extent that such a structure exists in a coterminous relationship with other structures. In other words, hypertextual design presupposes not only that multiple points of access are preferable to a single point, but by extension, that multiple structures are preferable to a single structure. Information retrieval studies have shown that a single user’s selection of access points for a given topic may vary over time and space, making it difficult for an indexer to predict potential user vocabulary. The principle of multiplicity is reflected in hypertextual design by the coterminous presence of varying modes of access to a single structure on the one hand, and of varying structures on the other.

Landow and others have noted the hypertextual nature of pre-hypertext literary projects from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. Yet the lists I have seen are conspicuous in their omission of female writers and feminist critics, not to mention writers of color. I have already mentioned Rachel Blau DuPlessis, but there are others who might be mentioned as well–Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston–all of whom practice a writing of inclusion and fragmentation, of absent centers and centered absence. Multiplicity, as a hypertextual principle, recognizes a multiplicity of relationships beyond the canonical (hierarchical). Thus, the traditional concept of literary authorship comes under attack from two quarters–as connectivity blurs the boundary between author and reader, multiplicity problematizes the hierarchy that is canonicity.

Principle of Asignifying Rupture

Hypertextual design intuitively supports two forms of access which must be forced in hierarchical structures: user-generated access and mapping. The principle of asignifying rupture supports the former, and those of cartography and decalcomania, the latter. In an hierarchical structure, a user-generated access point may cause a rupture in the system. For example, in a database search, a user may, through the process of serendipity, arrive at a particular point in a hierarchy, even though her departure-point has no apparent hierarchical relationship to that arrival point. If she is allowed to introduce a link from her departure term to her arrival point into the hierarchy without further evaluation, the very structure of that hierarchy might well be undermined. One might view the project of feminist criticism in this light. The introduction of non-canonical texts and authors into the canon disrupts the foundations of the canon altogether. In contrast, hypertextual design encourages such disruptive activity while rendering it insignificant. Since the structure does not rely on any given theory of relationship, it cannot be affected by the characterization of a new relationship previously alien to it. The potential for any relationship exists within the hypertextual structure; some simply await unmasking.

Principles of Cartography and Decalcomania

The second form of access not easily supported within an hierarchy is mapping. Tracings or logs of an individual’s progress through an hierarchical database are of course possible and may help a user to retrace a given path, or provide useful data for research in human-computer interaction. Current maps of search paths exist in the form of recordings of transactions, though the best systems record only the user query and the system response, without making a record of the context of either query or response. The records thus constructed are divorced from context, non-relational, and perhaps most importantly, non-spatial. They are grammatic, rather than diagrammatic. They perpetuate the hegemony of language and de-emphasize the sense of a journey through space and time. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of mapping is, however, quite different, and presupposes the operation of the principles discussed previously.

Each user’s path of connection through a database is as valid as any other. New paths can be grafted onto the old, providing fresh alternatives. The map orients the user within the context of the database as a whole, but always from the perspective of the user. In hierarchical systems, the user map generally shows the user’s progress, but it does so out of context. A typical search history displays only the user’s queries and the system’s responses. It does not show the system’s path through the database. It does not display rejected terms, only matches. It does not record the user’s psychological responses to what the system presents. On additional command, it may supply a list of synonyms or related terms, but this is as far as it can go in displaying the territory surrounding the request. It can only understand hierarchy, so it can only display hierarchical relationships. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification (12).

A hypertextual map is more closely related to geographic maps than to search histories. It shows the path of the user through the surrounding territory, but always from the point-of-view of the user. It is as though the map were perpetually shifting as the traveller moved from one quadrant to the next. Some of that territory is charted–it is well mapped out in terms that the user understands, and connected to familiar territory or nodes–and some is uncharted, either because it consists of unlinked nodes that exist in the database much as an undiscovered island might exist in the sea, disconnected from the lines of transfer and communication linking other land areas, or as an unidentified planet in space, with the potential for discovery and even exploration, but as yet just a glimmer in the sky–or because it is linked in ways that are meaningless to the user in his present context. The user can zoom in on zones of interest, jump to new territories using previously established links or by establishing new links of his own, retrace an earlier path, or create new islands or nodes and transportation routes or links to connect them to his previous path or the islands or nodes charted by others.

The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states (21).

Hypertext is rhizomorphic in all its characteristics. Its power derives from its flexibility and variability; from its ability to incorporate, transmute and transcend any traditional tool or structure. Like the rhizome, it is frightening because it is amorphous. The hierarchical systems we are accustomed to are definitional–they are centers of power. Knowledge of the hierarchy engenders authority; corrupted authority breeds despotism. Knowledge of the rhizome as a totality is impossible, precisely because “totality” and other absolutes have no meaning in a rhizome. The rhizome is as individual as the individual in contact with it. It is that individual’s perception, that individual’s map, that individual’s understanding. It is also, and at the same time, a completely different something–another individual’s perception, another individual’s map, another individual’s understanding. It provides no structure for common understanding. It is a state of being, reflective always of the present, a plateau in a region made up entirely of plateaus–“a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze & Guattari 22).

Works Cited
- Altick, R. The English Common Reader. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.
- Bush, V. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-8.
- DuPlessis, R. Tabula Rosa. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1987.
- —. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New York: Routledge, 1990.
- Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
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September 25, 2013
Derrida/Fort-Da: Deconstructing Play
Alan Aycock

Department of Anthropology
University of Lethbridge
aycock@hg.uleth.ca

Jacques Derrida is a notably “playful” scholar, in two senses of the term. First, his writing style is playful, richly replete with the puns, circumambulations, excurses, hesitations, and gnomic recursions that make him a bane to his translators and a delight to his readers. Second, Derrida’s playful style reflects his argument that the Western metaphysics of presence may be deconstructed (as indeed, he believes that it “always already” is) by exposing the playfulness of differance, the constant motion of forces elsewhere in space and time.

From this point of view I find it somewhat ironic that despite the extensive use of Derrida’s ideas in numerous scholarly fields, no one has addressed the implications of deconstruction for the study of play itself.¹ To remedy this apparent oversight, I shall first present a brief discussion of Derrida’s treatment of the fort-da game described by Freud, and draw out several nuances of Derrida’s approach to this game which seem to me to be more generally applicable to play. I shall then offer five examples of the playing of chess, ethnographic situations that are familiar to me from many years of participant observation and writing about the game (Aycock, n.d.[c]). In each instance, I shall show how my characterization of Derrida’s approach illuminates the understanding of the play at hand. Finally, I shall evaluate, tentatively, the prospects and implications of a deconstructive approach to play, and suggest some directions for further research in this area.

Fort-da

The game of “fort-da” was invented by Freud’s grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14-17). In the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring “o-o-o-o,” then pulled back, saying “da.” Freud (and the child’s mother) interpreted the first sound as the child’s version of “fort” (“gone away”), the second as the German for “there” (as in English “there it is!”). Freud associated this game with the child’s attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child’s apparent lack of reaction to his mother’s death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

In general, Freud was using the fort-da game to illustrate the operations of the economy of pleasure that he had described, and to introduce the notion of the return of the repressed; that is, the neurotic effects of an earlier psychic trauma upon later behavior. As a preliminary to Derrida’s discussion of the game, it may also be noted that he perceives a resonance in Freud’s work here with the broad philosophical doctrine of the “eternal return,” which Nietzsche elaborated lyrically in his Zarathustra (e.g., Nietzsche, 1961: 159-163, 176-180). It is quite possible that Freud, who was familiar with Nietzsche’s work (Freud, 1955: 123-124), also made this connection.

Derrida turns this brief anecdote into a playful trope for Freud’s writings (Derrida, 1987a: 257-409), showing first how Freud repeatedly sends away and calls back his central argument on the pleasure principle as he tries to summon evidence to support it, then how Freud himself, as the writer of the play, conceals initially from the reader his genealogical relationship to the child as a convention of scientific writing, deferring his authorship by devolving it impersonally on an unidentified child at play. In “writing” his grandson in this fashion, Freud speculates not only on the psychic economy of pleasure, which must yield in the finest bourgeois terms more than is invested, but on the political economy of his own family, and of his own writing.

Derrida gradually extends this convoluted image into an analysis of the incompletion of the game (Freud believed that the only use that the child made of his toys was to “make them gone” [Derrida, 1987a: 311]), of his family (the child’s mother and father are mute and unidentified in this account), of his theory of pleasure (Freud never completely proved its existence to his satisfaction, but he never discarded it entirely, reworking it constantly throughout his life), and finally of the subject himself (Freud’s own death prefigured in that of his daughter). But Derrida is not done with the game, either (Derrida, 1987a: 1-256): he plays on “fort-da” in his love letters (whose messages go and return), in the pleasure of his love (which threatens to lose and find itself), in the uncertainty of writer and addressee (always incompletely known), and in the fort-da of his own theory of writing (set in eternal motion by the forces of differance).

Even this is not enough: Derrida plays upon the common etymology of the “legs” and “legacy” of Freud (Derrida, 1987a: 292), upon Freud’s reference later in the same work to “limping” as a halting fort-da of his legs/legacy of writing (Derrida, 1987a: 406), upon Derrida’s own limp acquired during an illness as a fort-da of his love and his work (Derrida, 1987a: 139, 141, 199), upon van Gogh’s paintings of shoes as a fort-da of “step/nothing” (both from the French pas) (Derrida, 1987b: 357), upon Socrates-Plato as engaging in an intellectual and erotic fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 222), upon autobiography and the genealogy of ideas as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 62; 1988: 70), upon Freud’s “scene of writing” as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 336), and upon the eternal return/return of the repressed as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 303).

The play of fort-da, then, occupies much the same analytical space in Derrida’s writings as the play of differance, because it substitutes the centrifugality of uncertainty for the centripetality of the Western quest for a transcendental signified. ² I am highlighting the game of fort-da here not as an opening to Freud’s own economy of pleasure, but as a device to illustrate and gain access to that which I take to represent most clearly Derrida’s approach to the ludic.

Several elements of Derrida’s use of fort-da stand out for my purposes. First, the margins of play talk, the “fort-da” of the child, open up to reveal themselves in talk which is not obviously about play: the writings of Freud, of Plato, and of Derrida himself. Second, the authoritative structure of the game exposes itself as always going “somewhere else”: the spool that is thrown away, the rigidly structured scientific writing that is always incomplete, the differance of Derrida’s own circuitous writing style. Third, the players’ subjectivity is always lost: the unidentified child and parents, Freud, Derrida’s unidentified lover(s), Derrida himself, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche. Thus the differance of fort-da operates not to fix the game as a specific essence, but to defer the full apprehension of the ludic indefinitely, even as it is pleasurably experienced from moment to moment: “In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules” (Derrida, 1988: 69). For Derrida, play is not fixed in finite discourse or structural symmetry or subjective intent: it happens, irresistibly, as a movement elsewhere of the traces of writing in the world (Derrida, 1988: 69).

Chess As Fort-da: Five Examples

To apply my reading of Derrida’s approach to fort-da, I adduce five examples of different forms of chess: casual play, tournament play, correspondence play, computer play, and skittles. In each case, my narrative is followed by a demonstration of the manner in which talk about play, the structures of play, and the self-awareness of the players themselves lead inexorably elsewhere, into the miscegenations of play that deconstruct its apparent authority.

I intend by so doing to interrogate the peripheries of play rather than its core, and thereby suggest that it may be possible to continue the play of signifiers precisely where a more traditional analysis would seek to arrest it. I take this subversion of the authority of these examples of play to represent a paradigm, however tentative and limited, of Derrida’s own playfulness: “this lack, which cannot be determined, localized, situated, arrested inside or outside before the framing, is simultaneously both product and production of the frame” (Derrida, 1987b: 71).

Casual Play

In the local public library an elderly man and a younger one set up the pieces and begin to play; at the same table, others are doing the same. After a few games, all of which he wins, the younger man proposes that they play with a chess clock (comprising two clock faces set in a single base which operate independently to measure the time taken by each opponent). The older man demurs: “I’ve played chess without a clock for fifty years, and I’m not going to start now. I enjoy chess because I don’t work at it, and to hear that clock ticking takes away all the fun.” The younger man hesitates, then says “ok, no problem; let’s play.” But after one or two more quickly won games he leaves, saying “I’ve got to get home now; thanks for the games.” The other players at the table look up to say goodbye, but continue playing for several more hours.

Is there “no problem” here? Everyone has followed the rules of chess, and observed the politesse of social discourse that surrounds it. There’s no dispute; no obvious disagreement about what’s going on here. But there is something which is carefully unthought in the situation, an authority that is rejected, and a presence which is an absence.

First, the talk of play. I intercepted the younger man on his way out of the library, and asked him why he had left. As I had suspected he would, he said “Look, there’s just no competition here. I beat the old fart six times before he had even castled. Using a clock might have narrowed the odds a bit, but he wouldn’t do it. So why hang around?” Thus the offer of a timed game expressed covertly a sense of the discrepancy between the two players, and even more fundamentally an expectation that chess is inherently adversarial. Had the younger man said as much, he would have insulted his partner. So he sought an agreement to change the circumstances of play, and was rebuffed. This makes us think, perhaps, about Derrida’s “Bab-el” [1988: 100-104], the translation of disparate terms into covenant, and the fort-da of relationships embedded in discursive situations.

Second, the structure of play. The “ticking” of a clock is an image, as the older man pointed out, of discipline and authority in bourgeois society (he had worked for many years as an air traffic controller, constantly harassed by fateful decisions that had to be made instantly). I have spoken at some length with the older man on several occasions. For him, the clock was an enemy: “I hate to be rushed; I’ve had enough of that.” Thus a refusal for the older opponent carried with it an absence, a retirement from work; for the younger, the rejection of the clock was a denial of his presence in modernity, life in the fast lane: “I want to get on with it: just hanging around and playing to be playing is bullshit.”

Third, the players. The role of player was perceived quite differently by the two men. The younger man saw the purpose of play as “beating up someone tougher than you; if I had a choice, I’d always play someone rated above me. If you can’t get the rush, why bother at all?” The older man wanted to “enjoy what I’m doing; I don’t care if the other guy is better, as long as he gives me a good game. Rating? Naw, that doesn’t matter.” In other words, the younger man was interested mainly in working himself into an absent hierarchy of competitors ranked above one another, perhaps even in a formal rating system (a four-number designation of strength determined by a mathematical formula [Elo, 1979]), while the older man was engaged by the egalitarian moment of play, its intuited experience. Each of them pointed away from the presence of the game; even the older man had “forgotten” the formal history of chess, which is often recited as a project of triumph of greater over lesser players (cf. Eales, 1985 for an instance of the way in which chess “heroes” insinuate themselves into what is intended as a more impersonal social history).

Thus the “traces” of casual play in this example show that it is always on the edge of being transformed into something else, the absent authorial signifiers of formal competition, ranking, and time. The players’ self- consciousness of play moved in and out of phase with one another, and the decorum that required the younger player to stay for an extra two games after his proposal to use a clock was turned down, and to thank the older man for the games that had not really been equally enjoyed by both parties was a marker not of present intention, but of absent transactions, the “unthought” of play discourse that nonetheless dominated its situation. Even the age of the players became a factor absent from the game in terms of the specific way that its rules constitute the play, but present also when the players’ structural position in their life cycles–the retirement of the older player and the immersion of the younger in themes of modernity–is considered.

Tournament Play

Here a younger man and an older man play in a highly choreographed scene: the room is a small stage raised above an audience of chairs filled to overflowing by players from the same round of this tournament, by spectators who are excitedly pursuing what they take to be consummate competition, and by a few journalists assigned to cover the event. The competitors have a table to themselves, and upon the wall above their play there is a vinyl over-sized board with velcro pieces that adhere to it, moved as the players move, in utter silence, by an attendant. At their side a clock ticks away the time until the time control: 50 moves in two hours (apiece), and 20 moves per hour thereafter. Each player has a printed form at his side upon which he records the moves in a special code, overseen by the tournament director who hovers at the margins of the play, more than a spectator and less than a participant.

The younger man has begun the game with a Queen’s pawn opening and the older man, a national champion of some decades earlier, has defended aggressively with a King’s Indian. By the middle game, most of the center pawns are interlocked and the pieces are maneuvering within that framework. At a particular point, the older player pushes a flank pawn unexpectedly and turns the game around: the older man goes on the offense and the younger man has to rearrange his pieces to defend what has suddenly become to seem a vulnerable and overextended position. As the game transpires, the challenger falls back into an enclosed space that he can not sustain. He forfeits a pawn to gain some room to maneuver, but slowly the former champion pushes him into a lost endgame, two Bishops and three Pawns against a Knight, Bishop, and two Pawns. When the older man finally breaks through to a winning position, the audience applauds and the younger man turns over his King in resignation. The players discuss the game in a postmortem with several bystanders who eagerly intrude their suggestions about alternative lines of play.

The talk: here rigid silence dominates, other than the audible undercurrent of the clock’s working, but the pieces “speak” for themselves during the game. As a proxy transaction of those who move them, they thrust and counter in a dreamlike counterpoint to the players’ imaginations (in their minds, the players are recapitulating another game, the opening, roughly eighteen moves remembered, of two Grandmasters in a match more than twenty years before). As a kind of deferral of the silent talk that prevailed during the game, the players play out a postmortem in which many divergent lines of play are seized and released (fort-da), each in its turn as it proves more or less workable: “If I move here, then you must . . . .” “But if you do that, then I . . . .” A bystander: “Your King’s-side attack was premature; you had to consolidate on the Queen’s-side first.” Their transactions are always formed in memory, and recalled in afterthought, as what might have been possible. Their game appears afterward in a printed text of the tournament densely annotated with many of the different lines that have been discovered, and will be reincarnated by other players, elsewhere as they challenge latterly this intertext of play.

Thus the talk of play exhausts itself along several seams of tournament chess: first as between the silence of the players and the voice of their pieces; second the disciplined quiescence of the room (the tournament director quickly hushes any conversation among the spectators, and the kinds of things that one player can say to another are specifically prescribed, e.g., “Check,” “J’adoube” [the traditional French word “I adjust,” to reposition a piece on its square without being required to move it], “Draw?”) against the tension expressed by the clock that counts down the moves to the time control; third, the relative tumult of the postmortem where numerous previously silent lines of play, many formerly unthought during the game, are then spoken and often are themselves contradicted; fourth, the publication of the play and its annotations against the future replaying of the opening in this game, which is itself a reprise of a past game.

The structures: tournament chess is apparently very highly structured. I have described elsewhere (Aycock, 1992[a]) the micro-physics of control that operates during formal play, including the many constraints set upon the motion of competitors in space and time, the segregation and passivity of spectators, the hegemony of the tournament director and the chess organizations that sanction play, even the pairings from round to round (this particular event was a national championship including hundreds of players that lasted ten rounds, and occupied nearly two weeks of the players’ time). But it is also pertinent to observe that any tournament game is only divided by a word, a movement, or a tick of the clock from a dispute that may embroil all present, and many who are absent (for instance, the sponsoring chess organization); in other words, the semblance of systematic respect for the rules of play that suffused my description in this instance is very tenuous, a quarrel carefully “unthought” by the participants (one of whom indeed became intensely involved in such a disagreement during a subsequent round).

Similarly, the structure of the play itself, taken as the configuration of pieces and pawns on the board, is always open to surprise, an intimation of structures disrupted. For instance, the King’s Indian opening that was used here is not a monolithic sequence of movements, but a family tree of potential excursions in which the displacement of a single pawn or piece has enormous implications all across the board (cf. Bellin and Ponzetto, 1990). A King’s Indian Averbakh, which was played, is wholly different in tenor from an King’s Indian Sdmisch, and even within the Averbakh there are important variations, each of which may be named according to the Grandmaster who prefers it or the place where it was first played (and often these names have yet further names attached to them to indicate subvariations, or are designated differently by players from other countries). In the instance of tournament play that I have narrated, the older man found a “new” move that he had in fact resurrected from a game that he had played thirty years previously, the venture of a flank pawn which set awry everything in its wake: “I wondered whether you had seen my game against Reshevsky.” “I just didn’t even think about that move; it didn’t seem thematic at all.” Even endgames, which are apparently simple because of the limited material on the board, and have been thoroughly classified (in a five-volume publication of many thousands of pages (Matanovic, 1982-) and analyzed extensively (sometimes by computers), bring the unexpected to bear in particular situations: “I thought if I kept all the pieces on the board, I could create some complications that offered drawing chances.” “I wanted to try losing a tempo (move) in that last position, to see whether I could get the opposition back and save the game.”

Thus each move is itself a trace of other opportunities ventured or foregone, and the perception or calculation of moves (which are two very different cognitive operations in human play [Aycock, 1990]) is a complex affair of faults and absences that becomes more problematic, not less so, as the skill of the players increases: “I tried to figure out what was going to happen when I moved the Knight to g5, but it was just too much, so I tried it and prayed.” “I couldn’t decide how you would respond if I pushed that pawn, but it looked right, so I just did it.”

Even the postmortem is a wilderness of deviant structures, many that are only discovered during the analysis that follows the game, and many whose impact cannot be assessed, but are marked with a “!?” or “?!” in the published text as possibilities to be pursued in other games. To take the notion of the postmortem one step further, at the highest levels of chess the players have trainers and seconds who study their own games and those of their putative opponents to find weaknesses and strengths that could be exploited in a match. Even in the less exalted national championship from which this game is taken, the strongest players had prepared not only a general repertoire, but also in some cases, for specific opponents who might or might not be paired with them. In other examples that might have been adduced (Aycock, n.d.[a]), the players had met across the board many times previously, and played their present game against a sense of absences, e.g., what their partner had been doing in recent games, how an opponent might react to a new or an old sequence of moves, whether the person involved was likely to be aggressive or conservative at that stage of the tournament. Thus structures of play are always, and have always been, deferred to and from other present situations of play; there is no transcendental signified, no perfect game to arrest the motion of the signifiers that I have discussed, and no abstract competitor against whom one always plays.

The players: in a very straightforward way it could be said that the division among competitors, spectators, and officials is exact at any moment of play; tournament rules capture this distinction with great precision (Aycock, 1992[a]). Even when these roles are relaxed during the postmortem everyone still knows who were the “authors” of play in this simple sense, a matter further attested by the results of play that are inscribed on the chart of opponents on the wall at the front of the tournament room, and the names attached to the published text of the game. In fact “serious” chess makes an extended effort, indicated among other things by the recording of moves made by each competitor during play, to identify and fix its origins.

Yet from what I have already said about this game it can also be observed that the players were not solely the masters of their own situation. They deferred, for example, the control of the circumstances of play to the tournament director, and beyond him to the organization that he represented, and even further to the rating formula whose advantage they desired (immediately after play, the younger man sat down with a calculator to figure out how many points he had lost; in a closed championship [where most, if not all of the competitors would have been internationally ranked], he would have been trying to sort out what overall score was still required to achieve an international norm). The tension in the room had to do at least in part with the breathless attention of the audience, “players” of sorts who constitute a stereotyped and generalized “Other” of the encounter. The players themselves took into account many absent factors respecting the intentions and self-presence of the players that I have already described: the previous games in which a similar opening was played and the styles of the players who played them, the manuals of middlegame style and of endgame technique, authored by yet other players, that had been studied for many hours each day, the suspicions harbored about the state of mind of the opponent. And as the postmortem dramatically displayed, the players had not intended their play either as a definite conclusion or as a comprehensive understanding of the results of specific moves.

Thus, as Derrida has argued, a text of play stands not only for itself but for many other things as well, since there is no one and nothing “outside of the text” who authorizes it of his/her free will. Indeed, there is a sort of Nietzschean flavor to the whole thing, where each player was the hero of his or her own myth, his or her “playing autobiography” (cf. Aycock, n.d.[a]), who lived out the “eternal return” (the endless replaying of a single opening variant, middlegame theme, or endgame arrangement) but who lacked the absolute self-presence to saturate the play: even the world champion loses once in a while, and lesser mortals must obviate their certain knowledge of victory as against the artifice of the tournament, else why play tournaments at all?

These traces of play, even in this highly regulated and harshly defined situation (very much a gulag of play, a strict regime of hard labor), express the movement of differance across a field of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980) that is contested and undermined at every point: who understands the play, how will domination be sustained if it can be at all, will the intentions of the players be realized? Always these traces evoke an incomplete presentiment of chess, although the constitutive rules govern the tournament situation just as comprehensively as that of casual chess. “Mastery” here becomes an irony to which everyone subscribes, and that reflects the desire that is summoned by its lack of presence: there is no final answer to any particular game, or to any of its phases, no matter who is involved. All of the answers, as I have demonstrated, are merely vectors to yet more questions.

Correspondence Chess

Recently when I was cleaning out the bottom of my closet, I came upon a bundle of letters that were written in the 60’s. Among them was my correspondence with a friend from high school, with whom I had played many games of chess over a period of six or seven years. We were quite evenly matched, and continued to play by mail after we left our home town to attend universities in different locales. There is, of course, a formal kind of correspondence play upon which I have reported elsewhere (Aycock, 1989), but here I shall draw attention to a more informal correspondence chess, which nonetheless shares many of the same features.

My friend and I played four games at a time, divided equally between White and Black. Unlike the more usual correspondence chess, we imposed no time limit; it was simply understood that a reply would be forthcoming as soon as possible given our heavy schedules of study. The games were inscribed in a code known as “algebraic,” where the chessboard is conceived as a grid of squares, each designated by a letter (horizontally, “a”-“h”) and a number (vertically, 1-8). Thus a move might be expressed as “d6-d7” or a capture as “d6xd7.” The code has the advantage of being unambiguous (for want of a more immediately personal context) by comparison with the descriptive notation that was more conventional in North America at that time.

In two of these games we had agreed to begin play from the 11th move of a well-known and highly tactical game, a King’s Gambit played by Boris Spassky against Bobby Fischer; in two others, we had decided to play a strategically more complex opening, the semi-Tarrasch variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. We had played these games against one another previously across the board as well as in our earlier correspondence, and the honors were about even.

In the particular letter that I am looking at, my friend begins with a short discussion of his life on campus and the courses that he is taking, then writes down his moves for each game. He comments on his move in the 2nd game, “well, I don’t know if this is getting me anywhere, but Fischer gave it an exclamation point in Chess Life, so here goes.” Then he pauses in the middle of writing his move in the 3rd game (thus: “h7-. . .”), and says “Excuse me for a little while, I’ve just been asked to play bridge by this guy from downstairs.” The next line continues, “There, that didn’t take very long, did it?” and adds ” . . . h6″). I’ll concentrate on these two passages for purposes of my analysis, which is of course much influenced by my reading of Derrida’s Post Card (1987a: 3-256).

First, the play talk is expressed by an interlocking sequence of discourses which include the personal remarks in the letter that have at best an indirect relationship to chess, references to a magazine article on chess and to a play event which interrupts the writing of the letter, and the code itself which speaks the move. The referents of each of these kinds of talk is hard to pin down: for example, I’ve never been to the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina (my friend’s school), I must once have had a copy of the Fischer article, but have it no longer, I’ve never played bridge with the “guy” downstairs, and even the code of the move is hesitant to identify itself without condition, in one case offered with a qualifier (“here goes”) and in the other case broken into in a way that’s impossible to visualize in “real” time (was the piece mystically suspended in the air over the board until my friend returned from his bridge game; was he even using a board and pieces to make his moves?).

The letter itself persists in time, though for all I know my friend is dead, since our correspondence has long since ceased. I didn’t throw away the letter, so it may be excavated by mystified archaeologists a thousand years from now if the paper has not decayed or the ink faded beyond recall. The letter also marks out its own space, sketches of a discourse that remains plausible after nearly thirty years, that could be (and perhaps has been) repeated on many occasions. In fact the very principle of the letter is the endless deferral and repetition of its conversations irrespective of our ability to locate it in a specific place and time.

Second, the structured authority of the play very readily loses itself upon its margins. These were not rated games, though they repeated rated games that we and others had played, and would play again; it was subject to no disciplinary gaze of a chess organization or tournament director, though we implicitly held certain constitutive rules of chess to be more or less constant, including among others the code in which it was written. Yet there is no constitutive rule of chess that allows the players to begin a game on the 11th move, and it would be a serious offense were players in a tournament to consult a magazine article or any other written text of play, including their own notes. Even the continuous sequence of moves that the constitutive rules of chess requires was interrupted in this writing, and the adversarial assumption that lies behind the play of the game was subverted by the confession of my opponent that he didn’t know whether he was playing a good move.

Was this writing of play simply a deferral, an inferior and secondary inscription of the oral authority of the presence of play (cf. Derrida, 1976)? Perhaps in one sense it was, yet writing the play offered quite a different set of textual resources than being there, e.g., stopping to play bridge with a different set of partners, playing four games at once, looking up (as we both did) “best” continuations of the semi-Tarrasch defense in the available chess literature.

To take another example of a possible transcendental signified that becomes problematic in the writing, it would be quite hard to locate the origin of our play: where did the Fischer-Spassky game begin (I seem to recall that it was later pointed out in Chess Life that the line advocated by Fischer in his magazine article had been “invented” at least a hundred years before), or the semi-Tarrasch (there was an early twentieth-century Grandmaster named Siegbert Tarrasch, but what on earth is a semi-Tarrasch)?

Finally, who were the players? I have already mentioned a couple of candidates for insertion at the margins of our game, such as the Grandmasters to whose names our play was affixed, or the “unthought” spectators of our play who might deliver the letter or dig it up latterly in a rubbish heap. Neither the addressee nor the signatory of the letter is secure, as Derrida has suggested: I have noted that I don’t know when or where my friend is now, but I didn’t then, either, though I accepted the usual conventions that associate the author of the play with the name of the correspondent who signs its written code, the Socrates-Plato matter revisited. And if I have the letter in my possession as I write these words, what does that demonstrate: am I truly reading it now, or was I reading it then, in some definitively authentic way? Is this present account of the play more serious than the original, or less so? Consider even the well-known scam, occasionally used as a plot device in novels or movies, where an amateur player bets on at least one victory in simultaneous games over two famous opponents, and merely transmits the move of the one to the other to win the wager. Can this be ruled out here, or in fact isn’t this very close to what actually happened–wasn’t my friend consulting Fischer to play me, and I to play him? But of course Derrida wants us to continue this argument for orality as well as for literacy, the “arche-writing” of which he speaks [1976: 56]. Thus in terms of the example I have given the uncertain traces of this correspondent play are no more derivative or false than the “spurs” of our personally present play: our intentions respecting the moves of this game and our respective abilities to guarantee its proper sequence were just as loosely connected to our self-consciousness in either event. Indeed, if we had been challenged to supply indubitable evidence of self-consciousness with regard to our play of these transacted moves, we would have had enormous problems doing so without setting ourselves in the flux of differance that is involved as I have indicated in the play of this particular game, let alone chess in general; again, the deferral of the intextuated self elsewhere looms just as Derrida has proposed.

Thus even the intimacy of friendship cannot guarantee that their transactions will be more assured of meaning than those of parties who are less well acquainted. In fact, it might be argued that the numerous contexts in which friends encounter one another become the stuff of the deferral of presence even more intensely than for those who have few such contexts, or none at all, since the values involved in any single encounter among friends become multiplied and unevenly focussed on that personal encounter (just as the fort-da incident reported by Freud). This does not lead, either for Derrida or myself, to a claim that the circumstances are meaningless or inscrutable; rather the problem is the reverse, that the meanings are too numerous and too easily scrutinized from every new vantage point to be comfortably situated in an ordinary version of empiricism.

Computer Play

I am presently playing a chess game with my son by means of an electronic mail system installed on the mainframes of our respective universities. He is not a chess player, or if so, he is only the rawest novice, vaguely aware of the constitutive rules of the game but not much else, and not particularly intent on repairing what to me seems an obvious deficiency. Instead, he refers the moves that I am sending him to a computer program that is also located on the mainframe of the university which he attends, and reports (I suppose, without any real evidence on my part, accurately) whatever the computer decides as his own move in the game.

Although we have agreed that I will test my own playing strength against my son’s computer program, he also understands that from time to time I may consult my own chess literature, and even that I might experiment with a chess program, the Chessmaster 2100, that operates on my personal computer. Thus from move to move the parties to the game may shift drastically from organic to silicate opponents. It should also be noted that neither of us is using a chess board and pieces to make our moves, although either of us could instruct our respective programs to print out a simulacrum of the position, and have done so when there was some uncertainty about the transmission of moves and the position at hand.

As our game has progressed, our e-mails which indicate the moves to be made have included side commentaries, much as in the correspondence games that I discussed above, not only about the game situation (“this is an English opening, but your program has gravely compromised itself by those silly Bishop moves”), but also about matters related to our jobs (“I’m an assistant operations supervisor now, with my own office, though I get mainly the shitwork”) and domestic circumstances (“are you coming to see us for Christmas?”). In fact, the latter have taken precedence over the game in recent weeks (“I’ve got this project to finish, so I guess I’ve got to earn my money”), and the game has been held in abeyance until more pressing duties are dealt with on both sides.

Where is the talk of play, and how is it configured? As in the correspondence games, the play “speaks itself” through our written message, but unlike those games, the writing seems to originate not just with the persons who are individually identifiable in a genealogical sense, but also with a computer discourse that carries with itself its own textual protocol. Being “online” is not merely a convenience which suits two people who are separated in space and time, but in addition a knowledge of procedures summoned from a source far beyond the immediate situation, such as in my case courses taken in “DOS.” Neither my son nor I can simply go to a keyboard and start typing, because both of us must conform to the established arrangements of our university mainframes that permit communication to occur within particular constraints, for example accounts, usernames, and passwords. Especially in terms of computers, the indelibility of the traces which inscribe a conversation is brought into question; if deliberate steps are not taken to “save” the words, the bourgeois gesture of finality, they may be lost forever in a kind of electronic limbo (cf. Heim, 1987: 21-22).

Similarly, the game itself endures only for as long as the memories of the mainframe and personal computer can be sustained; if the mainframe crashes, or the hard disk on my personal computer fails, then much of what has been transacted may be lost. Even the attempt to locate this memory within a special physical position, the hardware that underlies the communication, is subjected to the vagaries of telephone lines which transmit bits of information from one city to another. As every computer user knows, there are random glitches in these transmissions which can scramble the signals in progress and render them meaningless: “did you send ’14. d4-d5′?” “No, it was ’14. Ng1-e2′ and then ’15. d4-d5′.” Thus the talk of play in computer chess is mediated by the possibility of garbage introduced by those sitting at the computer keyboard or simply by the chaotic noise of the immediate universe, always threatening to lay waste (“trash”) the representations that are apparently intended.

How is computer play structured, and where is that structure brought into question? I have mentioned already that the protocols of computer use offer a structure which cannot guarantee the simple referentiality of the encounter. To give one example, both my son’s and my own mainframe system require users to sign a solemn declaration that they will respect the propertied interests, the copyright of particular authors, and obey the elaborate “Code of Computing” established by our respective universities. In my case, however, I must confess that some of the programs that I run on my personal computer have been “stolen” from their “rightful owners.” In electronic media, the ease of copying one program to another diskette has undermined this bourgeois sense of proprietorial closure (Poster, 1990: 73). From my son’s viewpoint, his conditions of employment, including the use of his university’s mainframe, proscribe its personal enjoyment, or at least accord game playing a very low priority that my son has, I suspect, sometimes circumvented. This resistance to institutional authority, pleasure against hegemony, is implicated in Derrida’s project of the deconstruction of writing, and in this case it is a potential which is readily available in the situation.

Our game obeys all of the constitutive rules of chess, and in fact the structure of the programs that we are using guarantees it; the computers will not permit an illegal move. Yet such a simple structuration is routinely dismissed in our play much as my friend and I did in our correspondence games, because we can comment on the play in a fashion that both brings its adversarial nature into question, and that places the play as a tracing of the background of other, more significant projects–our jobs and our families: “I just got an “A” on my combinatorics exam, and by the way, I am playing ‘8. c7-c6’.” We also have the capacity, that has been invoked throughout our game, to retract moves in order to follow a more interesting line of play: “Oh shit, this doesn’t work; let me try again from move 17.” This is not usual even for casual chess, and systematically betrays the notion that a movement of a piece or a pawn has some sort of lasting influence on play arising from personal presence. The lack of a “real” board and pieces underscores this sense of an encounter defined not by its presence, but by its absence in an otherwise identifiably empirical context.

The players, of course, are always those who may not be self-referentially present and intending or enjoying their game; I suspect that my son is humoring my peculiar obsession with the game rather than pursuing an activity that he himself values. Sometimes players are at a distance the guarantors of play, for example if I am making my move and writing it to my opponent. But from the other side of the game, the physically human author is a messenger only, even though I could scarcely reject his genealogical connection to me if I wished to do so. When I allow Chessmaster 2100 to reply to my son’s moves, we both become facteurs of the play. Does this mean that the computers are playing? They might be, but I know of no way to find out what they intend, or even if they “desire to win” in the ordinary sense of that phrase. If we don’t mean to say that players desire something, or anything, then what is really meant by a player?

In theory we could apply a Turing test (Levy and Newborn, 1991: 31) to the definition of player: “players” are those who transact the motions of the game in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish humans from computers. Forget that I, as an experienced player, could very likely distinguish the usual style of a computer’s play from that of a human, and let us consider whether the Turing answer is sufficient to disconcert Derrida’s model of differance. In the first instance, computers do not yet program themselves to play chess, nor do humans; the impetus always arrives from elsewhere, a programmer or a teacher (in the human case, usually a member of an immediate kin group, often a father [Parry and Aycock, 1991]), whose own programmability works in an infinite regression to many other origins, none of them terminable by any test that has been devised. No one spontaneously or self-referentially invents the moves of chess. Second, a Turing paradigm circumvents the intention and the desire of play in a fashion that Derrida would find agreeable. The play just “happens” for the Turing examiner, and that movement of play is both necessary and sufficient to make it real. Whether an embodied subject is the source of that play is left open for question. Finally, the actual play of a game is never fully determined by a Turing argument, because it is always assumed that following the constitutive rules is enough to accomplish the goal of locating “intelligence” that the Turing test addresses. In this situation there is a resonance of the Freudian “fort-da” game that should not be overlooked.

Yet actual games, such as the one that my son and I have undertaken, are not only a “black box” where moves go in and come out in a regular sequence. Games of chess have a particular style, even for novices, that is impossible to relegate only to their immediate conformity to its constitutive rules (Parry and Aycock, 1991). The meaning of “style” is not dissimilar in some ways to the medieval notion of “soul,” or to the more modern idea of the “real self,” as it might be transubstantially conceived (Aycock, 1990: 139): there remains a je ne sais quoi about a given game that overflows its authorial boundaries, but that lends to the play a pleasurable experience that is always somewhere else than merely in the recorded list of moves. Chess players have worried at length about the use of computers to contrive an “information death” of the game, but the quintessence of play, as Derrida has argued, resides always already beyond its realization in discourse that is immediately present. The play emerges from an uncertainty which is never encapsulated in its specific traces, but functions to inscribe those traces in the imagining of what might just happen next, or of the significance of what has already transpired. Nor is this a simple mystification of the human potential, because as Derrida has argued the moment of play is always arrested and released in an empirical circumstance.

Skittles

“Skittles” is a term used in chess to denote a kind of playing at play in which one or more of the standard rules of competitive chess is set aside to intensify the moment of the game (Aycock, 1992[a]). By far the most frequent form of skittles is the use of a chess clock to diminish substantially the time that players may take to make the moves of their game. As the time becomes shorter, players take ever greater risks, and rely upon the quickness of their wits and upon sheer luck to win. Chess is shifted in the process from, ideally, a game of perfect information and calculation to something closer to Derrida’s open-ended universe of traces. The device of that shift is a subversion of the bourgeois economy of the clock.

The situation is an empty tournament hall following the completion of the sixth round of a national championship. Since it is several hours past midnight, most of the players have completed their games and gone home. Half a dozen men of all ages and skill levels from strong amateur to titled master cluster around one of the hundred or so chess boards in the hall, playing ten-minute chess, munching on hamburgers and fries, and drinking soft drinks or coffee. As the term “ten-minute chess” suggests, each player has ten minutes for all the moves of the game. The person whose “flag” falls first (a red lever that is pushed erect by the minute hand of each clock, then drops when the hand reaches the vertical) loses irrespective of the material forces or the position then on the board. A common practise, which is followed here, is for one player to take on all comers until he loses, then to be replaced by another player who challenges the winner of that contest; the players take their seats more or less in rotation.

Tournament regulations such as strict silence and moving a touched piece are ritualistically reversed: the players freely “kibitz” their own games, while the bystanders join in the often ribald commentary. Touching or even moving a piece is not irreversible until one strikes the button that stops his own clock and starts that of his opponent. As the time limit approaches, the game builds to a frenzy, with players moving wildly, slamming their pieces off-center on the squares and hitting the clock with greater and greater force. Pieces that are captured are tossed aside, sometimes falling off the table to be caught or picked up by one of the bystanders. Even the clock is not exempt from this rough treatment, though chess clocks are relatively more expensive and fragile than the plastic pieces (another infraction of bourgeois norms, this time of commodification).

Eventually in this particular situation the most highly ranked and titled player present begins to win consistently. After some badinage (“It must be tough to be perfect” “Yeah, I hear that all the time”), he agrees to reduce his own time by one minute for each game that he wins, balancing the odds out a bit. He does not lose until he is playing with only a single minute against his opponent’s ten. At this point, everyone suddenly realizes that they are exhausted (earlier that evening each of them has played a strenuous tournament game lasting perhaps four to six or more hours), and the group breaks up to retire to their hotel rooms.

The play talk in this example is quite different from that each of the others. Unlike casual chess, politeness is deliberately avoided, as players comment rudely on one another’s skill and personal habits, as well as upon their own: “What a patzer!” “C’mon, get serious; I’m not going to fall for that!” “Holy shit, give me a break, huh?” Unlike tournament chess, noise is privileged over silence: “Ouch!” “Fuckin’-A!” “Auugghh!” Unlike correspondence and computer play, the talk is not incidental to the play, but part of its intensity: “What’s the matter; you too good to take my Rook?” “Well, I guess if you’re going to eat up my Queen’s-side, my King’s-side attack had better work; take the damn Bishop sac!” If the pieces speak for themselves, it is to share in the raucous tenor of the occasion, as they add their own clatter to the general turmoil. Thus in skittles more obviously than in the other forms of play that I have described the talk is confused with the action of the players, spreading out the game discourse over a much broader context that includes the braggadocio of the combatants and general colloquialisms of pleasure and disgust as well as the liberation of the ordinarily measured transactions of play. For instance, it’s not at all unusual in this situation for a player who has made a move and “punched” his clock to start making his next move even before his opponent has completed one in his turn; quite often two hands descend on the buttons of the clock simultaneously, sometimes with disastrous results for its mechanism.

The structures of the game, by the same token, are distorted to engage the players with the experience of the play rather than simply with its outcome. By contrast with the rigid discipline of the tournament round that was just completed, the skittles games are carnivalesque and have some of the characteristics of that resistant mode (cf. Aycock, n.d.[b]). Here the players have violated the spatial distinction that is normally made between the tournament hall as a kind of “sacred” context of serious play and the analysis room where such “secular” off-hand games are usually contested (Aycock, 1992[a]). The burlesquing of time constraints on play offers a patent contrast with the standard bourgeois economy of tournament time controls. The absence of a director (he was actually one of the participants, but was treated by all as just another player) removes the supervisory gaze of a sponsoring chess organization, though it is noticeable in any event that disputes in skittles are extremely rare. Finally, no one keeps score or computes ratings, so measurements of strength are entirely transient, claiming a sort of civil inattention (Goffman, 1963: 84) to the disparity in formal levels of accomplishment between the strongest and weakest players present.

Thus this skittles example represents notionally an “unthought” rejection of the limits or margins of serious play, and as well a complex refusal of the quiet relaxation of casual play (remember the younger man who became disgruntled when his older opponent would not use a clock in the instance of casual play). Skittles can be played without a clock, but most experienced players consider it rather unexciting. At the other end of the spectrum, tournament chess can be played with shorter time limits (for instance, games with an overall time limit of one hour) than those usually imposed by chess organizations, but it is only recently and after much debate that they have begun to be formally recognized as worthy of “serious” attention, such as the calculation of ratings or the award of titles such as the World Speed Chess Champion.

The sense of the chess “player” as such is also subtly decentered in skittles of the sort that I am describing, since there are not just two players involved in this example, but half a dozen who participate in the play both directly as they rotate to challenge the winner, and indirectly as they interject their commentary (“kibitzing”) while others actually move the pieces. The clock also becomes a participant of sorts, since it may dictate the result of the game irrespective of the situation on the board: a player whose game is hopelessly lost from a material or positional standpoint will nevertheless continue to move his pieces around (“just thrashing about”), desperately trying to stave off checkmate until his opponent runs out of time and loses “on the clock.”

Another critical factor is that the players, however they are to be defined, do not intend or guarantee the text of their play. Instead, players will attempt wildly unsound opening gambits or middlegame sacrifices, knowing that it is virtually impossible to respond to them as systematically as in tournament, or even in casual play. For instance, in one of the games of this sequence a player sacrificed his Queen for a Bishop and Knight in an otherwise relatively quiet position. His opponent stared dumbfounded at the board for a precious two minutes, then panicked and tried to realize his material advantage before his flag dropped. He wound up blundering away yet another piece in a couple of moves, and resigned in good-natured exasperation (not just by turning over his King quietly, but by suddenly gathering the pieces at the center of the board in a sweeping two-handed gesture) when he saw that he had placed his King and Queen in a position to be forked by his opponent’s Knight. The rupture of normal transactions and of the assumption of rationality that lies behind them (Aycock, 1992[a]) is a common feature of the displacement of intentionality in skittles.

Again, though players draw upon their skill and knowledge of the game, as in other forms of play, the instant recall of variations and themes that is involved in skittles works against players’ capacities to search thoughtfully for a specific authorization of a given opening or end-game technique that is associated with an ancestral champion of that style; this contrasts sharply with the correspondence and computer play that I have discussed, where chess literature is openly consulted to evoke the “best” line of play. Thus the authorization of play is as radically indeterminate in skittles as in the other instances of play, but for rather different reasons. The “arche-writing” of play amid personal presences, of which skittles appears to be an ultimate exemplar, is not necessarily freer of traces or absences than the “phonetic” writing of correspondent or computer play.

Conclusion

I have attempted in these five examples of chess to deconstruct what is ordinarily meant by the ludic. As I understand deconstruction (even in the excessively narrow, naove and demotic form that I may have deployed it here), this means that I have proceeded from an assumption that play is evoked not by a simple, measurable presence of speaking, structure, and self-awareness in particular meaningful situations. Rather, the ludic in the instances that I have given seems to trace or inscribe itself upon absences, the force that differs and defers meaning always already somewhere else beyond the immediate ken of the participant observer and of those who are the constructed “Others” of ethnographic analysis. It then becomes much more difficult to ground simple empiricism in the “real,” which reveals itself not simply as a given, but as a central problem and task of study.³

First, the talk of play does indeed seem to lose some of its solidity as I explore its role in different forms of chess. The casual players were talking about one thing, and meaning quite another when they debated whether to use a clock, and exchanged farewells at the conclusion of their games. Tournament players speak with their play alone according to the strict rules of competitive chess, but when they do so they are implicitly voicing the potential disruptions of that regime, and aligning themselves with many alternative directions of play that may emerge in their training for a tournament game, or in the postmortem that succeeds it. Correspondence players can, and in the nature of their play, often do defer their coded transactions to the interruptions of present circumstance or to the archaeology of closet dibris. Computers are programmed to speak the play in electronic signals, but they cannot sustain a linear discourse without the complicity of many other figurations that have little directly to do with the game. Even skittles players, the most immediately focussed of all chess participants, interweave their games with a barrage of words that make the game something other than that which is prescribed by its constitution. Time and space, in all five examples, are elements of the “babel” of play that render its meanings untranslatable in the most direct sense and thereby interrupt its covenants.

Second, the structures of play surround it and seem to fix its situation in deterministic, readily discernable contexts. But casual players may contest the structure of a game with clocks, and thereby resist unbeknownst to themselves the straightforward exchange of polite formulae of disengagement. Tournament players inhabit a highly structured event, though they may at any moment bring into question its institutionalization by disputes that call to account and sometimes undermine the authority of the director. Although tournament play is symbolically rationalized in numerous ways, those claims on structural authority are always subject to equivocation about the best play, and indeed the point of tournament chess is to overwhelm a particular positional structure by divergence toward unanticipated movements in an opening, middlegame, or endgame. Correspondent play uses writing as a resource rather than as merely a constraint of the relationship between players, and points to a reevaluation of structure (beginning on move 11, or consulting the Fischer article) as a way to play upon intimacy and to vanquish distance (the obtruding bridge player). Computers are physically structured to maintain the play in sequence and along acceptable lines, but they can be deprogrammed, as it were, by random noise, by circumvention of the “codes of conduct” of their authorizing agencies, or by an agreement of the parties to arrangements that were not originally contemplated. Skittles, finally, foreordains its deviance from the structure of the tournament or even of casual play, and encourages a catastrophic occlusion of time, touching, speaking, and rational calculation, all of which are apparently inherent in other forms of competitive chess.

Third, the players of chess work not only within the limits of the game, but beyond to express their broader roles which intrude upon its play. In casual play, what the players experience and intend is sometimes concealed and oftimes contradictory, dependent in part upon identities which arise from a position in their life cycle or an attitude toward the fast tempo of modern life. Tournament play expressly segregates authors of the game from its spectators, but relieves that distinction in the postmortem. More importantly, serious competition requires an ongoing relationship of the players with their predecessors and successors, trainers and seconds, and in addition defers their responsibility for the conditions of tournament play to a tournament director who represents an absent player, the organization that attempts, with rather uneven success, to guarantee that its conditions are acknowledged. Correspondents routinely admit their subservience to texts of play that are only tangential to the situation of their games conceived in terms of personal presence, and the literate circumstances of correspondent play divert attention from personal presence to authorizations that are potentially far removed in time and space from the material basis of their transactions, the post card or letter that bears its moves (is the “guy” who wants to play bridge not a player in my chess game with my friend, and if not, how is that to be demonstrated?). Computers confess a range of players whose own biochemistries may be entirely alien from one another, and whose intent or desire is, to say the least, highly problematic. Finally, skittles is an enterprise where players sometimes collude, often diverge, to create the semblance of a game. The relaxation of normal constraints upon authorization in skittles paradoxically invokes new and diffused authorities, the clock, the kibitzers, the sauvage style that skittles players tend to adopt as an intimation of their personal identities.

I must now consider whether a deconstructive approach to the study of play, as I have here characterized it, is sufficiently promising to continue work along similar lines. In a sense, there is very little involved in deconstruction that could not be accomplished by careful examination of traditional ethnographic assumptions (Aycock, 1992[b]) about the play, the players, and the role of the observer. Yet one important value of a deconstructive approach is to suggest that a figure-ground reversal of what is normally meant by the ludic and the serious may refocus attention on problems that could otherwise be taken for granted. In particular, it becomes possible to reformulate the instances of play that I have described as specific contexts of a more global problem of authority in Western cultures, ludic, scholarly or otherwise.

For example, familiar symbolic oppositions such as “culture-nature” and “order-disorder” take on an entirely new significance if the search for what is “real” is, deja aussi, a point of departure for analysis, because the fort-da of the human sciences is then shown to be at least as uncertain as human experience itself. We should not, from this perspective, be complaisant about adopting a deconstructive approach, but we should be aware that it offers a continuing challenge to more conventional notions. Thus competitive chess is for many in Western culture the ideal image of a “factory of reason” (Aycock, 1992[a]), which may lead a deconstructive analysis to reflect in general upon reason and its limitations.

Again, anthropology has invested itself with the Western conception of human knowledge as a progressive narrative that begins, continues, and flourishes interminably in Time (cf. Fabius, 1983). Chess shares with anthropology this sense of the limitless expansion of knowledge, an endeavor made “real” by the experimental attitude of serious competitors towards lines of play that are to be tested, discovered, renewed or discarded, and incorporated into volumes of games studied by each player as part of an autobiography of style (Aycock, n.d.[a]). Yet deconstruction causes us to hesitate in our easy affirmation of this progress. Like Foucault, Derrida works against the comfortable presumption of knowing the play–whether as players or as ethnographers–by relating it also to epistemological problems that are riddled through and through by contending gestures of empowerment and alienation.⁴ If you think about the “King’s Indian” not just as the name of a specific text or pattern of play, but as an image of authority, it suddenly becomes quite clear why a deconstructive approach might be provocative.

Finally, there is an aesthetic as well as an ethical dimension involved in deconstruction which might be generalized for those who labor in the human sciences, or indeed in any Lebenswelt where diverse values have become relevant (and where have they not?). There is, obviously, an important ontological debate evoked here, the familiar “is/ought/seems” trichotomy that Derrida particularly seeks to address. Thus, a deconstructive approach conflates the author, reader, and text in rewarding ways: who would have thought, before Derrida, that the variants of chess were meaningful not just as immediate transactions of a game, but also as forces of a cosmic kind of play interwoven by differance amongst a texture of the Western search for authorial presence? Feeling, knowing, and desiring the play, in this sense, cannot be held apart from one another, nor should they be: games are “world-building activities” (Goffman, 1961: 27).

The possibility of a coherent deconstructive approach is, of course, something of a contradiction in terms: differance lends itself most readily to pluralism, not singularity. In the very effort to write of a peripatetic style such as Derrida’s in the linear form of an essay, one despairs of closure. It seems to me, nevertheless, that if the conceptual issue is radically undecidable, the practical problem is not. All that I intend here is to suggest that at this moment, for these instances of play, I can offer a simplistic account of Derrida’s thought that seems to go beyond ordinary limits of ethnographic analysis.

Thus even the five examples of play related above afford a venue for more sophisticated study. An important direction for further analysis would deconstruct not only the immediate situations of play, but also, more comprehensively, their institutionalization. Another problem that I have glossed over in my analysis is that of mass-mediated play, which deserves a deconstruction all its own. Yet a third issue not dealt with in this essay is the relationships of play to engenderment, race, nationalism, commodification, and the post-colonial milieu of “carceral” society. Fourth, the contrivance of playful biographies is implied, but not directly brought to the fore in my arguments. Finally, a careful tracing of the economies of pleasure associated with these four issues would invoke more directly the Freudian fort-da transaction as it has actually been deployed by Derrida in his work. All of these represent the “unthought” in my discussion, and thereby implicate as yet unspoken, and more thoroughgoing deconstructions.

I have tried to show here that when we take the ludic as ludicrous, we have in some ways revealed a credential for analysis rather than only a means, finally, to discredit it. Derrida, typically, steals my last words and makes a game of them: If the alterity of the other is posed, that is only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the “constituted object” or of the “informed product” invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be “posed.” Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded…differance (1981: 95-96).

Notes

1. The extent to which deconstructive approaches have become entrenched in the human sciences is suggested by this lengthy list of subject headings, taken from a major North American research library, in which “deconstruction” appears as a key word: architecture, education, feminism, film criticism, history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, painting, philosophy, social psychology, sociology, and theology. Surprisingly, anthropology is not included, though one need not distort the “writing culture” debate (e.g., Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus, 1986) too much to perceive a deconstructive intent.

2. Think of Derrida in this sense, perhaps, as a master of Japanese “Go” (more evocatively in Chinese, “wei-ch’i,” the “surrounding” game): finely shaped colored stones are moved, insouciantly as if of their own accord, to circumscribe paths of influence that command the empty board without filling it (Korschelt, 1965: ch. III).

3. See also Hayles (1990: ch. 7), who perceives a modern alliance of deconstructive trends with another ultra- empiricism, chaos theory.

4. Like Swift’s Laputans who carry with them on their backs a bundle of objects so that they can converse by holding forth one after another with no possibility of misconstruction (Swift, 1945: 170-171), Derrida burlesques the comfortable assumption that we know what we are talking about at a particular moment. To extend the satiric image, I suggest that Derrida occupies the role of the servant who walks just behind one of Laputa’s meticulous philosophes with a bladder affixed to a stick, flapping it against his sense organs from time to time to return his attention to the dangers and resources of the “real” world (Swift, 1945: 144-145).

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September 25, 2013
Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance
Wendy Wahl

Department of English
University of Vermont
w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet

High technology networks make possible the deluge of texts surrounding us. We swim in the flow of information, and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations and representations. High technology has changed the way capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format of this journal. A new relationship between bodies and technologies is, seemingly, unprecedented in modern capitalism. Donna Haraway, in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), writes of a post-natural present in which “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are frighteningly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (152).

After all, the human capacity to generate or make sense of information has been surpassed by computers, and challenged by the deluge of texts (literal, aural, visual) that surround us. Baudrillard’s response to this deluge is triggered by a quick spin of the radio dial: “I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard” (132).

Theorists from many disciplines are engaged in the process of articulating the function and effects of high technology; many have argued, as Baudrillard has, that the human condition has been transformed by the encounter with the unique and unprecedented power of high technology. Assuming a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology is dangerous; this assumption obviates important precedents that may help us to strategize some resistance to a “gradual and willing accommodation of the machine” (Gibson, 203). Freud’s clinical methods, and his construction of the relationship between patient and therapist, for example, are strikingly similar to the current encounter between bodies and technologies. A look at Freud’s account of his treatment of Dora makes obvious this decidedly low-tech version of a “deluge of texts,” and shows the way in which this therapeutic construct incorporated resistance. What are the possibilities for resistance to this new deluge? This question has provided the impetus for a vital, and absolutely necessary, discussion of strategies. As I will show in this essay, these responses are symptomatic of the failure of resistance to technologies of the early twentieth century. Strategies of resistance are often incorporated into systems, strengthening that which is being resisted. Juliet Mitchell has described the function of this resisting space: “[Resistance] is set up precisely as its own ludic space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic alternative. It is not that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within terms of that law” (Mitchell, 1982).

I hope to provide some strategies, and historical warnings, that may help one actualize and resist power at a time when the possibility of doing so seems dismal. Haraway reminds us, with hope and pragmatism, that “we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people” (165). This “historical system” includes the interaction between bodies and technologies and the implications of these encounters, which are referred to in this essay as “cyborg politics.” The origin of cyborg politics doesn’t begin with the late twentieth century, however, but with the broad tradition of positing scientific and technical solutions to free humans from pain and to solve problems of the human condition, particularly problems that originate not with the machine or technology, but within the body. Foucault has given us a description of the emergence of bio-technical power in the seventeenth century; his description of this power maps onto our twentieth- century concern with bodies and technologies:

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology.(206)

Within an early twentieth-century Foucaultian formation, Freud emerges as the mental technologist and industrialist, producing the truth of mind and body within the critical tools of psychotherapy. Freud constructed a method whereby the mind, largely abandoned to the world of religious therapies, was treated by empiricists, and built upon the work of the psychiatrists of the French school: Charcot, Georget, and Pinel (Goldstein, 134-166).

Psychotherapy was a new disciplinary technology, unique unto science because it treated the mind as a machine (a method previously visited upon the body). Freud ushered in the Western twentieth century with this industrialist approach to the soul, fracturing the inner self in two: “conscious” and “unconscious” drives. Within this new science, and in Freud’s clinical approach, the Cartesian dualism of mind/body breaks down: “mind” has been divided into conscious/unconscious. As a result, “mind” is no longer one unitary term that can correspond to its binary opposite, “body.” This disruption could be promising: mind/body corresponded to male/female, and it would seem that this pair of binary oppositions would no longer be able to function with respect to gender. Yet this deconstruction of oppositional pairs serves to strengthen others, and raises some thorny questions for Freud’s treatment of Dora.

What, then, becomes of the relationship between mind and body within the Freudian construct? If there is a disruption of the mind/body dualism when the “mind” has been fractured into two distinct entities, how does this affect clinical practice? Freud changed these pairs or, at the least, expanded the way they function: the patient’s experiences, as described by the patient, were informed by the unconscious mind in a way that was not evident to the patient. In deconstructing the mind/body separation, Freud constructed a new oppositional pair in its place, that of the conscious/unconscious. The relations between the conscious mind and body were obvious to the patient, but those were less important for fixing the machine than was the relationship between the unconscious mind and body. If this relationship was the arbiter of the body’s functions and of the conscious mind, how could one go about fixing it? One couldn’t; a therapist had to be called in for repair. The “unconscious” drives were given over to the interpretation of the therapist. In treating the machinery of the mind, Freudian therapists were given the interpretive duty of constructing desire and representing the inner self. Philip Reiff, in his introduction to Dora, captures the perfect circularity of Freudian psychotherapy as enacted in clinical practice:

By presuming the patient incapable of an impartial judgment, the therapist is empowered to disregard the patient's denials.... A patient says: "You may think I meant to say something insulting but I've no such intention. . . . From this the analyst may conclude, "So, she does mean to say something insulting...."(15)

It is also evident in Reiff’s description that resistance against a therapist is incorporated, and neutralized, within therapy. The Freudian therapeutic situation is a cybernetic network in which resistance functions to support the system. It is in this clinical practice that any potential disruption of dualisms promised in Freudian theory were recuperated. That Freud has constructed an impenetrable defense for the therapist is obvious. In retrospect, it’s easy (albeit reductive) to view Freud’s incorporation of resistance into therapies (as a prerequisite for therapy) as a frustrated empiricist’s attempt to fit the mind into the structure of empiricism.

The patient/therapist opposition was constructed in place of the mind/body opposition, and re-enacted as male/female. Perhaps Freud’s construction of an impenetrable position for therapists, and an utterly penetrated position for patients, created a backlash against the material moment when male/female became disengaged from mind/body. At any rate, the context is utterly changed for a patient of psychotherapy. The beginnings of an answer to the question of gender difference in the therapist/patient relationship lie in asking the following question: Who is treated and why? Men were rarely caught on the “penetrated” side of the therapist/patient relationship. Although male/female no longer enacted mind/body, another structure excluded men from needing this interpretive therapy: the impetus for treatment is resistance on the part of the patient. Philip Reiff characterized the category of patient in his introduction to Dora when he wrote that, “the neurotic makes too many rejections” (16).

Although men were no longer excluded from the category of patient, having unconscious drives themselves, the prerequisite for treatment was often hysteria or neurosis. Hysteria was a term used to categorize actions seen, historically, as being particular to women, although Freud and the Paris school’s characterization of hysteria did not expressly exclude men. Jan Goldstein has documented that hysteria was flirted with by most of the nineteenth-century French male novelists, and she argues that the literary interest in such a disease “included as one of its components a fascination with this ‘otherness,’ a tendency to recognize in it aspects of the self and to enlist it in the service of self-discovery” (138). Goldstein’s theory would also explain why Flaubert never entered into therapy, despite identifying himself as an hysteric. In his fiction, Flaubert wrote of hysteria only through female characters, as did all the other French novelists mentioned in Goldstein’s essay.

Dora’s treatment, after all, was not in the interest of self-discovery, but in the interest of her father. Dora had been brought to Freud in an effort to get Dora to accept her father’s affair with Frau K. The father also needed Dora to respond to Herr K so that he could get his game of partner-swapping to continue to go smoothly: he attempts to swap “partners” with Herr K by offering his daughter, Dora, to Herr K, in exchange for Herr K’s wife. This play of substitutions, begun by the father, certainly asks to be seen as a machine. This is a desiring machine in which substitutions can be made: there are slots to be filled (so to speak) that eclipse an individual desire to be in that position. This is particularly true in Dora’s case. When Dora was put into treatment, Freud writes that “[s]he objected to being pulled into the game entirely, at the same time she was fascinated by it and wanted to play” (34). By the time treatment had begun, Dora was suicidal, and had been resisting Herr K.’s advances, the first of which occurred when she was 14 years old. “He suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust and tore herself free from the man . . .” (43).

Freud writes that “the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical” because she did not have the “genital sensation which would have certainly been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” (44). Dora’s resistance to Herr K.’s advances provided Freud with the cornerstone of the psychology of the neuroses: reversal of affect. Without Dora’s bodily resistance to Herr K., Freud would never have been able to treat her in the first place. Without Dora’s repeated verbal resistance to Freud’s suppositions, he couldn’t have written in the “repressed” desires for nearly everyone in the “game.”

Interestingly enough, in his interpretation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Freud didn’t perceive any indications that this approach could inhibit treatment by negating the patient’s interpretations. Freud’s textual analysis of the Memoirs, titled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”, ignores the obvious: Schreber is able to treat himself via his own process of writing and interpretation.

Schreber writes of his “gratitude” toward Professor Fleschig, his doctor, for helping Scheber to recover, but in a manner “so hedged with doubts and reservations that it subverts the expressed appreciation” (Chabot, 16). Schreber doesn’t give credit for his recovery to the doctor who was in charge of his treatment, and blames this on the doctor’s inability to recognize his patient as “a human being of high intellect, of uncommon keenness of understanding and acute powers of observation” Memoirs, 62). What does this tell us about Freud’s understanding of Schreber’s treatment? Freud didn’t extrapolate Schreber’s therapeutic process to his own clinical method; he ignores that Schreber’s experience points to the healing power of a patient’s interpretation. The patient’s story, moreover, must not be systematically negated, as in the treatment of Dora.

C. Barry Chabot examines these texts in his book Freud on Schreber, and writes that “Schreber’s understanding of his experiences . . . evolved with his progress on the manuscript: the act of writing was for him an act of revision”; “[m]oreover, writing his memoirs, an act that . . . played a role in [Schreber’s] eventual release from Sonnenstein, was itself restorative” (7). Schreber produced texts, as Freud did. Schreber’s ability to heal himself is evinced in the act of writing his Memoirs: Schreber’s “revision” and interpretation of his own experience is the therapeutic process by which he heals himself. Chabot makes a compelling case for the clinical and literary interpretations as being intertwined, such is “the nature of the interpretive process, be it literary or clinical” (11).

It can be argued that Dora does produce her own narrative, but this is used by and subsumed within Freud’s interpretation in clinical practice and, more permanently, within Freud’s written texts. Schreber’s interpretation existed outside of the formal or institutional therapy he received. Freud’s textual analysis of Schreber’s memoirs was just that: a textual exploration outside of clinical contact with the patient; as such, Freud’s analysis never affected Schreber. In Freudian clinical practice, the interpretive process that Schreber used to successfully treat himself would have been used against him by the therapist. Reiff writes that Freud “speaks of using facts against the patient and reports, with some show of triumph (this is no mean adversary), how he overwhelmed Dora with interpretations, pounding away at her argument, until Dora…’disputed the facts no longer.’ Yet these facts were none of them visible; they were all of them of the highest order, taking their life from the precise truth of Freud’s multiple analytic thrusts into her unconscious” (16).

The act of interpretation was the province of the therapist alone, and was used to engulf the patient with “indisputable facts.” These critics continue to argue for a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology, yet the “invisible facts” referred to by Reiff could easily characterize Baudrillard’s vision of the late twentieth century: “In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extension of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies” (132). This “forced injection” into Baudrillard’s as-yet- unpenetrated interior mimics Freud’s act of “pounding away” at Dora with his interpretations. Baudrillard’s profile of the new subject, assaulted on all sides by “those who want to make themselves heard” doubles for the Freudian patient: “He is now a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” (133). What Baudrillard can’t accept, obviously, are the multiple “thrusts” into his neutral terminal. Using theory to play with the loss of his private past and with the disruption of his position as subject, Baudrillard recalls Flaubert’s flirtation with hysteria.

Fredric Jameson’s response to the problem of subjectivity also evokes the nineteenth-century French novelists; he writes that “only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ which is our capacity to organize and live time historically” (523). In arguing for some sort of analytical prowess of which we are not capable at the moment, Jameson is putting the hope for a solution in a neo-Freudian construct: if we could only think ourselves away from the matrix, it would no longer penetrate us. This may be possible for Jameson or Baudrillard, but what about Haraway or myself? I mistrust that totalizing logic which would also exclude me; as a woman, I am linked by the system of significations to that repressed “other” against which this new “narrative dislocation” is posed. Baudrillard’s nostalgia for a private past, and Jameson’s characterization of the current condition as a sickness (needing analytic therapy), exclude the object, locating interiority once again within their experience.

The pentrator/penetrated relationship is gender-neutral in Freudian theory but enacted as male/female in clinical praxis; will Baudrillard’s theoretical loss of subjectivity be recuperated in the practice of technology? The reaction to no longer being excluded from the category of patient or hysteric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century parallels the reaction of men in this late twentieth century who are no longer excluded from the category of “penetrated.” This reaction is utterly significant: in a backlash against inclusion (signaled by the paranoid reactions of Flaubert, Jameson, and Baudrillard), the function of Freudian therapy Dora) and technologies of the bodies Neuromancer) is to keep gender opposition active. It’s a fascinating pattern: Baudrillard’s paranoid reaction to being a receiving terminal, penetrated continually by the hegemony, should be a warning for cyborgs seeking to strategize resistance to high technology. Even more symptomatically, Paul Virilio has declared: “We must take hold of the enigma of technology and lay her on the table” Pure War).

It’s dangerous to argue for a material uniqueness in the function of the panopticon, precisely because it prevents us from recognizing this continuing pattern of discipline and resistance, especially the way in which certain types of resistance are codifed to support the disciplinary society. Is there any space in a postnatural future for a female subject with interiority? Is it possible for a reading to occur which locates women in the position of subject? Although the human capacity to generate or make sense of facts and information has already been surpassed by computers, resistance to the matrix may work for Baudrillard. In William Gibson’s cyberpunk manifesto, Neuromancer, the (bachelor) machine incorporates high technology differently than the body does. The technologies of which Baudrillard speaks have been seamlessly incorporated to liberate men from their bodies and, as such, the mind/body paradigm is reclaimed as male/female with chilling results. That Neuromancer was intended as an historicized future is evident in Gibson’s description of the novel: What’s most important to me is that it’s about the present. It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (Rosenthal, 85).

Gibson’s work, based as it is on the present encounter with bodies and technologies, should inform any speculation or theoretical vision of our future. Pam Rosenthal describes Molly and Case, the heroes of the novel, as part of “an elite cult” who feel “an existential righteousness about diving into the matrix, braving its dangers, getting as close as possible to the shape of algorithms that come about as close to truth as anything does in the bad new future” (90). The access to information, and the surveillance tactics used to gather it, rests with multinational corporations (zaibatsus) in Neuromancer. Elite status is signaled by access to information in the hierarchy of the matrix in Neuromancer: getting in to the cyberspace of invisible facts equals power, and “not to be able to jack in [to the matrix] is impotence” (Rosenthal, 85,102). Molly’s experience of the matrix is fundamentally different from Case’s; the difference is informed by constructions of gender, although their resistance to the matrix (and zaibatsus) makes both of them more malleable and exploitable by the companies that control the matrix.

Neither Case nor Molly want the life of the “little people,” or, as Case puts it “company job, company hymn, company funeral” (37). Case makes his living as an information cowboy, able to jack in to the matrix, to fix his addiction to cyberspace/access/information. In this way, the mind/body separation is encoded via technologies of the body, and it’s furthered by the structure of the novel: whenever Case jacks in to the matrix, Gibson begins a new paragraph, highlighting the separation between the body and the mind/matrix. Case doesn’t seem to have a body unless he is inside Molly, either in sex or in sim/stim. In the first case, Case’s visual description recalls images of the matrix and, in the second, he perceives Molly’s bodily sensations electronically. Molly is the body. Case can jack out at any time.

Molly gets into cyberspace, too, but only so that her body can be programmed during “puppet time.” Freud’s dictum that “there is no ‘No’ in the unconscious” is literally true for Molly in this situation. She paid for the reconstructive surgeries by working as a “meat puppet,” a high-tech form of prostitution in which a receptor chip is implanted in a woman’s brain. The chip provides reception for the “house software,” chosen by the customer. So what happens when Molly is with a customer? Her cyberspace is blank and her access to the matrix doesn’t disconnect her body from other bodies (witness Case). The programs used on Molly were progressively violent after the house found out she was using the money she made to become a ninja, to construct a body capable of being a killing machine. The function of the software to direct Molly’s actions mimics, terrifyingly, Freud’s version of the unconscious:

You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? . . . once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for . . . . [t]hen it started getting strange . . . . The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time . . . so the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain....you can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space.(148-9)

When Molly comes up out of puppet time, her reaction to the scene for which she had been programmed is violent opposition. Although her ability to react to the scene is an accident of faulty wiring, it’s a direct refutation of the programming, the unconscious, and the technical separation of mind and body:

I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. Dead. So I guess I gave the Senator what he wanted...the house put a contract on me and I had to hide for a little while.(148-149)

Freud could have learned a few lessons from Molly about whether the conscious mind can say “No” to the unconscious drives. It is, however, an after-the-fact refusal; when Molly is unconscious (to a degree Freud could never have imagined), she seems totally incapable of resisting; it is the dysfunction of high technology that allows Molly’s “No.” The circle has been completed with techobodies, however: the access to the mind via science is complete, the comfortable line between human and machine has been erased, and the human therapist is no longer needed to interpret the signals. It’s a direct line.

The Freudian therapeutic paradigm can be mapped onto our relationship with (and struggle over) technologies of the body. The array of technologies used to construct bodies in Neuromancer seem fantastical, even technically impossible, yet the rush to develop technologies with which we can construct our bodies will provide funding and justification for their development, regardless of the health risks involved. At a recent Senate hearing over the safety of silicon breast implants (which have been known to break down once inside the body and produce disabling disease of the immune system), it was presumed that, despite these proven health risks, implants should be available for “cosmetic” uses. However, after testimony from “scores of women” who testified to their need “because of what they said they believed were their own deformities,” many panel members said they were “convinced that no line could be drawn and no group of women could be defined for exclusion” (Hilts). The cultural question of why “some women [are] terrified of not having the option to reconstruct their breasts” was never raised.

The solution to the problem posed presented to the F.D.A.? Surveillance. It was agreed that every woman who had undergone or wished to have this operation be “kept track of” in a database, set up by the companies which manufacture the implants. One can’t help but wonder if these records, and the access to them, might be used later to deprive the women of the protection allegedly promised to them–perhaps in manufacturing a “safe” reading of the implants or, alternatively, to prevent these women from taking action (legal or otherwise) against the companies.

The FDA case is simply one example of the need for some sort of resistance to this future. The case has some disturbing implications for Rosenthal’s declaration that “the matrix is too complex and fragmented to offer itself to any one unifying gaze–a notion that does not seem entirely reassuring to me” (95). This sentiment is problematic when we look back at Dora, whose unifying gaze had the opposite effect. Reiff acknowledges that Freud “had to admire Dora’s insight into this intricate and sad affair…Yet he fought back with his own intricate insights into the tangle of her motives…. Freud was to call this tenacious and most promising of all forms of resistance ‘intellectual opposition’” (17). Compare this statement with the following description: “Knowledge . . . is utterly immanent and implicated in the forms and technologies of instrumental power, and readable only to the extent that we have the power to decode it. How we are known and what we know constitute a matrix of unjustly distributed power . . .” (99).

This is Rosenthal, reading the matrix, yet it’s an uncanny characterization of the power dynamic that exists between Dora and Freud. But what about the present? In the wake of a reevaluation and, oftentimes, refutation of Freudian theory, wasn’t Freud’s clinical method also revised? Not completely; this clinical process is still used to manufacture belief and consent. In the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine (January/February 1993), Ethan Watters reports on psychotherapists who help their patients recover memories of physical and sexual abuse. The search for these memories, in theory, seems auspicious at a time when there is growing evidence that “childhood abuse is widespread” and underreported. Working against Freud’s seduction theory, based on the assumption that patients’ memories of abuse were fantasy (29), some therapists have taken the opposite tack, bringing past abuse to light by examining their patients’ subconscious memories. In theory, this hopeful disruption of Freud’s seduction theory promises to validate and treat the pain of childhood abuse.

This theoretical promise can be destroyed within a clinical method that recalls Freud’s relationship with Dora. Using hypnosis, suggestion, trance writing, and dream analysis, therapists “search [the patient’s] subconscious” for signs of abuse (26). Watters found that many of these memories were false, but are made real for the patient. The case of Kathy Gondolf reveals the process by which her beliefs were used against her to construct the version of her past held by the therapist. When Gondolf sought help for chronic bulimia, she told her therapist that she had been abused by an uncle during childhood. Watters reports that “[l]ater, during individual and group therapy, [the therapist] used dream analysis and trance writing to search her unconscious for signs that other members of the family had abused her as well” (26). Gondolf’s account of this therapy is a poignant reminder of the power dynamic in the relationship between therapist and patient:

You're sitting there and someone has taken everything you thought you know about your family--the people you love--and twisted it. They tell you that everything you knew for twenty, thirty, forty years was wrong.... It was devastating for me. Everything is so simple in the world of repressed memories, . . . if you claim that your parents cared for you, then they [psychotherapists] say that you are in denial. Anything you say can be misinterpreted. There is no way around it. This is costing people their lives.(26)

The women in her therapy group all claimed to have repressed memories of abuse as children, and one woman killed herself after “discovering” these memories. Gondolf, like Molly in Neuromancer, was released from this regimen when the supporting apparatus malfunctioned: her insurance ran out. Gondolf began to “examine repressed memories on her own” and, like Schreber, found treatment in being her own interpreter. She “became convinced” that “her therapist had coerced her and the other members of her group into imagining memories of abuse” (26). Forced out of the system, Gondolf relied on her own conscious memories to construct the truth of her history.

Is it possible to be “forced out” of the relationship between bodies and technologies? We cannot choose to end this relationship, as Dora chose to end her relationship with Freud. Nor can we escape the deluge of electronic texts. If any resistance to the “gradual accommodation of the machine” is possible, it will depend upon our reaction to the machine, and a continual realization that the machine is a human creation, a social creation. In late twentieth-century capitalism, has anything else assumed the role of therapist for us? In the struggle over representation, the media is given the power of interpretation; just as anything that is “conscious” knowledge (articulated by the patient) could not, by definition, belong to the “unconscious,” we are re-enacting the role of interpreter of reality with media. In doing so, we lend strength to the role of media by centering resistance within that arena.

In resisting hegemony via the struggle for representation, we may re-enact the binary opposition of representer/represented (and, on the same axis, therapist/patient); this resistance focuses on and strengthens the textual/media arena in which our actions are interpreted and represented. The exclusivity and limitations of television have been disrupted in the strategies of ACT-UP. The organization has found a way to use televised media without having financial access to them (staging protests during broadcasts as audience members, for instance).

We need to reconsider the issues of media(s) and representations with respect to the ways we define ourselves. Technology, having been taken into the body and reproduced (the male gaze being but one example), poses some immediate challenges. Neuromancer is the circle completed: technologies of the body connect the flesh to the computer. The issues raised here with respect to the post-natural future, and the questions of resistance, are urgent. Remembering the patterns of discipline and resistance, and the space to which the other has been assigned, might be a first step in helping us to describe and resist the “slow apocalypse” of technology (Rosenthal, 96).

It’s not simply that the body must claim its resistance against the machine; when recuperation is instantaneous one can resist only though finding new ways of resistance that don’t operate through negation, or marginalization. Resistance that succeeds is a testament to the interpretive power of individuals to make sense of their lives. I hope to have presented some warnings and historical precedents that may help one actualize and resist power in a time when our ability to do so is matched against and challenged by our encounter with technology.

Note

1. I have chosen to cite from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984), because selections from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [translated by Alan Sheridan, Panthon Books (Random House) 1977] are brilliantly excerpted in the section titled “Discipline and Sciences of the Individual” (pp. 169-239). The excerpts describe many of the terms and issues used in my paper, particularly the formulation of the term “discipline” and the uses of “the examination” to further surveillance and power.

Works Cited
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- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books (Random House), 1977.
- Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Introduction by Philip Reiff. Collier Books, New York: <1963.
- —. “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Volume XII:9. London: Hogarth, 1958-1974.
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- Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
- Hilts, Philip, “F.D.A. Panel Cites Need to Keep Breast Implants.” The New York Times, November 15th, 1991, p. A8.
- Jameson, Fredric. “Nostalgia for the Present.” The South Atlantic Quarterly v. 88, no. 2 (1989): 521-32.
- Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
- —. “Femininity, Narrative, and Psychoanalysis.” Women, The Longest Revolution. Virago Press, Ltd., 1982.
- Rabinow, Paul, Ed. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books: New York, 1984.
- Rosenthal, Pam. “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberspace, and Cyberpunk.” Socialist Review (Spring 1991): 87-103.
- Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. London: Dawson, 1955.
September 25, 2013
The Four Luxembourgs Civitas Peregrina (From the diary of a traveler Pseudo-Vladislav Todorov)

Vladislav Todorov

Department of Slavic Languages
University of Pennsylvania
vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu

The explorers of Luxembourg usually designate its four stages according to the four possible etymologies of its name. The first three: the Luminous one, the Dissipated one, and the Twisted one stem from the Latin: Lux, Luxuriosus, Luxus. The fourth is usually derived from the name of the legendary revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg. The present exploration shall adhere to these interpretations of the name thus established through tradition.

I. The Luminous City of Luxembourg

Some travelers also refer to it as the City of the Sun. This city encloses an enormous hill. Seen from afar its architecture resembles a gigantic mesh that has caught and subdued the upheaval of the mighty masses of earth which had inflated with gas and lava the earth’s crust and left behind the mountains as monuments of their provocative erections towards the sun. The city is segmented into seven circles or rings that grip the hill in concentric circles towards the top. It resembles a formidable crinoline that repulses any rascal who might crawl up the hill. A grandiose temple is erected at that very top. To be precise the temple itself is the top. It springs up into an extraordinarily large dome on the top of which rises another smaller dome in whose center gapes an orifice that looks straight on the middle of the temple where the altar is placed. The dome is painted inside with the map of the celestial constellations, as if the sky repeats itself only lower down and smaller than itself. It has stooped down to the temple like a mystical constellation, a cipher that locks the meaning of the earthly events. The orifice is the threshold at which the maximal cosmic space is turned over into the minimal symbolic space of the temple. It is precisely through this orifice that the cosmos discharges its own superfluity for it to descend as the sacred order of the temple. Thus, the temple resembles a Cyclops’s skull turned towards the sun which has scorched his eye in order to illumine him from inside. In this sense the illuminated-the internally luminous city is blind. Thus built the temple manifests through its figure the original sin of man towards the sun. Because before he stood on two legs, before his forehead bulged out like a church dome, before his eyes turned radiant, before he became sunlike man was turning up towards the sky and its luminaries, his scarlet and cracked like an enormous sore ape’s ass. It is precisely this original anal openness of man towards the sun that some travelers saw manifested in the architecture of the shrines. The radiant–the seeing eye, the organ of light that bathes in rays will always drag after itself like a tin can the embarrassment of being once an anus. Thus the central aperture of the temple, respectively the city expresses the ambivalent openness of the citizens towards their ruler–the Sun. Anyone entering the temple seems to cave in an ass through whose anus the Sun down-casts its stern and all-pervasive gaze. It is the source of the total illumination of the city. In general, the whole city is arranged in such a way that it culminates spatially in the aperture. Thus the whole city bathes its guilt in light. That is an all-encompassing luminescence in which you cannot help but wallow. This is the city of the total vertical transparency emanated by its center (the aperture). An all-pervasive solar gaze descends downwards as a guillotine. Man who stares against this gaze glows completely illumined from inside. Man stops casting a shadow. The city corpus is in fact the terrestrial figure of this super-terrestrial gaze. The very body and structure of the city are the terrestrial incorporation of the downward gaze of a super-power. The city itself represents the total exteriorization and exhibition of life before this gaze. The descending transparency of the world manifests the epiphany of the Eye of the supreme supervisor–the Sun. Any kind of opaque negativity is usurped by the center. It is located there beyond and above the aperture of the city. Inside and below the aperture all is positive-transparent. The people are neighbors for they are totally illumined and all-pervaded by the self-same luminous substance. They bathe in this totality and thus they prosper. Completely transparent and weightless they seem to lack bodies with tunnels flatulent with heavy slops. This is the city of the completely erect and utterly projected outwards and upwards man who baths in the descending divine gaze. The emblem of the city is the Obelisk. Its erecting corpus is the spiritual gaze enacted in the matter of the world. The Eye-Sun as phallus.

II. The Dissipated City of Luxembourg

This city rises not completely built and not completely demolished. A grand bust happened and the crowd bustles around the city somewhat rowdy, somewhat corrupted, somewhat raped, somewhat exhausted, promiscuously fornicating, having once transformed plummets into maces. The demolished city gapes like a cold volcano resounding from time to time with damnation. Once the people had grown defiant and started erecting a Tower City in order to reach God. They tried to look upwards and see God. They wanted to erect the vertical (upwards) transparency of the world. It was an attempt to establish surveillance over God. To catch God on the spot. So God got furious and segmented, that is, demolished their language. He dismantled it into a multitude of mutually impenetrable languages. A total incongruity set in that demolished the corpus of the city. The demolished Tower City stands for the demolished human look advancing upwards to make transparent the world space. The fragmentation of language manifested an opaqueness that descended from above. This figured the absence of God, i.e. the absence of a center in the space of the City that could fully absorb all negativity in itself and thus make the people neighbors. God abandoned the Babel. The God-forsaken city developed an exclusively horizontal vision and strategy. The neighbor turned stranger. The space between people hollowed out. When God desolated the city He, so to speak distributed the negativity among the citizens. He turned everyone into something partial, strange, alien, something “other” than everyone else, into a capsulated particularity. The only possible interest became the horizontal interest between the incompatible particularities. Everyone lusted after power, strove to achieve self-made and self-fashioned Deiformity. The space of the city became a space of internecine strife. Thus the negativity discarded by God burst forth and desolation occurred.

Each desired the other in order to possess and abuse him, to subdue and mastered him. The space between thee and me was reduced. The city life demonstrates the desolation as a common condition. The corpus of the city that had started threatening erection towards God was castrated and went limp as a gut–the cesspit. God forced man to bend over. He twisted his bold gaze downwards. Thus God reinstated man’s guilty position. Bent over in guilt man met the eyes of his fellowman and desired him. He desired his neighbor. The Cross became the emblem of the castrated city corpus. The broken up obelisk.

III. The Twisted City of Luxembourg

Before they lived in their city, the people were engulfed in the intestines of a Bull. The Bull was God. And then one day the Hero appeared and led them out by killing the Bull-God. Before this happened, the world was split in two chambers, into physical and allegorical space. The allegorical space was the Labyrinth, whose tunnels always led towards the mouth of the Bull. The physical space was the Bull himself. The Labyrinth allegorically represented and exhibited the Bull’s intestines. The mouth of the Bull was the aperture which connected the two spaces. Exactly there “the one” began and ended in “the other”.

The mouth was the threshold. The world was set up as a two-chambered device engulfing the people from one space into the other. The allegorical space (the Labyrinth) continually collapsed into the physical one (the Bull’s mouth). This way the procession of Death was performed. The physical space was God himself. The allegorical one–His phony presence outside His own natura. In order to succeed the Hero had to walk back this same lethal path, to do an act opposite to the engulfing. It was precisely for this reason that the Hero did not appear among the living ones in the allegorical space in front of the mouth of the Bull-God. He appeared in the rear of the physical space or at the aperture opposite to the mouth–the anus of the Bull-God.

From there he entered the physique of the intestines and led out the people engulfed there back to the mouth. He led them out. Thus the Hero liquidated the Bull-God. He abolished the physique of the God and as a consequence of this he found himself together with his people in the allegorical space of the Labyrinth which survived as the One space. This turned out to be the virtual City of their liberation. The liquidation of God reduced the world to the omnipresence of the allegorical space. Nothing could exist beyond it. The tunnels of the figurative reality did not lead to any apertures. They were blind. The liquidation of God came as a radical denaturalization of existence. The Labyrinth is by itself a twisted construction. The corpus of the Labyrinth City does not resemble any bold exalted erection. It can never be straight, nor can it be broken. Its natural joints are twisted so that it cannot stand up. It drags its spreading horizontality. The transparency is reduced to the direct visibility in the convolutions of the tunnel. The global allegorical space could be recognized in the fact that the Labyrinth is exactly the same in all its cells and can be surveyed without moving about. It is a self-duplicating sameness. The citizens live in one and the same allegory without being able to see each other because of the vertebral-like structure of the Labyrinth. The physical space was absolutely shredded up and so busted. The allegorical one opened unlimited and thus became omnipresent. There was no power able to justify this endless allegorical order. The Labyrinth has no center. Every place in it is absolutely identical to every other place. In each cell of it emerge exactly the same things as in every other one. There are no heroically privileged places. When the Hero led his people into the Labyrinth he himself disappeared. He took a place in it and became like everyone else. He acquired the anonymous existence of everyone else. The Labyrinth as an emblem signifies nothing but the torso of the world after God was wrested off it. Nothing is present to testify to the sense of life, nothing exists to justify the order of the world but it is total. The Absurd. It is conspicuous the final de-gradation of the phallus into a colon. The erection is supplanted by constipation.

IV. Luxembourg–the Phantom City

Comrade Luxembourg–this is a woman

–Platonov

Most travelers describe it like this: a gigantic corpus, slowly augmenting, because it inflates and at the same time blackens. Having reached the point of bursting, exactly when its crust is ripping frightfully, threatening to let out slops and gases, the corpus starts slowly to soften and lighten up until it turns into a pulp. It is a necrotized womb stuffed up by dead substances. A womb turning into a vampire. This is the city of the most incredible metamorphose, mutation and vicissitude.

This city is organized according to the grammar of an instructive language. In contrast to the Tower City, here the language has not been demolished, but nevertheless, no tower has been built, no “Common Home”. This language propagates and agitates people to perform the sublime act–to claw the earth in exaltation. It was necessary to dig harder and more cunningly in order to transform the earth interior into a “Common Home”. The main effort of the subjects was to dig out a colossal pit, a gigantic aperture–sanctuary, an organized subterranean eternal sun-trap.

The total language projected reality of the Phantom City. In the space of the City reverberated thunder like proclamations. The people became heralds of stunning proclamations, of verbal maltreatment because the proclaimed reality was a bruised piece.

Reality dispersed in panic chased away by its own proclamations.

Language was the virtual reality and all things real peek out of it as phantoms. The Last Judgment was proclaimed real in order for a phantom to be punished–the bourgeoisie. Communism was proclaimed real in order for the other phantom to be immortalized –the proletariat. It was realized by being proclaimed. Do you recollect the story of the madman, who believed he was a hen, so They fed him with raw corn. He did not stop being insane but he stopped pretending to be a hen, so that he wouldn’t have to gnash his teeth on the raw corncobs. Someone proclaimed himself God and proceeded to feed on soil. The sun was proclaimed to be the Universal proletarian. Language. In the language there was no center nor horizontal or vertical coordination. It performed twisted parables according to the rules of its grammar. Language was a radioactive instrument that caused monstrous mutations in the city. Uncanny, melancholic longing engulfs the souls of the citizens. A longing for reality. And only through longing could reality open itself in the minds. Through this longing did the unnamed reality rush into the phantom figure of the city. The longing became the aperture through which reality made known its own presence. One thing sustained the population and the militants of the City–the fact, that there had to be a super point of view, one might say a central herald of the proclamations, for whom, everything that happened was observable, manageable, and goal-oriented. There existed the certainty that the life of the City is performed before the gaze of one centralized Eye-Mind. A certainty, that one surveyor observes and supervises the correct going on of the grandiose ceremony called Proletarian Revolution. Otherwise to every glance from inside life passed as an arbitrary dispersal or merging of phantoms and names. The despair came with the suspicion that this super Eye-Mind is also a phantom. A high density phantom arbitrary authorized with a centralized ontological presence. The certainty that the transparency of the City descended from above was a sham. This “see-through-all” Eye was also proclaimed. Through renaming its realities the Phantom City assembled and disassembled itself like an animated toy puzzle before the amazed eyes of the greatest Dadaist of the world (proclaimed to be such in Zurich). Like a real hero this Dadaist succeeded in getting to the bottle and letting loose the genie of the most imbecile Hocus-pocus. And with an exalted babble it penetrated the City and proclaimed it. Another Dadaist of the same rank constructed a machine for executions with quite artistic and precise functions. Then he himself jumped into it and thus became the requisite matter for its function in order to demonstrate its exquisite perfection. At night, tired by the excessive work of the Hocus-pocuses, the citizens of the Phantom City sulked and listened to the lamp fuse sucking in the kerosene. And in order to stifle the rumbling of their empty stomachs, they nibbled the wall plaster. This city had no special emblem. It was emblem itself. For there existed no sign that could stand for it. Everything got proclaimed–interned into the Cit.

* * *

All travelers observe a strict tendency towards de-naturalization of Luxembourg during its four stages:–passing from a vertical into a horizontal symbolism and its vanishing into crooked parabolas;–an ever more irreversible dislocation of the natural joints and apertures of the city corpus;–presence, then absence, then abolishing and at the end turning into a vampire of the city center;–from emblem representing the essence of the city–to a city emblem of itself.

Usually the travelers evade the teleological interpretations, because they lead life unto a certain destination and in this sense to certain utopia or anti-utopia. Others speak of the cyclic recurrence of the herein described stages. Still others to whom we pertain are convinced of the principle of the back and forth momentum. According to this principle the City of the Sun and the Phantom City are respectively the upper and lower dead-point between which historically acts the piston of Luxembourg.

IMPLETA CERNE! IMPLENDA COLLIGE!

September 25, 2013
A Draft Essay on Russian and Western Postmodernism*

Mikhail Epstein

Department of Slavic Languages
Emory University

I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie Perloff’s and Barrett Watten’s papers now proposed for this discussion. Also, I will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely “ideological,” “Eastern” version of postmodernism as opposed to Fredric Jameson’s influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the “late capitalism” and therefore denies its possibility in non-Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological Language. Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies. Occasional Papers, # 243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991). What I am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in Russian criticism where the question of “post-modernism” became as focal as the concept of “socialist realism” was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). In particular, I would like to address you to the articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn “Post-modernism: new ancient culture” and Sergei Nosov “Literature and Play,” accompanied by editorial comments in Novyi Mir (Moscow), 1992, No.2. pp.225-239.

First of all, I want to discuss “the origins and the meaning of Russian postmodernism,” taking the idiom from the famous work of Nikolai Berdiaev The Origins and the Meaning of Russian Communism (Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma, Paris, 1955). Communist teachings came to Russia from Western Europe and seemed at first completely alien to this backward semi-Asiatic country; however Russia turned out to be the first nation to attempt to enact these teachings on a world-wide scale. Berdiaev has shown convincingly that communism was intimately linked to the entire spirit of Russian history long before Russia learned anything about Marxism.

The same paradox, in my view, relates to the problem of Russian postmodernism. A phenomenon which seemed to be purely Western, in the final analysis exposes its lasting affinity with some principal aspects of Russian national tradition.

Among the different definitions of postmodernism, I would single out as the most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the French philosopher Baudrillard calls “simulation.” Other features of postmodernism such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of the oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem derivative of this phenomenon of hyperreality. Models of reality replace reality itself which therefore becomes irrecoverable.

Indeed, the previous dominant trends in Western twentieth century culture such as avant-gardism and modernism were elitist in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society either because of an alienation from it (modernism) or because of an effort to transform it in a revolutionary way (avant-gardism). As for metanarratives such as Marxism and Freudianism, their main point was to unmask the illusions of consciousness (ideological perversions) in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production or libidinal energy.

Yet once the concept of reality ceases to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, and elitist arts, which opposed it, begin to wane.

The appeal to a reality principle evokes the phenomena of great Western science, philosophy, and technology and thus may be considered the cornerstone of all Western civilization. According to this principle, reality must be distinguished from all products of human imagination and there are practical means which permit the establishment of truth as a form of correspondence between cultural concepts and reality. Science, technology, and even the arts strove to break through different subjective illusions and mythological prejudices to the substance of reality by way of objective cognition, practical utilization, and realistic imitation respectively. The last great metanarratives of Western civilization, those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, are still penetrated by this obsession with capturing reality and they relentlessly attempt to demystify all illusory products of culture and ideology.

During the twentieth century, however, an unexpected twist transformed these highly realistic and even materialistic theories into their own opposites. While Marxism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism all appealed to reality as such, they also produced their own highly ideologized and aestheticized realities, and more sophisticated tools of political and psychological manipulation. Reality itself disappeared, yielding to the most refined and provocative theories of realities and, next, to the practical modes of the production of reality. Now in the late twentieth century, what is produced is objectivity itself, not merely separate objects.

There are different modes for the production of reality. One is a Soviet-style ideocracy that flourished precisely on the basis of Marxism, which claimed to denounce all ideologies as mystification. Another is an American- style psychosynthesis which includes the comprehensive system of mass media and advertising that flourished precisely on the basis of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, both of which claimed to denounce all illusions of consciousness.

In other words, what we now see as reality is nothing more than a system of secondary stimuli intended to produce a sense of reality, or what Baudrillard calls “simulation.” In spite of any seeming resemblances, simulation is the opposite of what was understood as imitation during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Imitation was an attempt to represent reality as such without any subjective distortions. Simulation is an attempt to substitute for reality those images which appear even more real than reality itself.

The production of reality seems rather new for Western civilization, but it was routinely accomplished in Russia throughout its history. Ideas always tended to substitute for reality, beginning perhaps from Prince Vladimir who in 988 adopted the idea of Christianity and implanted it in a vast country in which there was hardly a single Christian.

Peter the Great ordered Russia to educate itself and vigorously introduced newspapers, universities, academies. Therefore they appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliberateness, the forced order of their origination. Even the first factory in Russia was built not out of some industrial need, but because Czar Anna decided to build a factory to match Western development. In essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a “newspaper,” this–an “academy,” this–a “constitution”; but all of this did not grow naturally from the national soil, but was implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs–perhaps they will take root and germinate. Too much came from the idea, the scheme, the conception, to which reality was subjugated.

In his book Russia in 1839, Marquis de Coustine expressed this simulative character of Russian civilization in a most insightful manner. “Russians have only names for everything, but nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades. Read the labels – they have ‘society,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘literature,’ ‘art,’ ‘sciences’–but as a matter of fact, they don’t even have doctors. If you randomly call a Russian doctor from your neighborhood, you can consider yourself a corpse in advance.”¹ One can ascribe this negative reaction to a foreigner’s malevolence, but Aleksandr Herzen, for one, believed that Marquis de Coustine had written the most fascinating and intelligent book about Russia. This Frenchman had expressed most precisely the simulative character of an entire civilization, in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan.

This nominative civilization, composed completely of names,² discloses its nature in Russian postmodernist art, which shows us a label pulled off of emptiness. Conceptualism, the prevailing trend in contemporary Russian art, is a set of labels, a collections of facades lacking the three other sides.³

The most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of Russian civilization was, of course, Petersburg itself, erected on a “Finnish swamp.” “Petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary–umyshlennyi ) and abstract city on earth,” wrote Dostoevsky in “The Notes from the Underground”: the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction.

A shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. The realization of its intentionality and “ideality,” simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra–in Dostoevsky: “A hundred times, amidst this fog, I’ve been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: ‘And what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn’t this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn’t it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?’”(A Raw Youth, emboldening mine–M. E.).⁴

This vision could have just come off of the canvas of a conceptual artist, a postmodernist master such as Eric Bulatov, for example. Contemporary Russian conceptualism emerged not from the imitation of Western postmodernism, but rather from precisely that Petersburg rotten fog and Dostoevsky’s “importunate reverie.” Potemkin villages⁵ appears in Russia not simply as a political trick, but as the metaphysical exposure of the fraudulence of any culture or positive activity. It is an outward appearance of a type which almost does not conceal its deceptiveness, but also does not destroy its illusion in a purposeful way, like Hinduist Maya should be destroyed. Rather it is anxious to secure its preservation as an appearance, but in no way prepares to ground or fill it in. The intermediary stratum between “is” and “is not” is that edge along which the “enchanted pilgrimage” of the Russian spirit slides.

After the Bolshevik revolution, this simulative nature of reality became even more pronounced. All social and private life was subjugated to ideology, which became the only real force of historical development. Those signs of a new reality of which the Soviets were so proud in the thirties and fifties, beginning with Stalin’s massive hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River and ending with Khrushchev planting of corn and Brezhnev’s numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. This artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts. Communist subbotniks⁶ in the Soviet Union were examples of hyperevents which simulated “the feast of labor” precisely in order to stimulate real labor.

In Baudrillard’s definition of this phenomenon of hyperreal: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory–PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA–it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [written by Borges] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.”⁷

Anyone who looks at a map of the former Soviet Union today will agree that such a huge country had to arise initially on the map before it could expand in reality. Today we can address this phrase “the desert of the real itself” directly to what has remained from the Soviet Union. This country is originally poor not with commodities, comfort, hard currency, but with reality itself. All shortcomings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols themselves comprise the sole reality that survives in this country.

To sum up: reality as such gradually disappears throughout Russian history. All reality of pagan Rus’ disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, all reality of Moscow Rus’ vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens “to become civilized” and shave their beards. All reality of “tsarist” Russia dissolved when Lenin and Bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed in several years of Gorbachev’s rule yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of capitalist market and free enterprise have now the best chance in Russia, though they remain there once again pure conceptions against the background of hungry and devastated society. Personally I believe that in a long run Eltsin or somebody else will manage to create a sumulacrum of a market for Russia. Realities were produced in Russia out of the ruling elite’s minds, but once produced they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities. * * *

Almost all investigators of postmodernism cite America as a wonderland in which fantasies become more real than reality itself. In this sense, however, America is not alone. Russia, as distinct from Europe, also developed as a realized dream. It is true that the postmodernist self- awareness of Soviet reality emerged later than parallel philosophical developments in the West. Nevertheless, already in the mid-seventies, so-called conceptual art and literature became more and more popular in the Soviet Union, suggesting a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire phenomenon of Soviet civilization. As distinct from realistic literature of the Solzhenitsyn type, conceptualism does not attempt to denounce the lie of Soviet ideology (from false ideas to a genuine reality). As distinct from metaphysical poetry of the Brodsky type, it does not turn away from Soviet reality in search of higher and purer worlds (from false reality to genuine ideas). Conceptual painting and writing, as presented by Ilya Kabakov, Erick Bulatov, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, convey ideas as the only true substance of the Soviet lifestyle. Paradoxically, false ideas comprise the essence of genuine reality.

The erasure of metanarrative is another important feature of postmodernism that is worthy of explanation. In the Soviet case, it is an indisputably Marxist metanarrative. There is a common, though fallacious, belief that only under and after perestroika, have Marxist teachings begun to dissolve into a variety of ideological positions. In truth, this dissolution began at the very moment when Marxism was brought to Russia and further progressed when it turned into Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Marxism.

Perhaps more than other metanarratives, Marxism relies on reality and materiality as the determinant of all ideological phenomena. When this teaching came to a culture in which reality had always been a function of powerful State imagination, a strange combination emerged: materialism as a form and tool of ideology. Paradoxically, Marxism was a catalyst for this transformation of Russia into one great Disneyland, though one less amusing than terrifying. Before the Bolshevik revolution, not all aspects of material life were simulated and some place remained for genuine economic enterprises. But now that Russian ideology has assimilated materialism, all material life has become a product of ideology.

Marxist teachings themselves also suffered a paradoxical transformation. On the one hand, Marxism became the only theoretical viewpoint that was officially allowed by the Soviet regime. For this very reason, it ironically grew to include all other possible viewpoints. Internationalists and patriots, liberals and conservatives, existentialists and structuralists, technocrats and ecologists all pretended to be genuine Marxists, pragmatically adapting the “proven teaching” to changing circumstances. In the West, Marxism preserved its identity as a metanarrative, giving its own specific interpretation of all historical phenomena because it was freely challenged by other metanarratives (such as Christianity and Freudianism). In the Soviet Union, however, Marxism became what postmodernists call pastiche, an eclectic mixture of all possible interpretations and outlooks. As an all- encompassing doctrine penetrating into physics and theater, military affairs and children’s play, Soviet Marxism was the ultimate achievement of postmodernism.

In Western society, postmodernism is often regarded as a continuation of the logic of “late capitalism,” a condition in which all ideas and styles acquire the form of commodities and become “manageable” and “changeable.” In the Soviet Union, postmodern relativity of ideas arises from its own ideological, not economic, base. All those concepts previously alien to the essence of communist ideology, such as “private property” and the “free market,” are now freely entering this ideological space, stretching it beyond its limits–allowing the ideology to embrace its own opposite. This is a process of de-ideologization, but not in the sense of Daniel Bell’s understanding of the phenomenon in his famous book, The End of Ideology. In the Soviet Union, de-ideologization means the end of the “particular” ideology which originally had a definite class character, social ideals, and aimed to inspire the proletariat to launch a socialist revolution and construct communism. The current de-ideologization of Marxism in the USSR is a process of the universalization of ideological thinking as such, its final move from the realm of militant modernism to a more playful, relaxed, postmodern mentality.

This de-ideologization, or super-ideologization, of Soviet Marxism raises a vital question: are there two distinct postmodernisms, one Western and one Eastern, or is there a single, shared postmodernism? The best answer, in the author’s view, is that “one-and-a-half” postmodernisms exist. The postmodern condition is essentially the same in the East and West, although it proceeds from opposite foundations: ideology and economics, respectively. Late capitalism and late communism are polar opposites in terms of economic structure and efficiency, but economics alone does not determine culture as a whole. The fundamental underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism in the East are not economic, they are ideological. Communism has proved to be a more radical challenge to capitalism than was originally thought, not only did it change the mode of production, it changed the relationship of base and superstructure in society.⁸

A comparison of capitalist economics and communist ideology is imperative for elucidating the postmodernist traits common to both societies. Such a “cross” examination would be more interesting than a parallel comparison; if one compares communist and bourgeois ideologies, or socialist and capitalist economics, little can be found beyond commonplace oppositions. It is far more relevant–even from a Marxist-Leninist perspective–to examine the common ground between communist ideology and capitalist economics, as the two perform identical functional roles in their respective social structures. The circulation of goods in capitalist society is essentially identical to the circulation of ideas in communist society. Ideology, like capital, allows for the growth of surplus value, or, in this case, surplus evaluation. In a communist society, every concrete fact of the “material” world is treated ideologically, as evidence of some general historic tendency–its significance increases from one instance of ideological interpretation to the next.

The famous formula of a capitalist economy which Marx suggested in Das Kapital is “commodities–money–commodities,” or “money–commodities–money.” The same formula can be applied in modified form to the ideology of Soviet Marxism: “reality – idea – reality,” or “idea – reality – idea.” Facts are exchanged for ideas in communist society in the same way as goods are exchanged for money in capitalist societies. Ideas, as a sort of currency, acquire an abstract form of “ideological capital.” They do not constitute material wealth, but the “correctness” of communist ideology. This “correctness,” or absolute truth, compensates people for their labor (“heroic deeds and sacrifices”), as well as recoups the cost of so-called “particular” mistakes resulting from Party policy.

What happens in the late stage of communist development? Why does it move toward a “postmodernist condition” along the same path followed by “late capitalist” societies? Totalitarianism was a superlative machine for accumulating and exploiting all sorts of ideas: leftist and rightist, revolutionary and conservative, internationalist and patriotic, etc.. However, this machine spawned a phenomenon bigger than itself. Just as capital eventually outgrows the capitalist “machine” and becomes a self- sufficient entity, Soviet ideological capital has outgrown the “machine” of a particular personality or system of ideas and has become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea. Such is the current state of Soviet society under glasnost’. Marxist ideology, the most powerful of all modern ideologies, is losing its identity and becoming only one possible interpretation of reality (in the Soviet Union, it would be the least probable one!). The expansion of Marxist ideology overcame Marxism as a form of modernity and created the postmodern condition in the USSR.

The overarching expansion of Soviet ideology occurred in the Brezhnev era, when the difference between facts and ideas was practically erased. Ideology was gradually transformed from a system of ideas into an all-encompassing ideological environment which retained all possible alternative philosophical systems as latent components within itself. Existentialism and structuralism, Russophilism and Westernism, technocratic and ecological movements, Christian and neo-pagan outlooks–everything was compressed into the form of Marxism, creating a sort of post-modernist pastiche.

One can easily anticipate a counter-argument: how can we refer to Soviet postmodernism without a clear identification of Soviet modernism? Western postmodernism came after modernism, so where is the corresponding progression in Soviet culture?

It is obvious, however, that Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period was predominantly modernist as such trends as symbolism and futurism indicate. As expressions of a highly utopian vision, the Bolshevik movement and October revolution also can be seen as modernist phenomena. The same rigidly consistent style of modernist aesthetics was dominant in the twenties as Mayakovsky’s and Pilnyak’s works demonstrate.

In this sense, socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction of all possible stylistic devices including Romantic, Realist, and Classicist models. Andrei Siniavsky’s dissident interpretation (in a 1960 famous essay “On Socialist Realism”) of Soviet official literature as of a reborn classicism was one-sided, as were more conformist attempts to describe socialist realism in terms of amplified critical realism, or heroic romanticism, or combination of both. Socialist realism was not a specific artistic direction in a traditional or modernist sense, it can be adequately approached only as a postmodernist phenomenon, as an eclectic mixture of all previous classical styles, as an encyclopedia of literary cliches. We should trust more to social realism’s own self-definition: the unity of a method attained through the diversity of styles (or their mixture, or pastiche). “Socialist realism is regarded as a new type of artistic consciousness which is not limited by the framework of one or even of several modes of representation….”⁹ Socialist realism simulated successfully all literary styles beginning from ancient epic songs and ending with Tolstoy’s refined psychologism and futuristic poetics of a placard and a slogan.

The epoch of the thirties through fifties in the Soviet Union was clearly post*modernist, even though the prevailing term at the time was “anti*modernism.” The furious struggle against “rotten bourgeois modernism” became the hall-mark of Stalinist aesthetics. What was antimodernism in relation to the West was postmodernism in relation to the native, pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist culture.

In the sixties and seventies, another wave of modernism came into Soviet literature: futurist, surrealist, abstractionist and expressionist trends were revived in literature, painting, and music. The twenties became the nostalgic model for this neo-modernism of the sixties as presented in Andrei Voznesensky and Vasily Aksyonov.

This explains why later, in the seventies and eighties, another wave of postmodernism arose in opposition to this sixties “neo-modernist” generation. For such postmodernists as Ilya Kabakov, Boris Grois, or Dmitri Prigov there are no figures more adversarial, than Malevich, Khlebnikov, and other modernists of the early 20th century, not speaking about the latter’s successors in the sixties such as Andrei Voznesensky or Vassily Aksyonov. Consequently, this postmodern generation feels a sort of nostalgia precisely for the typical Soviet lifestyle and the art of social realism which provides them with congenial ideological material for their conceptual works. Social realism is close to conceptualism in its antimodernist stance: they share highly conventional semiotic devices, the sets of cliches and idioms that are devoid of any personal emphasis and intentional self-expression.

These components of the postmodernist paradigm, which in the West were introduced simultaneously, took much longer to mature in Soviet culture. The erasing of the semantic difference between idea and reality, between the signifying and the signified, had been achieved by the first Soviet postmodernism (socialist realism); while the syntactic interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second postmodernism (conceptualism). Although it would seem that these two processes must coincide, it took several decades for Soviet culture to pass from one stage to another.

The point is that Western culture has great respect for reality that is beyond signs. As soon as signs proved to be self-sufficient, they immediately acquired a playful dimension. The Russian cultural tradition is much more inclined to view signs as an independent reality deserving of the greatest esteem. Therefore it was extremely difficult to accept that these signs which substitute for reality may become objects of irony and aesthetic play.

Western postmodernism includes two aspects: what can be called the substance of postmodernism, and the interpretation of this substance in postmodernist conceptual framework. In the Soviet Union, these two aspects developed separately. The period from the thirties to the fifties witnessed the emergence of postmodernism as a specific substance, including the ideological and semiotic dissolution of reality, the merging of elitist and mass culture into mediocrity, and the elimination of modernist stylistic purity and refinement. Only in the late fifties, in the works of such poets as Kholin, Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Vilen Barsky, and then in the seventies, in the works of Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinstein, was the “substantial” postmodernism of Soviet culture interpreted precisely in postmodernist terms. Signs of heroic labor, collectivism, the striving for a communist future, and so on which previously were perceived seriously as the signified reality itself, now were perceived only at the level of signs themselves, which are susceptible to all sorts of linguistic games. In the 1980s Soviet postmodernism finally overtook its second aspect and bloomed into a full cultural phenomenon comparable with its Western parallel.

Certainly, such postmodernist phenomena as Borges’s stories, Nabokov’s and Umberto Eco’s novels or Derrida’s models of deconstruction have had a considerable influence on some contemporary schools of Soviet writing, including conceptualism and metarealism. What is much more striking, however, is that the earlier Soviet post- or antimodernism still influences, though unconsciously, the contemporary American literary scene. For example, Tom Wolfe’s recent manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”¹⁰ gained much attention with his attacks against modernism and his calls for a social novel which would combine fiction and reporting. Wolfe involuntarily duplicates the very patterns that Stalin’s ideologists used in their relentless political tirades against Russian pre-revolutionary and Western bourgeois modernism. Wolfe probably has never heard of Zhdanov’s infamous 1946 report debasing Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, let alone read it. Nevertheless, Wolfe’s main points and even his choice of metaphors are the same as Zhdanov’s: they both compare writing to engineering, for example. Wolfe also proposes that writers form brigades to pool their talents for an investigation of the amazing social reality in the United States, as it was in the Soviet Union of 1930’s.¹¹

I do not go so far as to suggest that the aesthetic code of Stalinism directly influenced such an “antimodernist” writer as Tom Wolfe. Yet the terms of postmodernist debate apply equally well in such embarrassingly different conditions as the U.S.S.R. in the late forties and the U.S. in the late eighties. The striving for a postmodernist world view inevitably brings about an opposition to the abstractness and individualism of modernist writing; it also causes a turn towards common and stereotyped forms of language as imposed by the dominant social order.

In a broader perspective, postmodernism can be seen as a type of culture which was developed in both the West and the Soviet Union, although by different methods. The Western version of postmodernism came chronologically later, though it was much more theoretically self-conscious. To try to isolate and identify a Western-style postmodernism in twentieth century Russian culture proved to be a difficult problem because the formation of specifically Russian postmodernism had been divided into two periods.

The development of Russian modernism was artificially stopped in the thirties, while in the West it developed smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, in the thirties and in the seventies. This obliges us to compare not only Russian postmodernism with its Western counterpart, but also to examine the two Russian postmodernisms: socialist realism and conceptualism. Perhaps, it is the chronological gap between them that made both versions so ideologically charged, though in two opposite directions. The first postmodernism is explicitly heroic, the second one is implicitly ironic. Nevertheless, if we identify them as two aspects and two periods of one historical phenomenon, these opposite tenets easily neutralize each other, comprising entirely “blank pastiche,” to use Fredric Jameson’s definition of postmodernism.

The tendency to perceive socialist realism and conceptualism as mutually s/t/imulating aspects of the same cultural paradigm presumably will get further support in the course of future reinterpretations of Soviet history in terms of its integrity and the interdependence of its “initial” and “conclusive” phases. Two Russian postmodernisms complement each other and present a more complicated and self-contradictory phenomenon than Western postmodernism which is concentrated in a single period of history.

* This draft essay was circulated during Postmodern Culture’s Symposium on Russian Postmodernism. See SYMPOS-1.193 to find where it was included in the discussion. Included here are Epstein’s comments introducing the essay. –Ed.

Notes

1. Marquis de Coustine, Nikolaevskaia Rossiia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo obshchestva politkatorzhan, 1930, p. 79.

2. Is it not this “nominativity,” this pure concern with names, that gives rise to the sinister power of the nomenklatura, that is those people selected by no one and by no means meriting their stature, but who are named “secretary,” “director,” or “instructor” and have received power by virtue of these names.

3. On contemporary Russian Conceptualism see Mikhail Epstein “After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1991, v.90, no.2, pp.409-444, and Mikhail Epstein, “Metamorphosis: On New Currents in the Soviet Poetry.” Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby. University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 382-407.

4. Dostoevsky has several variations on the theme of this vision, which affected him deeply, in A Weak Heart(1848), in Petersburg Dreams in Verse and in Prose(1861), and in the sketches for The Diary of a Writer(1873).

5. Dummy villages erected, according to foreigners, by the order of Prince Potemkin along the route he was to take with Catherine II after the annexation of the Crimea, 1783. This expression is used allusively of something done for show, an ostentatious display designed to disguise an unsatisfactory state of affairs, a pretence that all is well, etc. See Russian-English Dictionary of Winged Words, Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1988, p.162.

6. Voluntary unpaid work on days off, originally on Saturdays.

7. J. Baudrillard. The Precession of Simulacra. Semiotexte: New York, 1983, 2.

8. For a critical discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled “Basis and Superstructure: Reality and Ideology,” in Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, 106-107.

9. Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Moscow: Sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1987, p.416.

10. Tom Wolfe. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. A literary manifesto for the new social novel.” Harper’s November 1989.

11. These issues are discussed at length in my article “Tom Wolfe and Social(ist) Realism.” Common Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1992, v. 1, No. 2, pp. 147-160.

September 25, 2013
Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?

Marjorie Perloff

Stanford University
0004221898@mcimail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

September 25, 2013

Symposium on Russian Postmodernism

Symposiasts:

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

Vitaly Chernetsky, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

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

Mikhail Epstein, Department of Slavic Languages, Emory University

Lyn Hejinian, (70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM)

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

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

[Editor’s note:

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

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

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

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

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

Jerome McGann

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

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

         Lyn Hejinian

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

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

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

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

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

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

Lyn Hejinian

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

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

With best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

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

31 October, 1992, 3:32 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                   St. Juan de la Cruise

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

     Among such things can be found "memory".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

only:

**********

Author's Notes:

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

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

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

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

6) See Lyotard's meta-recite.

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

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

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

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

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

Translator's notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

g. see note b.

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

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

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

k. see note a.

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

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

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

o. Tartarus of Greek mythology.

p. in Latin in the original.

q. See note i.

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

November 1, Sunday:

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

       from XENIA

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

only what
lets us be ourselves--
seen.

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

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

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

To go on.

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

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

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

               The azure's shrieking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyn Hejinian

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

Subject:      memory again

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

               "Thoughts on `Zapamyatovat'"

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

jerome mcgann

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

To the symposium participants:

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

               --Jim English

        WHY THE RUSSIAN POSTMODERN?

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

Vitaly Chernetsky
University of PA

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

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

Marjorie Perloff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 eccentrically
 the while, warped edge
 jostling
 half-turned edge

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

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

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

 Postmodernism beckons
       as modernism beckoned.
               Critical genealogy is a kind

 of art prose,
       a sort of poetics,
               even

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear colleagues,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

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

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

     November 15, 1992

     Dear colleagues and friends:

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

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

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

To the Symposium participants:

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

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

                              Sincerely,

                              Vitaly Chernetsky

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

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

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

Best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

September 25, 2013

From Phosphor

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of California, San Diego

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

(Watten, in Davidson, 23)

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

(Hejinian, in ibid., 34-35)

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

A Metapoetics of Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fall of Soviet Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Subject?

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

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

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

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_A POSTMODERN READER_

edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Reading a Postmodern Reader

I. Modern/Postmodern
   Preface
* Zygmunt Bauman              "Postmodernity, or Living with
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* Hans Bertens                "The Postmodern Weltanschauung
                              and its Relation to Modernism:
                              An Introductory Survey."

* Jean-Francois Lyotard       from _The Postmodern Condition:
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* Jurgen Habermas             "Modernity versus Postmodernity."

* Andreas Huyssen             "Mapping the Postmodern."

* David Herman                "Modernism versus Postmodernism:
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II. Representing the Postmodern
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* John McGowan                from, _Postmodernism and its
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* Jacques Derrida             "Structure, Sign, and Play in the
                              Discourses of the Human Sciences."

* Linda Hutcheon              "Beginning to Theorize
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* Ihab Hassan                 "Toward a Concept of
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* Charles Russel              "The Context of the Concept."

III. Entanglements and Complicities
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* Fredric Jameson             from, _Postmodernism, Or the
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* Michel Foucault             from, _The History of Sexuality:
                              Volume I:  An Introduction_

* Jean Baudrillard            "The Precession of Simulacra."

* Thomas Kuhn                 "The Resolution of Revolutions."

* Cornel West                 "Black Culture and Postmodernism."

* Barbara Creed               "From Here to Modernity:  Feminism
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* Jane Flax                   from, _Thinking Fragments_

* Stephen Slemon              "Modernism's Last Post."

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* Henry Giroux                "Postmodernism as Border Pedagogy:
                              Redefining the Boundaries of Race
                              and Ethnicity."

* Agnes Heller                "Existentialism, Alienation,
                              Postmodernism: Cultural Movements
                              as Vehicles of Change in the
                              Patterns of Everyday Life."

* bell hooks                  "Postmodern Blackness."

* Paul Maltby                 from, _Dissident Postmodernists_

* Houston Baker Jr.           "Hybridity, the Rap Race, and
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* Catherine Belsey            "Towards Cultural History."

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_Black Sacred Music_
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Presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in
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Divine Politics:  Virginia Woolf's Journey toward Eleusis in _To
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Deleuze's Nietzsche / Petra Perry

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_DISCOURSE_

Volume 15, Number 1

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       Anne Allison   Dominating Men:  Male Dominance on
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                        ------------------------------

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

Eastgate Systems, Inc. announces:

its name was Penelope
by Judy Malloy

(Cambridge, MA) Eastgate Systems has announced the publication of
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     The Computer Is Not Sorry               The Houston Center
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     Women and Technology                    The National Library
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     Ringling School of Art                  Intl. Symposium
     and Design                              Electronic Art
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Since 1982, Eastgate Systems, Inc. has been a leading publisher
of quality hypertexts and hypertext writing tools, including
Storyspace (tm) and Hypergate (tm) hypertext writing
environments, Michael Joyce's _Afternoon, a story_, Sarah Smith's
_King of Space_, and Stuart Moulthrop's _Victory Garden_.

_its name was Penelope_ is available from:

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

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

_Minnesota Review_

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

**now under new management**

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

includes essays by:

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

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

topics include:

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

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

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

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

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

_NOMAD_

An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities, Arts, and
Sciences

_Nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as
intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing.  The
journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined
regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing.
_Nomad_ is published biannually and subscriptions are $9 for one
year (2 issues).  For information contact:

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

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

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

_NO MORE NICE GIRLS_
author:  Ellen Willis

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

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

Available through:

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

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

_NOUS REFUSE_

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

contributors to date include:

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

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

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

_October_
Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

The MIT Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

_REPRESENTATIONS_

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

SPECIAL ISSUE:  FUTURE LIBRARIES

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

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

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

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

GEOFFREY NUNBERG
"The Place of Books."

ALAIN GIFFARD and GERALD GRUNBERG
"New Reading Technologies."

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

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

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

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

To order, write:

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

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

_RIF/T_
E-Poetry Literary Journal

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

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

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

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

SUB e-poetry your name

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

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

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

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

_The World According to Disney_

Guest Editor:  Susan Willis

Contents:

Critical Vantage Points on Disney's World
Susan Willis

Reality Revisited
Karen Klugman

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

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

The Cartoonist's Front
Holly Allen and Michael Denning

Disney World:  Public Use/Private State
Susan Willis

The Contemoprary Future of Tommorow
Shelton Waldrep

Technological Utopias
Alexander Wilson

Theme Park
Arata Isozaki

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

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

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

_SSCORE_
Social Science Computer Review

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

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

Recent articles:

Social Impacts of Computing:  Codes of Professional Ethics
Ronald Anderson

Teledemocracy and Political Science
William H. Dutton

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

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

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

Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
David R. Heise

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

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

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

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

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

_Studies in Popular Culture_
Dennis Hall, editor.

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

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

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292.
Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
current MLA stylesheet is a useful model.  Please indicate if the
work is available on computer disk.  The editor reserves the
right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts.

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

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

_VIRUS 23_

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

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

_Virus 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature

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

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

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

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

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

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

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

_Zines-L_

announcing a new list available from:  listserv@uriacc

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

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

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

             _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO

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

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

telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777

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

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

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

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

Please contact:

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

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

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

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

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

Inquiries may be sent to Glen Scott Allen at:

E7E4ALL@TOE.TOWSON.EDU

or by mail to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_PHAGE_

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

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

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

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

Possible topics include:

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

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

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

or

ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu

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

_PHAGE_ Magazine
PO Box XXX
Green Bay, WI  54304

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

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

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

_Postmodern Culture_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor:  Joseph Natoli
Editor:         Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

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

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

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

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

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscriptions

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

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

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

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

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

Please direct inquires to:

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

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

CALL FOR PAPERS

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

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

Send inquiries to lxh16@po.cwru.edu

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

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

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

October 1-2, 1993
(Friday & Saturday)

Sponsored by:

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

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

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

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

Registration Information

Fees:

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

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

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

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

               "THE WATCH-TOWERS OF PEACE"

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

          Installation telephone Numbers:

               0043 3453 5411
               0043 3453 5412
               0043 3453 5413

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

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

DISSEMINATE YOUR ENERGIES IN REAL TIME THROUGH POSITIVE WAVES.

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

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

"OBSERVATION TOWERS FOR PEACE".

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

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

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

For more information, please write to:

          Fred Forrest
          Territoire Du MZ,
          60540 Anserville,
          France

          Tel 44 08 43 05
          Fax 44 08 59 67

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_FEMISA_

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

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

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

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

                       sub femisa your name

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

                           unsub femisa

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

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

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

_HOLOCAUS:  Holocaust list_

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

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

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

                  SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

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

Owner:  JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                         campbelld@apsu
or
                       u08946@uicvm.uic.edu

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

_UTNE READER INTERNET E-MAIL SALONS_

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

The Utne Reader Neighborhood Salon Association is launching a
global network of Internet mailing lists designed to foster small
group dialogue about hot topics and timeless conundra.  We call
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Neighborhood Salons (face-to-face) that we've helped form across
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Helping to revitalize democracy through vigorous discussion of
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Association (NSA), our not-for-profit community service, funded
in part by the Surdna Foundation.  We believe that both online
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September 25, 2013

Women and Islam

Lahoucine Ouzgane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 25, 2013
Cyfy Pomo?

Eric Rabkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve got it! Let’s put it on reserve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder what criticism will look like in ten years?

September 25, 2013
Risk and the New Modernity
Simon Carter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debra Silverman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 25, 2013
Women and Television
Leslie Regan Shade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columbia University
tw22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gramsci and “Us”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gramsci’s Corpus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Suleiman

Dept. of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature
Harvard University

Introductory Note:

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, February 3

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

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

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

Friday, February 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, February 6

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, February 8

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

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

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

Tuesday, February 9

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

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

Wednesday, February 10

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

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

Sunday, February 14

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

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

Monday, February 15

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

Tuesday, February 16

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, February 17

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, February 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, February 20

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

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

Sunday, February 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

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

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

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

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

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

I. On (Pure) Rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. Sign Models

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

Smolensky’s Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derrida’s Model

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

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

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

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

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

III. Movement and Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smolensky’s Intuitive Processor

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

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

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

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

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

Derrida’s Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dynamics

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

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

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

Smolensky’s Global Control

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

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

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

The modern scientific concept of fields–such as electric fields, magnetic fields, or even magic force-fields in science fiction–are examples of this kind of global effect. They are something usually unseen but considered to be real (i.e., they effect material reality) and they operate globally, albeit mysteriously, in an area of space. Smolensky sees reference as the asymptotic behavior of a trajectory in a dynamic system, and his scientistic assertion of the possibility of global control contrasts with Derrida’s exasperated skepticism, seen below.

Derrida’s Differance

The early Derrida is conducting a guerrilla war against structuralism from within the metaphysical terrain of structuralism. He only has whatever is at hand there for the fight. While Smolensky is free to use exotic weapons from his experience (he was trained as a physicist), Derrida must work within the tradition of the dyadic sign. He considers the dyadic sign constitutive of human thought, even as he shows its inadequacy for explaining meaning. Notwithstanding these differences in tradition and precept, there are many points of contact between Smolensky’s dynamic systems and Derrida’s trace and differance.

Derrida conceives of the operation of the trace as a field in the sense described above, but has no language to justify such a global and actively structuring concept. In exasperation, he calls it “theological”:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [etant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. The "theological" is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities-- generic and structural--of the trace.(Of Grammatology 47, my emphasis)

The reader should compare this description with the global structuring impact of dynamic systems on state- space, described above. At all times, Derrida presents the trace as dynamic. It is the “movement of temporalization” Of Grammatology 47), and “[t]he immotivation of the trace ought to be understood as an operation and not as a state, an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure” Of Grammatology 51). The shift from statics to dynamics is, of course, a key feature of contemporary discourse on the sign.

Derrida responds to accusations that differance is negative theology with an essay in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Frank Kermode summarizes the argument well:

The purpose of Derrida's pronouncement is to claim that differance is not negative in the same measure as the God of negative theology; for it is so in much greater measure--indeed it cannot properly be thought of as negative at all; it is outside negativity as it is outside everything. Only by an intellectual error-- induced by a sort of metaphysical paranoia, a fear for the security of that "realm"--could anybody suppose that differance has a design on us, or a desire to make itself into some sort of presence.(Kermode 75; my emphasis)

Informed by a reading of Smolensky, one might conclude that differance is desire, and that “metaphysical paranoia” is completely justified. Where structuralists and objectivist cognitive scientists assume “meaning” as a concept around which structure is built, Derrida and Smolensky use ideas of process and structure to produce “meaning.” The main rhetorical strategy both authors use to do this is to deny a hard distinction between form and function. This conflation gives reality to a field of signification. This is explicit in Smolensky’s mathematical metaphysics; in Derrida, it is implicit in the movement of the trace.

Derrida’s treatment of presence is interesting in relation to these metaphysical ideas. Culler, in On Deconstruction, invokes Zeno’s paradox to explain Derrida’s insistence on the impossibility of presence. The present moment is never really present, but always marked with the past and the future. The present is then not real, as difference is not real. Trace “does not exist” and differance is “nothing.” Time and absence conspire to destroy any phenomenology.

Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. No intuition can be realized in the place where "the whites indeed take on an importance."(Of Grammatology 68)

One might be tempted to regain presence by an appeal to the idea of a field of signification, proposed above, but presence fails for both authors at the point where its phenomenology must be intuitively accessible to the subject. Both authors set up a metaphysics which describes a mechanism for presence, but both place that mechanism in the inhuman realm of numbers or (pure) traces.

Derrida’s insistence, then, on presence and difference as “nothing” might be understood as referring only to the realm of human consciousness, the only realm describable in structuralist terms. Derrida’s nullification of presence and differance recall a funny story, an old chestnut, that I have most recently seen reincarnated in a book by Arbib In Search of the Person): it seems that there was this mathematician who wished to prove something for Riemann geometry. He disappeared into a room and filled a blackboard with Dirichlet integrals and other mathematical arcana. After a time, a cry was heard from the room, “Wait! Wait! I’ve proved too much! I’ve proved there are no prime numbers!” The nullification of differance is a funny idea when one considers such that this nullification might be the global control that produces cognition. Smolensky might accuse Derrida of having been inattentive in his calculus classes. On the other hand, Derrida would probably apply a quotation from Barthes (Noth 313) to Smolensky: “I passed through a (euphoric) dream of scientificity.”

IV. Conclusion

I would like to reiterate that this has been an exploration of rhetorical strategies that arose in two similar historical moments. My discussion ignores any justification or evaluation (scientific or otherwise) with regard to the works by Smolensky and Derrida, and it proposes no direct influence of one on the other. Most importantly, this is not a “methodological” paper that proposes something ridiculous like a “dynamic systems approach to everything.”

Both Derrida and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex vision of the signifying human. Structuralism and objectivist Cognitive Science present a syntactic picture of human meaning that is unsatisfying. Each author tries to breath life into the dyadic sign model by regaining presence. Smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems theory. Derrida precisely defines such a field with the terms trace and differance while denying their reality because he rejects the concept of global control. The genesis of these critiques is the static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of signification, theories which relegate all process to the gap between a signified and a signifier, a gap which is “nothing”: Derrida and Smolensky rush in to fill this void. Both authors note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a mysterious “semantic shift” from the unconscious to the conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida sees this as an insurmountable mystery, while Smolensky thinks it can be accounted for.

Spivak uses Levi-Strauss’ term bricolage to contrast modern discourse with engineering: “All Knowledge, whether one knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of engineering” Of Grammatology xx). Smolensky and Derrida are doing similar odd jobs, but with different tool boxes. Smolensky, with his “eye on the myth of engineering,” is a bricoleur with a full quiver of metaphor: he can play Ahab (“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate”). Derrida doesn’t have much faith in his weapons: he can love the whale.

References
- Arbib, M. In Search of the Person: Philosophical Explorations in Cognitive Science. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1985.
- Buchler, J. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover, 1955.
- Chomsky, N. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York, NY: Praeger, 1986.
- Culler, J. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982.
- de Man, P. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. J. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. and introd. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
- —. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable: Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. S. Budick, & W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
- Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. “On the proper treatment of Smolensky.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 31-32.
- Kermode, F. “Endings, Continued.” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. S. Budick & W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
- Lakoff, G. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987.
- —. “Smolensky, semantics, and sensorimotor system.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 39-40.
- —. “Cognitive Semantics.” Meaning and mental representations. Ed. U. Eco, M. Santambrogio, & P. Violi. Indiana, IL: Indiana UP, 1988.
- McClelland, J., Rumelhart, D., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
- Newell, A. Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
- Noth, W. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
- Piaget, J. Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1971.
- Rosch, E. H. “Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973): 328-350.
- Rosen, R. Dynamical Systems Theory in Biology Volume I: Stability Theory and Its Applications. New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience, 1970.
- Rumelhart, D., McClelland, J., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
- Sheriff, J.K. The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989.
- Smolensky, P. “On the proper treatment of connectionism.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 1-74.
September 25, 2013
Reading Beyond Meaning
George Aichele

Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College
470-5237@mcimail.com

The Theology of the Text

[T]here will never be . . . any theology of the Text.

(Derrida, Dissemination 258)

If the text is an instance of what Jacques Derrida calls “differance,” the ineffable writing, then there can be no theology of the text. There can be no theology of the text because the text is the trace which escapes onto- theological closure (closure of the “volume,” of the “work”) even as it inscribes it. As the non-identity or non- presence which lies at the heart of any scriptural identity, the text is no more than the entirely material “stuff” (hyle) which the idealism inherent in the traditional understanding of the text does not comprehend and therefore excludes.

This understanding of what a text is differs greatly from the traditional one. The traditional understanding of the text allows us to speak of two readers reading “the same text” (book, story, poem, etc.) even though not only the physical objects of the reading but the editions and even the translations involved are different. It allows us to agree or disagree about the legitimacy of an interpretation, the authority of an edition, or the accuracy of a translation. The invisible, underlying stratum which allows us to posit the identity of texts is their meaning, the spiritual essence which binds many varying physical copies into unity.

The traditional understanding of the text is therefore profoundly theological; it is that very theology of the text which differance refuses. It is also profoundly logocentric. For this understanding, the text is not the concrete, unique ink-and-paper thing which you might hold in your hand, scan with your eyes, file on a shelf, give away, or even throw in the trash.¹ Instead, the text is an ideal, spiritual substance, a Platonic form of which the material thing is merely a “copy.” The physical object is simply the medium, the channel in and through which the spiritual reality has become incarnate. This way of thinking seems quite natural to us; this indicates how deeply ingrained the theology involved here actually is.

Corresponding closely to the theology of the text is a complex economy of the text, which allows texts to be owned in three distinct but interrelated ways. The conspiracy between these three types of ownership forms the traditional understanding of the text. Meaning is at the center of this system of values; what defines each of the three types of ownership, and their relations to one another, is the desire for meaning. These three types of ownership together establish a law of the text, a system which authenticates “my property” and delimits my rights and obligations in relation to the text. The law of the text establishes the legitimacy of meaning, the possibility of a proper reading. It is the law of what Roland Barthes calls the readerly.

The first owner, the reader, normally owns one copy of the text, a physical object, the book. The reader desires but has no guarantee of owning the book’s meaning. The second owner, the author, is the book’s origin and therefore owns its meaning–the true meaning reflected in every copy. The author secures the book’s meaning. There is also a third “owner,” the copyright holder, who may also be the author (or the reader). This owner possesses the legal right to disseminate copies, to control the event of incarnation. Each of these owners may say, “This is my book,” but the term “my book” cannot mean the same thing in each of these three cases.

This economy of triple ownership turns the text into a “work.”² For Barthes, the work is defined by society’s recognition of an author and thus of an authority: “One must realize that today it is the work’s ‘quality’ … and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences between books” (“From Work to Text” 79). The work is meaningful and complete; it is an object of consumption. All three owners require the work to be a union of spirit and matter–a union which can (and must) be undone. For the theology of the text, meaning is “in” the text; it is a property of the text.

The theology of the text requires that a distinction be made between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis draws (or leads) the truth out of the text; eisegesis imposes the reader’s beliefs upon or reads them into the text. No confusion is permitted between these two. It is an ethical distinction: exegesis respects the integrity of the text, and eisegesis does not. Metaphysics is also involved: the text contains a truth within it, which the skillful reader can extract more or less undamaged, and without imposing too many of her own preconceptions upon it. The text is in some way connected to reality–a reality which is outside of the text (extratextual)–and it is this reality which grounds the proper meaning of the text, inside of the text.

Of course, the theology of the text recognizes that no reading is entirely free of preconceptions, no matter how objective or unbiased the reader may be. Your readings are inevitably shaped by who you are, your previous experiences, feelings and beliefs, and your current contexts, desires, and expectations. Crossing the gap between receiver and sender of any message requires a tricky and sometimes dangerous journey. The traditional understanding of the text assures us that there are guarantees which lessen the difficulties and overcome the dangers in transmission of meaning. These guarantees are provided by rigorous critical techniques, often historical, but also psychological, sociological, or literary. Within the text itself there hides an accessible meaning, which one technique or another can uncover. These techniques provide ways to bridge the gap between text and reality, to capture meaning and thereby close the circle of understanding. Completely objective analysis is impossible, but with proper use of the techniques something approaching a scientific consensus can be reached.

However, the theologically indispensable distinction between exegesis and eisegesis has been eroded in recent years. First the New Criticism, then structuralism, and most recently the various forms of poststructuralism (including the views of Derrida, Barthes, and Michel Foucault) have with increasing vigor exposed and challenged theological presuppositions on which the traditional understanding of the text rests. The notion that each text contains within it a single true meaning–or any meaning– has been abandoned by many, and the question of reference– the connection between text and reality–is up for grabs. The Eurocentric and phallocentric tendencies of the supposedly scientific criticism are increasingly difficult to deny, although defenders of the Western cultural tradition (the “great books”) remain plentiful, and the debate is probably far from over.

There will never be any theology of the text, says Derrida. However, if we must do without a theology of the text, then perhaps a theology of reading can in some respects take its place. The question of the object of our reading becomes uncertain and even mysterious, but the question of what reading is can be at least partly answered. In our belief that there is a connection between the text and reality, we have overlooked or minimized theologically important dimensions of reading, including the role of the reader in the production of meaning, the influence of ideology upon reading, and the resistance to meaning inherent within texts.³ As the concept of “text” becomes problematic and elusive for postmodern thought, an understanding of reading becomes more desirable. We can no longer rely upon a theology of the text, but we can explore a theology of reading.

The Non-Reader

Reading is an endless and violent playing with the text, and the reader is in a perpetual struggle with the law of the text. She draws her life from this law even as she disturbs it; she is a vector directing the movement of the law and giving it meaning. The law establishes the book as a meaning-filled work, as the product of a worker (an author) within a system of exchange which makes it available as a piece of property. Nevertheless the reader determines the value of the book, as a work, for all of its various owners.

In Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, there is a character named Irnerio. Irnerio is a “non-reader”–a person who has taught himself how not to read. He is not illiterate, not even “functionally illiterate.” Irnerio refuses to read. Yet Irnerio does not refuse to look at written words. Rather, he has learned how to see strange and meaningless ink marks on pages where others see words. Irnerio is beyond reading; for him the books, pages, and words are no longer the transparent vehicles for immaterial ideas, but they are solid, opaque objects.

I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. . . . The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.(49)

For the non-reader, the written words eventually “disappear”–they disintegrate into not-quite-letters, shapes, blobs of darkness on the white page. This is because the non-reader looks at them, at the physical marks themselves, and not at what they mean. The words disappear into sheer materiality; they become meaningless deposits of ink on paper. They are not altered physically, but they lose their signifying potential. They cease to be filled with what the philosopher Gottlob Frege called “sense”; they become nonsensical. The printed words return to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic chora. To speak of such texts as more-or-less accurate copies of an ideal, transcendent original is impossible.

The words also disappear for readers, but for the opposite reason, and in the opposite direction. As you learned to read, the meaning of the words gradually came to dominate the physical text. You learned to conceptualize past or through the concrete marks that make up words and sentences, to “see” meanings or ideas that are represented, to hear the language with your mind’s ear. As reading became easier for you, the materiality of writing (as an obstruction to sense) became an almost invisible, transparent vehicle; what you really read is what the written words “say,” their meaning. You only read words insofar as writing itself has become invisible. What you read is the idea within the word, and you don’t like it if the materiality of the word obscures the idea.

Thus the written word may disappear in either of two directions, which correspond to the two components that make up language–the physical medium (the signifier) and the intelligible content (the signified). For the reader, the word is caught in a tension between these two components–a tension which cannot be maintained, but only imagined as a midpoint between two extremes. When either of the differences which make signification possible–differences between signifiers, or differences between signifieds–are foregrounded (when they become visible), the word disappears. For those who know how to read–and this includes non-readers such as Irnerio–one component or the other must be foregrounded. Unlike Irnerio, readers choose to foreground the signified: the concepts, feelings, and other representations derived from reading. To foreground the material signifier of writing rather than its signified meaning, as Irnerio does, seems ludicrous and irresponsible to us–it goes against the grain; it is unnatural.

Non-reading stays close to the physical letter, the written word. This would correspond to Barthes’s “text of bliss,” the writerly text. A reader can become a non-reader only through a deliberate choice; such a choice reflects upon, and rejects, the ethics (and economics, and theology) of the text. Irnerio refuses the categories of ownership, at least when it comes to books. If he were not such an agreeable fellow, and actually quite moral in his own strange way, you would have to think of Irnerio as evil. Yet readers are also non-readers, although in a limited way. When you attempt to decipher an unusual script, or study a language with a different alphabet, the foregrounding of the signifier is unavoidable, and often unpleasant. You then become an inadvertent non-reader, although unlike Irnerio you are still trying to read.

However, no one can actually learn not to read. Irnerio represents an unreachable goal; that is why his subversions of literariness do not upset us. Instead, they amuse us. Not to read is an impossible ideal, for the unconscious habits of reading cannot be entirely unlearned. The non-reader rejects the signified, and chooses only the signifier. However, a signifier without a signified is impossible; hence the non-reader is impossible. Probably only the truly illiterate person–the one who can make nothing out of writing–can actually see the written word as a bunch of squiggles, senseless marks which cannot be significantly distinguished from other similar squiggles. Such squiggles are not signifiers, and they have no signifieds.

For Irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that [the reader] seeks in books. But he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using [the reader's] books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant.(150)

Irnerio views books merely as things. He is an artist, and literature is his medium, but not as we might expect. Books are worthy in and of themselves, but only as the meaningless stuff (hyle) which he glues together into larger hunks and then carves into abstract sculptures. However, non-reading is not easy, even for a master such as Irnerio. How does he decide which book is the right one for a sculpture? Is his decision based solely on the physical matter of the book (color or shape of cover, size or thickness of pages, binding, typeface, etc.), or is Irnerio also somehow aware of its contents?

I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them.. . . . The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. . . . A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works.

. . . . There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don't. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can't make it until I find the right book.(149)

Non-reading points to the limit-condition which defines reading: its material situation. It highlights the theology implicit in the traditional understanding of the text. Yet the non-reader is clearly a sort of parasite on the literate world, or indeed, on literature itself. Irnerio cannot exist unless readers exist, unless an entire immense structure of civilization exists–including authors and publishing houses and scholars and bookstores and translators, as well as economic and educational and political systems–a structure which allows and requires readers to be readers. The ramifications of that larger structure provide the world and much of the plot of Calvino’s novel.

Literal Translation

The reader is made possible by the misplacing of the word which is writing. Every reading is a translation, a transfer (or “metaphor”) of something which allegedly lies on or in the page–Frege’s “sense”–to some other place inside the reader’s mind. Yet as Irnerio makes clear, when he refuses to read, that “something” is not the physical stuff of the books themselves, but something else entirely. Readers are trans-lators, those who take things from their proper places and move them somewhere else, and reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts which is a kind of translation. The theology of reading entails also a theory of translation, and vice versa.

For the theology of the text, the goal of the translator is to retrieve the authentic message of the original text and then re-embody that message in a new text. It is only the ideal text, the “work,” which can be translated, not the material text. Translation is exegesis. Compared to its meaning, the physical aspects of the translated text are unimportant, and they can be modified and rearranged and ultimately sloughed off, like a mortal human body temporarily inhabited by an eternal soul. As noted above, the theology of the text has its own doctrine of the incarnation, for which the spiritual “word” enters into the written “flesh.”

The translation theory of Walter Benjamin presents an alternative view of the theological dimension of texts and the operations of language–a view that is close to Irnerio’s. According to Benjamin, the goal of translation is not to transfer a meaning (which can somehow be detached from its linguistic embodiment) from one textual body to another, but rather to form a kind of reciprocity between the translation and the original text, so that the reader sees through both to “pure language.” This pure or “true” language is not an historical, empirical language, but rather it is language itself, language without purpose, meaning, or function–language speaking only itself, endlessly. Benjamin called this goal “literal translation.”

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.(79)

Literal translation seeks “a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function . . . pure signifier . . . paradoxical in the extreme” (de Man 96-97). The goal of literal translation is the interlinear text, “in which literalness and freedom are united” (Benjamin 82). In the space between the parallel lines of the two texts, the translation and its original are united in a true language “without the mediation of meaning.” The translation reflects back upon and reveals the original as a fragment of pure language, in a way that it is unable to reveal itself. In translation the original is brought back to life, and the pure language imprisoned within the original text is “liberated” (Benjamin 71-72, 80). It is translation, according to Benjamin, that “saves” the text.

For Benjamin, the principal question in translation theory is: how does the translated text illuminate the original text? The value of a translation lies in its confrontation with the original text, not in its infallible transmission of the meaning of that text. The preferred translation will not necessarily be the most accurate one, the clearest transmission of meaning, but rather the one which stands in tension with the original text. Literal translation measures the uniqueness of the material text by the other texts with which it is juxtaposed, and with the possibilities for intertextual meaning which then emerge. Like a tangent to a circle, the translation harmoniously supplements and complements the original. There is no question of the two texts somehow being two copies of the same thing.

The interlinear space of translation is utopian and uninhabitable; it is sacred and untouchable space (Derrida, The Ear of the Other 115). The letters of the alphabet, from which the text is assembled, are meaningless in themselves. The text itself as a physical object, the material space of the semiotic, is deficient in meaning. The physical text is a literal text, and therefore it resists interpretation. It is unreadable, non-readable, non-readerly. According to this view, the purpose of language is not to reveal but to conceal, and translation tests the power of language to hide meaning:

[T]ranslation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed.(Benjamin 78)

Literal translation seeks to uncover the language spoken by God in creating the universe–that is, a language of naming. For literal translation, the proper name is a matter of crucial importance. Names cannot be translated, strictly speaking–they stand at the very edge of language, at the boundary of signification. Names have meaning (they refer to objects), and yet they do not mean (they cannot be defined). The name is language beyond meaning, without meaning–a language “lost” by humanity (because “confused” by God) at the Tower of Babel.

Benjamin’s views on translation come explicitly into the realm of theology, and they are close to a kind of Kabbalist mysticism. Like non-reading, literal translation draws language back to a point of ineffability, to the edge of the human world. It empties language of significance, reducing it to a material residuum alone. Literal translation refuses to allow the separation of meaning from its physical embodiment, and thereby it de-values the question of meaning. The ideal of exegetical translation is rejected. However, the absence of an extratextual realm of meaning does not liberate translation but rather constrains it, and perhaps even renders it impossible.

Materialist Reading

The reader invents the work as an authority, something worth owning. This law of ownership is equivalent to the desire for translation, and for exegesis. Barthes identified this kind of reading with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” In its explorations of narrative codes, strategies of authority, and the production of meaning, Barthes’s writings, and especially S/Z, present an important contribution to the theology of reading. Fernando Belo’s book, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark, is one of the few sustained attempts apart from S/Z itself to apply this method to any writing, although one might argue that Calvino’s novel playfully hoists Barthes on his own petard.

S/Z is an immensely complex and close reading of Honore de Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine. Barthes divided Balzac’s story into 561 “lexias,” which he then analyzed in terms of five “codes” which he found operating throughout that narrative. A lexia is a phrase (in the sense that Jean-Francois Lyotard has given to that term), an individual semantic unit which may range in length from part of a sentence to several sentences. The codes are the cultural and intellectual filters through which the great abstract repository of langue becomes the limited specificity of parole, and through which the field of potential signification (what Kristeva calls the semiotic) is formed into a narrative world (what Kristeva calls the symbolic). The codes permit and also channel the conjunction of signifier and signified.

The codes form the structures through which Sarrasine creates the readerly illusion of a transparent window (a story within a story) opening on to a coherent and realistic world. In the larger, “framing” story, an unnamed man attempts, and fails, to seduce a beautiful young woman by agreeing to reveal to her the identity of a mysterious old man. This revelation takes the form of a story (the inner, “framed” story) of a foolish and impetuous artist (Sarrasine) who mistakes a beautiful castrato (La Zambinella) for a woman and falls in love with “her,” with fatal consequences. Barthes’s detailed analysis of these codes, one or more of which functions in each of the lexias, reveals that they conceal a deep narrative incoherence (the writerly), an absence or deficiency (a castration) which the narrative both represents and is.

This catastrophic collapse always takes the same form: that of an unrestrained metonymy. By abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of legal substitution on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word, it is no longer possible to represent, to make things representative, individuated, separate, assigned. (215-216) At its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: What are you thinking about? but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: about nothing, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension.(217)

The writerly is the resistance which the text offers to coherent meaning–not an active resistance, as of a living presence (such as the intention of an author), but a passive, inertial resistance, a kind of friction. It is lodged in the materiality of the text as writing (hence Barthes’s term). This materiality disrupts the narrative codes, interrupting their operation or setting them against one another, and therefore the writerly may be identified through the frustration of the reader’s desire for a readerly, followable narrative. The writerly consists in those elements of the text which remain opaque to reading, refusing to be reduced to a consistent and comprehensive understanding–and which are present in even the most readerly and realistic narratives, such as Sarrasine.

Every instance of language is at least somewhat writerly, and there are some texts which resist any coherent reading. The conflict over meaning is somehow essential to the attempt to read these writings, which are in effect all surface, a surface which reflects parabolically upon itself and which never opens up to reveal unambiguously an extratextual truth. The materiality of the text appears whenever reference is suspended or otherwise incomplete. Barthes argued that the readerly work must disappear whenever the writerly text appears, that the text de-authorizes or de-constitutes the work (“From Work to Text” 78-79).

Through his reading of Balzac, Barthes (like Benjamin) recovered in a secular way a strand of the Kabbalah, the mystical rabbinic reading of Torah which attended even to the physical shapes of the Hebrew letters, and which has been long overlooked by the logocentric idealist tradition which has dominated Western philosophical and theological thinking–the theology of the text. Barthes’s reading praxis is a Benjaminian translation; the “pure language” of the Balzacian text is uncovered, and it speaks. Through his reading of Barthes (and of the gospel of Mark), Belo has re-imported this sort of reading into biblical studies. Belo’s “materialist reading” of Mark is not merely so in the sense that as a Marxist analysis, it is materialistic. Rather, it is materialist also (and perhaps more so) in that it attends to the written/printed text as a material body.

Belo follows the same method that Barthes used, adopting some of Barthes’s codes and identifying others appropriate to Mark’s text. He claims that he intends to read Mark in terms of its narrative qualities alone, and with no regard to its referential truth-value (95). In order to do so, he divides the gospel of Mark into 73 “sequences,” each made up of one or more “scenes.” Here he compromises Barthes’s text-analytical method by combining it with traditional historical-critical views; Belo’s “sequences” are established from critical pericopes, irreducible atoms of the tradition behind the synoptic gospels as uncovered by biblical scholarship of the last two centuries. The bulk of Belo’s book consists of detailed and often provocative reading of these sequences in terms of the relevant codes.

However, despite his ingenious adaptation of codes which Barthes developed for study of a nineteenth-century French Romantic novella, so that they are also relevant to a first-century Hellenistic Jewish gospel, Belo rarely uncovers in Mark the sort of remarkable narrative structures that Barthes does in Sarrasine. This is not a consequence of the differences between these texts. The gospel of Mark is more writerly than Balzac’s story, although its long entombment within the security of the Christian canon has protected it from this sort of critical reading. Nonetheless, studies of the gospels in recent years have gone far toward penetrating that security. Belo is apparently unaware of these studies.⁴

In addition, Belo frequently accepts the judgments of traditional bourgeois biblical scholarship–the very judgments which he claims to be rejecting!–not only in relation to matters of dating and provenance of the gospel (96-97), but also and apparently unconsciously in relation to many points of exegesis. Belo admits that his reading is “naive” (1). This naivete contributes to the charm and originality of his book. However, what is most disturbing about Belo’s reading of Mark at these points is its quality of naturalness.

Belo’s reading “de-materializes” the Markan text in an effort to bring to it a kind of closure. This closed text refers to participation in an apostolic succession which continues in contemporary movements of liberation, and it turns the oppressed peoples of the world into a new Israel. To this corresponds Belo’s reading of the Markan Jesus as a Pauline Jesus (206, 297), or a Jesus who abandons Judaism in order to turn to the gentiles, and who is stopped by Jewish authorities before his revolutionary plans can be fully realized.⁵ Liberation of the oppressed is a worthy goal, but if that alone is what Mark is “really” about, then the text may once again have been closed in the name of logocentric univocity.

I share Belo’s political sympathies, and I share his disgust with the theological tepidity of contemporary bourgeois churches, but I suspect (as I think Barthes would) those points in Belo’s reading where the reader’s need for a committed writing overwhelms the materiality of the text. I then become a non-reader. This tests both my reading and Belo’s. The strengths of his reading are in those places (and they are many) where it is itself radically shaken or disrupted by the writerly qualities of the gospel of Mark, where Mark’s refusal of the bourgeois reading emerges through its refusal of any single dominant reading–even Belo’s.

The gospel of Mark is not a politically neutral text. Few texts do the job of confronting and rejecting the reader’s need for power and for control as well as Mark does. My objections to Belo’s book do not center upon his political reading, but upon his apparent desire to have his reading be the only reading. This creates a conflict which may be inherent in any reading, but which is suppressed all too often. Belo’s ability to call Mark’s textual resistance to our attention emphasizes the degree to which many readers have failed to see that resistance. It is this ideological dimension of Mark–its resistance to the reader–which demands a materialist reading. Yet it is precisely this resistance which can never be read, which can only be encountered, by any reader, as the unreadable, the non- readerliness of the text. Belo’s reading reveals the alienness of Mark’s story, and this can only happen through close attention to the materiality of the text.

Belo’s book carries profound implications for those who engage in theological enquiry beyond the confines of traditional religious institutions.⁶ His book concludes with a long “Essay in Materialist Ecclesiology” in which Belo sketches an “ecclesial” understanding of the “collective son of man” as a material presence in the world–as a body composed of hands, feet, and eyes. This body, which is inherently political, is in Mark’s view (as interpreted by Belo) Jesus’s body. It is not a body to be abandoned in an ascension to some spiritual realm, but rather it is the text itself incarnate in its readers, in this physical world, the only place where the kingdom of God might be.

The continuity thus refers us to the figure of the collective Son of man at the level of the erased text; this figure . . . functions in the register of a continuity that is indicated by the ascensional schema in which the starting point is earth. Let us demythologize this figure. . . . What will be left of the figure of the collective Son of man will be the communist program of his practice, [and] his subversiveness.(287)

For Belo, this means a re-opening of the question of resurrection, for he insists that salvation in the gospel of Mark is always salvation of the body. The “body of Christ” is no easy theological metaphor here. Belo argues that the messianic narrative of Mark lies in fundamental opposition to the theological discourse of the institutional church. It is this discourse which keeps the church from being able to read Mark in liberative fashion.

The Gospel narrative is articulated with the indefinite play of the narratives of its readings, a play that must not be closured, even in the name of reason, even in the name of God. The debate thus opened concerns the evaluation of the power at work in the practice of the bodies which we are.(294)

By playing the culturally-determined pressures toward signification (the codes) over against the writerly resistance offered by the materiality of the text, Belo’s materialist reading treads a fine line. At every step it threatens the obliteration of the very thing which makes it possible. On the one hand, the desire to produce a coherent reading is very powerful, and perhaps irresistible. On the other hand, it is the materiality of the text–its otherness–that refuses the hegemony of bourgeois theology and opens a space for Belo’s alternative reading.

Concrete Theology

Literal translation, the non-reader, and materialist reading offer approaches to a theology of reading which stress the physical, concrete aspects of the text in ways customarily ignored by traditional theories of the text, as well as by much of the Jewish and nearly all of the Christian theological tradition. Calvino, Benjamin, and Belo provide examples of what I have elsewhere called “concrete theology.”⁷ The theology of the text understands the text as an incarnate yet ultimately spiritual word. In contrast, concrete theology is a theology of reading which seeks to discover the essential carnality of the word in the materiality of the text, language at those points where it bodies itself into concrete reality, apart from any signification, exceeding its own metaphysical limits.

Concrete theology desires the “new word,” the word which is as yet or once again meaningless–not really a word, but only potentially one. It seeks this word in nonsense, incoherence, and gibberish. (This is not glossolalia, for which the “speaking in tongues” is already Spirit-filled.) In this it is both materialistic and mystical. Concrete theology therefore attends closely to those points where language resists rational or empirical analysis, where the rules of meaning are broken–for example, questions of fictionality, connotation, and metaphor.

Concrete theology rejects the theology of the text, and in so doing it makes problematic the very meaning of “theology.” Nevertheless, the word “theology” points to the ongoing, inevitable, and inescapable slide of language and thought toward metaphysical (logocentric, onto-theological) closure–the inevitable return of the traditional understanding of the text. All language and thought, even the most atheistic, the most secular, and the most scientific, is caught in the gravitational field of this great black hole which we call by words such as “presence” and “reference.” Only poetry in its most radical, linguistically self-destructive forms comes close to escaping the vortex–but in such poetry, language is at its most concrete. This is the maximum degree of the writerly.

As a theology of reading, concrete theology is intensely interested in books, writings, scripture.⁸ However, concrete theology rejects the Bible as authority, just as Belo rejects the appropriation of biblical truth by bourgeois theology, and just as Irnerio rejects the demand of every writing, the demand to be read. Concrete theology reads the Bible against the grain of established theological truth. It also rejects the church’s claim to ownership of the Bible–concrete theology liberates the Bible from the church’s hermeneutic control. It refuses the closed canon as such. The Bible becomes for it just another text, or rather, many texts. For concrete theology, the Bible is many bibles, an expanding and contracting and multiple text, a shimmering of texts which cannot be contained in any one book.

For concrete theology, exegesis is eisegesis. A better term than either of these is one recently proposed by Gary Phillips, “intergesis,” which suggests a reading between the texts, or intertextual reading. The term “exegesis” is an ideological subterfuge used to conceal a preference for one type of eisegesis over others, to make one way of reading into the text appear to be the natural, normal reading- out of what the text had within it. The works of Calvino, Benjamin, and Barthes, among others, have made it clear that there is no such thing as an objective meaning hidden within any text. The notion of a scientific critical exegesis is as dangerous in its own way as the proclamation of the “true meaning of the Bible” (as inspired by God) on the part of fundamentalist religion, to which the theology of the text is functionally equivalent.

There are no limits to eisegesis, or to misreading. As a translation from the materiality of the text, every reading is a misreading, turning the text into what it is not. Still, to say that there are no correct interpretations doesn’t mean that there are no incorrect interpretations. One who reads Sarrasine and understands La Zambinella to be a woman, or a gay man, does not read “the same story” as another who understands the accepted meaning of “castrato.”⁹ An alternative set of codes which permit the understanding of “castrato” as, e.g., “a type of woman” is not inconceivable, but such a reading would render incoherent the narrative structures of Sarrasine. In such a reading the bounds of intertextuality would be strained to the point of “anything goes,” and the thwarted desire for meaning would destroy the prospect of its own satisfaction.

However, reading is a juggling of codes, trying to get it all to “work out right.” One misreading leads to another. I read Belo’s book within the context of an attempt to understand concrete theology. I sought a materialist reading of his materialist reading. I did not read Belo in the context in which Belo reads the gospel of Mark, and yet his reading is not entirely unlike Irnerio’s non-reading, either. In addition, Belo also permits a reading from within another context, the context of “the other.” Every (re)reading changes the context and opens a way for the other. The material text–physical marks on the page–is liberated from one context, and it is transported (translated) into another. The material text remains “the same” (physically), but the meaning must be altered. It is a misunderstanding–but then, all readings are inevitably misreadings.

What is needed is an understanding of the tensions between resistance inherent in the physical aspects of the text, and ideological pressures brought to bear upon it by readers. Like Irnerio, I reshape Belo’s work to fit my own desire–I read into it. As a middle-class male gentile white heterosexual North American, I am perpetually in serious danger of reclaiming Belo’s radically neo-Marxist reading of Mark for the sort of bourgeois theology over against which he sets his own reading. That is a risk which I must take, or else not read (that is, not translate) and remain silent–unlike Irnerio, whose non-reading culminates in the work of art. Nonetheless, my reading is also not entirely foreign to Belo’s, even as it cannot be identical to his. It stands over against his book, touching it (I hope) as a tangent to a circle.

The text is the specific, material product of a concrete act of production. For the logocentric, idealist tradition, the materiality of language is only the temporary and ultimately transparent medium for the spirituality of meaning. For materialist reading, in contrast, marks on the surface of the page are not merely the vehicle or channel of a fundamentally independent meaning, passing it on from an earlier, extratextual realm (such as the mind of an author) so that it may eventually be translated back to a different, but also extratextual, location (the mind of a reader). Instead, these marks are opaque, inert, and resistant to the desire for meaning. The differences through which they signify are themselves without meaning. The material body of the text conceals even as (and more than) it reveals. Different texts are not copies of some ideal original, and they cannot be collapsed into some universal, spiritual entity.

Concrete theology is the name for awareness of the tensions involved between the desire for, and the resistance to, meaning. Concrete theology therefore also offers a way of non-reading. It presents a different reading, an alternative reading, from the mainstreams of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is a reading of the otherness of the text which may well appear to traditional readers as a mutilation of the text. It looks so intensely at the text that the words disappear, not into ideas as they do for traditional readings, but into meaningless marks. Concrete theology can never be more than a prolegomenon, a not-quite- theology, a via negativa which can only announce what it is not.

Notes

1. Increasingly, texts are not a matter of ink and paper but of magnetic or laser-optic recordings. What will the relative invisibility of such media, unreadable without special machinery, do to our thinking about texts and reading? How will the change in the physical stuff of the text itself change our theology of the text?

2. Some analytic philosophers reserve the word “text” for the physical object (words on a page); what I call here the ideal or spiritual text, they call the “work.” The work is a self-identical artistic entity (for example, a particular story) which may be found in various texts. Barthes made a similar distinction, identifying the work with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” Foucault notes some logical difficulties in the concept of “the work” (143-44).

3. Varieties of reader-response criticism remain popular and influential in literary studies, but they will not be discussed here. However, some criticisms of reader- response theory may be inferred from the following.

4. With the exception of Louis Marin’s important book and the work of a few other French structuralists, Belo does not cite any of the literary and narratological studies of the gospels of the last several decades. His references to English-speaking biblical scholars are to an earlier generation.

5. Belo’s reading here is not at all foreign to the history of bourgeois biblical scholarship, despite his claims to the contrary, but it suggests an anti-Semitism which is arguably foreign to the gospel of Mark. One finds echoes of this at several points in Belo’s reading, such as his comments on Jesus’s interactions with the Gerasene demoniac (pagans do not endanger Jesus, 130) and with the Syrophoenician woman (as an alteration of Jesus’s strategy, 145).

6. See my essay, “Post-Ecclesiastical Theology,” Explorations (Spring,1992).

7. “In order to exceed the limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center, its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete” (Aichele 138-139).

8. “[T]o describe systems of meaning by postulating a final signified is to side against the very nature of meaning. . . . Scripture is a privileged domain for this problem, because, on the one hand, theologically, it is certain that a final signified is postulated: the metaphysical definition or the semantic definition of theology is to postulate the Last Signified; and because, on the other hand, the very notion of Scripture, the fact that the Bible is called Scripture, Writing, would orient us toward a more ambiguous comprehension of the problems, as if effectively, and theologically too, the base, the princeps, were still a Writing, and always a Writing” (Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge 242).

9. When I teach S/Z, I have the students read Sarrasine first, on their own. Several usually come up with such readings.

Works Cited
- Aichele, George. The Limits of Story. Chico, Calif.: Scholars P, 1985.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
- —. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- —. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
- Belo, Fernando. A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
- Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981.
- de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
- Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
- —. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
- Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- Frege, Gottlob. Translations From the Writings of Gottlob Frege. Trans. and ed. P.T. Geach and M. Black. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1952.
- Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- Phillips, Gary A. “‘What is Written? How are You Reading?’ Gospel, Intertextuality and Doing Lukewise: A Writerly Reading of Lk 10:25-37 (and 38-42).” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers. Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992.
September 25, 2013

XL (Letters on Xenakis)

Nathaniel Bobbitt

    Introduction and References

       Xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods
       have literary implications.  To consider the personality of
       Xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a
       means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and
       sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance.
       Xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with
       techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook
       within the writing process.  

       In XL, Xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary
       task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial
       reference within writing.  The next step is clearly textual
       instability and a generative prose form.

       A.  Breton's political/scientific approach, also in Xenakis
            -Collaboration and collectives
            -Science, Center of Mathematical and Automated
              Studies, compare Xenakis interest in musical
              cognition with Weil's thesis on Descartes' Science
              and Perception

       B.  What are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense
            of treating greater quantities of data, all at once,
            via:
            -Symmetry
            -Asymmetry
            -Computational complex patterns

       C.  "Objects in action,"  compared with optical illusions
               complex observations rather than the consideration
               of fallibility, hallucination:
            -Consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting
             hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as
             a rythmic source
            -Waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality

       D.  Irrational quality to be found in "objects in action"
            -Acceleration in glissandi
            -Multiphonic versus microtonal drone
            -Octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree
             These irrational qualities anticipate a "siren"       
             activity that tempi studies in Carter on the player
             piano.

                                  ***

       I.  B.F. Skinner & Xenakis as models for the commentator's
            (the friends') consideration of behavior as
            quantifiable:
            -Skinner...item...collection
            -Xenaxis...group...manipulation
            -Use of memory as heuristic module within the
             sensorial practice:  F(x, y)...sensorial
                                  F (x',y')...memorial
            -Skinner...behavior (habitual)
            -Xenakis...performance (task realization)
       Consider Skinner and Xenakis on math testing and the
        mathematics of experiment testing.

       M.
            Adieux, when I get a chance to break away from the
       hurry up and wait activity I write you, almost a symbol more
       than anything.  A symbol of what I should be in contact
       with, not that I need reminding but all my mainstays are
       packed away.  The necessity of a new place takes over so.  
       The chance to meet with others is here, as I am a substitute
       teacher.  Each day a new school, another direction, and a
       bus route to learn.  The time schedule is that of the rural
       doctor.  What does the sense of patrimony and
       grandfatherhood evoke for you: Such stodgy sorts perhaps
       are not vivid enough for "your punk German, your computer
       talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together."  Yet you
       were friendlier (than the other Darmstadters) as an ideal
       separates...and allows one to respond.  One day these
       letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end,
       that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression.

       For now, necessity takes over from irony.  Both are
       merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is
       another story.  Perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the
       thought.  I think of you as someone that asks for only a
       good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling
       after your desires are taken care of elsewhere.  Instead
       there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls
       and disinterested conversation between two commentators. 
       The word finally appears commentaire.  The ability to work,
       experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider
       lapses of conversation.  Good commentator, good night.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       1.2.0

       M.

            It hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term
       "volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental,
       arbitrary, and unavoidable.  I am content with this news
       which I must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle.

            By now you know that I am always trying to find ways to
       make more out of my sentimentality.  The act of reading a
       favorite is even more pleasurable if I can extend some
       aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the
       reading.  Better yet, someone shows me something "how to do"
       and I use it.  The call-backs, the sentimentality I live
       over time through the debris of a better time, the reading
       matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard.

       You as commentator must have some idea about this as all
       this work grew out of that name..."Xenakis"...with enough
       associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same
       name.  The ones today regard measure and the study in
       "pictures which make you think."  Diagram, meditatio,
       Archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the
       pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a
       study of volumetrics in Xenakis.

       Author's Note:

            These quotes refer back until we consider curvature and
       foci in the forms of volume, but what I am after is the
       place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the
       sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in
       the skyline.  Archimedes was gained from Weil, as your news
       on Xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question:
       how graphism informs acoustics.

            Ever since someone said, "the concert was no good
       because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and
       space was there, but what little advantage do we take of
       the notion.  Steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the
       remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align: 
       acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without
       metaphor.

            The first example will be mine...regarding clusters in
       the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated
       pitch.

       1.3.0

       M.
            Tell me something, when you are out at the club, at
       what moments does imagination take over from the body
       slamming.  How weightless do they get or is it controlled
       busting one's head into a wall.  Is it just black and blue
       or does clotting appear.
            Yesterday I read about India, rioters after an act of
       self-immolation.  Degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends
       fear the insipid.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

        The tenets of Logic:
            -To think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within
             correction and error.
            -To handle greater quantities of data
            -Applications for a math primer for everybody:
            -Selection
            -Mathematical Expectation
            -Weighting test criteria
            -Qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to
             quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of
             behavior.

       Conclusion:

       Seek modes and resolve application tenets:
            -rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered)
             figures at irregular durations.
            -interval in an interval
            -compare two-sided lineal time scheme

            Stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in
       dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's
       stroking of face when one is engaged or interested.
            Yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves
       but it is their hair which they stroke.  What role can
       stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and
       cognition:
            -memory
            -learning
            -concentration
            -recollection
            -attention

       1.4.0

       M
            One can concentrate by straining the forehead to
       attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head.  The
       relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a
       means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation
       without drugs.

       When dementia patients forget, several steps are missing:
       -image of concentration
       -direction of image (contextual relation)
       -inability to hold onto the image
            *) slipping away of name--object association
            *) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode
            Dementia is a regression into a childlike
       consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech.  Reinforce
       sensorial rather than verbal lapses.
            We are living very modestly and that stops me.  As
       always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place."  The
       lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with Toronto
       and Canada are reasons for you to come up.  The absence of
       identity makes it even a better place.  One is free of
       influence, one can just bounce off objects in action.  The
       radio reception is fair.  The  whole thing could improve.

       1.5.0

       M.
            Aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal,
       or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in
       their coupling or drone state.  Stasis in these blocks is
       like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a
       population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate
       without forward motion for a while but the particles slide
       through, ungluing the gridlock.  The gridlock is never fully
       immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block.  The
       sonora block can be considered as a gridlock.  The gridlock
       can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth
       pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto
       more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive
       again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       XL.2.0

       M.
            This series you will find in one piece but it has grown
       over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way
       fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in Xenakis's
       Phillips Pavilion.  I wish this series were more solid, I
       have found few mathematical conclusions, I have been left to
       observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations.
            It was comforting to hear from you after those months
       in which I had no address to send you.  Now you can call. 
       The fact that German has outweighed programming and
       computation...on with change.
            Your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted
       oversimplification are all parts of the commentary.  What I
       ask is that we should go into collective research, rather
       than work on solos and then join, to give solos.
            "Find yourself a programmable young thing."  If said
       what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen
       lip.

       Outline

            The success of this series would be the elaboration, of
       automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction
       problems.  First condsider architectural design as it holds
       for acoustic activity.

September 25, 2013

Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

H.Smith@unsw.edu.au

David Antin is a “talk poet” who gives provocative talks which combine the genres of lecture, stand up comedy, story-telling and poetry. They juxtapose anecdote with poetic metaphor, philosophical and political debate with satirical comment. The talks are improvised, that is they are created during the performance and no two performances are the same. In his talk piece Gambling (Tuning 148), performed in the seventies, Antin refers to the recreativeness which dominates many poetry readings and which he is reacting against; simply reading a poem is like “returning to the scene of the crime/you try to reenact it and the more you try to bring it back to life the deader it becomes.” The medium of the talk restores to poetry its lost oral dimension; the opportunity to bridge the gulf between creative process and product and the opportunity to create in a public forum. Although there is no written record of many of Antin’s talks, some of them have been published in two volumes Talking at the Boundaries and Tuning.

David Antin was born in New York City in 1932 and graduated from New York City College and New York University. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of California at San Diego. He is married to the performance and video artist and film-maker Eleanor Antin. He is also a distinguished critic who has written on the visual arts, postmodernism, television and video art, and the role of art in technology.

The context of the conversation was our forthcoming book Discovering the Discourse: improvisation in the arts after 1945 in which we are investigating the importance of improvisatory techniques and approaches in art, film, literature and theatre. In this book we will rebut the naive conception of improvisation as a purely spontaneous and intuitive process and demonstrate how improvisation has been a complex creative procedure used by many artists since 1945. We were particularly interested in David Antin’s work because it is one of the few examples of improvised poetry. We wanted in the interview to ascertain how David went about his improvisations, what his technique for improvising was and how this related to the effect of the improvisations.

The interview took place in San Diego in February 1992 shortly after David Antin’s talk at Carroll’s Bookshop in San Franscisco on the subject of the other. Although David’s work over the years was the main focus of the interview, we also alluded from time to time to that specific talk.

HS: In what sense do you think your talks are
improvisations?

DA: Probably in the same sense that most people's
improvisations are improvisations. One person I could
imagine myself in a relationship to, though I've never
said it before, is Coltrane. Coltrane was constantly
working over scales and examining other musical
manoeuvres, to keep his hands on a lot of things that
he could do; he was listening to timbres of different
mouthpieces and playing with different ways of making
music, so it is not as if he went in as a blank slate.
Jazz improvisation is work that in some ways I
feel very close to, because the language offers you a
well-formed grammar. I am not interested in
transforming English grammar, but I am interested in
the full range of English and its varieties of speech-
registers and its ways of movement from here to there.
It allows you much more freedom than anybody really
knows. I mean we know very little about the full range
of colloquial English. In fact most grammar that is
being used in the schools of the high levels of
linguistics, which I did doctoral work in, I regard as
highly idealized. There are so many things that it
doesn't explain, although it's a very eloquent family
of explanations for the things it does explain.
But it seems to me that language is a reservoir
of ways of thinking, because what I am really
interested in, at least as much as language, is
thinking: not thought but thinking. And the closest I
can get to thinking is talking. When I started doing
this I wanted to get close to the sound of thought, and
then I realised the only way you can get the sound of
thought is to think, to do a lot of thinking. Not all
thinking is verbal, and you can get close to some of
the things that are not generally thought to be
linguistic by approaching things in a way that seems
less discursive. That is, in some ways narrative and
images seem less discursive so that you can reach
towards images or towards semantics that are more
governed by other ways of arranging things in your mind
than merely what is taught to people as linguistics.
So the goal is to articulate through thinking, to find
my way and open up and explore the range of thinking,
but to think about things in the course of it. So in
this sense I have a lot of practice because I do it all
the time, but Coltrane also played music all the time.
It seems to me that Monk had a variably finite
repertory of ways of moving, part of which may have
been characteristic and part invented from time to time
and carried from performance to performance. In that
sense I am not any more original than Monk or Coltrane
but very much like them.

HS: I understand that. It is very important that
improvisation shouldn't just be confused with
spontaneity. Nevertheless, if you are going to give a
talk, is there any degree of preparation beyond previous
experience?

DA: Sometimes there is but the preparation is not
formalized. In other words when Peter Cole asked me to
think about the idea of the other I started thinking
about a variety of things. I started thinking about
the way the idea is used. Not systematically, but as I
was driving to school or doing something else like
making coffee in the morning. And I took out books
from the library to read, but not on the subject of
the other. It struck me that I wanted to look at
Marco Polo's travels. I did and it turned out to be a
bad translation and I thought that maybe Mandeville's
travels would even be more useful because they were
more fanciful. So I took out several volumes and was
browsing Mandeville before falling asleep at night. I
also browsed through an older history of ethnology that
I wanted to look at again and I re-read some of Levi
Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, none of which I found
specially important. It was just that I was preparing
my mind and it wasn't that I needed, or was necessarily
going to use any of this material: I thought it might
have some edge-like relationship to what I was doing.
I also looked at several old articles where the term
got recycled but again not very seriously. I made a
very light play with the material just to make myself
cycle the information in my head very loosely.
By the time I arrived for the talk I had no fixed
idea of how I would begin and I had no fixed idea of
structure. The structure normally is provided by the
finite length of the tape, sometimes I will stop long
before the tape runs out. So I talk for about an hour
or 45 minutes: if I'm told that I have to go shorter I
will run around half an hour. I can do very short ones
if necessary, but then it is different, you don't have
the luxury of manoeuvering in the same way. There are
dictates which are purely practical, such as how much
you can get on a side and there are the dictates of the
range and type of audience which has a lot to do with
social interplay and making things intelligible.
Because it is not only thinking out loud, it's thinking
out loud where you are sharing the thinking in some way
with other people.

HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
are not very directly interacting with them? How can
you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was
wondering all the time during the performance what kind
of audience you were pitching it at.

DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
how they work for you but also whether people find them
intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
them. But you get a sense from body language whether
people are with you or not with you and there are ways
of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount
of time circling the material before plunging in, to
achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
prologue. In other words in standard orchestral
situations they tune because they have got to reach a
particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
tuning.

HS: One possibility improvisation provides is
collaboration with other people, for example to
collaborate much more with the audience. I have read
about the incident at 80 Langton Place where the
audience, made up largely of poets, made you interact
with them.

DA: I was actually interacting with them rather maliciously
I thought.

HS: During your talk I wondered whether it would end with a
discussion and in some ways I was quite relieved that
it didn't.

DA: Most people are. I don't have a set feeling about it.
My sense is that people are there of their own free
will and I offer a kind of human engagement with them.
In other words I don't deal with material that is
impossible for them to deal with. I deal in a space
that I presume this intelligent audience can arrive at
in some manner. The length of the piece has something
to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the
question is how much I can push the material and keep
the audience still with it. I think that I can also
tell whether people are dialoging with the piece.
When I am talking what I say is never quite what I
intend to say. There is a kind of relationship between
the sense of one's own intentionality and what one
does, because if one had a complete match between what
one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go
any further, one would never have to reformulate. So
there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say
is better than your intention and sometimes worse or
sometimes merely to the left or right of it. And so I
am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as
well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience
is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but
also spinning off. I feel that's good. One of the
reasons I use a less tight presentation mode is that I
want the audience to have room to pursue its own
interest and loop away and loop back, which I think
they do. I think people associate off into things that
are like my experience but different, and that they
might have said in a different way. So they pursue
their agreements and disagreements with me through
parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale
dialogue. And to the extent to which they are involved
in it, they are interested in the piece and they have
this kind of intense but intermittent attention.

HS: It's still different from a direct dialogue with the
audience. Have there been some instances (apart from
the incident at 80 Langton Place) where people have
spoken from the audience or you have actively
encouraged that?

DA: Sometimes but not a great deal, unless it happens, in
which case sometimes I will respond to it in a way,
loop it in and continue, but my performance is not
aimed at that. Usually the audience doesn't feel
inclined to do this, anymore than they would normally
feel inclined to do it. Imagine an audience of
musicians at a jazz performance. They might feel very
responsive, someone might say, yeah, but they are not
likely to start playing. There is a feeling that the
audience generally has at an artwork that they interact
with it by thinking about it, rather than that they
immediately interact discursively with it. Although
once in a while I'll say something that gets close and
somebody will say something, usually not much, and I
acknowledge it and bring it in a bit and that is fine.

HS: As audience we're very conservative, I think: we're not
used to participating and so I suppose we would have
to be actively encouraged.

DA: You have to be not only encouraged but also feel
sufficiently ready. It is more than that, you have to
feel a readiness with respect to a common range of the
material and I think the lack of feeling ready is
partly a sense that the material is not quite so common
to them. In fact that was one of the complaints that
the Langton Place people had which I was toying with,
it was essentially that they knew very little about the
material. I was dealing with a relationship between
the figures of rhetoric and figures of mind and I was
trying to retrieve the values of certain Greek terms
because I thought they were useful. But when I got to
a story in an area they felt they knew a great deal
about or thought they knew something about, (they felt
inclined to have an opinion about anorexia say, or what
was called anorexia) it was funny because they hadn't
really thought about that either. Which was of course
one of the great difficulties for them, that is, they
were thinking about it now for the first time in any
significant way. And I think even they were tepid in
their interventions because they really hadn't thought
about it that much, and they figured I had thought
about it more which was probably true.

RD: Have you ever tried to set up a situation where you
have a discourse between several people who are
simultaneously thinking?

DA: I've never tried to set it up because it is hard to do.
Though I would certainly find it interesting.

RD: Because that would be the analogy to the jazz
performance.

DA: It certainly would, it's just that you have to organise
it and find people and find a terrain that you all feel
you are willing to do it in relationship to. I did a
thing in France at the Beauborg with several French
poets a couple of years ago but I think they saw
themselves as more supportive of what I was doing than
I would have liked. It was fun talking with them but I
found it hard to draw them out. I tried but it was
harder for me to draw them out in those circumstances.

HS: Could you give me any idea of the process by which you
generate the talks, how you get from one item in them
to another?

DA: Well I look for a promising tangle, some kind of snarl
of threads so to speak. I may not see all of them at
once, I may see the end of a thread, the end of a
couple of threads and I try to pick it apart, and find
out what it consists of.

HS: So you are holding all those threads together
simultaneously in your mind?

DA: I follow one of them and it either leads to another
knot or I go back up to find another one and I might
move into what seems like an end that I can't get out
of and then instead of backtracking I will leap to one
that was next to it. I will make a transition to the
one that was further away but which I had left over
there. So there is a way of dealing with it, as a
problematic: it is a sort of playfulness, it is as if I
took the notion of problem solving and thinking away
from its seriousness into a kind of sheer pleasure, the
idea of solving knots. You look for the great knot and
then you try to solve it like the Gordian knot. To me
the world is filled with some things that are knots and
some things that are snarls and some things that are
pleasant tangles and I try to find a way to open them
up and see what they are made out of and this sometimes
lead to new forms of ravelling. I knot and unknot and
I am looking for an ultimately elegant knot structure
which I will eventually work out of the remaining
material.

HS: That is actually what it feels like.

RD: It feels like several successive modules in some cases
doesn't it, particularly in the other. Did you have
an awareness that it was likely that there would be
five modules and that "Guattari" and "Saddam" and
"molecular structure" would be amongst them, or were
those things that mostly came to mind as it happened?

DA: I think they come from a kind of experience and a set
of attitudes and what sometimes happens is that you
have clear cut modules but the number of them may
differ and also they turn out not to be situated
precisely in the same plane. In other words there are
discrete concentrations usually, something leads to a
concentrated module and somewhere another one may
develop, but it generally turns out not to be module
module module in total contiguity. I try to construct
in a kind of cognitive space in such a way that the
distances between the modules create openings for the
mind and also begin to throw light on a space that
seems like a meaningful quasi container, but a
container filled with holes. In other words my
relationship to a system is--the problem of systems
is--that they don't have enough holes. So that they
become fanciful and unreal: the trap of systematic
thinking is that it is falsified through closure. I
like systems, I find them illuminating, but what I find
illuminating is the notion of systems that articulate
and are elegant and in some way incomplete and clearly
so. And it is a relationship between the one
incomplete system and the other one which creates a
kind of hyperspace, because the spaces between them
become interesting. The principle of complementarity
in physics is an example of concentration, on the non-
fit between two situations, and it takes head on the
difficulty of wave and particle and puts it right up
front in physics. Well I don't want to necessarily
argue that what I do puts it right up front like that
but I have treated it with casual obviousness. That is
I allow this complementarity situation to develop where
one story doesn't fit over the other story in such a
way that one completely clarifies the other (I don't
believe in total clarification) but on the other hand
it throws light onto it.

RD: But it is a logical necessity that thinking could not
have a complete closure really isn't it?

DA: It can't have complete closure.

RD: So what I was going to ask was,why so much emphasis on
making that necessary failure overt? I can see the
attraction but why is it attractive to you?

DA: Well it doesn't turn out to be a failure, because what
I really am doing is partly making a polemical case for
what I believe is real thought, real thinking, as
opposed to what has come to stand for rationalism in
the history of Western thought, which is a straw man:
the notion of the totally closed logical system which
has only one little hole in it that is unfortunate
because there is a paradox lurking in the corner. This
particular form, has dominated rational and
irrationalist thought in Western European discourse to
the point of annoyance finally, but what you actually
find is that structures, because they have holes in
them, don't become useless. On the other hand rational
thought is different from what people think it is, and
rationality is an exaggeration of the kind of clarity
of mind and the possible mental tactics that can be
deployed to think usefully, meaningfully and
creatively, and it seems to me these are very poorly
understood. So part of the purpose of my work is to
illuminate, by example, the nature of real thinking, in
which art-thinking shares a great deal with scientific-
thinking, and we have a lot in common although we will
do things that may be done differently we may not do
some of the things that scientists may do and we may do
a great number that they do. And even if you do what
they do, what they do doesn't look like what they say
it is, because when they write the article they always
do it backwards. The article is not the thinking.

RD: We art thinkers would not have such a tendency to
prioritise as scientists would have would we?

DA: No, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the
absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call
irrational artistic thought and rational thought. It
basically engages with the idea of raiding across the
two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain.
Logic is a function of human character, people are
basically in some sense logical when they think at all.
But logic is broader than that. The truth-table fable
is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories
in such a way and you could position them rigidly
between here and there, you could quantise between the
true and the false in a particular curious way. But
usually the categories are too slippery for anything
significant to be put into this position for very long.
What happens is that the slippage in anything you use
generally causes you to have to approach it in a number
of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true"
and "as long as this is like that then it follows from
that that this is this."

HS: Do you feel there is a sense in which you adopt a
persona in your talks? Reading through the talks I
sometimes felt there was a persona of a kind of naive
person struggling to understand certain things, for
example in the talk where you speak about the third
world and what the third world actually is.

DA: There is in a sense a persona but the persona develops,
because as soon as you begin representing yourself at
all, anything you represent has a fictional property.
As soon as a representation occurs it's partly untrue,
it's partly fiction, but it develops its own inertial
moment, its own commitments and a lot of these things
derive essentially from a kind of philosophical
positioning. In other words you can approach it in a
different way: "what if we didn't start by accepting
belief in all these things that everybody always knows,
what if we didn't know this, how could we examine this
belief." So the naivety is ultimately based on the
belief that we know too much and that it is founded on
too little. We are standing on a swamp or a cloud and
we rely on these well known things, that are well known
to be true, but how true are they? So in a way you
take things everybody knows so it sounds naive to say
them, but if you say "third world" by now everybody
seems to have forgotten what the first and second
worlds were. I mean is there a second world? What do
you mean by a world? Are there more than that? In
other words if the third is invented largely as a
function of a quarrel between one and two and you
develop a kind of economic theory on the basis of this,
the third gets to be built up largely on not belonging
to one or two. And then you call it unified, but the
relations that either the one or two might have can be
extremely bizarre, and furthermore you can imagine a
unity of victimization but the victims might not like
each other if they were unified. For example, it is
not obvious that the Jehovah's Witnesses, the gypsies,
the Jews, and the communists in the concentration camps
of the Nazis really were very friendly with each other,
or they were only as long as you had the barbed wire
around the camp, and they were often treated in
different ways. So it seems to me, without being
naive, you can't ask the right questions.

HS: But can I go back to the issue of the relationship
between the first person and yourself, because that has
been worked out in so many different ways in post-
modern poetry and yours seems to be very interestingly
situated with regard to that. Do you feel you have a
strong sense of talking about your own experience, or
do you sometimes tell lies about your own experience?

DA: Very often. No, it is all mixed! I basically feel
that my talks should be no more reliable than
conversation in general as absolute fact! You see what
one depicts as true is a function of one's feeling and
experience and all of it has its origins in things that
are factual as far as I remember, but some of them are
fantasies. And some of them are fantasies
involuntarily, sometimes you remember things that are
not true simply because your desire has already
produced the representation. So that I have never gone
out and notarised my statements, and my self-position
is that people will take it as credibly as
conversation. Now much of the experience is true or at
least partially true and some of it is very true and
some of it is fiction, but it is fiction that is true,
in other words it is serious fiction, it's not fantasy.
It is serious fiction in that it derives from a kind of
experiential engagement with it.

HS: How do you think the talks relate to your normal talk
or your normal speech?

DA: They are close but the situation creates a greater
intensification of the characteristics. In a
conversation with other people, in a social situation,
you tend to encourage other people and allow other
people to play and you may not have the space to take
on one of these things.

HS: The knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't
be so prevalent in a conversation would it?

DA: No. But it has a relationship with some of the
teaching that I do.

HS: That was another thing that struck me when I saw the
talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some
respects.

DA: Yes, well it draws on the lecture and on stand-up
comedy. It is not really stand up comedy in that I
really don't play gag after gag, I don't theatricalize
myself like Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray, of course,
is characterized as a performer who also does
improvisation although his improvisations become
somewhat memorized by the time he does the work. At
least I think he said this and on another occasion he
said he didn't, so I am not sure, he may work more like
me than he indicated first time around. He comes from
acting and so what he generates essentially is very
markedly a persona of Spalding Gray. He theatricalises
himself so he is his main actor and he positions
Spalding Gray as bewildered and as a major victim of
his own inadequacies and it is very charming.
And what happens is that though he is his main
actor, things befall him, whereas I tend to be
sometimes an actor and often merely only an observer or
sometimes an actor who is in there involuntarily but
the action is the other people. I am not my main actor
so my persona doesn't develop beyond necessity. It
seems to me as long as you start saying "I" you have
got a persona, especially if you say it three times in
a row because the "I" begins to develop a configuration
from its continuity. And you see Gray concentrates so
much on the behaviour and the bewilderment of his "I"
because he is his main actor, he produces not exactly a
Chaplinesque figure but a certain kind of bewildered
central figure. It is a more artefactually complete
version of the naivety you say that you pick up in
some of my pieces but my pieces are merely an attitude
that enters into a discussion of something else,
whereas in his case he then intrudes into and stumbles
over it and falls into a trap deliberately and picks
himself up out of the trap.

HS: Well that is a very important distinction isn't it?

DA: And so I don't build up the character and occasionally
I get sucked into a case where I am a considerable
figure but usually I am interested in something outside
of the "I." The subject in my case becomes the vantage
point from which to look.

HS: How do the talks relate to the written transcripts of
them, how do you actually notate them and what makes
you decide where to notate the gaps?

DA: It is very impressionistic. You see the media are
really quite different so what I am doing with the
talks is trying to create an experience for the reader
which is an analogue structure of the performance. The
media are really so different, that is performance has
all these unknown things that are happening between
you. The audience is there and they pick up a great
number of things from the way you look, from what you
are saying, the inclination of your head movement, they
have many more contextual clues than is on the tape
recording. The tape recording is in some ways totally
bewildering for most people, because it contains stuff
that people don't hear and it doesn't contain things
they do pick up. Whatever is said they ignore certain
things and slips at the time which they don't pay
attention to. It is perfectly clear when an audience
listens they hear the right thing. They hear what you
intend to a very great degree, and a tape recorder
records only what is acoustically available to it
within certain filters, so the tape recording is the
most bizarre mode of dealing with this material.
The transcript then is an attempt to construct. I
used to do it myself but now I get somebody just to
type it up altogether with no pauses, or to pause
wherever they think a sentence ends or not to worry
about it. If I decide to listen to the tape, which I
sometimes do, I listen all the way through and then I
take the transcript and put it down over there. And
then I look at the beginning and I read through it once
and then I start typing and then I might look at it
four pages later, six pages later, 12 pages later, I
may look at it very closely in spots. So what happens
is that I am typing, I am writing something with my own
habits of verbal composition and in my head the image
of what I have done, and I am recreating its image, I
am not transcribing line for line. Often without doing
anything of the sort it comes out almost as if it has
been memorized, which is very startling. But sometimes
what will happen is that I will come to a place where I
didn't have room to do something at the time, the piece
had a moment where I wanted to go on and for some
reason I couldn't do it as fully as I would have liked
and I think it should be made more articulate. Some
transcripts are twice as long as the talks originally
were. Some pieces are very close to the literal form:
the phrasing system seems to be very similar in both of
them and you could hardly tell the difference between
them.
I remember a piece called dialogue in my book
tuning. I did this piece in Santa Barbara and they
sent it back to me and I transcribed it and I added a
whole story that I cite in the performance but didn't
have room to tell it. But a reading audience doesn't
suffer from the same psycho-dynamic as a listening one,
you are in a different space, you are holding a book in
your hand and so I simply told the whole story that I
couldn't have told there given the difficulties of
timing. So the version that I sent back to them was
one and a half to two times the length of the other
piece. I met the editor about a week later and she
said she really liked it a lot and what she really
liked was how completely identical my original version
was with the performance! And so I have to say that
there is a phenomonological issue at stake.
It does vary from occasion to occasion depending
on the commitments I have. I have a commitment to the
performance, to the psycho-dynamics of improvisation,
to doing the best I can, which always involves an
engagement with an audience, and a commitment to
material. And sometimes one has to be traded off
against the other, you can't let the audience down. I
have a responsibility to an audience to do it as well
as I can in a way that allows them to be participants
to the end, and so my sense of timing is partly related
to that. I can stretch it, I can negotiate it but I
am not a performer who is interested in violating
audiences. My interest is essentially in engaging an
audience, discoursing with an audience perhaps pushing
it, but in some kind of social relationship that I find
is humanly responsible. Now the problem is I don't
always feel that I was responsible enough to some of
the articulations I should have undertaken in relation
to my loyalty to the material and then the question is
how do I do it in the text in such a way that it
doesn't violate the spirit of the performance? And
there will be times when I will take up in the text a
greater articulation of some of the material that I was
handling in a performance, and then I have to construct
a way of getting back from it into where I was before.
It is as if a cadenza went wild and I take the cadenza
way out and then I've got to come back in some way and
I create an artifice for getting back to where I was
before.

HS: I think, actually, the transcripts are very successful
because one of the things that struck me when I saw you
talk was...

DA: They sound like me.

HS: Yes that it was very much what I had conjured up from
the text.

DA: Well that is the intention.

RD: On the other hand another way of looking at that
process of transcribing is that you are using the
process of thinking but then you are also superimposing
thought.

DA: Well actually no. Just superimposing more thinking.

RD: Except that you are presumably doing that over a much
longer time-span and you are also thinking
retrospectively about what you thought in the process
of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought.
It is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it?

DA: Well it is interesting--it is true in a way although I
don't see it that way. I see it as thinking and
rethinking, because it seems to me I don't write slowly
either. I write almost as fast as I speak. I use a
computer and I used to use a typewriter and I am an
extraordinarily fast typist and the computer has made
me even faster. So I don't use the system that many
people use to write, which is built on endless
revision; not because I don't want to do it, I just
don't feel that way. I write almost the way I talk so
I go pusssssh you know and I catapult myself along
almost at the pace of my speaking.

RD: That raises the other question which comes from the
realization of the two stages. Why do you really need
to do the performance verbally in public? Why can't
you do the thinking at the computer.

DA: I like the engagement. Somewhere in Levi Strauss' work
he talks about the one thing that is so marked in all
primitive art and that is almost lost completely in
Western traditional art as we know it. And he says
what isn't there is a sense of occasion, whereas
occasion so dominates the art that he was talking
about. For me the sense of occasion, of art being
rooted in an occasion, is one of the central issues of
its motivation.

RD: Yes, well as an improviser I sympathise with that.
Stemming from what you said at the beginning of the
conversation and the comparison with Coltrane there is
one major difference, it seems to me, between what you
are doing in your talks and what they are doing. You
are saying that you don't really want to transform
grammar but I think that they did eventually transform
the grammar of music and by the heyday of free jazz it
became a primary objective almost. I don't think it
was ever a prime objective of Coltrane's but it
probably was of Cecil or Ornette. Do you not feel any
temptation in that direction in spite of that?

DA: Well grammar plays a different role historically in
music. And in a certain sense the grammar of music is
much more constraining and in some sense fairly
trivial. As someone reasonably grounded in music my
sense is that grammar in music is more of a
straightjacket than grammar in language. So they
really had to break with a lot, although they didn't
really break with grammar if you take grammar to be a
universal grammar. Supposing we take the notion of the
universal grammar of music, a very loosely
understandable psycho-grammar in a sense of what you
can distinguish, that is based on the
distinguishability of timbres, the limit and thresholds
of what perception can in fact articulate in sound. It
seems to me we don't know the universal grammar of
music. The grammar of language has just begun to be
discovered with the appearance of people like Chomsky
and the Russian formalists, and we hardly know what the
real grammar of language is.

RD: Nevertheless quite a few of our literary peers have
felt inclined to attack it haven't they?

DA: Yes though they usually do so on the basis of very
insufficient understanding.

RD: But as you have said in various ways already that
doesn't necessarily undermine the validity of the
enterprise does it, quite the opposite.

DA: No, not at all, I'm perfectly happy with them doing it.
If they start out from false premises and do terrific
things. I've got nothing against it! It is the theory
that I sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the
work is often terrific. So in a sense if Coltrane or
Ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is
only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the
grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose
that the deep grammar of music is different from the
grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look
for the deep grammar. I would say they are looking for
the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of
free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. I taught
one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where
we tried simply to take one whole performance of the
Coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we
tried to find a way to talk about it that made
intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods
that were made. And we needed a kind of theatrical
vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re-
formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was
extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly
grammatical because it was intelligible.

RD: Do you recognise a group of improvising talk-givers in
whatever country that are your peers, and if so have
you considered trying to set up a condition in which
you could collaborate with any of them specifically?

DA: Well I don't know of any peers in the sense of having
close relations although I know other people who work
in the domain.

RD: Yes I mean in the latter sense, a peer, somebody with
an equivalent level of interest.

DA: Yes they do but they are in a semi-commercial zone
overlapping mine and have different aims. For example
Garrison Keillor is an improvisor in certain ways. I
am not sure whether he memorizes his stuff and maybe it
is in story-telling that we overlap more than in
improvisation, although I have a feeling he may
improvise his stories. And there is a kind of
connection, although not a connection of sensibility
with Spalding Gray, though he is theatrical. And
whereas my talks have a kind of philosophical
linguistic commitment, in his there is a kind of
theatrical but also psychological set of concerns. I
don't know anyone who basically works that way that it
would be easy to imagine working in relationship to.

RD: So the idea of a collaboration with say a person who
might use phonemic improvising, let's say a Bob Cobbing
wouldn't really appeal because there isn't that
cohesion between the two approaches?

DA: No, although I am very inclined to the possibility of
working with a musician because I could imagine working
with some really contemporary musician, doing a piece
for example with George Lewis. I could imagine doing
things with him because the space that he operates in
seems to me not unreasonably playful. It is both
different enough and at the same time capable of being
rhetorically innovative and I could see myself playing
with it.

RD: We have used musical and verbal improvising. It can be
very interesting, you can make the relationship in lots
of ways.

DA: Yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together
in a physical sense and a team-like sense. It seems to
me that we could do it in ways that are not the most
obvious ways.

HS: And have you thought of doing anything, setting
yourself up technologically in any way? Having for
example a tape of yourself talking and then talking
with that or something like that.

DA: Well I did use the intervention of taped conversations
for the Archeology at Home and I was not enormously
thrilled by that. And I did another piece, Scenario for Beginning Meditation, that was published in one of
my books of poems. It has a set of questions with wide
spaces between them and some responses to them. There
were questions such as "is this the right time to
begin" and I left spaces between them on the tape
recording long enough so that I could answer the tape
recording. And I went back the next day and I ran down
the batteries of the tape recording so that I knew that
it would be fairly weak and that it would get weaker
and weaker. The sentences were philosophical
reflections on the problem of beginning. The tape
recording would talk and then I would try to answer the
recording in a dialogue. I tried to respond because it
was asking questions and I tried to answer it. The
students were in the middle and as the tape recorder
got lower and lower because I had deliberately run down
the battery very low, I had to push through the
students to hear the tape recording and be able to
respond to it. So the piece was a sculptural piece
because basically it forced the re-articulation of the
space. The piece took a while to do and at the end I
frantically leant against the tape-recording trying to
hear what it said in order to answer it. So the piece
was sort of funny but it was designed as a piece of
sculpture but later I just published the questions.

HS: Reading through Talking at the Boundaries and
Tuning there didn't seem to be a major change in the
way that you actually approached giving talks. When
did you start the talks?

D: Early 70's, about 71.

HS: Do you feel that the talks you give now are very
different in certain ways?

DA: I think they vary enormously. Obviously there were
changes because I am much more experienced at doing
them. But on the other hand if you look at the two
books, there are 16 talk pieces published in the two
books and yet in the 21 years that I have done this I
may have done 160 talks.
And this is a very small subset of what I have
done and in it is hard to have an idea of the range of
the talks from the 16. I could publish more but in a
way I am an oral poet who has book capability, and to
be an oral poet you have to do 7 or 8 performances a
year or you are not performing. It's important to be
an ongoing performer. I will do about 5 or 6 this
year; if you don't do it you can't keep your hand in
it. There have been changes and I've got a book coming
out with New Directions which will be out in Spring of
93. It is called What It Means to be Avant Garde.

HS: Do you think there are certain topics that you are
really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and
time again in your talks? I am sure if I went through
I could find certain recurring themes.

DA: Probably some that come up more than others and new
things show up once in a while. I like to think that I
am not so completely closed that I always talk about
the same things. On the other hand we have our habits
and concerns and things that are not resolved. What is
resolved I don't bother dealing with. For example in
the other certain things familiarly fit into it. On
the other hand it was not a subject I had thought about
in any significant way before and if you take it at the
micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you
are looking at them from different points of view. So
my sense is that there is a mixture. I am sure if I
went through the talks I would find things that were
familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's
capabilities.

The Interviewers:

Hazel Smith, who lived in England until 1989, was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, has a PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham in contemporary American poetry and is currently a lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has a particular interest in the contemporary avant-garde and in the creative process, and her current research interests include performance- orientated and technologically manipulated poetry, and improvisatory techniques and real time manipulation in the contemporary arts. She has published articles in many journals and is currently writing a book collaboratively with Roger Dean on improvisation in the arts after 1945 for the publishers Gordon and Breach.

Hazel Smith is also a poet and sound artist working in the area of experimental poetry and performance and has published in numerous international poetry magazines. She has also published three volumes Threely (Spectacular Diseases Imprint 1986), Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90 (Butterfly Books 1991) and TranceFIGUREd Spirit (Soma 1990). Some of her work was included in the 1991 Anthology Floating Capital: new poets from London, Potes and Poets Press, U.S.A..

Hazel Smith has given poetry and text performances in many different countries including Australia, Great Britain, USA, Belgium and New Zealand, and also on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), BBC and US radio. She has collaborated several times with artist Sieglinde Karl and musician Roger Dean and her performance work has been featured on several ABC programmes, and internationally, for example on France Culture. She is currently making a CD of her poetry and performance pieces and one is being released on CD by the US journal in sound, Aerial.

Hazel is also a violinist. She is leader of the contemporary music group austraLYSIS and has performed solo and chamber music in many parts of the world including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway and the Philippines. She has featured as soloist on several gramophone records.

Roger Dean is an improviser, instrumentalist (playing double bass, piano and electronics), composer and musicologist. He has worked widely in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the U.S.. He formed the European group Lysis in 1975, and its Australian counterpart, austraLYSIS, in 1989. He has made more than twenty five lp and cd recordings. Amongst his recent recordings are The Wings of the Whale (with Lysis; Soma 783), Something British (with Graham Collier Music; Mosaic GCM 871), Moving the Landscapes (austraLYSIS, Tall Poppies 007) and Xenakis Epei on the Wergo label.

He has written more than 60 works, both completely notated pieces and also works for improvisers. He has used a range of compositional techniques, from serial, and freely atonal, to neotonal and other post-modern approaches; and composed for digital electronics also. Several scores have been widely distributed in his books (mentioned below); and in publications of Sounds Australian, The Australian Music Centre, Sydney, and Red House Press, Melbourne. Many are on commercial record releases on Soma, Mosaic, and recently Tall Poppies.

Amongst his recent works are TimeDancesPeace, in which dancers and musicians work interpretively and improvisatorily with shared materials and methods of development. He has also collaborated with Hazel Smith in two large text-sound works, Poet Without Language, and Silent Waves, both written for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

He is active in musicology, with many articles and reviews published. His practical book Creative Improvisation was published by Open University Press (UK/US) in 1989. It was followed by New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960 (Open University Press; 1991). He has received bursaries and commissions from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Australia Council, ABC, and Rikskonserter (Sweden).

He also has a career in scientific research, and is the Director of The Heart Research Institute, Sydney, Australia.

September 25, 2013

“It Meant I Loved”: Louise Gluck’s Ararat
Eric Selinger

Dept. of English
University of California at Los Angeles
eselinger@aol.com

Thanatos undercuts, overrides Eros, his sweet, belated sibling–so says Freud.¹ And in Revolution in Poetic Language, her closely argued brief against paranoid Unity and culture as theology, Julia Kristeva more than agrees. Like the Accusing Angel that she calls “the text,” Kristeva puts the writing subject, in her now famous phrase, en proces–in process and on trial–charged with denying the very spark that drives him: the “jouissance of destruction (or, if you will, of the ‘death drive’)” (150). This drive lies below language, she argues; it underwrites or even is desire (49, 131). Even oral pleasure, that link between infantile suckling and the poet’s honeyed words which at one moment in her account “restrains the aggressivity of rejection,” thus holding the death drive in check, amounts in the end to “a devouring fusion,” “borne” and “determined” by the very rejection one hoped it would restrain (153, 154). Avant-garde social and textual “practice,” along with the critic’s own, must on account of this be strict, undeceived, and unsentimental. There’s no entry for “love” in the index to Revolution. No Eros peeks out from Psyche’s cupola, offering readers shelter from the storm.

At moments Louise Gluck’s Ararat calls to mind such passionate strictness. “The soul’s like all matter,” the poet observes. “Why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,” when it could fly apart into “particles” and “atoms,” disintegrate, “be free?” (“Lullaby” 28-29). The Kristeva I’ve cited so far would take this as a rhetorical question; and indeed, on first reading, so it seems. But these lines, like the rest of the volume, are spoken by a self-professed “Untrustworthy Speaker” (34). Suppose we read deeper, then, and hazard an answer? Recall another myth of rejection, the sentence passed on another subject on trial: Job, who refused to curse God and die (the biblical version of Kristevan “practice”). He survives to see an erotic restitution, his second crop of daughters, Dove, Cinnamon, and Eye-shadow, married with children and grandchildren of their own (Mitchell xxx, 91). A taste of fairy-tale closure, this end equally hints at that love “fierce as death” we read of in the Song of Songs (8:6), the book which follows Job in the Hebrew Bible as its countersong, a promise and a kiss.

The effort to unlock a love like that, a fierce erotic drive to hold life together, propels Gluck’s sequence from scene to stark, lyric scene. And the etiology of the affections we find in Kristeva’s more recent volumes can illuminate both the particulars and quiet formal imperative of the poet’s mourning work and self-analysis. “Beyond the often fierce but artificial and incredible tyranny of the Law and the Superego,” she writes in Tales of Love, postmodern love has been undermined by an “erosion of the loving father”: the one that Freud called the imaginary Father in Individual Prehistory, whose love for us ushers us out of melancholy longing for a lost maternal presence and into speaking subjectivity (378). Two musings from this book might serve as epigraphs to Ararat, highlighting the questions the poet sets herself as she attempts to reconstitute a vision of such paternity. “Love as unacknowledged lament?” Kristeva asks. “Lament as unsuspected love?” Tales 88).

It’s easy to read Ararat as a book about death, a fatalistic “family tragedy” (Cramer 102). The passing of the speaker’s father precipitates portraits of earlier losses, of a distance and coolness in the family’s past, and of the uneasy relations that remain. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem begins (15); the last poem echoes the phrase, suggesting that no cure has been effected in between. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved,” the volume all-but ends, and no sunburst of metaphor, rhythm, or rhetoric amplifies the retraction of the line that follows to close out the book: “It meant I loved” (68). And yet, for all Gluck’s restraint–she’s no Mahler, massing brass fanfares to signal the shift–this quick modulation from minor to major ripples back to revise our sense of everything we’ve read before. Thus while “Ararat” is the name of a Jewish cemetery in the text, as a title for the book it also suggests something rather more hopeful, a place to settle, a mountain that peeks into view as the high waters ebb. Somewhere to speak from, perhaps, for in Kristeva’s tale “our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for another, could exist nowhere except beyond an abyss” Black Sun 42). We might paraphrase that as “after a flood,” with Matthew Arnold’s “salt, estranging sea” filling the developmental gulf between child and mother that the theorist has in mind. And if we took this as a book about Thanatos, did we brush past its actual epigraph on the way? “Human nature was originally one and we were a whole,” Gluck quotes from Plato’s Symposium, “and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love” (11).

The androgynes split up by Zeus have long since lost their cartwheeling brio, their mocking, comic tone as a myth for the origin of sexual lack and desire. Gluck herself sets them aside, turning instead to the two visions of union that our modern myths allow: that between mother and infant, and the “coagulation of the mother and her desire” that intervenes in the mother/infant dyad as a third term, and that reveals to the child that “mother is not complete… she wants…who? what? … ‘At any rate, not I’” Tales 41). Through a “primary identification” with this third, whom Kristeva, following Freud, names the “father in individual prehistory,” we may be reconciled to the loss of primal symbiotic bliss (see Tales 21-56; Black Sun 6, 13). He, or he-and-she (since the Third “possesses the sexual attributes of both parents” [“Joyce” 172]) is the seed of the Ego Ideal, our original constitutive metaphor: “I’m like that.” Split off from mother, taking ourselves for, or becoming like, this other object of her affection, we thus inaugurate, all at once, subjectivity, metaphor, identification, idealization, symbolicity, and love. “The speaking being is a wounded being,” Kristeva explains; “his speech wells up out of an aching for love” Tales 372). Primary identification cannot heal the wound, but it sutures, salves, and compensates the pain. When it fails or is too fragile I lapse melancholic, have only the sense “of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good” as I run my thoughts over, in numbed, dumb repetition, the “unnameable” loss Black Sun 13, 12).

In Ararat this “father of imaginary prehistory” appears in several incarnations: the father as object of the mother’s love; other children, sisters, in the same position; the “family unit,” as we blithely say, in its full domestic happiness. Or, I should say, he fails to appear. For all these unities lie shattered, unrecognized, unimagined, or forgotten as the volume begins. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem opens:

I learned to exist, in reaction, out of touch with the world: I'll tell you what I meant to be-- a device that listened. Not inert: still. A piece of wood. A stone.(15)

The near-toneless abstraction, the muted affect here, is that of a poet cut off from the pleasures of language as tactile, material, rhythmic, “the world.” The register Kristeva calls “the semiotic,” words surging with instinctual energy, seems repressed or abandoned. “Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?” the speaker demands, as though such efforts of control were the only language games she knew, or thought to play–at least with those near her, “those people [sisters? the rest of her family?] breathing in the other beds.” If she “meant” in the past to be silent, mechanical or symbolic (a “device”), she hardly escapes that condition in the present tense of the lines.

A slumber does her spirit seal, we might say, for surely the last line of this stanza distantly echoes Wordsworth’s “rocks, and stones, and trees.” Her words, arhythmic, breaking off in dashes, suggest the melancholy speech Kristeva describes as “elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but . . . secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking” Black Sun 43). But hers is a sleepless slumber, a restless depression, stirred by a turbulence instantly put down. “Those people” are “uncontrollable / like any dream–” the poet observes, then at the word “dream” breaks off to watch “the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling.” Perhaps phallic in its alternate tumescence, or like a mother’s heartbeat, throbbing in the dark, this moon supplies an image for that archaic force the poet calls “the dark nature,” to which birth and death itself “are proofs, not / mysteries.” Ominous, the moon still seems attractive, a source of the dynamism the poet lacks. As we move through the stasis of the next few poems, its changes will be missed.

The opening poem I’ve been discussing stands in a double relation to the rest of the book. Its title, “Parados,” names the choral ode sung at the start of a Greek tragedy, a dramatic form that Nietzsche reads as teaching that “the state of individuation” is “the origin and primal cause of all suffering . . . objectionable in itself” (73).² If we take the poem as a distinct dramatic invocation, thirty-one verses remain–and exactly halfway through the book, in “Brown Circle,” we find the pivot of confrontation and forgiveness on which its progress hinges. Gluck doubles up on organization, however, supplying a second structural logic I will follow from now on. After “Parados” we find five poems that move the sequence along, introduce characters, fill out the plot. Then we have “Confession,” which comments both on the speaker and, obliquely, on what we’ve seen so far. Five more poems, then another address from and about “The Untrustworthy Speaker.” Five poems later, after the halfway pivot, we find “Animals,” which treats the speaker and her sister together, and for the first time hints at the true bonds between them. Five poems, and we find a deus ex machina of sorts, a vertical turn to hear “Celestial Music,” followed by the coda, “First Memory,” which echoes and revises the opening ode: “Long ago, I was wounded. I lived / to revenge myself / against my father” (68). I don’t mean by spelling out these structures to suggest that the book is primarily organized by differences and distinctions, other than of course its division into separate poems. The sections I propose are nowhere marked. But by reading this way, against the grain, we can get below the speaker’s evident emotional stasis, and tune in to deeper, subtler, curative shifts.

“A Fantasy” To “Confession”

At the end of “Parados” we learn that birth and death “are proofs,” not the mysteries the poet must bear witness to. Proofs of the power of Thanatos, or so it seems as this section opens in “A Fantasy.” Here, though no familial relationship has yet been described between her and her subjects, the speaker watches birth and death lamentably converge as “every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, / new orphans” (16). In the “new life” of each widow and orphan time flashes in jarring, paratactic fragments: “Then they’re in the cemetery”; “And after that, everyone goes back to the house / which is suddenly full of visitors.” The only force that counteracts this fragmentation and dispersal is the mourner’s memory: the imagination of “the widow” our attention has lighted on and entered into as the poem progresses:

In her heart, she wants them to go away. She wants to be back in the cemetery, back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows it isn't possible. But it's her only hope, the wish to move backward. And just a little, not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.(16-17)

The poet, we note, presses back a bit farther in the continuity than the widow allows herself. She lingers as the last line ends on the vision of a woman–the mother, we will learn–achieving her desire. And yet, as the focus widens again in the next poem to include the whole of “this family,” still unnamed as the speaker’s own, nostalgia withers and a harsher tone sets in. “No one could write a novel about this family,” this voice announces: “too many similar characters. Besides, they’re all women; / there was only one hero. / / Now the hero’s dead” (18).

Why this sudden shift in tone? It takes no particular psychological insight to see something defensive at work, signalling the importance of “the hero” when alive. The women may be “determined to suppress / criticism” of him, but in the speaker’s case, at least, they don’t succeed. His death “wasn’t moving,” the speaker insists; he was a “figurehead” alive, evidently narcissistic (the women are “like echoes”); “he’s weak,” she notes, “his scenes specify / his function but not his nature.” That function has something to do with narrative, with the making of sense and sentences through time. If at the gravesite a nameless someone instructed the mourners on “what to do next,” even that desiccated remnant of paternal function has now evaporated. “From this point on, nothing changes,” we are told. Not only is there “no plot without a hero,” but his absence rules out change as erotic development, new first kisses, escape. “In this house,” the speaker explains, “when you say plot what you mean is love story.” For Kristeva, love rests on a foundation of primary identification with the “imaginary father”: “a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity” Tales 46). The recovery of such an imaginary father–the reconstruction of “the hero”–will be the poet’s task. As imagined here, he can only hurt and divide: in a brief flash of metaphor that perhaps signals his continued power, each woman’s heart is “pierced through with a sword” (19). But since the imaginary father does not simply equal the biological father, but incorporates whatever “not I” the child discovers its mother to desire, the poet must equally reconstruct the rest of her family. Her sympathetic imagination cannot jump past or exclude “these women, the wife and two daughters” and their children. These paired efforts will shape the first three sections of the book, starting with an admission that, indeed, this family is the speaker’s own.

With the next poem, “Labor Day,” her mourning work begins. “It’s a year exactly since my father died,” she begins; everything snaps into focus with the first- person pronoun: the heat last year, a coldness now; a niece riding her bicycle out front. “There’s just us now,” the poet remarks, “the immediate family.” Immediate, since no longer mediated by a paternal third term, the family also seems trapped in an unhappy immediacy, a static present. Between the father as “a blond boy” and his appearance as “an old man gasping for air” we see nothing, no development, no life but “a breath, a caesura” (20); likewise, in the poem that follows, “Lover of Flowers,” we find references to “every spring” and “every autumn” as though years of seasons were compressed in the year that’s passed. Certainly immediacy does not equal closeness, for the speaker seems determined to mark off borders, to differentiate, particularly between her sister and herself. “In our family, everyone loves flowers,” she begins (21). But “with my sister, it’s different, / it’s an obsession.” When a set of poppies that the sister plants is beaten down by rain, we can glimpse the poet’s unacknowledged self-portrait in her mother’s words:

My mother's tense, upset about my sister: now she'll never know how beautiful they were, pure pink, with no dark spots. That means she's going to feel deprived again.But for my sister, that's the condition of love. She was my father's daughter: the face of love, to her, is the face turning away.(21-22)

The sister, too, was “wounded” it seems, perhaps by the father’s distancing love. Such separation marks “the face of love, to her,” the poet insists, as though this deprivation were not her own case, her condition as well. That acknowledgement would require more identification with the sister, and a stronger ability to idealize, to see the father or the parents’ love without dark spots, than she can summon up so early in the text.

If we’ve had a first sketch of the poet’s response to her sister, the next poem fills out the background, shifts our perspective back two generations. What we find bears little resemblance to the ease of partial differentiation, the reassuring presence of reproduced motherhood that critics of the Freudian scheme discover between women and their daughters.³ Gluck’s sibling mysteries play themselves out in a difficult key. Mother and aunt play cards, “Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game / my grandmother taught all her daughters” (23). The immediate, all-female world we see at the start and close of this poem, where the mother and aunt “have cards; they have each other” and therefore “don’t need any more companionship”–this world and its games may be “better than solitaire,” but they ring a little hollow nonetheless. “In the end,” in their game, “the one who has nothing wins”; and the next poem, the first address-lyric or echo of “Parados,” picks up and deepens that conclusion. Not Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care” but bracing competition motivates the women of this world, or at least their representative speaker. “You show respect by fighting,” she observes; that’s how her mother and aunt were raised. And something of that sororial strife has worked its way into the myths of the next generation. “Fulfillment” and “happiness,” the poet confesses, serve only to draw down the anger of the Fates: “sisters, savages–” who “in the end . . . have / no emotion but envy” (“Confession” 25).

Why does the speaker thus overstate the case against these women, evidently downplaying the affections of the scene? Why has she “learned to hide” her dreams, in other words, and what would those dreams contain? In her uncertainty we find a trace of resistance to that “sine-qua- non condition of our individuation” that Kristeva melodramatically calls “matricide” Black Sun 27-8). “Matricide is our vital necessity,” the theorist proclaims, for we must all extricate ourselves from undifferentiated infant bliss.⁴ But for women the violence of this process is harder to focus entirely outward. “Locked up within myself” it turns to “an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills me secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness” (29). The poet is trapped in this sort of bitterness, unable to blur her own borders, to metaphorize, to reach out in amorous idealizing identification to mother or sister, let alone to the dead hero or imaginary “loving father” she needs Tales 378). This family is indeed hers, but she stands outside it, at once unsympathetic and unable to acknowledge the roots of her pain.

“A Precedent” To “The Untrustworthy Speaker”

The five poems that come before “The Untrustworthy Speaker” hazard, if indirectly, one such identification. We learn of a death before the father’s loss–a sister to the speaker, one who died in infancy–and, more important, we find a new imaginative sympathy with the mother. As the poet details preparations for “the child that died,” a new delicacy of tone and loving accuracy of description breathes life into her voice. “Bureaus of soft clothes. / Little jackets neatly folded. / Each one almost fit in the palm of a hand” (“A Precedent” 26). We saw the mother’s capacity for care unfold in “Widows,” where she slept on the floor to be near her dying husband. But while the focus there was on her inability to get used to his absence after death, here we see her affections in full flower, as yet unthreatened, unhurt. When the hurt does come, when her daughter is lost, we see transformations in both the mother and the poet left behind:

. . . when my sister died, my mother's heart became very cold, very rigid, like a tiny pendant of iron.Then it seemed to me my sister's body was a magnet. I could feel it draw my mother's heart into the earth, so it would grow.("Lost Love" 29)

This poem and “A Precedent” are more tender, more compassionate, more fluent in their sympathetic identification than anything we’ve seen so far. But if the poet can sense her way into her mother’s skin, she equally seems inclined to be the dead sister, to cure the mother’s wound, to offer herself in a risky but attractive sacrifice.

Perhaps we do not press too far to see a crucial early identification with the dead sister as, in effect, a dead “imaginary father”–recalling that the father was defined as such, in part, simply for being what Mama valued other than me. Stillness thus seems a virtue to the poet-child, one learned from the sister who died. As she wanted in “Parados” to be “Not inert: still” (15), in the final poem of this section, “Appearances,” we see her hazard an analysis of that longing, recall her childhood pride in its accomplishment: “It was something I was good at: sitting still, not moving. / I did it to be good, to please my mother, to distract her from the child that died. / I wanted to be child enough” (32). But this is too close for comfort to the stillness of the stillborn, of “the dying” who “spin so rapidly they seem to be still” (“Lullaby” 28) and to the inertia of the women who “can’t get moving” after the father-hero’s death, which itself “wasn’t moving” (18). If those who fall asleep “grow slowly calm,” soothed by a mother’s heartbeat–one thinks of the moon of “Parados,” and of the curative regressions in Whitman’s “The Sleepers”– those who fall apart in death refuse, or fail, to be comforted. The speaker, we sense, would gladly identify with the infant her mother holds, feeds, attempts to keep alive, in order to prove that she’d accept. On her the effort would be efficacious; loved, she’d stay alive.

There is of course more to say about the middle poems in this bundle of five, and I will return to examine the father’s role in them shortly. But I want to focus on “Appearances,” the last of them, especially on its description of the living sisters’ relations to one another and their mother, and its invocation of a new character from outside the family, an artist. For if “forgiveness emerges first as the setting up of a form . . . [and] has the effect of an acting out, a doing, a poiesis,” Black Sun 206), the progress of the book requires this new intercessory term: a figure at once for the poet and for the loving father she lacks.⁵

What, first off, needs to be forgiven? In poems of this section we’ve seen the mother’s love in action: folding baby clothes, holding a child that doesn’t want to be fed, lulling husband and infant to sleep, and into death. (“I can’t say / what she did for my father,” the poet reassures us, and herself; still, “whatever it was, I’m sure it was right” [28].) And yet, when the speaker considers the portraits her parents commissioned, looking with the eyes of an adult, one who’s “been analyzed,” who can “understand our [her and her sister’s] expressions” (31), she sees something more painful and troubling:

My mother tried to love us equally, dressed us in the same dresses; she wanted us perceived as sisters. That's what she wanted from the portraits: you need to see them hanging together, facing one another-- separated, they don't make the same statement. ........................................... She likes to sit there, on the blue couch, looking up at her daughters, at the two that lived. She can't remember how it really was, how anytime she ministered to one child, loved that child, she damaged the other. You could say she's like an artist with a dream, a vision. Without that, she'd have been torn apart.(31-32)

The mother’s ministration to the living, unlike her care for the dying, calls pain to the poet’s mind in a new, post- analytic specificity. As usual, though, we see more than the words acknowledge. The mother’s desire to have her daughters “hanging together,” eyes fixed on one another, counters the potential dispersal by death of two generations. It works at once between the sisters (they won’t be torn away from each other) and in the mother’s heart (I won’t be torn apart by another loss), calling to mind and helping justify the grandmother’s attempt to make mother and aunt a sufficient pair: the attempt we read about in “Widows.”

And yet the poet withdraws from the potential identification I am, like my mother, an artist. She doesn’t reject it, I hasten to add, since we find none of the dismissive force she mustered in “A Novel.” She merely steps back to the solid ground of her painful individuation. She still wants, first off, to be set off from her sister: to be either the loved child or the damaged one. “You had to shut out / one child to see the other,” she recalls, clearly hungering for that specific attention (33). She gets it from the most successful imaginary father so far, the portrait painter, “Monsieur Davanzo.” He, like the poet herself, insists on distinctions and accuracies. He notices the difference between flesh tones, for example, against the identical green cotton dresses the two sisters wear: the sister, who’s been linked with reds and pinks, is “ruddy”; the poet’s “faintly bluish,” recalling the daughter who died. We have seen no play so far in the poem, whether in the language or by children or with parents; but here, “to amuse us, Madame Davanzo hung cherries over our ears,” reminding us that the imaginary loving father, the critical third term the poet lacks, is in fact a “father-mother conglomerate” Tales 40), pictured here, if briefly, as an actual couple. But the poem ends with “the painter” himself marking in his portrait what is at least the child’s interpretation of her mother’s wish that her children always be bound up together. Does she want me to stay with her, with women, forever? Never turn to a sexual Other, fall in love with a man? “Every morning, we went to the convent,” we read of her summer schedule. “Every afternoon, we sat still, having the portraits painted”; and the artist Monsieur (“my lord”) Davanzo understands her expression. “A face already so controlled, so withdrawn, / and too obedient, the clear eyes saying / If you want me to be a nun, I’ll be a nun” (33).

Does the mother really want this? Again, as after “Widows,” we sense an unfair accusation, and again we find a confession: the third of the “Parados” poems, “The Untrustworthy Speaker.”

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken. I don't see anything objectively. I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life, I've been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they're wasted--(34)

This poem marks the speaker’s first acknowledgement that she has cut herself off from something, someone; that the analysis she’s brought to bear so far has failed. We note the self-criticism as a flicker of Eros, a latent desire to “see myself, / standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand,” even if that means having to call herself to account for love’s sadisms and failures, “the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends” (34). This would entail, in part, an observation of her own masochism, of the degree to which the “wound” or loss she mourns is self-inflicted, a condition of her speech. An exculpation of the mother indeed soon follows, set in motion by the “criticism of the hero” (18) suppressed earlier. This combination will bring the book to its pivotal moment of confrontation and crisis.

“A Fable” To “Animals”

This central section of the book begins with its first extended metaphor for the poet’s situation: “A Fable.” “Suppose / you saw your mother / torn between two daughters,” she demands, the daughters identified with those competing self-proclaimed mothers who fought over a single baby before Solomon (36).

What could you do to save her but be willing to destroy yourself--she would know who was the rightful child, the one who couldn't bear to divide the mother.

Setting aside the admission of masochism here–itself a step beyond the mere victimhood of “Appearances”–we find a curious blur of familial roles. The mother plays at once the parts of a “wise king” who judges and a child under threat; the poet too is at once mother (the one who can’t bear to divide) and child. Not her own but the mother’s pain attracts the poet’s attention: an unsettling shift, apparently, as the short lines and shivering enjambments suggest. If indeed “the transfer of meaning” in metaphor “sums up the transference of the subject to the place of the other” Tales91), we can understand the fragility of the poem’s presentation, as it ferries the poet oh-so-nervously across the flood waters, the gulf or “abyss” of individuation.

Who, though, is the other daughter in this scene? The living sister, or the dead? Both sisters have divided their mother’s affections; and if we keep our eyes on the function of each sister, to borrow a term from the sequence itself (see “A Novel” and “The Untrustworthy Speaker”), we note that each acts for the other, in this emotional division, like the “imaginary father” Kristeva describes. As though to reinforce this connection the following poem, “New World,” turns from the sisters’ relations to those of the husband and wife. What role, the poet asks, did that Ur-Other play, and how did I imagine it at the time?

As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came wouldn't seem a significant change.

This life study, our first glimpse of the father in life, not death, treats him with imagistic specificity, as though to flesh out his “nature” in the way obscured at the start of the book. If he still seems the “someone remote” he was named in “Mount Ararat,” doing nothing but preparing to die, his association here with time and a certain style of language, the restrained clarity of “the Times,” is now insisted on through a new flair of metaphor. (So that’swhere the poet learned her style, we note in the margin.)

This subtle change of style marks a quiet change of heart. “I thought my father’s death / would free my mother,” the poet observes; and while “in a sense, it has”– she can travel, go to her museums at last–something valuable’s been lost as well. The mother “isn’t held” anymore; “she’s free . . . / Without relation to earth” (39) –a phrase that echoes the speaker’s own original condition: “out of touch / with the world” (15). It’s not that being earth-bound was so good, but the inverse seems equally unfortunate. For the first time the father seems a figure of curative attraction–like the dead sister’s body in “Lost Love,” he draws, or drew, the mother down to earth. But the speaker seems loathe to articulate this attractive quality, her focus on the mother occluding the father as an object of desire, whether her mother’s or her own. Thus in “Birthday,” the next poem, we find a stand-in for him: an “old admirer” who, even after death, continues to send roses on the mother’s birthday, “his way of saying that the legend of my mother’s beauty / had simply gone underground” (40). A figure for the loving, living father–an alternative to that morbid silence below the Times–he’s both Persephone to the mother’s Demeter and, in his “ministering,” a mother too.⁶ “I thought / the dead could minister to the living,” the poet remembers. “I didn’t realize / this was the anomaly; that for the most part / the dead were like my father.” Hard words, if she means “like my father when alive.” And even if she means like the father after death, a certain harshness comes through the allegation, for if “my mother doesn’t mind, . . . doesn’t need / displays from my father,” surely his daughter suffers as the mother spends her birthday “sitting by a grave,” “showing him she understands, / that she accepts his silence / . . . she doesn’t want him making / signs of affection when he can’t feel” (40-41). “Hates deception”; “can’t feel”–the present indicative tense sweeps together the obvious lack of response from the dead with a vision of the father as there, watching without response or turning his face away. Did he not feel before his death, not live up even then to the “standard of courtesy, of generosity” the old admirer set? One might read the lines that way, written by a daughter who prefers to rest, like her father, undeceived.

We have reached the hinge of the book, “Brown Circle.” Whatever objections we might have had to the speaker’s unforgiving stance toward her mother and sister, to the tone she’s taken toward her father until now, are suddenly voiced as this poem starts with a question from one who’s been silent so far. “My mother wants to know,” it begins, “why, if I hate / family so much, / I went ahead and / had one” (42). Why indeed? Freudian theory no less than the Bible finds the sins of the fathers visited on sons, and daughters here seem no exception. The cutting lineation of her response suggests the speaker’s uneasiness, the way she halts and stammers her way through to an unspoken answer.

I don't answer my mother. What I hated was being a child, having no choice about what people I loved.I don't love my son the way I meant to love him.(42)

How close she comes to simply saying “I don’t love my son”! Or, as we might expect from the end of the first stanza, “I don’t love him / because I must, but because I choose to.” In fact, of course, we find something quite different: a recognition that choice and love are uneasy bedfellows; that while we may choose to have our children we can’t choose who they are or even, often enough, what they do. Their ways are beyond us, have their way with us. How culpable, then, can we find each other and ourselves? If the poet loves like a scientist, unwilling to set down her magnifying glass and leave off her scrutiny “though / the sun burns a brown / circle of grass around / the flower”– and we think of her unyielding observation of the older generation so far–was she herself not similarly burned? Such scrutiny is “more or less the way / my mother loved me,” she admits, and the stanza ends on that line, backing up the recognition: my mother loved me, not just, as in “Appearances,” “one child . . . that child” or “the other.” “I must learn / to forgive my mother,” the poet admonishes herself, as the play of mother-daughter identifications we saw in “A Fable” becomes literal. It’s the only way to forgive herself, “now that I’m helpless / to spare my son” (43).

Ararat revolves around “Brown Circle” in two ways. First, and most obviously, the book now focuses on the poet’s sister and her daughter, the poet and her son, and on the father himself, with the mother largely absent. But behind this lies the more crucial shift from a poetry of hazarded, uneasy identifications, verse searching for its sponsoring imaginary Other, to a poetry of calm, practiced distance, observation, and compassion. “It is by making his words suitable to his commiseration and, in that sense, accurate,” Kristeva explains, “that the subject’s adherence to the forgiving ideal is accomplished and effective forgiveness for others as well as for oneself becomes possible” Black Sun 217). None of this is entirely new to the volume: we saw such accuracies at work in “A Precedent” and at moments elsewhere. But by bringing a new generation into focus the poet lets go of certain earlier obsessions, and clears a path for forgiveness in substance as well as in style. No longer, for example, does she insist on distinctions between herself and her sister. Both have children itching for independence: the sister’s daughter in the first panel of the triptych “Children Coming Home From School,” the poet’s son sulking in her driveway in the second, “accus[ing] me / of his unhappiness.” In the third panel the poet and her niece, both of whom can be said to be “growing up with my sister,” equally learn “to wait, to listen,” to grapple for verbal advantage. And in the poem that stands where we’ve come to expect a version of “Parados,” some confession of the speaker’s untrustworthiness, we find the unsentimental sororial accord of “Animals” instead:

My sister and I reached the same conclusion: the best way to love us was to not spend time with us. ...................
My sister and I never became allies, never turned on our parents. We had other obsessions: for example, we both felt there were too many of us to survive.
We were like animals trying to share a dry pasture. Between us, one tree, barely strong enough to sustain a single life.(47-48)

The poet’s growing ease with metaphor allows her, for the first time in the sequence, to unite the parents in either a phrase (“the” or “our parents”) or a figure (the “one tree”). Where once the sisters tugged at and split up their mother’s love, here they stand off warily from parents who cannot “bring themselves / to inflict pain” on either. (“You should only hurt / something you can give / your whole heart to,” the speaker mordantly observes.) The chosen metaphor of “Animals” would seem to suggest an inevitable competition or natural selection between the two; and we’ve been led to expect something rather like this through the first half of the book. An unspoken pact emerges in its place, however, marking our transition to the fourth group of poems, focused for the first time on connections. Neither girl, each staring the other one down, will move to “touch / one thing that could / feed her sister” (49). What comes between them now, if only it were a little bit stronger, could keep them both alive.

“Saints” to “Snow”

Two paragraphs ago I quoted Kristeva as saying that the forgiver’s commitment to accuracy demonstrates an “adherence to the forgiving ideal.” The nature of that ideal should by now be clear–the Third, the imaginary father–and, in fact, Black Sun names it as such elsewhere. “Whoever is in the realm of forgiveness–who forgives and who accepts forgiveness–is capable of identifying with a loving father, an imaginary father,” Kristeva propounds, “with whom, consequently, he is ready to be reconciled, with a new symbolic law in mind” (207). That new law–a covenant after the flood–will remain unspoken until the penultimate poem of Ararat, but already we can see the reconciliation proceed. At first the imaginary father appears as female, and as a familial ideal. “In our family, there were two saints,” she startles us by writing: “my aunt and my grandmother” (50). Generations flicker, linked by metaphor: of these the grandmother seems to stand in for the speaker’s own mother, “cautious, conservative,” the aunt for the speaker, suffering repeated losses and haunted by jealous Fates familiar from “Confession.” (The mother suffers and loses too, you say? Ah, but these are ideals, desires, imaginings…). The aunt’s marked as a saint by her refusal to “experience / the sea” that steals away her loved ones “as evil. To her, it is what it is: / where it touches land, it must turn to violence” (50). This stoic acceptance, a model for the poet’s own work, prompts her into accepting complementary opposites that must also remain “what they are” in the pair of poems that follow: herself and her sister, her niece and son, as treated in “Yellow Dahlia” and “Cousins.”

In the interest of space I will set these poems aside– suffice it to say that, despite Kristeva’s allegation that art forgives by giving shape “without exegesis, without explanation, without understanding” Black Sun 207), Gluck here demonstrates ample talent at all three. Let me rather turn to the central stanzas of “Paradise” and the final poems of the section, “Child Crying Out” and “Snow,” for here we see the slow introduction of the father as a loving Other in his own right. Once “remote,” a hero in disgrace, he approaches; and the poet admits an identification:

In some ways, my father's close too; we call a stone by his name. ..................... They always said I was like my father, the way he showed contempt for emotion. They're the emotional ones, my sister and my mother.(54-55)

We have, perhaps, suspected this deep congruence all along. The poet’s distance, her sense of deprivation, made her seem her father’s daughter as much as or more than the sister named as such back in “Lover of Flowers.”

But is “contempt” quite the right word here? “Child Crying Out” suggests that something else is at stake, a basic resistance to the claims of emotion to overwhelm the distance between individuals, to offer immediate access to the soul. This poem, an answer to Adrienne Rich’s “Night Pieces: For a Child,” refuses to assume a mother’s fundamental maternal connection with and insight into her child. Rich mourns her son’s slipping away into patriarchical terrors; here, the son has never been close enough to keep:

The night's cold; you've pushed the covers away. As for your thoughts, your dreams--I'll never understand the claim of a mother on a child's soul.

Does she mean the “claim” on his imagination, the way one’s mother slips into dreams as abject “death’s head, sphinx, medusa” (Rich 67)? Or, conversely, the claim to understand (a mother knows)? Though the former sticks in the back of our minds, the latter seems Gluck’s explicit quarrel:

So many times I made that mistake in love, taking some wild sound to be the soul exposing itself-- But not with you, even when I held you constantly. You were born, you were far away.
Whatever those cries meant, they came and went whether I held you or not, whether I was there or not.(56-57)

The son’s sleep, like the father’s face turned away, stands for a certain “condition of love” (22), of accepted alterity, “a basic separation that nonetheless unites” (Kristeva, Tales 90).⁷ It hints that the absence of “signs of affection” on either side of the grave won’t necessarily mean that the loved one, unlike the old admirer, “can’t feel” (41). Did the father, though we’ve never seen it, therefore love? And how would we, or the poet know?

“If [the soul] speaks at all,” “Child Crying Out” ends, “it speaks in dreams.” Fair enough: and in “Snow,” the last poem of this fourth group, we get our first dream-vision (though it’s phrased as a memory) since the moon in “Parados.” Poet and father are on their way to New York, waiting for a train.⁸ “My father liked / to stand like this,” the poet recalls, “to hold me / so he couldn’t see me,” but so that she can stare into the world he sees, “learning / to absorb its emptiness” (58). A father, then, of both connection and withdrawal, he stands implicated in the narcissistic emptiness of the subject split off from maternal plentitude, the disjunction from the earth we’ve watched the poet suffer. (The snow’s not falling but whirling, we notice, borne up against gravity.) Their love, for we edge into calling it that, rests on the same disengaged commonality we saw between mother and son, the sort Frank Bidart calls “the love of / two people staring / / not at each other, but in the same direction” (“To the Dead”). A love, it happens, closer to that shared gaze on the Good that Socrates offers than to Aristophanes’s erotic myth–though here the good stays elusive, out of sight, lost in the empty white-out of the flurries.

“Terminal Resemblance” to “Celestial Music”

The final sequence of Ararat, these five poems hover and turn from portrait to portrait without anxiety, with the sense of at last accomplishing that “promise, project, artifice” Kristeva sees as integral to writing as love, mercy, transformation, forgiveness Black Sun 216-17). We get a last clear look at father and mother, father and daughter, daughters and mother, sisters and children, along with two poems that stand out from the rest: a nod to aesthetic religion in “Lament,” and the turn to religious aesthetics of “Celestial Music.” Rather than treat each poem individually, as I’ve done so far, I will first explore the way these as a group echo and revise the themes and images of the book. “Celestial Music” deserves to be looked at alone, since it stands out from the rest as a deus ex machina, a tribute to love, to the Third, as quite literally “a godsend” Tales 40).

Since the start of the book the father has been linked to time, the Times–or, to be more accurate, the father’s absence has marked time’s failure to pass. In “Terminal Resemblance,” a poem about the poet’s last meeting with her father, we learn “he wasn’t . . . pointing to his watch” as he waited for her, signalling not only that “he wanted to talk,” but also certain relief from the earlier deathly, encompassing stasis. Gluck hints at this return to mutability at the close of the poem as well. “For a change, my father didn’t just stand there,” she writes; “this time, he waved” (60, my emphasis). Even the idea of immediacy is transformed in these last poems, appearing now in the mode of aesthetic appreciation, and not of numb, paratactic sequence:

Your friends the living embrace one another, gossip a little on the sidewalk as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze ruffles the women's shawls--this, this, is the meaning of "a fortunate life": it means to exist in the present.("Lament" 61-6)

Words and phrases culled from earlier poems make these last five seem a final tally, a summing up. In the first section we read about gardens and flowers; here we see a “gardener’s truck” (59). The grandmother-saint escaped suffering; so does the dying father (60). “It frightens” the mother, we read, “when a hand isn’t being used” (60); the poet’s sister wouldn’t let her daughter walk with both hands “totally free” in “Children Coming Home From School,” a poem whose title is given to a second poem, the fourth of this group, where the “children” are again the poet and her sister. The poet’s sadness over losing the mother’s complete, swaddling attention has been visible between the lines from the first. At last it is named outright: “I continued, in pathetic ways, / to covet the stroller. Meaning / all my life” (64). “Amazons” plucks the word “end” from the all-woman scenes of “Widows” and “Confession” and runs it through revelatory changes:

End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots. Everything else is gold--that's how you know the end of the growing season. .................................. My sister and I, we're the end of something. ................................... I can see the end: it's the name that's going. When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language. That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.My sister and I, we're like amazons, a tribe without a future. I watch the children draw: my son, her daughter.(65)

The father’s name will be lost; the maternal tradition of sufficient, respectfully fighting pairs of daughters, too, will soon die out, written as it was in “soft chalk, the disappearing medium.”

In such recapitulations Ararat comes to terms with its own ending, with the way that writing finishes, so unlike life. Do we see here that “unease over the final, masterful accomplishment” Kristeva sees as returning the writer to the need for forgiveness once again Black Sun 217)? That would perhaps explain the sudden entry of a “friend who still believes in heaven,” one who “literally talks to god” in “Celestial Music.” This poem, which in its sustained long lines and metaphorical resonance stands dramatically apart from the rest of the volume, snaps us back to the grander dimensions of the book’s long quest to imagine a loving father, a Third. For if the love of “primary identification” founds and figures both “Greek Eros–violent, destructive, but also platonically ascending towards the Ideal,” and “the Christian Agape which, emanating from the Other, descends upon me” (“Joyce” 168), why not identify with a father in heaven, that God who is, or so we’re told, Love?⁹

Such a turn seems at first promised by the poet’s praise of her friend, and the effects of her faith. “On earth, she’s unusually competent,” we learn. “Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness” (66). She’s like a mother, an “adult”; in the poet’s dreams she’s a lecturer on love. (“When you love the world,” she admonishes, “you hear celestial music.”) But a turn to on-high would belie, not enrich, the poet we’ve come to know; and, indeed, identification is extended only horizontally, on the human axis of friendship. If she starts by asserting her differences from the friend, as with her sister, similarities follow:

It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact that we're at ease with death, with solitude. My friend draws a circle in the dirt.... She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her. We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-- it's this stillness we both love.(67)

The success of the volume, not simply as a group of poems, but as a progress from loss, depression, the narcissistic wound, through “the narrow pass of identification with flawless ideality, loving fatherhood” Black Sun 216), into the formal aesthetic accomplishment of an ending, can be measured in the believability of these lines. Though different from the rest of the volume they must not seem out of place or make us frown in vexation at the poet’s claim to be “at ease” at last. For them to work we must have been prepared to see a metaphor for the poet’s own structures and symmetries in the friend’s dirt circle, that “composition” that surrounds a torn and dying (read: “wounded”) caterpillar. “The composition / fixed,” she writes; and the heavy stress of an enjambment forces us to pause, to read “fixed” as healed, made “whole” and “beautiful.” Fixed means “still” as well, and in “the stillness we both love” the twinborn but separated longings for stillness and new life of earlier poems are rejoined. Where it once implied a stunned fixity in the present, or a desperate identification with the dead in order to restore a mother’s love, stillness here suggests the reassurance of completion, the satisfactions of order and limit, an artist’s “it is finished” (if not Christ’s). A stillness bound up in the accomplishment of love, she suggests, telling over the word three times in the last two lines. “It’s this stillness that we both love. / The love of form is a love of endings” (67).

Though it brings Ararat to conclusion, “Celestial Music” is not the last poem we read. That place belongs to “First Memory”: a reprise of “Parados,” a piece whose title suggests both that this memory delves as far back as the poet can and that she can now truly remember for the first time. On a first read through the book we come upon “First Memory,” not with a shock (as with “Celestial Music”) but with a shiver at its spare, discursive, chilly, familiar style. The poem is short enough to quote in its entirety:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was-- for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.(68)

We can at last gloss those critical, open-ended phrases on which the poem ends and folds back on itself. “For what he was”: quiet, affectionate only at a distance, too hard to idealize, to imagine as the object of mother’s desire. “For what I was”: quiet, distant, longing to picture myself once again the sole focus of care, more like my father than I could bear to admit. But why does the poem not end with a perfect reversal, with “It meant I was loved,” which is equally true? Why does the pain mean she was a lover, too?

In part, and on the book’s own terms, this ending includes and implies my suggested alternative. If pain meant I loved, then I loved my family; which means I wasn’t incapable of love, as I thought my father was; which means, since I’m like him, that he wasn’t incapable of love either; which means that he loved mother and me, and so was in pain, was wounded too; which means that under all the relations in the book, painful or strained, we might find love, denied or distorted, as well. And, indeed, if we look beyond Ararat, place it in a broader context, we find a further sanction for this reading. In the final chapter of Tales of Love, Kristeva records her sense of the narcissistic crisis in which we find ourselves. We are, as a chapter title claims, “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love”: as cut off from the earth as the poet of “Parados,” lacking “the secular variant of the loving father” to ensure our identifications, our ability to “elaborate primary narcissism,” to love and be loved in return (374). (“The unsure narcissist,” we might paraphrase Robert Creeley, “is not good for himself.”¹⁰) “Because today we lack being particular,” she writes, “covered as we are with so much abjection, because the guideposts that insured our ascent toward the good have been proven questionable, we have crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love” (7).

In answer to this crisis Kristeva offers an aesthetic antidote: “the imagination” (381), which can “turn the crisis into a work in progress” (380), with no pretension to finality or ultimate satisfaction. “Let it [the self] remain floating, empty at times, inauthentic, obviously lying,” she proclaims near the end of Tales of Love. “Let it pretend, let the seeming take itself seriously, let sex be as unessential because as important as a mask or a written sign–dazzling outside, nothing inside” (380). But this is James Merrill’s solution, not that of Gluck, who may stun but rarely dazzles. The love elaborated in Ararat weathers the postmodern condition, with its lack of faith in the old codes of romance, less by insisting on the open- endedness of Kristeva’s “work in progress” than by reaching out to affiliate itself with a stern, more potentially moralistic tradition of love-theory: one in which love is defined (against desire) as that which “embraces the other’s limited and imperfect reality, and invites and accepts the binding and defining embrace offered by the other” (McWhirter 6). Such love, which “accepts, in other words, its own finitude” and resigns the Platonic quest for wholeness and reunion in favor of the bittersweetness of “the attainable” (7, 197), accords with Gluck’s undeceived stance, and it sponsors the collection’s final lines. The speaker, after all, has been “wounded” not only by the loss of the mother in her individuation, but by a series of more quotidian disappointments. She wasn’t “child enough,” and no one else was quite mother or father or sister enough either. That such disappointment is the inevitable “break- up” of any idealizing relationship, Freud and Kristeva and popular culture will all testify, since at heart we are all men and women who love too much.

Gluck’s poetic success lies in the way she turns the plot of a Donahue confession or an Oprah Winfrey show into memorable and particular verse, pressing her language to an antipoetic limit that marks, in some sense, her postmodernism as well. “Compared to the media,” as Kristeva explains,

whose function it is to collectivize all systems of signs, even those which are unconscious, writing-as -experience-of-limits individuates. This individuation extends deep within the constituent mechanisms of human experience as an experience of meaning; it extends as far as the very obscure and primary narcissism wherein the subject constitutes itself in order to oppose itself to another.("Postmodernism?" 137-8)

If we want to write love poems, Gluck’s book suggests, we have to start by pressing back into the depths behind our affections–not just to the power dynamics of a particular relationship, the culture it plays itself out in, or of the family romances that provide its local habitation and its names, but to what is at once our most and least private aspect: the way these construct the writing subject itself. Ararat takes us down to rock-bottom; it is a foundational text more than a therapeutic one. “Long ago I was wounded,” the poet’s choral ode begins, and she dares us as readers not to join in. This is not, I suppose, such a bleak rock song. “There is no imagination,” writes Kristeva, “that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy” Black Sun 6). Yet “if it lives,” as she adds elsewhere, “your psyche is in love” Tales 15).

Notes

1. See Freud, 139; see also chapter four of The Ego and the Id, passim, and the final passages and footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

2. My thanks to my UCLA colleague Brenda Kwon for pointing out this connection.

3. I think here less of the work of Nancy Chodorow herself than the use of it made in Homans, for example, 1-39 passim.

4. For a dissenting view, at least so far as daughters are concerned, see Homans 11-15. For a persuasive argument that we are always already differentiated, and that mother-child union is a nostalgic fantasy not borne out by studies of child development since the 1980s, see Benjamin 16-21.

5. “The artist takes himself,” Kristeva writes, “not for the maternal phallus but for that ghostly third party to which the mother aspires, for the loving version of the Third, for the preoedipal father.” (“Joyce” 174).

6. I make this maternal connection because the mother in “Appearances” “ministered” to her children, though with unforseen and divisive consequences.

7. Kristeva likewise speaks of “the abyss between the mother and the child” in the lefthand column of the split essay, “Stabat Mater.” “What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and…him. No connection. Nothing to do with it. And this, as early as the first gestures, cries, steps, long before its personality has become my opponent. The child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other” Tales 254-55).

8. Or so I now normalize the scene. On first reading, I saw them walking along the tracks, watching “scraps of white paper / blow over the railroad ties” in a way that calls to mind the opening of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Chemin de Fer.” “Alone on the railroad track / I walked with pounding heart. / The ties were too close together / or maybe too far apart” (Bishop 8).

9. Such a heavenly identification may be implicit in forgiveness, which, Kristeva writes in Black Sun, “assumes a potential identification with that effective and efficient merciful divinity of which the theologian speaks” (216).

10. I misquote Creeley’s “The Immoral Proposition” (Creeley 125).

Works Cited
- Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
- Bidart, Frank. In the Western Night: Collected Poems: 1965-1990. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990.
- Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1983.
- Cramer, Steven. Review of Ararat. Poetry (Nov. 1990): 101-106.
- Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
- Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” Papers on Metapsychology: the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XIV. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
- Gluck, Louise. Ararat. New York: Ecco, 1990.
- Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing. U of Chicago P, 1986.
- Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
- —. “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ or the Return of Orpheus.” James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Ed. Bernard Benstock. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988.
- —. “Postmodernism?” Bucknell Review: Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism. Ed. Harry Garvin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP: 136-141.
- —. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
- —. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
- McWhirter, David. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. Cambridge UP, 1989.
- Mitchell, Stephen. The Book of Job. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1967.
- Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-84. New York: Norton, 1984.
September 25, 2013
Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton
Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware

As reading matter, contemporary Marxist criticism is pretty heavy going. First and most obviously because it inherits a long, rich and adventurous tradition not only of political and sociological but also of philosophical argument–the breadth of Marx’s own interests insured that: he aimed, and so have all Marxisms after him, to synthesize all sciences, to make Marxism the key to all mythologies, or (in Fredric Jameson’s now-famous phrase) the “untranscendable horizon” of all cultural, political, and social inquiry. (Marxism obliges itself to reckon with, say, deconstruction; whereas deconstruction regards dealing with Marxism as discretionary.) But Marxism takes on other difficulties, other burdens besides the intellectual ones; it carries the torch of a moral tradition as well, of concern, even anguish about the plight of the oppressed. And its burdens are “moral” in another sense, too, the sense that connects less with “morality” than with “morale”; for it is the very rare Marxist text that is without some sort of hortatory subtext–though usually, it is true, expressed polemically (often most fiercely against other Marxists). And here, too, Marx himself is the great original: he asks to be read as a scientist, not a moralist, but we do not readily credit any Marxism that is deaf to the moralist (and ironist) in Marx’s potent rhetoric.

So “doing Marxism” is not easy. To join in the Marxist conversation, even just as a reader, requires an askesis that cannot be casual, an experience of initiation that involves extraordinary “difficulty” of every possible kind: difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions. Yet the initiation into Marxism is not without its pleasures, too: pleasures, indeed, not punctually marked off from, but rather continuous with, the satisfactions of the adept–and even more conflictedly, pleasures somehow deriving from, even constituted precisely by, the very “difficulties,” both moral and intellectual, that Marxism obliges its initiates to shoulder.

I want in this essay to consider Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the two leading Marxists writing in English, with an eye to the contrasting ways each negotiates the contradictions of this mix of intellectual pleasure with intellectual-moral difficulty. (A salient topos will be “Left puritanism,” with some sidelights from Roland Barthes.) The eminence of Jameson and Eagleton makes them the obvious choices for such an essay in contrasts. Their substantive differences are as well known as the warmth with which they avow common cause, but in what follows I want to shift the emphasis from their “positions” to the ground where the contrasts between them are the sharpest, namely to their prose styles. That a subculture so devout as the academic about splitting fine ideological hairs nevertheless seems agreed on accepting as indispensable two writers so different–Jameson with his aloof hauteur warmed occasionally by erudite despair, Eagleton with his impetuous, energetic hope–attests that their manifest differences as stylists, and in their stances as writers, make them virtually polar terms, “representative,” between them, of the limits, the possibilities and the predicaments, of the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to Marxist criticism in our historical moment. It should go without saying that my focus on “textual” effects intends no renunciation of more substantively “thetic” interests: rather, I hope to stage the contrasts between these two very different prose styles to see how each writer handles “pleasure” as an issue, a problem, desire, or object of critique–to see how (or whether) what each says about “pleasure” squares with the pleasures (or whatever else we are to name the satisfactions) of their writing.

A convenient place to begin, as it happens, is with Eagleton’s essay, “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), in which Eagleton avows the “profound pleasure” he experiences reading Jameson. Tactically, consider what a very strange move Eagleton makes in speaking this way. Though I no longer find Jameson as vexing to read as I once did, “pleasure” seems a calculatedly provocative word for whatever it is that keeps me reading him–and lest we miss the point, Eagleton even takes care to remind us that “‘pleasure’ is not the kind of word we are accustomed to encountering in Jameson’s texts” Against the Grain 66). Indeed, not. Quite apart from its notorious difficulty, Jameson’s writing is fastidiously pained, “stoic,” even “tragic,” in its evocation of the ordeals Utopian desire must suffer through what he calls “the nightmare of history as blood guilt.”¹ Most readers sense from the tone and sound of Jameson’s work, long before they get a grip on the complexities of its content, that the best motto it supplies for itself is the famous “History is what hurts” passage, the often quoted peroration to the opening chapter of The Political Unconscious. The passage begins in reflection on the genre of “dialectical” analysis to which Jameson obviously aspires to contribute:

the most powerful realizations of Marxist historiography . . . remain visions of historical Necessity . . . [and of] the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history . . . [they adopt] the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion, of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as "inevitable," and as the operation of objective limits.(The Political Unconscious 101-102)

As visions go (and “visions” is Jameson’s own word here), this one–the failure of all revolutionary action as “inevitable” after the fact–is about as bleak as any vision (Marxist or otherwise) could possibly be. (In other Marxist writers, Jameson warns, such a vision risks “post-Marxism,” and this is obviously an anxiety close to the quick for Jameson himself.²) This bleak vision bears a patent family resemblance to many other critically powerful pessimisms–Michel Foucault’s “total system,” Paul de Man’s “aporia,” and Harold Bloom’s “Gnosticism,” to name three whose “defeatism” Eagleton has particularly vilified.

Contempt for “defeatism” is a constant in Eagleton’s work, a gesture (symptomatically) much against the grain not only of Marxist “critique” but of culture criticism generally. So in testifying to the “profound pleasure” of reading Jameson, Eagleton is playing a deep game, seeming to praise Jameson but also, with typically British (not to say Marxist British) puritanism, subtly indicting Jameson in terms that echo Eagleton’s repudiation of the “frivolous” counter-culture (and French!) hedonism of Barthes and the Tel Quel group. Eagleton means it as a sign in Jameson’s favor when he specifies that he derives “pleasure” from Jameson’s work, but not “jouissance.”³ Evidently, “pleasure” may be tolerable in contexts of righteous revolutionary effort, but “jouissance” would be going too far. (Insofar as Eagleton’s own pugilistic wit invites us to pleasures that feel distinctly masculine, his aversion to Barthesian “jouissance” might seem almost a residual, unwitting homophobia: the revolutionary band of brothers, apparently, is to enjoy collective pleasures, but not collective ecstasies.)

Perhaps Eagleton’s double-edged praises of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson express the embarrassments of meeting so potent a version of the “defeatist” vision under the Marxist banner. But my point is that Jameson’s peculiar eloquence has been of that ascetic, despairing, facing-the- worst type familiar, and according to some (Leo Bersani and Richard Rorty, as well as Eagleton, and Barthes), over- familiar, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture- criticism. It is a rhetoric that cuts across the ideological spectrum: beside Foucault, de Man, and Bloom, whom I have already named, one might place Adorno, one of Jameson’s particular culture-heroes, and T.S. Eliot, one of his particular betes noirs. But what Jameson especially admires in a writer like Adorno, he has said repeatedly, is a “dialectical” quality in the writing: a power to render unflinchingly the awfulness of our present condition, but also to sustain some impulse toward utopian hope.

But this utopian impulse must not offer any solace; to do so would make it liable to a post-Althusserian, Levi-Straussian definition of “ideology”: “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” i.e., a kind of “false consciousness”–and the more so in that it here appears as a textual effect, an achievement of style. Yet just this, but (ironically?) as “praise” rather than indictment, is the implication of Eagleton’s judgment that “Style in Jameson . . . both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed” Against the Grain 69). Such “compensation,” such “adumbration” of how things will be after the revolution, is for Jameson sheer “ideological” indulgence in “the Imaginary,” and as such a particular pitfall or temptation that Marxist writing must avoid.

On the contrary, what Jameson calls “the dialectic of ideology [the capitalist present] and utopia [the socialist future]” should aggravate, rather than soothe, our discontent with the way we live now.⁴ Jameson is trying for a rhetoric, a tone, that will not be a profanation of its subject matter, an eloquence appropriate to the plight of capitalism’s victims, and to Marxism’s hour on the cross. In a time (ours) of near-total “commodification” or “reification,” this task gets harder and harder, as you can hear in Jameson’s grim joke that Adorno’s question about whether you can write poetry after Auschwitz “has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno . . . next to the pool” Late Marxism 248). The point of such a joke is not “pleasure,” but laceration; you might even call it a moral-intellectual masochism.⁵

And this seems a model for Jameson’s effect generally. As a writer, as a stylist, Jameson is committed to a bleak “vision” of near-total desperation, and to praise the effects of his prose, as Eagleton does, in terms of “profound pleasure” seems a shrewdly pointed missing of the point. True, Jameson himself earlier commended the “purely formal pleasures” of Adorno’s prose, but Jameson’s language sounds sober–even “purely formal”?–whereas Eagleton’s praise of the “intense libidinal charge” of Jameson’s prose sounds like transport, not to say (the word Eagleton specifically rules out) jouissance.⁶ And Eagleton’s “defense” (or mock-defense?) of Jameson’s style is couched not only in terms of pleasure, but of Jameson’s own pleasure: “weighed down” as he is with the “grave burdens” and “historical responsibilities” he has assumed, writes Eagleton,

[Jameson] must be allowed a little for himself, and that precisely, is style. Style in Jameson is the excess or self-delight which escapes even his own most strenuously analytical habits. . . . (Against the Grain 66)

I lack the space here to rehearse Jameson’s aversion to all discussion of literary, cultural, social, political, or even psychological issues in terms of “self”; any reader of Jameson will have noticed that after his 1961 book on Sartre, hostility to the category of “the subject” is the most consistent of his presuppositions. So Eagleton’s reinscription of “pleasure” here in terms of a stylistic self-consciousness, and a “self-delight” that is Jameson’s due as a sort of allowance or indulgence (like Lenin’s penchant for Beethoven, or Freud’s cigars) compounds Eagleton’s sly “mis-taking” of Jameson’s point.⁷ Eagleton is raising issues as ancient as Aristotle on tragedy: how do we derive pleasure (if it is pleasure) from works that visit unpleasure upon us? Eagleton seems “materialist” in the British tradition of Hobbes and Bentham rather than Marx when he unmasks the “pleasure” of reading Jameson in this way.

Eagleton’s remarks originally appeared in a 1982 issue of Diacritics devoted to Jameson. It was in the following year (1983) that Jameson published an essay that not only mentioned the word “pleasure,” but took it as its title, “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” I do not argue that Eagleton’s remarks prompted Jameson’s essay, but reading it “as if” it did makes its centerpiece, Jameson’s elaboration of Barthes’s plaisir–jouissance distinction, seem a kind of defense against, correction of, or better, a dialectical out-leaping of, Eagleton’s implied strictures, as well as a tacit program or apologia for Jameson’s own writing as far as its literary “effects” are concerned.

“Pleasure: A Political Issue” argues against what Jameson calls “Left puritanism” of just the sort that I have identified with Eagleton IT2 66-7); and its vehicle is a reconsideration of Barthes, a much more positive one than Jameson had offered, for example, in “The Ideology of the Text” (1976). The treatment of Barthes is, as usual in Jameson, quite unstable; he passes over, for example, Barthes’s wobble over the relation of “jouissance” to “significance” (“bliss” as liberation from the tyranny of “meaning,” versus “bliss” as restoration of a “meaning” utopia); and one of the most simply pleasurable parts of the essay, the opening jeremiad against the commodification of “pleasure” in our mass culture, ascribes this theme to The Pleasure of the Text, where it nowhere appears. (Jameson is conflating plaisir/jouissance with S/Z‘s lisible/scriptible.)⁸ Eagleton took care to absolve Jameson of any taint of Barthes’s “perversity”; but Jameson mounts a defense of the Barthesian “perverse” that resonates with his homage to Lacan.⁹ And where Eagleton reviles Barthesian jouissance as a flight from politics into a cerebral-sensual wet dream, Jameson avers that

the immense merit of Barthes's essay The Pleasure of the Text] is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma. . . . (IT2 69)

“Impossible”? As usual when Jameson offers a judgment for or against a writer’s politics, this seems an eye-of- the-beholder situation, Jameson’s construction of a “political” Barthes attesting Jameson’s ingenuity more than Barthes’s politics; but I want to pass to the next, most interesting phase of Jameson’s argument, in which Jameson reads Barthes’s binary of “pleasure” and “jouissance” as a contemporary avatar of Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime.” It seems a master stroke, until you reread Barthes. Jameson invokes Barthes’s epigraph from Hobbes about “fear,” and quotes Barthes quoting Hobbes in the section of The Pleasure of the Text called “Fear.” My own reading of Barthes is that by “fear” he means something like “shame”:

Proximity (identity?) of bliss and fear. What is repugnant in such nearness is obviously not the notion that fear is a disagreeable feeling--a banal notion-- but that it is not a very worthy feeling. . . .(Barthes's emphasis; Pleasure of the Text 48)

This unworthiness is a particular in which “fear” resembles “pleasure”; only two pages earlier Barthes protests the “political alienation” enforced by

the foreclosure of pleasure (and even more of bliss) in a society ridden by two moralities: the prevailing one, of platitude; the minority one, of rigor (political and/or scientific). As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. Our society appears to be both staid and violent: in any event: frigid.¹⁰

But Jameson tilts Barthes’s invocation of “fear” away from the disquiets of prudery and the miseries of a closeted Eros in a very different direction: towards a Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” IT2 72). Jameson initially treats this as an effect merely aesthetic, and therefore “ideological,” a mystification (Burke, he notes, makes the end-term of the sublime God Himself), and he jeers the hunger for such an effect–“choose what crushes you!” IT2 72)–but the valence changes when he goes on to posit an end-term of his own, namely that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing, the multinational apparatus” of late capitalism itself. Jameson alludes to the work of “the capital-logicians,” who invert Hegel’s providential world-historical metanarrative so that “what Hegel called ‘Absolute Spirit’ was simply to be read as the transpersonal, unifying, supreme force of emergent Capitalism itself”; it is “beyond any question,” he continues, that some such apprehension attaches to “the Barthesian sublime” IT2 72-73). Granted Barthes’s good-leftish politics, an ecriture(“sublime” or not) that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” is not only very un-Barthes-like, but actually valorizes Barthes in terms of that very “Left puritanism” Jameson affects to defend Barthes against.

Jameson has remade Barthes’s jouissance, in short, in the image of his own “sublime,” a passion of “fear” prompted by “History,” by “what hurts”: it is not Barthes who has chosen what crushes him; Barthes is willing to confess (or boast) that at least parts of him are not crushed; it is Jameson who insists on being crushed, by a “sublime” villain, late capitalism. The measure of that “crush” is of course the effect of the prose in which Jameson projects his “vision of Necessity” and its inverted Hegelian-Marxist metanarrative in which “the subject of History” proves to be not the proletariat but capitalism. “Pleasure: A Political Issue” invites a redescription of what Eagleton named the “pleasure” of Jameson’s prose as, on the contrary, a type of “the sublime.”

“The sublime” is a theme that has much preoccupied Jameson in the ’80s, a decade in which, it seems to me, his prose has undergone a change. It is as allusive and inward as ever, but its emotional charge is much larger and more accessible than before. Eagleton in 1982 chided Jameson’s “regular, curiously unimpassioned style” Against the Grain 74), and here his judgment is avowedly adverse: he is calling in fact for a more “impassioned” Jameson. But the formula of 1982 no longer fits the Jameson of 1992, as even a cursory reading of, for example, the short meditations on diverse topics gathered as the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism will show. Moreover, “the sublime” is a frequent theme in this writing, and Jameson unfailingly characterizes it (as in the passage quoted above) in terms of unrepresentability, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. To evoke the nightmare of history as beyond the intellect’s grasp is to present a vision of “fear.” But another frequent theme in Jameson is the ambition to write a “dialectical prose,” like Adorno’s, that resists or escapes what Jameson calls “thematization.” Jameson nowhere speaks of this condition “beyond thematization” as a “jouissance,” but insofar as it, too, involves a transit beyond a linguistic-semantic entrapment, this ambition of Jameson’s rewrites the fear of the sublime as a kind of desire, and thus projects the terror of the sublime as a kind of utopia.

I want to mention one more portent in the later Jameson’s evocation of “the sublime”: if “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of interpretation. From long before his 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through The Political Unconscious (1981), with its programmatic opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” Jameson presented his effort as a hermeneutic project, opposed to that of “anti-hermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. In his work since then, “postmodernism” itself figures as the unfigurable, insofar as it is (to use a paleoMarxist shorthand whose terms Jameson disapproves) the “superstructural” concomitant of changes in the “base” wrought by a “late” or (in Ernest Mandel’s terms) “third-stage” capitalism whose modes of production have undergone a decisive world-historical alteration since, roughly, the ’60s. Hence Jameson’s more recent rhetoric in which, ominously, the center does not hold: as if, to use the terms of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, our impotence to “change” the world must be expressed as an impotence also to “understand” it, in accordance with (“Left puritanism” indeed) the “vision of Necessity” in which the “failure” of revolution appears as “inevitable after the fact”–and must further entail the “vision” of the “inevitable failure” of “dialectical historiography” itself, along with any hermeneutic labor tributary to it. Hence the agitation of Jameson’s recent prose, particularly the later pieces in Postmodernism, in which “the sublime” is not only a prominent theme, but also a frequent effect.¹¹

I have suggested that “Pleasure: A Political Issue” be read “as if” it responds directly to Eagleton’s ambiguous praise of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson, “as if” it aims to propose another ethos, a literary “effect” (“the sublime”) more creditable than “pleasure” for culture-criticism generally, and for Jameson’s own work in particular. I want now to turn to Eagleton’s writing, which, beyond ideological affinities, seems diametrically opposed to Jameson’s rhetorically, in its effects as writing. Where Jameson enlarges every problem, problematizes every solution, insists on “inevitable failure,” and proposes both for his prose and for his readers an askesis of facing the worst (what Geoffrey Galt Harpham has called “the ascetic imperative”), Eagleton writes a prose full of jokes and irreverences, Bronx cheers and razzberries, polemical piss and ideological vinegar, every clause lighting a ladyfinger of wit, almost as if under the compulsion of a kind of high-theory Tourette’s syndrome. It is a style with affinities to “counter-culture” journalism, as if James Wolcott had gone to graduate school instead of to The Village Voice. With obvious and naughty relish, Eagleton transgresses the decorums of academic prose, setting (for example) a clever bit of baby-talk on Derrida’s name (labelled “Oedipal Fragment”) as epigraph to a chapter on “Marxism and Deconstruction,” or concluding a book of essays with a doggerel busker-ballad in the broadside style (“Chaucer was a class traitor,/ Shakespeare hated the mob,” etc., to be sung to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory”), or launching his essay on Jameson’s style with a parody of Jameson, or indulging a parody of Empson in his essay on Empson, “The Critic as Clown,” or sending up everything academic-critical in a parody of the academic handbook manner in “The Revolt of the Reader.” (Equally un- or anti-academic, but in the other direction, is the poem at the end of Eagleton’s book on Benjamin; compare the poem dedicating Criticism and Ideology [1976] to his father.¹²)

As for the pained, mournful, obligatory pessimism of “the ascetic imperative,” Eagleton consistently jeers it as a kind of false consciousness. Here, for example, he is setting the stage for a recuperation of Walter Benjamin (whose “melancholy” he readily concedes) under the sign of “carnival”; and with characteristic brass, he makes the very implausibility of such a move his opening gambit:

the suffering, Saturnine aspects of Benjamin, the wreckage of ironic debacles and disasters that was his life, have been seized upon with suspicious alacrity by those commentators anxious to detach him from the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope. Since political pessimism is a sign of spiritual maturity . . . Benjamin offers a consolingly familiar image to disinherited intellectuals everywhere, downcast as they are by the cultural dreariness of a bourgeoisie whose property rights they would doubtless defend to the death.(Walter Benjamin 143)

Two pages later, enter Bakhtin, and the theme of “carnival,” which the prose not only describes but enacts:

In a riot of semiosis, carnival unhinges all transcendental signifiers and submits them to ridicule and relativism . . . power structures are estranged through grotesque parody, 'necessity' thrown into satirical question and objects displaced or negated into their opposites. A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane) rampages throughout social life, deconstructing images, misreading texts and collapsing binary oppositions into a mounting groundswell of ambiguity into which all discourse finally stutters and slides. Birth and death, high and low, destruction and renewal are sent packing with their tails in each other's mouths . . . A vulgar, shameless, materialism of the body--belly, buttocks, anus, genitals--rides rampant over ruling-class civilities; and the return of discourse to this sensuous root is nowhere more evident than in laughter itself, an enunciation that springs straight from the body's libidinal depths.(Walter Benjamin 145, 150)

These passages are from the chapter of Walter Benjamin called “Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht,” and I want to consider this essay at length here: it provides the program projected in the book’s subtitle (“Towards a Revolutionary Criticism”), and the place of “pleasure” in this program is large and important–both as an aim proposed by the argument and, more immediately, as an effect of the writing. The energy of these passages is not the only kind of energy to be found in Eagleton–space forbids sampling the rabble-rousing wisecracks, the downright, matey metaphors, the sheer gusto for combat and polemical hurly-burly, the insouciantly highbrow laying about amid Heidegger, Althusser, Hegel, or whomever. But the fluency of Eagleton’s rant makes a sharp contrast with Jameson: while Jameson’s notoriously “difficult” prose enacts the difficult (indeed impossible) position of Marxism today, the sheer brio of Eagleton’s prose in all its guises, its “riot of semiosis,” seems to address a political situation whose solution ought to be as simple as getting everyone to admit what they already know, if only by springing jokes so cunningly as to enable us to catch them laughing despite themselves. “A vulgar, shameless materialism of the body– belly, buttocks, anus, genitals–rides rampant over ruling-class civilities”: is there a straight face to be seen? The transgressions seem a test to see who will laugh and who will scowl–good fun, and pointed, of course, at the latter.

Surely this is Eagleton’s dominant effect: it is why graduate students idolize him, and part of why he is recommended for anyone wanting an introduction to “theory.” He can, quite simply, be fun to read, and in that regard, more than any other contemporary highbrow Marxist, he can remind you of some passages in Marx himself. You can, indeed, almost imagine a coal miner or a factory worker reading him, as, in labor movement myth, some of them used to read Marx. I highlight this effect of Eagleton’s prose because it is an effect of pleasure. Even Eagleton’s darker notes, the moments of righteous anger, generally assume or imply (indeed, they aspire to create) a political situation in which righteous anger can readily find its proper effectivity–a situation, to put it another way, in which righteous political anger is felt as a pleasure in its own right. Eagleton’s prose means to yield such pleasure as an effect, as well as proposing it as a theme or program.

Over the course of Eagleton’s career, indeed, the effect of pleasure is far more consistent than the theme; about the theme, Eagleton has often, especially when younger, expressed doubts–as in the caveat above about Jameson, for example: “pleasure,” yes; “jouissance,” no. Jouissance is a Barthesian word, and although Eagleton does on occasion resort to it as a positive term, his reservations about Barthes remain everywhere in force. Pace Jameson, Eagleton regards Barthes’s plaisir and jouissance as privatistic, apolitical, and corrupted with the (to Eagleton) irredeemably contemptible bourgeois pathology of guilt-as-added-thrill; Barthesian pleasure is “guilty pleasure,” enacted behind closed doors in controlled environments, whereas Eagleton’s rabble-rousing implies gleeful sacrilege in public places, and not with guilt, but with whoops of righteous laughter.

“Carnival and Comedy” proposes such effects, such styles of revolutionary laughter and humor, not only in its practice (in the style of its prose), but also as a program for a “Marxist theory of comedy” Walter Benjamin, 159), which Eagleton sketches out, with Brecht’s help, as properly answering to something like the movement of history itself. For Brecht, the Marxist “dialectic of history” is “comic in principle”: “a source”–quoting Brecht now–“of enjoyment” heightening “both our capacity for life and our pleasure in it.”¹³ Hence, explains Eagleton, the redemptive move from pessimism to “the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope”: “What for Walter Benjamin is potentially tragic . . . is for Brecht the stuff of comedy.” But what of history’s horrors? Eagleton seemingly bids defiance to all obligatory handwringing on that score: “Hitler as housepainter yesterday and Chancellor today is thus a sign of the comic, because that resistible rise foreshadows the unstable process whereby he may be dead in a bunker tomorrow” Walter Benjamin 161). (Note the verb tenses, and especially the “may” in that last clause: even in this “comic” moment, Eagleton is conjuring with the prospect of future Hitlers, warning that we must not be complacent because the last one was vanquished.)

But against Auschwitz, a paragraph later, Eagleton knows that his comic bravura will not stand, and he acknowledges that there is “always something that escapes comic emplotment . . . that is non-dialectizable” Walter Benjamin 162). This last nonce-word seems a little too impromptu; it would be a mistake to hold Eagleton to all its implications against “dialectic” itself. It is better taken as a symptom of how Eagleton’s improvisational afflatus can tread Marxist toes as readily as bourgeois ones. But Eagleton means the word to acknowledge that the “comic” critique he projects here has its limit, comes up against things in history that can not be “emplotted” in a “comic” mode. If “comedy” can mean Dante, or the Easter Passion, it may seem that Eagleton has confused the “comic” with the “funny”; immemorially august Western conceptions of “the comic” have claimed to encompass brutality, suffering, injustice. Perhaps Eagleton regards these as in bad taste, or perhaps he wants to avoid the assimilation once again of Marxism to religion.

However that may be, what happens next in “Carnival and Comedy” provides a far more surprising tack away from revolutionary laughter toward something like the “melancholy” the essay began by protesting. And it does so, more remarkably still, by way of a reading of a passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, perhaps the first among Marx’s texts one might have cited as exhibiting just the sort of “carnivalesque” angers and “comic” pleasures (ridicule and mockery) Eagleton had seemed to project. But Jeffrey Mehlman reads the passage this way, and it is as a refutation of Mehlman’s reading that Eagleton stages his own Revolution and Repetition). What apparently prompts Eagleton’s ire is Mehlman’s reference to the “anarchism” of Marx’s prose, which Eagleton finds complicit with “those ruling ideologies that have an interest in abolishing dialectics and rewriting Marxism as textual productivity” Walter Benjamin 162). Mehlman argues that Marx’s rhetorical excesses overflow his supposed thesis; Eagleton scorns such a notion, but goes on to make an argument not much different.

Eagleton’s fulcrum is the first-time-as-tragedy- second-time-as-farce motif, for Marx specifies “Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre . . . the Nephew for the Uncle,” quite as if the Revolution’s giants were first-timers, and did not themselves dress up in Roman togas (conveniently requiring little restyling when the signified changed from “Republic” to “Empire”). Yet precisely this revolutionary repetition–both heroic and farcical– quickly becomes Marx’s main theme. Eagleton interrogates the resulting “semiotic disturbance” (inconsistent metaphors, etc.) over several pages of “close reading,” much too lengthily to quote here; but its surprising premise is that “Marx’s text is symptomatically incoherent” Walter Benjamin 163). But where Mehlman found this carnivalesque, and thus a strength and an interest, Eagleton, avowedly promoting “carnival and comedy,” is pained at Marx’s “unwitting” loss of control over his language, and finds himself talking back to Marx, correcting him, unmixing his metaphors for him. He recovers himself at last by the threadbare critical move of transferring the “symptomatic incoherence” from Marx to his object (bourgeois revolution), thus at the final bell transforming what had been Marx’s unwitting “symptom” into his masterful critical “negation.” But the passage ends weakly, and the essay moves to a coda lamenting Western Marxism’s loss of Marx’s comic strength (as if forgetting Brecht, Eagleton’s initial sponsor). There is irony here, insofar as Eagleton has just (by imposing a monologic of his own on Marx’s figurally dialogic text) sapped the very strength he now professes to mourn; and there is pathos in this wistful statement of irrecoverable loss, since recovering a comic possibility for Marxist critique had been, just a few pages earlier, Eagleton’s boldly stated ambition. The essay ends this way:

Benjamin, like Gramsci, admired the slogan "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," and in what Brecht called "the new ice age" of fascism one can see its point. But Marxism holds out other strategic slogans too. Having taken the point of the first, it might then be possible to say, without voluntarist or Kautskyist triumphalism: "Given the strength of the masses, how can we be defeated?"(Walter Benjamin 172)

Tentative (“it might then be possible to say”), and with the taunts of the shibboleth-meisters (“Voluntarist!” “Kautskyist!”) rising in his inner ear, Eagleton’s final flourish cannot, for once, deliver the pleasurable Eagletonian “triumphalism” that is his usual stock in trade. The final “slogan,” indeed, ending on a question mark, sounds more like a real question than a rhetorical one. Here the “optimism of the will” is too willful to convince, the “pessimism of the intellect” too much more than merely intellectual not to. For once, “pessimism of the intellect” really seems to win the agon in the arena of Eagleton’s prose.

So a guerilla foray into a “Marxist theory of comedy,” driven by “carnival” energies, loses momentum at the name of the eponymous master. This failure tempts the sort of lit-crit “psychoanalysis” indicated when, say, the word “balls” sends Stephen Dedalus’s chastely passionate villanelle off the rails: a gallant defense of Marx turns into a subtle assault on Marx–“anxiety of influence”?–and suddenly all Eagleton’s fight (and fun) have gone out of him. But of course we had better push in the direction of that transindividual “libidinal apparatus” that assigns the “objective limits” (Jameson’s phrase) determining such failures–and in fact to “allegorize” the trajectory of Eagleton’s essay as enacting the fate of pleasure in our present “conjuncture” is to assimilate Eagleton to Jameson. Jameson, as we have seen, makes a “vision” of “necessary failure” an imperative for Marxist criticism, and Eagleton, despite his bravely avowed aim of rebutting all such “pessimism” here ends by bowing to it. Jameson, inscribing a failure imperative, compels from it his tortured, ambivalent, “difficult” success; Eagleton, in brash defiance of all pessimisms and confident of Marxism’s inevitable, eventual success, here “enacts” the Jamesonian “vision” of “necessary failure” the more movingly for all his “optimism of the will” against it. This may sound like scoring points against both of them, especially against Eagleton–but if pressed to admit that Eagleton’s failure, at least, does seem a “symptom” rather than a “negation,” I would want to add that both writers, by putting their expository “mastery” at risk, challenge the whole ethos of “critique” that gives the “symptom”/”negation” binary its significance. The ensuing gain is that we can see how two writers so different, enacting differing consequences of the same “contradiction,” must probe and come up against different reaches of the same “objective limits.”

As for the question how to name the complex satisfaction of reading such writers as Eagleton and Jameson, the very difficulty of calling it “pleasure” raises problems whose force is worth looking into in its own right. What Jameson’s discomfort with “pleasure,” his need to sublimate it into “the sublime,” tells us about the fate of pleasure in our historical moment converges with Eagleton’s seemingly opposed embrace of pleasure (with, nevertheless, his reservations about “bliss” on the one hand and the more obscurely motivated “failure” enacted at the close of “Carnival and Comedy” on the other).

Which returns us to the question of “Left puritanism.” Both Eagleton and Jameson seem shadowed by the “minority (political) rigor” whose affinities with the more majoritarian moralisms we saw Barthes uncovering. Each seems to find some sorts of enjoyment (however they differ on which ones) tainted by (Barthes again) “unworthy [bourgeois] feelings.” Neither, of course, wants to be tarred as a “Left puritan”; Jameson’s embrace of Barthes (and Lacan) bespeaks his desire to escape that label, and Bakhtin serves as a similar alibi for Eagleton. As I have argued above, though, Jameson’s construction of Barthes seems motivated by a very un-Barthes-like, and very “Left puritan,” distrust of “plaisir,” and his reinscription of “jouissance” into “the sublime” sublimates it into something very far from enjoyment (in anything other than, say, the Zizekian sense).¹⁴ As for Eagleton’s appropriation of Bakhtin, it is to be read in opposition to, not as a version of, Barthesian “jouissance.” It constructs “carnival” as social, and thus an affair less of Eros than of its collective sublimate, Agape. Sex, in Eagleton’s “carnival,” is comically deflationary–“A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks)” Walter Benjamin 145)–rather than a unique, privileged, grand (or grandiose) access to the transport and exaltation of “the sublime.”

Barthes, I suspect, would see in both of these writers more than a few symptoms of that “frigidity” he protests, “As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone” Pleasure of the Text 46-7). Barthes writes as one for whom the “promesse de bonheur” that Marxists so frequently denounce as “ideological” has already been in some measure cashed; his superego has apparently fought free of that “categorical imperative” that would have him deny his own pleasure in the name of the possibly counter-revolutionary effects of corrupt ideas of “pleasure” on others. But insofar as the resistance to “pleasure” involves the worry of “false consciousness,” the fear of being falsely consoled by “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” it will doubtless remain a potent source of moral trouble for Marxists and others who would direct the energies of “critique” to the tasks of making a more just society. The example, though, of Eagleton’s “optimism of the will” (and, most of the time, of his optimism of the intellect, too) prompts me at least to the pleasurable speculation whether “false consciousness” might not equally involve the temptation of responding to real contradictions with imaginary aggravations.

Notes

1. “Stoic” and “tragic” are terms of praise in Jameson’s essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1 (hereinafter IT1), 98, 112; and it is manifest that part of Lacan’s fascination for Jameson is Lacan’s achievement of an ethos at once (“dialectically”) Hegelian and pessimistic, and to that extent a model for Jameson’s own. For “the nightmare of history as blood guilt,” see “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2 (hereinafter IT2), 43, and “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), ibid, 68.

2. See, for example, Jameson’s account of the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in IT2, 35-60; the caution about “post-Marxism” is on 38. See also remarks on Tafuri in Postmodernism, 61. Jameson scorns any suggestion of his own putative “post-Marxism” in the opening pages of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism.

3. Against the Grain, 68. Eagleton similarly praises Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism,” ibid, 49-64.

4. “The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia” is the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious (281-99), but the motif recurs throughout Jameson’s work, from the chapters on Marcuse (83-115) and Ernst Bloch (116-59) in Marxism and Form to the section of the “Conclusion” of Postmodernism called “The Anxiety of Utopia” (331-40).

5. Cf. Jameson’s most unequivocal praise for Paul de Man: that no one has been more “self-punishing” in pursuit of a moral-intellectual askesis Postmodernism 239).

6. Eagleton quotes Jameson on Adorno (from Marxism and Form xiii) in “The Politics of Style” Against the Grain 66); on the same page he quotes himself, on Jameson’s “intense libidinal charge,” from “The Idealism of American Criticism” Against the Grain 57).

7. Compare this move of Eagleton’s with Jameson’s judgment that de Man’s project, despite its avowed ambition to deconstruct “the subject,” is “fatally menaced at every point by a resurgence of some notion of self-consciousness” Postmodernism 245, cf. 258-9).

8. “Commodification” is a frequent topos in both Eagleton and Jameson, as well as in many other Marxist (and not-so-Marxist) writers. (Eagleton even images Jameson’s encyclopedic range of reference as a shopping cart wheeling through “some great California supermarket of the mind” collecting Hegel, Deleuze, Croce, et al., like so many designer-products Against the Grain 70].) Indeed, anxiety about the commodification of highbrow “theory” like his own–Barthes, Lukacs, Macherey, and whoever else as status-acquisitions in some flash-card degradation of intellectual life–frequently appear in Jameson himself, and in just such consumerist terms–as, for example, when he deplores hearing figures like Althusser, Gramsci, et al. turned into “brand-names for autonomous philosophical systems” (“Interview” 78).

9. For Eagleton’s exempting Jameson from Barthesian “perversity,” see Against the Grain, 66; for Jameson on Barthes and Lacan, compare “Pleasure: A Political Issue” IT2 69) with the closing paragraph of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” IT1 115).

10. Pleasure of the Text, 46-7. One of Jameson’s more dazzling asides is the linkage of Barthes with Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity on the grounds that both associate what they despise with the left–student radicals for Trilling, “Left puritanism,” as in the quoted passage, for Barthes IT2 65).

11. This hermeneutic despair, surprisingly, lightens in work Jameson has published since Postmodernism. See the (previously unpublished, and presumably recent) essay, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible, 155-248, where hermeneutic satisfactions again compensate for the reifications accounted for; and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, in which third world cinema’s reinvention of narrative and realism and its sense of “totality as conspiracy” offer a prospect of the world system once again rendered intelligible to the terms of a politically committed (mass) art form. See my review of these two books in Kritikon Litterarum (forthcoming).

12. “Oedipal Fragment,” Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, 131; “The Ballad of English Literature,” Against the Grain, 185; the parody of Jameson, ibid, 65; of Empson, ibid, 151; “The Revolt of the Reader, ibid, 181-4. For the homage to Benjamin, see Walter Benjamin, 185. This is also the place to mention Eagleton’s play, Brecht and Company (1979) and his novel, Saints and Scholars (1987).

13. Brecht on Theatre, 277; qtd. in Walter Benjamin, 160.

14. I am thinking, of course, of Slavoj Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, but readers of Zizek know that they will find this and Zizek’s other central themes rehearsed in virtually any of his books.

Works Cited
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
- Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Selected Essays. New York and London: Verso, 1986.
- Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. New York and London: Verso, 1981.
- Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana UP/British Film Institute: Verso, 1992.
- —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- —. “Interview.” Diacritics 12.3 (Fall 1982): 72-91.
- —. Late Marxism, Or, Adorno: The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York and London: Verso, 1990.
- —. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.
- —. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
- —. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
- —. Signatures of the Visible. Routledge: New York and London, 1992.
- Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
- Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
September 25, 2013
The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release
Roberto Maria Dainotto

Dept. of Comparative Literature
New York University
DAINOTTR@acfcluster.nyu.edu

Once a famous Hellenic philosopher, [Aesop’s] master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he’d told that great sage the story of the king’s loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. “But you don’t have to worry, sire,” he added, “you’ve no wit to shit.” Well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. For the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we’ve made–it’s the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods.

Now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it’s almost suffocating. Boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it’s as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. And there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes. That foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. His own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, feel suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, Zeus sent Modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor.

–Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest”

For this relief much thanks…

—Hamlet, I: i, 8

Dedicatory Epistle to the Reader

The paper hereby presented is, properly speaking, a treatise on evacuation. As such, its ideal location would be between Dominique Laporte’s Histoire de la merde and Pietro Manzoni’s Merde d’artista–works, in other words, secretly dedicated to friendly souls, or, as in this case, to the logorrheic interpreter of postmodernity. The author, but a humble hack, aims at the scholastic fame of having been able, if not to tap, at least to indicate a peculiar gap in postmodern criticism: for it appeared astounding to him that, among so many postmodernisms–“John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of inflationary economy; Jean-Francois Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of humankind…” (McHale 4)–the one concerned with the sublimity of evacuation had been so absolutely neglected.

To single out a certain sense of the sublime in contemporary literature, it is mandatory to impose severe limitations on and some critical selecting of the otherwise too heterogeneous material at hand. First, this research will be limited to North American fiction. Second, the investigation will focus on one particular theme that seems to have grieved American literature since the fifties–a theme that goes under the name of “the crisis of consciousness.”¹ What is intended here by “critical selecting” is that pre-Kantian form of judgement that constitutes the essence and very nature of the author’s critical method: “I like it, or I don’t.” On this basis, I have not the least intention to encompass within this reading the “fast-food fictions” (Pfeil 2) and minimalist melancholies of Jay McInerney or Susan Minot. They do not “fit,” and, moreover, they get on my nerves.

Of this critical scheme, the author is ready to admit that it is what nowadays seems to be the object of ridicule and scorn: it is, no doubt, a dogmatic scheme. It begins with an assumption about what contemporary American literature might be, and therefore it handles exclusively those works which “fit” into the scheme. In defense of this method, the author can only mention the innocence with which he is trying not to impose his assumption on any work.

If the reader finds this preamble to be redundant, or the following to be repugnant, let us make clear that these notes, “neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism” (Hutcheon, Poetics ix), should be intended as an attempt to single out some strategies of aesthetic, and maybe also moral and political, survival within the limits of what Jameson has so grimly called “logic of late capitalism”–or, in Baudrillard’s more pertinent formulation, the logic of fast-food, anorexia, bulimia, and obesity. Henceforth, dear reader, consider the following as yet one more exercise in survival and digestion–an exercise morally and socially relevant of which the author professes himself to be a persevering practitioner.

Fables of Digestion

The term digestion itself is one of the interfaces between ideas of bodily and mental process. Latin digero meant properly to force apart, to separate…

–R.M. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell”

Inclusion and exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices.

–George Yudice, “Feeding the Transcendent Body”

In this paper, the term “sublime” refers not only to a set of aesthetic practices and transcendental ideals that have manifested themselves in contemporary American literature, but also to certain features of our own life and culture, features that, to paraphrase Geoffrey Harpham, “have survived the loss of the ideological structures within which they emerged” (xi). Loss and survival are two of the most remarkable traits of the sublime: since Longinus, they mark the stages of the individual’s confrontation with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption of the subject, which is first “scattered,” and then joyfully reconstituted, “uplifted with a sense of proud possession…filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we felt” (Longinus On the Sublime VII, translation mine).

There seems to be general agreement today about the fact that the first epochal horizon within which one can speak of postmodernity coincides with the alleged death of the subject–or, at least, with an “attenuation of the self,” as Lionel Trilling puts it in Sincerity and Authenticity. From the “loss of the self” of Wylie Sypher, through the “divided self” of Ronald Laing, to the “deconstructed self” of Leo Bersani, the identity of the “I” is dramatically scattered.

One can locate the first symptoms of the vanishing Emersonian self in the schlemiel of the literature of the fifties.² Undoubtedly, there are specific historical reasons that generate this sense of pessimism and loss. The crisis of consciousness in the literature of the fifties may well witness, in Edmund Wilson’s words, the “homicidal and menacing schemes” of McCarthyan policy (Wilson 128). At the turn of the new decade, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest warns against the clinical suppression of the subject in the political style of Kubrick: “[they] try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want to” (Kesey 57). As Hendin puts it, society, as symbolized in Kesey’s asylum, “controls and infantilizes [the subject] in the name of the best interests of the inmates” (Hendin 132).

And yet, the fiction of the sixties muses, with Kesey’s McMurphy, an outside space (“We want to live out of this society,” the king of the Merry Pranksters avows), the revival of the American dream, the fantasy of an ultimate frontier that, once crossed, will open onto the uncontaminated plains of ultimate innocence and freedom. Although the themes of power and suppression undergo some variations, say, from Kesey’s dystopic vision to Kerouac’s beatnik quest, the literature of the sixties traces a neat line between a power reduced to mere symbol of evil and an Adamic individual consciousness outside power and innocently extraneous to it. Curiously enough, the writer of the sixties uses the themes of power and consciousness in a way that resembles Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, and Hawthorne’s more than it resembles any postmodern writer’s: the Walden of literature is still a sacred wood in which I sing myself far from the evil of civilization and far from its scarlet symbols of doom. But is there any such a space of innocence in the coming society of the spectacle?

Postmodern statements on politics and society, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Coover’s The Public Burning, persistently echo the gloomy tones of Kesey’s Foucauldian clinic–but where is the ultimate frontier of innocence and freedom?

America was the edge of the World. A message from Europe, continent-seized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its kingdom of Death, the special Death the West has invented. . . . Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. . . . Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling.(Pynchon 722-23)

Or, as Richard Nixon admits in The Public Burning, some pages before being sodomized by Uncle Sam, “we cannot escape” (Coover 8).

Yet, the theory and practice of postmodernity may recast the question of “the crisis of consciousness,” raised in the fifties and brought to its final “paranoid” conclusions in the sixties, in “a more positive mode of confrontation between subject and power” (Olderman 124); the postmodern answer to this question attempts at producing new and different structures of survival–“new mutants,” to say it with Leslie Fiedler. The argument I want to support with this paper can be summarized as follows: the claim of a death of the subject in postmodern discourse must be understood, pace all those critics who take the “death-theme” in absolute earnestness, as a “radical irony” (Ihab Hassan) which aims at reconstituting what one can call–faute de mieux–the “radical subject”: a subject which stands to represent “the community of disappointed . . . literary intellectuals–and how many of us really stand outside this class?–whose basic need is to believe in the autonomy of self-fashioning.”³ Escape is impossible, since Kesey’s clinic is virtually everywhere, in “the crime labs . . . the records . . . the radios and the alarm system and the TV over the teller’s cages . . . the cells and the jails and the schools and institutions . . . the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulation . . . the magnified maps of the city . . . the beats and patrols,” as Elkin’s Bad Man witnesses (70); and yet, the repressive project of society reveals itself inefficient to discipline the postmodern self-fashioning individual.

“I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I am invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.” But what can Ellison’s Bear do in the society of spectacle? How can Trilling’s “liberal imagination” survive the mystifications of mass-culture? And how can individual consciousness confront and survive a power disseminated in the most appealing forms of advertising, a power so forcefully obliterating reality with fictive simulacra? If “my life is a kind of simulation,” as the protagonist of DeLillo’s Mao II believes (97), how can the subject reposition itself within a society that transforms everything into simulation, in which even the individual, as Teresa de Lauretis warns, is “continually engaged, represented, and inscribed” (“Alice Doesn’t” 37)? In the last analysis, power is not framed within an inside that allows an outside innocence: power resides in the pre- fabricated notions of “reality” that the subject lives, “a series of overlapping fictions [that] cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth” (Coover, Burning 122). Power is the ability of mass-media to create “static tableau–The New York Times’s finest creation–within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold” (Coover, Burning 192).

Once reality and life have lost any ontological arche, and have become the result of a fictive construction, the radical subject, as Coover puts it, must become “cynical about it…learn the rules and strategies . . . [and become] a manipulator” (“Interview” 72); or, as Jerome Klinkowitz suggests, the radical subject must recuperate some sort of “transformative imagination” Disruptions 16) to be able to change plots and life, drive force beyond exhaustion, and transform indifference and its simulacra.

Indeed, the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967) had to convince a group of American authors, now labelled as “post-modernists,” that the first step towards the Bildung–or rather, a re-membering–of the radical subject was “to destroy the hold which these artificial constructions have on men, typically by forcing the very patterns and mythic structures to undermine themselves” (McCaffery, “Checklists” 112). Robert Coover declares:

Men live by fiction. They have to. Life's too complicated, we just can't handle all the input . . . All of them [fictions], though, are merely artifices-- that is, they are always in some ways false, or at best incomplete. There are always other plots, other settings, other interpretations. So if some stories start throwing their weight around, I like to undermine their authority a bit, work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.⁴

Thus, the dead “I” opens a breach in the institutionalized mythic structures, a breach in which s/he will find space enough for inventing new plots and new fables of identity: the radical subject survives the attempt of annihilation by virtue of his/her ability to transform social plots, “work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.”

Why, then, does postmodernism insistently repeat the litany of the dead at the same moment in which death is to turn into survival? One reason may be that postmodernism tries to re-enact a drama that takes place in daily life– the risk that the subject could be actually annihilated by his/her inability to confront overpowering social myths. Most important, this dramaturgy allows postmodernism to celebrate an ironically initiatory rite, or “mythotherapy,” as Campbell Tatham suggests (“Mythotherapy” 155), that enacts the drama of a temporary collapse in order to subsequently reconstitute a new subject in a stage of sublime ecstasy: as a ritual, the death of the subject initiates the reader to confront overpowering structures and destroy their hold. “The process is part of our daily life,” Richard Poirier tells us, “and no other novelist predicts and records it with Pynchon’s imaginative and stylistic grasp” V. 5). Indeed, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow might be the best example to illustrate this kind of ritualistic sublimation of the self. If “They” have transformed the self into a “poor cripple, [a] deformed and doomed thing” GR 720), living in the “master plan” of a continuous alienation; if the self has been ensnared in a plot that is trying to subject both humanity and the Earth to the principle of economic exploitation–then it is “our mission to promote death,” and to become, like Katje and Gottfried, “children who are learning to die” GR 175). As the narrator says, “We must also look to the untold,” to a story different from the “master plan” that has constructed our very idea of identity GR 720). Like Slothrop’s, the human self must first be “broken down” and “scattered” in order to overcome alienation and return as the Benjaminian “bright angel of death” GR 738 ff.). In Pynchon’s novel, Slothrop’s “death” serves the purpose of recognizing fictions and social “master-plans” for what they are, thus liberating the subject from his/her dependency on artificial constructs. As Ihab Hassan argues, “revulsion against the self serves [postmodernism] as a link between the destructive and visionary impulses of modern apocalypse; it prepares for rebirth” Postmodern Turn 5). It administers last rites to all of human life.

Coover’s fictions are no less rich of ritualistic sublimations. Coover, with his proclaimed interest in Roger Caillois’ Eucharistic rites (“Interview” 74), repeatedly stages sacrificial public burnings, regicides, and other executions. In “Aesop’s Forest” the artist/Aesop, who has sinned against Apollo, is, like Orpheus, dismembered by the angry Delphians–“one eye is gone, the other clouded, an ear is clogged with bees, his hide’s in tatters.”⁵ Aesop’s sacrilege consists in having denounced Apollo’s Truth as a fable.

As Aesop remarks, with a sense of tragic irony, “I told them the truth, they called it sacrilege.” Like the postmodern demiurge, Aesop has de-mystified an absolute Truth, but, in so doing, he has hypostatized his own construction as a new truth, allegedly free from any Dionysian construction. Men live by fictions, they have to. But some fictions, like Aesop’s “deconstruction” of Apollonian Truth, start throwing their weight around. When this happens, fictions can turn against their creator, and Aesop’s moralized animals join the Delphians in the lynching of the author:

they are on him: wolves, boars, apes, moles, toads, dancing camels, plucked daws, serpents, spiders, snails, incestuous cocks and shamming cats, hares, asses, bats, bears, swarms of tongueless gnats, fleas, flies and murderous wasps, bears, beavers, doves, martins, lice and dungbeetles, mice and weasels, owls, crabs, and goats, hedgehogs and ticks, kites, frogs, peacocks and locusts, all the fabled denizens of the forest, all intent in electing him into the great democracy of the dead.("Aesop's Forest" 82)

At once, Coover’s story gives the idea of Aesop-the-fabler’s “radical” (anti-Apollonian) activity, and of Aesop-the-man’s entrapment in his own “eloquent text of the forest.” It is not less amazing to notice how Aesop is dismembered by his own “fabled denizens” than to notice how the Rosenbergs are sacrificed to the fable of American democracy in The Public Burning. To give credit to fictions is to put lives at stake. It is not surprising, in this context, that Coover’s narrative technique continuously aims at constructing “exemplary fictions”–fictions that, in Robert Alter’s formulation, “flaunt their own condition of artifice” Partial Magic x) and that, by so doing, escape any hypostasis onto the plane of myth and absolute Truth:

Ejemplares you [Cervantes] called your tales, because "si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso," and I hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, I haven't strayed from your purposes, which I take to be manyfold. For they are ejemplares, too, because your intention was "poner en la plaza de nuestra republica una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entratenerse sin dao del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que daan"-- splendid, don Miguel! for as our mutual friend don Roberto S. [Robert Scholes, in The Fabulators] has told us, fiction "must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well being . . . We need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition"--and thus your novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation. . .(Coover Pricksongs, 77)

Coover’s self-denouncing fictions, differently from Aesop’s moralities, do not permit “to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly”⁶–they do not establish any interpretive order. Because, if Aesop was the victim of an Apollonian social order, he has become, quite paradoxically, the grantee for a classical order–think of La Fontaine– which sees in Aesop’s fables the explicit moralities of “avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic.” Eventually, whether they were guilty or not of a radical and anti-Apollonian statement, Aesop’s fables serviced another artificial but stable moral order. Establishing the tradition of the Aesopian genre tells enough about the institutionalization of fable and the fetishization of narrative constructs, as Chenetier argues: “Aesop[‘s] . . . transformations, a founding gesture for his particular world-view, [have become] a-dynamic and irreversible” (“Ideas” 101). Hence, Coover’s exemplary tale, in order to exercise “all the imagination we have . . . in good conditions,” must dismantle the whole of Aesop’s mythologized apparatus. For reasons antithetical to those of the Delphians, Coover himself must sacrifice Aesop–or his now overpowering plot–on the altar of the postmodern transformative imagination, in the “Temple of the Muses” (“Aesop’s Forest” 81).

Whatever happens to Aesop, and whoever kills him, we know that his is a tragic end. But what happened to the postmodern subject, or, to a lesser extent, whatever happened to Coover in Aesop’s forest? Does the death of Aesop stands to signify the death of the author tout court? Does this coincide with Lyotard’s claimed death of grand narratives? Coover’s allegory is very careful about this: the felicitous announcement of the death of the author can well serve the political agenda of the fox, “that treacherous foul-mouth.” Should we give absolute credit to the wide-spread announcement of the death of narrative (another myth, indeed), the fox may engineer a subtle takeover and make us believe that its realpolitik is the ultimate demystification–we may find ourselves entrapped into Peter Sloterdijk’s “cynical reason,” the belief that, since ideologies are all equally false, one’s behavior should then be absolutely determined by “particular interests.” The problem with Sloterdijk, as with our fox, is that they do not see in their “cynicism” a new fiction, a novel artificial construction: the “particular interest” is not more “real” than what has so far been deconstructed. Interests, to paraphrase Baudrillard, are never “free” from ideological determinations: “there is no basis on which to define what is ‘artificial’ and what is not. . . . No one experiences this [particular interest] as alienation” (“Consumer Society” 40). The grand narratives that have a hold on our life may be easily condemned and unmasked on the assumption that, much like the Socratic “enlightened” rationalism according to Nietzsche, they aspire to Apollonian truth, forgetting that they are bound to the deceptive nature of the Dionysian. However, what is striking is precisely the degree of forgetfulness that accompanies many annunciations of death and unmaskings of grand narratives: the authoritative announcement of the disappearance of authority, and the articulation of a total and comprehensive narrative of a postmodern condition in which it would be impossible to articulate any narration, surreptitiously establish, as Coover suggests, a “foxy” and fraudulent totalizing order. If there is any difference between Aesop’s and Coover’s postmodernism, it is this: the “suspicion” Aesop casts on Apollonian order is recast by Coover on the suspicion itself, with the result that the denunciation of myths does not acquire the status of an Aufklarung, but rather, in Bentham’s formulation, of a “necessary fiction.”⁷ In other words, the de- mythification itself is the result of another fictive construction that can acquire “exemplarity” only if it recognizes itself as “fictive,” thus avoiding any hypostasis onto the plane of absolute truth and enlightenment. Whoever would execute the myth-maker and fight an order of reality must be fully aware that the logics on which s/he would perform the “de-mythification” are not devoid of a necessary fictional nature–or, in Coover’s own words, “It’s all shit anyway” (“Aesop’s Forest” 83).

More precisely, the death of the author/Aesop prepares for a rebirth: once Aesop’s moralized forest “extinguishes itself around him,” a new, exemplary forest can be created, and a new “self-conscious” author can take Aesop’s place. The execution of the author participates of a tribal ritual of initiation in which “killing the author,” as Frazer would say, “assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain author is transmitted to his successor.” As in Freud’s “totemic meal,” oral incorporation and its correlates–instalment and digestion of authority within the self–consume a patricidal act that sublimates the subject’s desire for strength, authority, and life. The Gerontion-like loss of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch that characterizes the narrator of “Aesop’s Forest” must be counterbalanced by a will to eat: “even in such decline, the familiar hungers stir in him still… his appetite for power outlasting his power to move” (“Aesop’s Forest,” 68).

It is the same hunger that saves the characters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in their endless combat against the ghosts of patriarchal culture: “my mother won in ghost battle because she can eat anything…. All heroes are bold toward food…. Big eaters win.”⁸ In Kingston’s and Coover’s vocabulary, one must introject the myth for reasons of survival; only by following the drive of this appetite can the postmodern subject “learn the rules,” and find alternative plots, “more pathways, more gardens, and more doors” (Coover Pricksongs, 19). In other words, if eating practices and “disorders,” as Julia Kristeva suggests, may be the product of a hysterical resistance to (patriarchal) authority (“Stabat Mater”), it must be noticed that the postmodern resistance is not on the part of the anorexic, but, rather, of the bulimic. As the title (if not the argument) of Sohnya Sayres’s article on “Food and the Agon of Excess” suggests, postmodernism is a tale of bulimic excess, or, as George Yudice puts it, the promise of “transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals” (“Transcendent Body” par. 3). As Susie Orbach’s The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor implies, even the anorectic’s “hunger strike,” a loss at the level of the physical, “replenishes” the body with the metaphors of an excess in respect to social codes.

But is “appetite” enough for the individual’s survival? Cannot eating rather be, as Baudrillard’s discussion on “The Obese” insinuates, a “fatal strategy,”⁹ or simply produce a blockage? “As a child,” Kingston tells us, “I pictured a naked child sitting on a modern toilet desperately trying to perform until it died of congestion” (86). Cannot the introjection of social structures, literary traditions, and Aesop’s moralities, actually paralyze the childlike postmodern imagination in some sort of congestion? Or into a compulsion to repeat? Indeed, the rather heavy meal can create a digestive disorder, a rampant dyspepsia, and a metabolic chaos. The “urgent message” of the postmodern author is hindered. The author “squats hastily, breeches down. Ah!, what a plunging weight.” Can postmodernism overcome this moment of blockage, this compulsion to cite and repeat–this compulsion to death? One has reason for worrying: the signs shed in Coover’s forest seem to be Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s, rather than Coover’s own– “there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes”! For the voracious postmodern individual, blockage is the real threat, and survival coincides with some sort of “digestive capability”–the power to actively transform authorities and traditions into fecal signs, into wastes from which the subject has to separate in order to constitute itself as a subject. It is the ability of forcing apart, separating one’s individuality from that of the slain king. In the next section, I will try to associate the possibility of survival for the postmodern individual with a sublime ability to evacuate. This–it goes without saying–is a topic that the author, who is not free from certain academic scruples, has not the power to censor nor the happiness to approve. It is a topic that has been forced upon me by Robert Coover, for whom evacuation is “the closest we ever come to the gods.”

And so, with a timid “Can I?,” I’d like to move to the second section.

From Citation to Sublimation: Metaphors Of Evacuation

As if it were a game played by the sphincter muscle . . .

–Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

Although several critics have commented on the subject, the key document in defining postmodern American literature remains John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967). Barth’s radical announcement was that writers were facing “the used-upness of certain forms of exhaustion of certain possibilities” (29). From then on, the author could only cite and repeat old stories and earlier forms. It is evident that postmodern literature seemingly endorses Barth’s aesthetics of exhaustion: Coover’s repetition of Aesop’s fables, Barthelme’s rewriting of Snow White, Kathy Acker’s Borgesian Don Quixote, equivocally suggest a compulsion to cite, quote, and repeat a whole literary tradition that disturbingly crops up in the postmodern literary body. “Nobody had enough imagination,” Barth’s Ambrose muses at the end of Lost in the Funhouse (97). The postmodern author is condemned to cite and repeat old stories, given forms and structures. Or so it seems. Because some questions can still be asked: Is it possible to turn Barth’s aesthetic ultimacy, his entropic compulsion to cite, into a sublime strategy for the survival of the subject? Can the citing subject be “uplifted with a sense of proud possession” above the cited material? And, if so: According to which paradigm can we define this “uplifting” as “sublimation,” and in what terms?

Suzanne Guerlac, in her study on “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,” locates the force of the sublime in the humble practice of citation, in which the author takes “proud possession” of the given message (275). Frances Ferguson replies to Guerlac by suggesting that citation rather promotes, to be fair to Longinus, a “suppression of the author” (295; emphasis mine). Despite the different conclusions they reach, both Guerlac’s and Ferguson’s arguments, as Geoffrey Harpham argues (198-199), are essentially correct, since the Longinian sublime, in the last analysis, does not aim to promote auctorial individuality, but instead the unification of the author with a transcendent totality, or with a past re-presented by and in the citation. The author is thus “promoted” (Guerlac) by dispersing him/her self within a “totality” (Ferguson). When the Longinian author recognizes the citation “as something he had himself produced,” s/he is caught in the sublime experience because s/he feels as part of a transcendental creative energy.

From its very outset, postmodernism seems to tell a rather different story: postmodern citation can be more correctly imagined as a moment of blockage, in which the author is compelled to cite, to repeat,¹⁰ because a given totality–a literary tradition, a social given to which the author feels belated, or, as Kathy Acker puts it, some “great expectations”–already comprehends him/her. The problem for the postmodern author is that s/he, unlike Longinus, tries to escape that totality, whose overpowering force blocks and paralyzes. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, trying to narrate her own story, finds herself captured in a plot–Grimm’s Snow White–from which she cannot escape: “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (6). Whereas the Longinian sublime contents the subject with a syntactical “sympathy” (the term is Burke’s) between subjective expression and absolute logos, postmodern technique tries to free the subject from the hierarchy of syntax, and hinges, as Hayden White comments, on “a paratactical consciousness: a language of linear disjunction rather than narrative sequence” (“Culture” 69). To put it in rhetorical terms, the organizing principle of postmodern narrative would be metonymy–the succession of unconnected elements –rather than metaphor–the link between the parts. Accordingly, Donald Barthelme breaks syntactic hierarchy to introduce an element of error, a metonymic uncodifiable fragment, in the ordered space of social information:

I have a number of error messages I'd like to introduce here and I'd like you to study them carefully . . . they're numbered. I'll go over them with you: undefined variable . . . improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode, that one's particular grave . . . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that's a bitch . . . no END statement.("Explanation" 79)

The Guerlac-Ferguson debate suggests that Longinus’s holistic sublime may lose its usefulness to describe a postmodern strategy. The ironic tone of postmodern citation implies a different movement, namely, in Paul Bove’s terms, “a radical break or rupture in the genetic pattern,” in which the subject inter-relates dialectically with his/her genetic/historical predecessor, thus instituting “discontinuities” rather than syntheses.¹¹

If Longinus’s sublime and Burke’s “sympathy” do not “fit” postmodernism, Neil Hertz’s “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” tries to define the postmodern practice of citation in terms of Kantian sublime. The enormous “accumulation of secondary discussion,” the “proliferation of secondary comments,” Hertz argues, brings the postmodern author to face “a point of blockage: he [writes] of the threat of being overwhelmed by too much writing, and it may not be possible to go beyond that” (62 ff.) This “accumulation,” an enormous difficulty to ex-press (etymologically: ex premere, to push out) new signs under “the pressure of the super ego,” produces on the author/subject what Hertz calls a “blockage,” something emotionally similar to Kant’s fear and amazement in facing an overwhelming, “limitless” force. The subject/author feels impotent, constipated, quite dead. Yet, Hertz suggests, after the postmodern author posits this impossibility, after s/he installs such a monstrous accumulation impeding writing–after blockage is posited, writing flows out: a logorrhea, indeed, about the “impossibility” of writing. This process constitutes, according to Hertz, the liberating experience of contemporary sublime–an experience organized on the double “mind’s movement [of] blockage, and release.”

Let us consider, as an example of this mechanism of sublimation, Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism. The first chapter of this text is entitled “Representing the Postmodern,” and it begins with a subchapter devoted to the discussion of “What is Postmodernism?” That is to say: Can post-modernism have any identity? Hutcheon astutely plays on the oxymoron opened between the notions of “representation of postmodernism” and that of “postmodern impossibility of representation.” How can we possibly represent, in fact, a phenomenon whose first given is that of unpresentability? Impossibility rules the program of Hutcheon’s text, which is to represent the unpresentable. The Politics of Postmodernism may be seen as some kind of allegory–quite literally an anagogic attempt–of postmodernism itself. The entire postmodernist project is re-enacted here as the desire to “project,” and create, that which cannot be pinned down or mastered by representation. The transcendent object of desire is that which, according to Lyotard, moves postmodernism toward the sublime:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations.(Postmodern Condition 81)

The entire postmodern “representation” (or “postmodernism represented”) is in it–the “post-modernist project,” or, in other words, that ephemeral, brilliant moment of writing the impossibility of writing that by itself represents an entire era, and transcends the logical and stylistic possibilities of representation in the moment the unpresentable is finally presented:

it seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees.(Hutcheon, Poetics 2)

The “indeterminate,” the “unpresentable,” is thus transcended, as Kant puts it, in the “representation of the limitlessness.” The question “What is postmodernism?” poses to the reader an apparently unrecoverable “momentary check” (Kant) to the possibilities of representing “an indeterminate reference”¹²; the feeling of impotence is then “followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful” (Kant) in the moment the unpresentable is finally “connected with the mere presentation or faculty of representation, and is thus taken to express the accord, in a given intuition, of the faculty of presentation, or the imagination, with the faculty of concepts” (Kant). The identity of postmodernism is given, albeit in a negative way, as discrepant from representation itself; or, rather, as ironic (negative) representation, as a representation that takes traditional (positive) representation ironically.

However, we have come a long way from Kant’s sublime. Kant’s was the attempt, once again, to reconstitute the excess of feeling within the notions of “unity,” “integrity,” and “coherence” sanctioned by the “ethical man.” As Hayden White has noticed, Kant’s sublime is some sort of disguised ideology which disciplines the suprasensible by reconciling it with the re-cognition of a social meaning in it. The individual, rather than freeing him/herself from overwhelming totalities, is eventually subjected to the overpowering force–a force of representation, or “faculty of concepts”–of the ethical man.¹³ By advocating the need for rupture, disjunction, and differance, the postmodern “improper use of hierarchy” might well fall out from any Kantian categorization. In his insightful “Sublime Politics,” Donald Pease implicitly maintains the necessity, for postmodernist poetics, of dropping out any argument about, and tendency toward, the sublime:

Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes . . . the sublime, instead of disclosing a revolutionary way of being that is other than the ethical, in Kant's rendition, is reduced to strictly ethical duties. Or, put differently, the sublime makes the formation of an ethical character sound as if it is a rebellious task.(275-276; Pease's emphasis.)

Published in boundary 2 in 1984, Pease’s might be seen as a declaration of postmodernist intents. However, Pease’s refusal of the sublime may be contradictorily sublime in itself. What Pease claims, in his elaborate discussion and description of so many theories of the sublime, is the necessity of dropping out, releasing a certain political embarrassment which seems to be the given of the sublime. By first citing an impressive mass of material on the sublime, and then proclaiming a repudiation of all these structures, Pease’s article offers a clear example of what I intend as the postmodern sublime, organized, indeed, on Hertz’s paradigm of blockage and release. Not only does Pease confront something as overwhelming as the sublime, but he also exceeds it, thus “uplifting” postmodernism beyond the possibilities of what is usually known as “the sublime.” In Pease’s epistemological displacement, the “sublime” reaches what Kant’s conservatism represses: namely, the discontinuity between the given structures and the individual effort to transcend that given; Pease’s sublime results in the differance between self and world, present and past, referent (the “sublime politics”) and sign (a discourse exceeding that referent).

Dick Hebdige, in “The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime,” is more explicit than Pease in affirming the existence of a postmodern sublime based on the ironic rejection of previous theories of the sublime and on the disruption of totalities. Hebdige singles out what he calls “the pull towards the asocial sublime” in contemporary discourse: for Hebdige, the mode of the “asocial sublime” is a celebration of the “camp vision,” the vision of waste, trash, and excrement–an indirect citation of Barthelme’s “digging on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon.” The ironic inversion of the sublime from Kant and Lyotard’s totalizing aestheticizations (a re-engagement of the excess as aesthetic work), to the new “camp vision,” explicitly aims at both resisting unity and locating the force of postmodern sublime within the realm of an anti-aesthetic differance. For Hebdige, one of the most remarkable strategies of the postmodern sublime consists in the simultaneous citation and combination (“double coding,” in Umberto Eco’s or Linda Hutcheon’s terminologies) of texts belonging to high and camp culture. The result of this peculiar citational practice is complexly disruptive and constructive at once: at the same moment in which hierarchy (high vs. low culture) is disrupted, the post-modern subject is “uplifted” with a sense of complete mastery of both fields:

Rather than surrender mastery of the fields, the critics who promulgate the line that we are living at the end of everything (and are all these critics men [sic]?) make one last leap and resolve to take it all-- judgement, history, politics, aesthetics, value--out of the window. . . . The implication seems to be that if they cannot sit at the top of Plato's pyramid, then there shall not be any pyramid at all.(Hebdige 70)

As Fred Pfeil maintains, manipulation and digestion of culture in its entirety, from high to low, coincides with some sort of jouissance, of a pleasure that is, in the last analysis, the constitutive nature of postmodern subjectivity:

[the postmodern subject] finds him/herself an extraordinarily well-rounded, complete cultural consumer and connoisseur, eminently capable of taking pleasure in a spectrum of choices . . . ranging from just a step ahead of mass culture . . . to just a foot short of high.(108)

At this point, we can start defining the specific features of a postmodern strategy of the sublime, which is —on le sait!–an anti-theory, a virtual subversion of all totalizing theories. Hebdige’s sense of metaphoric inversion from art to anti-art, from aesthetics to anti-aesthetics, from the “beautiful” to the sublime “camp vision,” and from “exhaustion” to “mastery,” no longer stresses the drama of “ultimacies,” or the disintegration of identity; instead, it shifts into the strategy for the Bildung of a new subject. This new subject confronts given structures to master them with some kind of Keatsean negative capability.¹⁴ In his book on The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Tom Le Clair argues:

Recognizing their dependence on their culture's system of dissemination . . . novelists have two strategies to counter the homogeneity of mass-produced and institutionally controlled information. One strategy is to collect to excess and thus use against the dominant culture its own information. The other...(16)

. . . But let us stay with the first of Le Clair’s strategies of mastery: the postmodern sublime, to start with, is a strategy of “collection” and ex-cess (etymologically: ex cedere, to give out), in which the givens of an “accumulation of writing” (Hertz), of a political embarrassment (Pease), or of “mass-produced and institutionally controlled information” (Le Clair), lead not so much to a rejection, but rather to an introjection (admission of the problem, commentary, citation, allusion), which poses a blockage suddenly overcome by a release, an ironic “excess” which turns the manipulator against cultural givens. This sublime strategy of ingestion, ironic blockage, and final release, has been defined by Arthur Kroker and David Cook as the privileged strategy of an “excremental culture”: such a culture nourishes itself of the “pestilential spirit” of social and cultural entropic systems, to finally digest and drop out a fairly new message of disruption whose “psychological signs are those of . . . disaccumulation”: “[postmodern art] exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay where the consumer culture of the passive nihilists does a reversal and in a catastrophic implosion flips into its opposite number” (10 ff.). Not altogether differently, John Barth’s metaphor of disaccumulation in Lost in the Funhouse suggests that “The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self- consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history … Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid” (109).

Ihab Hassan, as far as I know, is the first critic who has defined the postmodern sublime as ironic discharge of the “infinite powers” that impede expression. Hassan’s metaphor is that of defecation overcoming the nausea brought about by constipation:

Nathaniel West, writing at the edge of our contemporaneity, first comes to mind . . . The Dream Life of Balso Snell, mock artist, proves to be a wet dream. More precisely, Snell imagines that he ascends into the bowels of the Trojan horse. This accords with his view of art as "sublime excrement." West seems to endorse this bilious irony: his own repugnance of life touches even his craft. His nausea, which no social dependency of the thirties can entirely explain, conceals itself in black comedy. A world of ugly doorknobs, dead dreams, and distressed loves, burns into the ash of parodic apocalypse. Thus West, turning violence into dubious merriment, is the new satirist laughing at the wound within his laugh. Thirty years after, William Burroughs carries the excremental vision even farther. A devilish mimic, he transposes a world ruled by entropy, waste, and disease into a film of metallic laughter.(Dismemberment 249)

The vision of excremental sublime, as “parodic apocalypse” of a subject opposing “a world ruled by entropy,” certainly emerges in many postmodern works. We might think of Pynchon’s “defecation rites,” or of the narrator of Gass’s The Heart of the Heart of the Country who asserts that “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” Federman’s The Voice in the Closet provides the (autobiographical) example of a thirteen-year- old boy hidden in a closet to escape the Nazis: “I was scared. And on top of that, in the middle of the afternoon I had to take a crap. And why not? So I unfolded one of the newspapers and took a shit on it” (47). After defecation, fear is overcome; the boy finds courage to leave the closet, and embarks to America. Federman charges the scene with almost obvious allegorical implications: the closet becomes the tomb and the womb for the coming-into- life of a new subject; defecation is the ironic release of the fear of death and annihilation. The same allegorical structure is at work in Coover’s Spanking the Maid. The “teacher” of Coover’s story has to realize that his Victorian ideal of Bildung–“feeding with spanking . . . that broad part preferred by him and Mother Nature for the invention of the souls”–is absolutely incorrect. For “that broad part” of the human body “seems more like a place for letting things out than putting things in.” After a moment of apparent death, which is, in truth, only a digestive pause, the “invention of souls,” the epiphany of the subject, happens in a water-closet, in a last heraldic effort to produce “spiritual” signs: “twitching amicably yet authoritatively like a damp towel, down a bottomless hole, relieving himself noisily” (102). Even more explicitly, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five offers fecal signs as allegorical signs of authorial consciousness and as the epiphany of the radical writer opposing war and its horrors:

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.(125)

This is the price that the subject has to pay for its survival. Giving up any metaphysical consistency, this sort of subject becomes, quite literally, an excrement, a surplus that cannot be codified and inscribed in the fabricated notions of “reality.” Its “resistance” to codification institutes at the same time its absolute superfluity in relation to the symbolic order. Its manipulation of codes and structures, in other words, cannot have any effectual consistency if not in establishing a topos in which subjectivity may exist, as a digestive process, in a sublime manipulation of pre-existing categories.

Examples of excremental sublime in postmodern American fiction could multiply almost endlessly. However, I should discourage my reader from thinking that the excremental sublime is limited to the (many) cases in which fecal signs explicitly appear in the literary space; rather, excremental sublimity consists of a narrative practice which I have defined as a movement from blockage to release, and from Longinian citation or Kantian re-presentation to sublime digestive transformation. As such, it encompasses a more general postmodern trend: it includes any strategy of incorporating social myths and given plots–we might say: history and/as literary tradition–to finally release new stories and new modes of being. This new mode of being is the postmodern radical subject, who has survived the menaces of death and has “uplifted” him/herself with “joyful pride” in an act of ultimate poiein. In this sense, we might well conceive of the postmodern subject as a sphincter muscle performing its daily activity of retention, manipulation, and ex-pression; Altieri seems to endorse this idea when he argues, rather aphoristically, that “as organ, the [postmodern] ego has its own rhythms of expansion and contraction . . . it is not a place to store experience, but a way of experiencing” (627; Altieri’s emphasis).

However, some mysteries are still unsolved: how can postmodern irony overcome the moment of blockage? And how can a subject be reconstituted–in his/her “way of being”– in spite of a power aggressively trying to “objectify” him/her? The postmodern answer to both questions is that the blockage–the “impossibility”–is not “real”; power is only a fiction. Put like this, the answer may seem too blunt, and it certainly exacts sharpening in order to prevent excessive optimism. It is my assumption that the achievements of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1962) and Norman O’Brown’s Life against Death (1964) must be taken as defining features of the American postmodern sublime. For it is in these works that, through an alliance of Marx and Freud, the inevitable confrontation of subject and power takes place in a radically new fashion. Exemplified (maybe at the excess) by Theodore Roszack’s “The Dialectics of Liberation,” the problem of “making a counter culture” during the sixties could be put like this:

While both Marx and Freud held that man is the victim of a false consciousness from which he must be freed to achieve fulfillment, their diagnoses were built on very different principles. For Marx, that which is hidden from reason is the exploitive reality of the social system. Culture--"ideology" [. . .]--intervenes between reason and reality to mask the operation of invidious class interest. . . . For Freud, that which is hidden from reason is the content of the unconscious mind. Culture plays its part in the deception not as a mask concealing social reality, but rather as a screen on which the psyche projects itself in a grand repertory of "sublimations." [. . .] There we have the issue. Is the psyche, as Marx would have it, a reflection of "the mode of production of material life"? Or is the social structure, as Freud argued, a reflection of our psychic contents?(84-85)

What is power, then? Social super structure, or father figure projected by the unconscious? Philosophically, the issue raises the question of the locus of reality; politically, it poses the question of how liberation is to be achieved: by social or psychic revolution? Marcuse’s answer to these questions is that power is both a reality and a fiction: accordingly, he tries to develop a radical social critique out of the psychoanalytic assumption that power may be, after all, a projection, a myth. Significantly enough, this Freudian turn moves American radicalism away from Marxist de-subjectification and, in a very Emersonian way, puts the accent upon those “tendencies that have been attenuated in the post-Marxian development of his critique of society [Marx’s, in his first writings], namely, the elements of communistic individualism.”¹⁵

Marcuse’s social critique hinges on the notion of “alienation.” For Marcuse, “alienation” does not have any of Marx’s (or Hegel’s) connotations. Alienation is no longer a locus between labor and exploitation, but rather a disease that is rooted inside human beings. What the psychiatrist knows is that alienation results from acts of repression: the patient “forgets” his/her own construction of symbolic structures that the analytic anamnesis should re-present. Marcuse emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in social changes: the subject must be conscious of his/her own projections; s/he must recognize, in other words, that “power” is nothing else than the re-presentation of an Oedipal complex Eros viii ff.). The impossibility, or blockage, is only a psychic construction, a story.

I will discuss the Oedipal strategy of postmodern sublime, based on Freud’s notion of “anal character,” in the next section. To bring the current section to a conclusion, let me notice how Marcuse’s social critique bears powerfully on postmodern narrative. Larry McCaffery’s The Metafictional Muse provides a neat summary of how postmodern narrative can produce an anamnesis of the artificial construction of overpowering structures of “reality”:

In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, [postmodern works] deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature: we observe writers trying to create stories, men struggling to break the hold of mythic patterns, desperate people inventing religious explanations for a terrible catastrophe. . . . Yet, [postmodern narrative] is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems--such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics--are also fictional at their core. . . . [T]here exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. . . . [T]his tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them.(25-26)

The postmodern subject is thus the locus (maybe all-too literally a rhetorical topos) of consciousness; consciousness of the fictional nature of overpowering structures will finally allow the subject to imagine new plots, new stories, new lives to be told. Let us think, in this context, of Coover’s maneuver in “Aesop’s Forest”: the imaginative power of the narrator is here absolutely impaired by the presence of his grand precursor–Aesop. Facing such an overpowering presence, the narrator can only cite the stories already told by the genius–Aesop. But, as the scholar well knows, “Aesop” is only “a fictional construct . . . [a] biography . . . reconstructed to satisfy the Greek requirement, according to which all genres should have an inventor” (Chenetier 97). The overpowering presence that impairs the subject turns out to be a mere fiction! As Borges would put it, “[t]he fact is that every writer creates his own precursor.”¹⁶ The blockage–the death–may be overcome by consciousness, thus uplifting the subject as the true crafter of his/her own narration. In this moment of sublime release, the dejecta membra are re-composed into subjective expression: “Orpheus, dismembered, continues to sing” (Hassan, Dismemberment 45).

…You see, dear reader, how, step by step, singing along, citing, arguing, implying, yawning, digesting what has been already said, apologizing, we go on together from section to section! We are already at the end of the second section, and one hour ago the first one did not even exist yet. You see, this is the mystery and joy of the excremental sublime. There was a great silence, nothing that we could say to each other, no new story we could entertain each other with. In truth, you did not even exist, and neither did I. There was nothing, not even the excremental sublime. Maybe only the embarrassing feeling of something that we wanted to say. And then, in this silence, a voice is heard, a voice that I want to compare to the growling of the bowels after a meal long retained, and the voice becomes stronger, and the story bigger, and nothingness a logorrhea…. Maybe it was in this way that the world we live in was created–from the unintentional digestion of an apple….

… Well, I was happy to find ourselves at the end of the second section, but now I am losing myself in superfluous details. And so, let us jump into our third section….

The Postmodern Subject: An Epiphany Of Sorts

I think of myself as a lyrical socialist,which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand.

–Robert Coover, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

“All aesthetics has its root in repressed anal erotism,” the psychoanalyst says (Ferenczi 325). All writing, on le sait!, engages in some sort of coprophiliac activity. Yet the paradigm of blockage and release that we have followed so far seems to suggest that the process —the movement from retention to release–is far more important, for the postmodern Muse, than the final excremental result. It is this process, after all, that structures the intensity of postmodern narrative–a process of digestion of old and mythical structures that will indefinitely defer the production of an ultimate (fecal) meaning. In this sense, even the postmodern subject will be, as Altieri has already told us, a “process,” rather than a simple excremental left-over of our times.¹⁷ It is a subject, as Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote has it, that resists “capitulation to social control. . . . [t]o letting our political leaders locate our identities in the social” (18), and that continually refuses to end its manipulations and digestion into visible social signs. It is a subject, in other words, that finds in the process defined above as excremental sublime its locus and only raison d’etre.

Another way to define this process, and thus identify our subject, is of course through Freud’s notions of “anal retentiveness” and “anal character”:

they [anal characters] seem to have been among those who refuse to empty the bowel when placed on the chamber, because they derive an incidental pleasure from the act of defecation.("Character" 28; emphasis mine)

Anal retention aims at finding “an incidental pleasure” in the moment of eventual defecation. Pleasure is “incidental” to actual defecation, since it belongs more properly to the process of retention and release. Such process is also, as the quoted passage suggests, an Oedipal strategy, that is, a refusal of the Law imposed by authority. If defecation is a pleasure, this pleasure cannot accept any external imposition or constraint: the subject must decide when, where, and how, this pleasurable activity shall take place. Freud supplements the passage quoted above with a footnote which better highlights the Oedipal refusal of a super-imposed Law (i.e., the wish of the nurse) which tries to regulate defecation according to social (i.e., non-pleasurable) norms; the footnote runs like this:

It is one of the best signs of later eccentricity or nervousness if an infant obstinately refuses to empty his bowel when placed on the chamber, that is, when the nurse wishes, but withholds this function at his own pleasure. Naturally it does not matter to the child if he soils his bed; his only concern is not to lose the pleasure incidental to the act of defecation.("Character" 29; emphasis mine)

The fact that Freud confers on the anal character the quality of an “obstinacy [which] may amount to defiance, [and] with which irascibility and vindictiveness may easily be associated” (“Character” 28) should not pass unnoticed. The most distinctive traits of the anal character seem therefore to be those of a rebellious, almost anarchic energy; its main qualities, much more than “parsimony” and “order,” seem to be, as Freud’s essay on “Character and Anal Erotism” has it, “obstinacy,” “vindictiveness,” and “eccentricity.” Dispositions, in other words, which defiantly refuse social order. It is worth noting that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, singles out in anal retention a “most remarkable” strategy for the “sublimation” of a particular kind of subjectivity, that is, an “original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis . . . of hostility to civilization” (43). Thus, an “anal character” is the sublimation of an anti-social impulse, and the anal-retentive character might well be identified with Coover’s “anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand”: s/he who survives a repressive society by disrupting its order, and by transforming its Law into pleasurable fecal signs.

In this ironic negativity, in this reduction to a metabolic process, Lentricchia’s “radical subject” and “disappointed intellectual” seems to have been re-membered and brought back to life after a digestive nap; social reality has been redeemed from Debord’s consumer conformism, Jameson’s schizophrenia, and Habermas’s indifference.

“But,” the fairy-tale reads, “there’s always a ‘but’”. . . . Like Barthelme’s “angel,” my reader might be overtaken, at this point, by some fundamental questions (the question of angels in postmodern discourse has a considerable history, from Barthelme to Wim Wenders): Is redemption a mere narrative practice? Is the sublimation of the subject a mere narrative freedom resulting from the disruption of notions such as “essence,” arche, and “representation”? Furthermore: what kind of hopes can we draw from a narrative that resolves any signification to excrementality? Will digestion resist the inevitable commodification of our lives? Will we prevent society from reducing our selves to excremental left-overs? Henry Kariel, in The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism, woefully remarks that “we resist . . . by telling a story, by producing narratives that elaborately depict the drift of events as the sublime unfolding of the inevitable” (117). But what besides these stories and ephemeral resistance? What changes in “real life,” or in the real life of our postmodern subjectivities–those wonderful entelechies of creation? However puzzling the term “real” may sound in the context of a postmodern condition, the doubt cannot be repressed; the angel, unaccustomed to doubt, falls into despair: “Redemption is a fucking fiction anyway,” Gravity’s Rainbow admonishes us; “It’s all shit anyway,” Coover’s forest resounds. Maybe Cornelius Castoriadis is right in his jeremiad on “Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism”: even this allegory of the postmodern subject as excremental practice may be the, albeit sublime, manifestation of “the pathetic inability of the epoch to conceive of itself as something positive” (14). Moreover, as Yudice admonishes, it is difficult to discern any political relevance–if not Coover’s anal-retentive “anarchism”–in these narratives of subjective redemption:

The aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the Right or Liberalism. We need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body.("Transcendent Body" par. 36)

Undoubtedly, angels should start looking forward for a more “concrete” strategy of survival, a radical praxis that does not act only in the sacred wood of literary theory and in the groves of subjectivity, but also in the doomed world of production. Until then, postmodern theory and narrative will play the role of praxis while praxis has no more role to play.

Today that postmodernism, as Hassan pontificates (in Selves At Risk) is at its dusk–or is it an ironic dusk preparing for another rebirth? Today that postmodernism seems on the verge of its ultimate exhaustion, it is likely that we should surrender to the ultimate impossibility of reconstituting radical politics according to excremental practices. Probably, the postmodern sublime is today an untenable strategy even for real subjects’s survival. Linda Hutcheon, among many, advocates the necessity of going beyond postmodernism, of “using” it to “exceed” it: “Postmodernism manipulates, but does not . . . (re)construct the structures of subjectivity . . . [we] may use postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order to initiate the deconstructive first step, but [we] do not stop there” Politics 168; emphasis mine). Postmodernism is dead! Long live postmodernism! (But isn’t there a sense of deja vu in Hutcheon’s forest? What is this initiation about?). Today, failure faced, one feels that new doors must be open, new strategies found, new steps taken, new paths trodden. Let us finally digest postmodernism!

. . . With a sense of deep elegy, a feeling of nausea and an unbearable burden in my constipated stomach, I conclude this paper with Robert Coover, postmodern Virgil, with whom my own quest begun:

THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL BE NO REFUND.(Pricksongs 256)

Notes

1. See Max F. Schulz, Radical Sophistication, esp. 198 ff.

2. See Franco La Polla, Un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano.

3. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988), 96-97; on the notion of postmodernism as “aesthetic of self-formation” see also George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.”

4. Robert Coover, “Interview with Larry McCaffery,” 68. In a slip of the tongue Coover seems to echo Sigmund Freud: Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings to us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. “We cannot do with auxiliary constructions,” Theodor Fontane tells us. . . . But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others…. (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 22 and 28)

5. Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest” 82; see also Hassan’s metaphorization of postmodernism in the terms of the Orpheus’s myth, in The Dismemberment of Orpheus.

6. Coover’s active participation in Aesop’s lynching cannot pass unnoticed in the shift from “They’ll be here soon,” (75), referring to the Delphians, to the final “We set him [Aesop] on his bendy legs and stepped back, blocking any possible escape” (81).

7. On the centrality of Bentham’s notion of “necessary fiction” in American narrative, see Guido Carboni, La finzione necessaria; see also Fred Pfeil, Another Tale to Tell.

8. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88 and 90. For the symbology of the ghosts as essence of patriarchy, see Sidonie Smith, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Filiality and Woman’s Autobiographical Storytelling.” Notably within feminism, “big eating” seems to counteract what Kim Chernin has called “the tyranny of slenderness” imposed on women by patriarchy; on this issue, see Kim Chernin, The Obsession. Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, and Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body.”

9. Jean Baudrillard, “The Obese,” Fatal Strategies; on the way food industry may re-code gastronomic excess into consumerism, see Warren Belasaco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry. 1966-1988.

10. In postmodern narrative, “[c]haracters become the passive receptors of phenomena from outside; they become all ears, listening to the sounds of voices, noises from the street, literary parodies and emulations, music . . . compulsion to repeat” (Poirier 9); anticipating for a moment, I would like to paraphrase Lacan, in order to individuate in the “repetition compulsion” an ironic (“reversal”) mode of affirmation of the subject in history but as difference from history: [the repetition compulsion] has in view nothing less than the historizing temporality of the experience of transference, so does the death instinct essentially express the limit of the historical function of the subject. This limit is death–not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unberholbare)” . . . This limit represents the past in its real form, that is to say, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition. (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Ecrits 103; emphasis mine).

11. Bove, Destructive Poetics 37. Examples of this break with genealogy: the abortion at the beginning of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote; the illegitimate child at the beginning of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

12. References are to Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement 90-94.

13. See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimation.”

14. Charles Altieri, in “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence,” stresses the importance of Keats’s notion of “negative capability” in the context of American postmodern poetics; he traces a genealogy from Keats to Olson.

15. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 294-295; another exemplary case of the psychoanalytic turn of Marxism into “Marxist Humanism” is certainly Erich Fromm, Marx’s concept of Man.

16. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and his Precursors,” 201; Borges’s own emphasis. Also Tony Tanner: “[postmodern writers suggest that] the plots men see may be their own inventions” City of Words 156).

17. Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence”; but is this idea of self-as-process a novelty of postmodernism? Identity as a process of self-creation is, after all, a Jungian idea. James Olney confirms: “Like the elements, individual man never is but is always becoming: his self, as C.J. Jung will say some twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus–nor did man change much in the interim–is a process rather than a settled state of being” (James Olney, Metaphors of Self 27). And so, postmodernism is once again repeating the old, isn’t it? And yet, John Paul Russo comments on Olney’s passage, “[i]t is hard to reconcile the two sides of this sentence: on one hand man is ‘always becoming.’ On the other, man has not changed ‘much’ in two and a half millennia” (John Paul Russo, “The Disappearance of the Self” 22).

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- Hebdige, Dick. “The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime.” New Formations 1 (1987).
- Hendin, Josephine. Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction since 1945. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
- Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
- Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.
- —. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989
- Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.G. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.
- Kariel, Henry S. The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989.
- Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: American Library, 1962.
- Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1989.
- Klinkowitz, Jerome. “The Death of the Death of the Novel.” Literary Disruptions: The Making of Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.
- Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” In The Female Body in Western Culture. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.
- Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
- Laing, Ronald D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Pelican, 1969.
- Lauretis, Teresa de. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
- Le Clair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.
- Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984.
- Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.
- —. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941.
- McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.
- —. “Three Checklists (Coover, Barthelme, Sukenick).” Bulletin of Bibliography 31 (1974): 112.
- McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987
- Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.
- Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
- Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age. New York: Norton, 1987.
- Pease, Donald E. “Sublime Politics.” boundary 2 3 (Spring/Fall 1984).
- Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tell: Politics & Narrative in Postmodern Culture. London: Verso, 1990.
- Poirier, Richard. The Performing Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
- —. “Thomas Pynchon’s V..” New York Times, 1 May 1966
- Polla, Franco La. Un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano (1962-1982). Ravenna: Longo, 1983.
- Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1987.
- Roszack, Theodor. “The Dialectics of Liberation: Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown.” The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
- Russo, John Paul. “The Disappearance of the Self: Some Theories of Autobiography in the United States, 1964-1987.” Tuttamerica 29-30-31 (1986-87).
- Sayres, Sohnya. “Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess.” Social Text, 16 (Winter 1986-87).
- Schulz, Max F. Radical Sophistication: Status in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists. Athens: Ohio UP, 1969.
- Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
- Smith, Sidonie. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Filiality and Woman’s Autobiographical Storytelling.” A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
- Sypher, Wylie. Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Random House, 1962.
- Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction (1950-1970). New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
- Tatham, Campbell. “Mythotherapy and Postmodern Fiction.” Performance in Postmodern Culture. Eds. Michel Benamou & Charles Caramello. Madison: Coda Press, 1977
- Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972.
- Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Dell, 1969
- White, Hayden. “The Culture of Criticism.” Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution. Ed. Ihab Hassan. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1971.
- —. “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimation.” Critical Inquiry 9 (September, 1982).
- Wilson, Edmund. The Cold War and the Income Tax. New York: Signet, 1964.
- Yudice, George. “Feeding the Transcendent Body.” Postmodern Culture 1.1 (Sep. 1990).
- —. “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.” Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
September 25, 2013

Anouncements & Advertisements

Journal and Book Announcements:

 1) _Essays in Postmodern Culture_
 2) _Black Ice Books_
 3) _Black Sacred Music_
 4) _boundary 2_
 5) _The Centennial Review_
 6) _College Literature_
 7) _Contention_ 
 8) _Differences_
 9) _Discourse_
10) _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_
11) _GENDERS_
12) _M/E/A/N/I/N/G_
13) _Minnesota Review_
14) _Nomad_ 
15) _October_
16) _RIF/T_
17) _SSCORE_
18) _Studies in Popular Culture_
19) _Virus 23_
20) _ViViD Magazine_
21) _Zines-L_

Calls for Papers and Participants:

22) _PMC-MOO_
23) _Call for Papers on Don DeLillo_
24) _Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture_
25) _Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture_
26) _Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
27) _Postmodern Culture_
28) _PSYCHE_

Conferences and Societies:

29) _The Network Services Conference_

Networked Discussion Groups:

30) _FEMISA: Feminism, Gender, International Relations_
31) _HOLOCAUS: Holocaust List_
32) _NewJour-L_
33) _Popcult List_

Grants:

34) _Duke University: Travel-to-Collections Grants_ 

1)--------------------------------------------------------------

                  ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE

Available in December, 1993:

An anthology of essays from _Postmodern Culture_ is forthcoming
in print from Oxford University Press.  The works collected here
constitute practical engagments with the postmodern--from AIDS
and the body to postmodern politics.

               --"I laughed, I cried.  The feelgood 
                 critical book of the year."  --Jonathan Beasley 

               --"Two thumbs up!"  --Chris Barrett

 CONTENTS:

 George Yudice, "Feeding the Transcendent Body"

 Allison Fraiberg, "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and other Indiscretions:
     Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern"

 David Porush and Allison Fraiberg, "Commentary: An Exchange"

 Stuart Moulthrop, "You Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and
     the Laws of Media"

 Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity: Scientism
     and Sadism"

 Roberto Maria Dianotto, "The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern
     Literature of Blockage and Release"

 Audrey Ecstavasia, "Fucking (with Theory) for Money: Towards an
     Interrogation of Escort Prostitution"

 Elizabeth Wheeler, "Buldozing the Subject"

 Bob Perelman, "The Marginalization of Poetry"

 Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton"

 Neil Larsen, "Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics
     in Latin America"

 David Mikics, "Postmodernism, Ethnicity, and Underground
     Revisionism in Ishmael Reed"

 Barrett Watten, "Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii
     Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov"

                 ISBN: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound)
                      0-19-508753-4 (paper)

                 _Essays in Postmodern Culture_ 
                      will be available at 
                       the MLA in Toronto
                         December, 1993

2)--------------------------------------------------------------

                        _BLACK ICE BOOKS_

_Black Ice Books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series
that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident
American writers.  Breaking out of the bonds of mainstream
writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging
and provocative.  The first four books include:

_Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation_

Edited by Larry McCaffery, this book is an assemblage of
innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various
other unclassifiable texts by writers like Samuel Delany, Mark
Leyner, William Vollmann, Kathy Acker, Eurdice, Stephen Wright,
Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe, Tim Ferret, Ricardo Cortez Cruz and
many others.

"One of the least cautious, nerviest editors going, Larry
McCaffery is the No-Care Bear of American Letters." 
                                   -- William Gibson.

"A clusterbomb of crazy fiction, from a generation too sane to
repeat yesterday's lies."
                                   -- Tom Robbins

_New Noir_
Stories by John Shirley

John Shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of
extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle
with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence.

"John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled
regions with visionary tales to tell."
                                   -- Clive Barker

_The Kafka Chronicles_
a novel by Mark Amerika

The _Kafka Chronicles_ is an adventure into the psyche of an
ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in
an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters
an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters

"Mr Amerika--if indeed that is his name--has achieved a unique
beauty in his artful marriage of Blake's lyricism and the iron-
in-the-soul of Celine.  Are we taking a new and hard-hitting
Antonin Artaud?  Absolutely.  And much more."
                                   --Terry Southern

_Revelation Countdown_
by Cris Mazza

Stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of
personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling
loss of control.

"Talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity."
                                   --LA Times

Discount Mail-Order Information:

You can buy these books directly from the publisher at a
discount.  Buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four
for $25.  We pay US postage!  (Foreign orders add $2.50 per
book.)

___  Avant-Pop

___  New Noir

___  The Kafka Chronicles

___  Revelation Countdown

Please make all checks or money orders payable to:

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

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

_Black Sacred Music_
A Journal of Theomusicology

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

Other special issues by single copy:

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

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

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

Duke University Press/Box 90660/Durham NC  27708

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

_boundary 2_
an international journal of literature and culture

Paul Bove, editor

Forthcoming in 1993:

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

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

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

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

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

%Saxa loquuntur%: Freud's Archaeology of the Text / Sabine Hake

Deleuze's Nietzsche / Petra Perry

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

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

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

Duke University Press/ Box 90660 /Durham NC  27708

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

_The Centennial Review_

Edited by R.K. Meiners

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

**SPECIAL ISSUE**

POLAND: FROM REAL SOCIALISM TO DEMOCRACY
Winter 1993

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

Adam Michnik:
_An Interview with Leszek Kolakowski_

Marek Ziolkowski:
_The Case of the Polish Intelligentsia_

Marian Kempny:
_On the Relevance of Social Anthropology

to the Study of Post-Communist Culture_

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

Please begin my _CR_ subscription:

___ $12/year (3 issues)

___ $18/two years (6 issues)

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

Please send me the special issue:

___ _Poland: From Real Socialism to Democracy_

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City____________________________________________

State/County____________________________________

Zip_____________________________________________

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

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

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

_College Literature_
A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom

Edited by Kostas Myrsiades

A triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving
the needs of College/University teachers by providing them with
access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of
literature and experiencing old literature in new ways.

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

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

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

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

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

Forthcoming issues:

     Third World Women's Literature
     African American Writing
     Cross-Cultural Poetics

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

Send prepaid orders to:

_College Literature_
Main 544
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
(215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150

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

_CONTENTION_
Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

_Contention_ is:

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

"...extremely important."
                                   Alberta Arthurs

"...the most exciting new journal 
    that I have ever read."
                                   Lynn Hunt

"...superb."
                                   Janet Abu-Lughod

"...an important, exciting, and 
    very timely project."
                                   Theda Skocpol
"...an idea whose time has come."
                                   Robert Brenner

"...serious and accessible."
                                   Louise Tilly

Subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00
and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface
postage) from:

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

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

_Differences_
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

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

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

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

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

Emily Apter:        _Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem_

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

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

Send orders to:

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

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

_DISCOURSE_

Volume 15, Number 1

SPECIAL ISSUE

FLAUNTING IT: LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Kathryn Baker:  Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in
                Reform Schools for Girls

Terralee Bensinger: Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a)
                    Community

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

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

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

JoAnn Pavletich:  Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder
                  Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice

David Pendelton:  Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in
                  Gay Male Porn

Thomas Piontek:  Applied Metaphors: AIDS and Literature

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

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

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

Send orders to:

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

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

_The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_

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

Our first issue was distributed in March 1993.  The future looks
very interesting.  Editors are working on Special Issues on
education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual
culture.

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

EJVC is published monthly.  Some parts may be distributed at
different times during the month or published only occasionally
(e.g. CyberSpace Monitor).  If you would be interested in writing
a column on some general topic area in the Virtual Culture (e.g.
an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc.
?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing
a special issue contact Ermel Stepp Editor-in-Chief of Diane
Kovacs Co-Editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. You can
retrieve the file EJVC AUTHORS via anonymous ftp to
byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or
listserv@kentvm.kent.edu

Cordially,

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

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

_GENDERS_

Ann Kibbey, Editor
University of Colorado, Boulder

Since 1988, _GENDERS_ has presented innovative theories of gender
and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography,
TV, and film.  Today, _GENDERS_ continues to publish both new and
known authors whose work reflects an international movement to
redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines.

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

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

Send orders to:

University of Texas
Box 7819
Austin TX  78713

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

M/E/A/N/I/N/G

A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues

M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a
fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas
in the arts.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring.
It is edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G #13 is a vivid mix of writings by artists and art
historians.  Curtis Mitchell's "Working the Park" considers the
sublime and the abject through the travails of an installation
artist's efforts at public sculpture; Jordan Crandall's
"Transactional Space" speaks of new systems of art communication
and production at the limits of information technology; Jo Anna
Isaak sheds new light on colonialist discourse in Matisse's "The
Comfy Chair"; painting illiteracy is considered in Mira Schor's
"Course Proposal;" Daryl Chin's "Those Little White Lies"
critiques art history as an instrument of capitalism; an artist's
spiritual sources are explored in David Reed's "Media Baptisms."

Also in this issue: Definitions of "Art" by Stewart Buettner;
Book and video reviews by Barry Schwabsky, Susan Bee, Johanna
Drucker, Stephen O'Leary Harvey, and Robert C. Morgan.

>From issue #13, Spring 1993

"The sublime consists of a major dose of entropy, with the
picturesque as only a condiment."
                                             -- Curtis Mitchell

"In all likelihood, what Matisse actually saw of a harem was what
any tourist would see -- the high outer walls of the compound."
                                             -- Jo Anna Isaak

"If 'good' painting is suspect and unseen, then it might help to
look at some bad painting just as closely."
                                             -- Mira Schor

"The artwork becomes a Marxist Christmas tree on which are hung
gaudy baubles of 'late capitalism.'"
                                             -- Daryl Chin

"Rationality or belief don't work well now for painting.
Suspension--doubt, works best."
                                             -- David Reed

Subscriptions for

2 ISSUES (1 YEAR):
$12 for individuals:
$20 for institutions

4 ISSUES (2 YEARS):
$24 for individuals;
$40 for institutions

* Foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad
and to Canada: $5

* Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in
U.S. dollars.

All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor

Send all subscriptions to:

Mira Schor
60 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013

Limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact Mira
Schor for information.

Distributed with the Segue Foundation and the Solo Foundation

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

_Minnesota Review_

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

**now under new management**

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

includes essays by:

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

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

topics include: 

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

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

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

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

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

NOMAD
      An Interdisciplinary Journal of
                       The Humanities,
                                 Arts,
                         And Sciences

**************************************************************
Manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields!

Nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the
undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and
writing.  It is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent
publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all
cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and
experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical,
political, and popular writing.  While our editorial staff
is comprized of artists and academics in a variety of
disciplines, NOMAD strives to operate in a space outside of
mainstream academic discourse and without institutional
funding or controls.

Manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of
references); any form is acceptable.  If possible, please
submit manuscripts on 3.5" Macintosh disks, in either
MicroSoft Word or MacWrite II format, or by E-mail.  Each
manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper
copy. Otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript.
Artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and
in black and white.  PICT, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG files on
3.5" Macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a
paper copy (or via E-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded).  All
artwork must be camera-ready.  Submissions by regular mail
should include a SASE with sufficient postage attached if
return is desired.  Diskettes should be shipped in standard
diskette mailing packages.

  Subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues)
  Send Manuscripts and Inquiries to:
  NOMAD, c/o
  Mike Smith
  406 Williams Hall
  Florida State University
  Tallahassee, Florida, 32306
  (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu)

*****************************************************************
 "In NOMAD, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with
  respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most
  appreciate them."
*****************************************************************

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

_October_
Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

The MIT Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

_RIF/T_
E-Poetry Literary Journal

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

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

_RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the
media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.

Dynamic--not static, _RIF/T_ shifts and riffs with the diction of
"trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of
exchange.

Archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry
FILELIST.

To receive a list of files send the command 

INDEX e-poetry 

to: LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU as the first
line in the body of your mail message (not your Subject: line).

To subscribe to e-poetry, send the command

SUB e-poetry your name

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

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

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

_SSCORE_
Social Science Computer Review

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

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

Recent articles:

Social Impacts of Computing: Codes of Professional Ethics
Ronald Anderson

Teledemocracy and Political Science
William H. Dutton

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

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

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

Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
David R. Heise

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

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

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

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

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

_Studies in Popular Culture_
Dennis Hall, editor.

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

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

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292. 
Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
current MLA stylesheet is a useful model.  Please indicate if the
work is available on computer disk.  The editor reserves the
right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts.

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

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

_VIRUS 23_

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

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

_VIRUS 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature

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

_VIRUS 23_ is the annual harcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the
Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.  

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

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

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

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

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

ViViD Magazine

The first issue of ViViD Magazine is now available. ViViD is a 
hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity
in cyberspace. We are actively seeking contributions for
the next issue.

The magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment
of a Windows 3.1 Help File. You will need Windows 3.1 to read the
magazine.

The magazine will also be available via anonymous FTP at 
"ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it:

                         ftp ftp.gmu.edu
username: anonymous
     password: (your email address)
     cd pub/library
     binary
     get VIVID1.ZIP

-----------------------------------------------------------------
For more information on ViViD, contact the editor, Justin McHale.
Internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Issue 1 Features:

Articles:
       What is Cyberspace?
       What is Hypertext?
       Multiple Fiction and Multiple Worlds.

News items:
       "Matrix News," a section featuring news items, notices
        and reviews concerning cyberspace. 

       "Treasure of the Internet," a section which details       

        interesting sites and services on the Internet.

Experimental writing:
                    Poemtexts
                    Explodedview Texts

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

_Zines-L_

announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to _Zines-L_ send a message to:
listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

22) -------------------------------------------------------------

             _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO

PMC-MOO is a new service offered (free of charge) by _Postmodern
Culture_.  PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality
environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of
the journal and participate in live conferences.  PMC-MOO will
also provide access to texts generated by _Postmodern Culture_
and by PMC-TALK, and it will provide the opportunity to
experience (or help to design) programs which simulate object-
lessons in postmodern theory.  PMC-MOO is based on the LambdaMOO
program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.

To connect to PMC-MOO, you *must* be on the internet.  If you
have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by
typing the command

telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777

at your command prompt.  Once you've connected to the server, you
should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

If you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead
find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it
means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777
at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask
your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port
number.  If you have the Emacs program on your system and would
like information about a customized program for PMC-MOO that uses
Emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail.

23) -------------------------------------------------------------

******************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS
for

"RAIDS ON THE CONSCIOUS:
New Essays on Don DeLillo"

A special cluster for _Postmodern Culture_, Jan. 1994
******************************************************

   Since the early Seventies, Don DeLillo's work (fiction, 
drama, and journalism) has played an important role in the 
literature of what has gradually become known as the 
"postmodern condition."  DeLillo's novels and plays 
investigate the problem of subjectivity in an environment 
increasingly governed by, perhaps even constructed purely of 
information and its various modes of transmission.  Identity 
in DeLillo is dominated by a sense of anxiety concerning the 
formation of "self" from this patchwork of postmodern 
discourses, and is often further problematized by the 
lurking suspicion that there is no longer any stable 
referential framework behind the blizzard of signifiers; a 
suspicion that ideals, goals, and even individuality are 
categories as "empty" as poststructuralist theory tells us 
are the images, words, and digits with which we are 
surrounded; that identity is as arbitrary, illusory, and 
transient as the "sign."

   The breakdown of various Western master narratives 
which is often at the heart of DeLillo's novels--a 
breakdown discussed by, among others, Lyotard--contributes 
to this "vacuuming out" of substance.  The result is a 
"postnarrative" world where the acontextual, the enigmatic, 
the arbitrary and fundamentally anti-rational continually 
threaten to become the sole reality--as in Jorge Luis 
Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

   Furthermore, in DeLillo's works this cultural 
identity crisis often "bleeds" into the characters' private 
anxieties; in fact, the boundary between public and private 
is the barrier which DeLillo seems to believe the postmodern 
condition threatens to breach.  Some line has been crossed, 
and in DeLillo's work identity is now formed from the 
outside in, the product of a ceaseless anti-Cartesian 
barrage of decontextualized messages and undifferentiated 
signals from without.  The governance of this situation has 
devolved from powerful but recognizable individuals onto 
shadowy larger "bodies": corporations, intelligence 
agencies, the academy and, perhaps most importantly, 
terrorist organizations.  Beyond such barely tangible agents 
DeLillo posits a postmodern sublime, the force described in 
Libra as the "world inside the world."

   Papers are solicited which respond to these issues in 
DeLillo's work (fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible 
inclusion in a special issue (January, 1994) of the 
electronic journal Postmodern Culture, and in a hard cover 
edition to be published later in 1994 or in early 1995.  
Papers should address the problems of how literature and 
other forms of public language support and/or resist the 
construction of the postmodern relationship of author, text, 
and reader; how these identities and their relationships are 
maintained, thwarted, or altered through a concatenation of 
public spectacle, random violence, and decontextualized 
language; and how the control of a massively disoriented 
narrative (or former narrative) of and about these 
identities increasingly depends upon a variety of ill-
defined and vaguely sinister "postindividual" agencies.  
Comparative essays utilizing other authors, films, music and 
other forms of popular culture are welcomed.
   Abstracts (250-500 words) should arrive no later than 
Oct. 15th, and the *first* drafts of papers (15-30 pages) 
will be due no later than December 15th.  Inquiries, 
abstracts and rough drafts may be sent electronically to: 

Glen Scott Allen at e7e4all@toe.towson.edu, or
Stephen J. Bernstein at bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu

or by regular mail to

Prof. Glen Scott Allen   or   Prof. Stephen J. Bernstein
English Dept.                 Dept. of English
Towson State University       University of Michigan-Flint
Towson, MD  21204             Flint, MI  48502

24) ------------------------------------------------------------

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CALL FOR ARTICLES

EJVC: Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Special Issue: Gender Issues in Computer Networking

Issue Editor: Leslie Reagan Shade
               McGill University
               Graduate Program in Communications
               czsl@musica.mcgill.ca; shade@well.sf.ca.us

EJVC is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to
scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computer-
mediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction.

This special issue of the EJVC will be devoted to gender issues
in networking.  Despite the abundance of various private networks
and the meteoric growth of the Internet, this rapidly expanding
user base does not include an equal proportion of men and women. 
How can women become equally represented in the new "electronic
frontier" of cyberspace?  Issues to be discussed can include, but
are not limited to, the following: 

* Access issues--to hardware, software, and training.  What
     barriers do women face?  What are some success stories.

* How can women be given the technical expertise to become
     comfortable and versatile with computer networking?

* Interface design: can there be a feminist design?

* How can networking realize its potential as a feminist tool?

* How can women scholars exploit networking's technology?

* What information technology policies could be developed to
     ensure computer networking equity for women, as well as
     minorities?

* How does one define computer pornography and "offensive"
     material on the net?  Should it be allowed?

* How should sexual harassment on the net be treated?

* Are women-only groups necessary?

* How do women interact on MUDS and MOOs?

* What net resources exist for women?

Deadlines:     December 1, 1993 (submission of abstracts)
               April 1, 1994 (submission of contributions)

Abstracts will be reviewed by the issue editor for
appropriateness of content and overall balance of the issue as a
whole.  In turn, authors will then be invited to submit full-
length contributions, which will be peer-reviewed by the
journal's normal editorial process before final acceptance for
publication.  The issue editor encourages correspondence about
proposed contributions even before submission of an abstract.

Potential contributors may obtain a more detailed statement about
the focus and range of this special issue by sending email to the
issue editor with the subject line: EJVC Issue or by anonymous
ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu, directory/pub/ejvc, get
ejvc.shade.call.

Further information about EJVC may be obtained by sending e-mail
to LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU with one or
more of the following lines in the text:
SUBSCRIBE EJVC-L YourFirstname YourLastName
GET EJVC WELCOME
INDEX EJVC-L
Also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu
in the pub/ejvc directory.

25) ------------------------------------------------------------

*********************
Call for Submissions
*********************

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_ is a research project
investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative
writers.

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware,
critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to
sites of publication.

We would like to request writers to submit their works for
review.  Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their
publications with subscription fees and submission formats.  We
are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach
creative writing for the hypertext format.

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a
page or two in length.  Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or
hardcopy to:

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail: KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA

26)------------------------------------------------------------

          THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR CULTURE

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

Scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that
meet the following criteria:

ISSUES:  The Journal invites critical reviews of films,
          documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual
          and performing arts.  The Journal also invites original
          manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the
          topic of popular culture and criminal justice.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES: To submit material for the Journal,
          please subscribe to CJMOVIES through the listserv and a
          detailed guidelines statement will automatically
          follow.

To subscribe, send a message with the following command to

                       LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1:
          SUBSCRIBE CJMOVIES YourFirstName YourLastName

Manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: 
The Editors, 
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
SUNYCRJ@ALBNYVM1.BITNET
or SUNYCRJ@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU

MANAGING EDITORS:
Sean Anderson and Greg Ungar 
Editors 
Journal of CriminalJustice and Popular Culture, 
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA 135
Western Avenue Albany, NY 12222 

INTERNET:
SA1171@ALBNYVM1.BITNET or GU8810@uacsc1.albany.edu

LIST ADMINISTRATOR
Seth Rosner 
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA
SR2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or SR2602@thor.albany.edu

27) -------------------------------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers
_PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary
journal of research on consciousness_
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural
issue of _PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on
consciousness_ (ISSN: 1039-723X).

_PSYCHE_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting
the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness
and its relation to the brain.  _PSYCHE_ publishes material
relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by
the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology,
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology. 
Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. 
_PSYCHE_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a
diverse academic audience four times per year.  As an electronic
journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not
apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not
attempt to abuse the medium.  _PSYCHE_ also publishes a hardcopy
version simultaneously with the electronic version.  Long
articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated,
synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version.

Types of Articles:

The journal publishes from time to time all of the following
varieties of articles.  Many of these (as indicated below) are
peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff.

Research Articles reporting original research by author(s).
Articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some
combination of the two.  Articles of special interest
occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer
commentaries.  Peer Reviewed.

Survey Articles reporting on the state of the art research in
particular areas.  These may be done in the form of a literature
review or annotated bibliography.  More ambitious surveys will be
peer reviewed.  

Discussion Notes critiques of previous research.  Peer Reviewed.

Tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of
consciousness to non-specialists.

Letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on
editorial policy or upon material previously published in
_PSYCHE_.  Screened by editorial staff.

Abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal
articles, books, and conference proceedings.

Book Reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and
evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as
textbooks.

Announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission
deadlines, etc.

Advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be
published: available grants; positions; journal contents;
proposals for joint research; etc.

Notes for Authors

Unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above
categories are welcome.  Prospective authors should send articles
directly to the executive editor.  Submissions should be in a
single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if
submitted by mail.

Submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name;
address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. 
Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-
200 word abstract as well.  Note that peer review will be blind,
meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to
the referees.  In the event that an article needs to be shortened
for publication in the print version of _PSYCHE_, the author will
be responsible for making any alterations requested by the
editors.

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.

If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as
separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by
readers locally.

Authors of accepted articles assign to _PSYCHE_ the right to
publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to
make it available permanently in an electronic archive.  Authors
will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may
republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge
_PSYCHE_ as the original source of publication.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions to the electronic version of _PSYCHE_ may be
initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L
Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

28) -------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************
Announcement and Call for Submissions
_Postmodern Culture_
*************************************

_Postmodern Culture_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor: Joseph Natoli
Editor:         Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a
postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential
campaign to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and
literature to politics and history, sociology and science to
women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies.

This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be-
completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto
postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
truths and parodies of truths.

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has
overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link
our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. 
Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style"
that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or 

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

29) -------------------------------------------------------------

                             NSC'93

              The Network Services Conference 1993
               Warsaw, Poland, 12-14 October 1993

Invitation

Networking in the academic and research environment has evolved
into an important tool for researchers in all disciplines.  High
quality network services and tools are essential parts of the
research infrastructure.

Building on the success of the first Network Services Conference
in Pisa, Italy, NSC'93 will focus on the issue of providing
services  to customers, with special attention paid to the 
actual usage of the various tools available.  We will address the
impact of today's global tools on service development and
support, the changing function of traditional tools and services
(such as archives), new services (such as multi-media 
communications), the future role of the library and the
effects of commercialization of networks and network services.
Customer support at the institutional and campus level, and the 
role of support in accessing global services, will also be
covered.

Talks, tutorials, demonstrations and other conference activities
will address the needs of the research, academic, educational,
governmental, industrial, and commercial network communities.

Tutorial sessions on specific network services have been
integrated into the regular conference program.  Practical issues
in the use of these services and tools will be covered in detail
by experts.  Throughout the conference, participants will be able

to get hands-on experience in the well-equipped demonstration
area.

NSC'93 is being organized by EARN in conjunction with EUnet,
NORDUnet, RARE, and RIPE.

To get a preliminary program and registration form, send e-mail
to:

   LISTSERV@FRORS12.BITNET     (or LISTSERV@FRORS12.CIRCE.FR)

In the body of the message, write:  GET NSC93 ANN2

David Sitman
EARN

30) ----------------------------------------------------------   

_FEMISA_

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

_FEMISA_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think
about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world
politics, international political economy, or global politics,
can communicate.  

Formally, _FEMISA_ was established to help those members of the
Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the _International
Studies Association_ keep in touch.  More generally, I hope that
_FEMISA_ can be a network where we share information in the area
of feminism or gender and international studies about
publications or articles, course outlines, questions about
sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or
upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to
the _International Studies Association_.

To subscribe: send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

                      sub femisa your name

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

                          unsub femisa

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

Owner: Deborah Stienstra  stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca
        Department of Political Science
        University of Winnipeg

31)-------------------------------------------------------------

_HOLOCAUS: Holocaust list_

HOLOCAUS on LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET
         or LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail
discussion groups ("lists") at the University of Illinois,
Chicago.  It is sponsored by the University's History Department
and its Jewish Studies Program.

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need and Internet or Bitnet
computer account.  From that account, send this message to
LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu:

                 SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

Use your own Firstname and Lastname.  You will be automatically
added.  You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to
everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the
world right now).

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************************************************************
                    John W. Hartman Center
          for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
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          TRAVEL-TO-COLLECTIONS GRANTS 1993-94

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          relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and
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          REQUIREMENTS: Awards may be used between November 15,
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September 25, 2013

Selected Letters From Readers
Paul Miers
Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4mie@toe.towson.edu

RE: Kip Canfield’s essay, “ The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky,” in PMC v.3 n.3. A reply by Paul Miers, Department of English, Towson State University.

Connectionism and Its Consequences

Kip Canfield’s article in the last issue of Postmodern Culture is one of the first pieces of critical theory to discuss the implications of the revolutionary paradigm shift now taking place in the cognitive sciences. The movement inspiring that shift, generally called connectionism, offers a powerful and still controversial alternative to the standard model of mental representation which has more or less dominated western philosophy at least since the Enlightenment (Bechtel). As Canfield notes in his comparison of Paul Smolensky, one of the leading connectionists, with Jacques Derrida, the connectionist critique parallels in many ways the deconstruction of traditional semiotics and structuralism. But, as Canfield also notes, connectionist theory does more than deconstruct the old paradigm: it also purports to offer an alternative account of representation, a genuine Copernican revolution which changes our view of mental life from a symbol centered token/type model to a network based vector/matrix account (Churchland).

Since Canfield focuses almost exclusively on Smolensky and Derrida, however, readers of his essay not already familiar with the paradigm wars in cognitive science may not see just how profound the connectionist revolution could be. For that reason, I want to offer here a brief note on the consequences of connectionism which follows up on a point I have made elsewhere regarding the implications of connectionism for critical theory (Miers).

The attraction of connectionism for cognitive science is its potential for providing a “natural” theory of information processing in the brain. All the evidence indicates that the brain itself is organized as a massively distributed parallel processor (Edelman); what the great debate is about is how to reconcile the neural evidence with the standard, classical theory of mental representation. Classical theory claims that mental representations are the product of arbitrary atomic symbols (i.e., signs rather than symbols in the Coleridgean sense) operated on by formal syntactic rules. Connectionist theory, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that neural networks have no one- to-one mappings, and that they respond to input vectors not by invoking rules, but by dynamic transformations of the network (Churchland). The real issue then is not a simplistic opposition between atomic and distributed elements or between arbitrary and motivated symbols; it is, rather, the problem of explaining how the brain produces the apparent formalism of symbolic representation from the non- classical structure of neural networks.

In broad terms, there are two explanations for this puzzle, the first of which I call weak connectionism or neo- symbolism and the other I term strong or pan-connectionism (Miers; see also Bechtel). In the weak version, the logic of neural networks serves simply to implement some version of the traditional token/type symbol processing which the classical cognitivists like Fodor see as essential for mental representation (Fodor, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture”). In the weak case, the classical cognitivists can, with some modifications, “save the appearance” of the symbolic paradigm. Even though connectionist processes may infiltrate and shape whole aspects of mental life, there remains a unique domain of rational or propositional thought governed by the formalisms of symbolic structures. As Fodor has consistently argued for years, not all of the messy flux of what passes through our heads needs be structured like a formal language, and Fodor is quite willing to concede much of mental life to Freudian and even Skinnerian accounts (The Language of Thought 200).

Strong connectionism, on the other hand, is much more radical and leads to a rather uncanny picture of the apparent symbol processing capabilities of the mind. Strong connectionism claims that symbolic representation is, in fact, a rather shallow illusion which is being approximated or mimed by a wholly connectionist strategy that evolved in the brains of mammals long before the appearance of humans. In this account, our sense that there are atomic tokens is being created by a series of vector/matrix interactions, and our notion that tokens belong to some double system of message and code or object language/meta-language is a belated allegory. There are only vectors operating within matrices, and the language of thought is in reality the algebra for convolving vectors and matrices (Churchland). Our received notions of deep structure, symbolic orders, even the Unconscious, are therefore historical constructs, reinforced by external contingencies and controls. The language of thought is not structured like a language; indeed language cannot be structured like a language since language itself is fabricated by a non-classical strategy for representation.

I have argued in favor of strong connectionism (Miers), but which, if any, of these two versions turns out to be the case is still an open question. The symbolists argue that connectionist models fail to meet the formal requirement for symbolic representation (requirements, it should be noted, which must be taken seriously) (Fodor “Connectionism”), while the connectionists point to increasingly sophisticated programs which have begun to meet (or more accurately approximate) these requirements (Bechtel). The point I want to make here, however, is that both the strong and the weak version of connectionism have significant consequences for a certain kind of ironic postmodernism most often identified with Lyotard and Baudrillard. It might appear at first glance that this postmodernism would be vindicated by the triumph of strong connectionism since strong connectionism undercuts classical representation. My claim is that ironic postmodernism loses either way, because it is wedded to a particular account of representation still tied to the symbol-centered token/type account–albeit a deconstructed, paradoxical version–of the classical system. In short, ironic postmodern can only think itself within the paradigm of the sign and is highly dependent on that paradigm remaining in place as a failed system.

If weak connectionism proves to be the proper model for representation, then what we will see is a return to classical theory and a demonstration that at least in some realm it is possible to defend the classical account of reason, indeed that the classical account of reason is rooted in natural evolution. In this case, the postmodern ironists will have bet on the wrong reading of the symbolic order, and their arcane jargon will rapidly look as out of date as the discourse of Ptolemaic astronomy. But if strong connectionism proves true, that is, if representation is driven by the logic of vector/matrix interactions, then ironic postmodernism also fails because of its dependency on the deconstructed sign. The triumph of strong connectionism would support the claim that ironic postmodernism is simply a very late, very belated and desperate version of modernism (Cascardi). The true end of modernism then would come not with the deconstruction of the classical system, a deconstruction which leaves in place and cultivates the ruins of the system. Modernism would end, rather, when the recipe for making the illusion of signs is finally revealed.

What is most radical about strong connectionism is its claim that such a recipe exists and that it can be formulated. This recipe for thought is going to include both sensory and propositional modes in a single model of figural forms. Ironic postmodernism tells us that we live in an economy of undecipherable hieroglyphs, condemned to know but unable to change their fictive, arbitrary status. Strong connectionism suggest that we might be able to refigure this notion and see ourselves as living in the first post-symbolic culture, a culture where we know how to make and unmake signs, a culture where it is possible to limit and resist the sublime allure of unlimited semiosis, a culture which knows itself to be a natural and necessary illusion.

Works Cited
- Bechtel, William and Abrahamsen, Adele. Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
- Canfield, Kip. “The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky.” Postmodern Culture May (1993).
- Cascardi, Anthony J. The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
- Churchland, Patricia S. and Sejnowski, Terrence. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
- Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
- Fodor, Jerry. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.
- —, and Pylyshlyn, Zenon. “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture.” Cognition 28 (1988): 3-71.
- Miers, Paul. “The Other Side of Representation: Critical Theory and the New Cognitivism.” MLN 107 (1992): 950-975.
September 25, 2013
The Sound of the Avant-Garde

Timothy D. Taylor

Music Department
Denison University
taylort@cc.denison.edu

Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in The Wireless Imagination as an attempt to compile a collection of “first utterances” rather than a Last Word on the subject of abstract sound. But these utterances are so disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for something a little less pomo and a little more old-fashioned: coherence. Kahn and Whitehead write, “Rather than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a hat, we have chosen to ground Wireless Imagination in the more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic resonances among the above existing histories, strangely dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear” (x).

Fair enough. Some of the essays are indeed historical and useful (Mel Gordon’s “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)”; Mark E. Cory’s “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art”; Christopher Schiff’s “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism”). But what’s wrong with theorizing? Perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from sprawling theory: there’s theory all over the place, and some of it makes little sense. A few essays indulge in the kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most ardent theory fetishist (Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth”; Gregory Whitehead’s “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art”; Allen S. Weiss’s “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud’s Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu“). I do not mean to make a blanket attack against theoretical work. The problem with these essays is not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as non-significant as the abstract sounds they’re ostensibly about.

Probably the most interesting portions of The Wireless Imagination are those that detail someone’s response to sound. Alexander Graham Bell worked with his father to try to find a written language for non-language sounds; the young Bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to “say,” “How are you, grandmamma?”; Thomas Edison believed that each person has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a machine to record these “life units” exiting dead bodies as they lay in their coffins.

Nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose inventions. Velimir Khlebnikov, in “The Radio of the Future,” presages Muzak: “During periods of intense hard work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great buildings, these sounds [“la” and “ti,” or the pitches A and B] can be broadcast by Radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously” (21). Khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by Mel Gordon on Russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of zaum, Alexei Kruchenykh’s “language” that incorporated all kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of schizophrenics. Khlebnikov’s zaum was meant to transcend all cultural barriers. Additionally, Khlebnikov invented a “universal alphabet,” in which each phoneme (just 25 in all) causes a certain emotional response, and is linked synesthetically with a color. So the phoneme “P,” for example, causes “explosion, release of pressure,” and is related to the color black outlined in red. Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) tells of a deboned head stored in a liquid called aqua micans. This head can be reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a connection with the head through the cone.

It seemed as though life once more inhabited this recently immobile remnant of faces. Certain muscles appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all directions, while others periodically went into action as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in particular moved with wild agility.(80)

Still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to record sound make fascinating reading, even if the contributors’ discussions of these attempts aren’t always satisfying. Alexander Graham Bell seemed to be fixated on the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life to working with his father on an attempt to notate in written symbols all kinds of sounds. Co-editor Douglas Kahn offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by Bell, describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this “language”:

The members of the audience were invited to make any sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my father. It was just as easy for him to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a sound that formed an element of human speech. Volunteers were called to the platform, where they uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my father studied their mouths and attempted to express in symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had observed. I was then called in, and the symbols were presented to me to interpret; and I could read in each symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. I remember on one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. They recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.(86)

Bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph but that Edison beat him to it. If Bell hadn’t invented the telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the foregoing excerpt.

There are some lacunae. The aestheticization of abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook politics, or real people “on the ground.” For example, co-editor Kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from Apollinaire’s 1916 “The Moon King” which is redolent of the kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting devices have facilitated (as Jacques Attali potently observes in his 1985 Noise):

The flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestrial life. Each key activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we were hearing a Japanese countryside. The wind soughed in the trees--a village was probably there, because I heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the spray of an icy waterfall. Then another key pressed down, we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I heard geysers spewing hot water. Then this wonderful morning continued in sweet Tahiti. Here we are at the market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New Cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek. You could also hear the Chinese selling tea, coffee, butter, and cakes. The sound of accordions and Jew's harps.(23)

The authors offer this excerpt as an example of Apollinaire’s “wirelessness,” his interest in abstracted sound, but don’t examine the issues of power and surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate sounds from all over the world.

But the most disturbing omissions concern gender. Some of the material presented is so outrageous that it would seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving considerations of gender. For example, the first essay, Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” avoids inclusive language, and at one point adds “the other” gender as an afterthought, as though Grivel at the last minute imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. Like so much French theory, Grivel’s essay is quote proof: “Symbol ‘become life,’ that is, substance, of a being articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently applied upon the listener” (33). Grivel describes Villiers del l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future (1886), which features a “fictitious” Edison who constructs a woman with two phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (An excerpt from del l’Isle-Adam’s story follows Grivel’s essay.) Grivel’s consideration of Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine parler” of 1892 likewise skirts gender considerations. Schwob’s story tells of a frightening device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are played by a woman, who is, in Grivel’s words, “servant to the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous ‘mechanical mouth’.” Another example is Allen S. Weiss’s discussion of Antonin Artaud in his essay, “Radio, Death, and the Devil.” Weiss, like most of the contributors to this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing vehicle–evidence of the “wireless imagination”–but does little more. His discussion of Artaud’sIl n’y a plus de firmament (c. 1932) describes “an archetypically Artaudian figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical instrument”:

Then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully, always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately strike with drumbeats.(297)

So, what is the relationship between sound and gender in such passages? Sound, it seems, can stand in for heterosexual sex, something that women “possess” and can “give” to men, or something that men violently take from, or beat out of, women.

All of the book’s discussions of gender serve as yet another example of the ways in which Western culture has mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case “abstract” sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence perpetrated against women. Or ethnic minorities, or whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to attack. This flexible binarism of violence has worked all too well throughout Western history, whether the target of the drumsticks was a woman’s belly or Rodney King’s head. But it goes without comment in all of these essays.

More satisfying considerations of the gendered nature of sound as it appears in these pages might have been possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that sound, including musical sound, signifies: here’s where the subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. Hardly any musicologist deals with this issue (and most contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers are hopeless–unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned with social and performance issues), so it would seem that the range of professions practiced by the authors of these ten essays would include someone who would tackle the problem. All of the writers and thinkers whose work is chronicled in the pages of The Wireless Imagination attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. But what does it “express,” if anything? Some of the primary texts under consideration address the issue. Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s No Music (1913), for example, begins, “Music cannot express the essence of sensation. One never knows what music is about . . .” (162). De Chirico and the other Surrealists turned against music because of their disaffection with first Erik Satie (1866-1925) and then Georges Auric (1899-1983, a Parisian composer of “Les Six”), and Christopher Schiff writes that the Surrealist movement eventually attempted to do without music altogether. But de Chirico’s writings on musical signification go without close examination. Arseni Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: “Of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization” (245). Perhaps. The authors of these essays fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger cultural and political concerns and to the other arts. Frances Dyson’s insightful essay–perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book–on John Cage comes closest to such a discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he unfortunately discounts): that Cage, in his emancipation of sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in Western bourgeois culture, despite Cage’s systematic critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture.

The translations of historic texts that aren’t often available are welcome; many of these form an important companion to Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos (1973). Included are de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Lamentations of Edison,” from L’Eve Future (1886); Alberto Savinio’s “Give me the Anathema, Lascivious Thing” (1915); Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923); F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La Radia (1933); and Artaud’s To have done with the Judgment of God (1947). These are important to have in recent translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine further in explicating the myriad ways Western culture has attempted to deal with sound as sound.

In sum, it’s about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the “avant-garde.” But as a starting point or “first word” on the subject, we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an effective weapon of political domination.

September 25, 2013
Idioculture: De-Massifying the Popular Music Audience
Marc Perlman

Department of Music
Tufts University
perlman@pearl.tufts.edu

Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project. My Music. Foreword by George Lipsitz. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Cultural Studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly disruptive sort of object, a form of resistance (Frith: 179). Part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of mass-marketed products. Though the best-known examples of this process have been literary (e.g. Radway on the romance, or Penley on K/S zines), Frith sees popular music consumption “becoming the model for ‘active’ popular cultural consumption in general” (Frith: 180).

The book under review features ‘active’ consumption as resistance, though in a way not limited to popular music. In this book the disruptive moment of consumption is generalized beyond pop: here it is the moment of listening across genre borders. In a world where the music market and musical institutions impose strict boundaries between styles, people resist by having eclectic tastes. The “most important message” of this book is that there is “far more complexity and far more self-directed searching, testing, and experimenting than either music schools or commercial market categories can account for.” People find their way to “an astonishing range of musical choices, despite the inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (Lipsitz: xiii). Their tastes are broader than the “confines imposed upon them by marketing specialists” (xiv).

That is the book’s message; but My Music is much more than an illustration of a thesis. Whatever the plausibility of this view of eclectic listening–and I shall add my reflections on this subject below–the book presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music. My Music is an edited selection of 41 interviews out of 150 conducted in Buffalo, NY. The interviewees range in age from 4 to 83. Most are white Americans, though five African-Americans, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American are included, as well as one Bolivian and one Ethiopian.

The Music in Daily Life Project started in 1984, when Carol Hadley, a student at SUNY Buffalo pursuing an independent study project, asked a few people about the role of music in their lives. She found people with unsuspected combinations of tastes (for example, one woman’s listening revolved around a Bette Midler/Allman Brothers/Joni Mitchell configuration) or striking trajectories (a woman who moved from classical music to Neil Diamond). That was the stimulus. Two undergraduate classes carried out further interviews, and three graduate seminars edited and organized the results. The result is this kaleidoscope of individual voices, too diverse and specific to be easily grouped into subcultures.

My Music is a portrait of particularity. As Keil puts it in his Introduction, “Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an ‘idioculture’ or idiosyncratic culture in sound” (2).

The interviews illustrate Keil’s notion of musical idioculture. A few seem to fit common stereotypes, but just as many defy such caricatures. May, for example, is an overachieving high school violinist who attends Julliard on weekends. Her favorite listening music is Italian opera, but she grew up on the Rolling Stones and the Who, has tapes of Talking Heads, and can play Grateful Dead tunes on request.

The editorial choice to present whole (edited) interviews was made to spotlight the interviewees, many of whom prove to be trenchant observers and witty conversationalists. Molly (age 11) comments on how music videos interfere with individual visualizations, “because you just think of what you saw on TV and not what your mind sees” when you listen (31). The insufferably cute Lisa (age 12) listens to the radio while studying for a test: “when it comes to the test, I remember the song, I remember the question, and I remember the answer” (40). Ralph, the polymath truckdriver (113-16), notices the “Ride of the Valkyries” in an Elmer Fudd cartoon, holds forth on the connection between the Jewish diaspora and polka music, likes the Beach Boys (“all a rip-off of black music … but white fun”) as well as the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but draws the line at opera (“Well, ‘Madam Butterfly’ is okay, but that’s the only one I really appreciate”). Stella, who emigrated from Greece thirty years ago, doesn’t consider Greek music to be her music: “It’s not mine, it’s a couple million other people’s” (159). She thinks country and western is the only adult music–not the “male bonding party songs,” but the ones where “the cliches are given reasons as to why they became cliches” (161).

In short, the interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. There are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives. Betty, for example, converted from classical music to Neil Diamond. The reader involuntarily wonders about the significance of this conversion when Betty tells us it accompanied her divorce from a classical-music-loving husband. There are also bits of intergenerational sitcom. Nineteen-year-old Abby, interviewed by her father, mentions Grace Jones. Her father, in a follow-up question, mistakenly refers to the singer as Grace Slick, which elicits this putdown: “Grace Jones, honey. Grace Slick? For-give me. Never in a million years” (87).

Nevertheless, while I applaud Crafts et al.’s decision to focus on people’s own words, I wonder if it was perhaps too zealously implemented. My Music is half of the book the authors originally envisioned; it lacks the planned set of essays reflecting on the interviews. In the end they chose to include more voices rather than reserve space for their own pronouncements. As one of the student members of the Project put it, “Isn’t the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?” (xxii).

It is indeed good to hear from so many people, but there is much we would like to know about them that they do not tell us. We know their age, sex, and (sometimes) ethnic identification. We are given their occupation in a few words: “pastor”; “student”; “music teacher”; “heavy truck salesman”; “works in her husband’s office”; “works at Allstate.” Some seem to be housewives. We know little else about their lives except what they choose to tell the interviewers. Crafts et al. refrain from fleshing out the picture, even when extra information would significantly alter our reading of the interview.

For example, Beth does not tell us that she plays music. We only learn this from Keil, who mentions it in order to make a point about the possible negative effects of the dominance of mediated music in our lives (2). We are told that Charles is a music teacher and composer; he is obviously also a performer, probably a pianist. But it would help us to interpret his diatribes against commercialism, his admiration for Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix, and his quotations from Plotinus, if we knew a bit more about him. Is he a classically-trained pianist performing in a general business band? An aspiring Frank Zappa–or Glenn Branca?

Crafts et al. minimize contextualization and all but abstain from comment. Keil invites us to make our own correlations and interpretations (3), but we can hardly do so without knowing more about these people. Their voices remain only voices, and we remain eavesdroppers on invisible conversations. (Other sorts of contextualization would be helpful, too. For example, some readers will be unable to understand some of the references to specific performers–Rick James, David Sylvian, etc.)

It is instructive to compare this collection of ordinary people’s voices with the results of a somewhat similar project, another book organized around quotations from listeners: Music and Its Lovers, by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget). Whether or not it is a unique precursor of My Music, it is surely the first such study to appear in America: published in 1933, it is based on research conducted before World War I. The two books draw on samples of similar size, but apart from that the differences are striking. Lee used a questionnaire, and usually collected written responses. She worked in French and German as well as English, and reached many of her respondents through a periodical. Her sample seems to have included a disproportionate number of musicians, poets, essayists, critics, and PhDs. She seems to have asked only about ‘high art’ music. In her presentation, too, she kept a firm authorial grip on the material: her respondents’ voices are dispersed throughout her text, surfacing as a sentence here, a paragraph there. Though she was interested in individual responses to music, her questions were narrowly focused: she wanted to know if people listened to music for “a meaning which seems beyond itself, a message,” or if they heard it as “ just music” (Lee: 25).

In other words, Lee was preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of her time: the question whether music was an “absolute” art, inhabiting a realm of its own, independent of programmatic content. As a result, her book has a fairly strict psychological focus. We learn about the inner worlds of her respondents, but hardly anything about their external, practical concerns. (Except in the case of an unnamed suffragette, who disliked Brahms because of the masculine self-satisfaction she heard in his music [211, 531].)

The interview format of My Music insures that it escapes Lee’s overriding tendentiousness. However, it too is clearly a child of its time, and its framing essays show its relationship to some recent themes in the study of popular music.

I have already mentioned the idea that eclectic, exploratory listening represents resistance to the market-imposed pigeonholing of musical styles, the “inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (xiii). This notion is the main source of celebratory energy in the book. (Though Keil dampens the parade with a light drizzle of cultural criticism: “Aren’t all these headphoned people alienated, enjoying mediated ‘my music’ at the expense of a live and more spontaneous ‘our music’?” [3].)

My Music seems to show that musical tastes cannot be predicted by the usual demographic categories: as Keil puts it, the “Billboard Charts view” of people’s musical worlds is a tremendous oversimplification (2). But is Keil’s notion of “idioculture” the only alternative to the Billboard Charts view? [18] The entire question of cross-genre listening as musical resistance surely needs to be discussed in a larger socio-economic and historical context. The marketplace does not inherently solidify genre or style categories. Under certain circumstances it can collocate diverse styles as well as differentiate them. Indeed, Max Weber argued that the market declassifies culture: presenters seeking large audiences try to provide something for everybody. This does seem to explain the behavior of for-profit, privately owned firms in some circumstances (DiMaggio: 36). Under other conditions (demand uncertainty, high competition, etc.) firms prefer to target narrowly-defined taste bands. This is evident (for example) in the fragmentation of radio formats.

We should recall that the decline of eclectic music programming on commercial radio is a relatively recent phenomenon, hastened by the migration of the radio audience to television in the early 1950s, the proliferation of stations in major markets, etc. (Peterson and Davis: 169-71). With increased competition, stations had more incentive to narrow their appeal to specific demographic groups–those attractive to advertisers.

The fractionalization of radio was noted at the time, and even greeted as evidence that the prophets of massification were wrong: the mass media could be “a vigorous force working for cultural diversity” (Honan: 76). In retrospect, it is clear that radio’s commitment to cultural diversity was contingent on changes in industry structure and market conditions that made it more profitable to differentiate tastes than to agglomerate them.

Finally, it is true that the interviews in My Music show the subtlety, variety, and depth of meaning music has in the lives of 41 individuals. This book represents a welcome complement to the macro-results of survey-based research; as such, it justifiably emphasizes the moment of autonomy in musical reception. Unfortunately, it could easily be read as a romanticized portrait of musical individualism. Aside from a brief mention of the “constraints” and “broader systemic practices” (xiv-xvi) within which listeners operate, My Music does little to avert such a reading. Its micro-vision needs to be articulated with a macro-vision. Recent developments in the sociology of cultural choice should make this articulation especially fruitful.

The past few decades have been marked by two paradigm shifts in the study of popular culture: first, by a drift away from the Adornoesque view of musical massification to an acknowledgement of plural “taste cultures” defined by demographic parameters (class, race, age, geography, etc.); and second, to a view of “culture classes” less tightly bound to social class, defined instead by consumption patterns (Lewis 1975; Peterson and DiMaggio 1975; Peterson 1983; DiMaggio 1987). Turning away from Bourdieu’s Durkheimian correlations of musical taste with position in social space (1984), recent writers reject earlier assumptions of isomorphism between taste and class.

The insistence of Crafts et al. on individuals’ unique configurations of musical taste, it seems to me, is consistent with these sociological results, and could even enrich them. But My Music‘s resolutely idiographic stance seems to forclose the possibility of a sociological account of eclecticism.

In fact, we already have at least one such account. DiMaggio (1987) suggests that broad tastes correlate with high socio-economic status, assuming that those in high positions have wider social networks and hence need to be familiar with a wide range of artistic styles. Might the patterns of musical choice revealed in My Music be explicable in these terms?

We badly need a study of musical taste that combines My Music‘s attention to detail with panoramic views of the social, economic, and historical context. Until one appears, however, we do well to appreciate this book for what it is. It is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people. I don’t know if this book is part of an “emancipatory cultural project” (xvii), but it is valuable in its own right. And I suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom.

Works Cited
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50.
- “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440-55.
- Frith, Simon. “The Cultural Study of Popular Music.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Honan, William H. “The New Sound of Radio.” New York Times Magazine 3 Dec. 1967.
- Lee, Vernon. Music and Its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.
- Lewis, George H. “Cultural Socialization and the Development of Taste Cultures and Culture Classes in American Popular Music: Existing Evidence and Proposed Research Directions.” Popular Music and Society 4 (1975): 226-41.
- Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice.” American Behavior Scientist 26 (1983): 422-38.
- Peterson, Richard A., and Russell B. Davis, Jr. “The Contemporary American Radio Audience.” Popular Music and Society 6 (1978): 169-83.
- Peterson, Richard A., and Paul DiMaggio. “From Region to Class, The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces 53 (1975): 497-506.
September 25, 2013
Fear Of Music
Andrew Herman

Department of Sociology
Drake University
ah7301r@acad.drake.edu

Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Televison and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television

The first time I heard the terms “postmodernism” and “the postmodern” was at the “Marxism and Interpretation of Culture Conference” at the University of Illinois during the torpid summer of 1983. Like the inhuman heat and humidity of the Midwestern July, the terms hung heavily in the conference atmosphere, a prominent feature of almost every presentation, debate, and discussion. The omnipresence of the terms was particularly frustrating as almost nobody had anything close to resembling a straight explanation of them. Clearly, I thought, these terms must have some shared intersubjective meaning, otherwise all these people wouldn’t be enunciating them with such zest and enthusiasm. Finally, in desperation, I nearly assaulted a fellow conference participant during an incredibly hot and hazy dance party, determined to extract at least a basic definition of this hot and hazy chimera, “the postmodern.”

This individual did her best to satisfy my inquisitorial hunger by telling me of “the crisis in representation,” the “death of the author,” the “collapse of master narratives,” “pastiche and parody,” the “waning of affect,” and so on. Unfortunately, none of these characterizations of “postmodernism” or “the postmodern” made much sense to me. And so I just stood there nodding and grinning, hoping to convey vague understanding. Sensing a lack of comprehension on my part, and desperate to extricate herself from what was rapidly becoming a dead-end conversation, my reluctant interlocutor directed my attention to the spectral glow of a television monitor that hung in the corner of the room. “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the postmodern is in this very room. If you want to understand the postmodern, watch music television.” She then slipped away, leaving me to ponder the connection between music video, MTV, and postmodernism.

My companion that evening was probably not the first, and most certainly not the last, to note that there was an intimate connection between the postmodern, music video in general, and MTV: Music Television in particular. Indeed, the argument that music video as cultural form and MTV as televisual apparatus were quintessential exemplars of postmodern culture has become the dominant interpretation of music television within cultural studies. For example, John Fiske (1986, 1989) argues that music video as textual form is postmodern because of its fragmentary and disjointed nature. In its privileging of signifier over signified, contends Fiske, music video produces the distinctively postmodern experience of decentered subjectivity. Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan (1987) and David Tetzlaff (1986) maintain that MTV, as a regime of televisual experience, is postmodern because of the atemporal, ahistorical and dreamlike quality of its programming flow. Although they draw widely different political conclusions from their analyses, Kaplan, Kim Chen (1986), and Will Straw (1988) locate the postmodern nature of music video in its palimpsistic intertextuality and representational practices of pastiche and parody. Finally, Larry Grossberg (1988, 1989, 1992) argues that MTV evinces a cultural logic of “authentic inauthenticity,” a peculiarly postmodern form of identity politics that self-consciously celebrates the temporary affective commitments of style and pose. As an expression of the logic of postmodern culture, Grossberg maintains that music television locates identity and difference in the surface appearances of mood and attitude rather than in the meaningful modernist depths of ideology. What makes this superficial, “inauthentic” politics of style “authentic” (and therefore postmodern), according to Grossberg, is that performers, programmers, and audiences all know that there is nothing beyond the pose. In the cynical postmodern sensibility of MTV (and, for Grossberg, popular culture as a whole), there is no pretension to making a difference in the structure or fabric of everyday life beyond the differences of image and appearance.

It would be an understatement to say that Andrew Goodwin finds the predominance of such accounts within cultural studies a bit troublesome. Indeed, much of Dancing in the Distraction Factory is a sustained, if uneven and somewhat contradictory, polemic against the understanding of music television as distinctively postmodern. For Goodwin, the aforementioned authors and their analyses (with the partial exception of Grossberg) represent a theoretical arrogance and political naivete of egregious proportions. They are part of a “current fashion for conflating the specificities of different media and genre into a ragbag category of ‘postmodernism’ that does injustice in equal measure to both the conceptual field [i.e., postmodernism] and the object of study [i.e., music television]” (17). Although Goodwin grudgingly admits that there are certain features of contemporary society and popular culture that might be accurately and fruitfully understood as “postmodern,” music television is not one of them.

According to Goodwin, the fundamental problem of the postmodernist take on music television is that it fails to take into account that music television is, quite simply, music television. Although there has been some work done in media studies on the aural dimension of television (e.g. Williams, 1974; Altman, 1987), according to Goodwin, “very few analyses of music television have thought to consider that it might be music” (5). Goodwin devotes much of the first part of the book to detailing the deleterious results of the bias in studies of music television towards the visual.

For example, Goodwin takes issue with two widely held positions that represent polar extremes of the postmodern assessment of the politics of music television. The first is the pessimistic argument that music video has had a detrimental impact on the interpretative imagination of the audience because its visual images tyrannically fix the lyrical and musical meaning of a song. The second is the more optimistic, “avant-garde” argument that music videos represent a radical, subversive break with “classic realist” modes of representation and subjectivity because of their temporally fractured narrative and distinctive mode of address. Due to their narrow emphasis on the visual text of music video, both arguments ignore two con-textual dimensions of music television that are central to Goodwin’s own analysis.

The first dimension is the interdiscursive polysemy of music television. Goodwin argues that there are a multiplicity of extratextual discourses beyond the visual image which help constitute any particular song’s meaning. These include discourses of performance, promotion, and stardom that are crucial to understanding the institutional context of music television. Secondly, the hermeneutical valences of music video can be understood only by taking into account the phenomenology of synaesthesia, or the complex relationship between sound and image that was central to the production of the pleasure and meaning of songs long before music television.

When both dimensions are foregrounded in the analysis of music television, Goodwin maintains, the aforementioned arguments make little sense. In the case of the “meaning-fixing” dominance of video-text images, because of the array of discourses that are both inscribed in a music video as well as brought to the video by an audience, there is a multiplicity of visual associations that are conjured by the audience, many of which have little to do with a particular video’s images. Rereading the avant-garde argument about the anti-realist nature of music video, Goodwin points out that if one understands the institutional history of pop music discourses and the aesthetics of performance, the supposedly radical mode of address of music video (where the performer often directly addresses the audience) is, in fact, revealed to be “entirely conventional and thoroughly ordinary” (76). Further, if one considers the ways sound and image are linked through the process of synaesthesia, the fractured narratives and other “instabilities” in the music-video text (which are supposedly indicative of its postmodern character) can be understood as visual analogs of the musical structure of a song in terms of voice, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmonic development and, of course, lyrics. Thus, according to Goodwin, much of what makes “no sense” to postmodernists (c.f. Chen, 1986; Fiske, 1989) makes a great deal of sense in terms of what he calls a “musicology of the image.” Indeed, from this perspective, music television represents “the making musical of television” through the subordination of vision to sound as much as it does the triumph of the visual over the musical (70). Consequently, as Goodwin concludes with a nice rhetorical flourish,

music television does not, generally speaking, indulge in a rapture with the Symbolic; nor does it defy our understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality through its refusal to make sense. Far from constituting a radical break with the social processes of meaning production, music television constantly reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance, poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the question of how meaning serves power.(180)

II. Meaning, Power and the “Scandal” of “New Populism”

It is this issue of “how meaning serves power”, and how it’s currently being addressed within contemporary cultural studies, that is Goodwin’s ultimate concern in the book. As should be clear by now, he believes that the postmodern perspective is ill-equipped to explore the “social process of meaning production” in music television because of its fascination with the surfaces of visual imagery. However, Goodwin is equally critical of what he terms the “new populism” of cultural studies. Although he never specifies precisely to what work the epithet refers, one gathers that this new populism is characterized by an ethnographic focus on the processes of reception and a concomitant privileging of the audience’s power in terms of interpretation and pleasure (e.g. Ang, 1985; Lewis, 1990). For Goodwin, this so-called new populism accords “too much autonomy” to audiences because it implies that they “could construct meaning from media texts at will,” thus denying the salience of hegemonic or preferred meanings that emanate from cultural institutions and are inscribed in cultural artifacts and texts (14). This valorization of the audience in cultural studies, Goodwin insists, has entailed an abandonment of the project of ideology critique and its concern with the relationship between meaning and power. To my knowledge, even the most optimistic of those who might fall under the Goodwin’s rubric of new populism, such as John Fiske (1989, 1992), do not in any way maintain that power or preferred meanings are inoperative in the process of reception. Nonetheless, Goodwin dramatically asserts that the new populism’s supposed abandonment of concern with ideology as power constitutes “the ‘scandal’” of cultural studies (158).

How, then, is this “scandal” to be stopped? In order to have an adequate grasp of the social processes of meaning and ideology involved in music television in particular and popular culture as a whole, Goodwin maintains that cultural studies must adopt a mode of analysis that is “more adequate to the real.” The “real” for Goodwin is constituted by “actual, historical relations of power” and production (158, 167). In other words, the scandalous state of cultural studies can be rectified by its reorientation within a framework of Marxist political economy. Of course, Goodwin is quick to point out that he is not advocating a return to the good old days of crude base/superstructure certitude where the masses were manipulated into false consciousness by the products of the culture industry, products whose ideological content could be explained solely in terms of the imperatives of capital accumulation. Rather, Goodwin’s political economic approach is meant to be a “non-reductionist” examination of the institution/text and text/audience nexi of popular culture that situates textual aesthetics and ideology, as well as audience reception, squarely within the conditions of cultural production in a capitalist society.

Accordingly, from his perspective, a materialist analysis of music television that is “more adequate to real” adheres to the following logic. First, one must examine the historical development and contemporary dynamics of the institutional politics of production in the music and television industries. This institutional analysis establishes a contextual framework for understanding the aesthetics and ideology of music videos as texts. Although Goodwin claims he is not suggesting that textual content is determined by conditions of cultural production, he does want to emphasize that such conditions have a constraining effect upon texts. Finally, having examined the nexus of institution and text, one can proceed to the final step of analysis wherein one examines the nexus of text and audience, or the relationship between the politics of production and the politics of consumption.

Again, while not claiming that the meaning and pleasures of music video are predetermined and fixed by the institutional imperatives of production, Goodwin clearly argues that there are limits to the polysemy of music television which are set by its political economy. Accordingly, he insists that the first and second levels of analysis can produce an understanding of the third by illuminating what he suggestively terms (but, unfortunately, never explicitly defines) “reading formations.” Such reading formations are multidiscursive regimes of representation and pleasure that privilege certain subject positions in terms of ideology and affect. One example of a “reading formation” is what Goodwin terms a “star-text.” The star-text is composed of the repertoire of images and discourses which constitute a musician’s or band’s persona and is central to the meaning of music videos. Such star-texts operate as a “metanarrative” that structure a musician’s or band’s identity. Thus, even before audiences have seen a particular video clip of, say, the band U2, they are probably familiar with the band’s metanarrative or star-text as the spiritual and political “conscience of rock and roll.” Further, argues Goodwin, such star-texts are inextricably linked to the imperatives of the music industry as they are an essential component of the effort to package and sell musicians as commodities. After all, it was the promotions department at Island Records that came up with the “conscience of rock and roll” moniker for U2 in order to sell The Joshua Tree album. Thus, even though at the book’s beginning Goodwin hedges his bets by disavowing any “claim to provide a definitive account of textual reception” (xxiii), by its end he feels entitled to state unequivocally that “while different parts of the audience will be positioned differently, music television viewers are nonetheless still positioned” (180). It is this claim about the audience which, I would argue, represents the major flaw in the logic of cultural analysis followed by Goodwin and ultimately undermines his claim to provide a coherent alternative to both postmodernism and the “new populism.” [13] When it comes to the first moment of Goodwin’s preferred mode of analysis, exploring the trends in the music and television industries that fostered the development of music video and music television, Dancing in the Distraction Factory is superb. Building upon Wolfgang Haug’s work on advertising and commodity aesthetics (1986), Goodwin offers a compelling argument that it is impossible to comprehend the pleasure and meaning of music video texts without considering their status as unique promotional commodities. Goodwin is certainly not the first to examine the emergence of music television in terms of pressures of market demographics, programming needs, and promotional imperatives of the music and television industries (c.f., in particular, Denisoff, 1988). However, his argument concerning the confluence of industrial marketing and programming imperatives with the emergence of new aesthetics and ideologies of performance and musicianship which privileged the artifice of the visual image (e.g. as articulated by the “New Romantics” such as the Pet Shop Boys), is startlingly original and convincing.

Similarly, Goodwin’s analysis of how the institutional discourses and practices of promotion, performance, and stardom become encoded into the sounds, images, and iconography of music video texts is nuanced and sophisticated. Indeed, the chapter on what Goodwin terms the “musicology of the image” should be required reading for all students of music television and music in general. Yet in spite of the complex relationship between sound, visual image, and narrative structure that engenders the ideology and aesthetics of music video, Goodwin maintains one cannot escape the political economic fact that all video clips are, first and foremost, promotional devices meant to entice consumers to purchase other commodities. Further, both music videos and the programming flow of networks such as MTV operate as a “super-text” which constantly directs the attention and desire of the audience towards commodities that promise solutions to individual and social problems. Accordingly, Goodwin argues, the polysemy of music video is limited by a hegemonic reading formation of commercialism which “attempts to restructure the subject-as-citizen . . . along the lines of subject as consumer” (169). Therefore, the central way in which in which Goodwin’s political economic approach is able to show how meaning serves power in music television is to demonstrate how text, programming, and audience are, to use an old Althusserian chestnut, structured in dominance by the ideology of the marketplace.

Naturally, when one makes such strong claims regarding the hegemonic structuring of the reading formations of music television one runs the risk of creeping (if not galloping) reductionism. That is, there is a danger of assuming that the politics of consumption in terms of use, meaning, and pleasure can be read off the politics of production like elephant tracks. Goodwin is well aware of this danger and, to pre-empt such criticisms, says:

The objection to such arguments is that they tell us too little about what particular television programs mean, what use-values are obtained in the consumption of popular culture and so on. . . . However, to argue that diverse audience readings and real use-values must also be taken into account is not to argue that a politics of individual consumption, based around the promotion of market relations, does not also operate. Indeed, to suggest that the former actually cancels out the latter is every bit as reductionist and simplistic as the most brazen economism.(174)

[16] And, indeed it is. Yet what vitiates Goodwin’s otherwise reasonable argument here is the contradictory way in which he deploys the audience in his analysis elsewhere. On the one hand, he frequently appeals to an audience of “music fans” to validate his hermeneutic analysis of the multi-discursivity of music video texts. For example, when discussing the visual iconography of performance, Goodwin forthrightly claims that he is simply “describing the process by which video clips make sense to the audience” (90). On the other hand, while this may indeed be true, Goodwin has absolutely no evidence to support his conclusions (and admits as much, 95). Further, although he concedes that his analysis “needs to be related to audience interpretation and reader competence” (130), he does not attempt to do so and dismisses almost out of hand other attempts along these lines (e.g. Lewis, 1990). The “audience” seems to exist for Goodwin only as a convenient rhetorical device that enables him to claim a face validity for his textual analysis and thus obviates the need for engaging in or with ethnographies of the music television audience. Doggedly sticking to his Marxist guns against the new populists, whom he condescendingly terms the “bright young things of cultural studies” (xxiii), Goodwin refuses to believe that the audience might tell him something about the politics of consumption that he doesn’t already know.

In the end, Goodwin’s cavalier attitude towards the audience and ethnographic study of the politics of consumption both blinds and deafens him to the salience of the concept of postmodernism for understanding the cultural politics of music television. At this point in the debate around postmodernism within cultural studies, it should be clear that the concept entails much more than simply textual aesthetics. The postmodern is not simply a style, attitude, or pose, but a fundamental mutation in the fabric of everyday life from the political economy of production to the rituals of consumption. In order to understand the politics of music television, to assess how meaning serves power, it would seem to me that it is imperative to examine how the postmodern is evinced in the everyday life of the audience. Goodwin seems to suspect that this might be the case when he notes in passing that “work on postmodernism as a condition of reception might be extremely fruitful” (153). Yes it would, but only if one is less dismissive of ethnographic dialogue with the audience. And, in spite of the many virtues of Dancing in the Distraction Factory, it is this refusal to take the postmodern seriously that is truly a scandal.

Works Cited
- Altman, R. “Television/Sound.” Television: The Critical View. Ed. H. Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Ang, I. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1985
- Chen, K. “MTV: The (Dis)Appearance of Postmodern Semiosis, or the Cultural Politics of Resistance.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
- Denisoff, R. S. Inside MTV. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988.
- Fiske, J. “MTV: Post structural Post modern.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
- Fiske, J. Reading Popular Culture. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
- Fiske, J. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Grossberg, L. “‘You Still Have to Fight For Your Right to Party’: Music Television as Billboards of Post-Modern Difference.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
- Grossberg, L. “MTV: Swinging On A (Postmodern) Star,” Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. Ed. I. Angus and S. Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1989.
- Grossberg, L. We Gotta Get Outta This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Haug, W. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
- Kaplan, E.A. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
- Lewis, L. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
- Straw, W. “Music Video in Its Contexts: Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980’s.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
- Williams, R. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974.
September 25, 2013
Postmodernist Purity

John McGowan

Department of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
jpm@unc.bitnet

Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art in America, who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just about everything he ever published–plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS–has been collected in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not just because Owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens’s intellectual trajectory–from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan as the major influence on his work–follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. From an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped Owens’s discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties.

The thread that runs through these various sub-periods in Owens’s work is the problematic of representation. An early (1979) essay on Derrida’s critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title:

If in 'The Parergon' Derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, 'The Parergon" signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition."(38)

What is the nature of the “necessity” here? Necessary for what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982), Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. He calls our attention to “the ways in which domination and subjugation are inscribed within the representational systems of the West. Representation, then, is not–nor can it be–neutral; it is an act–indeed, the founding act–of power in our culture” (91). The wholesale condemnation of the West’s representational systems is retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms.

Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for only telling “half the story”; what “Foucault would excise” is the half “that concerned desire and representation” (204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to “regard all human sexuality as masquerade” (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on “Posing” brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote from Derrida. “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is simply posed, doesn’t it amount to the same . . . . From this point of view I would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed” (215).

The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. I use the word “desire” deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in Marx’s version of historical repetition. “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women” offers a wonderful send-up of neoexpressionism, while “The Problem with Puerilism” argues convincingly that “what has been constructed in the East Village is a simulacrum of the social formation from which the modernist avant-garde first emerged” (263). But, lest we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia for the original modernist avant-garde, Owens is quick to sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making “difference . . . become an object of consumption”:

The fact that avant-garde artists had only partially withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory position; but this position also equipped them for the economic function they would eventually be called upon to perform--that of broker between the culture industry and subcultures.(264)

[5] Armed with this awareness of the modernist avant-garde’s failure, Owens offers nothing beyond calls for a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve. Writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which, again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like Robert Hughes in “The Yen for Art”), Owens is reduced to denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists he champions to that market. Andars Stephanson asks: “But isn’t it true that oppositional artists themselves became marketable, say, after 1980?”–to which Owens replies: “This is seriously overplayed. Hans Haacke does not sell much work, and he has not had a show in an American museum until now. Kruger’s work is also interesting because it costs far more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells for one-tenth of the latter’s price” (307). What’s significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form that the defense of oppositional artists takes. Owens has not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a commodity. He is setting himself up to reach the same dead end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of exchange that are repudiated.

In this context, the poststructuralist critique of representation comes across as a new variant on this long-standing modernist obsession with purity. To even engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to succumb to its terms.

It is not the ideological content of representation of these Others that is at issue. Nor do contemporary artists oppose their own representations to existing ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the positive image. (To do so would be to oppose some 'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) Rather, these artists challenge the activity of representation itself which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the primary agent of their domination."(262)

What would it mean to “indict” the “activity of representation itself” in the name of “the ability to represent themselves”? By rejecting a conflict within the social over different representations with the assertion that every positive image is a phallacy, Owens places the artist on the path of pure negation that has been a modernist treadmill since at least Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing.

The critic is left in even a worse position than the artist.

"What you are saying, then, is that to represent is to subjugate?" "Precisely. There is a remarkable statement by Gilles Deleuze . . . that encapsulates the political ramifications of the contemporary critique of representation: 'you [Deleuze says to Foucault] were the first . . . to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'"(261-2)

Owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. He wrote only one essay–“Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism”–that is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking for gay men, not of this particular gay man. Everything he writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating between audience and work (of art, of theory). A sometime academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic theory to a nonacademic audience (the New York art world), Owens was primarily a translator, re-representing representations to facilitate their entry into different contexts. His success is attested to by the fact that his work was widely read and highly influential. Through his efforts and those of some collaborators, Art in America became a conduit point between the academy and the art world. Owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling around his distrust of the means of mediation. By adopting a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of representation, Owens boxed himself into a corner where he had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. He wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he did not write about AIDS. I know nothing about Owens personally; his health as well as other commitments could easily explain this relative silence. But his own theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little space to work in.

No doubt Owens would have struck out in new directions. What is fascinating and rewarding about these collected essays is the combination of Owens’s sharp eye (this is someone whose representations of others’ art I came to trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to learn from theoretical arguments. If I focus on the theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because I find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own strictures against universals to this universal condemnation of representation, unable to think its own retrograde (modernist) desire for purity within its critique of discourses that aim for homogeneity. Not surprisingly, the specifics of Owen’s wonderful essays on William Wegman, Barbara Kruger, and Lothar Baumgarten already suggest some ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for absolute alterity. The conclusion to the essay on Wegman talks of “necessity” again, but this time it is the necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it:

When we laugh at Man Ray's foiling of Wegman's designs, we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating to the Other--one based not on the denial of difference, but upon its recognition. Thus, inscribed within the social space in which both Bakhtin and Freud situate laughter, Wegman's refusal of mastery is ultimately political in its implications.(163-4)

Postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the social space which would enable this recognition of difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much postmodernist cultural critique. For what could be more narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of representation by which the other might try to make contact?

September 25, 2013
Practice, Politique, Postmodernism
J.L. Lemke

Sociology Department
City University of New York
jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu

Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J.D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

I. The Text

Invitation to Reflexive Sociology is a book that is not quite a text. Tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: Fantasy Interview with the Great Man (Part Deux, a construction not a transcript), Fatherly Advice on Becoming a Sociologist (Part 3, from a seminar for Bourdieu’s students), several essays at a “How to Read Bourdieu” (Part 1, Appendices, Notes, from Wacquant). The unbounded border mosaic of intertexts, present and absent, draws down readers’ accumulated cultural capital toward indebtedness.

If you have read Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (1990), whose first half sets forth his most original theoretical ideas (elaborating and superseding the older Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), and at least one of his major sociological studies Distinction, 1984; Homo Academicus, 1988; La Noblesse d’Etat, 1989), then Invitation may help you decide whether to read more from Bourdieu, and what. If you have only a vague sense that Bourdieu is a leading social theorist who engages the telling intellectual issues of the day, Invitation may convince you that, along with his near neighbors in social space (as he himself defines them in Homo Academicus, 276), Foucault and Derrida, Bourdieu sets the stage for our postmodernist play.

And if you have ever wondered what Bourdieu thinks of his actual and potential rivals: sociological, intellectual, and philosophical (except Derrida and Foucault), or simply enjoy stockpiling ammunition for use in future intellectual battles of your own, Invitation is a fully-stocked armamentarium.

But Invitation is also a voice, one that resonates with our own, speaking as we would like to speak (if not necessarily saying what we would like to say), about the construction of reality and society, experience and meaning, language and power, the social and the personal, time and the body, gender and domination, science and politics, academics and intellectuals. Perhaps it is only an illusion, but in this text as nowhere else, we seem to hear Bourdieu speaking, rather than writing. Bourdieu writes himself out of his writing in too many ways. However written his speaking may be here, however defensive, didactic, or undialogical, to a small degree at least it allows us to write him back in.

And if you are a student, or any sort of newcomer, to academic and intellectual discourse in what was once humanistic and social studies, I advise you to read and challenge this book.

II. Postmodernism, Si or No?

So, is he or isn’t he? The short answer, I think, is that Bourdieu writes as a chastened defender of the great modernist projects, a modernist for postmodern times. But while his desire is with the best of modernism, his method is shaped by the same rebellion against modernism and structuralism that characterizes his close contemporaries Foucault and Derrida.

Here, taken from Invitation, is my reading of Bourdieu’s project and consequent overt stance against postmodernism, to be followed by a counter-construction of Bourdieu as postmodern in spite of himself.

The project of Bourdieu’s desire is a grand sociology which realizes in part the modernist dream of a scientific objectivity hard won through its own reflexivity: “Sociology can escape to a degree [from its necessarily socially determined point of view on the social world] by drawing on its knowledge of the social universe in which social science is produced to control the effects of the determinisms that operate in this universe and, at the same time, bear on sociologists themselves” (67).

This is the motivation for Bourdieu’s many studies of the academic and educational systems of his native France, and generally for his studies of how the social system shapes our perceptions and desires. He constructs his notion of what scientific objectivity about such matters means following Marx’s criterion that social facts exist “independently of individual consciousness and will.” But what exist objectively for Bourdieu in the social world are pre-eminently relations, not positive entities, and with this he has already taken the first, structuralist step into postmodernism.

Still, he wants to draw a line against critiques of social science that see its/his writings as merely “poetics and politics,” opening the door to “nihilistic relativism” of the same sort found in the “strong program of the sociology of science” (Feyerabend? Bruno Latour?). He opposes “the false radicalism of the questioning of science” and “those who would reduce scientific discourse to rhetorical strategies about a world reduced to the state of a text” (246-7). How can I hope to rehabilitate the author of such reactionary sentiments?

By better understanding the terms of the debate as Bourdieu constructs it. When, just following this last point, he characterizes the goal of his own project as “to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former,” we need to understand his critical distinction of the practical from the scientific, and his own critique of positivistic objectivity:

Against positivistic materialism, the theory of practice posits that objects of knowledge are constructed, and not passively recorded; against intellectual idealism, it reminds us that the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and struc- turing dispositions acquired in practice . . . and that all knowledge . . . presupposes a work of construction . . . that consists of an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from thinking . . . . [This view aims] to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with the agent, as well as from the philosophy of the [social, semiotic] structure, but without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent.(121)

III. Practice, Temporality, Embodiedness

For a systematic account of this Logic of Practice, we have to turn to that text. Its tour-de-force Introduction is mainly a critique of every form of objectivism, and more profoundly of the conditions of possibility of theoretical and scientific perspectives:

Social science must not only, as objectivism [vs. phenomenological subjectivisms] would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the "objective" observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object.... Knowledge does not only depend, as an elementary relativism would have it, on the particular viewpoint that at "situated and dated" observer takes us via-a-vis the object. A much more fundamental alteration ... is performed on practice by the sheer fact of taking up a "viewpoint" on it and so constituting it as an object ... this sovereign viewpoint is most easily adopted from elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation.(Logic of Practice, 27)

In The Logic of Practice Bourdieu inquires into those aspects of experience and social reality which look different precisely because we are in the midst of action and not theoretically and scientifically distancing ourselves from it: the contingency and anticipatability of events when they have yet to happen, the absence of synoptic order and structure from the logic of action, the construction of dynamic vs synoptic time, the role of the body in action without reflection (and in reflection itself), the importance of tempo, rhythm, pacing, duration, delay, and haste in the meaning of events-in-flow. This is the perspective from which Bourdieu originally criticized Levi-Straussian structuralism for its theoreticist blindness to whatever is elided from synoptic representations made from the sovereign viewpoint of a science outside of event-time and the pressures of the moment.

It also provides a counterpoint against which to examine both the conditions of possibility and the otherwise unthinkable biases of all theoretical and scientific discourses and perspectives, as such. Dialectically, it allows us to interrogate the practices of science as practice, and to see in them the role of the practical, embodied logics, the famous dispositions toward practice that Bourdieu calls “habitus”, and which derive from the trajectories of practice of individual social agents as they take up the lives available to them.

I have found this dynamic perspective on social practice, and its dialectical relations with the synoptic perspectives of theoretical representation, extremely useful in my own work on social semiotics, discourse analysis, and text semantics (Lemke 1984, 1990, 1991) and so have many others (e.g. Martin 1985, Thibault 1991) in these fields whose underlying disciplines and methods are quite distant from Bourdieu’s. The re-centering of the body in alternatives to mentalist accounts of subjectivity, cognition, and action; in deconstructing the idealist cheats of a natural science self-disembodied from its own practice; and in theorizing gender issues, domination relations, and the repressed role of bodily violence in constituting the social order are but some of the postmodernist projects that will eventually build on Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

IV. Gender, Habitus, and Us

For all that Bourdieu lays the foundations of a productive critical dialectic between the logics of theory and practice, of semiotic structures and bodies in action, social structures and personal trajectories, and for all the centrality of reflexivity in his notion of social science, there seems to be more preparing-the-way than radical self-critique in his work. There is no profound self-examination, for example, of masculinism, Eurocentrism, or even the essentially bourgeois perspectives in his own theoretical metaphors and paradigms.

Homo Academicus comes closest to being a self- analysis “by proxy,” as he says in the Preface. But it is a micro-analysis, situating Bourdieu in his generation, and in the academy, but not in his gender, social class (bourgeois, as such), or culture (European, as such). By proxy and indirection it suggests that various elements of his scientific and career trajectory are shaped, as his theory requires, by his own initial social position and the effects of the dispostions it engendered in him on his encounters with later opportunities. In Invitation he argues that he keeps the personal Bourdieu on the margins so as not to make facile argumenta ad hominem too easy for his rivals. In doing so, however, he may have kept himself from deploying the full power of sociological reflexivity toward his own theorizing. Enabling such self-critique is, after all, the point of his scientific project and the absence of such self-analysis the very point on which, in the Postscript to Distinction, he criticizes Derrida.

Who, Bourdieu included, can read his texts and not see that he models the whole social universe as a struggle and competition among agents for status, domination, profit, and accumulation in one guise or another? In every field of social action, whatever their habitus, agents deploy and convert their capital (economic, cultural, and social) in an effort to win the game as defined in that field. If the game, and especially the competitive game of sport, is Bourdieu’s favorite simile, his master trope is the agon, the struggle for dominance.

The field of fields, the master field, for Bourdieu is the field of power, in relation to which all others are defined, and power for Bourdieu is the power to win the game, to maximize one’s capital position, to overcome adversaries. Any such summary is caricature, of course, but with the truth of caricature, as well. When Bourdieu speaks, rarely, of what happens “in the family and in other relations of philia,” what he sees is “violence suspended in a kind of pact of symbolic non-aggression,” the pervasive potentiality of every utterance to function as an act of power “bracketed” (145).

The social relations of philia are defined as exceptions to the underlying principle of the agon. The institutions of philia are marginalized, those of the agon made central. Economic competition, cultural competition, personal competition, metaphoric competition among abstracted social positions and roles. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of masculinism. It survives as doxa for Bourdieu precisely for the reasons his theory offers: because the world as he sees it and lives it fits perfectly with the masculinist dispositions it has produced in him.

Power for Bourdieu is the power to dominate, to control, to win. It is not also the power to nurture, to befriend, to console, to inspire, to share, to yield, to cooperate. It is not the power, in general, to engage in, and so to engage with others in, every social practice that comprises the social reality of every agent–a social reality, therefore, remade from every perspective of practice, and not only from that of the specialized practice of the straight, male, bourgeois academic theorist.

Bourdieu began his career as an anthropologist, and all his theoretical work, and most of his insights, arise from and are illustrated by examples from his fieldwork among the berber Kabyle of Algeria. The view he offers is not meant to be restricted to European culture or to the social reality of the bourgeoisie. He offers brilliant analyses (in the Logic) of the differences between barter and monetary economies and the cultures that support them, but still he models all of social reality as an economics, he takes economic capital and the relations of the economic field to be primus inter pares among all forms of capital and all dimensions of the field of power. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of the bourgeoisie.

And what does Bourdieu add to economism, even as he transforms simplistic models of base and superstructure into something more dialectical and flexible? Cultural capital and social capital, the capital par excellence of the intellectual, the academic, and the cosmopolite. Know-what and Know-who compete with Have-bucks for power in every field of social practice for Bourdieu. This, too, is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of a successful academic and intellectual.

All of these dispositions and their theoretical effects are in need of correction according to Bourdieu’s desire for scientific objectivity. Or they are all in need of diversification and multiplication by the perspectives of feminist and gay alternatives to masculinism, working class and other non-bourgeois viewpoints about social reality, and cultural models of the social world that do not privilege agon over philia, or imagine the social world out of an experience of economism, according to we Others’ desire to make meanings troubling to us and ours.

V. Present and Absent Others

I have probably said too much already about some of the absent Others at Bourdieu’s banquet. I should say a little more about some of the theoretical absences here. Bourdieu is a marvelous describer of how things are. He announces, but does not labor at, a “genetic sociology,” an understanding of the historical trajectories by which not just individuals, but institutions and theoretical objects, came to be made as they are. This he seems to have left largely to the most present absence in his work, Michel Foucault. He does not deal well with matters of social and cultural change.

Invitation points to the final chapter of Homo Academicus for the kernel of a theory of change and revolution, but what we find there is much less, mainly a scheme for describing moments of crisis, turning points, the visible tips of the icebergs of long-term social dynamics. Bourdieu seems to have too profound an awe of the stability of social systems to be willing to see on what chaotic foundations of contingent self-organization they rest (cf. Lemke, in press). His emphasis on embodied habitus should point Bourdieu, and all of us, toward the potential of bodies in (inter-) action to find themselves acting as they should not, acted upon in ways their habitus cannot make canonical sense of, because the material relations into which bodies can enter cannot be exhausted by the semiotic relations of any culture, even an embodied one.

Among the present Others, there are many who help orient our reading of Bourdieu. There are the German philosophers, the first intellectual love of the younger Bourdieu, abandoned by him for social science in order to challenge the stranglehold of philosophy on the academic field of Bourdieu’s youth. There are the sociological and philosophical rivals of the phenomenological-hermeneutic school (especially Geertz and the ethnomethodologists) against whom he argues passsionately (and at least in the case of ethnomethodology, for me, rather persuasively). There are the methodological rivals, especially discourse analysis, which he quite properly resituates back in the sociological context (as do Bakhtin and the social functionalists). There are Sartre and Levi-Strauss, whose debate shaped Bourdieu’s choice between philosophy and social science, and the Algerian war, which defined the more difficult choice between politics and the meta-politics.

And always there is this presence-by-absence, Michel Foucault (and to a lesser degree Jacques Derrida), not simply as individual, but as proximate proxy in the academic social space Bourdieu himself defines Homo Academicus, 276). These three followed closely similar academic and social trajectories, and in Bourdieu’s rather convincing view, we should expect them to be critical keys to reading one another. But Bourdieu scrupulously avoids reading Foucault for us, almost as if he would be reading his mirror-self. The parallels of their projects are evident, and Bourdieu notes this himself, but only notes it, and no more. Perhaps self-reflexivity, like agon, meets its limit in philia.

Note

I have said next to nothing about Bourdieu’s discussions of education, particularly higher education, language and symbolic power, or the nature of science. I plan to address at least some of these areas, in which I have considerable personal interest, first in a separate review (of Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power for the journal Linguistics and Education) and then in a book in preparation Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Theory).

Works Cited
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. La Noblesse d’Etat: Grands Corps et Grandes Ecoles. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Lemke, J.L. Semiotics and Education. Monograph in Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs Series, Victoria University, Toronto, 1984.
- Lemke, J.L. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
- Lemke, J.L. “Text Production and Dynamic Text Semantics.” Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses. Ed. E. Ventola. Berlin: Mouton/deGruyter (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 55), 1991.
- Lemke, J.L. “Discourse, Dynamics, and Social Change.” Language as Cultural Dynamic [Focus issue of Cultural Dynamics (Leiden: Brill), in press].
- Martin, James R. “Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis.” Systemic Perspectives on Discourse. Ed. J.D. Benson and W.S. Greaves. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1985.
- Thibault, Paul. Social Semiotics as Praxis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
September 25, 2013
Postmodern Communities: The Politics of Oscillation

Heesok Chang

Department of English
Vassar College
hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu

Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

I. Philosophical Homelessness

Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from The Theory of the Novel: “‘Philosophy is really homesickness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’”

According to Lukacs that is why “integrated civilizations”–where the soul feels at home everywhere, both in the self and in the world–have no philosophy. Or “why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy. For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map?”¹

Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy’s “utopian aim” would not find many adherents today. If anything, the “task” of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, “archetypal” vocation. The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

Today, especially in France, philosophy has addressed itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a “thought from the outside.”² Modern thought has deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. Against the grain of philosophy’s utopian memory–its nostalgic stance in being, its nostalgia for Being–the philosophers of our moment urge a “nomadic” thinking.

This sort of generalization about “postmodern” philosophy (such as it is) is well known. Like journalism, it is useful up to a certain point–let’s say until the end of the day. But like all more or less accurate journalistic descriptions it tries to say too much in one breath. Decisive opinions about “postmodern” or “poststructuralist” thought “today” leave the philosophical terrain largely undifferentiated. For example, we might be overly hasty to isolate “poststructuralism” from a certain “homesickness.” This philosophical “malady” (maladie du pays) need not be grounded in a Judaeo-Christian or Romantic nostalgia for lost origins; it might point to a more urgent need to rethink the social constitution of our being. I am thinking here not only of Richard Rorty’s recent attempts to imagine a “contingent” community (a sense of human solidarity not founded on an essentialist understanding of the human, but on an expanding recognition of human sufferance).³

I am thinking particularly of those thinkers (again, largely French) who write explicitly “within” a Heideggerean idiom–or rather, those writers who continue to stage a critical confrontation, an Auseinandersetzung, with Heidegger’s thought. I am thinking, for example, of Jacques Derrida’s recent meditations on spirit, friendship, and today’s Europe; or Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s exemplary work on the aesthetic assumptions informing modern national identity formation (National Socialism). And I am thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy’s extended research on the finitude of our daily, nightly existence–our “being-in-common”–which has given new rigor and new impetus to thinking about what community actually means.

Nancy’s appeal to rethink community could not really be characterized as nostalgic (quite the contrary). Nevertheless, something of the philosopher’s “transcendental homelessness,” the registration of a shared pain or loss, and therefore of a desire, is distinctly audible in these words: “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer . . . is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”⁴

This sentence could stand as a more or less appropriate epigraph for both the texts under review (more so for The Coming Community, less so for The Transparent Society). Like Nancy, both Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben address questions of our contemporaneity on a very broad scale. They too write in response to this epochal demand: not to “be at home everywhere,” but to free the very idea of “home,” of a certain belonging, from the planetary administration of techno-economic forces. And like Nancy, both authors draw considerably on Heidegger to articulate not only their diagnoses of our (post)modernity, but also their prescriptions for rethinking our being-in-the-world.

Despite marked differences in tone, style, content, and indeed, quality, The Transparent Society and The Coming Community contribute to our political imagination, to our ideas about “freedom” and “singularity,” “heterotopia” and “community.” With varying success, they outline new ways of being at home in a world that is increasingly no longer, quite simply, “ours.”

II. Hermeneutic Oscillations

English readers of Gianni Vattimo’s previously translated work–particularly the later essays collected in The End of Modernity–will not discover much that is radically new in The Transparent Society (but given Vattimo’s thesis about the impossibility of a definitive overcoming, an Uberwindung, this should certainly come as no surprise). Those who are unfamiliar with his writing, or who have only heard his name in association with the miserable label “weak thought” (pensiero diebole), will find this book a lucid and economical (120 pages of largish type) summary of his latest views on “the postmodern question.”⁵

The brevity of his text does not inhibit Vattimo from fielding a wide range of academic topoi: the evolution of the human sciences, the modern resurgence of myth, the privilege of “shock” in aesthetic experience, the disappearance of utopian models, the centrality of interpretation in a radically plural society. These discussions do not dwell on example and illustration (with the exception of a brief and unexceptional look at Blade Runner). Rather, Vattimo engages his interlocuters–Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Apel, Habermas, Gadamer–at a pace of brisk generality we might as well call journalistic.

Despite the liberal scope of the contents, however, the book’s eight chapters elaborate a consistent politico-philosophical vision. At the risk of oversimplifying, I believe Vattimo’s essential argument is encapsulated in this sentence from the opening chapter: “To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation” (10). I will direct my review of the book towards a critical gloss on this sentence.

The Transparent Society takes up where the last book left off–namely, at “the end of modernity.” Vattimo elegantly defines modernity as “the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself” (1). This cultural capitalization of the new, which emerges in art with the cult of genius, is eventually incorporated into a greater narrative of human progress and emancipation. Within a unilinear, Enlightenment conception of history the intrinsic value of anything modern consists in its being simply the latest, the most advanced, the nearest to the ends of man.

In a hypothesis which clearly resonates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, Vattimo states: “modernity ends when–for a number of reasons–it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (2). In The End of Modernity the “reasons” he gives are confined principally to philosophical ones–in particular, the forceful anti-foundationalist thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the present work, however, the advent of postmodernity is no longer an emphatically “theoretical” event. Vattimo foregrounds two major sociological causes for the dissolution of unilinear history.

First, decolonization. The global rebellion against European colonialism and imperialism renders the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress “de facto problematic”; “The European ideal of humanity has been revealed as one ideal amongst others, not necessarily worse, but unable, without violence, to obtain as the true essence of man, of all men” (4).

Second, planetary mass media. Vattimo seems to regard this factor to be more decisive in ending modernity than the emergence of post-colonial voices because (although he does not say this explicitly) the former is the technological condition of possibility for the latter. A “society of generalized communication” must be in place for multiculturalism to get on the map. The relentless expansion of informational media enables “Cultures and subcultures of all sorts [to step] into the limelight of public opinion” (5).

According to Vattimo, this “giddy proliferation of communication” seems to equip the world for actualizing a fully “transparent society.” We should note, however, that the book is misleadingly, or at least provocatively, titled. For “the transparent society” does not name Vattimo’s vision of a utopian postmodernity. Rather, it describes the belated, modernist ideal of our socius championed by every postmodernist’s favourite straw men: Karl Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas.

Vattimo argues that Apel’s community of “unrestricted communication” and Habermas’ universe of “communicative action” are informed by the old dream of a self-transparent society. More specifically, their normative ideals of communicative rationality are modelled on the communal drive for self-knowledge exemplified by the human sciences. “But,” Vattimo objects, “can one legitimately model the emancipated human subject, and ultimately society, on the ideal of the scientist in her laboratory, whose objectivity and disinterest are demanded by what is at bottom a technological interest and who conceives of nature as an object only to the extent that it is marked out as a place for potential domination . . . ?” (24).

Here Vattimo sides with the Frankfurt School (and Heideggerean) critique of instrumental reason. The Enlightenment ideal of a perfectly self-transparent society–in which the subject (the Subject) seamlessly enframes the world as an object of reflexive knowledge–does not augur human liberation. Instead, it installs a logic of domination. Man is not emancipated from his social labour, but dehumanized by technology. The transparent society is the totally administered and regulated society.

Now does the ungovernable or “giddy” expansion of information technology today mean we are on the verge of realizing such a transparent society?

According to Vattimo, no.

Adorno’s pessimistic vision of an increasingly instrumentalized modernity is well taken. But “–and this is what Adorno missed–within the communication system itself, mechanisms develop (the ‘rise of new centres of history’) that make the realization of self-transparency in principle impossible” (23). Vattimo does not specify what these “mechanisms” might be. Instead, he testifies repeatedly that the generalization of communication guarantees the dissolution of a monolithic history of human knowledge; “the freedom given by the mass media to so many cultures and Weltanschauungen has belied the very ideal of a transparent society” (6). In postmodernity, it seems everyone gets to step up to the mike.

We should object here that the “liberation of differences” Vattimo has in mind–a sort of “giddy” multicultural polylogue–does not necessarily entail a radical challenge to the existing order.⁶ The fact that everybody now can have their “say” does not automatically disrupt the present constitution of our public sphere. Perhaps real political differences, differences that won’t make a difference by their mere “say” are everywhere today, to borrow Claude Lefort’s phrase, “dissolved into the ceremony of communication.”⁷

Vattimo acknowledges this objection, but hastens to emphasize the “irreducible pluralization” (6) accompanying the veritable explosion of mass media in our daily lives. Moreover–and here we return to his central argument–emancipation today should not, he urges, be thought on the model of self-authentication (this would return us to the dream of self-transparency). What is liberating about postmodernism is not the parading of different identities per se.

Rather, “The emancipatory significance of the liberation of differences and dialects consists . . . in the general disorientation accompanying their initial identification. If, in a world of dialects, I speak my own dialect, I shall be conscious that it is not the only ‘language,’ but that it is precisely one amongst many” (9). In this irreducibly multicultural and heterotopian world I carry around a “weakened” sense of my “reality.” Freedom here does not come from asserting the particularity of my (linguistic) being. Rather, I experience freedom in a totally new way: by “oscillating” continually between feeling at home in my language and sensing how thoroughly finite, transient, and contingent it actually is.

Without commenting on the viability of this weird notion of “freedom” (how could such a thing be judged in all rigour?), I would like to close out this discussion by dwelling a bit on the key word “oscillation.”

The figurative movement of vibrating or fluctuating is certainly not new to Vattimo’s thinking. Indeed, oscillation in the present work may well be read as a spatial translation of the temporal or (post)historical notion of Verwindung which is described in the last essay of The End of Modernity. Readers of that work may recall this Heideggerean word signifies a going-beyond of metaphysics which is not a complete overcoming of metaphysics (the modernist myth), but rather a sort of deepening, healing resignation to its tracelike survival. Amongst Verwindung’s other lexical meanings Vattimo points out “twisting” and “distortion.” We experience Being in postmodernity not as an emancipated presence, but as an ironic twist or distortion. Being is only approachable in its estrangement from our nostalgic grasp–as a constant oscillation between revelation and concealment.

In The Transparent Society Vattimo fleshes out this meaning of oscillation as ongoing estrangement by referring us to the realm of the aesthetic. The fluid play of differences we find in postmodernity is likened to the disorienting encounter with the artwork–the blow (Stoss) or “shock”–described by Heidegger and Benjamin. Vattimo explicitly gives ontology and aesthetic theory a defining role in conceptualizing the oscillation and disorientation peculiar to postmodern being.

But I would suggest the metaphor of oscillation in Vattimo’s argument does not only derive from his interpretations of philosophy and postmodernity. Oscillation is a crucial feature of his interpretive methodology itself.

An implicit aim of The Transparent Society (but made explicit in the final chapter) is to defend a ramified understanding of Gadamerian hermeneutics. To move very quickly here, Vattimo wants to rescue hermeneutics from unacceptable axioms like this one: “To recognize oneself (or one’s own) in the other and find a home abroad–this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.”⁸ Hermeneutics’ universalizing appropriation of other worlds can only be corrected by breaking its circular understanding. Thus, the hermeneutic circle gives way to a trembling arc of interpretation. The figure of swaying between the poles of belonging and disorientation, home and away, assure Vattimo’s hermeneutic procedure “cannot appear . . .[under the] logics of subsumption.”⁹

But this metaphor of oscillation is hardly a postmodern twist on interpretation. The methodological notion of oscillation appears at the pre-Gadamerian beginnings of hermeneutics. As Werner Hamacher has noted: “Schleiermacher’s concept for the delicate relationship between the general and the individual, within which all verbal and language-generative acts manifest themselves, is called the ‘schema of oscillation between the general and the particular.’”¹⁰

Vattimo’s hermeneutic oscillation guarantees his understanding of postmodern alterity will remain disoriented. But this does not allow other “dialects” to appear outside the sway of hermeneutic understanding (no matter how “weakened”) itself. In this oscillation differences can only appear as trembling versions of themselves–as different or “contaminated” identities¹¹ –and not as differences indifferent to identity. To borrow a term from Agamben, nothing singular may appear.

It does not occur to Vattimo that the postmodern experience of freedom may be post-hermeneutic as well.

III. Whatever Being

“Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”¹²

Edward Said’s words testify, in their own way, to what Nancy calls “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” Said here is criticizing the politics of identity–the “unreconstructed nationalism”–that grips not only the academy, but the postcolonial world at large. Reclamations of cultural identity were useful and necessary for asserting independence from colonial rule. But, today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of a clamorous separatism. Nancy concurs with this diagnosis when he remarks that “the emergence . . . of decolonized communities has not . . . triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community.”¹³

Unlike Said, however, Nancy does not presuppose the question of community to be a question about reclaiming our humanity. He does not think community on the traditional humanist model of a lost or broken immanence (“what has for centuries been denied”) which must be restored. Like Vattimo, he does not imagine our future in the direction of a “transparent society.”

But what other than a local or universal affiliation–a sense of belonging to this tribe, this nation, this race, or to the human race as a whole–could form the basis for any meaningful community? This is where Agamben’s latest book makes, I think, a fundamental contribution to our political thought. The Coming Community delineates the topos of belonging without mobilizing identity politics and without falling back on the idees fixes of humanist discourse.

It is impossible, in the space that remains, to give the reader an adequate sense of the immense scope of Agamben’s philosophical and philological learning. The expected readings of Kant and Heidegger, Benjamin and Kafka, are supplemented at every turn with astonishing examples drawn from medieval logic and analytic philosophy, Talmudic tales and Provencal poetry.

Dense though it is, Agamben’s writing is never turgid or pedantic. Rather, his terse, fluid style is reminiscent (the likeness has been drawn before and will be drawn again) of Walter Benjamin’s.

And like Benjamin (at least in this latest book), Agamben probes contemporary social phenomena–technology and media, the society of the spectacle and the modern fate of social classes, a stocking commercial and Tiananmen Square–in the light of his theoretical expositions.

A lengthier discussion would need to sample some of these exemplary readings (and this entire text proceeds through the by-play, the Bei-spiel, of examples). It might be more useful here, however, to summarize for the reader, against the grain of the text’s singular movement, the gist of the argument. To enhance the critical significance of such a reductive reading, I will place Agamben’s conception of “the coming being” in relation to Nancy’s groundbreaking ideas about community.

In order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally Christian) assumptions we must, Nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). A serious reflection on community requires we answer the call to rethink–at the most mundane level–what it means to be-in-common.

For Nancy this call does not arise from a utopian or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the work, of a subject labouring on itself. The obscure exigency of community comes from the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. This being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. Community or being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity. Rather, being-there (Dasein) is none other than a being-with (Mitsein). The very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to share my existence.

Emphasizing Heidegger’s differential and relational definition of Dasein in order to underline our constitutive being-in-common may be easy enough to follow. What is much more difficult to grasp is that for Nancy, our strange built-in sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. On the contrary, the fact that we are (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts–or resists (a key word for Nancy)–in advance any self- or communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being Italian, being communist–to cite Agamben’s examples). Our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude. What we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon singularity.

The experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both Nancy and Agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism, Nazism). Rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an exposure. We are exposed to the absence of any substantial identity to which we could belong. Exposure to singularity: that means to be scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face, oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.¹⁴ It is this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical singularity, our being-in-common.

Coming now to Agamben, I believe his work helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle. Specifically, he gives positive content to what Nancy is inclined, I think, to describe negatively: namely, the concept of singularity.

The Coming Community opens like this: “The coming being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum–whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common translation of this term as ‘whatever’ in the sense of ‘it does not matter which, indifferently’ is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which,’ but rather ‘being such that it always matters.’ The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire” (1).

The basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being–not in the sense of “I don’t care what you are,” but rather, “I care for you such as you are.” As such you are freed from belonging either to the emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual.

In Agamben’s elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or class (being old, being American, being gay). Nor does it consist in the simple negation of all belonging (here Agamben parts company with Bataille’s notion of the “negative community,” the community of those who have no community). Rather, whatever names a sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. The singular being is not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). This other being always matters to me not because I am drawn to this or that trait, nor because I identify him or her with a favoured race, class, or gender. And certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or the human race.

The other always matters to me only when I am taken with all of his/her traits, such as they are. This defining generosity of the singular means that quodlibet ens is not determined by this or that belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. It belongs to belonging. The singularity of being resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] Such a singularly exposed being wants to belong–which is to say, it belongs to want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love: “The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable” (2).

We must be careful here not to conflate Agamben’s exposition of whatever being with a more familiar discourse on love: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such–this is the lover’s particular fetishism” (2).

But what could a thing with all of its predicates look like? Agamben gives us the example of the human face. Every face is singular. This does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form or universalizes individual features. The face as such is utterly indifferent to what makes it different and yet similar. It is impossible to determine from which sphere–the common or the proper–the face derives its singular expressivity.

In this the face is not unlike handwriting in which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. We cannot say for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or whether the universal form is engendered by these million different scripts and faces.

Whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the face, on “a line of sparkling alternation” (20) between language and word, form and expression, potentiality and act. “This is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers,” Agamben writes, “who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations” (19).¹⁵ The coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of whatever being.

But what, finally, might the politics of whatever belonging be?

Agamben envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes for control of the State, but as an inexorable agon between whatever singularity and state organization. What the State cannot digest is not the political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a community not grounded in any belonging except for the human co-belonging to whatever being.

“What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May,” Agamben points out, “was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands” (85).

Here Agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of May 68. I would even say The Coming Community is (not unlike Vattimo’s book) a belated response to the radical promise–let’s say (using the wrong idiom perhaps), the promise of human happiness–exposed in that event.

In these works by two important Italian thinkers, philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. To a permanent disorientation. To oscillation. To whatever.

Notes

1. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1971), 29.

2. This phrase, “La pensee du dehors,” is the title of Michel Foucault’s important essay on Maurice Blanchot (first published in Critique 229, 1966). Gilles Deleuze elaborates on the theme of exteriority in his excellent book on Foucault Foucault, trans. Sean Hand [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988]). See especially the chapter entitled “Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)” where he links up this early essay with Foucault’s later and better known piece on Nietzschean genealogy.

3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

4. This is the opening sentence of “The Inoperative Community” (trans. Peter Connor, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor [Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 1).

5. I take this phrase from a blurb on the back jacket of the book: “‘This book is of major importance to the debate on the postmodern question.’–Jean-Francois Lyotard.”

6. For a recent–and typical (that is, typically anti-academic)–articulation of this objection see David Rieff’s piece “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner: It’s the newly globalized economy, stupid,” Harper’s 287 August 1993: 17-19.

7. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 226.

8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 15.

9. This quote, not to mention my understanding of the role of oscillation in hermeneutics, comes from Werner Hamacher’s essay “Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutical Circle in Schleiermacher,” trans. Timothy Bahti, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 190.

10. Ibid. 190.

11. In an essay entitled “Hermeneutics and Anthropology” Vattimo is careful to underscore the ideological nature of ethnographic otherness. Anticipating the theme of generalized communication he writes: “The hermeneutic–but also anthropological–illusion of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in which alterity is entirely exhausted. The disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination” The End of Modernity 159). This sobering reminder about the Westernization of third world cultures seems to drop out of Vattimo’s discussion in The Transparent Society where the emphasis falls on heterogeneity not homologation.

12. Edward Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan 11 (Summer 1991): 31.

13. Nancy 22.

14. “Passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. They are not linked. But they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers on this train, in this same space and for this same period of time. They are between the disintegration of the ‘crowd’ and the aggregation of the group, both extremes remaining possible, virtual, and near at every moment. This suspension is what makes ‘being-with’: a relation without relation, or rather, being exposed simultaneously to relationship and absence of relationship” (Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” trans. James Creech, Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991] 7).

15. “Oscillation” is an entirely appropriate word to use in this context for, as Hamacher points out, “oscillum is in fact a derivation of os, mouth, face, and thus means little mouth, little face and mask. Oscillation, understood in its etymological context, would indicate that ‘originary’ movement of language in which it is allotted to something or someone, which has neither language nor face, is neither intuition or concept” (190).

16. This sentence concludes, in parentheses: “(democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao–Bang, was immediately granted)” (85).

September 25, 2013
‘Imagining The Unimaginable’: J.M. Coetzee, History, and Autobiography
Rita Barnard

English Department
University of Pennsylvania
rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu

Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Perspectives on South Africa 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

David Attwell’s important new critical account of J.M. Coetzee’s work takes as its epigraph a statement from one of his interviews with Coetzee, recently collected in Doubling the Point:

I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations--which are shadows themselves--of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light.(341)

The remark is in many ways characteristic of Coetzee: it does not refer in a direct and unproblematic way to any one of his novels; and yet it captures their rigorous sense of their own limitations, as well as their muted utopian dimension. The allusiveness of the statement is also characteristic, in that it rewrites, rather than merely echoes, Plato’s allegory of the cave. Deeply conscious, as always, of our inevitably mediated and tenuous sense of reality (perhaps, in this context, we might call it “History”), Coetzee shares something of Plato’s skepticism about what the poet might do in the world: a body still chained in darkness can scarcely be an “unacknowledged legislator,” nor a herald, nor even a truthful witness. (South African literature, Coetzee once remarked, is “exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write in a prison” [Doubling, 98]). Yet the shadow-play he evokes here–and, he feels, in his fiction–is not quite the trivial passage of objects before the firelight which Plato has us conceive. It is a shadowy premonition of the impossible, of a different way of seeing: one that can only begin at that moment when, first, the body is unshackled, and then the eyes turn to a new order.

This statement, though far more personal, is reminiscent of a moment in Coetzee’s 1986 essay, “Into the Dark Chamber.” The piece recalls how Rosa Burger, the protagonist of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, is thrown into utter confusion as she watches a “black, poor, brutalized” man cruelly whip his donkey in a drunken fury. The act brings to Rosa’s mind, in the rush of an instant, a vision of the entirety of human suffering and torture, especially politically motivated cruelty: “solitary confinement … the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island” (Doubling 367). But it does so in such a way as to render moral judgement impossible: here is “torture without the torturer,” victim hurting victim. How does one proceed beyond this vision? Coetzee asks. He ends his essay with an expression of his longing, with Rosa, for a restoration of ethics, for a “time when all human acts … will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment,” for a society in which it will “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgement”–the gaze of one who has faced the light outside the prison-cave–“to be turned upon scenes of torture” (Doubling, 368).

The imperative to proceed “beyond” is, of course not one that is often indulged in Coetzee’s novels, nor is it clear, from a strictly logical or materialist point of view, that such a move is really possible. What is at stake, when Coetzee, and his critic/interlocutor, ponder this question, is the relationship between the imagination and the real, or, if you will, between textuality and history. This relationship is the main concern of David Attwell’s book. The project of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the distance between two contradictory attitudes towards history on the novelist’s part. The first position, discussed in Attwell’s opening chapter, finds its most forceful expression in Coetzee’s controversial address (“The Novel Today”) to the Weekly Mail Book Week in 1987. Coetzee here insists on the discursive nature of history, and its difference from–and even its enmity to–the discourse of the novel. He describes the position of the South African novelist as follows:

In times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.... (15)

In the face of what we might call the dominant counter- hegemonic discourse of the mass democratic movement, in which literature must become a weapon in “the struggle,” Coetzee resolutely refuses the “correct” position of supplementarity, and claims the separate discourse of the novel, of the story, as his own–beleaguered–terrain.

The second position, discussed in Attwell’s final chapter, emerges from Coetzee’s 1990 interview with the Washington Post, in which “real history” seems to be reaffirmed. A propos of Francis Fukiyama’s (premature) post-Cold War declarations about the global achievement of liberal democracy, the novelist observes:

There is a certain controversy, isn't there, going on right at the moment in the United States about "the end of history"?... The position, expressed in a very crude way, is that the Western democracies have reached a stage in their historical development in which development ceases because there is no stage beyond it.... That very way of seeing the history of mankind is a symptom of the First World ... moving to a plateau of inconsequentiality or irrelevance. It's actually the Third World where history, real history is happening. And the First World has played itself out of the game.(Attwell, 124)

This observation, with which Attwell brings his study to its close, is read as a return to the site of history, “real history,” as a place of privilege.

For Attwell, whose approach to literature is theoretically eclectic but fundamentally historicist, and whose declared purpose is not only to explicate, but to offer a “tribute” to Coetzee’s oeuvre (7), Coetzee’s insistence on novelistic autonomy in “The Novel Today” essay presents something of a political and a methodological problem. As a South African academic, he is only too aware of the critical protest which this kind of position could– and did–elicit; namely, that Coetzee is guilty of a decadent, elitist aestheticism.¹ He seems somewhat embarrassed by the “chilly political choice” and the “exclusively and unhappily Manichean” terms in which it is offered (16-17; Trump 107). It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that this might be the reason why “The Novel Today”–surely one of Coetzee’s most provocative and least circulated pieces–is not included in Doubling the Point.

In fact, however, the main impulse in J.M. Coetzee: Politics and Writing in South Africa is not to evade, but to challenge and complicate such a polarization of history and fictionality, by exploring the ways in which Coetzee’s novels are themselves contextualized. Attwell offers the term “situational metafiction” as a way of suggesting that the tension between the two contradictory positions is both irresolvable and productive. The term, as he argues, is by no means paradoxical: “Coetzee’s figuring of the tension between text and history is itself a historical act, one that must be read back into the discourses of South Africa where on can discern its illuminating power” (3).² Whether or not Coetzee chooses to represent South African history is then far less important, in this study, than the fact that his work consistently registers, even when it tries to escape, the political pressures that shape the act of writing. The historical contextualization we see in Attwell’s text is not the kind Coetzee excoriates in “The Novel Today”: the kind that treats the novels’ conclusions as checkable by history “as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a school mistress” [3].³ Attwell suggests that for Coetzee, as for Jameson, “History” per se is unrepresentable, but, as a political unconscious, leaves its mark on all forms of expression. The position is formulated as follows in Doubling the Point: “it is rare that history should emerge … as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. History, in [Coetzee’s] work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation …” (66).

Compared to the other three full-length studies of Coetzee’s work (by Penner, Dovey, and Gallagher) Attwell’s is by far the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in its treatment of the South African context–historical, political, and literary. Indeed, it is fair to say that only Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context, makes much of an attempt to offer a historicist reading.⁴ Attwell’s book situates the novels not only in terms of political events–the Soweto uprisings, the death in detention of Steve Biko, etc.–the kind of thing that Gallagher, at her greater remove from South Africa, also provides–but in terms of both the academic and political discourses prevalent in South Africa at a given moment.

Attwell is able, for instance, to relate the political stance of Dusklands (1974) to the emergence of a post- liberal discourse in South Africa during the seventies: a phenomenon shaped, in various ways, by the Black Consciousness movement, by Beyers Naude’s Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS), by the first contributions of a South African Marxist historiography, and by the first challenges to the comfortable Leavisite humanism that had dominated South African English departments up to that point. Or, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), he is able to demonstrate that the novel, despite its fictional location and indeterminate time–and despite its stated theme of resistance to “the time of History” as the imposition of a vicious Empire– responds rather specifically to the discourse and practice of the state at a particularly paranoid moment. In the wake of the Soweto uprising, and the fall of colonial regimes to the north, the Apartheid regime developed a “total strategy” to counter the “total onslaught” of terrorists, communists, and agitators at the border (not to mention those in the backyard, under the bed, and behind every bush). The novel’s challenge to “Empire’s” cruel certainties in its quest for self-preservation and its elimination of the “Other,” clearly responds to this time of detentions, bannings, torture, and rumors of torture in South Africa. Moreover, as Attwell argues, the very phantasmagoric remoteness of the novel’s mise-en-scene, has the paradoxically representational dimension of mimicking the phantasmagoric character of the state’s paranoid projections. As one who was subjected at school to classes in “Youth Resistance,” who joked that the Communists invented sex to seduce the Afrikaner teenager, and who listened in astonishment to the callous excuses given for the deaths in detention in the years just before the novel’s publication, I can only confirm the aptness of this contextualization: it is impossible for someone who lived through the late seventies in South Africa to read the novel only as “being about” a fictive never-never land.

But to say this is to minimize the caution with which both Attwell, and Coetzee in Doubling the Point, approach the question of relevant “facts” and “contexts.” (At the beginning of the latter book, for instance, we find Coetzee pondering the problem of writing the history of his intellectual career: “But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall with your evolving purpose. What is the purpose in the present case?” [Doubling 18].) Attwell’s introduction, significantly, offers a kind of apology for his own historicizing efforts: he recognizes that these might go against Coetzee’s “evolving purpose” (which Attwell admits seems to be shifting, in the later novels, in the direction of a kind of self-exploding textuality that opposes the fixed structures of historical consciousness).

The reason for this deference lies in Attwell’s realization that Coetzee’s resistance to history is based on what the novelist sees as an ethical and liberatory imperative. In the interview I referred to at the beginning of this essay, Coetzee reminds Attwell–and all of us–that not just history and necessity, but also freedom, stands beyond representation (freedom is, as Kant argued “the unimaginable”); and insists that (paradoxically) because of the way the overwhelmingly brutal facts of South African history tend to short-circuit the imagination, “the task becomes imagining [the] unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of the imagination to start taking place” (66-8). Coetzee, in short, does not deny his own status as a prisoner of history–but insists on the importance of those shadowy projections: the need to also think of “people slipping off their chains.” Attwell’s historicist study therefore remains constantly, and self- critically aware of Coetzee’s urgent insistence on the qualified freedom of fiction. The result is the first reading of Coetzee’s work that contextualizes and politicizes Coetzee’s novels, even as it articulates the theoretical problem of “history” and recognizes the possible limitations of historically demystifying criticism.⁵

The value and character of Doubling the Point is rather more difficult to pinpoint. It is, as the subtitle announces, a collection of critical essays and interviews. But it is perhaps primarily an autobiography of sorts; and while, as I suggested above, the collection frequently reveals Coetzee’s connections to the modernist tradition, it has to be seen as a rather postmodern autobiography. It offers only a few moments of conventional first person recollection (notably in the essay “Remembering Texas”), as is consistent with Coetzee’s suspicions about any claim to self-presence–a suspicion that makes him favor the mode of the interview, “as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue” (19). What we end up with is, therefore, fragmentary and dialogic; and, while the collection does conclude with a very revealing retrospective statement in the final interview, this too is rather self-deconstructive. Written in the third person, it identifies, as the pivotal moment of the intellectual life we have just reviewed, the essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”: a skeptical exploration of the infinite nature of confession, of the impossibility to ever tell the truth in autobiography.

All this is not to say that many interesting “facts” about Coetzee’s life and thinking do not emerge from Doubling the Point; but that, as I have already suggested, the idea of a personal “history” is from the start problematic. As the final essay states, there is little distinction to be made between the writing of fiction, of criticism, and of autobiography: all of these are modes of storytelling–and in Coetzee’s hand stories are always fictions that will claim no final closure, that are skeptical even of skepticism. Doubling the Point is thus an intriguingly contradictory text: authoritative (the rigor and range of Coetzee’s intellect inevitably give it that austere quality) and anti-authoritarian.

It is perhaps fair to say that none of the critical essays here–to turn to another aspect of Doubling the Point–are as good as, for instance, the introduction and the first chapter of White Writing; nor (inevitably) does the collection, selected for the sake of a more or less chronological intellectual biography, have the thematic coherence of that earlier book. The essays do reveal an impressive range of intellectual work: in addition to the pieces on Beckett, Kafka, Gordimer, and Achterberg, already mentioned, Doubling the Point includes discussions of Tolstoy, Dosteyevsky, Gibbon, Newton, Rousseau, Nabokov, Musil, Barthes, Godard, Girard, Derrida, Lacan, Fugard, La Guma, and also of advertising, censorship, and even rugby. I can live without some of the essays included here, especially those in the “Popular Culture” and the “Syntax” subsections of the book (though Attwell’s attempts to relate them to the fiction are consistently interesting). But at least two of essays in the collection, the Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech and the essay on torture (“Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”), have always seemed to me essential to an understanding of Coetzee’s political vision. I am also delighted that the sardonic Barthesian essay “The Burden of Consciousness in Africa” (on the Fugard/Devenish film The Guest [1977]) will now be available to a wider audience. On the whole, it seems to me that Coetzee is revealed in these essays as something quite rare, if not paradoxical: a very academic, very sophisticated autodidact. I don’t think this assessment would strike him as out of line: Coetzee observes at one point that he has no “field” as a literary scholar, and therefore frequently finds himself in the position of “reinventing philosophical wheels” (243). The results are sometimes extremely rewarding for the reader, and sometimes less so. 14] But the essays per se, do not make Doubling the Point: the book’s extraordinary interest lies in the interviews, which are by far the most engaged, the most revealing, and the most suggestive for readings of Coetzee’s fiction yet to appear. One interview even offers a disarmingly candid assessment (or would the essay on confession rule out my use of the word “candid”?) of the reason why so many of Coetzee’s previous interviews seem so terse and unrevealing. Coetzee quite frankly acknowledges his reputation for being “evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant” to journalistic interviewers (65), but suggests that his difficulty with the ordinary interview ultimately comes from a profound philosophical disagreement with their basic assumptions. On some level, he argues, they believe in the confession, whether as something that comes out of a legal interrogation, or (in a more Rousseauvian mode) from the “transports of unrehearsed speech”; while for Coetzee truth is in silence, and in the dialogic possibilities of writing–in the war between the counter-voices which the act of writing evokes within the writer. (The questions and answers here collected were written, not taped.)

Comments like these illustrate perfectly what we may find in the best moments of Doubling the Point: observations that are both personally revealing, and that suggest, rather than dictate, ways in which we might read Coetzee’s novels. The remarks on the interview, for instance, present us with an extremely important caveat against reading Coetzee too monologically, or against any simplistic identification of Coetzee’s position with a single character. Let us apply this suggestion to a controversial example: in the case of Life and Times of Michael K. we are not necessarily called upon to read the humble gardener as a figure for Coetzee’s putative political, or more exactly, a-political, position. The novel does not straightforwardly tell us (as such commentators as Gordimer and Steven Clingman seem to have thought) to “cultivate our own garden” as Michael K. does. (That position would seem to reach its limit after all when the garden is mined.) Rather, the novel sets in motion a struggle (a “war” in the novel’s terminology) between certain principles, possibilities, readings, and stories.

Another revealing moment in Doubling the Point can be discovered in Coetzee’s moving comments on suffering and the body in the interview preceding the section on “Autobiography and Confession.” I cite his confession at some length:

If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, I'm sure.) ... Let me put it baldly, in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being- overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)(248)

These comments are offered to account for the curious authority of Friday, the mute, mutilated, unassimilable figure from Foe, whom we are finally called upon to think of as standing outside language. (His home, we are told at the novel’s end, is “a place where bodies are their own signs” [157].) But they remind us, more generally, of the importance of the body in all of Coetzee’s novels: the bitten ear of the Hottentot child and the (unforgettable!) anal carbuncle of the explorer in Dusklands, the broken feet and bloodied backs of the prisoners in Waiting for the Barbarians, the harelip and bony frame of the starved Michael K., and the cancer that is slowly destroying Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron. These remarks explain, moreover, why Coetzee identifies so strongly with the moment in Burger’s Daughter I discussed above: that short- circuiting of moral understanding in the face of human brutality is something that he shares, and tries to repair in his fiction.

At the conclusion of Doubling the Point, Coetzee returns us again, surprisingly, to Plato, with a simple insistence that we are somehow born with an idea of justice and truth. This is, as Coetzee is all too aware, a vulnerable and perhaps a naive position, but it is the only way he finds himself able to explain his own marginal position–the paradox of the “colonial postcoloniality” of his texts; the fact that like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians he seems compelled to “choose the side of justice when it is not in one’s material interests to do so” (394-5). The reconstruction of an ethical vision, against the odds of an unbearably violent history, is the imperative with which both these texts finally leave us: Coetzee’s writings, as Attwell concludes, do project beyond their situation, “alerting us to the as yet unrealized promise of freedom” (125).

Notes

1. See for instance Michael Chapman’s comments on Foe as a “kind of masturbatory release, in this country, of the Europeanizing dreams of an intellectual coterie” (335). Cited in Attwell 127-8 fn.

2. In his essay “The Problem of History in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,” Attwell elaborates on the theoretical position underpinning his book (Trump, 128).

3. For a discussion of such readings, see Teresa Dovey, “Coetzee and his Critics: The Case of Dusklands,” English in Africa 14 (1987): 15-30.

4. The title of Dick Penner’s book, Countries of the Mind, declares candidly that his interest lies elsewhere; and Teresa Dovey, while deploying an extremely limited notion of South African discursive codes which Coetzee subverts, has even less interest in any kind of historical specificity. (Schreiner seems to be the only other South African writer she has actually read.) As Attwell so neatly puts it, Dovey challenges those naive critics who would turn Coetzee’s work into a supplement to history, but then turns it into a supplement to Lacan (2).

5. There is an interesting discussion in Doubling the Point of Coetzee’s increasing resistance to symptomatic readings in his own criticism: “Why am I now suspicious of such suspiciousness?” Coetzee asks himself (106). The answer he ventures is that demystificatory criticism tends to privilege mystification. Attwell’s criticism seems to me to be influenced by this discussion. (See, for instance, 118-19.)

Works Cited
- Attwell, David. “J.M. Coetzee and the Problem of History.” Trump 94-133. Rpt. Poetics Today 11 (Fall 1990): 579-615.
- Chapman, Michael. “The Writing of Politics and the Writing of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading … (?)” Rev. of Dovey. Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1988): 327-41.
- Clingman, Stephen. “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s.” Trump 41-60.
- Coetzee, J.M. “Author on History’s Cutting Edge. South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee: Visions of Doomed Heroics.” Interview. Washington Post 27 Nov, 1990: C1, C4.
- —. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1987.
- —. “The Novel Today.” Upstream 6 (1988): 2-5.
- Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988.
- Fukiyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.
- Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Gordimer, Nadine. “The Idea of Gardening.” Rev. of Life and Times of Michael K. New York Review of Books 2 Feb. 1984: 3,6.
- Penner, Dick. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
- Trump, Martin. Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 1990): 94-133.
September 25, 2013
Authorizing Memory, Remembering Authority
Mark Fenster

Department of Telecommunications
Indiana University
fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu

Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

“Best Evidence is the story of my journey in search of the truth about the autopsy [of John F. Kennedy]. When my literary agent first read this manuscript, he said, ‘You have written a book about authority.’ No, I said, I’ve written a book about the assassination. I didn’t understand, but he did. This is a book about authority because it delves into the process by which we–as individuals and as a society–decide what is true and what is false; what is to be believed and what is not” (Lifton 1992, xviii).

Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body are quite removed from the often heady world of Kennedy assassination researchers, a world in which David Lifton is a lofty, though somewhat controversial figure. Schudson is a sociologist, Zelizer is in a rhetoric and communication department, and neither is interested in the minutiae of medical evidence and the geopolitical speculation that are at the heart of Warren Commission critics. However, they would both agree with Lifton that the debates around such “critical incidents” as the Kennedy assassination(s) and Watergate are indeed as much about authority as they are about “truth” and the never ending and seemingly impossible search for it. While Schudson and Zelizer have written very different books on these events and their implications in their own time and in the present, their projects are quite similar and are worthy of comparison for the study of social memory and contemporary culture.

Specifically, they share the purpose of attempting to use the very problematic events that they discuss in order to make arguments about contemporary American culture. Schudson is interested in “collective memory,” and how societies institutionalize memories, and particularly historical memories, in cultural forms and social practices. Zelizer traces the establishment of journalistic authority in and over the Kennedy assassination–the title phrase, “covering the body,” refers to the actual media “coverage” of Kennedy and his death (ironically, the term was used before the assassination to refer to those whose beat was following the President to Dallas or wherever he went). Both authors, then, are using these events as case studies for projects that seek to move beyond mere historical chronicles, and this movement beyond history and into memory and authority are among the main strengths and weaknesses of these books. These were and remain, as both authors document, important events in recent American history and memory, and their reverberations throughout politics and culture are still felt; in the past year, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in was commemorated by a CBS documentary, while a “Director’s Cut” of Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK has just been released on video, with a number of scenes “restored” from the shorter version that met the time constraints imposed by Time-Warner. As powerful historical events that took place at crucial conjunctures in recent American history, Watergate and the Kennedy assassination can tell us much about such diverse topics as the function of memory and the practice of journalism; however, as such, these events can and often do exceed such attempts to “use” them. In other words, because there is far more to Watergate and JFK’s assassination than the rather specific theoretical and political interests with which these authors come to these events, their attempts to somewhat sharply focus, or to cut off a discursive slice of an “event” in order to examine “American Culture,” at times yields frustrating results.

* * * * *

Zelizer is most interested in the “interpretive community” of journalists, and how the “cultural authority” of (certain) journalists is asserted and maintained. “Journalism,” in this sense, refers to more than merely the printed page or the broadcast; it comprises the discursive practices authorized and legitimated in professional meetings of journalists, journalism textbooks, codes of professionalism, journalists’ folklore, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. Zelizer argues that the overarching narrative of journalism and the journalist is a structuring principle of journalistic discourse; the journalistic community constitutes itself, she argues, via the stories it tells about itself in order to legitimate itself and what it does.

Within this interpretive community and American culture in general, the Kennedy assassination serves as a “critical incident” (a moment ‘by means of which people air, challenge, and negotiate their own standards of action'[4]) in its historical position within the emergence of television news as a primary form of journalism, the chaotic circumstances of the assassination and the ability of the media to narrate and explain seemingly inexplicable information, and the close ties between the Kennedy administration and many members of the press. This was a story that was clearly “told” first and foremost by journalists–the trickling out of facts, the live coverage of the Oswald murder and the Kennedy funeral, and the early legitimation of the Warren Commission report were all dependent upon the reporting of the news media. And a number of prominent journalists, among them current CBS news anchor Dan Rather and Washington Post pundit David Broder, established themselves as important news figures while covering this event, and continue to keep the event alive within their own work and autobiographies (none more so than Rather, who seems to obsessively cover the story whenever it seems necessary for CBS to give it further prime time coverage). Zelizer is at her best when documenting and describing this obsessive use of the coverage by news organizations and journalists, and persuasively documents how journalists established themselves as “preferred spokespersons of the assassination story” (137).

In addition, her discussion of the struggles over journalism’s association with this story provides a good framework for understanding both the conflicts between journalistic and historical discourse, and those between “legitimate” explanations of the assassination and the explanations offered by Warren Commission critics, as exemplified by Stone and JFK. By asserting themselves as main spokespersons of the assassination story, journalists and news organizations were, and remain, poachers on the territory of historians; this was, after all, a presidential assassination, and can only be understood, so historians argue, within its proper historical context and with the “disinterested” and distanced care of the historian. Yet the assassination remains in the realm of the popular; the “explanations” of the event provided by Dan Rather or James Reston are more widely circulated and have greater purchase on social memories of the event than those of prominent historians (the recent “forum” in the American Historical Review on JFK [1992] was itself a rather problematic attempt to enable historians to engage in the popular debate about the popular film).

If historians represent one challenge to journalistic authority (or, more precisely, if journalists represent one challenge to the authority of historians), then Warren Commission critics represent a similar, though quite different struggle over the meaning of the event. Indeed, no group is more willing to provide an extended critique of the mass media and news organizations as instruments of propaganda than these “independent researchers,” who often come across as a poor person’s Noam Chomsky (this is intended as a compliment to the researchers). At the same time, the mainstream media view the work of these researchers with disdain, if indeed they view it at all. The incredible backlash against Stone and his film, which began before the film was even released, was, as Zelizer argues, as much an attempt to re-assert journalistic authority as it was an attempt to review a film; after all, if Stone was in any way correct, then journalistic accounts are willing or unwilling accomplices to a great cover-up. Thus the debate over the ethics of cinematic representation (i.e., which sequences and images were “real” and which were “fiction”?) was often a displacement of journalistic and mainstream political anxiety over who was telling the tale of the assassination and how it was being told. In this sense, this debate over the Kennedy assassination as a public event, no matter whether Stone is right, is very much about authority.

Yet a central problem of the book lies precisely in questions that arise in Zelizer’s definition of “authority,” as she seems reluctant to explain fully how she would define journalistic (and media) authority. On the one hand, she wants to emphasize what she sees as a “collective” set of knowledge and practices, and she seems to reject or at least to modify the classic left association of the media with the protection of and assistance to power and influence in the transmission of ideologically limited and distorted information (6-7). And yet she closes her book with a discussion of the importance of an “acquiescent,” “relatively uncritical and inattentive” American public in the crafting of journalistic authority. How “collective” is a media complex so removed from an invisible and seemingly powerless public and dependent upon electronic media and stars, and how does journalistic authority survive if not via the transmission of certain types of narratives and not others?

Despite these lingering political and theoretical questions, the book admirably meets its central objective of chronicling and critiquing journalistic discourses of authority. Yet it leaves me dissatisfied because of its inadequate recognition of what I would call the “excesses” of popular political/cultural events like the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. I’m referring here to both disciplinary and phenomenological excess: the assassination was “experienced” and continues to be remembered and “experienced” on a seemingly infinite number of personal, cultural and political levels, and can and has been argued over and “explained” by as many disciplinary authorities as have looked into it. This is why, in some ways, Don Delillo’s Libra can represent the event more powerfully than sociology of journalism can (or should be expected to); it is also why the vast and polymorphous corpus of pro- and anti-Warren Commission authors provides a fascinating, Joycean vision of virtually all aspects of the event.

This is not to say that Zelizer’s project is inherently flawed or that it tells us nothing; rather, it represents a good starting point for understanding the workings of discursive practices of authority in popular historical events such as this. It does, however, mean that in so tightly focusing her study on an event that needs a very wide screen, her argument at times becomes diffused within the broader implications of the murder of a president. Her very controlled academic prose and her staid sociological approach can explain the workings of journalists quite well; yet they can only describe one aspect of the event and the discourse that surrounded and still surrounds it. And at times, this excess seems to overwhelm the book’s premise–after all, if, as polls indicate, the American public disbelieves the findings of the Warren Commission and distrusts the media, then what exactly does “journalistic authority” over the event amount to? What is an authority that has a virtual monopoly on the circulation of information and the construction of historical narratives, and yet is so ineffectual that after thirty years of reiterating its official story of the Kennedy assassination almost nobody appears to believe what it tells them? Sociology of journalism such as Zelizer’s can help us to understand the attempt to control the excess of events like the Kennedy assassination. It remains for further work to explain the institutional and popular practices that attempt, sometimes successfully, to exceed this control.

* * * * *

Schudson’s book is more directly concerned with issues that are central to theorizing the practices of postmodernity: the construction, circulation and institutionalization of memory. Like Zelizer, Schudson is interested in authority, although his emphasis is less on the interests of any one specific group than on the use of and struggle over the events and meanings of Watergate. The book is written in engaging and, compared with Covering the Body, relatively informal and enjoyable prose; it is also neat and tightly constructed, beginning with a concise discussion of theories of social memory, a review of the central political elements of Watergate, and a series of case studies of the use of memory in post-Watergate reform politics, journalistic practice, and historical accounts, as well as in popular culture, language, autobiographies of Watergate participants, and in the self-serving Richard Nixon Library. Among other uses Schudson describes, memories of Watergate have been “mobilized” for the sake of political careers, “contested” in political practice, “ignited” in the discourse surrounding the revelations of and responses to the Iran-Contra scandal, and “besieged” in Nixon’s campaign to restore his personal reputation. In addition, Schudson argues that the revelations of Watergate were easily articulated with growing suspicions and distrust of government (which, as he cogently asserts, had begun prior to Nixon’s fall) as well as with the release of information about the sins of the American security apparatus at home and abroad. At the same time, he demonstrates how the discourse concerning Watergate generally ignores a central source for the conflict between Nixon, the Congress, and popular protest–the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia.

Watergate in American Memory is particularly effective in its mapping out of the various reactions to Watergate by different political groups. Schudson divides and sub-divides such responses: first, in terms of whether the event was understood as a constitutional crisis (generally by liberal and conservative centrists) or a scandal (i.e., as a superficial “show” that covered up greater manipulation by elite groups, generally believed by what he terms “ultraconservatives” and the “radical left”), and then by virtue of whether the problem that Watergate represented was caused by systemic shortcomings within the American political system (liberals and leftists) or was peculiar to the Nixon presidency (centrists and conservatives of all stripes). Clearly, these differing reactions concern the construction of larger historical narratives and the placement of Watergate within these narratives; as Schudson argues, understanding and remembering Watergate is an ongoing process and struggle over identifying actors, motives and context.

In this sense, Watergate represents the process of contemporary historical knowledge and memory; it was, at once, a Historical Event, an object of intense media scrutiny, and a site of popular knowledge and debate. Against the tirades of academics and intellectuals on the right and left which posit an American culture that lacks any memory of itself and others, Schudson conceives of a United States that immerses itself in certain texts and practices of popular history, such as the memory of the historical in relation to the personal remembrance, “amateur” historical research, and the popular political discourse of the mass media and everyday life. Like the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate is both popularly “forgotten” (in the “properly” historical sense of the knowledge of specific facts and human agents) and obsessed over in the struggle to understand and define the implications of these events and their relationship to the present. To remember Watergate is to remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Ervin committee hearings, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman–thus illustrating the continuing importance of popular narratives and memories in understanding contemporary political events and crises. For the study of contemporary culture, this emergent notion of memory as popular and (mass) mediated rather than as authoritative and mediated through “proper” historical channels is of considerable value.

My frustration with Schudson’s book is his tendency to set up a continuum of political and theoretical positions and to attempt to occupy what he constructs as a reasonable, yet transcendent, middle ground. This appears first in his validation and appropriation of virtually every political response to Watergate; he agrees, yet limits his own agreement, with those who see it as scandal and constitutional crisis, as peculiar to Nixon and as part of systemic problems with the Presidency. Unwilling to assume any one of these positions, he seems ready to occupy all at once. Yet taken to their logical conclusions, these positions are mutually exclusive: if Watergate was the successful resolution of a crisis through the removal of the constitutional threat and the reform of legislation and policy, then it could not have been a scandal constructed by the power or media elite to retain legitimacy for a corrupted system or to depose a conservative president. Similarly, while one might agree that Nixon’s was a singular presidency, the reign of Reagan was competitive in the breadth and fury of its domestic and foreign covert operations–and thus, clearly, Nixon’s singularity is far less significant than the systemic structures that allow for two such imperial presidencies in successive decades. While Schudson notes this, his apparent desire to remain above such “partisan” politics demonstrates an unwillingness to confront the issues of power that (what he might term) the “radical left” position would require of him. Because he chose Watergate as a case study of social memory, Schudson is obliged, it seems to me, to express a good deal more righteous indignation at the politics of the era and the treachery of the Nixon regime; this is neither a question of “objectivity” nor correct politics, but part of the terrain that comes with choosing such a controversial event for a case study of social memory.

This becomes more apparent in his lack of a satisfactory theory of memory. He provides worthy critiques of some of the problems with “interest” theories (i.e., critical theories of the ideological uses of memory), “cultural” theories (the symbolic logic of remembrance within specific cultures) and social constructionist theories (the construction of the past in the memory of present observers), yet seems to argue neither for a singular different theory nor for one that appropriates the best aspects of all of them. While he posits memory as a “scarce resource” that is “handed down through particular cultural forms and transmitted in particular cultural vehicles” (207, 5), he seems unwilling to note the degree to which, in his case studies, it is the power and media elite who construct the dominant, though not unchallenged, narratives of Watergate. While one would certainly want to qualify simplistic notions of ideology that would claim such discourse as all-powerful, the sheer dominance of certain ways of understanding and using Watergate for political ends demonstrates the viability of radical critiques of dominant discourse. Clearly, “American memory” is a site of struggle, but one in which certain groups and interests enjoy greater ability than others to manage what is remembered and how it is remembered.

If, as I would argue, an important dimension of postmodernity is the increasingly sophisticated array of strategies and technologies by means of which certain groups attempt to “manage” the construction and reconstruction of historical knowledge, then Watergate, as a text that was at its very core covert and opaque, seems a seminal example of the relationship between power, the realm of the political, and memory in contemporary American culture. As with the Kennedy assassination, memories of Watergate are aspects of the cultural struggle to construct and authorize certain narratives and explanations of the past. Zelizer and Schudson successfully document aspects of this process; the challenge for theories of postmodernity is to further map social memory within matrices of knowledge, power, and domination.

Works Cited
- “AHR Forum: JFK.” American Historical Review Apr. 1992: 486-511.
- Lifton, David. Best Evidence. New York: Signet, 1992.
- Stone, Oliver and Zachary Sklar. JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books, 1992.
September 25, 2013
If I Only Had a Brain

Steven Shaviro

Department of English
University of Washington
shaviro@u.washington.edu

Burroughs writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” Good advice for the anatomically deranged, like Cliff Steele. He’s a character in the DC/Vertigo comic book DOOM PATROL; I refer in particular to the issues written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Richard Case, between 1989 and 1992 (#s 19-63). Cliff has a problem with his body, you see. It happened like this. He used to be a daredevil racing car driver; he had a horrible wreck. Nearly all of him was burned to ashes, but they snatched his brain from the flames. And then they implanted that brain in a new prosthetic body, all shiny metal, ultra high tech, a veritable fighting machine. Now Cliff is the muscle of the DOOM PATROL, a brain turned into brawn. They expect him to be a macho bruiser, when actually he’s quite sensitive underneath. And to add insult to injury, they call him Robotman–a name he violently hates. What would that do for your sense of self-esteem? The life of a superhero these days! Cliff thinks of himself as just a regular guy; Robocop fantasies are the last thing on his mind. But with a metallic casing like this, he can’t exactly blend into the crowd. It’s what Baudrillard calls hyper-visibility, the postmodern condition par excellence. No chance of chilling out with a secret identity, like old Clark Kent used to do. All this metal is a clunky encumbrance, no matter how great its tensile strength. You know you’re in bad shape when you bang your head against a wall, and you still don’t feel a thing. At this point, Cliff doesn’t even really know what his body can do. How good is all this cyber-tech stuff anyway? How accurate and detailed is sensory input? How fast is motor response? What unaccustomed relays and connections now trigger the pain and pleasure centers in Cliff’s brain? Will he ever be able to taste and smell? Can he ever have sex again? What about getting drunk or stoned? “The only good thing about having a human brain in a robot body,” Cliff remarks sardonically at one point, “is that it’s easier to control brain chemistry.” Just the touch of a button, and anxiety is dissipated, alertness is heightened, or memory is enhanced. But alas, this techno-manipulation seems to work only for utilitarian ends, and not for hedonistic ones. “Our machines are disturbingly lively,” Donna Haraway writes, “and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” It might not be so bad, if only you could get used to the situation. After all, Descartes argued long ago that the body is a machine. It shouldn’t matter all that much whether metal or flesh is the medium. In either case, it’s simply a matter of mastering the electrochemical interface: regularizing chains of association, facilitating neural feedback patterns, reinforcing the appropriate re-entrant connections. In short, a question of recognition and memory, of cultivating habits over the course of time. The problem is that Cliff’s mechanical body never stays the same. He’s continually being sent back to the shop for upgrades and repairs. Transistors burn out; programming errors and faulty couplings throw him off stride. He gets into fights, and enemies regularly mangle his metal to bits. As if that weren’t bad enough, Doc Magnus (who built and programmed his body in the first place) and Niles Caulder (the Chief of the DOOM PATROL) tend to use Cliff as a pawn in their ongoing professional rivalry. Neither of them is content to let well enough alone; they are both all too eager to retool him in order to try out their latest cybernetic design ideas. And let’s not even think about those insectoid aliens who at one point fit Cliff out in a new metal carapace with six legs. Life in a robot body, even if you’re strong, is just one humiliation after another. The persistence of memory in the brain only makes things worse. Amputees typically feel phantom sensations in their lost limbs; poor Cliff has this problem multiplied many times over. He must endlessly relive numerous episodes of mutilation and dismemberment. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Woody Allen–our two best-known icons of hetero-male angst–ever had to go through anything remotely like this.

The worst part, though, is the waiting. All these body modifications take time, just as it takes time to alter a dress or a pair of pants. Cliff’s brain is disconnected meanwhile, and left in a vat of nutrient fluids. The experience isn’t exactly like returning to the womb. You don’t get some soothing “oceanic feeling”; rather, you freak out from sensory deprivation. The first stage is “boredom: hearing nothing, seeing nothing, experiencing nothing. Boredom and irritation and then panic.” Panic, because the brain (like nature) abhors a vacuum. So that’s when the hallucinations begin: “nightmares of sound and vision, grotesque sensory distortions.” Cliff is overwhelmed by paranoid delusions of a world controlled by malevolent insects and soulless infernal machines. “The body becomes remote, robotic, disconnected,” a symptom of the schizophrenic’s “sense of being abstracted from the day-to-day physical world.” But if this is the case with me, then what about other people? “Maybe I’m not the robot, and everyone else is.” It doesn’t help to realize that this is just a virtual world, and that your own brain is generating all these visions. If anything, such an awareness only makes things worse: your ontological insecurity is heightened, while the horrors you confront don’t for all that become any less vivid and intense. If only I could attribute these appearances to a malevolent programmer, to somebody like Descartes’ evil demon! Then at least I’d have the comfort of knowing that somebody else is out there, that I’m not absolutely alone. True hell for Cliff is the solipsistic universe of Bishop Berkeley, in which nothing exists except one’s own inner perceptions: a closed circle from which there is no escape.

But fortunately this idealist delirium doesn’t last forever; eventually the hallucinations subside. Virtual reality is a great leveller: “nothing can pass through without being broken down, disintegrated.” And so Cliff finally reaches a sort of nirvana, “something I can’t describe: the center of the cyclone, the room without doors.” Now becoming grinds to a halt; time no longer passes, you have all the time in the world. Plenty of time to meditate upon the Smiths lyric that opens and closes one episode of DOOM PATROL: “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?” The question resonates in the emptiness like a Zen koan: ironic, unanswerable, absurd. Meditate long enough, and the inner self, the first person of the Cartesian cogito, drops out of the picture. You’re left with the great postmodern discovery, anticipated alike by Hume and by the Buddhists: that personal identity is a fiction. The Cartesian subject disappears, together with all that it created. When I introspect deeply, I may come across all sorts of experiential contents and structures: feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, multiple personalities, and so on. But the one thing I am absolutely unable to find is myself.

The conundrum of the brain in a vat is an old philosophical slapstick routine, our updated postmodern version of Descartes’ original Meditations. The question is always the same: how can I know for sure that these inner representations correspond to something out there, that what I experience is real? How can I be absolutely certain that I’m not just a disembodied mind dreaming the external world, or that it isn’t all a computer simulation fed into my brain through direct innervation of the neuronal fibers? The comedy lies in this: that it’s only my hysterical demand for certainty that first introduces the element of doubt. It’s only by subjecting myself to the horrors of sensory deprivation that I approach the delirious limit at which the senses become questionable. Descartes does just that in his Third Meditation: “I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses . . . .” Descartes “proves God,” as Samuel Beckett puts it, “by exhaustion.” As metaphysics goes, it’s the oldest trick in the book: first you take something away, then you complain that it isn’t there, and then you invent a theory grounded in–and compensating for–its very absence. Deleuze and Guattari call it the Theology of Lack. A seductive ruse, to be sure: once you accept the premises, you’ve already been suckered into the conclusions.

“If I only had a brain . . . .” For as one character in DOOM PATROL remarks, “Descartes was nothing but a miserable git who never had a good time in his entire life!” Postmodern philosophers rightly reject the very logic that gets us into the dualist impasse. Descartes’ methodical doubt is ultimately a distinction without a difference, since it has no pragmatic consequences whatsoever. For consider the alternatives. Either there’s some telltale sign, which allows us empirically to determine whether or not we’re just brains kept in vats: in which case the whole sorry mess is merely a question of fact, without any deeper epistemological import. Or else, there’s no way of telling: but in this case, we have nothing to worry about, since experience remains the same one way or the other. “The mystery, as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden says, “is that there is no mystery.” Perhaps the evil demon posited by Descartes gets some private, masturbatory delectation out of fooling us like this; but that needn’t be any concern of ours. For the evil demon can’t do anything to us, can’t harm us or change us or otherwise affect us, without thereby tipping his hand and revealing his existence. Descartes’ dilemma is resolved without dualism, then, and without positing a transcendent self, simply by noting that appearances and simulacra are themselves perfectly real. The cogito is reduced to a third-person tautology: things are exactly as they are, “everything is what it seems.” In this postmodern life, “we have to take things as we find them.”

But such logic and such consolations are of little help to Cliff Steele, trapped as he is in all that heavy metal–except for the even worse times when his naked brain is actually left to stew and hallucinate in a vat. If modern Western rationality begins with Descartes’ self-mutilating gesture, perhaps it culminates in Cliff’s absurd disembodiment. For Cliff is the final, helpless, involuntary victim of a whole history of amputations. He iss compelled literally to live out the disabling paradoxes of Cartesian dualism. He suffers every day from schizophrenic disjunctions between the real and the imaginary, between self and other, between vitalism and mechanism, between mind and body. The problem may be a false one philosophically, but it’s still inscribed in our technology. Descartes’ idle speculations are now as it were incised in Cliff’s very flesh. Doc Magnus and the Chief mess with Cliff’s head more insidiously than the evil demon ever could. Their operations give dualism a delirious new twist: for now it’s Cliff’s mind that is materially incarnated, while his corporeality is entirely notional, virtual, simulacral. Such is our postmodern refinement of those old metaphysical endeavors to find the ultimate reality, to separate essence from accident. Descartes’ cogito and Husserl’s epoche were merely thought experiments; but now we can realize their equivalents in actual surgical procedures. Strip everything away that is not indubitably “Cliff Steele,” that is not necessarily contained in the very notion of his essence; and what’s left is precisely these three pounds of neuronal tissue, a fleshy lump “so full of water that it tends to slump like a blancmange if placed without support on a firm surface” (Anthony Smith, The Body). Since Cliff’s only ‘identity’ is that of this actual, physical brain, you might say that his sole grounding certitude is that he is an extended thing–as against Descartes’ claim to be a thinking thing. Just as you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, so you can’t get amputated unless you have a body.

The Chief claims that the operation was a success, that it’s all turned out for Cliff’s own greater good. The old Cliff Steele, he says, was “selfish, arrogant, overconfident, ill-educated . . . a loudmouthed, misogynistic boor”; it’s only through the traumas of amputation and cyborgization that the new Cliff has “learned kindness and compassion and a selfless heroism.” DOOM PATROL is quite different from the revisionist superhero comics that made a big splash in the mid to late 80s: Alan Moore’s Watchmen (with Dave Gibbons), Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), and Grant Morrison’s own Batman: Arkham Asylum (with Dave McKean). All these works “deconstruct” our familiar images of comic book superheroes. They go behind the scenes to reveal what we should’ve suspected all along: that Batman and all those other patriotic, costumed crime-fighters are really violent sociopaths with fascist-cum-messianic leanings and a kinky underwear fetish. Everything gets played out for these sordid characters in the registers of secrecy, disguise, and paranoia: literally in the form of their jealous anxieties about maintaining a “secret identity,” and more figuratively in terms of those notorious paradoxes of destroying the world in order to save it, or stepping outside of the law in order to enforce the law. As old Mayor Daley of Chicago once said, “the police are not there to create disorder; the police are there to preserve disorder.” Miller’s Batman and Moore’s tormented anti-heroes owe much to the creepy affectlessness and suppressed fury of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Indeed, their hoods and masks go Clint one better, when it comes to maintaining an unreadable, deadpan exterior. The crimefighter’s costume is a literal “character armor,” rigidly neutralizing whatever may rage beneath–and thereby perpetuating the modernist fantasy that there is a “beneath,” something like manhood or interiority or selfhood. Most of these psychotic superheroes are still organically human; but it’s only one more step to outright cyborgs like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Peter Weller’s Robocop (in fact, Frank Miller wrote the scripts for Robocop II and III). And hasn’t there always been something cyborg-like about Clint? In these cyborg fantasy films, in any case, the superhero’s costume–I include Arnold’s muscles in this category–no longer works as a disguise. Now it’s a prosthetic organ of strength, a kind of supplemental, rebuilt manhood. Todd McFarlane’s comic book Spawn (a series to which Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have both contributed) presents an even more fascinating case. Here, the protagonist’s costume is not just an article of clothing, nor even a mechanical interface, but a living inhuman being in its own right: a sexually voracious, “constantly-evolving neural parasite” from Hell that brings Al Simmons back from the dead, heightens his metabolism, encases him in an unbreachable protective carapace, and takes command of his central nervous system. The image is definitely arthropodal: hard armor on the outside, guarding some soft squishy stuff within. Al’s body is nearly invulnerable; but this security only intensifies his hidden anguish. He wallows in the misery of living in back alleys with the homeless, and mourns the loss of his wife and child. And so Al gets to display his macho prowess, while at the same time laying claim to a deep inner sensitivity, a self-righteous feeling of vulnerability and victimization. Can Robert Bly and his “men’s movement” be far behind? Again and again it’s the same old story: a near-catatonic rigidity that can be breached only in outbursts of extreme cathartic violence, whether by banging drums in the woods, or by blowing away the slavering hordes of sickos and scumbags with your .357 Magnum. At least Clint has a keen sense of irony about it all–which is more than you can say for Bly or for Woody Allen. Some guys’ll do anything to redeem their lonely, frustrated lives. And so they endow their experience with a certain self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of masculinity under siege. It feels so good to be a victim, ’cause then you’ve got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you’ve had to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You imagine your ‘manhood’ as something both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. Like a penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. But why even bother, why hold back? Why not just let yourself go? Why cling to this rigid exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self? Can Cartesian dignity mean that much to you? OK, OK, you’ll say–together with Descartes and with Arnold–this body is only a machine, but there’s still something inside that’s really me. I had to destroy my cock in order to save it: I tore it apart and had it recast in hard, cutting metal–a strategy implicit in many of these films, and savagely literalized in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Iron Man. McLuhan describes such techno-hysteria as an inevitable defensive reaction to change, “a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.” But McLuhan also insists that there’s no backing away from the dilemma: “there is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense ‘closure’ evoked by the TV image.” It isn’t a question of adapting ourselves to the new technological environment, but of realizing that this technology already is our adaptation. We must cultivate the new sensations offered to us by our new organs. And if masculinity can’t keep up with the changes, then so much the worse for masculinity.

Grant Morrison understands these dynamics better than anybody. His Batman: Arkham Asylum pushes the revisionist superhero comic to a parodic point of no return. Batman’s old enemies, now inmates of this asylum for the criminally insane, tauntingly invite him to join them. For isn’t the ‘virtual’ freedom of madness more appealing than the tedium of life in the ‘real’ world, “confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity”? Batman is all too receptive to this seduction. He knows he’s as crazy as any of them, what with his bizarre fixations and his hysterical rage for order. He senses that walking through the doors of Arkham Asylum will be “just like coming home.” And indeed, once he arrives, the blood of self-mutilation flows unchecked. Virility crumbles in an onslaught of psychedelic dislocation. The Cartesian fiction of the mind as a faithful “mirror of nature” (Rorty) is shattered and scattered into the multiple grotesque reflections of the Asylum’s funhouse mirrors. The Joker captures Batman, but declines to unmask him and reveal his secret identity; for he knows that the Caped Crusader’s mask already “is his real face.” I’ve loved the Joker ever since I was a child, so I was thrilled by Morrison’s reinvention of his character. The Joker may well be a gleefully sadistic mass murderer, but he’s also an exemplary postmodern subject. For he “has no real personality; he creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.” The Joker responds to the “chaotic barrage” of his overloaded senses–the postmodern information glut–in a radically new manner. Not by choosing and discriminating among his perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. But simply by “going with the flow”; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just lets it all happen. Unlike Batman, the Joker no longer needs the “protective buffers” that McLuhan feared were numbing us to change. He knows that the only way out is first of all a way in and through. His great adaptive innovation is to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-Euclidean forms. Far from being mad, the Joker may in fact represent “some kind of super-sanity . . . . a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.”

The Joker’s difference from Batman parallels McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media. “A hot medium,” McLuhan says, “is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’” Its chief characteristics are “homogeneity, uniformity, and linear continuity.” Hot media are imperious, unidirectional, even terroristic. They demand rapt contemplation or close, obsessive attentiveness. Your life at every second depends upon their dictates, and yet they leave you feeling strangely uninvolved. They keep you at a proper, ‘alienated’ distance, drawing you into a paranoid frenzy of endless interpretation. This is the culture of the Book: of fundamentalist Christians scrutinizing their Bibles, and of academic Marxists “reading” the insidious ideologies embedded in the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday life. Batman is a quintessentially hot figure, ever on the lookout for miniscule clues that will confirm his Manichean sense of the world’s depravity. Cool media, to the contrary, are ‘low-definition,’ and for that very reason “high in participation or completion by the audience.” Their sparse spaces welcome and envelop us. They are characterized by “pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity,” and they solicit high levels of feedback and involvement. A cool medium, McLuhan says in a famous pun, offers you a massage rather than a message: a multi-textured, tactile and sensual experience, rather than the rational finality of a meaning to be decoded. There is nothing to interpret. Instead, cool media invite the kind of open reception that Michael Taussig, elaborating on Walter Benjamin, calls distraction: “a very different apperceptive mode, a type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral visual perception.” This is the Joker’s random drift, a delirious passivity brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. With innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date. It’s no longer a case of me against the world. Contrary to the overwrought claims of Neil Postman, Jerry Mander, and other such high-minded media pundits, nobody’s ever been brainwashed by watching TV. In fact, most people talk back to their sets. As Clark Humphrey puts it, “people who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming . . . . A typical nonviewer may believe almost anything, [but] a typical TV viewer treats everything with (excess?) skepticism.” Our cheerful postmodern skepticism–reacting as if everything were just “on TV,” or always already in quotation marks–is poles apart from modernist angst or from Cartesian methodical doubt. You can’t ever defeat the evil demon in open battle, but you can put him in his place once you realize that he has more in common with Chuck Barris and Maury Povich than he does with Satan or with God.

You might say that when Cliff Steele lost everything except for his brain, he was thrust willy-nilly into this cool new postmodern world. With all his “protective buffers” gone, he was preadapted to change. He had no choice but to be plugged directly into the “extension of the central nervous system” that electronic media have made of our planet. The Chief is right: something inside Cliff has been altered forever, so there’s no point in even trying to recover what was lost. “We have to take things as we find them,” amputations and all. This is “what it’s like” to be a postmodern cyborg. Prosthetic surgery is painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. It’s all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you can stand to lop off, or just how far back you’re willing to go. Daniel Dennett notes that the question of the interface is the fatal weak point of every mind/body dualism: how can something be wholly immaterial, and yet still have material effects? Descartes placed the transfer point in the pineal gland; phenomenologists extend it to the surface of the skin; spiritualists push it even further out, to the ectoplasmic aura that surrounds us like a crustacean carapace or a superhero’s sheath. But for Cliff it no longer makes sense even to draw the line. Neurons and wires are much the same stuff. The electro-chemical feedback loops that constitute Cliff’s brain are of the same nature as those that are wired into his prosthetic body, or that course across the entirety of the postmodern “global village.” Cliff’s feelings, like the ashes of his former body, are scattered more or less everywhere. But there’s no one single point at which the experiences become “his own.”

So in this strange way, Cliff is the postmodern Everyman. He hasn’t quite become feminized, but at least he’s no “misogynistic boor.” It’s true that he suffers from a certain baffled frustration, from a perpetual sense of unfulfilled duty, from frequent bouts of self-pity, and from a chronic inability to relax. It’s true also that his lovely thirst for the concrete can’t be quenched by any number of virtual or psychedelic wonders. Nothing seems vital to Cliff any more; as his psychiatrist asks him at one point, “how must it feel to have saved a world you don’t really believe is worth saving?” But unlike the old superheroes, Cliff doesn’t feel any differently about the world than he does about himself. The distinction of inner and outer simply isn’t relevant any more. That’s why Cliff’s pathos has nothing vengeful about it; it can’t be seen as the reaction of a resentful masculine ego. This pathos is rather the very affect or quality of that ego’s having been dispersed. It’s the expression, not of Cliff’s subjectivity, but precisely of his no longer being a “subject” in the old Cartesian/Freudian sense. It’s the feeling of not having a center–but also of not even lacking one. A cool, prosthetic pathos, perfect for an age of television and computers. What is the ontological status of this “soul of a new machine” (as one episode of DOOM PATROL calls it), this deeply intimate, yet strangely unlocalizable, affect? Call it a secondary, sympathetic resonance; or an uneliminable redundancy; or an effect of multiple interference patterns; or an emergent property of information flows accelerated beyond a certain threshold. As Deleuze suggests, we need to replace the old phenomenological slogan (“all consciousness is consciousness of something”) with a new, radically decentered one: “all consciousness is something.” For this is what happens when your brain is plugged directly into the ‘real’ world’s “mixing board”; but also when it’s isolated in a vat, or when its contents are downloaded into the virtual-reality matrix of a supercomputer. Round and round and round it goes; where it stops, nobody knows. “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don’t know.” No cogito, then; no ergo, and no sum. “I don’t know if the world is better or worse than it has been”–as Kathy Acker writes in a different context–“I know the only anguish comes from running away.”

September 25, 2013
Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari
Martin Rosenberg

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
Texas A&M University
mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu

[O]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent in their own theory.

–Thrasymachus of Chalcedon

Introduction

In their recent work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make explicit the role that the concept of chaos plays in their representations of subjectivity, with respect to philosophy, science and the arts.¹ I wish to exfoliate the chaotic in Deleuze and Guattari’s works, for their analysis of the ways in which chaos may be used referentially in philosophy, science and the arts in this later work may interfere with readers’ attempts to grapple with manifestations of chaos as a referent in their earlier collaboration, the two volumes subtitled Captialism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. One way to make visible Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the chaotic in these two works is to examine the role that particular physics tropes play in their representation of subjectivity, especially since the tropes that model the subject in these two works engage agonistically with those that model subjectivity in the works of Sigmund Freud.²

The descriptions of human consciousness in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the “ground” for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists’ representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice particularly the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes–at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the mid-twentieth century. As we will see, these two periods are interesting because they represent moments when the term entropy, a concept describing the amount of disorder in a physical system, has very different meanings– in physics, and in the cultural matrix as well. In the mid- to-late nineteenth century, entropy (in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics) refers largely to terminal processes of disorder for a physical system; since the nineteen-sixties, however, entropy (in the context of non- equilibrium thermodynamics) came to be understood as an initial condition enabling greater order and complexity in a physical system. Since Freud draws on the first version of entropy as referent, and Deleuze and Guattari draw on the second version of entropy as referent, two questions emerge: Can we say that Freud and Deleuze and Guattari are making the same claims for tropes of chaos (or entropy, or disorder) as grounds for their contending representations of subjectivity? If so, what can we then say about the stability of such claims for a correspondence between laws of physics and the forces and processes of human consciousness? In order to confront these questions, we should first examine trope theories that might illuminate the problematic construction of correspondences.

Physics and Tropes

The problematic of the subject becomes the problem of representation when the particular forms of representation of the subject, such as tropes, come into question. This problem of representation then requires a rhetoric of the tropes of subjectivity that will discover the relationships among particular tropes representing specific functions of consciousness, such as the dreamwork, or the Oedipal scenario.

By the term trope, we may refer to what Hayden White calls the irreducible nature of metaphor in imaginative and realistic discourses. A trope is a turn of phrase that links an abstract concept to the physical world, and as such, establishes a correspondence between the physical world and human ideation. According to White, tropes are “inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences” (White 1-2). In other words, for White, every trope is a fiction, the authorship of which all writers must deny, in order to preserve their claim for the truth-content of their discourse. But even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Thus, for the sake of this inquiry, we must first question the motives for such recourse, not only in psychology, but in theories of the trope as well.

Jacques Derrida argues that tropes (or one particular form, metaphors) function explicitly as the onto-theological manifestation of a “White Mythology” that tolerates a “provisional loss of meaning” to arrive at “what is proper” (Derrida 45). Tropes demonstrate their truth-content by grounding discourse in the phenomenal world, with the given that there must be some essential connection posited between word and thing:

Like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its own truth and its presence. Nature always finds in it its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself.(Derrida 45)

Yet Derrida argues that metaphors serve both to “menace” and to function as “accomplices.” They menace by the way that the connection between name and thing is subject to “wear and tear” (13): by the tendency of tropes to wear themselves out like coins through the “repetition” of use; and by tearing that precise link between name and thing through deviation, or tropical “divergence” (71).

Derrida associates this precise link with “Physis,” or the claim for natural law, a law that apparently must decay, “wear and tear” through time–as implied by the nineteenth-century conventional understanding of the thermodynamic term entropy as a kind of end-game. Both Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom have noticed that interest in tropes and in entropy coincided in the middle of the nineteenth century (Derrida 60-74; Bloom 83-105). Yet, according to Derrida, tropes are also accomplices, allowing for “an inevitable detour,” in order to maintain “a horizon of circular reappropriation of the proper sense” (Derrida 73). That sense, of course, remains dependent upon the fiction that there lies an essential connection between word and thing: these tropes imply a correspondence between a pull or force among planets in a solar system, and with the sun; or, among electrons swarming around a nucleus and the energized link among the tropes in a system of signification, with the significance that it surrounds. As opposed to the borrowing of thermodynamic tropes to describe the irreversible decay of an individual sign, here systems of signification are described with reference to the reversible laws of dynamics–Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. Here one finds the conceit that the irreversible “decay” of individual signs can be arrested by situating signs in a system governed by stasis, or inertia. After all, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “What is Truth? Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of physical force, etc.” Will to Power 291).

Derrida’s deconstructive agenda involves demonstrating both the instability of individual signs, and the contradictory traces always present within the inertia of a system of signification. William R. Paulson has argued that Derrida draws on information theory, on the relationship between entropy as formulated in physics, and “noise” in the channel between sender and receiver as a problematic (1988, 26-28, 92-99). In this view, Derrida seeks therefore to subvert philosophical discourse by foregrounding the noise present in every possible message. More recently, Alex Argyrous explores Derridean discourse by formulating a theory of order which emerges out of the noise generated by his tactics, thus presenting a positive gloss on what Derrida’s critics have argued constitutes a nihilistic agenda (1991, 57-85). Yet Hans Kellner identifies the agenda of all tropical relations metaphorically (!) with catastrophe theory, particularly with the relations established in the shift from one master trope to another, as suggested by Vico’s notion of “ricorso” (1981, 24-28).

Within the field of trope theory, we can demonstrate the instability of a tropical system, based as it is on “circular reappropriation,” by observing trans-disciplinary borrowings. In recent theories of rhetoric, there has been a return to the four master tropes discussed by Aristotle– metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony–in order to ground trans-disciplinary borrowings.³

Both Hayden White and Frank D’Angelo have asserted the primacy of the four master tropes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to demonstrate the stability of certain cognitive structures beneath specific disciplinary formations, history and psychology. They argue that Freud’s mechanisms of the dreamwork–which would be useful to review here: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–are their psychological equivalents. Condensation, the process of fusing several elements or images into one, is equivalent to metaphorical identification; displacement, by which one idea, image or element “surrenders to another, signaling a shift in meaning and emotional intensity,” is equivalent to metonymic displacement; representation, the “process of transposing ideas, feelings into symbols,” is equivalent to synecdoche; secondary revision, which with the help of an analyst converts dream elements into comprehensive form through the intrusion of self-conscious distance, is equivalent to irony.⁴

We may accept or reject D’Angelo’s more pointed defense of the continued study of classical rhetoric by positing (in cognitive psychology) an ontological ground for the four master tropes. Still, and this is crucial, that rhetoric may supply tropes for clinical psychology, and that developmental psychology may provide tropes for rhetoric, indicates the potential circularity inherent in any attempt to ground tropes by recourse to other disciplines. For example, White becomes quite dependent upon a cultural application of Freud’s psycho-analytic approach when he claims that within a cultural field, schemes of tropes function “unconsciously” (White 13-20), thus circulating the grounds of his discourse between psychoanalysis and linguistics, with reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. White’s key word for describing tropical function here is defense, and I am most directly interested in exploring the defensive posture implicit in the recourse to tropes from other disciplines.

As Hayden White points out, Harold Bloom has taken the further, Freudian step in pronouncing tropes “the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense” that, while directed “against literal meaning in discourse,” must always assume that literal meaning is something possible (Bloom 88). For Bloom, however, literal meaning is “death,” what would occur if electrons spun into the nucleus, or planets spiraled into the sun. Bloom refers here, of course, to Freud’s Life and Death drives. Thus, out of “survival,” tropes form a reversible system of false signification that he compares to Newtonian mechanics (93), or even to a chess game (96), both of which are premised on reversible laws. This suggests that even what Bloom calls the romantic undoing [kenosis] of an existing tropical system marks merely the commitment to a “personalized countersublime” that itself then systematizes suddenly freed tropical patterns in order to avoid the “threat” of the literal meaning that is death (Bloom 89). We have here a physics of romantic revolution, of private epistemic shifts, a physis of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the tropical approximations that constitute the limits of representation.

Yet we must force Bloom’s influence theory into a further step that he would resist, by insisting that tropes “defend” an ideological as well as a psychological state, and thus that the disintegration of an accepted tropical field constitutes a public as well as a private event. Scientists resort to tropes of cultural phenomena to make their explanations of physical forces and processes accessible; social philosophers, artists and psychologists resort to tropes from physical forces and processes in order to similarly explain cultural, aesthetic and psychological phenomena. This borrowing from other disciplines reveals, first, a consensual dependence upon a given set of assumptions about the laws governing physical or human phenomena to which these tropes refer; and second, a mutual complicity in suppressing the fictive nature of the tropes that are used. Thus, physicists, philosophers, artists and psychologists betray their dependence on the fictive correspondence between the laws governing nature and the laws governing culture because it makes their thoughts intelligible. Furthermore, this dependence points ultimately to an essentialist perspective underlying even the thoughts of those whose project is to demystify, to deterritorialize old systems of tropical approximations. We address, therefore, how the institution of the avant-garde functions in complicity with the dominant systems it seeks to destabilize. But, before discussing historical examples of this complicity in two avant-garde moments in the history of theories of the subject, Freud’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, we should address motive more directly.

The problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing becomes complicated further by the relative status of each discipline in the cultural field. By this I mean that the borrowing of physical tropes by the arts, philosophy and psychology marks their marginalized position more than their cosmological reach. In contrast, the borrowing of cultural tropes (Richard Feynman’s use of the chessboard to describe the laws governing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, for example) to illustrate physical laws extends mastery, which in turn reflects the domination of the sciences across the spectrum of social discourses. As Michel Serres writes of the poverty of literature:

Science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong minds--strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space.(1990, 4)

Here, Serres emphasizes the legitimating power as well as the fictiveness of tropes from physics, and we must recognize, when examining the internally contradictory use of these tropes, that the motive for constructing such correspondences lies with the will to power. The source of internal contradiction generated by the tropes themselves comes from an ideological difference, a struggle from within the discipline of physics itself. This struggle arises out of the difference between the precision possible with the time-reversible geometrical perspective usually associated with dynamics, and the statistically-approached contingencies of the time-irreversible perspective normally associated with equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Here I am drawing on the works of Ilya Prigogine, particularly on his work to make visible an ideological war within the physical sciences, a war of what he calls “Clashing Doctrines,” between time-reversible and time-bound models of physical processes. In this “war,” time-bound theories are marginalized by time-reversible theories. Prigogine’s work in the physics of turbulent systems far- from-equilibrium brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977), not Physics. A further illustration of the marginal status of Prigogine’s own work comes from chaos theory, which was introduced to the public through James Gleick’s popular work, Chaos. This work emphasizes the geometry of fractals without once mentioning Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organizing systems (Gleick, 1990; 1984, 1-26 and 79-102). Yet Prigogine’s work may provide the most help in confronting problems created by the ideological appropriation of tropes from physics by other disciplines.⁵

We can situate the historical determinants of the construction of theories of subjectivity by identifying tropes from the very different conceptions of physical laws, identified here simplistically by the familiar terms dynamics and thermodynamics, as they are found in the works of Freud and in the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

After discussing dynamics and thermodynamics, particularly with reference to the internal combustion engine, we will then limit discussion to the allusions to machinery in Freud’s description of dreamwork and of the unconscious; and to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of human consciousness as an aleatory subject embedded in the schizo-fluxes of cultural machinery as a means of resistance to these machines of cultural signification. Finally, we will address Deleuze and Guattari’s transgressive yet fundamentally complicitous relationship with the Freudian hegemony of the subject’s representation.

Dynamics and Thermodynamics

The mechanistic world-view of dynamics involves the study of matter and its interactions; that is, the dynamic view reduces natural events to simple laws that can explain the motion of planets, cannon ball trajectories, the movement of molecules and atoms, the interactions of sub- atomic particles, even the time-lines of Einstein’s Twins. Crucial to the success of this view is the search for absolute precision in the description of these forces, in accounting for the history of, and in predicting the future of the systems upon which these forces work. This precision becomes actualized by the capacity of calculus to determine mathematically the time-line of any dynamic system by freezing time itself into an infinite series of still frames, thus tracing that system into the past or into the future at will.

This assumption of absolute certainty as the criterion for the success of physical investigations was challenged for the first time in the mid-ninetenth century by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, equilibrium thermodynamics, or entropy: given any isolated system, that system moves in the direction of greater entropy or disorder. Articulated further by Boltzmann’s Order Principle (given a closed system, that system will always choose the direction of greatest probability), this Second Law forces observers to recognize the roles that randomness and the irreversibility of time play in physical processes: a Mazda Miata is more likely to turn into a pile of rust then a pile of rust will turn into a Mazda Miata. Most important, however, the state of any system is perpetually contingent until it arrives at its rest state or equilibrium. The precise predictions possible in charting a planetary system, or in plotting the recursive trajectories of comets, are impossible in the investigation of processes governed by thermodynamic laws.

In dynamics, therefore, we have precision and certainty in the prediction of the behavior of any system; in thermodynamics, we have only statistical probabilities that remain contingent until equilibrium or, in the case of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a steady-state is achieved.

In the design of the internal combustion engine, we have a relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics that illustrates through metaphor, first, the hegemonic domination of dynamics within physics, and second, Freud’s agonistic model of the subject as a dynamic equilibrium of (dynamic) drives forcefully modulating unconscious (thermodynamic) processes.

Prigogine argues that as engineering became the context for the question of thermodynamic processes (mechanical, thermal or chemical), two constraints on the observation of those processes emerged. First, the classical method for accounting for every element in a system became replaced by statistical approximations called “macroscopic parameters.” Second, “boundary conditions” needed definition to account for the relationship between the system and its surroundings (1984, xxx). In engines, these referred, first, to the need for statistical analysis in order to predict the behavior of the energy utilized by the engine; and second, to the need to account for the active movement of that energy from one part of an engine to another, as well as the loss of energy from the engine altogether.

Internal combustion engines require two systems, each with a different energy level, to accomplish work. If both systems can be the source of heat flow from hot to cold, then any engine is reversible in the dynamic sense. Yet the Second Law also describes a universal tendency to erase thermal difference through diffusion, resulting in a limit to the utility of controlling heat to produce work. If engines depend upon the Second Law to do work, and yet have to fight the Second Law to do work, then two constraints occur: engines function inefficiently, and there is a limit to the amount of energy available. This does not mention the threat to the integrity of the mechanical system that friction produces, as well as threats created by imperfections in the dynamic system itself: there are limits to precision even in the manufacturing of the parts for the engine.

Thus, the industrial revolution brought about a war of domination by applying the principles of dynamics to mechanical dissipative structures against the inefficiencies that plague those systems. These inefficiencies are due, in turn, to processes governed by the same law of thermodynamics that enable work to be generated by dynamic machines in the first place. In the nineteenth century, the contradictions inherent in the application of dynamic systems and thermodyanmic processes culminates in a world- view, best described by Lord Kelvin, that the universe itself tends toward the degradation of mechanical energy. As Prigogine notes:

This world is described as an engine in which heat is converted into motion only at the price of some irreversible waste and useless dissipation. Effect-producing differences in nature progressively diminish. The world uses up its differences as it goes from one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, "heat death." (1984, 115-116)

The philosophical implications for this irreversible process were not lost on the nineteenth-century mind. Aside from the shift from a fascination with system and classification in the eighteenth century to the seeming domination of time over the imaginations of all the disciplines in the nineteenth century, the association of time with disorder, decay and death shaped the imaginations of social philosophers such as Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler well into the twentieth century. Here we may situate Freud’s recourse to the discipline of physics in modeling the unconscious and the dreamwork, while anticipating the cultural as well as clinical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical statement that “Everything is a machine” Anti-Oedipus 2, 8).

Physics, Hegemony and the Freudian Subject

If we examine the stages of the dreamwork– condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–these stages seem similar to the stages of the function of a steam engine as it does work. Condensation, or the mixing and fusing of disparate elements into one, corresponds to the initial activity of the chamber, the function of which is to mix coal or other fuel and oxygen before ignition produces heat. Displacement, or the surrender of meaning and emotion as it is transferred from one image to another, corresponds to the generating of heat in the chamber after ignition, that is then channelled to the steam engine used to drive the machinery being worked.

Representation, or the translation of those elementary ideas and feelings into symbols, corresponds to the commodity that can be manufactured by harnessing the process of conversion taking place in the secondary chamber of the machine. Secondary revision, or the conversion of the elements of the dream into coherent form with the aid of a therapist, corresponds to the attachment of public value to the commodity created by this dream machine. The dreamwork, then, modulates the flow of desire through a process that transforms that desire into a system of valuation cultured, even manufactured (in process), with the aid of the therapist.

Psycho-analysis, in this sense, becomes one of many cultural machines that control desire. Furthermore, Freud describes thought itself as the fundamental transformation: the sublimation of effulgent desire becomes by itself a threat to the health of the system that generates the desire in the first place. The purpose of thought itself, of which the dreamwork is only one manifestation, is to channel the libido, defined thus in thermodynamic terms, into acceptable behavior. As Freud writes in The Ego and the Id:

If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy . . . . If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive drives.(45)

In other words, the entire subject-system, expressed in terms of the Id, Ego and Superego, can be made to correpond to a mechanical dissipative structure, in which desire, as heat or entropy, motivates the system, and is modulated through drives for the purposes of psychological survival.

LaPlanche and Pontalis have identified two different subject-systems in Freud’s works: the narcissistic ego/ideal-ego system; and the superego/ego-ideal system (1973, 144-5, 201-2). Both systems modulate flows of sublimated energy-desire to different ends. One may inquire (as LaPlanche does, for example) into how these differing structures function in terms of the life and death drives respectively (1976, 8-24), especially if we remember Bloom’s conceit that the literalization of tropes brings “death” to the system-subject. What most concerns us, though, is that the function of the subject appears to be the control of energy-as-desire, to limit the representations of motivated thought by modulating motivated thought through systems that drive thought into acceptable forms. If forms are unacceptable, as in the case of disturbing dreams, the function of psychoanalysis, with reference to dreamwork, is to remodulate desire through a symbolic system navigated, and therefore mapped, in the dynamic, geometrical sense, by the therapist. To undertand how this system might work at the level of culture-dynamics, we should digress briefly to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White.

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White demonstrate, first, the disappearance of carnival forms in Northern European (British) society, and second, the reconfiguration of the carnivalesque into the lowest and basest of social interactions, that become a threat to emerging middle-class values (1986, 1-26). In two chapters on Freud, these authors demonstrate the function of the unconscious as the seat of the carnivalesque in the discourse of the bourgeoisie, the seat of dissolved hierarchies and vital turbulence that threatens the carefully modulated orderings of the European middle-class. They also demonstrate the institutions of control, associated with the Family Romance, that enforce the control of desire, seated in the Id, through the triangulation of the Oedipal scenario (149-91). As we have seen, the dynamic forces modulating the thermodynamics of desire for the individual, as a synecdoche, are now applied to the dynamic control of entropic forces throughout culture as a whole.

It will now be useful to negotiate a transition from Freud’s Oedipus to the anti-oedipal strategies of Deleuze and Guattari by situating the public mechanisms at work at the level of individual neurosis and psychosis.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative volumes, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, lies a Nietzschean synthesis of the Marxist theory of production (dominated, as it is, by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Industrial Revolution), and by Freud’s theory of the libido. They do so through the conflated term “desiring-production.” They state that the Oedipal scenario structures desire in capitalist countries, and that psychoanalysis helps to enforce the restrictions imposed by that structure. Also, they agree with the Marxist formulation that capitalism reduces all human interactions to “commodity-relations of universal equivalency.” As Ronald Bogue points out, capitalism therefore “deterritorializes” desire by exploding not only the limits created by the Oedipal scenario, but the limits created by other traditional structures as well (1989, 88-92). Yet capitalism also “reterritorializes” desire by forcing it to manifest itself through the network of commodity relations. While Oedipus helps to focus human desire through the family, leaving its residue to wander the leveled field of “universal equivalency,” capitalism also generates “schzophrenic fluxes,” a mixing up of material and human refuse in the diffused heat of undifferentiated desire which, if all goes well, is redirected through the Oedipal machinery. As trope, the “residue” of desire– “schizophrenic fluxes” of human and material refuse–makes sense when we recognize its thermodynamic origin, while tropes for capitalism and psychoanalysis take on the dynamic properties of machines modulating “fluxes.”

Deleuze and Guattari then define clinical schizophrenia as the psychological equivalent of a thermodynamic state of equilibrium, the human refuse (institutionalized or not) in which the machinery of Oedipus, and even the more primal subject-structures, have been overthrown. Their project is to build a psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics that valorizes the schizo-flux. They provide a schizo-analysis of the multiple cultural machines of desiring-production, and a program for resistance to those machines.

Deleuze and Guattari’s program for resistance lies in two related tropes for thought and action: the nomad and the rhizome. Representing subjective and cultural contingency on the one hand, and spontaneous aggregation of contingent subjective and cultural formations on the other, these terms constitute a theory of self-organization: the nomad and the rhizome have explanatory power across the human sciences: the writings of Kafka, the contingencies and collectivity of jazz performance, Pynchon’s Tristero postal subculture, the multiple human formations of the dance troop Pilobolus (itself a name for a rhizome), the “cells” of the Kuwaiti resistance.

Physis, Nomos and the “Grounds” for Subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari

First of all, it should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari merely valorize the heat-energy fluxes (limited by Freud to the chamber of the subject-machine as dissipative structure) over the machine itself: they argue for the sustained play of entropic thought and action, as that play may exist independent of the machinery that depends upon entropy to produce work and controls the chaos that seems necessarily to pose a threat to the system itself. Up until this point we have been discussing entropy as an end-game phenomenon, but it is precisely Prigogine’s work, over the last thirty years, on processes of self-organization possible in chaos or turbulence, that may provide a model for how Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to Freud is not merely destructive, but nihilistic in the affirmative sense. We will then need to confront how their response to Freud also remains complicitous in the rhetorical sense.⁶

Yet Deleuze and Guattari are sly, and they do not wish to seem invested in an essentialist correspondence between the laws of physics and the laws that may govern consciousness and culture. In the chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, entitled “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” Deleuze and Guattari analize war by opposing chess and Go as opposing game theories: “from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved” (1987, 34-52-3). Yet this concept of war involves processes within the subject as well as the most violent manifestations of social dynamics. While Deleuze and Guattari state that “Chess is a game of State, or of the court; the emperor of China played it” (352), we must also remember that chess tropes signifying systems that determine the socially-constituted subject, with rigid rules governing identity. Go pieces, on the other hand, “have only an anonymous, collective or third-person function,” with “only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations” (353). The properties of Go involve not semiotic precision but strategic flows that obey not cause and effect, as with chess, but dissemination that is contingent upon situation. They write, “it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (353).

The oppositions in the tropes generated by their analysis of these two games are useful for our purposes: a closed system against an open system; precise identity against the anonymity of numbers; determined trajectory of the pieces against contingent dissemination; fixed function against virtual potential. Clearly, these tropes from chess and Go draw respectively on the opposing models of pysical forces and processes, the dynamic and the thermodynmic.

We should note that by opposing the “‘smooth’ space of Go against the ‘striated’ space of chess,” Deleuze and Guattari make the distinction between the “Nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis” (353). By opposing polis to nomos, they imply that chess is premised upon physis, or natural law, while Go is premised upon nomos, or law agreed upon by convention. In their discourse, Go is valorized over chess in order to valorize nomos over the State’s claims for physis. Deleuze and Guattari assault the assumptions of natural law, proposing their avant-garde social philosophy in order to demystify the State. They do so by denying the correspondence between the laws of nature and the laws describing forces governing culture (physis). In their discourse, the laws of nature refer specifically to classical mechanics, and especially to the chess tropes used by Richard Feynman to describe the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and by Saussure to describe the laws governing signification.⁷

But in using the game of Go as a source of tropes, Deleuze and Guattari must make recourse to physis themselves by valorizing contingency and aggregation as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action. These concepts refer respectively to the initial conditions necessary for thermodynamic processes (contingency as a condition of freedom), and to one possible behavior for physical systems governed by those processes (prairie grassroots as a collectivity of blades of grass; slime mold as an aggregation of unicellular nomads).

We can trace fairly precisely a genealogy of concepts related to equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics in Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, indicating his debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of chaos or disorder that provide the tropical grounds for his theory of subjective and collective resistance to cultural machinery. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, 83), Deleuze describes Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as the return to difference, not sameness, an analysis of the contingent dimension of cultural systems and human consciousness affirming for any physical system, and, by implication, any human subjective or cultural system, the always-already contingency of past and future as it is reformulated in every present moment. This seems, in turn, to indicate a reformulation of Boltzmann’s Order Principle, first defined in Deleuze’s earlier Bergsonism (1966, 1988). In this work, Deleuze defines Bergson’s theory of creative evolution as a dialectic between contingent duration as “pure becoming” and the memory of a system engaged by elan vital or a physical/metaphysical principle of desire, a dialectic explored with remarkable subtlety in his recently translated Difference and Repetition (1968; 1993, forthcoming), particularly when repetition becomes a referent for pathology applicable both to the individual isolate and to the cultural field. The specific applications of these concepts–of the Eternal Return and of contingent duration as Becoming to human subjectivity and to the forces and processes of culture–lead to the nomad, and to nomad thought (“Nomad Thought” 1973, 1985). This is true as well of the passages on becoming as an initial condition for schizophrenia in The Logic of Sense (1969; 1990). This genealogy, in turn, helps to locate in Deleuze’s corpus, as well as in his collaboration, a continuous commitment to the concept of an intense, irreversible and irresistible impetus underlying the relational grids superimposed upon the subject by various visible and invisible cultural machines, machinery that produces aesthetic objects such as cinema (see Cinema I [1983, 1986] and Cinema II [1985, 1989]), or fiction Proust and Signs [1964, 72]; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975, 1986]). And it is in The Logic of Sense that Deleuze first comes to terms with the cultural as well as clinical implication of schizophrenia as a theory of subjective and cultural chaos (1-3, 82-93). With the help of Felix Guattari, Deleuze offers in A Thousand Plateaus an extended meditation on the role of Becoming as a form of resistance (232-309), a role recognized in Brian Massumi’s recent reading of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia.⁸

But what interests us further in this passage on game theories of war are the attempts to disguise the nature and function of the system of tropical oppositions that I have demonstrated are crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s representations of subjectivity. We can find other examples of oppositions disguising a recourse to physis.

Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems grounded in contingency and multiplicity, permeable membranes instead of rigid lines, enables them to articulate their program against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their own affiliations with the claim for physis:

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and...and...and...." (A Thousand Plateaus 25)

Here we may find, hidden in this parable of two opposing “organic” tropes (the arboreal against the rhizomatic), the implicit reference to the structures of dynamics against the processes of thermodynamics–the definitive static, vertical structure of the tree versus the open conjunction of the spontaneous aggregation of wandering cells into a weaving of roots constructed by simple addition. Chess and Go, tree and grass–sedentary structure and flows of openness: at the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing machine lies a programmatic commitment to one side of the ideological opposition between dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as a complicitous commitment to ground their discourses in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the dominance of our machine age.

Notes

1. I’d like to thank Ronald Bogue for pointing out the crucial role of chaos theory in this work and its relevance to this essay. An extension of the lines of inquiry pursued in this essay will serve as the springboard for a panel on chaos theory and subjectivity in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari at the 1993 Modern Language Association, with the following essays: my “Chess and Go: The Physis/Nomos Debate in Deleuze and Guattari’s Game Theory of War”; William R. Paulson, “Self-Organization and Figures of Resistance”; and Ronald Bogue, “The Micropolitics of the Fractal Fold.”

2. This requires an extension of the concept of chaos, as it is currently employed, to include an earlier theory of disorder associated with nineteenth-century entropy theory. We can suggest such a connection through the works of the contemporary physicist Ilya Prigogine, whose particular approach to chaos theory draws on a genealogy that begins with those nineteenth-century physicists working in thermodynamics, and whose work is central to my argument.

3. One exception has been George Lakoff, who, by drawing on generational grammar as well as on cognitive psychology, argues not only that all conceptual systems are metaphorical, but that the systems of human knowledge that depend upon these metaphors are grounded in the biology of cognition. Expanding beyond the four tropes, he argues that even the most abstract systems from any discipline are dependent upon spatio-temporal metaphors. Lakoff claims that these spatio-temporal metaphors are not arbitrary constructions, but function systematically and have universal status, precisely because they are rooted essentially in the biological fact of a complex organic orientation determined by gravity, by the perception of up and down, of inside and outside, of near and far (Lakoff 3- 24, 56-68). But Lakoff’s tactical representation of those grounded categories of metaphors in terms of maps remains problematic because using maps implies a structuralist methodology. In other words, despite Lakoff’s claims that there may be a “natural” order to metaphors, his use of maps involves the embrace of a conflicting assumption, which of course can be traced to Saussure’s argument that signs are, for the most part, constructed arbitrarily.

4. D’Angelo’s brilliant demonstration of the seemingly arbitrary correspondence between dreamwork and the master tropes of classical rhetoric requires a further negotiation. Specifically, D’Angelo shifts his fascination with the function of tropes in Freud’s account of the process of dreaming toward the discipline of developmental psychology by demonstrating that these tropes also correspond to the four stages of cognitive development as described by Piaget (1987, 37, 36). In fact he argues elsewhere, as Lakoff does, that the master tropes of Aristotle are similarly grounded in human cognition; that is, rhetoric itself, as the science of inquiring into the available means of persuasion, has ontological status in the deep structures of human cognition, structures that can be understood developmentally (1982, 105-117) and in fact may be described with reference to theories of evolution such as that of Pierre de Chardin. Another source for this kind of grounding comes from Gerald Edelman, whose Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind grounds the work not only of George Lakoff, but of Mark Turner and Mark Johnson as well. Another example of the dangers inherent in cross-disciplinary borrowings comes from Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Turner suggests that contemporary theory has led to a dead end in English studies; he considers their discourses suspect because of their complexity and inaccessibility. Calling contemporary theory “ungrounded bootstrapping” and “fragmented,” Turner argues that “contemporary theory fails to connect with the full human world to the extent that it treats objects in literature that can be seen only by means of the theory: in that case, if the theory vanishes, its objects vanish” (4). Turner argues for humanistic studies grounded in schemes and tropes that are working metaphors in the physical world. He grounds his systematic exploration of the matrix of schemes and tropes by resurrecting classical stasis theory: “image schemas to structure our understanding of forces,” in other words, through ordered forms or geometric structures. What makes Turner’s polemic so astonishing is its deliberate ignoring of a new paradigm in cognitive science that bears some relationship to the chaos theory discussed in this essay: emergence. Instead of connecting cognitive science and English studies through reference to geometric schemes and tropes organized by an implied and unified subjectivity, one could pursue such an interdisciplinary connection by postulating a human cognizing subject that has no unity but the unity that it perceives in itself is a fiction constructed to encompass all the heterogeneity of cognitions occurring. “Emergence” is a theory of self-organization that shares certain characteristics with Prigogine’s formulation of self-organizing systems theory. What Turner misses so egregiously in his attack on contemporary critical theory is that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the crucial developer of this connectionist/emergence paradigm (dormant though it was for some twenty years after he first conceived of the possibility of human perception without autonomous consciousness), is responsible for certain grounding concepts that led to Barthes’, Foucault’s and others’ assaults on naive concepts of authorships. Turner therefore attempts to ground his assault on contemporary critical theory in one paradigm of cognitive science, ignoring (or ignorant of) how another, competing paradigm within cognitive science grounds the very theories he attempts to refute.

5. One must say at this point that not all physicists have been drafted into this war, only those that are interested in the ideological dimension of the formations of their discipline. Prigogine’s reputation within the human sciences also lacks unanimous support. For example, take N. Katherine Hayle’s account of Prigogine’s position within the field of chaos studies, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (91-114). Yet if we apply Prigogine’s ideological categories to her own account, Hayles demonstrates a clear bias toward a time-reversible, geometrical perspective on chaos, something she shares with James Gleick. This becomes visible in her chapter on physics concepts in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon from her earlier The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (168-198). In addressing the concept of the “field” in physics, she ignores physics tropes that have to do with time irreversiblity and with self-organization. These tropes play a crucial role in the representation of subjectivity and cultural processes in that novel. See my “Invisibility, the War Machine and Prigogine: Dissipative Structures and Aggregation Processes in the Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow,” forthcoming in Pynchon Notes 21. See also David Porush’s response to Gleick’s account of chaos, “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science,” in New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly (“On Science” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442), which may also serve as a useful critique of Hayles’ own methodology.

6. By the term “complicity,” I refer to the implied “contract” embraced by contending opponents to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely. I consider the opening quotation from Thrasymachus a useful arche for this implication. Baudrillard calls this seduction. See “On Seduction,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited with an Introduction by Mark Poster, 149-165.

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 22; 88; 110; Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. For the most sustained treatment by an avant-gardist of the cultural implications of the game of chess, see Marcel Duchamp and H. Halberstadt, Opposition et les cases congugee sont reconciliees (Brussels: l’Echiquier/Edmund Lancel, 1932). The opposition of the Kings at endgame is described in terms of the dynamics of the reversible movement of the pieces, and of the thermodymamics of equilibrium, preserving the opposition and breach of equilibrium which precipitate the end of the endgame. At this stage, the kings remain complicitous in attempting to preserve the endgame for as long as possible by seeking only to avoid making a mistake.

8. See Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; citations with secondary references too numerous to count here. For a different reading of the significance of the concept becoming, as it indicates continuity between Deleuze’s work on Bergson and his work on Nietzsche, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, especially 19-25, 47-55.

Works Cited
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- D’Angelo, Frank. “Rhetoric and Cognition: Toward a Metatheory of Discourse.” Pre/Text 3, Summer 1982, 105-119.
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- —. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
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- —“Nomad Thought.” In The New Nietzsche. Ed. David B. Allison. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985, 142-149.
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- Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967.
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- —. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1966.
- Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze: Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
- —. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
- —. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
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- Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
- Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
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September 25, 2013

Year: 2013

References

Telenetlink contacts

Hypertext/Hypermedia

Historical Context

Theorizing

Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity

Principle of Multiplicity

Principle of Asignifying Rupture

Principles of Cartography and Decalcomania

Works Cited

Fort-da

Chess As Fort-da: Five Examples

Casual Play

Tournament Play

Correspondence Chess

Computer Play

Skittles

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Note

Works Cited

I. The Luminous City of Luxembourg

II. The Dissipated City of Luxembourg

III. The Twisted City of Luxembourg

IV. Luxembourg–the Phantom City

Notes

Notes

Symposiasts:

A Metapoetics of Memory

The Fall of Soviet Man

Whose Subject?

Works Cited

Works Cited

Works Cited

Gramsci and “Us”

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

Gramsci’s Corpus

Notes

Works Cited

Introductory Note:

Wednesday, February 3

Friday, February 5

Saturday, February 6

Monday, February 8

Tuesday, February 9

Wednesday, February 10

Sunday, February 14

Monday, February 15

Tuesday, February 16

Wednesday, February 17

Thursday, February 18

Saturday, February 20

Sunday, February 21

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

I. On (Pure) Rhetoric

II. Sign Models

III. Movement and Meaning

IV. Conclusion

References

The Theology of the Text

The Non-Reader

Literal Translation

Materialist Reading

Concrete Theology

Notes

Works Cited

The Interviewers:

“A Fantasy” To “Confession”

“A Precedent” To “The Untrustworthy Speaker”

“A Fable” To “Animals”

“Saints” to “Snow”

“Terminal Resemblance” to “Celestial Music”

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Dedicatory Epistle to the Reader

Fables of Digestion