Year: 2013

Cultural Trauma and the “Timeless Burst”: Pynchon’s Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland1
James Berger

Department of English
George Mason University
jberger@osf1.gmu.edu

Nostalgia has a bad reputation. It is said to entail an addiction to falsified, idealized images of the past. Nostalgic yearning, as David Lowenthal writes, “is the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present” (21). The political uses of nostalgia are said to be inevitably reactionary, serving to link the images of an ideal past to new or recycled authoritarian structures. And it is true that nostalgia has played major roles in many of the reactionary and repressive political movements of this century–in Nazism’s reverence for the “Volk,” in socialist kitsch, and, in the United States, in Reaganism’s obsession with idealized depictions of family life in the 1950s. Most recently, nostalgia has been described as a masculine response to feminist threats to patriarchal privilege.²

Nostalgia has certainly kept some bad company. And yet, it seems to me, the critiques of nostalgia have not addressed important questions concerning the mechanics of how the past is transmitted into the present and how it might best be used. Postmodern texts and readings, as Michael Berube has noted (with reference to Gravity’s Rainbow), place great emphasis on problematics of “transmission and reinscription; not on overturning the hierarchy between canonical and apocryphal but on examining how the canonical and apocryphal can do various kinds of cultural work for variously positioned and constituted cultural groups” (229). In this essay, I will reevaluate nostalgia as a form of cultural transmission that can shift in its political and historical purposes, and thus bears a more complex and, potentially, more productive relation to the past than has generally been allowed in recent discussions.

I will reconsider the possibilities of nostalgia through a discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, a book whose low critical reputation parallels that of the term in question. In fact, Vineland has been criticized precisely for its nostalgia, for a politics that exhibits an overly comfortable longing for those good old days of the Movement and the attempt at revolution.³ Indeed, Vineland seems, in its story’s emphasis on repairing the broken family, to veer toward an almost Reaganesque nostalgia. The novel ends with a family reunion; its final word is “home.”

Vineland works its way, however, to a very troubled home, and its “sickness”⁴ is not a conventional nostalgia for idealized sites of origin. Its concern, rather, as it returns to the 1960s from the vantage of the Reaganist 1980s, is with how cultural memory is transmitted, and it portrays the ideological distortions, marketing strategies, and the variety of nostalgias through which Americans in the 1980s apprehended the 60s. Central to Pynchon’s conception of how the past inhabits the present is the notion of trauma. Vineland returns to the 1960s not as to a site of original wholeness and plenitude, but, rather, as to a site of catastrophe, betrayal, and cultural trauma. Moreover, the past in Vineland is not simply a place to which a nostalgic text may return. Rather, it is the traumatic past that persistently leaps forward into the present.

And yet, as Pynchon presents it, along with the traumatic return of the past into the present (a return which is necessarily marked according to the prevailing Reaganist and consumerist ideologies) is another, utopian, element. The utopian, or revelatory, moment is simultaneous with the traumatic moment. And so, in effect, Pynchon’s nostalgia is a nostalgia for the future, for possibilities of social harmony glimpsed at crucial moments in the past, but not ever yet realized. Pynchon’s portrayal of this congruence or simultaneity of trauma and utopian possibility resembles Walter Benjamin’s use of the term jetztzeit, the critical moment of historical, redemptive possibility which continues to erupt into the present even after many previous failures. Like Benjamin’s use of jetztzeit, Vineland‘s nostalgia possesses an ethical and political urgency, an imperative to use its glimpse of utopian potential to try to change an unjust history. And, like the jetztzeit, Vineland‘s utopian/traumatic vision constitutes a kind of pivot or wedge by which a given historical record can be loosened, opened, made available to change. Where Pynchon’s account of nostalgia chiefly differs from Benjamin’s treatment of jetztzeit is in Pynchon’s attention to the mechanics of how the traumatic/utopian cultural memory is transmitted. Through his pervasive use of popular culture imagery and tone, Pynchon emphasizes that historical trauma and the possibilities of working through the trauma do not, as would seem to be the case in Benjamin’s “Theses,” burst unmediated into the present. Rather, the insistent return to, and of, the past as a site both of catastrophe and of redemptive possibility will always take particular cultural and ideological forms. In Vineland, these will be the forms of American consumerism and Reaganism in the 1980s.⁵

* * *

In Vineland‘s first sentence, Zoyd Wheeler (Frenesi’s ex-husband, father of their daughter, Prairie) wakes up in the summer of 1984,⁶ and prepares for an odd ritual. Each year, in order to receive his mental disability check, Zoyd must commit some public act that testifies to his insanity. A hippie, pot-smoking, small time rock and roll playing, long haired freak of the 60s, Zoyd is a picturesque character; he is very 60s. In fact, Zoyd is part of a government funded program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity, and the opening scene of the novel is a comic conflation of representations of the 60s in the age of Reagan: A hippie wearing a dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self- and property-destroying act which is broadcast live on television.

One of the greatest threats of the 60s, according to the Right, was its blurring of gender divisions. The hippie was already feminized by his long hair and lack of aggressivity (although at the same time he was–inexplicably–appealing to many women). Zoyd’s dress heightens the gender confusion but, through its absurdity, disarms it. This hippie, in his ridiculous K-Mart dress, can be no threat to traditional masculinity–he’s just crazy. But with his chain saw, the 60s representative is also a physical danger. He’s Charles Manson, the hippie as Satanic mass killer. And with the reintroduction of a physical threat, the sexual threat also returns as Zoyd, now armed as well as cross-dressed, enters the loggers’ bar.

The figure of Zoyd at the Log Jam brings together parodies of feminism, gay activism, and senseless 80s violence all as progeny of the old 60s hippie. And this is precisely the Reaganist view of the 60s: a source of political and especially sexual violence and chaos. As this opening scene of Vineland suggests, Reaganism had (and the New Right continues to have) an overriding interest in subsidizing and perpetuating the memory of the 60s in these terms. And so the 60s enter the 80s in Vineland as the Reaganist 80s would want to see them, as an aging hippie wearing a dress hurtling through a window for the local news.

The social upheavals of the 1960s–centering around rapid changes in thinking about race, gender relations, sexuality, nationalism and the American military, the power of corporate technocracy and marketing–constituted America’s central trauma for the New Right. All the Reaganist themes return to the 60s and attempt in some way to undo the incomplete changes of that decade. As the feminist historian Rosalind Pollack Petchesky describes it, the New Right is in large part “a movement to turn back the tide of the major social movements of the 1960s and 1970s” (450). And this view from the Left no more than reinforces the Right’s own self-description. Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 largely by campaigning against student radicals. A hippie, Reagan said, was someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah” (Cannon, 148), and he promised to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” in particular the “sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you” (Gitlin, 217).⁷ Richard Viguerie, the right wing fund raiser, claimed in the early 80s,

It was the social issues that got us this far, and that’s what will take us into the future. We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. We talked about the communist onslaught until we were blue in the face. But we didn’t start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues. (quoted in Davis, 171)

These “gut level issues,” which revolve primarily around race, sexuality, and violence, point directly back to the social conflicts of the 1960s and define that decade as the central site of trauma in recent American history.

But Zoyd is not the only relic from the 60s who returns. While Zoyd’s return is an orchestrated, well-funded gesture of propaganda, Pynchon shows also how the traumatic memories of the 1960s return involuntarily and somatically, as historical symptoms which inhabit and haunt the 1980s. It is in this symptomatic sense that ghosts play such important roles in Vineland, and ghosts are, indeed, ideal figures to portray the return of historical traumas. The ghost is propelled or, more accurately, compelled from the past into the present, and bears a message, invariably of a crime. Yet, in another sense, the ghost does not bear the message; it is the message: a sign pointing back to a traumatic event and forcing that event, in a disguised or cryptic form, back into memory. The ghost is an urgent, intolerable reminder of trauma: in other words, a symptom. And it is usually a symptom not only of an individual crime, but also of an underlying social sickness which extends into the present.⁸

In Vineland, ghosts appear in several forms. Watching the documentary footage that her mother, a radical filmmaker, shot during the 60s, Prairie becomes possessed by Frenesi, as by a ghost. Prairie

understood that the person behind the camera most of the time really was her mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she could absorb, conditionally become, Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, Frenesi’s whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there. . . Prairie floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead but in a special way, a minimum-security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by projector and screen were possible. (199)

Frenesi’s vision of the 60s, as a bodily experience, inhabits Prairie, and time–and the supposed barrier in time posed by death–is porous, a “minimum-security arrangement,” so that the past can actually exist, physically, in the present. History, for Pynchon, is the alien, uncanny presence which is also that which is most familiar; it is what has formed and informed the present suddenly encountered as Other, as dead. History is the living dead, buried once but come out of its grave, so that the line between living and dead (at least as they function historically) becomes blurred.⁹

The most prominent ghosts in Vineland are the Thanatoids. Although dead, these beings are physical and social. They eat, live in communities, watch television, and can hold conversations with living people. And the Thanatoids are, for the most part, victims of traumas of the 1960s. Weed Atman, betrayed by Frenesi during the rebellion at the College of the Surf, returns as a Thanatoid. The text notes that “since the end of the war in Vietnam, the Thanatoid population had been growing steeply” (320), and Vato and Blood, the wreckers/ferrymen who convey the disoriented, traumatized dead/undead to Thanatoid Village, are themselves Vietnam veterans strangely in thrall to a Vietnamese woman who (in more ways than one) balances their accounts. The Thanatoids’ traumas, as in psychoanalytic descriptions of the symptom, are not in their memories–indeed, the Thanatoids are only dimly aware that they may be dead–but on their bodies. On seeing her first Thanatoids, DL tells Takeshi, “some of these folks don’t look too good.” “What do you expect?” Takeshi replies. “What was done to them–they carry it right out on their bodies–written down for–all to see!” (174).

The Thanatoids are symptoms–physical marks on the social body–of the traumatic 60s now haunting and contributing to the traumas of the 80s. And yet, the Thanatoids are also ridiculous, another absurd remnant (like Zoyd at the novel’s opening) of the psychedelic 60s. And in this tension, between a serious, portentous return of historical trauma and its representation as a comic schtick enacted under the aegis of mass media, we see a crucial feature of Pynchon’s literary technique in Vineland, his representation of history, and his version of nostalgia. A ghost of the 60s can return in the 80s only as its own simulation: a ghost playing a ghost, a “Thanatoid,” a ghost expressed in technical jargon, a mediated, postmodern ghost of the Reagan era with an alarm watch that beeps out “Wachet Auf.” Yet, the 60s continued to return, albeit in these ridiculous, ideologically tinted, “fetishized” forms, because of their traumatic, indeed apocalyptic, place in American history.¹⁰

* * *

Having shown, through the returns of Zoyd and the Thanatoids, how the 60s were rewritten as chaotic, infantile, and ridiculous in the Reaganist 80s, Pynchon also sets out in Vineland to explore why the 60s failed. The social movements of the 60s failed, in Pynchon’s account–as did earlier radical movements–because of certain betrayals. And political betrayals in Vineland are inevitably linked to sexual betrayals; in fact, to failures of sexual purity or chastity. Both Zoyd and Frenesi describe political loyalty in sexual terms. Zoyd asks Hector Zuniga, the DEA agent, “`Why this thing about popping my cherry, Hector?’” Frenesi says to Flash, her second husband, “`Tell you what. . . . I’ll cross your picket line if you’ll go get fucked up your ass, OK? ‘N’ then we can talk about busted cherries–‘” (352). This stress on political or sexual purity, ultimately, I will argue, is intentionally misleading. As is the case with Vineland‘s language and its depiction of how the past enters and inhabits the present, purity is never in fact an option, and Pynchon derails even those myths of purity that he describes most compellingly.

Frenesi, nevertheless, does betray the Movement, her lover Weed Atman, her husband Zoyd, and her daughter Prairie as a result of her sexual obsession for her worst political enemy, the federal prosecutor Brock Vond. Frenesi’s failure, her “helpless turn toward images of authority,” is at the center of Pynchon’s portrayal of the failures of the 1960s. And Frenesi fatalistically conjectures that “some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control.” Indeed, Frenesi fears “that all her oppositions, however good and just, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by . . .” (83). Reciprocally, Brock Vond’s authoritarian politics are based on a fear of women and of physicality that seems typical of right wing politics in general. His sadistic control over Frenesi is a form of revenge against a feminine part of himself and an expression of rage against his own vulnerability–all of which we see in his recurring dreams of being raped by his feminine alter-ego, the Madwoman in the Attic (274).

The full revelation of the connection between sexuality and power comes during the “apocalypse” at Tulsa, when Frenesi joins Brock for a weekend of sex and strategy. What is unveiled, as the “weathermen” of Tulsa nervously acknowledge “the advent of an agent of rapture” (212) and the radicals at the College of the Surf feel the sense “of a clear break just ahead with everything they’d known” (244), is the gun: “`Sooner or later,’” says Brock, “`the gun comes out’” (240). And the gun, as Frenesi understands it, is an extension of the penis: “Men had it so simple. When it wasn’t about Sticking It In, it was about Having the Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world” (241).

What is further revealed at Tulsa is the link between Brock’s gun/phallus and Frenesi’s choice of revolutionary technology, the camera. Frenesi had believed that the camera worked in opposition to the gun, that its focus made possible a form of “learning how to pay attention” which could “reveal and devastate” the sources of social injustice (195). Brock, however, persuades her that the camera is simply another way, alternate but parallel, of “sticking it in from a distance.” “`Can’t you see,’” he tells her, “`the two separate worlds–one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real?’” (241). The full revelation that emerges from Frenesi and Brock’s relationship is that the world, and all possibilities of human action and desire, are circumscribed by destructive, interconnected, and all-encompassing logics of sex, power, and representation.

Frenesi can see no way out of this sexual, political, representational impasse. The only alternative would seem to be a kind of Heideggerian withdrawal from politics, sexuality, and representation–which is, in effect, also a nostalgia for some pure, aboriginal condition of Being untainted by human imprint. Such a withdrawal and nostalgia is the effect of the parable that Sister Rochelle recites to Takeshi Fumimota, retelling the story of the Fall. Originally, in Sister Rochelle’s account, “`there were no men at all. Paradise was female.’” And the first man was not Adam, but the Serpent.

“It was sleazy, slippery man,” Rochelle continued, “who invented `good’ and `evil,’ where before women had been content to just be. . . . They dragged us down into this wreck they’d made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honkytonk saloons.”

Finally, drawing her moral with regard to DL, with whom Takeshi is now linked through their attempt to undo the effects of the Ninja Death Touch, Sister Rochelle solicits Takeshi not to “commit original sin. Try and let her just be” (166).

Rochelle’s admonition to “let her just be”–free, that is, from impositions of notions of “good” and “evil,” and from all conceptual subdivisions and labels–recalls Heidegger’s dictum in the “Letter on Humanism” that “every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather valuing lets beings: be valid–solely as the objects of its doing” (228). From Rochelle’s Heidegerrian perspective, all forms of inscription–the gun, the camera, the phallus–are equally guilty. All constitute forms of “enframing,” through which the world is not encountered on its own terms but as a standing reserve” available strictly for use.¹¹ And all contribute toward the construction of the “world picture,” the representation whose reality replaces that of the world itself:

Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirely, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. (130)

What is necessary, Heidegger contends, is to create a kind of openness or clearing in which Being can become present on its own terms, which can be accomplished by humanity’s maintaining combined attitudes of alert passivity and nurturing. In Vineland, this role is taken by Zoyd, who both nurtures his (and Frenesi’s) daughter Prairie and is able to let her be. Zoyd is a father with the qualities of a mother, a father without the Phallus, whose penis is only a penis. He is not quite a void–some figure for feminine absence entirely outside the symbolic order; he is…a Zoyd: passive but capable, a laid-back fuck-up but a good parent, out of the loop but very much in the symbolic. And Prairie, as her name implies, is the clearing, the opening, which Zoyd allows to come into presence and who may become the site of a new political-sexual-symbolic order not based on the gun, the camera, and the Phallus.

This would be a straight Heideggerian reading, for which Pynchon has provided plenty of cues. But the book is too complex and excessive to allow us to stop here. In the first place, Prairie is not simply a clearing. She is also a subject, and a daughter in search of her mother–more importantly, as it turns out, in search of her mother’s history. She is aided and guided by DL and Takeshi, who have their own history to work through, and who do not just let Prairie be. If Prairie is the opening out of the closed sado-masochistic symbolic-political system embodied by Brock and Frenesi, she achieves this status not merely through the Heideggerian presencing suggested by Sister Rochelle’s injunction. She needs the help of a man and woman whose relation, like that of Frenesi and Brock, is mediated by a Death Touch.

Pynchon, then, advances Sister Rochelle’s Heideggerian alternative but does not, finally, accept it. At the same time, however, Pynchon suggests the importance of Heideggerian attitudes of withdrawal in the late 1960s as the New Left was falling apart. For Heidegger’s opposition to all forms of “enframing” can be translated in the context of the late 60s to two instances from popular culture: to the Beatles’ quietist slogan, to “Let it Be,” and to the Rolling Stones’ parodic response, to “Let it Bleed.” That is, the Heideggerian position in the late 1960s suggests attitudes both of passive withdrawal and of terrorism.

The Beatles’ song and album of 1969 spoke of a miraculous epiphany “in my hour of darkness” when “Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, Let it be, let it be.” Like the sentiments in “Revolution” (“If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You’re not gonna make it with anyone anyhow”), “Let it Be” advocates a withdrawal from a political activism which, in 1969, appeared to have utterly failed. And political activists in 1969 seemed to be faced with two alternatives: either to retire into some more private world of small community, religion, family, graduate school and let the larger world be; or to immerse themselves in the political chaos and violence, break down the barriers of their own scruples and repressions, not resist violence but become violent. To become a terrorist in that context was to “go with the flow,” or as the title of the Rolling Stones’ song put it, to “Let it Bleed.”

“Let it Bleed” was released apparently in response to the vapid quietism of “Let it Be,” but the tone of the song seems to belie the violence of its title. It is reassuringly melodic, without the sinister, if theatrical, edge of songs from “Beggar’s Banquet” (such as “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil”) which was released a year earlier. In fact, it seems in its tone and lyrics to reassert the sense of community that by 1969 had all but disappeared from the radical movements: “We all need someone we can lean on/And if you want to, you can lean on me…” But there is a strange sarcastic drawl that Mick Jagger gives to the word “lean” that immediately puts the assertion of community in question. And as the song continues, it appears to be not about community but about dismemberment and the unencumbered exchange of bodily fluids. “We all need someone we can lean on” is succeeded by “…dream on,” “…cream on,” “…feed on,” and finally “…bleed on.” In the verse, a woman tells the singer that her “breasts will always be open,” and Jagger responds that she can “take my arm, take my leg/Oh baby don’t you take my head.” And at the end of the song, having sung, “You can bleed all over me” he sings “You can come all over me.” The sarcastic emphasis on “lean” indicates that the mutual dependence and reciprocity implied by the opening line will in fact resolve into a mutual disintegration and a dissolution of both subjectivities into an undifferentiated flow of desire. The song proceeds from the mutuality of “lean” to a succession of self-shatterings: the unconscious (dream), orgasm (cream), cannibalism (feed), and bleeding (whether of a wound or of menstruation), and finally conflates the emissions of blood and semen. By the end of the song there is nothing but flow, unrestricted by any physical or social structure. To “Let it Bleed,” then, means to eliminate all distinctions and values: to let desire desire, to let flow flow. It is, though with a shift of emphasis, really not so different from letting Being be. “Let it Bleed,” I suggest, constructs a rock and roll version of the desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Deleuze and Guattari are named in Vineland at the wedding of Mafioso Ralph Wayvone’s daughter as authors of The Italian Wedding Fake Book, to which Billy Barf and Vomitones (disguised as Gino Baglione and the Paisans) resort when it becomes clear that they do not know any appropriate songs for an Italian wedding. They are only mentioned once, without elaboration, and it may be only another Pynchonesque throwaway, but if we follow the logic from Sister Rochelle’s “Let her be” to Heidegger, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, the reference to Deleuze and Guattari extends the Vineland‘s exploration of how to contend with the “Cosmic Fascist” which has contaminated sex, politics, and representation.

Published in 1972, Anti-Oedipus, like “Let it Be” and “Let it Bleed,” responds to the perceived catastrophic breakdown of the 60s social movements. It is to the political, and libidinal, utopianism of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown what the Weathermen were to the earlier communitarian idealism of the SDS. That is, it is a form of theoretical terrorism conceived in the collapse of hope in effective politics. The major problem Deleuze and Guattari address, and the problem which for them invalidates conventional political action and belief, is precisely the problem raised by Frenesi and Brock’s relationship, that of an inner fascism which structures sexuality, politics, and representation and which is apparently inseparable from these latter structures. As Michel Foucault writes in his Preface to Anti-Oedipus,

the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. . . . And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini–which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively–but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. (xiii)

For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no structure, no boundary, no form of identity which is not a blockage of the flow of desire, a flow which they posit as the only and necessary alternative to inner fascism. Desire alone is revolutionary. It is not governed (contra Freud) by the Oedipal conflict and its subsequent repressions, nor (contra Lacan) by some even more primal lack. Desire is nomadic and universal, and “does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures”; it is only “through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’ (292-93).

This relation between structure, desire, and inner fascism seems to describe the political sadomasochism of Brock and Frenesi and to provide a theoretical context for the catastrophes of the New Left in the late 60s. And if the problem is structure per se, any solution, as Deleuze and Guattari elaborate, must begin with destruction. What follows seems impossibly vague–the creation of subject (rather than subjugated) groups which can cause “desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinate the socius or the form of power to desiring-production” (348)–but the initial task is clear: “Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction–a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration” (311).

Anti-Oedipus marks a point in the history of theory which, both temporally and in spirit, parallels the moment of fragmentation, catastrophe, and apocalypse when, for the New Left, all forms of reasonable politics–either of working within the system or even of resisting it–became impossible. “Let it Be” or “Let it Bleed.” And yet, oddly, the quietist Beatles/Heideggerian position blurs into the revolutionary or terrorist Stones/Anti-Oedipus position. Both are post-apocalyptic responses to catastrophes perceived as all-encompassing and irreversible, as coterminous with the entire existing order. Both are complete rejections of that order, and embrace instead some incipient revelation outside of what the current, failed order is able to articulate.

It is only during times of massive cultural despair that such attitudes can appear as workable political positions, and Pynchon presents these absolute critiques of a phallic economy in the context of that late 60s moment when the counterculture tried utterly to divest itself of “Amerika” only to find those same forces of power and sexuality in itself. Yet we are not meant to see a Heideggerian or Deleuze-Guattarian position as providing the novel’s moral or political or redemptive energy. These positions, rather, represent initial, immediate, post-apocalyptic spasms. Heidegger’s is a voice from the grave (in Heidegger’s case, the grave of the German national dasein) in which all human acts appear flattened in the radiant (non)perspective of Being. Deleuze and Guattari’s is the voice of the revenant who has risen from the grave to devour the living. Both, in fact, are variations of Thanatoid postures, the resentful, traumatized, passive-aggressive (or aggressively passive) attitude of the living dead.

* * *

The moment of trauma, the apocalypse of the late 1960s–the moment that returns and is returned to–contains the revelation that all social structures, all human acts and culturally inflected desires, are inhabited by the Cosmic Fascist. At this same traumatic-apocalyptic moment, however, Vineland also depicts alternatives which entail neither quietistic withdrawal nor terrorism. The first of these alternatives is Karmic Adjustment, Vineland‘s parodic combination of psychoanalysis and Eastern religion. The second is the recurring vision of utopian possibility which, in Vineland, emerges at the same moment as does cultural trauma and inevitably returns with it as well. And these two forms of return–the working through of trauma and its symptomatic reincarnations by means of Karmic Adjustment, and the returns of utopian vision–in combination constitute Vineland‘s revised nostalgia.

DL Chastain and Takeshi Fumimota are the first characters in the novel to attempt to “balance” their “karmic account” (163). Their whole relationship, it must be noted, doubles that of Frenesi and Brock Vond. In fact, when they first meet, in a Tokyo brothel, Takeshi has accidently taken Brock’s place as a customer, and DL (who was to meet and assassinate Brock) is disguised as Frenesi. In this role, DL mistakenly administers to Takeshi the Ninja Death Touch, an esoteric martial arts technique which results in death up to a year after its application–acting, as doctors later tell Takeshi, “like trauma, only–much slower” (157). DL and Takeshi’s relation, like that of Frenesi and Brock, is marked by trauma: the Death Touch stands in for the Cosmic Fascist.

But while Frenesi and Brock arrive at a point of apocalyptic resignation whose dual forms are quietism and terrorism–“Let it Be” and “Let it Bleed”–DL and Takeshi, with the help of Sister Rochelle, enter the business of Karmic Adjustment. Although Sister Rochelle advises Takeshi to “let her just be” (a strategy which, as we have seen, is insufficient), she also insists that DL and Takeshi remain together, and that they balance their karmic account through DL’s “working off the great wrong you have done him” (163). This work involves, first, intensive therapy for Takeshi on what appears to be an enormous high-tech acupuncture machine, the “puncutron.” Ultimately, however, the process of healing consists of DL and Takeshi, gradually and with great resistance, creating for themselves a sexual relationship outside the reach of the Death Touch.

While working on balancing their own karmic account, DL and Takeshi encounter the Thanatoid community and transform their personal karmic labor (as the Reaganist entrepreneurial spirit would have it) into a small, high-tech, service industry based on treating unresolved Thanatoid traumas. The Thanatoids, they observe, are victims “of karmic imbalances–unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty” (173). And in the course of their work, DL and Takeshi

became slowly entangled in other, often impossibly complicated, tales of dispossession and betrayal. They heard of land titles and water rights, goon squads and vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and developers always described in images of thick fluids in flexible containers, injustices not only from the past but also virulently alive in the present day. (172)

The injuries and betrayals to be healed, then, are sexual and personal, but also social and historical; and Pynchon’s portrayal of Karmic Adjustment suggests that similar therapies can be applied to both types. Karmic Adjustment resembles, though on a broader scale, the Freudian process of “working through,” of learning to substitute a narrative remembering of trauma in place of a symptomatic repetition. As Freud wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a victim of trauma “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (18).¹² In Vineland, Frenesi and Brock, DL and Takeshi, the Thanatoids, and American culture as a whole in the 1980s all are engaged in repeating traumatic conflicts of the 1960s (which themselves, in Pynchon’s view, repeated such earlier traumas as the suppression of the Wobblies and the McCarthyist purges), and Karmic Adjustment provides a way to work back to those traumatic moments and retell them so as to make possible new histories and new futures.

At the same time, the whole Karmic Adjustment business is somewhat dubious. It is, after all, partly a scam. As Takeshi explains to DL, “they [the Thanantoids] don’t want to do it, so we’ll do it for them! Dive right down into it! Down into all that–waste-pit of time! We know it’s time lost forever–but they don’t!” (173). It is also, as the Thanatoid Ortho Bob Dulang reminds the two entrepreneurs, “wishful thinking” (171). Moreover, Karmic Adjustment, the Ninja Death Touch, DL’s whole martial arts education, Sister Rochelle’s Kunoichi sisterhood all are part of Vineland‘s comic treatment of the American interest in Eastern religion which took off in the 60s and reached a commercialized apotheosis in the 80s. Like the Thanatoids as symptoms of historical trauma, Karmic Adjustment as the working through of those symptoms is a joke, a bit of recycled 60s absurdity.

And yet, it is precisely as joke, as absurdity, that we can see Karmic Adjustment as a figure for Pynchon’s novelistic technique in Vineland. Traumas of the past return and are repeated as symptoms; but these symptoms may be outfitted in ridiculous historical costumes and take bizarre cultural forms. Indeed, Vineland itself is one of these ridiculous costumes and bizarre forms. Vineland‘s structure and style, its status as comic routine, an 80s parody that approaches Fredric Jameson’s notion of postmodern “pastiche”–a parody that has lost its moral axis and become indistinguishable from what it presumably had set out to satirize–enact the novel’s sense that postmodern cultural memory will be linked, inevitably and inextricably, to the consumer culture in which it is formed. As a “postmodern historical novel,” Vineland occupies a cultural position analogous to that which it creates within itself for Karmic Adjustment.

In its persistent and affectionate use of the cultural forms which it at the same time identifies as traumatic symptoms, Vineland verges on becoming what Michael Berube calls, in his discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow, a Pynchonian “pornography.” Berube describes this “pornography” in political and historical, rather than in sexual, terms as a “regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian (or prelinguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment and reconfiguration; and since,” Berube continues, “nostalgia itself works by much the same dynamic, Pynchon’s ‘pornography’ gives us fresh purchase on the cultural critique of nostalgia as well” (248). If Vineland did nothing more than show the inescapability of postmodern cultural forms, then it would be a “pornography” in Berube’s sense. Hanjo Berressem comes close to making this claim when he argues that “Vineland‘s main theme is the complicity of the subject with power” (237) and that in its inscriptions of popular and media culture, the novel “acknowledges thematically as well as structurally that literature (as well as criticism) is never innocent” (236). While the latter statement is certainly true, what needs to be added to Berressem’s Lacanian examination of Pynchon’s aesthetic strategies in Vineland, and what removes the novel from the status of nostalgic “pornography,” is the decisive role of historical trauma in helping both to create and to destabilize the postmodern cultural forms that the novel employs. The novel cannot help but be complicit, nostalgic, “pornographic,”–a part of the symbolic order–and yet it consistently returns to those historical moments that disrupt its “regressive anamnesias.” It continually stumbles on what Slavoj Zizek calls the “rock” of the Lacanian Real: “that which resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is always missed but none the less always returns, although we try . . . to neutralize it, to integrate it in to the symbolic order” (69).

Vineland‘s stylistic and thematic insistence on its whimsical deflections through American consumer culture, its role as schtick or pastiche, should not blind us to its historical seriousness and accuracy. Consider that DL is an American military brat who puts the Death Touch on an Asian man through a displacement of American domestic concerns, then is linked to him by guilt. This sounds historically familiar. And the novel’s depictions of betrayals and repressions of and within the old and new lefts are essentially accurate: The I.W.W. in the Northwest really was brutally repressed by local and federal authorities during the First World War. The F.B.I. in the 1960s really did infiltrate and subvert leftist movements. Hanging the “snitch jacket” on radical leaders (as Frenesi did to Weed) really was a common tactic. Lenient regulations regarding federal grand juries in the early 1970s really did allow federal prosecutors (like Brock Vond) to conduct open-ended investigations of people and organizations who had not been accused of any crime.¹³ And, most generally, as historians such as Sara Evans have pointed out, much of the New Left’s failure was, in fact, due to its inability to conceive of an egalitarian sexual politics.¹⁴

Part of Vineland‘s project, then, is to represent the transmission of the social traumas of the 1960s into the 1980s, and to suggest a method–which, in the 1980s, can only be parodic–of coming to terms with these traumas. But trauma is not all that returns in Vineland from the 1960s. Pynchon also describes a utopian, communitarian, vision and energy as having provided the basis for 60s radicalism, and then returning to indicate a moral and political axis for confronting neo-conservative and Reaganist politics of the 1980s. Frenesi, in the mid-60s, “dreamed of a mysterious people’s oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she’d seen in the street, in short, timeless, bursts…” (117). The model for such a community is Frenesi’s radical film collective, 24fps, and it is important to note that this group explicitly dedicates itself to a kind of visual-political revelation:

They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? (195)

Frenesi’s vision is a form of witnessing and is meant to be transmitted–as it is, twenty years later, to her daughter, Prairie, who, seeing her mother’s films, “could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty” (210).

These utopian moments, “timeless bursts” of light, liberation, and possibility, are the sites of Pynchon’s revised nostalgia. Along with the disasters and failures of the 1960s, whose traumatic residues continue to haunt the landscapes of the 1980s, Pynchon also locates moments of vision that leap outside their traumatic histories. These moments, in the first place, oppose the social injustices of their time. Secondly, they indicate alternative, communitarian, non-domineering, non-acquisitive forms of social life. We see these forms partly embodied in the social fabric of 24fps and in the early days of the “People’s Republic of Rock and Roll” at the College of the Surf. These forms of idealistic, politically committed communal life resemble the ideal Sara Evans describes in Personal Politics as the “beloved community.”¹⁵ And, finally, the “timeless bursts” of utopian feeling are unsuccessful; they are never achieved, but exist and are transmitted primarily as vision–and so it is fitting that Pynchon portrays this utopian vision as the work of radical filmmakers.

Pynchon’s revised nostalgia, then, is for sites of unrealized possibility; and it is a nostalgia which, as if akin to the social traumas that surround it, returns of its own accord, together with those traumas, and opposing them. In this revised nostalgia, it is not so much that we seek to return to a site of original wholeness; rather, the unrealized possibility of social harmony and justice itself compulsively returns, providing an alternative to existing conditions and a motive for changing them. Vineland describes a post-apocalyptic (or post-traumatic) and utopian nostalgia whose longing, amid the traumatic effects of historical crisis and disaster, is for yet unrealized forms of community. This nostalgia shoots into the present as a “timeless burst,” but it entails the effort to work through historical trauma and to construct the social relations which it has imagined.

Vineland‘s revised nostalgia, then, is quite distinct from the nostalgias attributed to it by its critics–the “60s nostalgic quietism” attributed to it by Alec McHoul. Pynchon does describe in Vineland these more conventional processes of nostalgia, the ways in which specific traumatic and political memories are obscured by memories of fashion and by universal laments about “the world,” “the business,” and human nature. And Pynchon shows how the nostalgic machinery which has already obscured the Wobblies, the Second World War, and McCarthyism is now at work on the 60s.¹⁶ Pynchon’s nostalgia for the “timeless bursts” of the 1960s is, rather, more akin to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “jetztzeit,” that urgent “time of the now,” the pivotal moment in which the history of oppression can be rewritten. And we should note that Benjamin, anticipating the fate of the Thanatoids, writes that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (255, Benjamin’s emphasis).

Pynchon, like Benjamin, gives a new political meaning to the pain of the returning past, and demonstrates that nostalgia need not have only a negative or reactionary value. Pynchon’s revised nostalgia does not constitute (as, for instance, does Reaganist nostalgia) a leapfrogging back past historical trauma to some imagined age of solid family values. It emerges, rather, directly out of the moment of greatest trauma, out of the moment of apocalypse itself. Thus, the family reunion with which the novel ends is not, despite superficial resemblances, a paean either to the “family values” of the New Right or to a middle-aged New Leftist’s yearning for vanished youth. Even Prairie’s eventual reunion with her mother, Frenesi, turns out to be, ultimately, beside the point. Her more important encounter, and reconciliation, is with the Thanatoid Weed Atman, the former revolutionary whom Frenesi had caused, or allowed, to be murdered back at the College of the Surf. Weed, in turn, “still a cell of memory, of refusal to forgive,” can only work through his “case,” his obsession “with those who’ve wronged [him], with their continuing exemption from punishment” (365) by means of this relationship with the daughter of the woman who betrayed him. Prairie, touching Weed’s hand, is “surprised not at the coldness . . . but at how light it was, nearly weightless” (366). It is this relationship that gives his existence weight and allows him, like the tails of the Thantoid dogs, to “gesture meaningfully in the present” (367).

The physical presences and meaningful gestures of these ghosts of history in Vineland allow us finally to distinguish Pynchon’s revised nostalgia from the genuinely regressive nostalgia of a work like Forest Gump. Gump, of course, brings the 60s back to the present through its extraordinary “documentary” special effects scenes that show us Forest shaking hands with Lyndon Johnson, as well as Forest participating both in the Vietnam War and in anti-war protests. Forest redeems the traumas of the 1960s, but the redemptive formula in that film lies in being oblivious to politics–and to adult sexuality–altogether: in simply (that is, very simply) being “human.” This vision of an apolitical, virtually infantile, “humanity” that can redeem a damaged national history is probably, unfortunately, the source of the movie’s enormous appeal. This vision is also a large part of the appeal of Reaganism and of the current neo-Reaganist Republican ascendency. In Vineland, however, every human feeling and relation springs from political-historical premises and is laden with political consequences. While Forest Gump firmly separates the traumatic from the redemptive, in Vineland the two are always fused. The real reunion at the end of Vineland is of the living with the dead: a reunion with the traumatic past (now at least partially “karmically adjusted”) and with the utopian sense of possibility that flashed into being at the same apocalyptic moment.

Notes

1.Thanks to Michael Prince and to the anonymous readers for Postmodern Culture for their help in revising this essay.

2.”In the imaginative past of nostalgic writers,” write Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, “men were men, women were women, and reality was real. To retrieve ‘reality,’ an authentic language, and ‘natural’ sexual identity, these writers fight the false, seductive images of a decadent culture that they believe are promoted by feminist writing” (3).

3.See, for example, Brad Leithauser’s ridicule: “How delightful it is as one’s joint-passing youth is now revealed to be no mere idyll but–Wow! Neat!–the stuff of great art” (10). Alec Mchoul criticizes Vineland‘s politics as “60s nostalgic quietism” (98), and Alan Wilde writes that “by locating the ideal in the lifetime of his characters, Pynchon betrays again his nostalgia for the regretted time before the eclipse of ‘the analog arts . . . by digital technology’” (171). See also Ellen Friedman’s more sweeping critique of Vineland as an example of an American male nostalgia for the vanishing privileges of patriarchy, in which “even the most radical expressions of rebellion and discontent . . . are suffused with nostalgia for a past order, for older texts, for the familiar sustaining myths” (250).

4.Recall that “nostalgia” was originally a medical term designating a physical illness experienced by travellers far from home.

5.Pynchon’s fiction has continually returned to historical trauma, and has presented historical trauma in terms that are both catastrophic and revelatory–that is, in apocalyptic terms. The German colonial genocide in Southwest Africa (treated both in its own right and as a precursor to the Nazi genocide of European Jews), the slaughters of World War I relived by Brigadier Pudding in his masochistic, copraphagic encounters with Katje at the White Visitation, the ongoing bureaucratic-scientific control procedures practiced by “the Firm” in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the implicit emptiness and oppression of the tupperware America presented in The Crying of Lot 49 all stand as portents for some potentially all-encompassing and definitive disaster. Further, they are revelations that this disaster has, in reality, been present all along; that we live, as Gravity’s Rainbow would have it, always along the trajectory of the rocket. Vineland‘s complex response to the apocalyptic question that ends The Crying of Lot 49–“either there was some Tristero . . . or there was just America”–goes beyond the binarism of that question and, I believe, beyond the curative potential contained in the vague countercultural “Counterforce” of Gravity’s Rainbow. In Vineland, there is “just America”; but there is a great deal to be retrieved and reworked in that traumatic legacy.

6.It is hard to remember now, only nine years later, all the cultural weight attached to that Orwellian year. For forty years, 1984 served as the measure of our social fears. Especially during the crises of the 1960s, 1984 loomed ahead as a prophecy. People could say in 1968, either there will be a revolution or it will be 1984–either way, the apocalypse. 1984, in effect, replaced the millennium. In Vineland, 1984 marks an ironic conflation of the anticlimax of Orwellian prophecy and the high water mark of Reaganism. For a discussion of the millennial significance taken on by Orwell’s novel, see Hillel Schwartz’ Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siecle from the 990s Through the 1990s. Particularly useful is the bibliographic note 75 on page 356.

7.See also John B. Judis, who writes that “Reagan invented the tactic, which became a hallmark of the new right, of targeting the white working class by campaigning against the civil rights, antiwar, and countercultural movements of the 1960s” (236). Finally, Gary Wills suggests that for the Right, “the ‘lifestyle’ revolution was the more serious [threat] because it was the more lasting phenomenon: it changed attitudes toward sex, parents, authority, the police, the military” (340).

8.Think, for example, of literature’s most famous ghost. Hamlet’s father is “doomed for a certain term to walk the night” first in order to purge his own sins; then he appears to Hamlet to narrate the trauma of his murder; but finally, his appearance goes beyond just personal and familial trauma and is a general sign that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

9.In a similar way, the Becker and Traverse families, in Eula Becker’s narrative, become living memorials to the labor movement: “Be here to remind everybody–any time they see a Traverse, or Becker for that matter, they’ll remember that one tree, and who did it, and why. Hell of a lot better ‘n a statue in the park” (76). And for Frenesi, of course, “the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back…” (71).

10.For the Right, the apocalypse of the 60s lay in the very fact that those radical social movements took place and, in part, succeeded. The conservative commentator Robert Nisbet pounded this apocalyptic chord when he wrote, “…it would be difficult to find a single decade in the history of Western culture when so much barbarism–so much calculated onslaught against culture and convention in any form, and so much sheer degradation of both culture and the individual–passed into print, into music, into art and onto the American stage as the decade of the Nineteen Sixties” (quoted in Kevin Phillips, 18). For the Left, of course, the catastrophe of the movements of the 1960s lay in their apparent failures. Although historians like Petchesky, Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin have pointed out that the Reaganist reaction to the 1960s presupposed that the radical movements in some measure had succeeded, the presence of Reaganism as the dominant political force in the 1980s led the Left–and certainly led Pynchon–to conclude that they had failed.

11.See especially “The Question Concerning Technology”: Enframing “banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. . . . Where Enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing. They no longer even let their own fundamental characteristics appear, namely, this revealing as such” (27).

12.Cf. Freud’s earlier essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in which he describes at greater length the roles of memory and narrative in treating neuroses.

13.See Frank J. Donner’s The Age of Surveillance, as well as Todd Gitlin’s and Tom Hayden’s accounts of the 1960s.

14.Pynchon is historically accurate in pointing to sexuality and gender relations as particular problems for New Left politics. As Stokely Carmichael commented in 1965, “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.” Sara Evans, Barbara Epstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Alice Echols have written compellingly of the sexual turmoil and contradictions in the New Left as rebellion against the restrictive gender roles of the 1950s had very different implications for men as for women. As Echols writes, “by advancing an untamed masculinity–one that took risks and dared to gamble–the New Left was in some sense promoting a counterhegemonic . . . understanding of masculinity,” but one at odds with any feminist sense of gender roles (16). A very interesting text from the 60s that treats this problem is Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, in which Cleaver, a convicted rapist, argues that sexuality is always incompatible with political action, that the political activist must be a kind of eunuch in order to be effective and uncorrupted–an extreme position taken by a man with his own extreme problems, but its implications are still part of current debates, as when Andrea Dworkin in her discussion of pornography writes, “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too” (217).

15.The vision of a “beloved,” or “redemptive” community that informed the early civil rights movement, Evans writes, “constituted both a vision of the future to be obtained through nonviolent action and a conception of the nature of the movement itself” (37). In showing how this sense of community was taken up by the New Left in the early 1960s, and then adopted by feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the New Left’s fragmentation, Evans, much like Pynchon, tells the story of the historical transmission of a utopian vision.

16.For Prairie, the 1960s are initially just a set of cliches. She watches her mother’s films of demonstrations and remarks on the “‘dude…with the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth . . .’ ‘You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?’ ‘Right on, sister!’” (115). Or, as Hector Zuniga, the former DEA officer and aspiring film producer tells Zoyd, “Caray, you sixties people, it’s amazing. Ah love ya! Go anywhere, it don’t matter–hey, Mongolia! Go way out into smalltown Outer Mongolia, ese, there’s gonna be some local person about your age come runnin up, two fingers in a V, hollering, ‘What’s yer sign, man?’ or singin ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ note for note” (28). And we should note in Hector’s ridicule of 60s nostalgia the repeated presence of Pynchon’s favorite recurring consonant, perhaps a parodic nostalgia for his own productions from the 60s.

Works Cited
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
- Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1993.
- Berube, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992.
- Cannon, Lou. Reagan. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1982.
- Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968.
- Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1986.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. [1972]. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983.
- Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
- Donner, Frank J. The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. New York: Knopf, 1980.
- Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Dutton, 1989.
- Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City and New York: Anchor, 1983.
- Epstein, Barbara. “Family Politics and the New Left: Learning From Our Own Experience.” Socialist Review 12 (1982): 141-61.
- Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage, 1979.
- Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 18:7-64.
- —. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” S.E. 12:147-156.
- Friedman, Ellen G. “Where are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon.” PMLA 108 (1993): 240-52.
- Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 115-54.
- —. “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 189-242.
- —. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 3-35.
- Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. “The Failure and Success of the New Radicalism.” The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980. Ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. 212-42.
- Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
- Judis, John B. Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.
- Leithauser, Brad. “Any Place You Want.” New York Review of Books 15 March 1990: 7-10.
- Lowenthal, David. “Nostalgia Tells it Like it Wasn’t.” The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1989. 18-32.
- McHoul, Alex. “TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA FICTION (Or, St. Ruggles’ Struggles, Chapter 4).” Pynchon Notes 26-27 (1990): 97-106.
- Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. “Antiabortion and Antifeminism.” Major Problems in American Women’s History. Ed. Mary Beth Norton. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1989. 438-452.
- Phillips, Kevin P. Post-Conservative American: People, Politics and Ideology in a Time of Crisis. New York: Randon House, 1982.
- Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
- —. Vineland. New York: Penguin, 1990.
- Schwartz, Hillel. Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siecle from the 990s Through the 1990s. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
- Wilde, Alan. “Love and Death in and Around Vineland, U.S.A.” Boundary 2 18 (1991): 166-80.
- Wills, Gary. Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
- Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
September 24, 2013
The Lamentation
Virginia Hooper

Invocation
```
Philosophical speculation and recent history alike had 
prepared the way for an understanding of the process by which, 
in times long past, the gods had been recruited from the ranks 
of mortal men.
 
-- Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods
```
Anything that serves as a hint
or reminder of the past, either of two prayers
in the canon beginning with the word Memento,
the first being for the living, the second for the dead,
each serving as a reminder of the past.
At the line of the apparent meeting of the sky
with the earth, the bounds of one’s observation, knowledge
and experience unfold upon the point
where the observer stands. The great circle
of a celestial sphere cutting the center of the mind
midway between its zenith and nadir,
revealing a layer of memory characterized by the presence
of one or more distinctive centers of attraction.
I came to know her again, to perceive her
as identical with the one I had previously known.
So related, as two concepts, that if the first
determines the second, then the second
determines the first. The quotient obtained in dividing
unity by a number or expression. To pursue
for the purpose of catching; to range over an area
in search of game; to chase, drive away,
or pursue with greed; to search for eagerly.
To search for until found; to find after a search.
To utter the loud, mournful wail of a dog, wolf,
or other animal. To utter such a cry in pain, grief or rage.

The first part of the romance
began on an ancient instrument of execution,
a horizontal piece near the top, upon which condemned
persons were fastened until they died. A sacred symbol
in many ancient religions, consisting basically of two
intersecting lines. The emblem of Christianity,
a representation of the cross upon which Christ died.
Any severe trial, affliction or suffering.
Anything that resembles or is intermediate between two
other things: a cross between poetry and prose.
The accidental contact of two wires so that current
from one flows to the other. The geometric mean
of two numbers. To move or pass from one side
to the other; go across; traverse. To draw
a line across. To obstruct or hinder; thwart.
Our paths had crossed. It had crossed my mind
this might happen. She made me promise to tell the truth
by making the sign of the cross over my heart.
She insisted I mark a cross on the palm
of my hand, as though paying a fortuneteller.
Choose implies an act of will: to choose a side.
Select emphasizes careful consideration and comparison:
to select the best cookie from a tray.
To pick is to select because especially well fitted
or appropriate. Cull means to select and collect
at the same time: to cull striking passages from a book.
To prefer is to favor mentally, often without any overt
act: she preferred me for no other reason.
But she had also thwarted it. This much I could remember,
but not easily. Memory, remembrance, retrospect, recollection
and reminiscence refer to the recalling
of one’s past experience. Memory is the mental
faculty by which this recall takes place; remembrance
is the act of bringing something to mind:
her eyes were like sapphires. Retrospect is the turning
of the mind to the past, and recollection
the voluntary calling back of what has been learned
or experienced. Of the two, retrospect suggests
contemplation or careful consideration of the past,
while recollection is more specific
and aims to recapture a single fact or event
for some immediate practical purpose. Reminiscence
implies the narration and savoring of past events.
The card had been drawn. The Fool represents the absence
of all things real or imagined. It is the beginner’s
mind and the concept of nothingness.
“Now that you’ve come, stay a while.”
Either of the terms of the story that,
separated in the premises, are joined in the conclusion,
so that they are eternally happy. We met by the edge of the sea.
Effect, consequence, result, outcome and upshot
refer to events or circumstances produced
by some agency. Effect stresses most strongly
the presence and force of an agency, since its correlative
is cause. Popular usage often substitutes
consequence for effect, though strictly a consequence
is merely that which comes afterward in time
and is not necessarily connected causally with its antecedents.
Result suggests finality, or that effect
with which the operation of a cause terminates.
Outcome suggests a result that makes visible or evident
the working of an agency, and upshot suggests
a decisive or climactic result. She had sent me hunting
for causes. A determinant, antecedent,motive and reason
refer to events or circumstances prior to others.
A cause produces a necessary and invariable effect;
it may be used in the sense of the determinant
to mean one of the prior factors that influence the form,
details or character of the effect
without being its sole cause. An antecedent refers merely
to that which goes before in time,
and does not necessarily imply any causal relationship.
A motive is the inner impulse that guides
intelligent action: a reason, the explanation given.
Reason, purpose, motive, ground and argument
are compared as they denote the basis of a human action.
A reason seeks to explain or justify an action
by citing facts, circumstances, inducement and the like,
together with the workings of the mind upon them.
Reasons may include purpose and motive
as internal or subjective elements,
and also grounds and arguments that are external or objective.
The purpose of an action is the effect
that it is intended to produce; its motive is the inner
impulse that sets is in motion and guides it.
I returned to the edge of the sea. The beginning
of the existence of anything; a primary source.
The point at which the axes of a Cartesian coordinate
system intersect: the point where the ordinate
and abscissa equal zero. A quarter section of a circle,
subtending an arc of 90 degrees, with a movable radius
for measuring angles, used in navigation, surveying
and astronomy. In a Cartesian coordinate system,
any of the four sections formed by the intersection
of the X and Y axes. Moving counter-clockwise
from the upper right-hand quadrant,
they are called the first, second, third and fourth
quadrants. Beginning, commencement, opening, initiation
and inauguration refer to the earliest period of existence.
Beginning is the broadest term and is applied
freely to human and nonhuman activities. Initiation,
besides the particular sense of the beginning
of membership in an organization, refers to the beginning
of things created by human effort or ingenuity:
The initiation of our friendship was marked by great relief.
This was as far as I could go without adopting
the method of the cross-word puzzler,
which is to use the answers already secured as clues
for the solution of the more difficult riddles that remain.

The First Quadrant
```
If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible 
sense, then an outside is precisely -- nonsense.
 
-- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
```
Being in the shadow of someone superlative,
spinning round a magical orbit,
forming the essential part of the symmetry,
climbing stairs that led the way
on a day that imposed upon us to stay
in the house, I met her trying to see
out the window. She had told me to sit
down and pause a moment, then she’d give
me a reason not to go. I began to cry.
“But why?” she asked. “You can have
your cake and eat it too, if you like.”
She was writing her memoirs, she would
later explain to me. “How come?”
I asked her. She handed me some
ice-cream for the cake. “I should
be on my way, you see, I’m on my bike
following a course on the far side of a wave
which brought me here. I guess it’s high
time I got somewhere.” She told
me to sit a moment, not to go, that much
of her time was spent in dealing with her
own endeavors. Tiresome, it became.
After our exchange, she asked my name.
I could not remember and said I would prefer
to omit that part of the game in favor of such
activities as keeping warm from the cold.
This apparently struck her as delightful,
that the verification of so small a percentage
of her theory could so powerfully strengthen
her belief in its totality. The blank
in my mind began to obsess my thoughts, as I sank
back into a chair to gaze out her window and lengthen
the vision of days I would spend with her, each vintage
of an hour before the passage into nightfall.

To confuse or perplex; mystify.
To solve by investigation or study; to puzzle
over. To attempt to understand or solve.
A toy, word, game, etc., designed to test one’s ingenuity
or patience. Puzzle, problem, enigma, conundrum,
riddle and mystery signify any difficult or perplexing
matter. A puzzle is usually intricate
but can be solved by ingenuity and patience;
many puzzles are made for amusement. A problem usually demands
special knowledge and good judgement; formal problems
are given to students to test their learning
and skill. An enigma is something said or written
whose meaning is hidden and can only be inferred from clues.
A conundrum is a baffling question, the answer
to which depends upon some trick of words.
Conundrums are also called riddles, but a riddle
is usually less playful in character: The riddle required
my response. A mystery was originally something beyond
human comprehension, but the word
is now freely applied to perplexing situations.

During the recurring period within which
certain events occurred and completed themselves,
during the days we came to know one another,
she began to teach me many things beyond
the level of my previous understanding, forming a bond
as though we were a daughter and mother.
There were many and assorted books upon her shelves,
each afternoon requiring that we find a niche
to settle in, while she revealed
her special knowledge pertaining to the arts
of magic and the stars. “Time is an abstraction
from change,” she began explaining to me.
I replied that this was possible to see.
“It’s secret rests in two bodies of attraction,
and in the knowledge there concealed.
We must distinguish between two different types
of change. The first of an event taking place
before our eyes, the second of an event
having already occurred. In the first,
we detect an event as randomly dispersed,
and in the second, it is the memory that is meant.
Imagine, if you can,measuring the relative pace
of those two seagulls in their flights.”
I looked to see through her window
the one intent upon overtaking the other,
following in a regular and persistent pattern.
“We observe the spatial disposition of things
and we follow their temporal succession,
but to perceive them moving forward in progression
requires the sense of each. As to where their wings
will take them and when, each seagull follows the pattern
determined in the search for its lover.
In this direction, all creatures go.”

Journey, voyage, tour, excursion and pilgrimage
denote a going from one place to another.
Journey is the general term, implying no particular distance
or means of locomotion, but the tendency
is to restrict it to travel by land; voyage
is commonly reserved for travel by sea. A tour is a journey
to a number of different places by a circuitous route.
A trip is a short journey. Both tour and trip
imply a return to the starting point; this is made explicit
in excursion, which describes a temporary departure
from a place. A pilgrimage is a journey to a destination
held in reverence. To succeed in time or order.
To seek to overtake or capture; to follow
the customs of a country. To watch or observe closely:
She followed the course of her life. I had,
no doubt, followed her here. To understand the course,
sequence or meaning of, as an explanation.
To come after as a consequence or result: the effect
follows the cause. To follow through to the end,
as an argument. In card games, to play a card
of the suit led. A stroke in billiards that causes the cue
ball, after impact, to follow the object ball.

The beautiful formlessness of the sea,
a landscape that was not land, but the end
of the land, upon this edge I stood and stared,
wedged between two waves of remembrance,
each of which afforded me an avenue of admittance.
And standing along this rocky shore, I knew then that I was paired
to both. The tide gathered itself as the wind
brought to me the sight of the seagulls in their constancy,
the faithfulness of their purpose. The silence
drew away from me as the rim of my vision parted
in such a way that a faint, undersea light filtered
across the sand, exposing each pebble and shell
as the wreckage of some other abandoned landscape,
as though seeing from the bottom of a pool, their fixed shape,
the glimpse of some other time and place I can’t dispel.
By the beautiful formlessness of the sea, I remembered
my given name. Following an imaginary line, I had started
the descending flight which had led to my residence.
After a moment, she stood beside me and we talked
of my understanding. I had made a big decision
not to leave, to stay right here in the house
and under no condition allow myself to be taken back.
It would be difficult, but I planned a counterattack
I knew should work if I used all my hope. Anyhow,
the first important step was to tell her my intention.
By now we were some distance from the house, as we walked
along the shore. A quarter of an hour
passed before we turned back. I told her to hold on
to me by all means because I hadn’t been discharged
at all. I had somehow managed to get out!
She took my hand, “You’ve only followed the route
I made for you.” We stood together facing her large
house by the sea until the sun was finally gone.
Events here, I plainly saw, were beyond my own power.

Emblem, symbol, sign and token agree
in denoting a visible representation, usually of something
intangible. An emblem appeals most strongly
to the eye. In this strictest sense, it is a pictorial
device, as a seal, badge, flag, etc., or, less frequently,
some object which represents or suggests
a religious, familial, political or similar group,
either through fitness or historical connection:
The seashell became the emblem of our love.
In less strict use, emblem is sometimes interchanged
with symbol, a word with much broader application:
The Cross is the emblem (or symbol) of Christianity.
A symbol may be pictorial or not; its connection
with its original may be historical, conventional or purely
arbitrary. A sign may be an arbitrary symbol, or
it may be the outward manifestation of inward character.
Token is applied chiefly to a symbol which represents
a pledge: A kiss is a token of love.
Bend, bow, crook, turn and twist mean to change
the form or direction of a thing. Bend and bow suggest
a smooth curve, but bend may also be used
for angular or irregular turns: She bent my path
toward her. Crook means to bend into a hooklike shape.
Turn refers to a change in direction
rather than a change in shape, while twist suggests
a great or violent force: to turn the course of a stream,
to twist my arm. Bend, bow and stoop refer
to bodily positions. Bend is used of any departure
from an upright stance: to bend over the table.
Bow is usually formal, and describes a forward
and downward inclination of the head or upper body.

By hook or by crook, I had been found in her book.
Without defense or protection, being without means,
lacking the conditions necessary for any particular
kind of validation, as of a contract or promise,
I was conferred into a precise point, a mysterious mark,
from which the diverted hours led me to embark
upon a course toward her side, an apprentice
washed in by the raging sea, standing perpendicular
above the teeming foam, seeking shelter and one to please.
On a day that imposed upon us to stay in the house, she took
me into her pleasure as though I had strayed into her presence
without there having been any need or reason. A longing
bred and borne on the very ground
where I had come to stand, a simple enough provocation
to awaken the desire for her and violent storms
at sea. Absorbed upon the forms
that made her image, I was protected by the sea’s fortification,
wishing for nothing more than to work beside her spellbound
through these days that promised to be forever ongoing,
as all things are governed by her intelligence.

The Second Quadrant
```
All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately
complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, 
but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming 
crests.
 
-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
```
“Would you care to take a trip to the lighthouse?”
she asked on a day that imposed upon us to stay
out of the house. I said that this sounded
like a lovely thing to do. “We can pack
a picnic basket and spend the whole day right smack
on the island,” she boasted, “and completely surrounded
by water.” The attraction was undeniable and not a little risque.
“If it appeals to you in the slightest, a night in the lighthouse
could be arranged.” I carefully considered the thought.
What did this portend? “Well, yes, of course,”
I replied to the pleasure, “but we must rise
with the seagulls.” She nodded her head.
“Which means, of course, we must go early to bed,”
she declared to me. I knew it was clearly unwise
to argue this point. In any case, I was quick to endorse
the event and certainly had no wish to appear untaught
in the particulars of my inclinations. But her point
was well taken that a day and a night spent
in the lighthouse would surely be divine. We were
definitely in sympathy. So the imagined milieu
of one foggy night’s indulgence did not provoke dissent
from me. I had heard strange tales about this joint!
And besides, a slight respite would be nice.
So the next morning we set our sails toward our goal,
tacking into the wind, rising with each cresting wave.
“What makes a sailboat go?” I thought to ask.
“The wind — that is what.” She handed me the flask
of wine. “But the wind will sometimes behave
in a very odd way.” She leaned back against our bedroll,
dipping her hand into the basket for a slice
of Camembert cheese. “Otherwise, how could we sail
directly against the force which is pushing us?
The wind’s force passing over our sail’s surface
creates a lift upon the topside, a contrary vacuum
occurs on the backside. This vacuum causes our boat to zoom
ahead. Any attempt to locate this power is useless,
but the laws assure us it is there. This wondrous
effect is also assisted by the essential detail
of the centerboard keel, maintaining our upright
position. And so, there are two forces — one from water,
the other from air — known as the parallelogram of power.
A boat is capable of sailing into the wind,
with the wind, or at right angles to its destined
position. We have two sails lending us power.
The first channels air across the main and is a quarter
of its size. The larger and the smaller unite
in concert to provide the proper angle in their opposition.
Air rushes through their division; from this the vacuum springs.”
I enjoyed her explanation, but better was the wind
against my face and, now and then, the sprays of mist
washing over us. She handed me a sandwich I couldn’t resist
of avocado and alfalfa sprouts. “I think I comprehend
what makes our sailboat go and all those other things,
but my mind is somewhat vague concerning the proposition
of opposition.” She told me not to worry. “Sit back
and enjoy your sandwich.” I obeyed and figured
by now we must be halfway there. From one perspective
I saw our home receding into the distance,
and from another emerged the lighthouse’s existence.
Everything seemed as it should, with no other objective
required then the one at hand. We clowned and snickered
the rest of the way, savoring every glorious snack.

Any movement of air, especially a natural
horizontal movement; air in motion naturally.
Any powerful or wonderful force: It was the wind’s
pleasure to serve them. The direction from which a wind
blows; one of the cardinal points of the compass:
They gathered from the four winds.
A suggestion or intimation: to get wind of a plot.
The power of breathing. Breath as expended in words,
especially as having more sound than sense; idle chatter.
The wind instruments of an orchestra; also, the players
of these instruments. To receive a hint of:
The deer got wind of the hunter — hurrah!
To sail in a direction as near as possible
to that from which the wind blows. A sandwich is made
from two thin slices of bread, having between them
meat, cheese, etc., only it is highly improper
to eat an animal, so an avocado may be substituted,
or even a banana if one desires. Sometimes an eggplant is tasty.
Any combination of alternating dissimilar ingredients
pressed together. Day alternated with night.
To change from one place, condition, etc., to another
and back again. Existing, occurring or following by turns;
reciprocal. We alternated steering the rudder
while our legs were sandwiched together.
It was a very pleasant voyage.

The abandoned lighthouse stood on a slight eminence
of land located in the center of the island.
On all sides, the ground sloped gently away
until the shore met the lapping affection of the water’s edge.
We climbed out of our boat. “We should wedge
our craft up among the rocks so it will stay
safe from the tide. Perhaps on the far side where the highland
faces north.” While we performed our task with diligence,
the sun had waited to place itself beneath the darkening sky
and now, as evening came, was nowhere to be found.
“Now tell me, have you ever seen such a splendid retreat?”
she asked with evident joy. I had to agree.
Anyone would. “Let’s put our bags away, then we’ll sightsee
around the place. We can gather some mesquite
for roasting our fish. Afterward, we’ll wade the sound
for a clam and an oyster or two.” This seemed to specify
precisely what we’d do for dinner. “Put your sweater
on, you’ll catch a chill.” She handed me my knapsack.
I couldn’t help but stop and admire the conical structure
of rusticated stone, a crown of tiny windows encircling the top.
We followed the winding path toward the door, when suddenly a drop
of rain splashed down. Seeing I was scared, she told me to trust her.
We wound our way up the spiral stairway and began to unpack.
“This storm is going to be a rough one, so we’d better
plan to camp inside. As I recall, there’s a dry supply
of wood stored down below. We’ll light a fire
and make ourselves at home.” I trembled as the first crack of lightning
bathed the facets of the room in separateness, a faint
and subtle apprehension stretched my fears undone,
directing my intelligence back upon its own confusion.
She had left me standing alone in order to acquaint
me with another part of myself, some unfelt, frightening
quarter I hadn’t known. Shadowing this initial agitation, my desire
to bring her back into my presence prevailed against
her absence, and suddenly she reappeared. “I found some nice
dry mesquite.” I turned to see her standing at the stairs,
a sign of reassurance that pinned me to ground.
“The fear that I just had while you were nowhere to be found,
I do not understand it — I have never suffered such nightmares
in my sleep.” She answered, “This was merely a device
to hear you call my name, as a young, tame animal left unfenced
will do when unattended.” I stared in disbelief.
She had put me to a proof. “Your voice is strong
and resonant. A fine thing. You have learned
from me.” She worked to build the fire. “Our calls are in accord.”
I understood nothing of this, only that she’d been restored
to me. Only that, without her, I had yearned
to be with her. “I hope this is not a lesson you will prolong.”
She answered that the test was tried, then sighed relief.

A device used in a timepiece for securing
a uniform movement, consisting of an escape wheel
and a detente or lock, through which periodical impulses
are imparted to the balance wheel. A typewriter mechanism
controlling or regulating the horizontal movement
of the carriage. To clasp or unfold in the arms: hug.
To accept willingly; adopt, as a religion or doctrine.
To avail oneself of: to embrace an offer.
Surround; include; contain. To have sexual intercourse with.
To hug one another. To grasp. We made love
after the fire was made. Affording approach, view, passage
or access because of the absence or removal of barriers,
restriction, etc.; unobstructed; unconcealed;
not secret or hidden: an open heart. Expanded; unfolded:
an open flower. I revealed to her .
my fear, she revealed to me her need. Afterward, we took a rest
and played a game involving a loop of string
stretched in an intricate arrangement over the fingers
and then transferred to the other player’s hands
in a changed form. To engage in sport or diversion;
amuse oneself; frolic. To act or behave in a way
that is not to be taken seriously. To make love sportively.
To move quickly or irregularly as if frolicking:
the lights played along the wall.
To discharge or be discharged freely: a fountain playing
in the square. To perform on a musical instrument.
To give forth musical sounds. To move or employ (a piece,
card, etc.,) in a game. To decide a tie
by playing one more game.

“The rain has stopped,” I observed in anticipation
of gathering a portion of our dinner from the profusion
of estuaries that graced our small island in a lacework
of tidal pools and shallow coves. She had prepared
my expectations with her many stories which had ensnared
me into their narrative. “Can we go out now and lurk
around in the dark?” My excitement was hardly in exclusion
to the hunger our lovemaking had awakened, and in participation,
I knew we could summon together the varied delights
of a seafood platter. Since our bedrolls were made,
the unpacking done, her permission was easily obtained.
This night was a mysterious place where land and water intertwined,
eroding any sense of where imagination began, all combined
to form this nocturnal vantage point. She said I was untrained
in the proper method of catching a clam. I was unafraid
and told her so. But still, she insisted on the wrongs and rights
of stalking our supper in a definite manner. “The interaction
between two communities, one below water, the other above,
is not to be treated carelessly. I will not permit you
to begin this enterprise until adequate measures are taken.”
I knew she was attempting to chasten
my imprudence, directing me against the act of some taboo.
I began to cry. “You must learn these things, my love,
I’m sorry to upset you. But until my satisfaction
is assured that you comprehend the laws of our environment,
I will restrain your actions.” My sense of shame
had spoiled my appetite, as a different sort of gravity
defined itself to me. She explained that I had neglected
to observe the rite of blessing which connected
the clam to her next home. “Its soul mustn’t leave a cavity
behind. You have to give the clam name.”
The simple rightness of this gesture afforded me an enlightenment
I had not know. “After you christen the creature, she will
forever be your friend.” I asked if there were any particular
requirements in the selection of a name. “The title should serve
a simple fitness to the form.” I carefully considered the issue.
“Well, I guess I need to meet the clam and conduct a proper interview.”
She nodded in approval. We walked across the island to where a curve
of land created a small pool enclosed by peninsular
protections. The water’s surface remained unbroken as a tranquil
divider between this world and that. Another frame of mind
penetrated my intentions as I stared through to this undersea
society. I glanced at her just once then plunged my hand
into its depths and seized a clam. I tenderly placed
the creature up on a rock at eye-level. I faced
it squarely and tried to start a conversation. “I understand
you have no name.” The clam would not respond to me.
This seemed an excellent opportunity to examine the streamlined
shape of her protective shell. Clearly, a fine design.
“Forgive me this inconvenience, but it’s my instruction
to inform you that other worlds request your company.
You probably have a little anxiety. As a matter of fact,
the same has recently happened to me. I did react
with fear at first, but now I see the richness of this polyphony.
Your new home will expose you to many colors of seduction,
as mine has, and some beautiful, unfamiliar shoreline.”
The clam began to stir at my suggestion. I felt the urge
to give her an affectionate pat on the head. With this,
she cracked her shell and whispered, “It would be my pleasure
to commence a journey.” I explained she must reveal
some attribute of herself to me, some insight upon which to seal
our acquaintance. She confided that the treasure
of her heart was the happiness of her home, a singular bliss
of satisfaction. Regarding this, our sentiments did not diverge.
So, I took an oath to keep her shell as a memento
of our friendship and christened her Lily of Brisco.
Before long, I had cultivated the companionship
of two oysters, four mussels, a periwinkle, three crabs
and one lobster. We spread a blanket on some slabs
of stone, and on account of our wet clothes, we had to strip
to nothing. The calm after the storm hummed a pleasing divertimento,
as the night began to spin its own diminuendo.

To rest on the surface of a liquid,
supported by the upward pressure of the liquid; also,
to be carried along gently across the surface.
To move lightly and effortlessly, as if buoyed across:
She floated dreamily about. In weaving, the filling threads
that are passed under or over the warp threads
without being engaged. Flock, herd, drove, bevy, covey,
gaggle, gam, pack, pride, swarm, litter, hatch
and brood denote an assemblage of animals. Flock
is applied to birds and to small mammals, now usually
sheep or goats. Larger animals, as cattle and elephants,
form a herd; when gathered together to be driven,
they are a drove. Other terms are fairly restricted
in application: a bevy of quail, a covey of partridges, a gaggle
of geese, a gam of whales, a pack of dogs or wolves,
a pride of lions, a swarm of bees. All the offspring born
at one time form a a litter or a hatch or brood.
The shape or contour of something as distinguished
from its substance or color; external structure.
The body of a living being. The particular state,
appearance, character, in which something presents itself:
energy in the form of light. The style or manner
in which the parts of a poem, play, picture, are expressed
or organized: to use traditional forms.
Proper arrangement or order. A formula or draft,
as of a letter, used as a model or guide. The intrinsic
nature of something as distinguished from the matter
that embodies it. Essence. To give a specific
or exemplified shape to: Guesswork forms the larger part
of this theory. To shape by discipline or training.
To take shape by winding around a fixed point
in recurrent curves, until a framework emerges of an interior structure.
To come out of one’s shell.

The Third Quadrant
```
If we see a city as a puzzle or set of riddles, we will believe
ourselves closer to its heart when lost or going nowhere in particular. 
  
-- Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
```
“It’s quite provoking,” she said after a long silence,
“to watch the flames dancing around the log.”
We were nestled deep into the sofa, snug and warm,
drinking cognac. She seemed at a loss
for words. I asked her if, by chance, she was cross
with me. “Not at all,” she hastened to inform,
“I’m merely considering what we’ll write into our travelogue.”
Happy to be home again after our brief absence,
I stared toward the fire with hopes of seeing
what she saw. Nothing was there
but flames and a log, as far as my eyes
could tell. I knew she saw things in ways
I did not, that an object conveys
to her a life, and all that it personifies.
I looked into the fire again and wished for her to share
what it was prevailed in there. Pleading
for an explanation, I begged her to confide
in me. “It’s time you learned to gaze
with your own imagination. I will guide
you when you need me, but I want your own direction
to define itself. Although, you should confide
in me, so as not to follow through a maze
of mishaps, or plunge into a backslide.”
I reflected on my new instruction then stared
inside my cognac glass. Her attention went back
upon the fire. After a diligent few minutes, I eagerly declared,
“Oh look! There’s a tempest brewing in my snifter.”
“Let me sneak a look before it swells to swifter
proportions.” She peeked with some discretion, despaired
in resignation, and told me I was off the track.
Apparently my vision was impaired.
“I’m just reporting what I found.”
She wrapped her arm around
me, evidently still fixed in thought, her mind
behind closed doors. “You teach me language,”
I complained, “and yet it rarely serves or works to my advantage.”
An explanation not forthcoming, I felt inclined
to quit this game, resolve it to the background
of my thoughts, label it a trick to confound
my senses. Outside our window, a bough
of cedar brushed against the pane,
distracting my obsession from the issue
close at hand. Mindful of her mood, I carefully
slipped away toward the window and drew the pulley
of the drapery, intent upon finding the clue
that had lured me near, knowing well it must pertain
to the inner workings of imagination, somehow.

That which induces or is used for inducing. In a pleading,
the allegations that introduce and explain
the issue in dispute. The window inspired her interest.
Desire for knowledge of something, especially
of something novel or unusual. Anything that retrains
or controls. A border of concrete or stone along the edge.
An enclosing or confining framework, margin, etc.
To protect or provide with a curb. A wayward inclination
was curbed by her instruction. Belonging
to the immediate present; in progress: the current point.
Passing from one person to another; circulating,
moving, running, flowing. A continuous onward movement,
as of water. Any perceptible course, movement
or trend. A line continuously bent,
as the arc of a circle. A curving,
or something curved. The locus of a point moving
in such a way that its course can be defined
by an equation. Any line that, plotted against coordinates,
represents variations in the values of a given
quantity, force, characteristic, etc.
Something that conceals or separates: The curtain
of darkness weighed heavily across the night.
Passage back. Withdrawal. Retrogression.
To return to the mean value of a series of observations.
Sing a a song of six pence until the song sings of itself,
having equal sides and equal angles,
unfolding flat upon the table to disclose
one red rose, two orchids, three African daisies, seven irises,
eight tulips and a bunch of freesia. To move together.

Bent on discovery, I stared through the window pane
and loosened my attachment to the warm protection
of the room. Gradually, I began to feel
the evening’s chill dissolve my awareness into separate
facets, each aspect of my self folding inward as elaborate
reconstructions reflecting one upon the other to reveal
an internal architecture precise in its perfection.
A spiral stairway winding in a crystal chain
led down toward the center, a second curving back
in opposite direction. The trickling sound
of water drew me closer. I descended
step by step into a honeycomb of courts
and chambers. Here were untold riches. All sorts
of geometrical configurations — their patterns extended
infinitely, by turns seeming to compound
and simplify. I saw no lack
of subtleties and symmetries to explore,
though I chose a simple one
which repeated a two-sided motif of dark horizontal
leaves, another of light vertical leaves.
Each shape clearly a form of translation, weaves
of parallel shifts in either horizontal
or vertical direction. Just as I’d begun
to see that both light and dark patterns were no more
than identical reflections, it became clear
to me that a dark leaf could be turned once through
a right angle into the opposite position
of a neighboring leaf, then always
rotating around the same point where its stays,
turning again into the next position,
and again around the same point, to continue
coming back upon itself through a sphere.
And then. . . her voice. I found myself standing
before the window again, mesmerized
by the snow silently falling in the dark, my nose pressed upon
the glass, my breath fogging up the scene.
The field outside our house was covered in a velveteen
blanket of white. But the spiral staircase was gone.
Everything my imagination yielded up had vaporized
upon the pane, leaving only the vaguest understanding.

A light, portable barrier for horses
or runners to leap over in races. A race in which
such barrier are used. An obstacle or difficulty
to be surmounted. Formerly, a sledge on which condemned
persons were dragged to the place of execution.
To leap over. To make cover, or enclose with hurdles, obstacles, etc.
A movable framework, as on interlaced twigs or branches,
used for temporary fencing. The outer coating
of certain fruits or seeds, especially of an ear of corn.
Any outer covering, especially when relatively worthless.
Appearance presented to the mind by circumstances.
A looking or facing in a given direction:
the southern aspect of the house. Any configuration
of the planets. A category of the verb
indicating the nature of the action performed
in regard to the passage of time. Phase, aspect, side,
facet and stage denote one of a number of different appearances
presented by an object. Phase differs through change
in the object; aspect differs through change
in the position of the observer.

The Fourth Quadrant
```
The experience of art acknowledges that it cannot present
the perfect truth of what it experiences in terms of final knowledge. 
Here there is no absolute progress and no final exhaustion of what 
lies in a work of art. The experience of art knows this of itself.
 
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
```
The sound of morning waves broke
against the shore outside our bedroom window.
I heard their soft retreat across the sand pulling
them back into the body of their container,
hesitating as though the sand were their detainer,
until the subtle lulling
washing to an fro
awoke
me from my sleep. Eager to explore
to world I had discovered
the night before, refreshed by dreams
of intimation,
filled with inspiration,
knowing now this world is something other than it seems,
I reconsidered what it was I had uncovered.
Or was it just a metaphor?
Silently, I dressed and made my way
down the hall, pausing briefly to admire a gilded frame
encaging hand-drawn birds pressed beneath the glass —
a cormorant, laughing gull and snowy egret.
I had gotten her to admit
these were the things she’d done to pass
the time before I came.
Some were done in watercolor, others with a conte
crayon. Even now, she set aside a part
of our morning for me to render
what it was that captured my attention.
I painted pictures she called abstraction —
the process of extraction
from natural forms the shapes of my conviction,
then shuffling them together, as though inside a blender,
and calling it my art.
Every morning I would hurry to examine
the color of the day. I loved the way the sky
would lift above the sea, the contrast of two worlds where this seam
divided air from water, where liquid blue
dispersed across the scene in a bleeding azure value
continuous as the canvas on which I painted. A theme
would finally emerge. I can’t say why,
but next I would be working in the studio, mixing a thin
wash of some new color. After creating the desired transparency,
I would begin to put my vision on the canvas.
Without the need for any preparation,
an image would come forward. The saturation
of the pigment might be analogous
to the nature of the light, though sometimes fancy
led another way and where I ended up
could be a trifle odd. But none of this mattered
to her. She saw lilacs
blooming on the horizon, bathed in hearts
of watery foliage, their delicate parts
opening in the mist. Or maybe she found tracks
across the snow, traces of a presence yet to scatter
with the wind. Or a cookie dipping in a cup
of tea, bringing back some memory of life
before I came. Today the light
is clear and luminous, the clarity of winter’s
spareness filling the air with a climate of intention
awaiting my invention —
September 24, 2013
Toward an Indexical Criticism
Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley

University of Maine
tony_brinkley.academic@admin.umead.maine.edu

The place where they lay, it has a name–it has none. They did not lie there.

Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat einen Namen–er hat keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort.

–Paul Celan, “The Straitening [Engführung]”

Part I

I(a). Saying

LEGEIN–A 1951 lecture by Heidegger on Heraclitus offers a series of readings of the Greek word LEGEIN, and, in response to the semantics of the word, discovers “the beginning of Western thinking, [when] the essence of language flashed in the light of Being” (“Logos” 78). “We have stumbled,” Heidegger writes, “upon an event whose immensity still lies concealed in its long unnoticed simplicity,” that “the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as LEGEIN, [as] laying [Legen],” so that “saying and talking occur essentially as the letting-lie-together-before [das bei-sammen-vor-liegen-Lassen] of everything which, laid in unconcealment, comes to presence” (63/8). As a sign, Heidegger suggests, LEGEIN “refers to the earliest and most consequential decision concerning the essence of language” (63). “Where did it [the decision] come from?” he asks (63). He does not answer this question historically but philosophically. “The question reaches into the uttermost of the possible essential origins of language. For, like the letting-lie-before that gathers [als sammelndes vor-liegen-Lassen], saying receives its essential form from the unconcealment of that which lies together before us [der Unverborgenheit des beisammen-vor-Liegenden] . . . the unconcealing of the concealed into unconcealment [that] is the very presencing of what is present [das Anwesen selbst des Anwesenden] . . . the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]” (64/8). From another perspective, one might have said instead that LEGEIN becomes the evidence of a different event, the offering up of language to philosophy (specifically, and quite recently, to Heidegger’s philosophy). But, whatever the reading, is LEGEIN as evidence a saying, is it a sign in the sense that LEGEIN speaks of signs? If not, then–as evidence–LEGEIN might be the sign of a semantics for which LEGEIN itself does not speak.

What does LEGEIN say?

What LEGEIN says may be different from what LEGEIN shows–To put this another way, what Heidegger says with LEGEIN may turn out to be distinct from what use of LEGEIN (the offering up of language to philosophy, and specifically to Heidegger’s philosophy) indicates. Not that Heideggerian philosophy is not alive to the indications: the interpretation of LEGEIN as evidence (as what we will refer to later as an index) shapes Heidegger’s presentation of language. Already in Being and Time (1927) he writes that “LEGEIN is the clue [der Leitfaden, the guide] for arriving at those structures of Being [der Seinsstrukturen] which belong to the beings we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or [in] speaking about it [des im Ansprechen und Besprechen begegnenden Seienden]” (47/25. Translation modified). And: “in the ontology of the ancients, the beings encountered within the world [das innerhalb der Welt begegnende Seiende],” and which are taken as an example “for the interpretation of Being [ihrer Seinauslegung],” presuppose that the Being of beings “can be grasped in a distinctive kind of LEGEIN [in einem ausgezeichneten LEGEIN]” that “let[s] everyone see it [the specific being] in its Being [in seinem Sein]” (70/44. Translation modified). Whatever the turns in perspective between Heidegger’s earlier and later writing, the approach to LEGEIN as a clue and guide, as Leitfaden, is not abandoned. Nor is the interpretation of the clue (of what saying shows) as indicative of the ontological difference between Being and beings. As a complement to the semantics of LEGEIN, there is always this semantics as well, a semantics of showing, a complement to be found not only in Heidegger’s writing but in the writing of his contemporaries as well. A concern with showing may itself be indicative of a collective project in which any number of collaborators knowingly or unknowingly participate (in this essay we will be concerned, in addition to Heidegger, with Wittgenstein, Peirce, Benjamin, Arendt, and Celan, but this list–like the essay– should be regarded as open-ended). At the same time, inasmuch as a concern with showing (and with what shows-up) will have as a kind of remainder what does not show-up, or what remains concealed, or what might be selected to go unnoticed, a reading of evidence which restricts itself to the relations between Being and beings can turn out to be at the expense of the specific historical referents to which evidence points but which a turn toward Being conceals. The second part of this essay will be concerned specifically with the way particular histories can turn up.

What does LEGEIN say?–The word can be translated as talking or saying, as expression (“Logos” 60). Heidegger says (60) that LEGEIN can also be translated as laying down before (like the German legen), as lying (like the German liegen), and as arranging, or gathering together (like the German lesen). Elsewhere Heidegger writes that translation requires “thoughtful dialogue” in which “our thinking must first, before translating, be translated” (“Anaximander” 19). It is in “thoughtful dialogue” with LEGEIN that Heidegger finds that “the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as LEGEIN.” Heidegger’s reading of LEGEIN might be regarded as an instance of LEGEIN, i.e. as an example of the decision it describes: “LEGEIN properly means the laying-down and laying-before [Nieder- und Vor-legen] which gathers itself and others” (“Logos” 60/4), and these actions in turn have “come to mean saying and talking” (61). Henceforth, to express is “to place one thing beside another, to lay them together [zusammenlegen] . . . to gather [lesen]” (61/5). This makes them available for reading, but “the lesen better known to us, namely, the reading of something written remains but one sort of gathering, in the sense of bringing-together-into-lying-before [zusammen-in-Vorliegen-bringen]” (61/5). There is also “the gleaning at harvest time [die Ährenlese]” that “gathers fruit from the soil,” a “gathering” that involves “a collecting which brings under shelter” (61/5). This “safekeeping that brings something in has already determined the first steps of the gathering and arranged everything that follows” (61). It has arranged it as a sheltering. For “what would become of a vintage [eine Lese] which had not been gathered with an eye to the fundamental matter of its being sheltered” (61/6). This sheltering, according to Heidegger, the laying side by side in a selected order, is also what is meant by saying. It determines that saying (LEGEIN) will be “from the start a selection [eine Auslesen] which requires sheltering”: “the selection [die Auslese] is determined by whatever within the crop to be sorted shows itself to-be-selected [als das Erlesene zeigt]” (62/6). It shows itself to-be-selected in terms of “the sorting [das Erlesen]” or “the fore-gathering [das Vor-lese]” that “determines the selection [die Auslese]” (62/6), so that “the gatherers [die Lesenden] assemble to coordinate their work” according to the “original coordination [that] governs their collective gathering” (62/6). This governance determines the essential choice in the selection of “things [to] lie together before us” (62), of that which “lies before us [and] involves [angliegt] us and therefore concerns us” (62/7). Saying produces this lying before that involves and concerns us, and that is selected to be sheltered by the saying–a sheltering, Heidegger says, that is the equivalent of truth, of unconcealment (ALETHEIA). So that saying means “shelter[ing]” and “secur[ing] what lies before us in unconcealment [des Vorliegenden im Unverborgenen] . . . the presencing of that which lies before us into unconcealment [das Anwesen des Vorliegenden in die Unverborgenheit]” (63/7). At the same time, implicit in Heidegger’s reading is the understanding that what will also be involved is a selection of what will not be included, sheltered, selected, a selection of the excluded that will then remain in concealment (LETHEIA, untruth), and henceforth go without saying.

What does the selection exclude?–Heidegger’s reading of LEGEIN might be exemplary in this regard as well. Fundamental to this reading is the recognition of an exclusion in what is said. Inasmuch as saying is a presencing of what is present, and presencing (das Anwesen) cannot be included as what is present (das Anwesende). Inasmuch as the saying of what is said cannot be included as what is said.

Then how does one know the presencing of what is said? One might say that, in addition to what is said, Heidegger points it out, but this pointing out–this showing of the saying of what is said as the presencing of what is present–would be indicative of a semantics that remains unsaid.

Of what, without saying, does LEGEIN give evidence?

I(b).Showing

“[T]he lighted and the lighting”–In a 1942-43 lecture course on Parmenides, Heidegger uses the distinction between “the lighted and the lighting” to indicate the difference between unconcealment (ALETHEIA, truth) and the unconcealed: on the one hand, “the determining radiance, the shining and appearing” of ALETHEIA; on the other hand, the “ones who look and appear in the light” of this truth (Parmenides 144). In a 1954 lecture, also on Parmenides, Heidegger employs the same figure of speech to distinguish between presencing and what is present: “every presencing [is] the light in which something present can appear” (“Moira” 96); while “what is present attains appearance [Erscheinen],” in this appearance “presencing attains a shining [Scheinen]” (97/48).

Is this then how LEGEIN gives evidence of what it cannot say, of what occurs in addition as the saying?

All these distinctions might be interpreted as more of what is said, as what through this saying is made present. Given such an interpretation–which is also a reading for which the meanings of LEGEIN allows–the evidence of what LEGEIN cannot say will remain concealed. A concealment that Heidegger calls the destiny of Western thinking. Insofar as Western thinking is restricted to this semantics of LEGEIN.

But isn’t it precisely the work of a Heideggerian reading that, while it restricts thinking to this semantics, it approaches thinking in a way that exemplifies a different semantics, one in which what is said gives evidence of what it cannot say? So that the writing is not so much a gathering, laying before and in front, sheltering, selecting, or saying, as it is an indication of what cannot be gathered, laid before and in front, sheltered, selected, said? Inasmuch as Heidegger points to a distinction between what is said and the saying as something that is not said, but that nevertheless can be shown in what is said and by what is said? So that through the unconcealment (truth, ALETHEIA) of what is said, the unconcealment of LEGEIN as presencing is shown: “the presencing (of what is present) manifests itself [das Anwesen (des Anwesenden) selbst zeigt] . . . the manifold shining of presencing itself [das vielfältige Scheinen des Anwesen selber]” (“Moira” 98/48)?

How else might we approach this shining?

Cf. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), where a distinction like the difference between lighting and lighted also occurs–In the Tractatus, the distinction between saying and showing will be adopted to account for what propositions can and cannot say, where “what can be shown [gezeigt] cannot be said [gesagt]” (4.1212). The Tractatus regards propositions as logical pictures, saying as a kind of picturing: “a picture [Bild] can picture [abbilden, depict or represent] any reality whose form it has” (Tractatus 2.171. Translation modified). What a “picture cannot picture [is] its [own] form of picturing [Form der Abbildung]; it shows it” (2.172. Translation modified). A picture cannot picture its own form of picturing because a “picture pictures its object from without (this standpoint is its form of representation)” (2.173. Translation modified), i.e. its form of picturing. A picture cannot picture its form of picturing (this standpoint from without) because it “cannot . . . place itself outside its [own] form of representation” (2.174), outside its own standpoint. A picture’s form of picturing can only be displayed, i.e. shown by the picture without being pictured. It cannot be represented; it can only be exhibited.

The Tractatus anticipates the radiance to which Heidegger refers, the shining in what is lighted of the lighting (the presencing of what is present that “manifests itself [selbst zeigt]” [“Moira” 98/48]). “There is indeed the inexpressible [Unaussprechliches],” Wittgenstein writes in 1921. “This shows itself [Dies zeigt sich]” (Tractatus 6.522). One might speak of the semantics of this display. Wittgenstein said as much in a 1919 letter to Russell, commenting on work toward the Tractatus: “The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions–i.e. by language (and what comes to the same, what can be thought)–and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy” (quoted in Anscombe, 161). But should the concern with a semantics of showing be restricted to “what cannot be expressed . . . but only shown”? Specifically should it be restricted to what is shown by an expression but which the expression cannot express?

In connection with Heidegger’s Being and Time, Wittgenstein said (1929) that while “we do run up against the limits of language” and “are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said,” this “inclination, the running up against, indicates something” (Conversations 68-69). Given Wittgenstein’s subsequent understanding (1930s–1940s) of language as not singular but plural (the plurality is indicated by the many language-games that Wittgenstein can devise), one might say that the limits of one language (for example, a language of depiction) turn out to be within another (for example, a language of display). In running up against the limits of one language (or language-game), I might be part of another language (game) in which there is something indicated.

I(c). Toward an Indexical Criticism

DEIXO–We will say that, together with the semantics of LEGEIN, there is another semantics which seems to be its complement, a showing alongside the saying.

For the moment we will restrict the reference of showing to the saying of what is said, i.e. to LEGEIN as it is indicated in what is said.

Perhaps this semantics is always alongside and complementary to the semantics of LEGEIN, indicative at each moment, but subordinate, so that the showing is always of the production of what is said.

A comment of Aristotle’s may be illustrative in this regard (suggestive precisely because it is presented as unexceptional, involving a kind of distinction one makes–without argument–in the process of making an argument). Aristotle says that when “what is said [LEGETAI] is not alike,” but “appears so because of the expression [LEXIN],” what I take to be the same “because of the expression [LEXIN]” can be “shown [EDEIXEN]” to be different (178a).

On the one hand, LEXIN or LEGEIN (expression). Also LEXO or LEGO (to tell, to speak, to say, to express, to lay in order, to arrange, to gather, to select). And the lexical. Also, legibility.

On the other hand, EDIXA or DEIXO (to point out, point towards, to show, display, bring to light, to tell, to indicate). Also DEIGMA (sample or example), PARADEIGMA (paradigm). And DIKE (the way, custom, justice), which may “originally [have] meant the ‘indication’ of the requirement of the divine law” (Hugh Lloyd-Jones 167). Also the deictic, the indexical. Gestures and signs that point (this) out.

This then might be a complement for a semantics of LEGEIN, a semantics of DEIXO in addition. The significance for Aristotle lies in what is pointed out about what is said, and here too showing has been restricted to saying, i.e. to the reality constituted by saying. But showing in words might also be directed elsewhere, in response to what is shown in other circumstances, to material displays that are not first of all a matter of LEGEIN but of DEIXO. Just as saying is open-endedly nuanced in its semantics, won’t showing be as nuanced? So that the showing of what cannot be said might be only part of an open-ended existential continuum of the instances in which showing can meaningfully occur?

The Indexical–How might one describe the semantics of DEIXO? Cf. Peirce, where the nuances of showing serve to distinguish each of his three categories of signs. Not that this is always the emphasis in Peirce’s writing. Insofar as he approaches the study of signs as a study of representations, the semiotics he offers might still fall within the realm of LEGEIN, as a re-presentation or re-presencing. So that when he writes that “a sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (Elements of Logic 135)–that “it must ‘represent’ . . . something else” (136), so that “for certain purposes it [a sign] is treated . . . as if it were the other” (155)–this might be taken as an interpretation of the way words participate in presencing. But at the same time (often in the same passages, so that we are emphasizing a distinction that emerges in Peirce’s thought but is not held strictly apart from representation), Peirce approaches signs as referential. Then a sign is “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which [it] itself refers (its object)” (169). Inasmuch as reference is a pointing–it indicates its referent, which Peirce calls its object, in such a way that another sign, which Pierce calls the interpretant of the first, will point to the same referent as the first (the reference of the second sign is determined by the reference of the first)–meaning becomes a showing.

It is the status of the object (or referent) and of the interpretant that distinguishes an index from Peirce’s other two categories of signs: a symbol or icon requires interpretation to be meaningful–regardless of any referent–whereas an index is meaningful regardless of interpretation: “an index is a sign which would, at once lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as [a] sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not (170). Even if the bullet-hole were never seen, even if an interpretant were never determined, the bullet-hole would still refer to the gun-shot.

But in a sense, given Peirce’s theory of reference, all signs will be indexical. Inasmuch as reference involves an existential (or material) relation, and the determination by a sign of an interpretant involves an existential (material) relation between the two (the relation of determining), any interpretant might be regarded as an index of the sign that determined it–whether anybody reads the interpretant as an index or not. One might say that insofar as a sign determines the reference of an interpretant, it is indexical in the sense in which Peirce writes that deictic words like “this” or “that” are indexical: “The demonstrative pronouns, ‘this’ and ‘that,’ are indices . . . [because] they call upon the hearer . . . [to] establish a real connection between his mind and the object; and if the demonstrative pronoun does that–without which its meaning is not understood–it goes to establish such a connection; and so is an index” (162). In the same way, an interpretant is also an index because a real connection is established with the referent. Given a theory of meaning as a theory of reference, meaning might be regarded as deictic, “more or less detailed directions for what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant” (163). This connection would be the interpretant; the interpretant would also be an index of the sign that determined this reference.

Within an indexical semantics one might then distinguish: as object or referent, what shows itself to be shown (the shot fired into the wood); as sign, the showing of what shows itself to be shown (the bullet-hole as a sign of the shot); as interpretant, the pointing out–more or less interpretative in its gesture–that responds to this showing (the deictic gesture by which I indicate this as the sign that a shot was fired). At the same time, the interpretant will also be an index of the sign that determined this reference. One might say that any interpretant indexes its production. ¹

Reading Heidegger and Wittgenstein indexically–Crucial to Heideggerian philosophy seems to be the understanding that what is present indexes presencing even when this reference goes unrecognized. If saying is a presencing, then what is said (presenced) becomes an index of the saying (presencing). As an index, what is said exists in an indexical relation with the saying and can determine an interpretant to refer to the saying (presencing) as well. So that the interpretant is in turn an index of the power of what is said (what is present) to determine a reference to the saying (presencing) that it indexes.

And with respect to Wittgenstein’s work in the Tractatus: in representing the world, a picture (ein Bild) simultaneously indexes its form of picturing, and can therefore determine an interpretant to refer to this form of picturing as well. Thus the interpretant will index the power of a picture to determine a reference to its form of picturing. However, the indexing by the picture of its form will occur regardless of interpretant.

We might want to explore a range of indexical reference that exists regardless of interpretation, the bullet-hole, for example, as a historical instance–To the extent that the bullet-hole determines a saying, the saying will also be an index of the bullet-hole. Inasmuch as the bullet-hole is an index of the shot, the saying will also be an index of the shot. But then the saying of this, although a presencing of what is present, as this index of the past, would be secondary to the bullet-hole and to the shot that was fired, about which I still know very little, but of which indices remain, regardless of what I know. What happened once can be presented now, determined not only by the bullet-hole in the molding, but by its legibility as a sign at this moment, the complexity of indices, the complexities at this moment of reading: an existential, material tangle. What cannot be said might now have an additional resonance, not so much the logical or ontological constraint, but the existential, the material constraints on interpretation–that only a portion of what is indexed will be possible for me to interpret (though another interpreter might be able to interpret more or less). Given the determinants of possibility (including, perhaps, a sense of the freedom to interpret or the willingness to interpret). Given the legibility and illegibility of a sign at any given moment, of “an image [ein Bild, a picture] of the past [der Vergangenheit, of pastness] which unexpectedly appears” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255/270), “flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized” (255/270), the possibilities of reading its “historical index [historische Index]” (Benjamin, “N” 8/577). “The image that is read,” Walter Benjamin writes, “I mean the image at the moment of recognition [Das gelesene Bild, das Bild im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit], bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse, that lies at the source of all reading [den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt]” (Benjamin, “N” 8/577-78).

Then how would an indexical criticism elaborate an alternative, or a complement, to the semantics of LEGEIN?–From the perspective of an indexical criticism, the semantics of LEGEIN seems to be restricted to a self-referential interpretation of its deictic gestures, to an indexing of the interpreting by what is interpreted. This restriction can also be read as an evasion of other indications that demand and exceed an interpretation, but that the deictic gestures of the interpretation can point out. Where interpretation as a deictic gesture is a more or less adequate response, a more or less responsive gesture (a saying in response to the indices that address you).

To approach an indexical criticism, one can begin by approaching what we have interpreted as the semantics of LEGEIN at a point where it indicates its own limits, but, in indicating those limits, it also marks its participation in a continuum of other indications, the indices and displays of an existential or material referentiality. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, we run up against limits and the running-up-against points to something–i.e. to a semantics of pointing out, indexing, showing–in which the indications of saying, representing, LEGEIN participate. It may turn out to be one of the gestures of LEGEIN to offer its saying as universal, to restrict semantics to its designations of meaning, and to offer encounters with its limits as an encounter with limits in general. So that what the running-up-against points to seems to be self-referential. Where an indexical criticism might begin is by questioning this universal claim. As if the limits we run up against could never point to something else.

Part II

II(a). A Farmhouse

Someone shows you the picture of a house, a white house as presented in a black and white photograph, or, actually off-white, a house that is slightly gray–You are asked what it is. You say, “This is a house.” Perhaps you should say, “This was a house,” or, “Then, this was a house.” Or: “Now, this is a picture of what then was a house.” In such ways a saying of what can be said responds to a presenting of what is present. As what was present is presented again. Or this index of an event in this way shown.

You are told, “This was a farmhouse,” that the photograph presents the picture of a farmhouse.

But inasmuch as the photograph is a picture of a house under construction, it offers perhaps what was not yet a farmhouse. The photograph of a building that was still to become a farmhouse, presenting as a picture what was not yet present to present. In the process of presenting, indexing the presencing of a farmhouse. Behind are pine trees (if asked, you will say, “These are pine trees,”) but in front, what is not yet a farmhouse.

Then: “This is an index of its construction.” Or: “This is the index of its presencing.” This house, you are told, was built of bricks.

But this does not look like a farmhouse. It may have been presented as such, you see the bricks in the picture that you were told were the bricks of the farmhouse, but the building is massive–Eventually you are told that this was never simply a farmhouse, that the presencing of this present was a deception. This, you are told, is what the photograph is a picture of: In late 1943, at Treblinka 2, after the camp had been demolished, a farm was created and “the bricks from the gas chambers were used for the farmhouse. . . . The deserted fields were plowed, lupine was sown, and pine trees were planted” (Arad 373). Subsequently, “a Ukrainian . . . name[d] . . . Strebel who had been a guard in Treblinka brought his family and began farming the area” (373). This was witnessed by Franciszek Zabecki: Strebel, Zabecki said, sent “for his family from the Ukraine . . . they all lived there until the arrival of the Russians” [quoted in Sereny 249]).

Then here are bricks from the Treblinka gas chambers; this is a farmhouse.²

Farmhouses were also built at Belzec and Sobibor. Odilo Globocnik wrote to Himmler that “for reasons of surveillance, in each camp a small farm was created which is occupied by a guard. An income must regularly be paid to him so that he can maintain the small farm” (quoted in Arad 371). The first of the three houses was built at Belzec where, after the camp had been dismantled (December 1942), “the whole area was plucked clean by the neighboring population.” “After leveling and cleaning the area of the extermination camp, the Germans planted the area with small pines and left,” but “at that moment, the whole area was plucked to pieces by the neighboring population, who were searching for gold and valuables. That’s why the whole surface of the camp was covered with human bones, hair, ashes from cremated corpses, dentures, pots, and other objects” (Edward Luczynski, a Polish eyewitness, quoted in Arad 371). In October 1943, Ukrainians, under German command, were sent from Treblinka and Sobibor to Belzec in order to restore the devastation. This work established the pattern to be followed later, first at Treblinka and then at Sobibor, toward the end of 1943, but the success of the operation was limited. Even in 1945 and thereafter, the farm continued to attract “masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand” (Rachel Auerbach, member of the Polish State Committee for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes on Polish Soil, quoted in Arad 379). “The area was dug up again and again” (Arad 379).

II(b). “[ü]ber Seinen Schatten”

Toward an indexical criticism–We wish to consider the situation into which specific evidence places us. When we run up against the limits of language, one limit we run up against may turn out to be historical, that we come to a point when we can no longer say this, without this indicating something more as well, a limit to what words can say–that we run up against–as the history of what else they have said. Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus that the book would “draw a limit . . . to the expression of thoughts,” where “what lies on the other side of the limit [janseits der Grenze liegt, lies beyond the limit] will simply be nonsense [Unsinn, rubbish]” (Preface). What lies beyond the limit of the expression of my thought may be historical, however–including the histories those expressions carry with them. If, as Wittgenstein later found, the semantics of many words are determined by their use, are determined then as well by the situations in which words have occurred–“the meaning of a word [die Bedeutung eines Wortes] is its use in the language [ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache]” (Philosophical Investigations 20); “if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use” (The Blue and Brown Books 4)–then the semantics of a word will be inseparable from the histories of its recurrence.

“How hard I find it is to see what lies in front of my eyes [vor meinen Augen liegt]!” Wittgenstein wrote in 1940 (Culture and Value 39)–Under the influence of a linguistics that emphasizes the arbitrary or conventional nature of signs, it is always possible to ignore the existential force of the indexical, to reduce the index to a category of the deictic which itself has been reduced to a gesture dictated by convention.

But insofar as even when dictated by convention, the deictic (or any sign) is specific to particular circumstances or situations in which it occurs, inasmuch as in each case it becomes evidence of its occurrence (and therefore historical), it will continue as an index in Peirce’s sense (i.e. as an existential signifier), whatever the hermeneutic conventions which permit this recognition or exclude it. In the 1930s and 40s, Wittgenstein found that we will not know what a remark means–since we will not know its use–if we restrict interpretation to a generalized reading. When I say that “I know that that’s a tree [Ich weiß, daß das ein Baum ist] this can mean all sorts of things [kann alles mögliche bedeuten]” (“On Certainty” 45. Translation modified); it will continue to mean all sort of things–although in principle more than in practice–until I know the specific use, i.e. a specific history. “I look at a plant that I take for a young beech and that someone else thinks is a black-currant. He says ‘that is a shrub’ [Er sagt ‘Das ist ein Strauch’]; I say it is a tree [ein Baum]” (45). Or: “We see something in the mist which one of us takes for a man [einen Menschen], and the other says, ‘I know that that’s a tree [Ich weiß, daß das ein Baum ist]” (45). Or: “someone who was entertaining the idea [dem Gedanken] that he was no use any more might keep repeating to himself ‘I can still do this and this and this.’ If such thoughts often possessed him [öfter in seinem Kopf herum] one would not be surprised if he, apparently out of all context, spoke such a sentence [as ‘I know that that’s a tree’] out loud” (44-45). Or: if “I had been thinking of my bad eyes again and it [the statement] was a kind of sigh, then there would be nothing puzzling about the remark” (45).

I can also imagine a circumstance in which I no longer understood this sentence, “though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind” (44). I no longer understand this sentence: “it is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning” (44), i.e. on any use. At that moment what might otherwise be recognized as historical, might appear to be an arbitrary sign (I imagine that these words could mean anything), but here too the use (even in apparently lacking a specific history) is the index of a specific history.

“It would be difficult,” Peirce writes, “to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality” (172)– The referent of the conventional sign is general (the notion of a tree, rather than any specific tree), but this referent “has its being in the instances which it will determine” and by which it “will indirectly . . . be affected” (143). The tree in relation to specific trees and to specific uses of the word. Through use, both the word and the generality of its reference “will involve a sort of Index” (144). As Jakobson says of Saussure, even arbitrary signs (or what we may choose to regard as arbitrary signs) do not turn out to be arbitrary: what may be “arbitrarily described as arbitrary is in reality a habitual, learned contiguity, which is obligatory for all members of a given language community” (28). This will mean, however, that for members of a community, the contiguity is not arbitrary but existential, a history determining of what is said, what is said indexing this history (the saying of what is said becomes specifically historical). Peirce writes that the conventional sign, “once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. You write down the word . . . but that does not make you the creator of the word, nor if you erase it have you destroyed the word. The word lives in the minds of those who use it. Even if they are all asleep, it exists in their memory” (169). Given any sign, the determination of interpretants is unbounded. Each in turn determines, the sequence of interpretants accrues incrementally, references accumulate.

The point of departure may not be arbitrary, arbitrarily the arbitrary sign; it may be the index, the existential sign, indicative of the histories that are determining for members of a community. Then given the histories into which things have been gathered, the word “tree” will never be only the sign for a tree unless the word’s history is denied. Since the sign becomes a historical tangle.

“No one can jump over his own shadow”–In 1935, Heidegger used this expression for those who are entangled in the destiny of Being (Introduction to Metaphysics 167), and it is this destiny, he says, in 1935, that in connection with “National Socialism” has concealed from its followers “the inner truth and greatness of the movement [der inneren Wahrheit und Größe die Bewegung]” (166/152). Heidegger adds, however, that entanglement–this entanglement or a “different entanglement”–cannot be avoided, inasmuch as it is the destiny of Being, because “no one can jump over his own shadow [Keiner springt über seinen Schatten]” (167/152).

In 1953, Heidegger revised “die Bewegung [the movement]” to “dieser Bewegung [this movement],” no longer referring to National Socialism as he had in 1935, in a way (as a listener recounts) that “the Nazis, and only they, meant their own party” (Walter Bröcker, quoted in Pöggeler 241). At the same time, in 1953, Heidegger also added in a parenthetical phrase an interpretation of “the inner truth and greatness of this movement” as “the encounter between global technology and modern man,” a revision that allows National Socialism not to be an “indication of new well-being,” but a “symptom of decline” (Christian Lewalter, quoted in Habermas, “Work” 451). ³ Heidegger subsequently adopted this reinterpretation as having been there from the beginning, as “historically belonging” and “accurate in every respect” (quoted in Habermas, “Work” 452).⁴

But “no one can jump over his own shadow.” In 1962, while writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt reconnected this saying to “the movement”: “It was in the nature of the Nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month,” while its members “psychologically . . . had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it, or, as Hitler used to phrase it, that they could not ‘jump over their own shadow’” (63). One might say that in what Arendt writes (and specifically for Heidegger as a prospective reader, given his reticence on the subject that Eichmann in Jerusalem addresses, given that he would have had to make the decision either to read or not to read a book of which he could not have been unaware, inasmuch as Arendt had written it, so that, even in not reading the book, he would at least have needed to turn from its address), “an image of the past . . . unexpectedly appears . . . flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized” and “bear[ing] to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading.”⁵

II(c). “[e]in Rechtes Licht”

“How can one hide himself before that which never sets?”–In the summer of 1943, Heidegger commented on this fragment of Heraclitus (Diels 16: TO ME DUNON POTE POS AN TIS LATHOI), reading “that which never sets” as Being, presencing, das Anwesen: “each comes to presence,” Heidegger writes (“Aletheia” 119). “[I]n what else could that exceptional character of gods and men consist, if not in the fact that precisely they in their relation to the lighting can never remain concealed? Why is it that they cannot? Because their relation to the lighting is nothing other than the lighting itself, in that this relation gathers men and gods into the lighting and keeps them there” (119-120). But if “mortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering which lights everything present in its presencing,” nevertheless “they turn from the lighting, and turn only toward what is present” (122). Turning toward being and away from Being, mortals hide themselves–or hide from themselves the awareness of–that which never sets. Or, as Heidegger wrote later, in 1946, “every epoch of world history is an epoch of [this] errancy” (“Anaximander” 27).

But perhaps, with respect to history, that which never sets is not the light of Being, but that which is there to come to light, the historical reference of indices, traces, evidence, reference produced from the referent. Where what brings them to light is our ability to respond to their persistence. I might hide myself from its legibility, but that which never sets might be the historical force of this lingering.

DIKE–From the perspective of the semantics Heidegger offered in the 1930s and 40s, LEGEIN can also be approached as deictic gesture, the gesture of LEGEIN is DIKE, which Heidegger, in 1946, does not translate (as has been customary) as das Recht (justice), but instead translates as das Fug (order). Just as ADIKIA, which has traditionally been translated as das Unrecht (injustice), is translated as das Un-fug (disorder) (“Anaximander” 41-43/326-28). So that the gesture of LEGEIN is not justice but ordering, and the resistance to the gesture is not injustice but disorder. In 1935 Heidegger wrote that “if DIKE is translated as ‘justice [Gerechtigkeit]’ taken in a juridical, moral sense, the word loses its fundamental metaphysical meaning” which “we translate . . . with order [Fug]” (Introduction to Metaphysics 135/123), as “the overpowering” that “imposes” and that “compels adaption and compliance” (135). This “overpowering as such, in order to appear in its power, requires a place, a scene of disclosure,” it needs beings that can be interpreted as its productions. To be human, i.e. to be-there (da-sein) is to be this interpreter of beings. Where the text is the interpreter’s existence (Dasein): “the essence of being-human opens up to us only when understood through the need compelled by Being itself. The being-there [Da-sein] of the historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of Being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself [i.e. “the being-there of historical man”] should shatter against Being ” (Introduction to Metaphysics 136-37/124. Translation modified). In this light Heidegger spoke of Being as DIKE, as das Fug: “Being [das Sein] as DIKE [das Fug] is the key to being [das Seienden] in its structure [seinem Gefüge]” (140/127. Translation modified).

And of those who resist this structure, resisting its claim of origins–Those beings “stand in disorder [im Un-fug],” Heidegger writes, resistant to an order (ein Fug) that decrees that they appear, then disappear, according to their selection, as they are said and as they are harvested. In disorder “they linger awhile, they tarry [indem sie weilen, verweilen sie],” they are unwilling to go. “They hang on [Sie verharren]. . . . [T]hey advance hesitantly through their while [die Weile], in transition from arrival to departure. They hang on; they cling to themselves [sie halten an sich]. When what lingers awhile [die Je-Weiligen weilend] hangs on, it stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on . . . each dominated by what is implied in its lingering presencing [im weilenden Anwesen selbst] . . . the craving to persist. . . . Inconsiderateness impels them toward persistence, so that they may still present themselves [sie noch anwesen] as what is present [als Anwesende]” (“Anaximander” 45-46/331. Translation modified). Those who linger resist order precisely as their struggle, in presencing themselves as what is present, resisting the presencing of DIKE, the ordering force of Being. “When what lingers awhile delays . . . stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on, . . . [it] no longer bothers about DIKE, the order of the while [den Fug der Weile]” (45/331).

Or is DIKE the justice of a specific display?–Given the etymological connection between DIKE and DEIXO (to show, to point out, to display). So that the translation of justice as overpowering order might be at the expense of pointing this out, in 1935-46, despite the justice that pointing this out might oblige. Perhaps those who linger persist as a way of pointing this out. Their disorder might then be just.⁶

Lingering–In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Filip Müller, a survivor of Sonderkommando, at Auschwitz-Birkinau, recalls the moment in Crematorium II when the prisoners from the Czech Family Camp were to be killed and he chose to join them in the gas-chamber. “I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die,” but “a small group of women approached . . . right there in the gas chamber . . . . One of them said . . . ‘Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice [das Unrecht] done to us” (164-65).

Someone offers you the picture of a house–If DIKE is “the order of the while,” would it not be DIKE, this order, which is displayed when a farmhouse replaces gas chambers (as the building blocks of the one become the building blocks of the other. In the photograph of the farmhouse, the image of the bricks is visible, dark shadowing the white)?

Then what you see might be DIKE under construction, the order of a particular presencing as it presences what becomes present (at the expense of what is made absent).

Or would DIKE require attention to what lingers in the picture, in testimony, pointing out what this was?

If the photograph of the farmhouse brings to display what this was, then the photograph of the farmhouse always offers what only lingers. It leads to the question as to what was here before what was here, of what lingers in the lingering, “impelled . . . toward persistence.” It indicates the DIKE of your response.

Translation–Heidegger imagines translation as a crossing over: “in the brilliance of this lightning streak . . . we translate ourselves to what is said . . . so as to translate it in thoughtful conversation” (“Anaximander” 27). The result is not so much a sense of the past (“we translate ourselves to what is“–not what was–“said”) nor of a present positioned in relation to the past, but a primordial force, the sense of the originating coming to language, which we can only inadequately sustain, where the “thoughtful translation of what comes to speech . . . is a leap over an abyss” that “is hard to leap, mainly because we stand right on the edge” (19), we lack distance (the perspective offered by what was), we are too close to jump without falling short (“we are so near the abyss that we do not have an adequate runway for such a broad jump” [19]) unless our “thinking is primordial poetry” (19), the lightning streak. “Because it poetizes as it thinks, the translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking itself speak [the Anaximander fragment is the oldest surviving text of Greek philosophy] necessarily appears violent” (19). This violence, in particular, as an alternative to any historicism (including philological tradition) that would distance the primordial force.

But–without hiding from this force by taking refuge in a more comforting historicism–can we let the oldest fragment, this beginning (assuming that it is), only speak in this way (primordially, assuming that it would) as primordial poetry in 1946? In 1948 Paul Celan imagined a conversation with someone who demands “a bath in the aqua regia of intelligence” that would “give their true (primitive) meanings back to words, hence to things, beings, occurrences” (Prose 5). Because “a tree must again be a tree, and its branch, on which the rebels of a hundred wars have been hanged, must again flower in spring” (5). To which Celan imagines in reply: “What could be more dishonest than to claim that words had somehow, at bottom, remained the same!” (6).

Questioning–In 1933, in connection with “true knowing [Wissenschaft, science] in its beginning,” Heidegger said that while “two and a half millennia [have] passed since this beginning . . . that has by no means relegated the beginning itself to the past . . . . [A]ssuming that the original Greek Wissenshaft is something great, then the beginning of this great thing remains its greatest moment,” and “the beginning exists still. It does not lie behind us as something long past, but it stands before us,” it “has invaded our future; it stands there as the distant decree that orders us to recapture its greatness” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 32. Translation modified). In 1946, developing the same thought slightly differently, Heidegger writes that it is not the beginning that “stands before us,” but we who stand before it, this beginning being separated from us by an abyss on whose edge we stand and that we can only leap poetically. In 1933, Heidegger says as well that “if our ownmost existence stands on the threshold of a great transformation,” this threshold nevertheless requires that “the Greeks’ perseverance in the face of what is, a stance that was initially one of wonder and admiration, will be transformed into being completely exposed to and at the mercy of what is concealed and uncertain, that is, what is worthy of question,” a “questioning [that] will compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 33). In 1933, this questioning, which seemed to have “come together primordially into one formative force” (37), as “the glory and greatness of this new beginning” (38), involved Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism, an engagement in which he hoped (he said later ⁷) to influence the future of the movement, for example by advocating a leadership that would allow for opposition from its followers (“all leadership must allow following to have its own strength . . . to follow carries resistance within it. This essential opposition between leading and following must neither be covered over nor, indeed, obliterated altogether” [“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 38]).⁸ It is possible to accept this explanation, even to find it supported by what Heidegger said in 1933, and still question how accurately he focused or questioned what was inescapable, already in 1933 and later, where this questioning would “compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable.” In 1933 Heidegger said that “it is up to us whether and how extensively we endeavor, wholeheartedly and not just casually, to bring about self-examination and self-assertion . . . . No one will prevent us from doing this. But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness. . . . Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision” (38). Hiding oneself from that which never sets.

Translation–Benjamin speculates (1923) that a translation “issues from the original–not so much from its life as from its afterlife [Überleben, survival]” (“The Task of the Translator” 71/58). Perhaps as an index is a survival, a lingering of its referent. In the Arcades Project, it is as afterlife that historical understanding occurs: “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be viewed primarily as an after-life [ein Nachleben] of the understood” (“N” 5/547), producing “an image . . . in which what has been [das Gewesene] and the Now [dem Jetzt] flash into a constellation” (“N” 8/578. Translation modified). Translations of DIKE might be regarded as specific images, where a difference (not ontological but historical) occurs between the specific time to which an image belongs and the specific time it comes to legibility. Translation as an image, the translation of DIKE as a coming to legibility: “the historical index of the images [der historische Index der Bilder] doesn’t simply say [sagt] that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily [er sagt vor allem] that they only come to legibility at a specific time [daß sie erst in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen]” (8/577. Translation modified). Or is this saying, a showing?

In this light–In contrast to Heidegger’s focus on beings that stand in disorder, tarrying, craving to persist, Benjamin, in a letter (April 14, 1938) to Gershom Scholem, distinguishes between different illuminations (where Heidegger questions the response to the light, Benjamin questions the lighting): “The point here is precisely that things whose place is at present [derzeit] in shadow [im Schatten] . . . might be cast in a false light [ins falshe Licht] when subjected to artificial lighting [kunstliche Beleuchtung]. I say ‘at present’ because the current epoch, which makes so many things impossible, most certainly does not preclude this, that a just light [ein rechtes Licht] should fall on precisely those things in the course of the historical rotation of the sun [im historischen Sonnenumlauf]” (Correspondence 216-17/262. Translation modified). Not tarrying but awaiting the “just light” and avoiding any artificial lighting: perhaps what this “just light” illuminates is a justice waiting to be found, perhaps as a lingering of DIKE. The persistence of this lingering, Benjamin suggests, even when no longer in what is present, can be found in the index of the past: “the past carries with it a temporal index [einen zeitlichen Index] by which it is referred to redemption” and because of which “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (“Theses” 254/268). Where Heidegger marks the difference between ontic relations among beings and the ontological distinction that separates Being from beings (ontic and ontological differences as defining of primordial relation), Benjamin distinguishes between die Gegenwart (the present) and die Jetztzeit (the time of Now), between the relation, on the one hand, “of the past to the present,” and on the other, “of the past to the moment” (“N” 8), “the present as the ‘time that is Now’ [der Gegenwart als der ‘Jetztzeit’]” (“Theses” 263/279. Translation modified). So that a past becomes legible, and Then gestures from the past to indicate the moment when This is Now. Now responds to Then, to the past’s address. The Then constitutes as Now the time that is historical. What comes to be read responds to the possibilities of the reading in which it is awakened. In 1940, Benjamin wrote that “as flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history” (“Theses” 255). The historian “must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations” (255).

To what else then might LEGEIN point?–In this essay, we began by talking about the presencing of what is present and the saying of what is said as if both were not also gestures of power, but what is striking about the semantics of LEGEIN–at least as it is offered by Heidegger–is the specific physicality of its force, that saying at the same time is a laying out before me, an act apparently predicated on my ability to produce (or, perhaps, reproduce) whatever I say as something that will remain in this position–spread out before me, subject to selection and harvesting. From this perspective, the gestures of LEGEIN will turn out to be productive of certain histories.

And if what I am saying is, for example, “You,” does this mean that in saying “You,” I also cause (or attempt to cause) you to lie there, spread out before me?

Perhaps with Heidegger in mind and in response, Celan writes in 1959 of “the snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed. / Crystal on crystal, / meshed deep as time, we fall, / we fall and lie there and fall [wir fallen und liegen und fallen]” (“Schneebett [Snow-bed]” 120-21). And in 1963: “unwritten things” that have “hardened into language” are “laid bare” like rocks from the ground. “The ores are laid bare [Es liegen die Erze bloß] . . . Thrown out upward, revealed / crossways, so / we too are lying [so / liegen auch wir]” (“À la pointe acérée” 192-93).

Translation–Heidegger says that unless what is said (presenced, gathered) is interpreted in the light of the saying (the presencing, the gathering), a concern for what is said can turn us away from the saying (presencing, gathering). From the beginning, however, this turning away has been the destiny of Being: “Presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present [Unversehens wird das Anwesen selbst zu einem Anwesenden] . . . [it] is not distinguished from what is present [das Anwesende]. . . [and] the oblivion of the distinction, with which the destiny of Being begins and which it carries through to completion, is all the same not a lack, but rather the richest and most prodigious event: in it the history of the Western world comes to be borne out.” Because “what now is [was jetzt ist] stands in the shadow [im Schatten] of the already foregone destiny of Being’s oblivion [der Seinvergessenheit]” (“Anaximander” 50-51/335-36).

But what is now, in 1946, what oblivion has Being produced?

With respect to the semantics of LEGEIN and to the pre-Socratic thought to which he looks for the origins of this semantics, Heidegger writes that “our sole aim is to reach what wants to come to language . . . of its own accord . . . the dawn of that destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings” (“Anaximander” 25), so that “in our relation to the truth of Being, the glance of Being, and this means lightning, strikes” (27). Because “only in the brilliance of this lightning streak can we translate ourselves to what is said” (27). “[I]t is essential that we translate ourselves to the source” (28).

But in doing the work of translation, in finding an originating semantics (assuming that it is originating) “what wants to come to language” in 1946–Given the selection and harvest that coincides with Heidegger’s hermeneutic project (albeit concealed from him, or from which he seemed later to turn away). In whose persistence the dawn might be reflected, but reflected in a different light. When (at Minsk, August 1941) “they had to jump into this and lie face downwards . . . they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot and then they were shot . . . Himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave—a sort of triangular hole–and was looking in” (quoted in Gilbert 191); when (in November 1943, at Majdanek, during the Erntfeste, the Harvest-festival action) the naked “were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before” (quoted in Browning 139); when (during the same action, at Poniatowa) “we undressed quickly” and went into “the graves . . . full of naked bodies. My neighbour from the hut with her fourteen-year-old . . . daughter seemed to be looking for a comfortable place. While they were approaching the place, an SS man charged his rifle and told them: ‘Don’t hurry.’ Nevertheless we lay down quickly, in order to avoid looking at the dead. . . . [W]e lay down, our faces turned downwards” (quoted in Gilbert 630).

In 1940–Shortly before his suicide at Port Bou in 1940, Benjamin wrote of “the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate [dem Triumphzung, der die heute Herrschenden über die dahinführt, die heute am Boden liegen]” (“Theses” 256). He imagined the historian who “dissociates himself from” the procession, who “regards it as his task to brush history against the grain” (256-57). With respect to his task, Benjamin wrote in 1936 that the “method of this work [is] literary montage,” because “I have nothing to say, only to show [Ich habe nichts zu sagen. . . . Nur zu zeigen, to indicate, to point out] . . . [To] let it come into its own [zu ihrem Rechte kommen lassen, into its right, into its justice]” (“N” 5/574. Translation modified). “The historical index of images doesn’t simply say that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily that they only come to legibility at a specific time” (N 3, 1).⁹

Notes

1. To emphasize the existential as well as the indicative character of indices, is to approach the indexical somewhat differently from those who interpret it primarily in terms of its indicative function. Cf., for example, Arthur Burks, who by emphasizing this function at the expense of the existential, finds that “to begin with, Peirce confuses the cause-effect relation with the semiotic relation” (679). From Burks’ perspective, “the function of an index is to refer to or call attention to some feature or object in the immediate environment of the interpretant” (678); with respect to the bullet hole, however, Peirce says that the interpretant is not crucial. So long as the existential relation exists, the index refers or indicates whether or not there is interpretation. Cause-effect relations are particularly significant indexically because they illuminate the way in which a sign (the index) can be produced by its referent and consequently serve as evidence. It is in term s of the interpretant that Burks denies Peirce’s assertion that “a weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind” (Peirce 286). A weathercock is not an index, Burks says, because “the interpretant does not use the weather-cock to represent or denot e the direction of the wind” (Burks 679), i.e. does not use it to indicate; but representation and denotation (the use of a sign) are not fundamental to an indexical reference. As the bullet hole is an index of the history that produced it, the weathercoc k is an index of the wind’s force; a photograph of the weathercock will be an index of something that has happened.

2.A copy of the photograph can be found in Klee, Dressen, and Riess, p. 248, where it is captioned: “The end of Treblinka. A farm is built to give future visitors the impression they are in a ‘normal’ area.” A copy can al so be found in Sereny, between pp. 190-91, where it is captioned: “The house built at Treblinka after the camp had been demolished, in which a Ukrainian farmer was to be installed. If questioned, he would claim that he and his family had lived there for y ears.”

3. Lewalter offers this interpretation in Die Zeit, 13 August 1953, as a response to an article by Habermas, “On the Publication of Lectures of 1935,” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 25 J uly 1953. Habermas had written of the 1953 text of the 1935 lectures: that “Heidegger expressly brings the question of all questions, the question of Being, together with the historical movement of those days [i.e. 1935]” (“Lectures” 192). Given this conn ection, Habermas asks if “the planned murder of millions of human beings, which we all know about today, also [can] be made understandable in terms of the history of Being as a fateful going astray?” (197). The question leads Habermas to the possibility o f “think[ing] with Heidegger against Heidegger” (197).

4.Heidegger supported Lewalter in a letter to Die Zeit, 24 September 1953. Rainer Marten, who worked with Heidegger in 1953 on the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics, recalls in the Decem ber 19-20, 1987 issue of Badische Zeitung, that Heidegger added the parenthesis at the time of publication (Habermas, “Work” 452).

5.As a rhetorical device, we might refer to the dilemma Arendt offers Heidegger as a caieta, naming Arendt’s strategy after an episode in the Aeneid (we are indebted to Robert Dyer for this reading of Virgil). At the end of Book 6, after leaving the underworld through the gateway of false dreams, Aeneas lands briefly in Italy at a place that will henceforth be named for the nurse Aeneas buries there (“Caieta . . . your name points out your bones [os saque namen . . . signat] . . . if that be glory [si qua est ea gloria]” [7:4-5]). As Virgil’s contemporaries knew, Caieta’s name not only predates Virgil’s naming, but refers to the place where Cicero was murdered, a crime in which Octavian wa s an accomplice (Cicero, who at the time was nursing Octavian’s political career, was murdered by Mark Antony’s assassins but with Octavian’s acquiescence, as a choice Octavian made on the way to power). Inasmuch as the Aeneid is addressed t o Octavian as well as those familiar with the recent past, the Caieta episode in the Aeneid works to indicate a buried memory. Virgil says nothing. Recent history is silently indicated both for Octavian and others when as readers they come to Caieta. They can perpetuate this silence or they can break it (though perhaps at some political risk), but either way the silence is marked.

With respect to Eichmann in Jerusalem, the caieta that Arendt offers Heidegger leaves him with the dilemma, either to choose not to read, thereby marking (or re-marking) a silence he has already chosen, or to respond to a text which repeated ly marks this silence he has chosen for himself (which for even sympathetic readers can seem “scandalously inadequate” [Lacoue-Labarthe 34] and “beyond commentary” [Levinas 487]. Both are referring specifically to the only break in the silence to be found in Heidegger’s public remarks, the 1949 Bremen lecture in which he compared the Final Solution to “agriculture [which] is now a mechanized food industry,” and is “the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers” [quoted in Schirmacher 34]). Once it is produced, an index can be like that; it addresses you whether or not you turn away, marking your response as additional evidence, whether or not anyone chooses–as Arendt did choose–to underscore the marker.

6.Heidgger’s translation of DIKE can be supported by passages from Homer, for example from the Odyssey, when Antikleia tells Odysseus that her existence as disembodied life or PSYCHE (“she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream” [11.207-8]) is “the way [DIKE, the order of things] for mortals when they die” (11.218). As such DIKE produces her as a lingering. Like the psyches of the slain suitors, “PSYCHAI, EIDOLA KAMONTON [psyches, images of the outworn, those whose work is done, or who have met with disaster]” (24.14), the dead whose lives Odysseus as an agent of DIKE has worked “to gather [LEXAITO]” into a lingering (24.106). In 1935, Heidegger uses this reference to “the slain suitors [der erschlagenen Freier]” as “an example of the original meaning of LEGEIN as to ‘gather [sammeln]’” [Introduction to Metaphysics, 105/95]).

7. Cf. the 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us”: “My judgment was this: insofar as I could judge things, only one possibility was left, and that was to attempt to stem the coming development by means of constructive powers which were still viable” (92).

8.Cf. Parvis Emad’s interpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of leadership: “The rectoral address does not mention anything that would connect it to a totalitarian worldview. On the contrary, Heidegger introduce s a daring notion of leading and following that is diametrically opposed to nazism. Heidegger talks about a leading and following in which resistance is present and which thrives on resistance. What could be more alien to nazism’s demand for unconditional and total obedience?” (xxiii).

9. In 1942, two years after Benjamin’s suicide and in response to news of the deportation of friends from the Gurs internment camp to Auschwitz, Arendt wrote a poem titled “WB”: “Dusk will come again sometime. / Night will come down from the stars. / We will lie [Liegen] our outstretched arms / In the nearnesses, in the distances” (Quoted and translated in Young-Bruehl 163/485. Translation modified).

Works Cited

Where both English translations and German texts are quoted, page references are first to the English translation, then to the German original. Versions of the essay were delivered at the 20th Century Literature Conference (Louisville, Kentucky) in Februa ry 1995, and at the Philosophy Interpretation Culture Conference (Binghamton, New York) in April 1995. We would like to thank Steven Youra with whom we have worked closely in formulating many of the perspectives presented here.
- Anscombe, G. E. M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1959.
- Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhardt Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
- Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
- Aristotle. On Sophistical Refutations. Trans. E. S. Forster. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; and London: William Heinemann, 1955. A Greek-English edition.
- Benjamin, Walter. “N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress].” Trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth. Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, History, and Aesthetics. Ed. F. Gary Smith. A special issue of The Philosophical Forum, 15:1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983-84): 1-40. “Das Passagen-Werke.”Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 5. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
- —. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 69-82. Illuminationen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969.
- —. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 253-64. Illuminationen.
- Benjamin, Walter and Gershom Scholem. The Correspondence. 1932-1940. Ed. Scholem. Trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. New York: Schocken: 1989. Briefwechsel 1933-1940. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
- Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
- Burks, Arthur W. “Icon, Index, Symbol.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1949): 673-89.
- Celan, Paul. “À la pointe acérée.” The Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1988. A German-English edition. 192-95.
- —.”The Straitening [Engführung].” Poems. 136-49.
- —.”Snow-bed [Schneebett].” Poems. 120-21.
- —.Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Manchester, UK: Carnet, 1986.
- Emad, Parvis. “Introduction to Heinrich Wiegand Petzet,” Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976. Trans. Emad and Kenneth Maly. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
- Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust. A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
- Habermas, Jürgen. “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935.” Trans. William S. Lewis. The Heidegger Controversy. Ed. Richard Wolin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 91-116. 186-197.
- —.”Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective.” Trans. John McCumber. Critical Inquiry 15:2 (1989): 431-456.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16).” Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 102-23. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Verlag Gunt her Neske, 1954.
- —.Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963.
- —.Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1961. Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966.
- —.”Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50).” Early Greek Thinking. 59-78. Vorträge und Aufsätze.
- —.”Moira (Parmenides VIII, 31-41).” Early Greek Thinking. 79-101. Vorträge und Aufsätze.
- —.”‘Only a god can save us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.” Trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo. The Heidegger Controversy.
- —.Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
- —.”The Anaximander Fragment.” Early Greek Thinking. 13-58. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963.
- —.”The Self-Assertion of the German University.” Trans. William S. Lewis. The Heidegger Controversy. 29-39.
- Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. A. T. Murray. Loeb Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; and London: William Heineman, 1919. A Greek-English edition.
- Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
- Klee, Ernst, Will Dressen, Volker Riess, Eds. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Trans. Deborah Burnstone. New York: The Free Press, 1991.
- Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Arts, and Politics. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
- Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. German quoted from the film.
- Levinas, Emmanuel. “As If Consenting to Horror.” Trans. Paula Wissing. Critical Inquiry. 15:2 (1989): 485-488.
- Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
- Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Elements of Logic.” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume Two. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931.
- Pöggeler, Otto. “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding.” Trans. Steven Galt Crowell. The Heidegger Controversy. 198-244.
- Schirmacher, Wolfgang. Technik und Gelassenheit. Freiburg, 1984.
- Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
- Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. H. R. Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; and London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1976. A Greek-English edition.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.
- —.Culture and Value. Ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. A German-English edition.
- —.Notebooks: 1914-1916. Ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. A German-English edition.
- —.On Certainty. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. A German-English edition.
- —.Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. A German-English edition.
- —.Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. A German-English edition. Translations at times modified.
- —.Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Ed. Brian McGuinness. Trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979.
- Young-Breuhl, Elizabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982.
September 24, 2013

Song of the Andoumboulou: 23

This poem originally appeared in SULFUR 34 (Spring 1994).

Audio clips are provided here in .au format and .wav format. Sound players are available from the Institute’s FTP site for AIX 3.25, Windows 3.1 and Macintosh.

         --rail band--

      Another cut was on 
   the box as we pulled 
     in. Fall back though we 
    did once it ended,
                       "Wings
       of a Dove" sung so 
      sweetly we flew... 
     The Station Hotel came 
   into view. We were in
       Bamako. The same scene 
      glimpsed again and 
        again said to be a 
                           sign... 
    As of a life sought
       beyond the letter, 
      preached of among those 
   who knew nothing but, 
                         at yet 
     another "Not yet" Cerno
       Bokar came aboard, the 
      elevens and the twelves locked 
        in jihad at each other's 
    throats,    bracketed light
       lately revealed, otherwise 
                                  out...
      Eleven men covered with 
     mud he said he saw. A 
        pond filled with water 
   white as milk. Three chanting
       clouds that were crowds of 
      winged men and behind the 
                                third
        a veiled rider, Shaykh
                               Hamallah...
      For this put under house arrest 
         the atavistic band at the 
     station reminded us, mediumistic
       squall we'd have maybe made 
                                   good on
    had the rails we rode been
                               Ogun's... 
      Souls in motion, conducive 
     to motion,    too loosely 
      connected to be called a 
     band, yet "if souls converse" 
    vowed results from a dusty 
                               record
    ages old

             .

      Toothed chorus. Tight-jawed 
   singer...    Sophic strain, 
     strewn voice, sophic stretch... 
    Cerno Bokar came aboard, 
                             called
      war the male ruse, 
                            muttered 
     it under his breath, made sure
                                    all within
       earshot heard...
                           Not that the 
         hoarse Nyamakala flutes were 
    not enough, not that enough 
      meant something exact 
                            anymore... 
     Bled by the effort but sang 
        even so,    Keita's voice,
                                   Kante's
   voice, boast and belittlement 
       tossed back and forth...
                                Gassire's 
      lute was Djelimady Tounkara's 
                                    guitar, 
    Soundiata, Soumagoro, at each other's 
     throat...    Tenuous Kin we called 
   our would-be band, Atthic Ensemble, 
                                       run 
      with as if it was a mistake we made
    good on,    gone soon as we'd 
                                   gotten
   there              

             .

     Neither having gone nor not having
       gone, hovered,    book, if it
                                     was a 
    book, thought wicked with wing-stir, 
        imminent sting... It was the book 
      of having once been there we 
         thumbed, all wish to go back
        let go,    the what-sayer,
                                   farther 
          north, insisting a story lay 
      behind the story he complained he 
         couldn't begin to infer...
                                    What 
       made him think there was one
        we wondered, albeit our what 
     almost immediatelv dissolved as we
                                        came
      to a tunnel, the train we took
   ourselves to be on gone up in 
       smoke,    people ever about to get 
     ready, unready, run between what, 
                                       not-what. 
         And were there one its name was 
       Ever After, a story not behind but in 
          front of where this was,    obstinate
        "were," were obstinate so susceptible, 
                                               thin
      etic itch, inextricable
                              demur

             .

       Beginningless book thought to've 
    unrolled endlessly, more scroll 
     than book, talismanic strum.
   As if all want were in his holding 
      a note    only a half-beat 
                                 longer, 
     another he was now calling love 
       a big rope, sing less what 
    he did than sihg, anagrammic sigh, 
      from war the male ruse to "were" the 
            new ruse,    the what-sayer, 
                                         sophic
       stir... Sophic slide of a cloud across 
   tangency, torque,    no book of a
        wished else    the where
                                 we
     thumbed

Performers: Royal Hartigan (drums), Nathaniel Mackey (vocals), Hafez Modirzadeh (tenor saxophone).

September 24, 2013

The “Mired Sublime” of Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou
Paul Naylor

Department of English
The University of Memphis
pknaylor@msuvx1.memphis.edu

We are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world.

— Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant’s incisive sentence–which inaugurates a series of essays, first published in 1981, devoted to the possibilities and difficulties of a cross-cultural poetics–registers the rhetorical-political shift from sameness to diversity that structures so many of the current debates over multiculturalism. Although the Martinican poet and critic raises a familiar charge against the West, that it imposed rather than proposed sameness, I want to draw attention to the curative, utopian dimension of Glissant’s diagnosis. Diversity, while fundamentally fragmented, can be “achieved in a no less creative way” than sameness. And it is this curative dimension that opens up one possibility for a cross-cultural poetry and poetics: the representation of the moment, enacted in a text, when traditions cross paths, and sameness yields to diversity to achieve a more rather than less creative encounter.

American literature in this century has witnessed its own series of attempts to produce a cross-cultural epic poem capable of telling the “tale of the tribe”¹–a tale including not only American but world history as well. This series of “world-poems” begins with The Cantos of Ezra Pound and continues in Louis Zukofsky’s A, H.D.’s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, Robert Duncan’s Passages, and, as I will show in this essay, Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou. Each of these works, in their own distinct way, holds out the possibility of a utopian vision created in and by poetry. Yet not all of these poems enact the passage from sameness to diversity that marks Glissant’s definition of cross-cultural poetry. Pound’s declaration in The Spirit of Romance that “all ages are contemporaneous” (6) has the unfortunate effect of reducing diversity to a transcendent sameness in the service of an all-encompassing view of world history, an effect all too evident in parts of The Cantos. As Mackey argues in his study of the 20th century American world-poem, “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems,” these poems allow for more diversity as we move closer to the present and as they begin to admit the impossibility of composing an all-encompassing tale of the human tribe. This admission, however, does not close the door on the possibility of a world-poem; on the contrary, it opens the door for the kind of creative encounter between cultures that Glissant calls for–an encounter based on the recognition of the irreducible diversity of the disparate cultures that populate the world. Nathaniel Mackey, I contend, achieves just such an encounter in his world-poem, Song of the Andoumboulou.

For the last ten years, Mackey, an African-American writer intent on exploring both sides of the hyphen, has investigated a remarkably wide range of subjects and forms. He has published two full-length volumes of poetry, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra; two volumes of an on-going work of epistolary fiction, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus’s Run; a major collection of essays, Discrepant Engagement; numerous articles on music, literature, and culture, and he has co-edited Moment’s Notice, an anthology of poetry and prose inspired by jazz. Mackey is also the founding editor of the literary journal Hambone, which Eliot Weinberger rightly calls “the main meeting-place for Third World, American minority and white avant-gardists” (232). Yet despite the wide range of subjects and forms his writing undertakes, Mackey’s work almost always gathers around the fact of song. The essays deal with Baraka and the Blues, Creeley and Jazz; the epistolary fiction is comprised of letters from “N,” a member of a jazz band, the Mystic Horn Society; and many of the poems are dedicated to musicians such as John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Jimi Hendrix, Pharoah Sanders, and Cecil Taylor.

For Mackey, song, a term that includes poetry, creates the possibility of what he terms a “discrepant engagement” between cultures. The phrase serves as both a title for his recent book of essays and as a description of his reading of the cross-cultural moment. Mackey defines the term in relation to

the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits. They call it the “creaking of the word.” It is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings “bass,” voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend. (Engagement 19)

Discrepant engagement, then, not only denotes a theory of cross-culturality; it enacts one in the structure of its definition. The crossing traditions of Dogon and Western cosmologies and philosophies of language allow Mackey to present a second crossing, one in which traditions of sense and nonsense, noise and word, encounter one and other. Mackey uncovers in this second opposition the cross-cultural moment shared by both traditions, although the judgment concerning that moment’s value is clearly not shared. This opposition animates most of Mackey’s writing and generates the cross-cultural recognition embodied in the moment of song.

Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou presents this illusive and allusive moment, this discrepant engagement, when two traditions of poetic cosmology–the Dogon tradition of West Africa and the American tradition of the world-poem–cross paths.² For Mackey, the cultural judgment concerning the value of song coincides with the way a given culture reacts to the opposition between noise and word, with how much “creaking” a culture tolerates in its words. If we recall Mackey’s contention that the “founding noise” of language also serves to remind us of a tradition’s “axiomatic exclusions,” then it follows that a culture’s definitions of and judgments about noise have political as well as aesthetic implications.

Glissant offers a useful interpretation of the politics of noise he finds at work in the “jumbled rush” of sound that composes Martinican Creole. “This is how the dispossessed man organizes his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise,” Glissant contends. “So the meaning of a sentence is sometimes hidden in the accelerated nonsense created by scrambled sounds. But this nonsense does convey real meaning to which the master’s ear cannot have access” (124). The “scrambled sounds” of Creole hide meaning from the master; the dispossessed find a form of subversion in the noise ignored by those who possess, and they hide meaning most often in song. In Mackey’s work, song inhabits this ambiguous ground. In the words of “N,” Mackey’s “namesake” correspondent in his epistolary fiction, “Did song imply a forfeiture of speech or was it speech’s fulfillment?” (Run 160) As we will see, Mackey’s poetry and poetics offer a deliberately ambivalent answer to this question.

In Gassire’s Lute, Mackey describes the world-poem in light of Duncan’s understanding of Pound’s, H.D.’s, and Charles Olson’s initial attempts to produce such a poem. “The world-poem is a global, multiphasic work in which various times and various places interpenetrate. It is no accident, as Duncan sees it, that this sort of work began to appear during the period of the two world wars, a time when national divisions and hostilities were at the forefront. What he puts forth is a sense of the world-poem as a dialectical, oppositional response to the outright disunity of a world at war” (“Lute” III, 152). The world-poem, then, is by design a cross-cultural work. It seeks to represent in collage or serial form the “luminous moments,” to use Pound’s phrase, that transcend temporal and cultural boundaries in order to overcome the nationalistic tendencies that led to two world wars. Yet both the world-poem in particular and the practice of collage in general raise significant questions concerning the relation of the author to the material appropriated from other cultures. Does the author necessarily underwrite the values of all the sources on which he or she draws? Is the author claiming “mastery” over these sources, or does he or she attempt to set up a more dialogic relationship with them? And given the often unwritten strictures against overly discursive language in these genres, how does the author make his or her relation to the source texts evident? I am not suggesting that Mackey answers all of these questions directly in his version of the world-poem. There are, as we will see, potential incongruities between the material he borrows from Dogon cosmology and his own position as author; there are, for instance, incongruities between the Dogon treatment of gender and sexuality and Mackey’s that are not fully addressed or worked out in the poetry. Nevertheless, Mackey’s concept of a “discrepant engagement” between cultures allows room for such unresolved incongruities without undermining the worth of his project.

Furthermore, Mackey does address in Gassire’s Lute the general problem of authorship and inspiration in a way that sheds light on his understanding of the possible dangers involved in the authorship of a world-poem. Mackey’s book investigates the ways in which the story of Gassire’s lute provides a connection between previous instances of the world-poem and brings the subjects of war and poetry face to face with each other. But, more significantly, it also investigates the ways in which that story announces the cross-cultural moment in at least three of those poems–Pound’s The Cantos, Olson’s The Maximus Poems, and Duncan’s Passages–and the ways in which the modernist aesthetic governing the world-poem comes under fire. As Mackey informs us, Pound found the story in Leo Frobenius’ and Douglas Fox’s African Genesis and incorporated it in Canto LXXIV, so the story brings African culture directly into the mix of the American world-poem. Frobenius first heard the story when he was working with the Soninke of Mali, who inhabit the same region of West Africa as the Dogon (“Lute” I, 86-89). Gassire, the son of the King of the mythical city of Wagadu, following a fierce battle, hears a partridge singing the Dausi, an African epic song, and determines to trade his role as military leader for that of singer. He orders a special lute to be made but is warned by the craftsman that the lute will only sing if its wood is stained with the blood of Gassire’s sons. He is so entranced with the song of the Dausi that he willingly accepts this price, which leads to the death of his eight sons and the destruction of Wagadu.

For Mackey, the story of Gassire’s lute becomes a parable about the dangers of song and poetry, about the dangers of placing oneself in the path of daimonic inspiration at the expense of human life. “Taken seriously, the notion [of inspiration] complicates and unsettles what we mean by ‘human,’ since if we’re subject to such invasions our susceptibility has to be a factor of what being human means” (“Lute” I, 96). Throughout Gassire’s Lute, Mackey interrogates the possibility that the poets producing the various world-poems under consideration may in fact be susceptible to just such a danger. In particular, he cites Duncan’s analysis of “Pound’s refusal to look at the possibility that the ideal might be a party to what betrays it, ‘that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure, with the obscene–what goes on backstage’”(“Lute” III, 160). According to this line of argument, Pound trusted his muse too much; he refused to question the source of his inspiration and, as a result, was unable or unwilling to see the ways in which the sublime may be intertwined with the political horrors he sought to denounce in The Cantos.

Mackey contends that Duncan avoids this trap because his poetry exhibits a “willingness to question or corrupt its own inspiration” (“Lute” II, 159). I want to extend this argument to Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou and argue that he, like Duncan, courts a muse that makes this questioning an integral part of inspiration–a questioning that intentionally leaves both the poet and reader enmeshed in a “mired sublime” (Udhra18). However, unlike a number of postmodern poets and theorists, Mackey does not unequivocally dismiss the possibility of transcendence through, among other things, song. He contends that song can embody “a simultaneous mystic thrust. Immanence and transcendence meet, making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well” (Engagement 235). As we will see as we examine his world-poem, Mackey offers a revised notion of transcendence–a notion that incorporates the social and political realms and that not only protects against dangerous notions of inspiration and the reduction of diversity to sameness but holds out the possibility of a truly curative cross-cultural poetry as well.

Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou begins in his first book of poetry, continues in his second, and new sections have been appearing recently in poetry magazines such as New American Writing, Sulfur, and River City.³ Because of the on-going and open-ended nature of the series, Mackey’s poems are not easy to enter, nor are they susceptible to an authoritative reading since they too include a certain amount of “founding noise” in their form as well as their content. This difficulty is augmented by the fact that the Andoumboulou are virtually unknown outside of a small group of West African anthropologists. Even for the interested, information on the Andoumboulou is scarce at best. Mackey is aware of only two instances in which the Andoumboulou are mentioned–in the liner notes to Francois Di Dio’s Les Dogon, a recording of Dogon music, and in Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen’s The Pale Fox–both of which Mackey cites as epigraphs to Songs 1-7 in Eroding Witness and Songs 8-15 in School of Udhra respectively. In the first instance, Di Dio reveals that “The Song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits. For this reason the initiates, crouching in a circle, sing it in a whisper in the deserted village, and only the howling of the dogs and the wind disturb the silence of the night” (Witness 31). In the second instance, Griaule and Dieterlen place the Andoumboulou in the context of Dogon cosmology, wherein the Andoumboulou are the product of the incestuous coupling of the Yeban and reside in the earth’s interior. As a result of this coupling, the Andoumboulou “attest to Ogo’s failure and his lost twinness” (Udhra 1). As we will see, exploring the possibility of a reconciliation of this lost twinness animates the utopian dimension of Mackey’s world-poem.

Although these citations might not provide the reader with a great deal of information about the Andoumboulou, they do provide Mackey with enough inspiration to begin his series of poems. “What really bore most on my initial senses of what would be active in that sequence was the actual music, the ‘Song of the Andoumboulou’ on that album, a funereal song whose low, croaking vocality intimates the dead and whose climactic trumpet bursts signal breakthru [sic] to another world, another life” (“Letter”). Admittedly, an author’s comments on his or her own work do not provide a privileged interpretation of that work; nevertheless, Mackey’s gloss of his world-poem brings to the fore two issues that prove crucial for an understanding of the work: the centrality of song and the possibility of transcendence through song. First, note that the music rather than the mythology of the Dogon initially sparks his interest and that it is the blurring of the boundaries between song and noise, the “croaking vocality,” that catches his attention in particular. Second, note that this particular kind of song opens the poet up not only to the possibility of encountering the past (the “dead”) but to the possibility of encountering “another world, another life.” Mackey’s conception of transcendence should not be confused with either a Judeo-Christian or a symbolist conception; nevertheless, the possibility of transcendence animates his cross-cultural poetic project.

Although Mackey’s understanding of transcendence will unfold more fully as my argument develops, his desire to leave open the possibility of temporal or historical transcendence suggests ways in which his treatment of the Andoumboulou moves beyond a mere antiquarian interest in Dogon mythology. According to Mackey,

it wasn’t until I read The Pale Fox in the course of writing School of Udhra that I found out the Andoumboulou are specifically the spirits of an earlier, flawed or failed form of human being–what, given the Dogon emphasis on signs, traces, drawings, etc. and the “graphicity” noted above, I tend to think of as a rough draft of human being. I’m lately fond of saying that the Andoumboulou are in fact us, that we’re the rough draft. (“Letter”)

For Mackey, then, the song of the Andoumboulou is also potentially “our” song–the song of a form of humanity that is not quite finished, that is still in process of becoming more than it presently is. As we will see, the reconciliation of the “lost twinness” mentioned above becomes a central preoccupation of Mackey’s world-poem, and that reconciliation may suggest a way in which humanity might move beyond the “rough draft” stage of development. Thus, Mackey’s remarks on his world-poem not only raise important questions concerning our access to history and tradition; they also suggest the ways in which his series of poems may develop the kind of curative dimension Glissant calls for since they hold out the possibility of humanity going through another “draft” or revision–a revision that recognizes rather than reduces diversity.

The original “Song of the Andoumboulou,” as Mackey points out, is a dirge sung by the elders of the Dogon. His world-poem opens with this moment of lament:
```
                     The song says the
                      dead will not
                  ascend without song.

                    That because if
             we lure them their names get 
                        our throats, the
                 word sticks. 
                                        (Witness 33)
```
First, what are we to make of the verb in the opening line? If we listen to the version of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” recorded by Di Dio, the song does not “say” anything if we construe that term strictly. The song seems to explore the pre- or post-articulate terrain of chant and groan, whisper and sigh rather than a definite ground of meaning or direct communication. Yet the mood or tone of the song is unmistakably that of a funereal chant; I doubt many listeners, even those unfamiliar with African music, would take the song to be part of a festive occasion.

Both the recording of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” and the first two stanzas of Mackey’s poem, then, bring the listener and reader up against the opposition between word and noise that figures prominently in his notion of a discrepant engagement. So the initial cross-cultural engagement between the Dogon song and his own embryonic poem takes place on the contested terrain between word and noise. “There’s something, for me at least, particularly ‘graphic’ about recourse to that strained, straining register, the scratchy tonalities [of the Dogon singers] to which the lines ‘their names get / our throats, the / word sticks’ allude” (“Letter”). The direct connection Mackey makes here between the Dogon song and the lines from the second stanza of his first “Song” hinges on the hesitant if not inhibited act of expression. Nevertheless, while the “word sticks” in the singer’s throat, the “founding noise” of the song “says” something which both precedes and exceeds that word and which, furthermore, precedes and exceeds the singer as well. Perhaps, then, we can extend Glissant’s contention that the noise or “jumbled rush” of sound in Creole speech deliberately conceals meaning from the master to include the contention that the noise inherent in both versions of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” deliberately conceals meaning from an equally domineering master–the master of meaning who demands that all linguistic sounds make rational sense.

This extension of Glissant’s argument brings us face to face with the mystical element inherent in Dogon cosmology and in Mackey’s poetry and poetics. The term “mysticism,” like the equally troublesome term “transcendence,” is, for contemporary Western readers in particular, often overwhelmed by its Judeo-Christian connotations, and, as a result, the term needs to be used in a carefully qualified manner. W.T. Jones defines mysticism as the “view that reality is ineffable and transcendent; that it is known, therefore, by some special, nonrational means; that knowledge of it is communicable, if at all, only in poetic imagery and metaphor” (Jones 424). I want to add song to Jones’ list of the means by which nonrational knowledge may be communicable since the mystical moment in Dogon cosmology and Mackey’s poetry transpires in song as well as in imagery and metaphor. Furthermore, nonrational knowledge of the transcendent and ineffable nature of reality may not be communicable at all. Song, imagery, and metaphor can suggest or intimate that knowledge, but they cannot make it explicit or absolute. Yet song, imagery, and metaphor can make explicit their own limits and, via negativa, draw attention to that which transcends those limits. Thus, the dialectic of word and noise that comprises the discrepant engagement occurring between the Dogons’ “Song of the Andoumboulou” and Mackey’s is best understood as part of a movement that simultaneously reveals and conceals a reality that transcends any attempt to represent it in a strictly rational mode of communication. This dialectical understanding of the relation between word and noise, therefore, mitigates against hubristic assumptions about the possibility of an all-encompassing tale of the tribe. Yet it also leaves unresolved–perhaps intentionally, perhaps not–the potential incongruities between the author’s stance and those of the cultural materials on which he or she draws.

Song, imagery, and metaphor, for Mackey, come together in the tradition of lyric poetry–a tradition with close ties to Western romanticism and the claims for transcendence that accompany it. Yet Mackey’s understanding of the transcendent moment in lyric poetry cannot simply be equated with romanticism. The transcendent moment for a romantic such as Coleridge, for instance, allows access to the “infinite I Am” of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Coleridge 263). In Coleridge’s poetics, lyric poetry is one of the primary means by which one can transcend the finite, material world of the senses and move into the infinite, immaterial world of God’s presence. For Mackey, on the other hand, the transcendental tradition of lyric poetry allows access to “modes of being prior to one’s own experience,” to “[r]ecords of experience that are part of the communal and collective inheritance that we have access to even though we have not personally experienced those things” (“Interview” 48). Mackey’s conception of transcendence, then, is best understood in a sociological or historical rather than theological or metaphysical sense–as a human to human rather than a human to divine encounter. In short, Mackey offers a “horizontal” rather than “vertical” notion of transcendence. For Mackey, language is one of the primary means of attaining this moment of transcendence since “in language we inherit the voices of the dead. Language is passed on to us by people who are now in their graves and brings with it access to history, tradition, times and places that are not at all immediate to our own immediate and particular occasion whether we look at it individually and personally or whether we look at it in a more collective way and talk about a specific community” (“Interview” 54). Yet language is only one means of transcendence, and, due to the “founding noise” inherent in the word, it does not hold out the possibility of absolute transcendence.

An equally important means of transcendence for Mackey is found in human sexuality. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 1,” we are told that “the dead don’t want / us bled, but to be / sung. // And she said the same, / a thin wisp of soul, / But I want the meat of / my body sounded” (Witness 35). I read the lines in italics as pertaining to that which both “she” and the “dead” desire: to be “sounded” in song, not as disembodied entities but as beings composed of flesh. Thus, two themes that are truly cross-cultural, sex and death, meet in the act of song–an act that purports to take the singer and the listener beyond the limits of their own experience but not out of their own bodies in order to share the sacred common ground of generation and degeneration. As we move through Mackey’s poems, both of these themes take on mythological proportions to such a great extent that in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 7” “N,” the same “N” who is the protagonist in Mackey’s fiction, admits to having “been accused of upwardly displacing sex” (Witness 54). Understanding how this “upward” displacement functions in the poems will help shed light on the possibility of reconciling the “lost twinness” through the potential transcendence in sexuality.

“Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” is an extended instance of this “upward displacement,” and, as such, it deserves close attention. The following passage is from the poem’s first section:
```
                         What song there
             was delivered up to
                   above where sound leaves off,

         though whatever place words talk us
                          into'd be like hers,
                     who'd only speak
               to herself . . . 

(A hill, down thru
           its hole only ants
     where this
              was. The mud

                    hut was her body.)

               Embraced, but
     on the edge of speech
             though she spoke

            without words,
                    as in a dream.

                     The loincloth, he 
               said, is tight,
                       which is so that it conceals
                     the woman's sacred parts.
     But that in him
           this worked a longing
                to unveil what's underneath,

    the Word the Nommo
          put inside the fabric's
       woven secret,

                    the Book wherein
the wet of kisses
                  keeps. 

                           (Witness 39-40)
```
The first two stanzas set the scene of transcendence, which transpires in song and in the space between silence, “where sound leaves off,” and signification, the “place words talk us / into,” a place likened to “her.” Following a parenthetical element, “she” appears “on the edge of speech,” speaking “without words”–a condition reminiscent of the paradoxical way the song “says” in the first poem of the series. This passage implicitly brings together the issues of language, song, transcendence, and sexuality, but to understand how these concerns are explicitly connected, we need to consult what is perhaps the primary source for the study of Dogon cosmology, Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmêli.

Griaule’s book records his unique discussions with Ogotemmêli, a blind Dogon sage, which took place in 1946 and which still stands as the most intimate and authoritative account of Dogon cosmology available. Mackey signals the importance of these conversations for his world-poem by prefacing the first poem with an epigraph from the book. Yet not until “Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” does the full impact of Ogotemmêli’s narrative become evident. In his commentary on the symbolic import of the Dogon women’s clothing, Ogotemmêli tells Griaule that “‘The loin-cloth is tight . . . to conceal the woman’s sex, but it stimulates a desire to see what is underneath. This is because of the Word, which the Nummo put in the fabric. That word is every women’s secret, and is what attracts the man. A woman must have secret parts to inspire desire” (Griaule 82). Clearly, the last four stanzas of the section from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” cited above are a poetic paraphrase of Ogotemmêli, and the common thread that runs between the two passages concerns the essential role concealment plays in desire. But this concealment provokes hermeneutical as well as sexual desire since what is longed for “underneath” the loin-cloth is “the Word.” According to Ogotemmêli, Amma, the originary God in Dogon lore, created the earth from a lump of clay and, after fashioning female genitalia in the form of an ant hill, proceeded to have sex with his creation–an act Ogotemmêli calls “the primordial blunder of God” (17). This act eventually led to the birth of twin spirits, called Nummo (spelled “Nommo” in Mackey’s version), who determined to bring speech to their speechless mother, the earth. “The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions” and formed a loin-cloth for their mother. But “the purpose of this garment was not merely modesty”: the “coiled fringes of the skirt were therefore the chosen vehicle for the words which the Spirit desired to reveal to the earth” (19-20).

To the extent that mystical discourse simultaneously reveals and conceals the reality that exceeds rational understanding, then the connection between language and sexuality as potential media of transcendence becomes more apparent if we explore not only the role the image of the loin-cloth plays in Dogon cosmology but the image of weaving as well. For the Dogon, as Griaule points out, “weaving is a form of speech, which is imparted to the fabric by the to-and-fro of the shuttle on the warp” (77). As Ogotemmêli explains, “The weaver, representing a dead man, is also the male who opens and closes the womb of woman, represented by the heddle. The stretched threads represent the act of procreation”; and the “Word . . . is in the sound of the block and shuttle. The name of the block means ‘creaking of the word.’. . . It is interwoven with the threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric” (73). Thus, the image of weaving brings us in contact with the primary elements of Dogon cosmology and Mackey’s poetics. The word and its creaking (the “founding noise” upon which the word is based) are essential parts of the procreative craft which produces the clothing that provokes the desire “to unveil what’s underneath”–a desire never fully satisfied in and by song or poetry.

As I argued earlier, the form of the world-poem raises troublesome questions concerning the author’s relation to the cultural materials on which he or she draws, and Mackey’s use of Dogon cosmology here is a case in point: by granting the essentialist notions of gender and sexuality implicit in Dogon cosmology such a prominent place in his world-poem, Mackey risks an unsavory equation of Dogon notions of gender and sexuality with his own. The all too familiar representation of woman as the passive provoker of desire and of man as the aggressive unveiler of truth is not one with which I suspect Mackey identifies. And although Mackey does not address this issue directly in Song of the Andoumboulou in a manner that draws a clear distinction between his views on this matter and the Dogons’, he does, particularly in the recently published sections of the series, explore notions that are consonant with a more contemporary understanding of gender and sexuality. I will return to this issue later; for now, let me suggest that the reconciliation of “lost twinness” will prove to be bound up with a less essentialist understanding of gender and sexuality.

To return to the connection between language and sexuality depicted in Ogotemmêli’s account, this sexualized image of the origin of language has strong implications for the notion of poetic inspiration that underlies Mackey’s world-poem. Recall his argument in Gassire’s Lute concerning the dangers of an unquestioned allegiance to the all-encompassing claims of a transcendent source of inspiration and the ways in which such claims can blind a poet to the possible complicity between poetry and politics. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5,” which carries the significant subtitle “gassire’s lute,” opens with “she”–whom I take to be the same “she” encountered in Songs 1 and 3–warning the poet to “‘beware the / burnt odor of blood you / say we ask of you” (Witness 44). The demand for blood clearly alludes to the story of Gassire’s lute, but the important point here is that those that “she” represents, the “we” of the third line, do not necessary make the demand that “you,” which I take to be the poet, say they do. This subtle qualification situates the origin of the demand in the human realm of the poet rather than in the realm of “she” and “we.” Is it possible, then, that the poet can be accused of “upwardly displacing” the demand for blood in much the same way as he admits to “upwardly displacing sex”? Read this way, Mackey’s poem enacts the kind of questioning of the source of inspiration that he finds in Duncan’s poetry–a questioning that becomes increasingly prominent in the sections of Song of the Andoumboulou that appear in Mackey’s most recent book of poetry, School of Udhra.

The sections of Mackey’s world-poem included in his second book continue to investigate the possibility of transcendence, but the poems take on a more personal tone as they turn their attention to love as a potential means of transcendence, and, as a result, a reconciliation of “lost twinness.” The site of the investigation is also more personal in these poems since they take place, for the most part, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking:
```
           Not yet asleep I'm no longer 
             awake,   lie awaiting what
          stalks the unanswered air,
                                       still
             awaiting what blunts the running
                                              flood
        or what carries, all Our Mistress's
                                             whispers . . .        

                                (Udhra 3)
```
With one foot in the realm of waking reality and one in the realm of dream, the poet awaits the whispered message that will allow him to ascend into the latter realm–a moment that occurs in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 10.”

In this poem the poet is again awaiting sleep as he sits “up reading drafts / of a dead friend’s poem” (Udhra 5). As sleep arrives, the poet envisions himself with
```
                                  Legs ascending
            some unlit stairway, saw myself
               escorted thru a gate of
             unrest. The bed my boat, her look
                                               lowers me
           down, I rise from sleep,
                                    my waking puts
                  a wreath around the sun.

                                   (Udhra 5)
```
The image of the stairway appears earlier in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5,” when “she” informs the poet “that all ascent moves up / a stairway of shattered / light” (Witness44). In the passage cited above, “she” also plays a crucial role, although one that cuts against the grain of traditional expectations. Rather than being the vehicle of the poet’s ascent–which, for example, is the role Beatrice plays in Dante’s epic–it is “her look” that brings the poet back down into waking reality, an act that results in his celebratory gesture toward the sun. Thus, “she” appears to lead the poet toward an earthly rather than other-worldly experience of transcendence.

I suggest this earth-bound transcendent experience is the experience of love, “And what love had to do with it / stuttered, bit its tongue” (Udhra 9). Love, like song, testifies to the dimensions of reality that exceed articulation, that can only be hinted at in a form of discourse that draws attention to its own limitations. Throughout Mackey’s poetry and poetics, the phenomenon of stuttering stands as just such a form. In “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” his major critical piece concerning the transcendent possibilities of music and the representation of such possibilities in literature, Mackey argues that the “stutter is a two-way witness that on one hand symbolizes a need to go beyond the confines of an exclusionary order, while on the other confessing to its at best only limited success at doing so. The impediments to the passage it seeks are acknowledged if not annulled, attested to by exactly the gesture that would overcome them if it could” (Engagement 249). This interpretation aligns stuttering with mystical discourse, which, like stuttering, simultaneously eludes and alludes to that which exceeds articulation and transcends the “exclusionary order” of rational discourse.

“Song of the Andoumboulou: 14” (Udhra 12-14) offers the most complete rendition in the series of the connection between love, transcendence, mysticism, and the limits of language. In this poem, the poet confronts “what speaks of speaking,” which is “Boxed in but at its edge alludes / to movement . . .” Self-reflexive language, while “boxed in,” can nevertheless point beyond itself to the “needle of light” the poet “laid hands on.” Confronting this light, which I take to be the same as that found at the top of the “shattered stairway” mentioned earlier, puts the poet in a position in which, although “move[d] to speak,” he finds his “mouth / wired shut”:
```
                            Mute lure, blind mystic
      light,               
             lost aura.   Erased itself,
             stuttered,    wouldn't say
                                        what
```
Although the elliptical grammar creates a certain amount of “founding noise” in this passage and makes any reading tentative, the subject of the verbs seems to be the light encountered by the poet. Read this way, the light effaces itself and leaves only a stuttering trace of its presence. Again, stuttering should not be seen as merely a sign of a failure to communicate but as a “two-way witness” to that which exceeds communication. Thus, both the transcendent experience and its object prove to be evanescent, which does not necessarily mean they are illusory; the fact that they do not endure does not mean that they never occurred. It does imply, however, that any representation of either the experience or the object of that experience as stable or eternal falsifies both.

As the poem comes to a close, the poet’s encounter with the “mystic light” causes a similar reaction on his part:
```
        Saw by light so abrupt I stuttered.
                                             Tenuous
                    angel I took it for. Took it
               for lips, an incendiary kiss,
                 momentary madonna. Took it for
                                                bread,
       condolences, cure. . .
```
The first line signals the moment of transcendence in which the subject and the object, the poet and the light, share the experience of stuttering–one that is transitory at best. Note that the light is figured here in feminine form, as an angelic “madonna” whose message comes as a kiss that is “tenuous” and “momentary” rather than authoritative and eternal. Yet despite the evanescent quality of the kiss, it provides, among other things, a curative experience for the poet, an experience that reaches its apogee in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 15,” the last in the series published in School of Udhra.

At the beginning of this poem the poet moves “Back down the steps” (Udhra 15) of what I read as the “shattered stairway of light,” yet this movement does not necessarily indicate a movement from one world to another. As I argued earlier, Mackey’s notion of transcendence is best understood in physical rather than metaphysical terms. His reading of the moment of transcendence in Duncan’s poetry provides an equally revealing insight into the same moment in his poetry. According to Mackey, the point of Duncan’s poetry and poetics “is that we live in a world whose limits we make up and that those limits are therefore subject to unmaking. The ‘irreality’ the poem refers to is not so much a stepping outside as an extending of reality. This is the meaning of the cosmic impulse or aspiration, the cosmic mediumship to which the poem lays claim” (“Lute” IV, 194). For Mackey, song and love, both of which are anchored in the material realm of the body, are two of the means by which such an extension of reality occurs:
```
                                       The rough body
                   of love at last gifted with
                                               wings, at
                     last bounded on all but one
            impenetrable side by the promise
              of heartbeats heard on high,
                                           wrought
       promise of lips one dreamt of aimlessly
                                               kissing,
                throated rift. . . 

                                      (Udhra 15)
```
Unlike a traditional Christian conception of utopia, wherein the soul gets its “wings” only after leaving the body behind, the wings in this poem, which serve as a figure for the means by which the experience of reality is extended, are given to the “rough body / of love.” Note also that this body is bounded by the promise rather than fulfillment of transcendence. Furthermore, this promise confronts an “impenetrable” element that, much like the “founding noise” inherent in language, curbs any claims for an unalloyed experience of transcendence and leaves a “rift” in the promise that cannot, and perhaps should not, be overcome.

This scene of provisional transcendence is as close as Mackey comes to a reconciliation of the “lost twinness” that may move humanity beyond the “rough draft” stage of the Andoumboulou. And it also marks the point at which Mackey’s own notions of gender and sexuality may move beyond the essentialist notions of Dogon cosmology discussed earlier. Throughout the recently published sections of “Song of the Andoumboulou,” the distinctions between “he” and “she” merge into a “we” that:
```
               
                would include, not reduce to us . . .
               He to him, she to her, they to them,
                                                    opaque
                  pronouns, "persons" whether or not we
             knew who they were . . . 

                                 ("Song of the Andoumboulou: 18")
```
This “we” does not reduce to either “he” or “she” but to an inclusive notion of humanity that suggests an understanding of gender that views men and women as having their essence in collective rather than gender-specific pronouns. I am not claiming that this invocation of a collective understanding of gender resolves all of the problems raised by Mackey’s appropriation of Dogon cosmology in his world-poem; it does, however, point in the direction I suspect Mackey will continue to explore as his on-going world-poem develops and works its way toward a reconciliation of the “lost twinness” that marks the “rough draft” of a form of humanity that is still in process.

The curative dimension of Mackey’s world-poem, then, occurs as it extends our conception of reality beyond the “exclusionary order” of rational discourse–an order that has based its exclusions on essentialist notions of race and gender. What Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou attempts to cure us of is the desire to reduce the representation of diversity and difference to the kind of all-encompassing sameness that compromises some of the initial instances of the American world-poem. As Mackey argues, there is a troubling measure of American imperialism implicit in the very idea of a world-poem, which may indeed “reflect a distinctly American sense of privilege, the American feeling of being entitled to everything the world has to offer[.] It may well be the aesthetic arm of an American sensibility of which CIA-arranged coups, multinational corporations and overseas military bases are more obvious extensions” (“Lute” III, 160). The fact that Mackey’s poetry conceals as much as it reveals, like the loin-cloth in Dogon cosmology, stands as his attempt to quell the appetite of such an omnivorous genre, an attempt that situates us in a “mired sublime,” a sublime that offers us “no way out / if not thru” (Udhra 18).

Yet this result is no more to be overcome than deplored since, as Mackey contends, the “saving grace of poetry is not a return to an Edenic world, but an ambidextrous, even duplicit capacity for counterpoint, the weaving of a music which harmonizes contending terms” (“Lute” IV, 199). Mackey’s use of the musical metaphor of counterpoint here resonates with Edward Said’s use of it in Culture and Imperialism to figure his understanding of the dynamics of a truly cross-cultural encounter between peoples and texts. “In counterpoint,” Said points out, “various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work”–a counterpoint that “should be modelled not . . . on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble” (51 and 318). It is in this sense that the counterpoint in Mackey’s poetry between “founding noise” and articulate word and between African and American poetic traditions opens the way for the kind of creative cross-cultural encounter that Edouard Glissant contends marks the “massive transformation” that is shaping our present history. The hope the promise mentioned above holds out is that the new song this transformation helps compose will be more inclusive without being more reductive, that it will be a song which does not insist on resolving all the tension involved in a “discrepant engagement” between cultures, and that, as a result, it will be a song more consonant with this diverse world and those embodied in and by it.

Notes

* I would like to thank John Duvall and Tom Carlson for their careful reading of this essay, and Nathaniel Mackey for discussing his work with me in a friendly and helpful manner.

1. The phrase is Ezra Pound’s, although he claims to derive it from Rudyard Kipling. For a history of this phrase and of three American poems that attempt to tell such a tale, see Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

2. These are not the only traditions woven together in Mackey’s poetry; elements of European, Arabian, Latin and South American traditions also make their presence felt in the poems. Although an examination of all of these traditions would prove illuminating, such a task is too ambitious for a single essay.

3. Mackey has recently recorded Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25. This recording is available from Spoken Engine Co., P.O. Box 771739, Memphis, TN 38177-1739.

Works Cited
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Ed. Donald A. Stauffer. New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1951.
- Glissant, Edouard. “Cross-Cultural Poetics.” Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. 97.
- Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli. Trans. Ralph Butler. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
- Jones, W.T. History of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, Inc., 1975.
- Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- —. Djbot Baghostus’s Run. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993.
- —. Eroding Witness. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, I.” Talisman 5 (Fall 1990).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, II.” Talisman 6 (Spring 1991).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, III.” Talisman 7 (Fall 1991).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, IV and V.” Talisman 8 (Spring 1992).
- —. “An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey.” Ed Foster. Talisman 9 (Fall 1992).
- —. School of Udhra. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993.
- —. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 18.” Poetry Project Newsletter #149 (April/May 1993).
- —. Personal letter to the author. December, 19, 1993.
- Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
- Said, Edward, W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
- Weinberger, Eliot. “News in Briefs.” Sulfur 31 (Fall 1992).
September 24, 2013
Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization
Phoebe Sengers

Literary and Cultural Theory / Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Institutionalization, October 11-18, 1991. What happened?

The week was bizarre, inexplicable, intense. The week had a story, the story of a breakdown, a story whose breakdown delineates the workings of the psychiatric machine. This machine, operating on a streaming in/out flow of people, is not only institutional but institutionalizing; its inputs become institutionalized. It works where it breaks down; “The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions” (Anti-Oedipus 151). The breakdown of its patients is reflected onto the ward; in its case, however, breaking down is productive and creates the institutional moment. Understanding that experience of institutionalization, making it explainable, means reading that story and following its lines of flight. What results is a patchwork narrative, neither coherent nor choosy about its sources. The aim is not purity of form, but an answer to “What happened?” that respects the complexity of the institutional moment and a diversity of viewpoints on that moment. Nevertheless, from this patchwork emerges an effective understanding of social machines in general and the possibilities for agency even at the moment of subjugation; the narrative of this singularity leads to a general strategy for escape from totalization based on the postulates of machinic analysis.

What Happened

In the middle of September, I started to get depressed. By the middle of October, things had progressed to the point that I could no longer function: I couldn’t read or write and was having trouble walking. I went to see a counselor and told him, ‘I think I need to go to the hospital.’ He took me to Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.¹

The fastest way into and out of theorizing about insanity is to state that people are labeled insane if they fail to correspond to social norms. Such a statement fails to take into account the experience of many mental patients who have committed themselves or of people who are seeking treatment outside the institutionalized stream. For these people the experience of being “crazy”–schizophrenic, depressed, or anxious, to follow the clinical classification–is routed through feelings of misery and, often, physical symptoms like an inability to concentrate, insomnia, or involuntary movement. This is not to deny that these physical symptoms bear the mark of the social formation (“[I]t is a founding fact–that the organs be hewn into the socius, and that the flows run over its surface” [Anti-Oedipus] 149). It is only to state that insanity and institutionalization are more complicated than a mere labeling on the part of a social organization. Insanity is something experienced both from the individual and from the social point of view.

I do not pretend to be able to (re)present the real institutionalization, the real experiences of mental patients. Instead, I want to consider the period of institutionalization as a moment where two flows come into contact with each other: that of the institution, with its labels and categories, ready to take in new input, and that of the individual, who leaves his or her everyday life to become, for a while, a more-or-less functioning member of the social community under the auspices of the ward. Corresponding to these two flows there are two points of view or modes of representation of the conjunctural period to be considered, that of the institution and that of the patient.

For the institution, any particular institutionalization is just a moment in its history, though each of these moments is in the strictest sense essential–the institution really only consists of the sum of these institutionalizations. For the individual, ripped from his or her normal existence and deprived of his or her accustomed social context, the commitment is a traumatic event, but one that is not constitutive–in most cases, the institutionalization will last only a moment in the scale of their lives. The meeting of the institution and the patient is a point of conjunction of the paths of two very different social machines. Here, I would like to consider the dis- and conjunctions between the ways in which these two social machines deal with their shared moment. By considering their respective representations of that moment–particularly the gaps between those representations–I hope to gain an understanding of how the processing of both machines comes to constitute the process of treatment in the institution.

I had to wait a long time in the emergency room before I was checked in. After a long wait someone took my temperature. After another long wait I talked to a counselor. After yet another long wait I talked to the psychiatrist.

While I was waiting someone was brought in from the state penitentiary. They locked him in a little room. He was screaming and kicking the door. The screaming went like this: ‘Society has made me this desperate! I was only arrested because I’m black and living in a white world.’ All the staff in the room, including the receptionist, put on latex gloves. They put a crying woman in a private room so she wouldn’t be bothered by this man. They asked me to move, too, so I wouldn’t be so dangerously close to the room where they had him locked up.

As the soon-to-be-patients stand on the threshold of entering the institution, they are immediately confronted with its first moment of breakdown. There is a conflict between two functions of the mental hospital: its function as a site of medical care or rehabilitation and its role as a custodian of certain more dangerous elements of society. As Erving Goffman discusses in “The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization,” the stresses and gaps between these two models are felt keenly within the institution, which currently prefers to underscore the service model. “Each time the mental hospital functions as a holding station, within a network of such stations, for dealing with public charges, the service model is disaffirmed. All of these facts of patient recruitment are part of what staff must overlook, rationalize, gloss over about their place of service” (30). Nevertheless, the institution continues to be able to operate on both registers (“No one has ever died from contradictions” [Anti-Oedipus 151]).

This presents a quandary for the mental patient. S/he is generally all too aware of being incarcerated despite the staff’s assurances that s/he is only there “for your own good.” “[O]ur conversation [had] the character of an authoritarian interrogation, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules. Of course neither of them was the chief of police. But because there were two of them, there were three. . . .” (Blanchot 18). Though the institution claims to work on the medical metaphor, it differentiates patients according to how well they fit into the service model. In the case of the man in the emergency room, the patients (i.e., I and the other woman) that are more or less “normal” are treated courteously and are even physically separated from the “problem patient.” He is considered dangerous and alien; the staff dons gloves to avoid coming into contact with him. The patient occupies a troubled status; s/he is at the same time the “good patient,” being treated for an illness more or less external to him or her, and the “bad patient,” fundamentally flawed and not allowed to go outside; the latter status is all the more real for being denied.

The most seditious example of this is the status of the “voluntary” patient. The involuntary patient, who is committed to the institution by legal forces and against his or her will, is at least somewhat explicitly incarcerated. The voluntary patient is, for all intents and purposes, equally though more surreptitiously incarcerated. This is because one’s status as voluntary is ephemeral. As soon as the patient shows signs of resisting doctor’s orders or of attempting to leave prior to “cure,” s/he can be and often is committed by the hospital, whose financial clout is often such that the patient’s legal representation can only look puny by comparison. Voluntary status, the ghost of the service model, lives on the cusp of existence, to disappear precisely when it is most needed.

Then two big white men went into the room and gave the black man a shot. He was still kicking and screaming. Later they went into the room again. I heard the receptionist talking on the phone. She said, “They’ve already given him twice the normal dosage and he’s still not calm.”

They brought me papers to sign myself in. I joked with the nurse. “This is so I can still run for president, right?” She didn’t think it was funny.

The moment of entrance into the institution is a symbolic one. It is accomplished through “order words” (Plateaus 80)–deeds that occur entirely through an act of signification. In the case of the institution, the order word is the signature. The papers I sign mean that I no longer have a right to speak for myself before the law. Once I have signed the paper, my signature is worthless. This gives the signature on the commitment form an eerie status–a signature, sealing its own inability to seal.

The signature, despite or perhaps thanks to its paradoxical status, is central to the institution. It is what binds the patient to the institution; it is what controls the flow of patients in to and out of the institution. The patient arrives, bound by his or her own signature or by that of a doctor. The patient may not leave, even if s/he came voluntarily, without the signature of a proxy²: the psychiatrist, competent, as though by an act of conservation of agency, to speak for two.

The signature is itself a proxy for the law. Maurice Blanchot writes,

Behind [the doctors’] backs I saw the silhouette of the law. Not the law everyone knows, which is severe and hardly very agreeable; this law was different. Far from falling prey to her menace, I was the one who seemed to terrify her…. She would say to me, ‘Now you are a special case; no one can do anything to you. You can talk, nothing commits you; oaths are no longer binding to you; your acts remain without a consequence.’ (14-15)

In this respect, the patient stands beyond the grasp of the arm of the the law. But it would be more appropriate to say the patient is jettisoned by the law. “When she set me above the authorities, it meant, you are not authorized to do anything” (15). The law deprives the mental patient, not only of his or her culpability, but also of his or her ability to speak. “Of course you had what they called an [sic] hearing but they didn’t really want to hear you” (Washington 50). The category of the “insane,” then, is defined by its inability, socially speaking, to speak for itself. It is a category without legal status in the narrowest sense.

The breakdown of the institution at the moment of entrance, then, is mirrored by a breakdown of the social machine of the patient. It would be better, perhaps, to speak of a breakout: the patient is no longer seen as a functioning member of society. This is a Catch-22 for the patient trying to affect reform or even just trying to voice his or her experience; how can a group of people defined by an inability to speak find a voice in society? By definition this should be impossible, except perhaps for the gap between “insane” (insane as a social label, from the point of view of the institution) and insane (insane as an experiential label, from the point of view of the labeled individual). In the mental reform movement, as well as in this paper, one often finds such voices stemming from ex-patients: “We, of the Mental Patients’ Liberation Project, are former mental patients” (Liberation Project 521). “Insanity” in the first person is invoked as a category of nostalgia.

The Mental Patients’ Liberation Project is a good example of one such reform project. The project aims to get basic civil rights protection for patients in asylums. The problem of establishing civil protection for individuals held to be outside of civil society is approached in their project statement by a loosening of the term “we,” which is used alternately to mean the “former mental patients” of the project and patients currently in asylums. “We have drawn up a Bill of Rights for Mental Patients. . . . Because these rights are not now legally ours we are now going to fight to make them a reality. . . .” (522). By blurring the categories patient/ex-patient the Project also blurs their respective legal statuses, pulling the patient into the realm of the law occupied by the ex-patient. The Project still speaks for the patient, but with some sleight of hand its voice appears to come out of the patient’s mouth.

In the same statement, the Liberation Project also plays the role of the law for the mental patient. The Project presents the patient with a Bill of Rights; rights, the Project grants, without true legal status but “which we unquestioningly should have” (522). A major concern of this Bill is the legalization of the mental patient: “You are an American citizen and are entitled to every right established by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America” (523). The project thus solves its theoretical problem handily–it plays the parts of the constituencies that cannot or do not want to appear on the stage.

After I had waited for a total of seven hours they took me upstairs. When we got to the 11th floor (the depression ward) I was met by a disoriented-looking patient, who said, “You’ll like it here. We all help each other get better.” I thought to myself, “Oh no! I’m going to be locked on a floor with all these strange people.”

The moment of the signature has passed. As far as the hospital is concerned, the patient has already been classified into the type that will determine how s/he will be processed for the rest of the stay. For the patient, however, the order word is not enough to change his or her entire system of functioning. His or her point in the social hierarchy has changed but this change has not yet manifested itself in the realm of action. The machine is still running, just as it did before. On entry into the social situation of the ward its old system of functioning will choke; the machine will have to reprogram itself.

My clothes and all my belongings were searched and they took everything they thought was “dangerous” out of it. That includes my contact lens solution and my tampons. I said, “What could I possibly do with my tampons?” The staff person checking me in couldn’t think of anything. But those were the rules.

Although the commitment took place at the moment of the signature, the institutionalization really begins here. This is the moment at which the patient is made to realize the rights and privileges s/he has lost by seeking help within the institution. The incoming patient is stripped, searched, given hospital clothing, and led onto the ward identified only by a hospital bracelet. No one on the ward knows the patient, who is reluctant to circulate with the other patients, people from whom until recently s/he was protected by the comforting arm of the law. Any attempts to identify with the staff, however, will soon be rebuffed; the patient becomes forcibly alienated from the person s/he thought s/he was and must assume a new role.

From the point of view of the institution, this is a dangerous moment. A new element has been absorbed but at this point it still retains marks of the outside world. These now out-of-date attributes must be removed as quickly as possible. Erving Goffman points out, “Many of [the admission] procedures depend upon attributes such as weight or fingerprints that the individual possesses merely because he is a member of the largest and most abstract of social categories, that of human being. Action taken on the basis of such attributes necessarily ignores most of his previous bases of self-identification” (“Institutions” 16). The institution must create a deterritorialized space onto which to reterritorialize its input.

Once the incoming patient has been sanitized, s/he is more easily adapted to the role the institution has planned for him or her. “Admission procedures might better be called ‘trimming’ or ‘programming’ because in thus being squared away the new arrival allows himself to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operations.” Institutionalization becomes mechanization; the humanity of the patient is stripped away and replaced by a robotic faciality. The issue is not whether the patient is comfortable in the new role; from the point of view of the institution, the patient can only be dealt with in so far as s/he is mechanized. Stripped of individuality, individual psychotherapy no longer makes sense; in the hospital, the model is group therapy. The model for the psychology of the mental patient is a robot psychology, working mechanically in the roles of the automated patient, Parry³, and his analyst, Eliza⁴.

After a while, I had a headache. I went to the nurses’ station and knocked. After a couple of minutes of ignoring me, someone came. I asked for a Tylenol. “Has your doctor approved it?” she asked. “I don’t have a doctor.” “Well, then you can’t have any.” After a couple more equally humiliating trips to the nurses’ station I gave up, even though by then my new doctor had given me permission to take two Tylenol every four hours.

Changing arbitrary people into cogs in a machine takes some filing down of resistance. In the institution, the most innocuous requests are taken as an opportunity to regulate the life of the patient more closely. “[T]he inmate’s life is penetrated by constant sanctioning interaction from above, especially during the initial period of stay before the inmate accepts the regulations unthinkingly. . . . The autonomy of the act itself is violated” (“Institutions” 38). The patient is made to feel that any unusual activity–one that is not already structured by the institution–requires too much effort. S/he becomes more passive; the authority of the institution is reinforced.

The power of deciding over the patient’s life does not disappear; it is given to the psychiatrist. “Incarcerating institutions operate on the basis of defining almost all the rights and duties the inmates will have. Someone will be in a position to pass fatefully on everything that the inmate succeeds in obtaining and everything he is deprived of, and this person is, officially, the psychiatrist.” (“Medical Model” 35) The psychiatrist has an enormous amount of power over his charges. Blanchot: “[T]hese men are kings” (14). But it is not the individual psychiatrist who has gained agency; s/he too must play within the parameters of the game. “Almost any of the living arrangements through which the patient is strapped into his daily round can be modified at will by the psychiatrist, provided a psychiatric explanation is given” (“Medical Model” 36; emphasis mine).

Soon I started meeting the other patients. At first I thought that would be a little scary. But it turned out they were no weirder than the average person you meet on a bus. One of them was even a psychologist himself! When I arrived, there was only one patient on the ward who had lost grips with reality. She talked a lot, very enthusiastically. I’ve met a lot of people like that on the bus, too.

There was only one scary person on the ward. She showed up a couple of days after I did. She wore latex gloves all the time, thought she had all sorts of horrible diseases and tried to get everyone to take care of her. We were afraid of her and thought she should have been on a different floor.

As far as the institution is concerned, all patients on a ward are the same (except as differentiated by whatever deed-reward system has been put into place). Nevertheless, outside the purview of the institution the patients remain a heterogeneous group. Thus the patients will coalesce into social groups on the basis of educational level, race, neighborhood and so forth. In particular, the patients on the ward repeat (though without institutional support) the same status differentiation of sane/insane as on the outside; those patients perceived to be “more insane” are treated with a similar kind (though not a similar level) of distancing as the “saner” patients themselves receive at the hands of social organization. Thus, the patients think the strange woman should have been on a different floor–just like the rest of society, they want to be separated from her.

The paradox is that the strange woman (we dubbed her “Latex Lady”) actually comes to embody the institution. Her preoccupation with disease and desire for care reflect the “medical model of hospitalization” Erving Goffman points towards, while her perpetual donning of latex mirrors the less appetizing aspects of the institution. We considered it in bad taste; it reminded us of our loss of agency, which we were all too willing to gloss over just as the staff did. She brings forth the same kind of stratification within the hospital that the hospital brings forth in society. This stratification is different in that it has no legal backing and this is what brings about the fear in other patients. They realize that under the law they have no protection against her because they belong to the same class of undesirables.

I started meeting the staff then, too. That is when you realize what your status is. The patients still treat you like a human. The staff treats you like you’ve lost the right to speak about yourself. Everything you do is treated as a symptom. You’d better not confide in any of them since they report to each other. You run into your psychologist and he says, “I hear you had a hard group therapy session.” In that respect, there is no privacy.

The mental hospital treats the “whole patient” (as much of him or her as the hospital can recognize): for the institution there is no room for excess. “All of the patient’s actions, feelings, and thoughts–past, present, and predicted–are officially usable by the therapist in diagnosis and prescription. . . . None of a patient’s business, then, is none of the psychiatrist’s business; nothing ought to be held back from the psychiatrist as irrelevant to his job” (“Medical Model” 34-5). All information about the patient is funneled to his or her psychiatrist. For all intents and purposes s/he becomes the patient’s institutional alter ego. “Throwing open my rooms, they would say, ‘Everything here belongs to us.’ They would fall upon my scraps of thought: ‘This is ours’ ” (Blanchot 14). The psychiatrist takes over the legal role of the patient: s/he alone can make decisions about what kind of medication (including over-the-counter) the patient can take, what kinds of “privileges” the patient can have and whether the patient will be allowed to go home.

Now that the psychiatrist has taken over the agency of the patient, everything the patient does is treated as symptomatic. The patient can no longer act, only signify. “Right before their eyes, though they were not at all startled, I became a drop of water,a spot of ink” (Blanchot 14). The patient’s actions only function insofar as they are informational–they only act as ciphers, which it is then the responsibility and right of the doctor to decode. As a cipher, a patient’s words can never be taken seriously as such; rather than being understood to refer to their intended meaning, the words are used to place the patient in the narrative of the doctor’s diagnosis. “When you spoke, they judged your words as a delusion to confirm their concepts” (Robear 19). The institution makes a double movement–it ciphers the patient in order to decipher him or her. The patient’s acts are robbed of meaning so that another system of meaning can be imposed. Though the patient cannot speak, the patient is always already signifying, against his or her will.

We already noted that the patient has lost the right to speak. Now we see how his or her language is re-routed, being cited to the patient as the rationale of his or her loss of control–“my story would put itself at their service” (Blanchot 14). The patient’s desires, agency, and subjectivity have been elided; his or her words become the voice of the doctor and, through him, the judge. No longer a person, the staff often also no longer considers the patient to be a worthy addressee. Goffman notes,

Often he is considered to be of insufficient ritual status to be given even minor greetings, let alone listened to. Or the inmate may find that a kind of rhetorical use of language occurs: questions such as, “Have you washed yet?” or “Have you got both socks on?” may be accompanied by simultaneous searching by the staff which physically discloses the facts, making these verbal questions superfluous. (“Institutions” 44)

By this point, the patient qua human agent has been written out of the institutional picture. The patient has no social choice but to turn to his or her fellows.

The main kind of therapy is talking to the other patients. Once you realize your status in the hospital you’d much rather talk to them than the staff anyway. There is no hope of fruitful discussion with the psychologist at all. He or she is just someone you see for five minutes a day and who asks if you’ve been feeling suicidal.

We patients talked about a couple of different things. We were all depressed so we spent a lot of time talking about how pathetic we were and about our miserable problems. Another popular topic of conversation was medication. Almost everyone was medicated, so we spent a long time discussing our medication and rumors about what different drugs (or treatments, such as shock therapy) would do to you. Finally we spent a lot of time complaining about being in the hospital and being treated like a mental patient. This was usually done when there was no staff around. One common comment was, “The people on the outside are just as crazy as we are. We just had the sense to get treatment.”

The mental institution’s functioning is predicated on the value of treating individuals, not groups or situations. The individual is separated from society, treated, and then like as not returned to the situation in which the original symptoms were brought about. The unspoken implication is that the individual is at fault for any problems that occured. At the same time, modern psychiatry has had a hard time explicitly laying the blame for the genesis of insanity on individuals or just their bodies per se–and blame it is, as the discourse of insanity maintains discreet moral overtones. Both institutional psychiatry and antipsychiatry have used the notion of “schizophrenogenic” and other dysfunctional families to describe a situation in which someone becomes insane because of the madness of his or her world. “Madness, that is to say, is not ‘in’ a person but in a system of relationships in which the labeled ‘patient’ participates” (Cooper 149). Indeed, it seems that if one’s world lacks logical coherence the only sane response is to go mad.

All this calls into question the utility of labeling the individual patient as insane in contrast to the rest of society. If the problems are inherent in the structure of society, it might make more sense to treat that structure than to lock up the walking wounded. “[The law] exalted me, but only to raise herself up in her turn. ‘You are famine, discord, murder, destruction.’ ‘Why all that?’ ‘Because I am the angel of discord, murder, and the end.’ ‘Well,’ I said to her, ‘that’s more than enough to get us both locked up’ ” (Blanchot 16).

The end result was that many patients felt a strong bond with the other patients but were a lot less enthusiastic about the staff and doctors.

After a couple of days in the hospital I was starting to get claustrophobic (in its usual metaphoric sense). None of the windows open–since patients might be tempted to jump out–so the ward never got fresh air. I started to feel like I was living in a fishbowl, constantly observed.

Here is where the patient and non-patient are truly differentiated: by the very experience of being in the hospital itself. This is particularly true of people with schizophrenia, whose terms of hospitalization are generally longer than those of anxious or depressed people. Some psychiatrists claim they “[need not] fear that it is [their] diagnosis which separates a schizophrenic person from his family and peers” (Freedman xviii). But in the most material sense it does: it is the justification for the removal of that person from his or her surroundings and their depositing into the institutional machine.

In fact, the notion that the institution itself participates in the construction of its patients’ insanity has developed currency in the psychiatric community, who label it “institutional neurosis” (Cooper 129). The effect of the institution is not limited to the changes we have already seen a person must make to adapt to the hospital situation. David Cooper sees the structure of the hospital ward as reproducing the conditions of the schizophrenogenic family, thereby creating, not a curative climate, but one that fosters the development and maintenance of insanity. Documented effects of the asylum on its inmates lead some people to believe that “[w]hat [psychiatry] attempts to cure us of is the cure itself” (Seem xvii) and to speak of “the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions” (Anti-Oedipus 5). “One is left with the sorry reflection that the sane ones are perhaps those who fail to gain admission to the mental observation ward. That is to say, they define themselves by a certain absence of experience” (Cooper 129).

I wanted out. But that wasn’t so simple.

If I checked myself out (since I was a voluntary) I would have to wait three days before they let me go. If they let me go. A number of my fellow voluntary patients were committed by the hospital (or threatened with commitment) when they tried to leave. This was rumored to be because the hospital was afraid of being sued. And even if they did let me go, it would be “AMA,” against medical advice, and I would forfeit my right to come back if I should take a turn for the worse. The only option was to fool the doctors into thinking I was better.

The anti-psychiatric community is well aware that many patients manipulate the doctors into letting them out prior to any basic change in them that can be correlated with cure. “I am quite sure that a good number of ‘cures’ of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane” (Laing 148). But consider what a patient needs to be able to do in order to “play at being sane.” Among other things, the patient must have enough control of him or herself to be able to play a role, s/he must be able to monitor him or herself well enough to understand what his or her social role is expected to be, and s/he must be suspicious of the doctors and/or the psychiatric institution. In short, s/he must be able to function in his or her role to the satisfaction of the institution. Fooling the doctors is therefore equivalent to being healthy for the institution. The nature of the institution means there can be no question of whether the patient is “really” better, or only pretending; the two states are identical.

This is due to the paradoxical fact that the institution’s control over the patient is limited by the very mechanisms it uses to gain control over him or her. The institution can only control the patient insofar as s/he is mechanized. There are aspects to the patient that the institution cannot even see, let alone do anything about. For instance, some (perhaps most) patients get very good at playing the part of the patient. These patients may use their acting abilities to shorten their length of stay or to get a hospital bed as an alternative to sleeping in prison or on the street (I myself took advantage of their ignorance to read what might be considered subversive literature–Anti-Oedipus and The Birth of the Clinic–without any problems). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is usually cited as an example of the power of the institution over its charges: McMurphy, by defying Nurse Crachett, places himself in the way of smooth running and is crushed by the institutional machine. But in the same novel Chief Bromden has staked out a territory of agency: he pretends to be deaf, stays away from the moving parts and hence finds space to maneuver.

The certainty of the existence of such territories is a consequence of the gap between the institution’s mechanized view of the patient as symbol and the patient’s view of him or herself. The patient as agent always exists in a space beyond the totalizing view of the institution and is hence after a certain point invisible to it. “The whole of me passed in full view before them, and when at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too. Very irritated, they stood up and cried out, ‘All right, where are you? Where are you hiding? Hiding is forbidden, it is an offense,’ etc.” (Blanchot 14). On the one hand, this gap between agent and role means there can be no question of a “real” or “objective” cure; on the other, it provides some play in the system where the denied agency of the patient can work.

I actually was feeling somewhat better. The pressure of constant observation was returning me to a normal level of repression and I got some tips from some of the more seasoned patients on what the doctors looked for. After three more days I was allowed to go home.

Now when I think back to my time in the hospital the main impression I have is one of being trapped. I also got pretty good at ping-pong. A few weeks after I got out of the hospital, I received a final reminder–the bill, $11,000.

Money is a theme running discreetly under the surface of the institutional situation. Many of the deprivations of freedom the patients suffer (not being able to go for a walk, for example) can be traced to worries on the hospital’s part of being sued. The fact that the patient is paying to be in the hospital runs in strange counterpart to this loss of agency. After all, the patient is being held accountable for the bill, even though s/he has no control over the length of the stay (witness recent allegations of hospitals unnecessarily committing people for their insurance money). This brings a new twist to Henry Miller’s comment: “The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means money in his pocket” (Henry Miller; cited in Seem xv); in this case, it is every minute he detains you.

In the end, then, the legal status of the patient is restored to him or her in the form of the bill. The hospital says, in effect, “You are now a legally responsible person–we entrust you with the ability to pay us.” But the patient is not merely returned to his or her former existence. As we have noted, the hospital stay leaves marks, both intended and unintended, on the functioning of the now ex-patient and “mental health survivor” (Beeman 11), while the hospital churns on, processing new patients.

In my case, I was left in a state of confusion, insistently wondering what had happened. My experience had been intense, mysterious, inexplicable; the process of finding some order and meaning in it is reflected in the paragraphs above, which were mostly written while slowly returning to sanity in the months after the institutionalization. As months turned to years it became apparent that it was not the week of institutionalization that had marked me most strongly; rather, it was the analysis that had made it comprehensible that continued to live on in me. Over time, it became distilled into a general technique of analysis which I found tremendously useful in all situations where institutions attempt to totalize and circumscribe individua ls. I had learned to escape, not merely from the psychiatric institution, but from all totalizing institutions. This machinic analysis, with its roots in experience, reached the plane of the theoretical with its politics still intact, allowing those politics to be applied to superficially radically different situations.

Postulates of Machinic Analysis

While the analysis of this institutionalization has consisted of a patchwork of diverse voices, it is not amethodical. In fact, its methodology is unexpectedly strengthened in that the affinity of the explanation with the narrative of my experience removes that methodology from the realm of the purely theoretical. The analysis makes the story explainable, while the story makes the analysis understandable. The analysis is rhizomatic, its roots in a schizoanalysis inexorably leading, like Avital Ronell’s schizophrenic, to the metaphor of the machine: “I am unable to give an account of what I really do, everything is mechanical in me and is done unconsciously. I am nothing but a machine” (118).

Instead of describing society in terms of grand individual subjects and the utilitarian institutions and systems with which they come into contact, machinic analysis describes it in terms of machines: systems of rules, procedures, habits, that operate, that take input and produce output, that couple with other machines: social, technical, economic. Machines are processes in society that cut across individuals and across institutions; they allow one to theorize history and political action without depending on a coherent subject as the subject of history.

Machinic analysis is not only an explanation of a single event–it tells what happened–but a strategy which, though derived from a singularity, generalizes into (1) a mechanics of escape from subjugation and (2) a form of analysis with purchase that goes beyond the scene of psychiatric institutionalization to all situations where institutions are mechanically constructing subjects. In all these cases, a machinic analysis can trace out lines of flight for the subjugated individual and suggest strategies for delineating the limits at which mechanizing institutions can no longer appropriate their input. This generalized analysis, distilled from this particular example, works because it is based on the following postulates:

Machines are asubjective

(1). What I mean here is that a machinic analysis does not posit psychological states or experiences on the part of the individuals involved. The psychiatric institution is a social machine which channels an in/out flow of bodies, labels and categorizes them, and attempts to route them into a method of functioning which will allow it to manipulate them in terms with which it is familiar. The patient, too, has certain accustomed methods of functioning, which break down when they come into contact with the institutional machine and have to be recalibrated for processing. Such recalibration will always be incomplete, since it is only done with an eye to the limited modes whereby the institution understands the patient; additional modes of functioning which the institution cannot account for are not excluded. This analysis allows one to talk about what concretely happens in spaces where institutions and individuals meet without trying to pin down the subjectivity involved. It is assumed that these social formations can only be discussed within the limited framework they afford.

(2) Machines focus on process, not on structure. While structuralism focuses on cultural manifestations as structure, schizoanalysis is interested in these manifestations as process. The psychiatric institution is not a static structure of meanings in which a subject is inserted; it is a method of operation which necessarily involves not only meanings and principles but also concrete actions and effects. This is not the age-old distinction between synchrony and diachrony revisited. Rather, it leads directly to a politics of engagement. Structures are to be interpreted; processes, on the other hand, are to be tinkered with–one can be engaged in a mechanics and in experimentation. Mechanics means that one deals with the social formation in question as a process and sees it as changeable through tinkering. Experimentation refers to the fact that this style of analysis is not complete when the intellectual work is done; institutions must be dealt with as concrete formations. An analysis that has no effects in practice must be jettisoned.

(3) Machines do not operate in isolation. Machines, as process, have input and output. They work with and in the context of other machines. The psychiatric machine works in conjunction with a legal machine, which both provides the psychiatric machine with some of its input and conditions much of its workings. Technologists sometimes forget that technical machines work in the context of social machines, through which they come into being and without which they cannot be evaluated. Analysis via machinery demands always going beyond the limited context in which the machine views itself to ask what things it hooks up with, what it works with, how other processes allow it to come into being. This means politics, purchase, and, paradoxically, the enablement of an immanent critique through a reunderstanding of the limits of the system and of the outside forces invisibly at work on it.

(4) Machines are engaged in a process of incomplete de- and encoding. This is because machines do not operate alone, but work upon other objects and machines. When an input comes in, it must be deterritorialized, i.e. have the markings of previous machinery removed, and reterritorialized, i.e. reunderstood in the context of the current process. In the case of the psychiatric institution, this means the process of taking in a new patient and recoding it to be manipulated by the institutional machinery. This encoding process ignores the subjectivity of the oncoming object; instead, a faciality is constructed for the input, which will have an effect on but does not constitute the range of expression, action, and experience for that individual. Machines necessarily leave out something of the objects they process.

(5) Machines do not need to be coherent. This type of analysis does not expect either patient or institution to be rational and coherent; in fact, the opposite is expected, because of each machine’s limited point of view. And there is no need for social machines to be coherent. “The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate” (Deleuze 151). Just as Freud analyzed human consciousness by noting how it breaks down, analysis of machines is an analysis of the ways in which they misfire, and how those misfirings allow the machines to function.

(6) As noted above, in the case of the psychiatric institution, there is a disjunction between its legal and service functions. It functions simultaneously as an alternative prison for those who cannot be contained by the law alone and as a locus of rehabilitation for the ill. Both of these functions overcode the hospital stay, though the institution itself prefers to stress its medical aspects. While the institution can ignore its legal function–though simultaneously fulfilling it–the patients cannot; their position outside the law is keenly felt in such aspects as not being able to discharge oneself, not being able to go for walks, and being locked in a ward with patients who are perceived as insane(r). The legal function, while ostensibly not at work, plays an important role in keeping the patients in their place: continuously faced by these restrictions, they are all the more likely to be worn down into the mould the institution has prepared for them. Thus, the contradiction between the hospital’s self-presentation as a service machine and status as semi-penitentiary is not debilitating to the institution but functional.

Based on these principles, machinic analysis engages the following argument:

(1) Machines are asubjective, so they can be thought of as pure process.

(2) Because they are processes, they operate on input and generate output.

(3) Because they operate on input and output, they must work in the context of other machines.

(4) Because machines operate on circuits occupied by other machines, each machine encodes and decodes its input and output not in absolute terms but with respect to its own limited methods of functioning.

(5) Because machines encode and decode in a non-transcendental fashion, there is always space left for the individual being operated on and limits outside of which the system’s totalizations no longer hold.

In the case of the psychiatric institution, the stated function of hospitalization is to take in those who are labeled “insane” and return them to some level of normality. We see that the institutional machine does not function at this ideal level in its performance of its task. Through a machinic analysis we discover that the institutional nature of the ward, with its emphasis on a mass-produced patient, demands a total abandonment of agency on the part of the patient, who is reduced to a cipher. At the same time, by insisting on seeing the patient only in the most reductive ways, it leaves an unmonitored gap between the ideal and the actual patient, a space where the real patient can maneuver. The psychiatric institution not only does not accomplish its stated function of total enclosure and cure, it cannot accomplish it. The institutional moment works both through and despite the point where the institution breaks down: the point at which its visions of totalization obscure the limits of its own system of encoding.

Notes

1. This is my story in my words. I wrote them with this paper in mind, but before I wrote the paper.

2.If a patient voluntary commits him or herself, s/he can sign him or herself out, but must wait three days before s/he can leave. In the meantime, s/he can be, and often is, committed by the hospital against his or her will.

3.Parry is a program that simulates a paranoid schizophrenic. See Kenneth Mark Colby, Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes (New York: Pergamon Press, 1975).

4.Eliza is a computer program intended as a study in natural language communication. It plays the part of a Rogerian psychoanalyst. It is described in J. Weizenbaum, “ELIZA–A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 1 (1965) 36-45. To the shock of its programmer it was received with enthusiasm by the psychiatric community and was recommended for eventual therapeutic use in K.M. Colby, J.B. Watt, and J.P. Gilbert, “A Computer Method of Psychotherapy: Preliminary Communication,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2 (1966) 148-152.

Works Cited
- Beeman, Richard P. “Court Appearance.” In the Realms of the Unreal: “Insane” Writings. Ed. John G. H. Oakes. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. 10-11.
- Blanchot, Maurice. The Madness of the Day. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill Press, 1981.
- Colby, Kenneth Mark. Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes. New York: Pergamon Press, 1975.
- Colby, K.M., J.B. Watt, and J.P. Gilbert. “A Computer Method of Psychotherapy: Preliminary Communication.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2 (1966): 148-152.
- Cooper, David. “Violence and Psychiatry.” Radical Psychology. Ed. Phil Brown. New York: Harper Colophon, 1973. 128-155.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
- —, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
- Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1972.
- Freedman, Daniel X. Foreword. The Meaning of Madness: Symptomatology, Sociology, Biology and Therapy of the Schizophrenias. By C. Peter Rosenbaum. New York: Science House, 1970. xvii – xix.
- Goffman, Erving. “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions.” Asylums. New York: Anchor, 1961. 1-124.
- —, “The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization.” Radical Psychology. Ed. Phil Brown. New York: Harper Colophon, 1973. 25-45.
- Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Signet, 1962.
- Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. Baltimore: Penguin, 1959.
- Mental Patients’ Liberation Project. “Statement.” Radical Psychology. Ed. Phil Brown. New York: Harper Colophon, 1973. 521-525.
- Robear, James Walter, Jr. “Reality Check.” In the Realms of the Unreal: “Insane” Writings. Ed. John G. H. Oakes. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. 18-19.
- Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology–Schizophrenia–Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
- Seem, Mark. “Introduction.” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977. xv–xxiv.
- Washington, Karoselle. “The Killing Floors.” In the Realms of the Unreal: “Insane” Writings. Ed. John G. H. Oakes. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. 48-52.
- Weizenbaum, J. “ELIZA–A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine.” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 1 (1965): 36-45.
September 24, 2013
Selected Letters from Readers

The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular email or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.

PMC Reader’s Report on Kevin McNeilly, “Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music”

I think a problem arises when defining postmodernity as the appropriations of pop culture as a sort of social critique — I think that, rather, Attali is right on when he stakes the claim that it is indicative of its environment as well as discursive to it. Pop culture requires itself as a lens to our vision and our voice. I would say that, rather than remark upon the music’s instrumentality, he reiterates it in a very symptomatic pop-culture fetishism. Pastiche IS NOT by its nature a revolutionary form. The moments of “tension” between the segments are not noise in Attali’s utopian sense, nor any sort of revolutionary parody which critiques each pop-gem in turn (and I think it would be a big mistake to see his classical moments without their genre lens, too) but slippages between genre units. These slippages, or shifts, are fascinating because the genres are seen as coherent chunks — it’s a pastiche, not a melange — and the listener is required to be a consummate pop-cult navigator who can identify the genres as they appear. It is these shifts that are operating in a movie like Pulp Fiction, where the slippages between gangster, boxing, film noir, kung-fu, etc. film are fetishized, nostalgic moments. The fun and the appeal of the film, and Zorn’s music, is based on the recognitions of each genre as they fly by in a flurry — one is left not with someone wiser to cultural production but someone self-satisfied with their own pop-connoisseurship. The clever aesthete. Who needs more self-satisfied clever aesthetes? Not me, that’s for sure.

And I think its a big mistake to consider Zorn as critical of any sort of consumer repetition compulsion, considering his CD’s mostly cost 25 dollars, and as I remember many repeat the same tracks/tricks. The only consumer awakening I see going on is the consumer who gets pissed at the fact that John Zorn is screwing them over. Like Warhol, he’s gotten rich from his reiterative postmodernity that supposedly attacks consumer culture. Does that make sense to anyone?

Last, Zorn treats the genres upon which whole undergrounds and cultures exist (hardcore punk, dub reggae) as pop culture chunks with all the depth of soundbites. as is typical of reiterations of capital, and capital itself: it wants you to think there is no outside of the system, and no difference between equally recognizable soundbites. Recognition is the key. What matters is who can best navigate the cracks of the collage, instead of what is being elided in or just simply left out of the pop-chunks. And what is left out is whole discursive, critical cultures and registers — what we’re left with is apolitical pop babble for hipster connoisseurs. I’m sorry if I sound too adversarial here, but I think it’s a big problem to write the equation between pop collage and a coherent critique of pop culture.

Later,
Julian

These comments are from: Julian Myers
The email address for Julian Myers is: drm3@cornell.edu

PMC Reader’s Report on Phoebe Sengers, “Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization”

Machinic analysis described by Phoebe Sengers brings to mind cellular automata and self-organizing system theory, but applied at higher levels of abstraction. The totalization could be described as the constraints imposed by the collectivity of the self-organizing automata on any other single automata — all the automata are linked, and each is limited to some degree by interactions with its neighbours. The active agents are more like processes, hence asubjective as the author states. Just as any one machine can “escape” the totalizing force of other machines — and even the big, social machine — any single automata can be the seed for bifurcated reshaping of the entire system (this is, maybe, what history is all about).

It would be interesting to develop such thought in mathematical terms. Is there such a thing as postmodern physics? Or as postmodern psychiatry? My secret thoughts are, I think, ancient ones too — we’re missing something in physics, I know, and just maybe it has something to do with process and machines, as we are and everything is, in a way, both, but not in a cold, engineering sense; rather, as creative, substantial activity, as A.N. Whitehead would put it. Also, recently I came across a paper on schizophrenia in which the authors apply the work of Prigogine et al. and complex systems theory to understanding the physical manifestations of machinic disorder.

Finally, to the question “what happened to me?” posed by the author. It is interesting, but why it happened is even more so. It happened to me too, but I had the good sense (or maybe I’m just poorer) not to fork over $10,000 to overpaid, uptight “professionals” to tell me I’m screwed up, and pretend to fix me (well, actually, here in Canada I could of got the machine service for a lot less!). In any case, I know I am a faulty product — not a sterling one. I have no ability to persuade animal, vegatable, or mineral, and that is probably the central process of the machine: to persuade. Because I am feeble at it, I am inferior, and my process is sometimes almost unbearable.

Ben Romanin
September 21, 1995
Toronto

The email address for Ben Romanin is: romain@io.org

September 22, 2013
The Cult of Print
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Department of English
University of Virginia
mgk3k@faraday.clas.virginia.edu

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

It is tempting to begin by commenting on the fact that this review of the work of an author who is at best wary of, and often openly hostile to, the various new writing technologies, is appearing in the pages (so to speak) of a journal that is published and circulated solely through the electronic media of the Internet. But since this is also a point we might do better to simply bracket at the outset, let me begin instead by saying that I agree with Jahan Ramazani’s recent paraphrase of Countee Cullen: we need elegies now more than ever (ix). If the elegy, as Ramazani writes, is itself an act of struggle against the dominant culture’s reflexive denial of grief, then surely the elegiac sensibility must contain the potential for evoking badly needed forms of recognition in an era when the nightly news is brought to us by Disney (15-16).

The merger of the American Broadcasting Company and the entertainment ensemble which this past summer brought us Pocahontas is, in fact, just the sort of phenomenon that gives rise to Sven Birkerts’s project of presiding over the occasion of Gutenberg’s passing. In this collection of essays and meditations, however, his critique of our contemporary electronic environment belongs more properly to the tradition of the jeremiad than the elegy. Birkerts, a critic, reviewer, and self-confessed “un-regenerate reader,” has lately been appearing in such places as Harper’s Magazine to speak against what he describes as the onset of “critical mass” with regard to our media technologies. The components of this critical mass include, first and foremost, the Internet and other on-line services, as well as hypertext systems, CD-ROMs and most other forms of multimedia, PCs in general and word processors in particular, fax machines, pagers, cellula rphones, and voicemail — in short, the whole riot of circuitry that has, over the course of the last decade or so, migrated from the showcases of consumer electronics fairs to our homes, offices, and classrooms.

It is no exaggeration to say that for Birkerts, who holds that “language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle,” this migration is anathema to the printed word as he knows it, and apocalyptic in terms of its broader cultural effects:

As the world hurtles on . . . the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise. As we ponder that act, profound questions must arise about our avowedly humanistic values, about spiritual versus material concerns, and about subjectivity itself. . . . I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what profundities the author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. (6)

To understand Birkerts’s perspective here, we must turn to the model of reading he develops in the early essays of The Gutenberg Elegies. But first, I should note that the above passage allows us to glimpse at the outset a disturbing tendency in Birkerts’s thought: here and elsewhere, “The Book” collapses far too readily into “Serious Literature,” a category which in turn collapses too often into a familiar canon of novels, a canon which, whatever its merits or demerits, forms only one constellation in the Gutenberg galaxy.

Reading, for Birkerts, is an insular activity. It allows him to transcend the quotidian order of things, and experience what he calls alternately “real time,” “deep time,” or: “Duration time, within which events resonate and mean. When I am at the finest pitch of reading, I feel as if the whole of my life — past as well as unknown future — were somehow available to me. Not in terms of any high-definition particulars . . . but as an object of contemplation” (84). One might wish to question whether this particular experience of time is truly unique to reading and print culture; Victor Turner and others, in the course of their work on ritual in oral societies, have documented numerous and strikingly similar accounts of temporal transcendence. Yet for Birkerts, it is precisely his anxiety over the “fate of reading,” reading as understood and experienced in this way, that is at the foundation of his aggressive response to new media technologies. This is a position he sketches very early in the course of his work, and I will quote him on it at length:

In my lifetime I have witnessed and participated in what amounts to a massive shift, a whole-sale transformation of what I think of as the age-old ways of being. The primary human relations — to space, time, nature, and to other people — have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is change — that change is constant — are missing the point. Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited. The advent of the computer and the astonishing sophistication achieved by our electronic communications media have together turned a range of isolated changes into something systemic. The way that people experience the world has altered more in the last fifty years than in the many centuries preceding ours. The eruptions in the early part of our century — the time of world wars and emergent modernity — were premonitions of a sort. Since World War II we have stepped, collectively, out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable. This is why I take reading — reading construed broadly — as my subject. Reading, for me, is one activity that inscribes the limit of the old conception of the individual and his relation to the world. It is precisely where reading leaves off, where it is supplanted by other modes of processing and transmitting experience, that the new dispensation can be said to begin. (15)

This long passage both pinpoints the nucleus of Birkerts’s cosmology, and provides us with the basic outlines of narrative in which Gutenberg becomes the signifier of our vanished origins. The themes presented here are reiterated throughout the book, though they are only rarely developed with any greater degree of detail.

While the tenor of Birkerts’s argument may strike some as idealistic or perhaps even simplistic, it is not my intention to begrudge him his convictions. Much of what is written in The Gutenberg Elegies seems to exist completely outside the ken of what have come to be accepted as the works defining the leading concerns of humanities scholarship in the past three decades. To ignore this body of work, with the exception of token jabs at Roland Barthes on a single occasion, seems to me distressing and irresponsible, but also a privilege Birkerts assumes at his own risk. What I find more disturbing is the ease with which Birkerts’s own particular experience of reading is propagated as normative and universal. It is true that his authorial strategy is often unabashedly anecdotal and autobiographical; the longest essay in the book, “The Paper Chase,” is a more or less engaging narrative of Birkerts’s own development as both reader and writer. Many of the incidents he recounts here, from the endless fascination derived from arranging and re-arranging his bookshelves, to the realization that he is not, after all, the Great American Novelist, may strike readers as familiar, even endearing. But although the book is laced with such highly personalized reflections, all too often they slip seamlessly into blanket generalizations. Witness, for example, the following shift from the first to the third person over the course of a page:

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents. Indeed, I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I’ve finished it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. (84)

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That, God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could somehow discern for ourselves if we could lay the whole of our experience out like a map. And while it may be true that a reader cannot see the full map better than anyone else, he is more likely to live under the supposition that such an informing pattern does exist. He is, by inclination and formation, an explorer of causes and effect and connections through time. He does not live in the present as others do — not quite — because the present is known to be a moving point in the larger scheme he is attentive to. (85)

It is clear that this Reader is a Romantic Reader, and while I would not wish to deny Birkerts any of the pleasures of reading that way, his model of our engagement with the written word — a model that occupies the first half of his book and is the basis for the all-out assault on electronic media that follows — is badly weakened by its uncritical and unselfconscious presentation of a highly stylized and idealized reading self. And I should add that this notion of an ideal originates not with me but with Birkerts himself: one of his chapters is entitled “The Woman in the Garden,” and it evolves out of a meditation on a Victorian painting whose name he cannot remember, but which depicts, on a bench within a secluded bower, a woman lost in thought with an open book in her lap. (I am myself reminded of D. G. Rossetti’s “Day Dream.”) That this particular painting represents not a transcendent ideal, but rather a distinct set of artistic conventions from a discrete historical moment, is the sort of critical awareness toward which Birkerts, in his passion for print, is blind.

From here Birkerts proceeds to a discussion of what he terms the “electronic millennium,” as well as more specific considerations of CD-ROMs, hypertext fiction, and, somewhat incongruously, the recent commercial phenomenon of books-on-tape. The latter, however, actually proves to be the medium best suited to his taste: “In the beginning was the Word — not the written or printed or processed word, but the spoken word. And though it changes its aspect faster than any Proteus, hiding now in letter shapes and now in magnetic emulsion, it remains . It still has the power to lay us bare” (150). Birkerts discusses a number of different audio books in the essay from which I quote (“Close Listening”), while his experience with CD-ROMs and hypertexts seems limited to the Perseus package developed by Classics scholar Gregory Crane, and Stuart Moulthrop’s interactive novel Victory Garden. And when Birkerts confesses that he finds a recording of Dudley Moore reading Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince much the superior achievement, his misapprehension of the technologies he is ostensibly investigating appears near total.

It is also in these middle chapters that we begin to notice a certain rhetorical shift, one that is altogether in keeping with the conventions of the jeremiad. Birkerts begins presenting extensive lists of what the future might have in store. In the chapter entitled “Into the Electronic Millennium,” for example, we find the following:

Here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch for as our “proto-electronic” era yields to an all-electronic future:

1. Language Erosion. . . . Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

2. Flattening of historical perspectives. . . . Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. . . .

3. The waning of the private self. We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. (128-30)

A similar list appears in the chapter on CD-ROMs. My point here is not so much that Birkerts’s observations are uniquely misguided, for they are not very different from the positions others have articulated, albeit with somewhat less millennial urgency, in various ivory tower skirmishes for years. Rather, my concern is that these lurid predictions manifest themselves at the expense of a more balanced account of ongoing work in the humanities that is engaging with such technologies as hypertext and the CD-ROM in innovative and productive ways – -work that when done well, I might add, is conducted with the same rigor that has characterized the best of more traditional forms of scholarship.

Birkerts’s claim that the classics will soon lie unread, for example, is not only stale, but it also displays complete ignorance of a project such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is the result of an effort by an international committee of scholars and librarians to produce a set of guidelines for the standardized markup of electronic texts. As it is adopted by a growing number of libraries and other institutions, the TEI will enable a vast body of printed material to be archived, indexed, and disseminated in a consistent manner. In time, a community library in, say, Nome, Alaska, will be able to deliver access to the same materials as are available to the patrons of the New York Public Library. The TEI’s 1600 pages of specifications also, I would argue, reflect a somewhat deeper and more thoughtful commitment to the Word than simply a headlong rush to zap books into cyberspace. Birkerts need not be impressed by any of this, but he ought to at least be cognizant of it when he writes, with regard to the development of electronic media, that “every lateral achievement is purchased with a sacrifice of depth” (138).

The final suite of essays in The Gutenberg Elegies ponders more or less recent trends in literary and academic circles. One piece comments upon the eclipse of the homegrown Trillingesque intellectual — described as a benevolent sage whose thought is accessible to the “intelligent layman” — by the inscrutable knowledge industry of the modern university (181). In another essay we meet the writerly counterpart to the gentle reader encountered earlier in the bower. This personage turns out to be Youngblood Hawke, a romanticized Hollywood icon of a writer who, living in rural isolation, toils throughout the night to finish his first novel, wraps the manuscript in plain brown paper, and ships the whole thing off to the Big City where it is promptly accepted by a major publishing house (198). The final essay in this section recounts the decline of the American literary tradition, and here Birkerts has the misfortune of conceiving a certain “Mr. Case” as sort of postmodern teflon Everyman who spends the whole of his day interfacing with computers and networks and the like, all the while removed from the world of Nature (205-6). How, Birkerts asks, can Mr. Case — into whom we are all gradually evolving — possibly provide an honest writer with the motivation to put pen to paper? Birkerts is unaware that William Gibson’s protagonist in Neuromancer — a novel which received widespread acclaim when published in 1984, and which also, as everyone by now has heard, contains the first use of the word “cyberspace” — happens to be named . . . Case. This is mere coincidence, I am sure, but cyberpunk fiction is not the only or even the most important literary trend to emerge from developments in electronic media. Birkerts has no comment whatsoever on the recent proliferation of E-Zines and other electronic venues for writing and publication, nor does he consider the phenomenon of the personal homepage and its implications for new forms of autobiography. But even laying these last points aside, the banality and pining nostalgia of these three pieces make it difficult to accept Birkerts as a serious observer of the contemporary American literary scene, to say nothing of his views on technology.

The Gutenberg Elegies closes with a Coda entitled “The Faustian Pact,” and if there were ever any doubts about the jeremiad being the hidden rhetorical structure of this text, those doubts are ended here. “I’ve been to the crossroads and I’ve seen the devil there,” Birkerts begins, and he ends with the admonition to simply “refuse it.” In between, he proceeds to assemble a series of charges against technological change that culminate in an astonishing avowal:

My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth — from the Judeo-Christian promise of unfathomable mystery — and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of competing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems — to act as if it’s all just business as usual. (228)

Here there is no room left for compromise — one either embraces this worldview or one sees in it a black hole of anxieties and essentialisms. The utter insolubility of Birkerts’s position, combined with his blatant unfamiliarity with the electronic media he discusses, is the reason why reading The Gutenberg Elegiesso failed to move me.

In a recent Harper’s Magazine forum on technology in which he was a participant, Birkerts said the following: “I have very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can accomplish and be. I don’t have a computer. I work on a typewriter. I don’t do e-mail. It’s enough for me to deal with mail. Mail itself almost feels like too much. I wish there were less of it and I could go about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment” (38). Any implementation of technology on the scale of the Internet brings with it its skeptics and naysayers. I would go so far as to say that those skeptics and naysayers are indispensable. This may strike some as patronizing, but I have yet, for example, to read an informed critique of class issues in relation to the Net that matches the cogency of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips depicting a homeless couple accessing on-line services through a terminal in the public library. The massive telecommunications bill now flying through Congress is so much arcana to most of us when compared to the attractions of Waco and Whitewater. There is much work here for Birkerts, and for like-minded others. But until Birkerts at least acquaints himself with the technologies he so fears, he will not participate in this work in any meaningful way.

Works Cited
- Barlow, John Perry, Sven Birkerts, Kevin Kelly, and Mark Slouka. “What are we Doing On-Line?” Harper’s Magazine Aug. 1995: 35-46.
- Ramazani, Jahan. The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
September 22, 2013
Hard Bodies

Nickola Pazderic

University of Washington
nickola@u.washington.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013
Postmodernism as Usual: “Theory” in the American Academy Today

Rob Wilkie

Hofstra University
rwilkie1@hofstra.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013
Spectors of Sartre: Nancy’s Romance with Ontological Freedom

Steve Martinot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013
Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est

Kristine Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

5. Cited in Halbreich and Jenkins, 20.

September 22, 2013
Queering Freud in Freiburg

Tamise Van Pelt

Idaho State University
vantamis@fs.isu.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013
Have Theory; Will Travel: Constructions of “Cultural Geography”
Crystal Bartolovich

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

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

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

— OED

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

— Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

Works Cited
- Blaut, J. M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. Guilford Press, 1993.
- Baker, Houston. “Forward” in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Paul Gilroy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
- Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
- Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. “Editor’s Introduction” in “Race, Writing and Difference.” (Critical Inquiry 12, Autumn 1985). reprinted Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
- Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1993.
- —–. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. (first published in 1987).
- Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
- Hall, Catherine. “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
- Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
- Jackson, Peter. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
- —– and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
- McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
- Miyoshi, Maseo. “Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy.” boundary 2 22.1 (Spring 1995): 61-84.
- Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
- Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
- —–. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1983.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
- —–. “Reading the World.” In In Other Worlds. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
- Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
- Wolff, Janet. “Excess and Inhibition: Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Art.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
September 22, 2013
Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons
Rhonda Garelick

Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado at Boulder

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1 (3.2MB Quicktime clip)

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

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

(IMAGE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 3 (2.4MB Quicktime clip) Figure 4 (3.4MB Quicktime clip)

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited
- Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. “Introduction.” The Ideology of Conduct. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.
- Bergman, David. “Introduction.” Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality ed. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993. 3-16.
- Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985.
- Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- —–. The Matter of Images. New York: Routledge, 1993.
- Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
- Meyer, Moe. “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 1-22.
- Miller, Michael. The Bon Marchè Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
- Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982.
- Richard Simmons DiscoSweat. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. 1995. 60 min.
- Richard Simmons Get Started. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and Stuart Karl. Karl-Lorimar Home Video, 1985. 60 min.
- Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. Deal-A-Meal Corporation, 1988. 46 min.
- Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies 3: Tunnel of Love. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. GoodTimes Home Video Corporation, 1993. 60 min.
- Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1988). (Rpt. in Bergman, Camp Grounds. 54-77.)
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
- Simmons, Richard. Interview. David Letterman Show. CBS. 15 February, 1994.
- —–. Letter. Vanity Fair. 58 (January 1995): 24.
- —–. Infomercials for the Deal-a-Meal Corporation. Prod. Richard Simmons, 1987-1995.
- Susan Sontag. 1964. “Notes on Camp,” A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage, 1983. 109-119.
September 22, 2013

P L U N D E R S Q U A D

Charles Woodman

and Scott Davenport

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

(IMAGE)

(3.5 MB Quicktime clip)

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

A Self Defining Object

“Plunder Squad” is entirely constructed of appropriated elements from TV cop shows in rerun, reality-based police dramas and pulp novels. Within “Plunder Squad,” multiple parallel streams of text and image, each containing widely disparate narrative elements, compete for the viewer’s attention. These elements, designed to move the viewer/reader through a narrative to its conclusion, provoke in us a desire to resolve these unstable layers into a congruous story . In this case, however, there is no story. Instead the resolution of narrative is replaced by an accumulation of elements deprived of their structure. The impulse to complete a narrative string is thwarted by both the disjunction of those elements and the sheer volume of visual information. The horizontal left to right movement of text across the screen mimics the reading process and the reader’s rush to narrative closure while the shifting fields of video image and aural noise mock this attempt at coherence. Accidentally, images and texts combine, inform and comment on each other. Pulled from the stream of mass culture, these reclaimed narrative moments reveal the mechanics of their effect even as they shed the burden of content. As our focus shifts between the moving layers we may chose to drift within the video — we may overload — we may find ourselves watching only a glowing object moving across our screens.

Next Thanks to Rick Provine for technical assistance

September 22, 2013

Facing Pages: On Response, a Response to Steven Helmling

Tony Thwaites

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

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

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

Accounts of Derrida stress his work’s diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions — in short, a history — of its own. (1)

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

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

in Glas [1974] itself, for example, the left-hand column, on Hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-“perverformative” right-hand column on Genet. Such “inter”-effects, effects between philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when Derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book — in The Truth in Painting [1978], for example, between the material on Kant and Hegel in “Colossus” [i.e., “The Colossal,” part 4 of “Parergon,” 1974] on the one hand, and the diary or postcard (“Envoi” [sic] -like) format of “Cartouches” [1978] and the dialogue of “Restitutions” on the other; or in Margins[1972] itself, the contrast between “Tympan” [1972] and such pieces as “White Mythology” [1971].

Here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the “apocalyptic” Derrida of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology and the later “perverformer”… (23-24)

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

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

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

involves philosophy’s status in our current historical moment in the West. Here the “contest of faculties” motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition . . . . For two centuries and more, Western culture has worried that poetry, or “imaginative” literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. The fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled . . .³ (21)

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

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

It seems a version of a thematic as old, in Western Culture, as the book of Job, if not of the Iliad, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. (27)

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

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

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

And I’m afraid my first answer can’t help sounding a bit moralistic: ‘perverformativity’ diffuses the political application, or ambition, of Derrida’s work. (26)

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

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

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

“Metaphysics” as analogy or synecdoche for “ideology” seems to me the self-evident premise of any “political” deconstruction, though only Michael Ryan, so far as I know, has made this premise explicit, in Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, “The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:” “The deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology” (117). (footnote 2)

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

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

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

The Aufhebung of speech/writing proposed in Derrida’s early work was projected as belonging to the future (or, at a minimum, a future). By contrast, the point of “perverformativity” is its immanence in the “letter,” ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the “present” of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of “the thetic” or any “thematization” importing anything for, or importable into, a future. (27)

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

The future . . . becomes . . . the future anterior, a “will have been,” a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of “event” and of “outcome” — a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, “the same” as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it “different” from or “other” to the present. (27)

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013
‘Junk’ and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs

Jeffrey T. Nealon

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

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

–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

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

–William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levinas in Rehab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Junk Con

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I tug on your coat for a minute?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

3. ibid., p. 50.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. ibid., p. 18.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23. ibid, p. 34.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2013

Memory and Oulipian Constraints

Peter Consenstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The description of the frozen moisture,

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

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

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

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

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

Memory is voyage in two directions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Image)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

5. Paris: Hachette, 1978.

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

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

8. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapters:	1	2	3	4	5	6
# of sections in “récit“	9 +	9 +	11 +	6 +	6+	6 =	50
# of sections in “incises“	17 +	14 +	19 +	5 +	9 +	17 =	81
# of sections in “bifurcations“	14 +	5 +	14 +	17 +	1 +	14 =	65
Total	40 +	28 +	44 +	28 +	16 +	40 =	*196*

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

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

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

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

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

21. Paris: Julliard, 1965.

22. Paris: Denoel, 1969.

23. Paris: C. Bourgois, 1990.

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

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

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

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

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

III: oulipo

(16)  xlinamen

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

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

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

26. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1928.

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

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

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

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

1) Position 2) Activité 3) Citation 1 4) Citation 2

5) Nombre 6) Rôle 7) Troisème secteur 8) Ressort?

9) Murs 10) Sols 11) Époque 12) Lieu

13) Style 14) Meubles 15) Longueur 16) Divers

17) Âge 18) Sexe 19) Animaux 20) Vêtements

21) Tissus (nature) 22) Tissus (matière) 23) Couleurs 24) Accessoires

25) Bijoux 26) Lectures 27) Musiques 28) Tableaux

29) Livres 30) Boissons 31) Nourriture 32) Petits meubles

33) Jeux et jouets 34) Sentiments 35) Peintures 36) Surfaces

37) Volumes 38) Fleurs 39) Bibelots 40) Manque

41) Faux 42) Couples

(Translation:

1) Position 2) Activity 3) Quote 1 4) Quote 2

5) Number 6) Role 7) Third sector 8) Spring?

9) Walls 10) Floors 11) Epoch 12) Place

13) Style 14) Furniture 15) Length 16) Diverse

17) Age 18) Sex 19) Animals 20) Clothing

21) Cloth (natural) 22) Cloth (material) 23) Colors 24) Accesories

25) Jewelry 26) Readings 27) Musics 28) Paintings

29) Books 30) Drinks 31) Food 32) Small furnishings

33) Games and toys 34) Feelings 35) Paint 36) Surfaces

37) Spaces 38) Flowers 39) Knicknacks 40) Wrong

41) Gap 42) Couples)

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

32. See note 27.

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

34. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

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

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

37. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963.

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

39. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

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

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

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

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

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

45. Preuves 202 (déc. 1967) 6-10.

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

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

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

49. New York: Methuen, 1985.

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

September 22, 2013

Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee
Daniel White and Gert Hellerich

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

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

— Jacques Derrida, “Différance” (22).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Event-Scene I:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DELEUZE (breaking in):

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

NARRATOR (trying again):

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

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

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR (recalling a memorable bout of shopping):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR (offering him a light):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BATESON (laconically):

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

NARRATOR (intoning chorally): Amen.

Event-Scene II: Situation: War Rages

A neon sign blinks on and off at the rear of the stage, signalling the band’s return after a break:
```
The Neocapitalist Imagology of the Sacred
                   or
  Bush Does Baghdad:  The TV Mini-Series
```
TAYLOR AND SAARINEN ( sound biting their way out of a bubble):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR (helpfully chorusing):

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

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

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

NARRATOR:

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

NIETZSCHE:

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

NARRATOR:

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

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

Event-Scene III: The Dionysia
```
          The Devotee of Life or
God Quits Moralizing, Gets a Gender Change
                    and
        Cultivates a Sense of Humor
```
ZEN BUDDHIST: “The miracle is to walk upon the earth.” REZNOR:
```
i want to fuck you like an animal
  my whole existence is flawed
    you get me closer to god
(nine inch nails, "closer", downward spiral)
```
NARRATOR (As the music fades to a faint pulse):

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

NIETZSCHE:

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR:

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

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

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

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

BATAILLE:

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

NARRATOR: So YOU are the evangel? Hypocrite!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIXOUS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

REZNOR: . . . my whole existence is flawed.

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

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

NARRATOR:

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

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

Event-Scene IV: Encore
```
       The Philosophy of Laughter:
                    or
Adam Flushes Money and Eve Ditches Bridge
            when they discover
                Jouissance
```
BATESON (In a story-teller fashion that he learned both at home and in New Guinea):
```
                    Dunkett's Rat-Trap:

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

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

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

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

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

When he [Butler] told me this I [Jones] knew what was
in his mind, and that, if he had not been in such
respectable company, he would have said:  "It was just
this which stopped me from getting married." (Jones,
Samuel Butler: A Memoir, vol. 1; cited in Bateson,
Steps 238)
```
NIETZSCHE (Twirling one end of his, even in Longinian terms “awesome,” moustache):

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

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR (Uncompromisingly serious):

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

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

HARAWAY:

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

NARRATOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 22, 2013
Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable
Stephen Barker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transgression is never complete(d).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fragment is will-to-power as art, “itself” consisting of difference and of the dialectical tension between general and regional economies, consisting further of not will, not power, not a step beyond, distilled in the fragmentary, as these nearly-contiguous fragments from Nietzsche (“The Will-to-Power As Art”) demonstrate:
```
	The work of art where it appears without an
artist, e.g. as body, as organization. . . .  To what
extent the artist is only a preliminary stage.

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

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

	"Play," the useless . . . .

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

	The artist who began to understand himself would
misunderstand himself.

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

	We possess art lest we perish of the truth. 

(The Will to Power 796-822)
```
Nietzsche’s thematic, fragmentary coagulations across the white patches on the page, fragmentation whose weight and meaning collapse in on themselves, is an interrogative critique. Nietzsche’s paramodern consists of the step (not) beyond what Heidegger calls “the quest for the proper word and the unique name” to a topos “without nostalgia” (though not without memory); “that is,” as Derrida says, “the outside of the myth of a purely material or paternal language . . . in a certain Nietzschean laughter and a certain step of the dance.” (see Margins of Philosophy, 27). This is the tightrope logic of Nietzsche’s paramodern fragment. Extra-aphoristic liminality underlies the contestation of Apollinian particulars “existentially made comfortable to what can be known,” as Ofelia Schutte points out (21). The Dionysian principle of dynamic continuity is violated to such an extent that Dionysus’ only recourse is to take revenge on humanity “by condemning it to perpetual fragmentation” (21). Fragmentation, then, is the Dionysian threat in reaction to reason and the Law.

In Nietzsche, this Dionysian threat becomes a transgressive practice, in which fragmentary style is part of an effort to “atomize” poetic discourse and philosophy, to “return” it to its basic semantic and grammatical ingredients. Only interpolations of sense emanate from the noli me legere of Nietzsche’s fragmentary logic, marking a portentous opening from and to a void. Fragmentation is for Nietzsche an inescapable solipsism, carefully and energetically distinguished from and in contradictinction to what he calls “philosophy so far.” His aphoristic and fragmentary works are themselves, as he calls them in The Gay Science, freigeisterei, “free-spirit works,” thus marking their extra-moral sense and their play on (and away from) the surface. In this transgressive (non-) designation in which the aphorism, or the fragment, is to be seen as the free spirit, at the same time one must remember that the freigeisterei, in their flight from reason and the Law, must accept in that flight the slippage that makes them “vogelfrei,” “free-birds,” as in the Songs of Prince Vogelfrei with which The Gay Science concludes. These “free-bird songs” begin with a short poem “To Goethe,” the first stanza of which declares that,
```
Das Unvergängliche
Ist nur dein Gleichnis!
Gott der Verfängliche
Ist Dichter-Erschleichnis . . .
[The intransitory
Is but your parable!
God the ineluctable
Is poetic pretension . . . ] (Gay Science, 350)
```
Here Nietzsche borrows shards and fragments from Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus at the conclusion of Faust, Part Two, where Goethe makes precisely the opposite claim: “what is destructible is but a parable.” Nietzsche’s appropriation from and parody of Goethe’s parabolic song, here in the song of the free-bird, compounds the transgressive nature of the vogelfrei, who is not only a freigeist but also (as Nietzsche points out) an escaped criminal, a bird who has broken free and who can (and should) be killed on sight; that is, whose freedom is dramatically curtailed by the sentence of death and marked by a double transgression, commission of a crime and escape from prison.⁵ The freigeistis a quintessentially liminal figure adumbrating those in Blanchot, Beckett, and the paramodern.

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

But in a reversal of expectation as dramatic as anything in these texts, the Nietzsche-position on the fragment and thus to the nature of meaning can present itself in all of its duplicity, as these two contiguous fragments from Beyond Good and Evil demonstrate:
```
(222) Poet and Liar. -- The poet considers the liar
a foster brother whom he did out of his milk.  Hence
his brother remained weak and wretched and never even
attained a good conscience.

(223) Vicarious senses. -- "Our eyes are also intended
for hearing,"said an old father confessor who had
become deaf; "and among the blind he that has the
longest ears is king."
```
This juxtaposition emphasizes the atomism and synaesthesia — the poetic violence — of the Nietzschean disruption which, as a disruption of the senses, is for Nietzsche a gateway to pre-semiotic writing drives, and at the same time a strategic and parodic juxtaposition of (not) logical discourse, another step (not) beyond. Thus art, for Nietzsche, in its very subjectivity is an exploding of the subject as chimerical aesthetic object, an ontological de-realizing that undermines and destroys the law-as-subject and replaces it with the tension of and in language-as-other(ing), a “reduction of the subject to an effect of antagonistic forces” (Slöterdijk, 16), the drives by which writing operates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the tightrope walker.

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

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

II. Blanchot’s Fragmented Subject

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

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

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

(Image)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Beckett’s Unnamable Meaning to Mean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited
- Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P. 1992.
- Bataille, George. L’Expérience intérieure. 1943.
- —–. Oeuvres complètes VII-VIII. Paris: Gallimard. 1973.
- Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press. 1958.
- Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. 1969.
- —–. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1993.
- —–. The Step Not Beyond. Albany: SUNY Press. 1992.
- Boyne, Roy. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman. 1990.
- Derrida, Jacques. ‘Aphorism Countertime.’ Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge. 1992.
- —–. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1972.
- —–. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1987.
- Goethe, Johan von. Faust. Trans. Philip Wayne. Baltimore: Penguin Books. 1962.
- Gregg, John. Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP. 1994.
- Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. 1988.
- Kamuf, Peggy. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia UP. 1991.
- Libertson, Joseph. Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille, and Communication. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1982.
- McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP. 1991.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1966.
- —–. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1974.
- —–. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1966.
- —–. The Will to Power. Trans and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1968.
- Shutte, Ofelia. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks. Chicagoy: U of Chicago P. 1984.
- Slöterdijk, Peter. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1989.
September 22, 2013
“Just like Eddie”1 or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama
Stephanie Barbé Hammer

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

1. can’t find a better man²

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Wounds in the mirror waved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The picture kept will remind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. I got bugs

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

6. When she couldn’t hold, she folded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for Barthes’ theory of photography.

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

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

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

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

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

7. All my pieces set me free¹¹

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

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

8. she dreams in colors she dreams in red

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

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

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

2. All frame lyrics by Eddie Vedder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited
- Barthes, Roland. La Chambre Claire. Cahiers du cinéma. Galimard/Seuil 1980.
- —–. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. Noonday. New York. 1981.
- —–. The Pleasure of the text. Farrar Strauss Giroux: New York, 1975.
- Berger, Maurice. “A Clown’s Coat.” Artforum (April 1994) 82-122.
- Blau, Herbert. “Barthes and Beckett: the punctum, the pensum, and the dream of love.” The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Indiana UP; Bloomington. 1992.
- Brennan, Theresa. The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. London: Routledge, 1992.
- Gallop, Jane. “Feminist Criticism and the Pleasure of the Text.” North Dakota Quarterly. 54.2 (Spring 1986). 119-32.
- —–. “Beyond the Jouissance Principle.” representations 7 (Summer 1984). 110-115.
- Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. “On the Bull’s Horn with Peter Handke: debates, failures, essays, and a postmodern livre de moi.” Postmodern Culture. (September, 1993). Electronic journal.
- —–. The Sublime Crime. SIUP: Carbondale, 1994.
- Handke, Peter, Hermann Beil, and Claus Peymann. “Die einladende Schweigsamkeit”Theater Heute (January 1994). 14-18.
- Haverkamp, Anselm. “The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography.” Comparative Literature 45.3 (Summer 1993). 258-79.
- Heath, Stephen. “Barthes on Love.” SubStance. 37/38 (1983). 100-6.
- Hoft-March, Eilene. “Barthes’ Real Mother: the Legacy of La Chambre Claire. French Forum 17.1 (January 1992). 61-76.
- Kaplan, E. Ann. “Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism.” Postmodernism and its Discontents. London: Verso, 1988. 30-44.
- Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing.” The Georgia Review 35.2 (1981). 381-398.
- Koestenbaum, Wayne. ” My Masculinity.” Artforum April 1994. 78-122.
- Kritzman, Lawrence. “Roland Barthes: The discourse of desire and the question of gender.” Modern Language Notes (Sept 1988) 103.4. 848-864.
- Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- —–. Mystery Train. New York: Plume, 1990, 3rd edition.
- Marder, Elissa. “Flat Death: Snapshots of History.” Diacritics 22.3/4 (Fall-Winter 1992). 128-44.
- Nägele, Rainer. “Peter Handke: Wunschloses Unglück.” In Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Paul Michael Lutzeler. Konigstein: Athenaum, 1983. 388-402.
- Park, Clara Claiborne. “Author! Author! Reconstructing Roland Barthes.” Hudson Review 43.3 (Autumn 1990). 377-98.
- Pearl Jam. Ten. Contains “Alive” and “Go.” Lyrics by Eddie Vedder. Epic Records, 1991.
- —–. V.S. Lyrics by Eddie Vedder. Epic, 1993.
- —–. Vitology. Lyrics by Eddie Vedder. Epic, 1994.
- Polan, Dana. “Postmodernism and Cultural Analysis Today.” Postmodernism and Its Discontents. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: Verso, 1988. 45-58.
- Sarkonak, Ralph. “Roland Barthes and the Specter of Photography.” L’Esprit Créateur 23.1 (Spring 1982). 48-68.
- Sirius, R.U. “Pomo to Go.” Wired June 1994. 54-8.
- Spin. December 1993. Cover story. “Eddie’s World.”
- Spin. January 1995. Cover story. “Eddie Vedder breaks his silence.”
- Stanton, Domna. “The Mater of the text: Barthesian displacement and its limits.” L’Esprit Créateur 22.1 (Summer 1985). 57-72.
- Street, John. Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
- Toney, Gregory T., and James B. Weaver. “Effects of Gender and Gender Role Self-Perceptions on Affective Reactions to Rock Music Videos.” Sex Roles 30.7/8 (April 1994). 567-83.
- Tyler, Carole-Anne. “Boys Will Be Girls.” Inside/out. Ed. Dina Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 32-70.
- Ulmer, Gregory. “Barthes’ Body of Knowledge.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature. vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 1981). 219-35.
- Varsava, Jerry A. “Auto-bio-graphy as metafiction: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. CLIO 14.2 (1985). 119-135.
- Woodward, Kathleen. “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief.” Discourse 13.1 (1990-91). 93-110.
September 22, 2013
Rewiring the Culture

Brian Evenson

Department of English
Oklahoma State University
evenson@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu

Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Pierre Klossowski, in Sade, My Neighbor, offers two statements that might serve to introduce the startling, and often transgressive, vignettes of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. The first is the assertion that “it is not by arguments that [he] can obtain the assent of his interlocutor but by complicity” (27). The second is the realization that “reason itself . . . is but a form of passion” (67-8).

The Age of Wire and String thrusts into the forms of reasonable thought a great deal of passion, revivifying dead ways of speaking by short-circuiting them. The formal genres of both the hard and social sciences are manipulated by eccentric but nearly invisible narrators who, having emptied objective forms of their original content, fill them with highly original visions of the world. By applying extreme subjective pressure to the objective world, Marcus warps and splays the forms of capture we have come to expect. Where Marcus differs from less successful experimenters is that rather than merely allowing science to turn inward, revealing the subjectivity innate to any apparently objective process, he forces the subjective pressure to deflect again outward — thus revealing an objectivity that can only be reached through the subjective. In pursuing a line of flight that cleaves through a progression of selves and then flees outward, Marcus offers an array of voices to lay bare the whole of contemporary culture.

The Age of Wire and String is a non-system masquerading as a system. It is referred to, in the mock-argument at the book’s beginning, as a device for “cataloging a culture.” The book consists of eight divisions of stories which parse the culture into eight broad interrelated topics — Sleep, God, Food, The House, Animal, Weather, Persons, The Society. Each section is supplemented by a list of terms which sets out to define words that may or may not be relevant to the fictions of a particular section. These include objects as promising as:

FUDGE GIRDLE, THE Crumpets of cooked or flattened chocolage, bound or fastened by wire. This garment is spreadable. . . . (43)

MATH GUN, THE 1. Mouth of the Father, equipped with a red freckle, glistening. It is shined by foods, dulled with water, left alone by all else. 2. His pencil. . . . (26)

ARKANSAS 9 SERIES Organization of musical patterns or tropes that disrupt the flesh of the listener. (122)

The arrangement of the book and the definition of terms seem formal and orderly enough, and on the surface The Age of Wire and String seems to offer a fictional world holding the same sort of relation to the real world as does Borges’ Uqbar. However, the orderliness of the surface is quickly disrupted, and it becomes clear that what Marcus offers is not a single world but elements of several similar, but not completely compatible, worlds. Though the pieces all have some relation, they cannot be thought of as generating a single alternate reality; instead, the space they create is heterotopic, bringing together disparate elements whose connection cannot be adequately mapped, but which are joined nonetheless. How is one to bring together , for instance, the introduction (in Montana) of clothing made from food products, the song’s capacity for mutilating the body of a man on horseback, sleep’s ability to forestall the destruction of the house, a string’s tendency to fall in the shape of the next animal to be slain, and the more passionate and worldly spectacle of the mad invader who ties up everyone in the house and forces them to watch as he commits suicide? The impact of the book can be found less in the individual pieces than in the connections which spread from text to text, which make a rhizome of the different pieces and which allow one to travel from one disparate locale to another.

Within the text, the author’s name, as an administrative function by which to gather the book into a whole, falls under suspicion, for one discovers multiple definitions for “BEN MARCUS, THE,” including:

1. False map, scroll caul, or parchment . . . a fitful chart of darkness. When properly decoded, it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction. . . . 2. The garment that is too heavy to allow movement. . . . 3. Figure from which the antiperson is derived; or, simply, the antiperson. It must refer uselessly and endlessly and always to weather, food, birds, or cloth. . . . (77)

The Ben Marcus becomes three functions, all of which mock the way in which we think through significance and proprietorship in fiction, the different functions far from compatible.

Throughout the stories, Marcus performs the theft and adaptation of a variety of speech genres. He is able to treat certain styles and manners of speaking — certain forms of expression that give in their rightful or common context the seductions of convincingness (scientific discourse, prayer, technical writing, historical lecture, encyclopedia entries) — in ways that expose the strategies and seductions of the forms, opening them to new types of content. By bringing together accepted forms of discourse with unexpected content (in the attempt, for instance, to scientifically define a dog as a mode of heat transference, or in the offering of a prayer meant to preserve the wires of the house) the devices that allow for a form’s power of seduction ar e revealed and neutralized. But, by passing into new contexts, these forms are given a new power. They persist as walking frames over which a transient mythology begins to spread, vying to establish itself as the new truth.

The whole world rewires itself, connections being established where none were believed to exist before. What might have once begun as the simple act of branching a plug into a wall socket becomes a transgressive and sublime ritual, as an almost imperceptible character tries to piece together a collapsed life, perhaps believing that what has gone wrong on a human level must be corrected or else natural laws will collapse. What results is a technical explanation of the oddest kind:

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. (7)

Here the narrator reveals himself only in the definition of intercourse as a superstitious act, in the formal, technical framing of necrophilia, and in his attempt to thrust the experience on the reader by using the second person. The result is a transgressive act framed in measured terms and careful language, at once more beautiful and more disturbing than the usual approach to such acts can be.

The nature of transgression itself as an artistic project is defined in another piece, “The Golden Monica,” which takes for its utterance the mode of academic discourse. Here it becomes clear that for Marcus, as for Klossowski’s Sade, the aesthetic purpose is not so much to convince the reader as to establish complicity. As Marcus suggests elsewhere, “members alternate performing and watching, until there is no difference” (137). “The Golden Monica” serves to extrapolate this statement, speaking of “the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself” in the presence of the inhabitants of the house (47). He binds the inhabitants in such a way that they must watch him, and then settles in the middle of them as he conducts a self-made ritual which will culminate in his demise. After the suicide, the narrator postulates, one of the members of the family will somehow manage to get free of the restraints and flee the house. Once outside, startled and moved by what he has just experienced, he will falsely confess to having murdered the suicided intruder, taking the blame upon himself. “The act of doing and watching are interchangeable here,” the narrator suggests. “[The] spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing,” the viewer thus taking the actor’s actions as his own (48). Such purpose seems to be behind several of Marcus’s stories, in that he often attempts to place the reader in a position from which it is difficult to gain a safe distance from the transgressions depicted. Though the forms of the language at times allow a narrow respite, the movement through the language and the rearrangement of the world of each story by the necessarily active reader give him or her a much more consciously role than is usually the case. Such a sense of one’s own participation in and creation of a text potentially ends in the recognition that there is more affinity than we would care to admit between seeing and doing.

Wordplay has often been a mainstay of experimental writers, but Marcus’s linguistic extravangances here work in a way they seldom can in the merely experimental. Marcus’s verbal manipulation is successful because it is not overused and does not exist for its own sake. Indeed, there are no idle experiments here, no manipulations for the sake of trying to prove the author’s cleverness. There is, however, a proliferation of new definitions and redefinitions, and in this we have what seems to be a movement to increased distinction. On the other hand, these definitions often sabotage themselves, and we can find a word so purposefully burdened with meanings that it becomes meaningless. In some of the fictional pieces, this burdening shifts into a destruction of distinction between signifiers. Thus, in “Arm, In Biology,” we find the term arm used in a number of ways — as a physical part of the body, as a percussion instrument, as an element of a machine, and as a medical device — with the definition sliding imperceptibly from one area to another, at once all of them yet none. What is under threat, then, are the rational distinctions made at the base of language — our ability to separate things off from one another through our words. What is gained is a revelatory short-circuiting of language that, in making the connections that rational thought would find invalid, understands the shaping of language to be a passionate affair, vibrant and alive. Moving from satires of scientific classification to the simultaneous lampooning of the fashion industry and historical truth, The Age of Wire and String is an alarming and exacting book which reveals American culture in ways that will always remain hidden to the more conventional “professional disclosers” (3) of the culture.

September 22, 2013
It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Jeff Schwartz

American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University
jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

The Sex Revolts, which appeared this past spring from Harvard University Press, is unquestionably a major publication in the field of popular music studies. But it is also a deeply troubling one, one which points to significant problems concerning the status of popular music within the academy, and particularly within cultural studies.

Reynolds and Press offer a typology of cultural narratives of gender which dominate rock, mainly the rebel, who must escape the smothering femininity of mother, home, family, committed relationships, etc. for the freedom of the open road, the all-male world of adventure, and the possibility of machine-like autonomy, and the mystic, who seeks reunion with the lost maternal through mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and the embrace of nature (xiv). They conclude by surveying attempts by female artists to negotiate with these dominant narratives. The book is organized in these three sections: Rebel Misogynies, Into the Mystic, and Lift up your Skirt and Speak, and each section proceeds through an exhaustive survey of artists both well-known (The Rolling Sto nes, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Pink Floyd) and obscure (John’s Children, Radio Birdman, Can).

As the first book devoted entirely to how gender is treated in rock, The Sex Revolts deserves our attention and even our praise. Yet it also calls out for some serious criticism, since it is in some important respects a deeply flawed piece of work. It is my hope that in beginning to excavate these flaws, I will be embarking on the kind of critical engagement with the book that will assure not its undoing but rather the productive unfolding of some of its unrealized potentialities in the coming years.

Essentially the book suffers from three glaring weaknesses. First, although the dust jacket features a Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger with pink lipstick and green eye shadow, promising a decadent, cynical, knowing attitude towards gender performance, Reynolds and Press present a version of rock which is completely heterosexualized. Their examples are chosen to support their theory, not to complicate it. Queer musicians are not featured (a scan of the index reveals no entries for David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tom Robinson, Melissa Etheridge, or Elton John, to pick some prominent names at random), and those male artists who do appear who have made sexual ambiguity part of their persona, such as Jagger, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and Kurt Cobain, are treated only with regard to the putatively heterosexual content of their lyrics. Likewise, female artists’ use of sexual ambiguity is read as negotiation with the maculinist dominant narratives of rock, without any possible queer connotations. Such a blindness to the complex performativity of gender and sexuality within rock ‘n’ roll is astonishing, and constitutes a real obstacle to understanding.

The second serious flaw in the book is the authors’ almost exclusive emphasis on lyrics. Reynolds and Press seldom discuss the non-lyrical dimensions of the music, and when they do they resort to vague and highly impressionistic language. Thus, for example, the music of Trobbing Gristle is said to have “mirrored a world of unremitting ugliness, dehumanization, and brutalism. They degraded and mutilated sound, reaching nether-limits that even now have yet to be under-passed” (91). These are perhaps valid things to say about Throbbing Gristle, but they don’t go very far toward explaining what the music actually sounds like or how the sounds can be understood as mirroring such social conditions as “dehumanization.” It is unlikely that a book on film, painting, fiction, or any art form other than popular music could be published by a major academic press if it contained no formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question. This is not to say that only musicologists should write about popular music. Given the culturally conservative character of contemporary musicology, this would be a poor idea. But those of us in cultural studies who write about music have an obligation to acquire some familiarity with its mechanics, just as film scholars learn the conventions of camerawork and editing.

The lack of rigor in popular music scholarship is due to the failure of popular music to be accepted in the academy as anything other than a (more or less transparent) social symptom. Courses on topics such as “Rap and African-American Politics” or “Madonna and Postmodern Feminism” are widespread, while those on the formal aspects of popular music or on popular artists as composers and performers are scarce to nonexistent. The basic tools needed for serious analysis of music are monopolized by a musicology which has little interest in popular music or or in the socio-political concerns of cultural studies. This situation has begun to change in the past decade. But the changes have come almost entirely from within musicology, where a new generation of radical musicologists (such as Brett, McClary, and Walser) has been slowly emerging. A corresponding shift within cultural studies has not yet materialized.

With musicology still largely hostile to, and cultural studies still largely incapable of rigorous engagement with, popular musical forms, a kind of semi-scholarship has tended to fill the void. If one runs through the list of university press books on popular music, one finds mostly books written by non-academics or by academics whose primary work is as journalists. The tendency has, I suspect, been exacerbated by university press editors, who, increasingly confronted with a bottom line, are likely to see their popular music titles as a best bet for the coveted crossover market. I do not intend here to marshall a defense of the academic gates against the journalistic barabarians. My point is simply that the particular circumstances of contemporary academe have given the field of popular music studies a somewhat anomalous set of contours — contours whose limitations are evident in the book under review.

To be blunt, The Sex Revolts is not a scholarly book. And while in some respects this is refreshing, it also leads to the third and greatest of the flaws I am enumerating. In their handling of cultural theory — of the range of theoretical materials from which contemporary cultural study draws its assumptions and practices — Reynolds and Press are often clumsy and irresponsible. Names familiar to PMC readers are dropped every few pages: Kristeva, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Theweleit, Sartre, Burroughs, Marinetti, Bataille, Sade, Nietszche, Bachelard, Caillois, Catherine Clement, Marjorie Garber, etc. But there is no evidence that these different and in some cases quite contradictory thinkers have been seriously or systematically engaged. Their names are simply tossed off as the authors string together well-known theoretical catch phrases and brief, striking quotations. The text is no more than garnished with contemporary theory, and this window dressing can’t obscure the fact that Reynolds and Press are basically working with a Jungian myth-symbol criticism that emerged back in the 1960’s. Admittedly, twenty years ago this approach produced Greil Marcus’s masterful Mystery Train, but it also gave us such foolishness as David Dalton’s study of James Dean (wherein Dean is Osiris) or, more recently, Danny Sugerman’s tedious book on Guns ‘n’ Roses (Axl Rose is a shaman) — not to mention the works of Camille Paglia.

Paglia, in fact, is one of the more frequently cited theorists in The Sex Revolts, along with Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell. And the habitual recurrence to these three, whose work is more or less compatible with the pseudo-Jungian approach of Reynolds and Press, leads to their unlikely — not to say hilarious — combination with other cultural theorists whose work is conspicuously incompatible with such an approach. Bly, for example, is yoked together with the brilliant theorist and historian of the Nazi imaginary, Klaus Theweleit; Paglia is paired variously with Sartre, Kristeva, and Ferenczi (85-86).

As I said, it is not a scholarly book. And yet it is one that I think will be genuinely valuable to scholars in a field which offers so few points of productive departure. The Sex Revolts has the great advantage over other works in the field that it at least poses some of the important questions, and gestures, however haphazardly, toward some of the theoretical tools that could be used to answer these questions. Even a conceptually bizarre combination like Bly/Theweleit might lead to a worthwhile mutual interrogation once it is unpacked from Reynolds and Press’s rather artless framework and taken up by someone more adept at contemporary cultural and political theory. For all its faults, The Sex Revolts succeeds in suggesting some of the productive directions that an as-yet barely emergent, more rigorous and thoroughgoing cultural study of popular music might take.

Works Cited
- Brett, Philip. Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Dalton, David. James Dean: The Mutant King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
- Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: Plume, 1975.
- McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
- Sugerman, Danny. Appetite for Destruction: The Days of Guns N’ Roses. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
- Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Havover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1993.
September 22, 2013
The First Amendment in an Age of Electronic Reproduction
Daniel Barbiero

barbiero@enigma.com

Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover. The Death of Discourse.Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

What, in an age of electronic mass communication, is the status of the First Amendment? Specifically, what is or should be the scope of First Amendment protection, given the seeming ubiquity electronic dissemination has afforded commercial speech and entertainment? Ronald Collins and David Skover raise and explore just such questions in their book, which examines the contemporary culture of free expression in the overlapping contexts of popular culture and commercial discourses.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention here that I know Collins and Skover and have discussed some of these issues with them in connection with the articles — subsequently and substantially rewritten — on which this book is based. I am acknowledged in the book for my part in these informal dialogues.)

I

Collins and Skover contend that there are operating at present two cultures of expression. The first, roughly corresponding to the political and intellectual elites, is that of discourse, while the second, roughly corresponding to mass cultures, is t hat of “the new free speech.” By their definition, “discourse” is speech resounding “with reason, with method, with purpose” (ii), while the new free speech consists in the “vernacular of the popular culture . . . in the service of self-gratification” (i i). Although the deliberative discourse of the elites has traditionally been afforded full First Amendment protection, this same protection has been increasingly granted to other forms of expression, thus creating a “wide gulf” separating the kind of (ve rnacular) expression now meriting protection from the deliberative speech the First Amendment was designed to protect (iii). Given this situation, the authors ask, “can the high values of free expression be squared with the dominant character of mass com munication in our popular culture?” (vi).

Collins and Skover’s answer to this question is set out over the course of the book’s three main sections. In the first, they describe what they take to be the general problem created by contemporary First Amendment interpretation, while in the other two they look at the specific issues involved in determining the constitutional status of commercial speech and pornography.

In the first section, the authors describe the defining problem of First Amendment interpretation as a “paratrooper’s paradox.” The image of the paratrooper is meant to convey the notion of one parachuting “into a territory hostile to old notions of free speech” (2). And the “paratrooper’s paradox” consists in the difficulty of reconciling a provision created to protect discursive speech from government tyranny with a culture accustomed to invoking that protection for even the most trivial forms of expression.

The second section is devoted to an examination of the constitutional status of commercial speech. The argument is that modern, image-based advertisers demand constitutional protection by claiming association with the information-based advertising ch aracteristic of a previous era (84). And yet, the authors hold, it is just such image-based advertising that, far from furthering the original goals of the First Amendment, is threatening to turn “America’s marketplace of ideas . . . [into] a junkyard of commodity ideology” (64).

In the third section, the authors examine the debate over whether or not full constitutional protections should apply to expression with an exclusively, or almost exclusively, sexual content. Collins and Skover choose pornography not only as a First Amendment test case, but also as the symbolic epitome of a debased culture of expression. To this end, they construct a fantasy anti-utopia they call “Pornutopia,” which is presented as the logical culmination of the intersection of commercialism, the el ectronic mass media, and indiscriminate First Amendment protection. Although the authors point out that such a state “is not quite America as we now know it” (117, emphasis in the original), they wish to offer a hypothetical object lesson i n what happens when expressive freedoms create an atmosphere in which discourse is degraded, electronic technologies are put at the service of profit and pleasure (130), and “private passion overrides public reason as the key rationale for constitu tional protection of expression” (127, emphasis in the original).

What the authors wish to establish overall is that in a mass culture saturated with television and advertising, the effective exercise of First Amendment rights is threatened more by what they call the “Huxleyan” scenario than by an “Orwellian” scenar io. While the Orwellian scenario is the familiar one of State suppression of speech,the Huxleyan scenario involves the relatively novel danger of the trivialization of (serious) speech through a “tyranny of pleasure” (5). Though not discounting the pote ntial danger to free expression posed by State intervention, the authors assert that within the context of contemporary First Amendment culture, “the Orwellian evil is not likely to pose a clear and present danger to traditional First Amendment values” (2 1).

For Collins and Skover, the Orwellian-Huxleyan dichotomy is the key to understanding the current debate over First Amendment protections (29), and, they note, this dichotomy does not admit neat solutions along traditional ideological lines (22). In o rder to show this, the authors outline three potential scenarios in which the First Amendment and contemporary reality might be made to square (22-28). These are the Classical, the Modern, and the Reformist. In the Classical scenario, various forms of e xpression may be regulated in the interests of protecting deliberative discourse. In the Modernist scenario, fears of State repression of expression — the Orwellian problem — lead to a laissez-faire approach in which all forms of expression are protect ed. The Reformist scenario is a sort of compromise attempt to provide the greatest latitude for expression while still promoting deliberative values. Which do they prefer?

Given the logic of their argument, and their evident distaste for consumer culture and commercial speech, one would expect them to declare that discursive expression alone is deserving of protection, and that either the Classical or Reformist position would set things right. But they do not. Instead, they assert that if we wish to preserve a culture of expression in which Orwellian dangers are minimized, then neither of these two positions will work. Attempting to put either into force would result in a situation they describe as destroying the First Amendment in order to save it (168) — that is, imposing potentially tyrannical restrictions on expression in order to promote only the “high-value” deliberative discourse appropriate to the serious di scussion of weighty issues. At the same time, though, they appear ambivalent toward the Modern position which, while significantly expanding the scope of First Amendment protection, has brought about the “death of discourse.”

Rather than choosing from among these three alternatives, Collins and Skover call for a “bottom-up,” “cultural approach” (iv) that would recognize that First Amendment principles are as much a function of what people actually do with expression as the y are a function of what elites say those principles should be (177). Adopting the cultural approach means rejecting what they call the “deliberate lie”: that protecting trivial expression will foster deliberation and rational discourse (169). They conc lude that “once we confront the reality of First Amendment hypocrisy, we will no longer wish to perpetuate it” (177).

II

Although Collins and Skover call for a bottom-up analysis that would by necessity be rooted in the actual expressive habits and inclinations of mass culture, they clearly display a distrust of certain aspects of that culture. In this respect their bo ok continues a well-established tradition, as an overview of postwar critiques of mass culture readily reveals (e.g. Bulik; Jay, chapter 6). In their alarm over mass culture’s threat to critical thinking one hears echoes of Fromm (Fromm 277); in their ac cusation that advertising debases language and stunts thought, one hears echoes of Marcuse (Marcuse 95). And like that of some of these earlier critics of mass culture, Collins and Skover’s perspective is informed, though by no means wholly determined, b y a mandarin outlook. Such an outlook is made explicit when they state that “if the Philistines have invaded America’s culture, it is not because television forced open the gates of the popular mind. Rather . . . it has everything to do with the nature of popular democracy” (18).

But although they take the mandarin position in regard to the content of contemporary media culture, their cultural approach allows them to take a more sympathetic position on the forms associated with that culture, some of which they wish to incorpor ate into their work. In an attempt to recreate in a print medium some of the features of a computer environment, the authors punctuate their text with icons, table windows, and dialogue boxes; citations are to popular songs as well as to the more traditi onal books and articles. In an afterword about the book, the authors even claim that the book is “interactive and multi-media” — but by interactive they simply mean that they intend the reader to attempt to develop his or her own answers to the problems they pose. (It would not be too far off the mark, in fact, to see the entire book as a full-length exercise in devil’s advocacy.) The multi-media aspect is a bit more complicated. Though it mostly consists in the citations to non-print sources, it inc ludes the construction of “virtual dialogues” at the end of each of the book’s three sections. What the authors have done is to quote letters they solicited from or conference discussions they held with their colleagues, and assemble them to appear as if they have been transcribed from a real-time discussion involving all the participants. The effect is reminiscent of the digitally manipulated images one frequently runs across in cyberspace — convincing records of events that never actually took place.

The authors’ borrowings from the culture(s) at large are not limited to these cyber-conventions, however. For they adopt something of the hyperbolic tone of commercial culture as well. In fact it is in this atmosphere of hyperbole that the book’s ma in weakness lies. Partly this is the result of the authors’ predeliction for sweeping generalizations, which frequently are asserted rather than argued. In other instances, available evidence bearing on a claim may be treated selectively. In making cla ims for the cognitive and behavioral effects of television, for example, the authors admit that studies attempting to establish just such effects are “indeterminate” (19); their response is to dismiss these studies and appeal instead to a series of hypoth etical assertions that they claim are supported by “ample experiential evidence” (19), none of which is given.

In fact, the book’s hyperbole threatens to cross over into jeremiad. For although Collins and Skover explicitly disavow adherence to a “hell-in-a-handbasket” viewpoint, their rhetoric frequently creates the opposite impression. During a virtual dial ogue in which they deny precisely this charge, they remind their critic that “the commercial culture appears low only from the lofty place of traditional First Amendment values. In one important sense, low or lofty is of no moment to us” (106). Perhaps not, but they spend much of the book describing a crisis in which the low threatens to overwhelm the lofty. They speak of an “electronic commonwealth [that] belittles the American mind by degrading discourse” (15); they entitle one section of their analy sis “The Decline of Citizen Democracy and the Rise of Consumer Democracy” (77); they predict that, should entertainment culture continue in its current course, “deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image-driven onanism” (117); and they warn of the “high ideals of Madisonian discourse” being “invoked to protect the low practices of mass communication” (176-7). The authors’ rhetoric of decline recalls the kind of critique Nicholas Zurbrugg has characterized as consisting in a reductive, “apoc alyptic fallacy” (Zurbrugg 5). Drawing on the work of John Cage, Zurbrugg shows that the postmodern situation need not be interpreted apocalyptically, that one can find in postmodern technologies of communication and reproduction the potential for new an d fruitful modes of representation and conceptualization (8-9). Though Zurbrugg perhaps carries his optimism too far, he is surely right to reject the posture of apocalyptic hand-wringing. And indeed, when pressed, Collins and Skover admit the justice o f such a critique (e.g., 19). The trouble is that, having made this concession, they immediately return to their rhetoric of catastrophic decline.

Indeed, the author’s reliance on the rhetoric of decline threatens to undermine their conclusion. For in the end it is difficult to reconcile their denunciation of contemporary culture as a “debauched dystopia” (177) with their hope that a cultural a pproach to First Amendment rights will have a salutary effect on the exercise of those rights. Confronting and refuting expressive hypocrisy calls for a particularly active intellectual engagement; but it is exactly this, they have been arguing, that has been all but washed away in flood of entertainment-induced passivity. Thus it would seem we can either accept at face value their description of the utter degradation of contemporary expression, or we can accept the prescriptive program of unmasking imp licit in their cultural approach — but not both, since the former would seem to preclude the latter.

III

It may be best to see this book as an elaborate thought experiment designed to illuminate a real problem but worked out through various hypothetical conditions and extreme or hyperbolic gambits (the first of which is the “paratrooper’s paradox” itself ).¹ Even if we reject the terms of Collins and Skover’s analysis, we may agree that they have identified a problem of real moment in American culture — the problem of effectively maintaining a First Amendment whose interpretation has long been intractably bifurcated.

The bifurcation in First Amendment interpretation consists in the distinction between high-value speech, which is deemed worthy of full protection, and low-value speech, which is not. Speech with political intent or content is uncontroversially consi dered high-value speech, even if the attribution of political intent and content may in particular cases be controversial. Other types of speech — commercial speech, for example — are considered low-value, and historically have not been accorded full F irst Amendment protections. This bifurcation of expression on the basis of political intent and content is a function of Madisonian standards. What happens, though, when Madisonian standards are superseded in a broadened interpretation of First Amendmen t protection?

The question is not idle, since it might be argued that the Madisonian standard has largely been replaced in actual practice by the standard of self-realization. The principle of self-realization, which holds that individuals should be allowed to cul tivate themselves in order to attain a state of total personhood (however defined), would expand First Amendment protections on the assumption that allowing the broadest possible scope of expression will promote the democratic goal of allowing the greates t number of people to realize themselves. And in fact this principle can be seen to be at least implicit in First Amendment interpretation since the 1950’s, particularly as embodied in the opinions of Supreme Court Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Bl ack. As Cass Sunstein shows, Douglas and Black did much to push First Amendment intepretation toward an “absolutist” position (Sunstein 4-7) compatible with distributing protection on the grounds of self-realization.

But such grounds are not always self-evident. Collins and Skover illustrate this in a virtual dialogue on the problem of determining the status of sexually-explicit expression (154-9). Determining high-value expression (in this case, art) from low-v alue expression (in this case, obscenity) is in and of itself difficult — internal or content-based standards, for instance, have a tendency to be murky and often seemingly arbitrary. But as the authors and their virtual debate partners show, it is also true that the application of the self-realization standard — i.e., that a given work is not obscene (that it is art and therefore has redeeming value) because it contributes to self-realization and thus furthers democratic principles — is itself highly elastic and perhaps ultimately no less arbitrary than the evaluation of the work’s internal features.

What strikes the authors as noteworthy is that, even when the self-realization standard is used, there may still be a discrepancy between the ideals invoked by defenders of freer free expression, and the value of the expression thus protected. The au thors explain this discrepancy by maintaining that despite the explicit invocation of the self-realization principle (when in fact it is explicitly invoked), the de facto principle behind much current extension of First Amendment protection is that of sel f-gratification. They conclude that defenders of the modern First Amendment have found themselves having to “cloak the self-gratification principle in the garb of something more ennobling” (43).

It is this that is behind the authors’ prescription that we become more honest in acknowledging the true motivations behind the current distribution of First Amendment protection. Such honesty would, presumably, go far toward ending what the authors see as the hypocrisy of those invoking the principle of self-realization in order to justify expression that is in fact geared toward self-gratification.

Truly taking the “cultural approach” seriously, it seems to me, would entail going further and recognizing that the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification is itself an unsteady one. Much like the distinction between “true” needs and those that are, to paraphrase Fred Dretske’s expression, cognitively derived desires (Dretske 128-9), the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification may simply be the distinction between two points at different locations on a spectrum .² If this is so, then it may be that the most honest approach would be to acknowledge that self-gratification may indeed be a contributing factor toward self-realization. Would this bring on the apocalypse? Some no doubt will think so. But it very well may be that encouraging the greatest range of deliberation means tolerating a corresponding diversity in the relative values of expression produced.

Notes

1. Two assumptions seem to be required to accept the “paratrooper’s paradox.” One must first assume an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment in which “mass advertising’s pap . . . [is elevated] to the level of fundamental discourse” (113), and then assume that any situation in which this is not the case represents intolerably tyrannical regulation. The first assumption does not describe an actual situation — as evidenced by, e.g., the prohibition of televisio n advertising for hard liquor and cigarettes — and the second does not seem inevitable.

2. It is worth recalling the rationale behind the 1952 Supreme Court decision extending full protections to motion pictures. As Justice Tom Clark wrote, “The line between . . . informing and entertaining is . . . elusive ” (De Grazia 619).

Works Cited
- Bulik, LouAnne. Mass Culture Criticism and Dissent. Bern: Peter Lang, 1993.
- De Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, 1992.
- Dretske, Fred. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge: MIT, 1988.
- Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1969.
- Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little Brown, 1973.
- Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964.
- Sunstein, Cass. Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
- Zurbrugg, Nicholas. The Parameters of Postmodernism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.
September 22, 2013
Theorizing Public/Pedagogic Space: Richard Serra’s Critique of Private Property

Minette Estevez

Hofstra University
engmam@hofstra.edu

Richard Serra. Writings/Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

If artifacts do not accord with the consumerist ideology, if they do not submit to exploitation and marketing strategies, they are threatened or committed to oblivion.

— Richard Serra

Writings/Interviews, a collection which spans the 60’s through the early 90’s, makes clear the depth of Richard Serra’s commitment to art as a critical intervention, as an inquiry into the social contradictions that unfold in the dominant discourse. Though his politics are most concretely visible in those essays and interviews detailing the battle over Tilted Arc, this volume demonstrates that Serra’s grasp of the repressive nature of bourgeois aesthetics has always been a major component of his work. While his earlier minimalist and process art practices were specifically directed toward the commodification of art and “creativity,” his recent encounters with the legalities of intellectual property rights has succinctly focused his work on the politics of public space. This places Serra’s work within some of the most contested of discursive spaces. Given the current world-wide efforts at the reprivatization, the concept of “public” itself has become one of the most densely layered sites upon which the superstructure of a new world order is being erected.

The continuing controversy surrounding the U.S. government’s destruction of Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc has made it one of the most publicly visible of contemporary battles over intellectual property law. Though Serra’s contract, like most contracts for public art work, sought to guarantee the sculpture’s maintenance in the site it was commissioned for, the government was able to break the contract, moving, and subsequently destroying, the work. Serra argued that the government’s actions were a violation of “free artistic expression, but the final court ruling held that any rights of artistic “free speech” were not violated since as owner, the government also owned the “speech” of the art work. Property rights take precedence. As Serra learned, “the right to property supersedes all other rights: the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to protection of one’s creative work.”(215)

What lends the work of artists like Serra their particular political resonance, a resonance that goes beyond the mere affirmation of “free expression,” is that they do not abandon the institutional spaces of artistic practice — the conceptual apparatus of “high art” as well as its museums and galleries — for a supposedly unmediated contact with their audience. Thus, such work begins from an implicitly materialist assumption about the institutional structuring of experience. In this way it makes possible the important argument that institutional spaces cannot simply be abandoned but must be worked with and transformed. These concerns are spelled out in Serra’s earlier writing and interviews, such as the 1980 interview with Douglas Crimp in which Serra highlights the importance of context in thinking through the potential of any public sculpture. “There is no neutral site,” he remarks. “Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones” (127). For Serra, then, one of the functions of any public art should be to make those “ideological overtones” visible and accessible to an audience. Public space thus becomes a pedagogical space where citizens can become students of, in the words of Serra’s contemporary Robert Smithson, “cultural confinement.”

Serra rightly links the attack on Tilted Arc to a larger conservative agenda. In his essay “Art and Censorship,” he details the effort of politicians like Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms to conduct a “cultural war.” It is important to recognize the extraordinary ideological mileage conservatives have gotten out of recent “arts” crises. The battles over the NEA are only one of the domestic sites touched by multinational capitalism’s reprivatization efforts. But the NEA struggle is functioning as an exemplary test-site for the dismantling of public institutions and the ideological remaking of notions of “the public” generally necessary for the creation of a post-Cold War ideology. With the collapse of communism, the evil threat from “outside,” new enemies must be manufactured to legitimate a “new” political agenda. Reprivatization is being sold as a “moral” or “democratic” attack on stifling and oppressive bureaucracy, with the “beneficiaries” of bureaucracy pictured as the “real” oppressors of society: welfare queens, incompetent blacks, arrogant elitist artists, and other perverts who undemocratically demand “special treatment.” Through the creation of this cast of “outsiders from within,” defending the public becomes the pretext for an all-out evacuation of the public sphere.

Serra also examines how this agenda is underwritten in the work of art critic Hilton Kramer. Kramer justifies highly-stratified hierarchical social relations through a defense of “the aesthetic”: those epistemological categories which have historically provided one of the most powerful guarantees of bourgeois property relations. In his attacks on Serra, Kramer is not defending the universal rights of individuals, but is instead defending the rights of bourgeois governments and institutions to suspend individual rights at whim, and the legitimation of such suspension of rights through appeals to the “public” and the “common man.” The struggle over Tilted Arc was not the struggle of “the little people” against an “authoritarian” artist, as it has been represented by Hilton Kramer, Donald Kuspit, and then District Attorney Rudolf Giuliani. It was in fact a struggle over the responsibility of powerful institutions, like the United States government, to live up to their contractual obligations, and the rights of “little people” to dispute and redress ontractual violations. It was also a struggle over public space: a struggle over what interests are represented by the uses these spaces are put to, in fact, a struggle over what “public” means, who the “public” is.

That Hilton Kramer should seem to be a defender of “the average joe” is more than a little bizarre since in all his work he assiduously strives to stave off the barbarian hordes from the sacred portals of High Art. However, Kramer’s faux populism in the case of Titled Arc is not so strange considering the kind of adversary Serra is for Kramer. The reason Serra’s work is so threatening to the position represented by Kramer, is that it contests the notion of a “pure” aesthetics, one where art has no necessary connection to anything else in the world except self-reflexive aesthetic categories: form, space, weight, etc. From this vantage Minimalist sculpture would seem to embody the essence of “art” itself. But “Minimalism” is not the idealized category that bourgeois criticism would wish; in fact, in order to represent Minimalism in this fashion the history of its development must be suppressed. And no figure more aggressively gives the lie to a “pure” minimalism than that most political of Minimalists, Richard Serra. In fact no other contemporary American sculptor has so consistently and relentlessly challenged not only traditional notions of pure art, but also traditional notions of political art — that politics amount to a “content” held in an aesthetic container.

The theoretical category of the aesthetic defended by bourgeois critics emerged with the historical transition to a capitalist mode of production. It is a by-product of the processes by which cultural production becomes “autonomous” — severed from earlier social functions. As autonomous artifacts, art objects can be incorporated into the marketplace as commodities. This idealization of the autonomous or “self-reflexive” art object suppresses an understanding of its materiality, its production through historically specific labor relations, and instead glorifies it as an individuated, self-contained “thing.” Art derives its value then from its status as a commodity: a singular and precious item that can be sold, bought and owned. The notion of “autonomy” this brand of aesthetics protects is necessary to the rationalization of bourgeois property relations as it regards the idealization of the commodity as a natural, ontological condition of existence. From this perspective, ideas and objects naturally belong to the separate and discrete cultural domains they have been historically “found” in. Thus a critic like Kramer can insist on the absolute restriction of things and ideas to their proper realm — art can be divided from politics, morals from business, and so forth.

Serra’s art practices have always resisted the epistemological and political divisions that lie behind these aesthetic categories. His early process art pieces, such as splashed lead sculptures, challenged the collectibility of the art object and the market and patronage system which demands art’s availability as private property. His site-specific sculpture also resist the notion of art as exchangeable objects; they are designed to exist as art objects only in one place, incorporating as artistic elements all aspects of the site of their installation, from the formal to the social, historical, and political. The interdependence of work and site in site-specific work forces connections between the formal and the political to the surface and makes difficult the re-separation of these categories attempted by art critics such as Hilton Kramer and Rudolf Giuliani. In capitalist society what makes art “art” is its status as private property, its capacity to be owned. So it comes as no surprise that in bourgeois law, property rights, defined as the rights of owners, are more important than the rights of producers. And the copyright laws derived from this understanding of “property” don’t just limit the circulation of ideas, they place the ownership and control of ideas in particular hands, they render intellectual property the private property of certain classes, and so are inimical to the free access of all individuals.

The current ideological reworking of “private” and “public” achieved through the alignment of conceptuality with authoritarian domination, while representing itself as a progressive “protection” of “individuals” and “individuality,” in fact, quite neatly corresponds to the global restructuring of public institutions under the pressures of privatization necessitated by the late capitalist crisis in productivity. Far from offering some space beyond and therefore resistant to the encroachment of power, such constructions of the “inviolability” of the self and the “interiority” of public space are in fact necessary to their inscription within a transnational political economy which requires not the abolition of existing transpersonal boundaries but rather their reworking — the category of the autonomous subject and its position within a single world order is rendered more flexible, but still intact. What is being defended is bourgeois privacy, a space beyond the limits of the public inquiry and contestation. This makes a political rereading of the controversy surrounding Tilted Arc all the more urgent since it has become a standard touchstone in debates over “the public.” For example, Tilted Arc is the central art work discussed in Critical Inquiry‘s special issue on public art. Virtually all the articles accept the “official” version of the controversy, that is, the version of conservative officials. By unquestioningly accepting those terms of the discussion, the participants leave unchallenged the theoretical concepts which structure conservative discourse on art, most importantly the concept of “the public.” Thus, in his essay, W.J.T. Mitchell, who would undoubtedly not represent himself as a conservative of any sort, ends up pretty much subscribing to the same understanding of reality as Jesse Helms. Mitchell can make such statements as the public is “fed up” with “tolerating symbolic violence against religious and sexual taboos,” and talk about “the public, in so far as it is embodied by state power and public opinion,” without asking how the public may be considered embodied by such things or without considering other publics — the public of intellectuals, artists, blacks, gays who are “fed up” with tolerating the real violence of exploitation and oppression.

In a similar vein, John Hallmark Neff uses Tilted Arc as evidence that public art has “failed” because of the absence of shared beliefs and common interests between artists and the public. In his essay art is imagined as little more than the icing on the cake of consensus, and unsurprisingly, “difficult” or “avant garde” art is dismissed as elitist. That difficulty and rigor are not essentially elitist is beyond Neff, who never bothers to ask whether it might not be more elitist to contend that the “common man” cannot handle rigor and difficulty than to give him the opportunity to do so. And in Michael North’s essay the work of Vito Acconci is smeared as authoritarian. In Acconci’s work Fan City, viewers participate by unfolding banners printed with slogans, “so the viewer is made to wave the flag of a faith he or she may not share . . . the viewer is in fact entirely helpless in the hands of the sculptor.” Setting aside his conflation of sculpture and sculptor, North seems to believe that the temporarily uncomfortable awareness of oppressive structures of power which works like Fan City and Tilted Arc encourage is somehow commensurable with the relentless economic and political helplessness many Americans are subjected to constantly. Mitchell and North, and possibly Neff, would all see themselves as opposite numbers to Hilton Kramer, yet it is striking that “aesthetics” allows them a ground on which to agree: democracy is a formal assemblage of free individuals and their “feelings,” rather than the particular organization of institutions which limit or allow public access to the resources which create and satisfy those feelings and desires.

The discrediting of artistic practices like Serra’s is ultimately not just an issue for the art world. The prohibition of avant-garde practice found in traditional arguments as well as in postmodern ones is connected to a dismantling of systemic critique and revolutionary opposition currently sought by both conventional conservative forces and by postmodern neo-liberalism. What is specifically under attack here is the notion of “public” as a pedagogic space. The “difficulty” of work like Serra’s comes from its challenging of “simple” and common sense modes of understanding “art” and its relation to anything else — in other words from the work’s ability to transform subjectivity, to serve a criti(que)al pedagogic unction. A criti(que)al pedagogy requires a self-distancing from its object, from the common sense, from “the common man,” and all other conventional understandings of a common public, precisely in order to interrogate and transform those conceptual series. In this regard criti(que)al pedagogy contests liberal humanist notions of the public as simply an extension of private individuals — a space where people get together to take care of interests they have in common, a space to mediate conflict and make sure that nobody transgresses the private boundaries of anyone else. Criti(que)al pedagogy argues instead for a notion of public space which doesn’t rest content with a basis in the private individual. It wants instead to transform private subjectivity in order to produce a public individual — one who is interested in enabling the transformation of the global distribution of resources and capable of setting into motion collective modes of institutional organization.

An unexamined humanism explains the hostility to avant-gardism, or indeed to any art which is not immediately accessible to everyone at the same time and in the same way. Such a standpoint assumes that art works and other texts have direct and immediately appreciable politics “in” them as opposed to producing their meaning in their various uses within concrete contexts. Theories of the empirical immanence of meaning correspond to and reinforce the “interiority” of the liberal public space and the homogeneity of the private individuals who constitute it. In both cases criti(que)al pedagogy appears to come from “outside,” and seems apocalyptically threatening. And in a sense it is, since criti(que)al pedagogy is an attempt to exacerbate the very contradictions which the “inside” attempts to suppress. The political effect of this suppression, however, is to exorcise from the community any rigorous consideration of its social content, of the purposes or uses that it does or might serve. Given this set of circumstances, a criti(que)al pedagogic practice, in “art” or any other social space, must place a critique of institutionality at the center of its practices; a critique which does not imagine that one can abolish public/collective institutional effects and “free” the private and individual.

In other words, far from being an alien intrusion from “outside,” as radical strategies are commonly understood (i.e., Serra is “forcing” a restrictive art work on the “free” movement of the public), the resources for revolutionary opposition are also produced by those institutional contradictions, between forces of production and social relations which in Marx’s words comprise “two different sides of the development of the social individual. [They] appear to capital as mere means . . . for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.” The interiority of the individual subject, then, is no more than the position of this subject within the interior of capital. A criti(que)al pedagogy brings the cultural “outside” (in all its vanguard and avant-garde forms) to bear on the “inside” in order to disrupt the formation of subjects as interior forces of production and force the possibilities for collective transformation. In this sense it is truly a practice of public pedagogy. Throughout this volume, and of course in all his work, Serra argues for an understanding of the artist as cultural critic, a stance which may seem “old-fashioned,” but still flies in the face of business as usual in a time when, as Serra puts it, “criticism in the United States has become for the most part a promotional exercise, a pseudoadvertisement to enhance sales” (226).

September 22, 2013
Biding Spectacular Time

A.H.S. Boy

spud@nothingness.org

“Guy Debord.” The Society of the Spectacle.trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Numbers between brackets refer to numbered theses in the book.

For decades, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was only available in English in a so-called “pirate” edition published by Black & Red, and its informative — perhaps essential — critique of modern society languished in the sort of obscurity familiar to political radicals and the avant-garde. Originally published in France in 1967, it rarely receives more than passing mention in some of the fields most heavily influenced by its ideas — media studies, social theory, economics, and political science. A new translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith issued by Zone Books last year, however, may finally bring about some well-deserved recognition to the recently-deceased Debord. Society of the Spectacle has been called “the Capital of the new generation,” and the comparison bears investigation. Debord’s intention was to provide a comprehensive critique of the social and political manifestations of modern forms of production, and the analysis he offered in 1967 is as authoritative now as it was then.

Comprised of nine chapters broken into a total of 221 theses, Society of the Spectacle tends toward the succinct in its proclamations, favoring polemically poetic ambiguities over the vacuous detail of purely analytical discourse. There is, however, no shortage of justification for its radical claims. Hegel finds his place, Marx finds acclaim and criticism, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg add their contributions, and Debord’s own insights are convincingly argued. It becomes evident quite quickly that Debord has done his homework — Society of the Spectacle is no art manifesto in need of historical or theoretical basis. Debord’s provocations are supported where others would have failed. The first chapter, “Separation Perfected,” contains the fundamental assertions on which much of Debord’s influence rests, and the very first thesis, that

the whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

establishes Debord’s judgment; the rest attempt to explain it, and to elaborate on the need for a practical and revolutionary resistance.

By far Debord’s most famous work, Society of the Spectacle lies somewhere between a provocative manifesto and a scholarly analysis of modern politics. It remains among those books which fall under the rubric of “oft quoted, rarely read” — except that few can even quote from it. A few of the general concepts to be found in Society of the Spectacle, however, have filtered down into near-popular usage. For example, analyses of the Gulf War as “a spectacle” — with the attendant visual implications of representation and the politics of diversion — were commonplace during the conflict. The distorted duplication of reality found in theme parks is typically discussed with reference to its “spectacular nature,” and we are now beginning to see attempts to explain how “cyberspace” fits into the framework of the situationist critique. (Cf. Span magazine, no. 2, published at the University of Toronto.) But this casual bandying about of vaguely situationist notions by journalists and coffee-house radicals masks the real profundity of Debord’s historical analysis. Much more than a condemnation of the increasingly passive reception of political experiences and the role of television in contemporary ideological pursuits, Society of the Spectacle traces the development of the spectacle in all its contradictory glory, demonstrates its need for a sort of parasitic self-replication, and offers a glimpse of what may be the only hope of resistance to the spectacle’s all-consuming power.

Fully appreciating Society of the Spectacle requires a familiarity with the context of Debord’s work. He was a founding member of the Situationist International, a group of social theorists, avant-garde artists and Left Bank intellectuals that arose from the remains of various European art movements. The Situationists and their predecessors built upon the project begun by Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism in the sense that they sought to blur the distinction between art and life, and called for a constant transformation of lived experience. The cohesion and persuasive political analysis brought forth by Debord, however, sets the Situationist International apart from the collective obscurity (if not irrelevance) of previous art movements. Society of the Spectacle represents that aspect of situationist theory that describes precisely how the social order imposed by the contemporary global economy maintains, perpetuates, and expands its influence through the manipulation of representations. No longer relying on force or scientific economics, the status quo of social relations is “mediated by images” [4]. The spectacle is both cause and result of these distinctively modern forms of social organization; it is “a Weltanschauung that has been actualized” [5].

In the same manner that Marx wrote Capital to detail the complex and subtle economic machinations of capitalism, Debord set out to describe the intricacies of its modern incarnation, and the means by which it exerts its totalizing control over lived reality. The spectacle, he argues, is that phase of capitalism which “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life . . . is mere appearance” but which remains, essentially, “a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself” [10]. In both subject and references, we see Debord tracing a path similar to Marcuse in Counter-Revolution and Revolt, in which Marcuse describes the motives and methods behind capitalism’s “repressive tolerance” and its ability to subsume resistance, maintain power, and give the appearance of improving the quality of everyday living conditions. Debord’s global cultural critique later finds an echo in the work of scholars like Johan Galtung, the Norwegian peace research theorist who established a similarly pervasive analysis of cultural imperialism. It is the situationist focus on the role of appearances and representation, however, that makes its contributions to political understanding both unique and perpetually relevant.

The spectacle is the constantly changing, self-organizing and self-sustaining expression of the modern form of production, the “chief product of present-day society” [15]. An outgrowth of the alienating separation inherent in a capitalist social economy, the spectacle is a massive and complex apparatus which serves both the perpetuation of that separation and the false consciousness necessary to make it palatable — even desirable — to the general population. The bourgeois revolution which brought about the modern state is credited with founding “the sociopolitical basis of the modern spectacle” [87]. The longest chapter of the book, “The Proletariat as Subject and Representation,” follows the development of the modern state in both its free-market and state capitalist forms, and attempts to describe how this development increasingly led to the supersession of real social relations by representations of social relations. Later chapters cover the dissemination of spectacular representations of history, time, environment, and culture. The scope of Debord’s critique is sufficient to demonstrate that the spectacle is more than the brain-numbing flicker of images on the television set. The spectacle is something greater than the electronic devices to which we play the role of passive receptors; it is the totality of manipulations made upon history, time, class — in short, all of reality — that serve to preserve the influence of the spectacle itself. Much like Foucault’s discipline, the spectacle is an autonomous entity, no longer (if ever) serving a master, but an entity which selectively chooses its apparent beneficiaries, for its own ends, and for only as long as it needs them. Consequently, resistance is difficult and the struggle is demanding.

On the one hand, Debord faults Marxists for their rigid ideologizing, their absorption in an archaic understanding of use value, and their faith in the establishment of a socialist state to represent the proletariat. On the other hand, he criticizes the anarchists for their utopian immediatism and their ignorance of the need for a historically grounded transformational stage. Debord’s own offerings in Society of the Spectacle are generally vague, beginning with claims like

Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. [53]

In the chapter on “Negation and Consumption,” Debord outlines the theoretical approach of the situationists, distinct from that of contemporary sociology, which he claims is “unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen object, because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object.” The situationist, according to Debord, understands that critical theory is dialectical, a “style of negation” [204] — and here we find the description of what has become perhaps the most well-known tactic of the situationists, détournement. This strategy, at a theoretical level, is a manifestation of the reversal of established logic, the logic of the spectacle and the relationships it creates. At a practical level, détournement has found its expression in comic strips, whose speech bubbles are replaced by revolutionary slogans; utopian and apparently nonsensical graffiti; and the alteration of billboards. This latter tactic, first introduced in Methods of Détournement (1956), involves the radical subversion of the language — both textual and graphic — of the modern spectacle. In its most common form, it involved taking comic strip speech bubbles or advertising copy and replacing them with revolutionary slogans or poetic witticisms. The point, according to Debord, is “to take effective possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented” [187]. This “unified theoretical critique,” however, can do nothing without joining forces with “a unified social practice,” and this is where Debord’s scholarship fails him despite its veracity. The situationists were, after all, a group of intellectuals, and not factory workers — a fact which Debord himself did not hesitate to acknowledge. He firmly believed, however, that “that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes” was the only hope for a return to real life.

Despite their predominantly intellectual status, however, the Situationist International has had its share of practical influence. One of their members is credited with writing the bulk of On the Poverty of Student Life, the tract published by the students of Strasbourg in 1966 and often cited as a catalyst for the events of May ’68. The Situationists played a role in those events as well, seeing in them the first real possibility of a general strike — a modern Commune — in their time. But it may be Greil Marcus, in his book Lipstick Traces, who has done the most in recent times to promote the visibility of the Situationists. Lipstick Traces follows the history of punk rock back to the tradition of Dada and situationist theory. Both Jamie Reid (creator of much of the graphic “look” of punk) and Malcolm McClaren (self-styled “creator” of the Sex Pistols) acknowledge the influence of the SI on their own work, and the legacy of punk rock may well be the last great youth movement which involved not only a musical revolution, but total social critique (with a soundtrack).

Plagued by constant internal battles (in which Debord, in his best André Breton manner, irrevocably excluded virtually every member over the course of 15 years, in a hail of harsh criticism each time), and so determinedly revolutionary that it alienated most of its potential sympathizers, the SI finally disbanded in 1972. It’s a bit ironic, in this light, that the latest translation of Society of the Spectacle is brought to us by Nicholson-Smith, who was himself excluded from the SI in 1967 along with his colleague Christopher Gray. Together, their translation efforts account for a large part of the major SI texts available in English — an admirable testament to their belief in the significance of situationist theory. This new translation addresses a number of awkward points in earlier translations, but is not without its own inconvenient or clumsy prose. Debord writes in a difficult manner; style is not his strongest point. But Nicholson-Smith sometimes forsakes fidelity in favor of his own sense of consistency and clarity, even when these things were lacking in the original. The result is a bit less awkward, but also a bit less Debord.

When Debord released his Comments on Society of the Spectacle nearly 20 years after the original publication, he had several comments to make on the importance of recent events, but virtually no revisions to his original theses. His reflective judgment was not in error. The concise Society of the Spectacle remains an accurate depiction of modern conditions. Debord’s only addition to his original critique was, however, cynical and foreboding. Whereas the spectacle in 1967 took on two basic forms — concentrated and diffuse, corresponding to the Eastern Block and American social structures, respectively — we have now reached the era of the integrated spectacle, which shows less hope and exercises greater control than ever before. The spectacle now pervades all of reality, making every relationship manipulated and every critique spectacular. In this age of Disney, Baudrillard, the total recuperation of radical chic, and the dawn of virtual worlds, we need to familiarize ourselves with the situationist critique. The recent hype surrounding the Internet and the regulation of digital affairs — not to mention the very structure of virtual relationships we are beginning to feel comfortable with — are perfect candidates for evaluation. The speed of life, the pace of the spectacle, is proportional to the speed of computers and communication. True criticism is plodding, historically situated, and unwilling to accept the immediate fix of reformism. The challenge today is to recover the situationist critique from the abyss of the spectacle itself. Debord concluded Society of the Spectacle by stating that “a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time” [220]. Not by waiting, but through the unification of theoretical critique and practical struggle of which “the desire for consciousness” is only one element.

NOTE: The Situationist International published their works with an explicit anti-copyright notice which states that the writings may be “freely reproduced, translated, or adapted, without even indicating their origin.” With this in mind, the Situationist International archives were established at http://www.nothingness.org/SI. The reader will find there a number of Debord’s works translated in their entirety, as well as texts in the original French, Situationist graphics, and links to other Situationist-related sites.

September 22, 2013
Lacan Looks at Hill and Hears His Name Spoken: An Interpretive Review of Gary Hill through Lacan’s “I’s” and Gazes

S. Brent Plate

Institute of the Liberal Arts
Emory University
splate@emory.edu

Gary Hill. Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. May 11 – August 20. Organized by Chris Bruce, Senior Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

[D]esire, alienated, is perpetually reintegrated anew, reprojecting the Idealich outside. It is in this way that desire is verbalised. Here there is a game of see-saw between two inverted relations. The specular relation of the ego, which the subject assumes and realizes, and projection, which is always ready to be renewed, in the Idealich.

-Jacques Lacan¹

Gary Hill’s video and installation art challenges a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view of perception by showing the mediated nature of the viewing subject’s interaction with the artwork. Hill investigates the relationships between bodies, words, images, and technology. While much of Hill’s work in the past has focused on single-channel videotapes, his recent exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo (11 May – 20 August) is a display of 13 room-sized installations, artworks within which the viewer’s body must move. Furthermore, by incorporating philosophical and literary texts (e.g., writings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Blanchot) into his videos and images, Hill manages to confront the incessant relationship of words and images in a striking ly original way in artistic practice.

Hill’s exhibition spaces are spaces of and about media (sing. medium) in two senses of the word. As the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, a “medium” is, “1. Something . . . that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes. 2. An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on.” This dual definition makes it possible to consider the term ‘medium’ in aesthetic categories of form and content. Medium as content is “something between.” Medium as form is a “substance through which something else is transmitted.” Hill’s art investigates each sense of the term, and both of them together.

Though essays about Hill are pocked with poststructural references, Hill makes no explicit mention of Lacan in his installations or video works. Yet, Hill and Lacan seem to share affinities for what Lacan calls the “function of seeingness.”² That is, they each explore the space of mediation between the viewer and the object viewed. This relation is a see-saw game of desire and projection, and is, finally, constitutive of subjectivity.

In the following i take Lacan’s theory of subjectivity and the interrelated notion of “the eye and the gaze” as an orienting point. From there i create a “conversational re-view” of Hill’s recent exhibition. As this exhibition included thirteen installations — each abundantly rich enough in content to summon its own essay — i will concentrate on only three particular installations.

The dense opening quote of Lacan serves as a preface to the following reading of Hill’s installations. Within the quoted passage resides the catalyst that is desire, the notion of projection, and a relation between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. In further comparing Hill and Lacan, i suggest that through the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic one of Lacan’s underlying motifs is to reconceive the relation of the word and the image within the realm of subjectivity. While it is clear that Lacan privileges the symbolic over the imaginary (and hence also, the word over the image), they each remain vital in the construction of the subject.

Turning to Lacan’s mediated view of “the function of seeingness,” there is found a distinction between the eye and the gaze. To clarify this distinction, Lacan provides what are perhaps the simplest of his diagrams (91):

(IMAGE)

The first diagram portrays the geometral perspective set up in Renaissance schema (notably that of Alberti) of a singular point-of-view taking in the whole of the other (object) through the eye. As the agent of vision, the subject is the “Cartesian subject, which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective” (86). As the still point of singular perspective, the subject is affirmed in her or his position. Lacan’s conception is duplicitous in its combining of the simple, now common-sensical notion of perspective with the modern view of the singular and unitary subject.

Entering Hill’s exhibition space, the viewer comes upon a room containing the installation Learning Curve (1993). Here the viewer/subject finds a seat, and the eye is given “something to feed on” (101). Sitting in a chair at a schooldesk, the viewer faces forward (the only way possible) and finds the lines of the edge of her or his desk fanning out a long way away from the chair toward a screen at the far end of the schooldesk. (The desk is approximately 8′ long.) The viewer sits at the “point” of the triangular schooldesk which, due to its size, shifts from being a mere desk to a spatial plane — separating, but also connecting — the seated viewer to the image on the screen. Projected on to the screen from a video projector above the head of the seated viewer is the moving image of a seemingly endless breaking wave. Metaphors of drowning hardly need be mentioned as one quickly becomes captivated by the image of a perfect wave, curling right into infinity.

Learning Curve, 1993

(IMAGE)

Without mention of Lacan, commentator Robert Mittenthal states that, “To sit in Learning Curve is to become part of the piece; one is physically supported by the same object that focuses one’s attention on the pure visual space of the projected wave. The chair forces the viewer into a single-point perspective.”³ The single point of the eye in this installation is matched by the “projection” of the wave. The light is projected from a singular point (the video projector above the head of the seated viewer) and spreads out to the site where the screen is filled by the projected image. Projected lines of light exactly match the lines of the desk, thereby conflating the viewer’s position of seeing with the projector, and with the projected image.

Lacan’s comments on the imaginary realm of projection are fitting here: “Each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in his status, in his stature, in his static, his desire is projected outside.”⁴ In Learning Curve, the subject constitutes her or his self in the static schooldesk, and desire is projected to the screen in front. Desire is desire of a wave, the Idealich, the fluid motion, the amniotic fluids. To be identified with a wave . . . To be there . . . To Be, there. . . .

While the single-point perspective of Learning Curve and of Lacan’s Renaissance diagram entails a position of mastery — where everything flows from the eye/I — slippage is already occurring. The sight of the other (the perfect wave, the imago) enthralls, captivates, and causes the viewing subject to begin to dissolve because the other is finally only the image of the subject her or him self projected onto the other. For a final entry into subjectivity, the other must become more than a screen for a projected image of the subject. The subject must enter a field of visual relations (the symbolic) where she or he is the one seen as well as the one seeing.

Lacan’s theories of subjectivity confound the subject of visual mastery. The single-point perspective corresponds to a singular subject position, and Lacan is out to foil and complicate this notion associated with “modern science.” In so doing, Lacan inverts the first diagram, and the subject is now seen in relation to the gaze (see diagram 2, above). The gaze is a web of which the subject is but one (but not One) piece: “We are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. . . . [The] gaze circumscribes us” (75). Further inverting the first diagram’s effects, the gaze “is that which turns me into a picture” (105), with light moving in the opposite direction. The point of light is projected from the site of the other (the gaze) on to the subject through a “screen.” The subject is constituted by this pre-existing screen, a pre-existing set of symbols which creates a grid for the other(s) to perceive the subject.

Hill, in a separate but related installation, Learning Curve (Still Point) (1993), likewise inverts the triangle of vision. Now, rather than a large screen opposite the viewer with lines extended out, the viewer sits at the “base” of the triangular desk. The edges of the desk converge at a video monitor at the end of the long desk. The schooldesk and the seat are similar in each installation, only now the image of the wave is displayed in the small form of a 5″ video monitor, making it difficult for the viewer to identify with and be captivated by the image. Furthermore, the light is also reversed. With the first installation (as with Lacan’s first diagram), light is projected from the point of perspective, the “geometral point.” Now the light originates from the far end, from the “point of light” (due to the fact that a video monitor has replaced a video projector). Here the light is projected onto the viewer from the place of the other. The subject/viewer becomes, in essence, “the screen.”

Learning Curve (Still Point), 1993

(IMAGE)

Further comparing Learning Curve (Still Point) to the gaze, Mittenthal, again without reference to Lacan, suggests of Hill’s installation that “one imagines a California schoolboy daydreaming of surfing, suddenly called upon to answer one of his teacher’s queries.”⁵ The schooldesk becomes the site of “the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire” (85), the desire to be surfing, that is, to be elsewhere. Coextensive with this desire is the element of surprise, and one must wonder why Mittenthal, who neither quotes Lacan nor surfs, brings in the element of surprise in the viewing of these waves rather than the others. Perhaps his imagined response to sitting in this position is tinged with the voyeuristic shame of peering through a keyhole: “the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame” (84). This shame brings the viewer out of her or his self (out of the surfing daydream) into the realm of others, and therefore also becomes a realization by the subject of her or his role within the larger symbolic order.

Lacan further complicates the relation of the eye and the gaze by overlapping the first two diagrams, creating a more comprehensive “field of vision.” The eye and the gaze are brought together in a third diagram (106) and placed on opposing sides.

(IMAGE)

Here the viewing subject is not simply either the master of perception (as in the Renaissance schema), or objectified within the gaze. Rather,

Only the subject — the human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence of man — is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. He maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation. (107; emphasis mine)

It is, finally, at the site of the screen — at the point of the medium — that the subject’s identity is negotiated.

In Lacan’s third diagram we are brought back to the relation of the imaginary and the symbolic: “The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic” (118). In the register of the imaginary, the subject/viewer projects her or his own imago onto the screen. There the projected imago comes into contact with the other side of the screen, on which is portrayed the image through which the subject is seen by others in the symbolic realm. While the gaze circumscribes the subject, the site of the screen becomes the site where the eye and the gaze meet. Out of this sutured relation, this discourse in the field of the other, this sight in the field of vision, identity springs.

At this point Lacan shifts his oft-quoted “man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” to say “that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir)” (115). Lacan makes his final turn against the realm of vision and states that this showing is connected with the desire to see, and that desire is fascination (Latin: “the evil eye”). Too much fascination turns to envy (invidia): “the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction” (116). Here it is the symbolic (and language) which will rescue the subject from the power of annihilating envy. And “where can we better picture this power than in invidia?” (115). And perhaps, where can we better picture Lacan’s notions than in video?

One would have to imagine a continually spinning swivel chair at a schooldesk intersecting Hill’s two installations to relate the overlapping third diagram. But this wouldn’t quite get us to the point (however still). Fortunately, if we move into the next room, we come upon an installation which provides a clearer manifestation of the subject’s relation to vision. The installation places the subject/viewer in the overlapping third diagram of Lacan, but in an even more fluid way than Lacan imagined (or, was able to chart).

This next room is the site of the installation Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) (1990). Beacon is a simple design with complex content. The “beacon” (“a signalling or guiding device; a source of guidance or inspiration”)⁶ is a piece of aluminum pipe, 6″ in diameter and 54″ in length. The pipe is suspended from the ceiling and comes to rest about 78″ from the floor, just high enough for most people to walk under, yet just low enough to cause many to feel they have to duck to pass under it. Powered by a motor, the beacon spins slowly in a darkened room (approximately 20’x40′) providing all the light for the room. The light which is here provided is given by two 4″ video monitors placed in each end of the pipe. The video image is then projected out by projection lenses which cap the ends of the pipe. (Note that in this set-up the image can be seen two ways, by looking into the pipe — though no one would actually do this – – and by looking at the projected image on the wall.) The beacon spins in a circular motion, and since it is placed off-center in a rectangular room, the projected images vary in size, sometimes filling a good part of a wall, sometimes a small square. Finally, four speakers are placed in the corners of the room, with the sound sometimes “following” the moving images, sometimes not.

The fact that i have used the word “sometimes” four times in the last two sentences suggests that Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) gives a sense of chance. Many of Hill’s works provide for chance, yet this chance springs out of a polished and precise technological medium (even the appearance of the polished aluminum pipe itself gives a “smooth” feel). In Beacon there is a motor, a system, and an array of electronics controlling the piece. Hill arranges the installation to allow the blips in the circuitry (the slips, the elisions) to show through. Even so, it sometimes seems the blips may be intentional, wired into the circuitry, and that may be, but Hill allows an even greater interruption (a much greater inbreaking of the Real in Lacanian terms): the presence of the viewer in the space of the installation. The viewer is not a detached viewer here. The viewer is part of the room, part of the installation, and this interaction creates chance elements beyond the technical apparatus of the piece. Similarly, there is no position from which to take in the entirety of the piece, no place for a singular point-of-view. As the beacon spins, projecting its light onto the walls, viewers are caught in the searching path of light, their silhouettes outlined against the wall for others to see. Hill asks in a short writing on Beacon, “What will you do when you are in the light?”⁷

And i, as an observer and participant, watched what others did in the light, realizing that i, at the same time, was being watched. When i viewed the installation, there were on average five to ten others in the room at once — so there was a necessary negotiation taking place between bodies and between bodies and the revolving light. Most often people would move aside, attempting to get out of the light for fear of disrupting someone else’s view. The problem was that there were two sides to the beacon and to move out of the light meant an almost continual movement. One could stand directly under the beacon and always remain out of the light (standing at the geometral point, even if it is spinning), but due to the height mentioned above one kept feeling as if the pipe would hit one’s head, which would create an even more intense feeling of being a spectacle. Hence, there were few people who ever did stand close to the pipe. The perpetual escape from the light mixed with the revolving images and the viewer’s desire to see the images meant quite simply that the viewing involved a lot of bodily movement within the space of the installation.

There were others who — either due to an exhibitionist streak, or to a resignation that there was no escaping from the panoptic light — merely remained in their positions and allowed the light to cast their shadows on the wall. But of course, from this bold position there was still no way to see the entirety of the installation; one had to choose which image to look at. And then there were the younger ones who would jump up into the space of the light just to be seen, or would create fun shadows of dogs or butterflies with their hands, wanting to show a part of their selves and have an other take notice.

But let me leave aside the formal nature of the piece and address the content. What sounds are emanating from the speakers? And what exactly are the images being projected onto the walls? A text is being read. Various voices in somber tones recite a text of Maurice Blanchot. Ironically, the “Imaginary” in the title does not refer to Lacan, but to Blanchot’s short essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” Likewise, the images often correspond to this text. Sometimes there is an image of the printed essay itself, with the camera (like an eye) following along the pages and lines being spoken. Sometimes there is an image of a person reading the text. Other times there is a still shot of a person as the spoken text continues, leaving the simple view of a face moving across the walls.

Blanchot’s essay is complex and obscure, and i will only point out a few of the more important elements as it relates back to Hill’s video work. “Two Versions of the Imaginary” chiefly concerns the role of the image within language. The image brings forward places and times which are “absent” in the current perception to remake them as somehow present. In other words, linguistic images are a representation. But it is the relation between presence and absence in the image which for Blanchot provides the possibilities of power and fascination.

The essay begins with this enigmatic paragraph (and the quotes i give here are also quotes heard spoken within Hill’s installation):

But what is the image? When there is nothing, that is where the image finds its condition, but disappears into it. The image requires the neutrality and the effacement of the world, it wants everything to return to the indifferent depth where nothing is affirmed, it inclines towards the intimacy of what still continues to exist in the void; its truth lies there. But this truth exceeds it; what makes it possible is the limit where it ceases. Hence its dramatic aspect, the ambiguity it evinces, and the brilliant lie with which it is reproached.⁸

The image is a two-sided coin (perhaps even an effaced one), or a two-sided screen: showing limits as well as giving the experience of limitlessness. This, i would suggest, is Blanchot’s version of the suture between the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic.

In the subject’s perception, according to Blanchot, to see an event as an image is not to be infinitely removed from the originary thing itself. Rather, “to experience an event as image is not to free oneself of that event . . . it is to let oneself be taken by it . . . to that other region where distance holds us, this distance which is now unliving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things” (87). Just as a cadaver is typically thought to come “after” the being itself, the image, if all it did were to imitate a “real” thing, would be subordinated as a secondary event. But for Blanchot, contrarily, the image is “not the same thing distanced, but that thing as distancing” (80-81). The perception of the image exists in an in-between place, a mediated site.

Blanchot’s two versions of the imaginary are intertwined and stitched together. One version brings us to Lacan’s imaginary, the site of “universal unity.” The other version, through its emphasis on limits, recalls Lacan’s symbolic: “what makes [the image] possible is the limit where it ceases.” Subjectivity is created through splits and gaps enlisting desire and the need of mediation, a mediation working internally and externally.

Concluding my own stitched together review, i return to the site of Hill’s installation Beacon. The installation is an experience, a passing through (ex-peri: “pass through”), both in the sense that one must cross the room to continue the rest of the exhibition, and in the sense that one passes through a series of mediations while in the room. Among these mediations there is, of course, the need for negotiating space with other bodies in a darkened room. Then there is the negotiation with the revolving light; inevitably, the image is projected onto the viewer’s body for all others to see, the subject is caught in the gaze. Correlatively, the interception of light by the body leaves a dark spot (scotoma; blind spot) on the wall in the midst of the image, leaving others with a fractured, incomplete view. There is also the space of the viewer existing between the two images on opposing walls. While the images originate at the same point (the pipe) they are cast to opposit e ends of the room. From there the two images develop a relationship with each other — there are times when the book is shown on one wall while the person reading is imaged on the other wall — and, as Hill states, “perhaps one forms the Other’s projection across time.”⁹ Across time and space, the viewer occupies the space between.

Clearly, in Hill’s art, what you see is not what you get; there is a space opened up for mediation and negotiation. That space is a space the subject/viewer enters. In the midst of these interventions the subject’s body takes on the place of mediation. In Lacanian terms, the body becomes the site of identity, the image and the screen, a site projected on to, and a site projecting itself. It is a space between text and image (between spoken words and projected images) and between the symbolic and the imaginary (between others in a room and one’s own bodily negotiation to remain out of the light).

Notes

1. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Norton, 1978) 174.

2. Four Fundamental Concepts 82. All further quotes given in text.

3. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being: Gary Hill’s Learning Curve,” Gary Hill, Exhibition Catalog, Essays by Chris Bruce, et al. (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery/University of Washington, 1994) 92. < p> 4. “The see-saw of desire,” In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) [Fr. 1975] 171.

5. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being” 93.

6. American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

7. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary),” Gary Hill 25.

8. “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” The Gaze of Orpheus: and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981) 79. Further quotes from this essay are given in text.

9. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary)” 25.

September 22, 2013
Radio Lessons for the Internet

Martin Spinelli

Department of English
State University of New York at Buffalo
martins@acsu.buffalo.edu

For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system.¹

These words were not written in celebration of the Internet, as one might expect, but were were written about radio decades ago by German broadcaster and poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.² Enzensberger critiques mono-directional media and argues for a democratizing and empowering media rife with promise for the masses in a language that has recently found new currency with the net’s rise in popularity.

The ease with which Enzensberger’s radio essay could be mistaken for a contemporary tract about the Internet attests to the similarities between the utopian rhetoric once used to promote radio and the rhetoric now being used to promote the Internet. This essay is a study of the promises made for two emergent media: radio and the Internet. Three common aspects arise in a close examination of the independent popularization of radio and the Internet: (1) the emergent medium is instilled with hopes of initiating utopian democracy, providing for universal and equal education, and bringing a sense of belonging to a community; (2) cultural investment in these hopes is encouraged by people in power and exploited for commercial gain; and (3) the rhetoric of these promises obfuscates any real understanding of the material place of the emergent medium in society (such as who has knowledge of its use, how is it used, how is it produced, how is it consumed, how it addresses both basic and inessential needs) and ultimately defuses any potential for social change the emergent medium might have had. After an analysis of the emergent media of radio and the Internet, and their utopian rhetoric, I want to suggest a less naive, more responsible rendition of the net and a way of describing the net that conceives of citizens as genuine producers, not consumers.

That it operate in the “public interest, convenience or necessity” was the mandate handed down to radio in the Communications Act of 1934. But from its infancy as a laboratory experiment, through its advent on the market, radio was conceived by its creators not as a public service but as a consumer product. David Sarnoff, the future president of National Broadcasting Company, is often given credit for being the visionary employee of the Marconi Company who first imagined popular radio. In 1916, in a letter to the company’s general manager, he described the “Radio Music Box” which would “make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph.”³ This letter, notably empty of ideas of public service, concludes with a generally overlooked table of projected radio sales which figures that $75 million can be made selling radio sets in the first three years they are put on the market.⁴ This document of the seminal moment in American radio shows only a profit motive driving the production of radio.

Originally the companies that manufactured radio sets were the same companies that produced broadcast programs. As the federal government fumbled to insure standards and regulate the industry, programming was used to motivate people to consume radio sets.⁵ By the end of the 1920s, with network broadcasts beginning to cover the most populated areas of the U.S., radio began to enter the minds of social thinkers. Writers, politicians and educators began to characterize radio as the fertile ground where the seeds of a better life would take root and mature.

“[A]nything man can imagine,”⁶ was how Martin Codel, a newspaper editor and later a radio theorist, described the promise of radio in 1930, nearly a decade after the first radio ad quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne to sell suburban homes to Manhattanites.⁷ Codel exemplifies the utopian strain in writing about radio, rhetoric that would be detached from any political agenda and unconscious of profit motive. Radio was nothing short of magical.

[T]hat anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. Perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses!⁸

Codel finds in the emergent medium a most interesting space: reality and fantastic projection overlap and become indistinguishable. This overlap, happening in the virtual space of radio, shifts the consideration of life possibilities from an everyday physical space to an ethereal, magical one. For Codel, before radio life possibilities were confined to what could be done in the material world; after radio there are no limits. The possibilities of the emergent radio are but virtual possibilities; they take place not in a material space, not in the space of a physical being in the physical world, but in the virtual and surrogate world provided by the emergent medium. Radio has created a new space that has not been fully understood. Its conditions and limits are as yet so vague that radio can give rise to any utopian plan or individual desire. The shift in focus onto the surrogate space of the emergent media, the place where real desires seem to find virtual or “occult” answers, will ultimately allow virtual or simulated equality to stand in for actual equality while the switch goes unnoticed.

The feeling of fulfillment offered in the surrogate space of radio was a key element in the rhetoric of democracy and equality which evolved around the promotion of the emergent medium. The Codel-style euphoria that characterized earlier thinking on radio began to crystalize and soon led to the suggestion that buying a radio was like buying a seat in political chambers in that it promised a greater feeling of participation in a national democracy as well as a sense of access to that democracy not dependent on class status. Rudolf Arnheim, a German psychologist of media and communications effects, wrote in 1936 that the democratizing power of radio was so complete that it made class distinctions irrelevant, and the very concept of class an anachronism:

Wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. It insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralization, collectivism and standardization. Naturally its influence can only be extended to those who have a set, but from the very first there has nowhere been any attempt to reserve wireless reception as a privilege of certain classes, as it might have happened had the invention been at the disposal of feudal states.⁹

While egalitarian and inclusive in proclamation, Arnheim’s conception of a public does not include all the people in a society. As Arnheim describes radio as a requirement for contemporary civilized life, membership in his public begins to be defined in terms of consumption:

Rather it is the case that wireless, like every other necessity of life from butter to a car and a country house, is accessible to anyone who can pay for it, and since the price of a wireless set and a license can be kept low, wireless, like the newspaper and the film, has immediately become the possession of everyone.¹⁰

The class limitations of his “everyone” are obvious; “everyone” means car owners and those that own a second (country) home, not urban laborers or people who walk or use public transportation. (But even if we accept Arnheim’s premise that everyone may claim a radio as a birthright, the previous element of his argument is similarly untenable: that equality of access to the emergent medium makes for social equality. In saying all people are now a priori equal by virtue of access, Arnheim renders inappropriate any attempt to describe the economic realities that separate different classes. Here the rhetoric of the emergent medium covers up class distinctions while not erasing them.) For Arnheim, the “universal commodity”¹¹of radio confers citizenship; it is a “necessity” for citizens in a national culture. In order to be counted, one must tune in. This will soon evolve into: in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer.

In returning to David Sarnoff we again find an elaboration of this ethic of consumption. In testimony before the Federal Communications Commission, Sarnoff describes consumption not only as a sign of membership in a national culture, but as a quasi-patriotic act that feeds other American (free market) ideals. Before the FCC, as president of the largest producer of receiving sets in the world (RCA),¹² and chairman of the board for the first and largest radio network (NBC),¹³ Sarnoff skirts implications of monopoly while defending competition as an abstract principle.¹⁴ Sarnoff cloaked himself in the rhetoric of the social benefits of listenership in order to defend against federal anti-trust action. Because the emergent medium of radio could be conceived as a great leveler, it had a social value beyond price:

[T]he importance of broadcasting cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It must be appraised by the effect it has upon the daily lives of the people of America — not only the masses who constitute a listening audience numbered in the tens of millions, but the sick, the isolated, and the under-privileged, to whom radio is a boon beyond price. The richest man cannot buy for himself what the poorest man gets free by radio.¹⁵

The maintenance of the quality of radio as a social tool was more important than trust-busting. And because it is a tool that legitimates capitalist competition while feeding American myths of equality and equal opportunity in spite of class, Sarnoff could be given free reign to develop it in its current form. The emergent medium is described as existing beyond pecuniary value because it benefits all sectors of society; therefore it should transcend any critique of monopoly capitalism.

What belies the true nature of this proclaimed public space is that its ownership and management were to remain decidedly in private hands. Apparently unaware of the implicit contradiction, a 1939 NBC informational pamphlet exclaims: “Fortunately for the United States, the democratic answer to the programming problem was found in private enterprise.”¹⁶ As is to be expected, neither Sarnoff nor NBC nor RCA articulates the limits of a democracy based on the idea of citizen-as-consumer fostered by private enterprise capitalism.¹⁷ How could they when their fortunes depend on nurturing a nation of consistent consumers?

The rhetoric of radio’s power to democratize brought with it a renewed interest in the idea of community. Arnheim found in radio a sense of community defined in terms of use and interest, rather than proximity or economic relation. He explains how a national unity and identity are produced out of a collapse of geographic space:

Wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation.¹⁸

This replaces an old social order in which

[t]he relation of man to man, of the individual to the community, of communities to one another was originally strictly determined by the diffusion of human beings on the surface of the earth. Spatial propinquity of people — so we used to think — makes for a close bond between them, facilitates common experience, exchange of thought and mutual help. Distance on the other hand makes for isolation and quiet, independence of thought and action . . . individuality and the possibility of sinking into one’s own ego. . . .¹⁹

What would come about with the end of “distance” might today might be described as the totalitarian effects of a medium or its potential for control.²⁰Radio can collapse a regional sensibility, displace independence and individuality, unify the national community, and make possible a general standardization. The emergent medium of radio, he says, both homogenizes and colonizes:

Just as it incessantly hammers the sound of “educated speech” into the dialect-speaking mountain-dweller of its own land, it also carries language over the frontier.²¹

Radio, for Arnheim at least, is a collector of individuals into some unified conception of a society, not a purveyor of choice.

The utopian rhetoric of early radio often described this colonization as “education.” Collected in a celebratory volume on the first decade of radio published in 1930, Joy Elmer Morgan, then the editor of The Journal of the National Education Association, sees the emergent medium of radio as an educational tool ripe with potential. Earnestly, he declares radio a revolutionary tool on par with the invention of moveable type. As with moveable type, radio’s revolutionary nature lies in its ability to generate a unified cultural identity. For Morgan, education comes to mean a complete integration into this cultural identity:

It will give to all that common background of information, ideals, and attitudes which binds us together into a vast community of thinking people. It is giving the school a new tool to use in its daily work. No one can estimate the stimulus which will come into unfolding life as radio brings it into instant contact with the great thoughts and deeds of our time.²²

Morgan also finds in radio a useful kind of isolation or bracketing off individual experience which insures a fidelity to the common cultural identity. In removing the unpredictable variable of interactivity found in the public school classroom, radio codifies experiences and allows for controlled learning in isolation. Radio makes possible distance-learning from home by turning the home into a sacrosanct schoolroom:

[Radio] has helped to keep people in their homes and in that way to preserve the integrity of home life. No other agency can take the place of the home as a force for excellence and happiness. In it are the issues of life. In a very real sense it is the soil into which the roots of human life reach for spiritual nourishment and security. Whatever radio can do to strengthen the family circle is clear gain; whatever it can do through widespread instruction, looking toward better home practices in such matters as housing, nutrition, family finance, home relationships, home avocations, contributes to a better life.²³

Radio is the proposed antidote for the very social fragmentation it encourages. It is a provider of stability that works toward an America of happy homes while it limits broader human interaction. Socializing or organizing outside of the highly structured and morally regulated familial unit (communication that might lead to uncontrollable political union for example) is thus prevented. As Morgan continues, radio becomes more than just a force that keeps a family together. It provides a virtual example of an appropriate life: “Increasing numbers of people will catch a vision of what intelligent living really means.” The emergent medium civilizes and humanizes as it educates:

Through experience, through study, through habits of industry and reflection, and through long years of right thinking and right doing, there comes into individual life a unity and a quiet sense of power and happiness which are the highest of human achievements. We believe radio has a contribution to make here both in the school and in the home. It widens the family circle and the school circle to include the ablest teachers, the most earnest preachers, and the noblest statesman.²⁴

Here consumption rhetorically becomes a productive act. Because it is tied to values of self-discipline and industry, radio has the power to turn buying and passive listening into things more than refining and educational. Consumption itself imparts “habits of industry” and provides a feeling of diligence.

A survey of today’s radio landscape fails to reveal the flowering of what was then seen as nascent democracy, community, and educational potential. For a case study I look to Buffalo, New York, where (with the exception of three small independent holdouts) all commercial radio stations are now owned by four large media companies. The result is a dominance of talk radio and classic hits programming as these same companies fight over the same “average consumer.”²⁵

The recent decades of FCC deregulation allowed for format changes by freeing stations from having to employ news personnel and reducing or eliminating community service broadcasting requirements. But, because regulations preventing large-scale corporate ownership remained intact, the real homogenization of radio content did not occur until 1992 when FCC deregulation made it possible for a single company to own up to 49 percent of some radio markets.²⁶ Consolidated ownership, when coupled with the programming deregulations of past years, has lead to a massive increase in the broadcast of canned programming (pre-recorded programs produced outside of the local region and distributed via satellite or postal carrier) in Buffalo.

Hearing the listening choices diminish, and noticing in particular the lack of local bands now receiving air time, the Buffalo Common Council launched an investigation of local broadcasting in 1994. Their public study describes “a virtual blackout of local music”²⁷: only one song in roughly 900 played on commercial radio came from a local band without a national record contract. The Council invited the management of local stations to a public forum to address concerns about the lack of local context and content in broadcasts and the reduced variety in program offerings. Instead of appearing at the forum, the management of WKSE-FM (consistently one of the top rated music stations in Buffalo) sent a letter to the Council stating that they had “no legal or moral obligation to play music by local musicians” and that there were no FCC guidelines indicating that they should even consider the issues raised by the Council:

We retain the services of the country’s best broadcast consultants, research companies, and in-house employees to make decisions on our playlist. I can assure you that at no time has any data or direct input from our listeners ever given us reason to believe that a true demand exists for more music by local artists. It is our opinion that our ratings would be damaged and our profitability impaired if we were to increase our commitment to local musicians. . . . Meanwhile, we would encourage the local musicians coalition to strive to continually improve the quality of their work. Only then can they hope to gain a contract with a recording company who can promote them into a position to be played on our airwaves.²⁸

This letter emphasizes clearly and repeatedly that the profit motive exclusively, not any conception of community, is guiding the development of this radio station. The capitalism of deregulated commercial broadcasting does not even have room for the ideas “local” or “community.” In order for a band to be described as a local success it must have a national contract. Regional interest is simply not a category. It should further be noted that stations’ playlists do not even represent a kind of populist democracy in terms of most simple popular opinion determining what gets played. Marketing analysts are employed not to determine general popularity but only to define what is the most sellable or what will be the most appealing to an audience of consumers.²⁹Here again membership in a public would be defined as an ability to purchase. The management of WKSE-FM has even failed to understand how, by only making available limited musical choices calculated to appeal to a targeted audience, they might help determine the musical taste and interest of local consumers. The station plays what is popular to increase listenership and advertizing revenue, but they have not recognized that what they play influences what gets bought and what is popular. Simply put: people will not buy music they have never heard before.

Local music is not the only avenue presented for the expression of community. Talk radio has received much popular press for facilitating democracy. But this democracy is wholly inflected by a profit motive as well. Arbitron ratings for the Buffalo market (Autumn, 1995) show that a single and delineable demographic constitutes the audience for all the top talk shows. The fight to attract this demographic between every daytime talk show has eliminated content difference and reduced what might have been an exchange of ideas to a repetition of the single ideology of the target demographic. In Buffalo the hosts of all the daytime shows on all the top rated talk stations are exclusively right of center, libertarian, and populists (Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, or locally-based equivalents). For an active demonstration of the counter-democratic operation of these programs we need only examine the way the callers are handled: All calls are carefully screened to prevent airing anything that might shock listeners into turning off their radios. Guests and callers with views opposed to those of the host/audience are invited to speak only in so far as the host may confirm carefully predicted listener fears about an issue or to provide an opportunity for the host to engage in ad hominem or to assert his verbal prowess. Should a caller slip past the screener and seriously threaten the host/audience he or she is quickly and easily disconnected and the host is given ample time to recontextualize the caller in an unthreatening manner or to dismiss the caller as simply abhorrent. Talk radio “Democracy,” like “The Latest News,” or “The Greatest Hits of the ’70s,” is simply a programming format aimed at a specific demographic to insure faithful listening and (indirectly) steady consumption by the target audience. As with the radio of the 1930s, today’s talk radio offers only a promise of democracy.

The utopian rhetoric that surrounded the emergent medium of radio functioned largely to obscure a profit motive; and, in a celebration of consumption-as-citizenship, the needs for real democracy, fulfilling community, and equality in education were not realized even in a virtual sense in the surrogate space of radio. The same hopes have become staples of Internet theory. As with radio, the utopian promotion of the net under the rubrics of democracy, community, and educational opportunity, will serve only to obscure economic and representational disparity and thwart any democratizing potential the net might have.

In a recent Forbes magazine column, House Speaker of the 104th Congress, Newt Gingrich, gushes with praise for the democratizing, liberating potential he sees in the Internet:

The information age means . . . more market orientation, more freedom for individuals, more opportunity for choice. Government must deal with it.³⁰

He seeks both to highlight the virtual potential of the information age, and to characterize government in its familiar role as antagonistic regulator of liberating emergent media.

As it is typically characterized by Internet promoters, access to the net is another great social leveler which does away with government and gives equal weight to everyone’s voice. When Gingrich asserts, “Everybody’s an insider as long as you’re willing to access [the information on the net],”³¹ “access” becomes not simply a supplement to democracy, but the only way democracy can now work. In strikingly similar terms to the discussion of early radio, the emergent medium of the Internet can end the oligarchy and provide us with genuine democracy. For Gingrich, the Internet is not just a corrective to democracy, it is democracy.

In January 1995, Gingrich testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about the democratic imperative of access to information through the Internet. He said:

If we’re moving into the information age, don’t we have to figure out how to carry the poor with us? Don’t they have every right to have as much access as anybody else? . . . [M]aybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop.³²

Gingrich neglects to acknowledge a basic economic reality in his assertion that a tax-credit-for-access would equal opportunity: He does not mention or is not aware that the vast majority of poor people would not save enough through an annual tax credit to buy even the most basic software package.

The scope of net promotion is not confined to guaranteeing democracy. An evangelical zeal has evolved within Internet rhetoric. Being online offers a kind of salvation which must be heralded to everyone. In this way Gingrich’s Internet functions as Morgan’s radio did:

Maybe private companies ought to do it. But somehow there has to be a missionary spirit in America that says to the poorest child in America, “Internet’s for you. The information age is for you.” There’s an alternative to prostitution, drug abuse and death, and we are committed to reaching every child in this country. And not in two generations or three generations; we’re committed this year, we’re committed now.³³

The recourse again to private ownership/management is more than a rehash of the now standard “smaller government” rhetoric. Its implications are capitalist colonization and perpetuation of a market. If private companies supply people with simply another way to consume wrapped in the promise of equal opportunity, money would soon find its way back to those owners in the form of training classes, always “affordable” user fees, and the sale of ancillary computer products and services each with additional attendant promises. Money that could be returned or given to the disenfranchised to improve their real lives (to buy clothes or food, to build new schools, or to rent busses to transport angry voters to Washington to lobby Congress or protest) is channeled back into the accounts of private companies. The virtual possibilities of “anything man can imagine” cover up real, material disparities with the promise of the benefits of access.

The official vision for the Internet from the White House, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda For Action, is also utopian. On the first page we encounter language that could have been lifted directly from Morgan’s tract on radio and education: “The best schools, teachers and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability. . . .”³⁴ This education is still based in some school somewhere, and maintains the rather traditional concept of education with students, teachers, and courses. Described in this way its disruptive force is not revealed. What this description lacks however is an acknowledgement of the real economic and political problems that can come with this idea of collapsed geography and local context. Carried to fruition, a centralized model of distance learning would electronically shift larger and larger blocks of the student population to what are currently considered the “best” schools. Increasing virtual enrollment at these (almost exclusively suburban) schools would cause a shift in public educational dollars from poorer schools less prepared to deal with the “information age” to schools already in possession of liberal technology budgets. Even better programs would then be created at the these large affluent schools. As poorer urban schools have funding decreased and are forced to close due to declining enrollment, poorer students who are currently excluded from the information age by the economic realities of their own lives and educational facilities would then be even further removed from the physical sites of education and would ultimately have less access to educational materials. These students will be left behind in the race to virtualize education.

The Agenda continues, “vast resources of art, literature, and science are now available everywhere.”³⁵ Beyond the overstatement (fewer than four hundred books are currently available online for the cost of access alone), this assertion reveals the Agenda‘s monolithic spirit. What the Agenda does not observe is that a fixation on a global community of art and literature will cause the destitution of locally relevant art and literature in the same manner that radio has meant the destitution of local music in our Buffalo example. While it is true that the net could be used as an archival site for regionally specific culture, this seems outside its purview. Couched in the Agenda‘s language of “best” and “greatest” is the belief that “art” means images from the Louvre, not ballads from Appalachia. In addition to the problems of what is and will be available in the globalized community of the Agenda, there is the more interesting notion of what the Agenda calls “universal access.” Following a vow to promote private-sector ownership of the net, the Agenda articulates its second objective which reads:

Extend the ‘universal service’ concept to ensure that information resources are available to all at affordable prices. Because information means empowerment — and employment — the government has a duty to ensure that all Americans have access to the resources and job creation potential of the Information Age.³⁶

It continues:

As a matter of fundamental fairness, this nation cannot accept a division of our people among telecommunications or information “haves” and “have-nots.” The Administration is committed to developing a broad, modern concept of Universal Service — one that would emphasize giving all Americans who desire it, easy, affordable access to advanced communications and information services, regardless of income, disability, or location.³⁷

As with Gingrich, “affordable access” to the emergent medium is made available to all. But what these official promoters have failed to recognize is that access by itself is meaningless and unimportant.

There are, however, political gains of all sorts in the promotion of access to information as a social curative. Political thinking about the net is most often condensable to this: “If we give welfare mothers laptops they can get their benefits and do their shopping online and we can end the wasteful bureaucracies of Food Stamps and WIC; after access they shouldn’t be found asking for better schools because the best courses and teachers are already online; and they won’t need better ways of holding their elected officials accountable — protests and boycotts now being irrelevant — because dissent can now be sent neatly to Congress electronically.” In this system a mere feeling of representation in a community must replace actual representation.

As with radio’s early promoters, the Agenda promises classlessness in an information age: “It can ameliorate the constraints of geography and economic status, and give all Americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them.”³⁸ “Ameliorating constraints” is code for effacing real class difference.

“Democracy” in the Agenda, as in Arnheim’s radio, means the act of consuming. Vice President Al Gore, in his contribution to the Agenda, goes so far as to say, “We can design a customer-driven electronic government.”³⁹ Those without the technology, or without the opportunity to learn how to use this very class-bound technology, are left without representation in his electronic government. This conflation of the consumer with the voter can do nothing to realize any genuine democratic potential of the net. Again, the implication is that one must be buying the emergent medium to have representation.

A similar kind of virtual/consumptive inclusion is evident in the assertion of community on the net. Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community (1994) offers an excellent reference for this new community spirit as embodied in the WELL of San Francisco (a typical fee-based computer network). The need for a fulfilling sense of community was so strong among the WELL’s creators that its 1985 design goals included the credo: “[The WELL] would be a community.”⁴⁰ The conception of the electronic space as community existed before the space did. Even the name “WELL,” is a forced acronym designed to evoke an image of a traditional village resource. It stands for “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link.”

Included in those goals was the belief that the WELL should be profit making. In trying to realize this goal the virtual value of electronic community becomes apparent; in telling the history of the WELL Rheingold invokes one of the WELL’s architects, Matthew McClure, whose vision was to “facilitate communications among interesting people” at “a revolutionary low price”:

To reach a critical mass, [the architects] knew they would need to start with interesting people having conversations at a somewhat more elevated level than the usual BBS stuff. In Matthew’s words, “We needed a collection of shills who could draw the suckers into the tents.” So we invited a lot of interesting people, gave them free accounts, called them “hosts,” and encouraged them to re-create the atmosphere of a Paris salon — a bunch of salons.⁴¹

The virtual community of the net is artificial even on its own terms: the communal feeling did not grow out of shared interests, but was formed by bribes, discount prices, and contrived social interaction. Its “community” was a commodity the WELL’s creators could then market like any other.

But in spite of the celebration of the WELL as the new informal meeting place, a space that has replaced the pub, the cafe, and the park, Rheingold somehow manages to claim that the highest achievement for his electronic community is its ability to transport the user to yet another community. He describes the WELL as “a small town” with “a doorway that opens onto the blooming, buzzing confusion of the Net.”⁴² Movement, not destination is the real goal. This reveals that the net has clearly not replaced the corner coffee shop in that its greatest achievement is always transporting the user out of a community, leaving whenever a community promises to become recognizable or delineable. No real community, in the sense of actual interaction or exchange of something (ideas, goods, etc.) is ever sufficient. Clearly the promise of connection is more important than what is being connected to, this is the impulse that led to the virtualization of the idea of community in the first place. The eagerness to abandon and move on, rather than to work in and develop a community, mirrors the promise of that first radio ad: the better world is always just through the next gateway, ready-made and without those noisy neighbors. It also reveals that a buffet of choices is more important than developing the potential of the options or spaces already available. This is the same thinking that promises 500-channel television.⁴³

Despite utopian rhetoric’s complicity with monopoly capitalism and its actual denial of real democracy, community, and educational opportunity in promising their virtual equivalents, there may yet be value in the utopian expression of the emergent media. The value certainly does not exist in the “electronic commons” promised by the Agenda,⁴⁴ any more than it existed in the almost identical “America’s Town Meeting of the Air” of the RCA of the 1930’s.⁴⁵ In light of past failures, I would like to argue for a smarter, more aware, set of ideas to guide our thinking, a set of ideas conscious of the material realities of the “information age” and the Internet that does not pretend “affordable access” is social penicillin.

To do this I would like to return to Enzensberger whose theory of the media may yet unlock any real potential for social change that might exist in the net. Enzensberger would not have us see in emergent media a panacea or a pacifier for the disenfranchised, but the power to “mobilize.” This mobilization is not the virtual movement of telnetting from San Francisco to Milan, nor is it access to the Library of Congress at affordable prices. It is the mobilization of production — that is, a public identified as producers, not consumers. Any democratic potential in an emergent medium must lie in its ability to facilitate the organization of non-virtual politics, not in vacuuming political action into itself.

On only a few occasions have I experienced a glimmer of this kind of mobilization: the February 1995 “Freely Espousing” multi-city demonstration against cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Protests and marches were planned and the net was used to help organize them and arrange their simultaneous occurrence. Distribution lists such as POETICS were used to provide information used for speeches and posters, and texts of angry letters were posted to be downloaded and mailed to politicians. It must be emphasized however that this example does not address “access” as an issue of class and shows the net being used for mobilization by people on the cultural margins but not the economically disenfranchised.

Other, primarily aesthetic, versions of this mobilization exist within the net. Mobilization on the net happens around textual poaching,⁴⁶ the reinflection of texts already generated by the medium in order to elaborate new meanings or uses to discrete users. The Anti-hegemony Project⁴⁷ poached texts and formats from news oriented usergroups to illustrate the vacuity of traditional news coverage and to poke fun at the group of writers spontaneously involved in producing the Project. Also, the currently difficult to regulate transfers of information (if not ownership and access) of the net facilitate valuable copyright violations which occasionally make available everything from philosophical texts to pornography otherwise locked up by publishing company capitalism and intellectual property law. But as the technology of information control and intellectual property law evolve to service the needs of private enterprise these useful moments will doubtlessly become more scarce.

But in spite of these moments of genuine productive potential and sparks of mobilization, the current system of ownership and management of access generally renders the productive activity on the net framed by consumption on all sides. In order to produce anything, whether news story or parody, we must not only buy a modem but access time for every minute of our productive activity. The argument can be made that there are costs of consumption involved in every productive activity. But the one-time purchase of a computer or typewriter, and the continuous cost of paper to print on, are minimal (and get less and less significant over time) when compared to the 3 dollar an hour (plus extras) charge of most access providers. And interestingly, the vast majority of information produced on the net (the writing of user groups and chat rooms) already seems to revolve almost exclusively around other consumptive activities: the consumption of goods or of other media products. And further, it must be restated that the cultural community or democracy of the net, in so far as it consists of a collection of producing subjects, is still extremely class bound. Observing that a kind of creative enfranchisement exists for those with the money and the education to use the net does not minimize the efficacy of our critique of the Gingrichian classless democracy proclaimed by Internet promoters.

Corporate ownership of the media, says Enzensberger, is simply antithetical to a conception of citizen-as-producer and only affords the most co-opted and simulated form of production:

To this end, the men who own the media have developed special programmes which are usually called “Democratic Forum” or something of the kind. There, tucked away in the corner, the reader(listener/viewer) has his say, which can naturally be cut short at any time. As is the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback.⁴⁸

The responsible role then for those in possession of the technology of use is to insure not a universal access to what has already been produced, but to insure a universal knowledge of media production which grows out of, and contributes to, an understanding of material social relations. This means more than simply making the economic and class realities of human relations more central to the subjects of the media; it means actually using the media to enact a change in material circumstances. Revolutionaries of all stripes learned this decades ago, hence broadcasting centers are always the first things seized in a political overthrow.

Neither the Internet, nor radio, is some kind of deus ex machina of democracy, community, or education. The net is only an emergent medium, existing in a specific context with a real set of material confines, and possibly with a real potential. But it is a potential that will remain unrealized if we allow the drive to virtualize to obscure its material base and the economic realities of our culture.

Notes

1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review 64 (1970) 15.

2. Enzensberger’s career as a writer, broadcaster and critic spans various genres and addresses various audiences. After having attended several German Universities as well as the Sorbonne, Enzensberger could have easily entered academe, but he chose initially to engage with the world on a more populist level. He joined Radio Stuttgart and began producing radio essays. During years of radio work, journalism, writing poetry and criticism, and guest lecturing in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Enzensberger evolved as a protegee of the Frankfurt School. In 1964, on the event of his first public address as the poet-in-residence at Frankfurt University, he was introduced by Theodor Adorno. His works of criticism, poetry, novels and plays interrogate a broad range of topics (Spanish anarchism, cultural progress and barbarism, documentary fieldwork, communication technology, etc.) and have always been informed by political analysis. In 1968 he gave up a fellowship at Wesleyan University and left the United States in protest of the Vietnam War. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Critical Essays, ed. R. Grimm and B. Armstrong with a forward by J. Simmon (New York: Continuum, 1982) xi-xv. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” serves as both a series of observations about the genuine potential of emergent media and as a site of utopian hyperbole about emergent media, it therefore makes an excellent point of departure for our discussion.

3. Radio Corporation of America, Principles and Practices of Network Radio Broadcasting — Testimony of David Sarnoff Before the Federal Communications Commission November 14, 1938 and May 17, 1939 (New York: RCA Institute Technical Press, 1939) 102.

4. RCA 104.

5. Robert Hilliard and Michael Keith, The Broadcasting Century (Boston: Focal Press, 1992) 28-29.

6. Martin Codel, “Introduction,” Radio and Its Future, ed. Martin Codel (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1930. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972) xi.

7. Hilliard 30.

8. Codel xi.

9. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971) 238-39.

10. Arnheim 239.

11. Arnheim 239.

12. RCA 10.

13. Hilliard 48.

14. Sarnoff says, “Our policies are based on the belief that the public interest . . . will best be served by a strong, prosperous, and growing radio industry, and by vigorous competition which results in better service to the public and greater stimulus to the industry.” (RCA 7)

15. RCA 12.

16. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., Broadcasting in the Public Interest ([New York]: National Broadcasting Company, 1939) 10.

17. The emphasis on “private enterprise” in the American discourse of radio owes much to the extensive use of radio by fascist European governments at this time. It only took a few casual references to Nazi Germany to create a popular fear of the idea public ownership (government management) of radio in America. This fear of fascism was used by Sarnoff and others to stall the regulatory efforts of the FCC. For an example of this fear of government managed media see Thomas Grandin’s The Political Use of the Radio (Geneva: Geneva Research Institute, 1939).

18. Arnheim 232-233.

19. Arnheim 227.

20. These totalitarian aspects, viewed as favorable by Arnheim in the emergent medium of radio, are almost always absent from discussions of the emergent medium of the Internet. But if this totalitarian potential is found to be essential in one emergent medium it probably also exists in another. Obviously today an Internet promoter would not laud this potential but conceal it.

21. Arnheim 223.

22. Morgan 68.

23. Morgan 71.

24. Morgan 74.

25. Anthony Violanti, “Uneasy Listening,” The Buffalo News 22 April 1994, “Gusto” section: 20. One local politician describes the state of the city’s radio as “below banality.” See also Violanti’s “Morning Madness,” The Buffalo News 10 March 1995, “Gusto” section: 18.

26. David Franczyk, The State of Buffalo Radio (Buffalo: The Buffalo Common Council, 1994) Appendix E.

27. Franczyk 11.

28. Franczyk, Appendix D.

29. “The myth is, of course, that the American public gets the programming it wants (and can thus blame no one but itself for the banality of mass culture); the reality is that the American public gets programming calculated to attract the “commodity audience” with limited concern for what most [people] actually desire.” (Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers [New York: Routledge, 1992] 30)

30. Newt Gingrich, “Newt’s Brave New World,” Forbes 27 February 1995, “ASAP” section: 93.

31. Gingrich 93.

32. “Gingrich Pushes Computers for Poor,” The Los Angeles Times 6 January 1995: A18.

33. Gingrich 93.

34. The White House, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1993) 3.

35. The White House 5.

36. The White House 5.

37. The White House 8.

38. The White House 12.

39. The White House 17.

40. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994) 43.

41. Rheingold 42.

42. Rheingold 10.

43. For a discussion of the social ramifications of this virtual movement, and an understanding of the virtual ideology that it facilitates, see Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

44. The White House 15.

45. RCA 12.

46. Henry Jenkins, in his Textual Poachers, provides a useful model and vocabulary in his discussion of TV series fans as producers of a kind of cultural community. Fans of Star Trek pirate stories and characters from the series to produce new stories in fanzines, songs and videos. Armed with copyright attorneys the owners of the series object to this appropriation. Fanzines draw attacks from Hollywood because they short-circuit the desired distribution and consumption of a product: new products with roots in an old series are distributed without any involvement of, or profit to, network TV or Hollywood. But because the commodity of the net is different from that of Hollywood or network TV — it is access or means of consumption/distribution not an image or story — the poaching metaphor must be deployed differently to describe would-be alternative culture on the net. Since the “text” in the case of the net is access, “poaching” would resemble something like stealing blocks of AOL time for non-profit or anarchist purposes.

47. Archived at the Electronic Poetry Center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/

48. Enzensberger 22.

September 22, 2013
“Early Spring” and “Equinox”

Cory Brown

Ithaca College
cbrown@ithaca.edu

Early Spring

It is early evening of a spring late,
very late in coming–so late, in mid-April
the deep crescents and parabolas of snow
in the yard, resisting even an imperceptible
slide down the subtle slopes on a chilly
gray evening, seem something new grass
may simply latch onto to grow on
and carpet right over. And the child’s
swing in the yard, and the clothesline too,
are moving back and forth in a way which,
to me, represents a motion seemingly knowing.
Like someone slowly rocking–toes, heels,
toes, heels–someone who’s been standing
a long while, say, in a cold snow waiting
for a bus, foothills of the Ozarks or Rockies
in the distance, implacable and unforgiving
as they block the early evening sun–
and the grayness begins to bear down
as she ponders the disease which has taken
a mind she thought was well secured
and robbed it of its house, its room of memory,
his own street’s name, his spouse’s name–
her name!–their children’s faces,
indiscriminately the minutest details
that surfaced their lives then slowly sank
to what she thought was an inviolable core.

Equinox

It is dark outside, sixteenth of April
and the stars are turning and turning,
but the equinox is weeks to come it seems.
Dolls around the house, mice and bears,
a cow and little doll boys and girls,
are seemingly mesmerized by the sound
the dryer makes late at night,
when animation’s at a standstill and cars
and trucks on the nearby highway are hushed.
Hush my sweets, your bangs are growing
sweetly into your eyes, but we will
trim them back. And your ankles
sometimes ache in your growing pains,
like my knees do when the world
suggests that you will suffer one day
before you die. And the word “die”
sends the ache up my thighs and into
my chest. There are small baskets
of varying sizes around the house;
one from Easter a few days ago casts
its handle’s arched shadow onto the yellow
wall. And the globe atop another table
goes untouched, Australia catching day
after day of sunshine and dust. It is
too much, at times, to synthesize
the desires, to subliminate the question,
to wonder how long the child’s marble
will remain misplaced beneath the wicker
chair before a chance encounter
brings to light its green translucence.

September 22, 2013
Hyper in 20th Century Culture: The Dialectics of Transition From Modernism to Postmodernism*

Michael Epstein

January 1994, Atlanta
Emory University
russmne@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu

1. The Modernist Premises of Postmodernism

The first half of the 20th century evolved under the banner of numerous revolutions, such as the “social,” “cultural” and “sexual,” and revolutionary changes in physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, literature and the arts. In Russia, momentous changes took place in spheres which were not the same as those in the West. But both worlds were united through a common revolutionary model. This fact explains the typological similarities, which have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, between Western postmodernism and contemporary Russian culture, which is evolving, like its Western counterpart, under the sign of “post”: as post-communist or post-utopian culture.

Our analysis will deal with the laws of cultural development of the 20th century which are shared by the Western world and Russian society, nothwithstanding the fact that this was Russia’s epoch of tragic isolation from and aggressive opposition to the West. It was Russia’s revolutionary project which distinguished her from the West, but it was precisely through this “revolutionariness” that Russia inscribed herself into the cultural paradigm of the 20th century.

Revolutions are certainly a part of the Modernist project. In the widest meaning of the term “modern,” this project is a quest for and reconstruction of an authentic, higher, essential reality, to be found beyond the conventional, arbitrary sign systems of culture. The founding father of Modernism was in this respect Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his critique of contemporary civilization and discovery of a primal, “unspoilt” existence of man in nature. The thought of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which exposed the illusion of an ideological self-consciousness, discovered an “essential” reality in the self-propagation of matter and material production, in the life instinct, in the will to power, in the sexual drive and in the power of the unconscious. These discoveries were all creations of Modernism.

In this same sense, James Joyce, with his discovery of the “stream of consciousness” and the “mythological prototypes” underlying the conventional forms of the “contemporary individual,” was a Modernist. The same can be said of Kazimir Malevich, who erased the multiplicity of colors of the visible world in order to uncover its geometric foundation, the “black square.” Velimir Khlebnikov, who insisted on the essential reality of the “self-valuable,” “trans-sense” word, affirmed the shamanistic incantation of the type “bobeobi peli guby” in place of the conventional language of symbols. Although antagonistic to artistic Modernism, the communist revolution was a manifestation of political Modernism. It strove to bring to power the “true creators of reality,” who “generated material well-being” — namely the working masses. These masses would bring down the “parasitic” classes, who distort and alienate reality, appropriating for themselves the fruits of the labour of others by means of all manner of ideological illusions and the bureaucratic apparatus.

On the whole, Modernism can be defined as a revolution which strove to abolish the arbitrary character of culture and the relativity of signs in order to affirm the hidden absoluteness of being, regardless of how one defined this essential, authentic being: whether as “matter” and “economics” in Marxism, “life” in Nietzsche, “libido” and “the unconscious” in Freud, “creative elan” in Bergson, “stream of consciousness” in William James and James Joyce, “being” in Heidegger, the “self-valuable word” in Futurism or “the power of workers and peasants” in Bolshevism. The list could go on.

Postmodernism, as is known, directs its sharpest criticism at Modernism for the latter’s adherence to the illusion of an “ultimate truth,” an “absolute language,” a “new style,” all of which were supposed to lead to the “essential reality.” The name itself points to the fact that Postmodernism constituted itself as a new cultural paradigm in the very process of differentiating itself from Modernism, as an experiment in the self-enclosure of sign systems, of language folding in upon itself. The very notion of a reality beyond that of signs is criticised by Postmodernism as the “last” in a series of illusions, as a survival of the old “metaphysics of presence.” The world of secondariness, that is, of conventional and contingent presentations, proves to be more authentic and primary than the so-called “true reality,” in fact, “transcendental” world. This critique of “realistic fallacy” nurtures diverse postmodern movements. One of these, Russian Conceptualism, for instance, exposes the nature of Soviet reality as an ideological mirage and as a system of “supersignificant” signs projected by the ruling mind onto the empty place of the imaginary “signified.”

Our task is to explore the intricate relationship of Modernism and Postmodernism as the two complementary aspects of one cultural paradigm which can be designated by the notion “hyper” and which in the subsequent analysis will fall into the two connected categories, those of “super” and “pseudo.” If Russian and Western Postmodernism have their common roots in their respective Modernist past and the revolutionary obsession with the “super,” so also the current parallels between Western Postmodernism and its Russian counterpart, their common engagement with the “pseudo,” allow us to glimpse the phenomenon of Postmodernism in general in a new dimension. This new depth, which it acquires through the comparison, is projected as the path leading out of a common revolutionary past, whose heritage both postmodern paradigms — the Russian and the Western one — are striving to overcome.

Paradoxically, it was the revolution as a quest and an affirmation of a “supersignified,” a “pure” or “essential” reality, which has led to the formation of the pseudo-realities, constituted by hollow, non-referential signs of reality, with which postmodern culture plays in both Russia and the West.

What follows is an attempt to analyze “the modernist premises of postmodernism in the light of postmodern perspectives of modernism,” or, simply speaking, the interdependence of the two historical phenomena. My argument will focus on the variety of modernist approaches, in physics (quantum mechanics), in literary theory (new criticism), in philosophy (existentialism), in psychoanalytic theories and practices (sexual revolution), in Soviet social and intellectual trends, such as “collectivism” and “materialism” — which expose the phenomenon of “hyper” in its first stage, as a revolutionary overturn of the “classic” paradigm and an assertion of a “true, essential reality,” or “super-reality.” In the second stage, the same phenomena are realized and exposed as “pseudo-realities,” thus marking the transformation of “hyper” itself, its inevitable transition from modernist to postmodernist stage, from “super” to “pseudo.” What I want to argue is the necessary connection between these two stages, “super” and “pseudo,” in the development of 20th century cultural paradigm. The concept of “hyper” highlights not only the lines of continuity between modernism and postmodernism, but also the parallel developments in Russian and Western postmodernisms as reactions to and revisions of common “revolutionary” legacy.

2. “Hyper” in Science and Culture

A series of diverse manifestations in the arts, sciences, philosophy and politics of the 20th century can be united under the category “hyper.” This prefix literally means “heightened” or “excessive”; its popularity in contemporary cultural theory reflects the fact that many tendencies of 20th century life have been brought to a limit of development, so that they have come to reveal their own antitheses.

The concept of “hyperreality” in the above sense of the prefix “hyper” has been advanced by the Italian cultural semiotician Umberto Eco and the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, both of whom relate it to the disappearance of reality in the face of the dominance of the mass media. On the face of it, mass communication technology appears to capture reality in all its minutest details. But on that advanced level of penetration into the facts, the technical and visual means themselves construct a reality of another order, which has been called “hyperreality.” This “hyperreality” is a phantasmic creation of the means of mass communication, but as such it emerges as a more authentic, exact, “real” reality than the one we perceive in the life around us.

An illustrative example is the influential movement in the art of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, called Hyper-Realism. Works produced by this movement included giant color photographs, framed and functioning as pictures. Details, such as the skin on a man’s face, appeared in such blow-ups that it was possible to see every pore, every roughness of surface, and every protuberance not normally visible with the naked eye. This is the “hyper”-effect, which allows reality to acquire an “excessively real” dimension due entirely to the means of its technical reproduction.

According to Baudrillard, reality which is firmly entwined in a net of mass communication has disappeared completely from the contemporary Western world, ceding its place to hyperreality which is produced by artificial means:

Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferrably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object . . . the hyperreal.¹

This paradox was discovered by quantum physics long before the advent of the theoreticians of postmodernism. It was the scientists who first discovered that the elementary particles, that is, the objects of observation, were largely determined by the measuring instruments. The reality which was revealed to the physicists from the late 1920’s onwards came to be increasingly recognised as a “hyperreality,” since it was constituted by the parameters of the measuring equipment and the mathematical calculations. In the words of the American physicists Heinz Pagels, “it is meaningless to talk about the physical properties of quantum objects without precisely specifying the experimental arrangement by which you intend to measure them. Quantum reality is in part an observer-created reality. . . . [W]ith the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world.”²

The most challenging methodological question in present-day physics, engaged in the modelling of such speculative entities as “quarks” and “strings,” is the question of what is in fact being investigated? What is the status of the so-called physical objects and in what sense can they be called “physical” and “objects,” if they are called into existence by a series of mathematical operations?”

Quantum mechanics became the first discipline to admit to its hyper-scientific character or, more precisely, the hyper-physical nature of its objects. In getting ever closer to the elementary foundations of matter, science is discovering the imaginary and purely rational character of that physical reality, which it allegedly describes but which in fact it invents. In the past, discoveries and inventions could be clearly distinguished: the former revealed something that really existed in nature, the latter created something that was possible and useful in technology. In the present, there are no such strictly delimited categories of discoveries and inventions, since all discoveries tend to become inventions. The difference between discovery and invention has become blurred, at least as far as the deepest, originary layers of reality are concerned. The more one penetrates into these layers, the more one finds oneself in the depths of one’s own consciousness.

In the same way, the more perfect instruments for the observation of physical reality are used, the less can it be detected as reality in a proper sense, as something different from the very conditions of its observation. This is precisely the creation of “an observer-created reality” which makes the case for Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. The notion of “hyperreality,” in relation to cultural objects, was introduced by Baudrillard in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), half a century later than Niels Bohr laid foundation for the new understanding of physical objects as “influenced” by human intention (1927). It is the improvement of instruments for the observation and reproduction of physical and cultural reality that dimmed out reality as such and made it interchangeable with its own representations. In his statement “From medium to medium, the real is volatilized . . .” Baudrillard refers to the most authentic and sensitive means for the reproduction of reality, such as photography, cinema, and television. Paradoxically, the more truthful are the methods of representation, the more dubious the category of truth becomes. An object presented with the maximum authenticity does not differ any more from its own copy. Hyperreality supplants reality as truthfulness makes truth unattainable.

Alongside the hyperphysical objects, there are several other parallel processes generating the “hyper,” emerging particularly in the timespan of 1920’s to the 1930’s. These spheres of “hyperization” are so diverse and at such distance from one another that it is impossible to speak about a direct influence between these processes. Rather, they describe a new limit of being and perception, at which Russia and the West had simultaneously arrived.

3. Hyper-Textuality³

In the human sciences the same thing takes place as in the natural sciences. Along with hyperphysical objects emerges what could be called hypertextuality. The relationship between criticism and literature undergoes a change. The Modernist criticism of the 1920’s and 1930’s, as represented by the most influential schools, such as Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, and later Structuralism, attempts to free itself from all historical, social, biographical and psychological moments, integrated into literature, in order to separate the phenomenon of pure literariness. This literariness of literature is analogous to the “elementary particles” of the texture of literature, its ultimate and irreducible essence.

Criticism is engaged in purifying the stuff of literature by separating from it all those additional layers, with which it was encumbered by schools of criticism of earlier times: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, the biographical, psychological and historical criticism, the criticism of Naturalism and Symbolism, and all other critical fashions of the 19th and early 20th century. That is, criticism now wanted to free literature from an imposed content in order to turn literature into pure form, to reduce it to the “device as such,” to the text in itself. Everything which was valued in literature — the reflection of historical reality, the author’s world view, the influence of the intellectual trends of the times, the inferred higher reality of symbolic meanings — all of this now seemed naive and old-fashioned and extraneous to literature.

But as the process of purification of literature from all non-literary elements continued to reduce literature to the text itself, so the process of appropriation of that text by criticism developed alongside it, until the text was transformed into a thing wholly dependent on and even engendered by criticism. The literary work thus becomes a textual product, created in the modernist critical laboratory by means of the splitting of literatures into “particles” or structural elements and by virtue of the separation of literature from the admixtures of “historicity,” “biographicality,” “culturalness,” “emotionalism,” “philosophicalness,” considered alien and detrimental to the text.

In the same manner as textual criticism, quantum mechanics splits the physical object — the atom — into so many minimal component parts whose objective existence fades into ideal projections of the methods of observation and the properties of the physical measuring appartus. Pure textual signs, excised from literature in the manner of the smallest irreducible particles or quants, are equivalent to ideal projections of the critical methodology. Since these signs are purified of all meanings, supposedly imposed by the author’s subjectivity and extraneous historical circumstances, the critic is the only one empowered to read them as signs carrying meanings or signs with potential meanings. It is the critic who determines the meanings of those signs, intially purified of all meanings.

The paradoxical result of such a purification of literature has been its increasing reliance on criticism and on the method of interpretation. Both Formalism and Anglo-American ‘new criticism’ make literature accessible to the reader through the intermediary action of criticism itself. Literature thus becomes a system of pure devices or signs, filled with meanings by a criticism according to one or another method of interpretation. In other words, criticism bans literature from its own territory and substitutes the power which the writer used to exercise over the mind of the reader by the power of the critic.

In the mid-60’s, the result of this modernist overturn was reflected in the words of the English critic George Steiner who complains about this new status of a critic as the Master of a hyper-textuality: “The true critic is servant to the poet; today he is acting as master, or being taken as such.”⁴ Similarly, Umberto Eco remarks that “at present, poetics are coming more and more to get the upper hand of the work of art. . . .”⁵ And according to the writer Saul Bellow, “criticism tries to control the approaches to literature. It confronts the reader with its barriers of interpretation. A docile public consents to this monopoly of the specialists — those ‘without whom literature cannot be understood.’ Critics, speaking for writers, succeeded eventually in replacing them.”⁶

Certainly, all these negative responses to the modernist revolution in criticism belong themselves to anti-, rather than postmodernist consciousness; more precisely, they designate the very limits of modernism. Postmodernism emerged no sooner than the reality of text itself was understood as an illusionary projection of a critic’s semiotic power or, more pluralistically, any reader’s interpretative power (“dissemination of meanings”). The critical revolution which began with Russian formalism in the 1920’s and continued with structuralism in the 1950’s-1960’s ended with a brief reaction in the 1960’s when lamentations about “the critical situation” and the domination of critic over creator became popular. With the advent of postmodernism, both modernist enthusiasm for the “pure” reality of text and antimodernist nostalgia for the “lost” reality of literature became things of the past.

4. Hyper-Existentiality

Hypertextuality as a phenomenon of literary criticism parallels the phenomenon of the hyper-object created by physical science. Another form of “hyper” can be found in one of the leading Western philosophical trends between the 1920’s to the 1950’s. European Existentialism turned to the authentic reality of individual existence, to “being as such,” which precedes any categorization, every rational generalization. With this, Existentialism seemed to subject the “abstract,” “rationalistic” consciousness of idealistic systems from Plato to Descartes and Hegel to crushing criticism.

Yet it is the case that as early as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Russian literature pointed to the process of the production of being or of “pure existence” from a[n] [abstract] consciousness which dissolved all concreteness and formalness of being. This “pure being” was constituted by the temporal duration of a permanence. Existence thus became a pure abstraction of being, produced by consciousness and deprived of all characteristics which might impart concreteness to it. In his concreteness, a man is either one or another entity, he is either lazy or diligent, a clerk or a peasant and so on. Dostoevsky’s underground man, one of the first Existentialist (anti)heroes in world literature, is not even capable of rising to the definition of a good-for-nothing, or an insect. His consciousness is infinite and even “sick” in its “excessiveness”; it destroys the definitiveness which enslaves the “dull,” “limited” people of action, pushing towards that ultimate limit of existence at which a human being is nothing concrete but only is, simply exists.

Not only couldn’t I make myself malevolent, I couldn’t make myself anything: neither good nor bad, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. . . . [A] wise man can’t seriously make himself anything. . . . After all, the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia. . . . I practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake, and so on ad infinitum. That is really the essence of all thinking and self-awareness. . . . And finally, “Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.⁷

Thus existentialist critique of routine forms of existence (“neither a hero nor an insect”), paradoxically, brings forth even more abstract kind of existence, “a method of being born from an idea.” The quest for such absolute being, which precedes all rational definitions and general classifications — such as psychological traits or the attributes of belonging to a profession — is not less abstract and rational than such classifications. It is even more abstract. It is the limit of the abstraction of being, which is also an abstraction of singularity, resulting in a kind of “hypersingularity,” which is only itself and which is alien to all forms of typicality. Such is the result of the existential quest. This “hypersingularity,” based on the “in-and-for-itself” (to borrow a Hegelian term), is the highest possible abstraction, which clings to the “tip” of the self-conscious consciousness, dissolving all qualitative determinateness. This it does in the same way as quantum physics dissolves the determinateness of matter to obtain elementary particles as projections of mathematical description. Precisely because of its “elementariness,” existence thus becomes the metaphysical “quant,” the ultimate, indivisible particle of “matter” or existence-as-such — a derivation of the most speculative type of consciousness, which objectifies itself in the form of “being as such.” The existentialist self-definition “I am” is much more abstract than “essentialist” definitions like “I am a reasonable being” or “I am a lazy man.”

In Hegel, the Absolute Idea develops through its embodiment in increasingly concrete forms of being, according to the principle formulated as “the progression from the abstract to the concrete.” Starting with Kierkegaard, being itself becomes a form of abstraction. This is the abstraction of “the particular,” the unique “this one here,” which applies equally to any concrete form of existence, from insects to human beings, from the peasant to the artist, who are completely dissociated from any typical features of the genus, which Hegel still endows with the concreteness of the manifest idea. Contrary to a conventional opinion, Kierkegaard is a much more abstract thinker than Hegel. Hegel’s thought proceeds from the abstract idea to its specific manifestations, whereas Kierkegaard’s thought proceeds from concrete idea to abstract singularity. Hegel’s Idea goes through the process of concretization through being; the Existentialists’ being itself goes through a process of abstraction through the ultimate generalization of the idea of “being.” Thus being becomes “pure being” or an almost empty abstraction, a “hyperbeing,” the form of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s “nothing.”

Sartre’s La Nausee demonstrates how the “unhappy” consciousness of Roquentin, not bound by anything and raised to the highest degree of abstractness, suddenly encounters — but in reality engenders — the abstract texture of being, of the roots and of the earth, stubborn in its absurdity and inducing nausea. This absurdity, which the Existentialist consciousness discovers everywhere as the revelation of a “true” reality, which has not been distorted or generalised, and which is given anterior to any act of rationalization, is in fact “hyperreality.” It is the product of a rational generalisation, which singles out in the world such an all-embracing trait as the “irrational.”

Existentialism is not a negation of rationalism but rather its ultimate expansion, a method of rationalistic construction of the universal principle of irrationality, designated as “will” by Schopenhauer, as “life” by Nietzsche, as “existence” and “the individual” by Kierkegaard. This irrationality is much more cerebral and abstract than all the forms of rationality which divide being into concrete types, into essences, into laws and into concepts. Rationality always contains at least a certain dose of concreteness because it is always in a determinate relation with “some thing,” it is “the sense of a concrete thing,” the rationality of something which needs to be defined or specified from a rational point of view. “Irrationality” does not demand such concretisation, it is “irrationality as such,” “the absurdity of everything,” it represents “an all-embracing absurdity.” It betrays its ultimate generality precisely through its totally and nausiatingly indiscriminate relationship to the concrete things. The irrational world, which ostensibly eschews rational definition, is a product of the most schematizing rationality, which negates all concrete definitions of things and which finds its ultimate expression in abstractions such as “existence as such,” “the particular as such.”

At this ultimate level of abstraction, being is only the opposite of non-being. As Sartre asserts in Being and Nothingness, consciousness, or being-for-itself, in its freedom from all ontological determinations, is pure nothingness emerging from itself and nullifying, or, to use a Sartrean term, “nihilating” the substantial definitions of the exterior world.

The type of existence of the For-itself is a pure internal negation. . . . Thus determination is a nothing which does not belong as an internal structure either to the thing or to consciousness, but its being is to-be-summoned by the For-itself across a system of internal negations in which the in-itself [the world of objects] is revealed in its indifference to all that is not itself.⁸

As Hazel E. Barnes comments, in Sartre “consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness. Thus nihilation is that by which consciousness exists.”⁹Therefore, the phenomenon of existence is determined by the series of “internal negations,” proceeding from the consciousness as pure nothingness. In this case, the absurdity of being, as it appears to the nullifying consciousness, can be understood as the derivative of this nothingness, of this abstraction that strips concrete things of their meaning. One would imagine that there is nothing more abstract than “nothing,” since it is draws itself away from all peculiarities and specificities of being; but being, as it is posited in Existential philosophy, is even more abstract than non-being, since it emerges as the second order projection of this nothingness. This is no longer that nothingness which has a reality in-and-for-itself, like the self-effacing nothingness of self-consciousness. This is a nothingness which has lost that intimate relationship to its for-itself and which is turned towards the absurd Being which surrounds it, which is pure abstraction, deprived of even the concreteness of self-consciousness and of self-negation. This Being is simple nonentity — a being-for-no-one.

Behind the apparently authentic and self-evident “existence as such” postulated by Existentialism, one can detect the hyper-reality of a reason abstracted from itself in the emptied form of ultimate irrationality. It is a conceptual abstraction to such a degree that it abstracts itself from its own rational foundation in order to affirm itself as its own opposite — as Being as such, ungraspable by reason, unconcretizable and untypifiable. There are two degrees of abstraction: a moderate abstraction, which is confined to the sphere of reason, and an extreme abstraction, which goes beyond the limits of reason. When rational abstraction goes as far as to abstract from rationality itself, it converts into the concept of universal irrationality. This form of abstracting reason from reason is the one which gives rise to the notion of the non-sense of pure Being.

5. Hyper-Sexuality

In the 20th century, the “hyper” phenomenon is also in evidence in the sphere of intimate personal relationships, in which experimentations with sex come to the fore. War is declared on the Puritanism of the 19th century and the entire Christian ethics of “asceticism.” The sexual instinct is set up as the primordial reality, underlying thought and culture. The Nietzschean celebration of the life of the body prepared European society, which had experienced the trauma of the First World War and the explosion of aggressive emotions, for the acceptance of psychoanalysis, which becomes the dominant intellectual trend of the 1920’s. The scientific work of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich and their pupils, the artistic discoveries of surrealists, Joyce, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and others, the new freedom of sexual mores characteristic of the culture of jazz and cabaret — all of these things placed the 1920’s under the banner of the so-called “sexual revolution.” The “basic instinct” is sought in theory and art, and extracted in pure form as the “libido.”

But, as already noted by many critics, in this pure form, the “basic instinct,” abstracted from all other human capabilities and driving forces, is nothing but an abstract scheme, the fruit of the analytic activity of reason. In the words of the English novelist and religious writer, C.S. Lewis, “Lust is more abstract than logic; it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness.”¹⁰ Moreover, the notion of an “abstract lust” emanates from a bookish, post-logical conception of desire, generated by the theorizing of the sexual revolution. The passionate dionysiac ecstasy of the “flesh as such” thus becomes like the burning fantasy of the onanist, who through pure mental effort separates this flesh from the great diversity of the individual spiritual and physical qualities of the desired “object.” On an individual level, such exaggerated fantasies may lead to the exhaustion of physiological potency. On the scale of Western civilization, it was a construction of still another level of hyper-reality: the artificial reproduction of bodily images, more bright, tangible, concentrated, hypnotically effective than the physical reality of the body, and therefore evoking mental ecstacy while eroding the properly physical component of attraction. Thomas Eliot noticed about Lawrence’s novels: “His struggle against over-intellectualized life is the history of his own over-intellectualized nature.”¹¹ As is the case with existentialism, the struggle against rationalism is an expression of over-rational approach, an abstraction of “existence of such” or “flesh as such.”

Critics often point to this internal contradiction of Lawrence’s creativity: “[H]is world of love [is] more strangely and purely abstract than that of any other great author. The more intense and urgent it is the more it is a world inside the head. . . . [T]he ‘phallic consciousness’ seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair, making Lady Chatterly one of the most inflexibly highbrow novels ever written.”¹² It is interesting that Bayley still uses the prefix “hyper” to characterize the intellectual component of Lawrence’s erotic images, while today we would rather identify them as “hypersexual.” In the first case, hyper means “super,” while in the second case “pseudo” or “quasi”: the critic’s implication is that Lawrence’s images are super-intellectual, but pseudo-sexual. This evolution of hyper‘s predominant meaning from super to pseudo constitutes the very core of hyper‘s dialectics, as will be discussed in the last section of this chapter.

Hypersexuality, as one might call this “rationally” abstracted and hyperbolised sexuality, emerges in the theories of Freud and in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, as well as, on a more basic level, in the upsurge in the circulation of pornographic writing. Pornography is the very bastion of hypersexuality which presents the condensed simulacra of sexuality: glossy photographs and screen images of unthinkable sex, of unimaginably large breasts, powerful thighs and violent orgasms.

Even the theory of psychoanalysis, for all its scientific caution and sophistication, reveals this hyper-sexual, and more broadly hyper-real, tendency. The world of the unconscious, proclaimed by Freud to be the primal human reality, was discovered or invented by consciousness, as its internal, in-depth “self-projection.” This invention assumed the proportions of another reality, preceding and exceeding the reality of consciousness itself. True to its ultimate destiny in the 20th century, consciousness thus creates something other than itself out of itself in order to surrender to this other as something primal and incontestably powerful. A more likely explanation of this phenomenon is that it is not at all a primary or “pre-existing” reality, opposed to consciousness from within, but that the unconscious is constructed by consciousness itself as a form of self-alienation of consciousness, which then sets itself up as a “super-real” entity dominating the latter. Hyperreality is a mode of self-alienation of consciousness. The Freudian unconscious thus becomes one of the most pronounced and hypnotically convincing projections of consciousness “outside itself.” As Derrida remarked, “the ‘unconscious’ is no more a ‘thing’ than it is a virtual or masked consciousness,” the continuously delayed consciousness which can never come to terms with itself.¹³

Even Freud admitted that the discovery of the unconscious as a force dominating consciousness must serve the overall increase in the power of consciousness itself. Psychoanalysis is a process of decoding and illuminating the unconscious, which would allow consciousness to regain control over this “boiling cauldron of desires.” In other words, consciousness discovers the unconscious in its ‘underground’ in order to resume dominance over it. Thus psychoanalysis is the method of penetrating into those spheres of consciousness which consciousness itself had declared to be beyond its penetration; through the symbols of the unconscious, consciouness plays hide-and-seek with itself.

As distinct from quantum mechanics, which recognizes its physical object to be prestructured by consciousness a priori, psychoanalysis sets up the conscious structuring of its psychical object as its final goal. But in both cases the physical and psychic realities prove to be at least partially projections or functions of the intellect, which observes and analyzes them. Perhaps psychoanalysis would benefit methodologically if it followed the example of quantum mechanics and recognized that the observed attributes of the unconscious were primarily determined by or even derived from the very conditions of its observation and description.

The significance of the sexual revolution, theoretically dominated by psychoanalysis, did not consist of the fact that organic life and instinctual life changed the modes of their existence from one being dominated by consciousness to one of dominance. That was only the ideological intention, the “wishful thinking” of the revolution. Where instinct dominated — in the intimate sphere, in real-life sexual relations — there it had always been dominant. The sexual revolution was in fact a revolution of consciousness, which had learned to produce life-like simulations of a “pure” sexuality, which were all the more “ecstatic” the more abstract and rational they became. The result of the sexual revolution was not so much a triumph of “natural” sex as a triumph of the mental over the sexual. Sex thus became a spectacle, a psychological commodity, reproduced in infinite phantasies of seduction, of hypersexual power, of a hyper-masculinity and a hyper-femininity. This “hyper,” which renders sexual images into mass products of popular culture, is a quality missing from nature. It is a quality introduced by a consciousness with infinite powers for abstraction and generalization.¹⁴

6. Hyper-Sociality

The four processes indicated so far, which led to the creation of hyperobjects — namely: the hyperparticles of quantum mechanics, the hypersigns of literary criticism, the hyperbeing of Existentialism and the hyperinstincts of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution — were processes taking place in the advanced Western societies of the 20th century. Within the communist world, however, similar processes of “hyperization” were taking place at the same time, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and these extended over the whole social sphere. Even communism itself, its theory and practice, could be viewed as the typically Eastern counterpart of the “hyper”-phenomenon.

Soviet society was obsessed with the idea of communality, of the communalization of life. Individualism was castigated as the gravest sin and a “cursed remnant of the bourgeois past.” Collectivism was proclaimed the highest moral principle. The economy was built on the communalization of private property, which came under the jurisdiction of the entire people. The communal was placed infinitely higher than the individual. Communal existence was considered to be prior and determinative in relation to individual consciousness, in full accordance with Karl Marx’s formula: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”¹⁵ In factories, in kolkhozes, in party meetings, in penal colonies, and in urban communal apartments, a new man “of communist future” was produced — a conscientious and effective cog in the gigantic wheel of the collectivist machine.

But this new type of sociality, infinitely tighter and denser in its imperatives compared to the earlier (pre-revolutionary) one, was nothing but another instance of hypersociality and a simulacrum of communality. In fact, the social bonds which unite people were rapidly being destroyed. Towards the middle of the 1930’s, even people in familial relationships, like husbands and wives, parents and children, could no longer trust one another in all respects; their Party loyalty and social obligations forced them to denounce and betray even their closest friends. The civil war and the process of collectivization destroyed the natural ties among members of the same nationalities and professional communities. “The most tightly-knit society in the world” (a cliché of Soviet propaganda) was an aggregate of frightened, alienated individuals and tiny, weak social units of families and friends, each of which was trying on his or her own to survive and to withstand state pressure.

Even the base of the entire state pyramid rested on the will of a single individual, who regulated according to his own needs or judgement the work of the whole gigantic social mechanism. And it is curious that it is precisely communism, with its will to communality, which always and everywhere gave rise to the personality cult: in Russia, in China, in North Korea, Roumania, Albania and Cuba. This is not accidental but is the expression of the hypersocial nature of the new society. Communism is not a natural, primary sociality, arising on the basis of biological and economic connections and needs, which unite people. It is a sociality constructed consciously, according to a plan, emanating from the individual mind of the “founder,” and enacted by the individual will of “the leader.”

The “pure” sociality of the communist type is similar to all those modernist models of “hypers” described above: the “pure” sexuality of psychoanalysis, the textuality of new criticism, and the elementariness of quantum mechanics. Communism thus represents some sort of hypnotic quintessence of the social body, which excludes and destroys everything individual and concrete by virtue of its exclusive abstractness — and for this very reason reveals, in the final analysis, its purely individualistic and speculative origin. If we conventionally qualify the pre-modernist state of civilization as “traditional,” then traditional sociality made provisions for the whole gammut of individual diversity and for private forms of property, just as traditional sexuality included the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual intimacy of two people, and just as the traditional work of art gave expression to the views of the author and the spirit of the age. But the “hyper,” by virtue of its artifically constructed character, is the “extract,” the “quintessence” as it were, of one particular property or sign to the exclusion of all others. Hypertextuality excludes all illusions of a separable, distinct content (opposed to form), hypersexuality excludes the notion of a “spiritual intimacy,” or “sexual relation.”¹⁶ In similar fashion, hypersociality excludes the “illusion of independence and personal freedom.” “Hyperization,” the process enacted by modernism and realized by postmodernism, achieves this exclusion precisely because it represents the hypertrophy of an abstract property, its heightening to an absolute, “super” degree.

7. Hyper-Materiality

The same applies to the basis of the basis of the Soviet Weltanschauung — “scientific materialism.” From its point of view, physical matter comes first, is primary while consciousness and spirit are secondary. Reality is through and through material and even thought represents only one form of the “movement of matter,” along with physical, chemical, and biological forms of the same movement. Such is the postulate of this philosophy, aspiring towards a completely sober, scientific approach to reality, verified by experience. “The world is moving matter, and nothing exists which would not be a specific form of matter, its property or a form of its movement. This principle took shape on the basis of the achievements of scientific cognition and Man’s practical mastery of Nature.”¹⁷

But as is well-known, in practice Soviet materialism never tried to conform to the laws of material reality but strove instead to refashion this reality. The material of nature was subjected to merciless exploitation, pollution and destruction, the material life of the people was brought into decline, the economy was subordinated not to the material laws of production but to entirely idealistic five-year plans and ideological edicts of the successive party congresses. As Andrei Bely remarked at the beginning of the 1930’s, the dominance of materialism in the USSR brought about the voiding of matter itself. Materialism was, in essence, a purely ideological construct, which raised the primacy of material into a theoretical absolute. In practice, materialism annihilated the material. “Matter,” which is thus aggrandized and separated from the principles of spirituality, consciousness and aim-orientedness, becomes a simulacrum of matter, destructive of matter as such. Just as hypersociality served the cult of the singular personality, so hypermateriality became a means of legitimating abstract ideas in their scholastically enclosed finality. The materiality of this materialism was thus the same “hyper” phenomenen as “collectivism,” “the libido,” “the elementary particle” and “the pure text.”

It is significant that out of the six spheres of “hyperization,” three are traditionally subsumed under the term “revolution”: the social, sexual and scientific. But three other “hypers” — hyperexistentialism, hypermaterialism and hypertextuality — can equally well be qualified by the term “revolution,” since they, too, developed in a movement of complete reevaluation of values: from essentialism to existentialism (the revolution in Western philosophy); from idealism to materialism (the revolution in Soviet philosophy); from “idea” and “content” to form and device and text (the revolution in criticism). To this we can add the revolution in the means of communication — the mass media revolution — which led to the birth of TV, video and computer technologies, producing a reality on the screen, perceived as more real than the world beyond the screen.

8. From Super to Pseudo

The very nature of the revolution appears in a new light — as the means or force productive of hyperphenomena. In its straightforward aims, the revolution is a coup — it sets up one antithesis in the place of another: matter in the place of thought, the collective in the place of the individual, the text in place of its content, the instinct in the place of the intellect. . . . But paradoxically it is revolution itself which demonstrates the impossibilty of reversal and expands, rather than eliminates, the power of the “suppressed.” That which is victorious in a revolution, gradually turns out to subordinate itself more and more to the very thing which it was supposed to have vanquished. Materialism has thus turned out to be much more detrimental to the notion of matter and much more scholastic and abstract than any idealistic philosophy anterior to it. Communism has turned out to be more favorable for the abolute affirmation of a singular, almighty individuality than any kind of individualism which preceded it. Literature reduced to a text and to a system of pure signs turns out to be much more dependent on the will of the critic than “traditional” literature, filled with historical, biographical and ideological contents. Matter, reduced to elementary particles, turns out to be a much more ideal entity, mathematically construed, than matter in the traditional sense of the term, having a certain inertia mass. Sexuality reduced to pure drive turns out to be much more cerebral and phantasmagorical than the ordinary sexual urge, which results in a total state of enamouredness in the physical, emotional and spiritual sense. It is the “purity,” the “quintessentiality” as the goal of all the above-named revolutions — pure sociality, pure materiality, pure sexuality and so on — which transforms them into pure antithesis and negations of themselves. That is why pure reality is ultimately a simulation — a simulacrum — of the property of “being real.”

Let us return to the initial meaning of the prefix “hyper.” Unlike the prefixes “over-” and “su[pe]r-,” it designates not simply a heightened degree of the property it qualifies, but a superlative degree which exceeds a certain limit. (The same meaning is found in words like “hypertonia,” “hypertrophy,” “hyperinflation,” “hyperbole” . . .) This excess is such an abundant surplus of the quality in question that in crossing the limit it turns into its own antithesis reveals its own illusionary nature. The meaning of “hyper,” therefore, is a combination of two meanings: “super” and “pseudo.” “Hyper” is such a “super” that through excess and transgression undermines its own reality and reveals itself as “pseudo.” By negation of a thesis, the revolutionary antithesis grows into “super” but finally exposes its own derivative and simulative character.

Certainly, it is neither the classic Hegelian dialectics of thesis and antithesis with subsequent reconciliation in synthesis, nor the modernist model of negative dialectics elaborated in the Frankfurt school (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), with an irreducible opposition of a revolutionary antithesis to a conservative thesis. Postmodernist dialectics (if it is still possible to combine such heterogeneous terms) implies neither reconciliation nor revolution but the internal tension of irony. Antithesis, pushed to an extreme, finds thesis inside itself, moreover, exposes itself as an extension and intensification of this very thesis. Revolutionary negation proves to be an aggrandizement, a hyperbole of what is negated. Antithesis circles back on thesis, as its disguised and exaggeratated projection.

In this way, materialism proves to be not a negation of idealism, but its most radical and militant form, ruthlessly destructive in regard to materiality. Communism proves to be not a negation of individualism, but its most voluntarist form ruthlessly destructive in regard to communality. The “hyper” is the “other” of the initial quality (“thesis”), its “second order” reality, its virtual intensity. The excess of quality turns into the illusion of this quality whereas its opposite which was intently negated actually becomes heightened.

Thus hypersociality heightens the power of an individual over society. It is a sociality raised to a political and moral imperative, to an absolute degree of “oughtness” or “duty,” which is no longer connected to any particular being, like mother, father, child, one’s neighbour and so on, but which, instead, destroys all such particulars in order to absolutize an ultimate individuality or particularity in the “personality cult.” The meaning of “hyper” in this instance subdivides further into the following: “super” and “pseudo.” Hypersociality is thus simultaneously a supersociality and a pseudosociality. That is, the social factor is subject to such a degree of intensification that it exceeds and negates all the particularities which initially made up the social. Thus the social becomes the virtual “other” of the social, which through its phantasmic growth fills a space which does not belong to it — the space of the particulars and, therefore, of the social itself, which it stifles.

Historically, intensity and illusion, “super” and the “pseudo” evolve in the development of “hyper” only gradually, as two successive stages. Its first “revolutionary” phase is represented by the “super.” This is the phase of the enthusiastic discovery or construction of new realities: of the socialist “supersociety,” of the emancipated “supersexuality,” of the elementary “superparticle,” of the self-referential “supertext,” of the self-propelled “supermatter.” The first half of the 20th century was mainly preoccupied with the revolutionary advancement of all these “super” phenomena. They germinated in the 1900’s to 1910’s in the theoretical soil of Marxism, Freudianism and Nietzscheanism; in the 1920’s and 1930’s, these “super” theories take on practical form — as the social, sexual, scientific, philosophical and critical revolutions.

This is followed in the second half of the 20th century by a gradual realization of the virtuality of all these ubiquitous superlatives. “Hyper” flips to its other side and second stage — “pseudo.” The transition from the “super” to the “pseudo,” from the ecstatic illusions of pure reality to the ironic realization of this reality as a pure illusion, accounts for the historical transformation of European and Russian culture in the 20th century which can also be described as the movement from modernism to postmodernism.

From this standpoint, Gorbachev’s perestroika (meaning literally, “reconstruction”) and Derrida’s deconstruction can be seen as isomorphic stages in the development of Soviet hyper-sociality and Western hyper-textuality.¹⁸ Both exemplify a transition from the “super” stage, manifested in the rise of communism and formalism (“new criticism”) in 1920’s-30’s, to the “pseudo” stage of 1970’s-1980’s. Both demonstrate that “structuredness” (in the form of ideally structured society or structuralist conception of textuality), which was the goal proclaimed by communist and formalist-structuralist movements, manifests only the illusion of social integrity or logical coherence. In the same way that Gorbachev revealed the illusory character of socialism, which proved to be a utopian communality of alienated individuals, Derrida exposed the illusory character of structuralism, of the very notion of “structure” which proved to be a utopian communality of actually decentered, dispersed, disseminated signs.

The “pseudo” phase is the common denominator for all the crises taking place at the end of the 20th century in place of the constructs of the early 20th century: social, scientific, philosophical and other revolutions. Under the sign of the “pseudo,” all of the following phenomena undergo a crisis: the crisis of structuralism in the human sciences, the crisis of the concept of elementariness in physics, the crisis of Leftist projects and Freudian Marxism in political ideology, the crisis of materialism, existentialism and positivism in philosopy, the demise of Soviet ideocratic system and communist society — such are the consequences of world-wide metamorphosis of “hyper” from “super” to “pseudo.” It is a crisis of the utopian consciousness as such, followed by the construction of parodic “pseudo”-utopian discourses.

In its historical evolution from the “super” to the “pseudo,” the “hyper” only now becomes revealed in its full significance, as the necessary connection and succession of its two phases, modernism and postmodernism. Modernism viewed its revolutionary accomplishments as a breakthrough into metaphysically “pure” reality of the super: supersexuality, supermateriality, supersociality — whereas postmodernism reveals the full range of the hyper’s dialectics, as an inevitable conversion of “super” to “pseudo.” From a postmodernist perspective, socialist revolution, sexual revolution, existentialism, materialism are far from being those liberational insights into the highest and “truest” reality they claimed to be. Rather they are intellectual machines designed for the production of pseudomateriality, pseudosexuality, pseudosociality, etc. Thus postmodernism finds in modernism not only the target of criticism, but also the ground for its own play with hyperphenomena. These hyperphenomena would be impossible if not for those revolutionary obsessions with the “super” that gave rise to the tangible “voids” and flamboyant simulacra of contemporary civilization, including non-sensical, empty forms of totalitarian ideologies which gave rise to Russian postmodernism.

In the final analysis, every “super” phenomenon sooner or later reveals its own reverse side, its “pseudo.” Such is the peculiarly postmodernist dialectics of “hyper,” distinct from both Hegelian dialectics of comprehensive synthesis and Leftist dialectics of pure negation. It is the ironic dialectics of intensification-simulation, of “super” turned into “pseudo.”

Every revolution of the first half of the 20th century is doubled and cancelled out with its own “post” of the century’s end. These “posts” are sprouting in all cultural spaces where the most radical changes and dramatic reversals occurred in the modernist era. Contemporary society is postmodern, postcommunist, post-utopian, post-industrial, post-materialist, post-existential, and post-sexual. At this point, the dialectics of “hyper,” which shaped the ironic wholeness of 20th century culture, comes to its complete self-realization.

Notes

*This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature, written by Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, and published by Berghahn Books (Providence, Rhode Island and Oxford). Publication is scheduled for Spring, 1997. The ISBNs are as follows: 1-57181-028-5 (cloth) and 1-57181-098-6 (paper). Thanks to Dr. Vladiv-Glover, who translated and edited the original Russian language version of this essay. It was then revised and extended by the author.

1. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988) 144-145.

2. Heinz R. Pagels, “Uncertainty and Complementarity,” The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, ed. Timothy Ferris (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991) 106.

3. As a reader will see, the concept of “hyper-textuality” in the context of this article has nothing to do with the “hyper-text” in commonly-understood, “electronic” sense of the word. “Hyper” is used here in the sense “super” and “pseudo” which relates it to the concepts of “hyper-sexuality,” “hyper-sociality,” etc.

4. George Steiner, Human Literacy, in The Critical Moment. Essays on the Nature of Literature (London, 1964) 22.

5. Umberto Eco, “The Analysis of Structure,” ibid. 138.

6. Saul Bellow, “Scepticism and the Depth of Life,” The Arts and the Public, ed. James E. Miller Jr. and Paul D. Herring (Chicago-London: U of Chicago P, 1967) 23.

7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground/The Double, Trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin Books, 1972) 16, 26, 27.

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Books, 1966) 256, 257.

9. Sartre 804.

10. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford UP, 1958) 196.

11. Cited in D.H. Lawrence: A Critical Anthology, ed. H. Coombes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973) 244.

12. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1960) 24, 25.

13. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 73.

14. In more detail the phenomena of hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality, though in different terms, are considered in my articles “Kritika v konflikte s tvorchestvom” (“Criticism in Conflict with Creativity”), Voprosy literatury (Moscow, 1975) 2: 131-168; and “V poiskakh estestvennogo cheloveka” (“In Search of a Natural Human Being”), Voprosy literatury, (1976), 8: 111-145. Both articles are included in my book Paradoksy novizny. O literaturnom razvitii XIX-XX vekov (“The Paradoxes of Innovation. On the Development of Literature in the l9th and 20th Centuries”) (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, l988). The affinity between these two modes of hyper (hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality) is formulated in the following way: “What is the general meaning of the paradoxes examined in the articles about ‘critical situation’ and ‘sexual revolution?’ In one case criticism attempts to extract from its object, literature, the most ‘literary’ essence and to isolate it from non-literature; as a result, it takes up the priority that was designed for the text purified from all ‘metaphysical’ contaminations. In another case, literature (and art in general) attempts to extract from its object, a human being, the most ‘natural’ essence, to purify it from all ‘intellectual’ contaminations; the result is the devastation of nature itself and the triumph of pure rationality” (Paradoksy novizny 249).

15. K. Marx. “Marx, Engels, Lenin: On Dialectical Materialism,” Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 43.

16. Compare Lacan’s “There is no sexual relation.” “A Love Letter (Une Lettre D’Amour),” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed J. Mitchell and J. Rose, trans. J. Rose (London: Macmillan, 1983) 149-161.

17. A Dictionary for Believers and Nonbelievers, trans. Catherine Judelson (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989) 336. The same formulation can be found in all Soviet textbooks of dialectical materialism.

18. Derrida’s own comments on the relationship between the concepts of “perestroika” and “deconstruction” can be found in his small book on his trip to Moscow in 1990. Zhak Derrida v Moskve: dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia (“Jacques Derrida in Moscow: a deconstruction of the journey”) (Moscow: RIK “Kul’tura,” 1993) 53.

September 22, 2013
Deleuze, Sense and the Event of AIDS

C. Colwell

Villanova University
ccolwell@ucis.vill.edu

. . . and the moral of that is — “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

–the Duchess.¹

AIDS, like cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our biological, social and moral existence together into a complex disease entity that is much more than the physical interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism. It presents those already marginalized individuals and communities most affected by it (so far) with personal and political challenges that threaten their social and their physical existence. And it presents the scientific and medical community with a challenge and puzzle that equals, if not surpasses, those that have preceded it. But it is a mistake to separate these two arenas (social/political and scientific) as they inscribe on one another their codes of sense and meaning in a hyper-dialectic of transcription and reverse transcription. It is, as such, a mistake to take the biological objects offered to us by science (specifically the HIV virus) as referents free from infection by meanings ideally supposed to be excluded from its domain. What I will attempt in the following is to mobilize Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sense, as he presents it in The Logic of Sense,² as a strategy for understanding the direction that the meaning of AIDS has taken and as a means of multiplying other directions that it might take.

As a preliminary sketch of the strategy that I will draw out of Deleuze I want to distinguish between three levels, strata or series that his discussion of sense will deal with: thoughts, things, and sense/events. Thoughts, insofar as they have meaning (are meaningful, make sense), are a function of language, i.e., the form and matter of their expression is that of language. But meaning is about or of things.³ As Michel Foucault notes in The Birth of the Clinic, the problem lies in the relation between words and things.⁴The Logic of Sense is directed at that gap between words and things in an attempt to understand what it is that bridges the gap, what inhabits the interval. Briefly, Deleuze uses the term “states of affairs” to refer to things and begins his analysis of words with propositions. Between the two he locates a realm of “sense” and “event” (which he equates as two sides of a plane without thickness). It seems to me that it is to the sense/event that we must direct our attention if we are to address the multi-faceted (social, political, economic and scientific) phenomenon of AIDS.

The first section of this essay is an explication of Deleuze’s notions of sense and event as a propadeutic to addressing the specific sense/event of AIDS. Deleuze’s approach is particularly useful here as it provides a conceptual strategy that accounts for the complex interactions between those arenas of meaning that are traditionally (and mistakenly) held separate while avoiding the mirror image errors of positivism and linguistic idealism to which much of post-Kantian philosophy of language is prone. In the second section I turn to the sense/event of AIDS, addressing in particular the social, political, economic and scientific dominance of the HIV model. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which this strategy allows us to pervert and transform the current hegemonic model of AIDS in all its facets. Let me stress at this point that I am using Deleuze’s work as a strategy here instead of as a conceptual model. As will become clear towards the end of this essay I am less concerned with developing a “better” conceptual model of AIDS than I am with perverting the dominant model(s).

I. Sense/Event

Although, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes,⁵ Deleuze largely bypasses those thinkers who have treated the question of sense in the last century, it is worth briefly addressing Gottlob Frege’s analysis of sense. In his seminal paper “On Sense and Reference (Meaning)”⁶ Frege distinguishes between the “mode of presentation” of a sign (sense) and that which the sign designates (reference). His purpose here is to give an adequate account of the functioning of propositions that contain signs that either have no referent (e.g., propositions in which “Odysseus” is the subject) or cases in which propositions containing different signs have the same referent (“morning star,” “evening star,” and Venus). While Frege rehearses a form of neo-positivism and privileges reference (due to its truth value function) to the detriment of sense there is one point worth noting here. Frege asserts that sense has a certain objectivity, that it is not subjective since it can be, and is, the property of more than one thinker. As such, Frege equates sense with thought (here thought is not the result of a thinker’s mental activity but that which a thinker “grasps”) and positions it between the subjective ideas of thinkers and the objects to which thought refers.

The striking thing is that Frege moves the consideration of sense out of the realm of both subjects and objects. That is, a philosophy of sense is neither a philosophy of the subject (phenomenology/existentialism) nor a philosophy of the object (positivism), although in the end it is on the side of the object, the referent, that Frege positions himself.⁷ This notion of sense as residing in the “in-between” is one of the two notions I want to retain from Frege. As to the second, Deleuze plays on the multiple meanings of the French word sens, “meaning,” “direction” or sense as a faculty of perception. While I will mobilize all of these meanings I also want to retain Frege’s use of the term as a “mode of presentation.”

Deleuze arrives at the realm of sense from two directions, one beginning with words or propositions, the other beginning with things or states of affairs. From the standpoint of words, he begins with three relations within the proposition: denotation, (which links the proposition to particular things); manifestation (which links the proposition to the beliefs, intentions, etc., of a speaker); and signification (which links the proposition to general or universal concepts) (LS 12-14).⁸ The problem arises when we seek to understand which of these relations is the primary one, i.e., which functions as the ground of the other two. Depending on one’s standpoint, each of the three relations offers itself as primary. In speech (parole), manifestation is primary since it is the “I” which begins (to speak). This is, of course, Descartes’ position in which the cogito functions as the ground of all propositions; it is the I which, e.g., denotes this piece of wax (LS 14). In language (langue) however, it is signification which is primary. In language, propositions appear “only as premise[s] or conclusion[s]” (LS 15); here “this is a piece of wax” is a conclusion that subsumes its object under a universal category. (Deleuze does not offer the standpoint from which denotation would appear as primary but it is obvious enough: the “this-now-here” of sense certainty.)⁹ Deleuze argues that when we seek the primary relationship we find ourselves in a circle, “the circle of the proposition” (LS 17). None of these relations will function as the principle of the proposition, as the condition of the possibility of the proposition, as the link or relation between the proposition and what is external to the proposition.¹⁰

That relation is the fourth dimension of the proposition, sense. It is “the expressed of the proposition . . . an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition” (LS 19). Note that Deleuze reprises Frege’s notion that sense lies in between, though now it lies in between propositions and states of affairs instead of in between ideas and objects. Sense functions as the condition of the possibility of denotation, manifestation and signification (and thus of truth value — but also of paradox), as the linkage between propositions and events and, as such, between ideas and objects. Sense is the “coexistence of two sides without thickness . . . the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs” (LS 22). That is to say that sense is a characteristic of both words and things. It lies in between but is also at the surface of both and identified with neither (it is identified with the event to which I shall return to below).

To a certain extent Deleuze leaves sense undefined and this necessarily so, since the sense of a proposition can never be an object of denotation or signification of the same proposition, as it is always presupposed in denotation and signification (LS 29-30).¹¹ That is, when one makes the sense of a proposition (P₁) explicit in another proposition (P₂) the second (P₂) always has another sense which is itself presupposed and so on in an infinite regress. As such, any proposition that attempts to offer a definition of sense will itself require another sense.¹² Moreover, sense is a property of expressions that have no denotation, manifestation, signification or expressions in which these functions miscarry, i.e., absurd and nonsensical statements. We get a clearer idea of sense by seeing how Deleuze distinguishes it from good sense and from common sense and how he links it with nonsense. Good sense is the sense of signification (LS 76). It is the sense that is ordered in one direction only, the sense of linear thinking.¹³ It is the sense, as Deleuze says, that “foresees” (LS 75), that is able to extrapolate from the present and the past in order to predict the becoming of the future based on past and current models. It is “good” sense precisely because it identifies the past, present and future as the Same, as a repetition of the Same in the face of the Other (a repetition that denies the possibility of the repetition of difference). Common sense is the sense that governs denotation (particularly the application of signification in denotation: this is a piece of wax) and manifestation (LS 77-8). It “identifies and recognizes” (LS 77). It identifies and recognizes both the self, the “I” that manifests, and the things which the self experiences. The two function complementarily as the identity of common sense provides a beginning and end (and thus a direction) for the movement of good sense and the action of good sense in bringing the manifold of experience under the categories of general signification provides the matter without which identity would remain empty (LS 78). Sense, itself, underlies both good and common sense in that it allows for multiple directions other than the one that any particular manifestation of good sense adopts, and, as the virtual ground of all actual identities, it potentially fragments any particular identity formed by common sense.

Nonsense, absurdity, expressions which violate the rules of good and common sense, have sense too, i.e., are sensical and sensible. “A round square” and “I am every name in history” respectively denote an impossible object, equate two inconsistent categories and fragment the identity of the one who speaks. Yet they nonetheless make sense and function expressively. The best example of this is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky:

Twas brillig and the slithey toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe¹⁴

Even prior to Humpty Dumpty’s definition of these terms this poem functions, it expresses . . . something. The notion of sense that Deleuze elaborates is one that grounds the functioning of language in its widest range, that includes nonsense and the absurd rather than excluding such expressions to fit a theory. Nonsense is not the absence of sense; it is sense that fails to result in denotation or signification or manifestation. The import here is that (non)sense¹⁵ grounds the possibility of meanings, directions of thought, of research, and modes of presentation that are cut off by the illusory clarity of good and common sense.¹⁶

Moreover, because the Jabberwocky makes sense it functions to transport us into the event of the slaying of the Jabberwock. And it is through the event that the second avenue to the realm of sense lies. Before examining Deleuze’s theory of the event it is worth pausing a moment to look at what counts as events. Michel de Certeau says that “the event is first and foremost an accident, a misfortune, a crisis.”¹⁷ Writing on Deleuze, Foucault speaks of the event as “a wound, a victory-defeat, death,” the last being the “best example,”¹⁸ while in the context of Nietzsche he says it is a “reversal of a relationship of forces” in response to “haphazard conflicts.”¹⁹ Deleuze takes a similar position on the event, considering it primarily as some sort of calamity. My point in raising this issue is to note the emphasis in Deleuze’s work since in what follows I will adopt a wider view of what counts as an event. It seems to me that the synchronic state of a science functions as a state of affairs as it is the set of static relations between bodies (theories, methodologies, experimental technologies, laboratory practices, objects of knowledge, etc.) in an immediate present. As such, it will give rise to its own sense/event.

Events are the effects of the interactions of bodies but are not themselves bodily, corporeal (LS 4). Deleuze distinguishes events from states of affairs, which are the static set of relations that bodies, things, are found in at a particular point in time. When bodies interact they produce effects, events, which are not coextensive with themselves, insofar as they are states of affairs, and which do not inhere in the same time. The time of states of affairs is rectilinear time, a time of “interlocking presents,” that flows in a single direction, from past to future but in which, strictly speaking, past and future do not exist except as boundaries of the present (LS 4, 61-2). The time of the event, however, is a time without a present, a time of an unlimited past and an unlimited future, a time that is expressed in the infinitive form of verbs (LS 5, 61-2). To a great extent, the distinction is between the brute existence of physical things (both in themselves and in their static relations to one another) and the subsistence of an incorporeal entity that floats on the surface of things and constitutes the movement and duration of their becoming and of their sense.

Take disease. As a state of affairs we have a relation between two bodies, two organisms, an infectious organism and a human body. At any particular moment in the course of this disease there will be various states of affairs, an infection, the reproduction and multiplication of the microbe, a fever, an immunological response, a recovery, an exacerbation, etc. But the disease as an event does not inhere in the present. What is in the present is, on the one hand, biological interactions between infectious and infected organisms and, on the other hand, malaise, pain, suffering, etc. The disease, however, is always just past, and yet to come, more appropriately, it is always becoming, always expressed in the infinitive of the verb. As Lecercle notes, the actors in the midst of the event do not experience it as the event, as a single identity, even though the event inheres in all of their actions.²⁰ Insofar as we perceive the person with a disease, insofar as we sense her as having this disease, insofar as we treat and investigate her disease our attention is directed to something more than the body before our eyes, our treatment protocols, our instruments and our diagnostic devices, more than the series of bodies that present themselves to the medical gaze. Our technologically extended and enhanced senses are directed to the event of the disease, an event that is manifested in the body in front of us but which is never immediately present to us either temporally or spatially.

This second path to the realm of sense leads through the event because Deleuze equates sense and the event, indeed, sense is a “pure event” (LS 19, cf. 22). Sense and the event both lie in the “in-between” of words and things. They are the same “thing” from different aspects, two sides of a plane without thickness. Each aspect adheres to its respective dimension, sense to words, events to things, and to each other, sense/event. The in-between realm of sense/events is the place, or, rather, “non-place,” in which words and things mingle, rub up against each other, consorting with one another to produce effects. The issue of causality is important here since there are, at least, three series of cause-effect relations. The first series operates at the level of things, bodies producing effects on other bodies, changes in the states of affairs of those bodies (the scalpel that cuts, the organism that infects). The second series is that in which the interaction of bodies produces events (being cut, being sick). These events are ideational or incorporeal entities that have “logical or dialectical attributes” (LS 5), i.e., entities that have sense and which can generate meaning.

The third series is that of the interaction of events themselves, in which events produce effects on each other. The causal relation here is a weak one, Deleuze calls it a “quasi-cause” (LS 6), partly because there is no necessary relation between cause and effect among events, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing whether the causes that produce the effects in events are those that arise from things or from other events. Insofar as Deleuze depicts events as hovering over things we may describe two horizontal series of causal relations (among things and among events) and one vertical series that flows from things to events.

Following this it seems to me that we can describe two other series of causal relations. The first (or fourth) is the horizontal relation between propositional structures. As Georges Canguilhem says, “theories never proceed from facts . . . [t]heories arise only out of earlier theories . . . facts are merely the path — and it is rarely a straight path — by which one theory leads to another.”²¹ Lastly, there is a transverse relation that moves from propositional structures to the level of the sense/event in which our ability to make explicit the sense of events can produce effects on meaning (with the proviso that we always presuppose another sense in doing so). It is by this avenue that we may produce transformations in the event itself. However, we must describe these relations as “quasi-causal” in nature because there is no strict necessity in operation that links these causes and effects. That is, good sense is not able to predict the effects of making the sense of an event explicit and common sense is not able to govern the denotation or manifestation of identities that arise as the effects of doing so.

In order to bring this conceptual strategy to bear on the event of AIDS I need to turn to one last notion in Deleuze, that of “actualization.” In a discussion of Henri Bergson’s theory of evolution²² Deleuze opposes the virtual-actual distinction to the possible-real distinction in order to show that actualization is the “mechanism of creation” (B 98). Here, the relation between the possible and the real is attributed to a “theological model of creation” in which the real is simply one of the many possibles, all of which resemble the real, that has been brought into existence.²³ Actualization, on the other hand, is the process in which the virtual differentiates itself in the active creation of something new, an actual which does not resemble the virtual from which it arose (B 97). The best example here is the relation between an organism and the genetic code of its DNA. It is through a process of actualization that the virtual structure of a strand of DNA generates an organism, the organism (phenotype) bearing no resemblance to its genotype.

We are now in a position to state the relation between sense/events and the meaning of propositions (denotation, manifestation, and signification as well as what Frege would term reference). Sense is the ground or condition of meaning, and thus of truth, but it is not a ground in the sense that it simply covers a wider range of possibilities, i.e., it does not stand in relation to reference as the possible to the real.²⁴ Instead, it has the relation of virtual to actual, meanings are generated by actualizing lines of difference from sense/events. This opens up a second possibility for transformation, this time the transformation of the propositional meaning of the event. Precisely because meaning does not stand in a relation of resemblance to sense, or to the event, the sense/event grounds multiple possible meanings.

We should note at this point that Deleuze’s notion of the sense/event does not function as either an epistemology or a metaphysics. That is, it does not function as a method for distinguishing between the truth and falsity of a particular proposition or set of propositions. And it does not provide us with a foundation for distinguishing between reality and appearance. Instead, the argument is that for any event, multiple meanings are possible, that the event can be actualized in multiple ways. And this allows for the possibility that the event of AIDS can be actualized in another way than it has been so far. Again, this is why I take Deleuze’s work to be strategic rather than conceptual model building. Rather than offering us a new way to construct the event it shows us the possibility of re-eventualizing the event, of setting it in motion again, of producing a thaw in the frozen river of “knowledge” that has fixed the event along a particular line of actualization.

II. The Sense/Event of AIDS

With the general outlines of this conceptual strategy in place I will now turn to the event of AIDS. What I will show is that the relations of (quasi)causality and lines of actualization of AIDS run through the in-between of sense/events in an extremely complex manner. The essential point here is that AIDS is not a single phenomenon, a repetition of the same, but a multiplicity whose identity is, at best, illusory. Following that I will argue that we must turn our attention to the senses of these events in order to adequately confront them.

My concern here is with the scientific, economic, political and social hegemony of the HIV model of AIDS and the correlative emphasis on the search for a cure/vaccine to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease. Since 1984 it has been taken as a fact that HIV is the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS.²⁵ I say “taken as a fact” not because there are no qualified dissenters from this view but because HIV has become the dominant model in the four registers listed at the beginning of this paragraph to the exclusion of all other possibilities. HIV may well be the sole cause of AIDS (and if we are lucky we will eventually find out whether or not this is the case) but the troubling aspect is that other avenues of research and treatment (not to mention prevention) have been effectively marginalized. Given the stakes, to say “troubling” is to say the least.

The dominance of this model is due to a number of reasons both within and outside the domain of what we nominally call science. “Science” is taken to be that language which accurately represents the world in a universalized system of signification in which signs refer to independent objects and the system of their relations to one another. It appears as an empirical endeavor in which the facts of the matter provide their own conceptual structure by means of revelation to sufficiently rigorous and insightful researchers. While this image has been criticized by a number of authors (e.g., Paul Feyerabend, Foucault, Thomas Kuhn) it remains the dominant model socially, politically, economically and scientifically (by this last I mean that scientists themselves largely retain this image of their work). With regard to AIDS the point is that scientific propositions that identify HIV as the cause of AIDS appear to establish a universal and uncontestable reference free of significant effects of the sense of those propositions, the mode of presentation of those propositions and the mode of presentation of the theories and observations which generate those propositions.

But if Deleuze is right, the always unexpressed sense of these propositions, theories, observations and the multiplicity of correlative and contiguous propositions, what Foucault calls a discursive formation, functions as their ground, as the virtuality from which they are actualized. Let me now turn to what I take that sense or senses, at least in part, to be.

As Donna Haraway has shown, immune system discourse, and correlatively, disease discourse, are structured around the concept of identity and individuality where the primary task of the immune system is the differential identification of Self and Non-self and the defense of the (self-same) individual against foreign intruders.²⁶ Political/military metaphors are not misplaced here as they permeate immune system discourse as they have done the discourse of both disease and the body for at least the last two centuries. On the one hand, epidemics such the one of cholera in Paris in the 1830’s were perceived as foreign invasions (and continue to be: syphilis sent back in the blood of soldiers returning from foreign wars, AIDS is the invasion of the heterosexual community by the gay or drug abusing communities).²⁷ On the other hand, the body’s cells were described as closed, individual organisms with their own borders and identity at both the advent of cellular theory and well into this century.²⁸ The sense of both immune system and disease discourse adheres to the surface of the propositions that deploy the terms Self, Non-self, individual, identity, border, attack, defense.

Moreover, the shift from vitalism/mechanism models of life to the information system model of DNA has not produced any fundamental change in the political/military sense of medicine and biology. All that has changed is the conception of the attack/defense structures. With the development of genetic models of heredity and the advent of DNA, the body (and all other forms of life) becomes the phenotypical expression of a genotype, a code, carried in the recesses of the cells that constitute it. Disease becomes a battle between information systems, those of the body and of the disease organism with a third system, that of medicine, intervening on the side of the body. This sense of disease becomes particularly apparent in both AIDS and auto-immune diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus). Part of the genetic code is the program for the development of defense mechanisms, the immune system, but precisely because it is a program it carries the possibility of errors occurring both within the code itself and in its translation. Auto-immune diseases (which can be either congenital defects in the code or defects produced by infectious agents or a combination of the two in which a pathogen activates a dormant gene) are caused by “errors” in the code that turn the body against itself in a physiological death drive. In this context HIV appears as an alien infiltrator that invades the body’s most fundamental structure and perverts the code that produces and maintains its identity. If auto-immune diseases are evidence of traitors within the body then HIV appears as a subversive foreign agent that recruits and produces traitors. And it appears as such precisely because of the way the sense/event of medicine and disease has been actualized.

Modern medicine is constituted largely as a discipline of intervention that confronts disease as an entity to be combatted and defeated. For the most part even preventative measures are simply efforts to identify disease at an early stage in order to initiate a counter-attack before a beachhead is secured. This is due both to the dominance of the germ model of disease, disease as an invader, and to the institutional reorganization of medicine that Foucault has dubbed the “birth of the clinic.” The clinic or hospital is where the body is placed in a position of hyper-individuation as it is removed from its socio-environmental context in favor of a controlled, universally reproducible setting in which the environment has no effect on the disease process other than those intentionally produced by medical intervention (in the ideal scenario²⁹) in order to isolate the disease process from all the other processes in which the body is enmeshed. The clinic enjoys a privileged position in the medical community; it is the site of teaching, the site of research, the site with the highest concentration of technology and new treatment modalities, the site where those on the cutting edge of the profession want to be. As such, it becomes the standard, the norm, for the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease.

The production of the ideal, neutral setting in which to isolate and treat diseases and the diseased has as its correlate the construction of the ideal, neutral social environment. The structure of medicine as interventional and the correlative invention of the neutral site for the study and treatment of disease constitutes the body’s environment, insofar as it is of medical interest, as either neutral or threatening. Either the environment acts as a factor or co-factor in the production of disease or it remains neutral. That is to say that social environments only appear as potentially invasive, as alien, to the body insofar as they appear at all as a factor in the generation or transmission of disease. In the social, political and economic structures of the western world the neutral environment (outside the clinic) is the white, bourgeois, suburban and rural domain of monogamous heterosexuals.

Lastly, we may note the long genealogy that has linked sex and sexuality to pathology. As Foucault has ably shown, sex and sexuality have been constituted as harboring within them an always present pathological element that can manifest itself along moral, psychological, and physiological lines in the individual generating a danger to both the individual and the species.³⁰ Sex is an autochthonous danger to the defense of the Self precisely because it is a drive within oneself (one’s Self) that violates the defensive borders of the Self by exposing the body to an Other, to a Non-self that harbors a potential invader. Sexuality is always, at least potentially, a double agent opening the back door of the citadel and admitting foreign insurgents.

These are some of the senses into which the disease we now call AIDS irrupted. The sense/event of AIDS mingles and interacts with the sense/events of medicine, biology, the immune system, sexuality and the environment in the in-between. It is here that it becomes, as Avital Ronnell has said, an historical event rather than a natural calamity.³¹ As an historical event it is caught up in the genealogy of these other sense/events that allows its propositional determination not only as a viral infection that disrupts the functioning of the immune system but also as an alien invader (whether it be from the “dark continent” or from the [gay and/or promiscuous] “aliens” among us), as moral retribution for abominations of nature, as divine retribution for the same, as “nature’s way of cleaning house,” etc.³² The construction of AIDS as an essentially gay disease (and hence one that affects those undeserving of “our” full social, political, economic and scientific intervention in the cause of eliminating “their” suffering) is not simply the result of imaginations fueled by ressentiment (although this element cannot and must not be ignored). It is a complex of propositions whose ground lies in the realm of sense/events. That is, all of the actualizations of all of the sense/events, all of the propositional meanings that arise from the sense/events, outlined above enter in to the constitution of AIDS as a “gay” disease. Moreover, the search for a singular and self-same cause of the disease elicits the construction of a singular and self-same “alien” presence that imports the disease into “our” midst — despite however illusory both of those identities are.

But this ground in sense/events does not have the relation of resemblance to its current manifestation as the possible does to the real. It is a virtuality, or series of virtuals, from which one line of actualization has been realized. The sense/event(s), along with the mixture of sense/events in which it is immersed, is not determinative of any particular line of actualization in the strong sense. Sense/event as ground of both sense and nonsense, truth functional statements and the absurd, is the ground of multiple avenues of meaning; it does not fix meaning, it enables it (that is, it enables both its fixation and the perversion of that fixation).

At this point, let me return to the question of the dominance of the HIV model of AIDS. Despite the fact that prominent researchers, Robert Root-Bernstein and Peter Duesberg among others, have provided significant evidence and coherent arguments that HIV is not a sufficient, and may not be a necessary, cause of AIDS there has been little research done along the lines that they suggest.³³ Indeed, those who have dared to publicly argue along these lines have had their research funds cut off. The reasons for this are multifold. Economically, the HIV model has generated enormous income for the manufacturers of HIV tests and antiviral drugs. Politically, it has allowed governments to claim that they are acting responsibly and to assure a frightened populace that the cause has been found with the concomitant implication that the risk has been decreased, that the scientific will to knowledge continues to have the power to protect them. Socially, it has strengthened the identification of the threat with body fluids of those already marginalized and feared and furthered their exclusion in the interests of the safety of the “general population.” Its hegemony lies in its positing of a singular and identifiable Non-self that functions as an invader and internal insurgent as opposed to multiple-antigen models that propose complex interactions in which no single, and thus identifiable, enemy is present.

To be sure, AIDS research is not entirely monolithic — if it were, neither Roots-Bernstein’s nor Duesberg’s work would be known or published. Nonetheless, such research is marginalized to the extent that the social-political-economic actualization of AIDS has effectively fixed HIV as the necessary and efficient cause. And this actualization functions in a spiral manner insofar as our social, political and economic capital is invested in scientific research on HIV which then provides support for the continuing reinvestment of capital.

Moreover, the hegemony of the HIV model focuses the direction of research toward the discovery of a magic bullet, a cure or vaccine that will overthrow the disease and render it harmless. Because the social environment is presented as either neutral or hostile it appears as something to be defeated instead of a milieu that can be transformed. And as the environment of AIDS has been actualized as sexual in nature, sex becomes an enemy to be defeated either through abstinence or its imprisonment within the legitimized perimeter of monogamous heterosexuality. This mode of presentation has functioned to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease by lowering a cone of silence over the discourse of safer sex and IV drug use.

That is to say that the fixation of one line of actualization, the one that runs through HIV, has established this retrovirus as a functional referent for both the popular imagination and the economically and politically legitimized scientific/medical community. It establishes a single meaning of the disease, single direction for research, a single perception of the infected and diseased. And it does so because it is both good sense and common sense, a means of foreseeing the future (hopefully) and a means of identifying the threat. It stabilizes and freezes the event, shifting us from the uncertainty of becoming of the event to the safety of the being of the referent.

Following this it seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about how we can respond to the sense/event. On the one hand, we have the project of counter-actualization.³⁴ By making the sense of the event explicit we return to the virtuality of the sense/event, to the series of virtual singularities that make up the sense/event, in an attempt to allow the formation of new lines of actualization, the formation of new structures of propositional meaning, new designations, manifestations, significations and referents. The sense/event is repeated but as a repetition of difference in place of the repetition of the same. On the other hand, the mobilization of virtual singularities holds open the possibility of transformations at the level of the sense/event itself, at the level of the interactions of the various sense/events that underlie, overlap, and interconnect with the sense/event of AIDS. These two operations are not fundamentally distinct in any manner. Instead, they are two ways of thinking about the mining of sense and the effects it might produce.

To return to the sense/event of AIDS, to the realm of the in-between, is to re-eventualize sense and the event, to set them moving again, to find in its becoming the multiplicity of other possibilities, of other lines of actualization, to other lines of research, to the possibility that AIDS is not the unitary and univocal disease that it is presently constructed as. The means to do so is by taking care of the sense, by mining the realm of sense/events in order to make its sense explicit, by remaining suspicious of the senses we presuppose in making sense of that sense. To do so is to produce, hopefully, shifts in the sense of AIDS, shifts in the mode of presentation of AIDS, shifts in the direction of AIDS and shifts in the meaning of AIDS.

Our project, then, is one of counter-actualization, undoing the lines of actualization in order to re-eventualize the virtual elements of the sense/events. The problem that appears to arise at this point is that of how we are to prevent other noxious lines of actualization, new lines that continue to increase suffering rather than decrease it. But this is a false problem or, more accurately, a bad formulation of the problem that supposes that we have control over the lines of actualization or over sense/events, that our causal interactions are more than quasi-causes whose effects we have the good sense to predict and the common sense to identify and control. But it is precisely the case, as Foucault has shown us so well, that this is the sort of control, the sort of power/knowledge, that we do not have. The best we can do is to pervert the actualizations that we find and wait to see what is actualized in the wake. The tactics and strategies of counter-actualization, of the mining of sense, are those of the nomad, the guerilla fighter, the terrorist. Counter-actualization is a street fight that attacks sedentary blockages and obstacles in order to set things moving again and then waits (im)patiently for new sedimentations, new blockages, new obstacles, new struggles.³⁵

We cannot simply take care of the sense and allow the words to take care of themselves. The Duchess is wrong there. Indeed, taking care of the words is a part of taking care of the sense. And if we do not take care of the sense, the words will surely take care of us.

Notes

I wish to extend my thanks to Constantin V. Boundas for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to Lisa Brawley of Postmodern Culture and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) 68.

2. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Hereafter cited in the text as LS.

3. This is, of course, too simplistic. But I leave aside here the reflexive issues of meanings that are about thought, language, meaning itself, etc.

4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) xi. See also The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970): the original title of this work is Les mots et les choses.

5. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass (La Salle: Open Court, 1985) 92.

6. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Meaning,” trans. Max Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) 56-78, hereafter cited in the text as SR. There is some debate over whether to translate the term “Bedeutung” (as Frege uses it) as “meaning” or “reference.” Following J.N. Mohanty’s practice I shall use “reference” at those places where I do not use both terms. See Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982) 43-4.

7. Michel Foucault, introduction, The Normal and the Pathological, by Georges Canguilhem, trans. Carolyn Fawcett, (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 8; cf. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 175-6. Nor is the philosophy of sense a philosophy of the concept for Deleuze, but of the conditions in which concepts appear.

8. We may note here that, on Frege’s terms, denotation and signification fall under the heading of reference while manifestation is a form of sense.

9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 58-66. The relation in which the denotation of a pure this breaks down nearly immediately into an dialectic between the I and the this-now-here. See Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) for reasons why Deleuze would ignore Hegel at this point.

10. Philip Goodchild offers a lucid description of this problem in “Speech and Silence in the Mumonkan: An Examination of the Use of Language in the Light of the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,” Philosophy East and West 43.1 (1993): 1-18.

11. Lecercle argues that the positive definition of sense is that of a paradoxical element that links the series of signifiers and the series of signifieds, always in excess in the first and lacking in the second. See Lecercle, 101-2, cf. LS 48-51. AIDS is always excessive in the series of signifiers that are deployed around it (see note to Paula Treichler below) and remains lacking in a number of ways as a signified.

12. This creates what in Platonic scholarship is known as the third man problem. One might argue that despite this sense could still be defined. However, I take Deleuze to argue that sense is an aleatory function that cannot be captured in any proposition precisely because it cannot be contained within language.

13. See Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, in particular Part 3 in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), 12-7.

14. Carroll, Looking Glass 117.

15. Cf. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 64, on non-being. Nonsense, on this view, is not the negation or absence of sense but sense as a problematic.

16. One might well wonder at this point what nonsense has to do with the event of AIDS, particularly with the scientific and medical aspects of the disease. What the history of science shows us is that propositions that had denotations or significations (or referents) in the past (under previous paradigms or in previous discursive formations) no longer have those referents. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, propositions that currently have referents did not have them in the past. Foucault points out that Gregor Mendel’s statements regarding hereditary traits were not truth-functional in 19th century biology (“Discourse on Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon Books, 1972] 224). They were taken to be absurd or nonsense and in the context of the dominant scientific theories of the day they were just that, even though they are presently not only truth functional but, to a certain extent, true. My point is that sense and nonsense function at a level prior to what Foucault would describe as the underlying order that structures an episteme. This is why I have not referred to Foucault’s discussion of the in-between in The Order of Things, xx-xxi.

17. Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 205.

18. Foucault 173-4.

19. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 154.

20. Lecercle 98.

21. Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, ed. Francois Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 1994) 164. Italics in the original.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Hereafter cited in the text as B.

23. John Rajchman, Philosophical Events (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 160.

24. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 153.

25. Mirko Grmek, History of AIDS, trans. Russell Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 68.

26. Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of the Self in Immune System Discourse,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 203-30.

27. See Francois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); and Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

28. Canguilhem 168.

29. This is of course an ideal as there are always nosocomial infections, to name but one unintended effect.

30. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).

31. Avital Ronnell, “A Note on the Future of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update),” Public⁸ (Toronto: Public Access, 1993) 56.

32. See Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Criticism(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 31-70, for a discussion of the multiplicity of meanings that have been generated around AIDS.

33. See Robert Root Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: The Free Press, 1993). Let me note here that there are serious problems with the sense of Root-Bernstein’s own argument which tends to portray certain sexual activities as inherently dangerous. Nevertheless, the multiple-antigen-mediated-autoimmunity (MAMA) model answers a number of questions that HIV model does not, in particular why some individuals have been infected with HIV for over ten years without developing AIDS or any symptoms thereof.

34. I take this term from Constantin Boundas.

35. One of the most remarkable examples of this sort of activity is the activity of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). See Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990).

September 22, 2013
“God has No Allergies”: Immanent Ethics and the Simulacra of the Immune System
Adrian Mackenzie

Sydney University
adrian.mackenzie@philosophy.su.edu.au

“[T]he science of life always accommodates

a philosophy of life.”¹

Conventional approaches to bioethics long for a purified set of principles in order to guide the application of scientific knowledges of the body — the life sciences — to individual “cases.” In the realm of bioethics, the possibility that these knowledges might themselves constitute entities such as the individual, or the possibility that the individual body might itself be something other than the more or less governable a-historical object of technoscientific action, awakens a kind of horror autotoxicus. Nor do the prevalent modes of ethical discourse react kindly to the possibility that the “living” body of an individual is also a self, an actor within a complicated set of narratives, codes and apparatuses whose various registers — medical, economic, racial, sexual, religious, and so on — intersect. In short, conventional bioethical discourses refuse to acknowledge that, as Emmanual Levinas has written, “the body is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of `giving meaning’ to each thing; it lives as this contestation.”²

Traditional bioethics disappoints us insofar as it overlooks the ways the body contests the prerogatives of consciousness, contests reason and self-identity. Instead of opening onto the possibility of divergent ethea, bioethics’ universalizing adjudicative principles legitimate the biomedical normalization of differences by trying to deal only with the moral rights of the rational self and by leaving the differing character of embodiment — a most profound aspect of the ethical habitat — aside. In its separation of scientific theory and “ethical” practice, and in its unwillingness to transit any borders into the epistemological territory of science, conventional bioethics misapprehends the active and ambivalent role of technoscientific intervention, an intervention which both produces these crucial differences in embodiment and participates in their effacement. Traditional bioethics allergically responds to the ethical issue — the maintenance of ethos, of embodied differences, of the character and habits of individual bodies.

Bios: nomó
```
"Now it is over life, throughout its
unfolding,
that power establishes its dominion."³
```
Foucault’s well-known description of a shift during the last two centuries from sovereign to disciplinary power or “bio-power” implies a displacement in the substance of ethics.⁴ In diverse discourses and domains, it becomes increasingly obvious that the presumed exclusion of ethics from the theoretical-pragmatic complex of science itself, from the very concrete operations and forces of technoscientific discourses engaging living bodies, significantly limits the relevance and effectiveness of the traditional notion of ethics.⁵

As Donna Haraway describes it, “the power of biomedical language . . . for shaping the unequal experience of sickness and death for millions is a social fact deriving from on-going heterogeneous social processes.” ⁶ The morality-displacing power of biomedical discourse and practice does not confine itself to sickness and death, but branches out into the normalization of whole populations. At many different scales and under different aspects — birth, death, sexual relations, work, fitness, stress, leisure, and so on — life is targeted by the vectors of biomedical intervention.

Again, Foucault makes this point succinctly when he writes of the emergence of bio-power: “For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time; amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.”⁷ The propagation of bio-power — designating “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life”⁸ — powerfully challenges any responsive ethics to address the realm of physiology and to reframe the ethical substance to include the embodiment of biomedical materiality. In other words, so-called “physiological” or “biological” questions increasingly raise ethical issues in ways that cannot be disentangled from the historical conditions of life as a locus of power relations or, conversely, solved through an a-historical ethico-moral calculus. Under the auspices of bio-power, biological knowledge increasingly presents itself as the ground of self-realization and governance in relation to life in general. It is difficult to suggest a more obvious example of the explicitly biomedical complications of ethics than the response to HIV/AIDS over the last decade: the rhetorics of defence and exclusion comprehensively blur the borders between scientific representations of disease and the institutional and “ethical” responses.

In the course of this translation, which constitutes biology as an object of power, a concomitant conceptual and representational shift has occurred in biological understandings of the body. “The body,” as the object of biomedical discourse, no longer displays the hierarchical unity of organs and structures which projected it as subject to the rational self, master of its own self-reflexive truth, the presupposed self of traditional ethical codes. In a shift that correlates with the shift from sovereign power centered on the speaking, judicative subject to the statistical, dispersed technological networks of disciplinary power, the living body can no longer be thought of as the “unambiguous locus of identity, agency, labour,” as Haraway stresses in her reading of the immune system as “icon.” Rather, the living body is symbolized and operated on as “a coded text, organized as an engineered communications system.”⁹ From the standpoint of bio-power, it is difficult to decide where, if not everywhere in the corpus of life, difference and identity reside. Certainly it no longer gravitates towards the constellation of reason as consciousness of self.

Hence two inter-related problems are at hand: (i) the need to dislocate the locus of ethical concern so that it is not simply excluded from the discourses of science, or confined to the instrumental regulation of their application; (ii) the issue of how to formulate such a relocated ethics when the new locus of embodiment turns out to lack stability because it “emerges as a highly mobile field of strategic differences.”¹⁰ Together they suggest that an ethics of embodiment must concern itself with the attempts of biomedical discourses exhaustively to code differences. Such an ethics calls for an account of the irreducibility of individual differences that goes outside the traditional assumption of independent selves standing in the solitary light of reason, illuminated by transcendent interior values. At the same time, if we seek differences conducive to heterogenous ethea in the face of ever-extending processes of bio-political normalization, we cannot rule out the possibility that strategic zones of difference reside within science itself.

Immunity and alterity

In the context of immunology the major stake is indeed the irreducible difference and self-identity of individuals. A contemporary textbook of immunology asseverates:

The central question in immunology has always been, How can the immune system discriminate between “foreign” and “self.”¹¹

Immunology proffers itself as the science of bodily self and non-self recognition. Varela and Anspach write: “[W]hat is the nature of the body identity when a syndrome such as AIDS can cause its breakdown? This leads us directly to the key phenomenon of body identity: the immune system.”¹² Haraway also cites a number of reasons why the study of the immune system stands out as an exemplary and strategic site in the biomedical coding of differences. First, immunological discourse increasingly tries to determine who or what counts as the “general population.”¹³ The diagnosis of HIV-AIDS has, for instance, created a new population group with different legal, insurance and employment status to the general population. In a more direct negotiation of differences, immunology now supplies anthropological field study with the means to conclusively determine ethnic groupings.¹⁴ As an already fertile field of biotechnological activity, the practical importance of immunology continually grows as the technology of monoclonal antibodies infiltrates diverse industrial, diagnostic and agricultural practices.

Secondly, Haraway proposes that the immune system be viewed as representative of the denaturing processes mentioned above which have translated the body into an explicitly decentered and dynamically structured object. She writes: “My thesis is that the immune system is an elaborate icon for the principal systems of symbolic and material `difference’ in late capitalism.”¹⁵ The use of the word “system” is not incidental in this context because one of Haraway’s main concerns is to show how biomedical representations of bodies now resort to the conceptualities of signal and logic derived from communication “systems.”¹⁶ Immunology, according to Haraway, is one of the principal actors in the re-staging of the body as a biotechnological communications system.

The corporeal negotiations of material differences carried by the immune system intimately determine what is properly one’s own body; they regulate a body open to and capable of responding to an indefinite variety of “others” — living, non-living, or on the borderline between the living and the dead (e.g. viruses). Thus we can identify a particularly apt biomedical figuration of “ethical” interest in the immunological figuration of the self, where “practically all molecules in the universe are antigens,” ¹⁷ that is to say, where almost any kind of matter potentially elicits an immune system response, and where there is no simple borderline between what is foreign and what is recognized as belonging, no simple dividing line between between drug and toxin, nourishment and parasite.

The triumph of an icon of the self: the self as icon

How can the promise of an ethics which does not place itself beyond the material effects of a biomedical discourse such as immunology be fulfilled? In what mode would ethics permeate the supposedly value-resistant fabric of the science of immunology? By dwelling less obsessively on values and orienting itself more towards an ethics understood as “a typology of immanent modes of existence.”¹⁸ The natural properties of bodies are steadily being diversified and complicated by immunologically sophisticated organ transplants, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, by practices of corporeal grafting and by all the inflorescences of matter to which the flesh is currently heir. If it wishes to account for the specificities of ethea — the dwelling places of living things — for the character, habits and habitat of localized bodies, ethics must begin to register the contours of difficult terrains such as the immune system on a map of embodied difference.

In part, as I have said, ethics must show how biomedical discourses such as immunology actively produce rather than merely describe differences. Can the biomedical sciences be shown always to be doing more than describing the origin of bodily differences? Can they also be seen as actively elaborating differences? If they can, we may assume that immunology not only describes how the immune system differentiates and secures self from other, but that immunology, in constituting a self immunized against others, also performs an ethically charged immunizing operation. (Certainly an obsession with severing obligation or connection to others runs strongly through the isolating treatment accorded to people infected with HIV-AIDS.) Counter to Haraway’s thesis that the immune system is an icon of symbolic and material differences, immunology could be read as a discourse of immunity which attempts, as the Latin root immunis suggests, to free or exempt the self from obligation to others.

Immunology, like nearly every science, does indeed present itself as “merely representing” rather than actively producing differences between self and non-self within the contemporary social field. In this sense it remains, along with most other sciences, Platonist. But unlike many other sciences, immunology explicitly allies itself with Platonism — the Western tradition’s most persistent and wide-ranging discourse on representation and the judgment of representation — in its foundational paradigm, the Principle of Clonal Selection. Because this foundation is no longer even questioned by immunology it is not, as Golub’s textbook points out, referred to as clonal selection theory but merely as Clonal Selection.¹⁹ Experiments do not test this foundation; they only test hypotheses consistent with it. Clonal Selection purports to explain how the body’s immune system is able to discriminate and respond to “foreign” material (antigen):

Antigen does not instruct the immune system in what specificity to generate; rather, it selects those cells displaying a receptor of the appropriate specificity and induces them to proliferate and differentiate, resulting in expansion of specific clones of reactive cells.²⁰

The “founding father” of this theory, Niels Jerne, conveyed Clonal Selection in the following terms:

Can the truth (the capacity to synthesise antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno (Socrates, 375 B.C.), namely that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know one cannot search for since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesise an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent.²¹

Can this overlapping of the Clonal Selection theory and the Platonic theory of knowledge as a recollection which needs nothing from the outside and which is exempt (immune) from obligation to the unknown be regarded as anything more than a fascinating but purely rhetorical invocation of a philosophical text as metaphor? Yes, if it can be shown that the Platonic investment descends beyond the play of `mere rhetoric’ into the deep structure of immunological theory, or, more significantly, that the rhetoricity of this Platonic explanation of the possibility of an immunological self could not be completely expelled from the body of immunological theory.

A logic of decontamination

In “Plato and the Simulacrum,” Gilles Deleuze claims that the founding motive of Platonism has always been the effort to secure the domain of representation on a model of Sameness. The dialectic and myths of Plato’s texts are read by Deleuze as providing a founding model for distinguishing and selecting proper claimants from false claimants. Proper claimants are copies which have some claim to truth, knowledge and the Good because of their internal resemblance to the Idea on which they are modelled; false claimants constitute the simulacra whose apparent resemblance to truth and the Good conceals an “interiorized dissimilarity.”²² This founding model is thus designated as the model of Sameness. Only representations or copies that have an internal relation to the essential Idea of the Good, beauty, or virtue possess the authentic resemblance or Likeness which delineates the domain of philosophical representation. I will return to the issue of the simulacra and the false claimants to be excluded because of the absence of any proper relation to the Same. But first, I would roughly contextualize Jerne’s fortuitous encapsulation of the foundation of immunology in Platonic terms within the broader framework of Platonism.

Varela and Anspach are explicit: “Formulated another way, the organism learns to distinguish between self and nonself during ontogeny”.²³ The idea of knowledge as recollection of the differences inscribed earlier (during embryogenesis) is understood as the immunological parallel to the immortality of the soul which Plato consistently introduces into his texts under the guise of a myth. These myths claim that only because the soul (and by analogy, the immune system), prior to its current embodiment (that is, during embryogenesis), has contemplated the eternal Forms or Ideas beyond the mundane world, can knowledge approximate in recollection the Truth which the soul has seen (that is, one’s body can recognise what belongs to it and what is other). While the myths of the Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Statesman and Meno which present the eternal life of the soul might all be regarded as interruptions or digressions in the course of the dialectic, Deleuze argues that the ironic play at evasion (the myths are always explicitly advertized as heuristic fictions by Socrates) only conceals the deeper motive of methodically dividing the faithful claimant from the false claimant in order to protect a line of succession from Same to Like. “The myth, with its constantly circular structure, [i.e. souls circulating between mundane and extra-mundane life, contemplating the Forms in eternity] is really the narrative of foundation.” ²⁴ It permits the claims of representations to be founded by determining which claimants may share in that which the unsharable, imitated Idea possesses firsthand: eternal, unchanging Being. Without that share, claimants are nothing but those impostors known as simulacra.

The philosophical schema and principle of selection of Platonism — and hence of any knowledge system such as immunology which purports simply to describe or represent differences — can thus be formulated as “only that which is alike differs.” The Same always returns, insofar as it generates good copies, faithful imitations, paternally authorized by the logos of reason. It instates a hierarchy descending from the Same to Like, from being towards becoming. (Hence the hierarchy of copies of the bed — idea, artifact, painting — to be found in Book X of The Republic, 596b-602b.) The method of recognition and selection by division constitutes “an exact definition of the world as icon.” ²⁵ This world-schema, within whose parameters science at least sometimes moves, does more than represent what is known. It actually selects or excludes various copies and representations on the grounds of their affiliation or non-affiliation to Sameness. The mundane world, a body, or an immune self is thereby selected and affirmed as an icon or good representation of that which it copies: the Same.

In this respect, Haraway’s ascription of iconic status to the “material-semiotic actor” of the immune system shares in the Platonism of the determinations of self she so cogently reads in the text of immunology. If the immune system is read as an icon of difference, it pictorially represents more or less truthfully an imitated referent which exists elsewhere. Read as icon, the immune system is condemned to remain within the hierarchical lineage of good or truthful claimants in the domain of mimetic representation.²⁶ In its allegiances to Platonism, this is also the operation of the immune system as constituted by immunology in its fundamental problematic of self and non-self. The immune system, insofar as it is governed by Clonal Selection (and insofar as it can be represented in the very ideal of a system), is said to function in order to exclude anything whose claim cannot be traced through a lineage of recognizable likeness founded in the complex genetic locus known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC).²⁷ The immunizing operation of immunology transpires through a theory that faithfully copies the Platonic operation of selecting among claimants, of bringing differences within a hierarchy of models and copies dominated by the model of the Same.

This way of looking at the immune system (and the world) has always cost dearly: it tends to preclude any relation with the outside other than the allergic. Indeed Derrida has argued that for Platonism in general, the

immortality and perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside. That is the case with God (cf. Republic II, 381b-c). God has no allergies. Health and virtue . . . , which are often associated in speaking of the body, and analogously, of the soul (cf. Gorgias, 479b), always proceed from within.²⁸

In conformity with Clonal Selection, immunological research privileges processes of selection that expel internal differences. Through an innumerable series of mouse-obliterating grafts, transplants, exchanges, extractions, and the patient isolation and exclusion of immunological diversity through selective breeding (for instance, the “nude mice,” lacking a thymus, often used in immunological work), immunologists have begun to map the complex molecular interactions of the immune system in terms of “marks” or coded traces. The guiding assumption: all the principal immune system cells involved in the immune response can recognize molecular markers on other cells, and these markers — MHC antigens — are elaborated by or refer back to genes in a certain region of the individual’s MHC gene complex. No proper immune response against antigens is to be expected unless all the participating cells display appropriate markers of self derived from the same genetic source. Indeed this attribute is now accepted as the operational basis of self in the immune system, although as Golub admits, “we do not now how non-reactivity to self is maintained.” ²⁹ MHC restriction entails the Platonic provision that the immune system can only react to “foreign” by recollecting an older, interior “self,” ultimately sourced in genetic coding. Unless “foreign bodies” are accompanied by the markings of “self,” they will pass unnoticed. The immune system’s reaction to antigens is therefore not an absolute barrier against all comers, but a selective response: only those outsiders who can be marked as “foreign” by self-identical MHC markers will elicit a response. Like the soul who has gazed on the truth prior to the earthly phase of its cycle, immunology has argued that the system’s marking begins prior to the body’s nativity (during embryogenesis MHC markers are already starting to mark every cell in the body as self ³⁰) and gradually accretes a memory of alterity through exposure to the infinite variety of antigens.

Difference within?

In the Platonic world, the domain of faithful representation is demarcated and defended by the methods of selection and exclusion which determine the legitimacy of the copy or the representation by either establishing its hierarchical position in relation to the model of the Same or excluding it from knowledge and reality altogether. Similarly the general orientation of immunology has been towards understanding the immune system as maintaining a defended bodily self, brought about through processes which recognized antigens related to the same MHC and dealt with foreign (allogenic) bodies marked as without an internal resemblance to the same by reacting defensively against them. This approach, carried out by the Platonic method of division and selection, is reproduced both in the inscriptive practices of immunology — the carefully controlled breeding of immunology’s laboratory mice essentially ensures that all offspring-copies are purged of hidden genetic differences — and in the theoretical formulation of the hierarchical mechanisms of cellular interaction in the immune system: the mnemic self of Clonal Selection. Clonal Selection in conjunction with MHC restriction distinguishes those claimants with proper internal resemblances from the diseased, pathogenic and purely factitious resemblances presented by antigens. A false claimant — a simulacrum — within the field of recognition of the immune system initiates the proliferation of good copies (antibodies in particular) which will expunge interiorized dissimilitude.

This Platonist commitment of immunology, although it permeates contemporary immunology and therefore needs to be taken into account, does not fully saturate it. Another dynamic is operative there, and it threatens the overthrow of Platonism. Deleuze expresses it directly as “only differences are alike.”³¹ Another possible reading of the immunological potentialities of the body can be linked to this other-than-Platonic rendering of the world. Jerne, who formulated the strongly Platonic motif of Clonal Selection which we have been following, also proposed a reading of the immune system that threatens the unity and telos of the system and the model of the Same it is employed to support. The network theory describes a regulation of immune response in which Clonal Selection would be undercut by the incessant reverberations of internal differences.

The theory specifies that all possible antigens of the outside world are able to be recognized by the immune system because they reverberate with interactions between elements internal to the immune system. Because every antibody within the system can interact with every other in a straightforward antigen-antibody reaction, i.e., every antibody can potentially mimic an antigen for some other antibody, the immune system will function through an unceasing cascade of internal responses. Of the roughly ten million or so different antibodies of the body (each antibody responds to a single specific type of antigen), “a vast number of responses are going on all the time, even in the absence of foreign antigen.”³² The equilibrium state of the immune system is a highly dynamic balance generated in a continual flux of differential relations. Antigens, ostensibly pathogenically entering the body from the outside world, are internally imaged by antibodies acting as defacto antigens. The immune system is capable of responding to the immense diversity of natural antigens because the part of the antigen (the epitope or antigenic determinant) internally imaged by an antibody acting as antigen (in this role, it becomes an idiotope) is shared by a relatively large number of epitopes. The confrontation with a foreign body takes place not in the mode of a defensive mobilization but in terms of a reverberation or resonance with some element of the system already sounding its own glissando of response. Varela and Anspach write:

[T]he immune system fundamentally does not (cannot) discriminate between self and nonself. The normal function of the network can only be perturbed or modulated by incoming antigens, responding only to what is similar to what is already present.³³

An epitope would normally attract the response of a number of antibodies (an antibody acting as antibody in the network is called a paratope) because only part of it is imaged by a particular idiotope, and conversely, a specific paratope would most likely not be the only possible response to the epitope. A proliferating number of never fully equivalent paratopes respond to any particular epitope.³⁴

In consequence, the humoral “self” maintained by the immune system in responding to foreign bodies would not be a matter of selection and exclusion according to criteria of internal relation to identity. Rather the identity of immune “self” would be produced as the effect of internal reverberations of disparate elements. The introduction of differences from the outside would thus effect nothing more than an amplification of certain reverberations already in play. As Haraway puts it:

In a sense, there could be no exterior antigen structure, no “invader” that the immune system had not already “seen” and mirrored internally.³⁵

The difference in response between “foreign” and “self” would be measured by the degrees of this quantitative amplification. The network theory implies that the immune system includes within itself the angle or point of view from which differences and distinctions between self and others are made, rather than having division imposed from above by a principle of selection based on resemblance to a foundational identity. Thus, the immune response (insofar as it concerns the generation of antibodies) takes on that very same simulacral aspect which Platonism has always, according to Deleuze (and Derrida), sought to exclude:

In short, folded within the simulacrum there is the process of going mad, a process of limitlessness . . . a constant development, a gradual process of subversion of the depths, an adept avoidance of the equivalent, the limit, the Same, or the Like: always simultaneously more and less, but never equal.³⁶

Interpreted as a simulacral entity, the immune system functions on the basis of internal disparities rather than on the basis of an internal likeness derived from a mnemic-genetic self. What immunology in its most explicitly Platonist inspiration regards as the recognition of external differences, can be understood as a sign that “flashes between two bordering levels, between two communicating series,”³⁷ a prolongation of the on-going interaction that is the functioning of the network. Immunology’s admission that “it is possible for an individual to make a productive antibody response against its own idiotypic [i.e. uniquely marking the individual] determinants” ³⁸ shows that (lymphocytically expressed) self-identity cannot be the ultimate foundation of the immune response against which all claimants, foreign or otherwise, are to be measured. Rather, the work of the simulacrum is a production of resemblances — between inside and outside, idiotopes and epitopes — through the resonance of divergent series. The effect of resemblance arises because the simulacrum (the sign generated between communicating series) “includes within itself the differential point of view.”³⁹ These resemblances can no longer be selected on the basis of their hierarchical position in relation to the Same, because the system operates so as to render the notion of hierarchy between Same and Likeness infinitely reversible. There can be no order of model and successively degraded copies because everything — the resemblances, the relation between elements — begins in differences, in mobility, not in the sharing of an unsharable Same.

Exclusion and selection of difference
```
We ourselves wish to be our experiments and
guinea pigs.⁴⁰
```
How, in the pursuit of “resemblances” between Platonism and the dominant immunizing strain of immunology, between the overthrow of Platonism and a largely latent simulacral immunology, can biomedical ethics begin to assert the primacy of an ethical concern affirmed as embodiment or ethos?

The locus of ethical concern is ineluctably drawn into considering embodiment by virtue of the increasingly refined and comprehensive investments staged by bio-power around the management of living bodies. Immunology is likewise confronted by a disintegration of the underpinnings of its disciplinary object — the immune system considered as a mode of self-identity. In the case of immunology, any bioethics that recognized the constitutive effects of biomedical discourses and practices in producing the self would have to accommodate an equivocal production: the simultaneous naturalizing of bodies as a self modelled on interior Sameness and the denaturing of bodies across a mobile and contingent field of communicating but divergent series of differences. On the one hand, through the “myth” of a remembered exposure to identity (Clonal Selection) maintained by exclusion and division, immunology affirms Platonism and lays down the laws of an immune system belonging to a world bound by the hierarchy of Same and Like, defended against representations without the proper internal resemblance. On the other hand, the problem of the regulation of the immune system’s response produces an inversion of the principle of hierarchy, a mirroring confusion of borderlines between inside and outside and a corresponding complication of the lines between self and nonself. While the Platonic motif suggests an attempt to maintain a bodily order and integrity in the face of the chaos threatening from the outside, against the foreigners that might insinuate themselves, the anti-Platonic motif — read sympathetically — suggests the possibility of subverting the drive to master chaos by allowing resemblance and recognition only through internal dissimilitude, through the constantly decentered responses of divergent series.⁴¹

Aligning immunology to “whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure,”⁴² entails two principal but uncertain outcomes. First, the simulacral impulse in immunology uproots any single identifiable locus in which, finally and with certainty, the immune self could be located. In addition, the ethical substance of the immune self would, in the interplay of divergent series of mirrorings and reverberations between disparate elements placed in contact, appear as in experimental relation to alterity rather than as a conclusive ordering of likeness and divergence.

The primary characteristic of such an experimental orientation would be to augment the legions of nude mice and hybridomas currently employed by immunological laboratories with a version of the self able to affirm the complication within itself of heterogeneous series through real experience, whether this be of infection, disease, auto-immune reactions, allergies, grafts, transplants and so on. It is precisely the internal reverberation of divergent series that characterizes the simulacrum, and, I would argue, the simulacral processes of the network theory of immunity. In constantly generating a plethora of paratopes in response to the endless variety of idiotopes, the cascading activity of the immune system unravels any putative identity or unity of the embodied self. Reframing the deracinated bodies of contemporary biomedical discourse within an ethical anti-Platonism enables an immunological ethics that neither severs obligations to others (since its regulation would take the form of a “resonance” between differences that cannot be definitively divided according to interior Self and exterior Other) nor defends an immured self through a self-assertion that always regards differences as allergic.

The ethos of a self inhabited by interior differences would be more like the “window of vulnerability” that Haraway speaks of: a mode of dwelling in which boundaries between individuals are hard to fix (this is not to say there are no boundaries, only that they are complicated), in which inside and outside are traversed by a non-identical self generated in the scintillations and reverberations of divergent series. Immunology thus suggests that ethics need not begin and end in the privilege of an immune self.

Moreover, if this self inhabited by differences is to assert itself over the iconic self, it cannot maintain the immune system (contrary to Haraway’s reading) or any other systematization of living bodies as an icon of symbolic or material differences. Read as icon, any system, no matter how de-naturalized or differential in its operations, stands ready for re-incorporation in the world of representation, along with all the distinctions (model/copy, essence/appearance) and exclusions mobilized there. It is precisely this world, the world of representation, that the simulacrum calls into question by showing that the resemblance and identity which purportedly legitimize the icon are the outward effects of perhaps small internal differences. Not selection, but the simulation of resemblance and identity; not hierarchy, but the “condensation of coexistences.”⁴³ Under these conditions, the ethos appropriate to the biopolitically-sensitive immune self would not seize on postmodern icons but would evaluate sameness as the always contingent resonances and harmonics of divergent series.

Notes

1. Jacuqes Derrida, “Autobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” The Ear of the Other, trans. C. McDonald, ed. P. Kamuf (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 6.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) 129.

3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981) 138.

4. Foucault 139-140.

5. Two papers about bioethics strongly influence this discussion: Rosalyn Diprose, “A `Genethics’ that makes sense?” in R. Diprose & R. Ferrell, eds Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991); and Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences, 1.1 (Winter, 1989).

6. Haraway 1.

7. Foucault 142.

8. Foucault 143.

9. Haraway 14.

10. Haraway 15.

11. Golub, Edward S., Immunology : A Synthesis (Sinauer Associates, 1987) 416.

12. Varela, Francisco and Mark Anspach “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation” in Materialities of Communication, trans. W. Whobrey, eds. H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L. Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) 273.

13. Haraway 37.

14. Golub 67.

15. Haraway 2.

16. Haraway 14-16.

17. Golub 380.

18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) 23.

19. Golub 1.

20. Golub 1.

21. Golub 9.

22. Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October Winter 1983: 49.

23. Varela 278.

24. Deleuze 46.

25. Deleuze 52.

26. See Deleuze, 47-48.

27. “Each person has a group of genes, the major histocompatability complex or MHC, which codes for self-antigens.” See L. Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems (St Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989) 391. Self-antigens mark each one of a person’s cells, thereby allowing the recognition of cells as proper to the individual. A more technical explanation states: “MAJOR HISTOCOMPATIBILITY COMPLEX (MHC). Mammalian gene complex of several highly polymorphic linked loci encoding glycoproteins involved in many aspects of immunological recognition, both between lymphoid cells and between lymphocytes and antigen-presenting cells.” See The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 8th ed. (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) 340. Also see, for an even more disconcertingly technical explanation: Golub chap. 17.

28. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 101-102.

29. Golub 481. For that matter, non-reactivity to self isn’t always maintained, as the multifarious auto-immune reactions show.

30. Golub 222, 421.

31. Deleuze 52.

32. Niels Jerne, quoted by Golub 384. Haraway 22-23 provides a clear explanation of the network theory.

33. Varela 283.

34. This diversity of possible responses to a given epitope is accentuated by the fact that “antibodies seem to recognize the three-dimensional configuration and charge distribution of an antigen rather than its chemical make-up as such.” The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology 33.

35. Haraway 23.

36. Deleuze 49.

37. Deleuze 52.

38. Golub 386.

39. Deleuze 49.

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) S319.

41. On these different relations to chaos, and the connection they have with two different types of Eternal Return, the Platonic and Nietzschean, see Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum” 54-55.

42. Jacues Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 36.

43. Deleuze 53.

Works Cited
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” October (Winter 1983): 43.
- —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
- Derrida, Jacques. “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” The Ear of the Other. trans. P. Kamuf, ed. C. McDonald. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.
- —. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
- —. Positions. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
- Diprose, Rosalyn. “A ‘Genethics’ that makes sense?” Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.
- Golub, Edward S. Immunology: A Synthesis. Sinauer Associates, 1987.
- Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse.” Differences 1.1 (1989).
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
- —. The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
- Scott, Charles E. The Question of Ethics. Indiana UP, 1990.
- Sherwood, L. Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems. St Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989.
- Varela, F. and M. Anspach. “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation.” Materialities of Communication. Trans. W. Whobrey. Eds. H. U. Gumbrecht and K. L. Pfeiffer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
September 22, 2013

Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext

Barbara Page

Vassar College
page@vassar.edu

It was while reading my way into a number of recent fictions composed in hypertext that I began to think back on a tendency of women’s writing which aims not only at changing the themes of fiction but at altering the formal structure of the text itsel f. In a useful collection of essays about twentieth-century women writers, called Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs trace a line of authors who subvert what they see as patriarchal assumptio ns governing traditional modes of narrative, beginning with Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, and leading to such contemporaries as Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, and Kathy Acker. They write:

Although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms — nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering — are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (3-4)

Among contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing nonlinear, antihierarchical and decentered writing, but many women who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of “realist” narrative from a consciousness stirred by f eminist discourses of resistance, especially those informed by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. The claim of Friedman and Fuchs cited above is itself radical, namely that such women writers can produce themselves — as new beings or as ones p reviously unspoken — through self-conscious acts of writing against received tradition. A number of the contemporary writers I discuss in this essay make a direct address within the fictive text to feminist theory, rather more as a flag flown than as a definitive discursive marker, in recognition of themselves as engaged with other women in the discursive branch of women’s struggle against oppression.¹For some writers of this tendency, hypertext would see m to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing, notwithstanding an aversion among many women to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind. My argument is not that the print authors I d iscuss here would be better served by the hypertext medium, but that their writing is in many respects hypertextual in principle and bears relation to discourses of many women writers now working in hypertext.

These women writers, as a rule, take for granted that language itself and much of canonical literature encode hierarchies of value that denigrate and subordinate women, and therefore they incorporate into their work a strategically critical or opposit ional posture, as well as a search for alternative forms of composition. They do not accept the notion, however, that language is hopelessly inimical or alien to their interests, and so move beyond the call for some future reform of language to an interv ention — exuberant or wary — in present discourses. I focus in particular on writers whose rethinking of gender construction enters into both the themes and the gestural repertoire of their compositions, and who undertake to redesign the very topograp hy of prose. At the most literal level of the text — that of words as graphic objects — all of these writers are leery of the smooth, spooling lines of type that define the fictive space of conventional print texts and delimit the path of the reader. Like other postmodernist writers, they move on from modernist methods of collage to constructions articulating alternatives to linear prose. The notion, for example, of textuality as weaving (a restoration of the root meaning of “text”) and of the constr uction of knowledge as a web that has figured prominently in the development of hypertext has also been important in feminist theory, though for rather different purposes.² Like other postmodernist writers, also, many of these women experimentalists are strikingly self-reflexive, and write about their texts in the text. One important difference, though, concerns the self-conscious will among these writers not simply to reimagine writing as wea ving but rather to take apart the fabric of inherited textual forms and to reweave it into new designs. For all of these authors, restiveness with the fixity of print signifies something more than a struggle going on under a blanket of established formal meaning. Their aim is to rend the surface of language and to reshape it into forms more hospitable to the historical lives of women and to an esthetic of the will and desire of a self-apprehended female body that is an end unto itself and not simply ins trumental. One frequent mark of this new writing is the introduction of silence, partly as a memorial to the historical silencing of women’s voices, but also as a means of establishing a textual space for the entrance of those “others” chronically exclud ed from the closed texts of dogmatists and power interests.

As my point of departure, I want briefly to describe Carole Maso’s 1993 novel, AVA, her fourth book in order of composition, though published third. This text unfolds in the mind of a thirty-nine-year old professor of comparative literat ure named Ava Klein, who is dying of a rare blood disease, a form of cancer. The book, divided into Morning, Afternoon and Night, takes place on the last day of Ava’s life, the same day in which President George Bush draws his line in the sand of the Per sian Gulf states, inaugurating a war. Against this act and all the forces of division and destruction it symbolizes, against the malignancy of cancer and of militarism, Maso poses the unbounded mind of Ava, whose powers of memory and desire abide in the emblematic figure of a girl, recurring throughout the text, who draws an A and spells her own name. Ava’s narrative is in fragments that in the act of being read acquire fuller meaning, through repetition, through their discrete placement on the passing pages, through variation, and also through the generous space between utterances that gives a place to silence and itself comes to represent a certain freedom — of movement, of new linkage, of as-yet-unuttered possibilities. Here is how the book begins:

                    MORNING

Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance.  Birthdays. In-
dependence days.  Saints' days.  Even when we were poor.  With
verve.

Come sit in the morning garden for awhile.

Olives hang like earrings in late August.

A perpetual pageant.

A throbbing.

Come quickly.

The light in your eyes

Precious.  Unexpected things.

Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh.

You spoke of Trieste.  Of Constantinople.  You pushed the curls
from your face.  We drank Five-Star Metaxa on the island of Crete
and aspired to the state of music.

Olives hang like earrings.

A throbbing.  A certain pulsing.

The villagers grew violets.

We ran through genêt and wild sage.

Labyrinth of Crete, mystery of water,
home.

In a polemical preface to AVA, Maso argues that much of current commercial fiction, in attempting to ward off the chaos and “mess” of death with organized, rational narratives, ultimately becomes “death with its complacent, unequivocal tr uths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis.” In this preface, Maso traces her resistance to traditional narratives back to feelings of dissatisfaction with the “silly plots” of stories her mother read alou d to her as a child. In order to stop “the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax,” she would, she recalls, wander away, out of earshot, taking a sentence or a scene to dream over. Often she would detach the meanings from the words her mother read, turning the words into a kind of music, “a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me.” Bypassing the logos of stories, then, she walked into a freer space where she was able to invent, or rediscover, another tempo and o rdering of language felt as a sensuous transmission from the mother’s body to hers. “This is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body.” (From AVA 175-76)

This is the beginning, but not the end or sum of Maso’s fiction. Rather like Adrienne Rich’s “new poet” in her “Transcendental Etude,” she walks away from the old arguments into a space of new composition, where she takes up fragments of the already spoken with a notable lack of anxiety about influence. In the stream of her narrative one hears formal and informal voices of precursors and contemporaries, male and female, along with patches of fact, history, even critical discourse that figure as feat ures of the rhythmic text, the writing of a richly nourished adult mind — Ava Klein never more alive than on the day of her dying:

García Lorca, learning to spell, and not a day too soon.

Ava Klein in a beautiful black wig.  Piled up high.

And I am waiting at what is suddenly this late hour, for my ship to
come in --

Even if it is a papier-mâché ship on a plastic sea,
after all.

We wanted to live.

How that night you rubbed "olio santo" all over  me.  One liter oil,
chili peppers, bay leaves, rosemary.

And it's spaghetti I want at 11:00 A.M.

Maybe these cravings are a sign of pregnancy.  Some late last-minute
miracle.  The trick of living past this life.

To devour all that is the world.

Because more than anything, we wanted to live.

Dear Bunny,
       If it is quite convenient we shall come with our butterfly
       nets this
Friday.

You will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom --
unlike the more classical texts -- which are not texts that delimit
themselves, are not texts of territory with neat borders, with
chapters, with beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little
disquieting because you do not feel the

Border.

The edge.

How are you?  I've been rereading Kleist with great enthusiasm and I
wish you were around to talk to and I realize suddenly,

I miss you. (113)

For Ava, thinking and feeling go together, and reading is sensuous, rendering literal the definition of influence, so that whole passages of her text — still unmistakably her own — are washed in the colors of an admired author: Woolf, García Lorca, Beckett, and others. Ava’s reading is finally a species of her promiscuous engorgement with life, and of a mind that declines to wall off speaking from writing or to isolate recollection, narration and description from meditation and analysis. In the passage above, for example, a snatch of a letter to Edmund Wilson (“Bunny”) from the lapidary lepidoperist Nabokov stands next to a bit from Hélène Cixous that graphically tails off into broken borders which in turn begin to enact an ex pansion of the text of the sort that Cixous calls for. The book, curiously, achieves unity in the act of reading, as the rhythmic succession of passages induces a condition approaching trance. The effect is both aural and visual: when spoken, real time must pass between utterances; when read, real space must be traversed by the eye between islands of text.

In an essay that itself intermingles argument and reflection with quotation from her own novels and from precursor writers and theorists, Maso points to images that both ground her ambition and suggest alternatives to linear prose: “AVA c ould not have been written as it was, I am quite sure, if I had not been next to the water day after day. Incorporating the waves.” And, “The design of the stars then in the sky. I followed their dreamy instructions. Composed in clusters. Wrote const ellations of associations.” Attributing independent will to genres, she describes the “desire” of the novel to be a poem, of the poem to be an essay, of the essay to reach toward fiction, and “the obvious erotics of this.” (Notes 26) The desiring text r ebels against the virtual conspiracy between “commodity novelists” and publishers to lock a contrived sense of reality, shorn of its remoteness and mystery, into “the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.” As a lyric ar tist in large prose forms, Maso explains that

Writing AVA I felt at times . . . like a choreographer working with language in physical space. Language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. Creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. Shapes that then regather and re-form making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being. (Notes 27)

She names as precursors Virginia Woolf of the Waves and Gertrude Stein, in Stein’s remark, “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense. . . .” (28, 27) In place of plot she aims to “imagin e story as a blooming flower, or a series of blossomings,” for example, and makes space in the text for “the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. Precious, disappearing things.” (27) And here the italicized words, from the secon d section of AVA, both incrementally repeat a line from the opening of the book — “Precious. Unexpected things” — and underscore the ethical, as well as esthetic impulse in Maso’s fiction. (AVA186)

For Maso, the attraction of the novel is its unruly, expansive refusal of perfection. She argues that, because we no longer believe that the traditional stories are true, we can no longer write tidy, beginning-middle-end fiction, even if this means t hat we must “write notebooks rather than masterpieces,” as Woolf once suggested. (Notes 29) The gain will be “room and time for everything. This will include missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Instead of the “r eal” story, we shall have: “The ability to embrace oppositional stances at the same time. Contradictory impulses, ideas, motions. To assimilate as part of the form, incongruity, ambivalence.” (Notes 30) And for Maso, who has the confidence to found ima gination on her own experience, this form of fiction, that does not tyrannize and that allows “a place for the reader to live, to dream,” leads not to the “real” story but to “what the story was for me”: “A feminine shape — after all this time.” (Notes 3 0, 28)

In an essay that is something of a tour-de-force, entitled “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds),” poet and theorist Joan Retallack, like Maso, addresses what is — or can be — of particular import for women in the refiguration of writing toward non- or multi-linear, de- or re-centered prose, by means of a revaluation of the terms traditionally affixed to the subordinated figure of the feminine:

An interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what Western culture has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence, empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics; open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist discontents. (347)

In thinking about why for her the writing of women today seems particularly vibrant with potential, Retallack underscores the worth both of productive silence, that gives place to the construction of new images and meanings, and of collaboration, that emp owers writer and reader to “conspire (to breathe together) . . . in the construction of a living aesthetic event.” (356) While denying a turn toward essentialism, she argues that the historical situation of women now provides a particularly fertile “cons truction site” for new writing, one important feature of which is its invitation to the active participation of others in an ongoing textual process:

I’d like to suggest that it is a woman’s feminine text (denying any redundancy), which implicitly acknowledges and creates the possibility of other/additional/simultaneous texts. This is a model significantly different from Bloom’s competitve anxiety of influence. It opens up a distinction between the need to imprint/impress one’s mark (image) on the other, and an invitation to the other’s discourse . . . (358. My italics)

Against those feminists who despair of entering a language over-coded with misogyny, Retallack argues that “Language has always overflowed the structures/strictures of its own grammars,” and that “The so-called feminine is in language from the start.” (37 2) In this regard, Retallack supplies a validation of Maso’s ready, unanxious introduction of quotation from male authors in what she calls her feminine text.

That prose writers like Maso and poet/theorists like Retallack do not stand alone is indicated, for example, by the 1992 anthology entitled Resurgent: New Writing by Women which has been co-edited by Lou Robinson and Camille Norton . It brings together a generous selection of writers who mix genres of verse and prose freely and embed manifesto or critique both in the narrative and the topography of the writing. Resurgent is divided into two, or perhaps four, pa rts — “Transmission/Translation” and “Collaboration/Spectacle” — as it moves from single-author texts to collaborative and to performative texts. Lou Robinson writes in the introduction:

Everywhere in these prose pieces I find that unpredictable element in the language which forces consciousness to leap a gap where other writing would make a bridge of shared meaning . . . , a sense of something so urgent in its desire to be expressed that it comes before the words to say it, in the interstices, in the rhythm: Marina Tsvetaeva’s “song in the head without noise.” . . . This is writing that swings out over a chasm, that spits. (1)

Among the most interesting pieces in Resurgent are the collaborations, including one by Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, entitled “Reading and Writing Between the Lines,” that undertakes a punning reclamation of the term “collabor ation” itself. Their endeavor resembles that of Retallack, when she reclaims the word “conspire” by reminding readers of its root meaning as “to breathe together” and applies it to the notion of opening the authorial text to the discourse of others. In their piece, Marlatt and Warland, “running on together,” write their way through the self-betrayal of collaboration in its political sense to a celebration of co-labial play, in the lips of speech and of women’s sex:

'let me slip into something more comfortable'
					she glides across the
room
labi, to glide, to slip

(labile;  labilis:
labia;	labialis)
				la la la
'my labyl mynde...'
labilis,  labour,  belabour,  collaborate,  elaborate

. . . . .

slip of the tongue

				'the lability of innocence'

. . . . .

				 labia majora (the 'greater lips')
				 la la la
							and
						labia minora
				      (the 'lesser lips')
not two mouths but three!
slipping one over on polarity

						slippage in the text
you & me collabi, (to slip together)
labialization!)
slip(ping)  page(es)
like notes in class

o labilism o letter of the lips
o grafting  of our slips
labile lovers
'prone to undergo displacement in position or change in nature,
form, chemical composition;  unstable'

This word play owes most, perhaps, to Irigaray’s feminist displacement of the phallus as the central signifier in the sexual imaginary, particularly as articulated in Lacan. In “This Sex Which Is Not One,” she writes: “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.” (24) Although Irigaray’s language is open to the criticism that it may lead to biological essentialism, we should bear in mind that all language is shot through with metaphors, many derived from the body, and that some of the boldest interventions by innovative women writers have been throu gh an insistence on speaking the body in new terms as a way of breaking the hold of traditional discourses that denigrate and demonize the female body. This is a move against a crippling inheritance of ideology, as Nicole Ward Jouve points out: “The whol e idea of sex talking is itself symbolic, is itself discourse; the phrase is a turning around and reclaiming of ‘male’ discourse.” (32) It is also a move, as we have seen in Maso, toward the discovery, in material forms commonly associated with th e feminine, of structures capable of inspiring new forms of writing. For collaborative writers Marlatt and Warland, the co-labial slippage between two and one opens the text to a commingling of voices about the unsanctioned commingling of women’s bodies, thus enacting a double subversion of the Lacanian Law. The effect is not that of reductive essentialism but rather of the frank erotics Maso refers to, an imaginative discursive enactment of the “desire” of one text for another.

At some points in Marlatt and Warland’s text two voices march down separate columns of type in a way reminiscent of Kristeva’s antiphonal essay-invocations,³ but at others, they merge into pronominal ha rmony and a playful syntactic break-up, reminiscent of Stein, that shakes loose the overdetermined subject:

to keep (y)our word.  eroticizing collaboration we've moved from treason
into trust.  a difficult season, my co-labial writer writing me in we
while we
are three and you is reading away with us --

who?

you and you (not we) in me and	      are you trying to avoid the auto-
all of us reading, which is what      biographical? what is 'self' writ-
we do when left holding the	      ing here? when you leave space
floor, watching you soar with	      for your readers who may not
the words' turning and turning	      read you in the same way the
their sense and sensing their	      autobiographical becomes com-
turns i'm dancing with you in	      munal even communographic in
the dark learning to trust that       its contextual and narrative
sense of direction learning to	      (Carol Gilligan) women's way of
read you in to where i want to go     thinking -- and collaborating.
although the commotion in
words the connotations you
bring are different we share the
floor the ground floor meaning
dances on . . .

The verbal strategies here are familiar enough to contemporary readers: the deconstructive questioning (whose is (y)our word?) that exposes the instability of subject and object; the reclaiming of terms and unmaking of conventional syntax; the diologism o f the blocked texts. The antiphonal effect of the double columns in fact puts eye-reading into crisis, just as, conversely, the broken, parenthesized, multiplication of signifiers baffles a single voice reading aloud in sequence. Unlike many collaborati ve writers, Marlatt and Warland refuse to distinguish between their two voices by use of a different type face or placement on the page. In Maso’s AVA, influences naturalize and borders among texts break; in Marlatt and Warland, collaboration undermines the notion of writing as intellectual property: we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. It is no coincidence, I think, that prose of this kind floats in generous, unconventional volumes of space, seeking escape, it would seem , from the rigid lineation and lineage of the print text.

Just as the potential for self-circling narcissism in Maso’s text is overcome by an ethics of regard for the external world, so similarly in many of the texts in Resurgent is celebratory subjectivity matched by an engaged politics, even — in Charles Bernstein’s words — by the “need to reground polis,” through “an act of human reconstruction and reimagining.” (200) Some, like co-authors Sally Silver and Abigail Child, directly link self-renovation with revolutionary politics, as when they urge women to “defeat coherent subjectivity on which capitalism, idealism is based.” (167) For others, though, political positioning has been made difficult by the very fragmentation of the culturally constructed self, owing to a painful severa nce from a home base. In Resurgent, the editors’ decision to select “Melpomene Tragedy” from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee highlights this phase of alienation and the yearning it engenders. In this chapter of her book, Cha writes from exile in America to her mother in South Korea and from a cultural dislocation caused by war that is felt as the separation of the self from a machine-produced screen image. In half-broken syntax, she makes a fervent and bitterly ironic ap peal to the traditional female personification of tragedy to intervene against the war machine that invented and shattered her:

Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but
rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than
her own.  Suffice Melpomene, to exorcize from this mouth the
name the words the memory of severance through this act by
this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once.
She without the separate act of
uttering.

In Cha’s Dictee, each chapter enunciates through formal and visual means a distinctive matter, often contrapuntal or even contradictory to that in other sections of the book. Its method of including writing in several languages and visua l artifacts from East and West, and its experimental form in fact led scholars of the 1980’s who were gathering the heritage of Asian American writing to shun Dictee for a time, as lacking ethnic integrity. The composition escapes the bounda ries of a single cultural identity, just as its form steadily resists confinement within the print book. As scholar Shelley Sunn Wong explains, Dictee “instantiates a writing practice that stumbles over rather than smoothes out the uneven te xtures of raced and gendered memory.” (45) At the very front of the book, for example, before the title page, appears a photograph of Korean graffiti etched in stone on the wall of a Japanese coal mine, by one of many workers forced into exile and labor. The words read in translation:

Mother
I miss you
I am hungry
I want to go home.

Wong regards Cha’s placement of this text — the only words in Dicteein the Korean language — that reads vertically from right to left, ending at the extreme lefthand margin, as a provocative move against conventional writings and readings that encode and enforce oppressive hierarchies: “Instead of leading the reader into the work, the directional movement of the frontispiece begins to usher the reader back out of the text. Within the context of narrative development, the frontispiece thus functions not to forward the narrative but, rather, to forestall it.” (46)

The tendencies of the kind of writing I have been describing receive fresh realization in the medium of hypertext. One of these, a collaborative fiction called Izme Pass, by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, seems particularly congruent wi th those in Resurgent, both in its politics and in its formal concerns. Izme Pass came about as the result of an experiment in writing proposed for the journal Writing on the Edge. The editors first asked hy pertext novelist Michael Joyce, best known for his hyperfiction Afternoon, to compose a story. Then they invited other authors to revise or augment his text into a collaboration. Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, each of whom had been at work on a hyperfiction of her own, took up the challenge but refused to accept Joyce’s fiction, called WOE, or a memory of what will be, as a prior or instigating text. Recognizing a patriarchal precept in the positing of a master text, they set about to create an independent construction that would also transgressively subvert and appropriate WOE. (79) In an on-screen map they placed a writing space, containing fragments of Joyce’s text, into a triad with spaces containing parts o f their own works-in-progress, then added a fourth, new work, called “Pass,” woven of connections they created among the other three texts to produce an intertextual polylogue:

(Image)

As Guyer and Petry explain: “Almost immediately we began to see how this process of tinkering with existing texts by intentionally sculpting their inchoate connections had the ironic effect of making everything more fluid. Izme Pass bega n to affect Rosary [Petry’s work] which poured its new character back into Quibbling [Guyer’s work] which flowed over into WOE and back through Izme.” (82) At the level of textual organization and of st ructural metaphor, Izme Pass mocks WOE, which graphically emanates from a “Mandala,” an Asiatic diagram for meditation supposed to lead to mystical insight:

(Image)

Instead, they designed a diamond- or o- or almond-shaped map headed by a “Mandorla,” the Asiatic signifier of the yoni, the divine female genital:

(Image)

Appropriations and revaluations of the sort illustrated here constitute critique as an internal dynamic of this hypertext. Because it is written in the Storyspace program, however, Izme Pass takes the further step of opening itself to in terventions by readers turned writers, who can if they choose add to, subtract from, or rearrange the text. In this respect, the politics of hypertext allows for one realization of the feminist aim articulated by Retallack: it provides “an invitation to the other’s discourse.” It pushes further those disruptions of the “real” story Maso calls for, allowing for effects of the sort she lists, including “missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Like all hypertexts, Izme Pass prohibits definitive reading; the reader chooses the path of the narrative. The graphical device of notating linked words, moreover, sometimes introduces further narrative possibilities. Opening Izme Pass through its title , the reading begins with this figure of a female storyteller:

When a woman tells a story she is remembering what
will be.  What symmetry, or assymetry, the story
passes through the orifice directly beneath
the wide-spread antlers, curved horns of ritual at her head,
just as it passes through the orifice between her open
legs.  Labrys.	How could she not know?

When a woman tells a story it is to save.  To husband
the world, you might say.  Thinking first to save
her mother, her daughter, her sisters, Scheherazade
tells, her voice enchanting, saving him in the bargain.

When a woman tells, oh veiled voice, a
story.

In Izme Pass, words linked to other texts can also signify in the passage on-screen. Here, for example, the linked words a story; passes through; passes through; mother; daughter; her sisters; saving him in the bargainyield a narrativ e surplus, becoming syntactic in themselves and creating resonant juxtapositions. In this case, the linked words sketch an incipient story having many “passes,” constellated around a family of women, that predicates the saving of a man.

Proceeding into the text through the word “story” itself, on a first pass one arrives at a text space under the title “stones,” that gives a definition of “cairns” and suggests one metaphor — or several — for communal story-writing:

Cairns: the cumulative construction of heaps of stones by
passers-by at the site of accidents, disgraces, deaths,
violence, or as remembrances (records) of journeys.

It is as if the stones in their configuration, in the years of
their leaning against one another, learn to talk with one
another, and are married.

Nested in the “stones” box at the map level is an assemblage of writing spaces that themselves graphically depict a sort of cairn and produce a textual neighborhood, so to speak, of thematic materials associatively linked to the notion of stones:

(Image)

Such a rich site as this offers a host of possibilities to the reader. I might for example linger at the level of this screen to examine the variety of materials gathered into the cairn. Or I might choose a text and follow the default path where it leads , out of this screen to other locations in Izme Pass. If I choose to click on “Stonestory 1,” at the center of the cairn, I am transported abruptly to a narrative line: “She said, When I was little I held stones up to my crotch to feel the coldness.’” Following the default path from this space, I navigate next to a space titled “a wedding,” containing this text:

Beside her groom, the cool stone closed tightly in her palm.
Just before the ceremony he had given her a small jade
butterfly, signal of his intent.  He wanted to learn her, and
one of the first things he knew was that jade was her
stone.

Piedras de ijada, stones of the
loin.

And then after that to a space titled “delight”:

His.  Delight.	Is what she seeks.  In this shade which
she herself creates, his mind turned inward, she might
hold him in her palm so, brief reprieve.

Another, he says.  Again.

Another click on the default path returns me to “Stonestory 1,” establishing a tight narrative circle that I realize has moved me swiftly through ritual passages of a female eroticism that has been symbolically associated with and mediated by stones. Deciding at this point to investigate the adjacent “Stonetory 2,” I navigate into the prophetic speech of a woman, here again unnamed: “She said, In order to move mountains you’ve got to know what stones are about.’” The default path in this case issues outward into a journal entry about a sort of female Demosthenes, with the words “She gathered a pearl in her mouth, an O within an O . . . ,” and then on to a screen entitled “Scheherazade,” one of Izme‘s key figures, I realize, recalling th e “stories” text with which my reading began. Backtracking to the journal entry about “an O within an O,” I take note of the growing significance of circles in Izme, and decide to revisit a screen I had previously encountered in my survey o f the cairn, entitled “salt,” and I read:

The alchemical symbol was the same for water as for
salt (representing the horizon, separation and/or
joining of earth and sky)

symbol of purification and rebirth

tastes like blood and seawater, both fluids identified
with the womb

Within this configuration of Izme‘s texts, circles have produced associations among: the form of a woman’s body, rituals of sexual passage, prophetic speaking, female storytelling and, here, a mystical perception of cosmic order. Becau se I am exploring Izme as an open text, that is, one that allows, even encourages, the reader to intervene as a writer,⁴ I now decide — unthinkable in one too well-schooled in reading closed pr int texts — to make a link and add a new text, by joining the O motif to the passage I quoted above in this essay, from Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One.” But where to place it? In order to answer this question, I find myself attending more closel y than I might otherwise do to how the structure of Izme and its thematic nodes interact. Finally, I decide simply to nest my new text within the salt, so to speak, by dragging a writing space I create into the interior of the “salt” space, linking it to the Irigaray passage from the alchemical symbol on a path that I name “like lips”:

In all of the texts under discussion here, there is a dynamic relation between feminist thematics and textuality, a relationship that intensifies in a hypertext such as Izme Pass, with its complex interweaving of disparate writings and it s invitation to the reader to move freely both among texts and between texts and syntactic maps. Not all hypertexts by women are as unconstrained or open as those, like Izme Pass, although many nevertheless contain aspects of what one might call hypertextual feminism. Judy Malloy’s lyrical fiction its name was Penelope, for example, presents only a handful of choices at any given moment of reading, through labels that may be clicked on to carry the reader into sections titled ” Dawn,” “Sea” (subdivided into four sections: “a gathering of shades,” “that far-off island,” “fine work and wide across,” “rock and a hard place”) and “Song.” Because the text screens of the “Dawn” and “Sea” sections have been programmed by the computer to produce a sort of random rearrangement with each successive reading, the contexts and nuances of any given passage change with different readings, even though one’s movement through a sequence is relatively linear. Though restrictive by comparison wit h Izme Pass, the structure Malloy adopts strengthens the analogy she intends between the text screens we read and the photographic images her artist-protagonist, Ann Mitchell, is trying to work into assemblages.

The “it” named Penelope in Malloy’s fiction is a toy sailboat, the inciting image of her strategic reconsideration of the Odyssey. In her story, Anne Mitchell, though a weaver of images like her wifely forebear, does not stay put but rather wends her way through relationships and sexual liaisons, evading “That Far-Off Island,” Malloy’s version of Calypso, on which, Malloy remarks in her introductory Notes, “[i]n these days, some married women artists feel trapped.” (11) Penelope’s compounded, disjun ctive structure corresponds with and seems to arise from the narrator’s restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire:

That Far-Off Island

On the telephone he told me a story
about working in an ice cream store
when he was 14 years old.
I looked through the box of photos that I keep by my bed
while I listened.

Repeatedly in the narrative, the pursuit of art draws Anne away from a lover and the “island” of monogamous, domesticated sex:

That Far-Off Island

We were looking at contact sheets in his kitchen.
My coffee sat untouched in the center of the table.
Where his shirt was unbuttoned,
dark hairs curled on his chest.
I got up and began to put the contact sheets
back into the manilla folder.
“I have to go,” I said.

Unlike its classical antecedent, Malloy’s Penelope is spare rather than expansive, made of vignettes rather than continuously developed action or panoramic description. Malloy, however, argues that Penelope, a narrabase, as she calls it, is not stream of consciousness, like parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, though it does bear a resemblance, she believes, to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, “that strove to be the writing equivalent of impressionist painting ,” just as Penelope “strives to be the writing equivalent of the captured photographic moment. . . .” (Notes 13) The analogy between the on-screen texts of Penelope and sequences of photographs prompts the reader’s reflection up on the nature of each medium. A photograph can be read as a composed image of visual objects removed from time and stilled into permanence, or as a momentary arrest of motion in time, pointing back toward a just-gone past and forward to a promised future . Similarly, though the lines of any on-screen writing are set (at least in a read-only text), and may seem as isolated as a single photograph found on the street, in the varied sequences one reads, the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, p oised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing.

In light of this interrelation of theme and structure in Penelope, Malloy’s decision to set the texts in “Song” — which tells a partial tale of a love affair — into a fixed sequence nudges the reader to consider how this differently des igned episode relates to the rest of the fiction. “Song” offers something of a romantic idyl, and something of a threat to Malloy’s edgy contemporary woman artist, fearful that sexual desire may lead her to yield to a man who would fill all of her space and time with his demand for her attention and care. And so the set sequence of “Song,” threaded through with images of a recording tape that is ravelled and rewound, comes to an end that allows either for a replay of its looping revery, in accordance wi th the textual program, or instead to a new departure, either through the active agency of the narrator within the fiction, who takes up the instrument of her work, or of the reader, who reaches out for a selection other than [Next]:

Song

Across the brook,
three teenage boys sat on a rock,
drinking beer.
I took out my camera.

END OF SONG — if you press <Next>,
the chorus will begin again.

Next

Sea

Song

Thus, in Malloy’s Penelope, the interplay of hypertextual freedom and sequential constraint — an artifact of the electronic medium itself — surprisingly produces a variant enactment of the dilemmas and decisions her woman artist struggles w ith inside the fiction.

In all of the works I have been discussing, the conscious feminism of the writer animates her determination not simply to write but to intervene in the structure of discourse, to interrupt reiterations of what has been written, to redirect the streams of narrative and to clear space for the construction of new textual forms more congenial to women’s subjectivity. And all of these writers have understood that their project entails both the articulation of formerly repressed or dismissed stories and th e rearticulation of textual forms and codes. It is for this reason, perhaps, that feminist theory and textual practice can be of particular pertinence to theorists of hypertext who recognize a radical politics in the rhetoric and poetics of hypertextual writing. And this is why, I believe, hypertext should prove to be a fruitful site for innovative writing by women, despite a deep-dyed skepticism and resistance toward its claims and demands.

In her hypertext novel Quibbling, excerpts of which provided material for Izme Pass, Carolyn Guyer embeds passages from a diary that reflect her sense of writing at a critical moment of change in relations between women and m en. Importantly, she conceives that where they are placed textually will affect how they can develop and how they will encounter one another. Here, for example, is one such passage; its title is, significantly, “topographic”:

8 Sept 90
I wonder what would happen to the story if I changed how
I have it organized right now.	I've been keeping all the
various elements of it gathered separately in his/her own
boxes and areas just so I could move around in it and work
more easily.  But it strikes me that each of the men is
developing as himself and in relation to his lover, while
the women are developing as themselves but also kind of like
sisters.  Each man has his box as a major element, or cove,
but each woman has her own box within the nun area.
Like a dormitory, gymnæceum, or a convent.

I've thought a number of times lately to bring each woman
into her lover's box and make each cove then a marriage box,
but have not done it.  The topography of the story speaks as
it forms, as well as when the reader encounters it.  I believe
what I was (am) doing is helping the women stay independent.
Also, giving them access, through proximity, to each
other.

In many ways, topography is the story of this writing, and it is remarkable that women, so long objectified and imprisoned in male fantasies of the feminine as territory, earth, terra incognita, should incorporate into the struggle to achieve self-articulation the remaking of both the material and figurative space in which they live, or will live after the earthquake that shakes down the myriad symbols and structures that have constricted them. Even in the handful of hypertextual fict ions that have been written thus far, the potential for projects of radical change in representational art is evident. Especially for women writers who self-reflexively incorporate thinking about texts into fiction and for women who wish to seize rather than shy from the technological means of production, hypertext — which peculiarly welcomes and makes space for refraction and oppositional discourses — can be inviting, even though it rightly arouses a suspicion that its assimilative vastness may swallo w up subversion.

This suspicion is confirmed provocatively by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan in a discussion of what they regard as the “futility of resistance” in electronic writing: “Where a resistant reading of print literature always produces another definitive discourse, the equivalent procedure in hypertext does just the opposite, generating not objective closure but a further range of openings that extend the discursive possibilities of the text for ‘constructive’ transaction.” (235) The very openness of hy pertext, initially appealing to writers of resistance discourses, carries the risk that their voices may simply be absorbed into the medium, precisely because, as Moulthrop and Kaplan explain, “it offers no resistance to the intrusion.” (235) The subversions and contestations in Izme Pass, however, suggest that resistance is possible at least at the level of syntax or structure. Similarly, as her diary in Quibbling indicates, Guyer wishes to structure gender-specific bo undaries and communities into her text, in an effort to preserve her fictive women’s independence from men while giving them proximity to other women. While the principle of linking perhaps does open a text to limitless discursive possibility, as Moulthr op and Kaplan argue, when a graphic mapping is used, as in Storyspace documents, new possibilities for demarcation and affiliation appear. This protocol, however, carries its own hazard; although any writing in an open electronic text is both provisional and discursively extendable, graphic maps or syntactic displays can reinscribe enclosure and hierarchy.

In differently structuring the text spaces of men and women in Quibbling, Guyer moves toward the encoding of difference at the level of structure, but then, through the reflexive interpolation of the diary, she shifts the signification of those spaces into history, by analogy to women’s communities in the dormitory, convent or gymnæceum. Historians of women have viewed such places variously, either as sites of confinement or as sites where women have achieved both supportive commun ity and freedom from servitude. While giving scope to the independence of women, in Quibbling (and in the collaborative Izme Pass) Guyer places emphasis on the importance of women’s communities through both structure and story. In Penelope, Malloy lays emphasis on the development of women’s subjectivity: like the individualistic Woolf with her room of one’s own, Anne Mitchell seeks a place where she can concentrate her attention and do her work, like Maso wh o wants to write, not the “real” story, but what “the story was for me.” (my italics) There is ample room in feminism for both tendencies; one can easily imagine an Ava or an Anne Mitchell at work within the fictive space of Quibbling. The direction hypertext and its fictions will take in this volatile moment for textuality and for gender relations is not altogether clear, but if hypertext is to realize its potential as a medium for inclusive and democratic writing, it is profoundly important that women’s desire and creative will should contribute to its future shapings. As Guyer writes, “the topography of the story speaks as it forms,” and a more hospitable topography will speak a fuller, richer story, one that can, as Retallack a rgues, invite those former Others into an ongoing shared discourse.

Notes

1. On the matter of “writing the feminine,” two questions are likely to be raised right away: (1) does the very term impose an invidious construction of the dyad masculine/feminine, such that the “feminine” locks writers into otherness, lack, and erasure; (2) does “writing the feminine” limit or liberate the writer, or perhaps achieve some other unanticipated result? I intend to take up these questions less in reference to theory than to the practice and professions of women writers wh o regard themselves as feminist or who regard their texts as examples of writing the feminine.

2. See for example Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.”

3. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” for example.

4. In her essay, “Fretwork: ReForming Me,” Carolyn Guyer describes her dismay on finding that someone had taken up her invitation to add writing to a work of hers, because she first judged that it was not good and then felt guilty becau se she “was imposing cultural values as if they were universal, absolute standards.” In this essay she searches for theoretical and figurative means by which to incorporate and embody “the challenges of multicultural communities,” uncovering along the wa y the trap of perfectionism (as Maso has also done in her argument for the messiness of the novel) and, by contrast, the privilege, as she defines it, “in sharing rather than in the owning of knowledge.” This leads her to argue for the value of opening a rt to differences that alter contexts and restore the vitality of dynamic process rather than the stillness of mastery. Guyer’s argument calls to mind John Cage’s advocacy of aleatory composition.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. 1982, Berkeley: Third Woman P, 1995.
Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.
Guyer, Carolyn. “Fretwork: ReForming Me.” Unpublished.
—. Quibbling. Eastgate Systems. Software, 1991. Macintosh and Windows.
Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. Izme Pass. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate Systems, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
—. “Notes for Izme Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 82-89.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Joyce, Michael. Afternoon. Eastgate Systems, 1987. Software. Macintosh.
—. WOE. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
Jouve, Nicole Ward, with Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. “Where Now, Where Next?” The Semi-Transparent Envelope: Women Writing — Feminism and Fiction. Eds. Roe, Sellers, Jouve, with Michèle Roberts. London and NY: Marion Boyers, 1994.
Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. NY: Columbia UP, 1986.
Malloy, Judy. its name was Penelope. Eastgate Systems, 1993. Software. Macintosh and Windows.
Maso, Carole. AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1993.
—. “OnAVA.” Conjunctions 20 (May 1993): 172-76.
—. “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: A Lifelong Conversation with Myself, Entered Midway.” American Poetry Review 24.2 (March/April 1995): 26-31.
Miller, Nancy K. “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. NY: Columbia UP, 1986. 270-95.
Moulthrop, Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. “They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing.” Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Eds. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1994. 220-37.
Retallack, Joan. “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds).” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 344-77.
Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton, 1978.
Robinson, Lou, and Camille Norton, eds. Resurgent: New Writing by Women. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1992.
Wong, Shelley Sunn. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 43-68.

Some Other Hypertext Works by Women

Arnold, Mary-Kim. Lust. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
Cramer, Kathryn. In Small & Large Pieces. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. I Have Said Nothing. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, by Mary Shelley and Herself. Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Larsen, Deena. Marble Springs. Eastgate Systems, 1993.
Mac, Kathy. Unnatural Habitats. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
Moran, Monica. Ambulance: An Electronic Novel. Electronic Hollywood, 1993.
Smith, Sarah. King of Space. Eastgate Systems, 1990.

September 22, 2013

“The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare”

Paul Mann

Department of English
Pomona College
pmann@pomona.claremont.edu

Prediction (1994):

We are about to witness a rise of “war studies” in the humanities. On your next plane trip the person beside you dozing over a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War might not be a corporate CEO but a professor of philosophy. There will soon be whole conferences on warfare; more courses in liberal arts curricula on the theory and literature of warfare; special issues of journals on war studies published not by historians or social scientists but by literary critics; new studies of the culture of the Kriegsspiel; new readings of Homer, Kleist, Crane. Books of gender criticism on the subject of war are already appearing, and essays on Clausewitz are now liable to turn up in literary journals and books of critical theory.¹ And we will hear more and more of the sort of moral outrage critics exercised during the Gulf War over the way the video-game imagery of computer simulations displaced grievous bodily harm.

Perhaps this imminent frenzy of production will open another front in the current campaign against the aesthetics of ideology. To the extent that modern warfare depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when a country has become to its citizens a fiction that wars begin.”² If this is the case, if war arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to teach us to read war critically — and, along the way, to establish the moral and political gravity of their own work. What is at issue here, however, are not only analyses of war but also analogies of it. We will burrow into the archives of warfare because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of warfare. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Gender critics already study war discourse in order both to attack its violent phallicism and to conceive gender struggle itself along strategic lines. We have theory wars, PC wars, linguistics wars, Gerald Graff’s culture wars, Avital Ronell appropriating the war on drugs for a theory of reading.³ Vast energies will be expended not only on the archives and rhetoric of warfare but on the warcraft of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the question, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.⁴

We will pursue the subject of warfare because we will increasingly see a relationship between our own activity and warfare. Let me articulate the law that governs this movement: Critical discourse always tends toward the eventual phenomenalization, as objects of study, of the devices that structure it. War becomes a field of critical study when critics come to believe, however obliquely, that criticism has always been a field of warfare. And warfare not only in the narrow terms of intellectual difference, but in the most material terms as well. If, for Clausewitz, war is an extension of policy, for Paul Virilio the reverse is true: politics and culture are, from the outset, extensions of warfare, of a logistical economy that encompasses and ultimately exhausts all of society. Standard critiques of the coordination of scientific research with the “military-industrial complex” are already being extended to include the ideological state apparatus; for Virilio, technology as such is a logistical invention and in one way or another always answers logistical demands, and the same point will be made about technologies of representation.⁵ The humanities are in a mood to see the complicity of what Enzensberger called the “consciousness industry” in the military-industrial-knowledge complex, to see themselves at one and the same time as ideological agents of the state’s “war machine” and as warriors against the state.⁶ I will have more to say about this contradiction.

To repeat: The object of criticism is always a symptom, if you will, of the structure of critical discourse itself, always a phenomenalization of the device. But this device tends to appear in a surrogate form, still dissimulated and displaced; it appears and does not appear, makes itself known in ways that further conceal its stakes. And it always appears too late, at the very moment it ceases to function: a kind of theory-death, a death that is not a termination but a particular sort of elaboration. Now, everywhere we look, critics will be casting off their clerical mantles and rhetorical labcoats for suits of discursive armor; the slightest critical aggression or ressentiment will be inflated with theoretical war-machines and territorial metaphorics.⁷ At the same time, the very rise of war discourse among us will signal the end of intellectual warfare for us, its general recuperation by the economics of intellectual production and exchange. It might therefore be delusional — even, as some would argue, obscene, given the horrible damage of real war — to think of this academic bickering as warfare, and yet it remains a trace of war, and perhaps the sign of a potential combat some critical force could still fight.

It would be a mistake to assume that this metamorphosis of discourse as war into discourse on war has occurred because criticism has become more political. On the contrary, criticism has never been more than a political effect — “policy” carried out, and in our case dissipated, by other means. The long process of seizing politics as the proper object of criticism is one more tardy phenomenalization of the device. What we witness — and what difference would it make even if I were right? — is not proof of the politicization of criticism but an after-image of its quite peripheral integration with forms of geopolitical conflict that are, in fact, already being dismantled and remodeled in war rooms, defense institutes, and multinational corporate headquarters. War talk, like politics talk, like ethics talk, like all critical talk, is nostalgic from the start. While we babble about territories and borders, really still caught up in nothing more than a habitual attachment to disciplinary “space” and anxious dreams of “agency,” the technocrats of warfare are developing strategies that no longer depend on any such topography, strategies far more sophisticated than anything we have imagined. And we congratulate ourselves for condemning them, and for our facile analogies between video games and smart bombs.

I would propose two distinct diagnoses of the rise of war talk. On one hand, war talk is merely another exercise in rhetorical inflation, intended to shore up the fading value of a dubious product, another symptom of the imaginary politics one witnesses everywhere in critical discourse, another appearance of a structural device at the very moment it ceases to operate. On the other hand, war talk might still indicate the possibility of actually becoming a war machine, of pursuing a military equivalent of thought beyond all these petty contentions, of realizing the truth of discourse as warfare and finally beginning to fight. It will be crucial here not to choose between these diagnoses. In the domain of criticism they function simultaneously, in a perpetual mutual interference; there is no hope of extricating one from the other, no hope of either becoming critical warriors or being relieved of the demand that we do so.

The real task of this prediction is thus not to make any claim on the future, but rather to pursue a sort of genealogy, in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense, in reverse: a projective genealogy, so to speak: an account not so much of the future as of the present, of the order of knowledge at this very moment. War here is a way to theorize discourse as collective behavior, to reconceive shifting positions, alliances, defenses, attacks, casualties and losses, logistical strengths and weaknesses, the friction and fog of discursive conflict. I will sketch out nine grounds of intellectual warfare: Logistics, Logomachia, Fortification, the Desert, the Screen, Number, High Ground, Chaos, and the Cemetery.⁸ These grounds are not exhaustive and do not constitute a singular field; they are not arranged in a logical sequence and do not amount to a single argument moving toward a single conclusion. War looks different from the vantage of each ground. During a given campaign an army or a writing might find itself, at different times, in different tactical situations and encounters, occupying several or all of these grounds, and deploying its forces in different arrangements. In this essay, the nine grounds do not amount to any telos, any whole, nor even an intellectual position, but in my movement among them I hope to indicate, in the most preliminary and doubtless futile manner, strategies for a critical writing that might actually learn from the war machines it studies.

I. Logistics:

It is commonplace to reduce intellectual production to economic terms. There is a vast, indeed a surplus critique of the commodification of thought, but critics are only just beginning to believe, as perhaps our travelling CEO has long believed, that there is some advantage in seeing their own business as warfare, and that it is possible to do so because culture, business, and defense are always to some degree integrated.⁹ Any executive who entertains the notion that he or she is a corporate warrior is no doubt engaged in a fantasy, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the utility of such fantasies, their ability to inspire performance. And perhaps we too should make a more rigorous accounting of our own investments in various critical ideologies, which so often presume to combat the institution while sustaining its discursive economy by the very means of our attacks. Everyone is aware that thought has been reified and transformed into a commodity, but that awareness has never inhibited production. The critique of the commodity produces perfectly marketable commodities. The half-conscious fantasies of the truth-warrior energize the intellectual economy quite as much as the samurai fantasies of the corporate factotum fuel the marketplace.

Virilio would argue that they are not fantasies at all; stripped of narcissistic ornament, we would still have to see ourselves as soldiers. Writing in the high years of the Cold War, Virilio developed a theory of “pure war,” global war so efficient it never needs to be fought, rather like William Burroughs’s notion that a functioning police state needs no police. What is most crucial for Virilio’s conception of the warfare state is his extreme emphasis on logistics. “Logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will become simple economy, to the point of replacing political economy” (PW 4). The invention of the city as such lies in logistical preparation for war. War is not an aberration, the negation of the truth of civilization, so much as its origin; or rather, civilization depends on an origin and order that forever threaten its destruction. And in a sense we have returned to this logistical origin:

If we can say that war was entirely strategic in past societies, we can now say that strategy is no more than logistics. In turn, logistics has become the whole of war; because in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war. . . . Deterrence is the development of an arms capacity that assures total peace. The fact of having increasingly sophisticated weaponry deters the enemy more and more. At that point, war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation. The perpetuation of war is what I call Pure War, war which is acted out . . . in infinite preparation. [However,] this infinite preparation, the advent of logistics, also entails the non-development of society . . . , peace as war, as infinite preparation which exhausts and will eventually eliminate societies. The Total Peace of Deterrence is Total War pursued by other means. (PW 91-93, 139, 25)

One could argue that the stakes have changed: the Cold War is over and smaller wars are heating up; one could also argue that this is merely another case of total deterrence, and not yet achieved. In any event, to whatever degree a discrete militarization of the peacetime economy has occurred, in Virilio’s model this logistical “endocolonization” depends on the production of technical knowledge. Indeed technology has its very origin in logistical demands: technology arises from the need for weaponry, “from the arsenal and war economy” (24). But it is not a matter of armaments alone: “the war-machine is not only explosives, it’s also communications, vectorization. It’s essentially the speed of delivery. . . . It’s war operating in the sciences. It’s everything that is already perverting the field of knowledge from one end to the other; everything that is aligning the different branches of knowledge in a perspective of the end” (20). There is, here, no viable distinction between defense research and peacetime applications of science. Technology as such is a function of total logistics. Every form of knowledge supports the warfare state. Analogous if less exaggerated claims have been made by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in War and Anti-War, a lay account of the reliance of post-Cold War strategy on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. It would seem that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Virilio’s global deterrence, which has resulted in drastic cutbacks in defense budgets and damage to the American economy as a whole, only exacerbates the logistical demand. Weapons now have to be smarter because we cannot afford so many of them; fighting forces now have to be more skilled, more mobile, and more cybernetically coordinated to deal with the realities of post-Cold War conflict. Tactical advantages are measured in technological terms rather than by sheer force of troop numbers. War, the Tofflers argue, is now about technical knowledge, increasingly fought by means of knowledge, and perhaps, in the future, over knowledge, over technological capabilities. “Cyberwar” is no longer science fiction: the acquisition, systematization, and deployment of technical knowledge have become the ground and stakes of bloody wars.¹⁰

As the economy in general and technological development in particular come to be seen in logistical terms, so the critical industry too will be taken as a logistical system, and war discourse as pure war carried out by other means. But it is all too easy to conflate military, technological, and intellectual production. It might be that the forces of deterrence or nuclear war really do extend into criticism, into the study of texts, into the colloquium and critical journal, but even if there is some economic coordination between them, it would be a mistake to elide their differences. There is no question that military success is increasingly determined by access to technical knowledge and that logistical development is a laboratory for new technologies, but to recognize this is not to prove that all fields of knowledge are connected to military research in the same ways. Such claims will certainly be made, with fantastic effects, just as the critical truisms that fictions are informed by political realities and that politics is dependent upon fictive forms are turned around, without careful examination of the reversability of these propositions, into the quite dubious but productive thesis that therefore criticism of these fictions constitutes political action. What pure war indicates, however, is that intellectual warfare is not oppositional: it is a form of systems-maintenance, and a feature of the status quo of capital.

Hence war discourse will cast intellectuals as agents of a general logistical economy and at the same time offer them an array of quite useful and quite delusional critical fantasies about their combat for and against the warfare state. But let me suggest another economics here, another fantasy, one not restricted to the familiar terms of use- and exchange-value for the military-industrial-knowledge complex, but based as it were on waste-value: a general economy, in Bataille’s sense: an economy like that of the sun, which gives life but is utterly indifferent to it, burns itself out as fast as it can, expends most of its energy into the void. Bataille’s image of war-economics is the ritual practice of the potlatch, a form of symbolic combat most likely associated with funerary observances, but which he sees as a solar means of purging the superabundance of natural and cultural energy. The purpose of art and thought is the purest expenditure, waste, dépense.¹¹ Intellectual warfare can be seen in this light, as ritualized combat whose value is that it has no value: a means of squandering useless wealth. Intellectual production is the production of superfluities tricked out with beautiful illusory truths, and we meet to exchange ideas only in order to destroy thought itself with these ludicrous gifts.

II. Logomachia:

The quasi-conflictual structure of the colloquium; the nationalization of intellectual outlooks (e.g., French vs. Anglo-American feminism, English studies vs. German philology in the wake of the First World War); the “diversification” of disciplines carried out as the conquest and colonization of discrete areas of academic territory, and all the ensuing turf wars between departments, methodologies, etc.; rising concern about the invasive, “violent” force of interrogation and argument in even so innocuous an act as literary interpretation; all the petty jockeying for personal advantage that will pass for intellectual combat: these are horizonal phenomena, indications of more prevalent and insistent orders of conflict that structure intellectual work and, perhaps, work in general.

Beyond these familiar instances, imagine for a moment (it is a fable, not philosophy) that Hegel, or at least Kojève’s Hegel, was right: consciousness, history, civilization begin with combat: “man, to be really, truly ‘man,’ and to know that he is such, must . . . impose the idea he has of himself on beings other than himself,” in a fight to the death in which no one dies, and in which the stakes are only recognition, the establishment of a certain narcissistic regime, the invention of nothing more than the subject.¹²

Perhaps then the first violence is the formal and ideal reduction of the complexity of conflict to a dialectical system.

Let me modulate the fable a bit further:

When imposition is collective, the fight becomes battle.

When it is strategically directed, it becomes warfare.

When we fight to impose not our own idea but an idea that has been imposed upon us, and with which we identify so intensely it is as if the idea were our own, we become soldiers.

The soldier is essential to the dialectic: neither master nor quite simply slave but the device that mediates between them. The soldier is slave as hero, risking death in order to impose the master’s will on another slave. Perhaps intellectual soldiers too are not slaves who can comprehend their slavery and still revolt but hoplite phalanxes marshalled in order for the day of intellectual battle; Plato’s guardians in the chariot of reason, and a chariot is, after all, a military transport.

It is not even precisely that some specific other has imposed his idea on us: the master is always in part a figure out of our own imagination, out of our desire and fear, a stand-in for a “true” master we can never quite locate and who need not even really exist, and we confront “death” in his name, in various surrogate forms, so that we will never have to confront our death. Any veteran of combat could testify to the folly of this project, even though the veteran might only have shifted his or her own allegiance to another ideal.

The slave’s fear of death is thus overcome as a warrior fantasy, itself in the service of a master the slave has to some degree invented. For the intellectual warrior as well, fear of death — of not being recognized, and thus of not being — is not overcome but displaced, sublimated, pursued through a vast array of surrogates, including the sublime study of death. Intellectual warfare is not a culmination of the master-slave dialectic but its proxy, its aesthetic. The sentimental violence of dialectics.

Today almost everyone seems to believe that, at the end of this struggle, what we confront is not the triumph of absolute reason but the collapse of the entire project, the idea, the hope and dream of the absolute. I would argue that this theoretical collapse is the event-horizon, the phenomenal threshold, of intellectual warfare. The theoretical abandonment of the absolute is rarely accompanied by its disappearance: the absolute returns in a ghostly form, haunting precisely those discourses that claim to have left it behind, and that continue to orient themselves around its evacuation. Nevertheless, this half-waking from the half-dream of absolute reason returns us to a primal dialectical scene, to a war for recognition now without stakes. In the farcical relativism that results, dominance is ever more explicitly a matter not of truth but of force. And if we discover that we have never gone further, that force is all that ever mattered, can we say that the dialectic ever occurred at all?

This self-consuming conflict is visible from another perspective. If war, as an extension of logistical, tactical, and strategic knowledge, is an extension of thought, it also ruins thought. It exceeds every effort of dialectical containment. The same forces that drive military conflicts past the limits of rational control, in Clausewitz’s view, drive the idea of war past the limits of conception. As Daniel Pick observes,

For Clausewitz, war is always to be understood as subordinate to political will. That is an iron law. But it also slips out of control, threatening to become jubilantly and anarchically autonomous. It is willed, but all too prone to chance and accident. . . . The practice of war, Clausewitz contends, can be shown to undermine the consistency of thought and theory upon war. . . . [War is] an idea, an abstraction, a supposed structural necessity; but also . . . an impossible subject, the subversive force in the account that seeks to master it.¹³

The “friction” of war can never be reduced to a system. That is why Clausewitz distrusts theory, even as he engages in what would seem to be a theoretical exercise. According to Garry Wills, that is also why Clausewitz insists on the distinction between theory and Kritik, the broadest empirical assessment possible in any strategic or tactical situation, without reference to absolute laws of warfare that the realities of battle may well disprove, with disastrous results for those who adhere to them. It is not that Clausewitz refuses any generality — his dictum about war as politics is certainly theoretical, and rules of warfare are proposed everywhere in his text — rather that tactical and strategic considerations should never be determined by rules alone; rules need to be tested, and what is most important is close critical observation of the field of battle from the highest empirical ground available. But if Wills believes that the distinction between theory and Kritik resolves the problem of analyzing the friction of war, Pick is just as adamant that theory and Kritik themselves are at war in Clausewitz’s own analysis, in any consideration of warfare, and the notorious inconsistencies of On War reflect the truth of this conflict. Kritik is compromised by its own forms of friction. As Peter Paret observes, in published studies of war even the most factual descriptions of battle ought to be printed in a different colored ink to indicate the discrepancy between a battle and every account of it.¹⁴War is absolute force pushed past the limit of dialectical recuperation; it involves the theoretical experience of the destruction of theory, which cannot be alleviated by any resort to empiricism.

Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point in respect to Freud. As a fundamental instance of human aggression, war could be said to constitute a proper field for psychoanalytic investigation, an object of scientific knowledge. The problem is that

[if] Freud offers . . . an explanation of war, he does so by means of the death drive. But the death drive, and hence the truth of war, operates, it has so often been pointed out, as the speculative vanishing point of psychoanalytic theory, and even more boldly, of the whole of scientific thought.¹⁵

Hence war is not only an object of knowledge but its “crisis,” its proper logomachia, “the instability, the necessary failure, of knowledge as resolution that [Freud] places at the foundation, or limit, of all scientific thought.”¹⁶

War . . . operates in Freud’s discourse, and not only in that of Freud, as a limit to the possibility of absolute or total knowledge, at the same time as such absolute or total knowledge seems over and again to be offered as one cause — if not the cause — of war. . . . The end of war [is] the end of knowledge. (16-17)

What is most challenging about this formulation is that the destruction of knowledge, its vanishing point, is both its foundation and its limit, the condition of its existence even as it destroys it. The impossibility of knowledge becomes the very order of knowledge. This device too must eventually rise into discourse and manifest itself as a proxy object of inquiry.

III. Fortification:

Nothing is more important to the intellectual than a position. Even the fabled collapse of foundations has done little to change this: economically, discursively, this collapse turns out to be yet another position, something to believe in and hold true, the consolidation of “flows,” “drift,” etc., into the most familiar academic architecture. You must have a position, and if you do not, one will be assigned to you, or you will simply not exist. The homology of position as standpoint and position as job, budget line, FTE, is a matter of a great deal more than analogy or vulgar marxism. With a position, everything is possible. You are supported by a truth, a discipline, a methodology, a rhetorical style, a discursive form, a mode of production and exchange. You know where you stand, you recognize yourself by your position; you see yourself there because you see yourself seen there. Your position is your identity and value; it authorizes your work, circulates it, constitutes it as property, lends you the security of ownership. But at the same time nothing is possible with a position. To hold a position is to be held by it, to be caught up in its inertial and economic determinations, to be captured by an identity that you might not, finally, believe to be quite your own. Nothing could be more difficult than really, substantively, radically to change one’s mind, change the forms in which one works, risk everything by leaving behind a position on which, it seems, everything has come to rely.

The position is a fundamental form of civilization. Recall Virilio’s remark that the city itself originates in a position, a garrison, a defensive posture, a logistical form.¹⁷ To adopt the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, the position is a “sedentary fortification” of “state armies”; it is entirely contained by the state apparatus.¹⁸ In academic criticism, the symbolic place of the state is occupied and held by the text or oeuvre, around which the defending force of commentaries is deployed; in a field such as English or Comparative Literature, the state or national form of the text is clearly and hence problematically manifested. The critic defends the text by the elaborate construction of interpretations around it; at the same time, in a kind of fractal homomorphism, the critic’s own position is defined and defended by the construction of the paper circle of his or her own works. The more forces occupy a position, the stronger it will be. The barrage of words projected from the most heavily fortified strongholds (currently: New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, certain orders of gender and race theory) can repel critiques by sheer force of numbers. Indeed, conflict between positions is itself one of the chief means by which they are defined. As Rose points out, for Freud war “not only threaten[s] civilization, it can also advance it. By tending towards the conglomeration of nations, it operates [not only] like death [but also] like the eros which strives to unify” (16). In intellectual warfare, the strategic form of this erotic unification is the discipline, in every sense of the word.¹⁹ Mechanisms of regimental identification are crucial here. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of esprit de corps to garrisoned forces. Healthy competition keeps troops battle-sharp and singles out the most effective officers, but such conflict must be contained and focused toward strategic goals.

If, on one hand, it is a mistake to refer to intellectual movements, since their force is always institutional, static, on the other hand it is the fixity of the intellectual position that proves to be illusory. A position must not only be held, but advanced. The surrounding territory must come under its influence and control. Furthermore, as Clausewitz indicates, defenses tend to become offensive. It is not simply that the best defense is a good offense; defenses, like attacks, exceed the limits of strategic reason. The escalating, offensive character of nuclear deterrence has long been noted. So also for the provocative force of the most striking cultural formations: defensive postures escalate beyond the power of whatever threat they face. More importantly, the position is never more than a temporary establishment: once consolidated, its termination is assured; the more force it generates, the more certain that its walls will be breached. That is Virilio’s brief against deterrence: it exhausts its own resources, it destroys the societies it defends. There is no indefensible position, and no position that can be defended for very long. At the moment a position is founded, its destruction has begun. Defections to other positions, other cities of words, are doubtless already under way.

The intellectual position is therefore not simply a ground, let alone a foundation, however attached to or identified with it its garrison becomes, even in the act of arguing that there is no foundation. On the contrary, the position turns out to be a point along a vector, a line of advance or retreat, a temporary encampment, a bivouac, of strategic or tactical importance alone, and supportable only by means of its relation to other positions, other forces, counterforces, and logistical agencies all along the line. There is no question that the strength of the sited force’s investment in its ground, however temporary, is crucial. But in the end every position will turn out to have been a relay-point or intersection, the temporary location of an intellectual army whose grounding is not to be measured by its “rightness” — the archaic notion of truth proven by combat may be said to survive only in the academy — but by its force and resistance in relation to other quantities of force, velocity, intensity, logistical power, tactical skill, etc., all of which will not only support but eventually help to detach that army from its ground. In psychoanalytic terms, it would be necessary to see the texts that a writer deploys around his or her position as defense mechanisms of another order, that is to say, as symptoms, but not only of an individual pathology: rather as encysted trouble-spots on the intersecting curves of discursive forces about which the intellectual is often barely, if at all, aware, and which no one — no chaos theorist of discursive physics — will ever be able to map.

The position is surrounded by a “border,” a “margin.” This circular, flat-earth topography mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing: here too we encounter a phenomenalization of the discursive device. Modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of hegemonic centers (e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions. But insofar as one wishes to retain this topography of margins and centers — and in the end there might not be much to recommend it — it might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by which it establishes its line of defense. Military commanders might be unlikely to deploy their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore indicate the fundamental instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly oppositional claims of marginal forces. That is why postcolonial criticism remains a colonial outpost of an older critical form.

Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women’s studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed and critics can still congratulate themselves on their “resistance.” But the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., Romance Philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still possible; nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance often serve as alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.

IV. Desert:

The standpoint, identification with and defense of one’s own thought, the demand that one be on one’s own side, that one stand by one’s word, is so standard a feature of intellectual ethics and politics that it has been taken completely for granted. But the entrenched position is a vestige of archaic forms of warfare. The Tofflers argue that the Gulf War demonstrated the failure of entrenchment — Iraq’s older, industrial, sedentary strategy — against advanced military technologies of speed, stealth, and coordinated intelligence. “[T]he allied force was not a [conventional military] machine, but a system with far greater internal feedback, communication, and self-regulatory adjustment capability. It was . . . a ‘thinking system’” (80). For Napoleon as well, Virilio notes, “the capacity for war [was] the capacity for movement” (WC 10). In the same manner, those bound to intellectual positions remain blind to the tactical advantages of mobility and secrecy, and the new war studies will be used to suggest strategic figures outside the position’s fortified walls.

I will return to the precisely oxymoronic, self-canceling figure of secrecy in a later section. Here, I will proceed by suggesting that the new war studies should come to quite rigorous and unromantic terms with the nomadology of Deleuze and Guattari.²⁰ In their work, the war machine is essentially exterior to the state, even if the state appropriates it. The problem is, therefore, how to pursue exteriority in disciplinary and epistemological structures that are themselves entirely defined by their institutional interiority. It will certainly not be through any of the current specular and spectacular modes of narcissistic identification with the “other.” One should treat every text that peddles its vicarious nomadism while elaborating the most conventional analyses with the greatest suspicion, and at the same time with some confidence, perhaps quite groundless, that an intellectual nomadology might still be carried out elsewhere.²¹ It is necessary to comprehend the force of extremely difficult ideas: the nomadic war-machine’s exteriority to the state and its precise relation to battle; the nomads’ territorial engagement with smooth space, without “striation,” interiority, or chrono-historical organization; their indifference to semiological systems and their particular epistemological orientations (ornament instead of sign, ballistics and metallurgical science, numbering, speed, etc.); the strange relation of A Thousand Plateaus to texts that would seem to treat the same matters in a more disciplinary way — its relation, for instance, to psychoanalysis and philosophy (and what is the strategic connection between this book and Deleuze’s extraordinary and in many ways quite scholarly treatments of the history of philosophy?); indeed, the very ontology of the nomadic idea itself: all of these must be explored in considerable detail, without ever descending to any merely exegetical commentary, and without reducing what is at stake in this book to an intellectual position. Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to rethink our whole relation to books and to writing, to the very order of our thought — a task in which they themselves often fail. One must begin by reading them at a loss, but a loss that is not only the result of their work’s difficulty, which careful analysis would eventually overcome; rather, a loss that reaches down into our deepest epistemological attachments. It will be necessary, for instance, to reconceive the very notion of intellectual rigor (the order of argument, demonstration, proof) and communicative clarity: not to abandon them for the sake of some impressionistic indulgence, but to relocate them outside the striated space of the state apparatus that has always provided their structure. One might find oneself, for instance, no longer putting forth positions, outlining, defending, and identifying oneself with them: one might find oneself engaged in an even more severe, more rigorous discipline of affirming ideas without attaching oneself to them, making them appear (as Baudrillard suggested in another context) only so as to make them disappear.²² One might find oneself developing a logic that is no longer striated and arborescent (a trunk and its branches) but smooth, rhizomatic, turbulent, fractal, self-interfering, labyrinthine, subterranean. I am fully aware of how treacherous, how complex and self-contradictory a gesture it is even to refer to these ideas in such a form and such a forum as this one, how properly absurd it would be to pursue writing, to pursue knowledge itself, in the following manner:

The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine . . . consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another. . . . The nomadic trajectory . . . distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. . . . [S]edentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. . . . [T]he nomad is on the contrary he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge. (TP 363, 380-81)

How shall we read this passage, which so clearly bears on the organization of thought itself, even in respect to the question of the historical, empirical factuality of its account? How shall we read work that conceives nomadism in a way that has nothing to do with the standard distinction between stasis and movement, that never defines nomadism simply as movement opposed to sedentary positions? Can we ourselves move and distribute our thought across a deterritorialized discursive field, now conceived as smooth space, living off it without attachment to or support of any state form? And how can one write nomadically, since Deleuze and Guattari consign writing to the state apparatus?²³What then is writing to them? One’s very attempt to appropriate nomadology in a critical essay serves as another instance of the state’s never quite successful appropriation of the war machine, and of the never fully addressed logistical-economic order of one’s own thought.

Let me advance here — as a preliminary gesture toward work being carried out elsewhere and precisely in other forms, and perhaps only in order to help put an end to the delusional use of such terms as nomadology, deterritorialization, and the rhizome in almost every academic forum that tries to employ them — a tactical figure that has nothing to do with sedentary and fortified positions: the assemblage. I am concerned here with the “numerical” organization of intellectual work.²⁴ Such work is of course highly institutional, hierarchical, regimental: intellectuals labor as individuals but their individualism is for the most part the atomic form of social and discursive systems entirely reliant on this atomization. The assemblage represents a mode of intellectual organization quite distinct from the pyramid scheme of individual in the service of discipline (whatever its ideological orientation) in the service of institution, etc., under which the professional intellectual currently labors. The notion of the assemblage can be traced, along one of its lines, to the nomad on horseback. The constellation “man-horse-stirrup” is a primary instance of an assemblage: a technological extension that transforms the subject it would seem to have served, installing the subject in another sort of instrumental relation and, in effect, in another ontology. “[T]here are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages.”²⁵ Even so subjectivist a notion as desire is transformed here: assemblages are “passional, they are compositions of desire,” but desire “has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, engineered desire” (TP 398). What is at issue is the projective movement of desire, its ballistic force out of anything like a subject-position into something more like a “relay” on an extensive line of flight across smooth, nomadic space. “The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model of the monument. An ambulent people of relayers, rather than a model society” (377). We are confronted with a different order of logistics itself: in a sense, the importance of lines of communication overtakes the importance of the strategic positions they were once thought only to support. There is clearly room here for a certain kind of analysis of cybernetic developments in critical exchange, although here too one must avoid indulging in any romance of technological transformation. If the assemblage of writer-software-network offers nomadic possibilities, no one would deny that the state has already recuperated this technology (the Internet is the home shopping network of the knowledge industries). That is why it is crucial to focus not only on the technological assemblage, but on its mode of circulation: the network’s accessibility for packs and bands that in their assembling do not serve institutional interests, whatever their day-jobs and unavoidable investments. Clearly the role of the hacker is suggestive here, not because of the quite trivial outlaw romance of hacking, nor because of any particular damage hackers might manage to inflict on this or that data base, but because of the form and force of the relay itself. Imagine banding together with others in temporary, mission-oriented, extra-institutional units, with specific, limited, tactical and strategic goals. Not the death or transcendence of the subject (not any metaphysics at all); not a post-bourgeois utopia of drifts; surely not the establishment of any new isms; rather the transitory platooning of specific on-line skills and thought-weapons in mobile strike forces in the net. Perhaps the resurgent interest in the Situationist International will be less valuable for its polemics against the “spectacle,” which only serve an already over-represented critique of representation, than for the organizational models offered by its particular forms of intellectual labor: the Situationist council as a nomadic war machine. The practice of such organization would affect the forms of thought itself. Assemblages will serve as the auto-erosive becoming-machine of what was never exactly the intellectual “subject.” The transformation might already be occurring, on-line, even as the network surrenders to the apparatus of the newly transformed state.

The task is to develop a war machine “that does not have war as its object.” It is a persistent theme for Deleuze and Guattari: the war machine only takes military conflict as its primary object when it is appropriated by the state; nomadology indicates other directions and ends. Reducing the war machine to warfare: in the realm of intellectual warfare, that would involve reducing it to conflicting binaries, to dialectics. If warfare as such indicates the most reduced dialectical forms of positionality and negation (no use imagining oneself “beyond dialectics,” since the beyond still drags the dialectic along with it), even the state army’s distribution of its forces might already suggest a more nomadic form of organization: deployed like a herd across a whole field, communicating rhizomatically, etc.²⁶ Witness then this strange twist on Clausewitz:

the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems of great importance. . . . The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary, but that of a war machine which does not have war as its object, and which only entertains a potential or supplementary relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. . . . The other pole seem[s] to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States. (420, 422)

It is crucial to note that Deleuze and Guattari are not critics, of Clausewitz or anything else. For all its talk of “against the state,” very little about their work has to do with critical dialectics. They are committed rather to a certain affirmation, generated perhaps most of all out of their nomadic encounters with Nietzsche’s thought. In that sense, a proper approach to their work will never take the form of elaborating critical objections to it, even when they would seem to be warranted. Nonetheless, I would argue that the greatest obstacle to deploying nomadology in a smooth space outside the state lies in the fact that nomadology, or something like it, might also represent the current form of the state’s own development. Sedentary armies are being defeated and replaced by nomadic strategies still directed toward warfare, in the service of deterritorializing states.²⁷If the end of global deterrence has hardly resulted in anything resembling a more pacific internationalism, but rather in a more ferocious and, it is often claimed, atavistic nationalism — represented in western eyes, as usual, by Africa (e.g., Rwanda) and the Balkans — at the same time we are also witnessing a reorganization of the state apparatus through the movement of multinational capital, information technologies, and high-tech international military interventions, as in Somalia and the Gulf. It is tempting, for some, to see these changes as signs of a shift from an old world order to a newer, braver one, but one ought to see them instead as the most complex of knots. The Bosnian conflict represents at one and the same time an especially vicious nationalism and the resurgence of nomadic war machines; the allied forces of the Gulf War represent interests at one and the same time external to the state and entirely in its employ; multinational capital represents at one and the same time a nomadic form of deterritorialization and the state’s attempt to survive what it believes to be its imminent demise. In the light of these events intellectual warfare confronts the complexities of its own appropriations and lines of flight. It also confronts massive proof of its utter triviality.

V. Screen:

Much of what we will be given to read in the new war studies will be rehearsals of older critiques of representation, heated by a certain love-hate toward cyber-technology; critiques of aestheticized violence as violence against real suffering, with the critic posing heroically beside the figure of the real. This moral reconnaissance of video games and smart bombs will be accompanied by historicist accounts of the spectacular aspects of warfare, perhaps along the lines of Virilio’s War and Cinema, in which, it is argued, “war is cinema and cinema is war,” a “deadly harmony . . . always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon” (26, 69). This facile but suggestive conflation of military and cinematic epistemologies into a single logistical project will also lend itself to the familiar critique of the phallic violence of the cinematic “gaze.” The limit of these reflections is liable to be the logic of the “simulacrum,” greatly reduced from its development in either Baudrillard or Deleuze. Let me suggest that the problem before us is not, however, only the spectacularly telegenic appearance of the Gulf War but the fact that these critical reflections on spectacular screens are produced on the spectacular screens of critics’ computers. It will be necessary to investigate the cybernetic and epistemological apparatus of critical debates in the light of developments in military technology and the conduct of actual warfare, but it will be some time before the extraordinarily complex ways in which their integration occurs can be adequately described, and one should avoid collapsing differences between these networks. They are not to be mapped onto each other in any sort of simple homology; the means by which intellectual “cyberwar” serves the state remain, to some degree, obscure. I would hope that enough thinkers soon become sufficiently bored with the standard critical tropes about military simulation to move on to a more incisive critique of the connections between our software and the military’s.

For the moment, this one observation: simulation means that intellectual warfare is always fought on other grounds. It is precisely the sort of virtual war it condemns. It is not a pure extension of politics but a form of ritual warfare, a phenomenon of the ritual dimension of politics and of the political deployment of ritual. War games of every kind present us with modes of simulation, of surrogation, that should not be addressed solely by reference to some terrible, displaced reality that criticism can or cannot locate behind the veil of the video image.²⁸ What we witness is rather the oblique necessity of virtual violence itself, of surrogate conflicts even in the very critique of surrogacy: the necessary satisfaction of a demand for warfare that war alone cannot fully satisfy.

So perhaps we still face nothing more than a Mirror: All discursive warfare is autoaggressive. We sacrifice ourselves in the name of an ego-ideal and become the enemy that we behold.

VI. Number:

If discursive combat is decided by might more than by right, we should allow for the remote possibility that intellectual warfare can be quantified, measured, calculated, perhaps with the sorts of empirical tools that have been developed in recent years by such social scientists as J. David Singer, K.N. Waltz, and Magnus Midlarsky, in their studies of international conflict.²⁹ Given the friction and fog of war and the difficulties it poses for any sort of analysis, however, it might also be advisable to entertain the folly of empirical, systems-oriented research in this area. The contradiction is vital: intellectual warfare is just as quantifiable as any form of military engagement, which is to say, absolutely and hardly at all.

In the critical discourse of war, number operates exactly as Kant predicted in the analytic of the sublime. The determination of quantity is overwhelmed by a Clausewitzian escalation of force past its measurable limit, which is then taken as its true destination. The mathematical sublime is the suppressed dream of every empirical study of warfare.

Hence the intellectual war machine will pursue the potential of number in Deleuze’s sense as well, no longer a quantity in the striated space of the state, the university, the discipline, but a determining movement or speed through smooth, nomadic space (TP 381); a mode of transit rather than a measured sum. Deleuze’s “numbering number” could be said to begin at the point where the mathematical sublime leaves number behind for x, for the infinite; number then rediscovers itself outside striated space, no longer the perpetual trace of the imminent loss of numerical representation, but a singular space in which one actually moves — a space still entirely outside the current occasion.

VII. High Ground:

Is this what Pierre Bezukov hoped to observe when he climbed a fortified hill to gaze down on the Battle of Borodino? Kant: “War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a measure a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude.”³⁰ Perhaps that is what Tolstoy would have us believe Pierre did see: all the sublimely ennobling horrors of war. But let us imagine that he also witnessed the sublime from another perspective, that he saw the flatness of the abyss, a flat figure of lofty visions of bottomless depths.

In Daniel Pick’s account of the war machine, two contending forces are in play: the increasing technical efficiency and rationalization of warfare, and an insistent figuration of war as a destructive energy that surpasses every effort of rational control. Warfare “assumes a momentum of its own which is difficult, even impossible to stop. . . . Battle is now nothing more than the autonomy . . . of the war machine,” the “unstoppable engine of war” (11). It is as if this machine obeyed the familiar logic of the Frankenstein mythos, in which the most rationalized human technology must eventually reveal its madness and destroy everything, including its creator. War too is reason’s war against itself: “nothing less than a catastrophic eclipse of sense, a bestial and mechanical descent into anarchy” (20). No Kritik can ever master it; one can never rise to the exact height above battle, high enough to see but not so high that one loses its detail, because the exact height doesn’t exist; it is an ideal standpoint. In respect to war, thought always shoots past its mark. That is why there is a war in On War. “Questions of friction, illness, madness, morals, fear and anarchy continuously need to be mastered by [Clausewitz], converted back into manageable currency which enables decision-making. He presides over and marshalls his thoughts, like a general seeking to retain control over potentially wayward troops” (40); and, as every reader of Clausewitz, including Clausewitz himself, knows full well, the war in On War gets out of hand. That is part of the attraction of the new war studies: even as warfare becomes a function of knowledge production it reveals itself as the transgressed limit of knowledge, as the very agent of its destruction. The thought of war is the sublimely desirable experience of thought’s abyss.

War is sublime.³¹ The theory-war in Clausewitz’s text, the war between knowledge and everything proper to it that surpasses and destroys it, signals the way war takes its place beside tragedy as a sublime for philosophy, theory, and critical studies. The sublime of war study is one of theory’s recuperated figures of its own imaginary abyss, an abyss in which it seeks its deepest reflection. Whatever the truth of war, what we witness here first of all is thought’s fascination with an imaginary and quite compelling depth projected out of an obscure “drive” for its own “death.” If the self-destruction of the family in classical tragedy is an interior form of this paper abyss, the contemplation of warfare serves as one of its public forms, as the sublime for a political criticism, already scaled down from the recent, imaginary apocalypses of nuclear criticism.³² “The issue,” Rose writes,

seems to be not so much what might be the truth of war, but the relationship of war to the category of truth. . . . Friction, dissolution, fluidity . . . surface in defiance of a resistant totalization. . . . In Clausewitz’s text, war seems to figure as the violent repressed of its own rationalization. It becomes, so to speak, the unconscious of itself . . . an intruder or foreign body that fastens and destroys. It is the perfect image of the alien-ness that Freud places at the heart of human subjectivity, the alien-ness whose denial or projection leads us into war. In Clausewitz’s text, the theorization of war seems finally to be taken over by its object. The attempt to theorize or master war, to subordinate it to absolute knowledge, becomes a way of perpetuating or repeating war itself. (23-24)

Under the aegis of a critique of war technology, critical discourse becomes a machine that both rationalizes the contests of thought and surpasses rational control. The end of this conflict, of intellectual warfare as such, is a terminal image of reason’s self-destruction, of the Endlightenment, an ideal we will fight to the deathto fall short of. Hard critical knowledge will no more lead us past this end than knowledge of war leads humanity past armed conflict.

VIII. Chaos:

Consider what Clausewitz calls the fog of war — its untheorizable turmoil, error, accidents, chance, the sheer disorientation of combat terror. The fog of war is quite literally noise, war’s resistance to language, to objectification, to the code: both its problematic and its seductiveness, the limit of its intelligibility and the depth of its sublimity.

There are two approaches to this fog. One can try to burn it off with the bright intensity of analysis, as if it were only a surface effect, even though everything would lead one to believe that fog is an irreducible element of war, something that must be taken into account, that cannot simply be withdrawn. Then perhaps one ought instead to attempt to map this fog, not in order to eliminate it but to put it to use. The fog of war might be more than an enemy of reason: it might be a tactical advantage.

But how to map the fog of war? I anticipate an increase in references to chaos theory, discourse analyses deploying language like the following:

military interest in turbulent phenomena revolves around the question of its negative effects in the performance of weapons systems or the effects of air drag on projectiles or water drag on submarines. But for our purposes, we want an image not of the external effects of turbulent flows, but of their internal structure. We are not concerned here with the destructive effects that a hurricane, for instance, may produce, but with the intricate patterns of eddies and vortices that define its inner structure. . . . In order to better understand turbulence, we must first rid ourselves of the idea that turbulent behavior represents a form of chaos.

For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. Today we know that this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization.³³

It remains to be seen whether and to what extent the turbulence of intellectual warfare obeys the theoretical laws of chaos. Perhaps it will become possible to map the way epistemic breakthroughs stabilize themselves as singularities and fractal “eddies within eddies” (De Landa), increasingly dense, detailed, and localized skirmishes in entropic disciplinary subfields. I imagine that the effect would be at one and the same time to deepen the breakthrough, by intensifying subconflictual areas within the field, and to dissipate it. Again: resistance, subversion, opposition, etc., stabilize quite as much as they destabilize. The deepening specificity of gender criticism, for instance, might represent the regulation of gender conflict as much as its disruptive potential: its increasing density becomes the paradoxical mark of its dissipating force. It is just as likely, however, that attempts to apply chaos physics within analyses of discursive warfare will constitute nothing more than another set of tropes, another pipe dream of a scientific humanities, another mathematical sublime: the same contradictory desire for the rational conquest of phenomena that seem to escape reason and the autodestruction of reason in the process that one finds in Clausewitz.

Even if fog cannot be reduced to a science without being caught up in the mechanics of critical sublimity, one might still pursue its tactical uses. There is no question that the military is committed to deploying the fog of war. The importance of disinformation, propaganda, jamming, covert operations, “PsyOps,” and so on increases as warfare becomes more dependent on technical and tactical knowledge. As the power of reconnaissance and surveillance grows, so does the tactical importance of stealth technology. Virilio remarks that, in the hunt, the speed of perception annuls the distance between the hunter and the quarry. Survival depends on distance: “once you can see the target, you can destroy it” (WC 19, 4). Thus, from now on, “power is in disappearance: under the sea with nuclear submarines, in the air with U2s, spyplanes, or still higher with satellites and the space shuttle” (PW 146). “If what is perceived is already lost, it becomes necessary to invest in concealment what used to be invested in simple exploitation of one’s available forces — hence the spontaneous generation of new Stealth weapons. . . . The inversion of the deterrence principle is quite clear: unlike weapons which have to be publicized if they are to have a real deterrence effect, Stealth equipment can only function if its existence is clouded with uncertainty” (WC 4). For Virilio, stealth is not a matter of radar-immune bombers alone: it involves a vast “aesthetics of disappearance” that reaches an order of perfection in state terrorism:

Until the Second World War — until the concentration camps — societies were societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the Foucauldian sense. The great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists, brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and public opinion which now ban concentration camps. You can’t isolate anything in this world of ubiquity and instantaneousness. Even if some camps still exist, this overexposure of the world led to the need to surpass enclosure and imprisonment. This required another kind of repression, which is disappearance. . . . Bodies must disappear. People don’t exist. There is a big fortune in this technology because it’s so similar to what happened in the history of war. In war, we’ve seen how important disappearance, camouflage, dissimulation are — every war is a war of cunning.³⁴

The methods of strategic disappearance developed by terrorist states are the most insidious form of secrecy. That is why Virilio, the anti-technologist, believes that the technology of secrecy must be exposed. Every order of stealth weaponry is purely and simply a threat. The aesthetics of disappearance must be reappeared. For Virilio, as well as for the reconnaissance cameras whose history he records, success depends on the logistics of perception, on closing the distance between the critic and his quarry. But what if critics are not only hunters; what if they are the quarry as well?

Michel de Certeau points out that, for Clausewitz, the distinction between strategy and tactics is determined not only by scales of conflict (war vs. battle) but by relative magnitudes of power. Strategy is for the strong, and it is deployed in known, visible, mapped spaces; tactics is “an art of the weak,” of those who must operate inside territory controlled by a greater power; it takes place on the ground of the “other,” inside alien space.³⁵ It must therefore deploy deception in the face of a power “bound by its very visibility.” De Certeau suggests that even in cases where the weak force has already been sighted, it might use deception to great advantage. This is another lesson from Clausewitz: “trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a ‘last resort’: The weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategist will be able to use deception.” In the “practice of daily life,” in spaces of signification, in the contests of critical argument, such a tactics of the weak would also apply:

Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power. From this point of view, the dialectic of a tactic may be illuminated by the ancient art of sophistic. As the author of a great “strategic” system, Aristotle was also very interested in the procedures of this enemy which perverted, as he saw it, the order of truth. He quotes a formula of this protean, quick, and surprising adversary that, by making explicit the basis of sophistic, can also serve finally to define a tactic as I understand it here: it is a matter, Corax said, of “making the worse argument seem the better.” In its paradoxical concision, this formula delineates the relationship of forces that is the starting point for an intellectual creativity that is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property. (38)

And yet it is rare that any of this ever occurs to critics, who seem to believe that “subversion” consists of vicarious identification with subversives, and of telling everything one knows to one’s enemies.

It is nonetheless already the case that, in critical discourse, behind all the humanistic myths of communication, understanding, and interpretive fidelity, one finds the tactical value of misinterpretations. In an argument it is often crucial for combatants not to know their enemy, to project instead a paper figure, a distortion, against which they can conceive and reinforce their own positions. Intelligence, here, is not only knowledge of one’s enemies but the tactical lies one tells about them, even to oneself. This is so regular a phenomenon of discursive conflict that it cannot be dismissed as an aberration that might be remedied through better communication, better listening skills, more disinterested criticism. One identifies one’s own signal in part by jamming everyone else’s, setting it off from the noise one generates around it. There is, in other words, already plenty of fog in discursive warfare, and yet we tend to remain passive in the face of it, and for the most part completely and uncritically committed to exposing ourselves to attack. Imagine what might be possible for a writing that is not insistently positional, not devoted to shoring itself up, to fixing itself in place, to laying out all its plans under the eyes of its opponents. Nothing, after all, has been more fatal for the avant-gardes than the form of the manifesto. If only surrealism had been more willing to lie, to dissimulate, to abandon the petty narcissism of the position and the desire to explain itself to anyone who would listen, and instead explored the potential offered it by the model of the secret society it also hoped to be. Intellectual warfare must therefore investigate the tactical advantages of deception and clandestinity over the habitual, quasi-ethical demands of clarity and forthrightness, let alone the narcissistic demands of self-promotion and mental exhibitionism, from however fortified a position. If to be seen by the enemy is to be destroyed, then intellectual warfare must pursue its own stealth technology. Self-styled intellectual warriors will explore computer networks not only as more rapid means of communication and publishing but as means for circumventing publication, as semi-clandestine lines of circulation, encoded correspondence, and semiotic speed. There will be no entirely secure secrecy, just as there are no impregnable positions — that too is Virilio’s argument — but a shrouded nomadism is already spreading in and around major discursive conflicts. There are many more than nine grounds, but the rest are secret.

IX. Cemetery:

When the notion that knowledge is not only power but a mode of warfare has gained sufficient currency, criticism will take it upon itself to develop the strategic implications of thought, and to combat the coordination of the “knowledge industries” with the military-industrial complex. Here, however, on this final ground, already razed by the self-consuming turbulence of battle, the project of war study is neither to serve the state nor to oppose it, but rather to trivialize the very idea of war, as we trivialize everything we take up as sublime.

Even as it imposes itself with unprecedented force, intellectual warfare is already dead. It is death carried out by other means. Do not mistake this claim. It has nothing to do with saying that war talk will stop; on the contrary, we will be subjected to it as never before precisely because it is dead. Let me repeat this essay’s fundamental law: The object of criticism is always a phenomenalization of some systemic device of discourse, and it always appears in a surrogate form at the very moment it is no longer functional. The task in respect to the knowledge and critique of war is thus not developmental but simulacral, a term whose own recent fate attests to its truth. Everything that Baudrillard’s theory of simulation was about happened to the theory itself: the sublime disappearance of its own referent through its obscene overexposure, its precipitous reduction to a mere bit of intellectual currency that quickly expended all its value and force. But what if that is the task of intellectual warfare as well: not to advance and defend the new truths of war but to ruin them in the very act of construing them, to level whatever criticism has assigned to itself of war’s sublimity, to recast it in the proxy forms of mental war toys and pitch them about in mock combats, in ritual battles for possession of the dead, waged in the name of the dead and on dead ground, and most of all to cast their shades across the future.

We — and who really is speaking here? is it the dead themselves? — we come to fight discourse’s war against itself. We are soldiers of an intellectual “suicide state” that practices the politics of its own disappearance (PW 90). War for us is no longer an idea, a historical object, or even a sublime image: all these are only symptoms of an autoaggressive drive, a rage for self-destruction, a turbulent movement that distributes and evacuates every image and idea. We are like Kleist’s Kolhaas or Penthesilea, in a question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: “Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to become a double suicide machine?”³⁶ It is certainly one task of A Thousand Plateaus to avoid reducing its field to such alternatives, such ethico-political choices — to project and affirm different possibilities. But here, at this moment and on this ground, imagine Kolhaas on the scaffold, reading the future of the state in a text that he always carried close to his heart but never before considered, and swallowing it without uttering its truth at the very instant he expires.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering Wartalk (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993); Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993); Garry Wills, “Critical Inquiry in Clausewitz,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation, special issue of Critical Inquiry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982, 1983) 159-80; Mette Hjort, The Strategy of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985); cited in John Muse, “War on War,” War After War, ed. Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992) 55.

3. Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993); Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992); Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992).

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter S. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) 46. See also Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes,” in War After War 47-51. On war as a metaphor for argument, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1980).

5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986); Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).

6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

7. One example of ressentiment calling itself war: Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).

8. The figure of the nine grounds is taken from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 88-105. This is not a scholarly edition, but precisely the sort of volume one might pick up in an airport, one of a series of “spiritual” handbooks including Buddhist and Taoist texts and works by Thomas Merton, Marcus Aurelius, and Rilke. Sun Tzu’s own grounds are, of course, quite different; it would be interesting to develop the grounds he stipulates as grounds for intellectual war as well.

9. The question of degree is crucial. If certain orders of humanistic discourse tend to suppress the strategic aspects of cultural exchange, the new war discourse will exaggerate them.

10. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1993). On the figure of “cyberwar,” see James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1992).

11. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: Vol. I (Consumption); Vols. II (The History of Eroticism) and III (Sovereignty), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988, 1991); “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 116-29.

12. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969) 11.

13. Daniel Pick, The War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 7-8.

14. Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 85.

15. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? — Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 18. Rose’s chief text from Freud is “Why War?” (1932) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholgical Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955) 22: 195-215.

16. In Zizek’s vigorous defense, Hegel has already accounted for this crisis, and attempts to reduce the dialectic merely to its most formal and totalizing elements misconceive, among other things, the perpetual surplus of negation. See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991); and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

17. See also John Keegan’s account of fortification in The History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 139-52.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 389-90.

19. One must, of course, refer here to Foucault’s vast elaboration of this term in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977); Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); and other works.

20. See A Thousand Plateaus, especially Plateau 12: “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine,” 351-423. For Deleuze’s most relevant preliminary explorations of nomad thought, see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990).

21. There are several instance of the former in a recent issue of Yale French Studies; nomadology there is rarely more than an interpretive prosthesis for sedentary academics. See Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, eds., Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, spec. issue of Yale French Studies 82:1 (1993).

22. Jean Baudrillard and Sylve`re Lotringer, Forget Foucault, trans. Philip Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987) 127-28.

23. I have already suggested that the very procedures of this essay constitute, at least for me, an exploration, quite preliminary and by no means successful, of the mode of nomadic thought itself. A ground is not a sort of geo-narcissistic foundation, a stand that is more plausible the more solid and immovable one can make it, but a strategic field across whose surface one moves and deploys one’s forces for the duration of a particular tactical encounter, in a manner that uses and may even defend the ground but does not finally attach itself to it. At all points, one must take into account the multiplicity of grounds and the fact that the field or ground itself changes given the forces in conflict upon it. This would seem to resemble Wills’s version of Clausewitzian Kritik, put into motion; insofar as that is the case, one cannot be too attached to the idea of nomadism either: as I argue at various points (grounds 2 and 7), the chaos of conflict itself militates against the full clarification of any tactic, and one must avoid the facile opposition of theory and Kritik (i.e., practice). And one must also avoid becoming too attached to Deleuze and Guattari, or to “Nomadology,” or to any body of thought, lest one turn one’s own work into sedentary commentary on a position.

24. For the Deleuze-Guattari treatment of nomadic numbering, see A Thousand Plateaus 387-94.

25. Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 93.

26. On the figure of the rhizome, see the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus 3-25.

27. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 11 ff.

28. It is by no means in order to defend Baudrillard’s position that one notes how, in this context, critics who dismiss the notion of simulation in the name of some political or historical reality are themselves caught up in the very same “precession of simulacra.” Baudrillard: “the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it marks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 11. For Baudrillard’s notion of strategy, see Fatal Strategies, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.D.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).

29. See, for instance, Magnus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989).

30. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 112-13.

31. We might also call war the sublime of the state. As Pick remarks, in Clausewitz, “friction occurs within war, rather than in the nature of the relation of war to politics,” but “a more radical interrogation of war is also implied; we glimpse a war machine which threatens the political state with something madder, more disabling and disruptive than the dominant formulation of On War suggests” (32-33). War is the state’s own limit text, its proper transgression of itself, its essential and constitutive surplus, its seductive symptom of the death drive.

32. See Klein, Richard, ed., Nuclear Criticism, spec. issue of Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984).

33. The first passage is from De Landa, 14-15; the second is cited by De Landa (15) and is taken from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) 141. See also James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).

34. Pure War 88-89. See also Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).

35. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 37.

36. A Thousand Plateaus 356. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O– and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Penguin Books, 1978).

September 22, 2013
Selected Letters from Readers

PMC Reader’s Report on PMC 6.2

Like every other issue.
People act before they think.
the history of acrylic can be told in terms other than analysis:
polymerization of substance is not a fictive lacquer but an immanent
rechaining of actual potential.
see the movie stalingrad.
war
indeed.

These comments are from: Paul Freedman
The email address for Paul Freedman is: pfreedma@osf1.gmu.edu

First of five letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on Nice Job

This page has been VERY helpful in my 11th grade English research paper, and i just wanted to thank the builder of this site. It’s is hard to find text referances these days. You did a great job and i probably used this source more than any of my others…

These comments are from: Jon Trejo
The email address for Jon Trejo is: nebula@prairienet.org

Second of five letters on this topic

PMC Reader’s Report on critique

Perhaps this imminent frenzy of critical post-production will calm the peripheral aesthetics, where subject remains pure. To the extent that modern creation depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when art has become to its makers a fiction that critique begins.” If this is the case, if self-esteem arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to rule over each of our bodies — and establish the moral and political gravity of their own. What is at issue here are analyses of self and analogies of it. We will burrow into the histories of critique because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of creation. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Critics of creation already manipulate the Self of their discourse in order both to attack their violent egoism and to conceive the struggle itself along imaginary lines. Vast energies will be expended not only on the histories and rhetoric of the creation of the Self, but on the mechanism of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the intellect, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.

These comments are from: Scott Morris
The email address for Scott Morris is: sm92+@andrew.cmu.edu

Third of five letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on Postmodern Culture

Dear Mr. Unsworth:

Just cruising this morning in my favorite area of interest which could be broadly defined as cultural/critical theory and came upon your paper about your efforts at PMC. What I would like to tell you is that although I am a long time home pc dabbler your journal was the primary reason I finally gained access to the internet. I came across some files from it that had been uploaded to a bulletin board (Temple of the Screaming Electron) in california. They fell like manna into a relatively parched, but beautiful, rural environment in which I live. When I finally realized that your magnificent journal was only accessible online I signed up with my local service provider.

I’m a union teamster living in rural Vermont so I don’t have a lot of access to the sort of stuff you have in your journal and you provide access to from your website. Our local library is swell, computerized too, but a computer search under postmodernism or poststructuralism or Derrida or Baudrillard or Jameson produces zero hits.

Thank you.
Finley

Fourth of five letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on Just trying to create communication:

I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate what you are doing.

It would an honor if you keep in touch, or send your messages, and what’s new.

By the way, this is my first time on the Net, so do you know how postmodern issues are touching Music? I mean, for me, I am trying to apply my ways and senses over the music that I am composing, and I have to say, the results are fascinating, even to me.

These comments are from: Issa Boulos
The email address for Issa Boulos is: imad-ibrahim-boulos@worldnet.att.net

Fifth of five letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz’s Review of Sex Revolts, PMC 6.2:

In PMC 6.2, Jeff Schwartz raises a particular problematic that is continually grappled with at conferences on popular music and in examining books featuring popular music studies — the serious examination of the music itself. Schwartz’s concerns about mu sicology being “hostile” (with the exception of “radical” musicologists Brett, McClary, and Walser) and cultural studies being “incapable of rigorous engagement,” completely overlooks the role that ethnomusicology may play in the explication of not only t he social/cultural context of popular music, but also the “formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question” (Schwartz). I think young ethnomusicologists (like myself) and musicologists are bringing the study of popular music i nto the academy without fear of invalidation. I know it will be necessary to teach music-lovers how to articulate “real” musical information in more musicological and ethnomusicological ways then that currently practiced in general. The American public is being musically educated almost entirely by music critics (i.e., VH1’s Four on the Floor).

My own research in ethnomusicology specializes in popular/vernacular music and gender. I examine issues of gender and popular music from the standp oint of music-making experiences practiced in the everyday and in institutional contexts (i.e., handclapping games, double-Dutch, and the music-making process involved with sampling). Musical analysis or semiotic analysis of music need not be represented as conventional music notation, but there are quite a few advantages to being able to enlighten the “resistant” musicologists by showing them the legitimate structural features of, for example, the musical grooves of Public Enemy through conventional not ation. Or to highlight the complex musical forms located within various genres of popular music, everyday music-making, and to attempt to represent the subjective listening experience so highly prized among popular music affecionados. Schwartz ultimatel y raises a critical issue, which musicology, ethnomusicology, culture studies, and sociology need to seriously engage through actual musical and semiotic analysis of the codes that shape musical sound, the meanings that inflect musical appreciation and di scourse, and the elements of sound the function both within and without modern conventions of music theory and aural cognition of popular music. Popular music studies must move past the constant re-interpretation of fan-dom and star-dom with its stereoty pical gender codes. It’s time to struggle with how pitch, timbre, tone, rhythm, dance, and the more significant compositional process of live and recorded music-making shape and problematize social codes and individual expression of gender, race, ethnici ty, class, kinaesthetics, sexuality, and sexual preference (to name only a few of the dimensions that represent identity in popular music). For example, the music and the roles that women artists play in the creative process as musicians, producers, perf ormers, etc., such as Me-shell Ndege Ocello (bi-sexual neo-funk composer and bass player), Alanis Morisette (eclectic vocalist and composer), Tori Amos (classical pianist and alternative rock composer exploring sexuality and religion), K.D. Lang (lesbian “performance artist” of song), BOSS (gangster rap duo), or the incredible rap finale by Ursula Rucker on The Roots debut CD (1994) are telling us a great deal about problematizing conventions of musical sound, grain of voice, and style that extends beyond popular music and engages the sounds of classical and “world” musics. Ultimately, it’s the music that is turning us on. Making us think about other music and style. Changing our ways of seeing, hearing, and talking about the world, its subcultures, and its people through music. Continuing to privilege the social context of popular music can only serve to perpetuate the hegemonic and dialectical appreciation of Western “high” art music as an autonomous musical phenomenon. I appreciate Schwartz’s review of Sex Revoltsfor publicly acknowledging this critical need in the study of popular music.

These comments are from: Kyra D. Gaunt
The email address for Kyra D. Gaunt is: kgaunt@umich.edu

First of three letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on “The Sex Revolts” review

Bravo! Excellent critique not only of this work but of the genre of “pseudo-musicological” journalistic views of popular music. As a composer and writer on all kinds of music (like Riot Grrrl, etc.), I know well that the writing in this area has been la rgely compiled by journalists, music critics, etc. Even the musicologists you name, however (Brett, McClary and Walser), tend to rely less on their critical faculties when approaching this music (see esp. the use of metaphor in, say, McClary’s “Feminine Endings”). If I may request a response, I’d like to know what you thought of Queer Noises, the new British book on pop music’s undercurrent of homosociality. I, personally, found it less than successful (I don’t even remember the author’s n ame, at this point! Oh, wait, I think it’s John Gill.) Anyway, just curious. Thanks again for the interesting review.

These comments are from: Renee Coulombe
The email address for Renee Coulombe is: rcoulomb@ucsd.edu

Second of three letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz: Review of Press/Reynolds’ Sex Revolts

While I’d concur with most of Schwartz’s assessments ofSex Revolts, I wish he’d been able to spend more time on the problems of analyzing specifically musical aspects of pop. While musicological analysis, if wielded carefully, can yield imp ortant insights into the musical workings of pop, its applicability is limited by the terms of its own historical development, as McClary, Walser,et al, point out (even if sometimes they ignore their own advice). The basic problem is that most po st-war popular music, certainly in America and in England, and to varying degrees elsewhere, valorizes texture and rhythm far more than melodic or harmonic information. No big revelation this — but since those last qualities are the qualities around whi ch Western musicological analysis has grown, that analysis is relatively ill-equipped to address what makes pop work: the complex affective semiotics of its rhythmic and textural spatiality, the way the sound hits you.

To resort to impressionistic, vague language here often seems the only alternative to the failure of more rigid, analytical language to come even close to conveying the impact and effects of the music under analysis: it’s like nailing the wind to the wate r. (I succumb to my own diagnosis, it seems . . .)

Sound often begins to seem irreducible, non-repeatable, impossible to reproduce. Rap producers, for instance, often justify sampling as the only way to capture a complete sonic precis of particular old records: only those instruments, those musicians, in that room with those mics, recorded on that board by a particular recording team — and only on that take — bear exactly the sonic signature desired.

If even sound seems incapable of speaking itself, what chance has language — except in its attempt to fray, fuzz, distort its own bounds, in imitation of music itself? Which makes me wonder: why does Schwartz think a more rigorous and scholarly engageme nt with cultural studies thinkers would lead to a less impressionistic account of the workings of the music itself — as his last criticism strongly implies, following immediately upon his critique of Reynolds and Press’s musicological shortcomings? The writers he mentions resort to rather imagistic language in their work on music — while conventional musicology fails notoriously to describe the musicality (as its performers must engage it) even of its native, proper music, the Western art music traditi on.

These comments are from: Jeffrey Norman
The email address for Jeffrey Norman is: jenor@csd.uwm.edu

Third of three letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on [Spinelli’s “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” PMC 6.2]:

I just finished reading the very interesting article comparing the Internet to the early days of radio. I would have to agree with you that the Internet is currently over-utopianized. However, I do believe that the capability of people to become produce rs rather than consumers is very strong on the Internet. For example, imagine if musicians and underground film makers could put their work onto the Internet! I think it would be extremely cool if people could broadcast their work through the Internet, cheaply and with high-quality. However, this might not happen if the protocols of the Internet increasingly become owned by corporations. For example, the premier streaming audio standard on the net is currently RealAudio; do you realize how expensive i t is to buy a RealAudio server? To service only one-hundred people costs something like five or ten thousand dollars; it’s crazy.

But you did raise a very interesting point. Why is the Internet so much more interested in the “process” than the “destination”? And why are most of the discussion groups on the Internet oriented around consumption? Those are two very interesting point s “you” (if I am talking to the writer of this article) brought up.

The thing that always bothers me is: if I could completely recreate society, how would I do so? What am I asking society to do anyway? What is the “good life”?

Is it to make sure no one ever goes hungry? Is it to attempt to achieve the ideal of justice? Personal freedoms?

Is it to better enjoy the material comforts of life, or is it to reach for something higher?

A lot more questions than answers!

Anyway, good article. Hope you have some interesting responses to what I have sent you.

These comments are from: Brad pmc Neuberg
The email address for Brad pmc Neuberg is: bkn3@columbia.edu

First of two letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on “Radio Lessons for the Internet”

The rhetorical tone of early radio and early Internet definitely have striking similarities. However, I would suggest to Mr. Spinelli to also look into the developments in Internet technology to see that the Internet may be headed in the direction of rad io and television.

Without the specific newspaper article next to me, I have read that many cable television providers and even satellite television providers are looking into ways of creating a “cable modem”, a one-way modem that acts as a high speed receiver. While advoc ates of the cable modem point to its significantly higher speed than a traditional phone modem, they also assume that users will spend more time “downloading content” than uploading. As the cable modem provides inexpensive access to most homes (many woul d use an “internet terminal” to browse web sites and launch remote applications), the individual’s ability to transmit information will be just as limited (possibly by only having a phone line out) or eliminated altogther.

Also, the economic limitations of broadcast on the internet are as real as those in radio: an inexpensive FM transmitter and antennae might cost in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a used transmitter with a 1500 watt capacity. A web server with a fast en ought connection to the internet to allow large numbers of users is similarly priced. However, as an internet user, I can at least transmit responses to other individuals broadcasts and even make information accessible to lay people.

These comments are from: Jack McHale
The email address for Jack McHale is: jmchale4@ix.netcom.com

Second of two letters on this topic.

PMC Reader’s Report on [Barker’s “Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable,” PMC 6.1]

Although perhaps your various digressions on the theme of fragments might at some time and at some place disclose an aperture onto the very view which every fragment, by force or by cunning, forces onto the reader, at least in Nietzsche, it remains an ope n question as to the difference between a fragment and an aphorism. Think, for example, of Novalis, from whom Nietzsche undoubtably received the art of anti-hegelian writing you are so fond of . . . Now, the serious question only begins after you have s aid what you desired to say, namely, can we articulate the difference, and hence the movement, from the fragment to the aphorism. My claim is simple: until you acheive the style of thinking — or writing — where the aphorism sheers away from the mere fr agment, you invariably miss the point of what Blanchot will name the writing of the disaster and Derrida will urge us to call the margin.

These comments are from: Chad Finsterwald
The email address for Chad Finsterwald is: pfinster@acs.bu.edu

PMC Reader’s Report on Paul Mann’s “The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare“

Clausewitz took the extremely difficult subject of warfare and explained it in simple, understandable terms. You have taken a relatively simple concept (“I critique, therefore I’m not!”) and spun so much hyperbole into it that it requires a dictionary an d a case of beer to get through it. I found many pearls of wisdom, but the oyster shells are up around my waist. I wonder if you didn’t fall into the pit you dug for others.

These comments are from: Mike Johnson
The email address for Mike Johnson is: b205s1.ssc.af.mil

PMC Reader’s Report on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

When I stumbled on a remaindered hardbound of Vineland (while working in my local Barnes & Noble non-superstore, since closed) I was amazed that anyone could capture the stresses of trying to keep the experiences of living in the ’60s (in my case, in Central Square, Cambridge MA) as a New Left activist both alive and moving through what has been made of them by their direst opponents (The New Right whose NeoAscendancy now controls Congress). Surely nobody who lived those years and is still l iving them as a forwardable experience has any illusion as to what actually happened, least of all Pynchon. Laborious academicization of the book is a form of engagement, but dissipates its gravity, by breaking it down into a series of discretionary note s. For a non-academic poet & journalist, this acts as an unnecessarily self-checking reduction of what a survivor like myself uses as an encoded, portable experience. I’m not disabled by the ’60s: I’m infuriated by the inability of non-participants to appreciate its continuing effects on the survivors as beneficial. This is no illustrated cartoon history we lived. I might also mention that Vineland is (as was not even noted) in California. We who lived the ’60s in Cambridge, MA had a dr amatically different experience only some of which has been preserved as fiction (by Marge Piercy in Dance the Eagle to Sleep) since we did not intend it to be fictionable while we lived it. Finally, when I sent one of my copies of Vin eland to John Brennan, a Boston College (Class of ’63) classmate who later got his PhD at U.C.-Davis, I inscribed it: “An American Mahabharata.” I suggest you see it as that: a minatory epic of reversals as terrifyingly instructive to warring impe rial clans who knew they were — the 60s was the Civil War of my generation. That the New Right appears to have won is evident; that they will control its history is not, citing this essay as an attempt to refute it. Thanks for the intent. I’m sure Pyn chon appreciates it. I do. Now write it again as a popular article that the general public can digest. The ideological action continues in the Public World, not the rarified section of the illustrated/annotated edition. Pynchon didn’t write Alic e in Wonderland, he wrote Vineland (CA).

These comments are from: Bill Costley
The email address for Bill Costley is: sunset@gis.net

September 22, 2013
Schama and the New Histories of Landscape

Mark Shadle

Eastern Oregon State College
mshadle@eosc.osshe.edu

Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995.

Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning.

— Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

Lithuanian Bison protected so they could be annihilated for “sport” by Goring as an incarnation of Tacitus’s transformed “wild man” of Germania, royalist Robin Hoods masquerading as mythological Green Men, the maniacal, neo-Roman hydraulics of Renaissance fountain builders, and whole drawing-rooms of mad Englishmen climbing Mt. Blanc with a pack train of gourmet food — these are just a few of the fascinating eccentricities of Simon Schama’s latest book, Landscape and Memory. But beyond its appetizing details, this book is an intriguing example of the increasingly problematic process of writing history in postmodern times.

Schama’s project is a controversial one. Besides examining the complex interpenetrations of nature and culture, he considers the difficulty of placing an environmental ethic within a postmodern “autobiography of history.” He also considers the tension between the individual and the communal, and between myth and history in light of “New Historicist” perspectives. Schama begins by following his lodestone of Henry Thoreau’s notion (and Magritte’s before him) that both “the wild man” and “wilderness” are more a matter of what we carry “inside” us than an exterior reality. He argues that the cultural appropriation of landscape may not be an entirely bad thing. In fact, he argues that this should be “a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration” (9). After praising their ability to make “inanimate topography into historical agents,” and “restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors” (13), Schama dismisses environmental historians like Stephen Pyne, William Cronon, and Donald Worster for their similarly “dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor” (13). Schama also steers clear of environmental critics like Max Oelschlaeger, whose call for new myths Schama paraphrases as the need to “repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet” (13). Instead, Schama describes his own book as: “a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation” (14).

This new book will be accompanied by five filmed BBC television programs that will air in America. Unlike Professor Schama’s previous works — including Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)— this one seeks an audience beyond historians. Ironically, though, it is this book for non-specialists which calls the nature of history most radically into question.

Instead of being yet another explanation of what has been lost, Schama wants his book to be an exploration of “what we may yet find” (14). Certainly he is right that old myths — and the behaviors they generate and are generated by — are still with us. But while Schama’s “range” (historically and geographically) is vast, his internal summaries and conclusions about what we “may yet find” are curiously slight and vague. Notice, for example, his way of letting Krhushchev’s response to his uneasy inheritance of the European forest drift into mystery when he says: “But although for a century or more, the rulers of Russian empires, from Tsar Nicholas I to General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, liked to show off their royal hunt, there was, at the same time, something about the heart of the forest that remained irreducibly alien; impenetrable, resistant” (53). Khrushchev, here, is a stand-in for all the heads of state who regularly exploit a “mythological bath” in nature on their way to becoming “super-natural.”

Schama makes it clear that this paradoxical relationship between nature and culture is a venerable one when he describes “Rome’s mixed feelings about the forest” (83). He explains it this way: “On the one hand, it [the forest] was a place which, by definition, was ‘outside’ (foris) the writ of their law and the governance of their state. On the other hand, their own founding myths were sylvan” (83). Even though the world since John Locke has extended Divine Law into a natural law that extends culture into nature, it should no longer be ironic that a “macho” politician like Khrushchev, who liked to indulge his “feral nature” in the forest, would try to subdue it with his “Virgin Lands” Project. Similarly, Donna Haraway has shown how the gun-totin’ Teddy Roosevelt both fed upon and horribly distorted nature with chauvinism and racism through the gorillas exhibited in the Natural History Museum in New York City.”¹

Schama’s book presents us time and again with this basic problematic, reminding us that landscape myths and memories have both “surprising endurance” and a “power to shape institutions that we still live with” (15), and that landscapes themselves “are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock” (61). Far from hoping to unravel actual nature from its mythological or ideological representations, Schama aims to show just how mutually entangled these categories really are. It should be acknowldeged, he says, “that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (61).

Schama does not seem fully to appreciate the tragedy of this “muddling,” now being learned everywhere, which is that playing out our own mortality against the immortal “image” of the forest can quickly kill nature while some subconscious human feeling of immortality for our species goes on. A redwood is not merely the hot air of metaphor, but the slow growth of actual wood and a giant ecosystem through the cool air of several millennia. No nursery of metaphor can regrow it without the soothing coastal fog of time. While Schama does not “deny the seriousness of our ecological predicament, nor . . . dismiss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress” (14), he never cites the best accounts of how nature was wrestled into submission in America (e.g. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, or Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence), nor does he discuss the most thoughtful and esoteric attempts to recycle and transform old histories and myths in order to find again or anew what Charles Olson calls, in Poetry and Truth, an “actual world of value.”² This destination/process is the central work of Olson’s three-volume set of poems to reclaim Gloucester, Massachusetts, The Maximus Poems.³

Schama could appreciate Olson’s careful approach to myth and history as it came out of his readings in pre-Socratic Greek culture. In The Special View of History, Olson follows out and shapes Heraclitus’s notions that “man is estranged from that which is most familiar” and that “what does not change is the will to change” (Olson). This is brilliantly elaborated by Sherman Paul:

One lesson [of Olson’s wanderings in Mexico] was that there were people who were not estranged from the familiar, who lived in the physical world and knew how to attend it closely, to make it a “human universe.” Another was the realization that since time does not alter the fact that they were like us, there is no “history.” In the enthusiasm of his discovery of the Mayan world, the only “history” Olson acknowledged was the “second time . . .” This does not mean that he transcends history. Instead it tells us what his preparatory poem declares: that civilizations decline when there is no will to change.⁴

While postmodern writers like Olson would agree with Schama that “place is a made thing,” and that language is slippery, they have worked hard to imagine an intertwined world of creatures and language “placed” not in the noun of history but in the histori/city of the only absolute we can still believe in: “Man is, He acts.”⁵While the entanglements of myth and history can contribute stability to society, they can also close it off to certain individuals, groups , cultures.

To clarify this, we need to consider the recent history of history. “Postmodern history” (as opposed to histories of the contemporary or postmodern period) has inherited the tension between incremental, authorial scholarship (“our civilization”) on the one hand, and autobiography (at once “my-story/stery” and the “his/her-story” implicit in Charles Olson’s translation of Herodotus’ “istorin’” as “to find out for yourself”) on the other. The New Historicism is the most prominent example of the kind of fractured historical practice this tension has produced. In the course of displacing both traditional historiography and the intellectual history of ideas, the New Historicism has opened the practice of history to the institutional and discursive violence inherent within the discipline itself, to the ways in which historical interpretation has functioned to shut out certain stories, to shut down possibilities of negotiation and exchange. While Stanley Fish has seen the value and efficacy of New Historicists’ work as essentially limited to the classroom (where, for example, it has helped to produce a new, multicultural canon),⁶Hayden White locates in their practice a more thoroughgoing (pronounce it Thoreau-going) and Olsonian transformation of the subjects and objects of historical knowledge:

What they [the New Historicists] have discovered . . . is that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches, at least as many as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum; that . . . to embrace a historical approach to the study of anything entails or implies a distinctive philosophy of history; and that . . . finally one’s philosophy of history is a function as much of the way one construes one’s own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one’s knowledge of “history” itself.⁷

While Schama remains in many ways a traditional historian, this book takes on something of a New Historicist cast. In the “Introduction,” he gives his account a post-structuralist frame and a feel for the kind of situational and environmental ethics that have characterized much New Historical work when he says: “My own view is necessarily . . . historical, and by that token much less confidently universal. Not all cultures embrace nature and landscape myths with equal ardor, and those that do, go through periods of greater or lesser enthusiasm” (15). Using the work of Mary Lefkowitz and Norman Manea, Schama castigates both Mircea Eliade in Europe and Joseph Campbell in America as structuralist myth-lovers and ultimately as hero worshipers impatient with democracy (133).

Yet there is the residue of the structuralist-idealist in Schama when he confesses that “it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland” (15). Despite his clear recognition that this “national identity” has been the engine of such political catastrophes as Nazism, Schama seems to place himself at least partly under its peculiar spell.

Schama apparently wants to have it both ways. The tension between his philosophy of history and his practice of history escalates in his accounts of visiting the sites of his Jewish heritage in Poland, or his American in-laws in the redwoods of the American West. In these places Schama “re-places” himself as historian to re-incscribe landscape. Working more in the sub-tradition of American literary history epitomized by Fred Turner in The Spirit of Place, where Turner revisits the sites and communities of some famous American writers, Schama tries here to feel the effects of history.⁸Having absorbed both the need for “objectivity” from the sciences and the value of situated subjectivity from the humanities, Schama, more than many historians, finds that the garden of personal narrative presents him with a tangle of difficult choices.

Historians can no longer easily decide which rhetorical and stylistic devices to use. Ironically, this is because we have set our “his/her-stories” aside, as something for the province of “expert” historians writing for incredibly diverse audiences, rather than as the responsibility of the more local “tribe.” What Schama’s alternately scholarly and autobiographical approach reminds us of is the call to “compose” the rough draft of any history as something personal. Out of several observations of revisited sites and serendipitously created intersections of texts, the “my-story/stery” becomes the “his/her-story,” inclining not toward the complete abstraction of some “universal” audience, but toward the scattered members of what composition scholars Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford call a new or “invoked” audience who have lived in the places/events (however metaphorically idealized or mythologized) under question.⁹Out of the seed of personal observation stem a description and analysis that will, in their greatest and final abstractions, paradoxically challenge the limits of an individualistic perspective.

Barry Lopez explains this process in what might have been a perfect epigraph for Schama’s book:

It is through the power of observation, the gifts of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward, it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. . . . Each infuses us with a different kind of life. The one feeds us, figuratively and literally. The other protects us from lies and tyranny. To keep landscapes intact and the memory of them, our history in them, alive, seems as imperative a task in modern time as finding the extent to which individual expression can be accommodated before it threatens to destroy the fabric of society.¹⁰

Yet the beauty of this process is accompanied by a danger which Lopez also describes:

The intense pressure of imagery in America, and the manipulation of images necessary to a society with specific goals, means the land will inevitably be treated like a commodity; and voices that tend to contradict the proffered image will, one way or another, be silenced or discredited by those in power.¹¹

The increasing resistance to this “pressure of imagery” has led in American Studies to a critical engagement with myth-symbol, as for example in Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography, where Turner argues that we Americans have substituted mythology for history.¹² Such an argument relies on the notion of a history distinct from mythology. Schama’s rather different engagement with myth-symbol, with its emphasis on the complex interweaving of myth and history in European experience, can assist Americans in better understanding their own situation. In this respect his book can be seen as extending a project that links together such diverse work as Raymond Williams’s study of the politics of ideas in The Long Revolution and Evan Connell’s tracking of a wanderlust of business in A Long Desire.¹³

Schama’s book demonstrates the need in America to dive back into a European past of “mythological history” and “historicized mythology,” but it also implies a need to study what we have lost of other venerable histories and mythologies around the world. Lopez, continuing his discussion of the danger of image and mythology, helps us appreciate this postmodern urge to “get behind the Greek” when he says:

All local geographies, as they were defined by hundreds of separate, independent native traditions, were denied in the beginning in favor of an imported and unifying vision of America’s natural history. The country, the landscape itself, was eventually defined according to dictates of Progress like Manifest Destiny, and laws like the Homestead Act which reflected a poor understanding of the physical lay of the land.¹⁴

Lopez’s concerns are being acted upon in America by a host of reflective, often multicultural, writers — writers who are in many cases important postmodernist historians in their own right, drawing on “folk” cultures that comprised “postmodern” knowledges and strategies long before the Modern Language Association staked out that term and territory. This work, by writers like Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor or Leslie Silko, Schama does not examine in any direct way. But there are many points of potentially fruitful contact between such work and his, since both are centrally concerned with the ways “landscape” is produced and consumed by those who would claim merely to be observing or exploring or preserving it: writers, artists, tourists, museums, governments, corporations, and of course historians.

Ultimately, the great value of Schama’s book would seem to lie in the urgency of the questions it raises rather than the clarity or completeness of the answers it can provide. In his admirably idiosyncratic way, Schama is wrestling with the central problem at the intersection of history and nature, the problem of how to put memory and interpretation positively to work in the natural world. Once we have deconstructed the mythological, morally-informed landscapes of the past, where are we to locate what Olson calls the “actual world of value”?

Notes

1. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City 1908-1936,” Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994).

2. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1971).

3. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983).

4. Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978) 29.

5. Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970) 34.

6. Stanley Fish, “Commentary: The Young and the Restless,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Weeser (New York: Routledge, 1989)315.

7. Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment,” in Weeser, 302.

8. Fred Turner, The Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989).

9. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” College Composition and Communication 35.2 (May, 1984)155-171.

10. Barry Lopez, “Losing Our Sense of Place,” Teacher Magazine (Feb., 1990) 188.

11. Lopez, 42.

12. Frederick Turner III., Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

13. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 1961). Evan Connell, A Long Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1961).

14. Lopez.

September 22, 2013
Bisexuals, Cyborgs, and Chaos

Kelly Cresap

University of Virginia
kmc2f@virginia.edu

Marjorie Garber. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Is it possible to conceive of bisexuality without resorting to binary logic? The very nomenclature of bisexual seems to declare faith in a certain form of dualism. Where, after all, might one locate bisexuality except between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as a predilection involving both sexes? Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber goes to considerable lengths in her new book to reveal the fallacies of such ways of thinking. She ushers bisexuality into a postmodern realm where it may be seen in fruitful interaction with anti-dualistic discourses and practices such as those of cyborg culture and chaos theory.

Garber strategically avoids providing a clear-cut, delimited view of her central topic in Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. A reader’s search for hard definitions is contraindicated by the book’s sheer proliferation of material, which includes excursions into cultural and literary history, scientific and pseudoscientific inquiry, mythology, etymology, fact, fiction, and anecdote. Through the course of 584 pages, bisexuality amasses a bewildering diversity of connotations.

Indeed, without Garber’s sustaining critical presence, the views of bisexuality registered in the book would threaten to devolve into a kind of pluralistic rampage. We ascertain from “common wisdom” that “everyone is bisexual” and that “there is no such thing as bisexuality” (16). Bisexuality is either the most “natural” or the most “perverse,” “the most conservative or the most radical of ideas about human sexuality” (250). Conceivable in terms of experience, essence, or desire (176), it presents a Janus-faced (365) or Sphinx-like (178-80) emblem of enigma. It is alternately chic and “creepy” (146), ubiquitous and invisible (267); a “whole, fluid identity” (56) and a “phantom proposition” (481); a practice predating antiquity (252) and a contemporary fad (219). Bisexual tendencies can be expressed concurrently or sequentially (30) as well as defensively, ritually, situationally, experimentally, and “technically” (30); they may also involve triangulated desire (423-35) or erotic substitution (435-42). Persons who behave bisexually do not necessarily identify as such, and (appropriately enough) vice versa. We learn from journalistic and cinematic accounts that bisexuals are creatures of “uncontrollable impulses” (93), the “ultimate pariahs of the AIDS crisis” (Newsweek, 1987); that the bisexual male is “the bogeyman of the later 1980s” (New York Times, 1987); and that the bisexual female’s known proclivities include vampirism (The Hunger) and serial murder (Basic Instinct). Such accounts mingle with discussion of long-standing stereotypes which cast bisexuals as fence-sitters (21), double agents (94), and swingers (20); as people who are habitually flighty, promiscuous (28), confused, irresponsible (56), opportunist (351), indecisive (360), going through a phase (345), devoted to group sex (476), attracted to anything that moves (55), guilty of wanting heterosexual privilege (20), and incapable of making commitments (56). Further, the situation of bisexuality is “either allegorically universal or untenably conflicted” (473); and coming out as bi would be easy for a dozen reasons, hard for a dozen reasons (67-8).

Garber intervenes in this topical maelstrom to assert that bisexuality acts as one of the great destabilizing forces of postmodern culture: “Bisexuality means that your sexual identity may not be fixed in the womb, or at age two, or five” (86); it “unsettles ideas about priority, singularity, truthfulness, and identity” (90). “Bisexuality marks the spot where all our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis” (368); it presents “the radically discontinuous possibility of a sexual ‘identity’ that confounds the very category of identity” (513).

However, rather than simply declare bisexuality a dissolver of categories and proclaim herself a sexual agnostic, Garber devotes the bulk of Vice Versa to documenting the concrete cultural and social histories that inform contemporary notions of bisexuality. She chronicles varieties of Western bisexual experience in a great many guises and milieux: in bohemian circles from Bloomsbury to the Harlem Renaissance to Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico; in the confined space of barracks, prisons, and boarding schools; in the U.S. Congress, the Mormon Church, Hollywood, the world of early psychoanalysis; in the irreducibly plural affections of dozens of historical figures, from Plato and Shakespeare to Bessie Smith and Sandra Bernhard.¹ With what the Boston Globe has called “a doctoral candidate’s rigor and a channel-surfer’s restlessness,”² Garber assesses the multifold bisexualities emerging from a range of cultural artifacts, including memoirs, novels, plays, movies, nonfiction, newspapers, letters, academic journals, talk shows, advice columns, fanzines, “slash” lit, and song lyrics.

This material, taken together, clearly militates against the notion that any individual can claim a “sexual identity” that is either unwavering or fully comprehendible. Readers of all sexual orientations will find that the engaging wit and eloquence of Vice Versa belie its disconcertingly open-ended questions about the stubborn liminalities of human behavior and desire. Casting about for a way of conceptualizing bisexual politics, Garber enlists the metaphorical use of miscegenation and hybridity made (respectively) by Donna Haraway and Homi K. Bhabha (88-9). Concluding her chapter on bisexuality and celebrity, Garber writes, “the cognate relationship between postmodernism and bisexuality merely underscores the fact that all lives are discontinuous” (150).

What are the consequences of such destabilization and discontinuity? What cultural fallout attends Garber’s assessment of bisexuality as a resolutely non-homogeneous, category-unsettling phenomenon?

Her book, like the topic it addresses, arouses intensely ambivalent response.³ Even while gay author and activist Edmund White charges Garber with neglecting the more unnerving implications of her research, he confesses that her book left him profoundly unnerved. In White’s view, Garber focuses on the playfully “transgressive” side of her topic “at the expense of a deeper discussion of the threat that bisexuality poses to the orderly separation of gender roles, and of the corresponding rage that bisexual behavior can provoke.”⁴ Yet Vice Versa clearly prompts White to carry on such a deeper discussion himself, at least as regards his own past. The conclusion of his review finds him looking askance at his post-Stonewall “conversion” to a “full” gay identity, and at the way this conversion made him invalidate his previous sexual experience with women:

I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been bisexual had I lived in another era. . . . Following a tendency that Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading "Vice Versa," I find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.⁵

Certainly one of the virtues of Garber’s book is its ability to elicit this kind of self-reinterpretation. It’s not just that people will need to revise their position on the Kinsey scale (either retroactively or otherwise), but that they will be newly aware of how inadequate this and other scales are at accounting for the fluctuations and undercurrents of a sexual life. Vice Versa will also serve to help countermand the tendency in gay and lesbian circles to “reclaim” as homosexual any and all historical personages who displayed same-sex desire at any point in their lives. However, such factors only begin the task of reckoning with the Pandora’s-box contents of the book.

Without wanting to impose an artificial consensus on Garber’s scholarship, nor to downplay the specific and urgent rights-based agendas of the contemporary bisexual movement (of which both Garber and myself are members),⁶ I find it useful to describe Vice Versa in intellectual terms as a species of chaos theory, and to hazard Garber’s bisexual as a counterpart to the cyborg in Donna Haraway’s writings. (I use the word “hazard” here advisedly.)

In Chaos Bound, N. Katherine Hayles defines cultural postmodernism as “the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions. We can think of this as a denaturing process.”⁷ Hayles speaks of interrelated waves in postmodern culture that have acted to denature language, context, and time. The next wave, she writes, “is the denaturing of the human. While this fourth wave has yet to crest, it is undeniably building in force and scope” (266).

Hayles’s account of this fourth-wave project focuses on Donna Haraway’s ironic political myth, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Hayles finds the denaturing of the human sphere exemplified in how Haraway’s cyborg works to “undo” three distinct sets of opposites: human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical (284).⁸ The purported effectiveness of such “undoing” of opposites needs a caveat, which I will provide later in this review. At present I wish to explore the implications of this logic for Garber’s text.

Key passages in Haraway’s essay might lead us to assume a close likeness between her cyborg and Garber’s bisexual:

The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation (150). The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence (151). My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work (154). Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (181).

While sensing a potential affinity between Haraway’s cyborg and Garber’s bisexual, I am nonetheless aware of the risk involved in announcing a family resemblance. Haraway specifically states:

the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity (150).

Re-reading this passage in the context of Vice Versa, I was immediately struck with two questions: Why does Haraway assume that bisexuality necessarily constitutes a “seduction to organic wholeness”? Why does Haraway’s notion of bisexuality seem to have nothing to do with Garber’s?

The species of bisexuality Haraway refers to here is in fact one from which both she and Garber take pains to distance themselves. Garber singles out for ridicule the “holistic” notion of bisexuality popularized in this century by followers of Carl Jung. In her chapter “Androgyny and Its Discontents,” Garber lambastes Jung for his static universalist notions of masculinity and femininity, showing how the intrapsychic union of “anima” and “animus” espoused by Jung constitutes an etherealized form of the practice of compulsory heterosexuality. Vice Versa mercilessly exposes a host of skeletons in the closet of Jungian psychology: essentialism, egocentrism, romanticism, puritanism, sexism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism (208-19). Garber shows how traces of such elements persist in a host of Jung-influenced practices: in the writings of Joseph Campbell (215-6), Mircea Eliade (218), June Singer (214 ff.), and Camille Paglia (221- 2); as well as in the men’s movement (224-5) and in certain cross-dressing and transgendered circles (225-9). Garber instances radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly as one of androgyny’s outspoken malcontents. (Although elsewhere in the book Garber criticizes the idea of Pauline conversions, she presents this one approvingly.) Daly initially favored the idea of “psychic wholeness, or androgyny,” then “recanted” from the position, finding the word androgyny “confusing,” “a semantic abomination,” and describing the androgynous ideal as the equivalent of “John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors Scotch-taped together” (216).

In Garber’s reconstructed sense of the term, as distinguished from Jung’s and Haraway’s usage, the bisexual may be said to collaborate in Hayles’s project of denaturing the human sphere. Like Haraway’s cyborg, Garber’s bisexual works to “undo” certain prevailing oppositions — though the principal oppositions involved in this case are not human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical, but rather 1) homosexual/heterosexual, 2) masculine/feminine, and 3)sexual/platonic.⁹

Garber problematizes the first of these three fundamental dyads in a number of ways: a) by looking at “borderline” cases which raise general doubts about the viability of a linear gay/straight continuum;¹⁰ b) by revealing the specific shortcomings of quantified indexes such as the 7-point Kinsey scale and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (28-30); and c) by citing Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, whose scholarship has shown how normative claims are culturally produced within what Butler has called “a heterosexual matrix for desire” (161). Within this matrix, Butler argues, bisexuality is “redescribed as impossible” by the patriarchal law that “produces both sanctioned heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality” (183-4). In a similar vein, Garber quotes feminist Mariana Valverde: “Although bisexuality, like homosexuality, is just another deviant identity, it also functions as a rejection of the norm/deviance model” (250).

In connection with the second dyad, Garber extends the discussion of her previous book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Her chapter on androgyny deconstructs not only Jungian psychology but related concepts such as hermaphroditism and the myth of unisexuality.¹¹

With respect to the third dyad, Garber argues that there is an unavoidably erotic component in amorous childhood and adolescent friendships (ch. 13), as well as in the teacher/student relationship (ch. 14). The realm of pedagogy is institutionally bisexual, Garber asserts, noting that classroom transferences occur regardless of the sexual predilections students and teachers display outside the class setting.

As this list suggests, few social or psychological institutions remain uninterrogated in the pages of Vice Versa. In addition to those already mentioned, marriage (chs. 16, 17), monogamy (chs. 18-21), “normalcy” (297-303), the “conversion” narrative (ch. 15), and even theories of ambidexterity (ch. 12) all come up for revisionist scrutiny.

I see Garber’s bisexual as a potential complement or corrective to Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway and Garber both create a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” which charts paths away from a unitary sense of self; but the paths they select diverge in important ways. Despite the masculine/feminine dyad discussed above, Garber’s bisexual would hardly be overjoyed at the prospect of living in Haraway’s “world without gender.”¹² Even if such a world were imaginable, would it be advisable? providential? fun? In Haraway’s talk of “ideologies of sexual reproduction” and the “informatics of domination,” one is left to wonder what place, if any, remains for Garber’s “eroticism of everyday life.” The very style of Garber’s book — its affable wordplay, countless anecdotes, vigorous readability — stands as an implicit rebuke to Haraway’s manifesto, with its ascetic ironies and pinched, semi-automaton syntax.

At the same time, a greater appreciation for what Haraway means by situated knowledges might have helped Garber to curb her occasional tendency toward grandiosity. Garber’s chapter on Freud ends with this pronouncement: “Bisexuality is that upon the repression of which society depends for its laws, codes, boundaries, social organization — everything that defines ‘civilization’ as we know it” (206). Despite the element of irony in the final words, Garber leaves open the possibility here, as elsewhere, that bisexuality carries the potential for shaking Western civilization to its very foundations. Such a cataclysm would be a tall order indeed for a movement which is bedeviled with problems of visibility and representation, and which is unlikely to yield a politically empowering event equivalent to the Stonewall Riots.

This matter of “pull-apart” opposites, and of cultural theory encroaching on realpolitik, calls for a caveat. John Guillory, rearticulating a concern that has become almost ritualized in the field, recently criticized the cultural studies tendency toward fostering claims about the supposed across-the-boards subversiveness of certain marginalized practices.¹³ This tendency, he suggests, arises as a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment in the midst of a widening credibility gap: in the absence of persuasive totalizing narratives about politics or economics, cultural studies brings ingratiating relief in the form of crypto-totalizing discourse about neglected minorities. Guillory specifically takes Judith Butler to task for intimating that historically entrenched binaries about gender can be fully “subverted” through the auspices of drag performance.¹⁴ A similar argument could be made about some of Garber’s claims for bisexuality — her occasional habit of resorting to breathless superlatives (does bisexuality really mark the spot where all of our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis [368]?), and of relying on a plethora of literary close readings where broader historical analysis is called for. In Vice Versa, bisexuality at times seems to be elevated to the status of a full-fledged sociopolitical paradigm shift by surmise and enthusiasm alone, by the sheer prettiness of thinking it so.

Yet it must also be argued that bisexuality is an unusually volatile and productive site of present contestation, and it is not Garber’s duty to undersell the potential of a movement whose parameters are still manifestly in flux. What Eve Sedgwick asserted of her book Epistemology of the Closet may be said as well of Vice Versa:

A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the syntax of a 'broader' or more abstractable critical project.¹⁵

Nor, pace Edmund White, should Garber be burdened with the task of enumerating every one of bisexuality’s discontents. The enormous misconceptions and prejudices that still saturate most discussions about bisexuality, even among the highly educated, form their own inverted justification for the kind of playfully affirmative treatment Garber provides. Many readers, faced with the carnivalesque inversions and crosscurrents found in Vice Versa, will feel a sense of vertigo akin to the kind Fredric Jameson has described about the encounter with postmodern architecture:

We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . The newer architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions.¹⁶

Notes

1. A sampling of individuals from the present century: Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay, married to a woman and actively gay (73-4); Patricia Ireland, whose bisexuality came under political censure when she became the president of N.O.W. (72-3); writer John Cheever, described by his daughter as a man who loved men but disliked homosexuals (403); First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (76-8); ex-congressman Robert Bauman, who pled “nolo contendre” to charges of homosexual solicitation, and whose marriage was subsequently annulled by the Catholic Church on grounds of “Mistake of person” (71); and painter Larry Rivers, for whom the term “trisexual” is coined (“He’d try anything”) (448).

2. Joseph P. Kahn, “The new book on bisexuality,” Boston Globe, 6 Sept. 1995, 80.

3. See also Rita Mae Brown, “Defining the New Sexuality,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 30 July 1995, 2,9; and Frank Kermode, “Beyond Category,” New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1995, 6-7.

4. Edmund White, “Gender Uncertainties,” The New Yorker, 17 July 1995, 81.

5. Ibid.

6. Garber traces the roots of nineties bisexual activism through the gay and lesbian movement to seventies feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties (86-7). She acknowledges that the activist and theoretical sides of bisexuality are by no means interchangeable: “the two strands of bisexual thinking, the identity-politics, rights-based arguments for visibility on the one hand and the theoretical, deconstructive, category-questioning arguments for rethinking erotic boundaries on the other are not always easily combined” (87). For biographical material on Garber, see Kahn, 75, 80.

7. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 265.

8. See Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149-81. The material Hayles refers to is found in pp. 151-4.

9. Garber writes, “If bisexuality is in fact, as I suspect it to be, not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges the easy binarities of straight and gay, queer and ‘het,’ and even, through its biological and physiological meanings, the gender categories of male and female, then the search for the meaning of the word ‘bisexual’ offers a different kind of lesson . . . The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being” (65- 6).

10. See note 1.

11. Regarding the potential for “destabilizing” the man/woman divide, Garber’s bisexual shows an affinity with the drag queen as figured in Judith Butler. See Butler’s “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 128-41, and note 14 below.

12. Haraway, 181.

13. John Guillory, “System Without Structure: Cultural Studies as ‘Low Theory,’” Keynote Presentation, GWU “Intersections” Conference, Washington, 30 March 1996. An earlier formulation of this oft-reiterated concern is found in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) 177-8.

14. Guillory singles out Butler’s scholarship as an unusually intelligent and influential (rather than unusually vulnerable) example of this practice. Butler herself, of course, is not unaware of the problem. She spends a considerable portion of Gender Trouble making similar objections to this tendency in the writings of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig (79-128). Further, she has made a number of clarifications about her own claims for drag performativity in “Critically Queer,” GLQ 1:1 (1993): 21, 24, 26-7; see also Butler’s Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). In Gender Trouble Butler writes, “Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (13).

15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 12.

16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 38.

September 22, 2013
The Problem of Strategy: How to Read Race, Gender, and Class in the Colonial Context

Anjali Arondekar

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
arondeka@dept.english.upenn.edu

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.New York: Routledge, 1995.

Strategy works through a persistent (de)constructive critique of the theoretical. “Strategy” is an embattled concept-metaphor and unlike “theory,” its antecedents are not disinterested and universal. “Usually, an artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy” (Oxford English Dictionary)

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine

One of the founding assumptions of this book is that no social category exists in privileged isolation; each comes into being in social relation to other categories, if in uneven and contradictory ways. But power is seldom adjudicated evenly — different social situations are overdetermined for race, for gender, for class, or for each in turn. I believe however that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire.

— Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather

In a recent interview, ironically entitled “In a Word,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the term “strategy,” and argues for the use of precise critical “strategies” in academic scholarship. As the quotation above indicates, her notion of “strategy” strives for a political accountability, for a situated reading that prioritizes a local context that by definition cannot function as a blanket “theory” that is then applied to all like-sounding cases. “A strategy suits a situation,” she reminds us, “a strategy is not theory.” While Spivak’s work on “strategic essentialisms” is well known, and often misunderstood as an excuse to proselytize on the virtue of academic “essentialisms,” her particular articulation of the critical necessity of the notion of “strategy” itself has often been overlooked.

I begin my review of Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest with an invocation of Spivak’s notion of “strategic” readings to situate McClintock as one such admirably engaged and embattled “strategic” reader. McClintock’s collection of essays wrestles with situating and balancing the problematic variables of race, class, and gender in readings of the colonial context within a range of hermeneutical discourses. While it is critical commonplace in current academic parlance to speak of the imbricated discourses of race, class, and gender, McClintock calls for a critical reading of empire that demands a rigorous re-conceptualization and historicization of such utterances. Race, gender, and class, she argues, are to be called “articulated categories” that “are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” (5) These categories thus do not derive their signification from a fixed point of origin, but instead are “articulated,” unfolded from uneven and often opposing locations. Operating within such a methodological framework, McClintock’s book offers three related critiques of “the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention of industrial progress”(4). Each critique points up the tendency in earlier critical work to overemphasize one term of the articulation at the expense of the others. For instance, McClintock demonstrates how the cult of domesticity in late nineteenth-century England has as much invested in hierarchies of race as it does in traditional taxonomies of gender. Or that imperialism has as much to do with gender asymmetries (both within and without the colonial context) as it does with the more pronounced impositions of class and race.

McClintock’s heuristic gestures reflect the same kind of constant structural scrutiny that she brings to bear on the analytical categories of race, class, and gender. One of her preliminary moves is to locate herself firmly at the juncture of a range of traditionally separate theoretical schools:

An abiding concern of the book is to refuse the clinical separation of psychoanalysis and history . . . and to rethink the circulation of notions that can be observed between the family, sexuality and fantasy (the traditional realm of psychoanalysis) and the categories of labor, market and money (the traditional realm of political and economic history) (8).

McClintock similarly refuses to conceive of time and history as a binary of before and after, with the post-colonial condition comfortably cushioned from an oppressive colonial past; she points instead to the urgent continuity of historical patterns. The plotting of time and histories, she argues, is nothing more than “a geography of social power” (37).

In this essay, I will pursue the limits of McClintock’s claim for such critical practices insofar as they can be traced in her book, and in turn pose a series of questions: First, given the scattered, albeit connected, chronologies of the book’s individual essays (which begin with Rider Haggard’s sketch map of the Route to King Solomon’s mines, and end with a more contemporary map of South African politics), does McClintock manage to achieve the kind of precise historical and theoretical intervention she herself calls for? Second, is the scale of McClintock’s project simply too ambitious, too wide-ranging, too methodologically fragmented to produce readings that are coherent and “strategic?” Imperial Leather‘s table of contents reads like a model for a cultural studies collection, with sections on a dizzying array of issues from an essay on race, cross-dressing, and the cult of domesticity, to another on commodity racism and imperial advertising. Does McClintock, in her effort not to privilege one category over another as an organizing trope for her analysis of different cultural pheonomena, end up with a more radical version of the “commonplace, liberal pluralism” that she so abhors (8)? Third, how does McClintock’s book add to the current scholarship on the structures of colonial discourse? The past few years have seen a prolific and rich widening of critiques in the area of colonial discourse analysis. Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire, Ali Behdad’s Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, and David Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire are just some examples of the diverse cultural-studies based critiques of empire that have recently emerged. Does McClintock offer us something that we won’t already find elsewhere in this rapidly emergent field?

The first, and most persuasive section of McClintock’s book is entitled “Empire of the Home.” This section attempts to situate genealogies of imperialism within the European domestic landscape, and specifically within the cult of domesticity. “Discoveries” of the colonies appear as belated gestures where the “inaugural scene is never in fact inaugural or originary: something has always gone before” (28). And that “something [that] has gone before,” McClintock argues, is something that is staged internally within the bedrooms and boardrooms of the European metropole. McClintock expands the notion of domesticity to include “both a space (a geographical and architectural alignment) and a social relation to power” (34). Using material examples of commodity racism such as a 1899 Pears Soap advertisement, she demonstrates how discourses of scientific racism and commodity fetishism conflate in scenes of marketable “imperial domesticity.” The Pears’ image “shows an admiral decked in pure imperial white, washing his hands in his cabin as his steamship crosses the threshold into the realm of empire” (32). Access to imperial spaces is arrived at through the cleansing powers of a domestic product that significantly promulgates a version of imperial domesticity that is without women. Colonialism may well be metaphorised as the benevolent expansion of the English family and its accompanying domestic habits, yet it is a family that is structurally inflexible and exclusively male.

McClintock’s most successful location of the convergence of racist, classist, and sexist structures in the production of late nineteenth-century bourgeois English domesticity lies in her analysis of the infamous Arthur Munby/Hannah Cullwick affair. Arthur Munby, a well-known Victorian barrister (1829-1910), was discovered, posthumously, to have “loved Hannah Cullwick , “servant born at Shifnal,” for forty-six years, and for thirty-six of those years to have secretly harbored Cullwick as his “most dear and beloved wife and servant” (76). McClintock not only points to the myriad connections between work and sexuality that found this “particularly Victorian, and particularly neurotic” relationship (77), but further demonstrates how this dynamic is artfully managed through a Victorian order of things that relies on learned and interconnected discourses of race, class, and gender. Munby’s urban projects and elaborate typologies of working-class women collide, McClintock reminds us, with the distinctly “imperial genre” of travel ethnographies: “Like the colonial map, Munby’s notations [and photographs] offered a discourse of the surface and belonged — like the musuem and exhibition hall — to the industrial archive of the spectacle” (82). Working-class women, like the racialized ‘natives’ dotting the imperial landscape, become subject to, and object of a similar masculinist order of colonial logic. And the genre of Munby’s photograph, as Malek Alloula’s Colonial Harem has also stridently articulated in a related context, is the imperial site/sight of choice.

Unlike earlier readings of the affair that cast Cullwick as the beleaguered lower-class victim of an oppressive master, McClintock however chooses to emphasize the couple’s shared investment in the maintenance of this S/M dynamic. Throughout the various roles Cullwick adopts for her master’s pleasure (from servant to mistress, from class to race transvestism), she stages, for McClintock, not merely her master’s fantasies, but also her own. The couple’s desires can converge because and not despite of their articulated class and gender positions. And the site at which they do indeed converge most markedly is in their mutual fetishization of race. Munby, in stride with the discourses of Victorian degeneration, imagines Cullwick, not just as transgressively “male” but also as “black.” At her most desirable (for Munby, that is), Cullwick is presented “in a grotesque caricature of the stigmata of racial degeneration: her forehead is flattened and foreshortened” (107). Cullwick, too, stages her most effective rebellion against Munby’s authority when she refuses to relinquish control of a “slave-band” that marks her as racialized, even as she is performing other roles. In a radical re-writing of Freud and theories of fetishism, McClintock grants Cullwick, the woman, the ability to fetishize. The filthy leather “slave-band” as fetish stands in not for the phallus, but for the concealed/missing component of Cullwick’s/womens’ labor.

I find McClintock’s fusing of psychoanalytical categories of the fetish with categories of race and class persuasive but also problematic. While McClintock’s careful placement of Munby and Cullwick within a dense history of Freudian disavowal and displacement of early objects of desire (such as the elusive and yet everpresent maid-figure) is compelling, I am less struck by her reading of race in such an analysis. McClintock does not fully problematize Cullwick’s and her own conflation of slavery with gender and class oppression. Such conflations have been vehemently opposed by many African American feminist critics, such as Carla Peterson and Hortense Spillers, who argue that to make such analogies in experiences is to elide the very specificities and brutalities of the history of slavery. Herein lies the main challenge to McClintock’s heuristic battles: her continued appeal to the analogical as well as to the intensely different structures of analysis within the categories she is exploring. In other words, race is to class as class is to gender, and so on and so forth. Within such analogs, race can only approximate gender, never stand in or substitute for it. Yet, to argue, as she does, that race, class, and gender participate in mutually generative relationships is to erase the binary structures of the analogy, and to arrive at problematical dialectical moments such as the one cited between slavery and gender oppression. I am not suggesting that there is an easy way out of this quandary, but merely that McClintock appears to have overlooked such potential pitifalls in an otherwise dense argument.

McClintock’s second large section, entitled “Double Crossings,” moves our gaze from the domestic body of Cullwick’s performances to the larger domestication of the market of empire. In this instance, the history of English soap production and advertisement functions as an allegory for the whitewashing of empire. Imperial advertisements for different brands of soap invoke images of the monkey (Monkey Brand Soap), or of an evolutionary racism, to sell not just commodities but a particular version of positivist history: “Civilization is born [such images imply] at the moment of first contact with the Western commodity” (223). Commodities in their crossings to the colonies suggest the possibility of a different brand of colonial mimcry. The native is not encouraged to aspire to the public status of an Englishman, but only to adopt his private habits and accoutrements; to buy, but never to participate in the trading of such commodities. The poetics of colonial cleanliness become “a poetics of social discipline” (226). But as McClintock’s prior section has already demonstrated, such boundaries and fantasies of colonial control are rarely maintained. Myths of native idleness, lassitude and filth are crucial to the reification of such commodity exchanges, myths that, McClintock points out, are easily dismantled through close historical readings of the particular colonial labor context. Fetishism appears disruptively here, too, as in the case of Hannah Cullwick, manifested in the uncanny quality of commodity exchange processes, especially as they involve indigenous practices and products. Colonial feminists, like Olive Schreiner, further interrupt the hegemony of Western commodity discourse through their focii on gendered and racialized forms of production.

Again, as in my critique of the earlier section, I will argue that McClintock falters in her analysis of the category of race. Race, as is refracted through the multiple images of soap advertisements in this section, does not transcend its traditional binary of black and white. McClintock restricts her analysis to the African continent, ignoring the similarly powerful reverberations such racialized commodities had on other colonies, such as India. Extending her critique to India, or even gesturing toward its perverse racial position (India begins to be read in heavily racialized terms only after the rebellion of 1857) would permit McClintock to interrogate conflicting discourses of race in simultaneous moments of colonial history. Similarly, I would add that just as units of analysis like race and gender have their particularized locations in history, so also do discourses of critical inquiry. If we are urged to localize the fetish, we must concurrently localize the post-colonial theory that McClintock uses in its precise political and historical moment. While McClintock expends considerable effort in explicating and situating psychoanalyis and Freud within a distinct genealogy of theoretical negotiations, she is less prone to do so with regard to post-colonial theory and its practitioners such as Homi Bhabha.

McClintock’s final section, “Dismantling the Master’s House,” provides a contemporary and powerful closure to her first two sections. Using the political struggles of men and women in South Africa, this section explores the crucial thread of historical continuity, exposing the disruptive kernel of colonial oppression that contaminates any neat division of the colonial past from the putatively post-colonial present. The theoretical purchase of terms such as hybridity takes on a markedly political valence in contexts such as South Africa, where narrative ambiguities perform tasks that few politicians can accomplish. McClintock uses the example of a collaborative literary text, Poppie Nongena, produced through the labor of a white and a black woman, as one site of hybrid resistance. Elsa Joubert, a white Afrikaans writer and mother, transcribes in this text the orally transmitted history of a black woman, “Poppie Nongena” recorded during the bloody Soweto uprising of 1967.

I will end as I began with a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In an interview republished in The Post-Colonial Critic, Spivak compares the project of sustained critical inquiry to the daily cleaning or brushing of one’s teeth. Both, she argues, need to be undertaken in the spirit of daily maintenance, and unlike a surgical operation, should not be expected to bring about a drastic recovery or change. McClintock’s book asks for a similar critical vigilance in our analysis of the categories of race, class, and gender. Thus, even if at times McClintock’s text appears maddeningly repetitive and heavily over-burdened with disparate topics, it is her commitment to constant rereadings of empire that we most remember. The post-script to her book, “The Angel of Progress” sums up this gesture and warns us against the dangers of critical lethargy:

Without a renewed will to intervene in the unacceptable, we face the prospect of being becalmed in a historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back spellbound at the epoch behind us, in a perpetual present marked only as “post.” (396)

September 22, 2013
Personal Effects, Public Effects, Special Effects: Institutionalizing American Poetry
Joe Amato

Lewis Department of Humanities
Illinois Institute of Technology
amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu

Jed Rasula. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990.National Council of Teachers of English. 639 pp. ISBN 0-8141-0137-2. Hardcover $42.95.

Judging by its sheer heft, its blurbs, and its bulk of carefully-detailed appendices, one might expect that The American Poetry Wax Museum represents a major intervention in the ongoing struggles over American poetry. The second title in NCTE’s Refiguring English Studies series, it bills itself as an “innovative and irreverent” book that “oscillat[es] between documentary and polemic.” The inside book-jacket bio of Rasula details a curious trajectory, involving a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program, a “stint as researcher for the ABC television series Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,” and a relocation to Ontario, Canada, where the now expatriate author teaches at Queen’s University.

Front matter includes a brief mission statement of this NCTE series, which aims to provide “a forum for scholarship on English studies as a discipline, a profession, and a vocation.” The Series Editor, Stephen M. North, is himself author of The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (Boynton, 1987), the first truly comprehensive attempt to survey the field of composition studies. North’s emphasis on and validation of “practitioner lore” launched a provocative challenge to then-prevailing notions of researcher expertise, and substantially bolstered the status both of composition studies and of its practitioners.

Rasula’s book thus emerges from a curiously recombinant domain of publishing practices within the English industry, a domain whose academic lineage is marked by the rocky ascent to legitimacy of composition studies, and with it the corollary effect that writing practices as such, including poetry, are a suitable subject for institutional interrogation. Which legitimation has in turn been reinforced by the present popularity of cultural studies — specifically, critical reception theory, an enterprise focused on unveiling the various social and cultural apparatuses of textual consumption. With North as custodian, then, and under the imprimatur of NCTE, we might expect from this unconventionally situated author a renegade challenge to prevailing orthodoxies.

And to a considerable extent, the book delivers on its promise. I’ll begin at the beginning, synchronizing my commentary with the text rather closely through Chapter Two to give some idea of its conceptual progression. A Polemical Preface” provides Rasula’s motivated macro view of what he is up to: his is “a study of the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of American poetry since World War II,” a “field of productive tensions . . . which are foreclosed prematurely by denials that they exist.” Concurring with Don Byrd’s appraisal that “‘poetic’ self-expression” has proliferated to the point of being a “cradle to grave opportunit[y],” Rasula alleges that it has been “anthologists and commentators” who have legislated this state of denials, compiling and categorizing in the service of a graven-cum-waxen image, “the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject” (4).

Chapter One: Though I found the opening salvo a bit mechanical and digressive in places, Rasula’s modus operandi is comprised of equal parts erudition and rhetorical aplomb, and a penchant for mordant observation: in accord with the NCTE series title, he refigures American poetry anthologies as museums of wax simulations whose “carceral” condition is such that each “talking head” is forced to “speak” courtesy of the wonders of voice-over technologies (yes, Baudrillard looms large in all of this, as do the lesser known Philip Fisher and Neil Harris). Poets along with their poetry are thus reduced to ventriloquial ploys employed by their curators both to pander to public taste and to promote various not-so-hidden, but often complex social-qua-literary agendas:
```
My concern, in elaborating this thesis of a poetry wax
museum, is to suggest that the seemingly autonomous
"voices and visions" of poets themselves have been
underwritten by custodial sponsors who have
surreptitiously turned down the volume on certain
voices, and simulated a voice-over for certain others.
Nothing defines the situation more succinctly than the
police phrase protective custody.
(33)
```
For Rasula, the “figure of the poet as cyborg” (another refiguring, incidentally, one owing to the work of UC Santa Cruz scholar Donna Haraway) signifies but one of many facets of a cultural imbrication best captured in buzzword. “For some time now,” he writes, “we have been citizens of a Cybernation,” the pun serving to connote an American collective consciousness construed as a “mental homeless shelter that harbors Dan Rather, Roseanne Barr, and Bullwinkle” (47). The Wax Museum is in fact itself transfigured, courtesy of further conceptual correspondence, into an orphanage “where mute icons of imaginative authority are sheltered along with the voices just out of their reach” (48). Chapter One concludes with a “coda” that transfigures again (or pe rhaps prefigures) the Wax Museum to evoke the greenhouse; in particular, Roethke’s invocation of same in “Child on Top of a Greenhouse.” “Greenhouses are controlled environments, sites of artificially induced vegetal animation” (53). Etc. Given its scholastic medium, the message of Chapter One is guaranteed both to illuminate and to exacerbate the public disputes that have lingered on among neoformalists, antiformalists, language poets, and others (where “formalist” is itself understood as a highly conflicted term). By the end of his first chapter, Rasula emerges as something of a latter day Pound, sans Pound’s annoying self-righteousness and unforgivable bigotry.

Chapter Two, “The Age of ‘The Age of’”: Part One of this two-hundred-fifty page chapter constitutes the beef. Rasula begins with a summary overview of Louise Bogan’s correspondence, arguing that, because she was a “fastidious observer,” had “significant contact with many of the more famous personnel of the poetry world,” and “was generationally situated so as to have a dual perspective on both the modernist and subsequent generations,” Bogan’s letters help to provide an accurate “sense of poetry in America as lives lived” (58). Well, yes. Someplace along the way, though, Bogan’s intimate voice recedes rather quickly into the background (to resurface at irregular intervals) as Rasula gradually builds his case against, as one might have expected, the New Critics and their New Criticism — to simplify enormously, a southern agrarian, religious, somewhat autodidactic collective led by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. A quick paraphrase of Rasula’s argument might go something like this: Whereas many have illustrated how the New Criticism shaped the way English studies came to be practiced during the thirties, forties, and fifties, few have emphasized sufficiently the overarching, extratextual imperatives and consequences associated with this latter’s “public relations” role in servicing a constraining literary-academic enterprise, an establishment initially rooted in trade press publication and eventually forced underground — where, however, it has continued to shape academic practice.

My professorial mortarboard began to tip to one side as it grew increasingly clear to me in reading through Rasula’s careful indictment that New Critical hegemonic effects are yet unconsciously with us (i.e., us academics), the source of numerous anxieties and tacit alliances. Here Rasula indicates incisively, and with unprecedented historical clarity, how New Critical textual practices reinforced and informed more organizational motivations. New Criticism is successful in the postwar world precisely because this baby-booming “age of sociology” — an age in which “introspective compulsion” grows increasingly susceptible to an external, “managerial temperament” — demands explanation (122, 126). “Poetry fared well in the age of sociology,” Rasula observes, “because New Critical pedagogy constituted a veritable explanation industry, reassuringly in the hands of ‘qualified experts’” (127). Ultimately it is the “romance of technical efficiency” that validates and is validated by New Critical close readings and the like, a damaging functionalism” that reduces and trivializes the “traumas of history.” Among the most significant of such “traumas” in coeval literary terms was the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949, following as it did on the heels of treason charges against him (which were ultimately suspended on the grounds of insanity). Rasula’s analysis of “the Pound affair” manages to capture the contradictions manifested by the Fellows in American Letters (who presided ove r the award) without wishing away either the evils or the ambiguities of Pound’s actions, symbolic and otherwise.

One might argue that Rasula’s elaboration of New Critical influence itself contributes to such influence, that he has “paid homage” to the New Critics by accusing them of such far-reaching and pernicious effects. To be sure, there are other histories to be written, histories that have more to do with writers and artists whose work has never been regarded as “central” to prevailing academic or cultural orthodoxies. Any critique of orthodoxy risks a certain sort of reification, a reification of the center. One antidote is to introduce, as Rasula has done, a presumably marginal figure such as Louise Bogan — though Bogan’s marginality as a poet per se belies her access to poetry power brokers. And as I have indicated, Bogan figures into Rasula’s argument only irregularly after her initial appearance. One would therefore expect some resistance to Rasula’s argument from those who have an interest in revising historical “realities” to reveal the imposition of a center as a fiat of historical method.

Rasula’s evocation of the “age of sociology” includes a brief survey of those institutional consolidations (high-cultural, pop-cultural and geopolitical) that (re)constitute the American bandwidth. Part Two of Chapter One situates in the midst of this bandwidth those poetic imperatives that conspired throughout the fifties to promote the ascendancy of Robert Lowell as the “poet who personified the postwar American bard” (247). Auden’s arrival in New York and subsequent naturalization as a US citizen provides immediate sanction for the then current, now sometimes retrospective view that this marks the “Age of Auden” (and in subsequent mimicry, the “Age of Lowell”), an age initiated, in Rasula’s caustic formulation, by Auden’s “demonstrating to Americans how to import a poetry culture, much as horticulturalists imported French vine stock to get the California wine industry going” (148). Auden’s presence and influence worked to reinforce the “pedagogic and scholastic advocacy” of the New Critics, while the formation of a “centrist” position cleverly concealed its more avant-garde Modernist roots (145). To his credit, Rasula suggests a “nonaesthetic” reason for this development: race. If Lowell had been elected the prodigal son as if by default, it was certainly not without regard for the fact that he was a white Christian (male), whereas many of his contemporaries — Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen — were Jewish. Anthology-wise, this was indeed the age of the WASP.

Expertly weaving poetry and criticism from the fifties with critical studies of the period, Rasula chronicles the twists and turns of fifties establishment/ counter-establishment mores and poetic positionings, warts and all. The advent of the widely publicized and popular Beat movement, along with the controversies that ensued from its high profile, are viewed by Rasula as the historical springboard for the decade’s notorious, and defining, literary culmination: the “anthology war” inaugurated by the release in 1960 of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (revised and rereleased in the late seventies as The Postmoderns). The Beat and Black Mountain harshness that gives offense to the status quo of the academic elite is shrewdly and accurately cast as a function of these presumed upstarts’ collective tendency toward “theorizing a poetics” — and in this formulation Rasula offers us a convenient way of understanding the historical present of poetic practice. As for Lowell, he emerges under Rasula’s scrutiny both as id and superego of “Criticism, Inc.,” his life punctuated by genteel self-aggrandizement and manic outburst even as his poems themselves ultimately reveal the self-tortured persona grata and non grata congenial to conformist culture. In the terms he borrowed from Virginia Woolf in his acceptance of the National Book Award — terms which, as Rasula indicates, resonated well with establishment skepticism — Lowell may be seen with some sympathy neither as cooked nor as raw; he was simply overdone. In any case, I found Rasula’s contrasting of Lowell’s poetic self-construction with Charles Olson’s “Maximus” (to the latter’s advantage) instructive, if not altogether convincing; one is tempted simply to observe in this connection that boys will be boys.

Chapter Two’s concluding section is entitled “Conformity Regained,” the ironic evocation of Milton signaling an establishment coup de grace in this veritable epic of American poetry’s various struggles and perturbations. The section begins with a cursory review of “previously formalist poets” whose work underwent “dramatic stylistic and procedural changes” (269) as a result of sixties instigations — Merwin, Wright, Kinnell, Wilbur (not much change here), Bly, Eshleman (publisher of Sulfur) and Baraka. With Baraka, Rasula’s historical overview becomes the occasion for a sustained meditation on multiculturalism. I must admit to having felt a bit uneasy at first, what with Rasula’s observation that, given “the present conundrum of a revised canon in which it is essential that minorities be included” even as “their minoritarian features must not be essentialized,” “we now see the shameless opportunism of a curriculum designed to reflect political correctness” (279). What initially troubled me here was less the insight itself than Rasula’s adoption of “political correctness” as an easy pejorative, which gesture mirrors precisely the current conservative jeremiad against “(il)liberal” education.

But my discomfort was quickly dispelled as Rasula derived an alternative to such “tokenism” from a close reading both of Baraka’s process orientation and recent critical work by Nathaniel Mackey (another member of the UC Santa Cruz faculty). Rasula discusses in a footnote why Mackey’s concept of “creative kinship” has not caught on, suggesting that the influx of Continental theory, among other factors, has produced a “scholarly climate in which the admissible terms of affiliation are legislative, not creative” (282). In demonstrating the value of seeing the poet as subject of creative kinships, Rasula once again seizes on Olson as a powerful example, and throughout his discussion of ethno-aesthetic complexities he suggests that jazz and its history might serve usefully to reorient our thinking and our curricula. After some further exploration of the specifically WASPish ethnic character of the New Critical hegemony, Rasula concludes this chapter with a reference to Robert Duncan’s spirtual reading of poetic warfare, calling for poets and anthologizers not only to admit the “multiplicity of convictions at work in poetry,” but to “be at strife with [their] own conviction . . . in order to give [themselves] over to the art” (305).

Chapters Three, Four and Five together comprise a progressive illumination of the present situation of poetic practice in general and poetry anthologies in particular. Rasula borrows Chapter Three’s title, “Consolations of the Novocain,” from Karl Shapiro to indicate that American poetry suffers from the application of critical anesthesia. After surveying the relative dearth of informed studies of postwar poetry, Rasula diligently dissects what he calls the “default mode” of literary criticism in this period, whereby “readings are so ‘close’ that the critic’s own claustrophobia permeates the text” (318). He explicates the textual reduction (and subsequent redaction) of poetic practice to luxuriating lyrical egos, a reduction which produces a fatal(istic) reading of poetry as a social art to the extent that “the lyrical ego condemns itself to a prison of its own making” (329).

In Chapter Four, “Politics In, Politics Of,” Rasula mounts a complex overview and critique of poetry’s material basis vis-a-vis the ubiquitous and normative medium of television. Rasula’s argument throughout is predicated on his view that “poetry is not a linguistic oasis, and is not immune from the discursive norms of society at large” (366). Hence the question becomes one of how best to address such norms without ignoring materialist concerns. “Insofar as poetry has become synonymous with the free verse lyric,” he writes, “‘poetry’ is in dangerous competition with television,” for “the inscrutable rhetorical foundation of free verse abandons all the immunizing paraphernalia of prosody” (366). Poetry is apt to come up short if it aspires to the flashier projections of the tube. After a brief and enlightening foray into typography, Rasula turns his attention to the “mind-cure theology” of “industrial-communications society,” the exemplar of which becomes televangelism. “Watching television is keeping the faith,” he writes, and this leads to his most oracular, and enigmatic, assertion: “Poetry, unlike television, is not contingent on belief” (373). He is at some pains to show, largely through a 1942 essay by Welsh poet David Jones, that the art of poetry, unlike the art of war, is a “path of charities” (374). Building on the work of Manuel DeLanda and Paul Virilio to the effect that “we have inhabited an ‘eternity’ of war,” what Virilio calls “pure war” (374), Rasula offers a peculiarly sociobiological version of a crisis in the arts: “The lapse of poetry is more serious than any supposed competition with television suggests, for what is at stake is not simply cultural displacement but the erosion of a species’ [sic] trait” (377).

This would seem to accord very nearly with the radically empirical view of language practice evident in the work of William Burroughs (and others), where language becomes a viral social machine of self-replication akin to our genetic substrate. Although Rasula is quick to distinguish between poetry “as public event, which is to say commodity” — the only “kind of event recognized as public in the U.S.” (379) — and the poetic concerns of Olson and Williams, he nevertheless seems to allow precious little non-poetic space for resistance against the encroachments of popular-cum-militarized culture (the more hopeful elements of Michel de Certeau’s work come to mind here). It would seem that Rasula wants to safeguard a kind of political efficacy for poetic practice which he will not grant more popular media, and this despite his stated disavowal of any special status for poetic agency. This represents a curious romantic deviation from what is for the most part a pessimistically Foucauldian reading of the postwar technological era, a reading in which, to take one example, the movement of the humanities online is seen in part as an extension of the “military communications network” (376).

Rasula’s discussion of political poetry and language poetry warrants a few specific remarks. In a brief foray into the poetic thematic of war, Rasula invokes Duncan once again to the effect that his work exemplifies “the old and venerable journey” of “resolving public crisis in spiritual autobiography” (385); it is clear that Rasula feels a special affiliation with the Olson-Duncan lineage. He offers little here in the way of anatomizing specific examples of “topical” political poetry; as he puts it, the “risk run” by such poetry is that “it may prove to be expendable after its suit is resolved” (389). Yet the same may be said of more (and less) aesthetically-motivated work, finally, such as that of Lowell & Co., much of which clearly steered away from direct political confrontation with dominant fifties rhetoric (Rasula’s gist throughout much of Chapter Two). I would have preferred here more active consideration of war-oriented poetry, such as that of (Viet Nam War poet) W. D. Ehrhart (whose work, though hardly popular in demographic terms, is nonetheless predicated in large part on first-person experiential narrative); in fact, some discussion regarding the “literature of trauma” in general might have been to the point.

With this question of political poetry as a prelude, Rasula intervenes in the past two decades of controversy over language poetry-writing (term used advisedly — it’s a “fuzzy” construct, as Rasula indicates). Situating language writing over and against “low mimetic realism” — this latter marked by “the unexamined urge to find the soft emotional center of its issues” (393) — he emphasizes the “community of readers” that constitutes perhaps the signal achievement of such work (397). Rasula summarizes several of the aesthetic liabilities foregrounded by (and often in) language writing: that it “risks reifying distraction in a new complacency” (398); that, “once the soft lyric voice has been deconstructed or deposed, the remaining linguistic material is susceptible of further unforeseen subordinations” (410). Although “it is apparent from the existing body of language writing that poetic praxis and theoretical examination have rarely been so intimately bound together in American poetry” (405), the customary “separation of theory and practice” evinced even in language writing anthologies has resulted in a certain measure of “isolation and apparent autonomy” (405). Hence such poets have thereby “courted the spectre of preciousness, art for art’s sake, and esotericism” despite their theoretical assertions to the contrary (405). I would argue, on the other hand, that language writing may well have blurred the theoretical initiative as such, despite actual distinctions evinced by its various practitioners and anthologists; time will tell. Citing Maria Damon’s and Michael Berube’s studies of marginality, Rasula concludes by aligning, in brief, excerpts from Charles Reznikoff, Bob Perelman, and David Antin (this latter’s “skypoem”) to suggest that documentary “witness,” deconstruction of “the rhetoric of expert testimony,” and “a refusal of monumentality,” respectively, comprise evidence as to how “the most vital American poetry has operated on those margins that it has conscientiously allied itself with, rather than haphazardly submitted itself to” (408-413).

A critical establishment enamored of its capacity for celebrating the lyrical self provides the backdrop against which Rasula identifies and dismantles one of the real targets in his book, canonical method. Rasula’s frustration with scholastic inertia becomes the source of perhaps his most contentious remark, that “Poets may be justified in thinking of scholarly critics as educated halfwits” (317). He finally squares off against the orthodoxy by addressing what Ron Silliman has coined “canonic amnesia or Vendler’s Syndrome” (qtd. in Rasula; 333). Named after its chief purveyor, Helen Vendler of Harvard, Vendler’s Syndrome refers to the hegemony of “tastemakers” who authorize the who’s who of literary anthologies, and do so “imperiously presum[ing] unanimity (of taste) where none exists” (334). Rasula demonstrates how, in Vendler’s case, this assumption of edict coincides with a certain infantilization of students as well as those deemed unworthy of the editorial task (such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha!). In truth, Rasula does have an axe to grind with the Vendler-Harvard University Press establishment, which he reserves for a footnote (334); his remarks on this score are candid and unflinching. “The cost of those left out of the game is hard to assess,” he writes, and what is refreshing here, in my view, is his resistance to any “polite” appraisal of the poetry power center(s), his willingness to see indoctrination and oppression for what they are. Rasula elucidates the editorial and critical myopia of Daniel Hoffman’s Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, and continues his critique with a summary dismissal of Jay Parini’s Columbia History of American Poetry, which he calls “literary history as calculated (or — maybe worse — casual) obscurantism” (355). As he puts it, this kind of official literary history “inevitably reproduces private life as public event without accounting for its social (and sociable) dimension” (360). Because this fai lure is closely allied, in Cary Nelson’s words, with a “collapsing of modern poetry’s wild diversity” into a homogeneity that “mirrors the most simplistic of 1950’s North American political world views” (360), the only “solution” that presents itself to Rasula is to refrain from “thinking of solutions as happening only once” (361). Tactics of resistance, in this as in other areas, must be conceived as regular and ongoing practices.

The critical denouement represented by Rasula’s decimation of Vendler et al. is followed later in the text by an examination of four recent anthologies: J. D. McClatchy’s Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry; Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950; Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Of the four, only McClatchy’s book fails (like the Vendler, Hoffman and Parini anthologies) “to be explicit about the strategies of consensus building” (464) — which is to say, only McClatchy’s relies on “awards and prizes” as the implicit measure of inclusion. But the crux of the matter here, for Rasula, is a “disabling nostalgia” that he finds “symptomatic of all four of these recent ambitious anthologies” (461). McClatchy’s nostalgia is simply a case of Vendler’s Syndrome — a yearning for the false consensus of the past. But for Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli, the nostalgia is one which neutralizes the “practice of outside” by absorbing it into a “reverie of the outside, the experimental” (461). As Rasula asks, rhetorically, “what purpose is served by making an orthodoxy of the unorthodox?” (463).

“It’s now possible,” Rasula writes, “. . . to summarize the genealogical contours of contemporary American poetry” (440). In five or so pages, he presents an historical precis — the climax of his documentary narrative — which serves to demarcate what he calls the “four zones” of the contemporary American “poetry world”: the Associated Writing Programs; the New Formalism; language poetry; and “various coalitions of interest-oriented or community-based poets” (440). Rasula is careful to note that these four zones are “utterly disproportionate” in resources and the like, and that the fourth zone is “more heterogeneous and fluid than the others” (440).

As an alternative to current anthology practices, Rasula proposes, tentatively, a “certain cunning and guile” (464): to align more familiar, (let’s say) AWP writers with (let’s say) writers from the fourth zone. Crossing zones, that is, would seem to be the only provisional answer he can muster to this question of how best to generate a compilation, as opposed to a representative collection or display, and one that can challenge the authority of the AWP. Such an approach is undeniably viable, though it, too, is vulnerable to the more agonistic impulses of poetic discourse. Anthologists would invariably be open to the charge of “rigging” poetic “confrontations,” of “unfairly” deforming a given work’s contextual (not to say aesthetic) aims. Moreover, this charge would likely be leveled by all parties, not simply by those who enjoy privileged status (however this latter is defined), simply because there are no guarantees that more “experimental” work will fare well in readerly terms when compared and contrasted with more “accessible” samplings. One can already hear cries of “meet the new boss/ the same as the old boss.”

Rasula’s final chapter, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” begins with an examination of how poetry has “successfully been quantified and integrated into the marketplace” through the “vast domain” of (M.F.A.) writing programs operating largely under the aegis of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP; 419). Though “the workshop demeanor can hardly be said to derive unmodified from earlier poetic models of selfhood” (421), it is nonetheless the American “self-help” tradition, as this latter “readily settles into cultism,” that provides the social glue for more obscurantist workshop posturing (421). Elaborating on the recent critique of creative writing programs one finds in the work of writing specialists such as Eve Shelnutt (but with no mention, curiously, of Wendy Bishop’s substantive criticism of workshop format), Rasula argues not surprisingly that “we need to rethink the social role of creative writing” (424). Yet instead of emphasizing a revision of writing practices per se, Rasula addresses himself to the broadly “discursive function distributed throughout this network [that] requires a steady focus on the purported ‘needs’ of selfhood” (425). Because “poets speak only for themselves” in the prevailing mediocrity, statistically averaged, of the workshop environs, critics can no longer resort to “nominat[ing] representative figures”; hence the proper “critical vocabulary” for the present state of affairs “necessitates a shift from the aesthetic to the sociological and political” — Rasula’s study itse lf obviously serving as an example of such a shift (426-427).

Rasula turns his concluding gaze to “the case of Walt Whitman” as “curiously appropriate to the topic of anthologies” (472). Perhaps not so “curious,” for Whitman has in the past forty years been made to seem “appropriate” to just about everything peculiarly American. Whitman’s self-proclaimed “new Bible,” Leaves of Grass, is elucidated in the abstract as an anthology akin to the Bible itself, which latter text Rasula regards as “at once the most encompassing ontology in the West, and the definitive anthology” (473). Drawing on John Guillory’s work on canon formation and Alan Golding’s study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthologies, Rasula discusses the “nationalist rhetoric” underwriting anthology production, against which Whitman’s notion of “ensemble-Individuality” potentially augurs some relief. Because Whitman “secures the linguistic act” to “his sociopolitical prospect,” Leaves becomes a revisionary self-anthology which, unlike postwar American anthologies, constructively surfaces tensions owing to the “experimental” de- and self-regulation of its author-subject-citizen (474-5). Here I have but one reservation. Speaking as a poet myself, and to state the matter somewhat contortedly: however idiosyncratic or mediated (or appealing!) the gesture, recourse to a poetic past grounded in no less a figure than Whitman, coming as it does at the end of a sprawling historical study, sanctions a (conventional) historiographic first cause. We end where “we” — “we” poets, many of us — believe “we” each began; received poetic wisdom is reinstated, and in our end is our beginning. This kind of traditional reassurance seems to work against the critical thesis with which Rasula concludes his book, the thesis that “poetry can — and should — be our term for a language in crisis” (482).

Whatever my reservations, this is an extraordinary work. There are few punches pulled here, and almost nothing of the sort of connoisseur-based preciosity (not to mention self-indulgent tastemaking) that typically mars such treatises. Indeed, one sometimes gets the feeling that Rasula’s intervention in the scene of American poetry is less a historical blow-by-blow than a contemporary coming-to-blows. Rasula evinces at times more than a touch of Noam Chomsky’s investigative resourcefulness, unraveling establishment machinations and covert disinformation practices with unrelenting rigor, and regardless of the culprit’s publicly-endowed prestige. In fact, one of the unintended side-effects of Rasula’s remarkable effort may be that his disputatious, lengthy history proves too daunting, that its sheer scope and depth discourage even specialist readers. Yet this book should be studied, and restudied. Its very existence bears witness to the stubbborn durability of the ancient alphabetic art. Just as a certain anarchic anxiety (or pretension to same) may explain poets’ vociferous resistance to viewing poetry as a symbolic technology, an allied impulse toward vatic self-authorization prevents many from confronting the institutional bases of their calling in concrete and critical terms. Rasula’s book provides an occasion for poets and critics alike to reexamine their contiguous, conterminous, and often conflicting word processes. Given its critical unmasking of the discourses and institutions of canonization, the book itself stands as counsel against the panegyric impulse to label it a masterpiece of historical research and analysis. Perhaps one might observe, though, that the book also stands as an exemplar of applying to scholarship what Rasula calls poetry’s “privilege” — its “insouciant disregard for the exemplary pose” (483).
September 22, 2013

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

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

Year: 2013

Notes

Works Cited

Invocation

The First Quadrant

The Second Quadrant

The Third Quadrant

The Fourth Quadrant

Part I

Part II

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Institutionalization, October 11-18, 1991. What happened?

What Happened

Postulates of Machinic Analysis

Notes

Works Cited

PMC Reader’s Report on Kevin McNeilly, “Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music”

PMC Reader’s Report on Phoebe Sengers, “Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization”

Works Cited

Notes

Notes

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

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

A Self Defining Object

Notes

Levinas in Rehab

The Junk Con

Can I tug on your coat for a minute?

Notes

Notes

Event-Scene I:

Event-Scene II: Situation: War Rages

Event-Scene III: The Dionysia

Event-Scene IV: Encore

Works Cited

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

II. Blanchot’s Fragmented Subject

III. Beckett’s Unnamable Meaning to Mean

Notes

Works Cited

1. can’t find a better man2

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

3. Wounds in the mirror waved

4. The picture kept will remind me.

5. I got bugs

6. When she couldn’t hold, she folded

7. All my pieces set me free11

8. she dreams in colors she dreams in red

Notes

Works Cited

Works Cited

I

II

III

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Notes

Early Spring

Equinox

1. The Modernist Premises of Postmodernism

2. “Hyper” in Science and Culture

3. Hyper-Textuality3

4. Hyper-Existentiality

5. Hyper-Sexuality

6. Hyper-Sociality

7. Hyper-Materiality

8. From Super to Pseudo

Notes

I. Sense/Event

II. The Sense/Event of AIDS

Notes

Bios: nomó

Immunity and alterity

1. can’t find a better man²

7. All my pieces set me free¹¹

3. Hyper-Textuality³