POSTMODERN CULTURE

Year: 2013

  • A Millennial Poetics

    Kenneth Sherwood

    Department of English
    State Department of New York at Buffalo
    sherwood@acsu.buffalo.edu

     

    Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (Volume one: From Fin-de Siècle to Negritude).Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. Pp.xxvii + 811; 35 illustrations. Paper, $25.00.

     

    The newest entry in the long-running debate over the scope of modernism and its relation to postmodernism is neither a discursive essay nor a scholarly book. Rather, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris reveal the “experimental modernism” at modernism’s core via an anthology which, through its form and range, exhibits the continuity of poetries “that wouldn’t so much describe the world as remake it, through a vital act of language” (189). Their Poems for the Millennium maps out just this expansive a project, one certain to be transformative of criticism and the hermetic world of literature anthologies. With a “global” reach that transgresses the conventional narratives of aesthetic movements or national literatures, the book performatively demonstrates twentieth-century poetries’ exploration of language — the common term — in relation to: consciousness; desire; performance; dialect; technology; politics; and play. The resonance between these concerns and those of post-structuralist criticism illuminates the editors’ contention that “at the core of every true ‘modernism’ is the germ of a postmodernism.”(3)

     

    This first of two volumes embraces poetry “from Fin-de Siècle to Negritude,” crossing more than twenty national borders and nearly as many languages. An unusually expansive project in many respects, Poems for the Millennium rejects the retrospective stance toward the literary canon typical of the standard anthology. It posits a formulation of new literary relationships rather than the further reification of accepted ones. Of its eleven sections, only half respect conventional historical movements: Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, Expressionism,and Negritude. These are interspersed with three “galleries” and bounded by sections of “forerunners” and “origins.” On either end, then, the temporal bounds of the anthology’s period frame are strained at — as if to recall William Blake’s “Poetry Fettr’d, Fetters the Human Race!”

     

    In the initial “Forerunners” section, which begins fittingly with Blake, one first notes another aspect of this project’s effort to survey without succumbing to the homogenizing and containing habits of the conventional anthology. Instead of being presented in typeset “translation,” the poems of Blake and Emily Dickinson are presented in holograph. Partly as acknowledgement of recent scholarship emphasizing the significance of the visual materiality of these authors’ texts by Susan Howe and Jerome McGann, the visual reproduction respects the fact that Blake almost exclusively self-published his poetry in handmade, illustrated books and Dickinson meticulously bound her handwritten, eccentrically formatted poems into notebooks, holograph reproductions of which are the only adequate representation of her generally bowdlerized poems.

     

    Representing these and many other works in their original and often visually striking typography does more than make for varied perusal. It more accurately reflects the divergent activities taking place within what is too easily termed Modernism. The reductive groupings of literary historians, their tracings of the anxious lines of influence, is aided and abetted by anthologies which themselves visually homogenize such writing. The materially conscious presentation here dramatizes the connections between nineteenth-century practice and the highly visual texts of Futurism and Dada, which are also presented in a sample of reproductions (leading in later years to the Concrete poetry and book arts sure to be represented in the upcoming second volume). Moreover, by reproducing something of the heterogeneous visual forms these poems originally took, the anthology argues for a consistent, historical interplay between poetry and visual art through the twentieth century while, at the same time, urging the reader to keep in mind the particularity of the remaining poems presented in the volume’s default, thirteen-point Sabon font.

     

    The “Forerunners” section that introduces the volume forces the reader of modernism to bring Baudelaire, Whitman, Lonnrot, Hopkins, Lautreamont, and Holderlin into consideration, but the book’s closing frame, “A Book of Origins,” is even more frame-breaking. Consisting largely of “ethnopoetics” texts, it leaves modernism doubly open-ended. Perhaps the most often overlooked dimension of twentieth-century poetry, the traditions which ethnopoetics encompasses are simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Early efforts at ethnopoetics anthologies by Blaise Cendrars and Tristan Tzara (incidentally translated by Joris in the 1970’s) and its influence on poets like Apollinaire, Pound, Olson, and Rothenberg tell part of this story. Unlike the conventional account of modernist visual art’s appropriation of African traditional forms, “A Book of Origins” wants to see the poetries constituting ethnopoetics as themselves — apart from their important influence within Euro-American tradition — essential dimensions of modernism. Hardly meant to be comprehensive or even adequate, it points to the extensive body of Rothenberg’s previous anthologies.

     

    For readers from the English Departments certain to provide homes for many copies of this anthology, the “Negritude” section will be particularly important. Selections from Aime Cesaire, Rene Depestre, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon Gontran Damas provide proof positive of the creative vibrancy of what Kamau Brathwaite subsequently termed “Nation Language.” Given the number of recent multi-cultural anthologies, most of which seem to assume that multi-cultural values require a narrative, formally “approachable,” identity-based poetics, the acquaintance or reacquaintance with Cesaire’s poetry will invigorate. Senghor’s polemical claim to write a “natural African surrealism” should productively raise some eyebrows. But the placing of “Negritude” against “Surrealism” as defining twentieth-century movements begins to perform the reimagining of modernism that has been Millennium‘s proposition.

     

    The four largely European movements presented — Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism — are most familiar, if not canonic, as rubrics applicable to the visual arts. Believing that the “history of twentieth-century poetry is as rich and varied as that of the century’s painting and sculpture,” the editors emphasize the crucial roll of poetry in all four, exemplified by the work of painter/poets like Kandinsky, Schwitters, Picabia, Arp, and Duchamp; it turns out even Dali and Picasso wrote some poetry. With notable exceptions in Johanna Drucker’s recent work and that of Marjorie Perloff, it does seem that “the academic strategy has been to cover up that richness” (8). The special collusion between modernist art and poetry, through radical typography, is here convincingly illustrated through the careful reproduction of numerous typographical collages; works by Marinetti, Picasso, and Carra, and Max Ernst’s amazing visual/verbal collage “The Hundred Headless Women,” challenge the borders between literature and visual art. Not to let the visual dominate, Futurist performance poems and sound poems like Schwitter’s “Ur Sonata,” which have existed primarily as curious footnotes to literary history, or in the colorful anecdotes of Cabaret Voltaire performances, are thrown into the mix. Progressing by such contraries, the compilation of these divergent pieces substantiates experimental modernism, not as another monolithic “ism,” but as a constellation of varied and serious activities.

     

    The devotion of a section to “Objectivism,” the primarily American 1930’s non-movement whose few verifiable members almost immediately denied the term’s application to themselves, may be the most controversial of this anthology’s gestures toward the canon. Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, and occasionally Lorine Niedecker are usually grouped among the Objectivists (though often, as here, the older Pound, Williams, and the British Basil Bunting are also included.) Their work shared an interest in the “historic and contemporary particulars of language,” notably influencing Black Mountain and Language poets as well as some contemporary French writers. Yet what recognition they have received came as late as the 1960s. Their early work, including Oppen’s first book Discrete Series, here reprinted entire, was often self-published and little circulated. The specificity of their language, the dense lexical and acoustical patterning of their work, particularly Zukofsky’s long poem “A“, are just now being engaged by scholars. The (re)introduction of an anti-symbolic literalism — an ordinary-language poetics conceptually if not formally comparable to that of Gertrude Stein — may be the single most important event of twentieth-century American literature.

     

    The unsettling of established literary niches is just part of this anthology’s particular generosity. Ultimately, it is less interested in challenging the constructions of literary history than in presenting individual poems so that they can be read on their own terms. The three remaining sections, termed “galleries,” are interspersed through the book and together comprise nearly half its 800 pages. Taking a cue from Modernist collage, Rothenberg and Joris construct the galleries by placing poets in juxtaposition. Each gallery presents a series of poets arranged chronologically, but the galleries themselves are not sequential. So the first begins with Mallarmé (b. 1842) and ends with Huidobro (b. 1893); the second begins with Yeats (b. 1865) and ends with Lorca (b.1899); the third begins with Akhmatova (b. 1889) and ends with Paz (b. 1916). The resulting composition complicates any simple taxonomy of influence. Has any other anthology ever dared to place William Butler Yeats beside Gertrude Stein, following her with Rainer Maria Rilke, with an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses beginning just five pages later? The arrangement and immense range take this anthology beyond the documentary presentation of what has happened to ask and begin to answer the question of what poetry is worth bringing across into the next century. In this sense, it wants to set aside genealogy to suggest the importance of interrelations and shared concerns among often historically disparate artists and traditions, as well as the larger, shared forces potentiating such works.

     

    With respect to teaching, other anthologies may sometimes seem to satisfy the requirements of a given class. This is the only one I know which might actually stimulate the design of a course to fit it. For students and many teachers of poetry, the wealth of this book will bewilder. Readers of modernist poetry will have heard of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s Cabaret Voltaire performances, but few if any will have considered the near-Dada poetry of Yi Sang (Korean) or J.V. Foix (Catalàn). Langston Hughes’s poetry is almost always addressed in relation to the jazz idiom or Black English; but how many anthologies facilitate a comparison with the transcribed blues lyrics of Doc Reese, or with the complementary efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid to reinvent a Scots dialect?

     

    This raises the question, who is competent to teach such an expansive book? Perhaps only Rothenberg and Joris. But the question itself highlights the guiding principle of more conventional anthologies: the transmission of a stable, contained network of representative and teachable texts. That it might raise such issues is this book’s, shall we say, insouciant charm. It is not, of course, a perfect book. Certain poets are badly represented, and many critics will want to descry the travesty done their favorite. A sadly out-of-print Mina Loy is represented by a hacked-up version of the “Love Songs” sequence; worse, the ubiquitous and tin-eared misprint of “Sitting” in place of “Sifting the appraisable /Pig cupid” is again perpetuated. One has to wonder, if Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred innovates the “segue,” a serial motion between riffs and poems (as the commentary has it), why did the editors choose to present a scattering of ten poems from various points in the book instead of a sequence, without even indicating the ellipsis or otherwise giving indication of the classic repetition of riffs throughout the volume? And while we’re at it: Are “Negritude” and “Objectivism” — each given a section — more legitimate or significant movements than the Harlem Renaissance? Is Hughes the only “Harlem Renaissance” poet worth inclusion? How about Sterling Brown or James Weldon Johnson? Williams’s Spring and All (excerpted) makes remarkable use of prose and poetry; but so does Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in the same year.

     

    The book’s critical apparatuses are minimal; no intrusive and condescending footnotes clutter the text or waste space. Poets are instead accorded a brief commentary (often partial quotes from period criticism or the poet’s own statements) after the work. The section introductions and brief commentaries appended to most selections carefully eschew a sense of scholarly comprehensivity to turn back toward the work itself. The saved pages allow the quiet, white space of Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance to play out over a full twenty pages; “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railroad,” a two-meter-long poem/painting collaboration by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay (designed so that its original 150 copies would reach the top of the Eiffel Tower) appears in reduced facsimile.

     

    While granting the value of an uncluttered format,any reader without Motherwell’s Dada Poets and Painters, all of Marjorie Perloff’s books, the full run of Sagetrieb, and a healthy selection of Rothenberg’s previous anthologies next to their desk will experience frustrated moments. Was Oppen’s Discrete Series originally printed three poems to a page, each separated by horizontal rules? Who was/is Maria Sabina? Where can I find further translations of Catalan experimental poetry? Why not mention that Joris’s complete translation of Tzara’s proto-ethnopoetics anthology (here excerpted) appeared in the journal Alcheringa? For readers fascinated by the tantalizing two pages of “Ur Sonata,” why not mention that the complete translation of Schwitters (by none other than Rothenberg and Joris) is now available? Since all the selections are necessarily meager and these editors, more than most, want to avoid the illusion of “comprehensivity,” basic bibliographic and critical “links” to further resources should have been provided, at least to help the newcomer find more of the poetry. In an anthology as determined as this one to open up the domain of poetry,it is a shame the reader is not given more of a roadmap.

     

    Inevitable defects and petty complaints aside, as anthologies go, this book can fairly be called “revolutionary.” Its international scope reflects the global aspiration of poetry; its visual presentation testifies to the beautiful pragmatism of recent textual theory; the unconventional organization enacts a concern for the life of poetry, to conserve not embalm it. All told, it is a book unique among its kind. Just to look at it is invigorating. To read it is an intellectual pleasure. No one who seriously engages it will leave the encounter with their view of poetry or modernism intact. In fact, this reader is on the brink of springing for the clothbound copy!

     

    To be able to say: "I am in the book.  The book is my
world, my country, my roof, and my riddle.  The book is my
breath and my rest." . . .  The book multiplies the book.

                            -- Edmond
                            Jabés

     

  • Ends and Means: Theorizing Apocalypse in the 1990’s

    James Berger

    George Mason University
    jberger@gmu.edu

     

    Lee Quinby. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism.Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

     

    Stephen D. O’Leary. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

     

    Richard Dellamora. Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.

     

     

    The apocalypse would be the definitive catastrophe. Not only final and complete, but absolutely clarifying. Out of the confusing mass of the world, it would unmistakably separate good from evil and true from false, and expel forever those latter terms. It would literally obliterate them — expel them from memory; inflict on them what the Book of Revelations calls the “second death” or, as Slovoj Zizek calls it, “absolute death.”1 Evil and falsehood would be purged. It would be as if they had never existed. The revelation, then, the unveiling unhidden by the apocalypse would be the definitive distinguishing of good from evil, or godly from ungodly — all made possible, of course, by a violent cataclysm that shatters every surface.

     

    This is the standard apocalyptic scenario, portrayed in texts from Revelations to Steven King’s The Stand. But sometimes, especially in the last century or so, there have been complications. It may be that when the seals are broken and absolute evil identified and isolated, the Blessed will look across the abyss and see themselves. Melville’s Indian Hater story (in The Confidence Man), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment provide revelations of this sort — “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Enlightenment is indistinguishable from barbarism. Moral distinctions themselves compose the surface that is shattered, and under that surface is a universal murderous chaos. This shift in apocalyptic sensibilities exemplifies the cataclysmic transition into modernity — the sense, in Marx’s phrase, that “all that is solid melts into air.”2

     

    If the anti-religious apocalypse of the doppelganger is the apocalypse of modernity, the apocalypse of the postmodern is that of Baudrillardian simulation. In Baudrillard, the catastrophe is the end of the whole apocalyptic hermeneutic itself. There can be no unveiling because there is nothing under the surface: there is only surface; the map has replaced the terrain. Commodification is universal, and no longer even under the interpretive control of notions of the “fetish.” What, after all, would there be for the commodity to disguise? Not only “God,” but also “labor relations” or “material conditions” would be without revelatory value.

     

    These visions of the end as they appear in fiction, in social movements — and even in social theory — emerge out of a wide range of social and historical contexts. Apocalyptic thought has long been, and continues to be, a political weapon for the dispossessed.3 But it has also been, for a century or so, a form of playful despair among intellectuals. Great power politics for forty years after the Second World War were devoted to making apocalypse possible, then simultaneously threatening and preventing it. And apocalyptic representations in American popular culture have channelled widespread anxieties over nuclear cataclysm and general social breakdown into viscerally compelling — we might even say addictive — forms of entertainment. Fear of apocalypse — of that merging of clarity and oblivion — itself merges with fascination and desire for such a definitive, and perhaps even ecstatic, catastrophe. And this desire for an end to the world must then be considered in relation to the apocalypticist’s attitude toward his own particular society and toward the “world” in general. What degree of hatred for the world — for world as world: the site of procreation and mortality and economics, and the site as well of language and representation — is necessary to generate the wish to end it entirely? Where does this hatred come from? All in all, what historical and psychological alignments can bring about such bizarre, but frighteningly common, imaginings?

     

    These are some of the questions a study of apocalyptic movements or representations should try to answer. In this review I will discuss three important recent attempts at describing and theorizing some of the ways the world is imagined to end.

     

    Lee Quinby’s Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism is a provocative and far-ranging book impelled by passionate political commitments. Quinby uses methods of Foucauldian genealogy to decipher and, she hopes, deactivate the apocalyptic tendencies she sees as pervasive in contemporary American culture and politics. Quinby’s analyses range from blue jeans advertising to contemporary feminism, Henry Adams’s philosophy of history as a prototype for Baudrillardian irony, Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories, and a chapter of what she calls “pissed criticism” discussing the controversies surrounding Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.”

     

    Quinby claims that apocalyptic thinking is a primary technology of “power/knowledge” in America today, and that in its combined religious, technological, and ironic forms it authorizes economic, political, and cultural repressions and perpetuates a repressive status quo. Quinby further claims that genealogical analysis is the best method for opposing apocalyptic regimes and their “claims of prophetic truth” (53). Quinby’s study is ambitious and perceptive. At the same time, I find some of her key terms and arguments not sufficiently developed, and I question her reliance on Foucault as an antidote to apocalyptic thinking.

     

    Quinby characterizes apocalyptic thinking as a belief system that “insists on absolute and coherent truth” (47) and relies on “self-justifying categories of fixed hierarchy, absolute truth, and universal morality” (55). She claims that “absolute monarchy and the Vatican, for example, are structured in accordance with principles of apocalypse” (63). And, crucially, apocalyptic micro-structures remain even when power has been significantly decentered. Apocalyptic thinking, then, for Quinby, is above all a technique for perpetuating power through existing institutions — whether they be monarchial or the more diffuse mechanisms of commodity capitalism. In attacking these institutions and their ideologies, Quinby claims to be attacking an apocalyptic tendency that underlies them.

     

    Like the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, Quinby is critiquing tendencies toward totalizing thought in which methods of control are inculcated and enforced through discourses and institutions into the smallest forms of behavior. But not every form of totalization is apocalyptic. To cite her own examples, monarchies and the Catholic Church hierarchy are decidedly opposed to apocalypse. Their beliefs in hierarchy and absolute truth serve to sustain and perpetuate an existing order, not to explode and overturn it. Those already in power have no reason for locating a final revelation in the violent collapse of the world as it stands. Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor can still, I think, serve as an example of the probable response of any institutional authority to the Second Coming. It is far more likely — indeed, it is widely documented — that apocalyptic thinking arises in contexts in which individuals and groups feel themselves to be radically without power.

     

    Quinby partly recognizes this historical and definitional problem. She acknowledges that apocalyptic thinking has also been characteristic — has, in fact, been inspirational — in certain feminist movements. Quinby’s feminist apocalypticism is pragmatic: “The most crucial point to stress is that feminist apocalypse has often been a powerful force for resistance to masculinist oppression.” And she argues that a contemporary oppositional feminism can be “made possible through the twin legacies of apocalyptic and genealogical thought and activism” (36). I find this position plausible; at the same time, I would argue that it seriously undermines the book’s principal arguments in opposition to apocalyptic thinking per se (especially its identification of apocalyptic thinking with dominant hierarchies) and it reinforces a reader’s sense of the vagueness of Quinby’s definitions.

     

    A second problem in Anti-Apocalypse arises, for me, in Quinby’s uncritical use of Foucault. Quinby uses Foucauldian genealogy as a method for demystifying American regimes of apocalyptic power/knowledge. As Foucault writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy seeks to analyze the non-teleological “emergence” of knowledge and power — an emergence that is without any single, epistemologically privileged origin and that does not lead toward a preordained or necessary ending. Foucault explicitly describes genealogy as anti-apocalyptic in its refusal “to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending” (88). What Foucault does not acknowledge, however, and what Quinby also fails to recognize, is the powerful apocalyptic component to Foucault’s own genealogical thinking. If we take genealogy in its more modest forms, as a critique and demystification of institutions and ideologies, and as an insistence and continuing demonstration of historical contingency (in opposition to teleological master narratives), then genealogy differs very little from the actual practice of professional historians. The recent controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution is instructive in this regard. The curators sought to employ, in Nietzschean terms, a critical history to retell the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They were opposed by veterans groups and political conservatives who effectively reinstalled a monumental history in which Truman’s decision was incontestably right on every political and moral level. And yet, the historiography on which the curators relied — the work of scholars like Gar Alperovitz and Michael Sherry — is entirely in the mainstream of the historical profession. The Nietzschean-Foucauldian opposition between critical and monumental history is apt, but in this case it pits not “genealogists” but professional historians against popular perceptions and political demagoguery. The “historian” whom the genealogist is intended to oppose is a straw man drawn from nineteenth-century Hegelian and Whiggish models.

     

    Where Foucault goes beyond what is now the normal practice of the historical profession, he tends to veer into apocalyptic tones and imagery. The most striking instance, of course, comes at the end of The Order of Things where Foucault predicts that the post-Enlightenment notion of “man” constructed by the human sciences will “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” And Foucault’s genealogy is less a critique of the institutions and permeations of power than it is an apocalyptic shattering of the discursive unities and continuities that he sees as providing their foundation. Genealogy, then, is a kind of total critique that sees the false continuities of “humanism,” and first among these the idea of continuity itself, extending from the largest institutions and social practices to the most intimate habits of the body and of consciousness. Thus history, as genealogy, for Foucault “becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being — as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 88). Genealogy would be the revelatory catastrophe thrust in the midst of every form of power/knowledge. Foucault was an apocalyptic thinker, and it would be helpful if Quinby, as a Foucauldian critic of apocalyptic texts, would consider Foucault as a model to be analyzed and critiqued rather than merely employed.

     

    The great strength of Anti-Apocalypse lies in the range and provocativeness of its specific analyses, although, on my reading, important connections remain elusive. For instance, the link Quinby makes — via the pun “eu(jean)ics” — between contemporary fashion advertising and early twentieth-century discourses of eugenics is intriguing, but relies too much on the cleverness of the pun. I never fully understood either the historical or the conceptual connection between these two discourses of human perfection. Likewise, I would like to think that Henry Adams can provide a model for late twentieth-century “ironic” apocalyptic thinking (such as that of Baudrillard), but Quinby’s analysis of The Education, while valuable in itself, does not convince me of this connection. Her idea of the “ironic apocalypse” is intriguing, but should probably be linked more clearly with notions of the post-apocalyptic or post-historical. Quinby’s most powerful chapter, for me, was the one dealing with the controversy surrounding Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Here, Quinby’s close analysis and her political anger combine to describe Serrano’s photograph as a powerful (apocalyptic? anti-apocalyptic?) attack on existing power structures that well deserves their panicked responses.

     

    Quinby’s most important thesis in Anti-Apocalypse concerns the prevalence of an apocalyptic sensibility throughout contemporary American culture. Quinby is wrong to attribute this sensibility only to those in power, and to equate apocalyptic thinking with the maintenance of institutional power and hierarchy. And yet, an apocalyptic sensibility is a presence in American institutions, especially, but not exclusively, since the rise of Reaganism and the New Right. There needs to be an historical and theoretical perspective that can analyze an extraordinarily broad array of apocalyptic phenomena, ranging from Star Wars the movie to “Star Wars” the missile defense system, and from the apocalypticists of Waco and Oklahoma City to the academic theorists of postmodernity.

     

    Stephen O’Leary in Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric takes on part of this project. O’Leary proposes that we stop regarding belief in apocalyptic prophecies as purely irrational, if not psychotic, and that we, rather, examine apocalyptic pronouncements as forms of rhetoric: that we seriously consider the possibility “that people are actually persuaded by apocalyptic arguments” (11). O’Leary’s book is in part a contribution to rhetorical theory, along the lines drawn by Kenneth Burke’s writings on “dramatism.” It is in part a contribution to a rhetoric of theology, again following the contributions of Burke. O’Leary’s knowledge of these fields is thorough, and he describes apocalyptic rhetoric as an attempt at theodicy that justifies the existence of evil in the world by redefining temporality: by promising an end to time, and therefore to evil. He also distinguishes apocalypse in a tragic “frame” (using Burke’s term), in which the end is simply the end, from apocalypse in a comic “frame” in which no end need be final, and regeneration is always possible.

     

    Although O’Leary’s erudition is impressive, it seems to me that some of these discussions will be of interest chiefly to students of rhetoric and theology. His analyses intervene in highly specialized debates that detract from his larger arguments. Of more value and interest, I believe, are his accounts of specific American apocalyptic movements and texts. His descriptions of the Millerite movement of the 1830s and 40s, of the writings of Hal Lindsey, and of the apocalyptic tenor of the New Right in the 1980’s and 90’s are compelling and contribute greatly to our understanding of these important apocalyptic phenomena. O’Leary’s narrative of the growth of the Millerites makes clear the importance of the “total critique” in apocalyptic thinking. O’Leary shows how Miller’s prophecies gained their greatest popularity among those who had previously been involved in the early nineteenth-century reform movements — abolition and temperance — and that “the shift from social reform to Millerism resulted from a growing perception that the evils of American society were systemic, rooted not only in ignorance and apathy but also . . . in the nature of the cosmos” (128). Likewise, O’Leary argues effectively that the popularity of Lindsey’s writings grew not only out of general nuclear anxieties and the Cold War, but also in reaction to the social dislocations of the 1960’s. Christian right wing apocalypticists of the 1970’s of course regarded the Soviet Union as the great apocalyptic adversary; but they also came to see the United States itself, in its depraved condition, as a kind of Babylon that likewise merited destruction.

     

    Given these perceptive historical accounts, it is strange that O’Leary ultimately downplays the role of social context in favor of his rhetorical model. Describing apocalyptic writings and movements as responses to social turmoil and destabilization (or, as he terms it, “anomie”) ultimately explains nothing, O’Leary argues. “If anomie is caused by experiences of disaster,” he writes, “which in turn are defined as events that cannot be explained by received systems of meaning, then we have not really added anything new to our conceptual vocabulary; having defined disaster in terms of symbolic communication, anomie becomes endemic to the human condition and so loses its explanatory power. For all symbolic systems, all hierarchies of terms, find their limit in the inevitable confrontation with the anomalous event” (11).

     

    This last statement is true, and yet not all systems and hierarchies feel the need to invent some ultimate anomalous event that shatters all systems and hierarchies. In negative theology, for instance, the anomalous event is God who supports the hierarchy that cannot explain or represent Him. And responses to genuine historical disasters need not take apocalyptic forms, as Alan Mintz and David Roskies have shown with regard to Jewish history. Disasters of all kinds can be assimilated into existing historical narratives if institutional or symbolic structures remain intact.

     

    O’Leary is right, then, to reject a mechanistic model of “anomie” as a trigger for apocalyptic thinking. But he does not add to our understanding when, describing the crisis that produced Millerism as “not simply economic or political,” he concludes that “in the terminology of this study, it can be described as a breakdown of the comic frame, the revelation of the apparent inadequacy of the optimistic view of history that inspired reform efforts” (98). This breakdown would seem to be expressly economic and political, and the new terminology needed is not that of comic vs. tragic frames or of generalized theodicy but is rather a terminology that can describe the Millerite’s, and other apocalypticists’, overpowering desire for a cataclysmic end of the world.

     

    While O’Leary cites instances of this desire in Miller’s writings, he does not recognize or analyze it as such, even as he characterizes one passage as having an “intensity that verges on the orgasmic” (114). Such an insight regarding the “orgasmic” nature of apocalyptic outbursts seems exactly right, but O’Leary does not pursue its implications. Instead he consolidates these apocalyptic erotics into a Weberian vocabulary as a display of “charismatic excitement” that is, in turn, a product of “a rhetorical construction of temporality” (115). But when Miller writes, “O, look and see! What means that ray of light? The clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! Amazement fills the universe with awe! He comes! — he comes! Behold, the Saviour comes! Lift up your heads, ye saints, — he comes! he comes! — he comes!” (in O’Leary, 114), a theorist of apocalypse must investigate this extraordinary wish for salvation, culmination, the End to the known world, and for personal survival after that End — or for the ecstasy of oblivion.

     

    In his widely read The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode described apocalyptic desire in terms of a theory of narrative, positing a universal urge on the part of finite human beings to imagine the end of the story in which they find themselves always in the middle. Kermode, however, is never fully able to account for the violence of apocalypse, or for the fact that the catastrophic revelation is always of something wholly Other. Kermode’s narrative theory can account neither for the passionate joy felt in imagining universal catastrophe, nor for the overwhelming hatred of the world that accompanies apocalyptic imaginings. In a sense, O’Leary’s theory of apocalyptic rhetoric extends Kermode’s thinking. O’Leary conceives of apocalyptic discourse as a means of resolving unanswerable questions concerning evil and time, of creating a narrative structure that brings those stories to a conclusion. But both Kermode and O’Leary are silent on what we might term the “sensation of an ending”: the end as emotional-sensual release, and as spectacle.

     

    O’Leary’s discussion of the apocalyptics of Reaganism and the New, and Christian, Right is insightful and raises important questions concerning the role of apocalyptic thought in American history as a whole. O’Leary argues that as the Right gained power in the 1980’s, its perspective shifted from a tragic to a comic frame without, however, losing its sense that an apocalyptic ending was coming soon. O’Leary is concerned with trying to explain the movements for conservative “reform” of American culture and politics, movements that a Millerite or Hal Lindsey position would reject as useless given the inevitability and imminence of the end. This shift is partly, as O’Leary points out, a result of achieving power and realizing that such reform may actually be possible. The outsiders became insiders, and the hardcore apocalypticists moved further to the margins — among the Branch Davidians and in the militias. But O’Leary maintains that the apocalyptic impulse is retained ambiguously on the political Right, combined with what he calls, quoting Nathan Hatch, “civil millennialism,” that is, “the establishment of a civil society that would realize millennial hope” (189).

     

    This last point, I believe, is of even greater importance than O’Leary grants it. Susan Sontag’s comment in 1967 that America is a country equally apocalyptic and valetudinarian is especially apt when applied to Reaganism. For Reagan’s Cold War fervor, his apparent eagerness to go to the edge of the abyss with the Evil Empire — “Make my day” — coexisted with no perceptible contradiction with his unreflective nostalgia for a largely imaginary “America” that existed before a) the communist menace; or, b) the 60’s; or, c) the industrial revolution. Furthermore, in a remarkable transposition, this site of nostalgia, for Reagan, came to be seen not only in the past, but as actually achieved in the present — under his presidency. The apocalypse, in a Reaganist view (and this is true also for his successors on the Right, the Newtists) will take place in some final struggle, against somebody, yet to come; but, in a more important sense, the apocalypse has already happened. Reaganist America, I would argue, regards itself as already post-apocalyptic.

     

    Reaganism should be seen not only in relation to right wing Christian apocalyptic discourses of the 1970’s, as O’Leary effectively portrays it. It also needs to be considered in a larger history of American millennial thinking, a history in which the founding and existence of America is itself regarded as a fundamental apocalyptic rupture, a salvific divide between old and new political, economic, and spiritual dispensations. America in this view — as a New Jerusalem, a City on the Hill — is perfect, and post-apocalyptic, from its inception.4 And yet, also from its inception, America has been faced with the political, economic, and class antagonisms that beset any country — and with the racial catastrophes (involving both African-Americans and Native Americans) that have been its unique encumbrance. Thus, throughout American history, we see a confrontation between a vision of American post-apocalyptic perfection and the facts of social tensions, crimes, and disasters.

     

    The characteristic response of Reaganism to this encounter has been denial. Racism, for example, from a Reaganist perspective, used to be a problem; fortunately, however, the problem has been solved; and, since there are no lasting effects, it was never really a problem in the first place. America was perfect in its orgins, and has developed perfectly to its perfect telos. The problem, according to Reaganism, lies with those malcontents who seek to “revise” America’s perfect history.

     

    And yet, the crimes and catastrophes of the past — whether in the context of psychoanalytic theory or in history — cannot be denied without consequence. They continue to return and, in various forms, inhabit the present. I would suggest that O’Leary is right to reject social “anomie” as a determining factor in apocalyptic discourse. A better heuristic concept would be the sychoanalytic notion of trauma, for trauma encompasses not simply a momentary disorientation, however severe, but also a theory of temporal transmission and of the mechanisms of repression and denial of that transmission. Thus, the tension O’Leary describes in Reaganism between comic and tragic apocalyptic frames can be thought of more fruitfully as the continuing, conflicted responses to historical traumas in the context of an ideology, or mythology, that denies the possibility of trauma.

     

    One of the principal virtues of Richard Dellamora’s Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending is its recognition of the central importance of historical trauma and its aftermaths in the shaping of apocalyptic sensibilities. Dellamora’s study is more specialized than either Quinby’s or O’Leary’s — it concerns the formations and disintegrations of certain constructions of male homosexual identity around particular historical crises, namely the Oscar Wilde trial and the onset of AIDS — but its theoretical and methodological implications are more far reaching than those of the other two books. Historical catastrophe, for Dellamora, shatters existing narratives of identity. It renders them impossible but, as it forces their repression, it also enables their return in a variety of symptomatic forms. Catastrophe functions as apocalypse in creating a historical rupture that obliterates forms of identity and cultural narrative. But apocalypse in this sense must be understood in terms of trauma, for these identities and narratives are not fully obliterated. What is forgotten eventually returns, changed and misrecognized. Dellamora shows how such misrecognitions can result in further repressions; and he shows also instances in which repressed stories are purposefully remembered — instead of being acted out and repeated.

     

    Dellamora contends that “the most notable feature of the history of the formation of male sexual minorities [is] the repeated catastrophes that have conditioned their emergence and continued existence” (1). Specifically, Dellamora writes, the Wilde trials of the 1890’s,

     

    brought to an abrupt, catastrophic close an
unprecedented efflorescence of middle-class male
homosexual culture in England.  The advent of AIDS
occurred at the end of a decade of dramatic gay
subcultural development.  The evident contrast between
these crises and the aspirations, efforts, and
accomplishments of the immediately preceding years
makes it inevitable that both periods will be cast
within apocalyptic narratives of Before and After. (31-32)

     

    Dellamora describes the development of late nineteenth-century “Dorianism,” the construction of English middle-class male homosexual identity based on the imaginative retrieval of ancient Greek models. He describes the elaboration and problematizations of this construction in Pater’s Marius the Epicurian and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. And, in a particularly brilliant chapter analyzing E.M. Forster’s story “Albergo Empedocle,” Dellamora shows Forster’s literary response to the shattering of “Greek” identity brought on by the Wilde trials and the Labouchere amendment of 1885 banning homosexual activity. In this after-the-end narrative, the Greek spirit, along with open homosexual identity, has been forgotten. The story’s protagonist, through some mysterious metempsychosis, becomes Greek, that is, receives the infusion of an obliterated identity — and is subsequently judged insane by his baffled and concerned family and friends. In Dellamora’s interpretation, the social repressions and amnesias of the post-Greek world of “Albergo Empedocle” have become so complete that a return of the repressed can appear only as a traumatic wound in the heterosexual social fabric — an illness that deprives its subject of any role in that world.

     

    Dellamora’s concern then is with the vicissitudes of cultural transmission through traumatic-apocalyptic moments of rupture, discontinuity, and outright suppression. In a compelling final chapter on Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, Dellamora shows the blockages and reopenings of several narratives of homosexual freedom and repression. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic having wiped out the 1970’s “paradise” of sexual openness, Hollinghurst’s protagonist gradually discovers, through oral testimony and rediscovered documents, a forgotten history of repression that preceded that brief era of openness. And the apocalypse of AIDS also reveals a white middle-class orientation of that lost paradise — its ambiguous status as a colonialist “cruising” of the third world. In Dellamora’s reading, The Swimming Pool Library portrays cultural apocalypse in both its destructive and revelatory aspects, as it approaches those “motivated absences that mark the history of gay existence” (191).

     

    In the middle of his book, Dellamora examines another set of blocked transmissions of homosexual narratives. These are instances in which liberal or left wing literary intellectuals have appropriated important features of gay culture while suppressing their specifically sexual contexts and implications. Dellamora discusses J. Hillis Miller’s use of Walter Pater as a precursor of literary deconstruction, Frank Kermode’s dismissal of William Burroughs as representative of an avant-garde apocalyptics that lacks the proper skeptical attitude, David Cronenberg’s cinematic transformation of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Fredric Jameson’s criticisms of Andy Warhol. Dellamora’s central point is that these liberal or leftist heterosexual discourses emphasize the “difference” or “dissidence” of these texts in the abstract, but cannot or will not articulate their specifically gay differences and oppositions. Miller, for instance, having placed Pater in the company of Wilde, Proust, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, ultimately “proceeds to defend deconstruction by dissociating it from being-homosexual” (70). Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Dellamora argues, “identifies with Burroughs as artistic iconoclast” while separating itself “from the ‘womanly’ Burroughs who is a sexual pervert” (121). In a particularly interesting and provocative discussion, Dellamora takes issue with Jameson’s criticism of Warhol’s art as postmodern ahistorical pastiche. Citing Warhol’s series of reproduced photographs of Robert Rauschenberg’s family in the rural south in the 1920’s, entitled ironically (after Agee and Evans) “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Dellamora counters Jameson’s claim that Warhol consistently elides history, claiming instead that it is Jameson who, in his readings of Warhol, elides the gay and working class histories that Warhol has, in fact, inscribed. While Dellamora does not make the point explicitly, it would seem from these instances that homosexual desires and gay cultural sensibilities are, for liberal heterosexuals as well as for reactionaries, traumatic intrusions that must be re-routed through an apocalyptic forgetfulness in an attempt to constitute a post-apocalyptic world in which such things could never have existed.

     

    One question I have for Dellamora concerns his interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s 1980 essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Dellamora sees two distinct moments in Derrida’s account of apocalyptics: first, an analytic moment seeks to extend the Enlightenment impulse toward demystifying the power claims implicit in apocalyptic discourse; second, an affirmative moment, recognizing the fictional, thus potentially heuristic, nature of apocalyptic discourse, seeks, in Dellamora’s words, “to mobilize the discourse on behalf of subordinated individuals and groups” (26). This distinction strikes me as overly neat, and it misses a necessary middle step that problematizes the two that Dellamora mentions. What is missing is Derrida’s unsettling conclusion that all utterance is apocalyptic. If, as Derrida writes in a passage quoted by Dellamora, the apocalyptic tone is “the possibility for the other tone, or the tone of another, to come at no matter what moment to interrupt a familiar music,” the political consequences of such an intrusion remain ambiguous. The sudden derailment that constitutes the apocalypse, Derrida continues, is “also the possibility of all emission or utterance” (in Dellamora, 26). Elsewhere in the essay, Derrida asks,

     

    and if the dispatches always refer to other dispatches
without decidable destination, the destination
remaining to come, then isn't this completely angelic
structure, that of the Johannine Apocalypse, isn't it
also the structure of every scene of writing in
general? (87)

     

    Apocalypse as the continual destabilization of every meaning, origin, and end is, finally, for Derrida, inherent in language. It joins Derrida’s earlier terms of linguistic destabilization such as “trace” and “differance,” but with the difference that in the case of “apocalypse,” the social and political effects are likely to be more immediate. As Derrida writes, “Nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre” (89), but “conservative” must be taken here to mean any impulse to perpetuate an existing order. Apocalypse, for Derrida, is the desire, embodied in language, for a continual revelatory catastrophe, a continual unveiling of whatever lies hidden beneath any social veil. As I read Derrida’s essay, apocalypse remains recalcitrant to any particular politics.

     

    This Derridean quibble aside, however, I regard Dellamora’s Apocalyptic Overtures as the best work on apocalyptic literature to appear since Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. It does, I believe, exactly what a book on apocalyptic sensibility should do. It emphasizes the role of catastrophe both as destruction and as revelation; it places actual and imagined catastrophes in specific historical contexts; it analyzes the role of desire in apocalyptic imagining; and it pays close attention to the mechanisms of cultural transmission and repression of historically traumatic events. And together with its theoretical and methodological merits, Apocalyptic Overtures tells stories of the suppressing, forgetting, and remembering of gay culture and catastrophe that need to be told and heard.

     

     Notes

     

    1. We read in Revelation (20:14), “[t]hen Death and Hades were flung into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death; and into it were flung any whose names were not to be found in the roll of the living.” Zizek then cites de Sade, distinguishing between natural, biological death and absolute, or symbolic, death: “the destruction, the eradication, of the [natural] cycle itself, which then liberates nature from its own laws and opens the way for the creation of new forms of life ex nihilo” (134).

     

    2. Marshall Berman, of course, took this phrase as the title of his excellent book on the experience of modernity. Michael Phillipson sums up very well the apocalyptic perception of the modern when he writes, “The modern experience . . . cannot be comprehended in the languages of the past, of Tradition, and yet we do not find ourselves except in this present — hence the need for . . . a language without history, without memory . . . a language against representation” (28 ).

     

    3. Norman Cohn’s study of the relations between medieval apocalyptic movements and economic and political struggles remains compelling after almost forty years. See also Adela Yarbro Collins’ work on the historical context of the Book of Revelation, and anthologies edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp and Paul D. Hanson.

     

    4. For accounts of the importance of apocalyptic strains in American ideologies, see Tuveson, Bercovitch, Slotkin, and Boyer.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 1995.
    • Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
    • Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
    • Collins, Adela Yarbro. Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Semeia 23 (1982): 63-97.
    • Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76-100.
    • —. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.
    • Hanson, Paul D., ed. Visionaries and Their Apocalypses. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.
    • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
    • Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction London: Oxford UP, 1966.
    • Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
    • Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1984.
    • Sherry, Michael S. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987.
    • Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
    • Thrupp, Sylvia L., ed. Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements. New York: Schocken, 1970.
    • Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1968.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

     

  • The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of The World’s Demise

    Andrew McMurry

    Indiana University, Bloomington
    jmcmurry@mach1.wlu.ca

     

    The startling calamity.
    What is the startling calamity?
    How will you comprehend
    what the startling calamity is?

     

    -- Al-Qur'än

     

    Were you expecting the sun to wink out, the heavens to open, the beast loose upon the earth? Or maybe you imagined a Ragnarok of more cosmopolitan origins: nuclear war, bioengineered plagues, alien invasion, supernova. In any case, it’s pretty clear the last days are upon us, but given the laggardly pace at which this doomtime is proceeding we simply haven’t yet grasped its contours. We adapt well to changes not sudden, swift and terrible, and just as we come to terms with the incremental decay of our own bodies and faculties, we learn to overlook the terminal events of our time as they unfold, gather, and concatenate in all their leisurely deadliness. We have wrongly expected the end of the world would provide the high drama we believe commensurate with our raging passions, our bold aspirations, and our central importance to the universe — we are worthy of a bang, not merely a whimper. And let me be blunt: by holding out for that noisy demise, we can pretend we haven’t been expiring by inches for decades.

     

    Clearly, this accommodation to the ongoing apocalypse is in large measure the result of our limited temporal perspective. In terms of recorded human history, the span of a few progressive centuries since our medieval torpor is brief indeed. On the geological clock, the whole of Homo sapiens’ rise and spread over the earth is but a few ticks of the second hand. Yet how seldom is this belatedness to the cosmic scene granted any significance! How, in our ephemerality, is it even comprehensible? Does a mayfly grasp that its lifetime lasts a day? From our blinkered, homocentric perspective the decade of the eighties is already a bygone era, the fifty years since World War Two an eternity. Our neurological incapacity to hold in our minds with firmness and freshness anything but the near past and the now allows to us to file away history as rapidly as we make it. Thus, absent a hail of ICBM’s or seven angels with trumpets, the apocalypse can have been upon us for some time, may abide for another lifetime or more, and not until those final, tortured moments may it dawn on us at last that the wolf has long been at the door.

     

    But how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in coming and promises to be as long in going? Where to begin and, more importantly, where to end? Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? Oh, and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and ignored by everyone else? Is “Apocalypse” but a way to connect a vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its own demise?

     

    Oddly, this apocalypse seems harder to deny even as its metaphoric dimension expands. Might it thus be real and constructed at the same time? That would be the most interesting possibility: an apocalypse so profoundly wrapped in its own apocrypha that it remains unrecognized even as its effects become massively known. A stealth apocalypse, then, plodding camouflaged among us, hiding in plain sight. Inured to its many signs and omens, the risk is that we can never be sure when the hard substance itself has heaved into view, and even as we peel away the rumors and lies that disguise it we fear our own voices may only be adding new tissues of obscurity. So before we speculate as to why some await so serenely the new millennium, while others hunker down bravely, smugly, or resignedly, let us gather together some of these discourses of doom, and then consider as best we can the indications that indeed we are already living in, and living out, the slow apocalypse.

     

    Prophecies

     

    Traditional interpretations of the various scriptural revelations of apocalypse have drawn on millennial expectations, notions of inexorable decline, the implicit moral bankruptcy of humankind since Adam and Eve, or linear or cyclical visions of history. Projected across the basic model of the human life, human civilizations have been seen to manifest the attributes of infancy, maturity, decline, senility. The apocalypse could be likened to the death of civilization, ominous to be sure, yet also the beginning of an “afterlife” when history is completed, all contradictions resolved, profane human time replaced by the sacred time of God. More recently, “apocalypse” is the name applied to any global catastrophe, with the idea that out of the rubble emerges a new and better order de-emphasized or abandoned. The apocalypse becomes in its secular manifestation just The End of The World as We Know It.

     

    The specific features of the apocalypse have been explored in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology, in Norse and Nazi mythology, by Edgar Allan Poe, Oswald Spengler, Ingmar Bergman, and David Koresh. Ronald Reagan, too, made frequent references to the end days. He once explained, “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if — if we’re the generation that’s going to see it come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of the prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through” (quoted in Brummet 5). Well, Reagan said many things the left took as signs of an impending apocalypse (especially since he had the power to put theory into practice), but this statement shouldn’t have been construed as one of them. Reagan had merely put his finger on the pulse of the times, the fact that the portents pointed to a clear and present decline. Of course, his reliance on a mish-mash of Christian literalism, Nancy’s zodiacal bent, and the cold war rhetoric of the “evil empire” led the already confused former G.E. pitch-man to get his timetable and mechanisms all wrong. The apocalypse wasn’t just around the corner — it was already proceeding apace, furthered no doubt by the retrograde foreign and domestic agendas of his own administration.

     

    With a more nuanced rhetoric than Reagan’s, and like Arnold, Yeats and Lawrence before him, Robert Frost had some things to say about the end of the world:

     

    Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. (220)

     

    Actually, Frost’s meditation on the caloric coefficient of the final cataclysm registers an ambivalence that has echoed on down through the ages. Fire, ice, famine, flood, man against man or god against god: it hasn’t mattered so much how the world ends, but rather that there are plenty of ways it can go, all nasty, and all fitting, considering the wide range of human moral failures that apocalypses always serve to punctuate. For example, science fiction has developed an entire sub-genre to explore the myriad shapes the apocalypse might take, and not surprisingly, these books and movies about TEOTWAWKI form a catalogue of disaster scenarios that replicate perfectly the seven deadly sins: nuclear “anger” in A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Day After; the “lust” of overpopulation in Soylent Green and Stand on Zanzibar; “coveting” nature’s power in The Stand and The Andromeda Strain; ecological “gluttony” in Nature’s End and The Sheep Look Up; “slothful” unmindfulness of the alien threat in Footfall and Invasion of the Body Snatchers; “prideful” technological fixes which go wrong in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day; and the “envy” which causes speciesist Chuck Heston to blow up the world in a fit of sour grapes in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Add to these the idea of cosmic contingency (ignorance) in When Worlds Collide and The Day of the Triffids and entropy (powerlessness) in The Time Machine and The Dying Earth, and the litany of human frailties as embodied in the apocalyptic narrative is pretty much covered.

     

    It may seem passing strange to learn that science fiction has devoted so much verbiage and footage to doom and gloom, especially since some people still think of it as a genre comprised of clean, shiny surfaces, gleaming towers and silent monorails, authored by dreamers, utopians, and Trekkies. But most SF authors seem well-versed in the Greek concept of hubris: it’s not what you don’t know but what you think you know that will kill you. Take the work of William Gibson: embraced as a prophet of cyberspace and virtual reality by everyone from William S. Burroughs to Wired, Gibson has repeatedly made the point that his novels describe a future he himself hopes never materializes. Corporate thuggery, techno-onanism, ecological breakdown, and a high-security, class-based information economy: Neuromancer or Virtual Light come across not so much as “scientifictions” but as simply the technical embellishment and literary intensification of the current contradictions of late capitalism and the limits of instrumental reason. Robert Silverberg also sets his recent novel, Hot Sky at Midnight, on a near-future Earth when corporations have effectively superseded the nation-state, and where the ability to add to the profit margin has become the only criterion for social advancement (hardly science fictional yet!). Global warming has drastically altered weather patterns, ice-bergs provide the only source of potable water; the American hinterlands are a dead or dying moonscape, and the entire planet appears to be a few years away from total biotic meltdown. The only optimistic note is sounded near the novel’s end, when the protagonist draws on the Gaia hypothesis to imagine a recuperated world of a hundred thousand, maybe a million years, in the future. “The planet had plenty of time. We don’t, Carpenter thought, but it does” (325). The future histories Silverberg and Gibson convincingly construct trace the last gasps of a dying world. According to the gradualistic theory of apocalypse, we’re in our middle gasps already.

     

    This idea that the world is already moribund gets picked up in mainstream writer Paul Theroux’s disturbing futuristic novel, O-Zone, which once again is really just a hypertrophic version of today. When the billionaire Hooper Allbright thinks about his own era, and then waxes nostalgic about ours, we realize that if the future is ill-fated that’s because it’s merely a playing out of the present:

     

    It was a meaner, more desperate and worn out world. It had been scavenged by crowds. Their hunger was apparent in the teethmarks they had left, in the slashes of their claws. There was some beauty in the world's new wildernesses, of which O-Zone was just one; but its cities were either madhouses or sepulchers. Fifty years ago was simply a loose expression that meant before any of them had been born. It meant another age. And yet sometimes they suspected that it had closely resembled this age -- indeed, that it was this one, with dust on it, and cracks, and hiding aliens, and every window broken: smoke hung over it like poisoned clouds. (13)

     

    In the America of O-Zone what is more frightening than the routine round-up of economic refugees, the death-squads, the degraded environment, and the national “sacrifice zones,” is the casual acceptance by everybody that this is the way the world must be, perhaps has always been. In Theroux’s vision, the real horror lies in the way the slow apocalypse is normalized, the Unheimlich made Heimlich, murder and mayhem become healthful pastimes.

     

    There are other writers who are sketching out the details of the end of the world, and they aren’t even fabulists. A recent spate of articles in no less liberal organs than The Atlantic and Harper’s take the first tentative steps down a road that should soon make earth’s deathwatch a mainstream topic of journalism. Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” looks at the Third World’s accelerating social, political, and environmental breakdowns, and their potential effects on the First World in the coming century. The scenario of O-Zone might have been drawn from Kaplan’s analysis: resource wars, massive migrations, climate change, tribalism and disease. Kaplan’s case study is west Africa, where these stresses, clearly exacerbated by the legacy of Western imperialism and post-colonial development policies, are producing “criminal anarchy.” “The coming upheaval,” he suggests, “in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering . . . Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence” (54). Not just Africa will be affected, of course, for many of the problems there are endemic to the Balkans, Latin America, and much of Asia. As the state disintegrates in the Third World, the First World is destabilized by the chaos beyond its borders, borders it can no longer effectively control. Federal authority, incapable of dealing with regional problems, finds itself ceding powers to ever more isolated local communities.

     

    That isolation will likely find itself playing out along predictable fault lines, as Michael Lind previews in a recent Harper’s article. In Lind’s view, the growing unwillingness of economic elites to support education, income redistribution, and health care, along with their retreat into the protected, privileged spaces of the neo-feudal society, combine to spell the end of the broad middle-class. The new underclass (Which Dares Not Speak Its Name due to its allegiance to the myth of egalitarian society) poses no threat to the economic royalists at the top, because as the war of all-against-all is felt particularly sharply at the bottom of the food chain, the various sub-groups that reside there can be counted on to perceive each other as the more immediate source of their problems.1 Lind sees a two-tiered society in the making: an upper tier, provided with work, security, comfort, hope, and insulation/protection from a disenfranchised, fragmented, and squabbling underclass, which faces a hard-scrabble existence with little chance of improvement. The proper image for the new world order with its international moneyed class: an air-conditioned, tinted-windowed, bullet-proofed limousine gliding safely over a pot-holed, squalid, dangerous street in Lagos — or New York or Toronto.

     

    Paul Kennedy, historian and author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, presents a wealth of evidence to support his own grimly compelling vision. Even as he performs the appropriate genuflections to the logic of the market and does a journeyman’s work in ranking countries’ “competitive advantages” as they face the road ahead, unlike his ebullient contemporaries Alvin Toffler or Bill Gates Kennedy has the good grace not to elide the incredible suffering that is going to occur in the Third World, and the honesty to admit the possibility of a no-win scenario all round. Kennedy also understands the importance of scale when it comes to thinking about human history, which in turn suggests the need to consider whether we are justified in thinking our past success in overcoming adversity provides any sort of basis for believing we are up to the challenges that now confront us:

     

    this work also asks whether today's global forces for change are not moving us beyond our traditional guidelines into a remarkable new set of circumstances -- one in which human social organizations may be unequal to the challenges posed by overpopulation, environmental damage, and technology-driven revolutions and where the issue of winners and losers may to some degree be irrelevant. If, for example, the continued abuse of the developing world's environment leads to global warming, or, if there is a massive flood of economic refugees from the poorer to the richer parts of the world, everyone will suffer, in various ways. In sum, just as nation-state rivalries are being overtaken by bigger issues, we may have to think about the future on a far broader scale than has characterized thinking about international politics in the past. Even if the Great Powers still seek to rise, or at least not to fall, their endeavors could well occur in a world so damaged as to render much of that effort pointless. (15)

     

    Unfortunately (for all of us), Kennedy’s book goes on to prove that the tone in this introductory passage is entirely too tentative.

     

    In general, apocalyptic scenarios take place against the prior and persistent conceit that human culture does truly move to culmination, that there is a larger goal or a target toward which time’s arrow is moving. Like children inferring mommy and daddy will always be there because they have always been there in the past, we project our history forward under the presumption that the human presence on this planet is a durable one and, no matter how or why, purposive. We can’t imagine an alternative. But while in cultural development there has been innovation, differentiation, and amplification, such changes can no longer be taken as evidence for an overall direction or telos. For there is no teleology at work here, let alone an eschatology, a dialectic, or even a simple logic. In fact, it is precisely the absence of any point to our history that makes this apocalypse unreadable except as an accretion of systemically deleterious effects which, incredibly, have become indistinguishable from progress. Skeptical of totalizing theories, postmodern intellectuals are reluctant to prophesy doom, but without coherent oppositional narratives to clarify such effects those who profit from the positive spin have the stage to themselves. Thus every sign gets read as its opposite, every trend that points to a decline is seen as the prelude to improvement, and every person becomes a shareholder in the fantasies of the boosters. In this environment of doublethink, the now-routine failure of corporations or nations to provide even short-term security for their members can be glossed as bitter but necessary “medicine,” or as the “growing pains” associated with increasing economic “rationalization.” We are left in the paradoxical position described in game theory as the “prisoner’s dilemma” and in environmental thought as the “tragedy of the commons”: the incentive for individuals to ignore the evidence for unqualified disaster far outweighs the personal risks involved in seeking to slow it. Everyone proceeds according to this same calculation, indeed is encouraged to do so, and everyone suffers minimally — that is, until the collective moment of reckoning is reached.

     

    Four Horsemen

     

    What is the hard evidence that taking the long view reveals an apocalypse already in progress? To keep our metaphor intact, we could speak in terms of the “four horsemen.” There are the usual ones — war, famine, disease, pestilence — but to put a finer point on the apocalypse I’m describing we are better to call our riders 1) arms proliferation, 2) environmental degradation, 3) the crisis of meaning, and, crucially, 4) the malignant global economy.

     

    1

     

    Armaments are the world’s single biggest business. John Ralston Saul notes that “by any standards — historic, economic, moral, or simply practical — in a healthy economy arms would not occupy first place unless that society were at war. Even then, such prominence would be viewed as an aberration to be put up with no longer than events required” (141). The permanent war footing of the earth’s major powers, and the rapid military build-up of many others, constitutes an aberration that has ascended to normalcy, so much so, in fact, that most American taxpayers now understand military expenditures to be more vital than health, education and, especially, welfare. Indeed, on the far right, military spending is seen as the only legitimate use of taxes by a national government. Because the American body politic has obligingly allowed itself to be perfused with upwards of 200 million personal firearms with no signs of saturation in sight, the extent to which the psychological need for “self-defense” informs all segments of policy, foreign and domestic, should come as no surprise.

     

    In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, certain questions are more easily entertained. What effect, for example, might all that personal firepower — and the willingness to use it — have in times of severe social disruption? Imagine, as Umberto Eco does (drawing on Roberto Vacca’s Il medio evo prossimo venturo), a giant traffic jam and blackout in the northeast US during a blizzard which leads to:

     

    forced marches in the snow, with the dead left by the wayside. Lacking provisions of any kind, the wayfarers try to commandeer food and shelter, and the tens of millions of firearms sold in America are put to use. All power is taken over by the armed forces, although they too are victims of the general paralysis. Supermarkets are looted, the supply of candles in homes runs out, and the number of deaths from cold, hunger and starvation in the hospitals rises. When, after a few weeks, things have with difficulty returned to normal, millions of corpses scattered throughout the city and countryside begin to spread epidemics, bringing back scourges on a scale equal to that of the Black Death . . . (489)

     

    . . . and on it goes, with a decline in the rule of law and a general disintegration of modern society into neo-feudalism. Now Eco’s point, highlighted by this rather dramatic scenario, is that in a sense we don’t need a disaster to inaugurate a new middle age for, to make the point yet again, in many respects we are already living through one: “One must decide whether the above thesis is an apocalyptic scenario or the exaggeration of something that already exists.”

     

    Of course, advanced weaponry is not necessary to kill whole peoples, as the horror of Rwanda has shown. The rhetoric of the N.R.A. may then be largely correct, with only an addendum necessary: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people — guns are just a way of creating “added value.” Given the underlying tensions between ethnic and national groups, religions and classes, arms sales become simply a method by which the First World cashes in on the simmering results of its own colonial adventures and the world’s myriad internecine feuds. Even the nuclear arsenals in the making in Israel, Pakistan, India, or Iraq, which now bring these countries near-universal opprobrium, were unthinkable without the prior transfer of necessary bootstrapping technologies by the West to these, the earth’s most lucrative hot-spots.

     

    In general, the multiplication of arms throughout the Third World means that the struggles which are likely to arise ever-more frequently in the decades to come (i.e., nationalist and ethnic wars, and wars for resources) have the potential to be fought at increasingly high levels of ferocity with concomitantly high levels of collateral damage to infrastructure and environment. As the Persian Gulf conflict amply demonstrated, modern warfare not only targets military personnel and civilians, but also aims to reduce the capacity of the ecosystem to support the survivors.

     

    2

     

    About the degradation and exhaustion of the planetary biosphere, again not much needs be said. Most of us are benumbed by the statistical evidence that points to our gross long-term mismanagement of the earth’s resources, its biota, and its atmosphere, soils, and water. The State of the World reports from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, for example, provide disturbing yearly round-ups of the various obstacles the planet faces in its “progress toward a sustainable society,” as the reports’ subtitle judiciously puts it. Yet that “progress” toward sustainability still awaits confirmation. Worldwatch director Lester Brown and his associates lament in their 1993 foreword, “One of these years we would like to write an upbeat State of the World, one reporting that some of the trends of global degradation have been reversed. Unfortunately, not enough people are working yet to reverse the trends of decline for us to write such a report. We are falling far short in our efforts” (xvii). As a sequential reading of the reports quickly shows, not only are we “falling short” but the decline becomes ever more precipitous with each passing year. Typical articles try to put a brave face on unmitigated disaster: “Conserving Biological Diversity” discusses the earth’s declining biological diversity; “Confronting Nuclear Waste” explores the technical incapacity of humans to deal with nuclear waste; “Reforming Forestry” documents the annihilation of the earth’s forests; “Reviving Coral Reefs” describes their worldwide decline. (One wonders what an analysis of Canada’s former east coast fishery might have been called: maybe “Keeping the Cod Stocks Healthy.”)

     

    Environmental apocalypticism is by now a familiar part of the landscape, but all the anxiety in the world does little to moderate our destructiveness. Just as smokers or alcoholics do not perceive the ongoing catastrophe in their cells and tissues and can therefore project the day of reckoning far into the future, so too is our devastation of the environment a problem in observation. The social system has not evolved to recognize environmental perturbations in a preemptive and amelioratory manner; in fact, it is constructed precisely on the basis of ignoring such stimuli as it pursues its own self-organization (see Luhmann). Environmental problems are endlessly recontextualized, analyzed, debated, and circulated through bureaucracies to the point where environmental protection consists largely in changing the definitions of “wetlands,” “allowable catch,” or “toxic limits” to comply with a state that already exists. Indeed, from this systems theory paradigm, it is questionable whether society is any longer capable of drawing a useful distinction between sign and referent at all.

     

    3

     

    This brings us to Jean Baudrillard, who must be the crown prince of apocalypse theory, although one suspects the actual mechanics of the world’s undoing would for him be nothing more than the messy and mundane details of a crisis far more profound and far more interesting, one that occurs at the level of meaning, purpose, the sign itself. That crisis appears simultaneously as both an excess and a scarcity:

     

    It is as if the poles of our world were converging, and this merciless short circuit manifests both overproduction and the exhaustion of potential energies at the same time. It is no longer a matter of crisis but of disaster, a catastrophe in slow motion. The real crisis lies in the fact that policies no longer permit this dual political game of hope and metaphorical promise. The pole of reckoning, dénouement, and apocalypse (in the good and bad sense of the word), which we had been able to postpone until the infiniteness of the Day of Judgment, this pole has come infinitely closer, and one could join Canetti in saying that we have already passed it unawares and now find ourselves in the situation of having overextended our own finalities, of having short-circuited our own perspectives, and of already being in the hereafter, that is, without horizon and without hope. ("The Anorexic Ruins")

     

    With Baudrillard the apocalypse is long played out, old news, so one shouldn’t panic. How can you panic about an apocalypse that precedes you, exceeds you, defines you? Baudrillard long presaged R.E.M. by announcing, “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).” While I agree with him that we are now moving through a signscape made unnavigable by its own excrescences, Baudrillard’s emphasis is, as always, on the futility of resistance. Emerging out of the seventies and eighties as a theory of what is beginning to look like the final flowering of the welfare state, Baudrillard’s post-scarcity semiotic is no longer so timely:

     

    We are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal. Everything is there. The heavens have come down to earth. We sense the fatal taste of material paradise. It drives one to despair, but what should one do? No future. Nevertheless, do not panic. Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What more do you want? Everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place everywhere.

     

    Armageddon by surplus meaning, a drowning in honey. Not exactly what the prophet St. John had in mind. For the many victims caught in the slow torture of the ongoing apocalypse, this aesthetisization of the endgame would be nothing short of obscene. The more natural stance toward this mess is one of anger, indignation, and defiance: as a friend of mine puts it, “sometimes you have to pick up the cue by the narrow end and start swinging.” That’s pool-hall politics, but in the face of Baudrillard’s incognizable hyperreality it’s either that or lapse into numb acquiescence as the velvet jackboots are put to you.

     

    Whether one resigns oneself to the seductions of hyperreality or falls into sheer animal panic, the point I think Baudrillard makes very well is that there is no longer a clear imperative to do anything at all. Perhaps the apocalypse is upon us, but so what? Unless or until a critical mass of desperation is reached, it seems unlikely the advanced nations have the collective will to acknowledge their own precarious situation: that they have at best shunted the ecological ramifications of their industrialization onto the rest of the world; that they can provide meaningful work to fewer and fewer of their citizens; that they have no moral authority to tell any other country how or at what pace to develop its economy; and that their political structure is fast devolving into a policy clearing-house for international capital and its movers and stakeholders.

     

    4

     

    This latter point brings us to the final horse, and let’s for a moment imagine, as do some biblical scholars and most economists and politicians, that this particular horse is the white one, the one which the Savior himself is said to ride. The savior in this secular interpretation would be liberal democracy and capitalism, which along with the lowering of trade barriers through international agreements such as GATT and NAFTA and the application of market principles to ever more forms of human interaction, marks the sublime phase of our political and economic development. This optimistic reading is embraced by people like Milton Friedman, Newt Gingrich, and Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and The Last Man is a Hegelian treatment of the apotheosis of liberal democracy and capitalism, or “lib-dem-cap” as I’ll call them to signify the conflation of the political and economic implicit in Fukuyama’s thesis. The victory of lib-dem-cap is the outer limit of human socio-economic evolution, rational self-interest quenched and hardened in the smithy of democratic institutions.

     

    In Fukuyama’s view, although the voyage to lib-dem-cap has been a difficult one, the many horrors of the twentieth century have been but a few rapids in the inexorable flow of history, not evidence of a basic flaw in his (or Hegel’s) teleology. This think-tank idealism’s blithe elision of the manifest empirical facts of our time prompts Jacques Derrida to write:

     

    it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (85)

     

    Must it now be that to reach the golden age promised in Revelations, Hugo Gernsback, and The Jetsons we must first pass through an extraordinary period of “structural adjustment” that for most will be no different than a living hell? Stock markets rise and total output increases but, as if it were some bloated parasite drawing off our nourishment, improvements in the fortune of global capital generally mean a diminishment in the lives of the people an economy is supposed to serve. A rise in the stock market means the stock market has risen; an increase in GDP means Exxon wrecked another oil-tanker and Boeing fired ten thousand workers. Somehow, irresponsibility and profit-taking by corporations can accrue to a country as a net gain. Coddled and coveted by liberal democracy, big business was celebrated as the goose that laid the golden egg of employment, but stateless corporations and financial institutions now steal their eggs along with them as they head for greener pastures. Capitalism has always had to destroy so that it could create more capital, but global capitalism destroys so that there is little left but capital. Soon, the new trans-national economy, with its elite class of knowledge workers, money-movers, and their subordinates, will rise and circulate like a warm, pleasant zephyr above the miasma below, where laissez-faire will still obtain, but only as method of enforcing the stratification.

     

    In the conclusion to his book, Fukuyama marshals the image of a wagon train of nations at last entering a new frontier town to symbolize the arduous journey to the liberal capitalist utopia at history’s trail-end. But the image rings hollow in today’s by no means kinder and gentler world. Fukuyama seems to believe the “rich North Atlantic democracies” (to borrow Richard Rorty’s phrase) are destined to be history’s John Waynes or Glenn Fords; but there is nothing in the brutal present and recent past to think so, and plenty to think they might be better compared to the Clint Eastwood character in Unforgiven, whose only heroic quality is that he doesn’t kill the whores. If lib-dem-cap as currently constructed represents the best of all possible socio-economic arrangements, there may not be world enough and time to see it come to fruition across the globe.

     

    Revelations 6:17

     

    Yet even this dismal portrayal of lib-dem-cap has a darker dimension. For what if the gathering storm is in some sense and in some quarters gamely anticipated? What if there are those who not only understand precisely the kind of fix we are in but actually view it as a confirmation of their ideology — and an opportunity to exploit? I do not mean the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who already started the apocalypse clock running in 1975, or their assorted ilk, who are no doubt preparing for a Judgment Day in the year 2000. Nor do I mean the various cults and survivalists who stockpile supplies and munitions against nuclear war, totalitarian government, or forestry service workers. No, I’m simply talking about those who have always had an interest in chaos, the folks who think that just as with Kennedy’s rising and falling nations, life divides people into winners and losers — and it’s best to be among the winners. In the halcyon days of supply-side economics the rhetoric from these cash-value pragmatists said that in open market competition even the loser wins. But now the news is less rosy. It turns out that in the new economy we won’t all be driving Cadillacs. In O-Zone even the millionaires and billionaires are worried:

     

    "You think just because there hasn't been a world war or a nuclear explosion the world's okay. But the planet's hotter and a whole lot messier, and that leak was worse than a bomb. And look at crime. Look at the alien problem. Look at money. Forget war -- war's a dinosaur. The world is much worse off."“I’m not worse off,” Murdick said . . . “Neither are you.”

     

    "Willis, what kind of a world is it when there are some simple things you can't buy with money?" Hooper added, "I hate that." (13)

     

    Life in the future looks more and more like a zero-sum game, and as any investment consultant will tell you, you must prepare yourself for a pay-as-you-go economy in which only the savvy and the diversified will survive.

     

    In this sort of milieu it’s only natural to subscribe to the Chicago Gangster Theory of life, as Andrew Ross names the rising tide of social Darwinism after the genetic model of Richard Dawkins: “Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases, for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior” (quoted in Ross 254). Ross is quick to point out that the “gangster” is an ill-chosen metaphor for absolute self-interest, because there is just as much or more basis for the opposite view, that gangsters, like everyone else, are embedded in social networks that bind them to their families, friends, communities, and so on. But while I agree with Ross that Dawkins’ theory is part and parcel of the Hobbesian world-view that sociobiology often seems to underwrite, our manifestly inequitable and unjust social order doesn’t require a Dawkins or a Darwin to justify itself (although it could use a new Dickens to describe it). It now gets along quite well with no justification at all. The “way things are” seems to have become its own excuse, and the regurgitation of this or that bio-ideology is simply a prettying-up operation of power structures already secured by the fact that they can “get away with it.”

     

    So what can be done about the secular four horsemen? The short answer is: nothing, really. An apocalypse, even one that moves like a tortoise, does not admit of correction, mitigation, or reversal. Taking on each of these catastrophic developments alone might bear positive results, but even assuming they were seen as tokens of impending doom instead of the price of progress, their total magnitude poses a challenge only a concerted effort by all responsible nations could even begin to deal with. Some technophilic wowsers suppose that what man has unleashed, he can, so to speak, re-leash. But as the apocalyptic forces have had decades, centuries perhaps, to gain momentum and have, too, insinuated themselves into the physical processes of the planet and the mental furniture of the human animal, the organizational apparatus, technical control, and collective good faith required now to bring these forces to heel seem to defy plausibility.

     

    But then (and to borrow a term from biology that specifies evolutionary experiments that are freakishly maladapted to non-extraordinary environments) what are humans but “hopeful monsters”? One group of Ragnarockers who call themselves “DOOM, the Society for Secular Armageddonism,” express their faith in the coming apocalypse this way:

     

    This conviction is based not on religious prophecy, but on observance [sic] of a multitude of critical world threats, including nuclear proliferation, chemical/biological weapons, terrorism, ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, acid rain, massive species loss, ocean and air pollution, exploding population, global complacency and many more. We believe the magnitude and number of these threats represent a movement toward a secular apocalypse that has gained such momentum it can no longer be stopped. The situation is hopeless. In the face of this coming cataclysm, the Society feels that the only viable remaining option is immediate emergency action, across the board, against all global threats. Such action is imperative if there be any chance of delaying the inevitable, of staving off, however temporarily, our imminent doom. (Apocalypse Culture; my emphasis)

     

    That’s the thing about apocalypses: they offer no hope, no hope at all, but humans just won’t seem to throw in the towel. In that light, we can take equally cold comfort from the distinguished economist Robert Heilbroner, who wrote twenty years ago in his Inquiry into the Human Prospect that

     

    in all likelihood we must brace ourselves for the consequences of what we have spoken -- the risk of "wars of redistribution" or of "preemptive seizure," the rise of social tensions in the industrialized nations over the division of an ever more slow-growing or even diminishing product, and the prospect of a far more coercive exercise of national power as the means by which we will attempt to bring these disruptive processes under control. From that period of harsh adjustment, I can see no escape. Rationalize as we will, stretch the figures as favorably as honesty will permit, we cannot reconcile the requirements for a lengthy continuation of the present rate of industrialization of the globe with the capacity of existing resources or the fragile biosphere to permit or to tolerate the effects of that industrialization. Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind, individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of lifeways that foresight would dictate. If then, by the question "Is there hope for man?" we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenges of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No, there is no such hope. (162)

     

    Predictably, despite this dismal prognosis Heilbroner manages to find the silver lining, or at least, in a tough-minded way, how we (and I tend to think “we” is properly understood as the “West,”) might construe the coming disaster as a test of our mettle:

     

    The human prospect is not an irrevocable death sentence. It is not an inevitable doomsday toward which we are headed, although the risk of enormous catastrophe exists. The prospect is better viewed as a formidable array of challenges that must be overcome before human survival is assured, before we can move beyond doomsday. These challenges can be overcome by the saving intervention of nature if not by the wisdom and foresight of man. The death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence -- one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on a basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition. (164)

     

    In other words, if we don’t discipline ourselves nature will do it for us. Either way, what doesn’t kill everybody makes the survivors stronger, to place Heilbroner’s views in their properly Nietzchean philosophical climate.

     

    As these two examples show us, following the typical apocalyptic narrative structure seems almost as unavoidable as the apocalypse itself: “We’re screwed, no getting around it, but . . .” So it is that doomsayers, for all their dire warnings, like to hold out the note of hope, the chance that maybe things could turn out differently if only we’ll listen to them more attentively. This carrot-and-stick strategy helps us see that apocalyptic rhetoric is always an invocation of power: do thus and so, or else suffer the consequences. Even those, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Pat Robertson, who are firmly convinced the Judgment Day is at hand, have a practical agenda in the here and now to gain adherents and compel obedience, and clearly the apocalypse scenario is a useful tool.2 The only thing more predictable than apocalyptic pronouncements is the scoffing with which they are greeted, yet the apocalyptic frame of mind is never impressed by the fact that doomsday has always failed to manifest itself decisively. In truth, apocalypticism depends on the asymptotic inability of the world to ever reach conclusion; the perpetual pregnancy of the apocalyptic moment is what keeps its metaphoric appeal so strong. What good is the apocalypse once it begins? As Ross notes in his discussion of Dawkins, the notion of “scarcity” — whether in terms of time, food, wealth, or heavenly seating-room, and whether based on ecology, economics, or the Gospels — is a powerful means by which to limit freedoms and naturalize repressive social orders. Perhaps this is another reason why it is difficult for us to entertain the notion that we are already moving through the apocalypse: to admit to such a thing would be to drain the “threat of doom” of its potency, and would allow the symbolic value of scarcity (mobilized so effectively by fiscal conservatives and religious zealots alike) to be effaced by a more coercive and brutal set of exigencies. Yet perhaps if we owned up to these disastrous exigencies we would at least be better prepared to discuss openly the socio-political bases for shortage, which so far are labeled by economists simply as “the distribution problem.”

     

    Having said that, it might now seem appropriate to acknowledge my own unspoken agenda, to call out for an end to arms sales, genuine environmental protection, renewal of civic society, guaranteed incomes to redistribute wealth, and so on. In posting that agenda, I would also be heading off the charge that my theory is irresponsible precisely because it describes an apocalypse that is ongoing, overwhelming, and a fortiori not susceptible to correction. Admittedly, there is a point at which cynicism should draw back from fatalism. Yet I only wish my subject left me cheery enough to believe such introspection would amount to more than an exercise in fashionable self-reflexivity.

     

    So let me instead conclude as despairingly as I began. We know that “History” consists of grand narratives arranged over past, present, and future events. We learn from Lyotard that metanarrative is now moribund. But we simply cannot go on without internalizing at least one metanarrative, for today, tomorrow, and the days after that: the narrative that takes for granted the world will go on. We all get up each morning and pursue our private lives as if they fit into this larger story, which is, granted, a story without a defined resolution, but still one we hope is not without a plot, at least not as far as it concerns us personally. Doesn’t everyone who raises a child believe, with Bill Clinton, in “a place called Hope”? Isn’t hope another name for the implicit belief that time is taking us somewhere, that things can only get better — even if now they are quite bad? Don’t we tell our children that things always have a way of working out?

     

    Well, what if things don’t have a “way” of working out; what if the notion that our world works at all is based on a sample too small to be predictive, a nose taken for a camel? Suppose our hyper-complex civilization is nothing more than an evolutionary blind alley. This is not a new idea, but let us place it an even more sweeping context. Recent discoveries of planets around nearby stars have upped the odds of non-terrestrial life, but at the same time led some in the SETI community (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) to suppose that were there many enduring civilizations in the galaxy we would have detected one by now, considering that our bubble of electromagnetic semiosis announces our presence for more than fifty light years in all directions. Yet any fellow sentients remain, contra The X-Files, tellingly silent. Some conclude that a paucity of ETI can be explained only if advanced civilizations have a relatively brief life span, so that by their technological zenith they are already senescent. To be sure, such a theory is as unfalsifiable as can be imagined. But if nothing else it reminds us of how facile, too, is the opposing theory, the one we have never relinquished, the one that assumes rather than having a foot in the grave our world is only now learning to walk.

     

    Ours may be understood as an apocalypse without origin or destination. It may have begun to unpack with the advent of the junk bond, the A-bomb, the concentration camp, the internal combustion engine, the corporation, or even the scientific method; and it may cease only when most of those things are no more. So then: is this apocalypse I have described really an apocalypse, or just the motion of history itself? For the multitudes who have died, are dying, and will die under modern history’s heavy feet there is no significant difference. Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves the questions we have foolishly assumed this same history has already settled. Who says the human presence on this earth was ever sustainable? Why do we continue to believe so strongly in our competency to manage the risks we compound daily? Where is this secret heart of history we trust has been beating? What precisely leads us to believe our world is not perishing? Why isn’t this the Apocalypse?

     

     

    Notes

     

    1. In that vein, another Harper’s article finds Canadian David Frum, the latest synapse in the pan-national neo-con brain-trust, demonstrating one of the sly, faux-populist containment strategies by which the elites and their spokespeople help single out the currently unemployed underclass as the approved scapegoat for those not currently unemployed: “People are tired of the constant moaning they hear about the poor. A lot of middle-class taxpayers feel they’re paying more and more for the poor and the poor are behaving worse and worse. And people are not sure that they’re as sympathetic as they used to be” (“A Revolution.” 50).

     

    2. Editorializing in The New Republic, Robert Wright seems somewhat puzzled by the conspicuous paradoxes in Robertson’s apocalyptic rhetoric: “First he uses climate chaos as a recruiting device, amassing money and power by calling it a sign of the apocalypse. Then he uses the money and power to decry policies that might reduce the chaos and forestall the apocalypse. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!” But of course the whole point is that Robertson’s supporters don’t want to him do anything about the apocalypse save to check off its signs and help them prepare for the end. The apocalypse they envision is simply prelude to salvation, and the only danger would be to have a soul unfit for the millennium. To send money to block the apocalypse would be like paying Dr. Kevorkian to not help expedite your demise.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Ali, Ahmed, trans. Al-Qur’än (The Koran). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. 548.
    • “A Revolution, or Business as Usual?” Harper’s. March, 1995: 43-53.
    • Baudrillard, Jacques. “The Anorexic Ruins.” Looking Back at the End of the World. Dietmar Kamper and Christina Wulf, eds. New York: Semiotexte, 1989. 29-45.
    • Brown, Lester, ed. State of the World, 1991. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
    • —-. State of the World, 1992. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
    • —-. State of the World, 1993. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
    • Brummett, Barry. Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric. New York: Praeger, 1991.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Eco, Umberto. “Towards a New Middle Ages.” On Signs. Marshall Blonsky, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 488-504.
    • Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969.
    • Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992.
    • Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
    • —-. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1994.
    • Heilbroner, Robert. An Inquiry into the Human Prospect: Looked at Again for the 1990’s. 1975. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
    • Kaplan, Robert. “The Coming Anarchy.” The Atlantic. Feb. 1994. 44-76.
    • Kennedy, Paul. Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993.
    • Lind, Michael. “To Have and Have Not.” Harper’s. June, 1995: 35-47.
    • Luhmann, Niklas. Ecological Communications. Trans. John Bednarz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
    • Parfrey, Adam. Ed. Apocalypse Culture. Los Angeles: Feral House, 1990.
    • Ross, Andrew. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life. London: Verso, 1994.
    • Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993.
    • Silverberg, Robert. Hot Sky at Midnight. New York: Bantam, 1994.
    • Theroux, Paul. O-Zone. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986.
    • Wright, Robert. “TRB” column. The New Republic. July 10, 1995. 5.

     

  • My Name in Water, Adumbration, Offering, and Depth Perception

    Cory Brown

    Ithaca College
    cbrown@ithaca.edu

    My Name in Water

    The kids are in the bathtub screaming
    and splashing, my wife on the phone
    discussing a book on Australian aborigines,
    whether we should even bother reading
    literature anymore, and you would think
    by the way I’m scribbling in the corner
    I was trying to write my name in water.
    But I can’t even begin a poem let alone
    put the rhapsodic, quintessentially-barbaric
    yet sumptuous touch on the last line —
    you know, the one with such transcendental
    finality you would think the bard himself
    had risen to scribble out a few last, sad,
    desperate lines. Which reminds me of a poem
    I heard had been found on the desk
    of a college professor killed in a car accident
    a few days before the last days of school,
    when the forsythia are in full bloom
    and tulips no longer purse their lips
    for the kiss of spring. The poem is entitled
    “Last Instructions to My Students,”
    which to me signifies a most profound joke.
    I mean, it had been an accident for Christ’s sake!
    It’s as if God himself were pointing
    to that title and saying, “See! see!
    This is what I mean.” Which is to say,
    folks, that life is so meaningful you simply
    can’t take is seriously. Let me give you
    another instance: it is a different day now
    and spring is in full bloom; the tulips
    on the side of the house have all been picked
    by my four-year-old, little purple and
    white-striped tulips plucked in the innocence
    of youth, and the sun is out now after
    a brief storm this morning and there’s
    a lull in the day. What I mean to say
    is there may come a time, perhaps even today,
    when I’ll notice I had forgotten to do something
    very important and then realize I had been
    squandering my time writing. Then
    like in a dream, I will remember the way
    my two-year-old’s hair curls up from his
    head, and how he’ll sometimes be swinging
    in his swing with me pushing him, and off
    to the side there will be a puddle
    from a brief storm and I’ll look over
    and see the perfect reflections it gives
    of the now cloudless blue sky, and I’ll stare
    into that puddle and not even think about my name.

    Adumbration

     

    I experienced the annular eclipse today
    as an adumbration. As something extraordinary
    I wasn’t quite conscious of at the time.
    You see, I had forgotten it was coming
    and a rainstorm was moving in that hour,
    so when it got very dark I sensed that this
    was simply one of those eerie moments
    when a storm blankets the sky to remind us
    of the structure of normalcy. Later,
    when I dropped the lawnmower off, Al the repairman,
    with his deep, sweet anchorman voice,
    shaking hands, and whisky breath,
    said he watched it through welding glass
    and described the ring as moving around
    the moon. How charming, I thought,
    and then I imagined the fury of that ring,
    its enormity. On my walk, the sun was
    shining on the wet, fresh-plowed black soil,
    and even the old cornstalks seemed to glow,
    pale brown as they were and dirty in their
    tired late spring appearance. I was making
    my regular ring around the apple orchard
    edged now with full-blooming pear
    and cherry trees. The tiny blooms themselves
    I thought of as rings of fragile tissue
    bursting with color. My dog made her run
    around me again and again and the sun
    continued to pulse its brilliance down
    onto the growing alfalfa fields, onto trilliums
    in the woods, jack-in-the-pulpits and mayflowers
    blooming or preparing to bloom; and down
    onto cars and trucks on the highway,
    bug-sized from where I was — their little
    motors buzzing in the distance, the road
    in the bright sun burning around the lake.

    Offering

     

    What am I doing? Is it enough
    to say I know, or don’t
    trust you? What’s wrong
    with that, that you
    would have to be relied
    upon to know the question
    is rhetorical and serious.
    I’m barely alive to you, sometimes
    the poems says. And I say
    nothing, I can’t help it
    (the poem, that is).
    That is how I am
    keeping it all in hand.
    Half in hand and half getting
    out of hand is how
    to pass it along to you
    in your life that I am
    offering to myself, for you.

    Depth Perception

     

    So I was telling Creeley
    how I once got a piece of chaff
    stuck in my eyelid so each time
    I blinked it scratched
    my cornea, but I had to keep
    the combine going even though
    I couldn’t tell with just one eye
    how close the header was
    to the ground — no depth perception
    you know. I’ll never know
    how closely he was listening.

     

  • Youngest Brother of Brothers

    Chris Semansky

    University of Missouri-Columbia
    writcks@showme.missouri.edu

    Ihit a kid. He’s about eight, and the better part of his right ear has been ripped off by the windshield. He’s lying in the road, moaning, his legs jerking like he’s underwater.A crisis becomes a wonderful moment to free oneself from ideas of “correctness,” “objectivity,” “acceptance,” and redesign, reconstruct one’s place in the on-going narrative or life story. Yet the success or failure of such an endeavor can only be provided in the discursive realm.
    A masseuse from Newark, New Jersey, my mother loved events, engineered ecstasy, spectacular moments of sensuous clarity when the body gave up its idea of being merely a single thing, separate and uncopied, and fell somewhere wholly strange. When I was eight and just after she had dropped four squares of Windowpane while listening to the White Album, she tattooed a picture of the Beatles in the small of my back. Just the heads.
    Daddy, what does the discursive realm look like?The discursive realm is a place of wonder and enchantment and not at all like you’d imagine. Your mother and I lived there for the better part of our marriage. Remember that building we saw out West made of marble and glass and aluminum and discarded tires and old Hush Puppy shoes with the withered Buster Brown face still in the heel? It’s like where we are right now, yet also where we’ll be in a few minutes, a few days. It may or may not be where we’ll all wind up when our little pumpers stop pumping. The discursive realm is an orphan, son, with a family as large and tenuous as the sky. And it is dangerous because it watches us better than we can watch ourselves. Maybe a picture would help:
    Maybe not.
    I write because I cannot see my face. I drive because I cannot get away from my face.
    How they’ve stretched and faded, how their haircuts now resemble bruised soup bowls, their noses nothing more than squamous plugs of dappled sunburn and scars. How they resemble your average bowling team from Wichita.I don’t have to look at them.
    Other things I don’t have to look at but of whose existence I have been informed and whose symptoms I have been taught to read:

    •      lesions of the parietal lobe posterior to the somnesthetic area
    •      a T-cell count of 160
    •      proprioceptive agnosia
    •     the inside of all things holy and wordless
    He’s wearing red Converse sneakers, size six I guess, maybe smaller, with the most darling little Mets tee shirt, bloodied now but still smart. If I had a boy, I’d want him to be just like this kid. If he survives I imagine in a few years he’ll be playing hoops with his friends, juking past defenders while looping in from the wing for a layup, dribbling behind his back, dishing no-look passes to his awe-struck teammates who, without thinking, shyly smile at his grace.
    The youngest brother of brothers’ chief interest is the quality of life and the joys and sensations of the present, rather than the collection of goods and property. He is relatively soft and yielding with women, even if he plays the part of a cynic or an erratic adventurer. His preferred professions include announcer and entertainer, quizzmaster, advertising agent or salesman, artist, writer, musician, actor, tutor, technical or scientific specialist, assistant or associate of leading men in business, politics or science, a vote-rallying politician, ophthalmologist, or anesthesiologist.
    For ten points, name the five slowest dying characters in modern history:
    The panel light blinks red: “Check Engine.”
    Give up?
    What defines an emergency is a person’s acknowledging it as such. But what constitutes the person’s idea of emergency per se? Crisis and opportunity co-exist like blood and flesh. They are both the same and different. Calculated in the moment of its happening in retrospect a crisis as opportunity becomes an excuse for changing, a bookmark to the place you remember best.
    What determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places.
    Blank says he’d like to live his life backwards, start as an old man with recurring memories of a childhood yet to come, to gradually empty himself of the stale revelations and sudden pains that he would simultaneously grow into. My preference is for the life lived from the middle, then alternating a year in either direction. One step forward, one step back to when the first step was taken.
    In the television series of our story little Tommy Smartpants plays the author when the cop bangs on the window.
     
    “Can you open the door?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “What happened?”
     
    “Door’s stuck.”
    Since one experiences one’s own intentions as good, then the problem is seen as the other’s actions and what one assumes are the intentions behind them.”Do you really mean that?”People tend to explain to themselves what the other is doing by interpreting the other’s intentions. The other’s actions (and assumed intentions) then become the mitigating circumstances that justify one’s own actions, despite knowing that one’s own actions do not necessarily fit what is culturally or personally acceptable.
    I bite his other ear. He is so beautiful.
    I unbite it, then throw him back into the street, where he is once again young and whole and can bother me no more. Children have their own explanations for things.

     

  • HYPERWEB

     

     

     

    This is an experimental hypertext site using HTML.

     

    It is an essay about what hypertext is, and it performs what it says.

     

    While making use of various images it is text driven, and like all such projects is a combination of the personal, the contingent, and the theoretical.

     

    It relies on Netscape version 2 or greater. This is not my usual policy in WWW publication and design, but this site is less about the WWW and much more about hypertext per se. As far as I’m aware these pages are HTML 3.0 compliant, and they make use of gifs and jpegs (depending on which yields the more economical file). Netscape 2 seems to do the best job of the browsers I’m familiar with of dealing with the HTML elements contained on these pages.

     

    What happens…

     

    The web pages that make up this site use the HTML <meta> tag to provide a client side pull where pages are loaded serially. You can attempt to intervene at any point by clicking on an image, a word, or a letter. In most cases where a link is available it will randomly place you back into the series, however in some cases the HYPERWEB ‘expels’ the reader.

     

    If you simply let the pages cycle then the HYPERWEB will take about 6 or 7 minutes to return to its beginning (if you’ve already loaded the graphics – see below), but if you intervene you can end up anywhere.

     

    Making it work

     

    These pages require Netscape version 1.1 or greater. Version 2.0 is recommended.

     

    To speed delivery of the pages you can download a page that has all the images this site uses, then move into the site proper. This is advantageous because Netscape caches these graphics, which means that it delivers them as needed; thus the pages will run as they’re supposed to.

     

    You should make sure that you have Netscape configured to load images automatically.

     

    FTP

     

    If you have downloaded the HYPERWEB via FTP to your own computer then you do not need to preview all the images manually. Simply enter THE HYPERWEB, making sure you have your browser set to load images.

     

    Technical specs

     

    The pages were written in Storyspace v.1.3 (Eastgate Systems) then exported as HTML files. They were edited substantially using PageSpinner and BBEdit. All work has been done on a Macintosh Quadra 630 (20MB RAM, 500MB drive) and a Macintosh Duo 250 (12MB RAM +RamDoubler, 200MB drive). An Apple Colour One Scanner was used for the graphics, graphics editing by Photoshop, and that’s about it.

     

     

    Department of Communication Studies
    Media Studies
    RMIT
    amiles@rmit.edu.au

     

  • The Intimate Alterity of the Real A Response to Reader Commentary on “History and the Real” (PMC v.5 n.2)

     

     

     

     

    To: Dr. Shepherdson
    From: hescobar.datasys.com.mx (Hector Escobar Sotomayor)
    Subject: Comments on your paper in Internet about Foucault and Lacan

     

    Dear Dr. Shepherdson:

     

    I’m a Mexican student of Philosophy and now I’m working on my thesis devoted to an archaeological study of Psychology, considering the relation Foucault-Lacan so I’d like to get in contact with you and to interchange ideas. If you like, I could send you a copy of my thesis (in paper or by e-mail) (it’s in Spanish). My proposition is that according to Foucault in The order of things we have reached a new epistemic period that can be defined as a Postanthropologic one, in which is neccesary to leave the notion of the human being and replace it with the notion of the Subject of Desire. The importance of Lacan’s work is obvious mainly in his idea of Jouissance (“Goce” in Spanish), which opens a new line of philosophical arguments.

     

    Please, as you can see, my written English is not very good, but I think we could establish a communication. My adress is hescobar@datasys.com.mx.

     

    Thank you very much for your attention

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Shepherdson’s article on “History and the Real”:

     

    Dear Mr. Shepherdson:

     

    I’m a psychoanalyst and I’m on my way to mastering desire [in] psychoanalytical theory. I read you paper “History and the Real” and really “enjoyed” it, even knowing very little about Foucault. But there’s one thing that called my attention in such a special way, that I want to discuss it with you:

     

    Under your topic nr. 42, you wrote: “(. . .) the element of lack that destablizes the structural, symbolic totality.”

     

    It then seemed to me (I may be wrong) that you suggest that the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow. I’ve found close concepts to this (which I’m not sure if it is what you intended at all) [in] many earlier Lacanian authors.

     

    Now, this is a very hot question. For me, it is much easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself; in other words, what is prohibited is part of the structure, and what makes the prohibition be is also a part of the structure. The lack of the structure is also [in] the structure and, futher, it’s only because of its lack that the structure can be . . . (I’m not being original at this point: I think you know G. Deleuze’s paper “On quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?”).

     

    Well, I also must say that this interests me because I didn’t find any answer which could be conclusive. What do you think about that?

     

    Yours,

     

    Marcus Lopes
    marclop@omega.lncc.br

     

     

    Charles Shepherdson

    Pembroke Center
    Brown University
    engcs@mizzou1.missouri.edu

     

    Dear Mr. Lopes:

     

    Thank you for your questions on my article “History and the Real,” which Postmodern Culture recently forwarded to me. It is always interesting to me to hear from practicing psychoanalysts, and from others in the medical profession who have an interest in Lacanian theory. In the United States, of course, interest in Lacan has mainly arisen through philosophy, or literary theory and cultural studies, so it is not always recognized that in Europe and South America — as well as in Australia and Mexico — Lacan has a much greater impact on clinical circles. I say this only because, if you are looking for clinical material, there is much more information in French and Spanish than in English. But I am grateful for your question, and I will do my best with it, because it gives me a chance to try to clarify — even for myself — a difficult and important issue.

     

    You asked in your letter about the concept of the “real,” and especially about its relation to the symbolic order. You say I suggested that the real is “outside” the symbolic structure: “the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow.” And you say it is “easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself.” These are interesting and difficult questions. Many readers have asked me a related question: “Is everything really a ‘discursive construction,’ a product of the symbolic order, and if not, how can we speak of an ‘outside’ without returning to a naive realism?”1 This is one of the most important problems in contemporary intellectual life, and it might be said that one’s response to this single issue is enough to define one’s theoretical orientation today.

     

    A map of postmodernism could even be drawn on the basis of the answers that are given to this question. It would have three major areas: in the first, we find an emphasis on the “symbolic order,” and certain theories of “social construction”; in the second, we find a reaction against “post-modernism,” and a return to “positive” and “empirical” investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, and endocrinological accounts of consciousness, behavior, and sexuality; in the third area, we find an effort to think through the “linguistic turn” — not to react against the formative power of representation, but rather to think its limit. This is where I believe the most interesting contemporary work is being done, and this is the problem that is held in common by Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, though they do not elaborate the issue in the same way. There are many ways to approach the question, as it concerns Lacan, and I will therefore try to touch very briefly on a whole range of directions in which your question might take us. I will loosely organize the discussion under three headings: “Inside/Outside,” “The Limits of Formalization,” and “Two Versions of the Real (Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek).”

     

    1.1. Inside/outside

     

    First, concerning the idea that the real is “outside” the symbolic. As you probably know, Jacques-Alain Miller developed the term “extimité” from Lacan, suggesting that the real is not exactly “outside,” but is a kind of “excluded interior,” or an “intimate exterior” (see Miller, “Extimité”). In Seminar VII, for example, in the chapter “On the Moral Law,” Lacan says of the “thing”: “das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded” (SVII 71). And again in the chapter on “The Object and the Thing,” he speaks of what is “excluded in the interior” (101), noting that this exclusion presents us with a “gap” in the symbolic order — something that escapes the law — “a gap once again at the level of das Ding,” which indicates that we can “no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee” (100). However much one may stress the notorious “law of the father” in Lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real (or between language and das Ding) involves a certain failure of the law. We must therefore take account of this element that “escapes” the symbolic order, or renders it “incomplete.” The problem remains as to how exactly this “excluded object” should be conceived, but we can already see that it is not simply “outside” the structure, but is missing from the structure, excluded from within. So your question is: just how we are to understand this “belonging” and “not belonging” to structure, this “intimate alterity” of the real?

     

    1.2 Topology

     

    Lacan often drew on topology in his attempts to describe this peculiar “extimate” relation between the symbolic and the real. One could thus approach the question in geometrical terms. For the usual relation between “inside” and “outside” that exists in Euclidean space (a circle, for example, has a clearly defined interior and exterior) is disrupted by topological figures such as the Klein bottle, or the torus (the figure shaped like a doughnut, which is structured around a central hole). Even with the Mobius strip, it is difficult to say whether it has “one” side or “two” — the usual numerical ordering is disrupted. Juan-David Nasio has a very good book in which he argues that each of these topological figures is meant to address a specific problem within psychoanalytic theory. Thus, (1) the torus describes the relation between demand and desire, (2) the Mobius strip describes the relation between the subject and speech, (3) the Klein bottle describes the relation between the master-signifier and the Other, and (4) the cross-cap describes the structure of fantasy, where we find the subject’s relation to the object. There also is a fine short book on these issues by Jeanne Granon-Lafont.

     

    1.3 Being-toward-death

     

    Without developing these points in detail, it is easy to see this material at work in Lacan’s text. Even in the familiar “Rome Discourse,” Lacan says that the human being’s relation to death is unlike the “natural” relation to biological death, and that death is not a simple “event,” a moment “in” chronological time, but rather the very opening of time, its condition of possibility. Instead of being placed at the end of a temporal sequence, as a final moment in biological time, the relation-to-death is placed at the origin, and understood as the “giving” of human time, the opening of possibility, of time as a finite relation to the future and the past, structured by anticipation and memory. Death thus involves a peculiar link between the symbolic and the real, presenting us with a sort of hole or void in the structure of meaning — a void that is not a deficiency, but virtually the opposite, an absolute condition of meaning. The human relation-to-death (discussed in such detail by Heidegger) is thus in some sense at the “origin” of the symbolic order — not represented “in” language, or entirely captured by the symbolic rituals that seek to contain it, but rather “primordial” to language: “So when we wish to attain in the subject . . . what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death” (E 105). The topological reference to a “missing” center (added to the text in 1966) follows: “To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure . . . it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as an annulus.” He adds, “If I wished to give an intuitive representation of it . . . I should call on the three-dimensional form of the torus” (E 105). I won’t go into this matter in detail, but one can easily see that the relation between the symbolic and the real cannot be approached if one begins with a dichotomy between the “inside” and “outside.” It is rather a matter of a void “within” the structure. This is of course what the theory of “lack” in Lacan tries to address. And this is why those for whom “lack” is foreclosed — those who “lack lack” — are in some sense deprived of access to language.

     

    1.4 The structure of the body

     

    Lacan’s topological formulations may seem esoteric, and many commentators have ridiculed them, denouncing his “pseudo-mathematical” interests as chicanery or mysticism or intellectual posing. But if one thinks for a moment about the body — about the peculiar “structure” of the body, and all the discussions in Freud about the “limit” of the body, the difficulty of “containing” the body within its skin, or of determining what is “inside” and “outside” the body (the “relation to the object,” the mechanisms of “projection” and “introjection,” and so on), it becomes obvious that the space of the body is not really elucidated by Euclidean geometry. The body is not easily “closed” within itself, as a circle is “closed” with respect to the “outside.” The body does not “occupy” space as a natural object does. When it comes to the “body,” the relations of “interior” and “exterior” are more complex and enigmatic than one would suspect if one began by regarding the body as an “extended substance” in Cartesian space, or by presupposing that space is structured by Euclidean dimensions, and that the “place” of the body can be delimited in the same way that the natural object can be located by spacial coordinates in Euclidean geometry. So the discussion of topology may seem esoteric, but it addresses problems that are obviously fundamental to psychoanalysis. Freud speaks, for example, of the “orifices” of the body as points of exchange with the “outside” — points where the “limit” of the body is most obscure, where the relation between the “inside” and “outside” of the body is unstable and problematic. All the analytic problems having to do with “incorporation,” “mourning,” “abjection,” and the “object-relation” — even the themes of “aggression” and “love,” and the entire question of the “relation to the other” — can be put in terms of the “inside” and “outside” of the body.

     

    1.5 From the “imaginary body” to the symbolic containment of the void

     

    These observations are very brief, but they should be enough to indicate that the “body” in psychoanalysis is not simply an “imaginary body.” To be sure, Freud speaks of the “ego” as a “bodily ego,” and Lacan says that the body is an “imaginary body.” And this bears not only on the “space” of the body, but on “external” space as well: in the “Mirror Stage” he notes that the imaginary order allows the world of objects to appear, calling it “the threshold of the visible world” (you may know Kaja Silverman’s recent book by this title). But discussions of the “imaginary body” have tended to obscure the fact that the symbolic and the real also play a crucial role in the constitution of the body. Furthermore, if we speak of the body as “imaginary,” we will tend to regard the “symbolic” as if it were a purely “linguistic” matter, a domain of speech and “representation,” and not a matter of our embodiment as well. I remember visiting a clinic in Boston once — a halfway house for schizophrenics. Many of the patients had specific materials — scarves or string or favorite hats — that they would attach to their bodies. Without these things, they became extremely anxious and refused to go outside, as if the body were not “unified” without this external prop. The body does not automatically cohere by nature: it holds itself together as “one” entity, and is able to move through “space,” not naturally, with the physical coherence of an objective “thing,” but only with the help of imaginary and symbolic props that give space and time their consistency. So we could say that the relation between the real and the symbolic — the formation of a “structure” which also includes the real as an “interior exclusion” — allows the body to move, and gives coherence to “external space.” This human “space” — the space of desire and human movement–cannot be grasped in terms of Euclidean space, and the space of the “body” therefore cannot be adequately conceived through the usual geometry of “inside” and “outside.” Thus, while we are often told that the “body” is an “imaginary body” for Lacan, the constitution of the body also depends on the inscription of the void, the symbolic “containment” of lack. I have tried to make this argument in more detail (partly in reference to anorexia), in “Adaequatio Sexualis.”

     

    1.6 Demand and desire

     

    The relation between the symbolic and the real can also cast light on the distinction between demand and desire. In a famous — but still notoriously obscure — passage in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Lacan distinguishes between demand and desire, calling desire an “absolute condition”: “for the unconditioned element of demand,” he writes, “desire substitutes the absolute condition” (E, 287). Demand is “unconditioned” in the sense that it simply designates the general “deviation” by which human demand comes to be separated from animal “need” (which is “conditioned” by the requirements of survival and reproduction). We thus have a “deviation in man’s needs from the fact that he speaks . . . insofar as his needs are subjected to demand” (E, 286). This has a clear impact on the “object-relation”: for unlike the object of need, the object of demand is symbolic, and is therefore subject to metonymic displacement, losing its natural specificity in a movement along the signifying chain that makes the object a “substitute,” a signifier of the other’s recognition. In Lacan’s words, “demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love” (E, 286). Demand is thus not only perpetually displaced, but also projected to infinity, always seeking “something more.” As Marx also says, human life loses its foundation in nature, in a movement of “excess production” (the arena of “supply and demand”) that goes beyond all biological need and has no natural limitation.

     

    Consequently, at the “symbolic” level of demand, there is a further requirement for a “limit,” and it is precisely desire that emerges as this limit to the infinite displacement of demand, giving a finite shape to the otherwise endless play of symbolic substitution. Thus, as Lacan says in “Direction of the Treatment,” “Desire is produced in the beyond of demand (E, 265; see also SVIII, 246), and introduces a “limit” to the displacement of the signifier. As Derrida also notes in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” the free play of the signifier is in principle unlimited, but in fact is always brought to a certain tentative closure, and thereby grounded in a peculiar “center.” “And as always,” Derrida writes, this “point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible . . . expresses the force of a desire” (279). We can also see here why Lacan claims that although the “particularity” of the object of need is lost when we pass to the level of symbolic displacement (“demand annuls [aufhebt] the particularity of everything that can be granted”), he also insists that “the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand” (E, 286). Thus, the “reversal” or transformation that characterizes the shift from demand to desire is accomplished precisely by the institution of a lack, a void or “obliteration” that is not symbolic, that escapes the dialectical movement of “productive negation,” but is nevertheless constitutive of the subject. This “void,” therefore, has an “effect”: it leaves a “remainder,” a “relic” that is regarded as a “power” — “the force of a desire”: “By a reversal that is not simply the negation of a negation, the power of pure loss arises from the relic of an obliteration” (E, 287; see Borch-Jacobsen’s very useful discussion of this text in The Absolute Master, pp. 199-212, where he also corrects some deficiencies in the English translation). We thus return to the “mortal center” of the “Rome Discourse” — as if language were opened by a mark of death that haunts it, but cannot be inscribed or reduced to a symbolic phenomenon. This not only explains the link between “death” and “desire,” but also suggests why Lacan claims, in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” that psychoanalysis goes beyond Hegel precisely insofar as it is able to give theoretical precision to an element of “lack” that is not dialectical — a lack that is not “inscribed” in the movement of symbolic production, but rather makes it possible. This is the “absolute condition” that “reverses” the “unconditioned” character of demand, allowing it to acquire a local habitation and a name.

     

    1.7 The “invention” of the body

     

    Before we close this initial “topological” approach to the problem, the historical aspect of these remarks should also be stressed. It is often said that psychoanalysis is simply ahistorical, and that it promotes a “structuralist” position, a version of the “law” that is inattentive to different social and historical conditions. There are at least three points that should be stressed in this regard. First, “classical” structuralism was in no way simply “ahistorical” (as Piaget pointed out, and as Derek Attridge has recently emphasized). It rather sought to elaborate a model of historical transformation that would not immediately have recourse to the familiar, diachronic and quasi-evolutionary models of history that had characterized the philology of the nineteenth century. For Saussure, it is obvious that there are “living” and “dead” languages, and the “laws” of the symbolic order do not ignore this fact; they simply seek to account for shifts and displacements of the structure — for what one might call the historicality of language — without automatically presupposing a “natural” time of “growth” and “decay.” Second, if — having recognized the historical dimension of structuralism — one then turns from the strictly “structural” conception of the “law” (Saussure and Lévi-Strauss) to Lacan’s concern with the relation between the symbolic and the real, one can see the problem of the real as precisely an additional temporal problem — since it bears on the incompleteness and thus the destabilization of the law. As Slavoj Zizek has rightly said, psychoanalysis is not simply “ahistorical,” but it is “anti-historicist,” insofar as it entails a conception of time that differs from the historically linear, chronologically sequential time of “history” as we usually understand it. Third — to return now to our initial problematic — if one recalls that topology was invented by Leibniz in the late 17th century, as “analysis situs” (a theory of “place” that cannot be formulated in terms of “space”), one might be led to consider that the Freudian theory of the body could only emerge after the “classical,” Euclidean conception of space had been challenged. In short, psychoanalysis is not simply “ahistorical”; on the contrary, it explicitly engages the question of the historical conditions of its own emergence. Indeed, as the reference to Leibniz suggests, Lacan, like many “postmodern” thinkers, is profoundly engaged with the Enlightenment, as a historical moment whose “end” we are still experiencing.

     

    The “body” in psychoanalysis is thus conceivable only on the basis of a certain history. This is why Lacan talks so much about “measurement” and “science” and “Kepler” and “Copernicus.” Even without going into Lacan’s account of the history of science, one can see that the relation between the “real” and the “symbolic” is concerned with the theory of space (or rather “place”), and is such that the real is something like an “interior exclusion” — not simply “outside,” entirely unrelated to the structure, or completely foreign, but — quite the opposite — “contained” by the particular structure which excludes it, like an internal “void”. Many writers have recently taken up this problem — notably Irigaray, in her article on Aristotle, but also Heidegger, whose famous analysis of the jug is intriguing here, since he insists that the jug is not an “object” in Euclidean dimensions, but rather a structure that contains the void. As Heidegger says, the “gift” and “sacrifice” that one encounters in the face of the “thing” cannot be understood unless we see that the jug is not reducible to the “object” in Cartesian space (“the jug differs from an object,” he writes in “The Thing”). As with the “real” in Lacan, the void or “nothing” that is “given a place” by the jug is not a “natural” void (nature abhors a vacuum), but an unnatural “nothingness,” a “lack” that arises only through the structure, and only for the being who speaks: it is a lack that is produced in the symbolic order.

     

    2.1 The limits of formalization

     

    Let us now leave these topological matters aside, and take another approach to your question. We have seen that the real is neither “inside” nor “outside” the symbolic, but is more like an “internal void.” This can be clarified through topological figures, but we could also put the question in a more general way, as a question concerning the “limits of formalization.” This would oblige us to clarify the way in which psychoanalysis goes “beyond structuralism.” Many people condemn Lacanian psychoanalysis for being “trapped” in structuralism, committed to a “science” of the subject and a doctrine of the “law” that claims to be “universal,” and does not adequately attend to the “contingent” historical and cultural specificity of human existence. There is indeed a commitment to a kind of “logic” or “formalization” in Lacan, and an emphasis upon the “law” of the symbolic, but one must recognize it as an effort to theorize the limit of the law, the incompleteness of the law, the fact that the law is “not all,” and that it always malfunctions. Slavoj Zizek has insisted upon this point more than anything else in his writing. In For They Know Not What They Do, he claims that the link between Hegel and Lacan should be seen in this way:

     

    Hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational totalization ultimately fails . . . his wager is located at another level . . . the possibility of "making a system" out of the very series of failed totalizations . . . to discern the strange "logic" that regulates the process. (99)

     

    The task is therefore to grasp what Derrida has called “the law of the law,” the “logic” which governs the malfunction of the law, showing us why the classical position of structuralism is unstable, and allowing us to see in a clear, “rational” and quasi-logical way what Lacan calls the “mystical limit of the most rational discourse in the world” (E, 124). In this sense, Lacan is a “post-structuralist”: the “real” can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that “does not belong” within the structure, an “excluded” element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.

     

    2.2 Cause and law

     

    At this point, we could also take up your question concerning the “cause.” For when you ask how the real, if it is “outside” the symbolic order, can possibly have an “effect” on the symbolic, it seems to me that you have expressed the position of classical structuralism (and perhaps the position of “science”). For if we think of “cause” in terms of the usual “scientific” model — in terms of a “lawful” sequence of causes and effects (“the same cause always produces the same effect”) — then we may suppose a continuity between “law” and “cause.” If we can account for the “cause” of a phenomenon (the cause of disease, for example), we have begun to elaborate the “laws” that govern it. Now it is precisely here that Lacan introduces a “discontinuity“: there is a “cause,” he says (in the first chapter of Seminar XI), only where there is a failure of the law. To speak of the “cause of desire” is always to speak of a certain excess or deficiency in the relation between the subject and the Other, a “lack” that cannot be grasped at the level of the signifying chain. From here we could obviously go on to explore the very complex question of whether psychoanalysis is a “science” or not, and how it can claim to be “scientific” while questioning the usual notion of “causality.” And yet, many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have followed Husserl in arguing that the scientific attitude is a construction that cannot simply be taken for granted as a starting-point, but must be explored in its philosophical presuppositions and its historical conditions of emergence. Lacan addresses these issues explicitly in Seminar XI, where he asks, not whether psychoanalysis is a “science,” but what “science” would have to be, in order to account for the “cause” as a disruption of the “law.” This is the problem of the “subject,” the problem of a “desire” that is normally excluded by “science”: “Can this question be left outside the limits of our field, as it is in effect in the sciences?” (SXI, 9).

     

    2.3 The Other and the object

     

    For Lacan, the very concept of the “subject” cannot be understood without this split between “cause” and “law.” We thus circle back to the “limits of formalization.” For if we start with the Saussurean position, we can elaborate the “law,” but we will not reach the “cause.” According to Saussure, the “laws” of the symbolic order function “internally,” on the basis of the relations between the elements, which are defined “diacritically” in reference to each other, and not to any “outside.” From this perspective, one can indeed claim — as you do in your question — that it is “easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself.” As Piaget has very clearly shown, this is entirely correct from the standpoint of Saussure: it is impossible to understand the structure, or indeed any of its “elements” (a particular “signifier” for example), except on the basis of the whole. It would be a mistake, from Saussure’s perspective, to regard a particular signifier as having its “cause” outside the system — as though the signifier were based upon designation, and could be derived from “outside,” grounded in an external “reality” which it represents. On the contrary, we must recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the “system” is not an atomistic accumulation, and cannot be derived from its elements considered individually. (Foucault makes the same point in The Order of Things, locating this shift in priority from designation to system at the end of the Enlightenment: “in the Classical age, languages had a grammar because they had the power to represent; now they represent on the basis of that grammar” [237]. On this basis, the entire philosophical problematic of “clear and distinct ideas” is replaced by a doctrine of “expression,” “inheritance” and “national identity.”) Contrary to common sense, the system is not built up, piece by piece, on the basis of designation, but rather the reverse: the very possibility of naming is “derived” from the system itself, which is thereby presupposed, since it makes meaning and designation possible. The entire system can thus be regarded as the “cause of itself.” A quasi-theological view, no doubt, in which one cannot seek further into the “origins,” since the system is “always already” in place, arising as it were “in the beginning.”

     

    From Lacan’s point of view, this is not altogether incorrect, and it is indeed the case that we cannot derive language “naturalistically,” on the basis of designation (“there is no Other of the Other”). But we cannot stop with this observation: we must go on to note the incompleteness of the system, the fact that the Other functions only by the exclusion of a peculiar “object,” such that the smooth, consistent functioning of the law is disrupted, destabilized by what Lacan calls the “cause” — among other things, the “cause of desire,” which is not the “object of desire” (in the sense of an actual thing “outside” language), but rather the “object-cause of desire,” the “lack” that gives rise to desire, and yet is not present “in” the symbolic order, or situated at the level of “signifiers.” Lacan makes this explicit in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” when he notes that if we may use structural linguistics to clarify Freudian doctrine, we must also recognize that Freud introduces a problem of “lack” that goes well beyond Saussure: “during the past seven years,” he writes,

     

    I have been led to certain results: essentially, to promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to the signified, in modern linguistic analysis. Freud could not take this notion, which postdates him, into account, but I would claim that Freud's discovery . . . could not fail to anticipate its formulas. (E, 284)

     

    We must not stop here, however, as if Freud simply refers us to the structuralist “theory of language,” for Lacan adds that “[c]onversely, it is Freud’s discovery that gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications,” by raising the question of a certain “outside,” or an “interior exclusion” that has effects on the body which linguistics does not try to address. As he puts it in “Subversion of the Subject”: “[i]f linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relation by making ‘holes’ in the meaning . . . of its discourse” (E, 299, emphasis added). With this reference to “holes” in the meaning,” we see the step that takes Lacan beyond classical structuralism, to the “limits of formalization,” the element of the “real” that escapes symbolic closure. The “cause” is therefore “outside” the law as Saussure presents it.

     

    2.4 The Subject and the Real

     

    This notion of “cause” should also allow us to situate the place of the subject as real, and not simply as “symbolic.” We often hear that for Lacan, the subject is “constituted in the symbolic order,” but the subject is not entirely “symbolic” (as is suggested by some accounts of “discursive construction”). If we think of the autonomous sequence of signifiers as governed by the “internal” laws of the symbolic order, the diacritical relations between the elements (S1-S2-S3), we can consider the “subject” ($) as a “missing link,” a “place” that is marked, and that can be located through the symbolic, but does not actually belong to the chain of signifiers (S1-S2-[$]-S3). We must be careful here to note the peculiar status of this subject, which is partly symbolic and partly real. In Freud, this “place” of the subject can be located in specific symbolic phenomena — the lapsus, the dream, free association, and so on — which reveal the repressed “unconscious thought.” We find here the “symbolic” aspect of the unconscious, where certain “slips of the tongue” indicate a “discontinuity” in the chain of signifiers, a disruption of conscious discourse, and a sign of unconscious desire. This is consistent with the famous Lacanian thesis that “the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the Other.” We must be careful, however, if we are not to reduce the unconscious to a purely “symbolic” phenomenon. We must stress that although the “place” of the missing link is marked or “filled in” by certain symbolic formations, the “subject” does not belong to the chain, but indicates a point of non-integration or malfunction. This is why Lacan insists on the “bar” that divides the subject ($): the subject of the unconscious is “represented” in the symbolic order (through the dream, or free association, or other symbolic forms), but in such a way that something of the “being” of the subject remains excluded — “absent” or “barred,” but nevertheless “real” — and not without a certain “force,” an ability to have “effects.” In “Subversion of the Subject,” Lacan says, “we must bring everything back to the function of the cut in discourse . . . a bar between the signifier and signified” (E 299), adding: “This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real” (E 299).

     

    2.5 Formations of the unconscious ($), formations of fantasy ($ a)

     

    We thus see more clearly how the “object a” emerges in Lacanian theory: Lacan introduces the “object a” precisely in order to distinguish between the subject as “real” and the subject as manifested through the symbolic order. Thus, among all the “mathemes” and “formulae” that we find in Lacan, we can take our bearings — as Marie-Hélène Brousse has suggested — from two basic forms: generally speaking, the “formations of the unconscious” (the lapsus, dream, symptom, parapraxis, etc.) reveal the “subject” in a symbolic form (the unconscious as “discourse of the Other”), whereas the “formations of fantasy,” by contrast, provide us with a relation between this “subject” and the “object a” — that peculiar “object” which does not appear in the signifying chain, but which marks a point of pathological attachment, bound to the “real” of the body, a point of libidinal stasis where desire is lost. Accordingly, we find these two aspects of the subject linked together in the formula for fantasy ($ a), which concerns the relation that binds the “split subject” of the symbolic order ($) to a certain “real” element (a) that exceeds the symbolic order. In a manner that is similar to fantasy, the “object of the drive” designates a point of bodily jouissance, a “libidinal attachment” which does not appear at the level of the signifier, and is irreducible to the “symbolic” order. This is why Freud speaks of the “silence” of the death drive — the fact that (unlike other “symptomatic” formations) it does not emerge in speech, and cannot be resolved through “free association.” We must stress here the peculiar status of the “object,” for the “object” of the drive, as “real,” is not a matter of biological instinct (“it is not introduced as the original food . . . the origin of the oral drive” [SXI, 180]), but it is also irreducible to language, since it concerns a “remainder” or “excess” that escapes the symbolic “law” (“this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void,” Lacan says, “can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object” [SXI, 180]). It is therefore not a matter of a “prelinguistic” material that is simply “outside” language and prior to it. It is rather a question, as Judith Butler has said, of the particular “materialization” of the object — the specific “occupation” of the void being unique to the individual subject. The problem is therefore to define the relation between the Other (the symbolic order) and this object which is “outside” the law. And we can regard this problem in terms of the “limits of formalization” — that is, in terms of a certain failure of the law.

     

    2.6 A new division: free association and transference

     

    Once this distinction between the “symbolic” and the “real” has emerged, we are led to a radical shift in psychoanalytic theory, a splitting of the transference — a sudden division between “transference” and “free association.” For at first, in the period of the “Rome Discourse” (which is perhaps canonical for the secondary literature), Lacan relied heavily on the symbolic order, stressing the difference between the imaginary (the ego) and the symbolic (the “subject divided by language”). The great battle against ego psychology was thus presented as a “return to Freud,” a return to the unconscious, presented as a “discourse of the Other.” The “subject” was marked by a “split” that could not be overcome, though the ego always tended to conceal this division, in the name of imaginary unity. This argument is condensed into “schema L.” On this account, analysis could be presented in a “classical” Freudian manner, as grounded in free association, which would reveal the discourse of the Other in the symbolic form of symptoms, dreams, the lapsus, parapraxis, and so on. The difficulty arose when the symbolic order encountered an impasse, something that was in principal beyond the reach of symbolization (the “silent work” of the death drive). This is where we first find Lacan claiming that the transference is no longer simply a “symbolic” matter, an intersubjective relation governed by speech, and aiming at the “discourse of the Other.” Instead, the transference suddenly presents us with an “object” — something “outside” the symbolic order — an object that marks a point of impasse, a sort of “affective tie” that stands as a limit to symbolization. Freud spoke of this when he characterized the transference as a form of love, and noted that this “love” could actually be an impediment to the patient — an impasse to analysis rather than a means. The crucial point for Lacan is thus to recognize that this dimension of “transference-love” (identification with the object) presents us with a form of identification that is opposed to symbolic identification.

     

    We thus reach a split between free association and the transference, a split between the symbolic and the real. In Seminar XI, Lacan is explicit, insisting that we must now confront something “beyond” the symbolic order, “precisely what one tends most to avoid in the analysis of the transference” (SXI, 149):

     

    In advancing this proposition, I find myself in a problematic position -- for what have I taught about the unconscious? The unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech . . . the unconscious is structured like a language . . . And yet this teaching has had, in its approach, an end that I have called transferential. (SXI, 149)

     

    We are now faced with a dimension of bodily experience that cannot be reduced to the symbolic order, a problematic division between “language” and “sexuality.” Lacan returns here to Freud’s persistent claim that the unconscious always has to do with “sexuality” — that “the reality of the unconscious is a sexual reality.” In spite of his emphasis on language, Lacan cannot ignore this claim, since “at every opportunity, Freud defended his formula . . . with tooth and nail” (SXI, 150). This is a crucial shift in Lacan’s work: if the classical method of “free association” once provided access to the unconscious (as a “symbolic” phenomenon), it now appears that some aspect of the transference disrupts that process, and works precisely against “meaning” and “interpretation.” In Lacan’s words: “the unconscious, if it is what I say it is,” can be characterized as “a play of the signifier” (SXI, 130), and the relation to the analyst should allow this play to unfold; and yet, we must now recognize that “the transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again” (SXI, 130). “I want to stress this question because it is the dividing line between the correct and incorrect interpretation of the transference” (SXI, 130). The same claim marks the very beginning of the seminar as a whole, so its importance is unmistakable. There Lacan rejects “the hermeneutic demand,” which characterizes “what we nowadays call the human sciences” (SXI, 7). In explicit contrast to this “hermeneutic demand,” then, we find psychoanalysis insisting on the limit of the symbolic order, a certain dimension of the “real,” an aspect of the unconscious that is linked to the “body” and “sexuality,” and not to the symbolic order. Viewed in this light, the first sentence of Seminar XI (written afterward, in 1976), could not be more of a challenge: “When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious” (SXI, vii).

     

    2.7 Against hermeneutics

     

    A similar shift can be found in Freud. Initially, it seemed to Freud that free association, as a relatively loose and uncensored mode of speech, would allow the unconscious to emerge, permitting analysis to gather up the unconscious associations and construct the logic of this “Other” discourse in which the subject’s destiny was written. But as Freud himself observed, there often comes a point at which analysis encounters something “unspeakable,” a center that cannot be reached by analysis:

     

    There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. (SE 5:525)

     

    We have here precisely the relation between the symbolic and the real. Faced with this “absent center,” analysis is suddenly confronted with the prospect of becoming “interminable.” The transference, guided by free association and a “symbolic” conception of the unconscious (as “discourse of the Other”), is suddenly insufficient. Something else must come to pass, some non-symbolic element must be grasped, if analysis is to reach its “end.” The “aporetic” point described by Freud — the “nodal point” that resists symbolization and “adds nothing to our knowledge” — leads Lacan to the concept of the “object a,” which can be understood as a point of identification that is opposed to symbolic identification. As he says in Seminar XI:

     

    what eludes the subject is the fact that his syntax is in relation with the unconscious reserve. When the subject tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs this syntax and makes it more and more condensed. Condensed in relation to what? In relation to what Freud, at the beginning of his description of psychical resistance, calls a nucleus. (SXI, 68)

     

    Some analysts regard this “psychical resistance” as a phenomenon of the ego, calling it a “defense” and suggesting that analysis must “break down the resistance” and reveal the unconscious. In Lacan’s view, however, such a procedure amounts to imaginary warfare between egos. He therefore insists that “we must distinguish between the resistance of the subject and that first resistance of discourse, when the discourse proceeds towards the condensation around the nucleus.” For this nucleus is not a “content” or “meaning” that might be reached through the symbolic order, if only the ego were not “resisting.” On the contrary: “The nucleus must be designated as belonging to the real” (SXI, 68). The fundamental issue of Seminar XI could be reduced to this single point, where it is a question of elaborating the limit of the law, the peculiar relation between the “symbolic” subject and the subject in the real. All of the chapters — on the “gaze,” on “sexuality,” on the “transference,” and so on — could be seen as different perspectives on this single problem.

     

    2.8 Identification with the object

     

    The “object a” thus emerges in Lacanian theory at the moment when the “symbolic law” no longer has the final word. This is the point at which we can “no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee” (SVII, 101). We are thus led to what Jacques-Alain Miller calls “the formula of the second paternal metaphor,” which “corresponds point by point to the formula of the name-of-the-father,” but which adds a twist that “forces us to operate with the inexistence and the inconsistency of the Other” (85). In fact, Miller locates this moment in the development of Lacan’s thought between seminars VII and VIII (the ethics and transference seminars). In the former, we find “the opposition between das Ding, the Thing, and the Other,” but it is “worked out enigmatically” and remains “wrapped in mystery”; in the transference seminar, however, “this opposition is transformed into a relation,” giving us “a revolution in Lacan’s teaching” (80). However one may date this shift in Lacan’s work, the question it entails is clear enough. We must now regard the transference as bearing on a certain “affective tie,” a certain “libidinal investment,” a dimension of “identification” that cannot be reached by the symbolic work of free association — an “attachment” to an “object” of jouissance that is not reducible to the symbolic order, and is linked to the patient’s suffering — to the symptom, and the body, insofar as they are irreducible to the symbolic order. This is where the question of “sexuality” (of the drive and libido) emerges in a certain “beyond” of language. In the seminar of 1974-75 called R.S.I., he will take this question up in terms of “affect.” “What is the affect of existing?” (FS, 166); “What is it, of the unconscious, which makes for ex-istence? It is what I underline with the support of the symptom” (FS 166). “In all this,” he adds, “what is irreducible is not an effect of language” (FS 165).

     

    2.9 The “end” of analysis

     

    The question of identification — and, to be precise, identification with the object, as distinct from symbolic identification — introduces a limit to the process of symbolization. If something about the transference suddenly distinguishes itself from the labor of free association, it is because the endless labor of speech (the “hermeneutic demand”) cannot reach the “rock of castration,” the point of pathological attachment that binds the subject to a suffering that will not be relinquished. If analysis is suddenly faced with the prospect of becoming “interminable” — if it cannot simply proceed by resting on free association — this means that the “end” of analysis requires a certain “separation” between the subject and the “object a,” insofar as that object is understood to entail a bodily jouissance that works against desire, a “suffering” akin to what Freud called the death drive. Seminar XI closes on this very topic: “The transference operates in the direction of bringing demand back to identification” (SXI, 274), that is to say, by revealing the link between the unending series of demands and the singular point of identification that underlies them. But the “end” of analysis requires a move “in a direction that is the exact opposite of identification” (SXI, 274), a direction that amounts to the destitution of the subject. This act of “crossing the plane of identification is possible,” Lacan says, and it is what one might call the “sacrificial” dimension of psychoanalysis. It is therefore the “loss” of this pathological attachment that marks the terminal point of analysis: “the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation,” Lacan writes, “is the maintenance of the distance between the I — identification — and the a” (SXI, 273). These details are perhaps somewhat technical, and warrant further discussion, particularly with respect to the problem of the relation between the “symbolic order” and “sexuality,” but I will not pursue them here. I have discussed the problem in “Vital Signs” (following some remarks by Russell Grigg), where I have tried to show how the “limit” of the symbolic order (and the question of “sexuality”) has consequences for Lacan’s reading of the case of Anna O.

     

    2.10 Aporetic sciences

     

    Let us now turn from the “internal affairs” of psychoanalysis and try to sketch the intellectual horizon it shares with some other domains. Our remarks should be sufficient to show that the “unconscious” cannot be reduced to a purely “symbolic” phenomenon, and that the theory of “sexuality” and “jouissance” will only be understood if the relation between the symbolic and the real is grasped — in such a way, moreover, that we do not simply return to familiar arguments about the “real” of sexuality as a natural phenomenon, a libidinal “force” that is simply “outside language.” It is often said that Lacanian theory places too much emphasis on the “law” and the “symbolic order,” and we have suggested that this is not the case. But if we refer to the “real” (to “sexuality” and the “drive”), does this mean that we are now returning to a “prelinguistic reality,” a “natural” aspect of the body that is “outside” the symbolic order? Is this evidence of the “biological essentialism” that is often attributed to psychoanalysis, in spite of its apparent emphasis on the “symbolic order”? This is what many readers have concluded, and yet “everyone knows” that Lacan rejects the biological account of sexuality. In what sense is the real “outside” the symbolic order, if it is not an “external reality,” or a “prelinguistic” domain of “sexuality”? This is the point at which the “logical” aspect of psychoanalysis and the “limit of formalization” becomes especially important. For it allows us to elaborate the “real,” not as a “prelinguistic reality” that would be “outside” the symbolic order, but precisely in terms of a lack that arises “within” the symbolic order. The “object a” is this element put forth by Lacan, not as an object “in reality,” an “external thing” that is somehow beyond representation, but as a term that designates a logical impasse. Jacques-Alain Miller has this problem in mind when he writes that, with the “object a,” we are dealing with a certain “limit” to presentation, but a limit that cannot be grasped by a direct approach to “reality”:

     

    If there were an ontic in psychoanalysis, it would be the ontic of the object a. But this is precisely the road not taken by Lacan . . . Where does the object a come from in Lacan? It comes from the partial object of Karl Abraham, that is, from a corporeal consistency. The interesting thing is to see that Lacan transforms this corporeal consistency into a logical consistency. (85)

     

    Without following the theory of the “body” further here, we can nevertheless see that the general form of the question can be posed in terms of the “limits of formalization,” thereby recognizing that psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the “law” in the manner of classical structuralist thought — in the tradition of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. In view of this, we might try to make this “aporetic” point more concrete by referring to a “paradox” that takes a similar form in various disciplines.

     

    2.11 Incest

     

    In anthropology, the “incest taboo” is not simply a “law,” but a logical aporia: it functions as a sort of “nodal point” where the symbolic and the real are linked together. As is well known, the incest taboo presents us with a peculiar “contradiction”: on the one hand, it is a “prohibition,” a cultural institution that imposes “family relations” and kinship structures upon what would otherwise be the state of nature; at the same time, however, this “law,” because of its “universality,” is also defined as something “natural,” since it cannot be ascribed to a particular social group, or located in a single historical period. Lévi-Strauss and others have stressed the “paradox” or “scandal” of the incest taboo in just this way: “It constitutes a rule,” Lévi-Strauss says, “but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character.” Citing this passage in “Structure, Sign and Play” (283), Derrida has stressed that this impasse should not be reduced to a mere “contradiction,” but must be given its own theoretical precision. It is not a question of eliminating ambiguity by determining, for once and for all, whether this law is “cultural” or “natural” — whether it is “really” a human invention, or a biological principle that insures genetic distribution. The “scandalous” or “paradoxical” character of the incest prohibition is not an ambiguity to be eliminated, but must rather be taken as the actual “positive content” of the concept itself: it suggests that, properly speaking, the incest taboo must be situated prior to the division between nature and culture. In Derrida’s words,

     

    The incest prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them -- probably as the condition of their possibility. (283)

     

    Like the nodal point of the dream, the incest taboo thus isolates a singular point which “reaches down into the unknown,” a point “which has to be left obscure,” which cannot be interpreted (“adds nothing to our knowledge of the content”), and yet is absolutely indispensable to the organization of the dream. We thus return to the “limit of formalization,” an impasse in the symbolic system of cultural laws, but on which, far from being a “mistake,” is curiously imperative, irrevocable, and necessary — as if it were somehow integral to the law itself.

     

    The crucial point, however — and the connection between this “logical” impasse and the “object a” — is to recognize that this scandal somehow “materializes” itself. For the prohibition is not only a “paradox”; it has the additional characteristic that it “condenses” itself into an enigmatic “thing” — what Freud calls the “taboo object.” Is this not the crucial point of Totem and Taboo, this peculiar relation between the “symbolic” system of totemism (the system of the name), and the taboo “object” that somehow accompanies it? Indeed, as Derrida points out in speaking of the “limits of formalization,” it is not simply a matter of “aporiae”; if we are confronted with an “impasse” in the concepts of nature and culture, “something which escapes these concepts,” it is because “there is something missing” (289). This “missing object” entails a certain “materialization,” but it cannot be clarified by a simple empiricism, a simple reference to “presymbolic reality.” For there are two ways of asserting the impossibility of formalization. As Derrida notes, “totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style.” This would consist in pointing to an empirical diversity that cannot be grasped by a single “law” or “system,” an external wealth of historical differences that cannot be mastered by any theoretical glance. The other way consists in recognizing the intrinsic incompleteness of the theoretical gaze itself, the fact that the “law” is always contaminated by a “stain” that escapes the system:

     

    if totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field -- that is, language and a finite language -- excludes totalization . . . instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. (289)

     

    Psychoanalysis can be described as the theory which tries to grasp the bodily consequences of this fact, the physical effects of this “object” on the structure of the body. It is not a theory aimed at describing the connections between a supposedly biological “sexuality” and the symbolic codes that are imposed upon this original “nature,” but rather a theory which aims at understanding the corporeal materialization of this “impasse,” the concrete somatic effects of this “excluded object” that accompanies the law of language.

     

    2.12 The gold standard

     

    In economics, a similar “nodal point” might be found, which seems to be both “inside” and “outside” the structure. If one speaks of money as a “symbolic order,” a conventional system of representation governed by certain internal laws, a “formalist” or “structuralist” account would say that it is not a question of what a particular amount of money will buy (what it “represents”), but a question of purely “internal relations.” Precisely as with the “signifier” in Saussure’s account, we are concerned not with the relation between the “sign” and “reality,” but with the “internal affairs” of the symbolic order — with relations between the signifiers, and not with what the signifier “represents” outside the system. Accordingly, “ten dollars” is not defined by what it will buy, or by its relation to external “reality.” That is a purely contingent and constantly changing relation — today it will buy three loaves of bread, but next year it only serves as change to ride the bus. If we wish to define ten dollars “scientifically,” we must therefore take a “formalist” perspective and say ten dollars is “half of twenty,” or “twice five,” and then we have a constant measure, in which the definition is given not by any (contingent) external reference, but rather by a (lawful) “diacritical” analysis, which places it in relation to the other elements in the system.

     

    Nevertheless, there is a point at which the structure is paradoxically “attached” to the very reality it is supposed to exclude. Although “ten dollars” has no fixed or necessary relation to anything “outside” the system, but should rather be defined “internally,” in relation to five dollars or twenty, the system itself is said to rest on a “gold standard,” a “natural” basis that guarantees or supports the structure. “Gold” is thus both “natural” and “symbolic” — or perhaps neither, since it has no natural value “in itself,” and yet also no place “within” the system of money that we exchange. On the one hand, it is a pure “convention”: unlike bread (which we “need”), gold has no value in itself, but is entirely “symbolic” (a pure “signifier” without any “use value”). On the other hand, it is not an element “within” the symbolic system of money, something we might define in relation to other elements: instead of being a signifier in the chain (S1-S2-S3), it is a “ground,” a gold “reserve” that stands “outside” the system of exchange, giving value to the symbolic elements — whose purely formal relations are supposed to operate precisely by excluding any such “outside.” We are faced here with the same “enigma” we encounter in the incest taboo. And again, it would be a mistake to think that we have simply found a “contradiction” or “inconsistency” in the concept; we should rather be led to recognize this “scandalous” and “paradoxical” character of the “object” (gold), not as a confusion that might be removed (for example, when we finally “come to our senses” and realize that gold is “merely symbolic”), but as its “positive” content: it is to be understood (in Derrida’s words) precisely as “something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition” (283). “Gold” thus functions as a kind of “nodal point,” a paradoxical element that is neither “inside” nor “outside” the structure.

     

    2.13 Supplementarity

     

    At this point, however, we must again (as with “sexuality” and “libido”) be careful not to define this “external” element too “naively.” If it seems at first glance that gold is a “natural” basis for monetary value, the bullion in the bank that guarantees the “purely symbolic” money that circulates in exchange; if gold presents itself as the one element that is not symbolic, but has value “in itself” and thus serves as a ground (insofar as money “represents” it); this view is precisely what we must reject. For like the nodal point in the dream, it would not exist except “through” the system that it is “naively” thought to support. The “enigma” of gold as a “quilting point” is that it has no value “in itself,” but acquires its status as a “natural value” from the system itself, not in the sense that it is simply an “element” within the system, another “symbolic” phenomenon that might be placed at the same level as the money which circulates in the market, but in the sense that it is a “surplus-effect,” a “product” of the system which expels it from the chain of “representations,” and buries it in the earth, where it can be “found again.” Strictly speaking, therefore, the “natural” and “foundational” character of gold, the fact that it was “already there,” apparently “preceding” the monetary system and providing it with an external ground, is an illusion, but a necessary illusion, one which the system, in spite of its apparent “autonomy,” evidently requires. As a result, it cannot be a question of simply denouncing this illusion, and asserting the “purely symbolic” character of “value,” its arbitrary, conventional or “constructed” character. The task is rather to understand just how the system, which at first appeared to be “autonomous,” governed by purely “conventional” and “internal” laws, nevertheless requires this peculiar “object,” and requires that it have precisely this enigmatically “natural” status, this apparent and illusory “exteriority.”

     

    In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek suggests that this peculiar aspect of the “object,” as a surplus-effect of the system, a “product” which is not simply symbolic, but concerns an excluded object that must take on the illusion of naturalness (of “already-being-there-before,” so that it can be “found again”), can be clarified by reference to a famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, a passage from the “Transcendental Dialectic,” where Kant speaks of “delusion” — not of empirical delusion (a mistaken impression of the senses, which can always be corrected), nor indeed of merely logical error (which consists in the commitment of formal fallacies, a “lack of attention to the logical rule” A296/B353), but of an illusion proper to reason itself. It is proper to reason in the sense that, as Kant says, it “does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed” (A 297/B353). It is thus not an ambiguity to be avoided, but “a natural and inevitable illusion,” an “unavoidable dialectic” which is “inseparable from human reason,” and which “will not cease to play tricks with reason . . . even after its deceptiveness has been exposed” (A 298/B354). It is not that reason (the “symbolic order”) falls into “contradiction” by some error that might be removed; rather, reason would itself be, as Kant says, “the seat of transcendental illusion.” But how is the Lacanian “object a” related to this illusion? How are we to understand the claim that Kant recognizes not only that the idea of “totality” gives rise to contradiction, but also that it is attended by a peculiar surplus-object? For this (the “sublime object”) is what the “antinomies” of Kant’s “dialectical illusion” imply, according to Zizek. The point can be clarified by reference to “sexual difference. For Kant, “there is no way for us to imagine the universe as a Whole; that is, as soon as we do it, we obtain two antinomical, mutually exclusive versions,” two propositions that cannot be maintained at the same time. In Lacan, moreover, this “structure” is precisely what we find in the symbolic division between the sexes: it is not a division into two “halves” of a single species, or two “complementary” parts which together might comprise the whole of “humanity.” On the contrary, the division between the sexes makes them “supplementary” (Lacan: “Note that I said supplementary. Had I said complementary, where would we be! We’d fall right back into the all” FS 144). In Zizek’s words,

     

    the antagonistic tension which defines sexuality is not the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.), but a certain crack which prevents us from imagining the universe as a Whole. Sexuality points towards the supreme ontological scandal. (83)

     

    The status of the “object” is thus clarified, for if an object appears to fill this gap, offering to guarantee a harmonious relation between the sexes (sometimes this object is the child, which “sutures” the parental bond), it can only do so as the “prohibited” object, the product of “dialectical illusion.” We thus see more clearly the relation between the logical aporia that accompanies the symbolic order (the “real” of “incest” or “gold”), and the “object a.”

     

    2.14 The time of the object

     

    Before we close this discussion of the “limits of formalization,” we must stress the peculiar temporality of this object. We have identified the peculiar character of the prohibited or incestuous “object”: unlike the abstract “signifiers” that circulate in the community (diacritically or synchronically), gold is a “product” or “effect” of the system, but a “symbolic effect” whose precise character is to “materialize” itself, separating itself from all the other elements of exchange, in order to “appear” as if it existed before the system ever came into being, and possessed its value “by nature.” Its function is to dissimulate, to “veil” itself — to hide its own nature, we might say, if it were not for the fact that its “nature” is just this “hiding” of itself. We must therefore link the “paradoxical” or “contradictory” character of the object to the peculiar “time” that governs it. It is not enough to stress the “contradictory” character of this object — the paradoxical fact that it belongs to both “nature” and “culture” (or more precisely to neither, since it precedes this very division) — or to recognize that this “paradox” is not an ambiguity to be removed, but rather constitutive of the object itself. We must also recognize that its peculiar temporality is such that it comes into being through the system, but in such a way that it must have been there “before,” so that the system might emerge on its basis. This is why the “incest taboo” always refers us to an earlier “state of nature,” a time of “unrestricted sexuality” that was supposedly limited “once upon a time,” when the “law” was imposed and a certain “object” suddenly came to be prohibited. Since the “taboo object” is not a “prelinguistic reality,” but the place-holder of a lack that only comes into being through the law, we are forced to recognize the purely illusory character of this supposed “past,” as a past that was never present. This temporal aspect of the taboo “object” was clearly identified by Lacan in Television when he wrote that “the Oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure” (30, translation modified). If we now wish to clarify the relation between this “object” and the system of representation in Freudian terms, we might say that gold is, in relation to the system of money, not so much a “representation,” as the “representation of representation,” the “primal signifier” that grounds signification, but whose essential feature is that it had no such status as “ground” prior to the system which is said to be based upon it. In short, gold is the “Name-of-the Father”: as the “quilting-point” of the system, it is not one signifier among others, but the “signifier of signifiers,” the ground of exchange that appears to precede symbolization and guarantee its basis in nature, but is in fact a “by-product” of the structure itself — not an element in the structure of exchange, but peculiar “object” which comes into being to “veil” the lack which inhabits the structure itself. Needless to say, the “phallus” has precisely this status in Lacan. The phallus is a veil.

     

    2.15 The phallus

     

    To set out from the “limits of formalization” would thus allow us to see why the most common debate over the phallus is fundamentally misleading. For it is often said that the concept of the phallus confronts us with a crucial ambiguity: on the one hand, the phallus is a “signifier,” and as such demonstrates the “symbolic” construction of sexual difference; on the other hand, the phallus is by no means “arbitrary,” a purely “symbolic” function, since it clearly refers to anatomy. We are thus led into a familiar debate, in which some readers “defend” Lacan, asserting that the phallus is a “signifier,” and that psychoanalysis rejects any biological account of sexual difference, while others readers insist that in spite of protests to the contrary, the phallus is the one element in the theory that unmistakably implicates psychoanalysis in a return to “biology,” perpetuating the “essentialism” of sexual difference, and securing a certain “privilege” on the part of the male, and a corresponding “lack” on the part of the female. Accounts of psychoanalysis are numerous which vigorously defend both these positions, but in fact neither is accurate, and the entire polemic could be seen as actually concealing the theory it pretends to address. For the phallus is not biological, and does not refer to “prelinguistic reality,” but neither is it purely symbolic — one signifier among others, an element contained within the system. As a “signifier of lack,” it marks the “impossible” point of intersection between the symbolic and the real, the introduction of a lack which allows the mobilization of signifiers to begin their work of substitution, a lack which is the “absolute condition” of desire, but which “can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object” (SXI, 180). The phallus is this “veil” (“it can play its role only when veiled” [E, 288]), the singular mark of signification itself, the paradoxical “signifier of signifiers” which (as in the case of gold) only functions through a substitution that dissimulates, allowing it to appear in imaginary clothing, as “gold,” a natural ground “guaranteeing” signification — a materialization that, in presenting itself as “already-there-before,” veils its status as a surplus-effect, a non-natural lack in the structure that has been “filled in” by this extimate object. As in the case of “gold” and “incest,” then, it cannot be a question of finally determining whether the phallus belongs to “nature” or “culture,” to the order of “biology” or the order of the “signifier.” Such efforts will only circumvent the “logic” of the “nodal point” which this paradoxical concept is intended to articulate. And insofar as the phallus is also bound up with the imaginary body, one can see that the concept requires clarification in all three registers, as imaginary, symbolic and real. To ask whether the phallus is “biological” or “symbolic” is thus to refuse the very issue it addresses.

     

    2.16 Material aporetics

     

    We have stressed the fact that with this “paradox,” it is not simply a question of a “logical” contradiction, a “term” which belongs to both nature and culture — or, more precisely, which escapes this very distinction — nor only a question of time, but also a question of a certain “materiality.” For gold is also an “object,” unlike the “signifiers” that are said to represent it, but also unlike the purely natural “things” that might be said to exist independently of any language. Need we add here that in the case of the incest taboo, we are also faced with a certain “materialization” of the taboo object, the “thing” that is excluded from the “totemic” order of the name? And is not psychoanalysis the theory which endeavors to articulate the consequences of such “materialization” in terms of our bodily existence? Discussions of Lacan that insist on the “linguistic” or “symbolic” character of his theory (whether to denounce or celebrate it) only serve to conceal this enigmatic logic of the body. Our general claim is thus given some concrete clarification: every effort to establish a structure “on its own terms,” by reference to purely “internal” relations (money, kinship, language), will encounter a point at which the system touches on something “outside” itself, something that has a “paradoxical” status, being simultaneously “symbolic” and yet also excluded from the system. The “real” in Lacan is a concept that tries to address this enigma. Readers of Derrida will of course recognize that many of the fundamental Derridian terms — the “trace,” the “supplement,” and so on — touch on precisely the same problem, the “limit” of formalization, an element that “founds” the structure while being at the same time excluded from it. One day, someone who knows something about both these writers will develop these issues in more detail.

     

    3.1 Two versions of the real

     

    Let us now attempt a final approach to your question, by distinguishing two versions of the real. This will allow us to develop the concept in slightly more detail. One of the difficulties with the concept of the real in Lacan is that it appears in several different forms as his work unfolds. Without exploring all the detailed transformations, let us simply isolate the most important development in his use of the term. It is this: initially, the “real” seems to refer to a “presymbolic reality,” a realm of “immediate being” that is never accessible in itself, but only appears through the “mediation” of imaginary and symbolic representation (in this case, it tends to correspond to the common meaning of “reality”); later, however, the term seems to designate a “lack,” an element that is missing from “within” the symbolic order, in which case the real can only be understood as an “effect” of the symbolic order itself. One might thus speak of a “presymbolic real” and a “postsymbolic real.” In the first case, the real precedes the symbolic and “exists” independently, while in the second case, the real is a “product” of the symbolic order, a residue or surplus-effect that “exists” or comes into “being” only as a result of the symbolic operation that excludes it. It is perhaps this very duality in the concept that leads you to ask whether the real is “inside” or “outside” the symbolic order.

     

    3.2 A parenthesis on “being”

     

    These two versions of the real will have two different modes of being, for in the first case, one can say the real “exists” independently, and then go on to ask whether we can have any “knowledge” of it, independently of our “representations”; but in the second case, we are led to speak of the “being of lack” — thereby initiating a whole series of apparently paradoxical claims about the “being” of what “is not,” reminiscent, perhaps, of theological disputes concerning the “existence” of God. As Lacan says in Seminar XI, “when speaking of this gap one is dealing with an ontological function,” and yet, “it does not lend itself to ontology” (SXI 29). In distinguishing these two versions of the real, we must therefore recognize two different “modes” of being, since the “existence” of the presymbolic real is not the same as the “being” of the “lack” that characterizes the postsymbolic real. Anyone who has read Heidegger knows how complex these questions concerning “existence” and “being” can be. One has only to think of Heidegger’s account of Kant’s thesis that “Being is not a real predicate” — a thesis discussed by Moustafa Safouan in Pleasure and Being — to see how many philosophical issues weigh on the discourse of psychoanalysis. Apart from the question of whether (and in what “mode”) the real “exists” — “inside” or “outside” the symbolic — it may also be necessary to distinguish between real, imaginary and symbolic modes of “existence.” On a first approximation, one might say that the imaginary is a dimension of “seeming,” the symbolic of “meaning,” and the real of “being” (though as we have suggested, this last term can be divided further, into two forms). If, moreover, we recall Lacan’s claim that “the real is the impossible,” we would have to consider the other categories of modal logic as well. Lacan seems to have followed Heidegger to some extent in speaking of the “impossible,” the “contingent,” the “necessary” and the “possible” (categories which have been discussed in some detail by Robert Samuels in Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis).

     

    3.3 “Reality” and “lack”

     

    The significance of the distinction between these two versions of the real should thus be clear: we know the concept of “lack” is central to Lacanian theory, and that it cannot be adequately grasped in terms of the “symbolic,” since it is closely bound up with the category of the real. Much of the secondary literature on Lacan, however, characterizes the “real” as a prediscursive reality that is mediated by representation — the reality that is always lost whenever we represent it. This does in fact capture some aspects of Lacan’s work, but if we wish to understand the relation between the real and lack, it is not sufficient, for the concept of “lack” points us in the direction of a void that cannot be understood by reference to prediscursive reality, as Tim Dean has argued. Thus, even if there is some validity in regarding the real as a dimension of “immediate existence” which is always filtered through imaginary and symbolic representations of it, we will not grasp the concept of “lack” in this way, but only if we turn to the real in its second version, as an “effect” of the symbolic order, in which case we can no longer regard it “prelinguistic.” Let us therefore consider these two versions of the real more closely.

     

    3.4 The “pre-symbolic” real

     

    The first version of the real — the “presymbolic” real — provides the more familiar account. One often hears that, according to Lacan, the real is “organized” or “represented” through images and words that do not actually “capture” the real, but always “misrepresent” it. Human life is thus subject to a fundamental and irremediable “misunderstanding,” such that the “real” is always already “lost” — figured or disfigured in some manner. Such a conception, however, makes it difficult to understand what Freud means by the “reality principle” or “reality-testing,” and it completely obscures the concept of lack, since the real, understood as a prediscursive reality, is “full.” Nevertheless, Lacan himself sometimes used the term in this way, and it cannot be entirely rejected. We thus face an apparent conflict between the prediscursive real (which is “full”), and the real as a “lack” which arises through the symbolic order. One recalls the Lacanian dictum, based on our “first version,” that “nothing is lacking in the real” (a phrase often cited in reference to the supposed “castration” of women, which, on this account, is not “real” but strictly “imaginary” castration). One can already see here that symbolic castration (lack) cannot be understood through this account of the “imaginary” and “real,” which circumvents language in order to enter a debate between “imaginary” lack and a “reality” in which nothing is lacking. Let us develop the first version somewhat further, to see why it has played such a prominent role in the secondary literature — for despite its deficiencies, it has a number of virtues, and Lacan’s own text provides some justification for it.

     

    In the first version, the real is construed as a domain of immediate experience, a level of brute sensory “reality” that never reaches “consciousness” without being filtered through “representation” — by memory, by the ego, or by various internal “neurological pathways” that mediate and organize our sensory experience. This is a familiar motif in Freud, who often speaks of “consciousness” and even of “bodily experience” (sensory stimuli) as being fashioned or channeled by past experiences, anticipation, projection, and other forms of representation, which allow some aspects of our experience to become “present” to us, while others are not registered, and therefore remain “absent” even though they are “real.” A correlation would thus be made between two different modes of “presence” (namely, “imaginary” and “symbolic”), and a real that remains “absent,” insofar as it is inaccessible. Robert Samuels uses this notion of the real when he speaks of the subject as the “existential Subject” (7), that is to say, the subject in its brute “existence” prior to imaginary and symbolic formation. The “real” subject (S) would thus designate what Lacan in the essay on psychosis calls a level of “ineffable, stupid existence” (E, 193). This notation, in which “S” designates the subject “in the real,” is useful insofar as it encourages us to separate real, imaginary and symbolic definitions of the subject — distinguishing the subject as “real” (S), from the ego as formed in the imaginary (the “a” of schema L, which designates the “moi” as a correlate of the image or alter ego), distinguishing both of these in turn from “$” — the “split subject,” or the “subject of the signifier.”

     

    Richard Boothby’s book, Death and Desire, gives an excellent account of this argument, in which the “real” is a dimension of “immediate existence” or prediscursive reality that is never actually available to us as such, but only appears through the intervention of the imaginary or the symbolic. He shows how Lacan’s theory of the imaginary — and above all of the imaginary body — allows us to understand what Freud means when he says that even sensory experience and bodily excitations do not provide direct contact with the “real,” since even our most concrete, bodily experience or “perception” is organized and shaped through the imaginary, which “translates” or “represents” the real, thereby also distorting it. As Boothby says, the imaginary is a dimension of narcissism that maintains its own “world” by “defending” itself against the real, “recognizing” only those aspects of the real that accord with the interests of the ego. Boothby stresses the imaginary, but one could also speak of the symbolic here, as another level of “representation” that organizes the real, “presenting” it by translating or mediating it. For as Lacan says, “the symbol is the murder of the thing”; it “mediates” our contact with the real, “negating” the thing and replacing it with a “representation,” and thus with a “substitute.” It is important to recognize that imaginary and symbolic presentation (or representation) do not function in the same way, but in any case, the concept of the real as an immediate or prediscursive “reality” is clear. Eventually, we must come to see why Lacan gave up this notion, why he came to regard this account as inadequate, and was obliged to develop a different conception of the real. But let us not go too quickly.

     

    3.5 The “return” of the real

     

    For it is important to observe that, on this view, the real is not absolutely lost: on the contrary, one can speak of the “real” as sometimes “asserting itself,” or “disrupting” the systems of representation that have been set up to encode and process it. As Boothby suggests, certain bodily experiences can be characterized as “real” if they threaten or oppose the imaginary system of the subject: the narcissistic structure “refuses” or “defends” itself against the real, which is “excluded,” but which nevertheless sometimes “returns,” disrupting the structure by asserting itself. This is in keeping with Freud’s observations in the Project, where he notes that the bodily apparatus, its neurological pathways, act partly by “blocking” certain stimuli, which are in some sense “felt,” but not actually “registered” by the subject. One can then regard the sudden “rupture” of these neurological blocking mechanisms as an “encounter with the real.” A number of Freud’s metaphors appear to work this way, as if the “system” of the body were a system of “pressure” and “release” in which a particular threshold must be crossed before the “real” is allowed to “register.” The advantage of this account is that it allows us to see that the body is not a natural system of “rivers” and “dams,” governed by a biological force of “pressure” and “release,” but is rather an “imaginary” system, in which “force” is the expressly non-biological force of representation. Such an account allows us to explain the “return of the real” as a disruptive or “traumatic” event, while also showing us why the “body” in psychoanalysis is not a biological system. This is why Boothby insists on the “imaginary” structure of the body, and on the fact that the “energy” Freud speaks of is not a natural or “physical” energy, but rather “psychic energy” — whatever that means. As Freud himself says in his late text, the Outline of Psychoanalysis, “We would give much to understand more about these things.”

     

    3.6 Beyond mimesis

     

    This is the most common understanding of the “real,” but it has one great disadvantage, in that it tends to equate the real with “pre-linguistic reality.” On the basis of this conception, psychoanalysis is immediately drawn back into a number of traditional questions about “mimesis.” Starting with the idea that there is a “symbolic order,” or indeed an “imaginary” system of representation, we may ask whether it is possible to have access to an outside “reality,” but we will never be able to clarify the concept of the real. We will be able to enter a whole series of familiar debates about “representation,” in which two alternatives appear to dominate. Some (the “postmodernists”) say that “everything is symbolic”: we have no access to “reality” in itself, for reality is always given through some historically specific “discursive formation”; it is not a question of “reality,” but only of different symbolic systems, different “representations” which compete with each other, and which succeed in becoming “true” either because they are “persuasive” (rhetoric), or because they are formulated by those in power (politics), or because they have the authority of “tradition” (history), or for some other reason — in short, “there is no metalanguage,” no discourse that can ground itself in a non-discursive “external reality,” since the only thing “outside” discourse is . . . more discourse. Others (the “positivists”) say that in spite of these symbolic codes, there is a “reality” that asserts itself, or presents itself to us: we may try to ignore it, or refuse to give it any symbolic importance, or we may construct certain “fantasies” that seek to circumvent reality, or highlight only certain features of reality, but it is still the case that symbolic systems have a more or less adequate “purchase” on reality, and that some discourses are “more true” than others. These arguments are familiar, but they will not take us very far towards understanding Lacan.

     

    3.7 Reality and the real

     

    This is why, if we wish to understand Lacan, we must distinguish between “reality” and the “real” (thereby moving towards our “second version”). In “The Freudian Thing,” for example, Lacan explicitly refers to Heidegger when he discusses the classical definition of “true” representation (“adaequatio rei et intellectus,” the correct correspondence between the idea or word and the thing), saying that the Freudian account of “truth” cannot be grasped in terms of the problem of “adequate correspondence.” Freud’s “truth” cannot be approached in terms of “true” and “false” representations, or in terms of the “symbolic order” and “reality,” for “truth” is linked to the “real,” and not to “reality.” Lacan even coined a word to suggest the link between “truth” and the “real” — le vréel (a term that has been attributed to Kristeva, but came from Lacan). To address the relation between the “symbolic” and the “real” is therefore quite different from engaging in the task of distinguishing between “reality” and the symbolic or imaginary world of the subject.

     

    Let us note, however, that the distinction between “reality” and the “real” must be made in a specific way, according to Lacan. For it is perfectly possible to accept the distinction between “reality” and the “real” while at the same time sustaining the first version of the “real” (as a pre-discursive reality). In this case, “reality” is defined, not as an unknowable, external domain, independent of our representations, but precisely as the product of representation. Our “reality” is imaginary and symbolic, and the “real” is what is missing from reality — that “outside” which escapes our representations (the “Ding-an-sich“). The “real” thus remains an inaccessible, prediscursive reality, while “reality” is understood as a symbolic or imaginary “construction.” Many commentaries have taken this line of argument, distinguishing the “real” and “reality” while nevertheless maintaining our “first version.” As Samuel Weber writes,

     

    the notion of reality implied in the imaginary should in no way be confused with Lacan's concept of the "real" . . . In Lacan, as in Peirce, the "real" is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation, including cognition. It is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary. (106)

     

    If we turn to Jonathan Scott Lee, we find the same distinction:

     

    All language allows us to speak of is the "reality" constituted by the system of the symbolic . . . Because "there is no metalanguage," the real perpetually eludes our discourse. (136)

     

    The same conclusion appears to be drawn by Borch-Jacobsen, who expresses profound reservations about Lacan’s apparent “nihilism,” and writes that the “truth” ultimately affirmed by Lacan is that we have no access to the “real,” but are condemned to live in a domain of subjective “reality,” a domain of subjective “truth”:

     

    Lacan's "truth," no matter how unfathomable and repressed, remains none the less the truth of a desire -- that is, of a subject. It could hardly be otherwise in psychoanalysis. Isn't the patient invited to recount himself -- that is, to reveal himself to himself in autorepresentation. (107)

     

    The real is thus a prediscursive reality that is always already lost (a thesis tediously familiar to us, Borch-Jacobsen says, from a certain existentialism): “Thus the ‘real,’ as Kojève taught, is abolished as soon as it is spoken” (109). Or, in another passage:

     

    for Lacan -- agreeing, on this point, with Kojève's teaching -- truth is essentially distinct from reality. Better yet, truth is opposed to reality [since] the subject speaks himself by negating, or "nihilating" the "Real." (107)

     

    The peculiarity of this formulation is that it seems to equate the real and reality, but this is simply because we are to understand “reality” not as the constructed “reality” of the subject (what Borch-Jacobsen here calls the subject’s “truth”), but as the external reality that is always already lost. In all these cases, we can distinguish between a “real” (or “prediscursive reality”) that remains outside representation, and “reality” as “constituted” by the subject, while retaining the first conception, in which the “real” is an external domain that precedes representation and remains “unknown.”

     

    3.8 “The innermost core of the imaginary”

     

    How then are we to pass beyond the familiar problem of “true” and “false” representations, the classical problem of “mimesis,” the dichotomy between a prediscursive “reality” (which is permanently lost, or which occasionally “returns” in the form of a traumatic disruption of the representational system), and the network of imaginary or symbolic “representations” which either capture or simply replace that “reality”? How are we to move to our second conception in which we arrive at the concept of “lack” — a “void” that is not reducible to the imaginary or symbolic (that remains “absent” from representation), and yet does not exist in “external reality”? Clearly, the real, insofar as it is connected with lack, can only be grasped through this second formulation, as a “post-symbolic” phenomenon, a void that arises through the symbolic order, as an “effect” of the symbolic order which is nevertheless irreducible to the imaginary or symbolic.

     

    At this point, we can return to the question of the trauma, the “return” of the real, in order to see why the first conception of the real is inadequate. For one might well say that certain “experiences” or “encounters with the real” (momentary ruptures of our “defenses”) are traumatic or disruptive, but this is not simply due to their “nature” — as if it were a direct, unmediated encounter with some traumatic “reality.” The “disruptive” character of the real, regarded as a dimension of experience that disturbs the order of representation, is not due to the real “in itself,” but is due to the fact that it is unfamiliar. The “real” is traumatic because there has been no sufficient symbolic or imaginary network in place for “representing” it. It is “traumatic,” not “in itself,” but only in relation to the established order of representation. We must return here to Samuel Weber’s formulation. For if he claims (following our “first version”) that “the real’ is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation,” and that “it is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary” (106), he immediately adds a curious twist: “At the same time, one could with equal justification describe it as residing at the innermost core of the imaginary” (106). Obviously the Freudian concept of “repression,” as something “contained” (in every sense) by the subject’s “representational system,” would come closer to this conception of the “real” as an “innermost core,” rather than an autonomous, “external reality.” Consequently, the “real,” even if we wish to characterize it along the lines of our initial approach, as a disruptive element that “asserts itself” and threatens the usual expectations of the ego, cannot be understood as “pre-existing reality,” but must rather be understood as an “innermost core,” an “inside” that only acquires its repressed or traumatic character in relation to the familiar order of representation. As early as the “Rome Discourse,” Lacan stressed this aspect of the “trauma,” distinguishing it from any simple “event”:

     

    to say of psychoanalysis or of history that, considered as sciences, they are both sciences of the particular, does not mean that the facts they deal with are purely accidental . . . [or] reducible to the brute aspect of the trauma. (E, 51)

     

    3.9 The phobic object

     

    In “The Story of Louise,” Michèle Montrelay provides a remarkable account of a “traumatic” event, one that obliges us to see the real not as pre-discursive, but as an effect of symbolization. She speaks of the onset of a phobia, describing it as a particular moment in the history of the subject, a “moment” or “event,” however, which is not a simple “present,” and which consists, not of the “immediate experience” of some traumatic “reality,” but of an experience in which two chains of signifiers, previously kept apart, are suddenly made to intersect, in such a way, moreover, that in place of “meaning,” a hole is produced. “This hole opened by the phobia is situated in space like a fault around which all roads would open . . . except that all of a sudden the ground vanishes” (77). Instead of a “metaphor,” a “spark” of meaning, something “impossible” suddenly emerges from this intersection of signifiers, a “hole” or “cut” in the universe of meaning, a cut that is linked to an obscure “knowledge” that Louise suddenly acquires about her father — a “forbidden knowledge” that remains excluded the moment it appears:

     

    knowing is contained not in the revelation of the "content" of a representation, but in a new and impossible conjunction of signifiers. Two signifying chains created a cut or break. That is, they marked the place of an impossible passage. . . . The chains, suddenly brought into proximity, created a short-circuit. (81)

     

    An additional observation is necessary here, if we are to grasp the “object,” as well as this “cut” in the symbolic universe. For we must also note that the phobia dates from this “moment,” this symbolic intersection, this Oedipal crossing of the roads, which is to be understood, not simply as producing a “hole” in meaning, but as having an additional “effect.” Such is the genesis of the “phobic object” in the story of Louise: a fish has come to fill the place of this void that has suddenly opened at the subject’s feet, giving it a “local habitation,” a specific place among all the things spread out across the extended surface of the world — a place that is prohibited and can no longer be crossed. (Other places become contaminated, too, for thereafter, Louise will no longer enter the library, where her father taught her to read.) One day, Louise, who was preparing dinner in the kitchen with her mother (the domestic space is not a matter of indifference), goes to the dining room, and watches while this fish-object (its eye still looking up) is transferred to the father’s plate: “Louise, who was watching the fish cooking without saying anything, begins to scream. Nameless terror. She refuses to eat. The fish phobia has declared itself” (79). The daughter, who had always been clever and mature, becomes dizzy and speechless, to the bewilderment of her parents. She can no longer occupy space as before. As Lacan says in “The Agency of the Letter,”

     

    Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject . . . a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. (E, 166)

     

    The traumatic “fact” or “event” in psychoanalysis thus acquires its status not as an encounter with some autonomous, pre-existing “reality,” but only through the network of representation in relation to which the particular thing in question acquires a traumatic status.

     

    3.10 Retroactive trauma

     

    The “trauma” can therefore no longer be understood as a simple brute “reality” that is difficult to integrate into our symbolic universe. Zizek notes this when he corrects his own account of the trauma in For They Know Not What They Do. In a “first presentation,” he referred to the trauma as a sudden, disruptive experience of “reality” that is not easily placed within our “symbolic universe.” But this notion is soon modified: “when we spoke of the symbolic integration of a trauma,” he writes,

     

    we omitted a crucial detail: the logic of Freud's notion of the "deferred action" does not consist in the subsequent "gentrification" of a traumatic encounter by means of its transformation into a normal component of our symbolic universe, but in almost the exact opposite of it -- something which was at first perceived as a meaningless, neutral event changes retroactively, after the advent of a new symbolic network . . . into a trauma that cannot be integrated. (221-22)

     

    Thus, in place of a “pre-symbolic reality” that we might regard as traumatic, and that we must eventually “accommodate” into our symbolic universe, we have a trauma that emerges retroactively, as an effect of symbolization. One might think here of contemporary efforts to re-write the literary canon: for many years, most literary critics regarded the canon as “full,” as a list of “great names”; but after a shift in the “symbolic universe” (which consisted in acknowledging that there might possibly be women who also happened to be writers — mirabile dictu), the past suddenly appeared as traumatic, as “false” and “slanted” and full of “holes” — holding great vacancies that needed to be occupied. Here, the “traumatic event” must be clearly recognized for what it is — not the immediate contact with an external “reality,” the simple encounter with a historical “reality,” the “discovery” of women writers, but a new signification that has retroactive effects on the past. Obviously, this model of the “event” does not fit the “popular” examples of “traumatic events” — the “brute experience” of violence or war that must gradually be given a place in the symbolic universe. In this second version, where the structure of symbolic retroaction is stressed, we are in fact closer to the sort of “trauma” induced by Foucault, whose writings have the effect of making a neat, coherent and familiar past (the “grand narrative”) suddenly emerge as “mad” and “deceptive” and “fictional” — and thus in need of reconfiguration. This is why I have argued that Foucault’s work cannot be understood as a “historicist” description of the past in all its archaeological strangeness and contingency, but must rather be understood as aiming to produce effects, by negotiating te relation between the symbolic and the real.

     

    Given this account of the “trauma,” we are led to shift our account of the real slightly, and ask, not so much about the real “in itself” — the direct, unmediated “reality” that is always distorted by representation — but about the relation between the real and the order of “representation” (symbolic or imaginary). It thus becomes clear that our initial view of the “real” as a “prediscursive reality” cannot be entirely precise, since the real only acquires its “unfamiliar” and “disruptive” status in relation to the symbolic and imaginary. Even without considering the temporal factor of “retroaction” introduced by Zizek, or the peculiar “event-structure” of the symbolic overlapping discussed by Montrelay, we can already see in the account given by Boothby that the disruptive emergence of a “real” that violates the normal order of the ego — the sudden “rupture” of neurological pathways — cannot be characterized simply as a moment of contact with external “reality.” As Boothby suggests, the “real” is constituted in relation to representation, and thus appears as an “innermost core of the imaginary” (or symbolic) itself. We must therefore drop the idea that the real is “presymbolic,” that it is an “unreachable” reality that exists “prior” to language (the “first version”), and recognize that the imaginary, symbolic and the real are mutually constitutive — like the rings in the Borromean knot, which provide us with a “synchronic” and “equiprimordial” structure linking the imaginary, symbolic and real in a single set of relations.

     

    3.11 The “post-symbolic” real

     

    We are thus brought to a second account of the real in Lacan, in which it is no longer regarded as “prelinguistic” domain that is never available to us, or that occasionally “returns” to disrupt our representations. In its “postsymbolic” form, the real designates something that only “exists” as a result of symbolization. On this view, the symbolic order is structured in such a way that it produces a kind of “excess,” a “remainder” or “surplus-effect,” that is not at all equivalent to “reality,” but is rather an “effect” of the symbolic order, though not reducible to it. This refinement of the concept of the real is one of the major interests of Lacanian theory. At this point, however, a new complication arises (we have seen it already in the phobic object), for with this second version of the real, two related problems are now introduced: first, we are faced with a concept of “lack,” a void that cannot be clarified by references to prediscursive reality (which is “full”); and second, we are faced with the “production” of an object, a “surplus-effect,” in which the symbolic order gives rise to a certain “excess” it cannot adequately contain. The real, in this second formulation, would therefore seem to be simultaneously “too little” and “too much” — something “missing,” but also a certain “materialization.” The “object a” is Lacan’s effort to resolve this issue: it is a construction that seeks to address the link between the “void” and this “excess,” by establishing a relation between “lack” and this peculiar “surplus-effect.” Before turning to this enigmatic “splitting” within the second conception of the real, let us characterize the “post-symbolic” version more precisely.

     

    3.12 Butler and Zizek

     

    For in distinguishing these two versions of the real, we may cast light not only on Lacan, but also on some recent discussions of Lacanian theory. Consider Judith Butler’s recent book, Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993), which contains a chapter called “Arguing With the Real.” In this chapter, Butler touches on both versions of the real when she observes, in reference to Zizek, that it is unclear whether the real is to be understood as a prediscursive, material realm, a hard “kernel” located outside symbolization, or whether it is to be understood as a product of the symbolic order, “an effect of the law,” in which case we would be concerned, not so much with a “material” real, but rather with a “lack.” Such is the ambiguity Butler points to in Zizek’s work, noting that the real appears in two forms, as both “rock” and “lack.” She writes,

     

    the "real" that is a "rock" or a "kernel" or sometimes a "substance" is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, "a loss" [or] a negativity. (198)

     

    According to Butler, we thus find a certain equivocation: the concept of the real “appears to slide from substance to dissolution” (198). As “substance,” the real would seem to implicate Lacan in a reference to “prediscursive reality.” Lacanian theory would thus cut against the grain of most “postmodernism,” for if we assert the “discursive construction of reality,” stressing its contingent, historical formation, the “real” would seem to be a limit, an external domain that is untouched by symbolization. But as “loss” or “negativity,” the real would seem to bring Lacan closer to the thesis that “reality” is “discursively constructed,” though with the additional complication that the real implies a “lack” that remains in some enigmatic way irreducible to the symbolic — “beyond” discourse, though not simply “pre-discursive.” In view of our distinction between two versions of the real, we might see this “sliding” from substance to dissolution, not as confusion or self-contradiction, but as the simultaneous articulation of two forms of the real.

     

    3.13 Beyond “discursive” postmodernism

     

    In her discussion of Zizek and the real, Butler focuses on the fact that the concept of the real amounts to a critique of the “postmodern” thesis asserting the “discursive construction” of reality. This is indeed the crucial point. Butler notes that the real presents us with a “limit” to discourse:

     

    Zizek begins his critique of what he calls "poststructuralism" through the invocation of a certain kind of matter, a "rock" or "kernel" that not only resists symbolization and discourse, but is precisely what poststructuralism, in his account, itself resists and endeavors to dissolve. (198)

     

    At this point, however, the distinction between our two versions of the real is crucial: for we must ask whether Zizek’s critique of “poststructuralism” — conceived (rightly or wrongly) as a theory of “discursive construction” — amounts to a “naive” appeal to “prediscursive reality” (a “rock” or “substance”) or whether it concerns the “failure” or “incompleteness” of the symbolic order (a certain “lack” or “negativity”). In the latter case, as I have suggested, the Lacanian account of the real would be very close to certain questions formulated by Foucault and Derrida concerning the “limits of formalization” — the supplement, or transgression, or “madness” for example. It is because of this second possibility, moreover, that Butler does not simply reject the concept of the real (as a naive appeal to “reality”), insisting on an equally naive account of the “discursive construction of reality” (a thesis that has often been wrongly attributed to her).

     

    On the contrary, she regards the concept of the real as a genuine contribution, an effort to address a problem that contemporary theory has to confront, if it is to pass beyond certain inadequate formulations of “cultural construction.” For those of us who wish to insist upon an anti-foundationalist approach, and develop the claims of a postmodern tradition that recognizes the contingent formation of the subject, the concept of the real is not a stumbling block, or a naive reference to “reality” that must be rejected, according to Butler, but rather a concept, or a theoretical difficulty, that must be confronted and adequately developed. The question of the body and “sexuality” is one arena in which this issue is particularly important, and which psychoanalytic theory has done much to develop in a clear way, since the “body” and “sexuality” oblige us to recognize the limits of “symbolic construction” without, however, appealing to any “presymbolic reality.” If psychoanalysis has taken on an increasing urgency today, it is precisely for this reason, for psychoanalysis has perhaps the clearest conception of the “real” of the body, as a material dimension of the flesh that “exceeds” representation, yet does not automatically refer us to a “natural” domain of “pre-existing reality.” As I have suggested in “The Epoch of the Body,” debates as to whether psychoanalysis amounts to a form of “biological essentialism,” or whether it asserts the “historical construction” of sexuality only conceal the theoretical difficulty it seeks to address.

     

    Thus, Butler does not simply reject the “real.” On the contrary, the importance of this element “beyond” the symbolic is unmistakable, since it is crucial to recognize the “limit” of discursive construction, what Butler calls the “failure of discursive performativity to finally and fully establish the identity to which it refers” (188). Thus, she agrees that “the category of the real is needed” (189), and notes that if Zizek is right to be “opposed to poststructuralist accounts of discursivity,” it is because we must provide a more adequate account of what remains “outside” discourse, what is “foreclosed” from the symbolic order — since “what is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject” (190). On the other hand, while stressing its importance, she focuses on the ambiguous status of this “outside,” this “foreclosed” element, which remains paradoxical insofar as it is difficult to say whether it is a prediscursive “rock” or “kernel” that is simply “beyond” representation, or an “effect” of language itself, a “lack” that would be produced by the symbolic order, instead of simply preceding it. Butler thus identifies a certain wavering, an apparent duality in the concept, a “vacillation between substance and its dissolution” which is evident in the fact that the “real” is simultaneously “figured as the rock’ and the lack’” (199). Whatever the details of the discussion between Zizek and Butler may be, I have tried to suggest that this difficulty can be clarified by distinguishing between two quite different conceptions of the real, a “presymbolic” real, and a “post-symbolic” real, which would take us in the direction of “lack.”

     

    3.14 The anatomy of criticism

     

    On the basis of Butler’s remarks, in fact, one might even undertake an “anatomy of criticism,” a map of contemporary responses to postmodernism, distinguishing “two interpretations of interpretation” in contemporary cultural theory. One is a “reactive” response that has gained force recently, and that amounts to a “return to reality” — in the form of a call for concrete, historical and empirical research, a virulent rejection of “theory” (which is more and more characterized in terms of “French influences” and regarded as “foreign”), and also in the rise of genetic and biological explanations of “consciousness,” “behavior,” and “sexuality.” The other response is an effort to pass “through” postmodernism, to correct certain deficiencies in the theory of “discursive construction,” and — without returning to the “good old days” in which discourses were thought to be true when they secured non-discursive foundations for themselves, and without appealing to a “subject” or a “human nature” that might be regarded as independent of historically contingent discourses or practices — to develop an account of the limit and insufficiency of discourse, thereby doing justice to the concrete, historical effects of symbolic life, not by disregarding language in favor of a “return to the empirical,” but by recognizing the material effects of the malfunction of the symbolic order itself. This is precisely what is at stake in psychoanalysis, and particularly with respect to the “body.” For in speaking of the “real” of the body, psychoanalysis does not simply endorse a return to biology, or to a prelinguistic “reality” (the “reality” presupposed by bio-medical discourse, which focuses on the organism and not the body). If, however, the “body” in psychoanalysis is distinguished from the organism, it is not because it is simply a “discursive construction” or a “product of language,” but because it is a peculiar “structure” or “phenomenon” that is not governed by nature, but is at the same time irreducible to the “symbolic order.”

     

    3.15 The object — “prohibited” or “lost”?

     

    Let us now take a final step. Having distinguished two versions of the real, we must now return to the problem noted earlier, namely, the fact that the second, “post-symbolic” conception of the real gives rise to two different, apparently paradoxical or contradictory results, since it leads us to speak not only of “lack,” but also of a certain “remainder” or “excess.” As a peculiar “remainder,” the “real” is a “surplus-effect” of the symbolic order — a “product” that cannot be explained by reference to “prediscursive reality,” but that is also distinct from the idea of a “void” or “lack.” We have indicated that the “object a” is Lacan’s attempt to provide a theoretical resolution to this problem, by establishing a relation between “lack” and this peculiar “remainder.” Is this not in fact the “paradox” of the term itself, the “object a,” which allows us to speak of an “object of lack”?

     

    In order to clarify this final point, let us return to the argument of Robert Samuels, who speaks of the “subject in the Real” as an “existential” subject, prior to any imaginary or symbolic mediation — the purely “hypothetical” and always already lost subject of “unmediated existence.” With this “subject in the real,” we would seem to return to our first version of the real, a level of immediate “reality” that is never accessible as such. Beginning with this “prediscursive” conception, Samuels argues for a link between the real in Lacan, and the Freudian account of “auto-eroticism” and “infantile sexuality.” He establishes this link by suggesting that a primitive, more or less chaotic, “polymorphous” and undifferentiated “infantile sexuality” comes to be ordered and unified by the formation of the “imaginary body.” We can therefore regard consciousness, narcissism, the ego, and the body (as imaginary), as a set of related functions that impose unity on the “real” of infantile sexuality. As Samuels puts it, we have an “ideal form of unity that gives the subject the possibility of organizing its perceptions and sensations through the development of a unified bodily image” (18). There are good grounds for this link between the “real” (thus understood) and “infantile sexuality” in Freud, who writes in “On Narcissism,”

     

    it is impossible to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego can exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to develop. But the auto-erotic instincts are primordial; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism -- some new operation in the mind -- in order that narcissism may come into being. (SE, 59)

     

    On this view, the “real” subject of “existence” and infantile “autoeroticism” is an “original state” that is lost with the arrival of the imaginary body, and lost again (twice, like Erotic) with the advent of symbolic mediation. But this “pre-discursive” conception of “infantile sexuality” will soon be complicated.

     

    Later, in a chapter on Totem and Taboo, Samuels returns to this formulation, but in such a way that the question now arises as to the possible “resurgence” of the “real” in the unconscious, what Samuels also regards as a form of “incestuous desire,” outside the symbolic law: “in the position of the Real,” he writes, we find “the subject of the unconscious and infantile sexuality who exists outside the symbolic order” (81). One often hears that the Lacanian unconscious is simply a “symbolic” phenomenon, the “discourse of the Other”; but by stressing the “subject of the unconscious” as “real,” Samuels indicates that he is concerned here with something “beyond” the symbolic order, something that concerns the body, a sort of remnant or “trace” of “infantile sexuality” that persists in the unconscious, in spite of the symbolic law. It is this “persistence” of the real, this “trait” of incestuous desire within or beyond the advent of the symbolic order that we need to clarify, and that will lead Samuels to shift from our “first version” of the real to a “second version” (though he does not mark the shift in the manner we are suggesting). For we must now ask whether the real that “returns” beyond the law, after the imaginary and symbolic have “lost” it, is “the same” as the origin, the initial “infantile” state, or whether this “trait” or “trace” that exceeds the symbolic order is not rather a product, an effect of the law itself — in which case we can call it “infantile” only by a certain metaphorical displacement, a ruse that pretends to locate this incestuous desire before the law, when it is in fact a “product” of the law itself. The consequences are obviously decisive: if we believe that “infantile sexuality” is a “prediscursive” state of “existence” that is gradually organized and made “lawful” by representation (what Foucault calls the “repressive hypothesis”), we may regard the “return” of infantile sexuality as a sort of “liberation.” But if the “return” is in fact a “product” of the law, and not a “pre-discursive” state of nature, then this trait of incestuous desire can only be an effect of the law itself — not a form of liberation, but a surplus-effect of the symbolic order itself. This is in fact Lacan’s thesis, developed in particular when he speaks of “père-version,” a “turning toward the father,” a “trait of perversion” that accompanies the father of the law. On this view, something in the very operation of the law “splits” the paternal function into two incompatible parts, one of which bears on the inevitability of “symbolic mediation,” while the other bears on a certain “trait of perversion” that — far from designating a resurgence of “natural” sexuality — in fact designates a suffering that accompanies the law itself. This is what the concept of jouissance seeks to address.

     

    3.16 The incestuous object

     

    This is also the point at which we must introduce the concept of the “object a,” as a lack that entails a “surplus-effect,” a certain materialization. According to Samuels, this persistence of the real of infantile sexuality “within” or “beyond” the law, is precisely what Lacan addresses in terms of the relation between the symbolic order and the object a. Thus, in addition to distinguishing between the subject as “real” and “symbolic” (S and $) — while recognizing, of course, the ego as imaginary — we must also confront the problem of the “object,” as that which allows us to give concrete, bodily specificity to the dimension of “incestuous desire” that remains alongside, or in excess of, the “lawful” desire that characterizes the symbolic order. Samuels makes this additional development quite clear in his discussion of Totem and Taboo: we not only have an opposition between the “symbolic” subject (who enters into “lawful” kinship relations, governed by exogamy and “symbolic exchange”) and what Samuels calls “the Real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father” (82); we must also develop a conception of the “object,” the “prohibited” object that somehow “returns” in spite of the symbolic law. As Samuels puts it: “Implied by this dialectic between incest and exogamy is the persistence of an incestuous object in the unconscious of the subject” (82). Such is the relation, not simply between the “real” and “symbolic” subject, but between the Other (symbolic law) and the “object a.” As the “prohibited” object, the “lost” object, the “taboo” object, or the object of “lack” (and these may not be identical), the object a allows us to locate “the Real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father and presents the existence of incest within the structure” (82). The “polymorphous perversity” of infantile sexuality is thus designated as a “real” that is lost with the advent of the imaginary body, “renounced” when the subject passes through the mediating structure of the symbolic law, and yet a “trace” or “remnant” of this lost world remains, and is embodied in the form of the “object a.”

     

    Thus far Samuels’s account appears to coincide with our first version of the real: in speaking of an “existential subject” (S) that is distinguished from the ego and the “split subject” of the symbolic order ($), he seems to rely on the idea of a prediscursive “real,” prior to its having been filtered and organized by representation. This is the “real” of “infantile sexuality” and “immediate existence” that is always already lost, “repressed” or “mediated” by the imaginary, and by the symbolic order. The problem arises, however, as to the possible resurgence of the real, which is “lost,” but nevertheless able to “return” within the symbolic order, and somehow “present itself” — as a traumatic “return of the repressed,” as a momentary breakdown of representation that is due to a sort of “direct contact” with an unfamiliar “reality,” or in some other form of “presentation” that remains to be clarified. According to Samuels, the “object a” in Lacan designates precisely this element, a “real” that is not represented in symbolic or imaginary form, but is nevertheless presented somehow. It is not a “past”that has been lost, but something that “presents itself” in the present:

     

    The object (a) represents the presence of an unsymbolized Real element within the structure of the symbolic order itself. (81)

     

    Obviously other writers have taken up this “disruptive” presentation, a certain “concrete” remainder that exceeds symbolization — as Kristeva does for example with the “Semiotic,” and as Kant does with the sublime, which is the “experience” of an excess that disrupts both sensory and conceptual presentation, that cannot be contained by images or concepts, that disrupts the very faculty of presentation (the imagination), and yet somehow “presents” itself. At this point, the real is no longer a domain of “immediate existence,” a “reality” that is “always already lost,” but a peculiar “presence” within the symbolic order itself.

     

    This is where matters become complicated, and we are confronted with a certain “paradox.” For one thing (to put the point in a logical or structural way), it is difficult to say that the object a is a “presence,” or that (in Samuels’s words) it “represents” something like infantile sexuality, if we have claimed that all “presence” and all “representation” are imaginary or symbolic, and that the real is inaccessible, always already lost, impossible or absent. If the symbolic “law” means that all of the subject’s experience and desire is organized through representation — if the most concrete content of our bodily experience is given to us through an imaginary unity that is in turn filtered through the symbolic order — then the “object a” would be an element that does not fit within the imaginary or symbolic structure, that is “abjected” from the order of images and words, but nevertheless persists in “presenting itself.” This is the “structural” aspect of the problem: the “object a” is a “presence” that does not belong to the system of presentation, an element that appears without “appearing,” emerging “inside” the structure, without belonging to the structure. As Samuels points out, we thus face “the paradox of the analytic attempt to Symbolize that which cannot be Symbolized” (83-4).

     

    In spite of this apparent “paradox,” we should not be too quick to dismiss the question on “logical” grounds: we should perhaps be prepared to consider the possibility of a “real” that is “beyond” representation, an aspect of the subject that is “outside” the symbolic order, but would somehow present itself, or have an “effect” on the system of representation. Freud appears to have something like this in mind when he speaks of unconscious “residues,” which remain present without the subject being aware of them, residues which have an effect on the subject’s life, even when they are excluded from the field of representation. Butler appears to have something similar in mind when she writes that we must not reduce the “subject” to a purely “symbolic effect,” or regard the subject as a “discursive construction”:

     

    Zizek is surely right that the subject is not the unilateral effect of prior discourses, and that the process of subjectivation outlined by Foucault is in need of psychoanalytic rethinking. (189)

     

    But if the concept of the real is indispensable, we cannot ignore the problem of its “presentation.” As I have indicated, Jacques-Alain Miller’s approach to this difficulty is a “logical” one, insofar as he does not take an “ontic” approach to the “object,” but claims that the “object” is a construction, a concept that arises as a way of addressing the structural “impasses” of the symbolic order. As an “object,” moreover, it is not simply a “logical” issue, but should allow us to give concrete, bodily specificity to this “aporia,” without appealing to a “prediscursive” conception of the object. Obviously, the relation between Lacanian theory and object-relations theory is extremely complex at this point. It is clear, however, that we can no longer sustain the first version of the real as a domain of immediacy that is always already lost, and that we must instead consider the “object” as “an unsymbolized Real element within the structure of the Symbolic order itself.

     

    If we stress the temporal aspects of the “return” of the real, we can put the “paradox” in a slightly different form. In this case, it is not simply a matter of “representing” what is beyond representation, or of “presenting” the unpresentable. It is rather a question of the “return” of an “original” state within a structure that was supposed to reconfigure, prohibit, or transcend it. The example of “infantile sexuality” is particularly important here, for if we begin by characterizing the “real” as a “primitive” domain of disorganized “polymorphous” experience — if we claim that the ego and narcissism are imposed (together with the structure of language) upon the original chaos of the “real” body, in such a way that this “original experience” is lost — then the question concerns the return, in the “present,” of a lost origin. At this point, a temporal twist is given to our “paradox,” for it is clear that what returns is not the same as this supposedly original state. What returns, “within” the system of representation (as a “rupture” or “unsymbolized element”), is not in fact an initial condition of infantile sexuality — the memory of a past that is somehow preserved in all its archaeological purity — but rather a “trait” that emerges from the symbolic order, and yet — this is the crucial point — presents itself as the remnant of a past that has been lost. We now see more clearly why the “object a” can only be understood in terms of our “second version” of the real, but also why it appears to be conceivable in terms of the “first version”: this trace, designated as the object a, is not the origin, a “left-over” that remains from the past, or the “return” of an original state, but the temporal paradox in which we find the “return” of something that did not originally exist, but only emerged “after the fact,” as an effect of symbolization. Its apparently “original” status is thus strictly mythical. For the “thing” only came into being for the first time when it “returned,” hiding itself or disguising itself as an “origin,” while it is in fact a product of the symbolic order, an “effect” of the law itself.

     

    We are thus brought to our final observation: the importance of this second, temporal formulation is that it obliges us to recognize a split between the “object a” and the “real” as an initial, presymbolic condition. Samuels puts the point as follows. Speaking of unconscious “fixations” — what Freud calls “the incestuous fixations of libido” (SE 1913, 17) — Samuels writes:

     

    The fixation is not the existence of infantile sexuality (jouissance) itself, but rather a rem(a)inder of the primitive Real within the structure of the symbolic order. (83, emphasis added)

     

    The conclusion is clear: we now have a split between the “primitive” real of an original infantile sexuality, and the “rem(a)inder” that appears in the present, “within” the symbolic order. As Samuels puts it,

     

    There must be a separation between what Lacan calls the primitive Real of jouissance [infantile sexuality], which is placed logically before the Symbolic order of language and law, and the post-Symbolic form of the Real, which is embodied by the object (a). (83)

     

    That remainder, the object (a), is no longer identical with the “original” jouissance it is said to embody or represent. The “object a” is rather a “product,” the concrete materialization of an element of transgression or jouissance that does not submit to the symbolic law, but that, far from being an original state, a moment of natural immediacy, is precisely a “product” of the law, a surplus-effect of the symbolic order, which disguises itself as an “origin.” Where the first version of the real allows us to maintain the illusion of a “lost immediacy” (together with the hope of its possible return, through “affect,” or “transgression,” or “liberation,” or in some other way), the second account, based on the “object a,” recognizes this “state of immediacy” not only as a “myth,” a retroactive construction, but also as a peculiar “materialization,” a product of the symbolic order itself.

     

    We thus see more clearly what the status of the “prohibition” is in psychoanalysis. It is not an interdiction that prohibits a possible “pleasure,” compelling us to accept the standards of civilized behavior, but rather a “no” that veils an impossibility. It does not banish us from a state of nature, but rather erects (the word is used advisedly) a barrier to cover what is originally lacking. The object a is therefore not so much a piece of “infantile sexuality” that remains “latent” in the subject in spite of the laws of civilization, a piece of “libido” that refused to sign on to the social contact, a biological “Id” that resists the “symbolic law,” but rather a “construction” that accompanies the law itself — the trace of a “past that was never present” as such, but only comes into being for the first time when it “returns.” Lacan touched on this difficulty in the “Rome Discourse” when he observed that the traumatic “event” is not an original “reality” (the “brute aspect of the trauma”) that might be located in the past, but a later condensation or “precipitation” of the subject, and that psychoanalysis is a science of “conjecture” in this precise sense, since it has to “construct” the object rather than simply “discover” it. Freud drew a similar conclusion about the peculiar, “conjectural” status of the prohibited object, when he observed that when primitive tribes are asked about their “taboos” and “prohibitions,” it is difficult to get a clear grasp on the “object” that is prohibited, since every account “always already” falls back on symbolic “rituals” and other presentations that amount to misrepresentation. As Freud remarks in his brilliantly offhand way, these “primitive” cultures are in fact “already very ancient civilizations.”

     

    The “taboo object” is not a thing that is itself dangerous or contaminating, but a representation, a symbolic form, a ritualized displacement of a terror that, in itself, remains “unknown” and “obscure,” like the nodal point of the dream. Thus, when we ask about the “reason” for the prohibition — why this particular thing has been chosen as the forbidden act or object — we reach what we might call an “original displacement.” In Lacanian terms, the taboo object is a veil thrown over a void. This brings us to the strictest definition of the prohibition: what is “prohibited” is actually “impossible” or “originally lost,” but the prohibition produces the illusion of a possible possession — either in a mythical past, or in a promised future. The prohibition (and perhaps morality as well) thus reveals its status as a veil: we pretend to “restrict ourselves,” or to elaborate ethical standards of “civilization,” in order to “refuse” what is in fact unavailable — the very structure of the veil that Zizek sees in Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion to the Tractatus: “what we cannot speak of, we must leave in silence.” Why, it might be asked, is it necessary to prohibit what in fact cannot be said? Because “that is the law.” As Freud observes, the so-called “primitive” tribes make this “original displacement” especially clear: “even primitive people have not retained the original forms of those institutions nor the conditions which gave rise to them; so that we have nothing whatever but hypotheses to fall back upon, as a substitute for the observation which we are without” (SE 109). The prohibited “object” thus acquires a strictly mythical status: it is not a thing that was once possessed (in infancy or pre-history), but a thing that came into “existence” through the law, but as the lost object. The idea that this object was once possessed is strictly a retroactive fantasy — but an illusion that is inseparable from the symbolic order itself, and does not cease to have effects, even when its “non-existence” has been demonstrated. We must therefore recognize its “post-symbolic” status, but also do justice to its ability to create the “illusion” that this object derives from an “origin,” that it somehow “represents” a past which was once possessed (not only in the patient’s past, but also in the past that always haunts theoretical work as well, including psychoanalytic theories of “infancy,” “maternity,” and other “origins”).

     

    Notes

     

    1. Elsewhere in this issue, see Chris Semansky’s satirical allusion to this problem in “Youngest Brother of Brothers.” — Editor.

     

    Abbreviations

     

    SE: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et. al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953). 24 volumes. References will be by volume and page number.

     

    SZ: Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). References follow the pagination of the seventh (and subsequent) German editions, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1953), given marginally in the English text.

     

    E: Lacan, Jacques. Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). A portion of this volume has been translated as Écrits: A Selection, by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). References will be to the English edition.

     

    SVII: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992).

     

    SVIII: Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

     

    SXI: Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978).

     

    FS: Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985).

     

    T: “Television,” trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990).

     

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    • —. “Adaequatio Sexualis: Is There a Measure of Sexual Difference?” From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 447-73.
    • —. “History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan,” Postmodern Culture, 5:2 (January, 1995).
    • —. “The Epoch of the Body: Need, Demand and the Drive in Kojève and Lacan,” Perspectives on Embodiment: Essays from the NEH Institute at Santa Cruz, ed. Honi Haber and Gail Weiss, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
    • Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996).
    • Weber, Samuel. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).
    • Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do (New York: Verso, 1991).
    • —. Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

     

  • Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity’s Rainbow

    Wes Chapman

    Illinois Wesleyan University
    wchapman@titan.iwu.edu

     

     

    The title of Tania Modleski’s Feminism Without Women refers, Modleski explains, to a confluence of two political/intellectual trends: the subsumption of feminism within a “more comprehensive” field of gender studies, accompanied by the rise of a “male feminist perspective that excludes women,” and the dominance within feminist thought of an “anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term ‘woman,’ however ‘provisionally’ it is adopted, is disallowed” (14-15). The two trends are linked, Modleski argues, because “the rise of gender studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the tendendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of identity and the subject” (15). These trends are troubling for Modleski because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a “new phase” in feminism but rather feminism’s “phase-out” (5).

     

    My concern in this essay is with male-authored work on gender of the type identified by Modleski, and in particular with its intersections with anti-essentialism (which, for the purposes of this essay, I will define broadly as the belief that gender is socially constructed). Although not all male-authored gender criticism by men is radically anti-essentialist1, I believe that the confluence between anti-essentialism and male-authored work on gender exceeds mere theoretical justification. Anti-essentialism is both symptom and cause of a deep anxiety which I take to underlie much gender criticism written by men today, an anxiety about being a male subject in a society in which male subjectivity has been identified as a problem. On the one hand, an awareness of the social construction of the self can lead to a heightened anxiety in men about gender, as it implies an awareness of the complicity of male subjectivity with social structures which are oppressive to women. On the other hand, male anxiety about gender can encourage an anti-essentialist viewpoint, both because anti-essentialism appears to offers hope that positive changes in gender identity are possible and because anti-essentialism can diffuse personal responsibility by shifting the object of critique from the self to social codes which have “always already” constructed the self.

     

    In speaking in this way about “men,” “male subjectivity,” and the like, I am not at all presupposing that all men in contemporary culture are alike. I do think that the anxiety I am identifying is widespread, but it is not universal, and even for those men who feel such anxiety there are many ways to respond, including the direct backlash against feminism identified by Susan Faludi and others. My interest in this essay lies with a fairly narrow spectrum of men: those men who accept to some degree the charge that male subjectivity is a political problem of some kind — male anti-masculinists, for lack of a better term, since not all can be considered pro-feminist.2 I wish to explore the relationship between anti-masculinism and anti-essentialism in male authors and to determine whether anti-essentialism is a viable political strategy for male anti-masculinists. To this end I shall examine a text by a male writer, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, in which the relationship between an anxiety about gender and a anti-essentialist view of the self is particularly complex and revealing.3 I shall argue that, just as Modleski suggests, anti-essentialism in the novel does indeed serve to decenter women’s perspectives, and that, while anti-essentialism has been and still is an important part of pro-feminist men’s understanding of their gender identities, it is not a sufficient base for a politics which is not merely anti-masculinist but pro-feminist.

     

    Late in Gravity’s Rainbow, the narrator describes a culvert in the middle of a narrow road. There is a variety of graffiti in it from those who have taken shelter there, including a drawing of a man looking closely at a flower.

     

    In the distance, or smaller, appears to be a woman, approaching. Or some kind of elf, or something. The man isn't looking at her (or it). In the middle distance are haystacks. The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl. There is a luminary looking down from the sky, a face on it totally at peace, like the Buddha's. Underneath, someone else has written, in English: Good drawing! Finish! and underneath that, in another hand, It IS finished, you nit. And so are you. (GR 733)4

     

    Like everything else in Gravity’s Rainbow, the drawing resists rigid interpretation. The culvert where the drawing is found is the place where Geli Tripping will find Tchitcherine and turn him away from his obsessive quest to kill his half-brother Enzian; we could take the drawing as a foreshadowing of this event. In this interpretation, the man would be Tchitcherine, the flower would be Enzian (enzian is the German word, after all, for gentian-flower), and the elf-woman would be Geli, approaching to work her magic. If this interpretation is correct, then the drawing is a powerful symbol of the possibility for good in Pynchon’s universe, for Geli’s diversion of Tchitcherine is an important instance in the book where the power of love triumphs over a character’s obsession with destruction.

     

    But there are too many ominous signs in this drawing to be so hastily optimistic. Indeed, the drawing can be seen as an icon of the modern state as Pynchon sees it, where sexuality is brought into the service of a routinized, militaristic state. If the flower suggests the enzian or gentian flower, then the man’s intense attention to it is an ominous sign, for although the character of Enzian is presented sympathetically in the novel, his name was given to him by Blicero, the sadistic Captain in love with death, after “Rilke’s mountainside gentian of Nordic colors, brought down like a pure word to the valleys” (GR 101-2). In Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, the gentian is that which partakes of both the permanent transcendent world which continues beyond death and the physical earth; it is the “pure word” which is physical reality transformed within the human spirit (69). Blicero’s version of Rilke is more frankly sinister: he yearns to “leave this cycle of infection and death” by transforming the life which surrounds him into a “new Deathkingdom” — the military industrial technocracy which produces and fires the Rocket (GR 723-4). As Khachig Tololyan points out, too, Enzian was the name of an anti-aircraft rocket which German military scientists worked on but did not complete before the war ended (41). The flower, then, is an emblem of the routinized, labyrinthine “structures favoring death” that the novel protests, of which Blicero is first patriarch.

     

    The Buddha figure in the sky, too, is an ill omen within the novel’s world. Earlier in the novel Slothrop sees some figures in the sky, “hundreds of miles tall,” which stand impassive like the Buddha5; these are quickly associated with the Angel that the narrator describes as standing over Lubeck on the Palm Sunday raid, one of the massive bombing raids on Germany which prompted the Germans to retaliate with the V-1 (214-215). This raid is figured as a scene of willing submission to sexual violence: “sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lubeck,” says the narrator, “was the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s” (215). The luminary smiling so benevolently upon this scene, then, is one of the malignant cosmic entities in the novel which look on with indifference as human energies are brought into the service of death.

     

    The Buddha has other disturbing connotations within the iconology of the novel as well: the amoral unification of subject and object which is the aim of Zen Buddhism becomes a metaphor for submission to the all-subsuming technology of the rocket. When a problem arises in the design of the rocket, Fahringer, one of the technicians at Peenemunde, takes his Zen bow into the woods to practice drawing and loosing.

     

    The Rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one with Rocket, trajectory, and target -- "not to will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of the firer. The act is undivided. You are both aggressor and victim . . ." (GR 403)

     

    If human beings have stepped out of the role of firer, then the rocket has begun to fire itself, according to its own needs; technocracy has grown so far out of control that it no longer seems to serve human motives at all. The Buddha in the culvert scene thus again suggests the surrender of the personal and human to the technocracy, to Blicero’s “structures favoring death.”

     

    Finally, the caption of the drawing also suggests this movement towards death. Finish! urges the first hand. But the desire to finish, to close down, is shown in the novel to lead to determinism or death: Pointsman’s obsession with the ultimate mechanical explanation and its determinism are a way of finishing the process of understanding; Blicero’s “mission to promote death” is an attempt to be finished with death by somehow transcending it. The second writer acknowledges this: “It IS finished . . . And so are you.”

     

    The political critique of this passage has two objects. Insofar as the flower is associated with Blicero and the rocket, the passage is a critique of a technology of war which is so far out of control that it seems to be serving purposes of its own, and of the routinization of society which makes that technology possible. But it is also a critique — and this is my main concern here — of the masculinist patterns of thinking which provide such a system its driving force. If, as Tchitcherine suggests, the great problem of the state is to “get other people to die for you” (GR 701), then one effective way to accomplish this is to sexualize the machinery of death. The state is therefore dependent on a masculinist coding of sexuality such that all its citizens will respond sexually to a scenario of dominance and submission. Hence the grotesque eroticism of the Rocket: “fifty feet high, trembling . . . and then the fantastic, virile roar . . . Cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky . . . Oh, so phallic” says Thanatz (GR 465). Paradoxically, this emblem of sexual violence and death promises a kind of eternal life, by transforming (in good Rilkean fashion) nature, where death and decay are the normal course of things, into something not in nature’s sphere. This transformation is also figured as sexual conquest: “Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature . . .” (GR 324).

     

    One of the mechanisms by which the System assures a sexual response to the rocket is pornography. In the culvert scene, the flower, shaped like a young girl’s genitals, is an icon of pornography, and thus the deflection of sexuality from human partner to an economy of objectified images. The man in the drawing is oblivious to the woman in the background; he is wholly absorbed in the sexual image of the flower. The state is dependent upon this deflection of sexuality; “AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN,” run the slogans on the walls in the Zone (GR 155). To love is to want to live, and to care for others; neither emotion is useful to the state, the great need of which has “always been getting other people to die for you.” Pornography is one of the War’s diversionary tactics, a means of drawing sexuality into its own service. As Vanya says of the slogan AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN,

     

    It's true . . . look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction -- ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer -- all these novels, these films and these songs that they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort. . . . The self-induced orgasm. (GR 155)

     

    The masturbator, physical or emotional, is the ideal citizen: isolated from others by the steady stream of images which seems to be available for every need — not only sexual needs, but spiritual (“pornographies of Christian love”), aesthetic (“pornographies of sunsets”), and intellectual (“ah, that sigh when we guess the murderer”) — he or she is unlikely to form the bonds with other people which threaten the effectiveness of the “structures favoring death” by affirming the value of life.

     

    Pornography, then, is for Pynchon a means by which the state wields power over its citizens at the micropolitical level. As such, it is also an important factor in the formation of sexual identity, particularly male sexual identity.6 “Pornography is this society’s running commentary on the sexual for me,” writes Stephen Heath (3). In the novelistic universe of Gravity’s Rainbow, this is so thoroughly true that pornography seems to be specially tailored to every citizen. When Pirate Prentice, for instance, receives via rocket military orders written in an ink which requires an application of sperm to be visible, he finds included with the message a pornographic picture which has anticipated all of his private sexual preferences:

     

    The woman is a dead ringer for [Pirate's former lover] Scorpia Mossmoon. The room is one they talked about but never saw . . . a De Mille set really, slender and oiled girls in attendance . . . Scorpia sprawled among fat pillows wearing exactly the corselette of Belgian lace, the dark stockings and shoes he daydreamed about often enough but never -- No, of course, he never told her. He never told anyone. Like every young man growing up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty . . . how else would They know? (GR 71-2)

     

    There is a vicious political cycle operating here. On the one hand, Pirate Prentice’s complicity with the “structures favoring death” is assured by his response to the sexualization of those structures (he literally gets his orders by ejaculating on Their exciting new military equipment). On the other hand, his sexuality has been conditioned by the images which They have been providing him all his life. For Thomas Pynchon as for Oscar Wilde, life imitates art; the several discourses of society — movies, books, opera, popular music, etc. — create those who consume them. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Von Göll’s propaganda film about black troops in Germany precedes reports from Germany about the Schwarzkommando, as if the film had literally given life to the people. The gang-rape scene from Alpdrücken spawns shadow-children, both the literal flesh and blood kind like Ilse and a series of replays: Margherita Erdmann, continuing her history of becoming the roles she plays, replays the scene with Slothrop, who in turn finds that “someone has already educated him” in the fine art of sexual cruelty (GR 395-6).

     

    Social-constructionist theories of this type can be articulated in a number of ways. A pure anti-essentialist position holds that there is no “natural” self or “natural” order whatsoever, that identity is entirely constituted by discourse and that the concept of the “natural” is merely another social construction. A more Romantic position holds that there is a natural self or a natural order, but that selves are made over in unnatural forms by a unhealthy society. Pynchon’s version has elements of both. An important figure of the “natural” in Gravity’s Rainbow is the image of the Titans, an “overpeaking of life” from “the World just before men” (720), prehuman, pre-social, as originary as Rousseau’s Nature. Humanity is described as being “Counter-revolutionaries” against this force, “nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising.” But humanity is “only nearly as strong” as the Titans, because “a few keep going over to the Titans every day,” go to see “all the presences we are not supposed to be seeing — wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods — that we train ourselves away from to keep from looking further even though enough of us do. . . .” (GR 720). Thus a “natural order” seems to provide a rallying point for the rebellion against the routinized technocrary of Blicero’s “structures favoring death”; in general the image of the Titans, and nature generally, is invested with a powerful charge of political nostalgia and political hope.

     

    But Pynchon undercuts the political value of the “natural” even as he maintains it. Nature may contest the dominance of the “structures favoring death,” but we perceive and understand nature only through social discourses — and social discourses are ideological. Thus the Titans have an ambiguous resonance in the novel: on the one hand, they are associated with the “overpeaking of life” that predates death-obsessed humanity, but they also bring to mind the space helmets at the Mittelwerke (the helmets “appear to be fashioned from skulls . . . perhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms,” GR 296-7); the image of the Titans thus suggests technological militarism as well as vital nature. How one sees is crucial, and Pynchon never allows the reader an extra-ideological perspective from which to see. For example, the language of the passage quoted above seems to imply that we can see the “wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods” of nature, if we cease to “train ourselves away” from them, and that we can “leave Their electric voices behind”; in short, that Nature will indeed offer a moment of redemptive vision. But that vision turns out to be highly ambiguous; it is a vision of “Pan — leaping — its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful Serpent, its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky — into the sure bones of fright –” (GR 720-1). The Serpent recalls Kekule’s famous (or, in Pynchon’s universe, infamous) dream of the benzene ring, which Pynchon implicates in the rise of the German military-industrial complex (GR 412); the rainbow recalls the parabola of the Rocket. Moreover, in a typical Pynchonian narrative shift, the character through whose consciousness we experience this ambiguous vision changes over the course of the passage. It seems at the beginning of the passage to be Geli Tripping, the young witch whose magic is life affirming; as Marjorie Kaufman puts it, “Geli Tripping’s nurture is clearly special and specialized; open to every natural and supernatural force of the universe, loving, ‘World-choosing,’ her magic is some antique survival, come undiluted from the fruitful past” (GR 204-5). But by the end of the passage the vision has become Gottfried’s, who, as Blicero’s lover and willing victim, the chosen passenger of the 00000, is firmly headed toward the Deathkingdom; he has turned away from whatever the Titans might have to say to him. More importantly, so have we, by virtue of the position the narrative puts us in: we approach the narrative with Geli and turn away with Gottfried, never to know exactly how the vision has been co-opted. Thus there are traces of the Romantic quest for revelation from nature in Gravity’s Rainbow, but the reader perceives the “natural” only through a constantly shifting series of perspectives and discourses.

     

    The theory of ideology which is implied by Pynchon’s qualified anti-essentialism can only be described as paranoid: the very complexity of the involvement in oppressive structures which is implied by an identity constructed or conditioned by discourse argues for some sort of hidden design. Much of the comedy in the pornographic scene sent to Pirate Prentice, for example, comes from its absurd specificity — the De Mille set, the corselette of Belgian lace. Horrified that his most personal desires have been co-opted into the service of the state, Prentice can only wonder paranoically if They have monitored everything that he saw and read since puberty. Paranoia has enormous political significance in Gravity’s Rainbow, for it implies an acute awareness of the self within larger political processes. Paranoia is not only, in Pynchon’s words, “the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected” (GR 703), it is also a recognition of the place of the self within that constellation of connections: everything is connected, and it is connected to me. This is partly a sense of persecution, but just as importantly it is a recognition of complicity, of being used. For instance, the elaborate system of sexual coding implied by the pornographic drawing sent to Pirate Prentice seems to be designed not to destroy him, at least not immediately, but rather to use him; and the depth and complexity of Prentice’s complicity in the War can only be measured by imagining paranoically that “They (They?) have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty.” Slothrop’s paranoid quest for the Mystery Stimulus, too, is a way of acting out an anxiety about complicity in oppressive structures: in searching for information about who or what or how he somehow has been conditioned to respond sexually to the Rocket, he is in a sense asking about how he came to be coded sexually as he has been, how he himself has been written by the codes of dominance and submission. He finds no answers, just an infinite series of connections that do not add up to a coherent narrative. He cannot see the source of his coding as a male, because there is no outside point from which to see it: that coding is quite literally himself.

     

    What the novel offers as political praxis, then, cannot be a disentanglement from masculinism, for that would be an attempt to step outside of language and the self. Rather, what the novel offers is a disruption of coding in general — a failure of coherence, a breakdown in the narrative. I began my reading of the drawing by noting that it does have an optimistic interpretation, that it can be interpreted as a foreshadowing of Tchitcherine’s diversion from his quest to kill Enzian. By conventional standards, the story of Tchitcherine ends in anti-climax (pun intended). We expect, after hundreds of pages of build-up, that the hunter shall either find the hunted, or alternatively be killed by the hunted; that’s the way hunting tales are supposed to go. Instead, Tchitcherine simply fails to recognize Enzian, begs from him cigarettes and potatoes, and passes by him on the road (734-735). The novel here, by defying our expectations of what stories are like, in effect denies our own desires as readers to “finish” the story; it says, in a sense, “it is finished, and so are you.” In this way the novel mocks the masculinist coding that we ourselves bring to the novel — our desire for that moment of “redemptive” violence (whether the hunter’s or the hunted’s makes no difference) which resolves all suspense, ties up loose ends, and leaves us with an illusion of control. Similarly, to read the drawing as a foreshadowing of this redemptive anti-climax requires that we ourselves will disrupt our masculinist patterns of reading, that we avoid subduing the text, forcing it to a single interpretation or a conventional expectation.

     

    Pynchon’s politics of disruption is, up to a point, analagous to the politics of parody espoused by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. In this rigorously anti-essentialist text, Butler argues that a feminist politics does not require a concept of a subject as the agent of political change in order to be effective. Arguing that the subject is an effect of signification, and signification is a “regulated process of repetition” (145), Butler claims that new identities are possible, and only possible, by a process of “subversive repetition” (146):

     

    If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e. new possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes of heirarchical binarisms, then it is only within the process of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible. (145)

     

    Pynchon’s rewriting of cultural codes, a replication-with-a-difference similar to the “repetitive signifying” advocated by Butler, also implies a “subversion of identity.” The narrative of Slothrop’s quest for identity, for example, does not end, as we feel such a quest story should, with a climactic realization, but with his gradual dispersal until he is “scattered all over the Zone” (GR 712). As Molly Hite puts it,

     

    Slothrop has lost his identity; he is no longer a unified character. However unsettling this outcome may be, one implication is that he has escaped control, for it his phallocentric identity that has "placed" him in the apocalyptic pattern. . . . He [has become] radically uncentered, a fate that brings him to the opposite extreme of his initial characterization as a personified penis. (118-9)

     

    The analogy between Butler’s parody and Pynchon’s extends only so far, however, because of the differences between their cultural positions. Butler is a lesbian feminist; the “subversive repetition” she has in mind is drag, which, “[i]n imitating gender . . . implicitly reveals the imitative nature of gender itself — as well as its contingency” (137). But this reading of drag applies only within its cultural context. A straight male who, in the company of other men, dresses up in women’s clothes in mockery of women is surely reinforcing the “naturalness” of gender roles within that circle of men by emphasizing the Otherness of women. Butler acknowledges this when she writes that “[p]arody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (139). I would argue that one of the most significant factors in deciding whether repetitions subvert or reinforce the status quo is the cultural context of the act of repetition, including the cultural position of the person performing the repetition. The drag performer, by subverting codes of gender and sexuality, opens up a space for an alternate sexual identity disallowed by hegemonic culture. The performer brings a particular sexual history to the performance, and thus is prepared to occupy the space consituted in the act of performance. But what cultural space is opened up by a performance of subversive repetition by a straight male, whose identity is thoroughly legitimated by the hegemonic culture? The space which straight men are prepared to occupy by their sexual histories is simply their usual cultural positions. This is why Slothrop must simply disperse at the end of the novel; as power operates in and through his identity, and there is no alternate identity for him to occupy, his only political recourse is to cease to occupy any subject position whatsoever. What R.W. Connell calls “exit politics” — the attempt “to oppose patriarchy and . . . to exit from the worlds of hegemonic and complicit masculinity” (220) — is imaginable only if there is an alternate state or position to which to exit.

     

    Non-existence is not a viable subject position, so the novel’s necessarily incomplete rewriting of masculinism cannot help but reduplicate the masculinist ones it renounces. Thanatz and Blicero we might expect to revel in the imagery of sexual sadism, but it is the narrator who describes the Rocket as a system “won . . . away from the feminine darkness,” the narrator who describes the RAF raid as the look which says “hurry up and fuck me.” It is as if the novel is protesting a gender coding which it has itself set up. This is, I would argue, exactly what it is doing, quite self-consciously; the point is precisely that the coding of sexuality and gender that ensures our complicity in oppression are not “out there” somewhere, apart from us, but inside ourselves. Eschewing the possibility of ever standing outside of ideology, the novel can only gesture to a position outside the problem, a position which it cannot itself imagine, by a kind of masculinist gigantism which reveals its own absurdity. The technic of the novel is like the male minstrel shows Roger Mexico and Seaman Bodine give at the end of the novel in which they belt each other with “gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises, cunningly detailed, all in natural color. . . . Seems people can be reminded of Titans and fathers, and laugh . . .” (GR 708).

     

    This masculinist gigantism can is by no means self-evidently pro-feminist. Gravity’s Rainbow often reads like a male fantasy gone out of control: the phalli are a little too large, the female characters too eager to bed down with Slothrop, the victims of sadists far too eager about their own pain.7 And because the narrative doesn’t offer final readings, it is never quite clear how much really is mockery or disruption and how much is the residue of real assumptions about gender. These exaggerations self-consciously invite a feminist critique, from an outsider’s perspective. But the novel itself does not supply that critique; it can only inflate or dislocate the discourses of its own crimes, and so at once gesture to a newly written self and reduplicate an old and tiresome one.

     

    That this politics of discourse may tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism is suggested by the one direct and I think suggestive reference in the novel to a contemporary feminist, M. F. Beal.8 Felipe, one of the Argentinian exiles, makes “noontime devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock” which, he believes, “embodies . . . an intellectual system, for [Felipe] believes (as do M.F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals” (GR 612). M. F. Beal was (or is) a friend of Pynchon’s, author of two novels, Amazon One and Angel Dance, several stories, and Safe House: A Casebook of Revolutionary Feminism in the 1970’s. David Seed, who has written most about the relationship of Pynchon and Beal, explains that the reference to Beal in Gravity’s Rainbow refers to a conversation that Pynchon and Beal had about “the limits of sentience” (227): “Beal implicitly humanized the earth’s mantle (containing of course rocks and minerals) by drawing an analogy with skin. . . . ” (32) In effect, Beal was espousing what we would now call a Gaia philosophy9; as Seed writes, “[i]f there is such a thing as mineral consciousness then the earth’s crust becomes a living mantle and man becomes a part (a small part) of a living continuum instead of being defined against an inert environment” (227). There is a version of this belief in “mineral consciousness” in Safe House:

     

    Only recently have a few modern men begun to learn anything about life and what they are learning is that the only difference from the point of view of chemistry between living and non-living substances is their ability to reproduce themselves. (86)

     

    As in her discussions with Pynchon, Beal here minimizes the distinction between plants and animals on the one hand and “non-living” beings like minerals; if the “only difference” between them is the ability to reproduce, then in other ways they are the same (so, perhaps, rocks are sentient, as Beal had argued to Pynchon earlier).

     

    One tenet of Gaia philosophy is that the Earth acts as a conscious organism to protect itself. In Safe House, Beal speculates that one mechanism by which the Earth might be trying to protect itself is what she calls a “strategic retreat” — the possibility that “adult women given the choice will choose to live without [men] — to eat, sleep, work, rear children and dwell without them” (87) — in other words, female separatism. Beal wonders whether the contemporary urge toward separatism might be not just a conscious choice by particular women but a manifestation of some larger biological necessity:

     

    Could it be that we are witnessing an unfathomably significant genetic reflex for species survival? Could it be that the DNA code has been triggered by some inscrutable biological alarm system from the threat of male violence and annihilation? Could it be that this is some ancient reoccurring pattern which has activated female response over the millennia to withdraw, to protect and defend themselves and their progeny? (87)

     

    For Beal, man has turned away from the earth to “violence and annihilation,” just as for Pynchon humanity has turned away from the Titans to the “structures favoring death.” But for Beal, this turning away is specifically coded according to gender; the “man” in the previous sentence refers to men, not to humanity. Conversely, women are a key part of the Earth’s counter-struggle: the earth is triggering in women, who are open to the message of survival because they “have always known all things are alike and precious,” a “genetic reflex for species survival,” which consists of a disentanglement from “male violence and annihilation.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, the genderedness of Beal’s vision is lost; the Titans in Greek mythology were half male and half female.

     

    Safe House was published in 1976, three years after Gravity’s Rainbow, so it is impossible to be certain whether Beal had in fact worked out within a specifically feminist framework the belief in “mineral consciousness” which Pynchon attributes to her. But it seems to me likely that she had, or at least likely that Beal was a feminist by that point, and that that feminism was part of her discussions with Pynchon. If the critique of masculinism in Gravity’s Rainbow was influenced by Beal, then we can see the novel a kind of appropriation and recentering of feminism; Pynchon subordinates his critique of masculinism to a critique of militarism, and in so doing defuses the genderedness of his subject. Within the play of pluralized discourses in the novel, none of them privileged, none of them untainted by the structures of power, the issue of gender is subsumed within the issue of gender discourses. But if everyone is trapped within masculinist discourse, then masculinism is not a problem of men at all; it is a role one takes on or steps out of, as Greta Erdmann steps so easily out of the role of masochist in Alpdrücken and into the role of sadist with Bianca.

     

    That this dispersal of responsibility may serve to conceal rather than challenge gender roles is made particularly apparent by those passages where the novel addresses the reader directly, for, as Bernard Duyfhuizen points out, the “you” to whom the narrator speaks is male or male-identified.10 For example, the narrator addresses the reader at one point as a viewer of a pornographic movie:

     

    Of all her putative fathers . . . Bianca is . . . closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker . . . She favors you, most of all. (GR 472)

     

    The word you in this passage, as throughout the book, disallows the reader any distance from the objectifying, abusive attitudes which it critiques. But to the extent that this passage and others like it assume that the narrative’s you and we include everyone, it falsifies the actual positions of men and women with respect to social discourses. I doubt very much that many female readers can feel comfortable identifying with the “you” who says “count me in” and “probably some hooker.” Men are by far the greater consumers of pornography; men constitute by far the larger proportion of rapists and sexual abusers; women are far more frequently the victims of rape and sexual abuse. “We” may all have been at the movies, as the narrator says, but we have been watching different shows, and more importantly have watching the shows from quite different cultural positions. Gravity’s Rainbow conceals this positionality with its dizzying profusion of discourses; what Susan Bordo calls the postmodern “dream of being everywhere” collapses in key moments to a “view from nowhere” which is in fact a male-centered view (143).

     

    One of the values of anti-essentialist theories for pro-feminist men has been their ability to provide pro-feminists with a critical distance from their own subjectivities, and thus to help make visible and problematic what has been transparent. The masculinist gigantism of Gravity’s Rainbow serves this end well, writing out in extra large letters the cultural codes that form male gender identities. But the example of Gravity’s Rainbow also shows that while an awareness of the social construction of gender may be necessary condition for the disruption of this transparent male-centeredness, it is not a sufficient condition. Post-modern moves to decenter the self, to argue that the self is nothing more than an interweaving of “larger” discourses, can marginalize women’s issues quite as easily as the most traditional of humanisms. Male pro-feminists must take account of the power of social discourses to constrain, define and constitute identity, but at the same time, they must take account of their position within social discourses, as members of a particular gender, class, race, geographic region, religion or creed, educational background, age, language, etc.

     

    Judith Butler argues that the “etc.” at the end of such a list of positions is a “sign of exhaustion as well as the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplement, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all” (Gender 143). I don’t disagree with this, but the key phrase here, in my opinion, is “once and for all.” It is surely true that identity cannot be posited once and for all; words such “woman,” “man,” “straight,” “gay,” “middle class,” etc. are all totalizations of massively complex sets of practices, discourses and conditions which are not self-identical even within a particular culture at a particular time and are still less so when viewed historically and cross-culturally. These sites of instability are, as Butler makes clear both in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, potential sites of subversion and democratization, and the task of thinking beyond the limits of these terms, whether by deconstruction or redefinition, must continue. Yet if these terms cannot be fixed, nevertheless they can and must be deployed, because they continue to deploy us. Butler herself makes this argument cogently in Bodies That Matter: “. . . it remains politically necessary to lay claim to ‘women,’ ‘queer,’ ‘gay,’ and ‘lesbian,’ precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing” (229). Here too, the differences in subject position matter considerably. The context for this remark is a discussion of the affirmative resignification of “queer”; “men” and “male,” while surely in need of resignification, hardly need the same kind. But the claim that masculinity and male privilege has on men, “prior to our full knowing,” must also be acknowledged, not to fix male identity but to identify clearly what is at stake in it. As Michael Kaufman reminds us, what is most important in thinking about gender is not “the prescription of certain roles and the proscription of others,” but rather that “it is a description of actual social relations of power between males and females and the internalizations of these relations of power” (144).

     

    Gravity’s Rainbow also shows, I think, the limits of a pro-feminist politics based too exclusively on anti-essentialist theories. Simply to disperse one’s identity throughout the cultural fabric, as Slothrop does in the end of the novel, is not a viable alternative; nor is it adequate simply to gesture to the complicity of one’s own identity in oppressive structures. Ultimately, pro-feminist men need to work towards positive subjectivities which neither co-opt feminism nor revel masochistically in self-abasement,11 but reconcile self-fulfillment with recognition of women as subjects. Because these are subjectivities which must be lived as well as theorized, the complexity of factors which make up subjectivity cannot be accounted a single theory, whether essentialist or constructionist; it is always necessary to deploy a number of ways of seeing even to negotiate, much less account for, such complexity. My last point, then, is that some of those ways of seeing require a notion of self, of personal identity. Such a notion need not be essentialist, in the sense of supposing that there is some self which pre-exists and is outside of social discourses. But we must find a way to speak not only of constructed selves and signification but also of personal motives and individual responsibility, kindness or self-deception, housework and personal relationships. No single discourse will be adequate to the task.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For example, Victor Seidler is openly hostile to post- structuralist theories of gender construction, in part because they make it difficult for men to “recognize the poverty of one’s experiences and relationships,” discounting the very category of experience as “exclusively a construction of language or discourse” (xii-xiii).

     

    2. In the introduction to Against the Tide, Michael Kimmel distinguishes among three kinds of response to feminism: anti-feminist, masculinist, and pro-feminist (9-15). These categories, I would argue, are useful for characterizing direct male responses to feminism, but require the addition of an additional category, that of anti-masculinist, to take account of indirect responses to and appropriations of feminism, such as Pynchon’s. Feminism has entered into men’s consciousness in subtle and concealed ways; the results have often been positions which call for a redefinition or repudiation of masculinity but which are not necessarily feminist. For discussion of an early example, see my “Blake’s Visions and Revisions of a Daughter of Albion,” forthcoming in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly.

     

    3. The male-authored texts Modleski discusses date from the 1980’s, but I see this particular era of “feminism without women” as part of movement with longer historical roots. (In my discussion below, I will mention only texts which respond to or appropriate the most recent wave of feminism and thus fall approximately into the same historical moment as the texts discussed by Modleski, but texts by writers such as William Blake and James Joyce can be seen as examples of the same phenomenon associated with earlier feminist movements.) Early Men’s Liberation texts such as Warren Farrell’s The Liberated Man (1974) and Jack Nichols’ Men’s Liberation (1975), roughly contemporary with Gravity’s Rainbow, are predicated on the assumption that gender is socially constructed, and are suffused with an anxiety about gender (sometimes in the form of overcompensation, as when Farrell attempts to negate the idea that “women’s liberations is a threat to men (italics in original) by outlining “twenty-one specific areas in which men can benefit from what is now called women’s liberation” 175). Texts like these, along with writings by Derrida and Lacan (for discussion of whose appropriation of “woman” see Heath 4, 6-7), are important male-authored pretexts for the outpouring of male gender criticism in the 1980’s. Jonathan Culler’s “Reading as a Woman” in On Deconstruction (a text which does not seem to me to reveal significant gender anxiety) is the earliest Anglo-American male-authored text I know of (besides Pynchon’s) which deconstructs gender. Jardine and Smith’s Men in Feminism (1987), some essays of which are discussed by Modleski, was a high point of male self-consciousness of gender anxiety, focusing to a considerable degree on the “impossibility” of men’s relationship with feminism identified by Stephen Heath in “Male Feminism” (1984) and on women’s skepticism towards male feminism, exemplified by Elaine Showalter’s “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year” (1983). This “impossibility” is discounted by Joseph A. Boone in “Of Me(n) and Feminism: Who(se) is the Sex That Writes,” the opening essay in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (1990), a volume which, aside from the opening and closing essays, consists not of feminist criticism but of male-centered gender criticism. The distinction is made clearly in Claridge and Langland’s Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism (1990), despite that volume’s origin in an MLA panel called “Male Feminist Voices.” Although in general male gender critics have followed this trend away from feminist criticism toward gender criticism, issues of gender anxiety still resurface in such texts as Roger Horrock’s Masculinity in Crisis (1994) and R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (1995).

     

    4. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 733. References to Gravity’s Rainbow are cited in the text, abbreviated GR.

     

    5. Slothrop and Geli Tripping also create huge shadow-figures in the sky when they stand (and dance, and make love) on the Brocken at sunrise (I am indebted to Molly Hite for making the connection between this scene and the impassive figures associated with the Palm Sunday raid). As are so many scenes which feature Geli, this is a scene of ambiguous possibility; Geli and Slothrop in effect occupy the same position as the Palm Sunday bombers, but within that position they make love, they attend to their own pleasure rather than the needs of Blicero’s deathkingdom. This ambiguity is reinforced by the passage’s reference to Titans, an image the ambivalent political value of which I will discuss below. Clearly the impassive figures in the sky, angels of death though they may be, are not all-powerful, even if their influence is inescapable.

     

    6. See “Against the Avant: Pynchon’s Products, Pynchon’s Pornographies” in Marginal Forces/Culture Centers: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon, in which, reading Pynchonian pornographies as a form of “anamnesia,” Michael Berube also argues that pornographies are crucial in forming and controlling sexual identities (252-255).

     

    7. I am implicitly disagreeing here, albeit mildly, with Marjorie Kaufman’s conclusions in “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow,” surprisingly one of the few critical works on this novel to use an explicitly feminist methodology. Kaufman takes issue with a letter by Adrienne Rich which asks, “What are the themes of domination and enslavement, prurience and idealism, male physical perfection and death, ‘control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort,’ ‘the turning of people into things.’ . . . the objectification of the body as separate from the emotions — what are these but masculinist, virilist, patriarchal values?” (225). Kaufman replies that “If what Ms. Rich means is that male-oriented literature supports those ‘themes’ as positive values, then Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow can be read as a thinly disguised treatise written to support the views of radical feminism and its analyses of ‘patriarchal history’ and ‘patriarchal society’” (225). She continues on to say that “such a reading commits violence to the novel,” asserting that “Ms. Rich’s conflation of events turns the complex world into a simplistic dogma of sexual means and ends” (225). While I agree that an image must be read in a particular context, and that the political valence of an image can be complex, I don’t find it “simplistic” to ask whether a preponderance of masculinist images carries a load of political baggage regardless of how any individual image is used or undercut.

     

    8. Given the scarcity of biographical data on Pynchon, it is difficult to identify precisely just how indebted Pynchon was intellectually to the feminist movements of the 1960’s. Although Beal is the only feminist directly identified, I suspect that Pynchon’s debts to the feminist movement were both broad and deep, for there were several feminists interested, as Pynchon was, in the confluence of sexuality and militarism. A few well-known examples: in the “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto,” Valerie Solanis lists a series of crimes for which the male, because of his “obsession to compensate for not being female” is responsible; the first of these is “War” (578). In “No More Miss America!,” woman’s objectification as sex symbol is linked directly with the military: “The highlight of [Miss America’s] reign each year is a cheerleader-tour of American troops abroad-last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit. . . . The Living Bra and the Dead Soldier” (586). The fact that Geli Tripping is a witch may allude to the “phenomenon” (the word is Robin Morgan’s, 603) of WITCH, a loose collection of feminist groups or perhaps simply a style of feminism of the late 1960’s. As for other feminist groups of the time, for the WITCH covens patriarchy, militarism, and economic exploitation were interlinked; thus the Washington D.C. WITCH coven hexed “the United Fruit Company’s oppressive policy on the Third World and on secretaries in its offices at home (‘Bananas and rifles, sugar and death,/ War for profit, tarantulas’ breath/ United Fruit makes lots of loot/ The CIA is in its boot’)” (Morgan 604, Morgan’s emphasis). Gravity’s Rainbow does not directly allude to the documents identified above, and Pynchon may never have read them. However, they show that some of the gender issues that Pynchon was interested in were current in feminist circles at the time; Pynchon, presumably living within some kind of countercultural network at the time, could have been exposed to these issues from similar sources. If this is so, then what I identify later in this essay as a marginalization of women’s issues is all the more acute.

     

    9. I am indebted to Stuart Moulthrop for making this connection.

     

    10. I am indebted to Molly Hite for pointing out to me the implicit maleness of the “you” in the novel, but see Bernard Duyfhuizen’s “A Suspension Forever at the hinge of Doubt: The Reader-Trap of Bianca in Gravity’s Rainbow.”

     

    11. Modleski, discussing the masochistic element in some male feminist criticism, notes that the masochist does not necessarily cede power to the punitive mother nor call into disrupt the hidden power of the law of the father (69-74).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Beal, M.F., and friends.  Safe House: A Casebook of Revolutionary Feminism in the 1970’s. Eugene, OR: Northwest Matrix, 1976.
    • Berube, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.
    • Boone, Joseph A. “Of Me(n) and Feminism: Who(se) is the Sex That Writes.” In Boone and Cadden, 11-25.
    • —, and Michael Cadden. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Post-modernism, and Gender-Skepticism.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.
    • —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Chapman, Wes. “Blake’s Visions and Revisions of a Daughter of Albion.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (forthcoming).
    • Claridge, Laura, and Elizabeth Langland. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990.
    • Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
    • Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
    • Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
    • Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt: The Reader-Trap of Bianca in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Postmodern Culture 2.1 (1991): 37 pars. Online. WWW.
    • Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1991.
    • Farrell, Warren. The Liberated Man, Beyond Masculinity: Freeing Men and Their Relationships with Women. New York: Random, 1974.
    • Heath, Stephen. “Male Feminism.” Dalhousie Review 64.2 (Summer 1984): 70-101. Rpt. in short form in Jardine and Smith, 1-32 (page refs. are to this volume).
    • Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
    • Horrocks, Roger. Masculinity in Crisis. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.
    • Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • Kaufman, Marjorie. “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow.” In Clerc, 197-227.
    • Kaufman, Michael. “Men, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power.” Theorizing Masculinities. Ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. 142-163.
    • Kimmel, Michael S., and Thomas E. Mosmiller. Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States 1776-1990. Boston: Beacon, 1992.
    • Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Morgan, Robin. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage-Random, 1970.
    • Nichols, Jack. Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity. New York: Penguin, 1975.
    • “No More Miss America!” In Morgan 584-7.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961.
    • Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988.
    • Seidler, Victor J. Recreating Sexual Politics: Men, Feminism and Politics. London: Routledge, 1991.
    • Showalter, Elaine. “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year.” Raritan 3:2 (Fall 1983). Rpt. in Jardine and Smith, 116-132.
    • Solanis, Valerie. “The SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.” Excerpted in Morgan, 577-583.
    • Tololyan, Khachig. “War as Background in Gravity’s Rainbow.” In Clerc, 31-67.

     

  • Disney and the Imagineering of Histories

    Scott Schaffer

    Programme in Social and Political Thought
    York University
    sschaffe@yorku.ca

     

    Recently, the Walt Disney Company abandoned its plans to develop an American history theme park near Manassas, Virginia, the site of a major battle during the American Civil War. Part of the reason for this decision, according to the company, was that the citizens of Manassas and surrounding areas had fought the development of the theme park, claiming that the “true” history of not only the Civil War, but also of all of America, would not be told there. At the same time, The Globe and Mail reviewed Disney’s new live-action film, Squanto, stating that it was historically inaccurate; however, as the Globe notes, “history is written by the winners, and you can’t get much more victorious than Daddy Disney” (5 November 1994, p. C14). It is surprising that these are some of the first public, i.e. non-academic, protests against Disney’s perversion of local histories in the creation of its products, as this process is the entire basis of the Disney Company’s corporate production. That is, the Walt Disney Company co-opts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the Company’s own, and sells them to Disney’s customers as markers of American political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. This co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the Disney Company’s products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the “Small World” of the Disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the Disney Company’s transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify American imperial power.

     

    The first section of this paper will explore how the animated films of the Walt Disney Company (WDC) treat local stories and histories as fodder for “‘the rapacious strip-miner’ in the goldmine of legend and myth,’” (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18) and attempt to sell those who have their stories taken a perception that they are supposed to have of themselves — that of the cultural Other of America. To do this, I argue that WDC appropriates local stories, reinscribes them in the discourse of American imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, and sells the stories to all as portrayals of American cultural and political Others, revising old stereotypes in the current terms of American imperial expansion. I then argue, in the second section, that this reinscription process deprives the stories of their particular local geographies, and allows them to therefore be coopted and placed in ahistorical, ageographical ways in the creation of the Disney theme parks. This, in effect, allows WDC to set up representations of the world in the way that Disney would have wanted to see it — as an allegorical representation of the power of the United States. Hence, the guiding metaphor for the Disney theme parks is the ride, “It’s a Small World,” where all the “children” of the world are brought together in one place to sing the annoying song of cultural imperialism, all brought to you by Bank of America. In the third section of this paper, I turn to the way in which this cultural hegemony produced by the animated films and the theme parks maintains and perpetuates itself through marketing strategies designed to make these products seem timeless, and therefore the story they tell of American greatness seem to last for all time. In all, I would argue that the United States government no longer has the monopoly on the touting of America’s conquest of the world; Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters do it for them, making imperialism that much cuter.

     

    American “Distory” Through Film: Creating Disney’s World Order

     

    Making the conceptual stretch from examining Disney’s animated features to talking about the inscription of American cultural imperialist discourse seems to be nothing more than a senseless attack on one of America’s — and the world’s — most loved cultural icons. However, exploring those “myths” — and here I use myth in the sense of cultural stories that provide a structure by which society and narratives for social action can be constructed (Lincoln 1989:25) — is important, and especially for the Walt Disney Company’s (WDC) myths, because WDC is ideologically bound up with the American governmental apparatus, and has been since before World War Two. Officially, WDC became involved with the American government as a matter of finances, due to the near bankruptcy of WDC, thanks to Walt’s mishandling of funds and the war in Europe, which cut off quite a large market (and a popular one — King George apparently refused to go to a film unless a Mickey Mouse short was being shown, and Disney himself was received by Benito Mussolini during a visit to Italy in 1937). The Disney studios in Burbank, California, became “the most extensive ‘war plant’ in Hollywood, housing mountains of munitions, quartering antiaircraft troops, providing overflow office space for Lockheed personnel. By 1943, fully 94% of the footage produced at the studios was war-related. Disney had become a government contractor on a massive scale” (Burton 1992:33). In addition, WDC was hired by Nelson Rockefeller, who was then (1940) director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, to produce a series of documentaries and motion pictures about the Latin and South American regions, providing a way for the United States to “ease any remaining tensions with South American governments in order to maintain hemispheric unity as a bulwark against foreign invasion,” as well as to “show the truth about the American Way” to those who lived below the Rio Grande (Burton 1992:25). As well, WDC prodded the government of the state of Florida to allow it to set up two cities that encapsulate the Walt Disney World theme park so that it would have the ability to manage its own governmental affairs as well as have more clout with the Florida government when trying to get permits, development funding, and the like. Ideologically, WDC portrayed itself as being the bearer of true American values to the world; as one piece of Disney publicity circa the opening of Disneyland (1955) put it,

     

    Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.

     

    Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives (in Sorkin 1992:206). And, metaphorically, WDC sees itself as interchangeable — or at least exchangeable — with the US government; its Disney Dollars, available from the theme parks, are exchangeable currency with the US dollar at a one-to-one ratio.

     

    As a way of looking at the films and theme parks of the Disney Company as agents of legitimation for American imperialism, I would like to start with a simple premise: that the media works to affect and effect what Fromm called the “social character” of a society. In Fromm’s conception, the social character is formed by the educational and cultural apparatuses of a society. There is also another level of the character of society, the social unconscious, which Fromm says functions as a “socially conditioned filter,” through which “experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter” (Fromm 1994: 74). I would argue that within American society, the social character, formed as it is through the surface-level political discourses of liberty, equality, and freedom, is counteracted in some sense by the need on the part of the social unconscious for an Other — not in the Levinasian sense of a Face to Face encounter, but rather as in the sense that Durkheim refers to the deviant — as the defining moment of membership. This is not uncommon or unnoted: Hegel claims that the recognition of the self by another is the defining moment of humanity (The Phenomenology of Mind), and I would, following Bauman’s discussion of exclusionary strategies of social group membership (1994:237), extend this into the realm of the larger social order as well. In other words, at the level of the social unconscious, the Self (namely, the American society) can only be defined in terms of denoting the boundary between itself and Others that it interacts with in the world system at large.

     

    Disney plays a part in this boundary denotation, in that it allows for the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes that portray, albeit in a “cute” way, the Otherness of the areas of the world that the United States has come to dominate, be they politically, culturally, or economically. It does this by utilizing stories from the past — from traditions, generally those of other countries — in such a way as to reinforce the values and cultural practices of America. Disney’s intention as a corporation is to portray life in the places that it depicts in its products in the way in which America either was like or should have been like, regardless of the historical specificity of the situation it attempts to portray. My analysis here focuses upon this use of tradition as a mechanism for social boundary maintenance, and I analyze the products of the Disney company in such a way so as to highlight the imputation of these boundary maintenance mechanisms into the original stories that are depicted.1 As Bauman notes, “Rejection of strangers may shy away from expressing itself in racial terms, but it cannot afford admitting being arbitrary lest it should abandon all hope of success; it verbalizes itself therefore in terms of . . . the self-defence of a form of life bequeathed by tradition” (Bauman 1994: 235). While the Disney films do not explicitly argue for neo-tribalism in their content, I would argue that their past history as propagandists for the United States during World War Two, as well as the messages of their films and theme parks, combined with their marketing strategy regarding the recycling of films and the recontextualization of their contstructed geographies in the theme parks, provide sufficient reason to claim that their function vis-à-vis the social character is to construct a boundary between America/”Americans” and the rest of the world and its citizenry, even within the United States.

     

    One might argue that this analysis is one-sided, that there may be a critical distance between the constructed messages behind the Disney parks and films and the reception of them by the “guests” of the parks or the viewers of the film. While I do not dispute the possible existence of this critical distance (if I did, this paper would be impossible, for example), I would argue that these subtle messages have the potential to work their way into the social character of the United States. The Disney products function as cultural legitimations, which serve to make normal conceptions of the differences in access to power (Fjellman 1992:30). Following Fanon, I would argue that the products of the Walt Disney Company provide American society with a collective catharsis, a way of having all of the internal contradictions and aggression, both within its members and within the social order, externalized and played out before and away from them (Fanon 1967:145). Problematically, though, Disney’s catharsis marks out its aggressions from the perspective of the American hegemon. That is, its portrayals of the stories that it takes from the world rewrite them from the point of view of what Fanon would call the “neurosis of the colonizer”; in other words, I would argue that the master/slave dialectic that Fanon observes in colonial Africa in regard to the relationship between colonizer and colonized reappears, though in a much cuter guise, in Disneyland and in terms more appropriate for American society. In doing so, the Disney Company’s products serve to construct a “white” (or, in other terms, an American imperialistic) pathway for its consumers from which to perceive the world and themselves. As Itwaru notes, in regards to the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,

     

    It is assumed in this premise that our thinking must necessarily be realized within the Occupier's frame of references, that these perspectives should govern the ways we reflect on our condition. And in so doing to not pay heed to the fundamental differences in the circumstances in which we are deemed subordinate, our realities subservient to the principals as well as the principles of the super-ordinating imperial order. (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994:23)

     

    Put another way, cultural products naturalize the political and economic conditions within which they were created, and in the construction of cultural messages or legitimations presume a point of view that does not necessarily coincide with the place of the consumer and in fact, as Itwaru puts it, makes the consumer “faceless” and placed under the control, at least at the level of the political unconscious, of the creator of the cultural product. In doing so, imperialist discourse can ingrain themselves not at the level of normalcy, but at the level of the political unconscious (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994: 59, 94), making critical reflection upon the messages embedded in cultural commodities even more difficult.

     

    Having made clear the impetus for the critical examination of Disney animated features and theme parks for their depiction of American cultural and political imperialism, I turn now first to the films themselves.

     

    the Three Caballeros: The Monroe Doctrine’s Piñata

     

    The Three Caballeros, produced in 1945, was the direct result of a request by the American government to produce films that would represent the goodwill of America towards the Latin American region, as well as depict the American Way to them. Combined with an extensive comic book production, The Three Caballeros and its two predecessors, South of the Border with Disney and Saludos Amigos, were intended to ensure the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere against the possibility of enemy attack during World War Two by portraying Americans not as colonizers (as they had been since the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century), but rather as compañeros, joined in the enterprise of enjoying life.

     

    The Three Caballeros is a three-part cartoon, presented as a birthday “package” that arrives for Donald Duck. This package is designed to represent all of the best elements of Latin American culture and geography, and does so in the form of the “travel book” — the kind of book that is designed to give the entire experience of “being there” surrogately without ever having to leave one’s home. It tells three of these “travel stories”: one of Pablo Penguin, who decides that the cold of the South Pole is no longer tolerable, and decides to move north to warmer climes; another of Joe Cariota, a Brasilian parrot, who takes Donald to Baía, Brazil; and the last of Panchito, a Mexican parrot who escorts Donald and Joe Cariota to the resort cities of Mexico. In all of these stories, the underlying theme is domination: Pablo ends up enlisting a turtle in his service while lounging on the sands of a Pacific island; Donald attempts to dominate the women of South America, but is foiled by the “potency” of the local men2; and the portrayal of these scenes in the form of “travel books” dominates the locales in the sense of showing only what is commodifiable about the locations (i.e. the fiesta aspect of life in these areas).

     

    While originally contracted for and touted as a true representation of what Latin America and Latin Americans were “all about,” The Three Caballeros ends up becoming what I see as the standard pattern of Disney animated features3 — a legitimation, or the “Distorifying” (taking off from Fjellman’s concept of Distory, or Disney’s history), of the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the United States. The intention of the film was to show the American movie-going public what life was like in Latin America, much in the same way that Disney’s nature films showed what “wildlife” was like. As well, as Burton points out, it was to convey the idea of the American Way to Latin Americans, and to show that the US was not solely out to colonize their neighbours to the south. However, this is precisely what happens in The Three Caballeros: the different mediums by which Donald Duck (and us, the viewers) is shown the way of life in Latin and South America (a film, two books, and a piñata) are all easily commodifiable forms in which the story can be consumed and the life can be colonized in the same sense that Mitchell outlines; I will return to this later. The film, which tells the story of Pablo Penguin moving north from the South Pole, introduces Donald to the allure of the exotic “other” of the islands off of the Pacific coast of Latin America, and sparks Donald’s desire to “live the life” of Latin Americans. The story then moves to Joe Cariota’s transportation of Donald to Baía, where Donald meets the stereotypical Brasilians: partying men and women, dancing and enjoying life, seemingly without worry. After partaking of the life of Brazil, Donald and Joe are then joined by Panchito, who transports them to old Mexico, where Donald partakes of the life of Christmas and fiesta, wanders with hombres who are barefooted, wear serapes and sleep under their sombreros; and falls in love with conquistadoras who appear from cactus fields. In the cases of both Baía and Mexico, Donald’s participation in the festivities is only possible when the local music and dance begins to sound like American traditional (i.e. Broadway musical genre or Dixieland music); that is, Donald the American’s participation is only possible when there are American elements dominating the cultural practice. For example, Donald can only join in the fiesta when the mariachi band begins playing Dixieland-style jazz. Hence, like a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing, The Three Caballeros privileges the flattening-out of local cultures and their Americanization, making it possible for something this “foreign” in these strange places to be consumed.

     

    The Jungle Book: The Bare Necessities, Made in India

     

    The Jungle Book, released in 1967, is a most problematic film in terms of deciphering its unique colonial content, as separate from that of the story upon which it was based. Unlike Pinocchio, which was a local traditional story (whose perversion by Disney was litigated against by Collodi’s grandson; Forgacs 1992:371-72) and The Three Caballeros (an original Disney story), The Jungle Book originally comes out of a highly imperialistic context. Kipling wrote the original book during the height of the British rule of India, and many have commented on the colonizing aspects of this novel.4 I would argue that the use of this story by Disney allowed for its translation from one imperialistic context — the British rule of India — to another, the American war against Viet Nam.

     

    The Jungle Book was released in 1967, well into the so-called postcolonial era; however, some of its earlier, more British colonial tinges remain, most often in the accents of the characters: the elephant Colonel Hathi, recipient of the Victoria Cross “for service in the Maharajah’s Third Pachyderm Brigade”; Bagheera as Mowgli’s “nanny”; Shere Khan, with the thickest British accent of all of the characters, as the “ruler of the jungle” (referred to as “Your Highness”); and the vultures, who seem eerily like the Beatles. The film, though, functions as an allegory of the transition from British to American imperialist power; Baloo, sounding and acting strangely like The Duke, John Wayne, ultimately wins the battle to the death with Shere Khan. It is unseemly that this “shiftless jungle bum,” in the words of Bagheera, could become the ruler of the jungle; however, as the Americans have unfortunately shown since World War Two, one does not need to have the propriety of the British in order to rule the world, and Baloo’s character seems to embody this rather well.

     

    A second inscription of American imperialism would seem to be the treatment of Mowgli, the human boy who is raised in “the wild” by Bagheera and Baloo (the two imperialistic parents, of British and American voices/origins). First, Mowgli is never identified particularly as “Indian,” as he was in the original Jungle Book stories; instead, only his dark skin marks him off as “foreign,” and without any other identifying physical features, he becomes a generalized Other for Americans, one who could live anywhere in “the jungle.” Mowgli is also referred to variously as “man-cub” or “boy,” and in fact these become interchangeable throughout the film. The portrayal of this dark-skinned person (who, in the newly-released live-action version of The Jungle Book, grows from age five to an adult while in the jungle) as “boy” brings up issues of diminutiveness, which are also prevalent in imperialistic discourse:

     

    A boy is a male child below the age of puberty. But the term "boy" was also used to designate a servant or slave (especially in colonial or post-colonial Africa, and India, and parts of China, as well as in southern parts of the United States); in other words, "boy" functions as a term of domination, a term to designate an inferior, to create a distinction between or among men -- of any age (Garber 1992:89).

     

    Conflating these two markers of inferiority, Mowgli becomes a universal Other to imperialists (of either British or American ilk), much in the same way, as I will describe later, that Adventureland in the Disney theme parks becomes the land of the Others who are “anywhere outside North America and Western Europe.” So, it would seem that The Jungle Book becomes a marker of the expansion of American political imperialism into Southeast Asia, especially with the advent of the Viet Nam war. At the time of the film’s release, the American army was doing “relatively well” (at least in military terms) with the war, and I would argue that this film reflects the projection of America’s pride in the “body counts” onto “the jungles” of the region.

     

    A footnote: Disney recently released a live-action version of The Jungle Book, starring Jason Scott Lee, an actor of Chinese descent. This story stays more closely with the original Kipling stories, and attempts to show a “kinder, gentler” version of the story told in the earlier animated version. Instead, the film is changed so that Mowgli is an adult — and can be taught (see the discussion of Aladdin below) — and triumphs not over the colonizing forces, but only those who wish to take ancient treasures from secret cities. Here, the portrayal of the colonial British forces runs something more along the lines of benevolent patriarchs who provide education and industry for the local natives. Still, the conflation of ethnicities and locales — the actor who plays Mowgli is Chinese, and the film was shot mostly in South Carolina — sends a relatively clear message that the accurate representations of local stories and histories are fluff when compared with the profit margin.

     

    Aladdin: A Whole New (Old) World

     

    In Aladdin, Disney’s 1992 release, we find another expansion of American cultural and political imperialism, this time into the Middle East. Contemporaneous with the Persian Gulf conflict, this film re-marks the traditional story of Aladdin’s Lamp and the Genie with overtones of American power, as well as reinscribing it with the cultural commodities of Disney, making the film self-reflexive, in that Disney’s own cinematic history is written into the Distory of Aladdin.

     

    As in The Jungle Book, Disney begins the film by marking off its subjects as the cultural Other for America. The theme song that runs over the opening credits sums up the barbarity of this place: “Oh I come from a land / From a faraway place / Where the caravan camels roam / Where it’s black and immense / And the heat is intense / It’s barbaric — but hey, it’s home.” Originally, though, these lyrics portrayed a much darker, more evil portrait of its subjects, one which Arab-American groups protested heavily. Since then, Disney has rewritten the lyrics to make the place, but not the people, seem barbaric; previously, the fourth and fifth lines, the offensive ones in the original theatrical release, read “where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face” (“It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney,” New York Times, 14 July 1993, A18). Hence, the barbaric “nature” of Arabs in this film remains; however, it becomes disguised in the nature of the land in which these people live; as the editorial notes, “To characterize an entire region with this sort of tongue-in-cheek bigotry, especially in a movie aimed at children, borders on barbaric” (loc. cit.).

     

    The barbarism of Arab justice (both in the removal of one’s ear “if they don’t like your face,” as well as the removal of the hands of thieves) also harkens to the portrayal of Western capitalism — those who steal from the King (and here, as Jafar points out when disguised as a prisoner so as to lure Aladdin into taking him to the Cave of Wonders, where the Genie’s lamp is stashed, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules”) deserve to have their hands removed. Aladdin, though, has to wonder — “All this for a loaf of bread?” — thereby giving voice to what could be called the proletariat. However, here the proletariat is definitely not glorified; instead, Aladdin is portrayed throughout the film as “nothing but a street rat,” and has to use the power of the Genie in order to make himself appear appreciable to the local gentry, in particular Princess Jasmine. But, there is another allegory of American capitalism here — the desire to throw off the chains of royalty — and indolence — and become an “everyman,” or in this case, where Princess Jasmine runs off from the castle and goes into the marketplace, “everyperson.” In a sense, then, we can see that the film gives the message that neither of the two typifications of Arab society — the egregiously wealthy or the “street rat” peasant — are acceptable within Disney’s Arabia; instead, what is needed are self-made individuals (à la Pinocchio), who have the ability to judiciously live within, throw out, or rewrite tradition as it suits their needs. In Aladdin, this becomes Aladdin’s use of the Genie in order to make himself noticeable to the Princess; the Princess no longer taking orders as to whom she shall marry, and her act of convincing her father to rewrite the law so that she can marry Aladdin; and the Genie desiring to become his own master. All of this, though, is still inscribed within Jafar’s and Marx’s maxim (to paraphrase), “Whoever has the gold makes the rules,” as it is still the King who enables Princess Jasmine and Aladdin to be married. Hence, the rules of capitalism still hold, even in the strange, barbaric place that Aladdin calls home.

     

    Unlike the three films I have discussed above, or any of the other animated features that I have chosen not to examine, Aladdin marks the first time that WDC has inscribed its own history into the history of the film. As Fjellman points out, “The Company has managed to insinuate its characters, stories, and image as good, clean, fun enterprise into the consciousness of millions around the earth” (Fjellman 1992:398), and the sublimation of Disney products into the consciousness of the viewer makes it easy for the same process to occur in the telling of the story, even though it takes place well in the past. At one point, the Genie catches Aladdin telling a lie, and briefly transforms his head into that of Pinocchio’s, complete with foot-and-a-half long nose. In another scene, once Aladdin, posing as Prince Ali Ababwa, has won the heart of Princess Jasmine, is asked by the Genie: “What are you going to do now?” in the same manner as WDC has commercials with victorious sports teams and Miss America beauty pageant winners responding to this question with, “I’m going to Disneyland [or Walt Disney World, or Tokyo Disneyland or EuroDisney].” Finally, at the end of the film, when the Genie is released by Aladdin and becomes his own master — in other words, when he wins the battle of capitalism, having been in servitude for thousands and thousands of years, only to finally make himself his own boss — he is going to Disneyland, or at least Walt Disney World; dressed in an obnoxious tropical print shirt, carrying golf clubs, and wearing a Goofy hat, he looks as if he is headed to one of the theme parks, with the intention of partaking of all of its leisure activities. Hence, Disney’s own history, being bound up with the collective conscience of the world, also gets bound up with the local stories of the world, regardless of how far away those locales might be.

     

    Overall, then, we can see that the guiding pattern behind Disney’s use of local stories or histories, or their creation of stories that are meant to represent local ones (as in the case of The Three Caballeros), is the story-telling of the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialistic power in the second half of the twentieth century. The Three Caballeros intends to export the “truth” of the American Way (at least as Nelson Rockefeller and Walt Disney saw it) to Latin and South America; instead, the truth that gets told — and it is a truth of the American Way, even in the era of NAFTA, where Chile and Brazil are two of the most important trading partners of the US and are first in line to join the free trade agreement — that Latin America is a commodifiable good, one which can be consumed by the distant visitor (through films, travel books, and the like), but is under “no threat” (at least not sexually, as Burton points out) from America, because, just like Donald Duck, we are all engaged in the process of enjoying life. The Jungle Book allegorically transplants the original colonial story from British-ruled India to Viet Nam, and conveys a story of the success of American military troops in the region at that point in time. It also begins to more concretely display America’s attitude to the rest of the world that lay outside of North America and Western Europe: whereas in The Three Caballeros America was portrayed as un amigo to the region south of the Rio Grande, the films from The Jungle Book on show its subjects as cultural Others that are in general inferior, either morally or politically, to the United States. Aladdin does this by showing the barbarity of a place that would cut the hands off thieves who steal a loaf of bread — without admitting that the capitalist system does the same thing to the proletariat, and instead only respects those who play on the Catch-22 of capitalist society: it takes capital to get capital.

     

    An additional point on this matter: Disney seems to be legitimating, in the sense of providing justifications of the way that the world is, the cultural, political and economic oppositions that the United States government sets up for itself. As Fjellman points out, “Legitimations come in many shapes and sizes. . . . They help people — both socialized old-timers and especially newcomers such as children or immigrants — to understand daily life in a locally correct fashion. At the same time, legitimations justify the world. They tell us not only what our world is like but also why it is, and perhaps should be, as it is” (Fjellman 1992:27). And as Lincoln advises, “They [agents of either social order or social change] can advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth or modify details in its narration and thereby change the nature of the sentiments (and the society) it evokes” (Lincoln 1989:25). With the “ever-changing” world typified by the changing formations of the production of capital, as well as its organization both economically and politically throughout the world, there needs to be some sort of legitimating mechanism by which the political arena can be made to seem “natural,” or at least naturalized, to the citizens whose government feels need an enemy — or at least a cultural Other to demarcate themselves from. In The Three Caballeros, the opposition is clearly a North-South opposition, one which restated the geographic claim made in the Monroe Doctrine a century and a half before the film came out that Latin and South America were clearly in the realm of the US — if not politically (as most of the US’s puppet regimes were falling apart by that point) then at least economically, in the sense of being commodifiable and commodifying. The Jungle Book clearly makes the civilization-“jungle” opposition; Mowgli is always running from civilization, primarily under Baloo the (American) Bear’s direction to stay away from the “man-village,” and is only drawn into it by the “civilizing” effect of The Girl, who appears at the end of the film singing about her own servitude.5 Aladdin reiterates the civilization-barbarity opposition, but this time also inscribes a Christian-Islam opposition, one which in the context of the Persian Gulf conflict, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s recent comments in Toronto that “Islamic fundamentalism is a threat that is equal to if not greater than that of communism,” further serves to demarcate an enemy that can be rewritten as equal to or greater than Hitler. Hence, we can see that Disney’s animated features, in their appropriation of local stories and histories, reinscribe them with the current political, economic, cultural, and ideological discourse about America’s place in the world order.

     

    An argument could be made that, instead of reinscribing these local stories with the discourse of American imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, that instead the opposite process occurs. That is, that with the expansion of American political power into different pockets of the world, such as Viet Nam, the Middle East, and Africa, that interest in these stories is peaked because of the interest in the news stories about these regions, and that therefore WDC, instead of offering these animated films up as justifications for American imperialism, are merely responding to a perceived need. This would then place WDC in the light of being a “good capitalist company,” in the sense of answering the needs of the consumer with a commodity, instead of being an ideological arm of the United States government. Whereas historical work done on the early films produced by the Disney studios, and especially The Three Caballeros, has shown that WDC was recruited by the US government to provide ideological support for the expansion of political power,6 there is little or no recent evidence (save the charge that Walt Disney himself served as a “special informant” for the Federal Bureau of Investigation after World War Two, which appeared in Marc Eliot’s 1993 unauthorized biography, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince) that WDC has since been involved with the US government. Yet, I maintain that the Disney company — not only in its animated features, but also in its live-action films and its theme parks, to which I turn next — is instrumental in providing in commodity form what Fjellman and Lincoln have both called “legitimations” for America’s position in the world order and its depiction of its cultural Others, which are intended for consumption not only by those who would be most likely to believe these legitimations, but also by those who “need” to internalize these depictions. As Dorfman and Mattelart put it, Disney’s films define their — America’s — cultural and political others as the US wishes to see them as well as the way in which”the local people are supposed to see [it] themselves.”7 I turn now to another of the ways in which viewers — or here, visitors — are supposed to internalize Disney’s view of the world: in the theme park.

     

    “It’s a Small World, After All:” Disney’s “Historicidal” Ride

     

    Again, conceptually making the leap from textual analyses of Disney animated features to a structural analysis of the Disney theme parks, especially Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and the way in which they convey, in easily consumable ways, allegories of the American view of the world, of history, and the way in which people should view themselves seems to be quite a leap, one akin to the “lover’s leap” of lore. The mutual advertisement of Disney’s products by other divisions (for example, advertising the theme parks in print ads for films), as well as having the Disney films be the basis for many of the attractions within the parks, allow me to make this jump. As well, the usage of the World’s Fair as a model for the Disney theme parks (Sorkin 1992: 216) provides with me the ability to analyze the Disney parks (and here, I focus only upon Disneyland, as I was an employee there for eighteen months and know it best; I will later make reference to the other parks, all of which are based upon Disneyland) as portrayals of the continuation of the colonial world order. Similar to the way Mitchell notes that the placement of buildings provides a meaning to those buildings, I would argue that the placement of attractions, in combinations that are neither geographically, politically, or temporally similar, imbues them with Disney’s meaning:

     

    In the order of an exhibitional world, such as Lyautey's Rabat, each building and each object appeared to stand for some further meaning or value, and these meanings appeared to stand apart as a realm of order and institutions, indeed as the very realm of the political. The effect of meaning, however, as we might expect from the discussion of language in the previous chapter, actually arose not from each building or object in itself but out of the continuous weave of buildings and objects in which an individual item occurred. . . . To create the effect of a realm of meaning, this differential process was to mark every space and every gap. (Mitchell 1988: 162-63)

     

    In the construction of the Disneyland theme park, then, the gaps between places, politics, and times disappears, and is reconstituted by the imputation of American imperialist discourse, masked by the cuteness and the production of fun.

     

    The same process that I have described in regard to Disney’s animated features — their appropriation from local situations, reinscription in American imperialist discourse, and resale to “the locals” (as will be described below) — also occurs with regards to the attractions at Disneyland. Many of the attractions are based on the animated films, so that the decontextualization is bound up directly with the creation of the rides, and is subsequently enhanced with the inclusion of only the most exciting aspects of each story. Hence, the Pinocchio, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and others are all further decontextualized when brought into the theme park, as only the most exciting or dangerous (in the Disney sense) elements of the story are brought into the ride. However, the majority of the attractions at Disneyland, as well as at the other Disney theme parks, are not based on animated films, but are rather based upon Distorified versions of aspects of American history or of its perception of the world around it. Hence, there is no literary or cinematic basis for them — and therefore no direct history that they must refer to — and the rides can thus construct any type of history, or in this case Distory, that the imagineers (those who design the rides, films, etc.) wish; and these rides can be combined geographically in order to present Disney’s vision of the world as it should have been — with him at the centre.

     

    Rides like Pinocchio, Splash Mountain (based on the film Song of the South), and Star Tours (based on the Return of the Jedi installation in the Star Wars trilogy) all deny their origins, and are thereby recontextualized in whatever way WDC wishes geographically. The placement of rides in Fantasyland — which includes all of the old “fairy tales” and legends of Europe, such as “The Sword in the Stone” (the legend of King Arthur), Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (Disney’s version, not Barrie’s; Forgacs 1992:369), and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, a depiction of the intrusion of the automobile into the British countryside — inscribes these histories as being in the land of”fantasy.” As well, Splash Mountain, based on Song of the South, which contains the line, “This is how the niggers sing,”8 disguises its origins in the lore of American slavery, and instead exists in the fantastic realm of Critter Country. And Star Tours, which oxymoronically lies in Tomorrowland, since the Star Wars films took place “long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” is removed from its “historical” context, and placed in the land of tomorrow (which, thanks to its dating as being the land of 1984, is now the land of yesterday).

     

    Other rides, not based on the animated features, also are grouped without regard to their political or geographic context. The Jungle Cruise, for example, puts together “scenes” from Southeast Asia, India, and the African veldt and rain forests, connected by the Irrawaddy, Congo, and Nile Rivers. This ride is located between the Enchanted Tiki Room, a 1950’s-style, Don Ho-genre depiction of life in the South Pacific through big-band translations of some local music; Aladdin’s Oasis, a restaurant and Broadway-style dinner show based on the Aladdin film; and the Swiss Family Treehouse, a six-story cement tree showing scenes from the film which took place off the Caribbean coast of South America. Another ride has been built in Adventureland. The Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Eye ride is based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark film (now licensed by WDC), and entails the same sort of trip through a Mayan pyramid, except in 1930’s-style German troop transports. All of this, grouped under the heading of “Adventureland,” completely ignores the geographic contexts (and instead becomes “Everything outside of North America or Western Europe-Land”), and ignores the political context of the locales represented — all of the areas presented here either were or, in the case of the Middle East, are coming (as I have described above) under the strong-arm of American imperialism.

     

    In fact, in all of the lands that make up Disneyland time becomes the defining nature of the land, as opposed to space. As Fjellman notes, at Walt Disney World, where the themed lands are different from those at the California park,

     

    Each part of the Magic Kingdom has a temporal theme. Liberty Square represents colonial America and the War of Independence. Frontierland glosses the nineteenth-century American West. Main Street USA gives us a turn-of-the-century small town. Adventureland alludes to the history of empire -- from the Spanish Main to the African safari. Even Fantasyland is about time, suggesting simultaneously the timelessness of fairy tales and children's stories and the romanticized medieval castles of central Europe with a bit of King Arthur thrown in. (Fjellman 1992:61)

     

    I would go even further than this to argue that the spatial organization of Disneyland, based as it is on space-as-time themed lands, organizes the history of the world which Disney encountered and arranges it in such a way that history becomes the way he wanted it (Fjellman 1992:59). There appear to be two temporal eras represented in Disneyland — the Past and the Future, combined to make the Timeless. Main Street USA, Frontierland, New Orleans Square, Critter Country, Adventureland, and Fantasyland combine to make up the Lands of the Past; and Tomorrowland is designed to be the Land of the Future, but because of its 1984 dating loses that designation. To be precise, all of these lands, when taken out of all of their respective temporal settings and political geographies, become Timeless, and are only given a temporal designation at the hands of WDC. An example: Until 1994, the Jungle Cruise was one of the more contemporary rides. It had opened with the park in 1955, and had, through various updatings of its scripts, maintained its contemporaneity; it even featured jokes such as “Now we return you to the biggest jungle of them all — the California freeway system.” However, with the addition of the 1930’s style Indiana Jones ride, WDC wanted everything restaged so that the entire area of Adventureland would be set in the 1930’s. In order to achieve this, Disneyland redesigned the facade and queue area of the Jungle Cruise ride so that it would go through a pithy colonial governor’s mansion, as well as docks of this era, making apparent the political temporality of this ride, while reducing the meaning that this would give the ride through the pithiness of its decoration. While this expresses a seemingly new-found concern for the temporality of its staging, it also shows that within the terms of Disneyland all things — even time — are under the control of Uncle Walt.9

     

    We can see that the temporal and geographic setting of various world locales becomes seemingly arbitrary for Disney in Disneyland. However, as I have shown above, this setting is not wholly arbitrary; it instead conveys a very strong message not only about the power of Disney, but also of America. All things that are included within the Park fall under the allegorical purview of the United States’ imperialist power, be it political, economic, or cultural; and Disney has the power to organize them in such a way so that this power seems to disappear. As Mitchell points out in regards to the presentation of Egypt in various World’s Fairs, as well as the colonial restructuring of Egyptian cities,

     

    The Orient is put together as this "re-presentation," and what is represented is not a real place but a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seem to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these. (Mitchell 1988:31)

     

    And it is well-known that Disney did not explore at length the areas which he chose to represent in the Parks; unlike the nature films that WDC produced, which take painstaking detail and magnify it (although they misled people worldwide into thinking that lemmings are suicidal), most of the other films are no more than a series of quotations from first impressions or from “travel books,” as in The Three Caballeros.10 These quotations are then organized in the way in which Disney would have wanted them to appear had he written “history,” and are presented as a legitimation of the world order and America’s place within it. The ordering of these political, cultural, and geographic fragments are then ordered by WDC in such a way that it provides a hierarchy, in which, as Fjellman notes, Disneyland and America are presented as heaven, with all else below (Mitchell 1988:60; Fjellman 1992:317). Disneyland then becomes an exhibition of American cultural, political, and economic power, with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse at the centre of the exhibition, and serves as a cultural legitimation of American power. As Fjellman points out, legitimations often exist for those who are new to a society, either children or recent immigrants (Fjellman 1992:27); and from nearly 18 months of fieldwork within Disneyland, I have found that the greatest numbers of people who come to Disneyland for the first time (Disney placed the California park where he did so that he could attract repeat business from those who lived nearby in the burdgeoning Orange County) are either children or visitors and immigrants from foreign countries. As I have noted above (p. 4), Disney desired to represent the American Way so that it would be timeless — or, in other words, so that his representation of America’s position in the world would last for all time. This, then, is the way in which consumers (or “guests,” in Disney parlance) come to the Disney products — as if they are Timeless, and are therefore easily consumable in whatever temporal or spatial context one is in. I turn now to the marketing of this timelessness of American cultural power, presented by the Walt Disney Company.

     

    “It’s A Small World,” For All Time: Selling the American Way

     

    Examining the way in which WDC sells its products, namely the theme parks and the films, must begin with the animated films. However, as I have noted above, each of Disney’s products sells all of the others, so that we could start anywhere in their product line with this analysis. But, the theme of timelessness is paramount to the understanding of Disney’s marketing strategies, and nothing better offers this up than the animated films of Disney. So, it is there that I will start, and then turn to the theme parks, which are the embodment of this timelessness; and it is the recycling of both of these products for the consumption by Disney’s “guests” that allows for the timelessness of the product, as well as these timeless products, to exist for all time, thereby perpetually reselling the timeless hegemony of the United States.

     

    As I have already written above, WDC has the effect of producing a de-temporalization of its films, primarily by removing them from the original political and geographic context, but also, as in the case of The Jungle Book, by translating stories already inscribed with imperialist discourse into non-indigenous locales, which also has the effect of making these films seem “out of time,” or at least not governed by time. This process does not work as well for the live-action films, primarily because film quality, as well as topical interests (such as the Davy Crockett chronicles, which were hugely popular in the 1950’s), make these films seem somehow “older” or at least “dated,” and so interest in them seems to disappear.

     

    Another way in which WDC maintains interest in the animated features is by periodically recycling them in and out of circulation. WDC has a hard-and-fast policy that dictates how many of its films may be in video stores at a time and how long each of them may remain there (approximately two to three years). Additionally, WDC periodically re-releases feature films into theatres, giving new generations a chance to see Disney’s self-declared classics. In doing this, WDC plays on a sense of nostalgia that parents have for the films (as they seem to be able to relive their childhood through them), and increases the drawing power of the films by making them available “for a limited time only.” WDC thus creates a sense of excitement about the ability to see the film, something which often prompts parents to purchase the film so that they can hold onto it for all time, showing it to their children, grandchildren, etc. As Forgacs notes,

     

    It is remarkable that in this process of recycling and global rereleasing the animated features do not seem to age. They just do not look as old as other films do. In reality this magic of eternal youth has a lot to do with the way the films are promoted and publicized. Disney is very skillful at presenting its old films as "classics," at once perennial, timeless fantasies and the standard versions of the stories they adapt. (Forgacs 1992:368)

     

    Another aspect of the removal of the past from Disney’s temporal repertoire is the absence of parental figures in the animated features. There are no parents in Disney’s films: Gepetto is an uncle figure to Pinocchio; both Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse have no children, but are instead also uncles; and even Bambi’s mother gets killed in the process of Bambi’s growing-up. By doing this, as Dorfman and Mattelart argue, WDC can create a world in which there is no reference to the past, and therefore no history; I would take this further to argue that, by the Distorifying process, whereby everything bad that has happened in the past is erased or elided, everything that could be “historical” is instead rendered timeless, and therefore always already temporally there (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:34). By removing the possibility of temporality from the animated features, WDC makes it possible for ever-increasing numbers of generations to consume its animated products, thereby allowing WDC’s messianic message of the hegemony of the United States to be recycled throughout time.

     

    Since all of Disney’s products sell each other (in the sense of everything being cross-marketed), I would argue that this also works for the theme parks. In other words, the message that history, geography, and politics do not matter when it comes to the fun that Disneyland and the other theme parks delivers, captured in the ordering of the conceptual space that governs Disneyland (centered as it is around Walt Disney himself, both conceptually and geographically), is constantly consumed and reconsumed by countless generations. By refining older rides, such as “The Jungle Cruise,” which was recently turned into a 1930’s-era colonial governor’s home and dock (making explicit for once what “colonialism” was really like — cute, punny, and over in eight minutes), as well as introducing new rides and lands periodically, Disney attempts to constantly remake itself so that it appears bigger and better. At the same time, though, the messages that Disney sends out about America’s place in the world do not change, as the geography of the park cannot change, as cannot its de-temporalization. Hence, the idea that anything that involves Adventure has to take place outside of North America and Western Europe, and therefore in the realm of America’s cultural others, can be always consumed by new “guests” to Disney’s social order, and thus America’s cultural, political, and economic hegemony are constantly re-legitimated for the benefit of those who are new to “the Wonderful World of Disney.”

     

    As I have said above, the guiding metaphor for Disney’s theme parks, and its products more generally, is that of the “It’s a Small World” ride. In it, Audio-Animatronic dolls from all over the world dressed in “native” clothing sing in harmony the most maddening of songs, “It’s a Small World After All,” which is occasionally interspersed with countermelodies such as “Hava Nagila” and “The Mexican Hat Dance.” Here, though, the geographic message that Disneyland delivers in a more disguised fashion is made clear; as Fjellman puts it, “It is as if a forest — any forest — is chosen cavalierly to represent the idea of a place and time, and then infinite energy is directed toward the scrutiny of each leaf and each piece of bark on each tree” (Fjellman 1992:87). This, then, is the message of Disney’s portrayal of geography, and with it the politics, economics, and culture that is elided in the name of American imperialism: “If there is anything to be learned by this average citizen about geography — cultural, political or otherwise — [Walt Disney Company] will teach it” (Fjellman 1992:224).

     

    One question that arises when considering the ability of the theme parks to sell the message of American dominance of the world and its relevant political perspective that I have highlighted in this paper concerns the relative success of the Disney theme parks around the world. Disneyland and Walt Disney World in the US are fanatically attended, to the point that Disneyana conventions, held to allow collectors of Disney paraphenalia to trade and amass further stocks of the trinkets, become madhouses, and on the average day Disneyland has a population greater than probably sixty percent of the towns and cities in North America (its average daily attendance hovers around thirty thousand people; personal conversation with Guest Services, Disneyland Park, March 1995), while Walt Disney World’s population hovers around one hundred thousand per day. Tokyo Disneyland is also well attended and successful. However, the EuroDisney park near Paris is a near failure; reports consistently appear highlighting its financial troubles. One might ask why this phenomenon has occurred. I would argue that the EuroDisney park is placed within a political culture that is hostile to imperialist intentions as well as the “Small Worldization” of its local cultures (within the context of the burgeoning European Union, France, for one, is highly critical of the flattening of national differences in the name of a common European identity and society), while the political culture surrounding Tokyo Disneyland is a recent artifact highly influenced by the American reconstruction of the Japanese political, economic, and social systems after World War Two. Even considering Japan’s historic isolation and resistance to efforts aimed towards its colonization, I would argue that the reconstruction of Japanese society by the American military, coupled with the highly commodified culture that both Japanese and American societies share, prove to be rich ground for the propagation of Disney’s messages regarding the place of the United States in the world.

     

    Given the colonizing effects of the messages that Disneyland, as well as WDC’s other products, most notably the animated film features, it is not surprising that people who lived around Manassas, Virginia, were up in arms about Disney’s America theme park that it wanted to build. They were afraid of losing the actuality of the lived history of the Civil War — a heritage that lived on in the area, though not in the same fashion as history in most of the rest of the world (Silberman 1994:25) — to the dehistoricizing effects of “Daddy Disney.” As the previews for Disney’s latest animated feature, Pocahontas, run through my head, they were correct in fearing this. Pocahontas is portrayed in the preview (an actual musical number from the up-coming film) as an earth-loving, submissive woman to be won by the heart of the colonialist John Smith, something quite strange to have said about someone whose name, given by her father, meant “mischievous.” Disney’s overall policy towards the past, the present, and the future, as well as toward the world around him, was to turn it into the playland that it never was. Disney’s goal was to rewrite history “the way it should have been” (Fjellman 1992:31). And, as Barbara Crosette’s New York Times article (12 February 1995:E5) suggests, it appears that the future Disney wanted for America came true, as it appears that, even though “it is all but impossible to find a hegemonistic bone in any body in Washington — Republican or Democrat,” one is no longer needed, as the imperialist messages of Disney, as well as those of the American government in general, have been well received by so-called Third World countries, looking to the United States to become the hegemon it wanted to be, hopefully without the US allowing the further exploitation of histories in the course of the exploitation of countries. I can only hope that, for the sake of those who have had their histories taken from them by the “‘rapacious strip-miner’in the goldmine of legend and myth” (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18), that it can begin to rewrite its own history as it should have been — indebted to those who had history before, and will continue to have a history well after, Walt Disney and his imagineering of history.

    Notes

     

    1. While I do not make explicit reference to the original stories, the original stories used in the films that are discussed here–The Jungle Book and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights–are relatively well-known, and I presume a knowledge of these original texts in my analysis.

     

    2. Burton, “Don (Juanito) Duck,” p. 35: “The Disney team apparently felt the need to reassure their Latin American counterparts that they need feel no threat to their sexual hegemony from this North American neighbor who, for all his quacking up and cracking up, is clearly incapable of shacking up.”

     

    3. As well as all other Disney films: I chose to examine the animated films here primarily because they are my “favourites”; as well, they are also the most accessible, in the sense of being able to rent them at video stores. Part of the reason for this, as I will discuss later, is that the animated features seem “less dated” than the live-action films, and therefore are better “sellers,” in the sense of being accepted by a larger paying audience. However, the live-action films serve much the same function as the animated features; they continue to play up the political, economic, and cultural primacy and hegemony of the U.S.

     

    4. Many of the Subaltern Studies group have commented at length on the colonizing writings of those who were associated with the British rulers or the raj. I would argue that Kipling would be part of this group.

     

    5. I have written on this, as well as the imposition of an American nuclear family structure on the text of the film, elsewhere. See Schaffer, “The Bare Necessities: Family Structure and Gender Inversion in Disney’s The Jungle Book” (unpublished).

     

    6. Burton’s essay in Nationalisms and Sexualities provides extensive evidence of the linkages between the Disney studios and the US government during and just after World War Two. However, the Walt Disney Studios’ archives have become over the years increasingly more difficult to obtain access to, and inquiring writers must have their projects approved by WDC in order to gain access to the archives.

     

    7. Kunzle,”Translator’s Preface,” in Dorfman and Mattelart, p. 19. Burton also points out that Saludos Amigos, the precursor to The Three Caballeros, “became the first Hollywood film to premiere in all Latin American countries before opening in the U. S.” (Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up [Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987]:40) The only complaints received during the tour of this film were from Uruguay, which was not represented in the film. The gauchito sequence in The Three Caballeros resolves this problem. (Burton 1992:40n10)

     

    8. An interesting anecdotal note: Due to this line, as well as its general portrayal of the myths of African-American slaves, the Disney Company has removed Song of the South from the shelves of video stores in the United States. I have recently been asked — by a current Disney employee — to send copies of this film to the United States from my residence in Toronto.

     

    9. Until 1984, WDC owned even the airspace rights over Disneyland, so that no plane or helicopter could fly over the Magic Kingdom without the permission of the Company. In 1984, Michael Eisner sold the airspace rights in order to put more liquid cash into the Company’s coffers.

     

    10. Burton, p. 40 n11: Here, Burton comments on Smoodin’s comment on the “flawless calculus of cultural imperialism” that allowed “Walt Disney, a representative of the United States, could tour a foreign culture [actually, several different cultures and subcultures], come to understand it in just a short time, and then bring it back home, all with the blessing and the thanks of the culture he had visited.” (From Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era [1994: New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press])

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bauman, Zygmunt.  Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993.
    • Burton, Julianne. “Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America.” In Andrew Parker, et. al., Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
    • Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: International General, 1971.
    • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
    • Fjellman, Stephen. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
    • Forgacs, David. “Disney animation and the business of childhood.” Screen 33:361-74 (1992).
    • Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
    • Itwaru, Arnold and Natasha Ksonzek. Closed Entrances: Canadian Culture and Imperialism. Toronto: TSAR, 1994.
    • Kunzle, David. Translator’s Preface to Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 1975.
    • Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
    • Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
    • Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
    • Silberman, Neil Asher. “The Battle Disney Should Have Won”. Lingua Franca 5: 24-28 (1994).
    • Sorkin, Michael. “See You in Disneyland.” In Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: The Noonday Press, 1992.

     

  • “How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?” Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement

    Stephen A. Fredman

    Notre Dame
    stephen.a.fredman.1@nd.edu

     

    I.

     

    Reading the novels of Paul Auster over the years, I find myself drawn back again and again to his first prose text, The Invention of Solitude (1982), especially to its second half, “The Book of Memory,” a memoir-as-meditation, in which Auster confronts all of his central obsessions, obsessions that return in various forms to animate his subsequent novels.1 One of the most resonant images from “The Book of Memory” that recurs in Auster’s later work is that of “the room of the book,” a place where life and writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes dangerous encounter. In the present essay, I would like to examine the room of the book through three interpretive frameworks that will help to make its dimensions apprehensible. These frameworks represent dynamic issues that arise from within the room of the book, issues that account for some of the characteristic complexities of Auster’s work: 1) a contest between prose and poetry that colors much of his writing; 2) a parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity that he constructs with great effort; and 3) a pervasive preoccupation with Holocaust imagery. In my reading of Auster’s prose, the postmodern inquiry into the relationship between writing and identity metamorphoses into a confrontation with a series of gender issues, oriented around the father, and then metamorphoses again into an interrogation of the particularly Jewish concern with memory. Using memory to probe the ruptures in contemporary life, Auster returns ultimately to the unspeakable memories of the Holocaust, thus laying bare ways in which the postmodern is inescapably post-Holocaust.

     

    To set the stage, we will look at an exemplary dramatization of the equation between “the room” and “the book” in Ghosts (1986), the second volume of Auster’s New York Trilogy. The protagonist of Ghosts, Blue, has recently completed an apprenticeship to a master detective, Brown, and the novel narrates Blue’s first “case,” in which he hopes to establish an identity as self-sufficient “agent.” Blue has been engaged by White to “keep an eye on” Black, a simple “tail job” that turns out to be much more demanding than Blue could have imagined. It’s not that Black is difficult to follow; in fact, he hardly ever leaves his room. From his own room across the street, Blue, using binoculars, can see that Black spends most of his time writing in a notebook and reading. In order to record Black’s activities, Blue takes out a notebook himself and begins to write, thus initiating the equation between the room and the book.

     

    After nearly a year of tailing Black, following him on long walks and watching him read and write, Blue begins to find his lack of knowledge about Black, White, and the case unbearable. Unsuccessful in his attempt to precipitate a disclosure from the ever-elusive White, Blue realizes that his perpetual spying on the nearly sedentary Black has rendered Blue a virtual prisoner in his own room. It dawns on him that Black and White may be in collusion, and that in fact he may be the one under surveillance:

     

    If so, what are they doing to him? Nothing very terrible, finally -- at least not in any absolute sense. They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough -- to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. He could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There is no story, no plot, no action -- nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That's all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room? (NYT 201-2)

     

    Not an intellectual or even much of a reader, Blue has been metamorphosed into a writer — that is, into someone who lives inside a book. Every other aspect of his life has been taken away from him — he has abandoned his fiancée, his mentor refuses to offer advice, etc. — and he realizes the terror of the writer: “There is no story, no plot, no action — nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book.” This primal condition of the writer in the present age — imprisoned, facing a blank page without the structures of story, plot, or action to support him — has become Blue’s life, and he begins to suspect that Black (or White?) has planned it that way, willing this monstrous metamorphosis.

     

    Blue’s suspicions that his life has been captured by a book are confirmed during two visits to Black’s room. In the second, Blue crosses the street one night when Black is out and steals a pile of papers stacked on Black’s desk. When he begins to read them, Blue sees that they are his own weekly reports; this means that Black and White are the same person and that, in some mysterious way, Blue and Black have been writing the same book. With these realizations, Blue collapses into vertigo and enters a state of irresolvable doubleness:

     

    For Blue at this point can no longer accept Black's existence, and therefore he denies it. Having penetrated Black's room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black's solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is, even though Blue does not know it. (226)

     

    When Blue realizes that Black is his double, he also becomes aware that Black’s room is the uncanny scene of writing, which Blue, who had never conceived of himself as a writer, had been afraid of entering all along. In confronting Black’s solitude, he meets his own; in confronting Black’s writing, he recovers his own and realizes that he has become a writer. When he walks across the street to Black’s room one more time, Blue finds out why Black/White has hired him. Upon entering the room, Blue encounters Black pointing a revolver at him, intending to end both of their lives. In the ensuing dialogue, Blue, the bewildered detective, tries one more time to understand what has been happening:

     

    You're supposed to tell me the story. Isn't that how it's supposed to end? You tell me the story, and then we say good-bye.You know it already, Blue. Don’t you understand that? You know the story by heart.

     

    Then why did you bother in the first place?

     

    Don’t ask stupid questions.

     

    And me — what was I there for? Comic relief?

     

    No, Blue, I’ve needed you from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for you, I couldn’t have done it.

     

    Needed me for what?

     

    To remind me of what I was supposed to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me, Blue, and I turned you into my death. You're the one thing that doesn't change, the one thing that turns everything inside out. (230)

     

    Black has turned Blue into his ideal reader, for whom every moment of Black’s existence in a room writing a book has been full of unfathomable meaning. And by allaying the writer’s constant fear that the external world will dematerialize during his residence in the space of writing, Blue’s gaze has “turn[ed] everything inside out” for Black, making his writing into a fateful, and ultimately fatal, act. Having created this external witness to his internal activity as writer, Black has also transformed his reader, Blue, into a double, into a writer himself. Black has kept Blue trapped in a room, with Blue’s gaze fixed upon Black, in a successful effort to enclose himself in the space of writing until the demands of the book are met. And because Blue is also the writer of the book, its demands cannot be fully met until Blue comes to understand that all along he has been author of his own fate. When Blue achieves this recognition, the story that Black is writing ends in death — but not quite as Black had planned. For Blue is now the author, who physically overpowers Black and beats him, presumably to death, as though doing away with an insufferable mirror, which has kept him confined inside the room that is the book.

     

    II.

     

    For whom can it be said that entrapment within the room that is the book is intolerable? Certainly Blue, who has always thought of himself as a man of action, rather than a reader, finds it so: “He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life” (NYT 201-2). But through the character of Blue, Auster also paints a portrait of a type of writer about whom Blue knows nothing: the modern poet. It is the modern (male) poet whose condition is most fully epitomized by the statement, “There is no story, no plot, no action — nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (202). In the course of explaining why he became a performance poet, David Antin has characterized this solipsism of the modern poet in derogatory terms:

     

    as a poet i was getting extremely tired of   what i considered
   an unnatural language act   going into a closet so to
  speak   sitting in front of a typewriter and nothing is
   necessary   a closet is no place to address anybody
(Antin 56)

     

    Although he may be perverse in Antin’s terms, Auster is powerfully drawn to this “unnatural language act,” for the image of the lonely poet trapped inside the room that is the book haunts his writing. On another level, though, it is not self-enclosure that constitutes an “unnatural act” in Auster’s writing, but rather the intrusion of poetry into narrative prose. His fiction and memoirs have remained remarkably open to poetry and to what are thought of as poetic concerns, and this openness results in unusual pressures on the writing, pressures that account for many of its salient characteristics.

     

    Typically, if we call a novel “poetic,” we mean that it has a “lyrical” quality, like André Gide’s L’Immoraliste or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, or we mean that the words have been chosen with particular relish for their sound and exactitude, as in the stories of Guy Davenport or in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Auster’s fiction, however, is not especially lyrical in its rhythm or its diction; indeed, its tone is deliberately flat, in the manner of factual statement. And although by carefully portraying dilemmas of understanding he creates characters whose driving concerns are epistemological, his exactitude is of a phenomenological or hermeneutic sort, rather than a matter of heightened verbal precision. In other words, the poetic element in Auster’s fiction is not a “formal” concern. Instead, it can be located in his engagement with a range of the fundamental issues that have defined twentieth-century poetry: the materiality of language, the relations between words and objects, the commanding presence of silence, the impact of prose upon poetry, and the ways in which, as Marina Tsvetaeva puts it, “In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews” (quoted by Auster, AH 114).

     

    Just as the identity of the poet hides in the character of Blue, these poetic issues hide among the more immediately noticeable metafictional qualities of Auster’s writing. Admittedly, a general description of his fiction might make it hard to differentiate Auster’s work from that of any number of postmodern novelists, for whom poetry would be the least of their concerns. To give such a general description of Auster’s fiction in a single sentence, you could say that his books are allegories about the impossibly difficult task of writing, in which he investigates the similarly impossible task of achieving identity — through characters plagued by a double who represents the unknowable self — and that this impossible task takes place in an irrational world, governed by chance and coincidence, whose author cannot be known. And then it would be easy to construct a map of precursors and sources as a congenial modern terrain in which to situate Auster’s work: the textual entrapments of Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Ponge, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan, and Derrida; the psychological intensities of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and Freud; the paranoid overdeterminations of Surrealism, magic, alchemy, and Kabbalah. This capsule description and list of affinities and affiliations slights two important features: Auster’s extensive work as a poet and as a translator of French poetry and the crucial ways in which his narrative prose stages an encounter between poetry and the novel.

     

    For many novelists at the beginning of their careers, poetry may function as a form of finger exercises, but in Auster’s case there was a curiously persistent vacillation. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, he chronicles some of the dodges he took between verse and prose, before his decisive turn to fiction: “I had always dreamed of writing novels. My first published works were poems, and for ten years or so I published only poems, but all along I spent nearly as much time writing prose. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, I filled up dozens of notebooks. It’s just that I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I never showed it to anyone” (AH 291). Reportedly, he became so frustrated with his efforts at fiction that he stopped altogether in the mid-seventies, restricting himself to composing and translating poetry and to writing critical essays. The poems, as Auster rightly notes, initially “resembled clenched fists; they were short and dense and obscure, as compact and hermetic as Delphic oracles” (AH 293), but during the later seventies they began to open up: “The breath became somewhat longer, the propositions became somewhat more discursive” (AH 294). Finally, though, at a time of acute emotional and financial distress, he reached a profound impasse: “There were moments when I thought I was finished, when I thought I would never write another word” (AH 294). Having touched bottom, as many of his characters do, Auster was ready for a breakthrough, which he says came when he attended a dance rehearsal: “Something happened, and a whole world of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. I think it was the absolute fluidity of what I was seeing, the continual motion of the dancers as they moved around the floor. It filled me with immense happiness” (AH 294). The next day he began writing White Spaces (1980; D 101-110), his one work of what I would call “poet’s prose,” which he describes “an attempt on my part to translate the experience of that dance performance into words. It was a liberation for me, a tremendous letting go, and I look back on it now as the bridge between writing poetry and writing prose” (AH 295).2

     

    Over the past two centuries, poets have attested again and again to a liberating sensation when they begin to write poetry in prose. One might expect such freedom to be a result of escaping from the rigorous demands of meter and rhyme; but instead, it’s as if the poet finds him or herself on the other side of a heavily fortified wall — outside the “closet” — able for the first time to step beyond the tiny social space accorded to verse and to take command of some of the vast discursive reservoirs of prose. In Auster’s case, it’s as if verse (ordinarily associated metaphorically with dance) were frozen stock still, while prose (usually imagined as plodding) were free to dance; where his verse “resembled clenched fists,” his poet’s prose represented “a tremendous letting go.” A truly generative work for Auster, White Spaces marks the moment when prose and poetry actually meet in his writing; out of this moment arises Auster’s central poetic project in prose: the investigation of the scene of writing. It is an immense project — a kind of detective assignment that may well take him the rest of his career. In White Spaces, Auster records a primary investigative discovery, at once phenomenological, mystical, and social: writing takes place in a room. In the following passage, he begins to explore this room:

     

    I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real. (D 107)

     

    In this work of poet’s prose, Auster insists over and over again on the physicality of writing. He makes this physicality graphic by welding together three distinct spaces: the room, the space in which writing is enacted; the interior space where writing happens in the writer; and the space on the page the words occupy. In White Spaces, as later in Ghosts, Auster represents the physicality of writing by an equation of the room with the book: “I remain in the room in which I am writing this,” he says, as though he were occupying the “white spaces” of the page, the mind, and the room. Whichever way he turns in this symbolic architecture, the writer seems to find his physical body trapped: when he writes, it enters into the closed space of the book; when he gets up from the book, it paces the narrow confines of the room. This claustrophobic situation draws attention to what Antin might deplore as the marked leaning toward solipsism in Auster’s writing, a tendency that we will look at from different vantage points in later sections of this essay. At this point, however, it is important to note that the outside world does manage to break through the self-inscribed mental sphere of Auster’s characters, imposing actual consequences upon their ruminations and conjectures. In the passage above, he acknowledges at least the idea of interpenetration between the mental and the social worlds by locating, in the manner of Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, an “imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real.”

     

    III.

     

    Auster is not, of course, the first writer to figure the book as the allegorical scene of writing. In particular, two French poets who wrote extensively in prose, Stéphane Mallarmé and Edmond Jabès, have provided Auster with important examples. He has translated Mallarmé’s poetic fragments on the death of his young son, A Tomb for Anatole (1983) (some of which appears first in The Invention of Solitude), and Mallarmé’s notion of a grand Book that includes the entire world hovers in the background of Auster’s explorations of the scene of writing. But even more directly pertinent to Auster’s obsessions are those of Jabès, the Jewish Egyptian poet, whose remarkable seven volumes of meditative and oracular poet’s prose, The Book of Questions (1963-73), have had a shaping hand in Auster’s poetic narratives.3 Auster makes explicit the connection between Jabès and Mallarmé in an article he wrote originally in 1976 for The New York Review of Books, in which he links the Jewish themes of The Book of Questions to central issues animating modern French poetry:

     

    Although Jabès's imagery and sources are for the most part derived from Judaism, The Book of Questions is not a Jewish work in the same way that one can speak of Paradise Lost as a Christian work. . . . The Book is his central image -- but it is not only the Book of the Jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the Midrash), but an allusion to Mallarmé's ideal Book as well (the Book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). Finally, Jabès's work must be considered as part of the on-going French poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. (AH 113-14)

     

    Although Jabès himself has no wish to deny his placement within French poetic tradition, he takes great pains, in a subsequent interview that Auster conducted with him, to differentiate his notion of the book from that of Mallarmé: “Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book. He wanted to make a great book, the book of books. But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself. That destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it” (AH 164). Jabès favors a midrashic approach to the book over an idealist one, a text composed of questions rather than answers, a book from which one can at least provisionally escape.4 Like midrashic commentary upon Scripture, Jabès’s Book of Questions proceeds by locating anomalies or paradoxes or gaps in understanding, using such questions to generate further writing — as if one first had to become lost in order to be found. Such characterizations of Jabès’s work may sound like re-statements of deconstructive truisms — and one should note the profound impact Jabès’s writing has had upon Derrida and other French theorists — but there is also a desire for truth and wholeness in Jabès’s work (regardless of the difficulty of articulating such things) that seems at odds with deconstruction as a movement, and this desire is something Auster unashamedly espouses as well. Jabès pursues a wholeness based in fragments, and he claims to maintain an awareness of the entire book at every moment of writing, so that the whole exerts an irresistible pressure that determines the composition of the book word-by-word:

     

    When I say there are many books in the book, it is because there are many words in the word. Obviously, if you change the word, the context of the sentence changes completely. In this way another sentence is born from this word, and a completely different book begins . . . I think of this in terms of the sea, in the image of the sea as it breaks upon the shore. It is not the wave that comes, it is the whole sea that comes each time and the whole sea that draws back. It is never just a wave, it is always everything that comes and everything that goes. This is really the fundamental movement in all my books. Everything is connected to everything else. . . . At each moment, in the least question, it is the whole book which returns and the whole book which draws back. (AH 168)

     

    His highly elaborated notion of the book as the central poetic principle of writing — as that which holds open the space of writing — allows Jabès to make a radical distinction between the novel and the (poetic) book. Although The Book of Questions has characters, dialogue, and an implicit story, and although it is classified on the jacket of the English version as “fiction,” Jabès vehemently rejects the storytelling function of the novel as undermining the writer’s fidelity to the book. For the book makes moment-to-moment demands that Jabès believes should supersede the commitment to telling a particular story. He complains,

     

    The novelist's high-handed appropriation of the book has always been unbearable to me. What makes me uneasy is his pretense of making the space of the book the space of the story he tells -- making the subject of his novel the subject of the book. . . . Novelistic fiction, even when innovative, does not, from my point of view, take charge of the totality of [the risk involved in writing]. The book loses its autonomy. . . . A stranger to the book, its breath, its rhythm, the novelist imposes an exterior, exclusive speech: a life and a death, invented in the course of the story. For him the book is only a tool. At no moment does the novelist listen to the page, to its whiteness and silence (Jabès Desert 101).

     

    As a poet in a textual age, Jabès locates the space of poetry within the book, which has a life of its own. Aided by the evidence that a vital Jewish imagination has been able to survive within the book for two millennia, he seeks to defend this space from incursions by those lesser poetic talents, the novelists, who impose the stories of particular characters over the mysterious imperatives of the book. In his own investigations of “the space of the book,” Auster takes seriously the challenge issued by Jabès, endeavoring to enter the room of the book by attending to its “whiteness and silence.” Like Jabès in The Book of Questions, Auster writes a prose animated by the poetic issues of investigating and responding to the “white spaces” of the book. Unlike Jabès, however, Auster also has a commitment to the novel, and a deep tension arises in his prose from a confrontation between narrative and the book. At the beginning of his published prose, with The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, Auster’s fidelity resides primarily with the book. This results in a flatness of characterization and in a dialogue that appears more like its surrounding descriptive prose than like the speech of discrete characters; likewise, the narrative of his early novels seems wholly governed by plot. Over the course of his four subsequent novels, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan, Auster expands his ability to create realistic characters and begins to elaborate narratives that unfold beyond the exigencies of plot. Still, his characteristic explorations of the scene of writing take place within a palpable tension between novel and book.

     

    Auster’s first book of prose, The Invention of Solitude, contains a Jabèsian text, “The Book of Memory,” in which he explores the space of writing through an obsessive attention to the book that nearly rivals the poetic fixation of Jabès. And yet Auster does not, like Jabès, wholly eschew narrative, for the “Book of Memory” brims with anecdotes and little stories; it is here that Auster begins to create a fiction of the book. In his article on Jabès, Auster gives a summary description of The Book of Questions that applies equally well to his own “Book of Memory:” “What happens in The Book of Questions, then, is the writing of The Book of Questions — or rather, the attempt to write it, a process that the reader is allowed to witness in all its gropings and hesitations” (AH 111). “The Book of Memory” begins with a literal enactment of “listen[ing] to the page, its whiteness and silence”: “He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” (IS 75). Then, we continue to “witness in all its gropings and hesitations” the further attempts to write the book:

     

    Later that same day he returns to his room. He finds a fresh sheet of paper and lays it out on the table before him. He writes until he has covered the entire page with words. Later, when he reads over what he has written, he has trouble deciphering the words. Those he does manage to understand do not seem to say what he thought he was saying. Then he goes out to eat his dinner.That night he tells himself that tomorrow is another day. New words begin to clamor in his head, but he does not write them down. He decides to refer to himself as A. He walks back and forth between the table and the window. He turns on the radio and then turns it off. He smokes a cigarette.

     

    Then he writes. It was. It will never be again. (IS 75)

     

    As in Ghosts, Auster creates a scene of writing that is both book and room, and for which the question of identity is inseparable from the writing of the book. “The Book of Memory” is an autobiography, in which the author “decides to refer to himself as A.” in order to create enough distance to be able to see himself. He places himself at a turning point — “It was. It will never be again.” — which allows him to investigate the present in terms of the past, utilizing memory as a kind of book that, in Jabès’s terms, “destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it” (AH 164): “The Book of Memory” destroys memory by making it into a book. Likewise, the present sense of self is an enclosure created anew over and over again by interrogating the past. In other words, the question that Blue asks in Ghosts, “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (NYT 201-2), animates “The Book of Memory” as well. The room and the book are thematized in many ways in “The Book of Memory:” A. describes the room in which he lives and writes (as well as a number of significant rooms in his past) in obsessive detail; as in the old art of memory, he portrays memory in architectural terms, comprised of rooms in which contiguous impressions are stored; in addition, A. explores the principles that determine such contiguity — chance, coincidence, free association.

     

    Like Thoreau, whose Walden he plays with in Ghosts, Auster is fascinated by solitude; many of the images that recur throughout “The Book of Memory” evoke solitary enclosure, such as the references to Jonah in the whale, to Pinocchio in the shark, to Anne Frank in hiding, and to George Oppen’s phrase “the shipwreck of the singular.” Regardless of the imagery with which it is portrayed, enclosure within the room of writing invokes not just a sense of aloneness but an actual claustrophobia in Auster’s characters: “It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole” (IS 77). Ultimately, what we have been considering as a poetic anxiety about the room of writing is revealed as a fear of death, a fear so acute that A. tries to evacuate his life out of the present in order to observe it safely, albeit in a disembodied fashion, from the future:

     

    Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Whenever he turned on his radio and listened to the news of the world, he would find himself imagining the words to be describing things that had happened long ago. Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as "nostalgia for the present." (IS 76)

     

    In this passage, Auster employs four different methods of displacing the present: by portraying A. as bouncing between the past and the future, hearing first a report of present events as though it were referring to the distant past, and next trying to imagine himself looking at the present from the future; then, in the last sentence, by having a narrator locate himself at a future point, “Later,” looking back upon A. in the “present” moment; and finally, by giving this alienated condition the label “nostalgia for the present,” which further congeals and reifies it. There is, of course, a long genealogy behind the enactment of extreme alienation in modern literature — especially, for this text of Auster’s, in Jewish writers: Kafka, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin, Celan, Jabès, Barthes, Anne Frank, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Henry Roth, etc. But in “The Book of Memory” Auster deploys the effects of alienation in a particularly active way that he shares with a smaller circle of writers, like Samuel Beckett and the John Ashbery of Three Poems. These writers create what I have called elsewhere a translative prose, which is always engaged simultaneously in investigating identity and writing, bringing forth a tenuous fiction from the ever-new exigencies of the book.5 At one point in “The Book of Memory,” Auster invokes translation as an image for what occurs when one enters the room of the book:

     

    For most of his adult life, he has earned his living by translating the books of other writers. He sits at his desk reading the book in French and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in English. It is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. Every book is an image of solitude. . . . A. sits down in his own room to translate another man's book, and it is as though he were entering that man's solitude and making it his own. (IS 136)

     

    In the act of translation, identity is both found and lost: rewriting the words of another writer is a profoundly intimate form of relationship, in which the translator finds identities melting, mingling, or repelling one another. The translator invades the solitude of the space of writing, and the intruder never knows whether he or she will leave that violated solitude with a sense of self fortified or weakened by the encounter. For Blue, in Ghosts, this penetration into another’s solitude results in a terrifying mise en abime: “Having penetrated Black’s room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black’s solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own” (NYT 226). Like the later fictional character Blue, “A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating” (IS 136).

     

    Out of this meditation upon translation, though, A. achieves a realization that gives the ghostly existence of translation a new sort of life: “it dawns on him that everything he is trying to record in “The Book of Memory,” everything he has written so far, is no more than the translation of a moment or two of his life — those moments he lived through on Christmas Eve, 1979, in his room at 6 Varick Street” (IS 136). Translation not only renders the writer a ghost enclosed in the room that is the book; it is also a way out. For the moment that inaugurates “The Book of Memory” — the recognition that A.’s life and his writing have been on a collision course that has finally eventuated in their complete merging, a recognition provoked when he sits down at his desk and writes, “It was. It will never be again.” (IS 75) — also begins a translation of that moment out of itself. The only way to get out of the room that is the book is by writing the book, for writing translates the moment that inaugurates the book into an ongoing present that opens out of the memory of that moment. Auster makes explicit the notion of escape through the translation of memory by citing the example of Pascal’s “Memorial,” an ecstatic testimony that was sewn into the lining of the philosopher’s clothes as a constant reminder of his moment of mystical illumination, on the night of November 23, 1654 (137). The memory of such a moment illuminates the space of writing, so that as the writer dives into the memory he can see a way of moving beyond his solitude and out into the world and, ultimately, into history:

     

    As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). What he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -- which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. (139)

     

    The poet is trapped in narrative prose, the writer is trapped in the book, the “agent” is trapped in the room: can these figures use memory to come out into the world, into history? One way of looking at this conundrum would be to notice that for both Pascal and A., memory already includes simultaneously an inside and an outside: when Pascal writes his memory and then sews it into his clothing, he gives it a double exteriority, which matches the way that A. moves both inward and outward by writing about what he remembers of Christmas Eve, 1979. But thinking of memory in this way offers too easy a solution to Auster’s dilemma. We can complicate the notion of memory by seeing it not only as a matter of interiority and exteriority, but also as an interplay of remembering and forgetting. From the latter perspective, we will have to hold off deciding whether to accept Auster’s affirmation that memory leads out of the room and into history, until we have looked at what his text actively forgets.

     

    IV.

     

    In order to think about what is repressed in “The Book of Memory,” I would like to bring a second framework into play, which is that of the parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity embedded in the text. “The Book of Memory” is ostensibly a book of mourning, for A.’s father has just died and his grandfather dies during its composition. The previous half of The Invention of Solitude, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” treats the death of Auster’s father and his subsequent discovery that his paternal grandfather was murdered by his grandmother. Throughout “The Book of Memory,” Auster reflects upon the relations of fathers and sons, brooding particularly on his feelings toward his own young son in the midst of his reflections upon the traumas and losses inscribed within the continuity of generations.6 The mood of the text is one of melancholy, veering between hopelessness, nostalgia, and obsessive self-regard, but its desperately sought goal seems to be the regeneration of a life through writing. In this context, the room of the book receives a different set of figurative equivalents from those found in Ghosts. In the latter, the room of the book is a place where Blue is trapped, and where he is forcibly initiated into the brotherhood of writers. In “The Book of Memory,” the room of the book is figured as a void, a place of nothingness or meaninglessness, a site for the confrontation with death. Auster makes explicit a metonymic chain of rhyming words that underlies this particular figuration of the room as scene of writing: “Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room” (IS 159-60).

     

    The implication of this chain of equivalents is that the room of the book is a place where death can be transformed into rebirth. But this can only happen, Auster asserts, if we take meaninglessness as a first principle. By meaninglessness, Auster has a specific denial in mind, that of the motivated connection between any two factors:

     

    Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle . . . . (147)

     

    By enshrining meaninglessness as first principle, Auster seems to be striking a blow against the conventions of the novel, which rest upon the assumption that a meaningful connection between events can be constructed; without this assumption, the ideological work of the novel as creator of identity within a social world would collapse. Auster undermines the ideological basis of the novel by telling a series of stories in which coincidences and connections are never sufficient to ensure identity.

     

    Auster asserts the “principle” of meaninglessness several times in “The Book of Memory,” particularly when discussing coincidence or chance. After telling a story about M., a friend who finds himself living in Paris in the exact same attic room where his father had hidden from the Nazis twenty years before, A. notes the further coincidence that he, too, lived in such a chambre de bonne and that it was where his own father had come to see him. These thoughts cause A. to “remember his father’s death. And beyond that, to understand — this most important of all — that M.’s story has no meaning” (81). In this passage, the principle of meaninglessness is associated directly with A.’s father’s death, and beyond that with the equation of the room of the book with the tomb. From this void, however, comes A.’s impulse to write, to make of his memorializing book a site of regeneration, to find himself anew within the act of mourning. Recognizing that M.’s story is meaningless, A. counters,

     

    Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts. (81)

    But what does haunt Auster and his character in this experience of nothingness? He offers a clue to his haunting in the equations quoted earlier: “Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room.” These equations take us beyond the ostensible subject of mourning into a repressed but highly significant motivation of the writing; to tie the room and the tomb with the feminine image of the womb brings in gender considerations to a narrative that is otherwise almost exclusively masculine. It seems to me that in this text terms like “nothingness” and “meaninglessness” are gendered feminine, and that based upon this equation women are rendered as void and men are imagined as self-generating. Having projected so many desires upon the notion of nothingness, it’s as though Auster then takes the Buddhist image of the “pregnant void” and splits it in half, assigning the void to women and pregnancy to men. In “The Book of Memory,” Auster attempts a kind of parthenogenesis, using the room as a womb to give birth to the book, without the intervention of the feminine. Let me offer some illustrations to make this assertion convincing.

     

    In a discussion of Paris and of a composer he meets there, S., who becomes a father figure to him, A. gives a striking description of the room as a place at once claustrophobic (to the body) and infinitely generative (to the mind) — a masculine womb. He begins the description by noting, “These are his earliest memories of the city, where so much of his life would later be spent, and they are inescapably bound up with the idea of the room” (89). Having highlighted the room’s significance, A. goes on to describe first its claustrophobic quality: “S. lived in a space so small that at first it seemed to defy you, to resist being entered. The presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it. It was impossible to move inside it without contracting your body to its smallest dimensions, without contracting your mind to some infinitely small point within itself.” Here, the claustrophobia seems to affect both the body and the mind, as though the room were attempting to squeeze both down to nothingness. For the mind, however, this extreme form of contraction results in its opposite, a sudden expansion, inaugurated by becoming aware of the contents of the room:

     

    For there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. It was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of one man's inner world, even to the slightest detail. S. had literally managed to surround himself with the things that were inside him. The room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought. This was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination. (89)

     

    In this masculinist fantasy of self-generative creativity, the enwombing room is “like the skin of some second body around him,” capable of giving birth to the solitary artist’s works of art, without the intervention of woman, or even of the body. This is a kind of male “hysteria,” in which the wandering womb of the room takes on the generative qualities of the composer’s inner life.7 The most fully realized image of masculine birth in “The Book of Memory” is that of Pinocchio, who is sculpted into being by his father, and this image, as I shall later demonstrate, runs as a leitmotif throughout the text. Another major image of masculinist self-generation, Leibniz’s monadology, recurs at several points in the text and also partakes of the psychological disturbance of male birth. For instance, further on in the same meditation that produces the equation of room with tomb and womb, A. imagines that language is a kind of monadology, a matrix of rhyming words that “functions as a kind of bridge that joins opposite and contrasting aspects of the world with each other:”

     

    Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements -- cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids -- are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it. (160)

     

    A. ascribes tremendous potency to language, imagining it as the matrix of being, as the genetic matter of the world. He sums up this apotheosis of language by invoking Leibniz: “Language, then, as monadology, to echo the term used by Leibniz” (160). The monadology is the interconnected network of the “monads” that compose the universe, each of which is affected by the motion of all the others. After a long quote from Leibniz, Auster concludes, “Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world” (161). This seemingly Heideggerean recognition, that language “is the way we exist in the world,” is given a particular twist, though, by A.’s fantasy that “language . . . is an infinitely complex organism” with “cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids,” as though language were not just a mode of existence in the world but a replacement for life in the body; for, when “it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well” (161), the monadology of language has taken over everything. At the end of this three-page meditation on the power of language, A. arrives at the mysterious recognition that, in fact, everything is beginning to rhyme for him:

     

    What A. is struggling to express, perhaps, is that for some time now none of the terms has been missing for him. Wherever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if it were all suddenly converging in him and happening to him at once. Coincidence: to fall on with; to occupy the same place in time or space. The mind, therefore, as that which contains more than itself. As in the phrase from Augustine: "But where is the part of it which it does not itself contain?" (162)

     

    To see interconnections can be a result of a visionary heightening of consciousness, or, with the sense that “the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed,” it may well be that A. is experiencing a moment of sheer paranoia. If this is a moment of paranoia, it must have a causal connection to A.’s masculinist notion of self-generation, of mind outside body in a room. In fact, A.’s imagining of the human mind as the entire monadology goes far beyond Leibniz, whom Auster quotes as cautioning that “A soul, however, can read in itself only what is directly represented in it; it is unable to unfold all at once all its folds; for these go on into infinity” (161). In his more paranoid rendition of a monadology, A. has taken something like Robert Duncan’s poetic conceit about “the structure of rime” and inflated it into the fantasy of a wrinkle-free existence, in which all interconnections are apparent to the mind.8

     

    The gender implications of this fantasy of disembodiment are most disturbingly represented in an earlier scene in the text, in which A., “for no particular reason,” wanders into a topless bar in Manhattan. In a completely detached tone of voice, Auster describes how A. “found himself sitting next to a voluptuously naked young woman,” who invites him into the back room. “There was something so openly humorous and matter-of-fact about her approach, that he finally agreed to her proposition. The best thing, they decided, would be for her to suck his penis, since she claimed an extraordinary talent for this activity.” At the moment of ejaculation, the Leibnizean monad is revealed as an image of masculine parthenogenesis:

     

    As he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells -- or roughly the same number as there are people in the world -- which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: "Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe." For the fact is, we are of the same stuff that came into being with the first explosion of the first spark in the infinite emptiness of space. Or so he said to himself, at that moment, as his penis exploded into the mouth of that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten. (114)

     

    In this passage the conjunction of woman as nothingness with masculine parthenogenesis is made explicit. The sexual function of the woman is located in the mouth, not in the womb, and absolutely no connection, aside from mechanical friction, is made between the woman and the man. Not only is the woman nameless, but her name is actively erased by A.’s seemingly unnecessary final qualification: “that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten.” There is a barb in that statement, which we will have to look at momentarily. In the meantime, note the careful working out of a parthenogenic procreation: the emotionless ejaculation is converted into a purely mental reverie — as though the phallus were the mind, capable of generating the entire world by its explosive satisfaction. The woman’s role in this fantasy of masculine self-generation is “effaced” (that is, she is rendered faceless), and as recipient of the exploding penis she becomes mute.

     

    A few pages further on in “The Book of Memory,” A. makes a seemingly technical reference to “Solitude,” a song recorded by Billie Holiday (whose heart-wrenching vocal style registers unforgettably the effects of masculine aggression). Following the technical reference, A. notices that the mention of Billie Holiday and an immediately prior description of Emily Dickinson’s room (“it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse” [123]) constitute “First allusions to a woman’s voice. To be followed by specific reference to several” (123). But he does not deliver on this promise. Instead, he launches into an odd speculation: “For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth — assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak — it comes from the mouth of a woman” (123). This conjectured truth never arrives in the text, where, ironically, the only thing that “comes from the mouth of a woman” is A.’s penis. It’s as though Billie Holiday and Emily Dickinson are invoked only to be silenced. The question arises, then, why this desire to erase the woman’s voice?

     

    A clue to answering this question appears in a passage describing A.’s relationship to the one other character in “The Book of Memory” who is denied a name — also a woman. A. is telling a story about his two-year-old son’s sudden illness and resultant stay in the hospital. The fearful parents spend every waking hour with him:

     

    His wife, however, began to show the strain. At one point she walked out to A., who was in the adult sitting room, and said, "I give up, I can't handle him anymore" -- and there was such resentment in her voice against the boy, such an anger of exasperation, that something inside A. fell to pieces. Stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness, and in that one instant all the newly won harmony that had been growing between them for the past month vanished: for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her. He stormed out of the room and went to his son's bedside. (108)

     

    The woman-without-a-name in “The Book of Memory” is A.’s wife. In the passage above, his repressed anger begins to leak out. Her statement, “I give up, I can’t handle him anymore,” is something one expects to hear from the mother of a two-year-old at least daily. But its effect upon A., who has transferred the force of his anger at his wife to an excessive doting upon his son (which appears in many passages of “The Book of Memory”), is to break through the shell of his repression. Rather than commiserate with her, “A. fell to pieces,” that is, he became angry: “stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness.” What is “stupid” and “cruel” in the context of a marriage, though, is not the anger itself but the reported repression of it for so many years: “for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her.” If these two characters have suppressed conflict for so many years, it’s no wonder that their marriage is falling apart and that A.’s anger toward women has reached a bizarre climax in his attempt to exclude them completely from the room of the book. The parthenogenic fantasy running through “The Book of Memory” and the masculine genealogy of fathers and sons that Auster constructs in the entire Invention of Solitude must arise, at least in part, from the unacceptably explosive potential that resides in a bottled-up anger toward women. One important facet of this psychic economy is A.’s transforming his anger and sense of betrayal into a smothering identification with his son: in the passage quoted above, for instance, A. “stormed out of the room and went to his son’s bedside,” shifting his affection and allegiance from wife to son. In his identification with the son, Auster writes the mother out of the family romance; he effects this erasure by portraying A.’s wife as her son’s betrayer and by shifting the focus of the divorce drama onto the relationship of the parents to the son.

     

    If this is a book of mourning, a book of confrontation with death, then the fatality that looms largest within it but is given least expression is the death of a marriage. At one “ghostly” level, this is a book of divorce, a book of memory born from the almost total suppression of the memories of a marriage. A. allows his nameless wife very few appearances, and in none of them does she represent any of the positive creative qualities of regeneration that A. so desperately seeks. For instance, he figures their marriage as hopelessly unproductive from its outset: “He remembers returning home from his wedding party in 1974, his wife beside him in her white dress, and taking the front door key out of his pocket, inserting the key in the lock, and then, as he turned his wrist, feeling the blade of the key snap off inside the lock” (145). Rather than explore the interior landscape of his marriage in order to understand how what we might interpret as a symbolic castration took place, A. retreats to a room and writes a book of self-regeneration, in which he invents a masculine genealogy of creativity that will substitute for his father’s emotional distance and will also mourn the father’s recent death. From the perspective of this fundamental inability to confront the breakdown of his marriage and his feelings about women, it’s the connection between death and divorce that makes the most striking “coincidence” in the book: “Two months after his father’s death (January 1979), A.’s marriage collapsed” (101). In his desperate attempt to deny the true consequences of his divorce — the collapse of his ability to relate to women in a mutually beneficial manner — A. turns, as we have noted, to his son: “it was quite another thing for him to swallow the consequences it entailed: to be separated from his son. The thought of it was intolerable to him” (101).

     

    V.

     

    Within the masculine genealogy of this text, all of A.’s hopes for regeneration are transferred to his son. His feelings toward his son are not just those of the understandably protective father in such potentially damaging circumstances, but they also partake of a messianic desire for deliverance that the son is imagined as fulfilling. Throughout The Invention of Solitude Auster cultivates a fantasy, most fully represented by the Pinocchio story, that the son will rescue the father.9 Like Gepetto, A. as father hides in the room of the book, creating his own son parthenogenically as his savior. Given the depiction in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” the first half of The Invention of Solitude, of Auster’s own desperately wounded father (who witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of his mother), the provenance of this desire for the son to rescue the father is painfully apparent as a patrimony Auster inherits. This desire is not, however, only a feature of Auster’s psychological makeup, a response to his father’s maddening emotional distance; it also corresponds to the desire to rescue their parents experienced by children of Holocaust victims and survivors. The connection between Auster’s personal history and a post-Holocaust sensibility runs throughout “The Book of Memory.” Of all the scenes of hiding in a room rehearsed in the text, the most central thematically is that of Anne Frank, writing her own identity in a book while hiding from the Nazis. To consider further the relationship of a masculine redemptive genealogy to hiding within the room of the book, we must begin investigating the third framework, which is the post-Holocaust imagery pervading “The Book of Memory.”

     

    I say “post-Holocaust” because, although he includes a number of scenes from the Holocaust itself, Auster is a Jewish writer born after the war, and so what’s pertinent, both in his recounting of Holocaust material and throughout the text, is the way his imagination has been infected by the Holocaust. Although his secularity and his close reliance upon Protestant American writers like Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville may inadvertently hide the pervasiveness of the Jewish context for his writing, Auster provides a significant gauge of this context in his essays, collected in The Art of Hunger. Of the nineteen essays, eleven discuss secular Jewish writers, all of whom have had telling influences upon Auster’s writing: Laura Riding (2), Franz Kafka (2), Louis Wolfson, Charles Reznikoff, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès (2), George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. For Jews like Auster, born after World War II, two paramount realities demand attention: the Holocaust and the State of Israel. Auster makes mention of Israel in “The Book of Questions” only by reproducing an encyclopedia entry about a relative, Daniel Auster, who became the first mayor of Jerusalem after independence (85). Daniel is also the name of A.’s son (who is the only character given a full name in the text), so that this coincidence ties his Israeli relative into the genealogy A. is constructing. The invocation of Israel takes place, significantly enough, within the context of an extended meditation upon and identification with Anne Frank. During this meditation, Auster identifies Anne Frank’s room directly with the room of the book, setting forth the post-Holocaust thematics of his text.

     

    On a short trip to Amsterdam, ostensibly to look at art, A. finds himself confronted by the traces of Anne Frank. As in his entry into the topless bar, A. goes to Anne Frank’s house “for no particular reason.” By this point in the narrative, it is clear that this phrase indicates not chance but overdetermined motives:

     

    For no particular reason (idly looking through a guide book he found in his hotel room) he decided to go to Anne Frank's house, which has been preserved as a museum. It was a Sunday morning, gray with rain, and the streets along the canal were deserted. He climbed the steep and narrow staircase inside the house and entered the secret annex. As he stood in Anne Frank's room, the room in which the diary was written, now bare, with the faded pictures of Hollywood movie stars she had collected still pasted to the walls, he suddenly found himself crying. Not sobbing, as might happen in response to deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that the Book of Memory began. As in the phrase: "she wrote her diary in this room." (82-3)

     

    Anne Frank’s room of the book, in which she wrote her diary, supplies an originary moment for “The Book of Memory.” Entering this room, A. experiences not just a psychological but an ontological pain, as if the condition of hiding imposed upon Anne Frank by the threat of the Holocaust had now become the condition of being in the world. Two paragraphs later, A. imagines this claustrophobic ontology as “a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years” (83) — as though every post-Holocaust experience of solitude, every self-encounter, were haunted by Anne Frank’s absolute isolation. Looking out her window at children’s toys in a yard, A. wonders “what it would be like to grow up in the shadow of Anne Frank’s room” (83), in the shadow of that breath-stopping solitude. In a figurative sense, all Jews after the war grow up within this shadow. Whenever Auster enters the room of the book, he seems to find it enveloped by this shadow, as if his writing were a repetition-compulsion brought about by the trauma of the Holocaust. In an ironic juxtaposition, A. quotes a famous saying of Pascal, “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room” (83), as though Anne Frank’s life in the room of the book were a reproach to the monastic psychology of hiding and self-incarceration as a freely chosen way of life. Growing up figuratively in the shadow of Anne Frank’s room, A. feels trapped inside the room of the book; he chooses not his location but his identification with Anne Frank as writer, as though his overwhelming task of mourning were given concretion and containment by her room and her book.

     

    Not only does A. identify himself with Anne Frank, but he also notes that “Anne Frank’s birthday is the same as his son’s” (83), thus placing her into the genealogical chain of fathers and children, rather than opening up for her occupation the closed space of the feminine. Following this recognition of a kind of post-Holocaust kinship between Anne Frank and himself, A. quotes from an extraordinary document of familial trauma: “Israel Lichtenstein’s Last Testament. Warsaw; July 31, 1942,” in which one of the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, knowing he is about to die, asks not “for gratitude, any monument, any praise. I want only a remembrance” (84). Lichtenstein asks for remembrance of himself, of his wife, and especially of his preternaturally gifted daughter: “Margalit, 20 months old today. Has mastered Yiddish perfectly, speaks a pure Yiddish. . . . In intelligence she is on a par with 3- or 4-year old children. I don’t want to brag about her. . . . I am not sorry about my life and that of my wife. But I am sorry for the gifted little girl. She deserves to be remembered also” (84). Traumas of this magnitude — involving the obliteration of individuals, of communities, and, most poignantly for A., of marvelous children — are suffered not only by those who experience them; they are passed on to future generations as unfinished projects of mourning. At the family level (in traumas such as Auster’s father’s witnessing of his father’s murder) and at the societal level (in traumas such as the Holocaust or American slavery), unbearable memories are braided within the continuity of generations, so that the trauma maintains a virulent force, which has the ability to yank a member of a succeeding generation out of the present and into its secret room. When A. imagines the continuity of generations, he cannot call up a biblical plenitude within which to reside; instead, the trauma displaces him into a realm of isolation, in which the generations are squeezed into an individual body — itself incapable of inhabiting the present:

     

    When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels . . . . Inexplicably, he finds himself shaking at that moment with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forward and backward, into the future and into the past. And there are times, often there are times, when these feelings are so strong that his life no longer seems to dwell in the present. (81-2)

     

    When he is transported out of the present by trauma, A. lives in a genealogical world in which time is speeded up and fathers and children subsume one another: “Each time he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would look like as a grown-up. Each time he saw an old person, he would try to imagine what that person had looked like as a child” (87). This Blakean vision of the “mental traveller,” whose “life no longer seems to dwell in the present,” takes on a possibly misogynist twist when A. gazes at women:

     

    It was worst with women, especially if the woman was young and beautiful. He could not help looking through the skin of her face and imagining the anonymous skull behind it. And the more lovely the face, the more ardent his attempt to seek in it the encroaching signs of the future: incipient wrinkles, the later-to-be-sagging chin, the glaze of disappointment in the eyes. He would put one face on top of another: this woman at forty; this woman at sixty; this woman at eighty; as if, even as he stood in the present, he felt compelled to hunt out the future, to track down the death that lives in each one of us. (87)

     

    The post-Holocaust haunting by death dovetails with A.’s inability to imagine regeneration through the feminine, such that fertility and fecundity are replaced by dissolution and decay. A. ends this passage with a dispiriting quotation from Flaubert: “The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton” (87).

     

    Casting aside the feminine as a source of regeneration, A. turns to the hope that the son can rescue the father. When the father has suffered an unbearable trauma, it is natural for the son to entertain the fantasy of rescuing the father. An impulse of this sort must be at work, for instance, in Maus, Art Spiegelman’s remarkable Holocaust narrative. By foregrounding his difficult relationship with his father during his telling of the father’s tale of survival, Spiegelman subtly inscribes the son’s desire to rescue the father into the narrative. In “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” Auster presents himself as trapped within trauma, incapable both of rescuing his father and of mourning him satisfactorily, for complete mourning would require exorcising the trauma, and this he is unable to do: “There has been a wound, and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. At times I have even felt the pain of it concentrated in my right hand, as if each time I picked up the pen and pressed it against the page, my hand were being torn apart. Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever” (32).

     

    To attempt the rescue of his unburied father, A. goes into the room of the book and begins to write, seeking through writing to find his way back to the present: “The world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. Only one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. And if he does not manage to find this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another” (79). It sounds as though A. is setting himself a phenomenological project of learning to inhabit the room, as in the saying by Heidegger, “But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where we are already” (Heidegger 190). But instead of proceeding to register his sense of location in phenomenological terms, A. turns figurative immediately and begins to remember stories: “Life inside the whale. A gloss on Jonah, and what it means to refuse to speak. Parallel text: Gepetto in the belly of the shark (whale in the Disney version), and the story of how Pinocchio rescues him. Is it true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one’s father to become a real boy?” (79). Through the intertwined stories of Jonah and Pinocchio A. tries to understand what it means to live in the room of the book and how such dwelling might result in a rescue of the father. Thinking about Jonah’s residence inside the whale, A. notes that the whale “is by no means an agent of destruction. The fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea” (125). Such confinement represents incarceration as salvation, a kind of symbolic death that is “a preparation for new life, a life that has passed through death, and therefore a life that can at last speak” (125).

     

    The room of the book is an alchemical site, in which Auster hopes to make death speak life through the regeneration of the father by the son. In “The Book of Memory,” this alchemy makes its fullest appearance when A. meditates upon Pinocchio as he reads the story to his young son. Noting how “the little boy never tired of hearing the chapter about the storm at sea, which tells of how Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the belly of the Terrible Shark” (130), A. quotes Pinocchio’s charged exclamation, “Oh, Father, dear Father! Have I found you at last? Now I shall never, never leave you again!” (131). On one level, this exclamation gives direct expression to the feelings of these particular readers: “For A. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion” (131). On another level, this exclamation reiterates A.’s desire to recover his own father and, beyond that, to recover a patrilineal power from the dead that will enable him to speak. In his own life, as in the story of Pinocchio, the reunion with the father has become essential for the son’s regeneration: as A. notes, the bulk of Pinocchio “tells the story of Pinocchio’s search for his father — and Gepetto’s search for his son. At some point, Pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. But it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father” (132).

     

    When this reunion happens, however, the story is far from over. For regeneration to take place, for Pinocchio to become a “real boy,” for A. to redeem his traumatized father, the boy must emerge from the belly of the shark with his father upon his back. The parthenogenically created boy must give birth to himself out of the womb/tomb. This image resides at the core of Auster’s fantasy of regeneration through the room of the book, and he has A. meditate upon it intensively:

     

    The father on the son's back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of Aeneas bearing Anchises on his back from the ruins of Troy that each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing . . . certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupations: Cassandra, for example, predicting the ruin of Troy, and thereafter loss, as in the wanderings of Aeneas that precede the founding of Rome, and in that wandering the image of another wandering: the Jews in the desert, which, in its turn, yields further clusters of images: "Next year in Jerusalem," and with it the photograph in the Jewish Encyclopedia of his relative, who bore the name of his son. (133)

     

    In this swirling series of associations, the Greco-Roman “master”-civilization is brought into conjunction with the “wandering” Jewish culture and with A.’s own family. Here, the Jewish son carries his tradition upon his back, redeeming “Hebraism” in the face “Hellenism.” The story of Pinocchio is so seductive for A. because of the redemption of the fathers (and, proleptically, of the son) that it promises.

     

    For A.’s son, who spends an entire summer dressed as Superman, this fantasy of omnipotence and salvation is as irresistible as it is for his father:

     

    And for the little boy to see Pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be "good" and could not help being "bad," for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of revelation. The son saves the father. This must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. And this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined. Puer aeternus. The son saves the father. (134)

     

    Through the regenerative figure of the Puer aeternus, the son gives birth to the father — and thus to himself as “a real boy.” This represents the son’s wish-fulfillment of the overcoming of the father’s trauma, as well as the post-War Jew’s fantasy of saving the victims of the Holocaust. Through the agency of the “incompetent little marionette,” a mere simulacrum of a boy, the world of the fathers is to be redeemed. At the same time, however, A. as father remains only too aware of his own son’s vulnerability. In a meditation upon sons who die before their fathers, A. muses upon an imaginary stack of photographs: “Mallarmé’s son, Anatole; Anne Frank (‘This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to look. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different’). . . . The dead children. The children who will vanish, the children who are dead. Himmler: ‘I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth’” (97-8). These are the children whose fathers were unable to rescue them; their fate is encompassed by Himmler’s chilling anti-redemptive vow: for if there are no children, then there is no one to rescue and no one to do the rescuing.

     

    VI.

     

    It is time to return for a final look at the central question of this essay: what happens, then, inside the room of the book? Answer: a Book of Memory is being written. By engaging in such writing, Auster follows a central command reiterated throughout the Jewish scriptures: Remember! The Jewish historian, Y. H. Yerushalmi, notes that “the verb zakhar [to remember] appears in its various declensions in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with Israel or God as the subject, for memory is incumbent upon both” (Yerushalmi 5). Remembering is a central activity of Jewish culture, a form of commemoration that takes the place of priestly rituals, sanctifying the present through linking it to the past. In the Passover seder, for instance, the celebrants are enjoined to place themselves directly into the biblical scenes of deliverance, in order to understand that they are celebrating not something done by God for their ancestors but something done for themselves. As A. writes himself deeper and deeper into the room of the book, his relationship to memory undergoes a change: memory, when made active, need not be only a means of hiding from the present by residing in the past; instead, it can be a way of allowing the past, with all its traumas, to inform a more fully lived in present. “As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world)” (139).

     

    By claiming that writing effects a dual movement — both inward and outward — A. posits a way for memory to lead him at least partially outside his confinement in the room of the book. To the extent that the memory of trauma can function as restorative — as, in Kabbalistic terms, tikkun (a mending of the broken vessels of creation) — there is an opportunity for the writing that occurs in the room of the book to re-imagine not only individual experience but also history. From this perspective, A. begins to realize that his initial entry into the room of the book (“He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” [75].) contained a far greater potential than he was aware of at the time:

     

    What he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -- which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. . . . If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. (139)

     

    A. believes that memory will never “make sense” of the past, but that it is instead a necessary form of vision that keeps the past alive in the present. When he is inhabiting the room of the book in this way, A. seems to be writing as though his very life depended upon it, for the traumatic world of the fathers represents a burden this latter-day Pinocchio must carry in order to become “a real boy.”

     

    As a post-Holocaust narrative, The Invention of Solitude takes the memory of trauma as the groundless ground from which writing and life begin. The past cannot be possessed or made whole, but trauma and memory can become generative forces. Thinking about Jabès’s poetry as a response to the Holocaust, Auster speaks of the writer’s duties with regard to such memories: “What he must do, in effect, is create a poetics of absence. The dead cannot be brought back to life. But they can be heard, and their voices live in the Book” (AH 114). When the survivors emerged from the camps after World War II, their nearly uniform reaction to the Holocaust was expressed in two words: “Never again!” This meant, we must remember so that the moral revulsion created by these memories will prevent such situations from ever recurring. The last line of “The Book of Memory” seems to allude to this resolution: “It was. It will never be again. Remember” (172). These words bring “The Book of Memory” full circle, repeating the inaugural statements of the book and adding to them the command, “Remember.” Can this injunction to remember trauma create the conditions for understanding history? In his famous image of the Angel in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin gives us a figure for history who stands open-mouthed at the traumatic wreckage of history piling up at his feet without cessation (Benjamin 259). This gesture bears a family resemblance to the “crying without sound” that overcomes A. in Anne Frank’s room, a reaction that arises not only “in response to deep inner pain,” but also “purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that the Book of Memory began” (82-3).

     

    As a writer, Auster has made use of the room of the book as a way to interrogate the relationship of writing to history, through an invocation of memory. With respect to “The Book of Memory,” the question that needs asking is whether memory makes it possible for Auster to witness the world in such a way that he succeeds in releasing himself from the confining quality of the room of the book. On balance, I think we would have to answer that question in the negative, particularly in light of his refusal to remember the issue of divorce and of his unacknowledged anger toward women. But I would like to applaud the seriousness of Auster’s attempt to place issues of writing at the center of issues of living. Confronting head-on the situation of “a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (NYT 202), Auster makes of that situation an incredibly rich field of meditation, in which profound intellectual, historical, and personal issues arise and ask to be heard. As we have seen, Auster’s room of the book houses a fascinating struggle between the absolutizing qualities of poetry and the narrative investment in fictional characters; it functions for the male writer both as a site of retreat from engagement with women and as an alchemical retort in which a parthenogenic theory of creativity can be proposed; and it becomes a space of hiding and torment, in which the irresolvable problems of writing with reference to the Holocaust can be embodied. Within the room of the book, Auster stages with compelling expertise central dilemmas of the writer, dilemmas that will not go away. To Blue’s question, “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (NYT 202), the only decisive answer would be to walk out of the room that is the book. But for the writer, infinitely vulnerable to accusations of not living up to the moral claims enunciated in the writing, to walk out of the room of the book would be impossible: it would mean to stop writing.10

     

    Notes

     

    1. In “Paul Auster, or the Heir Intestate,” an excellent short essay on The Invention of Solitude, Pascal Bruckner also makes a strong case for the centrality of this book in Auster’s oeuvre.

     

    2. For a definition of poet’s prose, see Fredman xiii, 1-2.

     

    3. On the back cover of From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, Auster writes: “I first read The Book of Questions twenty years ago, and my life was permanently changed. I can no longer think about the possibilities of literature without thinking of the example of Edmond Jabès. He is one of the great spirits of our time, a torch in the darkness.”

     

    See Finkelstein for a short consideration of Auster’s relationship to Jabès (48-9); for more extended discussions of Jewish elements in Auster’s work, see Finkelstein (48-53) and Rubin (60-70).

     

    4. When Jabès speaks of a “book that would have a chance to survive,” he means also a book whose reader would have a chance of surviving it. See Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The Burnt Book for a fascinating meditation, via Jabès and Levinas, on the creative necessity of an escape from the book.

     

    5. Perloff argues strongly for the contribution of Beckett to contemporary poet’s prose. There is a discussion of Ashbery’s “translative prose” in Fredman, 101-35.

     

    6. For a useful application of notions of genealogy to Auster’s Moon Palace, see Weisenburg.

     

    7. In many ways, Auster’s fantasy of masculine self-generation is similar to Melville’s in Moby-Dick — an analogy quite appropriate in light of A.’s characterization of S.’s room as “the womb, the belly of the whale.” In Chapter 95 of Moby-Dick (350-51), a character also wears “the skin of some second body around him,” namely the “pelt,” or outer covering, of the whale’s penis. Having skinned and dried it, the “mincer” wears the sheath to protect himself from boiling blubber. Melville presents this investiture as a form of primitive phallus-worship (and then, as he does so often in Moby-Dick, compares jeeringly the “primitive” with the Christian: “what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!” [351]); but interestingly, by turning the phallus into a sheath, the mincer has, in effect, invaginated it.

     

    8. “The Structure of Rime,” one of Duncan’s two open-ended poetic sequences, first appears in The Opening of the Field. Although Duncan calls the Structure of Rime “an absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance [that] establishes measures that are music in the actual world” (13), he does not allow the mind to imagine itself as privy to this “absolute scale.” He ascribes this knowledge, instead, to a feminine presence, whom he designates in “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” as the “Queen Under the Hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded” (7). As in Leibniz, interconnectedness remains for Duncan “folded within all thought” (7).

     

    9. It is interesting to note how Auster, in crafting a Jewish interpretation of the Pinocchio story, makes nothing of the puppet’s embarrassingly prominent nose. See Gilman, especially Chapter 7, “The Jewish Nose,” for reflections on the stigma of the nose and the history of the “nose job.”

     

    10. Auster was recently given the opportunity to walk out of the room and yet continue writing. In the midst of shooting a film, Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay, the director, Wayne Wang, Auster, and one of the actors, Harvey Keitel, were having so much fun they decided to improvise another film. Auster outlined the screenplay on the fly and even directed Blue in the Face for two days when Wang took sick. After describing the joys of working with actors like Keitel, Michael J. Fox, Roseanne, Lou Reed, Jim Jarmusch, Lily Tomlin, and Madonna, Auster was asked by a journalist if he plans to direct or write screenplays again. He answered in the negative, but noted a signal benefit from the endeavor: “It was a great experience, it got me out of my room” (Chanko 15).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Antin, David. Talking at the Boundaries. New York: New Directions, 1976.
    • Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger. New York: Penguin, 1993. Abbreviated AH.
    • —. Disappearances: Selected Poems. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1988. Abbreviated D.
    • —. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. New York: Penguin, 1988. Abbreviated IS.
    • —. The New York Trilogy. 1985, 1986, 1986. New York: Penguin, 1990. Abbreviated NYT.
    • —, ed. The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. New York: Random, 1982.
    • Barone, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.
    • Bruckner, Pascal. “Paul Auster, or the Heir Intestate.” Barone 27-33.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
    • Chanko, Kenneth. “‘Smoke’ Gets in Their Eyes.” Entertainment Weekly 281/282 (June 30/July 7, 1995): 14-15.
    • Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove, 1960.
    • Finkelstein, Norman. “In the Realm of the Naked Eye: The Poetry of Paul Auster.” Barone 44-59.
    • Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
    • Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hostadter. New York: Harper, 1971.
    • Jabès, Edmond. From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991.
    • —. From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1990.
    • Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.
    • Oppen, George. “Of Being Numerous.” Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975. 147-179.
    • Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud. 1986. Trans. Llewellyn Brown. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1995.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry.” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 135-54.
    • Rubin, Derek. “‘The Hunger Must Be Preserved at All Cost’: A Reading of The Invention of Solitude.” Barone 60-70.
    • Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I and II. New York: Random, 1986, 1991.
    • Weisenburg, Steven. “Inside Moon Palace.” Barone 130-42.
    • Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 1982. New York: Schocken, 1989.

     

  • Selected Letters from Readers

     
     
     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Theoretical Obsolescence

     

    I enjoyed reading your post – I am an avid reader of DeLillo (tried unsuccessfully to finish Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it seems like it’s time for another shot) – I wholeheartedly agree that DeLillo can be in no way considered a postmodernist. Postmodernism, “the corpulence, the lack of pace, discernment, and energy”(Mao II) is precisely what he is fighting. His aim, I believe is to make the individual theoretically obsolete, for it is only in the “mohole-intense” realm of Reality, the shadow of Void-Core rationality, that an individual can find life. Anyway, it was thought provoking, and DeLillo deserves a lot of attention.

     

    These comments are from: Joshua Jones
    The email address for Joshua Jones is: Twilligon@aol.com

     
     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Cyborgs

     

    I have an article soon to be published in the journal for the American Academy of Religion that explores the history of cyborg discourse, and examines some possible reasons for the dearth of participation by traditional religious voices in it. The idea of a cyborg’s bisexuality provides an interesting nuance to the argument I’ve been making that I would like to discuss w/your author. Given the very high level of interest in the article I have written, I would also be interested in helping to organize a cross-disciplinary cyborg conference if you know of anyone planning such an event.

     

    These comments are from: Brenda E. Brasher, PhD
    Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Mount Union College, Alliance, Ohio
    The email address for Brenda E. Brasher is: BRENDA@NAUTICOM.NET

     

  • Resistance in Rhyme

    Brent Wood

    Trent University
    bwood@trentu.ca

     

    Russell Potter. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995.

     

    Spectacular Vernaculars is the most recent book on hip-hop to appear on university library shelves, and the first to deal squarely with hip-hop as a specifically postmodern phenomenon.

     

    Did I say “phenomenon”? Russell Potter would have my head. The central claim Potter makes in the intriguing introduction to Spectacular Vernaculars is that hip-hop culture constitutes a “highly sophisticated postmodernism” (Potter, 1995: 13). By characterizing hip-hop as a “postmodernism,” rather than a “postmodern phenomenon,” Potter begins to build his case for understanding hip-hop as a self-conscious political practice, not merely as a collection of commodities and customs. Furthermore, he means to insist, against Paul Gilroy to whose work Potter often refers, that hip-hop is fundamentally a postmodernity rather than an instance of oppositional modernity (4).

     

    Hip-hop, in Potter’s view, is a successful postmodern guerilla resistance against both the New Right and the corporate juggernauts that rule economic life in North America. Moreover, argues Potter, hip-hop is a resistance which has had “more crucial consequences than all the books on postmodernism rolled into one” (13). On the other hand, hip-hop is not simply a postmodernist praxis complementary to the postmodernist theory purveyed in the academy, but also a theoretical practice in its own right.

     

    Why hip-hop ought to be thought of as postmodernist rather than modernist has something to do with the guerrilla nature of its strikes and the ruthlessness with which it employs capitalist weaponry and the found objects of the postindustrial urban mediascape. Unlike Richard Shusterman’s 1991 essay “The Fine Art of Rap,” which discussed the postmodern aesthetics of hip-hop music, Spectacular Vernaculars is concerned with hip-hop’s political dimension. Ultimately, for Potter, hip-hop cannot be modern because it operates, in Sun-Ra’s words, “after the end of the world.” Potter also makes reference to Shaber and Readings’ characterization of the postmodern as marking a “gap” in “the modernist concept of time as succession or progress” (3). Potter compares this kind of interruption in a culture’s perception of historical time to the interruption in musical time caused by the use of the sample in hip-hop music. He also relates it to the concept and practice of “signifyin(g)” as defined by Henry Louis Gates, which implies a different relationship between the present and the past than the one supposed by modernism. As a “signifyin(g)” practice, hip-hop is always reclaiming, recycling, and reiterating the past, rather than advancing from it.

     

    The book’s title, “Spectacular Vernaculars,” plays on the double meanings of each of the words (and is a bust-ass four-syllable rhyme besides). The vernacular meaning of “vernacular” is something like “language of the common people,” and to his credit Potter makes an effort to speak in the language of the street. That he does not wholly succeed is probably inevitable, given his theoretical reference points and academic orientation. “Vernacular”‘s ancestry is more to the point of the book. It can be traced back to the Latin vernaculus–“a slave born in his master’s house.” “Spectacular” refers not only to the quality of Potter’s rhyme, but also to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Thus hip-hop is read fundamentally as a use of media and capital by the common people to further their own ends, rather than the ends of the hegemonic power structures which we generally assume are in control.

     

    Spectacular Vernaculars is divided into five chapters, which deal, respectively, with hip-hop in terms of art; language; the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality; tactical resistance; and political theory.

     

    Potter begins by characterizing hip-hop as a vernacular art, and seeks to demonstrate what he feels are its essential aspects. He argues that its fundamental practice is one of citation (or signifyin(g)), and that, as a result, hip-hop necessarily resists the categories of production and consumption. Three versions of the song “Tramp” are presented to illustrate this point: Lowell Fulsom’s 1966 “original” solo version, Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’s 1967 duet re-make, and Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s 1987 hip-hop track of the same name, which samples from and refers to the earlier versions. This treatment of a song lyric in its entirety and its evolution is one of the book’s high points. Unfortunately, this is the only in-depth “reading” in the book. The remainder of its arguments are supported only by short quotations.

     

    The second chapter, “Postmodernity and the Hip-Hop Vernacular,” has little to do with postmodernity per se but much to do with the vernacular as a language of resistance. Potter uses the medieval troubadours, Malcolm X, and Deleuze and Guattari as reference points as he builds a case for “Black English” as a resistant vernacular. He then takes this argument to another level, citing the subversive verbal and representational practices of rappers Paris and Da Lench Mob (Ice Cube’s crew) as building on this vernacular premise. Paris is cited to demonstrate the use of layered sampled dialogue (in this case, George Bush’s), while Da Lench Mob’s record Guerillas in the Mist is offered as an illustration of how hip-hop deals with racist verbiage from the likes of the LAPD.

     

    The title of the third chapter, “The Pulse of the Rhyme Flow,” is also somewhat estranged from its subject matter. Its subtitle, “Hip-Hop Signifyin(g) and the Politics of Reception,” is more to the point. Potter deftly shows how rappers’ rhetorical strategies are often misunderstood by their audience, and how “moral panic” can be used as a tool of powerful interests to keep insurrectionary culture at bay. He also deals here with inflammatory issues of sexism, violence, and homophobia in hip-hop, and with the question of black “authenticity.” In the end, Potter concludes, hip-hop is a culture whose roots and flowers are mixed and many. Hip-hop is not purely the domain of straight black men from the ghetto, although that image is often put to use by both rappers and the forces of moral panic. Its roots spread deep into the African diaspora, and its flowers transcend class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

     

    The fourth chapter is devoted to the politics of resistance, showing how hip-hop relays history to a society of amnesiacs. Potter calls hip-hop a “cultural recycling center” and a “counter-formation” of capitalism” (108). Here the central reference point is Michel de Certeau’s theory that consumers trace their own paths through the commodity relations with which they are presented. Thus the “eavesdropping” of white kids on black culture (Ice Cube’s term), Potter argues, can be read as an invaluable step toward an anti-racist society. The book’s final chapter continues this thread, emphasizing hip-hop’s multi-cultural and international aspects, and argues that essentialist definitions of what counts as “black” and “white” are ultimately more useful to the “powers that be” than to the people who are held in their thrall.

     

    Spectacular Vernaculars concludes with some insightful commentary on the relationship of academics to hip-hop, focusing on an interview between KRS-One and Michael Lipscomb. Potter argues that Lipscomb continually misses KRS-One’s main thrust by insisting on literal interpretations of language and conventional definitions of politics. Here Potter reminds us that “some real ground would be gained” by a dialogue between the sociologists of popular culture and the “vernacular cultural expressions” (153) they find so intriguing.

     

    Potter’s book is positioned as a translator between these two cultures and their respective dialects, yet it is obviously directed squarely at the academy. No young hip-hopper is going to read a book where rhyme is referred to as “homophonic slippage” and quotations from de Certeau open the chapters. Rather, Potter accomplishes much the same thing that Tricia Rose accomplished with Black Noise in clearing up the prejudices toward rap music and hip-hop in general that exist in the academy.

     

    Rose, however, eschews the term postmodernism and succeeds without it. Potter’s own formulations of the postmodern as an interruption in a collective sense of time and history and of hip-hop as a spectacularly resistant political practice are convincing enough in context, but in the end may leave the theoretically-oriented reader unsatisfied. Reference to James Snead’s worthy essays are absent from Spectacular Vernaculars, as is detailed consideration of the work of Cornel West. Furthermore, since we are dealing here with time and tradition, one can’t help but feel that there ought to be some consideration of West African concepts of rhythm, music, and social organization, and the cosmology that goes with them.

     

    In one sense, “Hip-Hop and the Politics of Resistance” might have been a more accurate subtitle for the book. For it is at its best when recounting hip-hop’s political history and serving up readings of the discourse between rappers and the media, rappers and politicians, and rappers and critics. Potter’s lens is a wide-angle one; he clearly considers himself a part of the culture in question, and he writes from a political position that is progressive without becoming preachy.

     

    One final issue is the relative neglect of aesthetics (postmodern or otherwise), a neglect which tends to reduce hip-hop’s musicians and poets to speech-writers and celebrities. After all, there is more to the hip-hop story than the self-consciously political, and there is more to the political itself than can be consciously thought. The greatest power of hip-hop is rhythmic and is felt as strongly as it is heard, yet the musical and poetic dimensions of hip-hop are hardly touched on here.

     

    In spite of these criticisms, Spectacular Vernaculars stands up as a complement to other recent academic writing on hip-hop such as Brian Cross’s It’s Not About a Salary, Rose’s Black Noise, David Toop’s Rap Attack and Michael Brennan’s “Off the Gangster Tip.” It’s never what Potter says that disappoints, but occasionally what he doesn’t say, especially given the book’s tantalizing title, the unresolved questions of African-American culture’s relationship to postmodernism, and the power of hip-hop rhyme and rhythm.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Brennan, Michael. “Off the Gangsta Tip: A Rap Appreciation, or Forgetting about Los Angeles.” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994): 663-693.
    • Cross, Brian. It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles. NY: Verso, 1993.
    • Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
    • Rose, Tricia. Black Noise. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994.
    • Shusterman, Richard. “The Fine Art of Rap.” New Literary History, 22.3 (1991): 613-32.
    • Snead, James A. “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Black American Literature Forum 154 (1991): 146-154.
    • —. “Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature.” Critical Quarterly 33.1: 31-39.
    • Toop, David. The Rap Attack. London: Pluto, 1984.
    • —. Rap Attack 2. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991.

     

  • Multiplicity: Una Vista de Nada

    Crystal Downing

    Messiah College
    cdowning@mcis.messiah.edu

     

    Multiplicity. Dir. Harold Ramis. Columbia Pictures, 1996.

     

    Multiplicity, a showcase containing entertaining displays of Michael Keaton’s acting range, is not a great film. The showcase itself, however, with its startling lack of depth, reflects off its slick surfaces the postmodern “transvaluation of values” that Fredric Jameson descried years ago in his now famous New Left Review article.1 Multiplicity (directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, of Animal House and Ghostbusters fame) is not a “postmodern film” in the sense that it develops “new rules of the game” which devalue the hegemonic perceptions and semiotic practices that encode mainstream movies (à la Lyotard); instead, it is a stylistically traditional entertainment vehicle whose content reflects the ineluctable power of what Jameson has called “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” wherein “depth is replaced by…multiple surfaces” (J 62).

     

    In the film, Keaton plays Doug Kinney, a beleaguered, though conscientious, foreman for a construction company, married to the lovely, though lackluster, Laura (Andie MacDowell) who put her career on hold to mother their two young children. Doug’s multiplicity of stressful responsibilities leave him no time to finish remodelling his own home, to help out with the kids so Laura can return to work, or to engage in any leisure activity whatsoever. After a tantrum-like display of frustration on one of his many job sites–a “scientific” institute on the Malibu shore–Doug meets Dr. Owen Leeds (Harris Yulin), who, with no compunction at all, offers to clone for (and from) Doug a second self who can help him on the job. With a gesture toward Keaton’s eponymous role in Mr. Mom (1983), Doug soon discovers that, even with his professional activities alleviated, running a home with children still allows him no leisure time, so he has a second clone made to handle the house chores. These two clones then clone a fourth Doug to help out with the housework in their own apartment above the garage (which, though in full sight of the house, is never detected by Doug’s family as housing three not-very quiet look-alikes). This third clone, extracted not from the original Doug but from one of his clones, turns out to be a near idiot: “You know how sometimes when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not quite as sharp as the original?” Doug’s first two clones explain. “Original” is the operative word here and signals a problematizing not only of “origins,” but also of the autonomous, unified, “authentic” self of modernism.

     

    The film itself mocks the mystifications of modernism when Doug first goes to Dr. Leeds’ office to discuss his problems. We cut to a full-screen picture of Doug’s talking head lying on a black leather couch, spilling out his frustrations to the “doctor.” As soon as we recognize this icon of psychoanalysis, it is undermined by Dr. Leeds’ response to Doug: “I’m not a psychologist.” Modernism’s depth model of the human psyche–which must be plumbed to discover the “origin” of behavior–is decentered by Dr. Leeds’ solution: a replication of the body, the surface of behavior. We have here what Jameson describes as the postmodern “shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology…in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject” (J 63).

     

    The displacement of identity is reinforced by a trick the film plays on its audience: we see Doug, after the first cloning operation, waking up on a gurney to stare at an image of himself standing in the shadows. Because the camera looks over the shoulder of the well-lit Doug on the gurney to view the darker image which stands before him (and us), we identify with the waking man, amazed to see a replicant before him. However, we quickly learn that the man with whom we have “identified” is actually the clone. It is as though we have been given a visual instantiation of the de-centered self which defines postmodern subjectivity.

     

    Multiplicity quite consciously explores Doug’s fragmented subjectivity by giving each clone a different manifestation of his “personality.” Made while Doug was still recovering from a testosterone-induced tantrum, in which he destroyed construction materials with a huge metal wrench while water powerfully ejaculated from a vertically erect pipe, the first clone embodies the macho side of Doug, not only kicking ass while on the job but trying to get some while off. The second clone appears soon after a scene in which the “original” Doug unsuccessfully tries to wrap up some pizza while struggling to talk on the phone above his children’s ruckus. This clone, therefore, adept at the home arts, loves to cook and is a master at wrapping up leftovers, and Keaton plays him as Doug’s “feminine side.” And then, of course, the third clone, made in both senses without Doug, gestures toward the “death of the subject” altogether; he is constructed from the superficial signifiers that mold Doug’s other selves. In fact, all the clones are quite literally “socially constructed,” made, we have seen, without much reflection on the part of Doug, by one who garners “authority” in our culture, a scientist who “authors” Doug’s various subject positions.

     

    These plural positions are mis-taken to be one “autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (J 63) when Doug’s wife makes love to all three in the same night and notices no difference–no authentic self that is missing–except that their bodies function differently: one cries, one is “athletic” and one has an erection as premature as his diction. Laura has experienced the postmodern simulacrum as Baudrillard has defined it: “reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.”2

     

    The concept of the simulacrum is also employed by Jameson; however, he privileges Plato’s definition of the term–“the identical copy for which no original has ever existed”–to foreground the postmodern obsession with surfaces, wherein “the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (J 67). Jameson’s reference to Plato is redolent of the “Allegory of the Cave,” in which people turn their backs to the “real,” naively convinced that the images on the surface of the cave wall, merely “shadows” of the real, comprise all that exists. Significantly, then, when the writers of Multiplicity describe Doug’s radically deficient third clone as “a copy of a copy,” they echo Plato’s indictment of the poet, who, “restricted to imitating the realm of appearances, makes only copies of copies, and his creation is thus twice removed from reality.”3 They go one step further, however, causing the viewer to question, with all postmodernists, the “reality” of Platonic “origins”; for the “original” Doug appears to have little substance other than the various subject positions he fails to coordinate in one body. Just as one of his construction sites is titled “Vista de Nada” (sight of nothing) Doug is the site of nothing other than his performance functions.

     

    “Nada,” for the modernist, as reflected in Ernest Hemingway’s famous lines “Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name,” meant that “In the absence of a God each person must take responsibility for his own actions.”4 There is no such faith in existential authenticity for the postmodernist; as the “authentic” Doug admits, “I am not in my own life.” Even when he presumably “gets it together” for the denouement, he achieves no self-transforming enlightenment; at the end of the movie Doug has the exact same perception as at the beginning: he needs to spend more time relaxing and with his family. He is even shown doing the same activity at the end of the film as in the opening scene: coordinating the demolition of a concrete driveway. The only difference is that the later construction work is for his own home, with a view to winning back the favor of his wife. The “happy ending” of Multiplicity is grounded in the reification of commodity: Doug’s four selves turn a shabby Los Angeles bungalow into a gorgeous house, complete with outdoor fountain, fit for the glossy pages of Better Homes and Gardens. This construction, like the earlier condominium construction, like the very construction of Doug’s subjectivity, looks not to some transcendent ideal of human connectedness or Godly benevolence, but only to a vista de nada.

     

    Appropriately, Ramis sets the film in Los Angeles, its opening aerial sequence of endless intersecting freeways and relentlessly drab buildings concretizing a true vista de nada. However, what makes the location especially significant to Multiplicity is its mythic association with the simulacrum: the locus of “the rise of Hollywood and of the image as commodity” (J 69). In Hollywood, as Jameson notes, we get the “‘death of the subject’ in the institution of the star” (J 68). Indeed, even the “original” and “authentic” Doug Kinney is “an identical copy for which no original has ever existed” since he is merely a fictional character (even if obliquely named after one of Ramis’ late friends, Doug Kenney). And Michael Keaton, like any movie star, displaces his subjectivity as he becomes identified with the characters he plays. In fact, we might see Keaton’s various film roles as his clones, constructed by the hegemony of Hollywood which replicates roles, as Los Angeles does its freeways, if even taking them in different directions. (I think especially of Harrison Ford’s multiplicity in the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones movies, and the Tom Clancey showpieces.) Indeed, Keaton’s Doug is a replicant of Keaton’s “Mr. Mom,” and Andie MacDowell is a replicant of the straightwoman she played in another Ramis film: Groundhog Day, whose plot is based upon the diachronic replication of a day in a weatherman’s life (Bill Murray) rather than upon the synchronic replications of Multiplicity.

     

    Hollywood even creates marginal “copies of copies”: idiot fans who seek to act and dress like characters from their favorite films, mimicking the shadows on the walls inside movie theaters. Without these simulacrum servers, businesses in Los Angeles like Star Wares, Reel Clothes, and It’s a Wrap, which sell, for outrageous prices, clothing once worn in “the movies,” could not survive. As the owner of Reel Clothes states, “Ninety percent of my customers are L.A. residents looking for something to wear to work,”5 fulfilling Jameson’s sense, expressed over a decade ago, that “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (J 68, emphasis mine).

     

    Ramis ends Multiplicity with a simulacrum of another beach town. The three clones, at Doug’s behest, have gone off on their own, and have ended up in Florida running a pizza parlour called “Three Guys from Nowhere,” an obvious echo of a California chain called “Two Guys from Italy.” The name appears on a sign above the door, also inscribed with three cartoon heads which look a lot like the iconic figures of “Manny, Moe, and Jack” once used on the sign for “Pep Boys” automotive stores. Thus the film ends with yet another manifestation of postmodernism: what Jameson calls “pastiche.” While parody usually has a purpose, “pastiche” is the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated, nostalgia-generating signifiers–like “Two Guys from Italy” and “Manny, Moe, and Jack”–which entirely empties them of any meaning other than recognizability. They are signifiers cut off from their origins, severed from any transcendental signified; they are signifiers like Doug, Doug, Doug, and, yes, even Doug.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-Aug 1984) 53-93. Quotations cited in my text as (J).
     

    2. Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchmann (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 150.

     

    3. As summarized by Hazard Adams, ed., “Plato,” Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 11.

     

    4. The first quotation is from Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” The Hemingway Reader, ed. Charles Poore (New York: Scribners, 1953) 421; the second quotation is spoken by a paradigmatic existentialist portrayed by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen, Orion, 1989).

     

    5. “Brief Brush With Fame,” Patriot News (Harrisburg, PA) 5 Aug. 1996: C1.

     

  • (Re)Presenting the Renaissance on a Post-Modern Stage

    Theresa Smalec

    University of Western Ontario
    tsmalec@julian.uwo.ca

     

    Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

     

    To say that Susan Bennett merely extends the questions that prevalent scholarship asks about postmodern culture’s obsession with re-presenting the past is to neglect the keen conceptual shifts that her new book performs. Her opening chapter reveals more than a bid to contest standard definitions of nostalgia as a longing for the mythical past, as a desire to keep things intact. Rather, “New Ways To Play Old Texts” refigures this conservative praxis of longing as radically linked to political change. Nostalgia becomes “the inflicted territory where claims for authenticity (and this is a displacement of the articulation of power) are staged” (7). This term provides the pivotal foundation for Bennett’s exploration of “how particular vested interests project their desires for the present through a multiplicity of representations” (3) of Renaissance texts.

     

    To reconceptualize how Shakespeare’s authority both figures and fails to appear in postmodern experience, Performing Nostalgia unsettles the power that literary culture ascribes to the written word. Bennett insists that the collisions between genre, gender, race, and nation which incite debate among textual scholars have generative counterparts in contemporary performance. Aptly titled “Performance and Proliferation,” her second chapter aligns historical power with the realm of corporeal ritual; it surveys a decade of those “verbal and gestural repetitions which activate remembering” (9). Specifically, this chapter traces the production methodologies and reception economies of twelve different stagings of King Lear that occurred in Britain between 1980 and 1990.

     

    Initially, Bennett probes the possibility of (dis)articulating Lear’s overarching “greatness” within the parameters of British public television and mainstream (commercial) theatre. Within the bounds of the Royal National Theatre Company, the Renaissance Theatre Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the BBC, she attends to those specific combinations of factors and agents that “suggest the potential for an innovative and perhaps radical reading of this canonical text” (40). And yet, to complicate the lens through which a notable range of postmodern criticism identifies and champions transgression, Bennett takes up the Royal National Theatre Company’s 1990 production of King Lear. She summons this re-presentation for two interrelated reasons: first, to assess the extent to which an orthodox British stage may serve as the site on which individual directors’ and actors’ revisionary idiosyncrasies are actualized; second, to locate and to explicate the “matrix of material conditions” (41) through which politically engaged renditions of Shakespeare are necessarily produced and received.

     

    Bennett begins with Deborah Warner’s direction of the Royal National Theatre Company’s 1990 version of Lear. Mindful again of the too-hasty suppositions that accompany our contemporary appetite for subversion, she notes that Warner might easily be marked as “challenging tradition by virtue of her biological coding” (40). After all, she is not only a woman directing Shakespeare, “but one doing it at a particularly prestigious theatre” (40). Moreover, there is Warner’s resolve to put red plastic noses on King Lear, King Lear’s Fool, and even on the dead Cordelia. As anticipated, scholarly accounts of this staging promptly align emancipatory change with the visible surface of things. One example is Anthony Leggatt’s Shakespeare in Performance, a text which endorses the view of Anthony Sher, who played Lear’s Fool: “We began with the red noses and…it was immediately successful. There is something very liberating about wearing a red nose, both externally and internally” (40). 1

     

    To problematize this faith in a singular agent’s power to unfetter the bodies that act out a text as prescriptive as King Lear, Performing Nostalgia confronts the multiple, interrelated forces that sway not only the production but the reception of this particular play. On one hand, it is clear that certain personal, bodily gestures bear the power to fill in the “gaps of the Shakespeare corpus” (2). The details that an individual director cites as missing from the script can be made to return through an embodied representation. In this sense, the highly visible yet unsanctioned red noses worn by Lear and Cordelia “become the text” (2) to supplant the locus of power traditionally bestowed upon the word. Deborah Warner’s desire to disrupt King Lear’s status as a standard of solemnity is suddenly manifest. Or, from another perspective, the shocking crimson that marks Cordelia’s corpse signals a potent strategy through which feminist translators of Shakespeare may avow the brutality toward women that male directors regularly efface.

     

    On the other hand, Bennett observes that transformative agency is never “the sole or unique possession of director, actor, spectator or critic” (41). Rather, modification relies on the mesh of circumstances out of which verbal and bodily forms of transgression emanate. To curtail the intervention intended by Warner is the fact that a “specific viewing community” (46) recognizes her revision and interprets it as merely mimicking one that has gone before. While the novelty of red noses may liberate a younger generation of eyes, Bennett’s archival research shows that London’s premier theatre critics saw the “innovation” as “something rather less new” (40). Precisely because of its lasting impression as “the first mainstream red nose King Lear of the decade” (41), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1982-3 production appears both in memory and in published reviews as Warner’s source text, as an influence that perversely subsumes both her own authority and that of the Bard.

     

    While this turn of events is far from promising, Performing Nostalgia does not forsake King Lear and other Shakespearean plays as “visible and thus significant sites for the contestation of cultural power” (48). Consistently cutting-edge in terms of the dramatic topographies that it surveys, this valuable work looks beyond mainstream theatres and beyond theatre itself to those other spaces where reconstructions of the present by way of the Renaissance past can and do occur. One fascinating example is Bennett’s account of the public works company Welfare State and its seven-year residency in the northern English town of Barrow-in-Furness; amongst other things, the working-class town’s single employer produces nuclear submarines. It is at this improbable locus that Welfare State initiates a site-specific performance and filming; since the idea is to create work for and with the local population, Barrow-in-Furness’s economic climate directly informs the project’s concerns. Significantly, Welfare State facilitates the community’s oppositional political engagement through a nuclear age King Lear. Here, as in her analysis of Barrie Keeffe’s racially and socio-economically inflected King of England and in her reading of Women’s Theatre Group’s Lear’s Daughters, Bennett underscores the potential for micropolitical change. In these noteworthy contexts, the act of restaging “takes up a global awareness of Shakespeare’s plays and resituates it in the specific experience of a community audience” (55). A pivotal inference can be derived from this attention to the often-neglected role of communal reception; precisely through a production’s focus on the possibility of dialogue and interaction with its target audience, the point of proliferation shifts from “what have we done to Shakespeare’s play” to “how can this material be useful to us?” (56).

     

    Performing Nostalgia’s third and fourth sections move Shakespeare out of straightforward performance studies to assess more disturbing histories of influence alongside the concerns that currently haunt the discourses of popular culture and post-colonialism. Chapter Three, “Not-Shakespeare, Our Contemporary,” examines the discord between the idealized authority of Shakespeare’s texts and those other, less than perfect Renaissance city comedies and revenge plots that we recycle in order to justify our own post-modern obsessions with sex, violence, and power. Brad Fraser’s 1993 production, The Ugly Man, figures as a potent example of Bennett’s determination to “situate the desire for desire,” to ask “for whom” such chilling nostalgia is “spoken, embodied and subsequently read” (7).

     

    Fraser models his play after Thomas Middleton’s classic drama, The Changeling. As portended by this antecedent text, The Ugly Man charts the devastating repercussions of an outsider’s entry into a small, sequestered community. Crucial, however, is Bennett’s scrutiny of why the gay, Edmonton-born playwright conflates Middleton’s unmerciful legacy with the seemingly innocuous heterosexual love plot of pop culture’s Archie comics. The initial effect of this unlikely combination is a medley of horrid laughter. Forrest, a hideously disfigured and newly-hired farm hand, becomes obsessed with the beautiful virgin Veronica, the daughter of his multimillionaire employer. Although Veronica is engaged to wed a respectable young man, her inability to find meaning or pleasure in the monogamous, matrimonial relationships that society sanctions incites her to acts of deviance. After coaxing Forrest to help enact her unlawful deeds, she finds herself sexually indebted to the ugly man upon whom she cannot bear to look. As the action progresses, the tension intensifies between Forrest’s and Veronica’s sadomasochistic desires and the heteronormative laws imposed by a rural community; despite his brute strength and her physical allure, their socially unviable yearning culminates in a spectacle of gore. By the end of the play, virtually every character is mutilated or murdered in the most depraved of ways.

     

    Bennett aptly notes that on the surface of things, Fraser’s fixation with scenes of gratuitous violence and sexual degradation does little more than restate the morally numbing message of a range of postmodern spectacles. In short, he locates the impact of his production in a “surfeit of images, rather than articulating any content or analysis of those images” (84). However, her analysis of The Ugly Man’s historical echoes does not end on this note of dismissal, nor in a homogenization of the play as merely another exhibit in popular culture’s parade of radical chic. Rather, she reviews its too-evident purchase on Jacobean apathy by undertaking an “activity of radical reading that might defamiliarize our own desires and dissatisfactions in the present tense” (94). This is to say that she recognizes and brings to the foreground the anti-heterosexist agenda that haunts the unspeakable subtext of Fraser’s visual excess. She discerns the conspicuous consumption and seizures of power from which Forrest and Veronica derive their fulfillment as fraught with desire for political change. Once it is situated in the right-wing, neo-conservative, and homophobic context of Alberta (the province where Fraser grew up and came out as a gay man), the meaning of his spectacle changes. For a specific community of viewers, The Ugly Man can be perceived as an articulation of presence forged in resistance to heteronormative tyranny.

     

    To close this cutting reappraisal of the past in performance, Bennett’s chapter on “The Post-Colonial Body” probes the long-neglected anti-colonial uses to which Shakespeare’s The Tempest might yet be put. To do so, she draws on recent feminist extrapolations of the Same/Other antagonism that is habitually staged through the figures of Prospero and Caliban. In response to the oversimplified view that “‘we’ now participate in a historical moment which is not only postmodern but post-colonial” (119), she insists that closer attention must be paid to those other bodies which are elided in our wary scrutiny of traditional polarities. In her words, “The potency of the Prospero/Caliban tropology has served to mask the sites in The Tempest of patriarchal colonization” (125). Moreover, “the play’s women (Miranda and the textually absent/silent Sycorax) have not been much read for their participation in (and destabilization of) what otherwise becomes a hegemonically male contest” (125).

     

    As an overdue complication and corrective to the androcentric discord of The Tempest’s Same/Other paradigm, Bennett summons Laura Donaldson’s 1992 study, Race, Gender and Empire-Building. Her subsequent analysis reconsiders Donaldson’s assertion that “the crucial question raised by the coupling of Miranda with Caliban…is why these two victims of colonialist Prosperity cannot ‘see’ each other.” Pivotally, the answer she offers is one that almost all Cultural Materialist and New Historicist writings on The Tempest omit: “the intervention of the performing body” (129). While it is undeniable that these modes of criticism attend diligently to discursive performance, Bennett underscores the very real deficiency posed by “almost always ignoring, and so explicitly or implicitly negating the implications of an intervented presentation” (129). As demonstrated by her interdisciplinary reading of how Miranda’s feminine body is regulated in both Shakespeare’s script and in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film, Prospero’s Books, “the relationship between discursive performance and physical mode of presentation is not only complex but crucial” (130).

     

    “The Post-Colonial Body” ends in an effort to think about both The Tempest and its colonial bodies as texts that were in fact conceived as performance. As Bennett rightly observes, this requires careful reference to “ideas about the body in circulation at the time of its original realization” (130). Ironically, however, she undermines her determination to historicize the seventeenth-century body by invoking Michel Foucault’s 1978 text, The History of Sexuality, as a principal source of authority. My critique of this maneuver is not meant to denounce Foucault’s confident account of the Jacobean period as “a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse and open transgression.” Nevertheless, it strikes me that any endeavor to assess the degree to which performing bodies of this era “made a display of themselves” 2 requires a more rigorous look at temporally specific commentaries on the productions that rivetted Early Modern audiences. To make up for this fissure in what is otherwise a solid analysis, Bennett effects a close and provocative reading of The Tempest’s opening scene between father and daughter. Mindful again of the radical difference between reading Miranda on the page and viewing her body on the living stage, she charts (from the perspective of production) why it is so important that “the language used by Prospero draws constant attention to the body he addresses” (130). Not only does his repeated reference to Miranda’s heart, hand, eyes, and ears provide for the actors “a code of gestural and physical representation”; it also “supplies the spectator with an itinerary for the gaze” (131). Most significantly, the combination of Prospero’s rhetoric and Miranda’s visible body alerts us (the ostensibly post-colonial audience) to the status of spectacle that still marks the feminine body. In a white, masculine, Western political and sexual economy, feminine corporeality retains its troubling legacy as “the battlefield on which quite other struggles than women’s have been staged.” 3 And yet, the enabling power of performance lies in its ability to show that the woman’s body, which is often presented as passive, is not naturally so. Enacting a particular subject position self-consciously can restore agency to those who lack it. Within such enactments lies the potential for social and political change.

     

    Acutely vigilant of the multiple and often conflicting political investments that subjects of the present make in re-presenting the past, Performing Nostalgia does a remarkable job of speaking across the gaps that riddle our postmodern tense. Time and again, readers will be struck by the book’s topographical, conceptual, and disciplinary versatility. From Britain’s famed commercial theatres to the steel towns of the working-class, from Jacobean decadence to the struggles for reform that tread our contemporary stages, from literature to theatre, from theory to praxis, Performing Nostalgia is relentlessly hopeful reading for students, professors, viewers, and performers alike.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991).
    • Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
    • Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (London: Routledge, 1990).

     

  • Music and Noise: Marketing Hypertexts

    Thomas Swiss

    Drake University
    ts9911r@acad.drake.edu

     

    Eastgate Systems, Inc.

     

    Given that musical references are common in the critical literature about hypertext, I begin with Jacques Attali, 1 whose criticism poses a challenge not only for music and musicians but for other artists as well, including writers working in hypertextual mediums. Considering sound as a cultural phenomenon, Attali argues that relations of power are located on the shifting boundary between “music” and “noise.” Music is a code that defines the ordering of positions of power and difference that are located in the aural landscape of sound; noise, on the other hand, because it falls outside of a dominant musical code, transgresses this ordering of difference. For Attali, then, music is tamed noise.

     
    By many accounts, hypertextual witing aspires to the condition of noise, not music. It means to jam the normal literary frequencies, create a disruption, some useful static. Said in a rawer, more openly political way, it “overthrows” “all kinds of hierarchies of status and power”; it is “radical,” “revolutionary”–or so the best-known arguments go.2 But how radical is hypertextual writing in our current Age of the Web? How committed is any of it, to borrow Attali’s terms, to producing an appreciation of noise (as opposed to music) that transgresses the dominant order of difference?

     
    Why “review” Eastgate? Because we only know Eastgate through its representations of its aesthetic and intellectual enterprise–the way it has conjured itself discursively. The way it has conjured itself as a text. In this brief review, I want to offer in impressionistic fashion (and with the support of a few hypertext links) some observations about Eastgate, a pioneering publishing company which has managed to create a kind of “local” scene for hypertext writers. Of course, as is often the case now with the wide-spread use of e-mail, news groups, and Web pages, locality here is less a place than a space: a network that brings people and their ideas together. In particular, I want to pose some questions about the evolving discourse surrounding literary hypertext, including certain conflicts and contradictions at work in the field of hypertextual production and promotion. At Eastgate, this discourse finally positions the company and its authors as both advocates of noise (meant to overthrow the literary mainstream) and music (meant to enter the mainstream.)

     
    Based in Watertown, Massachusetts, Eastgate specializes in “serious hypertext.” That last phrase, used in the company catalog, Web site, ads, and other promotional materials, appears to mean something like “academic” hypertext as opposed to, I suppose, much of the hypertext one finds these days on the Web: “The Dickens Web” as opposed to “Mike’s Cool Links.” I don’t know how big the market is yet for hypertextual criticism, fiction, and poetry–my own order for Eastgate’s fiction was a first for my university library. Judging from the number and increasing frequency of hypertexts that Eastgate publishes, however, the news must be fairly good. If it is, I suppose Eastgate is in an enviable position: it practically owns the franchise. Its stable of writers includes such influential authors and critics as George Landow, Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, and Stuart Moulthrop.

     
    In the area of hypertext and–is it too early to use the phrase?–“hypertextual studies,” Eastgate resembles certain other “niche” publishers of avant-garde work. Like City Lights Books in the 1950s, which provided the Beat writers an early home, or Roof Press, which still provides a publishing outlet for “language poetry,” Eastgate appears to offer hypertext writers close attention, good company, and (for a small organization) sophisticated marketing. Using the tag line “serious hypertext,” for example, is a clever marketing move as it marks out a “high” literary space for everything Eastgate publishes. Thus Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Clark Humphrey’s “The Perfect Couple” (described in the Eastgate catalog as “A New Age couple discovers the secret of perfect love”) get to travel together under the same umbrella, although they reflect–to say the least–different literary values and practices. But claiming for your authors’ work a certain (if undefined) seriousness seems mostly a pre-emptive strike on Eastgate’s part, an attempt to disarm those critics who refuse to take anything composed in hypertext seriously.

     
    The relationship between software and digital writing is indeed a complicated one. At the textual level, it obviously affects both writer and reader. That is, it alters the composition and influences the “readability” (and symbolic meanings) of a text. At Eastgate, where the discourses of (computer) science routinely meet those of literature and literary theory, this relationship can be difficult to express. Which metaphors will suffice? In the following passage we hear a certain–and sudden–awkwardness as Michael Joyce offers the “reading instructions” for his new (and very interesting) hyperfiction from Eastgate, Twilight: a symphony —

     

    When you begin a reading, you will see an open text window that looks like this one. If you want to shape this reading in something of a dance involving our common intentions and momentary whims, you can click and go on (here or anywhere) and the text will take you, or you it, where either you or it are going…

     

    (Enough poetry, you say, bring on the praying mantises! So be it…)

    Behind each open text window is an arrangement of titled boxes with arrows among them which represent their links. Each box (or space) contains text and/or graphic images. Many of the spaces also contain more text boxes. That is, each space can both contain text and images and hold more spaces like itself.3

     

    In this particular case, the passage into and through various lexicons, however discordant (“praying mantises”?) or conflicting, can be part of the reader’s pleasure in the text. What begins here sounding like an overly-ripe lyric poem concludes by sounding like an instruction manual–the sort of movement you might find in the work of John Ashbery and others.

     
    But some representations, including graphic ones, of the ways in which software and serious writing interact can be confusing or contradictory at Eastgate. Is hypertext more like literature or science? music or noise? commerce or art?

     
    Take the cover art on the catalog, which appears to reproduce a nineteenth century drawing. In the drawing, two bearded men in suits are gazing at or into telescopes while two boys in the corner converse at a desk.

     

    Cover of Eastgate catalog, Spring 1996

     

    I’m not sure how we’re supposed to read this illustration. Are the men programmers and the children writers? That hardly seems right. Why are there no women involved in this mysterious enterprise? Eastgate publishes a fair number of hypertexts by women. Minimally, we see that the image foregrounds the “science” of hypertext as opposed to its literary elements. What about the full name of the company? Eastgate Systems. “Systems”? Or the text of the brochure which includes a “welcome” from Mark Bernstein, “Chief Scientist,” who begins his message with the resonant phrase: “Dear Friends in Hypertext.”

     
    Now where are we? In The Church of Hypertext? Well, sort of. There is a lot of hyperbole surrounding hypertext, a kind of utopian (and sometimes evangelical) rhetoric that springs up, as Martin Spinelli points out in a recent essay on radio and the internet, among devotees of emerging mediums. 4 Thus we find George Landow, for example, talking about “hypertext visionaries” in the Eastgate brochure. Landow’s comment is a blurb for a software program called Storyspace which is sold by Eastgate and which happens to be the software of choice for many Eastgate authors.

     
    Nothing wrong with that, except that the relationship between Storyspace, “a hypertext authoring system for the personal computer,” and the hypertextual writing that Eastgate publishes may be misleading. That is, hawking the software, as Eastgate prominently does in all of its materials–even in the jackets of the hypertextual “books” they publish–may suggest too strong of a connection between the software and the quality of the work itself. The better the software the better the writing? Eastgate appears to promote this linkage in the brochure:

     

    Storyspace is used to write serious hypertext nonfiction--such as David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth and Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric by Diane Greco. Storyspace is also used to write creative and experimental hypertext fiction and poetry, like award-winning author Edward Falco's Sea Island, and Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story.

     

    Eastgate’s claim, while a common one in the world of advertising, means very little; it’s like Knopf developing a line of pens and paper and then crowing: it’s the same kind of writing apparatus Toni Morrison used to write Beloved! Maybe so, but so what? Of course, I am exaggerating here. Yet what animates this claim is something that currently remains under-studied and under-conceptualized: the relationship between the production of literary hypertext and the market. Some questions we might ask include: What are the ways in which we might consider the political economy of hypertext? How does the market impact the technology of hypertextual production and the practices of hypertext authors themselves? How do we conduct an institutional analysis of a company such as Eastgate? Like many “indie” labels in the music business, Eastgate often professes an oppositional discourse and yet needs, in some measure, to be understood not as “noise” but as “music” in order to survive economically.

     
    At any rate, no matter the claims made for it, I find both the Storyspace authoring program and the Storyspace Reader software rather cumbersome myself, though the design has improved somewhat over the nearly ten years they have been on the market. On the positive side, the quality of display is very good, as are the shapes and locations of the windows, even if one often wishes that the boxes could be enlarged by the reader. But I find the information structure tricky to learn, and the navigation tools in the Storyspace Reader–in the age of the easy-to-use Netscape Web browser–could use both re-locating and a new set of icons for clarity’s sake.


    Storyspace browser

    Netscape browser

    My comments raise familiar concerns about the difficulty for “independent” companies like Eastgate to compete, especially in the area of technology development, with mega-companies like Netscape. Of course Netscape itself was only a few years ago employing a version of counter-hegemonic discourse as it competed with the first widely used graphic browser for the internet, Mosaic. What difference would it make if Eastgate’s hypertexts were written not in the programming language of Storyspace, but in HTML and then bundled with the Netscape browser? How would this change Eastgate’s notions of independence and its representation of hypertextual fiction and poetry? Would the work be any more or less “serious,” “experimental,” “noisy,” or “musical”?

     
    Storyspace has been written about–both described and theorized–most prominently by Landow, but also by its multiple creators, including Michael Joyce in his rich collection of essays, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Joyce’s book is the best single-author collection of work in the field of hypertextual studies at this time. He calls the essays “theoretical narratives”; they cover a lot of ground (a number of issues are provocatively raised) in what might be described as an original and elegant style–unusual in such a book. While the title of the volume is meant to refer to the “two minds” of hypertext pedagogy and poetics, it seems to also signal something of the competing positions or mind-sets that a number of hypertext writers and theorists are caught between. By way of an example, let me note that while Joyce can be an astute commentator on the aesthetic implications of hypertext, he also writes (in a chapter on pedagogy):

     

    Indeed, hypertext tools offer the promise of adapting themselves to fundamental cognitive skills that experts routinely, subtly, and self-consciously apply in accomplishing intellectual tasks. Moreover, hypertext tools promise to unlock these skills for novice learners and empower and enfranchise their learning. 5

     

    This analysis springs from cognitive psychology as adapted by some of the “writing process” advocates of the late 1970s. Ignoring the social (and political) processes that decide who learns what and how, Joyce essentializes learning by reducing it to “skills.” There’s no consideration here or elsewhere of such issues as how a student’s home environment and community shape learning and what counts as “knowledge.” There’s no consideration of gender barriers as they relate to technology, and as they are inevitably played out in the classroom, etc. In this passage and others, Joyce constructs learning as a static set of skills that can be “unlocked” by the lucky novice with the right “tools.”

     
    In their critical writing Eastgate authors are sometimes constructivists; at other times they are cognitivists. Even in those essays framed in poststructuralist terms, there can be a heavy reliance on the classic “encoding/decoding” model of communication and culture. Thus while hypertext is sometimes lauded for its “revolutionary” power, here it is promoted as another (new and improved) route into the mainstream.

     
    As Majorie Perloff notes in her work on language poetry, 6 the early critiques of most avant-garde movements–and the literary hypertext community is that–draw heavily on that movement’s own statements of intent as represented in various essays, interviews, and manifestos. The Eastgate stable, while certainly not the only community of hypertext authors out there doing interesting work, has been particularly visible and vocal. Thus what thoughtful commentary there has been on hypertext, with the exception of Sven Birkerts’ ongoing (and retro-romanticized) critique, 7 has generally relied on what Perloff calls the “exposition-advocacy model.” Landow’s two ground-breaking books from Johns Hopkins, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and his edited volume Hyper/Text/Theory, are good examples of this model at work–Eastgate authors are routinely cited; their work is praised, explained, and theorized for a readership presumed to be just developing an interest in hypertext. Unsurprisingly since its authors are well-represented in these books, Eastgate distributes both of them.

     
    In part, I am suggesting that the sponsorship structure of Eastgate has contributed to what, in my view, is a surprising consensus among hypertext theorists. Last winter, for example, I attended a conference which brought a number of Eastgate authors together in keynote panels. There were no fireworks, not even any real disagreements. Instead the writers articulated a loose set of common goals, procedures, and habits. Much of the talk about hypertext, as usual, was about its relationship to post-structuralist thought: in this case, the foregrounding of textuality; the “interactiveness” between reader and text; praise for collage and fragmentation, for multiplicity and collaboration. What one did not hear repeated, happily, were some of the early claims made for hypertext: that it would somehow strengthen democracy, that the linear straightjacket of ink on paper would be liberated by hypertext, which was itself more natural or more representative of how humans (or intellectuals) think 8. Still, though the conference was more interesting than most, the presenters seemed, at least in this context, mostly of one mind.

     
    More emphasis on the differences between the writers might have proven more exciting–more “noise” and less “music.” But I suppose it is necessary to remember that we are fairly early into the story of hypertext and hypertextual studies; it is likely to be awhile before these writers get past the initial phase of advocacy and instruction and begin a rigorous (and public) self-critique.

     
    Given the time-delay mechanisms of literary politics, issues that Eastgate authors have been bravely raising explicitly for some years (in essays and talks) or implicitly (through their fictions and poems) are beginning to be augmented and seriously debated in other forums, and by a widening group. The least interesting of these discussions, as I have said, are debates painted in broad strokes (“classic print vs.the pixel”), and usually come with apocalyptic warnings on both sides. More compelling are those discussions about literary hypertext which foreground the possiblilities of either disjunctures or continuities through generations of language innovations and across cultural forms. A few of the best examine both. It is not only literary theorists who are increasingly publishing essays and books about hypertext, but also reading specialists, psychologists, and information and computer scientists.9

     
    Still, what has been largely ignored is the discourse surrounding literary hypertext and its relation to the market as well as to pedagogy–in ways that include the social realities of education. In the context of both increasingly available “commercial” literary hypertexts and (especially) the growing number of “free” internet-available hypertextual essays, poems, and fictions, the terrain is shrinking upon which a hypertext company like Eastgate may still articulate a “revolutionary” stance. The concepts of “serious” and “experimental” hypertexts, in flux like the concepts of “noise” and “music,” are in need of continued critique.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985). For a discussion of Attali in relation to pop music, see Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman, Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming 1997).

     

    2. George P. Landow, Hypertext (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). See the back cover of the book.

     

    3. Michael Joyce, Twilight: A Symphony. (Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996).

     

    4. Martin Spinelli, “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” Postmodern Culture 6.2 (January, 1996).

     

    5. Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor, 1995) 40.

     

    6. Majorie Perloff, Radical Artifice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). Also see Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996).

     

    7. See the hypertext roundtable, “Dialog,” in the inaugural issue of the Web-based magazine FEED. The URL for the site is http://www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html.

     

    8. Joyce, Minds 57.

     

    9. Jean-Francois Rouet, Jarmo J. Levonen, Andrew Dillon, and Rand J. Spiro, Hypertext and Cognition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996).

     

  • Whose Opera Is This, Anyway?

    Jon Ippolito

    Guggenheim Museum, Soho
    ji@guggenheim.org

     

    Tod Machover & MIT Media Lab’s interactive Brain Opera, performed at Lincoln Center, NYC, July 23-August 3, 1996.

     

    Composer and MIT Media Lab Professor Tod Machover believes anyone can make music. At least that’s what it says on the cover of the glossy brochure for his Brain Opera, which premiered last July 23rd at Lincoln Center in New York. Part science exhibit, part music recital, the Brain Opera promises its audience a chance to play electronic instruments in an Interactive Lobby and then hear a 45-minute performance based on their impromptu riffs and recitatives. The fact is, however, that the Brain Opera doesn’t exactly deliver on this promise–which makes Machover’s professed faith in his audience’s ability to make music a bit less convincing than his brochure would have us believe.

     

    I had been told in advance that the Brain Opera‘s Interactive Lobby contained a battery of 40 or so computer workstations that produce sounds and video based on visitors’ inputs. Since for me “a battery of computer workstations” conjures up phosphorescent screens set into sleek metal consoles with shiny right angles, I was a bit surprised upon entering the lobby to find myself in a dark jungle of amorphous pods, plastic toadstools, and oversized potatoes hanging from the ceiling, all interlaced with vines of computer cable. It seems that Machover and his collaborators hoped that a touchy-feely room of bouncing legumes would allay the public fear of technology. Judging from the crowd’s reaction, there was some justification for this hope: visitors streaming in the door eagerly hopped from pod to pod, thumping rubber protrusions to play crude rhythms or leaning their heads inside plastic cowls to chat insouciantly with videos of Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.

     

    It was not just the somewhat chintzy-looking plastic tubers that were designed to appeal to the computer illiterate, but also the way that these “hyperinstruments” responded to the audience’s presence. A particularly successful example was called the Singing Tree, though it looked more like a giant plastic mushroom: by singing a pure tone into a microphone found under the mushroom’s canopy, I was rewarded by a slightly delayed wash of sound harmonized to my voice, accompanied by the image on a video screen of a hand opening. The experience was unexpectedly gratifying–certainly the most intimate encounter I’ve ever had with a computer. The gratification was even more immediate with the Brain Opera‘s other hyperinstruments. Waving my hand in front of the Gesture Wall, for example, triggered a big splashy sound that I was told was the consequence of my hand interrupting an electric field generated by the Gesture Wall’s bud-like protuberances. The trouble was, when I placed my hand at different points in the field to map out the way the sound was affected by my hand position, I found that no matter where I placed my hand or how fast I moved it the music sounded pretty much the same. Ironically, the same mechanism that enabled me to make a sumptuous sound easily–a computer algorithm generating musical phrases based somewhat loosely on my hand position–prevented me from understanding, and hence controlling, the sound I was triggering. The result felt a little like having a conversation with a schizophrenic: it’s hard to tell whether he’s listening or not.

     

    I felt this frustration at many of the hyperinstruments in the first room of the opera, whether I was drumming plastic protuberances, waving my hands in front of video screens, or listening to Marvin Minsky respond to my questions with non sequiturs. With any interactive work, the important question is not how to make it interactive–which is relatively easy with today’s technology–but how to make the interaction rich and meaningful. This “quality of interactivity” problem is especially acute when the object of interaction is simultaneously billed as an artwork and an instrument (or “hyperinstrument”). One approach is to make an instrument that is highly underdetermined, something like leaving a guitar in the gallery for visitors to play. By plucking a few strings or strumming a few chords, they’ll be able to figure out how it works quite easily; the problem is that it takes a lot of practice to produce something really interesting. The alternative approach is to give the responsibility for making interesting sounds to the machine, as exemplified by the Brain Opera‘s hyperinstruments, which respond to visitors’ gestures with entire phrases rather than individual notes. Machover may have chosen this latter approach to ensure that visitors would not be intimidated by instruments that are too hard to learn. And his instruments do succeed in momentarily entertaining visitors flitting from station to station–it’s just that they fail to interest them in sustained learning. The sounds are rich; the interaction is not.

     

    After a half hour of hyperpummeling and hyperwaving, the audience moved to a theater for a performance featuring two hyperinstrumentalists, a conductor, contributions from the Internet, and a lot of prerecorded sound and video. The result was a multimedia cocktail containing something to please every taste: more or less three parts Minsky-esque aphorism (“The mind is too complicated to summarize”), two parts Bach fugue, and one part each NASA photograph, Bill Viola video, and Luciano Berio soundtrack. There was even an ingredient added by the audience: we were told that sounds made earlier by visitors playing hyperinstruments would crop up in the performance, and that remote players joining in from the World Wide Web could exert some control over the sounds heard during a short section of the opera. Perhaps the most important instruction in Machover’s recipe was to blend the contents thoroughly. For unlike the abrupt transitions found in more discordant postmodern compositions, Machover’s careful engineering of the overall sound mellowed the potential cacophony of all the contributors, with the result that his concoction became surprisingly “easy listening”–especially in comparison to the sonic anarchy of horn-honking taxis and chattering crowds that greeted me when I stepped out into Lincoln Center Plaza after the performance.

     

    The Brain Opera‘s attempt to embody bottom-up programming–to make the work accessible to listeners by incorporating their own contributions–was in explicit homage to Marvin Minsky, whose 1985 book The Society of Mind described a mind consisting of countless agents contributing to the daily upkeep of the psyche. In its mode of composition, however, the piece was an implicit homage to a composer who advocated a bottom-up approach long before Minsky: John Cage. Cage pioneered a number of methods for throwing authoritarian control out the window, including mathematical determination, chance operations, and indeterminacy. In an indeterminate composition like Music for One of 1984, the score gives the players leeway as to when and how long to hold certain notes. Cage called the unintentional montage when performers play overlapping sounds “interpenetration without obstruction,” a phrase he borrowed from the Avatamsaka Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism.

     

    Cage’s decision to incorporate the choices of others into his work was a reaction against the model of an authoritarian conductor telling the oboe player when to play a C-sharp and how long to hold it. The Brain Opera seemed to aspire to a similar democratic ideal–but then what was the conductor doing on stage during the performance, digital baton in hand, pointing at various players and inputs to emphasize certain voices and suppress others? And how much influence did the amateur hyperinstrumentalists and Net musicians really have over the music, once their unruly contributions were blended into seamless music by the opera’s engineers twiddling knobs and setting levels? To be sure, Minsky’s “society of mind,” the model invoked in the Brain Opera brochure, places a greater emphasis on cooperation and competition among agents than does Cage’s ensemble of autonomous musicians; if Cage’s society is anarchic, Minsky’s is more of a representative democracy, albeit a tangled “heterarchy” with agents at lower levels influencing the outcome at the levels above. Nevertheless, what Machover has realized is not Minsky’s representative democracy, but an oligarchy that subsumes the voices of the masses into a preconceived aesthetic program. As I took in its deftly modulated voice-overs and carefully synched video images, the Brain Opera seemed to have less to do with the startling juxtapositions of Cage’s acoustic experiments than with a commercial for Muzak I had seen on TV years back, in which technicians in white lab coats twiddled dials while a voice-over touted the benefits of “scientifically engineered music.” Perhaps Machover has succeeded in engineering music that appeals to a broad audience. The irony of his achievement is that in order to prevent the listeners from being alienated by a truly “bottom-up” performance, the artist and his collaborators had to wrest control of the performance away from them. Unfortunately for the Brain Opera, what is user-friendly for today’s audience will probably sound hackneyed and sentimental for tomorrow’s. Somewhere in all great music there is a gap, a gap the listener must leap across to find meaning. If the Brain Opera had such a gap, its ingratiating sound-and-light show made it all too easy for the audience to slide right over it, walk outside, and never think about the piece again.

     

    That’s why the most successful moments in the Brain Opera were unmediated by a preexisting idea of what sounds or looks good. The Melody Easels in the lobby were video screens with abstract images reminiscent of the surface of a pond; by running a finger across the screen, a visitor could create wave effects rippling across this surface. One of the Melody Easels, however, produced a bizarre rectilinear wave when stroked, a pixellation that was definitely at odds with the natural motifs developed in most of the other hyperinstruments. I later learned that this effect was an “artifact”–the unexpected result of an algorithm gone bad. The fact that this Melody Easel was also most interesting to play confirmed for me the power of bottom-up programming over a preconceived aesthetic.

     

    From New York the Brain Opera is scheduled to open in Linz, Austria, followed by select venues in Europe and Asia. As this mobile composition tours the world, it would only be consistent with the Brain Opera‘s stated ideals for it to evolve in response to feedback from its listeners. So here’s mine: Don’t be afraid of the sparks that fly when algorithmic composition meets audience participation; present the unfamiliar noise produced by their encounter raw, without sugarcoating. John Cage regretted that his work was not appreciated by a larger percentage of the general public, but he refused to dumb down his ideas to match the public’s taste. The Brain Opera‘s organizers have a real potential to achieve their goal of bottom-up programming–but to do so they will have to be satisfied with a stronger experience for the few rather than a weaker experience for the many.

     

  • “Head Out On The Highway”: Anthropological Encounters with the Supermodern

    Samuel Collins

    American University
    SCOLLIN@american.edu

     

    Marc Auge’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso, 1995.

     

    Does it matter that we spend substantial portions of our lives in a netherworld of highways, airports, supermarkets and shopping malls? Are these just liminal moments between other events and places that have more meaning to us, or do these sites warrant some attention in their own right? Marc Auge’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity elevates the ATM machine, the airport lounge and the superhighway to the status of high theory through a discussion of the interrelationship (and dissociation) of space, culture, and identity. Along the way, Auge takes anthropology beyond its sometimes theoretically moribund fascination with the borders between tradition and alterity, pre-modern and modern, and authenticity and commodification. Instead, non-place is the very nexus of raw and undistilled advanced capitalism, space shorn of all its cultural and social polysemy. But this does not mean that anthropology and ethnography in general are doomed to increasing irrelevance as some have forecast. In fact, Auge’s book is not about the dissolution of the anthropological object under the dubious sign of “crisis.” Rather, Auge locates non-place in a tradition of anthropological place and suggests that our understanding of the social relations and practices evident in more traditional anthropological places may help us to understand the different constellations of self and Other evident in non-place.

     

    Until quite recently, most anthropologists were inclined to view the encroachment of the modern (and the many modernisms that it implies) on the people they studied with considerable ambivalence, either with dyspeptic and patronizing elegiacs (“They’re losing their culture”) or with a sort of master-cynic’s irony (“They’re watching Star Trek in Bangkok!). Of course, with the violent displacements, forced migrations and military maneuvers common to late-twentieth century life, these ambivalences are probably quite warranted. However, both approaches ignore modernity as meaningful social practice in the lives of people around the world, whether we mean the entrance of small societies into the wage nexus or the proliferation of commodified media forms in far-flung places. With the exception of the often-ignored work of urban anthropologists, “culture” has usually delineated small, bounded, isolated, and “authentic” societies. In anthropology, ideas of culture have always traveled from the exotic periphery to the metropole. Like English gentry returning from a stint with the East India Company, anthropologists and their theories accrued both power and prestige in the colonies. The modern functioned only as a diluvial benchmark for the loss of the “real,” the fall from the allochronic “cultural” spaces of the exotic Orient to the “non-cultural” rational present of the Occident.

     

    With the advent of several major critiques of anthropology’s guilty past, most notably Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter and Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, anthropologists began their long journey towards redressing their fear of the modern with an innovative series of Baudelairean meditations on the dialectics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, simple and complex. From Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) to Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), many ethnographies in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s explored the interstices between the pre-modern “exotic” and the modern quotidian, focusing on the interpolations of Western forms into “native” places (and vice versa).

     

    As innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there is a pungent whiff of recidivism about them. As innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there’s a pungent whif of recidivision about them, as if the phrase “authentic primitive” has been crossed out only to be replaced by “subaltern peasantry”? These days, it seems, ethnographies are fairly redolent with the image of the plucky subaltern, stubbornly appropriating the reifying and alienating discourses and institutions of the colonial for their own more native, egalitarian, and sometimes utopian ends. Haven’t the ontological foundations for cultural theory in anthropology simply shifted from exotic authenticity to exotic resistance? In any case, the modern is reduced to a series of “Occidental texts” forced on people from the outside. Most anthropologists have yet to reconcile themselves to a lived modernity.

     

    But “modernity”–even without the adumbrations of “post”–does not end (or begin) with “Western Europe.” Anthropologists owe it to themselves, the people they study, and to their reading audience to theorize the modern in its worldwide manifestations of affect and effect. As a fieldworker with experience in both West Africa and France, ranging from the study of ritual to the sociology of science, Auge, perhaps, is in a particularly good position to tell us something about the world’s varied modernities without stepping into either fanciful abjections of the Other or narcissistic reflections on Self.

     

    Malinowski begins his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific with an abjuration to imagine: “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails out of sight” (4). Many ethnographies begin with a similar invitation to place oneself in the midst of a tableau vivant composed of village, atoll, and grinning natives. It’s also instructive to note that as anthropologists have shifted away from their obsession with the primitive so have their static descriptions of museum dioramas given way to dynamic, more piecemeal narratives. But the propensity towards these in situ evocations are characteristic, Auge suggests, of anthropological place, the identification of culture with geography. “The ideal, for an ethnologist wishing to characterize single particularities, would be for each ethnic group to have its own island, possibly linked to others but different from any other; and for each islander to be an exact replica of his neighbours” (50). “Anthropological place” describes the (imaginary) interpolation of individual into culture and culture into geography that Auge believes lies at the heart of both Mauss’s total social fact as well as equally ideological tales of autochthony and belonging advanced by peoples to legitimate their own territorial interest while weakening those of their neighbors. “Illusory” in the sense of a convenient fiction embraced by both anthropologist and informant, “anthropological place” is the “transparency between culture, society and individual” (49).

     

    This is an important distinction. Critiques of “orientalism” (Edward Said), condemnations of reified, “billiard ball” notions of culture (Eric Wolf), and exhortations to write about culture as complex movements of transnational identities and local understandings (Homi Bhaba, Arjun Appadurai), all protest the hypostatized “native under glass.” But what Auge means is somewhat less than the perfect interchangeability of geography, culture, and people.

     

    For although the ethnologist can hardly help being tempted to identify the people he studies with the landscape in which he finds them, the space they have shaped, he is just as aware as they are of the vicissitudes of their history, their mobility, the multiplicity of spaces to which they refer, the fluctuation of their frontiers. (47)

     

    Rather, “anthropological place” is the essence of belonging, the ethnological object conceived as a series of homologies between peoples, places, and practices, reminiscent of Bourdieu’s discussions of Kabyle architecture in Outline of a Theory of Practice.

     

    It is this fit between identity and identification that is overwhelmed by what Auge calls “supermodernity.” “We could say of supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of a negative” (30). Rather than the slippage of meaning and signification associated with modernity, “supermodernity” refers to their abundance. That is, supermodernity does not signal the negation of narrative and identity, but to their histrionic multiplication in a deluge of space, time, and event. Under a condition characterized by general excess, anthropological place gives way to the clean, cold lines of non-place, the imaginaire of the Other to the imaginings of the super-modern.

     

    If “anthropological place” is a series of isomorphisms drawn between being a person, acting as a person, and inhabiting a place, then non-place describes a situation where these have been dispersed and people act fundamentally alone without any particular reference to their common history or similar experience, each occupying a discrete seat in the airplane or lane on the highway: “If a place can be identified as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (77-78). If anthropological place describes, say, a small Breton village with its monuments, its one cafe, its old homes, its Church, its harvests, and its remedies for common ailments, then non-place is driving down an Interstate past the village only to stop at a gas station to glance at postcards and road-maps that form, perhaps, the merest trace of village life. Like M. Dupont in Auge’s opening narrative, we read about places and people, exotic cities and geopolitical calamity in magazines and see them on CNN, but we are, in the end, thrown back on ourselves, cradled in the bosom of non-place and assured that, no matter what sticky “places” in which we find ourselves embroiled in after we land or exit off the Interstate, we are, for the time being, “nowhere,” reclining in a self-referential non-place with nothing to do but reflect on the idyll of a world happening outside us. “For a few hours…he would be alone at last” (6).

     

    This is the key difference between the modern flaneur’s urban wanderings and the supermodern’s commute. In non-place, all of the events and relations that structure experience and underlie history disappear over the horizon; they are a fleeting trace. The Victorian traveler defined (him)self against a succession of Others: the urban Other, the racial Other, the sexual Other, the cultural Other and the historical Other. Walking across town was (and still can be) an engagement with the totality of history: the imperial order with its carefully maintained typologies of master and slave was (and still is) a visible feature of the landscape. In the squeaky-clean world of the non-place, however, these features are consigned–if they are acknowledged at all–to an in-flight magazine or a brochure for a tour.

     

    We do not always dwell in the supermodern, nor, perhaps, will we ever. Rather, we traverse non-place on our way to the innumerable places that make up the sum of our lives; our time spent in the commuter lane on the trans-Atlantic flight is time (and space) between. Even as the airplane takes off and our past selves recede along the runway, we know that our identity–along with the sometimes unbearable fullness of belonging–is only temporarily suspended, to be picked up later along with our luggage and our relatives waiting at the gate. This fleeting quality is the most fascinating aspect of non-place. “Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten” (79). Indeed, what’s potentially most interesting about non-place is this failure to erase the traces of “anthropological place,” this failure to “subject the individual consciousness to entirely new ordeals of solitude” (93). Like the “return of the repressed,” all of the iniquities of purely modern identity–race, class, gender, and so on–reappear at odd, jarring moments in non-place, belying this perfect reflection of the individual upon the Other of the self.

     

    Once we’ve paid our ticket, according to Auge, we surrender our self at the gate, so to speak, becoming, for the duration of our travel, a non-person in the strict, Maussian sense of the word. Or at least thatis how Auge would have it: “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver” (103). But this is not really true, as the many Rodney Kings of this world will tell you. Perhaps we would like to believe in this level playing field of non-identity that Auge is describing, but people seem quite capable of re-inscribing all of their stereotypes on the non-place, keeping their cultural baggage even as they check their physical baggage. To some extent, Auge has provided for this in his aforementioned description of place and non-place as a dialectical play rather than a strict opposition of terms. But the idea that a bigot becomes less so on an airplane seems ludicrous nevertheless and threatens to overturn all that Auge has advanced so far.

     

    The biggest difference between place and non-place is not so much that one is relational and historical while the other is not, but that non-place continues the relations and identities of anthropological place in highly commodified forms. For example, in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994), Iain Chambers writes about his pleasure and surprise in buying “beer-can art” from a black man on a New York subway. He celebrates this as one of a variety of tactics employed by the dis-located and disenfranchised to “cope” in the increasingly labile heterotopia of the city. While this may be true, I couldn’t help but think of the shallow and highly artificial quality of their encounter. What did Chambers really understand of that man’s world by buying a five dollar beer-can sculpture? What truths had he discovered about “coping” and what “tactics” had he unearthed? Should we be celebrating or eulogizing human beings reduced to (comparatively) meaningless exchanges on subway platforms? The moral here is that Chambers believes he’s encountered “authenticity” in a commodity and that the “relationships” engendered by the exchange of commodities are somehow key to our survival in a world of varied, transnational scapes.

     

    Henri LeFebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) is an eloquent warning against collapsing the varied spaces around us into the mental spaces figured in metaphors of reading:

     

    When codes worked up from literary spaces are applied to spaces--to urban spaces, say--we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level. Any attempt to use such codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce that space itself to the status of a message, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a reading. (7)

     

    This is, of course, exactly what non-placeencourages us to do: reduce a world of embedded histories and relationships to a sign on the highway. In this way, the whole of the Civil War, for example, with all of its unresolved contradictions and painful truths, can be reduced to a billboard welcoming us into historic Gettysburg.

     

    What is most interesting about Auge’s work is not so much that non-place exists, but that we would, on some level, like it to exist and that, moreover, it always fails our expectations of non-identity and atomized relations. While non-place may reduce history and social life to a passing road-sign, it does this in highly temporary and unstable ways. As an anthropologist, I believe that the abrogation of non-place–that moment when anthropological place rears its head again–seems key to our understanding of the supermodern. Like M. Dupont, we must arrive at a destination.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. By John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.
    • Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Le Febvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
    • Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton, 1922.

     

  • Confessions of a Net Surfer: Net Chick and Grrrls on the Web

    Carina Yervasi

    University of Michigan
    cly@umich.edu

     

    Carla Sinclair, Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

     

    “An Ironic Dream of a Common Address”

     

    Not since reading Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” have I thought so much about gender and machines, or more accurately, about women and computers, modems, and network connections. Harking back to the “Manifesto,” we might consider that the day has arrived when part woman, part machine working in/on the Net may be staging that perfect “coupling.” Or, this is at least one image of women and the Net evoked by Web Guide guru Carla Sinclair in Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. Taking up the challenge to see where technology and gender intersect on the Web, Sinclair offers an abundantly informative (and by no means exhaustive, as she herself acknowledges) Internet guide and e-dress book for “cyberchicks.” In the introduction Sinclair initially sets out to dispel two popular notions: that the cybercareer world is male-dominated and that the Web is an all-“boyz” club. Throughout the rest of the book, she interviews women who have successful careers using the Internet, gives advice on necessary software and hardware (e.g. ergonomic chairs) and, finally, reviews important Websites (mostly created by women) and newsgroups, which Sinclair believes are especially useful to women.

     

    That Net Chick should arrive when it did into the print and paper publishing world of the Internet guidebook “genre” is worthy of mention. Fortunately, Sinclair, co-editor of ’80s zine bOing!bOing! and co-author of The Happy Mutant Handbook, still believes in introductory accessibility. As Internet guidebooks go, way too many uninspiring and corporate-centered tomes have appeared in the past two years. Net Chick, however, is the first non-corporate, and intensely personal Internet guide to combine photographs, cartoons, history, interviews–as well as the main attraction; URLs and online newsgroup addresses. Sinclair’s book is very different from the commercially generated “Internet guides.” They often tend to look and feel (hefty) like the Manhattan Yellow Pages, positioning paid-for ads in between large (expensive) or small (cheaper) directory entries (cf. The Internet Yellow Pages; Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory; New Riders’ Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages ). Most of the Websites discussed in Net Chick are Personal Home Pages. Not that Sinclair has anything against commercial sites (“mersh sites”), but she is more interested in the independent sites because they “are created by individuals who want to share and show off ideas, information, and art” (10) and presumably don’t share a commercial concern for profit margin.

     

    Net Chick is a sort of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the ’90s computer grrrl generation, for the “cyberchick”: the “female Internet explorer” (234). This book may not read as a manifesto for technocratic or Webworld subject/object relations, but it is and will prove to be invaluable for a variety of Net surfing publics. As a guide and resource, its target audience is specifically women. It is an indispensable tool for those who teach women’s studies or contemporary culture and want to integrate more electronic media into their courses. Moreover, it has especially inspiring e-dresses for those who are simply seeking a grrrl-related beauty, health, or spiritual tip while surfing the Web. In other words, this guide is part fluff and part real stuff.

     

    So wait not, fair grrrlie: hie thee to a modem connection and get thine ass online!
    --Kristin Spence, Foreword

     

    And what is a Net Chick or a Net Grrrl anyway? Being a Net Chick for Sinclair means “having a modem,” using a keyboard “to navigate through…cyberspace,” and, ultimately, “becoming empowered by…acces to and knowledge of the Internet” (6). Sinclair’s “grrrl” is the “same as chick, except grrrls can be even tougher” (235). I imagine that a Net Grrrl is a combination of Tank Girl, Roseanne, and Valerie Solanas, whereas a Net Chick throws a bit of Barbie/Cindy Crawford into the mix. Cybergrrrls (with apologies to Aliza Sherman whose “cybergrrl” is a regular feature in her Website: http://www.cybergrrl.com) are akin to indy rock’s Riot Grrrls. And according to the spoof Cyberpunk Handbook, they “are fierce girls who like tech [because] [g]rrrls with tech experience are irresistible. NOTHING is more attractive than a fierce, blazing, ninja-type grrrl right now, and if she knows UNIX…the world is hers. Hrrrs” (31). Evidently, anyone (any woman) with access to the Internet can be a Net Chick.

     

    For newcomers to cyber- or Internet culture who want to explore the feminist and post-feminist wired world, Sinclair’s book is an important first stop. She includes a comprehensive “ABC’s” to the Internet in the Appendix and gives a clear explanation of many online services available with such stats as service fees, percentage of women users, most popular topics, etc. (220-221). For those who have successfully surfed the Net and have a few bookmarks already tagging their favorite sites, her guide will help to build a personal cybrary with other informative sites and addresses.

     

    Keeping in mind these possible user-groups, it would appear that Sinclair’s purpose in putting this book together is two-fold: to get people to think about gender and technology and to get more women involved in the Internet and cyberculture in general. Terms like “community” and “communication” are fundamental in understanding Sinclair’s encouragement for women to join chat groups, surf the Web, and ultimately create their own Home Pages. As suggested by the Australian Network for Art and Technology online newsletter–whose URL I found through a link from Australian e-zine geekgirl (http://www.next.com.au/spyfood/geekgirl)–“Collaboration replaces the individual author whose rotting corpse of privileged solitary genius long ceased to nourish the cultural body of ideas” (2). Well, maybe Sinclair doesn’t push cooperation that far, but she does see the Internet as the newest locus for putting communication skills to use. In this sense, then, Sinclair has written this woman-centered guidebook in order to develop, through a general understanding of the potential of cyberspace, informed publics and future “cyberchick” Web surfers.

     

    Brief introductions providing the basics about the World Wide Web begin each section. In chapters like “Sexy” and “Stylin’,” or “Media Freak” and “Entertain Me!” or in the health chapter, “Feelin’…Groovy,” Sinclair attempts to deal with all matters “femme” and wired in what she considers “post-feminist” chick cyberspace. By subdividing the chapters into “Profiles,” “Interviews,” “Hot Sites,” and “Tips,” she tries to capture the quirky cross-over cyber/print nature of the book. As Sinclair contends: “Net Chick [is] the only guide to stylish, post-feminist, modem grrrl culture” (5). This claim is true. It is the only printed guide that directly addresses women and the Internet. For online guides Sinclair recommends “Webgrrls!–Women on the Net” (http://www.cybergrrl.com/) and “Voxxen Worx” (http://www.phantom.com/~barton/voxxen.html). On the very last page of her guide, Sinclair includes the always-changing, always-updated URL of her net chick Web site: “The Net Chick Clubhouse” (http://www.cyborganic.com/People/carla) where links can be found to most of the other always-changing net chick sites in her book.

     

    One significant feature of this guide is the use of interviews with some of the pioneering women on the Web. Sinclair promises that readers will “meet the gals who are involved with cyberculture and how it relates to sex, style, the media, entertainment, recreation, health, employment, and political issues” (11). In light of this promise, Net Chick, g-URL guide extraordinaire, doubles as a cultural history of women working on the Web. Particularly impressive is the wide representation of Sinclair’s pioneering “net chicks” and their various fields of work.

     

    Because the general tone of Net Chick is playful, tongue-in-cheek, the advice given by many of these women ranges from the silly to the pragmatic (how to “flame” back) to the radical (how to subvert commercial technologies). Chapter One: “Sexy,” begins with Lisa Palac, “The Cybersex Chick” who, in the early ’90s, was editor of Future Sex, “the only magazine devoted to the fusion of sex and high-technology” (16). In Net Chick, Palac and Marjorie Ingall give humorous and practical tips on Online Dating. Another of the interviewees, in Chapter Three: “Media Freak,” is Rosie (X) Cross, editor of the “first cyberfeminist zine,” geekgirl (88). This interviews reads very much like a Situationist manifesto. Cross, also known as RosieX, became involved in digital culture because she thought it was a “subculture” (89). Unlike Sinclair’s American “net chick,” Cross, from Australia, prefers the term “geekgirl.” When asked to describe these “geekgirls,” Cross says that they “like machines, ‘specially computers. They wanna get history straight, they wanna subvert the mainstream…. They investigate the murky and sometimes mean worlds of postmodernity and the obsession with technology” (88-89). This slightly anarchistic sentiment is further echoed in Jude Milhon’s interview in the same chapter. Milhon, a.k.a. St. Jude, former managing editor and columnist for Mondo 2000, is described as “the patron saint of systems programming” who “was hacking computers before the word ‘hacker’ was even around” (94). Her interview nicely parallels the short bio of 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, whom Sinclair bills as “the world’s first hacker” (190-191).

     

    Some of the other interviewees include Rene Cigler, jewelry designer for the film Tank Girl; Reva Basch, “data sleuth” and cybrarian; Debra Floyd, Program Coordinator for a nonprofit Internet service provider, Institute of Global Communications (IGC) (200) and Director of African American Networking (http://www.igc.apc.org/africanam/africanam.html); and Jill Atkinson, who undertook the first Ph.D. in electronic publishing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Atkinson is also the creator of a rather racy Website, “Bianca’s Smut Shack,” which has information, interactive chat, and “activities” in every room. These interviews are supplemented by descriptions of Sinclair’s favorite personal home pages, which are “hand-picked, based on a high level of creativity, frankness, sex appeal, or plain old charm” (74).

     

    From the interviews and some of the Home Pages covered by Sinclair, one can conclude that these pioneering “net chicks” experienced difficulty breaking into once male-dominated cybercareers; that many of them are self-taught Internet explorers and creators; and that, by and large, most of them have some connection to electronic publishing. Interestingly enough, Sinclair and her “cyberbuddies” are convinced that the electronic industries’ gender imbalance is shifting because of the relative accessibility of the Internet.

     

    Spence, in her candid “Foreword,” argues that since “cyberspace is a world ruled by knowledge” (xi), women who know how to maneuver within it can gain access to knowledge and power through this and other media. Furthermore, she contends that the Internet connection is “all about communication, power, equality” (xi). For Spence, as well as Sinclair, to get online is to “seize power” (xii). More women online, for both these writers, means the addition of more grrrl-connections to calibrate the gender and power imbalance of the Net. And fundamentally I don’t disagree. Nevertheless, I take issue with both Spence and Sinclair for offering unsubstantiated new-agey essentialist nonsense like “the feminine energy now flooding the Internet” (3) and “the root forces driving this medium [the Net]–communication, community, and creativity–are inherently feminine. They are things women innately excel at. Plainly put, this means we were built to do this” (xi). Pop feminism or not, I don’t think that anyone is “built” for sitting and surfing the Web.

     

    Important to this guide, however, are Sinclair’s attempts to come to terms with the specificity of cyberculture. She endeavors to describe through her research (evidenced in the multiple and overlapping lists, reports, and interviews) that what the Web can hold and contain, all at once, is exactly that postmodern capacity to specify and generalize simultaneously, to show concurrently singularity and difference. Sinclair’s valiant efforts to disclose the nature of cyberspace in print are this book’s greatest strength, but this also opens up my major critique of her book. There is an inherent irony in describing the complexity of genderless electronic media while purporting to provide “femme only” sites and addresses. Perhaps more than ironic is the particular impossibity of singling out what makes a site a “grrrl-site” or a “chick-site,” especially when many Webpages are collaborative projects or are produced by–gulp–men. Kristin Spence, Section Editor of Wired, echoes this concern in her “Foreword” to Net Chick when she acknowledges that “[w]hile, it is always tremendously affirming and empowering to hang with your own posse, such a ghettoization of the Net would be a tragic step backwards” (xi-xii). Recognizing the irony and heeding Spence’s warning, I was none too anxious to continue on my “estrogenic journey” (3) through online “femme” culture.

     

    Confession

     

    After cruising the Web for over five hours checking out some “Hot Sites” listed in “Chicks and Flicks” (117-121) and surfing through others, from “Tank Girl,” incidentally created by a man, (http://www.oberlin.edu/~jdockhor/tg/Default.html) (91) to “Women Homepage” (http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/sorokin/women/index.html) (207), honestly enjoying myself, I began to feel keenly self-conscious of my own privilege: computer equipment, ethernet connection, and time to spend (waste). It was at this point that I realized that Sinclair’s guide, while claiming accessibility as the path to empowerment, also unknowingly raises questions about basic accessibility that simply are not addressed. Supporting Spence’s opening comments on online equality and power, Sinclair maintains that “cyberspace, the net, is an equal space” (72) and that “everybody has equal access to the same global soapbox” (9). But the word “privilege,” not “equal access,” comes more easily to mind when I think about computer culture. Sinclair, although well-meaning, is underestimating the real costs of such communication both in hardware and time. Equally naive is Sinclair’s statement that the Net is “[a]n anarchistic means of expressing oneself to the masses” (9). To which “masses” are we expressing ourselves? Contrary to cybertopian predictions of a growing cadre of decentralized information workers, Left Business Observer‘s Doug Henwood cites cashiers, janitors, and retail salespeople as some of the occupations with the greatest projected growth over the next ten years (2). I cannot stress enough the importance of having an online connection, but I also know that it isn’t currently as materially accessible as the telephone.

     

    Inasmuch as both Sinclair and Spence believe that our contemporary techo-Web world is post-feminist, one wonders why the need for all of their ersatz feminism, or what I called above “nonsense.” The problem for me comes back again to the very fact that Sinclair, while claiming this post-feminism, enumerates, catalogs, and calls for woman-, female-, grrrl-centered Web space and communication, in order to counterbalance the male-dominated fields within cyberculture. It would seem that in Sinclair’s “post-feminist” world, problems of power imbalance just wouldn’t exist. And yet feminists recognize that the scales of knowledge and power are still (and not always just a little) tipped in gender-, class-, race-, and sex-advantaged directions.

     

    Getting informed and staying active on the Internet is Sinclair’s Net Grrrl credo. After surfing through many of the Websites Sinclair suggests, I now realize just how implicated I am in this culture. And especially implicated when I feel that coming back to the printed text is a bit of a let-down. Acknowledging my preference for the “point, click, link, and go” of the endless space of the Internet–a space the book can’t possibly duplicate–feels like a freedom. At the same time, however, I certainly know that I am not liberated from the vise-grip of postfordist anxiety when corporate and electronic media America (Microsoft and NBC) announce that they will collaborate on a new online project: MSNBC, an “innovative” live news series that, as Jeff Yang reports, has been critically received by some as an “experiment in small-d media democracy” (39) for the technoliterate. But that is the split condition of living in a culture where information and communication are increasingly becoming the common (and only, perhaps) currency.

     

    Being a Net Chick therefore is not only about getting “empowered by access” (6): it is also about using that accessibility to try to figure out a way to provide it for others. This being the case, Sinclair’s book is a positive attempt at providing information for people who, with the right kind of opportunity, can get connected and make the Internet a source and object of everyday use.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Frauenfelder, Mark, Carla Sinclair, Gareth Branwyn, Will Kreth, eds. The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.
    • Hahn, Harley. The Internet Yellow Pages. 3rd Ed. New York: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1996.
    • Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990. 190-233.
    • Henwood, Doug. “Work and Its Future.” Left Business Observer 3 April 1996: 1-3+. (http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html)
    • Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory, 1996-1997 Ed. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1996.
    • New Riders’ Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages. Summer/Fall 1996 E. Indianapolis: New Riders, 1996.
    • Sinclair, Carla. Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.
    • St. Jude, R.U. Serious, and Bart Nagel. Cyberpunk Handbook: [The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook]. New York: Random House, 1995.
    • “Virtual Futures.” Australian Network for Art and Technology Newsletter 24 (1996): 10 pp. Online. Internet. 7 March 1996. (http://www.va.com.au/anat/newsletter/issue24/virtual_futures.html)
    • Yang, Jeff. “Joined at the N.” Village Voice 6 August 1996: 39.

     

  • Trip

      
     

  • Hypercapital

    David Golumbia

    University of Pennsylvania
    dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu

     

    Some of liberal democracy’s deepest convictions rest on assumptions about free (or nearly free) and complete access to information. These assumptions, tied to our dreams about liberal American democracy at least since the passage of the Bill of Rights, go something like this: more information is generally better than less information; the more widely information is disseminated, especially throughout the general populace, the better; perhaps most crucially, the wider, cheaper and more comprehensive the popular access to information the better. We might imagine the most radical element of this liberal dream of democratization in the utopian (and not coincidentally, Borgesian) image of a vast library containing accessible copies of every printed, public or significant (but how to decide this, and who?) document in human history, open all hours, admitting all, forbidden and forbidding to none.1

     

    Yet in several domains today, radical doubts have begun to be raised about the project of total information access, and even moreso about the liberal-democratic vision it is supposed to inform.2 Often, these doubts have been phrased politically, especially with regard to underlying theoretical politics that are, to be sure, crucial for understanding the structure of our public and private life. 3 In less academic spheres, grave concerns about the ultimate effects of multinational conglomerate, corporate control of the media (especially journalism) have been raised, most strongly though not at all exclusively by Noam Chomsky. 4 Yet these various criticisms have not yet come full circle: for what is unexamined–or more accurately what is displaced–in the dream of total information access itself is precisely capital, and the inextricable linkages of capital to the American democratic project.

     

    The dream of total access endures even in many of the most radical critiques of capitalist society–if nowhere else than in the implicit claims for the value of additional information that arise in the seemingly endless processing of textual and cultural critique. To the degree that every interpretation is another text, every additional text advances the implicit belief that more information can contribute, in some minor way at least, to a better world.

     

    Moreover, the state of much recent “media,” “culture,” and “information” phenomena suggests a rapid conglomeration of knowledge-technologies, within which the total processing and also the general neutralization of information remain largely unexamined. As profound as their impact on the state of culture may be the rows of cultural studies and feminist and race-critical volumes lining our bookstores, the glossy (or more often today, matte-coated) journals that accompany them, speak to a version of the dream of ultimate information, a state of pure processing power in which just telling the story under enough pressure and from the right angle will make it available for the right agents, perhaps even provoke emancipatory action.

     

    But to what degree is this implicit vision a covert version of the dream of total information access? For however deliberately difficult (and here, just for a second, can one not begin to understand their canny prescience in this regard) Jacques Derrida’s critical texts, or those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, even Michel Foucault, is not part of the vision of cultural studies to “interpret” these texts, to “do things” with them, to make their critical energy available? And what does it mean to carry out these actions–in the name of a personal professionalism, a personal egotism, an institutional necessity, to which almost none of us can claim meaningful resistance–what does it mean to put them forward as part of a system of information whose very essence may not be primarily, as we thought, accessible and useful knowledge, but instead the “filthy lucre” of capital?

     

    Hyperactivity

     

    We must set aside some of the most directly urgent of these issues for the remainder of what follows. For in order even to suggest that they have substance, we have a great deal of work to do at their heart, which is namely the equation, or isomorphism, or at the very least proximity, of what we today call “information” and what we have historically called “capital.” It may well be–and this again would require an analysis outside the scope of this essay–that this isomorphism has existed throughout the history of capitalism. There is certainly a hint of this view in some recent writings on the development of print technology and print culture.5 But whether it has created the isomorphism, or merely exposed it, or both, the current development of hypertext, and its specific realization on the World Wide Web, now bring the capital/information relationship forward with special force.

     

    For while in many ways the hype surrounding the so-called “information revolution” is all too extreme, all too politically suspect, in other ways–of course the ways less traveled by the popular media–the consequences of this revolution have been radically underplayed. Already we see glimmers of a change in the very notion of disseminated information: we already face imaginative difficulties, unthinkable a few years ago, about what kinds of information-bearing things would fill our ideal library.

     

    Furthermore these changes, in a sense mechanical, have been accompanied by “gestalt shifts” so subtle, profound, and rapid as to still be, for all their force, scarcely visible. Once we assumed that information was fragmented, disparate, characteristically hard to access, requiring trips or journeys or hour upon hour in dusty archives. Today for many of us the paradigm is changing. Now we assume that information about what is happening now is available from a small collection of central sources (chiefly television, radio and newspapers, and, more frequently today, online services), and even that the phenomenal quality of an event’s “happening” is determined to a significant degree by its reception in these various media. One encounters more and more a series of rhetorical gestures in which a reporter, a news program, or a talk show becomes a focal stage where events must be reported or else lack full credibility.

     

    The default source for information is becoming these centralized spigots: how many of us have rapidly become used to accessing the MLA directory from our home or office or (at worst) library computers, when only a few decades ago no compilation of recent journal articles was available at all, even in print form? If one multiplies the very idea of archived and indexed information both with the rapidly multiplying archives and indexes themselves, and with the logarithmically expanding capacity of computer hardware and software to store and to access information, one has a sense of the scale and force of the liberal dream of total access to information, only better than before: at one’s fingertips, even in one’s own home–even in everyone’s home.6

     

    Yet the price for this dream is higher than it seems, in many ways directly proportional to the mixing of capital and information in our culture. As the Internet and World Wide Web weave themselves in so many guises into so many parts of our culture, they bring with them the venture capitalists, corporations (from “above the garage” types to multinationals), and entrepreneurial “free spirits” whose actions often seem little more than the glazed, robotic, displaced expressions of the selfish gene, capital. And unlike the direct efforts of capitalists to control information flow by controlling its sources, the Internet and Web provide a fully-distributed system that, paradoxically, naturalizes and ever more profoundly insinuates capital into our own social and psychological economies.

     

    To take a specific example, many users of a university information system may tend to think of their Internet and Web access as cost-free. Capitalists, however, note the hardware, software and system maintenance costs and count them as hidden in lower salaries and higher tuition prices. This rationalization in mind, the capitalist asks how he (please allow me the naive demonization of calling the capitalist “he”) might make money from the system. His ability to answer is limited, for his thoughts of “profit margin” and “gross revenue” interrupt other, deeper trains of thought. You or I email a colleague, or use a Web browser to access the contents of the latest issue of Postmodern Culture; the capitalist asks how much the browser costs me, who put up the server, its maintenance costs, and so on.

     

    “As One Put Drunk…”

     

    More to the point, the capitalist looks at the operation of the Web and the Internet, or at least takes advantage of them, in technical terms. These systems operate via a networking standard referred to as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (more commonly known by the acronym TCP/IP). The World Wide Web and the Internet, while technically distinct systems, share these protocols where computer networking is concerned. This is visible to users when they access electronic mail–an Internet function–via a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator, can most often at the same time access electronic mail sent through the Internet. Each computer connected to these systems is assigned a TCP/IP address, which users may occasionally see in its numerical form–a sequence of four integers between 1 and 254 separated by periods. The Internet and World Wide Web operate by computers passing information among these various addresses.

     

    What the computers on these networks send each other, taking advantage of the rules set out in the TCP/IP protocols, are called packets.7 A packet is some amount of information (for example, the contents of a brief email message, or a segment of a World Wide Web page) stored within a kind of electronic envelope. The envelope is marked with an address–part of which includes one of the TCP/IP addresses for the destination computer–that tells various servers and routers along the network where to pass the packet and what ultimately to do with it (making the forms of information on the Internet quite virus-like, in a sense that Burroughs likely did not have in mind). Depending on the complexity of the operation, even a single transaction on the Internet can involve the exchange of many packets: depending on how the packets are sized, hundreds or thousands of packets can travel between a single personal computer and a host computer in a short period of time.

     

    Everything that travels the Internet or the World Wide Web is a packet. A single email message might be broken into one or many packets, each with its own address. Just so my point is not lost, a request for information on the Internet is carried in just the same way as the information itself is carried: as a packet. By clicking on a hypertext link to an article in PMC, for example, you send one or more packets to your server, which sends them on through a series of leaps eventually to PMC‘s server, which opens the packets, interprets the request they contain, and complies with the request by returning to the requesting computer (including the requesting computer’s Web browser) the many packets constituting an article or review.

     

    Internet capitalists see these packets, best case scenario for profit-making, as tiny units of money. Sites on the World Wide Web are rated by how many “hits” they receive each day–that is, by the number of requests they receive–or, in more sophisticated business models, by the number of distinct users logging in to the site each day.8 This may sound something like a library deciding to buy more copies of a book that is checked out frequently. It is more similar to television networks charging higher prices for advertising on programs with better Nielsen ratings. But it is also fundamentally different from either of these relatively crude feedback systems. For no previous system allows tracking of each user’s actions in precise detail, nor for that tracking to become itself a piece of information in the very system of information which both the consumer and the sponsor use. Even Nielsen ratings have to proceed on the assumption that several thousand Nielsen families form a representative sample of the American populace. The Internet and the World Wide Web promise exact, numerical statistics on every piece of information that goes in–every request, every posting–and every piece that goes out. Lest this strike some readers as hyperbole, I note that already two prominent Web software providers–Open Market and Netscape itself–sell commercial providers of Web sites exactly this kind of microscopic user tracking, of which users themselves likely remain altogether unaware.

     

    There exists a significant amount of pressure to turn our online data systems into a (de)centralized information super storage house that becomes more and more authoritative, more and more, in Foucault’s phrase, the “information source of record.”9. We are accustomed to accessing much of the best of this information today for free, but we must be attentive to the degree to which that lack of cost may be a culture-wide “loss leader” for a great payout to come–for the moment when so much information has been logged in these systems that we have no choice but to pay up when fees are requested.10

     

    It is a payout whose form we may not immediately recognize. Corporate capitalists would love to charge us per packet–so many cents for each packet sent out, so many for each packet we receive. Unsurprisingly, such proposals are frequently favored by the telephone and cable companies that would most likely profit most highly from them, and opposed by “information advocates” generally. But the more canny capitalist realizes that a better way is to provide access itself at little or no cost–buried in tuition, or cheaply at $9.95 a month–while charging for content. Charging not the user but the sponsor–the advertiser.

     

    Online advertising is nothing new. It’s been around with some full force for five or ten years, old hat already in our “rapidly changing technological world.” Many of us have already learned to mock, dismiss or “ignore” the Schwab or Toyota or Sears button at the bottom of our computer screens, in much the same way we (tell ourselves that we) mock, dismiss or “ignore” advertisements on television. But what if every time you access a certain magazine, database, or paper, a “hit” is counted that translates almost instantaneously into higher ad revenues for the sponsor of the page you’ve accessed?

     

    Fixity…or, Forget It

     

    We continue to understand our short-range information future in metaphors whose terms we know well–email, that’s like a letter or phone call; Web page, that’s like a page of a book or magazine, a segment of a TV program. These are inaccurate or at best incomplete comparisons, in ways corporate capitalists have not fully realized yet, but surely will. New technologies like Java and ActiveX, only the first of many to follow, even recent versions of Netscape’s Navigator, hint at just some of the information-technology changes that may arrive sooner than any of us may realize. Java and Active X, for example, can be used in part to develop what Internet “evangelists” call, somewhat generically, “applets.” Unlike what we know as applications, applets perform specific tasks relatively independent of the totality of system operations.11 Sophisticated applets in some sense resemble the “agents” that have become so entrenched in futurist versions of artificial intelligence in its commercial applications.

     

    Whatever the full implementation might look like, it is clear that our future desktop PCs or notepads or PDAs or whatever they are will contain fragmentary or miniature information retrieval and requesting subsystems that fit only loosely into more general architectures. These miniature elements will be highly adaptable and highly customizable. They will also be highly interactive with systems and functions “outside” of our own personal computer interfaces. As Bill Gates has suggested somewhat famously, someday soon intelligent agents will seek out the best-priced airline tickets for us.

     

    My system (the one on my home computer or standard Internet server, the one that has logged every request I have made during my use of the system) might not only guess in advance the kind of information I am seeking. It might very well actively seek out that information in response to only the most general sorts of instructions from me. And at every stage as my “agent” combs through the trillions of packets and the trillions of files available, every action my agent takes is logged, compiled and even anticipated, and accommodated for by subtle shifts in the value of the very packets navigated by my agent, which is itself no more than a collection of packets. Furthermore the information about my agent’s activities is collected and transported as packets. Together these packets swim in a largely unregulated, largely unregulatable soup of constantly-self-correcting information.12

     

    Within that soup, the distinction between “free” and “for profit” becomes obscured if not lost altogether. It seems plausible to suggest that the distinction between “information” and “capital” becomes obscured if not lost altogether. And the name of that soup, at least the word we have that most closely describes it today, is hypertext.

     

    Medium/Message

     

    The radical potential of hypertext has often been described, by George Landow and others, in terms of its capacity to destabilize the nature of the written page and to conform the flow of information to the user’s cognitive expectations and whims, replacing the stability of the author-function with the inherently variable practice of the user-function.13 This is not the place to read in detail Landow’s Hypertext or any of the wide range of other works that offer compelling visions for the radical potentials of hypertext. Nor is it the place to consider in detail the many forms that hypertext may eventually take. What concerns me here is what is so rapidly coming to dominate our contemporary hypertextual field: the overwhelming extent to which the development of that field has been in the service and the control of the forces of capital; the degree to which too much of our theorizing and fantasizing about hypertext’s possibilities have simply overlooked the plain facts of capitalist control and development of a new media tool; and, perhaps most importantly, what the specifics of capital’s influence on hypertext augur about social relations and information relations in the near future. For now, with the first widespread realization of the hypertextual vision, we are beginning to see that our early dreams for hypertext concealed buried prejudices about individualism, liberal democracy and total information access that fail to account for the ever-changing face and power of capital.

     

    As such dreams so characteristically do, this vision of the future “forgets” about capital and places us in a psuedo-utopia where the power of capital and commercialism are veiled.14 As we see in SF movies from the 1950s to today (with the notable exception of “corporation” SF horror films such as Alien), we characteristically forget to “brand” our future. The persistence of this “forgetting” is itself fascinating, and speaks to a crucial and under-remarked feature of capitalism. Buried in that forgetting is some kind of covert dream that the next new technology will somehow eliminate the need for corporations, for branding, even for capital itself: for our utopias often appear neo-socialist in nature, radically “egalitarian” in a way that even our visions of democracy often are not. It is no accident that this forgetting serves so well capital’s need for the most aggressive technological innovation. Perhaps it is this amnesia that led us to forgot that hypertext would be implemented, manipulated, created and owned by capital and its agents. As crucially, we “forgot” that hypertext would be a flexible medium whose agents, applications, utilities, applets, viewers, browsers and compilers would be largely owned and designed by corporations.

     

    As theorists have noted, hypertext distinguishes itself from previous “new media” because of its flexibility, its inherent ability to be shaped by not only its users but its designers (think, for example, of the rapid proliferation of features in successive versions of the various Web browsers). But it is this very flexibility that makes it such a powerful tool of capital reappropriation–indeed, hypertext augurs whole new forms of capital, which is to say, whole new instances of the same old thing.

     

    Never before have we had sustained and long-term examples of capitalism in which the unit of exchange itself–not merely the means by which the unit of monetary exchange is delivered–is developed and controlled to such a great extent by capital.15 While every media revolution has brought with it significant emancipatory potential as well as significant potential for exploitation (and we are no longer surprised that exploitative potentialities win out so often over emancipatory ones), I am suggesting here that hypertext is a special case, or more accurately a new kind of case. As importantly, I want to suggest an economic thesis that I lack anything like the space I would need here to develop here: that what we now call information may learn to replace, or to supplement, what we now call money in the systems of exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital. In an explication of the crucial notion of circulation in social production, Marx writes that,

     

    Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation. As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. (Grundrisse, 196-197; emphasis in original) 16

     

    The World Wide Web offers a startling new instance of this process of circulation, and especially of the ways in which capital itself uses the process of circulation to create forms that exist “independent of the individuals.” Something we had until just recently understood to be an unalienated labor process–the composition of one’s own thoughts into written or spoken form–now suggests itself as a commodity that can be fetishized, alienated, abstracted from its individual “maker” and distributed, for profit, disseminated, valued (and this done in some cases without the choice, conscious or unconscious, of the subject herself). And so where hypertext offers itself in terms of emancipatory potential for subjects, the Web suggests a further enmeshment of human subjects into the naturalized economy of capital.

     

    Specters, Subjects

     

    For what are subjects? What if not the products, the packets, of language, of meaning, of the stuff we obliquely call information, and its transmission? What might it mean for “the subject” to have the guts of the information system to be profitized, commoditized, capitalized?

     

    We can only touch on these matters here. But to the extent that we fail to understand how our subjectivities and psyches are themselves produced by the capital-regulated flow of information, 17 we remain extremely vulnerable to–even prisoners of–changes in that flow, especially when those changes are made and controlled by capital. As Stuart Moulthrop has written of hypertext (in a mode perhaps somewhat more hopeful than mine here), “changes in technology…suggest possibilities for a reformation of the subject, a truly radical revision of identity and social relations” (“Rhizome and Resistance,” 299-300).

     

    In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida writes that

     

    if the "mystical character" of the commodity, if the "enigmatic character" of the product of labor as commodity is born of "the social form" of labor, one must still analyze what is mysterious or secret about this process, and what the secret of the commodity form is. The secret has to do with a "quid pro quo." The term is Marx's. It takes us back once again to some theatrical intrigue: mechanical ruse or mistaking a person, repetition upon the perverse intervention of a prompter, parole soufflee, substitution of actors or characters. Here the theatrical quid pro quo stems from an abnormal play of mirrors. There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize in it the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. (Specters of Marx, 155; emphasis in original)

     

    There is a disturbing homology between the “abnormal play of mirrors,” the process by which we fail to recognize the social character of our own labors, the process of becoming “spectral”–and the advent of what I want to call, in a very preliminary fashion, hypercapital. For to the “hard” capital that is its substance, the information superhighway sees us, the subjects of capital, as nothing more than nodes of production, sites for debits and credits, shells of consumerism and fetishism that exist merely to instantiate or to reify the meta-flow of hypercapital. Not that these processes of reification or instantiation are unnecessary; indeed, at least as currently constituted, they are vital to the continued existence of the flow of capital. Yet their roles within that system become increasingly determined beforehand.

     

    In this disturbing sense, the subject under hypercapital threatens to become ever more restricted and proscribed than even the kinds of subjects we now observe under late capitalism. For again, the conversion of the majority of textually-based information into digital form–linked by a variety of communications and hypertextual mechanisms–suggests a radical centralization of semantic and social exchange, an exchange lubricated by capital in an unprecedented sense. Talking with one’s neighbors, organizing politically, any number of more and less collective forms of social action have heretofore been largely proscribed only by governments in their more authoritarian modes. Now such activities appear ripe not only for consistent and imperceptible monitoring and (nigh-permanent) recording, but also for exchange as units within a global system of capital that may readily compensate for, even anticipate, subversive or dissenting movements within the system.

     

    Internationalists

     

    Perhaps even more significant than its threats to Westernized subjects, the glare of a fully-capitalized information flow poses tremendous challenges to developing countries and whatever hope they currently have for non-capitalist development (or even capitalist development apart from the control of Western-based multinational corporate culture).

     

    These threats start with the most basic usages of language. For not only has the medium of communication on the Internet been mainly English and almost entirely Western; not only do current communication systems make usage of non-Western alphabets nearly impossible; not only does the usage of English on the US Defense Department-created Internet represent yet another kind of “loss-leader” to the prepaid Westernization of the subject throughout the world–but the very language of the packets, switches, applets and programs that fuel the machines making the information system operate are themselves almost entirely dominated by Western languages, mainly English. While other Western languages–especially Spanish, French, and German–generally can be accommodated through this media, it is still the case that the Internet and World Wide Web represent the most significant opportunity since mass-market publishing for broad-based lexical, discursive and linguistic standardization. (And this when we have only begun to understand what linguistic standardization has meant for the continued growth and power of capitalism.)

     

    While these criticisms extend mostly to the power of capital to maintain all aspects of subjectivity in extremely disturbing ways, they fail to capture what is perhaps most disturbing about the global information extension of capital. For as Marxian economic theorists have argued with great vigor over the last fifty or so years, classical Marxist theory provides an inadequate account of the reliance of “developed” capitalist economies on the exploitation of “underdeveloped,” “third world” economies and labor.18

     

    While we in the West can pretend to understand the effects of hypercapital on the creation of Western subjectivities and suggest critiques within a system that may always already be compensating for these critiques, developing countries outside of the West and developing populations within the Western context face even more brutal challenges. Talk of information “haves” and “have-nots” obscures the extent to which whether to have or not have access to the global information superhighway presents developing populations with a very real Hobson’s choice–a choice between two equally impossible choices. For to remain “off” the superhighway in any effective sense may come to mean staying away from huge swaths of information that are absolutely vital to any sustainable economy. Yet to get on may mean contributing to an economics designed to exploit not only individuals and their subjectivities but whole cultures and subcultures. (And of course this presentation of the subject avoids any mention of the degree to which many “developing” countries lack the basic infrastructure necessary for information technologies like telephones.)

     

    To the extent that Western capitalist development inaugurates a process of underdevelopment, in which the very lifeblood of the West is formed from the labor and raw materials of non-Western peoples, the global medium of exchange that is hypercapital suggests whole new ways of refining that process for the service of Western capital. The globalization of corporate capitalism increasingly makes governmental and national borders irrelevant though they remain highly relevant for the nationalist and fundamentalist fervors that capital at best incubates and at worst creates as the marks of its own displacement. Intellectual labor mimics the global mobility of capital as, for example, when students from India and East Asian countries attend classes in the US in computer science and engineering, where they learn to program in versions of the current master Western language. With foreign investment dollars and the backing of the corporations and governments that have facilitated this “knowledge transfer,” many of these young people will return home as neo-capitalists to set up vast networks of information retrieval and manipulation, whose centralized functions, we can surmise, make any hope for anti-imperialist governance that much more remote.

     

    Insofar as hypercapital appears abstracted and metaphorical, it is nevertheless a powerful construct built upon the lives and blood of real persons (ourselves included), whose labor becomes the stuff of capital through direct exploitation and through the processes of alienation.

     

    Il n’y a pas de hors-tissu

     

    For all of this essay’s quasi-apocalyptic fervor–not meant to be taken unambiguously, not meant to suggest that technological development is always or only wrong–it can only hint at the base fear that lurks in opposition to the more optimistic dreams beneath hypertext. For as capital comes to control so many aspects of our instantaneous and personal interactions to degrees it could not have imagined before, it comes to a new level in what has been a chief mission, a chief raison d’etre, of capital all along: not only to shape but to define, not only define but to own in the sense unique to capital–our selves.

     

    As a writer and interpreter, I cannot help but participate in the dream with which this essay began: a dream of total access and also total knowledge that will, somehow, prove emancipatory “in the end.” Such a dream seems unavoidable to me, at least as I as subject am constituted. In the great “Outwork” to Dissemination, Derrida writes of a similar dream as it is instanced in earlier moments in our tradition, specifically in the works of Mallarme and Hegel. Derrida writes of Mallarme’s vision of “all finite books [becoming] opuscules modeled after the great divine opus, so many arrested speculations, so many tiny mirrors catching a single grand image,” and suggests that

     

    The ideal form of this would be a book of total science, a book of absolute knowledge that digested, recited, and substantially ordered all books, going through the whole cycle of knowledge. But since truth is already constituted in the reflection and relation of God to himself, since truth already knows itself to speak, the cyclical book will also be a pedagogical book. And its preface, propaedeutic. The authority of the encyclopedic model, a unit analogous for man and for God, can act in very devious ways according to certain complex mediations. It stands, moreover, as a model and as a normative concept: which does not, however, exclude the fact that, within the practice of writing, and singularly of so-called 'literary' writing, certain forces remain foreign or contrary to it or subject to violent reexamination. (Dissemination, 46-47; emphasis in original)

     

    Like all products of capitalism, our most strident attempts to totalize information contain the marks of their own deconstructions; they inscribe contradictions that the full-on spirit of capitalism will neither admit nor condone. Yet the power and force of hypercapital, the enmeshment of the production of “money” and “credit” and capital with the production of information, hint at a world in which dissent, even deconstruction, become so reliably accommodated in the information-capital-feedback flow that we may never consistently know the effects or ends of our political and politico-critical efforts. In this sense hypertext and the World Wide Web amplify, exacerbate, exponentiate the trajectories on which Derrida has always situated “the book.”19

     

    The world of corporate capitalism is dominated by actors who do not truly see the play of which they are a part, and dicta whose consequences are themselves beyond the ken of all but the most foresighted of capitalists. With regard to technological innovation, the guiding principle of corporate capitalism is clearly this: one determines whether something should be done by asking whether it can be done. This ruling–one might in a more classical moment call it “amorality”–puts neither capitalists per se nor dissenters in power. Instead it leaves capital itself, surely as naturalistic a phenomenon as any other, in charge. I mean to suggest here that we do not know what capital has in store for us; and that, unless the chief actors in capitalism’s play learn an altogether new sense of responsibility to our collective future, we may learn what (hyper)capital is thinking all too soon–and all too ambiguously.

     

    Notes

     

    I appreciate helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from Stuart Moulthrop, Lisa Brawley and Suzanne Daly.
     

    1. For interesting discussions of Borgesian tropes in hypermedia, cf. Brook, “Reading and Riding” and Moulthrop, “Reading from the Map.”

     

    2.Most directly in work by critical legal studies scholars and other cultural critics and philosophers surrounding issues like hate speech, freedom of the press, and even free speech on the Internet. For the purposes of this essay I set aside the very complicated questions surrounding these issues, which are both affected by, and have an impact on, the problems I discuss here. It is notable, though, that the current debates surrounding issues of free speech–both left-versus-right debates, and debates between different parties of the left–themselves seem problematically fractured by issues of capital and corporate control, as in the case of sexually explicit material (in that it is largely produced by the most exploitative and abusive capitalists). This essay is meant to suggest that solutions to these problems will not become any more straightforward as information access and production become more universally networked.

     

    3. Most of the political critiques of hypertext work at this level–for example, the cited essays by Moulthrop and Landow–but see Brook and Boal, eds., Resisting the Virtual Life, especially the essays by Besser, Hayes and Neill. Spinelli suggests something like the view offered here when he notes that, like ones made for the Internet and World Wide Web, promises for social democratization made in the early days of radio contained the implicit command that “in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer” (“Radio Lessons,” 6). Ess, “Political Computer,” offers very much the liberal-utopian view of the Internet, in a somewhat advanced theoretical form, which this essay seeks to mark out as problematic.

     

    4.See, for example, Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, Deterring Democracy, Necessary Illusions, Letters from Lexington, and “Media Control,” and Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.

     

    5.See, for example, Eisenstein, Printing Press; Warner, Letters of the Republic; and Erickson, Economy of Literary Form; de Grazia and Stallybrass, in their “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” offer a theoretically advanced survey of some of the problems regarding print technology in the English Renaissance, on which also see Wall, Imprint of Gender. McGann’s Textual Condition remains a touchstone in the theoretization of print culture and its ideology.

     

    6.Some of the consequences of this particular part of current information technology are explored in Chapter 3, “Foucault and Databases: Participatory Surveillance,” of Poster, Mode of Information.

     

    7.Arick’s TCP/IP Companion is a widely-used guide to the networking protocols used on the Internet and the World Wide Web, though there are literally hundreds of volumes on the subject.

     

    8. A single Web page can be made up of many separate files (for example, several graphic files and a text file). Each access to one of these files constitutes a “hit.” “Hit counts” are therefore not a good measure of the number of actual persons using a given Web page, except for very crude purposes, since a single person accessing a single page can result in ten, twenty, or even more hits. One of the challenges to corporations attempting to profit from the Web has been to develop accurate ways to log individual use. The solutions to this challenge that have been offered so far (and in many cases, implemented without much public comment), as mentioned below, have been remarkably invasive of pre-electronic standards of “privacy.”

     

    9.Again, Chapter 3, “Foucault and Databases: Participatory Surveillance,” of Poster, Mode of Information, provides an excellent gloss on these tendencies.

     

    10.A certain cultural-technological trajectory deserves comment here. At many points in history, certain database and record-keeping technologies have seemed “stable” or “permanent,” with the attendant sense that the data they contain are permanent in that form. Yet at nearly every stage a future stage of technology has appeared soon enough on the horizon, in which the data stored by the previous technology has found additional, far more centralized, extensive and in some cases insidious uses than would have seemed possible in the earlier stage. This certainly accounts, for example, for the amount of information stored in credit reports, and for the importance of social security numbers. Thus, while an individual’s use of a particular Web site may seem somewhat unimportant if used by a single marketer or Web site producer, it seems quite plausible that this information will very shortly be available on a much more global and integrated basis. That is, although this information may seem at least partially local today, its growth into a centralized and highly invasive system may not only be inevitable; it may be imminent.

     

    11.This is oversimplified; the line between “operating system” and “application” and “applet” may in fact blur considerably as technology develops. Java, for example, which was developed largely for applet creation, has already been used to create fully-featured applications.

     

    12. I should emphasize that one of the key features of the Web implementation of hypertext is precisely its strong reliance on sophisticated feedback mechanisms (mechanisms which do not seem implicit in the idea of hypertext itself, but which do seem ever-present in capitalism, in a variety of more-and-less crude forms). Feedback and recursive systematization are hallmarks of recent work in computer science no less than in what we might loosely call “consumer technology”–they are no less present in professional products for advertisers than in sophisticated academic research programs like artificial intelligence and connectionism. I can only nod toward the degree to which much of the latter research has been carried out, unsurprisingly, with capital from the military and from technology-drenched corporations. It is important as well to note the degree to which value itself is a largely feedback-based concept–from the crudest capitalist notions (wherein, famously, an item is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it) to far more sophisticated economic analyses, Marxist and neoclassical.

     

    13.See, most famously, George Landow’s Hypertext. The exchange in Rosenberg, “Physics and Hypertext,” and Moulthrop, “Rhizome and Resistance,” includes interesting speculation on the terms that have been used to state the politics, emancipatory and otherwise, of hypertext.

     

    14.As such it is striking how rarely Landow in Hypertext, or the authors in his edited volume Hyper/Text/Theory (but for brief parts of the Moulthrop and Ulmer essays included there), to say nothing of the main part of the recent literature on hypertext, and without denying the emphasis frequently placed on discussions of the politics of hypertext, situates these technological advances in the capitalist system we inhabit. Two exceptions are Moulthrop’s “You Say You Want a Revolution,” which, through a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, at least in principle gestures at some of the problems I discuss here; and Spinelli’s “Radio Lessons,” which includes important reflections on the near-monopolistic control of radio and its implications for future media development.

     

    15.In this respect the World Wide Web may be meaningfully thought of in a sequence of the development of the unit of exchange in the world system, a development that has been in modern times largely led by Western interests and powers. I am especially thinking of the movement toward a credit economy and the recent discussions, often hyperbolic, about a cashless society. While it is probably not accurate to say that capital played no role in developing the unit of exchange in early modern society–if for no other reason than the central role played by capital in Western governments–it still seems true that recent developments in electronic funds transfer, electronic credit, “smart cards,” ATMs, and so on, and then the added interest in developing Web-based capital equivalents, represent a new kind of corporate-capitalist intervention in the system of exchange. For a discussion of the effects on Marxist economic theory necessitated by the enormous growth in credit over the last century, see Kotz. For a fascinating account of the history of money and thought about money that has a great deal of significance for the issues discussed here, see Shell, Money, Language, and Thought..

     

    16.The locus classicus for Marx’s discussion of circulation is Capital, Volume 2; also see Capital, Volume 1, especially Parts I, II and VII.

     

    17.For a telling though largely unconscious instance of this process, see Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, as well the attendant discussions of that work in recent philosophy of mind.

     

    18.A chief advocate for this view in recent Marxist theory is Sweezy, especially in his Modern Capitalism and Theory of Capitalist Development. One of the clearest indications of US hegemony in the World Wide Web and the Internet occurs in the assigning of what are known as domain names. A domain name occurs on the Internet as the part of an email address that follows the “@” sign (for example, in the address yourname@AOL.com, the domain name is AOL.com), or the first part of a World Wide Web address (or URL, for Uniform Resource Locator–for example, the beginning part of PMC‘s URL: jefferson.village.virginia.edu). The final segment of a domain name provides the actual “domain” for the site. In the US, there are six domains: edu, for educational institutions; com, for commercial providers; org, for non-profit organizations, net, for technical providers of network services; mil, for military users; and gov, for governmental organizations. Yet in all other countries, the domain name is a country abbreviation: Britain is uk, Japan is jp, Canada is ca, and so on. Every domain name from these countries ends with the country identifier. The impression left on a casual user is that US domains are multiple, mobile and professional, where non-US domains are essentially foreign. This parallels remarkably certain patterns of racial representation within the US, where non-whites are characteristically stereotyped by singular “foreign” characteristics while whites (most often white men) are represented as having a wide range of defining traits and skills, a formation I discuss at some length in Golumbia, “Black and White World.”

     

    19.This is part of Poster’s argument in Chapter Four, “Derrida and Electronic Writing,” of The Mode of Information.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Arick, Martin R. The TCP/IP Companion: A Guide for the Common User. Boston, London and Toronto: QED Publishing Group, 1993.
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    • Brook, James. “Reading and Riding with Borges.” Brook and Boal, eds., 263-274.
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    • —. Modern Capitalism and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
    • Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993.
    • Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

     

  • Poststructuralist Paraesthetics and the Phantasy of the Reversal of Generations

     
     

    Vadim Linetski

     
     

    I. What is wrong with the Oedipus complex?–The Oedipus complex and “the foundational fantasy of the ego’s era” (Brennan)

     

    These days it would certainly amount to a dare to propose that the Oedipus complex is the very core of patriarchal/logocentric discursivity. Every attempt to–consciously or unconsciously–(re)inforce Oedipus (Sprengnether 1985) is bound to be regarded as a reactionary enterprise. However, it is precisely such reinforcement that underpins the most advanced versions of poststructuralism. This paradox cries for a merciless treatment, for only thus can we hope to break the self-perpetuation of tradition, i.e. to attain the goal which the celebrated critics of logocentrism have justly posed but drastically failed to achieve.

     

    To be sure, the task of surpassing Oedipus is not an easy one; it implies real and not a conventionally rhetorical shift of paradigms.1 On the other hand, there are no actual reasons for pessimism.2 To substantiate our claim we must closely attend to the genealogy of this pessimism, that is, to start with the question, “what is wrong with Oedipus?”–however trite it might appear to the poststructuralist eye.

     

    Fortunately, the triteness happens only to be ostensible. Consider, for instance, one of the basic feminist charges against the Oedipal structure(s), that “the Oedipal chauvinism…for which Freud’s theory of the girl as ‘little man’ manqué was exemplary” (Benjamin 1995: 118). Chauvinism is, of course, an expression of the unconscious fear of castration, which, in its turn, gives rise to aggressivity, to the “drama of rivalry and aggression” that, according to Brennan, defines the “ego’s era”–the era of a self-contained patriarchal subject aspiring for (absolute) mastery and knowledge of the other (Brennan 1993: 53). As the postructuralist saying goes, historically, this abstract subject has found a talented impersonator in the father of psychoanalysis. Witness Freud’s strategy with his patients, governed as it was by the wish to evade and obscure “the legacy of the pre-Oedipal period,” “the flexible identificatory capacities of pre-Oedipal life” (Benjamin 1995: 119, 117). It is with the latter that feminism (and poststructuralism in general) has placed its stakes. Hence the vogue currently enjoyed by the “notion of recapturing over-inclusive structures of identification…by decentring our notion of development and replacing the discourse of identity with the notion of identifications” (118). At first sight it may actually appear that the decentering pluralization of identifications offers an economic solution to our problem. Since, as Derrida has taught us, there is no absolute ‘beyond’ to any logocentric structure, one has to work from the inside in the manner of “pharmakon.” As we shall shortly ascertain for ourselves, this view of deconstruction drastically limits its scope, making it a purely rhetorical affair, and unfortunately not in the de Manian sense.

     

    Theoretically, the pluralized identifications should enable us to circumvent the rigid Oedipal identifications which form the coercive structure of patriarchy and in so doing to merge the parental figures into the “father of individual prehistory” who can be dubbed the mother as well (cf. Kristeva 1987: 33; 1989: 13-14).3 In Kristevan terms, this mergence allows the semiotic to emerge into the symbolic, the former acting as a “pharmakon” to the latter. The result is that “we plunge…into the representational flux–the rolling identifications and wrappings of self and other–of fantasy itself” (Elliott 1995: 48). Put otherwise, “the construction of interpenetrating consciousnesses” (cf. Dorval and Gomberg 1993) should guarantee that the concomitant construction of the “libidinal space” (Elliott 1995: 45) would be purged of the aggressive rivalry (Brennan 1993: 53). Thus, the way for the post-Oedipal non-patriarchal sexuality (not in the developmental, quantitative, but qualitative sense) freed from coercive relations of power seems to be cleared, so that nothing prevents us from assuming that the “foundational fantasy” of the ego’s era which excluded the woman (49) has been successfully displaced and replaced by a more progressive fantasmatization (cf. Castoriadis 1995). However–and be it only as a tribute to common sense–I think it would be unwise to purchase a new commodity while taking its difference from the old at face value. In other words, the underpinnings of the fantasy acted out by poststructuralism remain to be seen.

     

    II. The foundational fantasy of poststructuralism–“Literature is psychoanalysis” (Spivak) but is psychoanalysis literature?–Parapsychoanalysis (telepathy) and paraesthetics (intertextuality)

     

    In order to proceed with our inquiry in a most succinct way we will be well-advised to focus on the implications which the developments sketched above have for literary theory. Far from being fortuitous, this focus is implied in the subject we are discussing. Not only because, psychoanalytically, the notion of fantasy is bound up with the problem of human creativity (i.e., with such questions as repression, representation, sublimation, etc.), but first of all because poststructuralist decentering of fantasmatical constellations underpinning the Oedipus complex is aimed at a subversion of the status of psychoanalysis as science conceived as an embodiment of the logocentric urge for absolute knowledge and truth. This subversion initiated by Derrida’s critique of Lacan (1988, 1975) and N. Abraham and M. Torok’s works (1976, 1978) has by now become a rather conventional affair. Literary theory adds nothing essentially new to the notion of intertextuality being, at most, another illustration of how the author’s (Freud’s) ashes can be disseminated. 4 Nevertheless, it is precisely from this (para)psychoanalytic point of view that the (para)esthetic notion of intertextuality fundamental for poststructuralist theory in all its existing versions and applications can be most fruitfully questioned. The patient reader will soon see why.

     

    The most recent attempts to undermine the psychoanalytic edifice foreground the notion of telepathy and in doing so promise to bridge the notorious gap between psychoanalysis and literary theory by trying to utilize precisely the alleged logocentric blind spots of both domains (N. Royle 1991,1995). After the studies of S. Markus (1985), N. Hertz (1985), to say nothing about Derrida, we are inclined to take for granted that psychoanalysis has mistakenly taken itself to be a science, whereas it is actually nothing but a fiction, a sort of literature (certainly, a first-class one). However, it remains to be proven that literature is psychoanalysis–and, more importantly, not “a perfect psychoanalysis” (Spivak 1994: 64), but also not entirely a failure. 5 Whence the appeal of telepathy, which “connects by disconnecting” (Ronell 1989: 132), retaining the supplement of copula precisely by crossing it. “There is no ‘and’ between telepathy and literature” (Royle 1991: 183). “It is difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. They can be neither confused nor dissociated” (Derrida 1981: 11). However, if we are to believe poststructuralism, every attempt has been made in the history of psychoanalysis to sunder both theories. Not so much by Freud himself, who was “mad” enough “to speculate on telepathy” (Spivak 1984: 64), but by his followers, especially by Ernest Jones, who in Derrida’s narrative comes to play the role of a scapegoat. The irony of the matter is that, in Derrida’s own terms, this scapegoat is precisely the role of a subversive “pharmakon,” for the excluded other inevitably spoils the coherence of the system unable to accommodate its “prodigal son.” As we shall shortly see, such is the case with Ernest Jones, whose intuitions were obscured and ignored by the psychoanalytic edifice for just the same reasons which now guide Derrida in his search for the guilty party.

     

    III. The prodigal son of psychoanalysis–The notion of “aphanisis”

     

    Given the current troubles with constructing feminine identity and articulating a theory of “écriture féminine,” troubles which, according to Sprengnether, boil down to inability of leading feminist theorists to free themselves from the spell of Lacanian thought (1995: 147), it is indeed surprising that Jones’s contributions to psychoanalysis remain in abeyance. For it is nobody other than Ernest Jones who has provided us with a set of valid tools for solving the aforementioned problems. My contention is precisely that a genuinely new theoretical model can be elaborated on the basis of Jones’s legacy. I think this assumption will be sufficiently substantiated if we succeed in demonstrating that the model in question can account for textual reality more adequately than the models propounded in the wake of deconstruction, the “telepathic” model included.

     

    As a theorist, Jones is best remembered for his notion of “aphanisis,” that is, of the disappearance of desire. That thus far no one has ventured to rethink this notion is another example of the “Lacanian spell” to which the postructuralist thought remains subject.6 The result is a drastic misunderstanding of Jones’s notion. Witness an entry in Laplanche-Pontalis’s dictionary, an entry, which, totally ignoring the most intriguing implications of this notion, can be said to give a faithful account of it only insofar Jones really “evokes the notion of aphanisis in the context of his inquiries into feminine sexuality” (1988: 40). Jones himself is at least partly responsible for the vicissitudes of this concept: certainly, there is no articulated theory of aphanisis of which to speak. Our present task is to remedy this deficiency–not only by drawing all the consequences from Jones’s remarks, but also by connecting these remarks with a number of Heideggerian and Bakhtinian intuitions which point in the same direction.

     

    IV. Aphanisis and telepathy

     

    Our first step will be to point out that aphanisis, central as it is to Jones’s thought, has a profound connection with his attitude towards telepathy, which, contrary to Derrida’s assumption, has nothing to do with logocentric biases. In fact, just the opposite is true. Witness Jones’s paper on “The Nature Of Auto-Suggestion” (1950). Certainly, Jones is unequivocal regarding the fundamental impossibility “to combine the two methods of treatment…those of psycho-analysis and suggestion” (291), equating suggestion with hypnosis, telepathy and analogous states (275-277). However, upon closer inspection, the train of thought leading to this conclusion proves to be a radical subversion of logocentrism, and thereby shows Derrida’s precarious complicity with the latter.

     

    What should alert us that things are not just so simple as Derrida would like them to be are two facts in Jones’s paper which, far from being suppressed, come to the fore of the author’s attention. On the one hand, Jones is quite willing to acknowledge that “it is extraordinary difficult to draw any sharp line between hetero- and auto-suggestion…the former process may prove in most cases in practice a necessary stage in the evocation of the latter” (284-285, 289), stressing, on the other hand, that “we can no longer regard the subject as a helpless automaton in the hands of a strong-willed operator; it is nearer the truth to regard the operator as allowing himself to play a part, and by no means an indispensable one, in a drama constructed and acted in the depths of the subject’s mind” (277). Both points play a prominent part in Derrida’s celebration of telepathy,7 which can be regarded as an attempt to “resurrect” poststructuralist intertextuality by deploying the Formalist device of “defamiliarization” (“making strange,” “ostranenije“).8 The effects of auto/hetero-suggestion as a disseminating process for the dislocation of subjectivity are described by Jones with sufficient objectivity to find Derrida’s approval and to conclude that hypnosis and psychoanalysis are opposed as “the Eastern and the Western methods of dealing with life” (293); these are a patent example of ethno/logocentric prejudices that border on a real outrage since both methods are equated with the difference “between infantilism and adult life,” respectively (293). Unfortunately, such an evaluation provides all too easy sailing, for the invocation of infantilism has much more to it than a deconstructive eye is willing to admit.

     

    It is obvious enough that a problem of knowledge is at stake. Far less obvious is which “method of dealing with life” that knowledge should be aligned with and what attitude should be regarded as its opposite. The first part of our question can be found without transcending Jones’s corpus, the second part requires an enlargement of our field of inquiry.

     

    Given the poststructuralist view of psychoanalysis as a bulwark of logocentric scienticity and the subsequent efforts to undermine it by reading Freudian theory as an “auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic” (Derrida 1977: 146) “paraesthetic” narrative, one will be certainly inclined to assume that Jones’s refutation of hypnosis and telepathy stems from his concern that psychoanalysis retain the status of a science. This is why it is so surprising to find that the real concerns of our author lie elsewhere. Even the most superficial reader cannot fail to notice that the controversy between hypnosis and psychoanalysis is judged from a purely pragmatic point of view, i.e., not as a theoretical problem but a practical one. If the methods based on suggestion are undesirable, it is because they fail to alleviate the symptoms (292). This explains why, in the last resort, the question of hypnosis boils down to the question of lay analysis.9 Put otherwise, psychoanalysis is to be preferred not on scientific grounds, i.e., not because of the insights into the content of the unconscious which it achieves–Jones is quite unambiguous regarding the fact that both techniques uncover the same complexes and fantasies (287-288)–but solely because, contrary to hypnosis, it can free the patient from his/her symptoms (292). However, this is not to say that the question of knowledge is absent from Jones’s discussion and therefore can only be imported into it by the reader.

     

    V. Paraesthetics and the infantile sexual theories

     

    The irony of the matter is precisely that knowledge makes its appearance under the guise of infantilism which is attributed by Jones to techniques akin to suggestion. So long as knowledge, to slightly alter Derrida’s dictum, is that which returns to the father, Jones’s constant emphasis that, contrary to psychoanalysis, paratechniques (hypnosis, suggestion, telepathy, etc.) inevitably bring about the return of the father figure10 point to the heart of our problem.

     

    This return is bound up with the reactivation of primary narcissism, which defines the hypnoid state (286). However, in order to tease out all the implications from this statement which at first sight appears hackneyed and uncommitted, we will be well-advised to take a step backwards, that is, to return to the stage in Freud’s development at which what has lately come to be known as ego-libido was still–and, as we shall see, more adequately–theorized as ego-instincts or instincts of self-preservation. For this return not only presents the sole possibility of solving a number of fundamental quandaries but also ultimately of precluding the desexualization of psychoanalysis,11 the desexualization, which, paradoxically enough, was an unavoidable corollary of the introduction of narcissism.

     

    In other words, the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse is bound up with the reactivation of infantile sexual theories. It is precisely this “infantile” grounding which prevents deconstruction from reaching its goal. Since we would like to make this goal our own, our first task is to identify the particular infantile phantasy underpinning Derrida’s theorizing. However, this identification is impossible without a reconsideration of the psychoanalytic attitude towards the sexual theories of children in general.

     

    Insofar as the infantile curiosity concerning sexual matters can be viewed as the very foundation of psychoanalysis, 12 it is surprising to discover that it finds no separate entry in Laplanche-Pontalis’s dictionary of psychoanalytic terms. That the authors have chosen to subsume our problem under the rubrics of “phantasy” and “sexuality” is a good example of the direction taken by post-Freudian psychoanalysis. And it is this direction which, throwing its retroactive shade on Freud himself, makes of a psychoanalysis an easy prey for poststructuralist attack.

     

    VI. Sublimation and its discontents–Sublimation primal and secondary

     

    What is at stake here is the very possibility of an exchange between psychoanalytic theory and humanities in general, literature in particular. For such an exchange, i.e., the existence of applied psychoanalysis, cannot bring any worthwhile results so long as psychoanalytic theory remains haunted by the ghosts of unsolved problems which bear directly on the foundational principles of psychoanalysis. More concretely, it is “the lack of a coherent theory of sublimation”–the lack which is not simply “one of the lacunae” but the lacuna “in psycho-analytic thought” par excellence (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 433)–that in the last resort is responsible for that precarious state in which psychoanalysis currently finds itself.

     

    The reluctance to thematize the link between sublimation and infantile sexual theories is quite understandable, for such a thematization will immediately expose the resemblance between the psychoanalytic edifice and the Tower of Pisa, inevitably exposing the profound complicity between poststructuralism and its logocentric adversary. And this is due to the fact that the architects have disposed of the very cornerstone of their construction. Put crudely and bluntly, Freud’s legataries have got him completely wrong.

     

    To clear the path, let us start from the very beginning–of Freud’s development as well as of a human being’s.

     

    The basic premise of psychoanalysis is that sexuality develops anaclitically: “the sexual instincts, which become autonomous only secondarily, depend at first on those vital functions which furnish them with an organic source, an orientation and an object” (29). Since “the instinct is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted towards a new…aim” (431), we can conclude that the emergence of sexuality is the first sublimation–the sublimation of self-preservative instincts. On the other hand, so long as Freud took considerable pains to keep sublimation distinct from repression as two different vicissitudes of the drives (cf. Freud 1915: 219), we can propose the notion of primal sublimation in contradistinction to the notion of primal repression allotted such a prominent role in Lacan’s semiosis. Thus we have laid down a foundation for an alternative model that will allow us to escape in one stroke all the logocentric pre- and post-Oedipal vagaries.

     

    “The primal repressed is the signifier,” says Lacan in a passage which notably ends with a famous dictum: “Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (1977: 176). All attempts to rethink the notion of primal repression in order to purge it of logocentric overtones (cf.Kristeva 1987: 26-27, 33; Laplanche 1987: 126-128, 137) have wound up reconfirming Lacanianism: “Whatever the radicalizing possibilities of primal repression and identification, identity requires meaning, and therefore symbolic law…relation to the other, and therefore to cultural, historical and political chains of signification. The entry of the subject into socially constituted representations secures the repetition of the law. For these reasons, it makes little sense to understand the psychical processes organized through primal repression as signalling a ‘beyond’ to symbolic law” (Elliott 1995: 50). The irony of this excerpt is twofold. For one thing, it comes as the conclusion of a discussion in the course of which Kristeva et alia have been criticized precisely for failing to signal as “beyond” to symbolic law (45). On the other hand, the alternative propounded by Elliott–a view of primal repression as “the representational splitting of the subject” (50; his italics)–corresponds neatly to that with which every reader of Lacan is familiar. However, Elliott deserves our full appreciation for his unusual candidness. The straightforward equation of primal repression with identification (45, 51) and the concomitant foregrounding of empathy is precisely the discursive move which produces the (para)esthetic telepathic interpretive attitude of Derrida, who is certainly far from admitting, as Elliott does, that the result is the perpetuation of the law/tradition grounded in the notions–intersubjectivity, intertextuality, etc.–which are so dear to poststructuralist’s heart. Unfortunately, Elliott’s candidness does not extend far enough to lay bare the mechanism of the deconstructive perpetuation of tradition. Hence his resentment regarding the impossibility to reach a “beyond”–a resentment which characterizes the current theoretical scene. The propaedeutic value of our analysis is bound up with the comprehensive demonstration of how and why poststructuralism has cornered itself into the impasse which it now bemoans.

     

    Despite its tone, the preceding paragraph is far from being a polemical aside, for it has established one fact essential for our inquiry. The recent celebrations of primary repression qua pre-Oedipal identification(s) show the impossibility to differentiate it from the secondary repression–from the Oedipal repression of the Name of the Father. At most, they differ quantitatively, the latter reconfirming the former. It remains to be seen what implications that this train of thought has for the project of “critical narratology,” parading as another attack on logocentric Oedipal metanarratives and taking its cue from Derridaean dictum: “writing is unthinkable without repression” (1978: 226).

     

    The unification of the notion of repression allows us to assign it a more definite place in the history of the subject’s development.13 In fact, repression is nothing other than a secondary sublimation which differs in kind from the primary sublimation. What deserves our full attention is the fact that defining sublimation qua desexualisation and by the same token firmly grounding the concept of repression has become possible only after the introduction of narcissism: “With the introduction of narcissism and the advent of the final theory of the psychical apparatus Freud adopts a new approach. The transformation of a sexual activity into a sublimated one (assuming both are directed toward external, independent objects) is now said to require an intermediate period during which the libido is withdrawn on to the ego so that desexualisation may become possible” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 433). Taken at face value, this passage gives no reason for panic since it seems to be in perfect accord with the generally accepted view of the ego. Unfortunately, this first impression is misleading. Sublimation conceived within the framework of narcissism turns out to be nothing less than a subversion of psychoanalysis in toto–or, to be more precise, of psychoanalysis equated with the theory of libido.

     

    The first paradox that immediately leaps to mind bears on the obvious impossibility of reconciling the desexualization of libido through its withdrawal onto the ego with the general definition of the latter agency “as a great reservoir of libido” (Freud 1923: 231). Certainly, this paradox has not escaped Freud’s attention. This explains why the notion of the super-ego becomes indispensable, appearing with the logical necessity of Derrida’s “supplement.”14 In effect, the super-ego, which, as a matter of fact, was introduced in the very same year as the cited definition of the ego,15 allows us to circumvent our quandary, but only confronts us with a more troublesome dilemma.

     

    VII. The production of Oedipus

     

    So long as the super-ego is conceived of as the differentiated part of the ego itself,16 it becomes possible to surmise that it is the former locks onto itself the libido withdrawn from the outer world (cf. 1916: 431-433). This means that sublimation within the framework of narcissism inevitably introduces the melancholic situation that it was designed to preclude by Freud as well as by Kristeva (Freud 1916; Kristeva 1989). The irony of the matter is that those who criticise Kristeva for her conviction that “to deny the power of the imaginary father is to risk depression, melancholia and, possibly, death” (Elliott 1995: 45) propound the model of melancholia as an anti-Oedipal alternative (cf. Abraham/Torok 1978; Sprengnether 1995) grounded in the notion of pre-Oedipal identifications which, as everyone tolerably versed in psychoanalytic theory knows, have exactly the same desexualizing outcome as the introduction of the super-ego described above.17 Whereas, according to the proponents of melancholically-telepathic hermeneutics, the melancholic model should enable the construction of non-Oedipal sexuality. The paradox is resolved since the process of desexualization foregrounds all the essentials of such a construction. In effect, the instinctual diffusion resulting from identification is nothing else than the return of the celebrated infantile polymorphism (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1972; Lyotard 1993; Benjamin 1995) which, however, happens to have nothing to do with sexuality. And it is hardly surprising, for the process we are discussing is aimed at undoing the primary sublimation that has transformed anarchical polymorphous instincts of self-preservation into sexuality. Put otherwise, the secondary sublimation is the non-Hegelian negation of the primary sublimation. And this is precisely what allows us not merely to equate secondary sublimation with the Lacanian notion of repression which triggers off semiosis, but to place the latter in its true light.

     

    The reference to Hegel was meant as a caution against those cursory readers who at this point may be inclined to wonder whence all the sound and fury of our analysis, since it is certainly nothing new to say that repression is by definition a repression of sexuality. However, this argument is valid only if we take Lacanian statements at face value. Such naivete has been made impossible precisely in the wake poststructuralist appropriation of Lacan’s legacy, an appropriation that, more often than not, takes pains to stress its faithfulness to the “Absolute Master.”

     

    As we have seen, pre-Oedipal identifications have exactly the same effect as the Oedipal ones. And yet to conclude that we have already hit on the very reason of the poststructuralist inability to do away with Oedipus would mean not only to treat poststructuralism rather leniently but also to miss the most interesting part of the whole story. For the gist of the matter is that identifications are in themselves neither pre-Oedipal, Oedipal nor post-Oedipal since the Oedipal structure does not pre-exist identificatory activity but emerges as its inevitable result. In other words, the discursive movement of telepathy and/or melancholy is a movement not of a reconfirmation/repetition but of the original production of Oedipus. And it is at this point that the infantile sexual theories come in, enabling us to spell out all the implications of the proposition we have just advanced.

     

    Given Freud’s rank of an honorable structuralist, it is rather surprising that in the matters that interest us here he remains at the thematic level of analysis.18 This is even more true in case of his disciples.19 This sufficiently explains the general neglect and obtusion suffered by infantile sexual theories and corresponding fantasies. As was already mentioned, for Freud these fantasies were the main evidence for the existence of infantile sexuality. This explains why he was reluctant to thematize the obvious fact that the impetus of infantile curiosity is provided by circumstances which are more likely to activate the instincts of self-preservation. I refer, of course, to the birth of a brother or sister. From a conventional, i.e., libidinal point of view–incidentally the one adopted here by Freud–this event gives rise to envy and jealousy in the elder child(ren). But obviously there is no necessary connection between these feelings, however intense, and an urge to penetrate into the “secrets” of Mother Nature. Moreover, the stronger the envy and jealousy, the less likely the appearance of an “intellectual” attitude: as common sense would have it, jealousy makes us blind. Equally problematical is another conventionally libidinal interpretation which tries to reduce fantasies produced in the course of the child’s inquiry to a plainly defensive affair and to make the inquiry itself a deployment of a defence mechanism. However, this interpretation begs an explanation of how a fantasy can protect a child from the repetition of a painful event and/or alleviate his/her current troubles. Evidently, the omnipotence of thought also has its limits, and the child of course is not such a dope as to believe that his notion of “where the children come from” can have any influence on their actual arrival.20 The arrival of a sibling is certainly experienced as a threat, but not a libidinal one. If “the development of a child is materially influenced” by this event (Boehm 1931: 449), then this is precisely because the problem thus posed is an epistemic one: it is a question of hermeneia and not of filia. Put otherwise, the whole affair becomes traumatic because the child discerns in it not the possibility of the decrease of his/her share of parental love (here all depends on an actual familial setting) but the threat of losing contact with parents, of being excluded from communication with them. 21 Semiotically, the birth of a sibling represents an instance of diffusion, rather than confusion, of tongues between the child and adults (cf. Ferenczi 1980, 1933). This suggests that trauma,22 representing as it does a rupture of a dialogic intersubjective relationship, can be reinterpreted in a way which will furnish us with a genuinely alternative model which will effectively transcend the logocentric (Oedipal) binarism that is reinforced by postsructuralist ensnarement within the dialogue vs. monologue framework.23

     

    There are two ways out of the traumatic impasse in which the child finds himself or herself. But first of all it should be stressed that the impasse that prompts the secondary sublimation qua desexualization/repression 24 is prior to any kind of Oedipality to which it may or may not give rise. 25 Put otherwise, Oedipus is a matter of free choice.

     

    On the one hand, the child can try once again to deploy the mechanism of primal sublimation, i.e., to sublimate the upsurge of self-preservative epistemophilia into sexuality. If he succeeds, the diffusion of tongues referred to above becomes irrevocable and the child establishes a discourse of his own, beyond all patriarchal tradition. In other words, he spares himself the problematic of castration/Oedipus simply by taking another route. This is what we will term the normal development without repression.26 Significantly, the textual reality is a telling example of such a development.

     

    On the other hand, the child can pursue his researches and become entrapped in the Oedipal strictures. He will (re)invent the Oedipal complex as the only means to ensure the possibility of communication. This obviously results in the perpetuation of tradition. It is far less obvious that this result crowns the efforts of those who make the undermining of tradition equated with power/knowledge/meaning/truth their battle-cry. We are left with a thorough misrepresentation and safeguarding of tradition; the targets of postsructuralist attack listed above (along with their derivatives) have nothing to do with the mechanism of tradition transmission. Significantly, these same motives are responsible for the direction taken by the post-Freudian psychoanalysis (Lacan’s version included), effectively robbing Freud’s teaching of its subversive potential.

     

    Consider the problem of the construction of meaning. As Derrida would like us believe, deconstruction exposes the traditional claims for what they actually are, that is, an unsustainable effort to restrict the disseminating flow of significations. Meaning is undecidable. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the logocentric fallacy. Witness Freud and his Oedipal complex, a structure which “does not permit much flexibility” (Sprengnether 1995: 143). Hence the hope that the situation of “women differently within this general structure” (143) is ultimately of no avail: Oedipus has to be “interrogated at its core” (143). As we have already ascertained for ourselves, this task, however valid and laudable, in poststructuralist discourse boils down to a declamation of ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendum. If Carthage nevertheless still flourishes, this is because the (para)esthetic discourse of empathy/telepathy which foregrounds desexualizing identifications cannot help but promote the Oedipal structures and thereby unwittingly prove that these structures are far more flexible than generally assumed. This certainly does not make them less dangerous. To the contrary.

     

    To return to our little explorer: having succumbed to the urge for knowledge, he has the choice between the negative and the positive versions of the Oedipal structure. Given the alleged impossibility of surpassing the Oedipal conflict, it is quite logical that the poststructuralist way of dealing with it boils down to privileging the negative version. Whereas the latter articulates patriarchal knowledge as grounded in rigid sexual difference which, in its turn, presupposes the recognition of the woman’s castration; “pederastic identification” implicitly “challenges the binarisms of sexual difference” by making the male subject “alert to further syntagmatic possibilities” (Silverman 1988: 172-173). These possibilities inscribed in the primal scene allow the conception of the latter as “perhaps most profoundly disruptive of conventional masculinity in the way it articulates knowledge” (157): “…it would seem that to the degree to which the primal scene phantasy acknowledges castration it cannot help but generalize it by making it a consequence not of anatomy, but of a subject position” (166). This seems to explain why the knowledge with which the primal scene confronts the male subject comes to be repressed within the patriarchal paradigm, anchored in the positive Oedipal structure that “fortifies the male subject within a paternal identification by renouncing his Oedipal desires” (157).

     

    The irony of Silverman’s account is that it leaves no place for infantile sexual theories. In effect, from the libidinal point of view, there is knowledge inscribed in the primal scene. However distorted, ignored or repressed, however belatedly understood, this knowledge remains active in shaping the subject’s destiny. Hence there is nothing to give impetus to infantile theorizing. At most, the child’s brooding will be confined to the issues of activity/passivity and aggression/caress. It follows that the poststructuralist theorizing itself remains entrapped in logocentric binarisms and therefore drastically underestimates the intellectual capacities of children. This is not to suggest that infantile fantasies transcend the patriarchal discourse. What justifies our interest is the fact that the child can act as a subversive “pharmakon” precisely because of its innocent ignorance, both in respect to patriarchy and its alleged adversaries. It is sufficient to adopt the child’s point of view in order to gain a vantage point for a genuine deconstruction.

     

    As psychoanalytically informed poststructuralist feminist critics would have it, sexuality is pregnant with knowledge, and not the other way round. Hence the role assigned to the notion of repression. Silverman’s reading of Henry James is just another attempt to prove that without repression neither patriarchal discourse nor its deconstruction are possible. What is repressed is the woman, especially empathic identifications with the mother figure. The trouble is not so much that deconstruction consequently mirrors the construction of patriarchy, coming under suspicion of being a simple reversal of signs, but primarily that femininity and the strategy of its recovery through removal of repression are at odds. To expose this paradox means to show that the notion of repression, 27 at least regarding applied psychoanalysis, is unsustainable and has no practical value. On the other hand, so long as femininity is equated with writing/style (Derrida 1979: 37), we are left with a challenging task of thinking writing without repression. The generally accepted view of Henry James as a patent example of writing as repression of unconscious desire 28 stamps him as a good frame of reference for our theoretical elaborations.

     

    However, we are not as yet finished with these latter deliberations. So long as poststructuralism has already made the choice on behalf of our little explorer, let us see what the option in favor of the negative Oedipus looks like from the point of view of the child itself. Epistemologically (and it should be remembered that the child’s concerns lie in this sphere), this option is obviously an ideal one. For, as Freud puts it, “pater semper incertus est, while the mother is certissima” (1909: 229; his italics). All the child’s broodings “over the question played by the father in the genesis” of the sibling (Boehm 1931: 450) are doomed to be of no avail. Hence the hermeneutical value of the identification with the mother; in identifying with her the child guarantees the automatic arrival of knowledge without any effort on its own part: all it has to do is to wait and see what the father will undertake with the mother.29 Put otherwise, everything speaks in favor of the “pederastic identification” and, by the same token, nothing can explain why this identification should suffer repression.30 Hence to assume that repression nevertheless takes place–and it is on this assumption that the whole critique of logocentrism apparently hinges–means to make the identification with the father a much more puzzling issue.

     

    The paradox of the matter is that, in the poststructuralists’ own terms, it is impossible to explain the existence of the positive Oedipus, to wit, the very possibility of logocentric production of knowledge and ultimately, the existence of patriarchy itself. To be sure, all these things are hard realities, but poststructuralism is unable to account for, let alone deconstruct, them. And what is worse, this inability cannot help but unwittingly promote all that is ripe for subversion.

     

    On the other hand, from the child’s standpoint it is quite clear why he privileges the identification with the father. His motives have to do neither with the problematic of activity/passivity (Silverman 1988: 171) nor with master/slave dialectic (Brennan 1993: 53-55).31 For at stake for the child, and by extension, for logocentric tradition, is not knowledge per se, as Derrida et alia take pains to convince us, but knowledge as a means of communication, by necessity a distorted knowledge. The epistemic certainty promised by the identificatory empathy with the mother has the same effect as total ignorance. And it is this Janus-like threat which, as we remember, prompted the quest of the child traumatically desexualized by the birth of sibling(s). To be sure, in cases of the child and of tradition alike, to identify with the father means to make a virtue of a necessity. But precisely by force of this fact, deconstruction, which exposes the devices of tradition’s transmission, in turn offers tradition an invaluable service.

     

    As Russian Formalism has amply proved, the exposing device is an act of resurrection, of promoting to the second life that which by its own means is doomed to perish. It follows that Derrida is quite correct in assigning to his “supplement” the status of the “discourse of support” (1981: 324-330) remaining blind regarding its supportive effects. The supplement adds itself to the discourse which needs support in the movement of “+ N” (cf. 1987: 122-180). This movement certainly has nothing to do with polysemy/knowledge (1981: 252-253); it (re)confirms by doubling the communicational setup. This means that the necessity of the “supplement” (and of all the other Derridaean notions which are arranged according to the substitution/supplementary logic) is intrinsic to the logocentric discourse only inasmuch as it is historical, i.e., inasmuch as human being is subject to exhaustion, to economic aphanisis.32 Put otherwise, Derrida’s supplement is a neat counterpart of the Formalist strategy of “making strange.”33 Whence the status of pleonasm as one of the two master tropes of deconstruction. In order for there to be meaning one should guarantee a non-meaningless communicative substratum constituted by the overabundance of pure signifiers which tend to overflow all boundaries. Whence the celebration of gossip which communicates nothing, but by virtue of this fact can be regarded as a pure instance of communication as such (cf. Spacks 1985: 3-24, 258-265). Notably, along these lines gossip comes to be aligned with telepathy and other (para)esthetical forms (cf. Forrester 1990: 243-259). However, this grounding requires in its turn to be grounded itself. And it is the latter act concealed by tradition and its deconstruction that the recourse to infantile sexual curiosity allows us to divulge for the first time.

     

    VIII. The fantasy of the reversal of generations and what is implied in it

     

    The effect of identification with the father is the fantasy of the reversal of generations. Already referred to by Freud (1931: 421), it remained an aside in his teaching. The thread was picked up by Ernest Jones, who devoted to the subject a separate paper (1950). What this fantasy boils down to is the belief, “not at all rare among the children, to the effect that as they grow older and bigger their relative position to their parents will be gradually reversed, so that finally they will become the parents and their parents the children” (407). The correspondence between this fantasy and Derrida’s strategy of subversion of logocentric values, primarily of the notion of origin(ality), is striking enough to require no painstaking elaborations.34 On the other hand, it can be easily shown that the same fantasy underpins the discourse of poststructuralism as such. Whence the necessity to investigate these matters more closely.

     

    The conventional interpretation is satisfied in seeing in our fantasy an instance of the drive for mastery.35 Paradoxically, to adopt this standpoint would mean to treat poststructuralism all too leniently and to miss the implications which highlight a real path beyond current theoretical predicaments.

     

    Significantly, Jones himself hints at a possibility of a more fruitful approach. Since our poststructuralist tutors have drilled us to see in the drive for mastery the rectification of the position of the logocentric subject, it is rather invigorating to hear that the effect of this fantasy on “the child’s own personality” is that of distortion. It is precisely this effect that makes the reversal fantasy an essential mechanism “in regard to the transmission of tradition” (411). Certainly, this corroborates what was said above about poststruralism’s complicity with the tradition which it sets out to deconstruct. However, in order to pass from the deconstruction of an alleged deconstruction to the deconsruction of the tradition itself, that is, in order to launch deconstruction of the second degree and in doing so to propose a veritably alternative mode of thought, it is necessary to spell out all the consequences of Jones’s intuitions.

     

    First, it should be noted that whereas Freud evokes the reversal fantasy in his discussion of female sexuality, Jones, for all his interest in the problem, chooses to speak in connection with our fantasy of a neuter “child.” However, what at first glance is bound to provoke a fashionable rebuke for genderless thinking proves upon closer inspection to be a genuine starting point for a construction of feminine as well as masculine identity beyond Oedipal strictures.

     

    Apparently, the reversal fantasy reduces Lacanian accounts of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic order to its most schematic form.36 It is the reversal (Verkehrung) of the drive which produces the split alienated subject of the Symbolic–the subject “which is properly the other” (1977: 178 et passim). Nevertheless, there remains one issue that seems to radically divorce our fantasy from the Symbolic: the question of castration. The latter, as every student of Lacan knows, is the crucial difference–and not only between the Imaginary and the Symbolic which otherwise tend to be conflated. The point of regarding this problem with the eyes of our innocent little investigator is bound up with the fact that this perspective shows beyond any doubt that the notions of castration and repression (the two being closely interrelated) are unnecessary for setting the mechanism of signification/tradition transmission in motion. The function of castration/repression is precisely that of Derrida’s supplement, a means of discursive revitalization.37 Unfortunately, far from exempting Lacan from feminist critique of phallogocentrism, this fact exposes a precarious complicity of feminist theorizing with its enemy.

     

    As we have seen, the identification with the father does not promote mastery, but even less does it lead to the denigration/exclusion/repression of the woman. The mother figure remains essential; it grounds the patriarchal discursivity–precisely because it is not repressed and therefore is not made to represent “castration as truth” (Derrida 1988, 184).38 The paradox of the identification with the father is that it suspends the problematic of castration as an access point to truth. Significantly, thus far no one has given proper attention to a crucial moment in Freud’s description of the castration complex which notably appears in a discussion of infantile sexual theories. The feeling provoked by the sight of feminine genitals is an uncanny, unbearable one. Hence the first reaction of the male child is not to deny or repress the perception but to assure himself that “the girl also possesses the penis, although a small one; but in due time it will grow. Only when the consequent observations prove the unsustainability of this surmise, the child assumes that the penis was cut off” (1910: 164-165). The identification with the father effectively spares the child the necessity of relinquishing his initial hypothesis. And this is precisely because the transition from the passive to the active position drastically diminishes the cognitive dimension, however phantasmatical and hallucinatory the latter may be. To become an actor, one has (at every moment to be ready) to act and not to wait to be acted upon. But there’s the rub! For the child still remains in darkness as to what the father does with the mother, still remaining excluded from communication with the adults. Whence the value of the initial hypothesis (the penis will grow in due time) which allows him to escape from this predicament that has proven to be unsurmountable by means of identification alone. The identification with the mother promises an absolute knowledge that can only result in silence, whereas the identification with the father prompts the communicative deployment of the knowledge which is lacking. The assumed possibility that the penis will grow effectively negotiates between these extremes, introducing a temporality which grounds hermeneutics as such. However, the advent of deconstruction coincides with the exhaustion of the potential of this temporality and by the same token of the resources of the Western hermeneutic tradition.

     
    The infantile sexual theory we are discussing substitutes discursive certainty for the linguistic one. Only the former can ground communication as an intertextual exchange. The child gives woman and her penis time to grow, but it is equally true that the woman gives time to child’s curiosity to unfurl itself without the pressure of temporal handicaps.39 Therefore neither the child nor the woman strives to be “waited upon” (Brennan 1993: 91); both wait (for one another). And it is this mutual waiting which grounds the intersubjective dimension of “energetic” exchange (110, 116), the dimension in which the temporal pressure is sublated by the potentially meaningful ones,40 to wit, by the narratological suspense. Put otherwise, temporality underpinning the fantasy of the reversal of generations is exactly the same as that which Derrida elaborated in Donner le temps (1991).

     

    IX. The guilt of gift, the gift of guilt

     

    According to Derrida, the giving of time is the impossible possibility both of the récit and gift (1991: 46-60). The paradox, however, is that it is not only the tradition which cannot account for and accommodate the notion of the gift subversive of all restricted economies (21-29) but Derridian discourse as well, for the structure of gift as described by Derrida corresponds neatly to the hermeneutical structure of guilt developed by Heidegger.41 This means that the real “debts of deconstruction” are more profound than Samuel Weber would like to make us believe.

     
    Weber’s paper can be classed as seminal in as much as it represents the most overt effort to “domesticate Derrida” (Godzich 1983), that is, to suppress Derrida’s striving to surpass the paradigm derived from his work.42 Starting with Derrida’s refusal to accept a telephone call, Weber draws the connection between this act and Derrida’s wonder at the ease with which Freud refuses his debts to the predecessors (cf. Derrida 1980: 25-26; 280-281) in order to reject Derrida’s intuition that it is possible to abolish intertextual/intersubjective indebtedness (Derrida 1980: 415). What is striking is that Weber classifies this intuition as “no longer deconstructive” (1987: 121). As we shall see, it is precisely this intuition which leads directly to the real deconstruction and not to what thus far passes under this name.

     
    Since the telephone call was supposedly from Heidegger or from his ghost, Weber draws upon Heidegger in order to show the impossibility of repaying debts. For Dasein, says Heidegger, is always already, primordially guilty (Heidegger 1962: 325-335; Weber 1987: 129-131). Now whereas Heidegger takes pains to show that guilt and debt differ qualitatively just as, say, the irrational and an attempt to rationalize it (Heidegger 1962: 329), with equal consistentcy, Weber is bent upon equating both notions (120 et passim). And it is hardly surprising, since a strict adherence (a plain acknowledgement of indebtedness) to Heidegger would immediately rob Weber’s exegesis of its raison d’être.

     
    In effect, that debt and guilt are not one and the same means that it is possible to requite debts so long as one assumes a primordial debt. Hence the crucial question is whether it is this operation which Derrida has in mind. Or, to generalize the problem, will the proposition still hold if we reverse its terms? An answer, on which the fate of deconstruction hinges, provides the last recourse to the fantasy of reversal of generations.

     
    The only explanation of Derrida’s conduct which Weber can think of surmises that the rejection of the call was prompted by the lack of certainty as to the identity of the caller, of his/her “proper name” (130). Obviously this solution does violence to the thought of Heidegger and Derrida alike. Both men agree regarding the impossibility of unambiguously identifying a speaking subject–be it sender or receiver. Witness Heidegger’s dictum “Dasein’s call is from afar unto afar” (271). This means that the fantasy of the reversal of generations amply exemplifies Derrida’s and Heidegger’s semiotical models. On the other hand, Weber’s view signals the semiotic closure implied in the identification with the mother. In other words, Weber unwittingly exposes the ultimate fate of all versions of dialogism, for a most thorough (para)esthetic telepathic confusion of tongues cannot help but return to its “maternal” origin.

     
    Witness Bakhtin, whose legacy is regarded as a theory of dialogism par excellence. Throughout his mature works, utterance is constantly defined by the change of the speaking subjects, i.e., by a discursive reversal (1979a: 254).43 In its turn, this change presupposes a “minimal degree of discursive closure which is necessary in order to make a response possible” (255). However, this closure has nothing to do with the “understandability of utterance” (255), i.e., with epistemology proper (knowledge, truth etc.). De Manian deconstruction provides a neat counterpart to Bakhtins’s theory. In de Man’s view, the epistemologic impasse, the celebrated undecidability of meaning, is a result of a clash between incompatible readings inscribed in a given text, although in itself each reading is complete (“finalized,” to use a Bakhtinian term) (cf. de Man 1975: 29). This means that the undecidability of meaning/identity of the speaking subject essential to the dialogic project has an unpleasant corollary in the decidability of the place, of the position from whence the utterance comes and whither it goes. Put otherwise, in order to remain forever uncertain about who is speaking, poststructuralism has to comply with certainty regarding the whereabouts of utterance.44 It is precisely this commerce that underpins the reversal fantasy, for in identifying with the father and giving time to the mother the child substitutes topological certainty for an epistemic (un)certainty. Whence the distortive effect of this fantasy on the child’s personality, which remains unaccountable and puzzling within the conventional interpretive framework.

     

    X. The Law of (Oedipal) Return

     

    By the same token, the reversal fantasy turns out to be not just a version of Oedipus complex but the very locus of its production. In effect, the structure of Oedipal Law is traditionally described in genuinely Derridaean/de Manian terms. The Law of Oedipus is the concurrent contradictory demand: “you must and must not be like the father” (cf. Laplanche 1980b: 284, 353, 401-402, 405, 409). Conventionally, the acceptance of this Law is equated with the dissolution of the Oedipal conflict. But, as we have seen, precisely this allegedly post-Oedipal impasse characterizes the child’s reversal of the order of the generations. Moreover, the acceptance of the (post)Oedipal Law turns out to be dependent on the maintenance of Oedipal structures, achieved by the suspension of the core castration problematic.

     
    The contradictory nature of the Oedipal Law seems to make it a perfect example of a Bakhtinian double-voiced word. Paradoxically, at the very moment when the (para)esthetic confusion of tongues reaches its acme, it becomes impossible to maintain intertextual telepathy. To make matters worse, it is none other than Bakhtin who has pushed the paradox to the fore in a work which is generally regarded as a most inspired precipitation of poststructuralism.

     
    I refer to Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, in which the direct speech equated with discursive mastery as repression of “resisting voices” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed 1993) is opposed to indirect speech as a decentring dislocation of identities. In Bakhtin’s terms this is the opposition between linear and picturesque style (1993a: 130-131). The picaresque is characterized by a thorough confusion of tongues between the author and hero and therefore by the suspension of the inside/outside border (131).45 It comes as a surprise to hear that in Russian literary language, where “as is well known, the syntactic patterns for reporting speech are very poorly developed,” where “one must acknowledge the unqualified primacy of direct discourse” (136) the precedence of the picturesque style has remained unchallenged throughout the modern period of Russian literature (from Classicism up to Symbolism). Given that the definition of utterance cited above is reconfirmed in this book (137, 143) as well as in the alleged “classic” of dialogism (cf. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 1979a: 300-301), one is bound to conclude that the literary text has either nothing to do with utterance/intertextuality or else that intertextuality is the very opposite of dialogism. However disastrous this paradox is for the postsructuralist project, it is not the weakness we are seeking. The great irony of our story is that dialogism is not Bakhtin’s main contribution to humanities just as the libidinal theory of repression/castration is not the quintessence of the Freudian legacy. The alignment of both thinkers is far from being fortuitous. Only in tracing the hidden interconnections can we show that Bakhtin and Freud have effectively spared themselves the subversive consequences of the mentioned impasse with which poststructuralism is doomed to end.

     
    In effect, the paradox of intertextuality we have highlighted is the paradox of psychoanalysis conceived of as an (unrestricted) libidinal economy, that is, as the process of (intertextual) signification (Lyotard 1993; Deleuze/Guattari 1972). However, as our interpretation of the reversal fantasy has amply proven, this view by necessity leads to a thorough desexualization for the simple reason that the disseminating meaningless libidinal flow of signifiers as an infinite supplementary movement, which according to Derrida underlies and grounds every signification making of it forever an unstable and undecidable affair, needs to be grounded in the Oedipal Law precisely because its contradictory structure has a paralyzing, restrictive effect. Put otherwise, two master tropes of deconstruction–the pleonasm/catachresis of supplement and the chiasm/oxymoron of hymen–are radically at odds. And it is precisely this self-deconstructive clash illustrated by our reference to Bakhtin which brings about the aphanisis of desire, an aphanisis that replaces the structure of repression/castration with that of sublimation.

     

    XI. Sublimation qua aphanisis of hermeneutic desire

     

    Certainly, Lacan was the first to acknowledge that desire which is “in fact, interpretation itself” (1977: 176) should not be subsumed under the rubric of sexuality (45). The immediate consequence is the contradiction which we are already acquainted with. This explains why, in the course of the same Seminar, Lacan is forced to give two incompatible definitions of desire. On the one hand, we are urged “to figure desire as a locus of junction between the field of demand, in which the syncopes of the unconscious are made present, and sexual reality” (156). On the other hand, he suggests that we “place ourselves at the two extremes of the analytic experience. The primal repressed is a signifier…. Repressed and symptom are…reducible to the function of signifiers…their structure is built up step by step…. At the other extreme, there is interpretation…. Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself. In between, there is sexuality. If sexuality, in the form of the partial drives, had not manifested itself as dominating the whole economy of this interval, our experience would be reduced to a mantic, to which the neutral term psychical energy would then have been appropriate, but in which it would miss what constitutes in it the presence, Dasein, of sexuality” (176). Whereas the first quotation represents the official image of Lacanianism which poststructuralism takes pains to maintain (desire as the contradictory structure of the Oedipal Law as an articulative effect of the deconstructive clash of two signifying entities/readings, i.e., chiasm/oxymoron only arbitrary superimposed upon the catachretic additive flaw of signifiers), the second quotation subversively reverses the first. And this subversion is even more thorough than our foregoing analysis would seem to suggest.

     
    At first glance, the second excerpt only reinstates that with which we have already become sufficiently familiar. In order to function in the articulative mode, sexuality should be decomposed. Since signifiers are formed “step by step,” i.e., since the structure of signification is additive, it is necessary to surmise “that sexuality is realized only through the operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives” (177). This means the desexualization of sexuality, or, in our terms, the secondary sublimation as the subsumption of sexuality under the model of the ego-instincts which are basically and inescapably partial.46 And yet this is not the whole story, for the articulative/ intermediary function assigned to desexualized sexuality in the second quotation remains totally unnecessary since sexuality is said to mediate between desire and that which has already the same additive structure, the edifice of signifiers. To reiterate the formula proposed above, we have another instance of the radical diffusion of tongues when their intertextual (para)esthetic confusion seems to reach its acme.

     
    Yet Lacan is not as blind as he might appear to be. In fact, the separation of desire and sexuality bears witness that Lacan, all his derisory jokes notwithstanding, has taken Jones’s theory of aphanisis seriously enough to regard it as a major threat to the semiotic libidinization of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s theory of desire, central as it is to his teaching, is a clandestine response to Jones. In effect, the semiotical extension of psychoanalysis is impossible so long as we maintain, as Freud and Jones do, that desire is synonymous with sexuality for the obvious reason that the semiotization of sexuality (as a transformation into the (infinite) network of signifiers) is attainable only through its disseminating fragmentation which would involve the desire itself. Whereas the maintainece of the indestructibility of the latter is essential in so far as this indestructibility guarantees the undecidability of meaning. Put otherwise, the interplay of two master tropes of deconstruction–pleonasm/catachresis and chiasm/oxymoron–on which the deconstructive strategy as such hinges becomes impossible. This means the impossibility of a discursive revitalization by means of a supplementary (intertextual) interpretive act. We are left with the exhaustion/aphanisis of intertextuality/dialogism inscribed in the very structure of the latter.

     

    XII. The poststructuralist return to Jung

     

    Whereas there is no possibility to preclude this outcome along the lines of literary theory proper, a psychoanalytic extension seems to offer a loophole. However, the price to be paid is a bitter one, namely, understanding the Lacanian “return to Freud” as the “return to Jung.” What is striking is the readiness with which poststructuralism pays this price.

     
    As we have heard, only the intermediary/articulative function of sexuality can preclude the emergence of “the neutral term of psychical energy” (Lacan 1977: 176). Lacan’s inability to maintain this function means that the ternary structure of signification (the Symbolic order) collapses into a dyadic structure peculiar to the Imaginary. One need not be a Marxist to acknowledge that dualism is a veiled monism. This explains why Freud’s attempts to maintain–in pique to Jung–the dualism of drives were from the outset doomed to fail. Witness the very title of the paper in which the instinctual dualism receives its final articulation. Instead of opposing the death drive to its “natural” “beyond”–libido–Freud suggests seeing in it the beyond of the pleasure principle. This boils down to an implicit acknowledgement that there is only one “neutral psychical energy” that functions dualistically–either in the regime of pleasure or of unpleasure.47 This is, of course, exactly the Jungian point of view which Derrida’s deconstruction of the death drive cannot help but make its own. In the same manner, feminist theorizing proceeds along Lacanian lines. Witness Brennan, who ends with the energetic intersubjective model grounded in the notion of the unified energy (48, 64).48 This model particularly clarifies the ultimate–Jungian–point of convergence between Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories, and thereby considerably facilitates our task.

     
    Brennan is candid enough to admit that her energetic model begs two crucial questions. For one thing, it remains unclear “how it is accumulated” (48). Likewise, “the mechanism of transmission” (110) remains obscure. Regarding the second problem, Brennan suggests (albeit the term does not appear in her book) that transmission can happen only telepathically (cf. 72). On the other hand, the accumulation of energy presupposes a kind of “dam” (48),49 i.e., an inhibition. Hence we have precisely the structure which, as was shown, by necessity leads to the subversion of dialogism. However, far from multiplying evidence for evidence’s sake, our detour presents us with the last attempt to solve the poststructuralist quandary and thereby allows us to appreciate its full scope.

     
    In effect, it appears that the demise of dialogism stems not only from the diffusion of two master tropes, but is already inscribed in the structure of one of them, namely, in the structure of supplement. And once again only the (psychoanalytic) translation, in a (para)Derridaean way, can allow us to see what is really wrong with the (semiotic) original.

     
    The unrestricted disseminating flow of unified energy should be semiotized/articulated. For only fragmentation can allow the supplement to play its discursively revitalizing role. Put otherwise, the inhibition becomes a structural necessity.50 Psychoanalytically, the basic form of inhibition is of course the threat of castration. However, there seem to be two, apparently incompatible, ways to conceptualize inhibition/castration. Traditionally (i.e. logocentrically), castration leads to the resolution of Oedipal conflict, that is, to “normal” sexuality and conventional gender identity. However, as we have seen, this patriarchal option, unacceptable as it is to poststructuralism, is unsustainable, semiotically prompting a regress from the signifying triadic structure to a nondifferenciated monism via imaginary binarism. And yet it is precisely this reduction which gives poststructuralism its last chance. For viewed energetically, i.e., conceived along Jungian lines, castration/inhibition is profoundly linked to the mother figure.51 Therefore, castration acquires the new meaning of separation. Now the problem is that separation should not lead to the denigration/repression of the woman (otherwise the result would be the same as the conventional patriarchal castration). Despite the separation without which there would be no articulation, the link with the mother should be maintained. The contradictory nature of this demand makes poststructuralist energetics/telepathy a neat counterpart of the Oedipal Law. This means a transformation of the catachretical/supplementary structure of (empha/telepathic intertextual) revitalization into the oxymoronic/chiasmic structure that should be revitalized by means of the former. Hence the reversal, exemplified by our infantile fantasy, becomes unavoidable. However, only now can wefully appreciate its consequences.

     
    For the poststructuralist castration, far from being a naive replica of the patriarchal one, exhausts the semiotical resources of the latter. And this is what allows us to see in the infantile reversal fantasy the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism.

     
    In effect, castration/inhibition conceived of energetically places the woman in exactly the same position which she is assigned by the child who decides to wait for the penis to grow. This decision obviously has nothing to do with the repression of the “maternal origin” (Brennan 1993: 167), but precisely because of this dismissal of repression it becomes the very core of patriarchal discursivity. To surmise that the penis will grow means to guarantee the male supremacy more effectively, ingenuously and unequivocally than is possible by recourse to repression. To put it bluntly, the male child automatically becomes older than the woman and hence secures all the privileges which this position implies. What patriarchy boils down to is not the rigidity of sexual binarism but generational binarism: the woman/wife is always younger than the man/husband and should be treated accordingly.52

     
    In Heideggerian terms, the woman becomes the very locus of the “potentiality for being” (1962: 333-335). The notion is basic to Heidegger insofar as it grounds the very possibility of understanding/interpretation as such. Potentiality obviously means the openness, over-inclusiveness, in Brennan’s words, the “accumulation of energy.” Thus, the woman becomes the accumulator or the reservoir of energy. These are not one and the same.

     
    The positioning of woman as an energetic reservoir in “the economic space of the debt” (Derrida 1980: 415) means precisely that the debt becomes “immensely enlarged and at the same time neutralized” (415). In other words, the neutralization is possible due to the libidinal monism. However, the unrestricted accumulation of libidinal energy has a paradoxical effect. Jones’s theory of aphanisis tries to provide an answer to this paradox.

     
    According to Jones, it is precisely the accumulation of libido that provokes its own disappearance53 with the result that the sense of guilt comes to the fore. Within the confines of the libidinal economy it is impossible to make either head or tail of this statement, for if there is no sexual desire of what can one feel guilty? However, if we remember that the libidinal economy operates with the desexualized libido, the two lines of our inquiry will merge in a most fruitful way.

     
    The accumulation of libido is triggered by the privation of sexual satisfaction, and this privation is already an inhibition just as guilt is. This means that the pleonasmic structure of supplement is actually a restrictive structure, an oxymoron/chiasmus of the Oedipal Law. Therefore, the collapse of dialogism becomes inevitable and total because only the device of dialogically intertextual discursive revitalization reveals its structural identity by means of the already exhausted discourse.

     
    According to Heidegger, guilt is interpretation itself as a limitation imposed upon the (signifying) potential of Dasein (1962: 331). Whence Derrida’s stress on debt rather than guilt, dictated by his concern for safeguarding the existence of tradition threatened by every interpretative act.54 The same concern guides the child in its sexual quest. In both cases the aim is to maintain communication/tradition and to ward off the revelation of meaning/truth. It is the contradictory nature of this demand which, paradoxically, prevents the child and Derrida alike from attaining their objective, for the narrative/sexual quest takes the self-subversive form of the reversal fantasy underpinned by the trope of oxymoron/chiasmus. Our analysis has proven that the undecidability of meaning stemming from the contradiction of the Oedipal Law is ostensible inasmuch as it calls for the supplement to ensure this suspension. But to add is to interpret. This explains why the supplementary structure can only double/mirror the structure that does not need the additive interpretive doubling but non-interpretive revitalization. The irony of communication is precisely that because it requires a delay/suspension of (the arrival of) meaning, that is, a mutual act of time-giving. But this act cannot help turning against itself: the more time one gives, the more the danger of exhaustion/aphanisis of temporality itself.55 Witness a mythological parallel of the reversal fantasy: the errancy of Ulysses.

     

    XIII. The Ulysses complex and its Oedipal representation

     

    The value of this parallel for our discussion is twofold, for it allows us to ultimately connect both strands of our discussion and thereby to end a critical part of it with a paradoxical conclusion opening directly onto a more positive task. Narratologically, the errancy we are speaking about clearly demonstrates the unsustainability of the notion of the “infinite text” (cf. M. Frank 1979) which is so dear to the poststructuralist’s heart.56 However, the textual infiniteness becomes unsustainable not due to the crude fact of the return,57 but because this return, and therefore the denouement of meaning, becomes a structural necessity only by virtue of the delaying technique deployed by Penelope and Telemachus. That this time-giving is fully conscious amounts to saying that, psychoanalytically, the postsructuralist model, dependent as it is on the notion of repression, fails to accommodate its own premises in exactly the same way as the logocentric discursivity.58 This means that the Oedipal complex cannot ground psychoanalysis, for at the moment of its final unfurlment in the reversal fantasy it reveals another structure that is its condition of possibility. And it is hardly surprising since the quest for meaning exemplified by Oedipus is secondary in respect to the quest for communication for which Ulysses provides a master plot.

     
    To sum up the results of our inquiry aphoristically, the inability of poststructuralism to surpass Oedipus stems from the fact that techniques deployed to this end reinforce the very structure which makes Oedipus possible. Hence the suggestion to rename the Oedipus complex, since it is far more adequate to speak of a Ulysses complex.

     
    The effect of renaming is twofold. For one thing, it enables us to radically place Freud outside of the logocentric paradigm and in doing so to divulge a profound convergence between Freudian and Bakhtinian intentions.59 The result will be an outline of genuinely psychoanalytic narratology.60 But this outline cannot help but contain the seeds for a theory of sublimation, an elaboration of which would require a thorough reformulation of psychoanalysis within a Kantian rather than Hegelian framework.61

     
    Lacan’s failure to sustain a ternary structure and the concomitant collapse into dualism (ultimately a monism) is unavoidable within the confines of libidinal economy closely tied to notion of repression as a regulatory principle of the latter.62 As we have seen, the same monism underpins the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse of telepathy. Narratologically, the result is not only the exclusion of the third party (the hero),63 but the inevitable evaporation of the dualistic disguise itself, so that the communicative act comes to have only one protagonist.64 The paradox is that the Other is not missing, assimilated, “objectified,” “pacified” (Brennan 1993: 58-59) or repressed, but held in suspense–just as the penis supposed to grow, providing thereby a potentiality necessary to ground interpretation. This sufficiently proves the convergence of monologism/dialogism opposition–the ultimate fate of all logocentric binarisms. What saves Freud’s theory from sharing this fate is not the dualism of the drives but the ternary structure of psychic agencies, precluding the monistic collapse of instinctual dualism. And it is here that reference to Bakhtin can effect the necessary maximization of the psychoanalytic screen and thereby furnish us with the vantage point for a cross-fertilizing reassessment of both legacies. And this is significant because perhaps the most notorious failure of post-Freudian psychoanalysis is the failure to maintain the ternary structure of agencies.65 In this respect, Lacan’s substitution of the signifying triad for the triad of the agencies should carry the lion’s share of the blame.

     
    The Bakhtinian insight that points beyond the logocentric binary of dialogue/monologue opposition is his (untheorized) distinction between the subject to whom the utterance is addressed and the subject whom it answers (1979: 174-177). According to Bakhtin, this distinction is fundamental to the structure of utterance. What is particularly pertinent to our discussion is that both positions fall together in case of the speech genres where the cognitive function prevails over all others (176).

     
    To fully appreciate the subversive impact of this distinction it is necessary to correlate it with the narratological model elaborated in Bakhtin’s early essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1979a),66 for otherwise Bakhtinian triadic structure can easily suffer confusion with the dualistic monism of poststructuralist intertextual narratology. Indeed it is all too tempting to collate the receiver and the addressee of Bakhtin’s utterance with the reader/writer-successor and writer-predecessor, respectively. The result, then, will be the reappearance of the “family romance” and the reversal of generations, its foundational consequence.67 However, Bakhtin’s thrust goes beyond the familial horizon,68 for only thus can one hope to conceive of relationships outside of the monologue/dialogue dyad.

     

    XIV. The debt of madness

     

    Far from being rigid, the “elemental structures of kinship” allow considerable “room for manoeuvre,” i.e. for all kinds of “double-voicedness” such as hybridization, meticulization, etc.69 Therefore Derridian “genealogical scene” (1977: 129) is a constructive act of elaboration of the blind spot of Levi-Strauss’ theory–not in order to subvert the latter but to improve it. As we have seen, the result is the exposition of a (communicative) structure (of Ulysses complex) that grounds the Oedipal structure of meaning. Put otherwise, there is no reason to oppose deconstruction to hermeneutics,70 for the former is a last attempt to furnish the latter with a secure foundation. However, the poststructuralist strategy of thinking out the un-thought axiomatics of logocentrism cannot help but turn against itself. Far from subverting logocentric rationality by exposing the layer of “madness” which, allegedly, underlies it (cf. Foucault 1967), deconstruction brings about the rationalization of “madness” that logocentrism places at the very fore of its discourse, and does this precisely by reinforcing the genealogical framework upon the parentlessness of the traditional discourse.

     

    Witness the problematics of guilt/debt. In Heideggerian hermeneutics, guilt functions as an irrational foundation of understanding (1962: 325-335). Heidegger is quite conscious that to maintain irrationality is essential if we wish to secure the communicative transmission of tradition (193-194, 209). However, it is precisely the lack of familial underpinnings71 that prevents Heidegger’s attainment of his goal. By virtue of the simple fact that outside of the family every debt is basically a rational affair: it can be repaid by definition. Only a familial debt can be said to subsist in the irrational way of a Lacanian symptom/signifier. Whence Derrida’s obsession with genealogy. But the irony of the matter is that this familial irrationality depends vitally on another rationality, to wit, on the purely rational, mercantile character of relationship between the members of the family.72 But by the same token, the irrational (communicative) impossibility to repay the debt suffers a (meaningful) restriction.73 This amounts to saying that the whole affair boils down to the warding off of the true irrationality of familial structure–of love as the possibility to transcend the problematics of guilt/debt by a perfectly gratuitous arbitrary act of forgiving. Now it is precisely love that, according to Bakhtin, defines the relationship between author and hero in aesthetic activity.

     
    The value of the emerging model is that it allows us to radically transcend the biologism inherent in the poststructuralist familial (para)esthetics, which reduces literary production to the question of the relation of father/author to his son/work and thereby leaves no room for the conception of the literary text as the very locus of construction of feminine identity.74 To be sure, our assumption begs an immediate justification, for Bakhtin’s statements taken at face value are rather misleading and bound to provoke contempt on the part of even the softest of feminists.75 In effect, the hero according to Bakhtin, is basically feminine (1979b: 80-81, 86). But this femininity seems to be notoriously patriarchal since it is constantly equated with passivity (110). However, the gender trouble is not Bakhtin’s. It is sufficient to abandon the dialogical perspective which reduces the aesthetic event to the encounter between the text and the reader in order to solve the optical predicament thematized by de Man.

     
    What makes the early work of Bakhtin so puzzling to the poststructuralist eye is the bracketing of the very item that we are accustomed to focusing on. The text (and by the same token the reader) remains in the background, whereas Bakhtin’s interest lies with the author and hero. The latter is said to depend vitally on the former, for only an aesthetic intervention can alleviate the tension to which the hero remains prey as a “potentiality-for-being” (94, 100).76 The salutary effect of this aesthetic act stems from the author’s excess of vision over the hero (89-94). What is surprising is that the hero also possesses an analogous excess over the author (173).

     
    Instead of avoiding this paradox77 and/or discarding it as a logocentric birthmark (naturalization) which was not yet washed off at this early stage of Bakhtin’s career, I am going to argue that we are dealing with one of the most profound and fruitful intuitions which, however, can be discerned and utilized only within a psychoanalytic setting. For the paradox is bound to evaporate the moment we recognize in it an aesthetic counterpart of Jones’s aphanisis which, in its turn, can be rectified only from a narratological perspective. Jones certainly said and did all he could to preclude the possibility of making of his notion a starting point for the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchy. Not in the least because within the confines of libidinal economy he was free to speak only about the fear of aphanisis, instead of investigating what aphanisis actually meant as such.

     

    XV. Aphanisis qua sublimation and the construction of the feminine identity

     

    The fear of aphanisis is Jones’s answer to the question: “what precisely in women corresponds with the fear of castration in men?” (1950c, 438). The paradox is that, in Jones’s own terms, the answer is invalid, since it is a “fallacy…to…equate castration with the abolition of male sexuality…we know that many men wish to be castrated for, among others, erotic reasons” (439-440) whereas aphanisis is exactly “the extinction of sexuality” (450). Fortunately, Jones himself is not as blind as his interpreters (Lacan, Laplanche and Pontalis included) would like him to be. Quite conscious of the contradiction, he proposes two solutions: one more or less explicit (to conceive of male sexuality beyond the problematics of castration78), the other clandestine but all the more challenging, namely, the suggestion to see in aphanisis not the cause of repression of sexuality but precisely the condition of its emergence through the sublimation of the polymorphous instincts of self-preservation, primarily the Wießtrieb. Within the confines of libidinal economy aphanisis leads to the impasse of the oxymoronic/chiasmic restriction of revitalizing additive supplementarity, but the view advanced here allows us to transcend the Ulysses complex and its Oedipal representation and to do so, paradoxically, by deploying exactly the Derridian strategy of operating from within the discourse to be deconstructed, if only more coherently than Derrida has ever attempted to do.

     

    XVI. What James knew

     

    At this point the reference to textual reality becomes indispensable. The reasons for selecting Henry James, specifically his novel What Maisie Knew are obvious enough. Only with the advent of poststructuralism has James’s interest in feminine psychology, his predilection for feminine protagonists, been thematized along the lines of (para)esthetic discursivity, which foregrounds the notions of tele/emphatical unconscious identification between author and hero and attempts to explain the textual production as an effort to repress this identificatory desire. The irony of the matter is that poststructuralism could not have chosen a more unfortunate example to substantiate its claims.

     
    In case of Henry James, the paradox of (para)esthetics is at its sharpest. First, it remains completely unclear what the notion of repression of “pederastic identifications,” which allegedly structures James’s textuality, has to do with the latter, since James himself was the first to consciously acknowledge it (see his prefaces). Secondly, to concetrate on repression means to make the question of knowledge a central issue. This is not to say that interpretation by necessity becomes a traditional search for a particular meaning, but that it becomes synonymous with the epistemic attitude.79 As a corollary, the denigration of aesthetics is equated with an attempt “to posit an idealized world that is nonconflictual,” with “a withdrawal into a private, idiosyncratic universe” (Przybylowicz 1986: 18, 23).80 The resulting distortion of James’s textual strategy in particular and of the subversive potential of literature in general is especially drastic in the case of this novel, which we will discuss briefly.

     
    Given the poststructuralist biases, it is not surprising that in her study of James’s heroines, V.C. Fowler does not devote a single word to Maisie. The example of Maisie considerably problematizes the very premise of Fowler’s analysis, according to which James’s “American girls” are defined by “the fear of knowledge” (35). The only way to accommodate our girl within a (para)esthetic framework would be to say that her fearless knowledge is exactly that which the author takes pains to repress in order not to become a (castrated) woman (cf. Evans 1989, L. Frank 1989). Witness Freud’s attitude towards Dora, with which James’s relation to Maisie has been equated (Hertz 1985). Ironically, it is precisely the narratological extension of psychoanalysis that makes this explanation untenable. Psychoanalytically speaking, to become a woman means not only to become castrated/dead, but also to achieve clairvoyance in the process, i.e., to bring about the revelation of truth (Ferenczi 1980b, 243-244). So long as clairvoyance is inscribed in the notion of telepathy, we once again end up wondering how the latter can undermine logocentrism. Inasmuch as “James’s realistic fiction” of which What Maisie Knew is exemplary is said “to reveal a noncontradictory and homogeneous world of truth” (Przybylowicz 1986: 25), we must conclude that James has many reasons to consciously identify with his heroine. In other words, to interpret our novel (para)esthetically we have to part with the notion of repression which grounds this mode of interpretation; that is, we must no longer view repression as a force that structures textual reality.

     
    Paradoxically, by acquiescing to this option poststructuralism gains more than it loses, at least at first sight. Upon cursory reading, the novel seems to reenact the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism–the fantasy of the reversal of generations–and what is more to do this on both levels of discourse–of author and heroine alike, allowing us to conceive of tele-empathy as a genuinely discursive phenomenon.

     
    In effect, in the course of the narrative, which coincides with the process of growing up, Maisie’s status undergoes a characteristic reversal that it is not too far-fetched to be described as a generational one. The divorce of Maisie’s parents, with which the story starts, positions the child as an entity the parents desire “not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other” (1966: 13). Hence from the outset she functions as a means of mediation. However, the older she grows the more consciously she deploys this role “of bringing people together” (54-55, 66-67, 233) for which she developes a kind of talent if which she is quite proud (264-265). However, this reversal, far from being an instance of “art for art’s sake,” is fostered by Maisie’s need to feel secure in an unstable situation, which is governed by the instincts of self-preservation.81 Notably, this movement from activity to passivity is caused by the aphanisis of the parents’ desire to harm one another.

     
    The reversal which apparently structures the rècit is paralleled by the discursive reversal, by the interplay of the two tropes for which James has an obvious predilection. These tropes are the master tropes of poststructuralism. Hence, as is easily foreseen, the outcome of the interplay between oxymoron and pleonasm82 is the same interaction with which our analysis has sufficiently acquainted the reader. The impossibility of discursively revitalizing what vitally needs revitalization would be especially disastrous in James’s case, amounting to the author’s failure to attain the aim that he has posed himself, namely, to endow the heroine with the power to transform “appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough” into “the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art” (7-8). The whole Jamesian project boils down to this particular aim. Put otherwise, it would not be enough for Maisie “simply to wonder…about them” (8), for within the (para)esthetic libidinal framework of aphanisis, especially when doubled, is at odds with this task. To worsen matters beyond any possibility of repair, discursive tele-empathy between author and hero, especially for novel that by its very title foregrounds the question of knowledge, would make the author an easy prey to logocentrism, positioning him either as the subject who knows, or, what amounts to the same, as a victim of repression. As the study of Przybylowicz amply proves, this is precisely how poststructuralism (mis)reads James. Fortunately, on an unbiased reading, James turns out to be not such an easy mark.

     
    Put paradoxically, for all their suspicion regarding the author’s overtly stated intentions, poststructuralist critics interpret James’s preface and not the text itself. If read alone, James’s preface allows us to speak about repression and thereby stage an interpretive act as an intertextual affair between the author (who in this perspective should have committed suicide in order to attain clairvoyance) and the reader.

     
    Such a view leads to a dialogically-conventional (mis)reading of Bakhtin, especially of his notion of emphatically grounded exotopy as a privilege of the author. The unnoticed irony is that on these terms it neither makes sense to speak of dialogism as a textual characteristic83 nor, and this is the point we are drawing, of the dialogicity of interpretive encounter with the text, of course, if we continue to use the term “dialogism” as a synonym for subversion.

     
    The result of the one-sided excess of vision is that the author-hero relation comes to be conceived in terms of amplification and supplementation of what the hero(ine) does not see/know. As Tony Tanner has put it, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know” (1965: 288). However, it is precisely this “in a sense” that makes all the difference in the world.

     
    Although James is the first to foreground supplementarity of the auctorial discourse84, he is also the first to notice that this exotopy is at odds with his task, but which is more profound than the preface’s phrasing may suggest. James’s task is not the dialogical revitalization–technically impossible and morally deplorable85–but the de-victimization of his heroine, the transformation of her (and thereby his own) discourse into the discourse of innocence free of intertextual guilt/debt. The task is a Nietzschean one, for despite all the poststructuralist efforts to make of Nietzsche an avatar of primordial (intertextual) indebtedness, Nietzsche himself was quite unambiguous regarding the priorities among (re-evaluated) values: “In this way the gods served in those days to justify man…in those days they took upon themselves, not the punishment but, what is nobler, the guilt” (1989: 94). Since the justification/de-victimization of man/hero can be achieved only through the other, it follows that the model Nietzsche had in mind represents a ‘beyond’ of logocentric monologue/dialogue dyad which reinforces indebtedness. This means that Nietzschean views correspond neatly to the Bakhtinian model of aesthetic activity aimed at ensuring the discursive innocence.

     
    Characteristically, the very title of James’s novel undermines all attempts to situate Jamesian textuality within the dialogically-intertextual (para)esthetic framework. The rough fact is that within this framework the title makes no sense at all.

     
    The supplementary nature of the one-sided excess of vision indebts the author to the reader by in turn indebting the reader to the hero(ine). So long as Maisie is conceived as the subject supposed not to know, it follows that the author’s task is to provide the reader with the answer to the question posed by the title. Certainly, the author becomes a possessor of knowledge but, since he is indebted/obliged to pass it to the reader, his possession is only a provisional one and has nothing to do with Absolute Mastery.86 However, James is reluctant to acknowledge this debt.87

     
    Ironically, from the poststructuralist standpoint, the answer to the question of what Maisie knew is doomed to remain in abeyance, albeit without this answer no interpretation can be regarded as complete.88 Certainly, this incompleteness itself may be interpreted in favor of a poststructuralist stance as evidence that the central concern of James is to perpetuate the transmission of tradition. For, in effect, James is quite unambiguous about the communicative point, to wit, about how Maisie knew. That her knowledge is acquired by (para)esthetic means of empathy and telepathy, if not by hypnotic clairvoyance, lies at the surface.89 This should already suggest that matters may eventually be a bit more complex.90 And in effect, on second glance, we are bound to concede that the title of James’s novel relates to the text in a way which is apparently more “conventional” than the one envisaged by Derrida (1991: 123). Nevertheless, it is precisely this conventionality that proves to be an actual subversion of tradition promoted by Derrida’s communicative supplementarity of which the title is a privileged example.

     
    Appearances notwithstanding, the real question on which the narrative hinges is not the “how” but the “what” of Maisie’s knowledge. Not for nothing is the text punctuated by confirmations coming from the author as well as from the other personages that Maisie actually does know, albeit the content of her knowledge remains unrevealed. This means that James grants Maisie an excess of vision over himself equal to that which his status of the author provides him with. Put otherwise, if the “how” presupposes the (para)esthetic one-sided excess of authorial vision, the “what” grants the same excess to the hero(ine), thereby introducing the dimension of mutual discursive dependency between the author and the hero which effectively abolishes the intertextual indebtedness to the reader promoted by the one-sided exotopy. But to make our model of the aesthetic event fully coincide with Jamesian textuality and unfurl its subversive potential, a final step remains, which will reveal its implications for the construction of feminine sexuality closely tied with the process of sublimation.

     
    Our description of mutual dependency between the author and hero can still be reappropriated (para)esthetically so long as its temporal dimension remains unspecified. One may argue that mutual dependency boils down to a mutual act of tele-empathical time-giving as the precondition of interpretation as such. The result would be a communicative re-naming of James’s novel. In other words, we still have to prove that the title of the novel has much more to it than the postructuralist reader is willing to concede.

     
    Fortunately, this proof provides the notion of aphanisis that within the (para)esthetic setting can be experienced only negatively as an always already present danger of communicative exhaustion which can be warded off only by recourse to the device that brings it about. This vicious circle is effectively broken by Jamesian narrative.

     
    Witness the final scene of the novel, the scene of Maisie’s departure with Mrs. Wix. This departure, since it is a matter of free choice on Maisie’s part, is essential to the proper understanding of James’s relation to his heroine and the appreciation of the subversive force of his textuality. For, in choosing to depart, Maisie effectively disentangles herself from the network of indebting relationships which, paradoxically, she herself has helped to establish by means of her empathetical identifications. To depart means to renounce the (para)esthetic strategy and the knowledge accumulated by its means. This proves that there actually was something that Maisie knew. And this renouncement makes it impossible to define our novel as a Bildungsroman, that is, as a passage from innocent ignorance to knowledge–a structure underpinning logocentric discursivity as the mechanism of tradition transmission (rites de passage).91 For that we are left with is the return of innocence.92

     
    The return of innocence should not be confused with the return to the monistic myth of pure origins. Paradoxically, (para)esthetics promotes this myth by conceiving of the aesthetic event as a relation between text and reader which becomes motivated by primordial indebtedness. On the other hand, Bakhtin’s theory corroborated by Jamesian textuality makes the bond between author and hero a purely arbitrary one and thereby for the first time provides an opening for the deployment of Saussurean linguistics without betraying its essence. But by the same token, we have a chance to solve the psychoanalytic quandary about super-ego and sublimation.

     
    The trouble with the concept of the super-ego is derivative of the fundamental psychoanalytic trouble with temporality. The basic structure of temporality with which psychoanalysis operates is that of Nachträglichkeit, of belated understanding. It is precisely these hermeneutical concerns which hinder a genuine psychoanalytic narratology.

     
    Paradoxically, the same Nachträglichkeit grounds both views on the emergence of the super-ego. According to Kleinians, the super-ego is already present at the pre-genital stage, whereas in the more conventional perspective it is the heir of the Oedipus complex. Appearances notwithstanding, both views are complimentary, representing an instance of the patently Lacanian signifying see-saw between too early and too late. For both theories converge at one fundamental point, i.e., both view the emergence of the super-ego as the result of introjection, that is, of the transformational movement from arbitrariness into motivatedness, the latter the precondition of interpretation. This explains why the relation between ego and super-ego is unanimously considered to one of indebtedness, guilt and fear of aphanisis. Put otherwise, the excess of vision is one-sided.

     
    From the poststructuralist standpoint, the semiotic correlate of the super-ego is the reader and the ego correlates with the author and/or the text. The result is the perpetuation of tradition, the inability to disentangle logocentric strictures.

     
    However, Bakhtinian theory and Jamesian textuality suggest that it is far more adequate to conceive of the aesthetic event as structured by the mutual dependence between author and hero. Psychoanalytically, this means that super-ego is equally and to the same extent dependent on the ego as the latter is on the former which boils down to saying that the relation between the two agencies is that between loved and beloved (cf. Schafer 1960). Semiotically, the relationship thus conceived is purely gratuitous and arbitrary, for the super-ego is the ego’s product, the result of the renouncement of the claims of the instincts of self-preservation,93 of the actively performed aphanisis qua sublimation leading to the emergence of sexuality. It is this sublimating process which structures James’s novel, making it the very locus of the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchal Oedipality.

     
    According to Freud, the weakness of the super-ego stemming from polymorphous identifications places women in a dependent position (1925: 29; 1933: 138). Therefore, we can conclude that the basic problem of feminism is the strengthening of the super-ego, which, as our exploration suggests, has by definition a feminine gender.

     
    Significantly, only on these premises can we hope to allot the notion of sublimation the place in psychoanalysis that it deserves, and thereby offer a theory of culture that escapes the notorious fancifulness of psychoanalytic accounts. The trouble with sublimation is that, so long as one conceives of it as a desexualization, it remains impossible to account for the existence of subversive art. In the conventional perspective sublimation is a synonym for conformism and compliance with received cultural norms. Sublimation becomes the very opposite of any genuine creativity, which is subversive by definition.94 However, certain psychoanalytic accounts of creativity suggest that it has nothing to do with repression of sexuality (cf. Lowenfeld 1941: 119-121) and that the self-preservative instincts, epistemophilia being the most prominent among them, interfere with creativity.95 Witness Freud’s study on Leonardo.96 In other words, if we are to continue to align sublimation with creativity, we must redefine the former as the process of sublimation of ego-instincts.97

     
    In its turn, this redefinition paves the way for a relationship between psychoanalysis and literature which will not lead to mutual reductivity. Textuality receives a firm psychoanalytic grounding in the ternary structure of psychic agencies. If the aesthetic event is an affair between author/super-ego and hero/ego, then its product–a text–is the Id itself.98 This explains why it can only be repressed, distorted, misread by the super-ego aligned by post-structuralism with the reader.

     
    Witness the poststructuralist repression of Jamesian textuality by an interpretive confinement within the framework of the ego’s fantasy of reversal of generations which James’s discourse on Maisie effectively subverts.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Put otherwise, it is not enough just to add the prefix “anti-.” Unfortunately, in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari theorists are quite content with this option.

     

    2. Cf. “…no absolute transcendence of the Oedipal is possible. It is no more possible to get rid of the omnipotent aspect of the Oedipal position than it is to get rid of the pre-Oedipal fantasy of omnipotence. (Or rather, it would only be possible in a world without loss, envy and difference–which would be a wholly omnipotent world.) Rather, the point is to subvert the concealed omnipotence by exposing it, as well as to recognize another realm of sexual freedom that reworks the Oedipal terms. To be sure, this realm depends upon the other face of omnipotence: the over-inclusive capacities to transcend reality by means of fantasy, which can be reintegrated in the sexual symbolic of the post-Oedipal phase” (Benjamin 1995: 119). It remains to be seen whether the equation of envy, loss and difference, on the one hand, and of fantasy, over-inclusiveness and sexuality, on the other, can be sustained. The testing of these equations is one of the aims of our present inquiry.

     

    3. I do not think that this is a simplification or a misreading. Speaking pre-Oedipally, there is only one combined parental figure (a notion which falls under the rubric of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis). Hence an attack on Kristeva for reinscribing gender stereotypes within the pre-Oedipal phase (cf. Cornell 1991: 69-71) is rather puzzling from the psychoanalytic standpoint. However, since this attack focuses on Kristevan phrasing, it corroborates our assumption about the conventional rhetoricity of postsructuralist strategies.

     

    4. Cf. J. Hillis Miller 1984; A. Ronell 1984, 1989; N. Rand 1988, 1989; E. Rashkin 1988, 1990; M. Sprengnether 1995, among other examples.

     

    5. Both views converge in a most paradoxical way, representing two ways to the same notorious impasse of applied psychoanalysis which constantly misses its target (text) hitting either too low or too high. “A perfect psychoanalysis of literature” (the one performed in Derrida’s view by Lacan) reduces the text by treating it as a symptom which itself is a failure (too low). On the other hand, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” undermines the very possibility of psychoanalytic explorations into the arts. Bloom deals only with “strong poets,” that is, with those who have successfully overcome the influence of predecessors. This obviously means that there are no traces (symptoms) of this influence in their texts (too high). It is precisely this paradox of Bloom’s intertextuality to which N. Abraham’s elaborations address themselves. Every text hides a “secret” (“truth”, “symptom”), but this secret cannot be located in any concrete text save that of the interpreter (a most lucid example of this strategy is Abraham’s “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act,” 1988). The interpreter comes to occupy the middle position assigned by Derrida to “pharmakon.” This means it is impossible to maintain that logocentrism undermines itself prior to any deconstructive intervention. Further it means that an act of interpretation boils down to the production of the “aesthetic object,” the production that, as we have shown elsewhere (Linetski 1995), in Bakhtinian theory is an activity of the reader as a fictitious other.

     

    6. I refer the reader to Lacan’s Eleventh Seminar where he invokes “aphanisis” only to make fun of it as a phantastical notion (cf. 1977: 207).

     

    7. Cf. “It is always difficult to imagine that one might be able to think of something in separation, within one’s interior space, without being surprised by the other…This puerile belief of mine, in part mine, can only stem from a foundation–sure, let’s call it unconscious….” (Derrida 1983: 212). The last sentence exposes the link between the two excerpts from Jones’s paper and in doing so exposes Lacan as a mediator between Jones’s and Derrida’s views on the unconscious, for it was up to Lacan to define the unconscious as “the presence of the analyst” (1988: 159). That is why already at this point we can precipitatingly hint at two conclusions of our analysis. The telepathic unconscious propounded by Derrida is profoundly similar to the logocentric one of Lacan because both guarantee the possibility of understanding and make the presence of the analyst/interpreter indispensable (one cannot help but wonder what the unconscious telepathic discourse “repeated in large letters to avoid all misunderstanding” has to do with the basic assumption of deconstruction concerning the primordial impossibility to deliver any “truth” whatsoever at its hermeneutic destination). This makes the unconscious an “aesthetic object” that, according to Bakhtin, is a product of interpretative activity of the reader as a fictitious other. Whence the Jones-Bakhtin connection, for the former also defines the operator as a dispensable figure. And this prompts us to equate the unconscious conceived along the poststructuralist (telepathic) lines with fetish qua Freudian ” (para)esthetic object” par excellence–a theme to be pursued elsewhere.

     

    8. As we shall see, the reference to Russian Formalism is a far cry from being simply a figure of speech. Derridian narratology, primarily thanks to the concept of “supplement,” has incurred a debt to Formalist theory–a debt which, given Derrida’s view of structuralism and its Russian precursor as adhering to the logocentric paradigm, no one is willing to notice, let alone to requite.

     

    9. “One may lay down the dictum that if the patient is not treated by psycho-analysis he will treat himself by means of suggestion, or–put more fully–he will see to it that he will get treated by means of suggestion, whatever other views the physician may have on the subject” (291).

     

    10. Cf. “Perhaps, incidentally, this is the reason why it is so difficult for the hypnotist to give effective suggestions that obviously conflict with the father-ideal, such as criminal and immoral suggestions” (287).

     

    11. Cf. “A general philosophical category is imposed, leading to a curiously asexual (and affectless) psychoanalysis” (Macey 1995: 81). Although Macey is speaking about Lacan and his commitment to Hegelian categories, the formula also applies well to psychoanalysis in general. The only point where a correction seems to be necessary is the linking of asexual and affectless. As our investigation will prove, psychoanalysis comes to be threatened with ultimate and unambiguous desexualization precisely in the wake of the poststructuralist foregrounding of various models grounded in affectivity, the telepathic model being the most illuminating example.

     

    12. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis not only boils down to this problem but, in the last resort, stands or falls with it. In effect, the theories of neuroses and psychoses alike hinge on the notion of sexual traumatic experiences of childhood. But the assumption of the sexual nature of these traumas presupposes that there is such a thing as infantile sexuality, the main evidence here being precisely the infantile sexual quest.

     

    13. The point of view advocated here allows for the first time to really merge structure and history–a task which remains unaccomplished despite all efforts undertaken in this respect from Saussure to Derrida. And this is because sublimation is not an arbitrary moment (a dominant psychoanalytic view) but a necessary and unavoidable stage predating repression/Oedipality. The quandary regarding sublimation is precisely the inability to conceive of it temporally. This leads to the structural misconception of this notion.

     

    14. That psychoanalysts and poststructuralists alike prefer to turn their eyes away from this logic is quite understandable, for to expose it means to undermine the famous notion of the mirror stage as a first step in acquiring an identity by an attempt to unify anarchical sexuality through the reference to the other. Ironically, to relinquish this notion means not only to part with the Lacanian version of dialogism but also with the very point d’appui of a postsructuralist attack on patriarchy which, as Brennan has made sufficiently clear, has to postulate the existence of a self-contained ego (cf. Brennan 1993: 12-25).

     

    15. See “The Ego and the Id” (1923).

     

    16. It seems that this is the only indisputable point in the psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego.

     

    17. Cf. Quite a random example: “With every identification, Freud points out, there is a desexualization and at the same time an instinctual diffusion. The libidinal cathexis no longer binds the destructive tendencies which now find expression in the severity and punitiveness of the superego. This diffusion is particularly evident in melancholia” (Sandler 1960: 134; italics mine).

     

    18. Witness his attempt to provide an intertextual symbolic framework for the Rat Man’s fantasy or for Dora’s imagery–an attempt that received a full elaboration in Shengold (1980) and Kanzer (1980). But the most notorious example of psychoanalytic thematicism is certainly “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908).

     

    19. It is not an accident that the obfuscation of infantile sexual theories is paralleled by the interest in primal fantasies, for the latter foreground the notion of repression problematized by the former.

     

    20. In point of fact, if the child’s concerns were defensive ones, he would have had all reasons to accept the explanation furnished by the parents, and this precisely because a stork or its substitute can be hindered (at least phantasmatically) from coming. The parents’ aim is not so much to deceive, but to console the child who–unexplainably–does not want to be consoled.

     

    21. “Perhaps we have not always noted sufficiently in our analyses that this is when children begin to divine that their father and mother can do something that they themselves cannot, namely, can produce children together” (Boehm 1931: 449). As we shall see, the apparent familiarity of this statement evaporates the moment we try to read it semiotically (i.e., to treat the parent’s “doing” as a performative). However, in our case the deployment of this patently poststructuralist mode of interpretation will immediately subvert the claims of its propagators.

     

    22. It is worthwhile to adumbrate one of the “remnants” of our analysis which proves its fruitfulness by highlighting the scope of reassessments to which it can give rise. From the point of view advocated here it is possible to resuscitate one of the most abused items from psychoanalytic archives, namely, Rank’s theory of the “trauma of birth” which turns out to be indispensable for tackling a number of contradictions that Freud’s rejection of Rank’s intuition has left us with. But, in order to make Rank’s notion an effective weapon, one has to view the traumatic birth as the birth of a sibling.

     

    23. Thus far only one author was candid enough to at least voice suspicions that perhaps dialogism may be a purely logocentric affair (cf. Calinescu 1991: 163). Needless to say, to pursue this train of thought requires more independence than the average theorist can muster.

     

    24. Obviously this begs the question of how we are to conceive the development of a child who is spared the society of siblings. The question is crucial since, on our own terms, the secondary sublimation is a necessary stage. Although an answer requires a large amount of original clinical work, we can assume that the situation in both cases is basically the same. A single child is prompted in his quest by comparison with his more (un)fortunate playmates. One can even go as far as to surmise that his quest will be all the more compelling since in addition he has to grapple with the puzzle why “there are too few…persons involved” (Fenichel 1931: 421).

     

    25. However idiosyncratic or paradoxical it may appear, this thesis is the only solution to the contradiction which haunts psychoanalytic theory in matters of infantile sexual curiosity. As we have already pointed out, the whole problem is central to Freud’s teaching. But the irony of the matter is precisely that within the Oedipal framework which is postulated as preexistent, the infantile sexual theories can be conceived of only as an arbitrary phenomena unable to influence child’s development in any significant way. In effect, if the incestuous wishes are primordial, if they preexist the traumatic situation we are investigating, it is impossible to understand what influence the arrival of sibling and the fantasies which it fosters can have upon them.

     

    26. In the wake of Foucault and Derrida, we happily take for granted that semiosis as such is grounded in repression. Against this background, the recent study by Kincaid (1992) is bound to appear more innovative than it actually is. Kincaid’s critique of Foucault and the questioning of the notion of repression deserves our full appreciation especially because it comes as an introduction to the study of the period (Victorian culture) which is conventionally regarded as a patent example of the workings of repression. Unfortunately, Kincaid’s introductory remarks lack consistency, being a far cry from a theory of writing without repression.

     

    27. This has corollaries, the notion of the primal scene being the most formidable among them. Paradoxically, within the libidinal framework we have to make an unpleasant choice between the notion of the primal scene–as a real event or as a fantasy, it matters little–and the concept of infantile sexual curiosity. According to Freud, the primal scene is already a result of sexual curiosity while at the same time it is said to awaken sexuality (Freud 1925: 24 et passim). On the other hand, sexual curiosity is an ultimate proof for the existence of infantile sexuality.

     

    28. Cf. Silverman (1988), Przybylowicz (1986), Rashkin (1990).

     

    29. As a reminder to the reader with an all too stark reality complex: the whole story is played on the fantasmatic/hallucinatory plane, the plane on which the (para)esthetic tele/emphatic discourse of poststructuralism deliberately operates.

     

    30. Especially if we grant pertinence to the poststructuralist assessment of logocentrism as a culture which places (absolute) knowledge above all other values.

     

    31. Thus far poststructuralism has not managed to get beyond these two–complementary–solutions in its attempt to account for the “ego’s era” in the history of human knowledge.

     

    32. Therefore Derrida’s critics, whose main target is the alleged a-historicity of deconstruction (cf. Lentricchia 1985: 105-106; Brennan 1993: 195) obviously miss the point. The paradox is that deconstruction’s inherent historicity is a purely self-deconstructive affair.

     

    33. Cf.: “In art, material must be alive and precious. And this is where there appeared the epithet, which does not introduce anything new into the word, but simply renews its dead figurativeness” (Shklovsky 1973, 43; italics added).

     

    34. The most lucid example is certainly Derrida’s La carte postale (1980). According to Derrida, the postcard depicting Plato behind Socrates corroborates his views on textuality/writing which by definition is incompatible with the notion of stable origins. Writing by virtue of the reversal it stages makes it impossible to grant hermeneutic supremacy to any particular structure: “…the oedipal trait is only a rection for the leading thread of the spool” (362), “only one figure among others” (Weber 1987: 106). This explains why the generational reversal has become a poststructuralist strategy par excellence: “Everything has to be read in reverse” (Derrida 1986: 74). Allegedly this is “a new attitude towards knowledge” directed “against the traditional model of research” and by the same token against the continuity of tradition grounded in the belief in “an irreversible heritage” (Ulmer 1985: 133, 136). However, an attempt to apply grammatology more or less coherently immediately exposes the real state of affairs. I refer to endeavours of Abraham, Torok and their imitators. The aim to be attained is the one mentioned above: to prove that the symptoms are more varied and complex, are not reducible to one common source (Oedipus/castration) but that they have multiple origins (cf. Rashkin 1988: 32-34). But the result is the substitution of one general structure for another: instead of Oedipus we have the genealogical reversal structure which comes to be regarded as an explanatory structure “par excellence” (Abraham/Torok 1978: 395). The irony is twofold. For one thing, the search for (textual) secrets which declares itself free from Oedipus/castration but nevertheless stresses its psychoanalytic character, by necessity boils down to equating psychoanalysis with the most general structure of scienticity which poststructuralism attempts to undermine by means akin to those of Abraham and Torok (this logic is especially lucid in Torok and Rand 1994). This means that precisely within the conventional psychoanalytic framework Oedipus/castration is only one figure among the others. However, this is not to say that we are dealing with another instance of the paradox of the Cretan liar sufficiently thematized by poststructuralism as the universal fate of discursivity. The gist of the matter is that the famous critique of Barbara Johnson (1977) is no critique at all, for Derrida is the first to admit that it is impossible to escape the Law(s) of the genre one sets out to deconstruct. But by the same token our analysis can lay claim to being the first sustained critique of the shortcomings of deconstruction, and this because only from our standpoint does it becom possible to show that deconstruction does not repeat the fallacies it has pointed out but tries to secure the mechanisms which tradition itself has failed to shield.

     

    35. “The ‘reversal’ fantasy then gratifies this by placing the child in the imagination in a position of power over the parent” (Jones 1950: 411). The same interpretation is reiterated by Brennan, who evokes the fantasy in her discussion of the “ego’s era” but significantly breaks off the discussion at the point where further investigation threatens to undermine the accepted views on patriarchal discourse (1993: 96-97).

    36. One goes even as far as to say that the notion of reversal is the Lacanian concept par excellence. It is the reversal which underpins the Imaginary as well as the Symbolic. Witness the famous scheme of the concave mirror (1977: 145; 1978: 132-134; 1988: 77-79) or the definition of transference illustrated by reference to “a famous song by Georgius Je suis fils-père (‘I am son-father‘)” (1977: 159), or, last but not least, the reversal underpinning the celebrated interpretation of the Freudian dictum “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (1988: 232).

     

    37. Although I see no point in multiplying evidence, it may be worthwhile to make an exception for a corroboration which comes from the Lacanian camp. Paradoxically, an attempt to develop Lacanian theory has led Laplanche to reformulate the problematic of castration in terms of a conflict between fathers and grandfathers (1980a: 226-227) which is precisely the conflict foregrounded by the reversal fantasy (to posit oneself as a father of one’s own father means to adopt the role of the grandfather).

     

    38. Hence Brennan’s account is in itself an example of discursive reversal: “In making the woman…the repository of his truth…the man is directing his urge to control and his belief in something beyond himself to the same object. He has no reference point for his ‘I’ that is distinct from his ego, in that he has no grounds for separating that to which he defers (the woman as truth) from that which he seeks to shape” (1993: 74). As we shall shortly see, some Bakhtinian intuitions applied to the textual reality offer an effective solution to this self-imposed poststructuralist quandary.

     

    39. Cf. “…the slower time becomes, the greater the ego’s need to speed things up, its anxiety, its splitting, its need for control, its ‘cutting-up’ in its urge to know…and its general aggression towards the other” (Brennan 1993: 181). According to Brennan, these are the consequences of the acting out of the foundational fantasy of patriarchy. As our analysis shows, the failure to identify the foundational fantasy leads not only to the misconception of patriarchy but to the theoretical acting out which reconfirms what it intends to subvert.

     

    40. Characteristically, Brennan speaks of the “energetic attention” as “the cornerstone of my theory of an intersubjective economy of energy” (110; italics added). However, this allegedly innovative theory is what patriarchal discursivity boils down to.

     

    41. Hence the controversy Derrida vs. Heidegger, deconstruction vs. hermeneutics which continues to trouble theorists (cf. Allison 1982; Hoy 1982; Behler 1991; Krell 1990) proves to be a tempest in a teapot.

     

    42. This is not to subscribe to the view expressed in an equally seminal paper by R. Gasché (1994) who thinks that Derrida and Derridians are simply and bluntly at odds. In my view, the appropriation of Derrida’s theory by literary critics is faithful enough. The real problem is not the one of misreading but of ignoring instances in Derrida’s work where the author is at odds with himself. These contradictions have nothing to do with de Manian dialectic of blindness and insight, being far closer to the Freudian conflict between conscious and unconscious strivings, save that in Derrida’s case the conflict seems to be a hysterical one, i.e., the conflict between two consiousnesses which, according to Freud, comes to the fore in hypnotic and similar paranormal states (cf. Freud 1885: 91). Needless to say, it is precisely these instances that can furnish the starting point of a real deconstruction.

     

    43. All the apparent “parergonal” confusion of tongues (polylogue) notwithstanding, Derridian polylogue cannot escape from this basic Bakhtinian rule: the speaking subjects remain distinct and do not merge (cf. 1987: 340-343, 358, 377).

     

    44. Witness Derrida’s style, his obsessive question “where?” followed by an immediate unequivocal reply: “there” (cf. among many examples 1987: 361, 366, 372). Which means that Derrida’s and Heidegger’s concerns are fundamentally the same. Cf.: “While the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the direction it takes is a sure one” (Heidegger 1962: 318; his italics). Place and direction establish an elementary communicative network. In respect to the latter the content of the”call” (Heidegger)/”missive”, “letter” (Derrida) is secondary, but by the same token it is only seemingly indefinite. Notably, Abraham and Torok’s paraesthetic cryptonymie operates precisely within this Heideggerian setting: “It is understandable that, in contrast to other cases, this type of work requires a genuine partnership between patient and analyst: all the more so since the construction arrived at in this way bears no direct relation to the patient’s own topography but concerns someone else’s” (Abraham and Torok 1978: 290).

     

    45. It is towards this model that most advanced versions of poststructuralism are oriented: “The standpoints of Kristeva and Laplanche are flawed in respect of…the outside as constitutive of desire itself. By contrast, I suggest that we must develop a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity which breaks with this inside/outside boundary” (Elliott 1995: 45). Derridian “parergonal logic” is another unavoidable point of reference especially since its fullest elaboration is to be found in the study of visual representations (Derrida 1987: 18-121).

     

    46. Interestingly, our interpretation is corroborated by Lacan himself who cannot help but acknowledge that sexuality proper “shows a natural functioning of signs. At this level, they are not signifiers, for the nervous pregnancy is a symptom, and, according to the definition of the sign, something intended for someone. The signifier, being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier” (157). This holds so long as “repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to the function of signifiers” (176) On the other hand, it is the Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian theory that should suffer repression; it follows that, on Lacan’s own premises, sexuality can be defined as precisely that which has nothing to do with repression. The repression therefore stems from the dynamic of the instincts of self-preservation, from the a-sexual search for knowledge. Characteristically, Lacan’s formulations just cited may be attributed to Torok and Abraham. But the paradox is that these authors cannot help ending with an implicit demise of the notion of repression, since the “secret” to be uncovered by means of cryptonymic reading is far more likely to be withhold consciously (cf. Abraham/Torok 1978: 236 et passim).

     

    47. Notably, only within this framework does the notion of repression become indispensable. The irony is that Derrida advances this profoundly logocentric model as the ‘beyond’ of logocentrism (1980: 287-290).

     

    48. The interest of Brennan’s explorations stem from the fact that they make particularly lucid the profound similarity between Derrida’s and Lacan’s models by exposing the ultimate–Jungian–point of their convergence.

     

    49. It should be stressed that far from being a perversion of Lacan’s teaching, Brennan’s energetics (which is another name for telepathy) faithfully follows in the steps of the Absolute Master. Whence her reference to a recent study by Boothby (1992), whose aims are those of a modest exegete (48).

     

    50. A number of Derridian concepts–hymen, blanc etc.–clearly have an inhibitory function.

     

    51. It is not a question of who actually issues the threat (Lacan has amply proved that the fact–already pointed out by Freud–that the threat more often than not comes from women has no bearing on the emerging structure), but precisely the question of structure.

     

    52. Hence the irony of Brennan’s appeal to “generational time” (1993: 189) which, within the energetical empha-telepathetic framework, is actually the time of the generational reversal.

     

    53. It may well be that Jones himself would have rejected this formula. However, the latter is the only feasible conclusion to be drawn from his elaborations and at the same time the only possibility way to to bring coherence into his rambling theorizing. In effect, Jones has done everything to obfuscate the subversive potential of his theoretical insight by trying to force his notion back into the narrow confines of the libidinal economy. However, within the framework of the libidinal economy, the notion of aphanisis is unsustainable. It is the privation of sexual gratification which provokes in the child the fear of the “extinction of sexuality” (450, 442), although, logically speaking, privation should lead to the accumulation of an undisposed libido. Fortunately, Jones’s break with logic is not thorough enough. Witness his remark that in order to ward off “the dread of aphanisis,” “the wishes that are not destined to be gratified” are damped down(442) or redirected. This is of course a conventionally libidinal view of sublimation which however implies that first of all libido should be accumulated.

     

    54. Cf. “…an undissolved transference, like an unpaid debt, can be transmitted beyond one generation. It can construct a tradition with this possibility in its entrails” (Derrida 1987: 353). The same concern, stated almost in the same words, underpins Abraham and Torok’s cryptoaesthetics (1978: 395-400).

     

    55. Obviously, this is a strictly materialist point of view. Interestingly enough, despite all Derrida’s theorization of time-giving postponements (cf.1984) which affect his style itself (thus far nobody has paid due attention to the fact that Derrida’s texts are punctuated by hymens like “Let’s take our time”, “no, no, or at least not so quickly” (1987: 281, 288).) In rare moments of candidness he cannot help admitting that there may emerge a (hermeneutic) impasse when “no one will have any more time” (1986: 117). Significantly, this impasse is somehow (for Derrida drops the intriguing thread) related to the construction of feminine identity.

     

    56. Derrida has made the fate of deconstruction directly dependent on the “unlimited textual propagation” (1980: 351-352).

     

    57. It may be argued that every closure is an arbitrary affair which therefore has no essential impact on the textual infiniteness (Cf. Lyotard 1988: 2).

     

    58. The full scope of this paradox becomes evident only when we evoke the defensive measure envisaged by Derrida, who certainly does not turn his eyes away from the shortcomings of his theory, to counteract the sort of critique just advanced. The failure to accomodate/account for the conditions of discursive possibility, says Derrida, is implied in the very definition of discursivity. Hence it would be a miracle if deconstruction has succeeded in exempting itself from this universal rule. And what is more deconstruction, according to Derrida, has never tried to do anything of the kind: one has to comply with the Law of the genre which one sets out to deconstruct. But the great irony is that in actual fact that deconstructive theory as well as practice runs counter to this basic rule of deconstruction, and this due to the central role assigned to the concept of the supplement. For the supplement is nothing else than a radical attempt precisely to account for all that which makes discourse (im)possible. To say nothing about the fact that due to the suspension of the inside/outside opposition the conditions of discursivity by necessity become invaginated. It follows that the supplement and repression as the exclusion of the unthought axiomatics are at odds. Put otherwise, Derrida’s own writing seems to escape from the predicament of all writing said to be inextricably bound with repression.

     

    59. The Freud-Bakhtin connection remains rather a murky question. The awkward Freudianism (1993b) seems to ward off any attempts to seriously broach the subject. Add to this the happy ignorance of Bakhtinians (and Slavists in general) in psychoanalytic as well as all other matters pertinent to the theoretical advancements of the last half century. With this in mind it is no wonder that the rare discussions of our problem remain either superficial (Byrd 1987) or address the question from a particularly unfruitful angle (Pirog 1987). The most recent effort to situate Bakhtin within the psychoanalytic context (Handley 1993) reiterates dialogical commonplaces and thereby effectively forecloses the possibility to divulge the most promising intuitions of Bakhtin and Freud alike.

     

    60. The volume Lacan and Narration (1985) remains representative for the current impasse of psychoanalytic narratology which is hardly avoidable so long as the narratologists continue to use the notions of repression, transference and the opposition of manifest/latent content. Up till now no one’s imagination has reached beyond this framework.

     

    61. To this task we address ourselves in a paper “The Sublime Innocence” (forthcoming).

     

    62. Despite all the assurances of Deleuze and Guattari to the contrary, repression as well as Oedipus structure their economy of desire. Witness the machines of desire which by definition are destined to perpetual malfunctioning (1972: 332-365). However, malfunctioning is precisely the principle of interpsychic economy as exemplified by a symptom (which is always a failure) unconceivable without the notion of repression.

     

    63. Recently, this exclusion has attracted attention of a number of authors (cf. States 1993). Unfortunately, they fail to propose anything worthwhile, confining themselves to a critique (actually a dismissal) of deconstruction, whereas, as we shall see, the consideration of this problematic can help deconstruction to the butterfly’s second life as opposed to the miserable caterpillar of contemporary deconstruction.

     

    64. This is precisely what happens in the most advanced–Derridian–version of poststructuralism. At the outset we have the familiar reversal: now it is the reader (receiver) who guarantees the text. However, this role presupposes “the death of the author”, or, in Derridian terms, the dissemination of the author’s name (cf. Derrida 1984). The paradox is twofold, for sometimes, notably in respect to Freud, Derrida is quite close to unambiguously stating that the reader in question is in fact the author himself (cf. 1977: 121, 136). This, in Derrida’s own terms, can only mean that there is no reader. On the other hand, if there should be a reader, his/her task boils down to collecting the scattered fragments of the author’s name. The result would be the revelation of the meaning in its most patent form: that of the proper name. This is of course quite a logocentric enterprise. However, it is precisely this enterprise which currently has come to be known as cryptonymie. Derrida’s admiration for Torok and Abraham’s stance can speak for itself.

     

    65. One example is what Sandler with unusual candidness calls the “‘conceptual dissolution’ of the superego” (1960: 130).

     

    66. Recently this work has attracted the attention of feminist theorists: “Bakhtin’s earliest work is potentially the most radical and relevant for feminists” (Pollock 1993: 238; italics mine). However, thus far nobody has attempted to profit from this potential. The reason is that the reappraisal is conceived along the familiar lines of telepathic/empathic dialogical (para)esthetics which is too narrow for Bakhtin’s thought: “…aesthetic activity is essential for understanding the social nature of individual consciousness. True aesthetic activity–and I think that for Bakhtin aesthetic activity is any shared, disinterested semiotic activity–consists of a double motion of empathy and ‘finding oneself outside’–which Bakhtin calls ‘vnenakhodimost’” (238; italics added). An attempt to transform Bakhtin’s aesthetics into poststructuralist (para)esthetics can lead only to a misunderstanding of the notion of exotopy (vnenakhodimost) central to Bakhtin’s thought. However, this misunderstanding has become a commonplace, if not a dogma, in Baktinian studies (cf. Morson and Emerson 1990).

     

    67. A striking fact which, nevertheless, remains unnoticed is that the theories of literary history propounded in this century boil down to the reversal model. There is a reversal between the Formalist notion of “indirect descendence” (a generational reversal of sorts) and the latest model of Harold Bloom which represents a double reversal starting as it does with the reversal of Formalist views in order to endorse the reversal on the rhetorical level. This means that the celebrated “double bind” turns out to be nothing else than the double reversal in respect to the structuralist predecessors, with a purely Hegelian result.

     

    68.”This other person–‘a stranger, a man you’ll never know’–fulfils his functions in dialogue outside the plot…. As a consequence of such a positioning of ‘the other’, communion assumes a special character and becomes independent of all real-life, concrete social forms (the forms of family, social or economic class, life’s stories)” (1979a: 264; italics mine). An astute reader need not be prompted to recognize in this kind of dialogism only a conventional phrasing, a more than transparent disguise of a beyond of monologue/dialogue dyad.

     

    69. This equation of family and language is another Derridian appropriation from Hegel (Derrida 1986: 7-9), and, as our analysis suggests, not at all deconstructively.

     

    70. A common demarche which, logically enough, cannot help but end with more than modest results. Cf. Behler 1991.

    71. “Family” is the Heideggerian blind spot par excellence: the reference to it is completely missing from his oeuvre, which is all the more puzzling given his focus on “everydayness,” “care,” etc.

     

    72. In order for the capitalist economy to function accounts cannot be settled. Crediting is a perfect economic counterpart of the semiotical act of time-giving, without which there would not be any capitalism to speak of. Whence the fundamental law of capitalism: “the poor become poorer, the rich–richer.” It is worthwhile to note that, according to Marx, the crisis of capitalist economy stems from an oxymoron (over-production leads to impoverishment)–and therefore corresponds neatly to the crisis of the libidinal economy of (intertextual) (para)esthetic signification for which Jones’s notion of aphanisis provides an ample description. It remains to add that for quite understandable reasons that neither Lyotard (1993) nor Derrida (1991; 1994) have anything to say about these obvious interconnections despite their interest in the semiotic extension of the problematic of crediting.

     

    73. An astute reader has already recognized here the outcome of the interplay between two master tropes of deconstruction discussed above.

     

    74. The notion of dissemination is in itself a sufficient proof for Derrida’s entrapment in traditional biologism, or, to be more precise, for the deconstructive reinforcement of this biologism. For, as we have amply ascertained for ourselves, it is the disseminating fragmentation of sexuality (as a result of the secondary sublimation) which foregrounds the questions (of knowledge, truth etc.) essential to logocentrism. This explains sufficiently why Derrida’s attempts to introduce the problematic of gender into his discourse (cf. especially 1985: 52-53) cannot help appearing as a concession to the prevailing trend.

     

    75. This is a major obstacle for the feminist theorists interested in Bakhtin (cf. O’Connor 1993: 247-248). Fortunately to remove the obstacle it suffices to read Bakhtin more closely and independently, that is, to approach him not as an avatar of dialogism.

     

    76. Although at the moment of writing the essay Bakhtin has not read Heidegger, the description of hero’s condition before the author’s intervention is a perfect echo of Heidegger’s description of Dasein in its throwness (1962: 219-225). Despite the fact that the Bakhtin-Heidegger connection is anything bu a neglected subject (in fact Heidegger is the thinker most frequently evoked in connection with Bakhtin), its real nature remains undivulged owing to the dialogical commitments of investigators as well as to their stance (shared by Bakhtinians with Slavists in general) to see in theorizing a bogey.

     

    77. Thus far no one has bothered to pay attention to it, let alone to ponder over its implications.

     

    78. Cf.: “The male dread of being castrated may or may not have a precise female counterpart, but what is more important is to realize that this dread is only a special case and that both sexes ultimately dread exactly the same thing, aphanisis. The mechanism whereby this is supposed to be brought about shows important differences in the two sexes” (440; italics added).

     

    79. It is impossible to speak of repression without evaluating positively knowledge as such. Which means that grammatology grounded in the notion of repression is not a “science that functions as the deconstruction of science,” as its fans would like it to be (Ulmer 1985: 12).

     

    80. This anti-aesthetic, to wit, (para)esthetic stance is one of the most striking characteristics of poststructuralism. Cf.Przybylowicz 1986: 2, 13-14; Norris 1988: xii, 86.

    81. Hence her need to be reassured that she actually brings people together (67).

     

    82. Cf. James 1966: 51, 65, 180, 200, 209.

     

    83. This point is readily acknowledged exactly by those Bakhtinians who bother to take account of what goes on by way of theory around them (cf.Hirschkop 1989: 24-25). However, far from questioning the concept of dialogism as such, they assume that the dialogicity of the reader’s response is unproblematical.

     

    84. “…our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies” (6).

     

    85. For the discursive revitalization presupposes that the hero(ine) is put to use by the author in just the same manner as Maisie was at first used by her parents to indirectly communicate in quite a poststructuralist way.

     

    86. So long as postsructuralism chooses to see in Jamesian textuality an instance of logocentrism, the poststructuralist claims exemplified by Derrida’s account of the letter’s itinerary in Poe’s tale have been always already deployed by tradition.

     

    87. This rectifies the general view of intertextuality. The primordial debt is not the debt to the predecessor(s) but to the reader. The first being a meaningful, the second a communicative one. The theories of intertextuality obviously privilege the first (the reader-response criticism is exactly the criticism and therefore can allow itself the franchise of ignoring theoretical issues) but in doing so unwittingly undermine the very foundations of intertextuality. For this stance amounts to a mute acknowledgement that virtually any author rejects his debts to the reader, whereas only these latter make reading possible.

     

    88. The less prejudiced the reader, the more likely he/she is to avow this deficiency.

     

    89. Cf. 67, 92, 132, 144, 152-153, 172, 214.

     

    90. It is by no chance that precisely in the case of James, poststructuralism is compelled to make an exception from its basic postulate not to trust the textual surface.

     

    91. Alternatively, we can rethink the genre of Bildungsroman beyond logocentric metanarratives which, as we have seen, are dialogical in essence.

     

    92. Certainly we are not the first to recognize in innocence the very core of Jamesian textuality. Unfortunately, far from elucidating matters, the book-length treatment of James’s thematization of innocence (G.H. Jones 1975) has rather obscured them. This is not so much due to the fact that the study in question is a pure instance of thematical criticism. Despite the structuralist and the postsructuralist denigration of the latter, I would rather subscribe to Jones’s view that the thematical description is in the last analysis also a structural one (285, 287). But the gist of the matter is that Jones strikingly fails to establish the continuity between theme and structure. This means that the real trouble is primarily that of misreading in its most trivial sense. And it is this misreading which is responsible for the ultimate convergence between the poststructuralist treatment of James and the one advocated by Jones who is bent upon preserving his theoretical innocence (the fashionable references are totally absent from his study). Instead of examining the Jamesian meaning, Jones is satisfied with the traditional view of innocence as essentially a process of loosing it (287). This view makes of innocence a mechanism of tradition transmission (144, 149). Jones’s study is a particularly telling example of all the paradoxes to which an attempt to accommodate innocence within the framework of Western logocentrism gives rise. The first to emerge is the narratological impasse. Put bluntly, Jones fails to show that innocence is “the premise from which evolves the conflict in a novel or tale” (285). And it cannot be otherwise so long as innocence is conceived of in a traditional way as “abundant time, timeless time” (286), or, in Derridian terms, as an act of time-giving. Whence the recourse to generational/genealogical model. The dialectic of innocence (innocence–a thesis, responsibility–an antithesis, renunciation–a synthesis) which is said to represent Jamesian master plot suffers a diffusion with the result that each term comes to be represented by a group of texts. That this implies a certain reversal of chronology is obvious, for the dialectic is a development of concept and not of an individual. In other words, instead of dialectic of innocence we have a Hegelian dialectic of desire which, as Lacan is the first to remind us, is essentially a negativity (1988: 147). What comes to be renounced is the desire. This renouncement promotes the tradition (277). This means that the mechanism at work is that of repression. Jones’s description of innocence is strikingly similar to the poststructuralist (Lacanian) description of desire: “Innocence itself…is absence or vacancy; it is limitation; it is negation” (285). And once again the distortion of textual reality is particularly obvious in case of the novel we are discussing. Witness Jones’s summary: “Maisie has lost her innocence because of all that she knows” (10). The recovery of innocence in which Jones is interested is to be sought in other texts. However, it is not be found, for the renunciation (and Jones is quite astute to recognize in it the gist of the problem) affects desire and not knowledge. Put otherwise, thematical criticism cannot help relinquishing thematicism in favor of theoretical model which tallies perfectly with the poststructuralist one. However, this reversal, in its turn, comes to be reversed. The paradoxical result is the resurrection of the buried author. The cue for Jones study provides “a letter in which Henry’s older brother William describes him in middle age as ‘dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Henry’. What, I wondered, does innocent mean if it applies equally to a writer…and to the characters he conceived as well?” (ix). But in the course of his study Jones has nothing to say about the innocence of the author’s discourse. Jones attempts to remedy this deficiency in a brief section (288-295) appended at the very end of the study in which James’s own innocence is treated in purely biographical terms. This uncanny return of the referent is paralleled by the same outcome in the poststructuralist discourse on the uncanny/sublime. To sum up: it is precisely the innocence that, despite the apparent foregrounding of the purity of origins, subverts the tradition said to privilege these origins. For it is tradition and its postsructuralist Indian summer and not Jamesian textuality which is “haunted by innocence” (ix). However, to account for this subversion as a discursive event played out between the author and the hero(ine) one has to adopt our perspective.

     

    93. Paradoxically, only by acquiescing to this interpretation can one maintain the view of the super-ego as “a pure culture of the death-instict” (Freud 1923: 283), which, as we have seen, is unsustainable from the libidinal standpoint which by necessity implies the reversal between the ego and the super-ego as regards the function of accumulation of libido.

     

    94. Witness the interpretation of What Maisie Knew advanced by Przybylowicz who treats Maisie’s development as an instance of conformism (27). The textual misreading stems from the psychoanalytic, from treatment of sublimation as synonymous with repression (19). The paradox of this kind of exegesis is that it cannot help but end with the reversal of the subjects of repression. Now it is not the author who represses his/her unconscious knowledge but the hero(ine). However, even the most cursory reader is bound to admit that the latter assumption is strikingly at odds with Jamesian textuality. Cf. for instance: “What helped Maisie was that she exactly knew what she wanted” (263).

     

    95. Significantly, despite all his attacks on the “ascetic ideal” equated with sublimation and the “will to truth” (1989: 143-146, 160) as the very core of Western tradition, Nietzsche seems to be the first to discern the subversive potential of sublimation. Witness his opposition between ascetic castration and genuine Vergeistlichung–the real enemy of tradition (88). Derrida mentions tis opposition but only to quickly drop the theme which threatens his paraesthetic stance (1979: 91-93). The value of our theory of sublimation is that it allows us to account for narrative structures without privileging the avant-garde ones. Precisely this privileging and the concomitant inability to deal with traditional narratives is what all attempts to crudely equate sexuality and textuality are bound to wound with (cf. Lingis 1983: 101 et passim). That poststructuralist theory takes its cue from avant-garde textual practice is another point in favor of our standpoint. For, far from being a subversion of Oedipal patriarchy, the avant-garde thrust to always be ahead of its time corresponds neatly to the assumption implied in the reversal fantasy, i.e., the assumption that the male child is older, ahead, of the woman–the foundational premise of patriarchy. It follows that the traditional narrative is the real touchstone for the validity of theory.

     

    96. Cf. Freud 1910: 193. It can be said that the very thrust of Freud’s study is to show how epistemophilia equated with the father figure impairs art. Interestingly, Laplanche picks up Freud’s discussion to ultimately dismiss the notion of sublimation from psychoanalytic vocabulary (1980b: 119, 191). A telling example of epistemophilia promoted under the nickname of postmodernist paraesthetics.

     

    97. This redefinition emerges as the only feasible solution to the paradox that Freud’s musings on “the future of an illusion” have left us. On the one hand, Freud admits that “every individual is virtually an enemy of culture,” which remains puzzling so long as the attainment of the cultural ideal is said to provide a narcissistic satisfaction (1927: 345).

     

    98. I propose this definition in contradistinction to the paraesthetic theory of “the unconscious of the text” (cf.Bellemin-Noèl 1979; Davis 1985; Schleifer 1985) which by necessity equates textuality proper with the ego.

     

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    • —. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.
    • Sandler, Joseph. “On the Concept of the Superego.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 15 (1960): 128-162.
    • Schafer, Roy. “The Loving and Beloved Superego in Freud’s Structural Theory.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 15 (1960): 163-188.
    • Schleifer, Ronald. “The Space and Dialogue of Desire: Lacan, Greimas, and Narrative Temporality.” Davis, 871-891.
    • —. Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
    • Shamdasani, Sonu, and Münchow, Michael, Eds. Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
    • Shengold, Leonard. “More on Rats and Rat People.” Glenn and Kanzer, 180-203.
    • Shepherd, David, Ed. Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.
    • Shklovsky, Victor. “The Resurrection of the Word.” Russian Formalism, 1914. Eds. S. Bann and J. Bowlt. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973.
    • Silverman, Kaja. “Too Early/Too Late: Subjectivity and the Primal Scene in Henry James.” Novel Win/Spr. 1988: 147-173.
    • Spacks, Patricia M. Gossip. New York: Knopf, 1985.
    • Spanos, William V. “Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle: Towards a Postmodern Theory of Interpretation as Dis-closure.” Boundary 2 4.1 (1976): 455-488.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Psychoanalysis in Left Field and Fieldworking: Examples to Fit the Title.” Shamdasani and Münchow, 41-77.
    • Sprengnether, Madelon. “Enforcing Oedipus: Freud and Dora.” Bernheimer and Kahane, 254-277.
    • —. “Mourning Freud.” Elliott and Frosh, 142-166.
    • States, Bert O. “The Mirror and the Labyrinth.” Style 27.3 (1993): 452-471.
    • Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965.
    • Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
    • Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • Wulff, Michael. “Fetishism and Object Choice in Early Childhood.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15 (1946): 450-471.

     

  • Saving Philosophy in Cultural Studies: The Case of Mother Wit

    Angelika Rauch

    Hobart and William Smith Colleges
    amr18@cornell.edu

     

    In an attempt to ground the metaphysical nature of humans in form, Immanuel Kant pursues the possibility of a framed image without content. He calls this postulated state or mental product “purposiveness of representation.” What he means by this is that when you are faced with the beautiful what happens in your mind is the process of forming an image with the crucial exception that this image never achieves completion, you can never quite grasp in a conscious, representional image what the beautiful is. It is in a way like the story of Sisyphus, who rolls his rock up the mountain only to have it roll back downhill just as he reaches the summit–and so on, over and over again. This kind of repeated, and uncompleted, effort is the same activity as the mind games of imagination. The power of imagination is responsible for creating the image of the beautiful, and it has to start forever afresh in its attempt to build a new image whenever the previous is aborted just before it reaches closure–or, as Kant says “form” or “schema.” Full form would turn a complex and fragmented image or figure into a conscious representation of a concept. But this is precisely what does not happen in the aesthetic experience. (Kant asserts in the third Critique that imagination, when in reflexive play, “schematizes without concepts.”) What happens instead, is the production of vague images which, in my interpretation of Kant as the first postmodern thinker, I will call intuitions rather than images.

     

    Kant’s postmodern status pertains to the difference between representative image and figure that figures according to internal, unconscious laws. It is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words “not a world nor the world that takes on figure, but the figure that makes world.”1 Nancy compares this indeterminate figure to dream of a Narcissus who does not know the surface he is looking at, who is oblivious to the matter and composition of the sign he interprets. It was the merit of Kant to associate affect with the judgment of the beautiful. The aesthetic sign that elicits a feeling of pleasure, in this case also a libidinal affect, is first of all a presentation. And as Nancy elaborates, nothing plays itself out but the play of presentation in the absence of a concrete, represented object. The imagination is only encouraged to fill in the void of the object and, as I will show in the following, to associate memories from the subject’s unconscious history. These memories, as they are fleetingly touched by the play of imagination, are not subject to the general logic of representation; they do not have to appear as a reconstructed image of a concrete experience as if to be communicated to another person. Rather, they contribute to the primarily affective state of the present aesthetic experience where concepts and logic are banned. It is here that psychoanalysis has completed Kant’s struggle with imagination as a non-representative power of thinking and with the status of feeling as judgment. Since in my argument feelings are memories and therefore insert history into the process of thinking, Kant’s apparent formalism can be ammeliorated by his unacknowledged contingency on history and experience when it comes to the matter of imagination, or, as Kant himself suggests, to “mother wit” in the question of taste.

     

    Kant’s treatise on the aesthetic judgment tries to reformulate the question of the beautiful as a question of formality: How can beautiful form be reflected or be constituted in the mind so that its subjective judgment can find universal consensus? Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment gradually funnels into an analysis of the “power of imagination”(Einbildungskraft) rather than imagination as sensuous representation, as concrete image content: How can imagination produce form if it does not work with concepts? It does not come as a surprise that Kant needs to abandon an empirical, body-bound concept of imagination for a so-called “transcendental” power of imagination that will not be contaminated by a sensuality through which the body would enter into representation. The putative power of this transcendental imagination produces pure intuitions, representations of mere possibilities of experience. The question is whether the idea of transcendence can indeed dislodge human cognitive faculties from physical contingencies, and hence from one’s body and sensations as they are also influenced by cultural objects.

     

    Insofar as transcendental imagination is contingent on the subject’s existence, the implications of transcendentality for subjectivity would indeed be an affective determination of cognition. Here Kant’s change in definition of the transcendental power of imagination from “a function of the soul” (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) to “a function of understanding” (in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) is crucial for an investigation into the meaning of transcendence in metaphysical speculation about human nature. Today we would say, the distinction between soul and reason is important when we investigate the process of meaning formation in psychological terms. In other words, it is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes. In the discourse of the 18th century, the authority of the soul attributed to imagination a separate and autonomous faculty of imagination. In the case of imagination being a function of understanding, it loses its creative and unconsciously fueled status; in this latter definition, imagination can indeed not transcend the control of understanding. Kant’s notion of transcendental imagination is therefore a purely formalist concept, one that must repress the body in judging aesthetic experiences and aesthetized and pleasurable cultural objects.

     

    Kant’s (insurmountable) task in the Critique of Judgement is to rationally combine a definition of taste with a concept of form that is not cognitive. It is his precise definition of the judgment of taste, for example “this rose is beautiful,” that it is not a cognitive statement, and a cognition of the beautiful and the work of art is not achieved. Why? Because the judgement of taste is based on a feeling, he says, the feeling of pleasure, and I would like to warn my reader, Kant is anything but a hedonist: this feeling of pleasure is one of “disinterested pleasure.” (Kant was clearly not a sensuous man; one only needs to read his biography). The funny thing about this subjective feeling of disinterested pleasure is that it is, as he claims, “attributed to everyone,” anyone can or could feel this “disinterested pleasure” in the realm of the beautiful. I will get back to this paradox later. Right now, I am concerned with Kant’s formalism in the aesthetic judgment of taste which is not supposed be cognitive. For, if the judgment of taste does not cognize anything, then the form of mental representations must be a non-cognitive form. This means, that the form of representation in the case of the beautiful cannot be issued by the faculty of reason because it would then have to be an “idea,” that is a completed and framed and cookie-cut representation. Instead, it must be a form that is an “intuition” of pure formality, or merely the experience of transcendence as a mental state. Since the judgment of taste pertains to the feeling of pleasure, the problem naturally lies with the objectification of this feeling in representation.

     

    Transcendence and feeling are the two states that need to be represented to the mind. So, how then do you represent a feeling to the mind? Feelings are first of all body-bound. Kant is forever in a bind when he needs to make his move from the sensuous to the conceptual realm, from matter to form. His way out is to simply focus not so much on the form as on the process of forming a representation itself. This mental preoccupation with the process of form, of forming as such, ties up imagination and diverts its attention away from the body, from the sensuous realm, and from physical pleasure, and, as I will argue, away from the unconscious memory of the body of the mother. For it is the maternal body that supplies the infant subject with its first experience of wholeness, of absolute pleasure, and therefore of a libidinal subjectivity.

     

    This formal/material impasse in the process of representing the beautiful reveals philosophy’s ambivalence towards imagination as a sensuous and intellectual faculty. The point of mediation between the sensuous and the intellectual would be affect, or rather a presumed affective character of imagination. This impasse proves that thinking the “imaginative” state, what Kant calls the purposiveness of representation, is impossible, precisely because it serves no purpose in the psychical economy of affective cathexis and emotional investment. Although an essential part of creative imagination is the capacity of wit, wit has to be excluded from the philosophical paradigm of cognition. Kant actually mentions the subcategory of mother wit (Mutterwitz) to stress that wit cannot be acquired or learned, but that it has to be inherited, presumably from the mother. And only what can be learned can also be cognized. Mother wit however belongs to the category of intuition, of a non-representational imagination that is linked to the body and to affect. Here one goes purely on intuition, and on feeling, as our still current turn of phrase suggests. But this exclusion, on Kant’s part, of the intuitive knowledge of wit and mother wit means coming to terms with neither the phenomenon nor with the feeling of creativity. Kant cannot come to terms with creativity because the implicitly acknowledged source of creativity in intuitive wit is the nurturing body of the mother; and this body has to be explicitly suppressed for the sake of glorifying the enlightened individual, whose undividable status is warranted by reason alone. (For, what makes us a common species and legitimates the right of equality is the fact that we all have in common the power of reason and rational thought.) By inhibiting the desire for merging with an other, the unconscious mother, the obscure feeling of a dependency and the experience of imperfection which accompanies the separated and individuated self is also eliminated. The inevitability of this desire for an other manifests itself only negatively, in an attempt to split off the affective nature from the cognitive self as a way of denying one’s dependence on something prior to consciousness. Once the foundational (m)other is killed off in the self, the possibility for relating to a social other on existential grounds diminishes. Kant’s reference to the “natural talent” of Mutterwitz serves him well if he wants to reflect the psychological structure of a mimesis in which the imaginary body of the mother not only produces a concrete sense of relation but also the intuition of the mere possibility of a sensical relationship between radically different things. Kant explains the capacity of mother wit as one that lets us compare unrelated and apparently different things; mother wit creates in the mind a new context for separate, cultural objects which then take on a different meaning. This facilitating, creative, and utterly subjective mental capacity in mimesis seems to resist further abstraction and must legitimate itself indeed as a natural talent; otherwise, imagination needs to rely on the fictional canon as providing necessary examples for grasping human nature through symbolized representations in language.

     

    With respect to affect as the material base of experience, Kant’s critical move must aim at abandoning, if not repressing, affect altogether if he wants to define imagination as the formal power capable of detaching itself from the body. Such isolation of imagination from the body and from sensuous experience shifts the power of imagination towards the faculties of understanding and reason. Yet, bodily experience, namely sensation and affect, is what supports imagination and makes it an effective power for self-experience. Experience supplies the material for an imaginative translation into meaning. And it is this translation that represents the central issue in aesthetic judgment. For, what follows the feeling of pleasure, which supports aesthetic judgments, is a reflection on the mind’s relationship with feeling. Such reflection should, according to Kant, result in a “feeling of being alive,” a Lebensgefühl. Through feelings, the body has an impact on self-consciousness. It mediates between self and environment. One might be prompted to wonder “what might have determined the self” until this moment of self-awareness purely determined by feeling. An answer to this question would suggest that the subject does not decide the meaning of past experiences until they actually coalesce in a name for the feeling involved. (Hence, psycho-therapists always want to label the “feelings” that disturb you.) Without previous experiences, preserved in unconscious fantasies about the mother/other, the present experience could not motivate the subject’s imagination to produce an intuition. Past experience is needed for the creative power of imagination to draw on. Without recourse to history and an awareness of the past, the very concept of experience loses its cognitive validity. And now I should state my thesis: experience only has significance because of its genealogical and erotic structure.

     

    If the judgment of taste does not rest on experience and history, as it surely cannot when it is regarded as the result of an abstraction from feeling and body, then it represents little more than a conceptual construct of an intellectual feeling and a heuristic device for mediating imagination and understanding. Kant’s understanding of (aesthetic) experience results from a separation of mind and body. His reasoning is caught in opposing the categories of materiality to those of formality. He is therefore unable to link these categories plausibly without the insight into a third “category,” the category of an unconscious translation, or what Walter Benjamin calls “correspondence” (which Benjamin extracts from the poetry of the French poet Baudelaire “Correspondences”). This third category of mediation, the correspondence, calls attention to itself only in the case of aesthetic judgment; for in the aesthetic judgment, the faculties are not preoccupied with cognizing the (beautiful) object. What is cognized can perhaps be summarized as the impact of the past upon the present, or even as history as a condition for consciousness.

     

    If reflection on feeling were to bring about a cognitive judgment, an understanding, then it would have to evoke a lived past for an assessment of the present experience. A hermeneutical process of the mind would thus indeed bring about an understanding of the self as a historically constituted being. Kant, seemingly handicapped in this case by an epistemology of universal reason, cannot allow such subjective, and necessarily historical, understanding of the status of cognition. His aesthetic philosophy, however, manifests an attempt at combining the subjective category of experience with the universal truth of beauty. He follows through in this attempt by analyzing the function of various cognitive faculties generally involved in experience. This maneuver, necessary for postulating the universality of the judgment of taste, exposes Kant’s ongoing struggle with the concept of knowledge, as he is unable to theoretically separate knowledge from cognition. His bias towards an objective, universalizable knowledge, a knowledge that results from a priori logical categories of consciousness, prevents him from recognizing a hermeneutic process of cognition. When he associates materiality with sensation, which is variably subjective, he means by “reflection” only the formal, mental movement that is at stake when a phenomenon is apprehended into a representation, a formally closed, sensuous, and stable image. The mental process in reflective judgment leads to an accord of the faculties, which Kant stresses to be the same psychological result in everyone. It is here that Kant’s moral underpinning of the aesthetic judgment shows through. Since the mind’s interest does not lie with the object but with the subject’s feelings, Kant can come up with the idea of a “disinterested pleasure” of the beautiful.

     

    Since for Kant, reflection only implies an apprehension according to form, the question remains: what is the form of a feeling? Feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. These images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain. In the case of the beautiful, it is not the mental representation of a rose that is pleasurable but the images remembered along with the subject’s affection by the rose.

     

    A temporal differentiation of affect and feeling suggests that there are actually two pleasures at stake, the pleasure of the original which creates the affect, and the pleasure that results from many fleeting images associated with that pleasurable feeling. This pleasure of a pleasure relies on the (formal) power of imagination to continuously create and dissolve images for the purpose of keeping pleasurable feeling alive. No one image can do justice to the beautiful experience. The fuel for this ongoing process of imaging is supplied by the memory of pleasure to which, equally, no one (framed) representation does justice–why? because the memory is preserved in the material of feeling, not in a memorable image or, as Benjamin would say, a “souvenir.” If Kant has problems with the evaluation of feeling and affect as concerns their part in knowledge, he is all the more aware of the seminal role imagination plays in the mental process leading to cognition: “Every reference of representations [to imagination], even those of sensations, can be objective…but not the reference of [the representation of] the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, whereby nothing is signified in the object, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.”2 Crucial for the judgment of taste is the subject’s (meta)affection by a representation of his being affected with pleasure. Being affected by representation means being affected by one’s imagination which brings about the feeling of being alive (Lebensgefühl ). This feeling, in turn, calls for another representation. But the feeling of being alive exceeds representation; thus, feeling occupies a heterodoxical status in knowledge. The discrepancy between feeling and representation impels the production of art whence intuitions derive their visual material. The visibilities rendered by art affect the subject anew each time.

     

    The significance of (Kant’s mention of) “mother wit” may be greater yet if we cite the psychoanalytic feminist vantage in the physical premises of knowledge and desire.3 A feeling of pleasure that stems from a primary experience with an other, i.e. the mother-child union, will unconsciously preserve the memory of this (m)other as a condition for feeling good. The relation between the child and the mother (read: the concrete object of pleasure) becomes a memory by which the developing subject recognizes a similar relationship to an object of pleasure in the future. Whereas the mother at this later point has become a fantasy of the object at hand, the feeling between self and other has remained the same; hence, the feeling could guide the subject’s conscious imagination to a creative interpretation or assessment of any object at hand. This kind of pleasurable connection and unhampered transference of the mother’s body onto the object to be cognized could engender the capability of mother wit. Through such transference the object becomes a “transitional object”4 as a means of coping with desire and the experiental difference between real and ideal. Such libidinal coping via transitional objects materializes the passage of time–until the nurturant (m)other returns to the abandoned child–into subjective history.

     

    A “witty” interpretation of an object always works on the object’s form, a form that receives its impetus from some previous representation that supplies the interpreter with an intuition. For Kant, “mother wit” suggests the natural gift of forming an imaginary connection between concrete experience and abstract knowledge. We might conclude that the capacity for wit in general develops through the use of mother wit, the correlation between feeling and intuition in aesthetic representation or judgment. Mutterwitz seems to comprise the creative, or flexible, part of imagination which in the process of judgment transforms the past and arrives at a cognizable intuition of the present.

     

    This natural ability to judge with mother wit does not need recourse to a conceptual frame in order to effect an understanding. We might say, Kant unconsciously utilizes a concept of the subject whose self-containment is not guaranteed from the start. Yet, if the subject were merely constituted by a priori mental faculties, its self-sameness could not be in doubt. Instead, the Kantian subject finds itself engaged in a process of developing first its various faculties, especially the skill for interpreting its experiences. Essential for such experiences, and consequently for interpretation and the production of sense, is an other, as both source of stimulation and as “surface projection” for the subject’s Ego formation. In the very first stage of human development, the other is the family of care givers who provide the child not only with its first experiences but also with the first meaning (i.e. language) to be associated with such experiences. The family mediates and thus manifests knowledge for the child. Kant, however, does not reflect upon this onto-genetic aspect of knowledge and the development of faculties. Though a reflection on the meaning of the conventional wisdom of Mutterwitz might have yielded such a developmental, if not historical, insight into the constitution of the subject as well as of knowledge. What should not be forgotten here is the fact that the other provides the support in the development of faculties, because the sensuous experience of an other, and of the subject’s own body via this other, provides the context for mimetic development. In this physical rather than meta-physical construction of an origin, experience testifies to its material ground, a ground that is not easily left for the purpose of some sort of formal experience. For matters of philosophical representation alone, the body provides the necessary metaphors in explaining unimaginable phenomema.

     

    In an effort to rehabilitate the body for a critique of the dialectics of enlightenment, Hartmut and Gernot Böhme (two German literature professors who wrote an important book called The Other of Reason) have traced the human body in Kant’s scientific discourse about the universe. They emphasize that Kant’s ideas are not supportable by laws of physics but only by his own body experiences.5 The experience of touch, pressure, and jolt which causes the body to resist the “onslaught” of an other evidently motivates Kant to imagine the formation of spheres in space. Kant defines the structure of matter as an antagonistic relationship of polar forces: attraction and repulsion. Particularly repulsion is made out to be a basic force because it balances the force of attraction so that bodies, their volume, are “closed off by definite boundaries.”6 At the body’s boundaries, the forces of repulsion and attraction are equal. The body’s limits are extremely important for the protection of their form, and we could say also for their identity. Intruders have to be warded off if the body’s identity is to be maintained by its boundaries: “The force of impenetrability is a repulsive force keeping off [limits] any exterior being that might further approach.”7 Yet it is through the play of competing contracting and expanding forces that bodies, or rather spheres, delimit their shape.8 Hartmut and Gernot Böhme demonstrate in their investigation into Kant’s pre-critical writings how Kant searched for comparable phenomena of conflicting forces in the intellectual, psychological, and moral realms. Kant’s examples are indeed those of pleasure and displeasure, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, etc. These are all polar forces of repulsion and attraction, because one force cannot simply be annihilated by its logical negation, but only by the effect of an existing, polar Other. Kant explicitly states that there could be no difference in spiritual/mental matters and in the forces operative in the physical world: these forces can only be compensated with another, opposing force: “[A]n inner accidence, a thought of the soul cannot cede to exist without a truly active force exerted by/in the same thinking subject.”9

     

    The parallel structure in patterns of thought between this “physical” Kant and the biologically grounded Sigmund Freud for the purpose of analyzing human consciousness is striking. This similarity in thought almost forges a new Kantian paradigm, “the process of unconscious repression necessary for unity of thought,” or what Freud has defined as consciousness, “to know and not know at the same time.” The participant of an unconscious is Kant’s unacknowledged paradigm of cognition. He had no recourse to the category of the unconscious, but in effect he is arguing for the necessity of repression which is only lifted in the non-cognitive judgment of aesthetic experiences.

     

    Protecting the unity of the self through a model of consciousness requires an activity of thought in discernable images, in formed representations. To guarantee the form of being or its framed perception by the subject, the excess of matter, the memory of a limitless cosmic mother, has to be repressed. While the subject’s Ego is still linked with the mother/body in its affective capacity of wit, both Ego and (m)other are transformed into a self-contained cognitive subject that takes its stand (Gegenstand) against “mother nature” from which it forms its objects. Professors Böhme assume a similar kind of development of the philosophical subject when they analyze the philosophy of memory “as a reconstruction of the original detachment and emancipation of the Ego from the symbiosis with mother nature.”10 Kant can only admit cognitive status to what is and can be formed and framed in a mental image, because otherwise the force of the (m)other of matter per se cannot be overcome: the force of fear (of being engulfed by a noncognizable other) cannot be compensated with the force of (objectifying) reason. Kants says: “In dealing with nature, only the legitimacy of the cogito now prevails which has purified itself from its traditional fusion with nature.”11

     

    Traditional practices of communicating with nature–e.g., caring for nature, experiencing one’s dependency on nature, acting out in ritual one’s fear of nature as well as one’s gratitude–are no longer accepted as an enlightened form of being. These practices are not, in principle, guided by reason. Nature becomes that which must follow the laws of scientific reason. Such is the revolutionary turn in the conception of nature that Kant institutes alone in his conceptual shift from his pre-critical to his critical writings. Nature is no longer considered a maternal nature, a natura naturans, but a product, natura naturata. The human body is transformed into a “body of reason”12 for the purpose of its cognition.

     

    Priority of the intelligible turns the body into a surface for reason’s projections; projections are those images that cover up the body’s “wounds” inflicted by social inscriptions13 (i.e., the process of social conditioning) preventing individuals from being in touch with their own, physical experiences. Therefore social community loses its immediate ground in the body, and in a common physical history. Community is instead artificially legitimated in mediated ideologies and images of social existence and social cohesion. The subject no longer perceives his or her body directly but through representations in which “the subject affects himself in an intuition a priori and becomes its own object according to a principle of synthetic representation a priori of transcendental cognition.”14

     

    No matter how material or maternal experience may be, in the conscious mind the mother has to leave. Afraid of the indeterminability of matter, Kant not only insists on the formality of knowledge, he also insists on the formality in the judgment of the beautiful. Only the formality of experience, purified of any sensuous aspect, “admits of universal communicability.”15 Kant even construes the formality of judgment as analogous to the theoretical and conceptual power of understanding. Since such an analogy to conceptual cognition necessitates the abandonment of the body or the other, the judgment’s task is to overcome the body in the feeling of pleasure; otherwise, it cannot claim its universal validity.16 In psychoanalytic terms, the separation from the (m)other has to be reinstigated with every judgment of taste. The avoidance of being captured by affects or passions–unconscious offshoots from the Ego’s desire for the other–indeed requires what Freud calls Trauerarbeit, a labor of mourning. The work of mourning is the conscious effort of giving up the fantasy of the mother, a fantasy that sparked the subject’s interest in feeling pleasure. In this light, mourning is necessary for clearing the subject’s mind and preserving the freedom of reason.

     

    With the concept of the sublime, which is avowedly part of the aesthetic experience and particularly of post-modern experience, Kant explains the mind’s transformation of the impact of the other, the affects of terror and fear, into a reflection on the power of the human mind as such. The mental capacities supply the subject with the possibility of transcending the terrifying other in imagination. Awareness of one’s imaginative capacities re-enforces the will to dissociate from that threatening other. The sublime ultimately rests with the subject and his mental superiority to the seemingly sublime and hence overwhelming particularity of the object. A psychologically based sublime thus safeguards the affection from becoming passion and from swaying the Ego to surrender to the power of the other.

     

    In his treatise on the sublime, Kant struggles to find a justification for dissociating reason from affection. The latter upsets the mind too much and motivates it to seek a purpose for this affection. But reflective judgment does not produce a purpose; it only proceeds according to the “principle” of purpose and produces the sense of an ability to represent affect. This sense of one’s ability for representation, the purposiveness of experience, would have to be contained in the resulting feeling of pleasure if the latter is to be an intellectual feeling. For the mastery of the initial sublime affect, however, the intellectual transformation does little more than merely suppress the other’s alterity. It seems as if the subject’s desire to know has been curtailed with an insight, instilled by reason, that whatever the unknowable quantity of the other may be, the subject qua consciousness is always bigger than “it.”

     

    The evocation of an unknowable “Id” should be less a matter of homophony than a psychologically conditioned move, on Kant’s part, toward maintaining uniformity of the mind. Since the unknowable affect or nature threatens to split consciousness, Kant must retroactively efface the initial sense of the affect’s purposiveness (read: the affect’s knowability) by denying all cognitive content to the power of judgment (which includes the value of aesthetics and pleasure) and by positing its similarity to understanding in grammatical subjunctive only.17 Since the universal form, the concept, is not given in the beautiful, its reflection in the mind must entail a process of deformation that merely becomes manifest in and as the analytics of the sublime. By force of the mind’s incapacity to represent the beautiful, and we remember it is only the beautiful’s affect that is reflected, the beautiful itself is always already sublime in its “non-form.” Reason performs a therapeutic and moral task for the mind, which is to keep the affect in check and guarantee the equilibrium of faculties in the aesthetic as a sane mental state. The sublime portion of the aesthetic is determined, for instance, by the affect of enthusiasm. But such a strong affection, which no “sensible representation” can capture, thus causing the imagination to run wild, endangers the “noble mental state,” the only (natural) state that Kant admits as truly sublime. Kant is thus forced to eliminate affection from aesthetic pleasure altogether: “But (which seems strange) the absence of affection (apatheia, phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason.”18

     

    What should have become evident in my exposition, is that Kant nonetheless starts out with the sense impression of the beautiful object and with nature, even though he dwells on the mental processes which bring about the formality of aesthetic judgment. Both sensation and nature–precisely because they resist subsumption under concepts and hence constitute an unknowable other in the aesthetic judgment–need to be regulated by laws of representation. The establishment of such laws force Kant into a concern with the formality of representation. This focus on formality rather than the physical support or context of reflection prevents him from taking into consideration what Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, the major figures in the philosophy of what could be called proto-Freudian Romanticism, have called “the subject’s inner sensibility,” its sensitivity, which affects the subject’s power of intuition. Sensibilität, or sensitivity, is a requirement for perception and aesthetic experience. Hence, perception names a capacity that is patterned after the subject’s past. This view subverts a concept of taste which reduces taste to its formal properties in judgment. Such a reduction of taste to its mere form demonstrates Kant’s avoidance of historical considerations for conceptualizing the subject’s experience of the present. If I had the space, I would show my reader how Kant’s epistemological innovation of criticism (Kritik) is, after all, grounded in history, the history of taste, rather than in a “transcendental aesthetics” that analytical philosophers opposed to cultural studies like to pursue. The method of critique takes as its object the particularity of taste, one that is contingent on the capability of discrimination.

     

    In a nutshell, you cannot arrive at a judgement of taste or the statement that you like something without the ability to compare the present sensation to a previous one. Or, in other words, if you don’t remember your pleasurable mother, you will not stand a chance of finding this pleasure again in things beautiful.

     

    In the 18th century, this comparing, transferring agency of the mind was conceptualized as the faculty of wit or–at least in the first half of the century–as spirit (Geist), which were both regarded as very distinct from reason. Reason represented scholarly bound (that is, coherent) thought, whereas Geist generated free roaming and creative thought. By this definition, Geist is no different from the concept of fantasy fashioned by European romantics in relation to thinking. Before the romantics placed their emphasis on fantasy as a power of thinking, 18th century philosophers of aesthetics acknowledged a mental capacity or talent in wit (which never occurs separately from Geist) which was responsible for the psychical translation process and its rhetorical representation in language. The presence of wit in a person accounts for the translation of Vorstellunginto Darstellung. This conception of wit foreshadowed the aesthetics of “genius” to which Kant fully subscribed. Philosophers before Kant reflected on the connection between psyche and language, and interpreted wit as a faculty that was contingent on language to express its power: Wit creates metaphors in language. Language, in its sensuous power of expression, reflects a certain knowledge of human experience, otherwise it could not affect the reader or listener on the level of feeling or imagination. This affection only happens if the faculty of wit has previously assembled the signifiers of language in such a way–i.e. in a text–that the receptive mind can easily compare different things that otherwise might never be compared. With reference to Benjamin, this comparison may only be possible by means of a tradition in which language and individual psyche are related in history. Tradition presents itself as what Benjamin has called the “canon of non-mimetic representation” in language.19 The capacity of wit turns written signifiers into figurative signs. Wit was acknowledged as a significant power of artistic representation in the burgeoning critique of aesthetics.20

     

    Wit came to represent an ingenious faculty to perceive similarities in different things. Again, Benjamin’s notion of unsinnliche ehnlichkeiten (non-mimetic similarities) in his essay on the mimetic capacity lends itself to an interpretation of wit as that mimetic capacity. Such a rendition of wit inevitably ruptured the mimetic model of representation which had been established on the premise that appearance resembled identity. Wit interferes in the mirror relationship of Urbild and Abbild, distorting and distracting imagination in its attempt to represent the object. Wit causes imagination to be creative and to assemble the various parts of the object in different and unexpected ways so that different things can be compared and subsequently associated with one another in the perceiver’s mind. The experience of surprise resulting from the unexpected relations survives in today’s meaning of wit in German as “joke.”21 When Freud elaborates on the commemorative power of joke, he points to an “ingenius” faculty of the unconscious mind in understanding a joke. Wit suggests an unconscious knowledge of relationships between things. For reasons of cultural taboos, this knowledge can only emerge in an oblique or non-mimetic linguistic representation. The fact that consciousness of the tabooed meaning is accompanied by explosive laughter shows the repressive tension involved in the socio-cultural reglementation of thought and meaning. By analyzing people’s mental constructions, Freud has also demonstrated that conscious thought requires the repression of certain similarities between experiences. The joke’s effect does not stem from an innovative connection between things but merely reveals an already cognized but repressed familiarity with tabooed ideas attached to these things. Finally, Freud’s notion of the uncanny (unheimlich) expands on this phenomenon of an unconscious familiarity in the feeling of fear.

     

    Associating very different things in the linguistic representation of an object is made possible through the creation of seemingly artificial similarities; artificial, because artistic representation rests on the rhetorical quality of language which initially produces such similarities between things or signs. From this vantage point, language exerts a psychological power by prompting additional meanings that would otherwise be forgotten in the reference or mirror function of linguistic signs. This latter utilitarian concept of language prevails in the science of linguistics not dissimilar from the view of texts in the positivist assumptions of historicism. The antidote to such a constrained view of language is comprised by the realm of the aesthetic, or an assumed literariness of texts, which is decried for poetic license confined to this realm. This antidotal status of so-called literary texts was, in the history of aesthetics, finally cancelled by Benjamin. His critique insists that for the purpose of building historical consciousness aesthetic and allegorical strategies are necessary. These strategies of representation (Darstellung) parallel the psycho-analytic transference and essential temporality in the formation of thought (Vorstellung). The similarities produced by the rhetorical and figural power of language can be viewed as examples of a belated intuitive connection supplied by wit. Wit thus proves indispensable for imagination as a cognitive power in aesthetic representation.

     

    Contingent on mother wit, aesthetic judgment, even in its reflective component does not act arbitrarily (freed from certain universalities) but finds its support in a subjective history of desire and feelings. Kant’s notion of transcendental power might have to be abandoned in a psychology of subjectivity which seems to be expressed and analyzable in the aesthetic realm. We may, however, read transcendental power as merely a philosophical term for an 18th century theory of invention. Invention was held to be the result of absolute creativity and not a function of memory, or forgetfulness; this memory aspect nonetheless resounds in the German word Er-findung and in English might be associated in the term dis-covery. But if wit is responsible for something new, it might only seem new to consciousness when it is represented as art.22 If this is the case, then the novelty rests merely on the feature of the-finally-becoming-conscious of what had already been latent but could not be cognized. We remember that Freud found the wittiness of a joke to consist of the unconscious meanings of words which had been commonly repressed in accordance with a cultural taboo. In this view, what underlies wit is an unconscious knowledge that is un-covered in an imaginative, witty use of language. This cognitive-creative structure, reflected in newly detected similarities between things, seems to fit the 18th century use of the concept “soul” with which the notions of wit, spirit, and imagination are almost interchangeably linked. All these notions designate an activity of the psyche that interferes with a presumed a priori distinction of subject and object, displacing and even dispersing both into a new constellation in representation. An unconscious agreement between subject and object is articulated in the repetition of signifiers. In the temporality of this repetition, previously contiguous or associated features of an experience are recombined in the conscious emergence of a single sign. The analytical-philosophical (that is, nonlinguistic) approach of metaphysics always denied this temporalized and historically significant liaison between subject and object while insisting on their definite distinction.

     

    What sets this activity of the psyche in motion? Why would the individual, encountering textuality, “see” something differently than before? And why, when looking at separate things, would the subject indulge in a vision of their similarities? Such questions aim at identifying the motivation of wit and fantasy. They try to address the e-motional relationship between the subject and the object. The process starts, again, with affect. Depending on its force, affect triggers an emotional interest in the objects and motivates the subject to perceive similarities. The knowledge supporting the perception of similarities can emerge only once affect has set in motion the mental translation process, the movement of meta-phora, that turns affect into images and reflected feelings. The power or rather the intensity of affect depends upon the impact of experience in the subject’s past. The past experience is unconsciously repeated along with the sense impressions of the current object. The subject’s disposition vis-à-vis the object is thus influenced by the past as it engages the subject’s desire. This animated desire ultimately forms the subject’s vision of the object. It is this desire-driven vision that constitutes the basis for a value judgment, such as “this rose is beautiful.” Given the view that the past is represented only in feeling, what the mind compares is not so much the particularities of various objects, as it compares the affect with an unconscious desire. To what degree this desire is satisfied by the present experience determines whether the contingent affect is reflected now as a feeling of pleasure or pain. If there is pleasure, the affect has satisfied the desire for self-completion, for the imaginary experience of being whole. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant recrutes this kind of pleasure as a basis for the judgment of taste.

     

    My elaboration of the feeling of pleasure and pain as originating in the past may suffice to suggest an analogy between the creation of metaphor in both language and the mind. The tertium comparationis, which functions as the reference point for a comparison of different things, may indeed be provided by the capacity for pleasure and pain in the psychical apparatus. In Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, the feeling of pleasure imports a subjective purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) into mental representation.23 Purposiveness precedes the cognition of an object and sets in motion the psychical activity of comparing the affect with the unconscious desire in the subject. The activity of comparing will “find,” i.e. create (erfinden), similarities between the pleasurable experience in the past and the one in the present, all projected at first outward, enveloping with fantasy the world of objects. The creative power that finds and has traditionally always found such similarities is the artistic genius in aesthetic representations. But in our postmodern culture where objects have turned into aesthetic icons, the aesthetic effects in popular culture are triggered by a fantasy of loss and remembrance of things past. Everyone resorts to wit to assemble into a pleasurable configuration and familiar life context the cultural debris of history and aesthetic tradition, to which the objects-turned-icons allude.

     

    Since the object is of no cognitive concern in aesthetic judgment, it is the subject’s sense of familiarity and connectedness with her past that is being challenged in the beautiful. This appears as a familiarity for which she has no concept or representation but only a feeling of pleasure that expresses the connection with the past, a feeling that lingers while affecting the person’s mood. Mood calls attention to itself in the lingering of the feeling and the contemplation of the beautiful. Kant defines this mood (Stimmung )as a state of inner harmony with all faculties in playful accord (übereinstimmung). (The semantic identities in the German words for mood and accord already suggest a “sensible” correspondence between mental and physical phenomena.) Such a mood might also be analyzed as a harmony between unconscious drive and conscious reality. But reality here is the irreality of the imagination. In the beautiful, the experience is not one of objectivity or exterior reality but of the formation of subjective intuitions. The intuition of the beautiful is an intuition of feeling. In this state of intuition, the subject is made to reflect upon her own Gemüt, her state of mind, her mood, through which she gains a sense of life, Lebensgefühl.

     

    If wit stands for the capacity to compare an unconscious past with its similarity in a different medium such as language, it must itself be partly unconscious and partly conscious. Indeed, because of this ambivalent status, wit was conflated in the philosophy of the 18th century with equally ambivalent, non-conceptual but nonetheless potentially cognitive and creative powers such as Geist and imagination (Einbildung). The unconscious component in these faculties, which I have developed here as an aspect of history with respect to the form of representation and feeling, actually does surface in Kant’s critique of imagination, specifically in his discussion of genius as related to Geist. If the unconscious not only makes itself felt in the aesthetic experience as a feeling of pleasure but also determines the latter’s cognizability in the judgment of taste, then Kant’s term Mutterwitz for the natural talent of judgment already invokes a connection between an unconscious and a conscious faculty. Intuition of the beautiful relies on the mediating capacity of such a natural talent; this talent is all the more important for the transformation of an intuition into a mental representation. If mother wit performs the switch from intuition to representation, then the exact status of imagination in representation remains unclear, is it indeed a formal power (i.e transcendental) or an archive of image content (i.e., empirical)? Is it an Einbildungskraft (power), and thus possibly an extension of the force of desire, or a phenomenon and thus a phantasy (Einbildung) about the form of the object, i.e., the other?

     

    If the aesthetic judgment consists of a process of reflection where imagination is free to produce intuitions, then it seems to be based on an a priori (unconscious) knowledge of pleasure. In German, Vermögen, the term for mental faculty and mental capacity, is semantically related to the word Vermächtnis meaning “legacy.” Legacy implicates the past as an active agent in the present, and this is made explicit in the incorporated noun Macht (power). In the signifying capacity of humans, the power of legacy transpires in the idea of tradition, understood as both translation and inheritance. As a mental activity, this legacy or tradition asserts itself in the capacity of wit. If the faculty of wit is inherited from the past as Mutterwitz, wit cannot be a formal category of consciousness but must be a capacity of formation that is unconsciously derived from the mater-iality of the primal experience of completion and its resulting pleasure. In the cultivation of genius (Bildung ), an appeal is made to this inheritance that constitutes the subject’s nature which Kant claims gives the rule to art. The universality that Kant ascribes to the judgment of taste can only be based on a concept of nature that does not exist in opposition to culture, but that is above all derived from culture and hence developed from the formation of individuals (Bildung). What cannot be “cognized” in aesthetic judgment–the aesthetic judgment is not a cognition in Kant’s view–is the appropriation of the past as nature itself, because this nature only manifests itself in representations of an experience. Thus, it is tradition that has to be invoked in the formation of the individual by appealing to his or her inheritance which builds genius as the capability of translating experiences into images. And the use of tradition is what distinguishes a postmodern experience from a modernist experience. The past is after all not dead, never in the individual psyche that is always confronted with new specimens of a seeming present.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Luc Nancy, et al., “The Sublime Offering,” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: SUNY UP, 1993) 29.
     

    2. “Alle Beziehung der Vorstellungen, selbst die der Empfindungen, aber kann objektiv sein…nur nicht die auf das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust, wodurch gar nichts im Objekte bezeichnet wird, sondern in der das Subjekt, wie es durch die Vorstellung affiziert wird, sich selbst fühlt.” Kritik der Urteilskraft, 115.

     

    3. Psychoanalytic feminism disputes the patriarchial mode of separation and brings evidence for a psychological, specifically male, need to repudiate the primary identification with the mother in order to arrive at a sense of individuality. Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: California UP, 1978) has argued that this assertion of (male) difference rests on a denial of the mother as dependence on the other as well as commonality with the other. In Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) Evelyn Fox Keller departs from this psychological dynamics and critiques the resultant dualism in Western scientific thought where only one side is always idealized at the expense of subduing the other. This idealization of the autonomously thinking subject is typical in all modern social activity and forms of knowledge which projects the irritant (m)other outwards in order to dominate it/her, as Jessica Benjamin argues in “Authority and the Family Revisited; or A World Without Fathers?” (New German Critique, 13 [Winter 1978] 35-57). In a more recent article Benjamin elaborates the importance of intersubjective space for the recognition of desire and its resultant sense of self; the body of the mother provided the first space of this kind and the fantasy of the mother’s body can be called up any time via “transitional objects” that are then identified as causing pleasurable experiences. Cf. “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space,” Feminist Studies /Critical/Studies ed. Theresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 78-102.

     

    4. cf. D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1958).

    5. “His [Kant’s] theory of bodies (spheres) is not a physics of the exterior of bodies, but from the interior of an organic body (Leib), one’s own sensibility. As such it is however repressed–excluded from the discourse of metaphysics and is nonetheless its hidden Other.” Harmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 103.

     

    6. Immanuel Kant, Der Gebrauch der Metaphysik, sofern sie mit der Geometrie verbunden ist, in der Naturphilosophie, dessen erste Probe die physische Monadologie enthält in Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) 549. (In the following I shall refer to this text as Monadologie.)

     

    7. Kant, Monadologie, 547 (“Die Kraft der Undurchdringlichkeit ist eine Zurückstossungskraft, die jedes Äu ere von einer weiteren Annäherung abhält.”)

     

    8. cf. Monadologie, 547-553.

     

    9. Kant, Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grö en in die Weltweisheit einzuführen in Vorkritische Schriften, 804.

    10. cf. Das Andere der Vernunft, 145: “Wenn die Geschichte des Selbstbewusstseins zurückgeht bis zu jener primären Unabgegrenztheit, die abgelöst wird durch den dynamisch gerichteten Organismus, von dem her sich die Unterschiedenheit von Objekten wie die Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins bilden–: wenn dies so ist, dann kann die Philosophie der Erinnerung als Rekonstruktion der ursprünglichen Ablösung und Emanzipation des Ich aus der Symbiose mit der Natur/Mutter gelten.”

     

    11. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 140. (“Im Umgang gibt es nur noch die Legitimität des Cogito, das sich von jeder traditionellen Vermischung mit Natur gereinigt hat.”)

     

    12. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 109.

     

    13. cf. Dietmar Kamper’s critique of the “body’s graphism” that engenders a different sense of historicity as well as of community mediated in the physical memory of pain: “On the basis of regularities in the similarity, correspondence, and sympathy with the pain of the other, a unique embodied temporality can emerge from all the metamorphoses of wound, scar, memory trace, pattern, sign.” Zur Soziologie der Imagination (München: Hanser, 1984) 159. (my translation.)

     

    14. Kant, “Wahrnehmung ist die empirische Vorstellung wodurch das Subjekt sich selbst in der Anschauung a priori afficirt und sich selbst zum Gegenstand nach einem Prinzip der Synthetischen Vorstellung a priori der transzendentalen Erkenntnis macht…” Opus Postumum II, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. XXI/XXII (Berlin, Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1900-1955) 461.

     

    15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 60; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 140.

     

    16. “Thus the principle of judgment, in respect of the form of things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the purposiveness of nature in its variety. That is, nature is represented by means of this concept as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the variety of its empirical laws.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 17; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 89 (emphasis mine.)

     

    17. Kant derives the principle for judging from the “universal laws of nature” which “have their ground in understanding, which prescribes them to nature…,” thus it assumes a unity that the undetermined particularity of the object has with the determined laws in the faculty of understanding. In this same passage, Kant continues to, however, by denying such a cognitive process: “Not as if, in this way, such an understanding really had to be assumed (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle–for reflecting, not determining); but this faculty gives a law only to itself, and not to nature.)” Critique of Judgment, 16/17. Translation modified according to Sam Weber’s introductory essay to his book Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986). In this essay he excavates the problematic status of “purposiveness” for an aesthetics that cannot come to terms with the status of feeling as other. “The purposiveness of nature,” Kant says in the same place, “is therefore a particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgment.” (my emphasis).

     

    18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 113; Kritik, 199.

     

    19. Elaborating on the cultural history of mimetic capacity, Benjamin compares language to astrological figurations to show how non-sensical similarities can be produced in imagination: “Jedoch auch wir besitzen einen Kanon nach dem das, was unsinnliche ähnlichkeit bedeutet, sich einer Klärung näher führen lä t. Und dieser Kanon ist die Sprache.” “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” Angelus Novus, 97.

     

    20. Cf. Alfred Bäumler: “Wit shows itself mainly in the happy invention of a ‘flowery manner of speaking’ [verblümter Redenarten], i.e. metaphors, through which we are brought to [recognize] similarities among things, as metaphor is only a ‘short allegory.’” in Kants Kritik der Urteilkraft. Ihre Geschichte und Systematik. (Das Irrationalitätsproblem in er ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft) (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923) 148.

     

    21. “Eine zweite Gruppe technischer Mittel des Witzes–Unifizierung, Gleichklang, mehrfache Verwendung, Modifikation bekannter Redensarten, Anspielung auf Zitate–lä t als gemeinsamen Charakter herausheben, da jedesmal etwas Bekanntes wiedergefunden wird, wo man anstatt dessen etwas Neues hätte erwarten müssen. Dieses Wiederfinden des Bekannten ist lustvoll, und es kann uns wiederum nicht schwerfallen, solche Lust als Ersparungslust zu erkennen, auf die Ersparung an psychischem Aufwand zu beziehen.” Sigmund Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, 135. (emphasis mine.)

     

    22. “Wit discovers something new by tracing similarities between things…. Similarities have to first be found, they are not obvious to everyone.” Bäumler, 148.

     

    23. “But the subjective element in a representation, which cannot be an ingredient of cognition, is the pleasure or pain which is bound up with it…. The purposiveness, therefore, which precedes the cognition of an object and which, even without our wishing to use the representation of it for cognition, is at the same time immediately bound up with it, is that subjective [element] which cannot be an ingredient in cognition. Hence the object is only called purposive when its representation is immediately combined with the feeling of pleasure, and this very representation is an aesthetical representation of purposiveness.” Kant, Critique of Judgement, 26; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 99/100.

     

  • Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral Critique of the Media

    Allen Meek

    Massey University
    ameek@massey.ac.nz

     

    One of the most compelling sites in which the methodologies of psychoanalysis and marxian cultural theory intersect in contemporary critical writing is in the figure of the ghost. The political significance recently ascribed to this figure suggests a paradigmatic shift in cultural studies taking place where the poststructuralist death of the subject encounters both the collapse of Soviet communism and the “revolution” in global telecommunications. The historical situation in which Western critical theory finds itself at this moment has called for a renewed engagement with psychoanalysis, attentive to questions of mourning and collective memory. As particular examples of this project I will cite Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), Margaret Cohen’s use of the term “Gothic Marxism,” and Ned Lukacher’s notion of a “phantom politics,” all of which work in the intertexts of psychoanalysis and politics, history and literature, but none of which are focused explicitly on what Derrida has called the “spectraleffects” (Derrida, 54) produced by electronic media.

     

    While Derrida’s reading of Marx “conjures” (Derrida characteristically enumerates the various meanings of this word) the specters of Marx, taking care to reveal Marx’s commitment to and ambivalence toward this figure, Cohen shows how the question of the spectral in Marx’s text has developed in those who have followed him and inherited from him, particularly André Breton and Walter Benjamin. Derrida interrogates the figure of the specter at the “frontier between the public and the private” that is “constantly being displaced” (Derrida, 50) by technology. Cohen’s genealogy of Gothic Marxism reminds us that this frontier has long been the subject of research at the experimental front of Marxian cultural theory. Between Cohen’s and Derrida’s respective discussions lie also the legacies of psychoanalysis, including Freud’s primal scene reconstructed by Lukacher as a methodological invention of continuing historiographical and political significance. It is in the psychoanalytic notion of “working over” that a spectral critique of the media comes into focus.

     

    In the face of the multinational corporate media’s claim to transmit all significant “world events,” a spectral critique would seek to confront those ghosts who call into question the legitimacy of this representational system and its ideologies. The globalization of electro-tele-presences seeks to usurp the place of, as it carries with it the traces of, a more general phantasmatic economy. Flows of electronic images and information allow for the proliferation of what Marx called the “phantasmagoria” of commodity capitalism, amidst which the conjunction of spectral imagery I am pursuing here begins to accumulate another kind of value and currency. In Specters of Marx Derrida pursues a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xix) arising out of a sense of responsibility toward the ghosts of our collective histories: the victims of war, imperialism, totalitarianism, and political, social, and psychological oppression in all of its forms. For Derrida it is this sense of responsibility that we inherit from Marx that will help us “to think and to treat” (54) the spectral presences made available by global telecommunications. So for those who today wish to be rid of Marx and Marxism once and for all (the particular example of this position under investigation by Derrida is Francis Fukuyama), his and its ghosts always threaten to return. It is a condition of the so-called “End of History” and the ends of Marxism that they will never have arrived–and this is also the condition of their messianic promise and of the ethico-political imperatives that they precipitate: “Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever” (75).

     

    The emancipatory impulse that should guide cultural critique is called forth in the form of a ghost: one who will challenge the hegemonic claims of the corporate media and unsettle the world order it seeks to impose. The ghost recalls those forgotten or repressed histories that compose the collective unconscious of our mass mediated society. Cohen’s reading of Breton and Benjamin conjures the ghosts of revolutionary struggles that haunt the streets of Paris amid the phantasmagorias of an emerging consumer society. Derrida’s specters are called forth on the stage of our own contemporary global politics. What are the legacies of the Surrealist experiments of the 20s and 30s and how can they be approached in the sphere of the new trans- and multi-national electropolis? To begin to answer this question we need to consider Derrida’s and Cohen’s specters in the context of critical theories of the media.

     

    Derrida’s specters of Marx should not be made equivalent to that “other scene” of politics and eroticism submitted to rigorous ideological analysis by the marxian school of Cahiers du Cinema. I will argue that Derrida’s application of intertextual montage in pursuit of specters implies a different ontological order to that of the materialist histories made available by Althusserian criticism which, while it helped us to understand that ideology was not simply a phantom to be dispelled but itself a mode of operation with its own structures (Harvey, 90), did not offer a model for a therapeutic encounter with the specter or for what Derrida understands by the work of mourning. If Althusser’s analysis of ideology as an imaginary process enabled marxian cultural analysis to depart from a crude model of culture directly reflecting the material basis of social organization, Derrida’s insistence that “mourning is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought to reconstruct the very concept of production” (97) demands a reconsideration of the practices of cultural studies.

     

    Indeed the range of interpretive strategies and critical approaches loosely collected in the Anglo-American academy under the rubric of Cultural Studies employs various syntheses of marxian, psychoanalytic, and structuralist theories, but there remains very little work in that field that acknowledges the full scope of Derrida’s methodological critique of those theories. The critical response to the media that emerged amid the uprisings of May 1968 in France has had an enduring effect on the development of film and television studies, primarily through Althusser’s application of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but (with a few notable exceptions) Derridean deconstruction has had a much less direct influence on critical media studies. Now Derrida has published for the first time an extensive meditation on Marx, inviting renewed speculation about the place that deconstruction might have in the context of marxian theories of media.

     

    Important precedents for considering how such a critical practice might proceed are made available by Margaret Cohen’s and Ned Lukacher’s work. Cohen’s Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution(1993) sets out to reconstruct a neglected politico-aesthetic tradition which she calls “Gothic Marxism,” or “the first efforts to appropriate Freud’s seminal twentieth-century exploration of the irrational for Marxist thought” (2). She inquires into the intertexts of French Surrealism and Walter Benjamin’s historiographic application of montage in the Arcades Project. Benjamin’s relation to Surrealist texts, on one side, and Soviet experiments in cinematic montage on another, continue to suggest forms of critical engagement with a mediatized culture that remain largely unexplored. Derrida explicitly cites Benjamin’s messianic interpretation of Marx as a precursor text to his own project. Both Cohen’s and Derrida’s excavations of the ghosts of Marx are anticipated in Lukacher’s Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis(1986), which elaborates a “phantom politics” based in the Freudian reconstruction of the forgotten event and Marx’s period underground after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Cohen shows how Surrealist novels like Breton’s Nadja present a mode of counter-memory that haunts the facade of the modern state-supported consumer society which emerged after 1848. But where is the possibility of such an alternative tradition in the mediatized society after the interventions of 1968? Or the challenges to State Communism of 1989?

     

    In the context provided by Derrida’s discussion of Marx, I will attempt to situate Cohen’s notion of a Gothic Marxism by comparing it with Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern(1993). Taken together with Cohen’s Profane Illumination, Window Shopping helps to pose the question of what an application of Gothic Marxism to the postmodern media environment might be like. What is initially striking about the juxtaposition of these two books, however, is that in Friedberg’s analysis of shopping mall culture we witness the disappearance of those darker social forces that form the political unconscious of postmodernity but which it is the project of Gothic Marxism to make visible. Through a comparative reading of Cohen’s and Friedberg’s books, in the intertextual space that these two theoretical works define, I aim to bring the project of a spectral critique toward a more direct application with regard to the imagery of electronic capitalism and to show how the critical force of psychoanalytic reconstruction can be reconsidered in the postmodern culture that presents history as a perpetual re-make.

     

    Genealogy

     

    A spectral critique takes its place between the experimental practices of the avant-garde and the marxian analysis of capital and in the context of the dissemination of new audiovisual technologies. Freud’s experimental reconstructions were contemporary with the invention of cinema, both of which share a prehistory in all of the picture puzzles (rebus, anamorphosis) and visual machines (zoetrope, stereoscope) that had already accumulated throughout the modern period. The revelations of psychoanalysis were first thought in conjunction with the appearance of film and, as Benjamin suggested with his notion of an “optical unconscious,” the filmic zoom, close-up and the development of montage extended this parallel attention to the microscopic details of everyday life. The conjuration of the hidden picture and the other scene could be understood as either an unconcealment or a contrived illusion, or both. The ghost-effect (think of Melies’ celebrated inventions) takes place at the seam between two texts, in the overlay of different discourses, the encounter between different modes of representation, or at the interface of different media. For Derrida between Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party, for Cohen between Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Fantomas.

     

    A spectral critique would seek to redirect the insights of psychoanalysis regarding the therapeutic value of mourning toward a politicized critique. But what needs to be mourned? Cohen’s Gothic Marxism is positioned as a response to a “post-revolutionary” situation and a sense of the failure of Communism that she claims is anticipated in Benjamin and Breton’s responses to Stalinism (11) and she wants to revise vulgar Marxist notions of a direct causal relationship between base and superstructure as a way of explaining ideological meanings manifest in cultural artifacts. Althusser provides her with the systematic theorization she finds missing from Benjamin’s notes on the dialectical image (19). In this way she can reformulate Benjamin’s psychoanalytic Marxism in the following phrase: “the ideologies of the superstructure’ express the base in disfigured products of repression” (33).

     

    In contrast to Althusser’s “scientific” Marxism, however, Benjamin’s method is “therapeutic” (37-38). Cohen lists the positions of Gothic Marxism as the following:

     

    (1) the valorization of the realm of a culture's ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a culture's detritus and trivia as well as strange and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique moving beyond logical argument and the binary opposition to a phantasmagorical staging more closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy, privileging nonrational forms of "working through" and regulated by overdetermination rather than dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the epistemological privilege accorded the visual in the direction of that integration of the senses dreamed of by Marx...; accompanying this dehierarchization, a practice of writing of criticism cutting across traditionally separated media and genres...; and (5) a concomitant valorization of the sensuousness of the visual: the realm of visual experience is opened to other possibilities than the accomplishment and/or figuration of rational demonstration.(11-12)

     

    One might speculate briefly, without reverting to a McLuhanite determinism, on how many of these positions would serve as effective critical responses to media culture, with its collapsing of fact and fiction into a general flow of electronic text. Yet cultural studies, particularly as it has inherited the Birmingham model, has rarely incorporated any such experimental practices into its methodologies.

     

    With a similar attention to therapeutic practices as offering an analogy for a critical method, Ned Lukacher’s Primal Scenes brings together Freud and Heidegger’s practices of intertextual reconstruction as a response to the postmodern problematic of mourning and history. In Lukacher’s readings of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, intertextuality takes the place of the transcendental ground of history and memory. Freud’s listening for repressed memory in the speech of his patients and Heidegger listening for what is left unsaid in the Western philosophical tradition serve for Lukacher as precedents for a new historiography. Freud’s construction of the primal scene in the famous Wolf Man case was never able to be verified by the subject of analysis himself: the patient could never remember if it actually “happened.” So the theoretical scene, constructed from an intertext of the patient’s dreams, remembered stories, and anecdotes from his own experience, assumed the place of “true” memory over the subject’s conscious attempts to remember. In Lukacher’s discussion, Freud’s term “primal scene”:

     

    comes to signify an ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive free play.(24)

     

    Freud’s ontological revolution can now be seen, retroactively, as an anticipation of (post)historical consciousness in the global cultural economy made possible by, among other things, telecommunications. As Arjun Appadurai has noted, popular perceptions of history are now characterized by a “nostalgia without memory” (Appadurai, 272) in which a global audience looks back on a past they have learned to identify with through contact with American media culture. Disparate peoples everywhere now “remember” a collective past that only ever took place on cinema and TV. Just as Freud constructed the primal scene at the interfaces of orality and literacy, of childhood and folk memory with the forms of memory and analysis made possible by alphabetic technologies and methods, historiography today needs to engage with the penetration of individual and collective memory by electronic media if it is to excavate its political unconscious.

     

    The implications of such a problematic for contemporary marxian cultural theory suggests that a materialist analysis would not be adequate unless it confronted spectrality in all of its electronic mutations. As Frederic Jameson has commented with reference to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, it is “the problem of materialism, its occultation or repression, the impossibility of posing it as a problem as such and in its own right, which generates the figure of the specter” (Jameson, 83). Jameson argues that dialectical materialism needs to be understood as a set of strategies, a critical praxis, or “an optical adjustment” (87) rather than an unquestioned ideological position: materialism can learn from deconstruction. Here the practices of Gothic Marxism listed by Cohen also provide a set of valuable leads. Lukacher argues for an historiographic practice in which “the subject of history is not the human subject–whether defined as an individual, a class, or a species–but rather the intertextual process itself” (13). The tasks of redefining a “new international” in a “post-communist” world would include the invention of such an historiographic practice that would contend with the ways that data banks, information networks, and electronic communication technologies are transforming collective memory.

     

    The intertext through which Derrida inquires into the primal hauntings of European culture takes place between literature and politics, between Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party. The appearance of the ghost in Hamlet provides the scene by which the legacies of Marxism can be (re)staged; or, as Lukacher puts it, “the intertext is the medium through which history gives itself to thought” (237). Mourning, writes Derrida, always involves “identifying the bodily remains and…localizing the dead” (9). The problematics of mourning in the New World Order include the ways in which the experience of cultural identity is increasingly displaced and national boundaries are reconfigured or subverted by flows of information and capital. New forms of agency need to be invented in the virtual spaces that increasingly define our public sphere (or the absence of it). The ghost becomes a signifier for such structuring absences as problems of mourning.

     

    The intertext of Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party, then, allows Derrida to re-present the specter of Communism and to remind us that “this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction” (Derrida, 92) is unthinkable without Marx or Shakespeare and without Hamlet as the founding literary text staging the modern European encounter with the question of the unconscious. Lukacher names the deconstructive radicalization of Marxism a “phantom politics” (Lukacher, 245) in which the reference to tragedy signifies a certain rejection of politics conceived as conscious self-interest and opening instead onto an encounter with ghosts.

     

    Another example of this deconstruction of the boundary between literature and politics is when, through attention to intertextuality, Cohen reveals Marx to be not only a master theoretical voice guiding Benjamin’s excavations of Paris but Marx himself a reader, alongside Baudelaire, of Poe (Cohen, 226). Indeed Benjamin’s 1938 essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” is full of references not only to Poe but also to James Fenimore Cooper’s influence on the French novel of Dumas, Hugo, and Sue. The forerunner of the postmodern subject of history, the nineteenth-century reader’s imagination was stocked with fictionalized experiences of the Americas. The long term effects of this mass cultural imagination could be seen in the Nazi deployment of myth and are now to be found in cases like the militia in post-Communist Yugoslavia dressed in outfits derived from American movie remakes of the Vietnam war (Denitch, 74). Rambo not only remakes history as film but history also remakes Rambo as history.

     

    Lukacher compares the theoretical status of Benjamin’s dialectical images to Freud’s primal scene. If the primal scene constructed in psychoanalysis can never be ultimately verified by conscious memory, it can nevertheless have a powerful explanatory and potentially therapeutic effect. In the same way that Freud investigated the origins of the Wolf Man’s psychosis through a network of signifiers derived from the patient’s dreams and memories, Benjamin sought to recover from the dream images embodied in archaic forms of commodity culture those voices that had been excluded from official histories (Lukacher, 277). For example, in his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin discusses how the atmosphere of Cooper’s novels of the American West is borrowed by French writers in their early detective novels (Benjamin, 41-42). The direct comparison of the streets and avenues of Paris to the prairie and the woods imbued the urban market place with exotic appeal. Such exoticism masked fundamental anxieties provoked by the conditions of modern urban life; so Benjamin cites Baudelaire:”‘What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?’” (39). In this situation, the popular physiologies provided journalistic stereotypes to simplify the bewildering strangeness of the city. French authors invoked the figure the Indian tracker to describe the vigilant detective in an alien landscape. Contained in the wish image of the American west was a displaced memory of colonialist genocide. Through attention to the intertextual construction of urban experience, a political unconscious registering the global catastrophe of capitalism becomes manifest as an image. This image of the Native American, however, is not as much dispelled in Benjamin’s historical investigation as conjured, appearing as a guide to the ideological territory that Benjamin is traversing.

     

    Guides Noires

     

    In order to bring the ghosts of our collective histories into visibility on the postmodern scene we can assume, as the legacy of Freud and Breton, that the practices of everyday life make their way along the royal road to a collective unconscious. Benjamin’s insight was to understand the Paris arcades as an entry into the repressed memories of High Capitalism. One of the more provocative observations in Window Shopping is that the design of the Bibliotheque Nationale (where Benjamin worked on the Arcades Project) served as a precedent for the shelving in department stores (Friedberg, 79). While the nineteenth-century shopper adapted the browsing practices of the scholar, studying displays of commodities like titles arranged on library shelves, the postmodern cultural theorist has been made-over in the image of the TV viewer, with shopping channels and the internet today conspiring to make the activities of writing and consumption identical.

     

    Both Friedberg and Cohen account for their respective projects through chance encounters in everyday experience that put the present and past in startling conjunction. For Friedberg this encounter is seeing a Hollywood remake of Godard’s Breathless in an L.A. strip mall (xi). For Cohen it is coming across “at a sale of used French books…a card advertising the services of one Eugene Villard, private eye, dressed in a fantomas outfit and holding a key” (75). The image of this detective–with its caption “Qui suis-je“–triggers for Cohen an association with the opening line of Breton’s Nadja. Friedberg sees her geographical move from New York to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s participating in a shift of greater historical significance–New York being “the quintessential modern city (Capital of the Twentieth Century)” and Los Angeles “the quintessential post-modern city (Capital of the Twenty-First)” [xi]–which frames her transportation of Benjamin’s flanerie in the Paris arcades into the motorized landscapes of Southern California and the phantasmagoric spaces produced by electronic technologies.

     

    The original title of Friedberg’s book, Les Flaneurs du Mal (1), installs a palimpsest–Baudelaire/Benjamin/Friedberg–in which her precursor figures are summoned as guides conducting passageways between the nineteenth century and the present. Baudelaire’s flanerie presents for Friedberg an early form of what she calls the “mobilized virtual gaze” (2): an experience of locality and identity made possible by the technological simulation of travel through time and space. Cohen’s Profane Illumination also begins with the figure of the guide, in this case tourist guide books. Cohen notes the existence of a special genre of guide book, the Guides Noirs, “guides to the Gothic sides of familiar places” and relates this mode of tourism “devoted to the irrational, illicit, inspired, passional, often supernatural aspects of social topography” (1) to the set of practices she calls Gothic Marxism.

     

    Cohen confronts these practices most directly in her interpretation of Breton’s Nadja, a surreal “novel” which she compares to the discourse of the analysand in psychoanalysis(66). Breton investigates his own subjectivity as haunted, opening onto a realm of ghosts. Cohen discusses tourist guides to historic Paris and uses Nadja as a counter-example of flanerie devoted to the bizarre and marginal, as opposed to the most official, monumental sites of the great city. Nadja serves as Breton’s guide to the noir sites of Paris. For Cohen, Nadja provides a significant example “of writing surrealist historiography by applying a Freudian paradigm of memory to collective events” (80). Cohen’s juxtaposes passages from early twentieth-century tour guides against the sites of Breton’s surreal explorations, drawing attention to the bohemian and lumpen populations that have haunted them and reveals Paris–as Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire do also–a memory theater containing a revolutionary history around every corner.

     

    The value of comparing Cohen and Friedberg’s different approaches to the Arcades Project lies in their mutual exclusiveness. Friedberg demonstrates, in her translation of the Arcades Project onto the contemporary loci of the shopping mall and freeway, how the postmodern moment suspends historical consciousness. The memory theater of the urban streets that Cohen’s Gothic Marxism aims to make readable strikes one as impossible in the world described by Friedberg: “The mall creates a nostalgic image of the town center as a clean, safe, and legible place, but a peculiarly timeless place” (113). The mythic topos of small town America encloses (as does TV in the domestic space) and services the desires of an insulated middle class that has effectively removed itself from the public sphere as a domain of political contest and struggle. Benjamin “asserts that Baudelaire cannot bring the urban crowd to direct representation but rather occults it, much as the neurotic represses a formative psychical trauma” (Cohen, 209). This mode of reading, informed by psychoanalysis, is not at work in Friedberg’s study of Los Angeles shopping malls.

     

    Yet the mall is not ghost-free, for it is certainly haunted by what Jameson calls “sheer class ressentiment” (Jameson, 86), the hatred that the dispossessed feel for the privileged and that the dead feel for the living. The malevolent spirits that emerge in the wake of the endless series of catastrophes that Benjamin identified with the advance of technological progress appear in Friedberg’s book as the zombies who invade the deserted shopping malls in the cult film Dawn of the Dead (Friedberg, 116-117). As Jameson notes, these figures are not identical to Derrida’s specters, who embody a “weak messianic power” something akin to Benjamin’s angel of history. Derrida’s specters demand not revenge but social justice. So a gothic critique would not aim to give voice to this primal ressentiment but rather to open global tele-capitalism to the enigmas of visibility that call us back to our fundamental social and political responsibilities: to the un- and under- employed and represented, to non-citizens and to all of those whose civil liberties are diminished or annihilated in the New World Order.

     

    Remake

     

    Three years before the completion of Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, Sergei Eisenstein discussed precisely the same transplanting of literary imagery as he sought to define the principles of montage in film. Shifting, like Benjamin, from a discussion of the “science” of physiogonomy to the French fascination with Cooper, Eisenstein briefly notes how the ideology of private property that informs the detective novel is underwritten by a narrative of colonial imperialism (Eisenstein, 128). Both Benjamin and Eisenstein were interested in this example of literary influence for the same reason: the political significance and pedagogical potential of archaic wish-images. For if behind Cooper’s narratives there lurked the realities of ethnocide, there was also in the dream of a faraway landscape a desire–repressed, or redirected into colonizing aggression–to return to the utopian society that the discovery of “primitive” peoples had presented to the European imagination. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, Benjamin’s dialectical images and Eisensteinian montage are interested in repressed memory, but they apply this interest to collective memory which they seek to awake for the purposes of inspiring historical agency. As Freud had attended to images derived from fairy tales half-remembered from childhood, Benjamin looked to the origins of the detective novel in images of tribalism. The images that made the novels of Cooper and Dumas so popular we recognize in the classic Hollywood genres of the western and film noir as they continue to be recycled by our contemporary electronic media.

     

    This recycling process tends to produce effects of arbitrary equivalence rather than historical consciousness. The postmodern signscape in which “the hammer and sickle is equal to Marilyn” (Friedberg, 173) leads Friedberg to consider the cinematic form of the remake as both an expression but also potentially a critique of the nostalgia industry (174-175). But the question of the remake in her argument (one of her examples is the early Fantomas films) lurches toward a paradoxical mise-en-abyme:

     

    Consider, for example, a Victor Fleming film produced in 1939, set in 1863, but shown in 1992 (Gone With the Wind). Or a film produced in 1968, set in 2001, but shown in 1992 (2001: A Space Odyssey). Or more exactly, a film made in the city of Paris in 1964, set in a future world, but seen in 1992 in the city of Los Angeles (Alphaville), or a film made in Los Angeles in 1982, set in Los Angeles in 2019 (Blade Runner), but seen in Los Angeles in 1992. (177)

     

    Or an historiographic experiment produced in Paris in the 1930s, set in Paris in the 1850s, not published (in German) until the 1980s and read (about) in America in the 1990s? The passage demands that we consider Friedberg’s relation to Benjamin’s work, as she comments at one point that the Arcades Project might be best compared to “a film never completed” (51). Is her own book to be understood as a remake? If so, how does the temporality of the postmodern as it is explained by Friedberg shape her own critical project and its attendant historical and ethical responsibilities?

     

    On this point an illuminating contrast to Window Shopping is provided in a very different study of L.A., City of Quartz by Mike Davis, which offers a social and political history of the city in terms of race and class war–from its exposure of local business interests overtaken by offshore investment, to its analysis of the fortress mentality of the white middle class and a new underclass decimated by unempolyment, drugs, and gang-police warfare. The criminalization of the poor in “post-liberal” L.A. that Davis documents provokes a far more bitter and frightening vision of postmodernity than that of Window Shopping:

     

    contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating "postmodern space," or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan "galaxies" has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at street level. (Davis, 223)

     

    Indeed the L.A. of Window Shopping does not provide any account of the historical or social space described in City of Quartz: those spaces are not to be traversed as much as escaped through the modes of virtual travel which Friedberg explores. The technological mediation of the social transforms the very notion of a geographical site or a public sphere. And as long as the social Other reappears only on the screens inside the fortress, one wonders about the viability of a spectral critique that might return the ghosts of the New World Order to consciousness in ways that can more effectively challenge the postliberal imaginary “reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariate” (Davis, 227). City of Quartz provides the analysis of social struggle absent in Window Shopping, as Davis argues that the restructuring of urban space in L.A. is a direct response to the race riots of the 1960s (224). The L.A. mall is to 1968 what the Paris arcade was to 1848.

     

    Guides Noir to L.A.? Given that the ambition of Friedberg’s book is to redefine the postmodern in terms of the central role that cinema and other modes of technological simulation have had in shaping that moment’s perception of its own historicity and spatiality, it should be noted that for Mike Davis, film noir–that mix of American and exilic European sensibilities that left such a mark on classic Hollywood–“sometimes approached a kind of Marxist cinema manque, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism” (Davis, 41). Forties detective fiction in some respects assumed the place of the abandoned project of thirties socialist realism. And while the Chandlerian detective that cruises the noir landscape of California might not serve as an exact analogy to the Baudelairian flaneur, he is surely a mythic–and highly ambivalent–type in whom a spectral critique would discern a site of redemptive possibility. What the juxtaposition of Friedberg and Cohen’s books offers is a hope of such a critical vision: one that can negotiate history in its mediatized forms and thereby as a ghost history. To begin to write this history will demand attention to the intertextual migrations of our cultural legacies. Friedberg’s book is inspired by her encounter with a remake of Godard’s Breathless–itself a remake of both Hollywood film noir and Italian neorealist forerunners. More recently, Godard offers us an image of a post-Communist landscape haunted by cinematic ghosts in Germany Year 90, featuring Lemme Caution, his noir detective hero (resurrected from Alphaville) wandering the ruins of Cold War Europe. Like Benjamin and Eisenstein before him, Godard has invented a montage practice that works with hybrid images from European and American traditions but that stages a critical vision of the dominant mode of representation.

     

    The primal scenes of Oedipus and the Wolf Man, the mise-en-abyme of Hamlet, the social critique of film noir, all serve as precedents for a spectral critique which must learn to confront and to mourn the catastrophic losses that haunt the scenes of our collective memory; they displace the subject of history with a series of intertextual encounters and overlays that include both the interfaces of our various technological media and the legacies of the liberational struggles to which we remain indebted; they teach us to recognize our historical situation as formed by the contradictions of becoming post-communist, -literate, -modern, -metaphysical, but not yet agents of the social justice that we must strive to bring about.

     

    In Godard’s film an aging man with a suitcase, a refugee, crosses the borders of East and West: like Benjamin’s flaneur, part-detective, part-exile, bearing testimony to the ruins of both totalitarian Communism and consumer capitalism. Likewise, between Friedberg’s Breathless and Cohen’s Fantomas, between psychoanalysis and cultural studies, emerge images of those whose labor supports but is rendered invisible by the smooth surfaces of fin-de-siecle consumerism: the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless–the specters of our electronic arcades.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 269-295.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso,1983.
    • Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1993.
    • Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London, New York: Verso, 1990.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernd Magnus & Stephen Cullenberg. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Denitch, Bogdan. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
    • Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leda. San Diego, New York, London: HBJ, 1977.
    • Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
    • Harvey, Sylvia. May 68 and Film Culture. London: BFI, 1980.
    • Jameson, Frederic. “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” New Left Review No 209 (Jan/Feb 1995): 75-109.
    • Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1986.

     

  • Representation Represented: Foucault, Velázquez, Descartes

    Véronique M. Fóti

    The Pennsylvania State University

     

    In The Order of Things, René Descartes–the early Descartes of the Regulae ad Direcetionem Ingenii (1628/29)–is, for Michel Foucault, the privileged exponent of the Classical episteme of representation, as it initially defines itself over against the Renaissance episteme of similitude.1 The exemplary position accorded to Descartes (a position that is problematic from the “archaeological” standpoint, since exemplars belong themselves to the order of representation) is complemented as well as contested by the prominence Foucault gives to a visual work: Diego Velázquez de Silva’s late painting Las Meniñas, completed some eight or nine years after Descartes’s death. Foucault understands this painting as the self-representation and self-problematization of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core. Specifically, Las Meniñas demarcates the empty place of the sovereign, the place that will, in the epistêmê of modernity, be occupied by the figure of man. Since the place of man, his announced and imminent disappearance, and the character of a thought that can situate itself in the space of this disappearance (the space of language or écriture) are the crucial concerns of The Order of Things, the discussion of Las Meniñas is both inaugural and recurrent; the painting is not placed on a par with the two works of literature, Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sade’s Justine, which problematize, respectively, the Renaissance and Modern epistemic orders.

     

    Foucault maintains a puzzling silence as to why he finds it necessary to turn to a painting (rather than perhaps a work of literature) to find the epistêmê of representation both revealed and subverted. The question concerning the relationship between painting and representation gains further urgency since Foucault, who rejects phenomenology, does not concur with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of painting as an antidote to Cartesian and post-Cartesian representation.2 Does he then treat painting as simply a special type of “the visible” which, as Gilles Deleuze points out, is for him irreducible to the articulable without, however, contesting the latter’s primacy?3 Does painting simply belong to the non-discursive milieu or form part of the visual archive without having any power to challenge discursive configurations?

     

    In order to address these questions and to carry forward the dialogue between classical representation and painting that Foucault initiates, I will first discuss the role of Descartes in Foucault’s epistêmê of representation, then interrogate his analysis of the structure of representation in Las Meniñas, arguing that he is not fully attentive to the materiality of painting and to its resistance to discursive appropriation but remains, strangely, bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting. I will, in conclusion, consider the implications of renewed attention to the materiality of painting for theories of representation, and the importance, for genuinely pictorial thought, of the irreducibility of painting to a theoretical exploration of vision.

     

    Descartes and the Epistêmê of Representation

     

    Foucault perceives clearly that, in Classical representation, as inaugurated by Descartes, universal mathêsis as a relational science of order and measure takes precedence over the mathematization of nature (which is emphasized by Husserl and Heidegger).4 Descartes notes, in the Regulae, that mathematics is merely the “outer covering” (integumentum) of the pure mathêsis that is the hidden source of all scientific disciplines.5

     

    For Descartes, the cognitive order of the mathêsis is not a representation of any pre-given, ontological order, but a free construction of the human intellect or ingenium (which, in the Regulae, is not subordinated to divine creation). Representation does not function here as a replication, in the order of knowledge, of a reality that is independent of and withdrawn from the apprehending mind (a replication that typically seeks to disguise its own secondariness or shortfall). Rather, if mathêsis can be regarded as a prototype of representation, it is one that boldly re-invents reality in the autonomous order of thought. The intellect reflects and contemplates only itself in the order of nature.

     

    Given his constructivism, Descartes insists that the limits of human knowledge must be scrupulously demarcated and respected. He notes, for instance, the futility of postulating occult qualities and new types of entities to account for the phenomena of magnetism. If one can explain the phenomena entirely in terms of “simple natures” that are “known in themselves” (because their simplicity is not absolute but relative to the apprehending intellect), and of their necessary interconnections (which is to say, by intuitus and deductio), one can confidently claim to have discovered the magnet’s true nature, insofar as it is accessible to human knowledge.6 Even in his classical works, where the epistemology of simple natures is superseded by that of innate ideas, which are not necessarily comprehensible to the finite mind (the idea of God is a notable example), Descartes continues to emphasize that the limitation of human knowledge is the price of its certainty.

     

    Although Foucault does not explicitly discuss Descartes’s strategies of limitation, he indicates the “archaeological” configuration in terms of which they can be understood. He points out that the indefinite profusion of resemblances characteristic of the Renaissance epistêmê of similitude becomes finitized once similarity and difference are articulated in the order of mathêsis. Infinity becomes the fundamental problem for Classical thought, and finitude is understood privatively as shortfall or limitation. Infinity escapes representation. By contrast, modernity relinquishes the unattainable standard of the infinite and thinks finitude “in an interminable cross-reference with itself.”7 In his exchange with Derrida, Foucault brilliantly analyzes the problem of finitude in Descartes’s Meditationes with reference to madness and dream as afflictions of the finite mind.8 In the Regulae, however, the intellect or ingenium is not situated in relation to the infinite but is granted autonomy, so long as it can conceal its own usurpation of the position of origin. It translates its experience of finitude into the parameters of scientific construction.9

     

    Foucault does not pay heed to the anomaly of the Regulae in relation to the Classical epistêmê; but he discusses two orders within which an effacement of the position of origin (and therefore also of its usurpation) can be accomplished: signification and language. He observes that “binary signification” (which conjoins signifier and signified without benefit of a mediating relation, such as resemblance) is so essential to the structure of representation as to remain generally unthematized with the Classical epistêmê.10 The sign must, however, represent its own representative power within itself, so that the binary relationship immediately becomes unbalanced, giving primacy to the signifier over the signified or the phenomenon. This concentration of representative power in the signifier tends also to obscure the role of the subject as the originator or representation, which is precisely the obscuration or ambiguity that the early Descartes needs.

     

    Language, in the context of the Classical epistêmê, abets this obscuration, in that it takes on an appearance of transparent neutrality, becoming the diaphanous medium of representation. Discourse interlinks thought (the “I think”) with being (the “I am”) in a manner which effaces the speaker’s finite singularity. For this reason, Foucault finds that language as it functions in Classical representation precludes the possibility of a science of man.11

     

    The function of Classical discourse is to create a representational table or picture which is schematic and pays no heed to phenomena in their experienced concreteness. In the case of the visible, which is at issue here, phenomenal features that resist schematization, such as color, or perceived motion and depth, are ascribed to a confused apprehension of intelligible relationships and are therefore denied any intrinsic importance. The Classical epistêmê recognizes no significant differences between thought and a vision purged of its adventitious confusions (those that accrue to it due to its immersion in sentience). Purified vision is understood in terms of geometry and mechanics.

     

    Representation Self-Represented: Foucault’s Las Meniñas

     

    Foucault analyzes Las Meniñas as a referential system that organizes mutually exclusive visibilities with respect to a subjectivity or power of representation which remains incapable of representing itself, so that its absence interrupts the cycle of representation. As John Rajchman observes, Foucault, in the 1960s, was practicing a form of nouvelle critique which views the work of art as abysmally self-referential:

     

    In each work, he uncovered a reference to the particular artistic tradition in which the work figured, and thus presented it as the self-referring instance of that tradition. Las Meniñas is a painting about painting in the tradition of "illusionistic space"...12

     

    In Las Meniñas, the attentive gaze of the represented painter reaches out beyond the confines of the picture space to a point at which it converges with the sight lines of the Infanta, the menina Doña Isabel de Velasco, the courtier in the middle ground (thought to be Don Diego Ruiz de Azcona), and the dwarf Maribárbola.13 Foucault takes this point to be the standpoint of the implied spectator, converging with that of the implied actual painter gazing at and painting the represented scene, and with that of the model being painted by the represented artist. The hand of this represented painter is poised in mid-air, holding a brush that he may have, a moment ago, touched to the palette. It will presently resume its work on a surface invisible to the spectator to whom the monumental stretched and mounted canvas reveals only its dull, indifferent back. His eyes and hands conjoin spatialities that are normally disjunct: the space of the model, excluded de facto from the composition, the space of the spectator excluded de jure, the represented space, and finally the invisible space of representation, the surface of the canvas being painted. In the allegorical dimension, an unstilled oscillation is set up between signifier and signified, representative and represented, leaving the one who has the power of representation (the painter who, as represented, has momentarily stepped out from behind the canvas and who, in his actuality, remains invisible) both inscribed andconcealed in the referential system.

     

    Foucault observes that the source of all the visibility in the painting, the window opposite the painter’s eyes, through which pours “the pure volume of light that renders all representation possible,”14 remains similarly invisible, both by its near-exclusion from the composition, and by being, in itself, a pure aperture, an unrepresentable empty space. The light which it releases streams across the entire foreground, casting into relief or dissolving the contours of the figures, kindling pale fires in the Infanta’s hair, and sharply illumining the jutting vertical edge of the represented canvas. Since it must also illuminate this canvas’s unseen surface, as well as the place of the model, it functions as the common locus of the representation and, in its interaction with the painter’s vision, as the former’s enabling source. Similarly, the Cartesian “natural light” is the unitary but hidden origin of representation. It remains hidden in that “to make manifest” is understood as meaning “to represent;” for, as already indicated, it cannot itself be represented. It is not, to begin with, a positive value in the economy of presence and absence.

     

    At the far back wall of the interior that Las Meniñas (re)presents, the focally placed yet disregarded mirror startingly reveals what the represented painter is looking at and what so fascinates the gaze of the various figures (including that of Don Nieto who, standing in the open back door, both reflects the spectator and opposes his dynamic corporeity to the spectral mirror reflection). The image in the mirror shows the royal couple, King Philip IV and his queen Mariana, seemingly posing for a double portrait (such as Velázquez is not known to have executed), but also gazing incongruously at their unseen real selves with the same rapt attention shown by the various figures. In their invisible and withdrawn reality, they function as the center of attention and reference; but their reflection is the most “compromised” and ephemeral aspect of the represented scene. Were the menina on the left, Doña Maria Agustina de Sarmiento, to rise from her kneeling position, the ghostly sovereigns would at once be eclipsed; and the mirror would show only her carefully coifed wig with its gossamer butterflies. The mirror’s superimposition of seer and seen, and of inside and outside, is emphatically unstable, accidental, and transitory. As if to emphasize this point, the superimposition which the mirror allows one to extend to the entire picture (insofar as it is “looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene”) is, as Foucault observes, uncoupled at its two lower corners: at the left by the recalcitrant canvas that will not show its face, and at the right by the dog, content to look at nothing, and peacefully relinquishing itself to just being seen.15

     

    Whereas the mirror reflection functions as the painting’s effective yet disregarded center, the visual focus is on the head of the young Infanta, situated at the intersection of the main compositional axes, bathed in a flood of golden light, and emphasized through the positioning of the flanking meniñas. The lines of her gaze and the gaze of the royal couple converge at the point of the model/spectator and form the painting’s sharpest angle. The superimposition marked by this point of convergence is, however, dissolved within the represented scene into its three components: the painter, the model (in reflection), and the spectator (in the guise of Don Nieto). Natural vision seems to be as inept in holding together the schema of representation as is the mirror image.

     

    Within the cycle of the “spiral shell” of representation, which Foucault traces from the window to the attentive gaze and the tools of the painter, to the implied spectacle, to its reflection, to the paintings (hung above the mirror), to the spectator’s gaze, and finally, back to the enabling and dissolving light, the sovereign place of the author as well as of the one who is to recognize him/herself in the representation is inscribed as a place of absence. In marking this place, Las Meniñas indicates the necessary disappearance, within representation, of its own foundation.

     

    For Foucault, the absence inscribed is essentially that of man, so that the interruption of the cycle of representation reveals the impossibility of developing, in the disclosive space of the Classical epistêmê, a science of man. Only with the eclipse or mutation of this epistêmê and the ascendancy of analogy and succession over representation can man show himself as both knowing subject and object of knowledge, as “enslaved sovereign” and “observed spectator.” He then appears, as Foucault points out, “in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meniñas.”16

     

    Las Meniñas in Question

     

    Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas is compelling because it attests equally to theoretical originality and sophistication and to an acute visual sensitivity. Subsequent discussion, however, has called some of the underlying assumptions of Foucault’s analysis into question. Moreover, one can ask whether his analysis exhausts the extraordinary visual and symbolic complexity of the painting. Before returning to the questions raised at the outset, I propose, therefore, to engage in another reflection on Las Meniñas, one that is mindful of these issues without being subservient to a pre-conceived agenda.

     

    In response to John R. Searle’s construal of the painting as a paradox (and, implicitly, a cryptogram) of visual representation, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen have shown the incorrectness of both Searle’s and Foucault’s guiding assumption that the (re)presented scene is viewed from the perspective of the model who is reflected in the represented mirror.17 Since the painting’s perspectival vanishing point is at the elbow of the figure of Don Nieto, the point of view must, theoretically, be directly opposite it; but whoever stands along this axis or at this (not entirely specific) point could not possibly be reflected in the mirror. Snyder and Cohen establish that what the mirror reflects is not the hypothetical model, but rather a centrally located portion of the face of the represented canvas.18 As Jonathan Brown notes, Antonio Palomino’s well-informed discussion of the painting in El museo pictorio y escala óptica of 1724 “is confident that the mirror image reflects the large canvas on which the artist is working.”19 Palomino’s testimony (important, in part, because he was able to consult most of the represented persons) thus corroborates Snyder’s and Cohen’s analysis.

     

    The painted mirror image is strangely ambiguous. Its frame assimilates it to the paintings shown on the back wall, but the line of light around its edges and the sheen on its surface mark it off from these and indicate its purely optical status. The image it shows is quite obviously not a glimpse of life, but rather an artful composition which gives every indication of being shown in reverse. The red curtain, for instance, looks incongruous when placed, as shown, in the upper right corner but would be visually effective if placed in the upper left, as it is, for example, in other paintings by Velázquez, such as The Rokeby Venus, Prince Baltasar Carlos, or Las Hilanderas. The relative heights of the king and queen as well as the customary practice of reading the graphic articulation from left to right (with its implicit hierarchization) suggest an artistic composition shown in reverse, which would then be superior both to the real-life scene that it represents and to any mere optical artifices of representation, such as the mirror.

     

    Art-historical consensus has, as Svetlana Alpers points out, come to view Las Meniñas as a visual statement concerning the status of painting in 17th century Spain.20 Spanish painting was striving at the time to emulate the prestige of the Venetian school, and Philip IV, a noted connoisseur and patron of the art, significantly advanced its standing. Madlyn Millner Kahr concurs with this interpretation. She points out that Velázquez places his own head higher than those of the other foreground figures and that the represented paintings (which depict the contests between Apollo and Marsyas and, as in Las Hilanderas, between Athena and Arachne) extol human creativity and thus symbolically place painting on a par with music.21 Palomino suggests that Velázquez immortalized his own image by associating it intimately with that of the Infanta.22 Jonathan Brown, in contrast, thematizes the painting’s relationship to the figure of the king who, as Kahr points out, could not have been directly shown in an informal setting. Given that Philip IV had the painting installed in the personal space of his summer office and was its sole intended spectator, he could, when he faced it, see his own reflection and the effect of his presence on the courtly gathering. If, however, he withdrew from it, the painting could again be construed as focused on the figure of the Infanta, with the mirror reflecting the painted canvas.23

     

    A key difficulty in both Foucault’s analysis and that of Snyder and Cohen is that they construe the painting as perspectivally univocal and systematic, so that their analyses resort unquestioningly to an Albertian understanding of perspective for which, as Norman Bryson points out, “the eye of the viewer is taking up a position in relation to the scene that is identical to the position originally occupied by the painter,” as though they both looked “on to a world unified spatially around the centric ray.”24 Bryson notes the ineluctable frustration of this ideal system (and of the more encompassing ideal of compositio in which it functioned) by its inability to allocate to the viewer not just an axis, but a precise standpoint. In consequence, he remarks, the perspectival vanishing point becomes “the anchor of a system which incarnates the viewer” and renders her visible “in a world of absolute visibility.”25 Bryson’s analysis here is essentially congruent with Foucault’s in conjoining the articulation of a system with its immanent subversion. He does not, however, take the full measure of what it means to incarnate the viewer–not only to give her a precise standpoint or the body of labor and desire, but also to inscribe her into a radically differential articulation, to inscribe her into indecidability. The secret privilege of painting, acknowledged somewhat obscurely by Velázquez and Foucault, and more lucidly perhaps by the late Merleau-Ponty, is its power not only to represent a certain epistêmê together with its intrinsic difficulty, but also to deploy the resources of representation (traditionally assigned to it) so as to disintegrate the representational schema in favor of an articulation that is non-systematic and not subservient to any dominant epistêmê.

     

    To return to Las Meniñas, it is clear that the painting addresses itself to the discontinuity of what Bryson terms the “glance,” rather than to the syncretic and durationless “gaze.”26 If this discontinuity is disregarded, one comes up against difficulties such as the one Snyder and Cohen confront in realizing that, since mirrors reverse, the represented mirror image cannot reflect its implied counterpart on the unseen face of the represented canvas, even though their positions correspond. A double reversal, that is, would simply restore the aspect of the original.

     

    It is not enough to note, as Brown does, that in creating numerous focal points, Velázquez followed “the restless movement of the eye,” leaving perspectival relationships deliberately ambiguous.27 Velázquez not only allows for ambiguities and undecidability as if these were surds of natural vision, but he also actively stages them and does so in multiple pictorial registers. To begin with the compositional and perspectival staging: in Albertian perspective, the viewer is invited to take up the standpoint of the painter so that her vantage point is anticipated and acknowledged by the represented figures and scene. The viewer’s situation in Las Meniñas, however, is rendered problematic and undecidable. Yes, the viewer is seen by the figures of the composition (and even curtsied to by Doña Isabel), but only because her position coincides with that of the implied model, not the represented painter. Moreover, the “model” functions as such only for the mirror reflection (given that the canvas being painted by the represented painter is not of suitable size for a double portrait); yet, the reflection is ambiguously mediated by an unseen painting. The viewer confronts the unseen painter and does not merge with him, so that the positions of seer and seen are marked out in an inter-encroachment that both anticipates and radicalizes the analyses of Merleau-Ponty.28

     

    It is interesting to consider that in Jan Vermeer’s The Painter in His Studio which Bryson foregrounds as breaking with “the privileged focus of the spectacular moment,” the spectator stumbles, as it were, inadvertently upon a scene in which the represented painter is shown from the back, and the model with downcast eyes is retreating into a condition approaching that of the Sartrean In-itself–no doubt in “bad faith.”29 The disruption of the “spectacular moment” enacted here is straightforward; it virtually advertises itself. Las Meniñas is more subtle, for it consummately employs the resources of representation to render its seemingly lucid relationships aporetic. In short–and therefore with a certain element of exaggeration–I want to suggest that Las Meniñas problematizes representation in a more complex and “postmodern” way than Foucault’s analysis suggests.

     

    Whereas, as Bryson points out, the “realist” tradition of painting, subservient to the gaze, strives to fuse the three-dimensionality of the “founding perception” with the flatness of the canvas and the duration of viewing (reduced to the pure moment), and to cover its traces, Las Meniñas frustrates this telos in both its spatial and temporal registers, highlighting the insuperable incongruities that subvert it.

     

    Leo Steinberg notes that sight lines sustain the painting’s compositional structure, and that the diaphaneity emphasized through eyes, aperture, and mirror serves to open up opaque matter to vision and light.30 The light in the painting seems to ascend from below, from the material plane on which daily life deploys itself, to the hall’s lofty spaces. On the lighted foreground plane, the billowing forms of the ladies’ extravagant crinolines create a massive and soothing undulation, a wave that folds in on itself with the sleeping dog and retreats along the axis of the figures in the middle ground, contrasting throughout with the austere geometry of the pictorial space. Throughout this silvery wave pattern one can follow a procession of reds–from the red curtain in the mirror reflection or the cross of Santiago to Doña Maria’s cheek and proffered búcaro, to the adornments of the Infanta, washing over the shoulder and front of her dress in a crimson glaze, then on to the bows and shimmer of Doña Isabel’s costume, finally coming to rest in the muted red of the outfit of Nicolasito Pertusato. The relationships of form and color lack univocal meaning; they are not ancillary to subverting the epistêmê of representation, yet they are no less crucial to the painting’s articulation than the geometric relationships that Foucault emphasizes.

     

    One needs, finally, to attend not only to ideal and geometric relationships, but to the painting’s materiality and inscription of process. As Yve-Alain Bois points out in the title essay of Painting as Model (the essay being a review of Hubert Damisch’s Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture), there is a “technical” model of painting that remains irreducible to the “perceptive” model; and the “image” beloved by existentialist (and much of post-existentialist) thought is, after all, only a surface effect.31 A theory of representation that is informed strictly by geometry does not give due weight to the materiality of painting. Indeed, achieving a weightless ideality is part and parcel of its still metaphysical agenda.

     

    In Las Meniñas, quasi-material form is given visual existence by means of the sketchiest touches of the brush, so that under closer scrutiny manifest identities dissolve into pigment and trace. Even the beige ground is hardly a ground, for it is applied with such translucency as to allow the canvas to assert its grain. Velázquez’s brushwork is particularly sketchy and thin at the painting’s visual focus, the head and torso of the Infanta. Such freedom of the brush, momentarily evoking light, form, and the similitude of life out of accident, requires the spectator’s participation and is therefore not univocal. Moreover, as Joel Snyder has described, there was a sophisticated tradition, consonant with an exaltation of painting, of visually interpreting the seemingly accidental mark:

     

    In addition to seeing a borrón [stain or mark] from the proper distance and in the correct light, the viewer needed learning, experience, and sensitivity to decipher the painted code. To the initiate, the successfully decoded message carried a sense of heightened reality, a revelation . . . of profound and near-divine truth.32

     

    Here also, however, Las Meniñas deploys the resources of a certain “code” so as to problematize it and to place it, so to speak, en abîme. It offers no univocal message to be disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctably differential and an-archic character of perceptual and interpretive coherence. Illusionary form and materiality are equally compelling, so that which commands primacy is indecidable. One cannot acquiesce in the idea that one’s sophisticated perception unveils the painting’s “truth,” for one’s perception may be part and parcel of a procession of illusions and simulacra.

     

    The Autonomy of Painting

     

    Foucault’s selection of a painting to problematize the epistêmê of representation reflects his characterization of that epistêmê in terms of order, simultaneity, tabulation, and taxonomy, which is to say, Foucault characterizes the epistêmê of representation as an essentially spatial conception. By contrast, he characterizes the epistemic order that begins to assert itself at the close of the 18th century as informed by an awareness of time, genesis, and destruction. When things begin to escape from the order of representation, they reveal “the force that brought them into being and that remains in them,” and the static schema of representation is robbed of its power to unite knowledge with things.33 The way is opened for the Hegelian system and for the philosophies of finitude that subvert it.

     

    Whereas the arts of language are suited to reveal epistemic orders that are fundamentally dynamic and temporal, for instance, through allusion, irony, or narrative structure, traditional Western painting seems, for Foucault, to be privileged in thematizing the schematic and spatial order of representation, due to being an essentially spatial art. As soon as this point is acknowledged, however, the advantage gained (that Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas reveals its logic) is offset by a serious difficulty: painting, made into an art of spatial projection, is inherently and from the outset conformed to the procrustean bed of Classical representation, modeled on geometric projection. In consequence, it is deprived of autonomy, becoming simply, as it were, a shadow-writing in the wake of philosophy. Its history, moreover, becomes obscure and problematic. If, for instance, one accepts Yve-Alain Bois’s apt characterization of abstract expressionism as “an effort to bring forth the pure parousia of [painting’s] own essence,”34 this essence sought for (however questionable the notion) can clearly not be the long exhausted schema of representation. Or, to use a similar example, Bois suggests that Mondrian sought to accomplish an abstract deconstruction of painting (in response to the “economic abstraction” of capitalism) by analyzing “the elements that (historically) ground its symbolic order,” and which are not limited to formal relationships, color, luminosity, or the figure/ground opposition.35 Yet, the full extent of Mondrian’s desconstructive effort cannot be grasped if classical Western painting is reduced to representation.

     

    In his study of René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Foucault addresses the history of Western painting. He characterizes it as being governed, from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by two principles, the first of which mandates a dissociation of depiction from linguistic reference together with the establishment of a hierarchical relation of designation between them, while the second makes “resemblance” the criterion of representation.36 He then traces the subversion of these principles, respectively, to Klee and Kandinsky. It needs to be noted that “resemblance” is conceived here in terms of the logic of representation and is contrasted with sheer likeness, with the mimetic order which Foucault terms “similitude.” As Magritte notes in a letter to Foucault (and as the latter acknowledges), ordinary language does not distinguish between resemblance and similitude. On Foucault’s distinction, however, “resemblance” is instituted by thought, whereas “likeness” is encountered spontaneously in experience.37

     

    Foucault’s characterization of the history of Western painting in terms of his two principles is strangely Cartesian; for Descartes strives to eliminate natural and spontaneous likeness (which he calls ressemblance) from representation. In the Optics, for instance, Descartes argues that likeness is neither necessary nor even useful for representation:

     

    ...the perfection [of images] often depends on their not resembling their objects as much as they might. You can see this in the case of engravings, consisting of only a little ink placed here and there on the paper. . . . It is only in relationship to shape that there is any real likeness. And even this likeness is very imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies varying in relief on a surface that is entirely flat... 38

     

    For Descartes, painting is essentially drawing, conceived as the creation of representations that elide likeness. It functions, for him, as an extension of vision which is itself a masked form of mathematical thought. In virtue of this assimilation of painting to drawing to vision, the codes of recognition that govern representation are taken to be universal and timeless, rather than intrinsically historicized. Although Foucault provides precisely what Cartesian thought rules out, namely a historical interpretation of representation, his interpretation remains bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting as well as to their Cartesian assimilation.

     

    Curiously enough, this assimilation continues to be accepted by theorists as diverse as Snyder and Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, painting is the self-interrogation of vision (a self-interrogation that, ab initio, distances itself from Cartesian representation), throughout its history. In contrast, Snyder points to the inseparability of the perspectival construction of space from the rationalization and schematization of vision.39 In his view, the perspectival system of depiction offered a mirror in which vision could almost miraculously contemplate itself, so long as it accepted its own schematization.

     

    Foucault rejects the schematization of vision since he subjects both visibilities and discursive practices to “archaeological” analysis. As Deleuze notes, Foucault upholds the specificity of seeing, denying a schematic isomorphism between the visible and the articulable.40 At the same time, however, he resists Merleau-Ponty’s effort “to make the visible the basis of the articulable,” and thus to give vision a quasi-transcendental primacy. In Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas, his commitment to the “specificity” of vision is, at best, imperfectly realized–of the major registers of visibility, such as color, form, depth, or light, he devotes almost exclusive attention to the last two; and even one of these, namely light, becomes for him, as Deleuze puts it, “a system of light that opens up the space of classical representation.”41

     

    To avoid this impasse and to accord to painting an autonomous (though always historically contextualized) power of invention or differential genesis, what is needed is a theorization of what Bois calls “the mode of thought for which painting is the stake”–a genuinely pictorial thought that is irreducible to “visual thinking” or to a visual exegesis of vision and visibility in the manner of Merleau-Ponty.42 Although Merleau-Ponty’s study of vision, carried on in part through the resources of painting, is insightful and important, his commitment to the primacy of perception, and particularly of vision, leaves him unable to address abstract painting, which is importantly concerned with “disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and above all the figure/ground relationship” (as to which Merleau-Ponty still notes in his late work that it is insurpassable).43 To theorize the “mode of thought for which painting is the stake” will allow one not only to do painting more justice, but also to relate it meaningfully to developments in postmodern thought.

     

    One thing that is requisite for developing a theoretical understanding of genuinely pictorial thought is, as already noted, a painstaking attentiveness to the materiality and hence also the technicality of painting. Philosophical analysis–even of a contemporary and postmodern orientation–has tended to pass over the materiality of painting, unaware that such a move bespeaks an enduring bond to the oppositional and hierarchical mode of thinking that, in the wake of Heidegger and Derrida, has been termed “metaphysics,” a mode of thinking that privileges, in particular, the supersensible over the sensible. As concerns painting, such a move generally takes the form of attending to the pure image and of being oblivious of marks, pigment, or support. These, nevertheless, are thematized not only in contemporary painting, but also by classical painters such as Velázquez or Goya. One cannot approach a contemporary painter like Mondrian without understanding that he strove to “neutralize” painting’s proper elements, being aware that a bare rectangle of canvas is already “tragic,” in the sense of having in its sheer materiality a symbolic and expressive charge.44 This charge, however, is neither straightforwardly transposable into discourse nor into what Bois calls the “perceptive model,” as contrasted with the technical and other models of painting.

     

    Whereas Foucault’s study of Las Meniñas bypasses the painting’s materiality in favor of its quasi-mathematical (perspectival) intelligibility (affirming here philosophy’s own mathematical model, from which the schematization of vision derives), the painting, by contrast, calls attention to its own materiality: it presents itself as other than the geometrically analyzable mirror reflection; its own perspective is illegible; the represented canvas, which is given monumental proportions, presents to the viewer only its bare backside and the labor of its stretching; and both the light and the gestures of the brush are allowed to deliteralize form and to unsettle the hierarchies and protocol of court life, the political emblem of the order of representation. Over all of this, the represented painter presides, brush and palette in hand, his searching gaze indissociable from the inventive engagement of his hands.

     

    If the painter elevates his art, as discussed earlier, to the recognized status of music or poetry, he does so without passing over its materiality; rather, he makes evident that its materiality and technicality are of another order than those of the skills and crafts to which it had traditionally been assimilated. They function in the context of an autonomous order of poiêsis. For, as Damisch writes in a searching analysis of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, literature can say the indescribable and declare it to be such; painting “can only produce it, by the means that are proper to it.45 With respect to Balzac’s figure of Frenhofer, this opacity of painting renders it necessary

     

    to choose between seeing the woman and seeing the picture, at the risk of both of these disappearing, as happens here, in favor of sheer painting . . . [which] brings with it no information that could be translated into the terms of language, that could be declared, nothing that could be understood, apart from noise.46

     

    As soon as this opacity of painting, refractory to sheer perception as well as to intellectual and linguistic constructs, is grasped one not only can begin to understand the exigency that drives it, in its historical course, toward abstraction, but one can also draw on its specific order of poiêsis for addressing the issue of difference that remains in focus in postmodern thought.

     

    Notes

    Editor’s note: To see an electronic reproduction of Las Meniñas, go to http://www.gti.ssr.upm.es/~prado_web/villanueva/27_eng.html.

     

    1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (translation of Les mots et les choses), Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), referred to hereafter at OT. Descartes’s works are referred to in the standard edition, Charles Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, rev. ed., 13 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1964-1976), and in the English translation by J. Cottingham, B. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985-1991). These sources are referred to as AT and CSM, respectively. Translations from the Latin or French are mine throughout, unless otherwise indicated.

     

    2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). English translation by Carleton Dallery, “Eye and Mind,” in James Edie, ed., Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964). My references are to the French edition, cited ad OE.

     

    3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault trans. Seán Hand, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). See pp. 48-69.

     

    4. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1980) part II; and Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975 [1962]).

     

    5. AT X, 373-378; CSM I, 17-19.

     

    6. AT X, 427; CSM I, 49f.

     

    7. OT, 318.

     

    8. M. Foucault, “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu;” Appendix to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 582-603. There is no English translation of this appendix which is a response to Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 31-63.

     

    9. See here Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1981).

    10. OT, 65.

     

    11. OT, 311.

     

    12. John Rajchman, Michael Fouault: The Freedom of Philosphy. (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 15.

     

    13. Foucault argues that, when talking about painting, one needs to erase proper names, so as to keep open the relationship of language to vision (OT 9f). I do not agree that proper names foreclose this relationship; therefore I continue to use them.

     

    14. OT, 6.

     

    15. OT, 14.

     

    16. OT, 312.

     

    17. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, “Las Meniñas and the Paradoxes of Visual Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7:2 (Winter, 1980) 429-447.

     

    18. “Reflections on Las Meniñas,” 441.

     

    19. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986) 257.

     

    20. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation Without Representation; or the Viewing of Las Meniñas,” Representations, I:1 (February, 1983) 31-57.

     

    21. Madlyn Millner Kahr, Velázquez: The Art of Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) 172-185. Compare also Elizabeth de Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1948).

     

    22. As quoted by Brown, Velázquez 259.

     

    23. Brown, Velázquez 260.

     

    24. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 104.

     

    25. Bryson, op. cit. 106.

     

    26. See the chapter “The Gaze and the Glance,” in Vision and Painting, 87-131.

     

    27. Brown, Velázquez 259.

     

    28. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and the new translation by Michael B. Smith, “Eye and Mind,” in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993) 121-149.

     

    29. On Vermeer’s painting, see Bryson, Vision and Painting, 111-117.

     

    30. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’s Las Meniñas,” 19 (Oct., 1981), 45-54.

     

    31. See the title essay of Bois’s Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993) 245-257. Damisch’s collection of esssays is published by Editions du Seuil, 1984.

     

    32. G. McKim Smith, G. Andersen-Bergdoll, and R. Newman, Examining Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988) 23.

     

    33. OT, 312.

     

    34. Bois, Painting as Model, 230.

     

    35. Painting as Model, 240. On Mondrian, see also the chapter “Piet Mondrian: New York City.”

     

    36. M. Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973), ch. iii.

     

    37. Magritte to Foucault, 23 May 1966, in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 83-85.

     

    38. Descartes, Optics, Discourse IV, AT VI, 113; CSM I, 165.

     

    39. Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 6:3 (Spring/Summer, 1980), 499-526.

     

    40. Deleuze, Foucault 61.

     

    41. Foucault, 57.

     

    42. Painting as Model, 245.

     

    43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 197.

     

    44. Damisch, “L’éveil du regard,” Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 54-72.

     

    45. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 45.

     

    46. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 25.

     

  • Jameson’s Lacan

    Steven Helmling

    University of Delaware
    helmling@brahms.udel.edu

     

    Fredric Jameson’s career-long engagement with Jacques Lacan begins in the pages on Lacan in The Prison-House of Language, with the declaration that Lacan’s work offers an “initiatory” experience rather than an expository account. It is in the spirit of that experiential or “dialectical” emphasis that Jameson proposes an off-standard response to what (he says) most people receive as Lacan’s “programmatic slogan,” that “L’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’autre“:

     

    This seems to me a sentence rather than an idea, by which I mean that it marks out the place of a meditation and offers itself as an object of exegesis, instead of serving as the expression of a single concept. (PHL 170-1)

     

    In this essay I want to indicate what seem to me to be the parameters of Lacan’s importance for Jameson. I begin with this passage, in which Jameson discriminates Lacan’s “idea” from his “sentence,” in order to emphasize that Lacan and Jameson share a central problematic: the indissociability of what Lacan calls the “spirit” that motivates an enunciation and the “letter,” at once spirit’s vehicle and its betrayer, of the énouncé that “it speaks” (ça parle). I aim not to bracket “meaning” here, but to highlight what seems to me Lacan’s most immediate interest for Jameson, namely his sense, both as a problem for exposition and as the condition or “motivation” of his gnomic, enigma-mongering prose style, of what Jameson calls “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language” (PHL169).

     

    Jameson subsequently elaborates this “mystery” into the antagonism between the inevitability of “meaning,” its social, collective, constructed, conditioned, and thus (for Jameson) ideological character, and a Cartesian ideology of the self or “subject” that is rooted in and implies a speaker’s desire (futile perhaps, but only the more poignant for that) to “mean” things that haven’t been meant before, to make new and “original” meanings, to escape the entrapment (what Jameson calls the “ideological closure”) imposed by the “order of the signifier.” At issue are the ways in which how “it” is said may change or affect what is said–an issue, or “motivation,” fundamental to the deliberate, self-conscious, and exorbitant “difficulty” of both Jameson’s and Lacan’s notoriously idiosyncratic prose styles. For Jameson, Lacan’s writing is exemplary in not merely enacting, but inflicting upon the reader, all the dilemmas (inside/outside, same/different, surface/depth, written/spoken, temporal/spatial) to which highbrow postmodernity finds itself returning like a dog to a bone. Reading Lacan, your bafflement can’t decide whether you are trying to gain entry to something, or effect an escape from it–even if (indeed, no matter how many times) you’ve already surmised that the best model this prose offers of itself is the Lacanian “Real,” whose definitive measure is the success or failure with which it “resists symbolization absolutely.” This is a prose in which the law of non-contradiction does not prevail, a medium solvent enough to diffuse, but also stiff enough to suspend, every precipitate released into or catalyzed within it.1

     

    Jameson accesses the multifold issues entangled here by way of a term he borrows from the opening pages of Barthes’s S/Z, “the scriptible“–not the “culinary” pleasure of “the lisible,” the “readerly” text so consumably written that (so to speak) it does your reading for you, but rather a “writerly” kind of writing that is (Jameson’s word, not Barthes’s) “dialectical”: “sentences,” as Jameson puts it in “The Ideology of the Text” (1975/6), “whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own (IT1 21; “sentence” here, as elsewhere in Jameson, is a code-word for “the scriptible“–as in the quotation above, “a sentence rather than an idea”). The notion of “gestus” here suggests something physical, somatic: textuality as not a condition or premise of writing or language as such, but, more contingently, an energy, a contagion of excitement that prompts an “emulation” evidently free of the “anxieties of influence” so potently featured in Harold Bloom’s conception of literary transference. What is in question is not a point-for-point verbal “imitation” of distinctive stylistic effects, tics or mannerisms, but a sympathy at once libidinal and intellectual.

     

    Barthes’s “scriptible” opposes itself to “the lisible” as one style to another style; only by implication does “the lisible” encode a wariness of too lazy or complacent a reception of the usual “other” of “style,” namely “content.” Hence, Jameson cautions, another “repression” encoded in the “scriptible/lisible” binary, that of “content” itself, which, in an older critical discourse, functioned as the term polar or binary to “style,” style’s “other.” Much of Jameson’s effort has been to probe the possibilities of finding base-and-superstructure linkages between what he calls the “logic of content” in a given work and the “ideological closure” it enforces. (Despite his wariness of “our old friends, base and superstructure,” Jameson’s work cannot help continued deployment of spectral versions of them.) Jameson’s insistence on “content,” on the “referent,” is one of the larger themes of his critique of “the ideology of structuralism,” or any “ideology of text” that would “reduce” everything to textuality, écriture, “textual production” or representation; and in this Jameson is happy to find support in the nominally “structuralist” psychoanalysis of Lacan. Structuralist linguistics projects the binary of “signifier” and “signified” as recto and verso of (a third term) “the sign”; but between them the three terms delimit a domain strictly coextensive with the field or problematic of “representation,” with no access to (or, in some structuralisms, interest in) any reality beyond it. By contrast, Lacan’s linguistics-influenced, Saussurean, and to that extent structuralist account of mental processes nevertheless situates their range from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” within a larger extra-representational (and, indeed, extra-psychological) field, that of “the Real,” which (for Jameson) guarantees the “materialism” of Marxism and psychoanalysis both. Jameson argues for a Marxism-friendly Lacan when he grandly pronouces of “the Real” that “it is simply [!] History [capital H] itself” (IT1 104; recall here as well Jameson’s enthusiasm for Slavoj Zizek, whose project might be summarized as the attempt to elaborate a specifically Lacanian Ideologiekritik.)

     

    Thus does Jameson enlist Lacan in his “materialist” critique of structuralism, and the danger that he regards as inherent in its linguistic or textual focus, of entrapment in its own central metaphor, so that “language” becomes a “prison-house.”2 This negative, or critical, deployment of Lacan remains constant in Jameson from The Prison-House of Language (1972) through the major essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), and beyond. A more positive use of Lacan appears in Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political Unconscious (1981), especially the latter book’s third chapter, “Balzac and the Problem of the Subject,” which Jameson would later (1986) call an effort at “Lacanian criticism.”3 By this Jameson meant a criticism capable of achieving mediations between the social and the individual that could draw on psychoanalysis without reducing the social to the categories of individual psychology. For Jameson’s purposes, that is, Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis holds out the prospect of an analytically potent psychology not grounded in categories of Cartesian subjectivity, and thus (although Jameson nowhere puts it quite this way) able to fulfil Althusser’s stipulation in being a psychology “without a subject.” Jameson seeks a psychology that would render the representation of “character” in works of fiction amenable to issues of literary history as “genre” and “form,” and would thus invite the sort of politically and socially informed attention called for in Jameson’s famous imperative, “Always historicize!” (PU 9).

     

    The success of Jameson’s “Lacanian criticism” may be assessed in Fables of Aggression and The Political Unconscious; but I want to pass to another, more complex issue at stake for Jameson, especially in the latter book, and best introduced by citing that book’s subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,” which encodes the premise that fictional (and other) narratives are “symbolic” of forces, tensions, contradictions in what Jameson calls “the vast text of the social itself,” and thus that there must be some access (again, on something like the base-and-superstructure model) between the novel and “History itself.” But the corrolary of this claim for “narrative as socially symbolic act” is that narrative cannot escape determination by what Jameson calls an “ideological closure.” The more potently “symbolic” it is, the feebler becomes its potential as a liberatory “act.” Which raises, implicitly, a question very close to Jameson’s quick indeed, that of whether critique can escape “ideological closure” any better than narrative can. To ask the question another way, must “socially symbolic” mean “ideological”? Can it ever escape reduction to “ideology”? Can it ever mean or achieve anything else? (Note that the possible comforts of such a notion as “relative autonomy” count for nothing in Jameson’s all-or-nothing dramatization of the issue.)

     

    The question takes various forms, and tilts in the direction of various answers, in The Political Unconscious–suspended, and agitated, in Jameson’s inimitable fashion. But the general drift of the book is melancholy: his very premise presupposes a negative answer–though never, to be sure, unequivocally negative; the prose always evinces that “Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology” named in the title of the book’s concluding chapter. But among the largest hopes the book entertains for critique or for “narrative” is one cast in specifically Lacanian terms: that, somehow (unspecified), it might become a “socially symbolic act” in a fashion that would merit capitalizing the S in “Symbolic”: that would merit, in short, taking narrative’s or critique’s power as “Symbolic” in a specifically Lacanian sense. Most of the book functions, that is, as if “narrative as a socially symbolic act” encodes narrative’s “closure” within ideology; but at certain moments, especially at the close of the Balzac chapter, Jameson seems willing to talk as if the term “Symbolic” might indicate the condition of a possible critical escape from the prison-house of ideology, a break-out from the “ideological closure” the book protests. As if, in other words, “narrative [or critique] as a socially Symbolic act” [capital S] would mean surmounting a more normatively (and inescapably) ideological condition or closure in which cultural production could function only, inescapably, by definition, as “socially Imaginary act”–and from which any critical or utopian “escape” would therefore be sheer ideological (or “Imaginary”) delusion (see especially PU 183, where the locution “Symbolic texts” [capital S] is played off against “Imaginary” [capital I] in a fashion to make the Lacanian freight unmistakable).

     

    We will shortly consider why Jameson’s binary of “ideology” and “utopia” cannot be simply “transcoded” into Lacan’s “Imaginary” and “Symbolic.” But his fitful readiness to hope that it might encodes another of Lacan’s attractions for Jameson, namely his Hegelianism–a recurrent, if undeveloped, theme in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” It is shrewd of Jameson to have noted that Lacan’s Freud is a Hegelian Freud, in contrast to the (normatively) Nietzschean Freuds “theory” has mostly generated; but I think Jameson overplays his hand here: Lacan’s “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” don’t quite bear the freight he wants them to carry; though Jameson’s own caution against deploying the passage from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” as a version of the Levi-Straussian nature-to-culture motif perhaps says all that needs saying in anticipation of my reservations here (IT1 97). But the (Hegelian) point is that for Lacan and Jameson, the “Imaginary/ Symbolic” binary encodes a narrative, modeled on the Hegelian course from “immediate” to “mediated,” of transit from a “lower” to a “higher” state, in which the “lower” is aufgehoben, transcended yet preserved, in the “higher.” Lacan, in my view, plays the Hegelian dialectic ironically; hence the continual Schadenfreude of his textual voice, the continual irony at the expense of “the Symbolic” itself in its very aspiration (“stoic” and/or “tragic,” to use Jameson’s terms of praise for Lacan [IT1 98, 112], but either way, doomed) to disintricate itself from “the Imaginary.”

     

    However all that may be, Jameson takes Lacan’s Hegelian (and other) flourishes more straightforwardly, and thus finds in Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic,” notwithstanding the essay’s earlier denunciation of “ethics,” something like an “ethic”–“an implicit ethical imperative” (in Jane Gallop’s words), “to break the mirror . . . to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.’”4 Indeed, the quasi- or crypto-Hegelian narrativization of this ethic projects a scenario of change and progress, development and Aufhebung: it provides, in other words, for the continual coming-into-being of fresh perspectives, different from or “outside” of those preceding them, and thus allowing for “critical” reconsideration of them–in the context of this discussion, allowing one of the larger “desires” (or more Hegelian hopes) of The Political Unconscious, that the word “Symbolic” in its subtitle can mean genuinely “critical,” and not merely “ideological” in the sense of “an Imaginary solution to a Real contradiction.”

     

    But where Hegel was, there shall Heidegger be–“there,” above all, in the field of what solicits Jameson’s interest as a specifically Lacanian “scriptible.” And since, for Jameson, “interest” is proportional to problematicality, we must again acknowledge–indeed, insist on–the inextricability of Lacan’s “scriptible” from his “content.” This sketch so far, for example, has required brief exposition of “arguments” or “positions”; likewise Jameson’s own discussions of Lacan, except (of course) much much more so. It’s arguable, in fact, that of the many high “theory” figures and issues Jameson has written about, none has so forced him into the “expository” mode as Lacan. Lacan’s prose is calculated to confound every possible logic of “argument” or “position,” yet Jameson is not alone in the dilemma that discussion of Lacan is obliged to ascribe something argument- or position-like to him in order to conduct itself at all. Hence the ironic quotation marks with which Jameson refers to “Lacanianism” (IT1 95)–a term, indeed, that gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. We return herewith to the problem announced at this paper’s opening: the desire of the “speaking subject” to speak (or write) a way out of the entrapment, the necessity, the “ideological closure” of “meaning,” or what the later Jameson calls, in a term borrowed from Paul de Man, “thematization”5–a term, in Jameson’s usage, for the form (or threat) of “reification” specific to intellectual work, and to properly “dialectical” projects like his own (if, indeed, the word “dialectical” isn’t simply an apotropaism, the sign of a project’s self-consciousness of the danger of, and its desire to escape, “thematization”).

     

    “Thematization,” indeed, could serve as the “other” of “the scriptible“–its “other” in the pointed sense of its antagonist, or its special pitfall or danger. Jameson’s sense of the energies of “the scriptible” in doomed agon with “thematization” may be read as another version of his “dialectic of utopia and ideology”; it can also be read as a version, indeed, a less “irreversible” (i.e., less narrative, and less Hegelian) version, of his account of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” But my point here is that quite apart from any paraphraseable doctrine or portable “thematization” of Lacan–from any “Lacanianism,” in short–Jameson discerns in Lacan’s oracular and evasive, but also ingenious, witty, and energetic prose another instance of a scriptible well worth “emulation,” another exemplar of the effort to evade or disable in advance the “thematizations” any discourse, however “dialectically” written, must suffer in an age of “consumerist” reification.

     

    As noted above, Jameson in one of his aspects is an enforcer of “content” on those who would evade it; but his stress on “content” means to facilitate analysis and protest, perhaps even exorcism of, or breakout from, its pernicious “ideological closure.” The motif of “the scriptible” encodes this protest against “the logic of content,” this hope or desire to escape the constraints of “ideological closure,” at its most utopian and libidinal. And so it is as a prose stylist that I want to feature Lacan’s interest for Jameson in what remains–well aware as I do so that for many readers, precisely the impenetrable prose of these two figures is the primary stumbling block for any approach to their work. Such readers suppose, or hope, that the value of a Jameson or a Lacan is in a “content” that would be available after the difficulties of “style” have been obviated. But it is part of the appeal of “the scriptible” for Jameson to confound any such “thematizing” habit of reading that would aim at an instrumental extraction of content from a stylistic skin that, once evacuated, can be properly left behind. It is one of the marks of “the scriptible” in Jameson that he does not judge its exemplars on the propositional “content,” or “argument,” of their writing–as witness two of his favorite figures, Wyndham Lewis and Martin Heidegger, notoriously “right,” and at times explicitly fascist, in their politics. The presence of Heidegger in Lacan’s work, of course, is evident; Jameson links the two as exemplars of a twentieth-century critique of subject-object dichotomizing, “identity” thinking, correspondence or “adequation” theories of “truth,” the devolution of techne into technology, the instrumentalization of knowledge as “mastery,” etc. (IT1 103-5).

     

    In “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” Jameson gathers these Heideggerian concerns under the Lacanian rubric, “the overestimation of the Symbolic at the expense of the Imaginary” (IT1 95, 102; cf. PHL 140). Heidegger and Lacan (and Jameson himself) thus stand as petitioners for the claims of “the Imaginary” against those, already over-esteemed in our reifying culture, of “the Symbolic.” And here we abut Jameson’s twin enthusiasms for the sublime nutsiness of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and for the Deleuze-Guattari thematic and practice, in Anti-Oedipus, of the “schizo” and the “delirious.”6 Both of these enthusiasms align with, though they can appear at times to displace or eclipse, Jameson’s announced admiration for Lacan. And although neither Lyotard, on the one hand, still less Deleuze and Guattari on the other, are exactly fans of Lacan, Jameson’s mediations proceed at a level–that of “sentence” rather than of “idea”–where their substantive dissents from each other can remain in abeyance. In Fables of Aggression and The Political Unconscious the libidinal and the schizo are assigned the burden of the Heideggerian-Lacanian alternative to “the Symbolic”–in creative or imaginative writing, of course, but as the examples of Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari (and Lewis, if not quite so unreservedly Heidegger and Lacan themselves) insist, in critical writing as well. In the program chapter to Postmodernism, Jameson will project these affective properties as “sublime,” and as such, both a program and a problem for his own work.

     

    Yet above, the very possibility of critique, the very possibility of its power to escape “ideological closure,” was figured as its potential to surmount “the [ideological] Imaginary” and ascend to “the [critical] Symbolic.” Here, Jameson valorizes a desire to head in the other direction. Here, “the Symbolic” itself is the “ideology” from which escape is hoped for, by way not of the stratospheric mediations of critique, but rather of the affective immediacies of “the Imaginary.” I alluded above to the difficulties of “transcoding” Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic” binary into Jameson’s “ideology/utopia”; part of what obstructs that “transcoding” is that it requires, on one side of the bar, an equation of “utopia” with “critique” that feels counter-intuitive, insofar as “utopia” says pleasure and the libidinal, and embraces the collective; whereas “critique” implies a cerebral ascesis that will necessarily, even in utopia, be the concern of specialized elites. To put it more schematically: on one pass (call it the Hegelian), the Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic” binary seems to align with Jameson’s “ideology/critique,” implying a liberatory narrative of progressive possibility; on the other (the Heideggerian), it aligns rather with that of “utopia/ideology,” a story in which what masqueraded (and seduced) as progress eventuates at last, ironically, in decline, loss, nostalgia, and abjection before the exactions of ananke. In short: if “ideology” is our starting point, is the passage to the “schizo” a flight or a fall, an ascent or a descent, a progress or a regress?

     

    This difficulty (not to call it a “contradiction”) indicates much of the conflictedness Jameson registers when he describes the Lacanian “ethic” as “stoic” and “tragic”; it indicates as well the ambitions of, the mediations proposed in, and the contradictions bedeviling the Jamesonian “scriptible,” a prose whose potency is at once analytical and libidinal. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” indeed, ends by inferring from Lacan something like an ethic or ethos for “cultural intellectuals,” one which would eschew the “Symbolic” critical “mastery” of “subject” over “object” in favor of a more intersubjective “articulated receptivity,” for which Jameson enlists the Lacanian “discourse of the analyst”:

     

    The "discourse of the analyst," finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the "discourse of the hysteric," this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter's existential urgencies--in a fashion more dialectical than ironic. The "discourse of the analyst," then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire's subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority . . . ; rather it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L'écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the Other's desire. The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts. (IT1 115)

     

    This “active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial of this final subject position,” forecasts Jameson’s later recommendation that critique now must conduct itself “homeopathically,” from the inside, suffering ideology’s own virulences the better to turn them against it.7

     

    The ambition operative here, however, is for a mediation of “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” in an ascesis at once active and passive, of “listening” attention that can achieve contact with “the Real,” which Jameson has equated, “simply,” with “History itself.” Here the demands Jameson makes of critique, and of his own critical practice, rely less on Lacan’s categories than on his example as a writer, on that peculiar Lacanian “scriptible,” so elusive and yet so evocative of a “Real” that, as Lacan says, “resists symbolization absolutely”–a formula in which the word “symbolization” bears not only the full Lacanian charge, but also obvious affinities to “thematization,” the condition Jameson hopes his own writing practice may disable if not altogether prevent or escape. (Lacan’s cagy prose, we may note by the way, resists “thematization” more effectively–or resists “symbolization” more “absolutely”–than Jameson’s own.) Granted that critique, that utterance of any kind, cannot “resist thematization absolutely”; such is Lacan’s stoic-tragic, but also comic and even sarcastic theme. Jameson’s later prose derives its effects from making much, the most possible, both of the (imperative) attempt, and of the (inevitable) failure. Much: but what exactly?–a “socially Symbolic act”? a “socially Real act”? In The Political Unconscious, Jameson will elaborate “History itself” (“what hurts”) as “absent cause,” and thus as “unrepresentable” and “unsymbolizable” in ways that, in Postmodernism, will require or justify, or “motivate,” a rhetoric of “the sublime”–a designation apt, I think, for at least some of the grander effects of the later Jameson’s tortured “scriptible.” Lacan’s terminology permits us to indicate the anxieties often powering these passages by way of the question, Can Jameson’s critical “sublime” escape “the Imaginary” and broach “the Real”? The difficulty, of course, is how to know the difference–or even how to know whether the difference itself is “Imaginary” or “Real.”

     

    Oddly, however, although Lacan’s prose is much more “difficult” than Jameson’s, these particular difficulties, signally, feel much more “difficult” in Jameson’s prose than in Lacan’s. For all Lacan’s sarcasms at the expense of “le sujet supposé savoir,” it is just such a “knowingness” that Lacan’s prose projects: a knowingness, notably, from which the reader is excluded. (“The reader” here, of course, means this reader, who is happy to project himself, in the context of reading Lacan, as un sujet supposé ne pas savoir.) The agitations of Jameson’s prose, by contrast, project its “difficulties” as difficulties reader and writer have in common, dilemmas incurred by the shared desire to know confronting the insecurity, or the anxiety, incurred by Jameson’s and our own critical scruples. To this extent Lacan suggests one way of getting a handle on the “motivations” of Jameson’s notoriously agitated prose. Jameson often alludes to a “dialectic of utopia and ideology,” but also operant in his writing, as we have seen, is that other dialectic, that other binary, which projects as the “other” of “ideology” not “utopia” but “critique.” Can critique ever ascend beyond the closure of the “socially Symbolic” to “act” upon the elusive, absent, unsymbolizable “socially Real”? That is the form in which Lacan enables Jameson to dramatize the ambitions, or agitate the desires, both critical and “writerly,” of his writing.

     

    Notes

     

    1. It may be helpful here to observe that Jameson and Lacan share an alignment programmatically rejected by many, most saliently Derrida, for whom any talk of “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language” would be almost too caricaturally deconstructible. Hence at least some of Jameson’s evident wariness of Derrida, from The Prison-House of Language (1971) through “Marx’s Purloined Letter” (1995). Of special relevance in the latter essay are the pages in which Jameson improvises a genealogy descending from Hegel for the problem of how philosophical/critical writing is written–a problem manifesting in Derrida as “a certain set of taboos” enforcing “an avoidance of the affirmative sentence as such,” and, hence, a prose “vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent to avoid saying something” (“MPL” 81). Jameson goes on to insist that somehow or other, nevertheless, “content [is] generated” in Derrida; but despite his mildly ironic tone at Derrida’s expense, the problem is one that he elsewhere, in connection with other writers, stages as quite an anguishing one (see, e.g., the pages on “dialectical writing” in Marxism and Form [xii-xiii and the Adorno chapter, passim]; the passage on Barthes’s “writing with the body” in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” [IT2 69]; the lament against “thematization” in Late Marxism [LM 183]; the plangent reprise on the Barthesian scriptible in Signatures of the Visible [SV 2-4]. I have written about some of these problems at greater length in “Marxist ‘Pleasure’: Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton,” PMC 3.3 [May 1993]).

     

    Other Marxists (e.g., Eagleton) complain that Derrida is “apolitical”; Jameson’s take seems to be that Derrida’s proscription of “metaphysics” secures some of its gains a bit too facilely: for Jameson, the largest stakes, the success or failure, of theory or critique are at play only when ideology and metaphysics figure not as mere errors, or false consciousness (as if banishing false consciousness were as simple as calling it “false”), but as fated burdens: “sublime object(s),” or desired/hated “symptom(s),” in Zizek’s cheerful, cheeky Lacanian terms, whose “closure” critique can only fitfully protest–with the further irony that the very protest only confirms them. Jameson seems to me to miss the degree to which Derrida has recently begun to spin his longstanding motif of “affirmative deconstruction” in ways that suggest a greater hospitality to such patently “metaphysical” constructions as “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language”; I’m thinking especially of the motif of “the undeconstructible” in The Gift of Death (trans. David Wills [University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992]) and Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge: New York, 1994]). “The undeconstructible” encompasses such terms as “God,” “responsibility,” “spirit,” “justice,” and “a certain experience of the emancipatory [elsewhere, “messianic”] promise…”–motifs you could fairly call “specters of (late) Derrida.”

     

    2. For Marxism and psychoanalysis as “materialisms,” see IT1 104-5; for this critique of structuralism, see PHL passim, especially (for Lacan) 169-73.

     

    3. IT1 97, and 195 n45. Note that Jameson does not nominate Fables of Aggression as an example of “Lacanian criticism”–perhaps because though it deals with the problems he regards as belonging to “Lacanian criticism” (the insertion of the subject into ideology), he foregrounds Lyotard’s “libidinal apparatus” rather than any Lacanian vocabulary. (In like manner, as we will see below, Deleuze and Guattari displace–or sublate: simultaneously “cancel and preserve”–Lacan in the opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious.) Lacan persists in Fables of Aggression mostly via the mediation of Althusser. Still, the elision of Lacan, only two years after the programmatic claims based on him in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” is at the very least surprising.

     

    4. For Jameson’s denunciation of “ethics” in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), see IT1 58, 87, 95; cf “Criticism in History,” ibid., 123-6; FA 56; PU 59, 234. (Jameson more accommodatingly reconsiders “ethics” in “Morality versus Ethical Substance; or, Aristotelian Marxism in Alasdair MacIntyre” [1983/4], IT1 181-5). For the Jane Gallop passage, see Reading Lacan (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985), 59. Gallop and Jameson acknowledge each other’s work, and make some show of taking exception to each other, but on this their views are quite similar.

     

    5. For a suggestive Jamesonian deployment of the term “thematization,” see, e.g., Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1991), 182-3: “Proving equal to Adorno . . . doing right by him, attempting to keep faith with the protean intelligence of his sentences, requires a tireless effort–always on the point of lapsing–to prevent the thematization [Jameson’s italics] of his concept[s]…”

     

    6. The most relevant Lacan texts in this connection are “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960) and, to a lesser extent, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958), in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 292-325, 179-225.

     

    7. “To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history.” Jameson in a 1986 interview with Anders Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism,” in Douglas Kellner, ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989), 59.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • FA: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. U of California P: Berkeley, 1979.
    • IT1: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 1988.
    • IT2: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 1988.
    • M&F: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton UP: Princeton, 1971.
    • “MPL”: “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” New Left Review 209 (January/February 1995), 75-109.
    • PHL: The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton UP: Princeton, 1972.
    • PU: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP: Ithaca, 1981.
    • SV: Signatures of the Visible. Routledge: New York, 1992.

     

  • Selected Letters from Readers

     
     
     

    Author’s Reply to Letters Regarding “Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons” (PMC 6.1)

     

    In response to a number of letters regarding my article on Richard Simmons, I would like to say that it was never my intention to condemn Mr. Simmons. In my opinion, noting someone’s gayness is in no way an insult. My article was a piece of criticism that looked at Richard Simmons and his diet empire as a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Simmons’ personal life is, indeed, of absolutely no interest to me and I would not presume to discuss it. I was interested in his publicperformance, for he is very much a performer. While I think it it marvelous that Mr. Simmons has helped so many people, praising his dietary ideas was not, however, part of my article. Of course I take seriously the difficulty of losing weight but my article was not, I repeat was not, ever meant as a discussion of weight loss methods. As for the reader who suspects that I am a “skinney [sic] bitch”–I can tell you that you are mistaken on both counts.

     

    Rhonda Garelick
    Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature
    University of Colorado, Boulder

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on “The Slow Apocalypse”

     

    Thank you, Andrew McMurry.

     

    Your article is important and provocative. I will not forget it and will certainly reread it and share it with my friends. I am troubled by its veracity. I have two sons and am compelled toward hope. I remain hopeful but it is not a hope born of materialist sensibilities.

     

    Anyway…

     

    thanks

     

    Chris Franocvich

     

    These comments are from: Chris Francovich
    cfran@micron.net

     

    New Criticism Underground?

     

    [The writer refers to Joe Amato’s review of Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum, PMC 6.3]

     

    I read the bit quoted from Rasula about the New Critics being now “underground” and came straight to the comments page. If I could e-mail Rasula directly, I would, so if there’s an address to be had I would welcome it.

     

    Fact is, the heirs of the New Criticism are NOT underground at all. I did an MFA in poetry at the University of Arkansas, from which one Miller Williams will soon be venturing to DC to deliver the inaugural poem.

     

    First let me say that I am glad for the 4-year, 60-hour MFA program I undertook. I learned more about “the tradition” in western-world poetry there then I could have anywhere else, if for no other reason than the time given me in the form of a 4-year TA.

     

    I recognize now that along with the in-depth and thorough study of poetry past and present what I got was a straight and narrow (and I mean narrow) course on new-critical analysis. Like I said, I am grateful to at least know what that is all about. I could scan the tag on your jeans from 80 yards.

     

    But lately I have come to realize (unless it is unique to my experience having done UA) that the majority of current MFA recipients/”certified” poets are/were taught by the direct descendents of the NC’s. In my case, my teacher-poets at UA, aside from circulating in a somewhat closed but expansive group of like-minds in the south and mid-west, are also the running mates of the likes of Wilbur, Justice, Taylor, et. al. and these people still wield influence ABOVE GROUND, if not directly, then through the hundreds of students they’ve had who are now teaching.

     

    Please correct me if I am wrong, but the sheer fact of the poets’ entrenchment in the academy has provided an entire generation with the tools and the leisure to perpetuate a poetic that would have been dead 20 years now were the poetry teaching and poetry reviewing left up to scholars instead of poets themselves.

     

    As a result, it seems to me anyway, the “experimental” writing out there is still in a state of reaction rather than one of clearly defining its concerns and goals. When- ever I read Language poets I have a hard time seeing any- thing but “I am trying very hard to NOT BE a poem any NC would like.”

     

    Look, I’m 28, fully versed in “the tradition,” and desperately trying to escape that beautiful and irrelevant mode for higher ground. There are a number of us out here, whose reputations extend about as far as our mailboxes, who are becoming rather fed up with the academic-fuck-post-anything attitude on the one hand and the self-righteous fuck-anybody-who-says-fuck-us attitude on the other.

     

    Group A is holding fast to a sinking ship, and group B is sailing off for never-never land. As far as we are concerned, both Dana Gioia and Rasula can go to hell. Lately I’ve noticed that at least a few among this self-proclaimed post-whatever rebellion have joined the ranks of the tenured even before the old Vanderbilt-grads have died or retired.

     

    To be honest, I just can’t figure out for the life of me what the hell is going on–it seems like one ORDER is being displaced by another ORDER which readied itself ahead of time for the big university buy-out.

     

    But I rant, all apologies. Suffice it to say that for the young writers out here now trying to forge their way, few things would be more agreeable than if all the academic trenches on every side of any aesthetic had truckloads of grenades dumped into them tomorrow afternoon at 1:20, and were just left that way.

     

    Thanks for your time, DT

     

    These comments are from: daniel tessitore
    daniel@tiu.ac.jp

     

    Reader’s Report on “Biding Spectacular Time”

     

    [The writer refers to A.H.S. Boy’s “Biding Spectacular Time,” a review of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, PMC 6.2]

     

    Making the “point” (shall we say the “accent”?) on Debord’s theses Boy reconstructs the background of a thought that accompanied a historical time of change and criticism of Modernity. That Debord is highly “postmodern” means that capitalism is still in its “representational” state where the “social spectacle” is not a stage of participation but one where the “Script” of Power introduces its “codes” through which the whole “reality” “as experience” is alienated and the human “thing” is not anymore a “spectator” but the object of social manipulation, i.e. a “channel” which “reflects” the “Order” of the Reality of the Codes of Power. This Code had reduced language to “behaviour” and “behaviour” into pure biological reflexivity identifying man with the object (the tool). The “scene” of the Spectacle as Society may be observed in the industrial and corporative model of Swedish “national” social democracy. The State and the Society are synonymous. You cannot criticise the State without becoming a social “pariah.” The notion of “persona” or individual” is replaced by “client” making Spectacle into a marketspace. Baudrillard is the hyperrealisation of the ideas of the most advanced Situationists. Postmodern Culture is one of the most valuable sites at the net.

     

    Cveta Cvetkova

     

    [Prof. Cvetkova is the author of Codes of Power: From Situationism to Seduction, Chartwell-Bratt Ltd (ISBN 0-86238-443-5)]

     

    These comments are from: Cveta Cvetkova
    socpoo@soc.lu.se

     

    PMC Generally

     

    I’m an (analytically trained) philosopher at Oxford. I’m sympathetic to what seems to be the political position articulated in a lot of the stuff here, but detest postmodernism as a theory of truth/reference/meaning. Where can I debate that issue (online)? Can somebody persuade me why I should give up the notion of truth, commonsensically conceived, as postmodernists appear to think I should? Please email me if you can help.

     

    These comments are from: Tom Runnacles
    thomas.runnacles@jesus.ox.ac.uk

     

    A Reader’s Response (the reader is still alive!)

     

    Don’t you think there has been just a little bit too much fuss already around the subject of p******ity/ism? But honestly, your magazine is the only site on the Web, which contains even a modicum of seriousness and so-called scientific or scholarly ambition. Please, more about the relationships between analytic aesthetics and deconstruction (if there is something worth writing on that subject)!

     

    These comments are from: Samuli Hägg
    shagg@cc.joensuu.fi

     

  • What Was (the White) Race? Memory, Categories, Change

     

    Mike Hill

    University of Michigan
    mikehill@umich.edu

     

    Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (NY: Routledge, 1996), and Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
     

    ...it's impossible to me to separate black studies from white studies.

     

    --C.L.R. James

     

    Whiteness Redux

     

    When Timothy McVeigh’s photo appeared on the cover of Time, it was emblazoned with a caption that read “the face of terror.” Not a year later came the arrest of “Team Viper.” You may recall, the Vipers were that otherwise unremarkable group of suburbanites from West Shangri-La Lane, Arizona, who were caught with a half-ton of the same ammonium-nitrate compound that exploded in Oklahoma City, this time tucked away in the garage next to the gardening tools and other middle-class accouterments. Both events were reported to have “shocked” the nation, but why?

     

    These events, I would suggest, exhibit a fundamental Western, white, and modern anxiety, one that emerges somewhere between the putative normativity of the everyday and the eventual awareness of an other that is us. Not to slight the brutal tragedy of 168 dead, but glossy magazines and the evening news know that when blue-eyed, blond-haired, white men and outwardly peaceable suburbanites are cast as anti-government guerrilla warriors, it makes for a hot-button scoop–flashier, say, than repeating those hopelessly redundant statistics about government-sanctioned corporate greed and the new economic world order. Home-grown anti-federalism is a good story because distinctions and oppositions emerge where before were just stock commonalities. Here, you might say, Benjaminian “estrangement” meets the rank pastiche of Hard Copy or A Current Affair. A clean-cut, Caucasian “John Doe” in a moving van, or a middle-class home replete with ornamental cactuses and well-groomed lawns, are at some historical flash point transformed to disclose the barbarism just under the veneer of ordinary life.

     

    Indeed, to ferret out the ontological absenteeism implicit in the concept of the “ordinary” is at least one objective made available lately by the (also widely reported) “rise of White Studies,” a.k.a., critical ethnography’s next-big-thing.1 It was until recently assumed that white identity was all-but-featureless, a-categorical background, some unspeakable neutrality by which the default mechanism for otherness was automatically set. But, at least in theory, distinction has crossed the ontological tracks, and whiteness is no longer what James Baldwin calls the “jewel of naïveté.”2 No longer, that is, does whiteness in its omnipotence and absence afford white folk absolution on matters of race. Whiteness is instead a function of material inequity, even if it is also a fragile historical fiction.

     

    But “White Studies,” so far anyway, has hardly resulted in the political dispersion of whiteness on behalf of exclusively post-white agendas. Indeed, the simple declarative act of tagging whiteness with a temporal marker seems to have lead, with our barely noticing, to an inescapable performative irony, a sort of visibility blues wherein whiteness is (still), as Richard Dyer puts it, both there and not there.3 My question is: if whiteness is being variously examined in its normative capacity, is it (still) master of itself? The critical study of whiteness initiates a series of similarly awkward questions which bear as much relevance to the sly ontological struggles of (white) majoritarian culture over formerly colonized and enslaved peoples (of color) as they do the discovery of what Theodore Allen calls in another context that “truly peculiar institution.”4 Allen is referring here to the peculiarity of the category of whiteness itself to afford material privilege. But the critical rush to the study of whiteness is arguably no less peculiar. “White Studies” is peculiar at the very least insofar as this work, unlike Black, Hispanic, or Asian Studies, is eager to pursue the necessary disintegration of its object. The nettlesome epistemological questions inherent in this task, not to mention how (or whether) such a thing counts as politics, have yet to be seriously discussed.

     

    So I want to begin to do that here; but before plunging ahead, it is hard to resist mentioning one other recent media affair. Whether “jewel of naïveté” or not, Richard Jewell (one-time unofficial suspect of the Atlanta Olympics bombing) is the latest name in a growing cluster of nationally known, martially bent, more or less “ordinary” white guys. His, too, is a story of visibility, publicity, and distinction gone nastily awry, but with the added twist that in this allegory of white representation, the desire for unremarkability and ordinary life is apparently proportionate to exactly that impossibility. The levels of marking and re-marking still operative around Jewell (compounded now by my own) are too numerous to name, but they range from his longtime desire to be famous, to the apparently false report that he did the deed, to his lawsuit and the media’s odd tautological self-defense that he was, after all (that is, after all the publicity), a public figure. Willingly or not, Richard Jewell seemed to realize a certain lesson taught by discourse theory: that outside representation (self-, media-, legal-representation) “Richard Jewell” did not, in effect, exist. The irony of his finally becoming represented, and with nothing shy of a material force (lesson number two of discourse theory), is that Richard Jewell has in the final instance become a twisted rendition of his own purportedly benevolent dreams.

     

    My point in mentioning the Jewell saga is to note the cruel simultaneity of what the newspapers later called his “hero to villain to victim” status. “White Studies” itself initiates a similar conundrum. It, too, comes replete with the unintentional critical fallout of what must to some look like a white renaissance, with the ironies, reversals, and inversions that sober cultural workers might prefer to avoid for the sterner stuff of political self-mastery. “White Studies” seems to flirt with the same visibility problems that continue to dog Richard Jewell, where a protect-and-serve desire to secure for all better life (“heroism”), the indomitable urge to advertise it (in this case eventuating “villainy”), and a subsequent hero-villain reversal (“victimage”), re-combine in exceedingly troublesome ways. This process, it turns out, circumscribes the founding predicament of “White Studies,” now that its presence is official.

     

    In this review I want to explore “White Studies” as an engagement precisely of this sort, one that barely separates its ethnic heroes, villains, and victims. Such ambivalence is, I will suggest, an inevitable condition of work which is itself as much a political symptom of, as a political act upon, white skin privilege. “White Studies” seems to bring with it a politics of change that is also one of categorical misrecognition (of whiteness by newly race-conscious whites, and of “White Studies” by others). The irony attendant on the renewed institutional presence of whiteness indicates a certain awkwardness to be sure, but I think irony is nonetheless the right condition for a politics at the same time critical of whiteness. Indeed, the irony of whiteness in our midst initiates a process of identity re-negotiation wherein the white subject doing white critique is involved in a process of recollecting desires not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, its own. How else can “White Studies” interrogate whiteness as historical race “villain,” while imagining post-white “heroes,” all at once? The specific books under examination here are, first, Race Traitor edited by Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey and, second, Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest.

     

    Cross-Over Dreams

     

    It's gotten to the point where white folks own hip-hop. Black folks are just renting it.

     

    --Danyel Smith, Vibe

     

    Race Traitor is an edited volume of essays, editorials, and letters from the first five issues of the journal by the same name inaugurated in 1992. The premises of Race Traitor, which more or less repeat the boilerplate story of “White Studies,” are as follows: first, “the white race is a historically constructed formation” (9); second, whiteness is “a product of some people’s responses to historical circumstances” (9); and third, whiteness allows “those assigned a place within it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interest they hold” (10). Thus it is proposed that “the key to fundamental social change in the U.S. is the challenge to the system of race privilege that embraces all whites” (1). Neither “whiteness” nor “race” itself essentially exist; and if enough white folk choose to belong to categories that are not-white (for Race Traitor, resolutely black), the world might change for the better.

     

    That identity is mediated, categories permeable and impure, and that associations and the comparability of peoples are influenced by political interests but not necessarily fixed by them, seem unimpeachable premises this side of cultural nationalism. And the clarity and frankness with which Race Traitor holds its racial nominalism forth is probably unmatched in the widening congregation of critical work on whiteness. Contributors in the volume range from bike messengers, to cooks and prisoners, to intellectuals and managerial folk, to a powerful essay by Herbert Hill (former labor secretary of the NAACP). Most contributions are stories of “cross-over dreams” (148), others are polemics, others historical analysis or commentary on current events, and there is also a sort of primer on Israeli/Palestinian relations. Although an occasional anti-intellectual vibe sneaks through the book (as with the oddly reactionary deconstruction bashing that goes on now and again [e.g., 113]), there is something extraordinarily general-reader friendly and activist-inspired about Race Traitor. Whether or not the kinds of general reading the book longs for or the popular activism it seeks actually exist is something left by the by. But alongside David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, and more recently, Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters and Fred Pfeil’s White Guys, Race Traitor will be an essential volume for anyone interested in the critical study of whiteness.5

     

    There are pressing questions, however, and certain contradictions immanent to white “race trading” that make the word “dream” in “cross-over dreams” sound perhaps a little too innocuous. First, how to know an effective “race trade”; that is, how to distinguish the self-conscious choice of abandoning white skin privilege from a friendly little game of margin poaching, what Eric Lott calls “love and theft”6? This is something, after all, that the white popular media has been doing at least since minstrelsy and as recently, as my epigram above suggests, as rap.7 Second, to the extent that a race trade is at all thinkable–and I think ultimately it is, but something much less easily volunteered–how can it be separated from the privilege of whiteness to go on choosing where to draw the lines between its former self (as white “villain”), the other it has historically disenfranchised (the not-white “victims” of whiteness), and the eventual victory of post-white self-consciousness (that is, as “hero” qua “race traitor”)? Might this not arguably be a process of white fantasy rather than its dream, of psychic transferal, recuperation, and transcendence, white fright as well as fancy?

     

    One might fairly suggest that (the white privilege of) desiring to cast-off “white privilege,” our newfound eagerness to embrace brothers and sisters of color we now choose (whether or not they choose us), eventually runs up against a rather sneaky inverse narcissism. “Race trading” (recall the Jewell-effect) seems in part to enable whiteness to play the victim and the hero of its own imagined opposite, and such a thing warrants considerable explanation. While I may not want to dismiss out of hand some specific political value in the kind of auto-critique that might emerge on such a condition (more on this below), Race Traitor itself pays the inevitable complexity of crossing ontological margins no explicit or sustained attention. Its use of weak compensatory slogans lifted from the British Enlightenment like “loyalty to humanity” seem–it must be said–like liberal mish-mash in the face of the nettlesome identity troubles inherent to re-classifying oneself as an other. That white folk remain at the threshold of a political awakening that (still) lays claim to all and each alike is historically dubious. Without a great deal of qualification and careful explaining, “race trading” teeters on becoming patronizing, romantic, perhaps even downright insulting.

     

    For example, a white man looking back thirty years on Virginia’s unsavory race politics recalls “an attractive black woman.” He writes, “I could not elude my fascination with this woman…. Perhaps, in some primitive way, I sensed that we both shared the burden of cruelty in our lives” (71). Now at least two readings of these lines are possible. Do the words “attraction,” “fascination,” and “primitive” betray a wolf’s racism in the sheep’s guise of sharing human cruelty, where “human” is dictated Crusoe-like by the white attraction towards and projection upon the other as my fear and fantasy? Or does the story gesture towards some sort of political counter-memory, a performative admission that for white folk the best possible intentions emerge necessarily from the position of power? Without more explicit attention to the perhaps wearisome and certainly complex questions surrounding alterity, desire, and the classificatory struggles around identity formation and re-formation, the second option seems rather a generous stretch.

     

    Genre Trouble

     

    I urge each one of us here to reach down into that place of knowledge inside of herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

     

    --Audre Lorde

     

    The story of white desire (probably) gone wrong that I cited in the section above invites further pause over the near-absent gender politics in Race Traitor. It is from the perspective of gender–as, put a little awkwardly, an alternative alterity to the simple white/not-white distinction–that I think “race trading’s” inverse narcissism can be grabbed two-handedly and steered towards the more nuanced and, one hopes, more politically solvent prospects held forth by post-formalist notions of (racial) categories.

     

    One of the more intricate stories within the volume concerns interracial marriage. After having married a black man, a white, middle-class woman recalls her family’s and neighbor’s adverse reactions. For example, her grandmother refuses to meet with the couple on the grounds that she must have become “white trash” (86). The narrative continues: “there was no refuge for me in the suburbs, so resolutely white, which had defined themselves by distance from pain and struggle and anger and vulnerability and loss, as well as from the injustice the very distancing created and creates…. To be white means to be insensitive to the possibilities for oppression within oneself” (87-88).

     

    This story, unique in Race Traitor, complicates by pluralizing the “distance(s)” between otherness, identity, and the desires by which (white) self-identification is either maintained or displaced. It calls attention to the radical nuances around the issues of memory, categories, and change. To begin with, alterity is posited here not simply as a white/not-white distinction of race, but as a portable and pluralistic function of additional alterities, here of gender and class. Here, a “race trade” means less adopting the status of an ideal marginality of inverted whiteness as “primitive,” “attractive,” or “fascinating”–what I called earlier inverse narcissism–than it does trading amongst and between alternate forms of otherness which also, but not directly or binaristically, function to shore up white race privilege.

     

    The grandmother’s reaction to the mixed marriage is revealing on this score. The term “white trash” hinges upon the author’s eventual dis-identification with her group (“suburbia”), but also in her being moved between groups: class as sex as race trading, where the middle distinction remediates the other two without becoming their mere opposite. Thus does gender designate what might ostensibly be described as a genre problem, where genre is construed as: first, a semiotic performance on the mixed nature of all phenomena; and second, not only the mediation of identities by the categories under which they are habitually placed, but the remediation of those categories by other categories they inadvertently imply. Anne Freedman and Amanda MacDonald call this latter process “templating.”8 In applying this concept to an effective “race trade,” the initial category of race, designated by a white/not-white distinction, is not simply reversed but is “templated” through the “meta-functional” presence of other distinctions, other categories, here based on gender and class. These alternatives within the distinction of race are “meta-functional” because they have an associative status that cannot be reduced to the non-identical opposite of whiteness. Through the cross mediation (“templating”) of (“meta-functional”) non-identical alternative categories, the good-woman/not, and middle-class/not distinctions which the author describes are shattered so that the associate distinction of white/not is dispersed into an array of onto-generic components that allow identity to be categorized with other than an either white/not white status.

     

    I am proposing then that categories of race carry within them a (gendered) “meta-functional” feature or alternative alterity from which the color line can be indirectly dotted. Put a different way, the significance of gender to the problem of racial categories does not so much posit the easy collapse of the white/not-white distinction as Race Traitor seems too easily to suggest, than it points towards “family” matters in a more general sense of kin, that is, in the sense not only of the intimate sphere gone communicatively awry, but of post-formalist notions of kind, ontology as comparability, identity as a performative semiotic process that is negotiated through the multi-relational and therefore mutable existence of superficial sets of like/not-like combinations.

     

    The author’s own refusal to “distance” herself from “the injustices distancing creates” is also important in that it speaks directly to the necessity of the intimacy of categorical in-betweenness (as opposed to simple white inversion) that is implicit in her “race trade.” Insofar as she recognizes that the primary challenge to whiteness is an intimate question (her marriage, the refusal of “distance,” and ultimately “oppression within”), she is not capable of moving herself totally beyond the recognition of white race privilege, which she realizes in the interpellative misfire of being (mis)recognized by suburbia as now not altogether a good white woman, and yet not exactly not that either. The author’s suggestion that white privilege is simultaneously an intimate problem places her at a point of what might be called categorical and communicative displacement, a point of onto-generic interstices between herself and the (white) community that addresses and repudiates, respectively, a white middle-class woman and the critical alternative she eventually becomes.

     

    Thus, again, the problem of “race trading” seems most effectively approached by conceiving of whiteness, not so that it affords the political good conscience of being traded away or not, but as a problem that finds political effects in duplicity and mistake, a problem of working progressively within incommensurably mixed ontological combinations (here, gender, race, and class) that provide unfinished critical supplements rather than easy correspondences. The story of mixed marriage is important to this volume, then, precisely because of the conclusions it offers regarding categorical mixing in general. The story manifests a notion of “race trading” that provides a way around (or perhaps through) white narcissism. Here, as is not typically the case elsewhere in Race Traitor, “race trading” intimates a liminal proximity of otherness to whiteness, but not as its mere opposite. The question of race across gender (and finally, towards class) necessitates a process of political remembrance (intimacy as opposed to “distancing”) that is neither transparently schematic (i.e., moving beyond the limit of white/black), nor overly volunteeristic (since the post-white recollection brings about the specific onto-generic misfire of being another within a category formerly one’s own). Perhaps it might be said that remembering (the white) race and its categorical disintegration is also the form of gendered integration in process “within” and on the other side of whiteness. This, I shall finally suggest, comprises a more viable critical front for “White Studies” as a form of “race trading,” and it is precisely the point of Mab Segrest’s Memoirs of a Race Traitor.

     

    Coming Out White

     

    In 1963, history came to dinner.
     

    --Mab Segrest

     

    Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor is a book involving unlikely combinations where “race trading” is a sometimes painfully intimate and considerably intricate affair. It is ostensibly the tale of (white) anti-racist activism during the 1980s and 1990s. Spurred into action by the dismissal of neo-facist murders in 1980, Segrest joins North Carolina Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV) and, guided by black mentor Reverend Wilson Lee, eventually becomes its coordinator. Segrest is also motivated by the realization of her own genealogy as inextricably intertwined with white privilege and racism. She thus recalls the death of Sammy Younge in 1965 at the hand of her cousin Marvin Segrest, and the latter’s eventual dismissal by an all-white jury. This is the characteristic outcome of the Klan murders she would later confront in her anti-racist activist work. The history that “came to dinner” in 1963 is George Wallace’s “segregation forever” speech, which was a favorite of Segrest’s father. With almost unbearable frankness Segrest traces her lineage back to one Mabrose Cobbs, who landed in York Town in 1613. This connects her to the genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, and finally to her immediate family’s far-right political views. Woven into the narrative describing her family and descriptions of her tenure at the NCARRV is the death from AIDS of a close friend and fellow (gay) activist. Segrest’s mother dies as well. Thus, she writes, “I was a person haunted by the dead” (1, 127).

     

    Indeed, a political haunting is probably the best way to describe this book; for while it is a “memoir,” it is as the title intimates a memoir of its author as an other, or more precisely, as an other other than, but not the opposite of, white. This is a book therefore in hot pursuit of, as I earlier described, the onto-generic irregularities that less nimble and less modest accounts of “race trading” tend to ignore:

     

    Our identities, structured as they are on what we hate, resist, and fear, are disturbingly unstable. This leads to further repression and gives us a curious interest in proliferating the things we oppose.... My "racist self" resists, for example, Sammy Younge, Christina and Reverend Lee; my "anti-racist self" resists my parents and Marvin Segrest. So they all shape me (a hybrid of the slayer and the slain). (176)

     

    The white “hybridity” being described here denotes not a transcendent cosmopolitanism or the inverse narcissism I described before, but a critical encounter with the proximity of power to white interest, manifest even in the white struggle against whiteness itself. Segrest thus “questions the law of physics that no two objects could occupy the same space at the same time” (21). The statement harkens back to the slippery hero/victim inversion which I called the “Jewell-effect,” the path of narcissism on the one hand and, on the other, what “haunts” the white imagination to be otherwise. “I began to feel pretty irregularly white…. I often found my self hating white people, including myself. As I took on racism, I also found its effects could be turned on me” (80). Thus, the activism recalled by Segrest alludes both to a resilient commitment to the rough-and-tumble world of actually existing struggles within white civil society, but it is also an activism at work on the author as she negotiates the often incommensurable, but completely interrelated, extra-intentional privileges of membership within the very identity she wants to resist.

     

    In the way I described above using the story of mixed-marriage from the Race Traitor anthology, the eventual disintegration of the white race for Segrest, or at least the process for “irregularizing” one’s whiteness and moving white self-occupation towards politics, becomes a resolutely gendered process of integration already at work. Within two or three sentences in the book’s introduction, she informs us of her immediate connection to white violence vis-à-vis Marvin Segrest and his unthinkable acquittal, and then matter of factly states, “a decade later I recognized I was a lesbian” (2).

     

    An alternative title of this book might have been “coming out white.” Segrest uses the metaphor of “bad blood” to get at the complex interrelation between categorical alterities–gay, women, poor, of color–which, while not ontologically correspondent, provide critical positions beyond white skin privilege that are not merely the simple inversion of whiteness. I tried to describe this before as “templating,” that is, as the remediation of categories (of race) with other categories (here, of gender) so as to undo the material (class) privileges of white skin, and all this without inadvertently stealing alternative agencies by simply declaring alterity to be simply whatever whiteness is not. “Like the Muskogees on whose land she grew up, my mother was pulled in opposite directions” (101), Segrest writes. And so pulls her lesbian feminist politics in relation to her anti-racist activism and emergent socialist consciousness. The chapter “Bad Blood” immediately follows the chapter “Coming Out.” Given this important sequence, Segrest searches for a way to articulate what she calls the “material reality of the intersection” between alterities immanent (but not reducible) to matters of race and sex. The metaphor “bad blood” is thus outwardly a recognition of a comrade’s death from AIDS, but it is also less obviously (and less volunteeristically) an image about forbidden mixing, about the possibility of associational rights that would otherwise go unobserved.

     

    “The key to writing a good crime story,” Segrest recalls, “is in the gaps” (103). So too her memoir. Her “race trade” comes not simply by becoming white identity’s ideal other, but comes instead by imagining herself looked at differently from within a white community she both recognizes as her own and not. “I have worked on this essay to both think myself and unthink myself white” (226). In doing so, Segrest avoids simply “mimicking” an inversion of whiteness (19). Hers is the remediation of the white/not categorical distinction with an alternative alterity which is gender. Thus does her recollection of differently raced and gendered “selves” place her in the “gaps” between one identity and another.

     

    If the alternative to whiteness is present partly by negative association (“by proliferating what we hate,” a “haunting,” or what I more abstractly termed identity’s “metafunction”), for Segrest this alternative is decidedly not manifest as identity’s mere inversion. In Memoir of a Race Traitor, “race trading” alludes ultimately to the discovery of a certain politics that are both profound and, in the end, committed to reflecting critically on the profoundly ordinary. Such a politics amounts in effect to the critical marking of the otherwise unremarkable, the outwardly stated but exceedingly fleeting objective of a new “White Studies.” The “queer socialism” which Segrest finally espouses not only invites but performs the critical mis/recognition of what heretofore seemed quintessentially normative categories (white, heterosexual, middle-class). In the sense that these otherwise invisible identities are turned towards alternatives for the sake of material equity (and sacrifice) which they cannot both know about and remain unaffected by that act of knowing, this exceptional book is above all an invitation for “ordinary” white-folk to re-read themselves.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Lingua Franca have both carried articles declaring the emergence of the new “White Studies.” See Liz McMillen, “Lifting the Veil From Whiteness: Growing Body of Scholarship Challenges a Racial ‘Norm,’” The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 8, 1995): A23; and David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People,” Lingua Franca (September/October 1996): 68-77. Scholarly journals which have done or will be doing special issues on whiteness include: Socialist Review; Lusatania; the Minnesota Review; Transition; and American Quarterly. For an encyclopedic review of the growing body of scholarly white writing, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly 47.3 (September 1995): 428-66.

     

    2. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983) 166.

     

    3. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 45-64; see also, Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and the Right to Look,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 13-27.

     

    4. See Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994) 24.

     

    5. Theodore Allen, op. cit.; Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994); and Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Essays in Postmodern Domination (London: Verso, 1995).

     

    6. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993).

     

    7. While this objection is raised by Salim Washington and Paul Garon in response to Phil Rubio’s essay on the “exceptional white” who uses black popular culture, but it goes unanswered in the book. The section following the “Cross-over Dreams” section is titled, probably with unintentional irony, “White Silence” (179).

     

    8. Anne Feedman and Amanda Macdonald, What is this Thing Called Genre? (Mount Nebo: Boombana, 1992) 20. Thanks to Ross Chambers for his bringing this book and its relevance to whiteness to my attention.

     

  • The Resuscitation of Dead Metaphors

    Sujata Iyengar

    Department of English
    Stanford University
    sujata@stanford.edu

     

    “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse,” a conference held at the University of Western Ontario, October 5-6, 1996, and the accompanying exhibition, “Speculations: Selected Works from 1983-1996,” by Barbara McGill Balfour.

     

    When I told the Canadian Customs official that I was presenting a conference paper, she languidly enquired what the conference was called. “Incorporating the Antibody,” I replied unthinkingly. She perked up and scrutinized me more closely. “Are you bringing any samples?” she fired back. I looked back at her blankly. “Specimens?” she continued. She laughed at my bewildered gaze. “You’re just reading a paper, right? You’re not carrying any viruses?” I finally and belatedly awoke to my own metaphor and hastened to reassure her that I studied English, not epidemiology, and that the only infectious agents I might be harboring would be the cold viruses I’d contracted on the plane. I recount this anecdote because it illustrates some of the points that “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse” succeeded gloriously in making: namely, that we have become so accustomed to hearing medical discourse employed in figurative contexts that we are no longer alert to its full implications, and that, conversely, practitioners of medicine just as frequently fail to examine the assumptions and consequences of the metaphorical language that they themselves borrow from imaginative writing and other disciplines. The conference title, “Incorporating the Antibody,” expressed, according to conference organizers Elizabeth Harvey and Barbara McLean (Western Ontario), a desire for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship to reclothe with flesh (to re-incorporate) the increasingly disembodied dry bones of medical discourse about women (who have been historically figured as “anti-bodies” in binary opposition to men) and to provide a kind of antidote or antibody to medical and rhetorical complacency. The conference attracted participants from three continents and several walks of life. Speakers included professors, graduate students, and independent scholars of English Literature, Anthropology, History, and American Studies; health-care workers from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. (some of whom expressed anxiety at the growing commercialization of their fields and its uneasy alliance with care-giving); professional and amateur artists; community activists; and concerned parents.

     

    Plenary speaker Emily Martin (Princeton) spoke of her wish to revive or recover clichés and dead medical metaphors and follow them through to their logical conclusions. Her beautifully illustrated presentation on “The Woman in the Flexible Body” began by contrasting early twentieth-century images of the body as machine or fortress, protected from a germ-laden, disease-ridden outside world by the skin, with the “flexible,” three-dimensional, transparent body more familiar to us from images over the past decade. Early depictions of the body’s immune system figure the body as a fortress or castle, surrounded by ramparts and battlements; in this model, the working body and its parts function like a stable mechanical apparatus. More recent images, in contrast, display the body’s struggle against infection as one that takes place both inside and outside the body; they use three-dimensional imaging techniques to treat the skin as an active, permeable boundary rather than a barricade, and the healthy human body as a system working according to the rules of chaos theory–quick, subtle, and responsive to infinitesimal changes in its environment.1 Martin found that these metaphors of flexibility and adaptability travel between popular and scholarly writing on the body’s immune system and advertising campaigns for, among other things, ink-jet printers and employment agencies, and suggested that chaos models might offer us a new way of regarding women’s health. Such a model might, for example, regard menopause as the body’s dextrous response to changing conditions rather than as the shutdown of “normal” functions. She also offered a caveat: while the flexible body might seem to offer us a new and exciting way of looking at the world, it appears in current advertising campaigns as the telos of a late capitalist neo-Darwinism. In today’s employment market, “flexibility” is the key to survival.

     

    The ways in which we figure our bodies reflect our historical notions of selfhood and identity. The postmodern subject’s constantly shifting, adaptive, and multiple subjectivities offer us the shimmering pleasures and freedoms of the play of surfaces but also the terrors and suffocations of entrapment in this purely external world (my postmodern, flexible self, for example, might hold down three or four different jobs, none of which would provide me with health insurance or a pension plan).2 I recently received a catalogue for a popular book club that claimed to cater to my many different “identities” by providing me with as many different types of pulp fiction. Magazines run features on “spin” as the key to political and corporate success in the late twentieth-century; the very metaphor conjures up a speedy whirl that emphasizes constant movement over content (electrons spinning in probability clouds have replaced the stable, orbital Rutherford-Bohr atomic model that we learned in high school). Companies euphemistically call our insecurity and underemployment our “flexibility,” nimbleness, and agility; while many women hailed the advent of “flexi-time” as a way of combining an active professional life with motherhood, we have learned that it’s also a way of reducing our benefits, status, and salaries.

     

    As the post-Enlightenment or essential subject dissipates into numerous identities–legal, medical, personal, and social–so the rights and privileges associated with the modern, legal subject disappear. Gayle Whittier’s (Binghampton) harrowing account of “The Politics of Metaphor in Neo-Natal Units” made it clear that the mechanistic imagery associated with drastically pre-term infants dehumanizes them and turns them into subjects for experimentation, in many cases despite the wishes of their parents. Babies in the neonatal units studied by Whittier were frequently denied anesthesia on the grounds that their nervous systems were not developed enough to allow them to feel pain, and doctors often compared the infants to animals or marvels of technological wizardry, hardly human at all. At the other extreme, more than one speaker commented on the parthenogenetic or androgenetic fantasy of the anti-abortion movement, which detaches the fetus from its mother and endows it with agency from the moment of conception (Emily Martin alluded to an extreme manifestation of this in the current immunological debate over why a pregnant woman’s immune system doesn’t expel the fetus as a “foreign body,” as if mother and child were not connected at all). Fetal or infantile subjectivity and its putative existence or absence are politically variable terms, as is “the good of the child”; Natasha Hurley (Western) commented on this paradox in her discussion of “cutting” hermaphrodites and the medical insistence that babies born with indeterminate sex organs be “corrected” to a single and definite gender, even if they will become infertile and, in some cases, experience greatly diminished sexual pleasure.

     

    Historically, women have been associated with the flexible body, with softness, impressionability, permeable surfaces, with an enclosed secrecy that perversely becomes an ability to be opened up to the male medical gaze. Several speakers traced the archeology of the flexible feminine body or antibody through Early Modern texts. Plenary speaker Ludmilla Jordanova (East Anglia) analyzed “Feminine Figures in Medicine, 1750-1830” to suggest that male midwives were perceived as both effeminate and sexually threatening and that it would be misleading to see in the history of midwifery simply a narrative of female authority undermined by male control; Lianne McTavish (New Brunswick) discussed the careful self-fashioning of male and female midwives through the portraits of themselves printed in their treatises; Caroline Bicks (Stanford) noted the “darkening” of the midwife in seventeenth-century midwifery manuals and the racialized discourse of early modern gynecology. Elizabeth Harvey began with the two meanings of “glass” in the Renaissance, as a mirror in which one sees oneself and as a transparent window through which a viewer sees through an opaque surface, to connect feminine (in)visibility, ocularity, and penetration. Artist Barbara McGill Balfour’s exhibition “Speculations” provided a visual analogue to these concerns through her thoughtful and sometimes disturbing self-portraits, which explored the power of the speculative gaze when turned on women and when women look at themselves. Her Self-Portrait Series 1983-4
     


    figure 1: graphite on paper, 8 x 8
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    presented us with the artist’s multiple selves drawn individually and unsmilingly in pencil in pointed contrast to one of the most famous icons of postmodernism, Andy Warhol’s mass-produced and highly colored images of Marilyn Monroe.


    figure 2
    Full size 24K

     

    The video-installation Transference-Love (1996)


    figure 3
    Full size 68K

     

    and still photographs taken from it suggested that lenses–of the eye, the camera, a pair of spectacles–functioned as emblems not simply of distortion or filtering but as devices that concentrated visible light and invisible thought.


    figure 4
    Full size 64K

     
    The text of Transference-Love reads in part: “I don’t know where to begin because I’m not sure why I’m here and what I want out of this. It’s not that I’m trying to figure out everything in advance. I’m just not sure what my motivation is–it’s as if I need stage directions….Sometimes I just don’t listen to myself.” While Barbara Balfour’s images evoked sadness and a sense of mortality or fatefulness, they also represented some of the ways in which female observation or “speculation” can function as therapy or cure, or at least as a way of redressing the balance of gendered power. Beth Dolan Kautz (North Carolina) found a therapeutic theory of aesthetics in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy and Susan Craddock (Arizona) treated us to some truly terrible poetry from tubercular women in early twentieth-century San Francisco sanatoriums. “Incorporating the antibody,” for Shelley and for the infected women of San Francisco, involved negotiating a balance between accepting the rules of the establishment that would cure them (the sanatorium, for the San Franciscans; the spa, for Shelley) and finding their own therapeutic discourse.

     

    The conference itself performed as academic “antibody”: the program made no reference to participants’ rank or discipline, and some of the conference presentations acted as formal antibodies to preconceived notions of academic discourse. Sometimes this transgression was a matter of content or tone, reminding us that the personal is still the political; sometimes a startling generic switch forced us to look afresh at disciplinary boundaries within the academy. As Erin Soros (British Columbia) noted, patients “present” symptoms to physicians much as speakers “present” papers: in her circular narrative, a schoolgirl presented a term paper on anorexia only to “present” with the disease shortly afterwards and, years later, to return and “present” her story in an academic setting once more. A costumed Theresa Smalec (Western) unexpectedly disrobed along with the protagonist of the performance-art piece she was simultaneously analyzing and performing. Judy Segal (British Columbia) wove the deeply-personal and moving history of her mother’s mortal illness into a sharp critique of the euphemistic North American way of death and the secret code-words that, had she known them, could have given her mother an earlier respite from her suffering. And, at a conference that was so concerned with generation, it was entirely appropriate that Dino Felluga (Stanford) should dedicate his analysis of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s feminized pathology of popular taste to his parents, who were for the first time hearing him give a paper (we have become so accustomed to hearing the language of parenthood applied to literary or academic mentors that it was refreshing to hear it used in its literal sense).

     

    Antibodies accept the body’s infection and then turn the virus’s own weapons back on itself. The first wave of feminists desired legal and political equality but did not question the institutions they sought to join. For the so-called “second-wave” of feminists, a woman’s absorption into the world of logos, the world of the Lacanian symbolic, entailed a sort of passing, a lifetime spent in drag. A third-wave feminist “antibody,” however, recognizes our necessary implication in the “powers-that-be” and then uses those powers to help her fight them from within. Antibodies aren’t necessarily anti-viral; that is to say, they don’t insist on the utter destruction of the virus but on its reconfiguration in a gentler form (a good example of this is the recent discovery that the genetic predisposition to contract a mild case of malaria in infancy can protect adults from succumbing to the illness in its raging extremity). The performance artist Laurie Anderson functions as a kind of antibody to the misogyny of William S. Burroughs when she quotes his well-known aphorism, “Language is a virus from outer space” as part of her own carnivalesque encounter with technology, language, her body, and the late twentieth century. Antibodies also leave behind traces of the virus for which they function as antidote. We test for the presence, not of a virus, but of its antibody. In this way the antibody elaborates the Foucauldian dynamic of power relations: the hidden workings of power become not merely visible but also negotiable through our resistance to it.

     

    Notes

     

    1. On the imaginative shift from battlefield to network in metaphors of the immune system, see also Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, ed., Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 295-337.

     

    2. I am obviously indebted in this analysis to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

     

    A volume that will include several essays from the conference is currently under preparation.

     

  • Failing to Succeed: Toward A Postmodern Ethic of Otherness

     

    Tammy Clewell

    Florida State University
    tclewell@mailer.fsu.edu

     

    Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

     

    In The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek offers a welcome intervention in current debates on postmodern ethics. It has been widely recognized that the possibility of a contemporary ethics crystallizes around the dominating figure poststructuralism has addressed as “the other.” However, the frequent argument has also been made that contemporary thought merely sides with a romantic view of marginalized others to secure for itself a dubious position of innocence. The importance of Ziarek’s book, especially when juxtaposed with critical appraisals attempting to rescue poststructuralism from itself, resides in her elaboration of the special sense of responsibility and obligation emerging not in spite of but within deconstructive criticism.

     

    Ziarek also shows how understanding the ethical relevance of poststructuralism entails nothing less than a reconceptualization of both literary modernism and philosophical postmodernity: modernism no longer evaluated in terms of an aesthetic autonomy severed from political concerns; and postmodernity no longer restricted to the Habermasian view that Derrida’s deconstruction exhausts the paradigm of subject-centered reason but fails to move beyond it. For Ziarek the persistence of themes like exhaustion, impasse and skepticism suggests that evaluations of modernist aesthetics and poststructuralism have not taken into account their “rhetoric of failure.” By rhetoric she means the double significance of “failure” which not only negates traditional patterns of thinking, but also affirms an encounter with alterity, what Derrida has called poststructuralism’s “search for the other and the other of language” (10).

     

    Ziarek brings together the philosophical texts of Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, and the literary texts of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and the Polish modernist Witold Gombrowicz. She argues that the philosophical texts not only engage but also deconstruct skepticism, the negative thesis (roughly beginning with Descartes) claiming the impossibility of all truth and knowledge. For Ziarek the “deconstruction of skepticism” reveals what may at first look like a conflicting distinction between the epistemological negation of truth and the ethical signification of otherness. What allows for a “certain rapprochement” between otherness as both an epistemological and an ethical issue “is precisely [poststructuralism’s] turn to modern aesthetics where the intense confrontation between the claims of alterity and the claims of rationality is perhaps more readable than in philosophical discourse” (8). In her readings of Kafka, Beckett, and Gombrowicz, Ziarek suggests that modernism’s self-referential aesthetic undoes the concept of truth and the representational theory of language. Instead of purifying art, Ziarek’s modernist exemplars show how this loss of meaning produces a desire for discursive community based on a nostalgic notion of authentic speech. Because the texts disclose otherness not as an external threat but as an inherent feature already at work within self and community, modernist aesthetics has the potential to reopen a repressive socio-linguistic totality.

     

    The first chapter, “Stanley Cavell and the Economy of Skepticism,” pursues one of the most important questions in the book: can the signification of alterity be contained within the logic that assimilates divergent meanings into a coherent system? (9). By locating a contradiction in Cavell’s revision of skepticism, Ziarek answers no. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell takes issue with the typical reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language as a refutation of skepticism. The problem is that both skepticism and its philosophical refutations equally assume that skepticism’s significance is limited to its negation of the possibility for knowledge. Instead of a refutation, Cavell revises skepticism to disclose its special “truth”: that our relationship to the world and others is not a question of knowledge, where knowing is an epistemological issue of certitude, but rather a matter of acknowledgment, a recognition of the other as different and separate from oneself. However, Ziarek also locates a competing emphasis in Cavell’s work which suggests that without any grounding for knowledge, the meaningfulness of language can only rest on a common linguistic practice, on what he calls attunement, the being together of speakers within a discursive community (27).

     

    Ziarek convincingly argues that while acknowledgment recognizes the other, attunement undermines that recognition by subsuming alterity to an inherently conservative and nostalgic notion of community. Ziarek never loses sight of the fragility of Cavell’s conception of community, a crucial point since the need to bring clarity to any instance of linguistic confusion converges for Cavell with the very need to discover whether a community of speakers exists in the first place. Nevertheless, because Cavell’s appeal to community is based on an aesthetic issue of “representative speech” (that is, on the procedures of ordinary language philosophy), Ziarek rightly claims that Cavell’s formulation cannot signify different voices unharmonized within community, reducing them to mute and silent subjects (44).

     

    Ziarek draws an important parallel between Cavell and Levinas: both reinterpret skepticism as an ethical rather than an epistemological issue. For Levinas the revision of skepticism entails “an indictment of the violence of rationality” (84). Specifically, he takes issue with the tradition of skepticism because this philosophy of the subject exercises power through the unmistakably violent inscription of the other in the subject’s own representational register. Conversely, it is precisely “an absence of a similar critical attention to the operations of power in Cavell’s writings” which, Ziarek seems to imply, contributes to the way Cavell’s revision of skepticism persists in silencing otherness (83).

     

    Given Ziarek’s claim, it is regrettable that she does not address Cavell’s account of the “violence of skepticism,” an explicit problem of sexual difference which falls outside the scope of Ziarek’s book. In the “Introduction” to Disowning Knowledge, Cavell reads Othello, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, as a dramatization of the problem of skepticism.1 Defining the “violence in masculine knowing,” Cavell writes:

     

    Othello's problem...is that Desdemona's acceptance... of his ambition strikes him as being possessed, as if he is the woman. This linking of the desire of knowledge for possession, for, let us say, intimacy, links the epistemological problematic as a whole with that of the problematic of property, of ownership as the owning or ratifying of one's identity. (10)

     

    Similarly, in “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” Cavell admits that his earlier account of King Lear (concluding The Claim of Reason, which is Ziarek’s main focus) neglected the way “the violence of skepticism deepens exactly in [philosophy’s] desperation to correct it”.2I cite these passages not so much to challenge Ziarek’s quarrel with Cavellian community, as, more simply, to suggest that Cavell has increasingly come to see skepticism as a politically charged issue of gender entailing the violent reduction of the female subject.

     

    In any case, Ziarek does not draw on Cavell merely to annihilate his formulations. While she clearly rejects Cavell’s notion of the “aesthetic unity of community,” she also admirably locates within his own discussions of metaphor and modernism the undeveloped possibility for a less violent, alternative understanding of aesthetics. Cavell’s description of metaphor suggests language games not dominated by collective agreement. Ziarek therefore suggests that figurative language points to what cannot be unified by the regulative functioning of community (58). Displacing Cavell’s alignment of metaphor with unnaturalness, Ziarek maintains that “metaphor reveals the signification of alterity always already inhabiting linguistic exchange” (59). Similarly, Cavell’s highly ambivalent account of modernism–as both “a slackened conviction in community” and a textuality “haunted” by the other of reason and the subject–enables Ziarek to recover Cavell’s “truth of skepticism.” Rather than subsuming difference, Ziarek offers an “aesthetics of acknowledgment” suggesting a particular responsibility to the other which the ethical subject of discourse bears (63).

     

    The second chapter, “The Rhetoric of Failure and Deconstruction,” extends the issue of skepticism and the signification of alterity to an evaluation of Derrida’s deconstructive theory. Ziarek’s clarification of Derridean iteration marks one of the chapter’s highlights: iteration also offers her a viable alternative to both Habermas’ new paradigm of communicative reason based on intersubjectivity and Cavell’s theory of community, both of which claim to move beyond the centrality of the subject but which still locate the source of meaning in subjectivity (95). For Derrida iteration signals the risk of linguistic failure because it describes the subject’s inability to control all possible meanings in his or her everyday speech acts. Ziarek insightfully shows how Derrida generalizes this risk of failure as a fundamental feature of communication. Like skepticism, deconstruction works through the problem of linguistic failure; it does not, however, perpetuate skepticism’s sense of disaster, loss, and catastrophe. Rather, the risk of linguistic failure enables Derrida to trace “how the subject does not constitute the other as the recipient of its message, but, in the Levinasian sense, is exposed to alterity prior to any intention to communicate” (101).

     

    Derrida rejects theories of community (like Cavell’s) which are motivated by a nostalgia for authentic speech. Instead, he offers a “community of the question” which Ziarek endorses because it celebrates absence, division, and difference as the conditions of being in common. Derridean community thereby submits the ideal of communion, Ziarek stresses, “to responsibility for the violence and exclusion it entails” (103). Concomitantly, Derrida’s investment in modernist literature, not the valorization of self-conscious discourse over pragmatic everyday usage which many have assumed, also discloses within the excess of language an affirmation of alterity. Derrida’s reading of Ulysses hinges upon the concluding word in Joyce’s text: “yes.” For Derrida, Joyce’s “yes” serves neither a semantic nor naming function, but rather marks the “I” in an address to the other. Ziarek follows Derrida to suggest that “yes” does not unify the text’s disparate elements as much as it signifies that aesthetic unity itself may always be interrupted by “the affirmation in laughter of the Other” (112).

     

    The unequivocal strength of The Rhetoric of Failure resides in these early chapters where Ziarek brings a welcome clarity to the way the structure of linguistic exchange and the more conscious intervention of figurative discourse enable a signification of otherness. For Ziarek, Cavell’s (undeveloped) metaphoricity, Derrida’s iterability, and, as she later takes up, Benjamin’s transmissibility all point to a future-oriented and unpredictable opening of possibilities, a politicization of aesthetics which has everything to do with actually embodied others. What is surprising, then, is that even when Ziarek turns her attention to modernist literature, where, as she states, the confrontation between alterity and reason is more apparent than in philosophy, she persists in pitching her discussion of otherness on a level of theoretical abstraction–as precisely that which resists representation. Ziarek thus neglects the opportunity to contend with specific racial, gender, class, and sexual issues which give to the question of the other the kinds of explicit political implications she nonetheless claims for her insights. Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, to cite perhaps the most well-known example, has explicitly related Derridean iteration–the possibility for change which inheres in every repetition–to the realization of sexual identities not necessarily determined by a heterosexual norm.3 And yet, Ziarek’s “failure” to engage the way others materialize within our predominantly institutionalized forms of community also converges, paradoxically, with the very strength of her book. Her selection of literary texts–Kafka’s parables, Beckett’s How It Is, and (the lesser known) Gombrowicz’s Cosmos–focuses on modernist texts which, because of their obvious aesthetic preoccupations, appear to be most resistant to the politics of subjectivity that she convincingly locates in them.

     

    The third chapter, “‘The Beauty of Failure’: Kafka and Benjamin on the Task of Transmission and Translation,” draws an important distinction between the “aestheticization of politics” and the “politicization of aesthetics.” Worth emphasizing here is Ziarek’s mention of Kafka and Benjamin as modernists who confront the problem of fascism. As one of the most extreme examples, fascism aestheticizes politics by appealing to a desire for community grounded on a mythologized sense of natural linguistic commonality. However, Ziarek locates in Benjamin’s theory of translation, as in his account of the mechanical reproduction of art, a powerful “antidote to the modernist nostalgia for the being in common,” and “a safeguard of sorts against the complicity of this nostalgia with fascism” (131). Because the task is not to reproduce the “truth” of the original, Benjamin’s notion of translation and reproduction both suggest “a certain kind of iterability that drastically changes the meaning of the original, its structure, and its relation to history” (129).

     

    Similarly, Kafka’s short pieces, including “Couriers,” “My Destination,” and “The Pit of Babel,” variously show the “movement of transmissibility”: that is, a detachment from the primacy of origins and an important sense of obligation which an understanding of textual transmission renders possible. The tendency has been to read Kafka’s parables as sustaining a transcendental signifier that cannot be put in words. However, Ziarek, drawing on Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, argues that what the parables thematize as failure is not the loss of truth existing outside signification, but “the fact that the very idea of truth is one of the effects produced by language” (127). Ziarek’s excellent reading of “The Great Wall of China” contains many of the concerns about community raised throughout the book. The parable begins with the recognition that the wall, a patchwork construction riddled with gaps, cannot secure empire. Suggesting the dissolution of any epistemological grounding, the wall itself perpetuates the threat of external invasion. In Ziarek’s words:

     

    [I]t is this imaginary threat of penetration from the outside that provides the most expedient means to neutralize alterity inside the community: to exclude everything that is foreign, contaminating, or unsettling to its linguistic unity. The porous wall consolidates the community of speech in more pervasive ways than the work of any closure would be able to accomplish: it binds the people together by making them define themselves against the threat of the other--the foreigners, who are in turn marked as locusts or wild beasts, that is, as those who are deprived of community, speech and humanity. (148)

     

    For Ziarek, “The Great Wall of China” undermines the very desire for “speaking with the same lip.” Although the text suggests a sense of failure, Kafka’s parable also politicizes aesthetics by showing the violent exclusionary politics inherent in discursive communities longing for linguistic immanence.

     

    In the fifth chapter, “The Paratactic Prose of Samuel Beckett: How It Is,” Ziarek recasts her earlier discussion of the “obligation of transmission” in terms of Beckett’s “obligation of invention.” Critics have typically read Beckett’s aesthetics as a negative epistemology which undoes traditional categories of subject and object, representation and property. However, Ziarek sides with the affirmative and inventive features of Beckett’s writing. How It Is marks an important shift in Beckett’s work, from a solipsistic and self-reflective subject (as in The Unnameable) to a subject situated in relation to the other. The text’s notorious difficulty stems from the repetition of phrases without logical and semantic connections, a composition in which the predominating figure according to Ziarek is parataxis–a trope of disconnection and interruption (171). By suspending grammar’s capacity to determine the object of representation, Beckett’s paratactic style enables a signification of otherness which Derrida has called an “impossible invention,” impossible because alterity can only be signified in the blanks between the words, not in the words themselves.

     

    “How it was I quote before Pim with Pim and after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it…” In Part I’s opening phrase, Ziarek suggests that the anonymous speaker occupies a secondary position in the sense that he does not initiate his speech act, but engages in quotation. Ziarek also traces the temporal lapse, the slippage from the past–“how it was”–to the present–“how it is.” This temporal withdrawal from the past suggests that the signification of the other is precisely what cannot be recovered. It is this “remainder” in Beckett’s writing–the residue which persists after the traditional resources of signification have been erased–that enables the other to emerge despite (or perhaps because of) the limited present possibilities of representation. Beckett’s “impossible invention” thus places the decentered subject in the position of a witness and a scribe in relation to the other, a relationship that reveals a crucial understanding of obligation. As Ziarek point out, Beckett himself locates obligation at the core of his aesthetics, which clearly moves the task of writing beyond desire, knowledge, and pleasure. In “Three Dialogues,” Beckett defines his project as “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (170).

     

    The final chapter, “Witold Gombrowicz: Forms of Life as Disfigurement,” does not conclude as much as repeat Ziarek’s major contribution to contemporary ethics: the displacement of subject-centered discourse is not exhausted by skepticism’s account of the impossibility of all truth or meaning; rather, this displacement gestures toward an ethical encounter with the other which the grammar of our forms of life cannot determine or predict in advance. Given Ziarek’s conceptual elaboration, there is bound to be a certain repetitiveness in her book; however, its rigor unquestionably consists of the range of thinkers and writers–against the current picture of many of them as priests of negativity–which Ziarek profitably rereads in terms of their rhetoric of failure.

     

    In her reading of Gombrowicz’s last novel Cosmos (published in 1965), Ziarek introduces a modernist text which, like her other exemplars, shows how an encounter with the other exceeds the very structure of its representation in language. Like Gombrowicz’s theory of form, Cosmos dramatizes the limits of interpretive strategies; one based on a rational hermeneutic, the other on a sensual autoeroticism. In a parody of the conventions of both detective and gothic fiction, Cosmos shows how Witold and Fuchs, two young detectives of sorts, set out to solve the mystery of a hanged bird. In their obsessive frenzy to interpret the accumulating events seemingly associated with the bird’s death, they nearly commit a murder in order to complete the formal arrangement of disparate anomalies (219). By withholding this aesthetic unity, Gombrowicz’s novel–in its very dissolution of form–suggests that what is philosophically disturbing is not the failure of interpretation, but rather its very success. It is from this “failure” that Ziarek brilliantly succeeds in elaborating the compelling possibility of a contemporary ethics, challenging our understanding of poststructuralism and modernist aesthetics, and their relationship, in the process.

    Notes

     

    1. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1987), 10.

     

    2. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1988), 173.

     

    3. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), passim.

     

  • Holly Hughes Performing: Self-Invention and Body Talk

    Lynda Hall

    University of Calgary
    lhall@acs.ucalgary.ca

     

    Holly Hughes, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996

     

    Holly Hughes, one of the most acclaimed and popular contemporary performance artists and playwrights, publishes five of her works in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler, including: “The Well of Horniness,” “The Lady Dick,” “Dress Suits To Hire,” “World Without End,” and “Clit Notes.” She also includes extensive autobiographical material detailing her artistic process while commenting critically on her family and the sociocultural milieu which informs her work, such as the collaborative feminist performance community at Women’s One World Cafe (WOW) in New York City. In this review, I focus on the two performance pieces I have seen, “World Without End” and “Clit Notes,” which exemplify her active interventions into cultural norms.

     

    Self-creating within complex representational frames, Hughes uses parody and satire in her incisive critiques of misogyny and heterosexual hegemony. Self-creation and sociocultural critique are the thematic axes on which I address her book/performances. While her stage directions indicate “the performer,” her frequent references to her art as self-writing and self-invention invite the spectator/reader to conflate self and performer. There is no evidence to date that anyone else has performed either of the two pieces I address here. In discussing her work, I have simply used “Hughes” throughout.

     

    Describing the sociohistorical changes which impact her experience as an artist, Hughes states that “visibility is the dyke mantra du jour…. When I came out in 1973 we fretted about the Male Gaze, how it could swallow us whole. Now we’re complaining that folks aren’t looking hard enough” (“Headless Dyke” 7). While visibility is liberating and promotes a lesbian sense of self-presence and desire for the artist and potentially for the spectator, visibility also invites and produces societal discipline and censure. In 1990, along with three other artists, Hughes was defunded by the NEA, creating a notoriety which precedes her wherever she performs.

     

    In her Introduction to Clit Notes, Hughes addresses the NEA and the controversy that “swirled around public funding of art that addresses the body, especially the body that’s either queer, female, of color, or some combination of those” (19). The equation of “homosexuality with obscenity” by Congress made the risks of performance evident, as her works confront homophobia. Her art allows her to create and define her selves, providing the space “to talk back” (19).

     

    The immediacy and materiality of the writer/performer’s body and voice on stage facilitate talking back and contesting cultural conventions by acting out subjectivity in relation to history, memory, and desire. Performance by definition suggests repetition, and through repetition, the possibility to pose questions, to play the same scenes and roles differently, and to re-member, re-view, re-shape, re-mark, and re-invent the past. The elaborate stage directions in Clit Notes enable the reader to imagine Hughes’ actions and body during performance. According to Hughes, she hopes her efforts will inspire others to exercise agency and rewrite their stories. Readers and spectators may realize that “they can be the heroine, that they can create their own plot rather than go on living inside the standard narrative” (9). Rewriting and revising old myths and fairy tales strategically, as Hughes does, is a way of interrogating diverse patriarchal, heterosexist imperatives and narrative plots. She concludes “Clit Notes” by inciting the audience to “start acting out our own plots” (212) of resistance. Hughes indicates that very early in life she resisted women’s harmful constrictive scripts of passivity and silence, and their designated female role as object of male desire. As a child she felt “I didn’t want to be a princess,” and she sardonically and subversively inquired: “What if I’d rather be eaten than rescued?” (10).

     

    Writing/Performing: Creative Self-Invention

     

    The autobiographical nature of Hughes’ writings and performances blurs traditional distinctions between the “real” and representation. Her performances and theoretical discourse suggest that, for her, life and art exist in a continuous relationship. Discussing “World Without End,” Hughes says: “The work’s real personal, real autobiographical” (Schneider 180). Refusing to evacuate the subject position, she fluidly performs her self at many ages, as well as her mother and her lover. Hughes foregrounds the complex contextuality in time and space of all subjectivity. Placing her performances and experiences in a sociohistorical context, Hughes interweaves (and subverts) myths, bible stories, family history, and re-membered dreams in her performance of self-in-process.

     

    For Hughes, writing is a source of presence, self-exploration, and self-understanding, often integrated into an engagement with her sexual feelings and development. In her Introduction to Clit Notes she states: “I’m telling stories about how I became an artist and how I became a lesbian” (2). Hughes explains that she used writing to escape from oppressive family influences during “years of watching myself from the outside”; she realized writing “could open as well as close doors” (12). In reference to interrogations regarding her lesbian identity, she asks: “Don’t you hate it when people ask you why you are what you are?” (208). I suggest that this question constitutes the impetus for her art, and Clit Notes offers the reader Hughes’ perplexing and candid answers.

     

    Overcoming compulsory heterosexuality in narratives entails frankly addressing taboo topics and expressing “unladylike” desires and experiences. Hughes suggests the proximity of feeling at home in the body and in the self through sexual acts and through writing/creating reality: “At WOW I can tell the stories I wanted to hear as a child…. I use words to make a home for myself with passageways that lead from the past into the present” (Clit Notes 18). Her writing and performances constitute an integral part of her everyday life. Referring to the NEA controversy and the power of the religious right, Hughes notes, “My role in the Cultural War is still very much a work in progress, a story that I’m telling as I’m living it” (22). Her artistic endeavours address a need to create space for self in a world which largely denies her desires and experiences; she claims, “I’m interested in trying to invent new images for women sexually” (Schneider 182).

     

    In “World Without End,” multiple codes indicate to the audience the performative power to re-create your life. She enters carrying a composition book, and later reads words from it which we presume she has written earlier. She foregrounds the creative mode metadramatically in the first few words: “I’m going to tell you a story” (155). Performing with her own body and voice affords her performances an aura of authenticity.

     

    As a spectator at her performances of “Clit Notes” and “World Without End,” in Calgary in June 1994, I felt engaged in a private conversation. Hughes deliberately creates a feeling of dialogue through her intimate settings, such as an “overstuffed wingback chair” in “World Without End” (154), and her frequent direct address to individual spectators. “Clit Notes” concludes with a debate on being out of the closet or being invisible, in terms of safety, and leaves the spectator to complete the dialogue; “You tell me,” Hughes invites (208).

     

    Body Talk/Commanding the Gaze

     

    Hughes frequently interrupts her narrative and makes individual audience members the object of her gaze and her construction. She refuses notions of male ownership of the gaze and desire by reappropriating the gaze and desire for herself. Her defiant act of “looking back” disrupts traditional unbalanced power relations between the performer and the spectator. Making her body a spectacle of active desire and agency, and claiming her right to a creative look, Hughes embodies a practical resistance to negative social scripts.

     

    At one point in “World Without End,” Hughes directly addresses the audience in a confrontational monologue on issues such as racism, misogyny, domestic violence, rape, and lack of funding for abortion. Her mix of representational strategies motivates the spectators to perceive the fusion of both art and politics in everyday life. Hughes often assumes a teaching stance in relation to the audience, similar to the mother’s numerous lessons to Holly, thereby appropriating the traditional masculine prerogative of knowledge, voice, and authority. In “Clit Notes” she assumes the role of a professor and labels her first lecture “Performance Art as a Tool of Social Change” (196).

     

    She foregrounds the body in her work as a source of creativity, pleasure, and knowledge, as well as the site of often violent social prescriptions. Rebecca Schneider praises Hughes for her courageous acts, declaring that “autonomy and the expression of sexual desire are an unusual mix for a woman to so adroitly control on stage” (172). In her Introduction to Clit Notes Hughes states, “I’m thinking out loud; I’m writing with my body” (2). She recalls that in college her body was “still a foreign country, still occupied by my parents, the doctors, the storm troopers of the normal” (8). Her art performs a Foucauldian counter-resistance to powerful disciplining institutions colonizing her body. She states: “I wanted to live./In my body./In the world” (194).

     

    Hughes performs a body which appears very much under her control, and yet at times she also suggests a body and mind out of control. She joyously performs “hysterical” acts that defamiliarize the spectator and provoke us to read her body and its every gesture carefully. Near the beginning of “World Without End” she grabs flowers out of the vase, “throws them over her shoulder and then takes a nice long drink of water. From the vase” (157). Such an undomesticated act as drinking the flower water invites us to interpret her actions as resistant to several scripts of “normality.” She performs desires that are excessive and uncontrollable, and thus symbolically refuses patriarchal confinement and definitions.

     

    In the opening moments of “World Without End,” Hughes appears lounging deep in the chair, wearing a “red silk off-the-shoulder number” and holding her composition book (156). There are few props around her, focusing the spectator’s gaze on her body and gestures as she commands center stage. The stage directions indicate that “she’s just stepped out of a Balthus painting” (157). Balthus often painted portraits featuring nubile adolescent girls draped seductively over chairs or beds, nude, frequently with legs apart. They appear innocent, vulnerable, and available as erotic objects. Balthus invokes a sinister atmosphere by portraying a childlike body in place of the passive adult female nude of classical representation. Hughes’ relaxed posture in a soft chair holding her composition book evokes Balthus’ painting “Katia Reading.” In a postmodern gesture, consciously imitating a Balthus pose (which in turn represents a re-creation of earlier traditional art focusing on the female body as object), Hughes uses and subverts cultural conventions. She appropriates the stage to reframe Balthus and the patriarchal perceptions of women his art exemplifies. Creating her own text, speaking with her own voice, and self-determining her own posture and dress, Hughes reappropriates female subjectivity for herself. Her self-portrait powerfully exposes confining cultural frames.

     

    Female Sexuality and Desire / Mother Love

     

    Hughes’ provocative critique addresses pervasive cultural silences that surround women’s sexuality and structure our world. Her representations of various components of women’s sexuality bring them into the realm of the visible as she grapples with the dilemma of what can be made visible in a culture that goes to some lengths to forbid, or at least prevent, such scripts. Focusing on sexuality, Hughes discusses “World Without End” in an interview with Schneider:

     

    I'm experiencing that there's an absolute terror in this culture of women's sexuality. It's absolutely frightening...it's like, yeah, women are multiorgasmic, they're insatiable. There have been so many constraints put on our sexuality and so many blinders by every possible institution in the culture that we're just beginning to notice that there's this volcano beneath the surface.... We're just beginning to see that we have this desire, but it's terrifying to us. We back down from it all the time. There's just something monstrous about it, it's so unnameable and unknowable. (179)

     

    In “Clit Notes,” her acerbic, irreverent humor exposes and attacks patriarchal definitions of female sexuality and desire that dangerously distort and silence women’s actual experience and anatomy. The authoritative text she reads and mocks, Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, only mentions female homosexuality in a “footnote under ‘Prostitution’” (186). Distorting reality, he highlights strap-on appliances and warns about the extensive length of the lesbian clitoris (187). After her own body search, Hughes demarcates the self-alienation and doubt such misinformation creates in the teenaged girl; she states: “I began to doubt the very existence of my clitoris” (188).

     

    Writing and performing “Clit Notes” brings the unseen and unspeakable “clit” into public discourse. She frequently makes connections between language, particularly the ability to name, and presence. In her preamble to “Clit Notes” Hughes writes, “I see myself as a political artist, and I think that making more people wrap their mouths around the word, if not the thing itself, is precisely the kind of political goal one can hope to realize through theatre” (184). Hughes displaces the phallocentric vocabulary centered on the words “dick, prick and cock” (184) by celebrating the clit. She decries the still current practice of clitoridectomy in Africa as a literalization of violent patriarchal discursive and material erasure of women’s anatomy and pleasures (197).

     

    Hughes demonstrates the patriarchal maneuvres that oppress self-understanding and restrict women’s desire by promoting shame of the female body. In “World Without End,” after telling her childhood friend Jodeen about her mother’s active efforts at sexual education, Jodeen exclaims, “Holly, MY MOTHER does NOT have a pussy, and if she did–I would not want to know about it!” (168). Internalized shame and guilt produce massive self-denial. Foregrounding the insidious alienation from the body, Hughes claims that Jodeen will become “the kind of woman who’s doomed to drown in her own body. Doomed to wear her body like it was somebody else’s clothes” (169). The splitting of the self suggested in “wearing” the body like clothes confronts the cultural construction of body image that frequently produces anxiety and self-denial.

     

    Insisting on the integration of mind and body, and actively articulating her desires, Hughes deconstructs dualistic hierarchies that situate women on the inferior side of male/female, active/passive, mind/body, subject/object binaries. She flaunts her embrace of the “bad girl” linguistic putdown, observing that “a woman only gets two choices: good and bad. So I got on the bad-girl bus because I thought it would be more fun. And let’s remember that I’m a whore and a dyke for good reason. I’m good at it” (175). She claims the authority to name herself, to reclaim words, and to ridicule misogynistic negative labelling of women. Very often works of resistance are critiqued as dangerously reinscribing the status quo. I would argue that Hughes positively deconstructs the prevailing order and provokes thought and more open minds.

     

    Hughes persistently represents “mother” as inimical to traditional cultural scripts of a self-less, non-sexual being. Reversing the traditional male quest narrative, the mother takes her daughter on diverse voyages of discovery into unmapped sexual, psychological, and physical spaces. The mother exemplifies body talk. She uses her whole body to communicate her lessons. Hughes relates the mother’s “way of talking, with her tears and her pussy and with her sentences which could say ‘death’ but mean ‘pleasure’ in the same breath” (169).

     

    A major scene in the performance occurs when the mother is enacted as standing “NAKED. Sssh! NAKED and glowing! Bigger than life. Shining from the inside out” (166). Refusing to repress the erotic bond to the mother, Hughes refutes Freud’s theory that girls abandon the mother as love-object, turn to the father, and as a consequence suffer from sexual repression (251). Sexual repression is rendered dubious in Hughes’ dynamic performance. Excessively retaining and expressing love for the mother, this girl refuses to redirect her desire from the mother to the father and retains the pleasure derived from the clitoris. The mother ensures her daughter does not suffer from culturally-sanctioned misinformation and ignorance of her body, saying, “Holly, this is your clitoris” (167). Hughes blissfully performs the mother’s body and her own as neither a dark continent nor unexplorable. Early in the play Hughes says this “still is my mother’s land. . . . and I am a continent” (161, 163). In fluid, diffused sexual pleasure and bliss, Hughes powerfully reclaims access to the mother’s body and her own.

     

    Hughes also flagrantly undermines Freud’s notions of female genitalia as “nothing to be seen” by producing a new view. Hughes narratively brings woman’s insides out into view and into possible appreciation, placing value on the inner self and not just outer appearance. Calling this naked scene a mother-daughter fertility “sacred ritual, a mystery revealed” (166) which she witnesses and learns from, Hughes highlights the connections between ritual, performance, and life, and implies the audience’s intimate relationship to her self. In complete absence of the phallus, Hughes opens the “hidden room,” and the “mystery” or “meaning of life” is “revealed” (166). The mother celebrates her body and passes the possible pleasures on to her daughter. Performing this recollection with awe and delight, Hughes suggests appreciation for a mother who offers a daughter knowledge and self-respect.

     

    Complicating the female body as a major sign, Hughes’ body is on stage as a real woman’s body, not fragmented and shattered, nor restricted to fixed statuary; “I can smell the memory of ocean drifting out from between my mother’s legs. Oh there is power in my mother’s hips!” she says (165). Smelling the “memory of ocean” erotically re-members woman’s body as fluid, not frozen in fixed patriarchal positions. Her counter-memory constructs a daughter who has seen and witnessed the power of woman’s sexuality autonomous from the male desiring gaze. Here the mother not only has a body, she also embodies the power of sexuality.

     

    Hughes suggests that knowledge and appreciation of woman’s physical body contribute to the process of survival, to woman actively seeking and creating her own answers: “Mama says: ‘Holly, if something’s bothering you, and you want to know the answer to it, just remember the answer is inside you.’ And with that she reached inside herself, and then she pulled her hand out. I could see how wet she was!” (167). Erotic arousal and desire invite the daughter and the audience to explore the unrepresented and the unthought. Knowledge and self-understanding can come from “inside,” from the body and personal experience, from her mother’s teachings, rather than from “outside” misogynistic discourses such as Dr. Reuben’s.

     

    The mother performs transgressive acts like massacring a porcupine and revealing the plenitude of her sexual physical body parts, desires, and responses. Violently bludgeoning a porcupine with an axe, the mother represents death and destruction and celebrates the erotic, rather than exhibiting maternal nurturing and giving of life. As agent, the mother acts out a lesson for four adolescent girls, encouraging “unnatural” acts in the next generation, rather than provoking passive compliance to social norms. Her non-conventional image utterly disrupts and deconstructs expected maternal roles.

     

    Delightful hysteria and madness in the porcupine scene parallel Hughes’ act of drinking the water from the flower vase. Refusing circumscription by “rational” patriarchal scripts for women, she performs in outrageous excess and abandon, and her body and voice literally symbolize civil disobedience. After drinking the green water from the vase, “there is a sense of waking up, of coming to” (163), as though the irrational and hysterical act recovers knowledge about the body and the past that has been repressed by social forces. The sense of “coming to” echoes in “Clit Notes.” After her first conscious mutual kiss with a woman at the age of twenty, Hughes claims “that the expression ‘coming out’ doesn’t quite cover [it]. In my case, it was more a question of…coming to” (191).

     

    Deflating the Phallus

     

    The mother takes an active role in ensuring her daughter’s initiation into the pleasures of the body and also models active agency. Saying “Look, girls! A porkie,” Hughes performs the phallic mother. She is the mother with the axe, the castrating female, in a Dionysian Brechtian wild frenzied scene of symbolically tearing men apart. Tales of chivalrous sword-wielding knights who rescue helpless damsels are displaced by a mother who wields an axe, kills an animal, comes into the restaurant with “her hands full of bloody flesh and quills,” and presents it to her daughter as a lesson (160). This scene evokes Hughes’ earlier childhood memory of getting out a “big knife” and “chopping up everything I could get my hands on” (156). Joyful expressions of active female aggression, violence, and agency suggest the possibility of grasping power and cutting apart traditional cultural scripts, as well as deconstructing paradigms of the patriarchally controlled female body. Speaking of “phallic values that of course we’re trying to lop off” (173), Hughes represents woman as a source of danger.

     

    In “World Without End,” the biblical Garden of Eden undergoes major revision. At the play’s end Eve queries Adam: “Do you have any idea at all who you are porking? I’m the preeminent lesbian performance artist from southern Michigan!” (179). The Adam performing the “porking” (evoking the porcupine incident) is strategically axed and cut down to size at the start and at the finish.

     

    Radically revising the Eve and Adam “master-narrative” and its originary prescriptions and scripts, Hughes places her gestures and radical voice within the first biblical dialogue and within the sociogeographical setting for notions of woman as sinful temptress. The photograph on the front cover of the book parodies such cultural representations of woman. Hughes appears nude except for leaves covering her nipples and pubic area. Four luscious apples hang temptingly from her body, transforming her body into an iconic tree of knowledge. Her face is excessively and luridly made-up and her grin leers from the page. Her body as text to be read revises constricting Christian frames for female sexuality.

     

    Hughes decenters and transgressively parodies the site of the phallus; she exclaims,:”Mr. Adam! What is the meaning of that…edifice…I see leaning out of your pants like that? I haven’t seen anything so interesting since my last trip to the Vatican” (178). An “edifice” suggests a construction and thereby implies the possibility for a powerful potential deconstruction, another perspective, or alternative ways of making meaning. Hughes provides an epistemological questioning of the “meaning” of the penis/phallus. The huge pause in the text performs woman’s perception as unwritten and unspeakable. Her satirical derogatory act of looking at Adam’s genitals, judging them, and ridiculing them reverses “normal” masculine ownership of the gaze and authority to define women’s beauty, anatomy, and desires. Hughes remarks: “I wanted to rewrite the Bible” (177), indicating her desire for cultural change.

     

    Killing Family Romances

     

    Hughes represents the violence and death of spirit and the literal death that are often inherent in heterosexuality and the family romance: “some nights my father would come home drunk. There’d be the sounds of insults. Screams. Breaking glass. You know. The usual family stuff, right?” (155). She expresses the pain of rejection caused by her father’s anger at her public lesbian identification. Stating that her father blamed her for causing his cancer and killing him, Hughes asks: “Anybody want to take a guess what is the worst thing that ever happened to my father? You’re looking at her” (195).

     

    Clit Notes extensively details Hughes’ sexual development. She relates her summers at a Christian leadership camp as “a big dyke training ground” (6). She elaborates on her first sexual desires at the age of thirteen for her social studies teacher. Describing the joys of a current relationship, she comments that watching her lover get out of bed is the “moment I come back to the body I thought I’d lost to my father” (203). Reclaiming the body through love and her art is an ever-present theme throughout Hughes’ works. While sardonic, sharp humor imbues Hughes’ writings, there is an underlying frank interrogation of physical and psychic violence contained in culturally circumscribed compulsory heterosexuality.

     

    To conclude, I propose that Holly Hughes’Clit Notes creates hope and strength for the transformation of prevalent contemporary cultural misogyny and homophobia. Hughes’ introduction, her two performance pieces, and three plays offer a wealth of experience and support for her readers and performance audiences. Reading her texts promotes deliberation and contemplation and provides the opportunity to make the many interconnections among her writings over the years. The passion and dynamic love of life and sexuality Hughes exudes, her insightful ability to analyze her experiences and female sexuality, and her desire to contribute to others’ sense of being at home in the body and in the world make Clit Notes a pleasure for all to read. In addition, I recommend Clit Notes as an excellent text for classes in Drama, English, Sociology, Psychology, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies.

    Works Cited

     

    • Freud, Sigmund. “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. James Strachey. Volume 19. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. 248-258.
    • Hughes, Holly. Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
    • —. “Headless Dyke In Topless Bar.” Village Voice. Special Section June 21, 1994: 7-9, 33.
    • Schneider, Rebecca. “Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist.” The Drama Review 33.1 (1989): 171-83.

     

  • Dressing the Text: On the Road With the Artist’s Book

     

    Thomas Vogler

    University of California, Santa Cruz
    tom_vogler@macmail.ucsc.edu

     

    Dressing the Text exhibition, travelling in U.S. through 1998, catalogue available by mail.

     

    It is impossible to begin a discussion of the artist’s book without entertaining the issue of definitions. This is not the case with more well-known productions in the book art world, like the Fine Press Book, with its established aesthetic and practice based on high standards of craftsmanship and materials and attention to detail, usually in the service of an “important” text, printed with letterpress typography, in tastefully sumptuous bindings, with restrained illustrations that don’t upstage the text. Nor is it the case with the Livre d ‘Artiste that echoes the craftmanship of the fine press book, but usually has its production and design organized around the work of an artist (preferably a well-known one) who may also take part in the design of the book.

     

    In our time something called the “artist’s book” (or perversely “the artists’ book”) is earning itself the status of a separate category, continuing a movement many think started in the 1960s in the U.S. Still developing, it seems at times like a hybrid version of the other two, but one that is open to a much larger range of design and content, as well as untraditional modes of binding and packaging. It is usually produced by a small independent press, hand-made or hand-assembled in small editions, or perhaps even produced as a unique object. These books and book-objects are the work of artists who are actively resisting the assimilative force of publishing and distribution by creating works that defy easy reproduction, creating a realm where the “contents” of a “book” do not have to be made to fit the printing and packaging norms of trade and university press book production. Such works pose a potential threat to the cultural iconicity of “the book” by challenging conventional category distinctions. This may sound like a definition, but what “book” means in this emerging art form (or medium? or genre?) is still not much more than a hand-held interactive object. Some practitioners and critics claim that the term “artist’s book” has a signification comparable to that of “painting” or “sculpture.” But with the still-limited exposure in galleries and museums, and the paucity of critical writing on the subject, it is impossible to achieve anything like consensus on a single definition.

     

    We now complacently speak of “Greek Tragedy,” as if Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all doing the same thing. But if we think of the century-long development of that genre, every new production would have been a test case, stretching or confirming each aspect that might help define its form. It was only towards the end of its development that Aristotle sat down to consider the theoretical task of defining it, looking at all the tragedies he could find and inductively coming up with a definition. How did he know what works to look at in the first place? He must have had an adequate working sense of tragedy already, as did the judges and audiences who presided over the institutionalization of the genre. To define something is to announce its limits, or to limit it–to draw a conceptual line or boundary that implies it has reached full development and its borders are secure. In the case of the artist’s book the limits have not yet been reached or recognized, hence critical agreement is lacking. This is altogether appropriate and exhilarating, giving every artist’s book event, whether panel discussion, gallery exhibition, or museum collection, a special importance as part of the process of encouraging, defining, and publicizing this new thing. I recently had the opportunity to be present at the opening of 187 submissions for the Dressing the Text exhibition in Santa Cruz, and to spend a whole day in a hands-on encounter with the 48 works selected by the jury, including one work by each of its four members. In my comments here I’d like to suggest how that exhibition itself will function in its three-year travels across the country, as part of the process of defining what the artist’s book is, seeking a definition by practice rather than by theory or edict.1

     

    These works were responses to a call for submissions that announced a “national, juried competition and exhibition” of “The Fine Press Artists’ Book.” In the call an initial gesture is made to “an exciting period of experimentation” during the past twenty years, in which “both the structure and the traditional uses of books have been scrutinized and re-evaluated. Conceptual book-objects have shattered conventions through exaggeration, distortion, elimination, or substitution of the book’s various aspects, and have opened the entire nature of the book up to new and exciting investigations.” This exhibition is to represent “the fine printers’ response to both the technical and philosophical challenges generated by this exploration.” But the next paragraph defines the “fine press artists’ book” in opposition to this “exciting period.” It is not “a random collection of fractured bits…but rather…the thoughtful amalgam of text, image, paper, binding structure, typography, and meaningful content…[it] remains preoccupied with content.” Then, in an attempt to have it both ways: “Fine press artists’ books carry on the centuries-old tradition of fine printing while participating in the evolution of the book form.” The meaning of “printing” is implicitly defined by the exhibition requirement of an edition of at least ten, to avoid being “precious” in the bad sense, which is implicitly the status delegated here to the unique object. The call thus represents a rather restricted definition of the artist’s book, but a good definition of the aesthetic criteria of the jurors. All past students of William Everson, the members of the Printers’ Chappel of Santa Cruz (Ruth McGurk of Peripatetic Press, Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press, Peter Thomas of Peter & Donna Thomas: Santa Cruz, and Gary Young of Greenhouse Review Press), are technically skilled and highly creative artist-printers, trying to maintain their dedication to the highest principles of the “fine press” tradition while participating in the evolving identity of the artist’s book.

     

    The catalogue continues and intensifies the conservative (I use the word in a non-pejorative sense) rhetoric of the call for submissions, and backs it up with a formal structure or format that is at times contradicted by the objects it presents.2 In it Gary Young states that “the fine press artists’ book” is “characterized by a devotion to text,” and that “printing a book dresses a text.” This antiquated metaphysics of “dressing” a text almost distracts one’s attention from the equally tendentious emphasis on printing as essential to the genre, and from the subsequent emphasis on “narrative” and “page.” A final quotation from scripture (“In the beginning was the word”) is offered as the “philosophical conceit” that “infuses” every book, making it a “tale of incarnation” in which the “written word is speech incarnate,” and “the printed page allows utterance to become corporeal, and grants it a physical milieu.” But surely spoken utterance is corporeal, even though conventionally and metaphysically troped as “spirit.” And surely most of the printed (and not-“printed”) pages (and not-“pages”) of works in the exhibition were not spoken utterance before they were written.

     

    The quotation from scripture and the rhetoric here sound more like a defensive stratagem than like the manifesto for a bold new swerve in the art/book world. This is not at all surprising, since the values and skills represented by the fine print tradition are beleaguered from all sides. The tone is similar to that in the 1995 Fall Schedule of Programs from the University of Iowa Center for Book Arts: “With the support of numerous foundations, corporations, individual contributors, and over 800 members worldwide, the Center for Book Arts ensures that the ancient craft of the book–that container which preserves the knowledge and ideas of a culture–remains a viable and vital part of our civilization” (3). But in this case there is also a genuine desire to embrace the new, to expand artistic and creative horizons–if it can be done without going to extremes. The artist’s book evolution potentially threatens the aesthetic hegemony of fine printing and binding, so it is not surprising that some aspects of the exhibition are more than a bit inconsistent, with a number of the accepted entries not even trying to meet one or more of the announced criteria in the call for submissions and the catalogue. To accept such works equivocates and undermines on one level what is being proclaimed on another, continuing and repeating a process that is already evident in the call and catalogue.

     

    I turn now to a brief consideration of the harvest produced by the call, and a look at how that harvest is represented in the catalogue, where each item is photographed and described by means of basic categories that include author, artist, printer, binder, edition size, and dimensions. The photographs (by Don Harris) show the books for the most part in what we might call the codex display equivalent of the missionary position: leaning back or flat, open to the gaze (if not the embrace) of the spectator, presided over by a photograph of William Everson’s regal and monumental edition of Robinson Jeffers’ Granite and Cypress. An intriguing feature of the catalogue is its inclusion of sample text from each work, printed above or at the side of the photograph of the work, seeming to suggest that the words can exist free from their material embodiment, equally themselves and not themselves in any merely material form. Taken from the inside of the book, the sample texts testify to the existence “in there” of the essential text commodity, reminding viewers–like the glimpse of a piece of slip under a dress–of how much of the work we are not seeing, either in the photograph or the exhibition itself. These excerpted texts are all printed in the same italic font, with justified right margins. One implication of this gesture may be that the text of a work can exist in some representable naked form, separate from its “dressed” version in book form; but this would trivialize the difference of materiality that is supposedly the raison d’etre of the artist’s book. The one exception to this practice is worth noting: an Arabic text is not extracted for quotation, suggesting a surplus of materiality that exceeded the available fonts. Other examples obscure the illegibility or the non-semantic nature of their texts, displaying features that challenge or subvert the transparent representability of textual elements. In one case, however, the gesture does demonstrate that illegibility when a Greek quotation is badly garbled. Since the bookmakers were probably using the Greek primarily as a visual design element rather than a phonetic/semantic one, the difference between lower case sigma and omicron may be negligible; in either case, the effect of Greek will be produced in the majority of readers who do not know the language. At any rate, the few works that do raise the issue of the aesthetics of illegible documents are assimilated into the norm through typographic representation.

     

    There are a few exceptions to the missionary position norm in the photographs, where codex books stand up to show off their covers, but the most interesting exceptions are the numerous folded entries. These raise questions about the meaning and significance of the category “Binder” listed for each entry. Perhaps “Folder” would be a better term, with “Box maker” replacing “binder’ for the entries that chose that mode, since another exception to the “binding” category is the predictable assortment of boxed sets of prints. There are several boxes with “loose” contents that are quite pleasing, both in construction and content. One of these must be a contender for the world’s most artistic (and expensive) CD container: for $425 you can purchase one of the 55 “editions” of Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder/Four Last Songs, recorded by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf (with Georges Szell conducting) and packaged by Michael Alpert along with a beautifully printed libretto in German and English.

     

    “Dimensions” is another specification called for in the catalogue, to indicate the book’s size when closed up and at rest. This works well enough for the conventional codex, where the contents are distributed on the visual field of a single page at a time. But for others it is a bit like measuring a fishing pole when taken apart and packed in its case, rather than assembled for use. A prime example of the problem is Karen Kunc’s


    Mexican Gothic
    Full Image 57K

     

    Mexican Gothic, listed as 4″x 8.” There is a hole at the top of this work, placed so that it can be hung on a wall in order to reveal its full 80″ length at one time. This is a work with text by Vinnie-Marie D’Ambrosio, designed both to be read sequentially, as its folds are negotiated, but also to be looked at as an elongated broadside or wall hanging. A horizontal example of the same effect is found in Joseph Krupczynski’s Marginal Notes, an oriental-fold book that resembles an accordion broadside. A more ambitious and cumbersome example is John Talleur’s Eurydice Unbound, designed “for those of you who take delight in both reading and looking.” Talleur goes on to explain that the full effect of his work requires at least 40 linear feet of wall space for display. Is this a book that can be “unbound” to become a mural, or a mural bound into the confines of a book? Or is it an interactive work, where the reader-holder-looker can participate Orpheus-like in the “unbinding” of the work?

     

    This discrepancy is not limited to the folded books, for quite a few of the bound ones use the fully opened scope of two facing pages as their aesthetic mise en page. Other works engage the issue of size in different ways, testing the limits of how large–or how small–a work can be and still be an artist’s book. The average size “at rest” of all the books in the exhibition is 9.52″ x 8.79,” with the giant of the lot being Gloria Kondrup’s Extinctions at a monumental 22″ x 27.5.” There are also a few dwarfs, like Seth Kroeck’s


    McCarty Street Matches
    Full image 172K

     

    McCarty Street Matches, a 2.5 x 3 matchbox, with 21 matches inside, each match printed with a line of text. The wit of this is that it plays parodically both on the “container” motif and on size. Since its 21 “lines” can be combined in an infinite number of textual/spatial combinations, it is arguably the container of the most text in the whole show. The smallest entry of all is Donna and Peter Thomas’s


    A 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf
    Full image 92K

     

    A 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf. Another playful and skillfully made work, it too is a sneaky David among the Goliaths. When opened it turns out not to be a codex at all, but a scroll, with its text by John Muir printed on one long sheet of paper. The 1000 Mile Walk is a scroll-stroll, one long continuous sheet wound on wooden rollers. Other titles are misleading in other ways, like Mark McMurray’s Notebook Used along the New Jersey Coast, which is not a notebook at all, but the printed representation of text taken from a notebook used by Walt Whitman. This is a “fine print” production, quite busy and puffed up, in extreme contrast to its “notebook” source. Another codex that’s not a codex is Felicia Rice’s


    Codex NAFTArt
    Full image 66K

     

    Codex NAFTArt, with text by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. This is a work still “in process,” and one of the more interesting and exciting combinations of visual and textual material in the exhibition. Another juror’s entry that combines wit and humor with superb craftsmanship is Ruth McGurk’s Cannibal Ants.


    Cannibal Ants
    Full image 56K
     

    More obviously self-reflexive or self-descriptive titles grace other works. Martha Carothers’


    Inner Room
    Full image 161K

     

    Inner Room is a three-dimensional meditation on the possibility of thinking of a book as room(s), exploiting the silent sculptural potential of the book’s physical form, with each kinetic page combination a marvel of creative precision. Its minimal text by Lynd Ward is impressed into the paper without ink, for still more three-dimensionality, and to produce a complete effect of blanc becoming. Meg Belichick’s Frosting and John Talleur’s Eurydice Unbound, Kitty Maryatt’s Mani-Fold Tales, Walter Feldman’s Quiet Words and Beverly Schlee’s


    Texthypertext
    Full image 87K

     

    Texthypertext all play on the structure/content nature of their form. Coriander Reisbord’s Defensive Book has a text consisting of defensive imperatives (“Don’t trust anybody”) and pages embellished all over with straight pins, so that it is almost impossible to read it without getting stuck. A less obvious example of name play is Gloria Kondrup’s Extinctions, a work that seems to exist in large part to confirm the parodic aptness of Seth Kroeck’s McCarty Street Matches. This is a tome that presents itself as a tomb, a crypt for “the nameless or the unforgotten dead, whose faces we have never looked upon or voices ever heard.” These five giant slabs of charcoal gray paper are a bit like the Vietnam Veterans’ War Memorial in Washington, except that there the names are presented as live information about the dead, text to be read and touched, preserved and shared. Here the endless names printed in black on black are unreadable, as if already buried in oblivion along with the carcasses of their extinct namesakes.

     

    The contents of many works in the exhibition fall into some fairly predictable categories, among them that of myth, the old standby source of text suitable for continuing the tradition of sumptuous editions of the “classics.” Another popular source of text for artist’s book production is the artist’s family, and there are a number here, ranging from the poetry of someone’s eight-year-old niece (Walter Feldman’s Quiet Words) to children’s books, to family album books, with more detail than one wants to know about people one doesn’t know (Kirsten Johnson’s Past Presences, Susan Lowdermilk’s


    All My Relations
    Full image 192K

     

    All My Relations, to mild feminist protest (Rochelle Kaplan’s Daddy was King) to an eight-year old’s memories of cold-war paranoia and A-bomb fear (Russel Jones’ Overshadowed) and whimsical expressions of gratitude for learning how–and how not to–breathe (Jeri Robinson’s Inhale, exhale. These family-related works tend to favor bold, primitive techniques and materials, including coarse paper, handwriting, linoleum cuts, rubber stamps, and punched holes with wire ring binding.

     

    There are several livres d’artistes in the classic mode, with the poet dead or translated (or both), and the artistic elements of the presentation tending to dominate the production. Raphael Fodde’s Motets has text by Montale in Italian, with an adequate English translation. The book is too large for convenient reading, and the text is all in caps, to make it fit the scale and bring it into a relationship with 11 powerful etchings by Virginio Ferrari. James and Carolyn Robertson’s The Bread of Days includes the originals and translations of 12 poems by 11 Mexican poets, translated by Samuel Beckett, who didn’t have any interest in the project but needed the money. In spite of the hackwork translations, this is an exciting work, beautifully printed, with etchings by Enrique Chagoya filling each page to its outermost limits with dynamic force-fields of design. These items are impressive works, but in spite of their “important” texts it’s clearly the visual art that is running the show. For me, that keeps them from joining the first ranks of this fascinating and challenging exhibition.

     

    The largest single content/text category represented in the exhibition is poetry, and it is in this category that we also find some of the most impressive and aesthetically pleasing works, books that deserve a place among the best representatives of the fine print tradition. They are not necessarily elaborate, or sumptuous, or complicated, or even expensive. But they are superb examples of that complex and rare harmony of text, materials, design, structure, execution, and illustration or decoration that constitute a successful production. Claire Van Vliet’s


    Night Street
    Full image 126K

     

    Night Street combines a suite of poems by Barbara Luck on urban themes with a dense, graphically rich, complex rush of textures and images by Lois Johnson that echo the experience of city streets. The pages are folded, composed mosaic-style from several different papers, with images printed on offset press and silkscreened. Each opening of this sophisticated work is like a different miniature cityscape. Gary Young is author, artist, and printer for


    My Brother’s in Wyoming
    Full image 60K

     

    My Brother’s in Wyoming. In extreme contrast with Van Vliet’s work, this is an elegantly quiet, minimalist production, with what seems like as much open space as the state it represents. With four exceptions, each opening has a simple drawing on the right, with one line of print starting at the bottom right of the facing left page that continues across to the right. The exceptions are four drawings with a greenish background and no text. The overall effect is a brilliantly earned simplicity and harmony, without a single gratuitous feature. Inge Bruggeman’s Negation is one of only eight works in the exhibition priced below $100.00. In it she presents a poem by Hank Lazer, both in printed and tape cassette form. In this work, too, less is more. The interesting poem is enhanced by the tall pages that reinforce its form, and the combination invites repeated readings and handling of the work. K. K. Merker’s Manhattan presents poems by Amy Clampitt. One of the most striking pleasures of this work is the effective formatting of the relationship between Clampitt’s printed text and the abstract, colorful linear illustrations by Margaret Sunday. This is the second in a series of livres d’artistes published by the University of Iowa Center for the Book, and it is a delight to hold, to look at, and to read. One of the many reasons I single these four out is that they present contemporary poetry of high quality in such an intimate relationship with all the aspects of production. Even when the author, artist, and printer are not the same, the harmony is as effective as if they were. These are books one would gladly go back to again and again, and they represent an impressive fulfillment of the goals of the Dressing the Text exhibition. It is fortunate that the show is travelling widely, giving viewers across the country a glimpse of this perspective on the evolution of the artist’s book.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The exhibition will be installed next at the John Hay Library (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island: September 12-November 29, 1997) and at the Olin Library (Mills College, Oakland, California: January 12-March 6, 1998). It opened in Santa Cruz at the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County (April 15-May 28, 1995) and has been on view at the Clark Humanities Museum (Scripps College, Claremont, California: January 15-February 23, 1996); the Vernon R. Alden Library, Special Collections (Ohio University, Athens, Ohio: March 15-June 15, 1996); the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts (Minneapolis, Minnesota: June 29-September 14, 1996); and at The Davidson Library, Special Collections (University of California, Santa Barbara, California: October 7-December 20, 1996).

     

    2. The catalogue for the Dressing the Text exhibition is available from Ruth McGurk, Santa Cruz Printers’ Chappel, 318 Rigg Street, Santa Cruz, 95060, for $12, plus $2.50 postage and handling. A panel discussion featuring Johanna Drucker, Marcia Reed, and Michael Davidson was held in connection with the exhibition; an edited transcript is published in Quarry West 32 (Fall 1995).

     

  • “A Lifetime of Anger and Pain: Kalí Tal and the Literatures of Trauma”

    David DeRose

    Center for Theater Art
    University of California, Berkeley
    dderose@uclink4.berkeley.edu

     

    Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1996. 296pp.

     

    I am squirming uncomfortably as I read the first few pages of Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. She opens the book with a political anecdote that questions the integrity and judgement of no less a figure than Elie Wiesel, the high priest of Holocaust survivor literature. A bit stunned, I flip to the beginning of the next chapter. Here Tal characterizes a group of Vietnam veterans in front of the Lincoln Memorial as “entrepreneurs…hawk[ing] commercial products [and] POW/MIA propaganda” (23). Chapter three? George Bush is under fire: his pronouncement that “‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome’” implies, in Tal’s words, that “the whole country has been struck ill with this disease, and the Gulf War is the prescribed (and successful) cure” (60-61).

     

    To anyone not familiar with Tal’s subject matter, the literature of trauma, or with the repressive and reductive treatment afforded the study of such literature by the academy, Tal’s aggressive polemics might seem excessive; her use of public political examples might appear inappropriate in a work devoted primarily to literary texts. But as Tal herself reminds us early in her text, “bearing witness is an aggressive act” which “threatens the status quo.”

     

    It is born out of a refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than conformity, to endure a lifetime of anger and pain. (7)

     

    Tal’s own work, like the work of the writers/trauma survivors she describes, is a calculated act of aggression that situates the literature of trauma (and the study of such literature) within the broader realms of literary theory, cultural production, and national politics, all of which have long combined, Tal argues, to ignore its authority, devalue and silence its authors, and deny its unique position in the world literary canon. Tal seems to argue that those few trauma survivors/authors (Wiesel among them) who have entered the literary pantheon have done so not in recognition of the unique qualities of the literature of trauma, but in spite of them.

     

    The formidable task Tal sets for herself is to establish a position of recognition and respect in contemporary literary and cultural studies not for literature about trauma survival, but for the literature of the trauma survivor. To do so, she must begin with a definition of terms. But in this field, even the defining of terms becomes a political mine field. “Trauma,” for example, is defined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as an event “generally outside the range of human experience.” Yet, as Tal points out, in the United States one form of trauma, rape, is “more common than left-handedness.” Thus, it is clear that, to the APA, “usual human experience” can only mean “usual white male experience” (136); the recurring traumas of women are politically silenced by a psychiatric vocabulary which denies their prominent and disturbing place in our society.

     

    Defining a “Literature of Trauma” is no less problematic. For many scholars (including members of the literary and psychoanalytical communities at Tal’s alma mater, Yale), any work of literature which deals with traumatic events or the aftermath of such events is literature of trauma. The status of the author is irrelevant; no differentiation is made, for instance, between a fictional work of literature and the autobiographical bearing of witness by a trauma survivor. Text is text, the argument goes; literature is literature. Tal’s work, by contrast, is based on the conviction that for therapeutic and political reasons, one must identify a distinct literature of trauma comprising the writings of trauma survivors, and unwaveringly defined by the status and identity of those authors as trauma survivors. In Tal’s study, this literature includes, but is not limited to, narratives written by Holocaust survivors, Vietnam War veterans, and incest and sexual abuse survivors.

     

    Using Vietnam veteran authors as an example, Tal explains the difference between the impulse that leads an author to employ traumatic events as a literary device and the compulsion that leads a survivor to bear witness:

     

    These works [by nonveterans] are the products
of the author's urge to tell a story, make a
point, create an aesthetic experience.... in
short, the product of a literary decision.
The war, to nonveteran writers, is simply a
metaphor, a vehicle for their message....

For combat veterans, however, the personal
investment of the author is immense.
(116-117)

Literature of trauma is written from the need
to tell and retell the story of the traumatic
experience, to make it "real" both to the
victim and to the community. Such writing
serves both as validation and cathartic
vehicle for the traumatized
author. (21)

     

    The act of bearing witness is undertaken both therapeutically in order to rebuild the survivor’s internal sense of “personal myth,” and publicly and politically–before the community–in order to insist on validation from and make an impact on public norms of representation. As Tal insists, “representation of traumatic experience is ultimately a tool in the hands of those who shape public perceptions and national myth” (19). Those who control such representation are empowered to identify social power relationships and to determine the public perception and the fate of such traumatized communities as, for instance, rape and incest survivors.

     

    Thus, not only is the representation of trauma a highly political tool–a tool, Tal insists, which must remain in the hands of those who have first-hand knowledge of traumatic experience–so too is the job of interpreting and decoding such representations. The conventional literary scholar (or the manipulative politician) “has at his or her disposal the entire cultural ‘library’ of symbol, myth, and metaphor, but he or she does not have access to the meanings of the signs that invoke traumatic memory” (16). Survivor/readers, by contrast, “have the metaphorical tools to interpret representations of traumas similar to their own” (16). Tal identifies herself as a survivor of sexual abuse who “consider[s] it necessary not only to admit, but to define [her] subjectivity” (4). She seems to challenge literary scholars and political pundits who hide behind the mainstream’s customary adopted guise of neutrality to do the same.

     

    Tal’s exclusionist position–that only trauma survivors may represent trauma, and, perhaps more militantly, that only trauma survivors can properly “read” representations of trauma–is sure to incite critical rioting between the guardians of the “text is text” status quo and the anti-hegemonic forces of the marginalized. And yet, it is even more likely that Tal’s inclusionist position–that is, her controversial inclusion of various traumatized communities under a single umbrella–will create acrimony within and among those groups of trauma survivors. Holocaust survivors are inclined to insist that there is no human experience that could possibly be compared to the Holocaust: no body of literature with which Holocaust literature could be linked. But Tal classifies literature of trauma across demographic and political lines, unifying the voices of survivor communities who would appear to have little in common. By citing the psychiatric community’s recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as an occurrence exhibited across boundaries of gender, community, and experience, and by pointing out the successful treatment of various post-traumatic ailments with arts therapy, Tal establishes a bridge among these communities and defines a therapeutic model that links the artistic output of sexual assault survivors, Vietnam veterans, and Holocaust survivors. Her argument is compelling, but none of these groups is likely to feel entirely comfortable with a comparison that empowers their voices as trauma survivors but that lumps them together with other such groups.

     

    Worlds of Hurt is broken up, over seven chapters, into alternating units of theory and application, the latter coming in the form of “readings” from a broad range of cultural products and texts. The first chapter, “Worlds of Hurt,” serves to establish the academic and political battleground over the meaning and relevance of trauma narratives, to identify the common links among the various communities of trauma survivors that Tal will examine, to create a critical vocabulary, and to propose an interdisciplinary methodology for “reading” such narratives.

     

    In Chapter Two, “A Form of Witness,” Tal introduces that most paradigmatic of trauma literatures, the Holocaust narrative. But rather than offer a textual reading of Holocaust literature itself, she illustrates the transformation of the Holocaust into a metonym, not for the actual events that took place under Nazi rule in Europe, but for a set of formulaic symbols that reflect the narrative codification of those events. She then demonstrates the struggle of scholars to take control of and to dictate the meaning of “the Holocaust” as metonym by giving a political reading of the scholarly battle between Bruno Bettelheim and Terrence Des Pres for the right to “interpret” Holocaust literature.

     

    Chapter Three, “Between the Lines,” again looks at how trauma literature is traditionally “read,” this time comparing the attempts of seven prominent Vietnam War scholars to “fix the floating signifier of ‘Vietnam’” (61). All seven demonstrate Tal’s assertion that “traditional literary interpretation assumes that all symbols are accessible to all readers” and that most critics, unable to access the survivor’s symbolic universe, “dismiss the ‘real’ war and its devastating effect on the individual author,” interpreting the war as a set of symbols and metaphors “which denote instead an internal crisis of the ‘American character’” (115).

     

    To offer graphic evidence of the “real” war and its aftermath, Tal turns in her fourth chapter, “The Farmer of Dreams,” to a reading of poems and selected prose memoirs from the writings of the prolific Vietnam veteran, W.D. Ehrhart. Tal demonstrates the existence in Ehrhart’s work of what Chaim Shatan calls the “basic wound,” a psychological scarring generated in response to trauma that leads to a state of permanently altered, adapted interaction with experience. Employing a psychoanalytic vocabulary developed in arts therapy to define a survivor’s stages of recovery from PTSD, Tal chronologically traces Ehrhart’s various periods of writing as acts of personal revision in the wake of trauma.

     

    In Chapter Five, “There Was No Plot, and I Discovered It By Mistake,” Tal builds upon the theoretical groundwork laid in Chapter One and focuses in greater detail upon a number of concepts introduced within the first four chapters. She continues to define the terminology necessary for appreciating literature of trauma and for distinguishing between her proposed approach to such literature and conventional approaches. It is here that she defines the key terms of “personal myth”–one’s internal “assumptions about experience and the way the world works” (166)–and “national myth,” the collective myth of a people, “propagated in textbooks, official histories, popular culture documents, public schools, and the like” (115). Here she also defines the liminal state of the survivor. Because trauma, by its very definition, lies beyond the boundaries of “normal” conception or experience, because it is “unspeakable,” trauma survivors have set for themselves an impossible task. “The accurate representation of trauma,” Tal notes, “can never be achieved without recreating the event” (15). In other words, only trauma can convey trauma; only trauma can “accomplish that kind of destruction” (122). It cannot be re-presented. Thus, the trauma survivor “comes to represent the shattering of our national myths, without being able to shatter the reader’s individual personal myths” as his/hers have been shattered. (121)

     

    It is also in Chapter Five that Tal elaborates on the applicability of feminist theory in comprehending the therapeutic and political roles of trauma narratives and their interpretation. Because violence, for instance, frequently occupies a prominent position in the lives of women and in their narratives, many of the tools developed by feminist criticism to address that violence are applicable to the literature of trauma. Feminist theory is concerned with “how we read” and how our reading of events, as well as literature, is dictated by hegemonic control of cultural discourse. The dismantling of that control is a shared goal of feminist thought and the literature of trauma. Likewise, feminist theory has focussed on the limitations of language and of conventional literary means of expressing women’s experience. Since the literature of trauma deals with the “unspeakable,” it explores similar limitations.

     

    In Chapter Six, “We Didn’t Know What Would Happen,” Tal demonstrates the applicability of the theoretical models built in the previous chapter, offering a brief political history of incest and sexual assault narratives in a “society where violence against women is the rule rather than the exception” (137). She looks specifically at the techniques of cultural production associated with such writings by giving a comparative reading of the packaging, presentation, and marketing strategies employed in two recent anthologies of sexual assault survivor narratives.

     

    In Chapter Seven, “This Is about Power on Every Level,” Tal begins with models of post-traumatic behavior and experience generated in arts therapy and PTSD studies to trace the process of self-healing in three incest survivor narratives. But Tal moves beyond her therapeutic models to demonstrate the link between self-healing, self-validation, and the advocacy of public awareness and political action. According to Tal, the author’s work involves not only self-healing, but also the “reclamation of anger” (215) and control over “both the writing process and the interpretation of her work” (242). The work of healing the individual, she concludes, is inseparable from “the work of building a community of women, of making changes in the world” (221). These are conditions of struggle which Tal then applies, in her final pages, to the work of all survivor/artists.

     

    Kalí Tal’s book is equal parts scholarly brilliance and political and academic defiance by a member of a survivor community reclaiming control of the process of interpreting the literature of trauma. She has, in essence, defied and rewritten existing definitions of such literature, creating a critical methodology out of seemingly disparate and frequently feuding and territorial arenas of expertise. The diversity of the invaluable resources she calls upon and integrates into her arguments is truly impressive. And she reads so many different kinds of literary, cultural, and political texts, that all but the most broadly read interdisciplinary scholars will find themselves reeling as she blends critical vocabularies and methodologies to move effortlessly from the intellectual grudge match of Bettelheim and Des Pres, to the veteran poetry of Ehrhart, to the marketing of sexual abuse anthologies, to a therapeutic model of incest narratives.
     
    I am still squirming as I put down Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, but my initial anxiety over the vehemence of Tal’s attack has long since been replaced by uncomfortable and contradictory emotions regarding the embattled rights to represent and to interpret evoked in this book. Tal’s work reveals scholarly criticism of trauma narratives as a battlefield of political agendas and no less political methodologies. Her own adversarial position invites attack from academic as well as political opponents, from both the jealously territorial and those professing neutrality. But Tal seems both ready and eager for the fight; after all, bearing witness to trauma is “an aggressive act,” a lifetime decision “to embrace conflict rather than conformity” (7). Worlds of Hurt should be widely read–and, one would hope, widely employed as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship and academic activism–in all circles of cultural, gender, psychoanalytic, and literary studies related to the various literatures of trauma.
     

  • Son of Kong, How Do You Do?

    Gregory Wolos

    Aplaus, New York
    Baltowolos@aol.com

     
    It’s a 45 minute boat ride from the outer isle airstrip across the straits. The ferry’s railing cuts into my solar plexus, but I lean forward until my ribs ache. The pain and my excitement keep me breathless. Though I can’t see it through the cottony dawn fog, I can feel my island directly ahead: Tallulo Lillo, largest of the South Pacific’s Halloween Islands. Word of mouth, colorful travel brochures, and intuition have convinced me that this tropical paradise will be the perfect site for my next picture– the major studio, megabuck blockbuster that will free me from bondage to the backlot slasher films on which I’ve cut my directorial teeth. My reputation for turning low budget carnage into cash has earned me this opportunity, and I won’t waste it. I’ve come to this island to film the movie of my dreams. When the fog lifts, Talullo Lillo, as viewed through my professional eye, will no longer be Talullo Lillo. It will be Kong’s Island.

     

    I’m here to remake The Son of Kong!

     

    Whispers distract me, though I know I’m alone on the slick deck. In my other movies, the first of the Slitter series, for example, hushed voices sifting through the fog would be a bad sign. The character who hears them is done for. The neck hairs of an audience familiar with my work would tickle to attention. But my fans would be disappointed now, because I know these voices.

     

    I pretend at first that they belong to my young son and his nanny who nap with our baggage in the ferry’s cabin, but I’m kidding myself. Though I strain to keep my focus forward, I can’t block out my childhood voice, nor the laugh of my youthful mother. Now I see us, sneaking up from behind as suddenly as a tractor trailer in a rearview mirror.

     

    “We lost your daddy in the war,” Mom says. “When I was pregnant with you.” Then she laughs, tosses the waves of blond hair the men in her life would die for, and funnels cigarette smoke as acrid as Godzilla’s breath through her nostrils. He died in the South Pacific, she says. “He was a hero,” she says, though I never saw a medal. Men passed through our house like ghosts, the same man with different faces, none of them heroic, none of them my father. They all loved my mother’s golden hair.

     

    I’ve invented a father for my dreams. As if they were old movies, I watch the flashbacks he never lived to dread. I see gray newsreel figures formed from ashes and fog, their color wept away by time. Some soldiers lose their last meals over the sides of the landing craft before crouching into rows, using their rifles as staffs. My father last vomited back on the transport, one quick wretch over the railing. It spread like a parachute, shrinking toward the dark sea, reminding him of training films of paratroopers blown from their planes like dandelion seeds. But that’s in Europe. Here they say Zeros love to pick you off while you float through the clouds. The enemy waits in the island jungle. My father’s death would be their glory. Dad’s crammed in too low to see the horizon, which would be invisible anyway, because the fog pours over him, as white as milk. Sea swells smack the hull with a hollow syncopation. The newsreel ends, and the spinning film flaps on the projector, over and over.

     

    The drums on shore pound like the vein in my temple, but slightly off, like a tune on the car radio a milli-beat off from the windshield wipers. BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, over and over, happy drums, and why not? What a boon to the island economy! A Hollywood movie on location for over six months. Allison and her crew have been here for a week already, chatting up the locals, handing out everything from Baby Kong pens to free passes to watch filming (which mean nothing– we’ll run an open set, as long as spectators keep their mouths shut while the cameras roll). We’ll let them think we need extras, though we won’t use a single Islander. If they’d seen the originals, they’d know that Kong Island is a black community. The image of terrified Polynesians just doesn’t register. Their shrieking faces look too happy.

     

    Footage of screaming Pacific Islanders was test screened across the country, and no significant demographic group bought the premise. Some left the theaters swearing they smelled coconuts. A few said pineapple. None of the testing mattered anyway because of my commitment to the ethnicity of the original Son. But the demographics helped me avoid a studio showdown, because it’ll cost, flying in hundreds of black extras. So there’s no bigotry here. There won’t be any pale Island folk in my movie. Too Mutiny on the Bounty. Too idyllic.

     

    Ahead the fog congeals, a broad floating strip a lighter shade of gray. BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM. Materializing on a higher plane than I would have thought, an out-rigger canoe appears, bearing welcoming gifts, no doubt. They’re up early. If they were to offer me an Island girl for the evening, hair like black silk, skin smooth as coconut milk, I would accept their hospitality. With a vain touch I stroke my own cheek and find it hardly smooth. If I had a minute for a quick shave, I’d take it.

     

    The grainy old film rolls again. I watch as my father rubs his chin with his knuckles against his gritty beard. How will he shave in the jungle with his enemy lurking behind every fern, ready to spring for that bristly throat? He’s dreaming about a white porcelain wash basin. Hot water steams the mirror above. He clears a spot with the heel of his fist and looks into the future. Does he see his son beside him, waiting for him to lather his cheek? Mom lies in bed, her hair spread over the pillow like a sunrise. Reality returns as fog reseals the clear spot on the mirror, and my father feels the weight of the pack on his back and the rifle in his hand. There have been stories about G.I.’s drowning because cowardly landing craft pilots released them in deep water And if he should scramble safely to shore, what then? Every dune, every trunk of bamboo hides an enemy. They can make themselves smaller, thinner. They are diabolical, magic.

     

    My boy has come along for the ride. Angela, his mother, has left us no choice. She’s on her honeymoon in Budapest. She’s married a chess master, and there’s some kind of World tournament there. I imagine Klaus, her husband, hunched over a chessboard, his craggy brow shadowing the pieces like Skull Mountain above Kong’s Island. (There’s no mountain on Tallulo Lillo. Just palm trees, a few lagoons, white beaches, the sky, and the Pacific Ocean. The computer imaging people will design Skull Mountain according to my specifications.) Sweat dots Klaus’s forehead– a drop in slow motion close up falls like a jewel and shatters in a silent explosion at the onyx feet of the black king. What frolicsome honeymoon nights Angela and Klaus must be enjoying.

     

    I met my wife at the first Woodstock– as she swayed topless upon the shoulders of a massive, thick-bellied fellow, her breasts lightly basted with dried mud, as if she were a clay sculpture coming to life.

     

    “Hello,” I said, gazing upward. “You have beautiful eyes. You should be a model.” The big fellow holding her aloft may have growled at me. I can’t remember his face.

     

    For years Angela and I searched the footage of the documentary, looking for ourselves. As time went by we gave up. Had we ever met? Had either of us really been to Woodstock?

     

    Having Carl was a doomed attempt to stave off middle age and salvage a marriage of nearly twenty years. “Papa” and “Mama.” New roles, new self-definitions. We should have been screen tested. There should have been a reading. Either an absence of aptitude or an abundance of apathy rendered us unfit for parenthood. I won’t blame my own lack of a father figure. Imagining oneself a good father is no more difficult than visualizing a murder. We’re committed to the reality of neither.

     

    I remember the moments just after Angela gave birth to Carl. A nurse had swabbed the baby clean and nestled him at his weary mother’s breast. Angela’s lips pinched for a second, and she blinked dry eyes rapidly. She’s thinking too much, I thought, feeling my stomach fall. “He’s pretty hairy, isn’t he?” she murmured finally.

     

    I nodded. I patted my wife’s hand, pressed gently with my knuckles the downy flesh behind the ear of my son. Then I yawned, sorry that I did, but unable to stop myself. “Tough business,” I said pointlessly.

     

    Carl lost his furriness, all except for a headful of wild black curls. I see the boy whenever my schedule coincides with my custodial responsibilities. Odd weeks and weekends, special circumstances like our present trip. We are cordial. We call each other Carl and Dad, respectively.

     

    Our voyage to the Halloween Islands will be the longest time we’ve spent together since his mother and I split up. His nanny Greta accompanies us. She has trouble meeting my eye because Klaus, Carl’s new step-Daddy, is her nephew. Yesterday afternoon on the sun deck my little boy beat me at chess, which I suppose is an argument for nurture over nature.

     

    The boy is excited about the trip. He knows all about Kong. We’ve spent many weekends watching the original and sequel. He owns a photograph of the eighteen inch model used for both the senior and junior ape. Carl knows that baby Kong was pure white. He even knows that the little giant had a nickname– Kiko– used by the production crew. He owns one of those monkey dolls usually made of gray socks with white and red heels and toes, except his is all white. He calls it Kiko, though he knows the difference between a monkey and an ape. He’s aware that Kiko’s my baby, and that my son of Kong will be nameless, in faithful tribute to the original sequel.

     

    “We’ve got problems!” Allison says before I’ve even settled into the limousine that awaits me at the dock. Carl and Greta will follow in a taxi so my assistant and I can talk business. Finding and solving problems is Allison’s job. She’s high energy and dedicated. We’re a team, unless she screws up. She knows I’d hand the studio her head, and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. I have very little leverage until this film succeeds.

     

    Allison pinches an unlit cigarette between her lips, though she quit smoking years ago. “I like smokers,” she says. “I want to keep myself attractive to them.” And she is attractive, in spite of the grip on the cigarette that crimps her mouth into a sneer. She wears her dark hair rolled and twisted in a knot so tight atop her head that her blue eyes are pulled wide open. And because of her impulse to force them into a worried squint, they bulge with frightening intensity. “The Bwide of Fwankenthtein,” Carl once whispered to me in a quavery lisp.

     

    We failed as lovers. I found her attention to detail too exacting for a physical relationship.

     

    “Problems?” I ask. I am fingering the strings of flower petals draped around my neck by nearly naked island women. The less exclusive hotels near the harbor gleam like chalk cliffs over the palm trees and pink beach that curves against the blue ocean into the horizon. “What could possibly be a problem here? I’m being treated like royalty– like a Tiki– I’m a God. They’ll be sacrificing their virgins to me, like old Kong. Won’t they? What about locations. Do we have an itinerary?”

     

    “Yes– wait–” Allison blinks– the look of the Bride when she met her betrothed. “I sent that canoe out. I paid for those drummers. I hired those girls. Those flowers came out of our own budget. Now we’ve got a few publicity shots to send back to the States. Nobody else on the island knows you’re here yet. The word is that you’re arriving by plane tomorrow. That give us time to prepare.”

     

    I don’t like the sound of this. I’m not ready for it. “Prepare?”

     

    “Listen–” Allison spits the cigarette out of her mouth, doesn’t even seem to notice as it bounces off her thigh onto the leather upholstery. “–These are simple island folks, but they’re pissed. They really are.”

     

    “Okay– so who’s ‘they?’ Who’s not welcoming Son of Kong with open arms?” I’ve got visions of kids hugging furry white Kiko dolls that’ll make teddy bears obsolete. The rims of Allison’s contact lenses brand her bright blue irises.

     

    “There are two groups, really. But they’re forming a coalition, and I hate to say it, they’re getting support.” She’s unzipped a canvas briefcase and hands me a clipboard thick with xeroxed newspaper articles.

     

    ” ‘Mothers against Kong,’” I read.

     

    “It’s hot locally already. But right now it’s an island issue. Can you imagine if it gets to the states?”

     

    “The studio will love the free publicity.”

     

    “Maybe.” Allison’s eyes pop like flashbulbs. “But women are very powerful these days.”

     

    I hand the clipboard back to her. I can’t focus on the article. I’m too tired from last night’s champagne and the sleepless nights my nightmares cause. My hands rise to my aching temples. “Summarize,” I say.

     

    “Well,” Allison sighs, “It seems our project is attacking motherhood. Who, after all, is the little giant ape’s mother? ‘Son of Kong,’ okay, but where’s Mama Kong? Why doesn’t she get half the credit? The baby’s not the product of abiogenesis, is he?”

     

    “Abiogenesis?”

     

    “It’s in the article. A Ms. Malamala, she’s the spokesperson, says that by denying the Son of Kong his maternity, we’re, in effect, denying all children their mother. We’re not only undermining the maternal role in a child’s co-nurturing, we could cause psychological damage to children and even adults who watch the movie and have actually experienced or even only feared childhood abandonment. Like flashbacks.” Allison picks up her loose cigarette and jams it back between her lips. “What you’ve done,” she says, “is unite feminists and motherists. Quite an accomplishment. Nobel Prize caliber.”

     

    “What do they want?” I ask. Suddenly, every limb feels leaden, as if I’m pinned to my seat in a space vehicle accelerating to escape velocity.

     

    “Creative options? Acknowledge the baby ape’s maternity. Title change to The Son of Kongs, maybe, as in Mr. and Mrs. Or explain that missing Mommy. Something that makes her sympathetic, of course. Or make the movie involve the Mom thematically.”

     

    “Or baby boy’s attachment to her– his grieving over his dead father complicated by the Oedipal magnetism of his recently remarried Mom.”

     

    “Remarried?” Allison struggles to squint. New veins thread the whites of her eyes.

     

    “To Carl Denham– the promoter who started the whole mess– and baby Kong is despondent–and vengeful. A psychological wreck. They want creative? I’ll give them a god-damned monkey Hamlet!

     

    Allison is silent. She purses her lips, and the cigarette sticks out at me like an accusing finger. “This is serious,” she says.

     

    I sigh. “Okay. A motherhood group supported by women’s rights activists. Who else hates me?”

     

    “Only the group of Islanders who are calling you a racist.”

     

    “What?” It would be a pleasure to do nothing but watch the scenery. It reminds me of Honolulu, but it’s wilder. Nothing is cultivated. The flora cut by the road is profuse, tangled, and mean. Lush, but not luxuriant. Inland there are hills, but no mountains. Where’s Carl, I wonder, and glance out the limo’s rear window. All I see is the gray road snaking back to nowhere through the over and undergrowth. From above the cerulean sky flattens us like a cover slip over a microscopic specimen. Occasionally, the deep blue Pacific breaks into view through the shore side vegetation. There’s a shadow on the waves– maybe it’s Venus surfing in on her oyster shell to remind me of what a sexist bastard I am.

     

    And now I’m a racist too?

     

    “The word’s out that you’re not intending to use locals in the film. I couldn’t squelch it.”

     

    “So now I have to apologize for being faithful to the original? These people should understand about art. Don’t they remember Gauguin? Hell, we’ll give their Island Marlon Brando the part of Charlie the cook. Charlie’s Chinese.” An ache swells in my head like the Devil’s fetus. I’m talking and listening, but my eye has caught that shadow on Pacific again. It might be something large swimming just below the surface. Just before the foliage again interrupts my view, I see it’s an empty military landing craft retreating with the tide.

     

    “I’m afraid they won’t be so easy to appease–” I receive Allison’s voice as if through cheap headphones. “Raymond— Raymond– your monkey’s white. Not only do they want representation in the film, they have a problem with the monkey’s whiteness–”

     

    “He’s not a monkey, god-dammit, he’s a gorilla!” But I’m wishing I hadn’t lost that landing craft–

     

    The newsreel again.

     

    Every instinct screams at my beached father to retreat, to turn to the sea like a newly hatched turtle. Does he envision, as I do, a gull’s bill scissoring through a soft shell or severing a flipper with a snip? His raging nerves deafen my father to the enemy’s bullets, but he feels their concussion as they split the air.

     

     

    Fear drives him forward. He struggles past a leg lying on the beach. It wears a familiar boot, and the khaki cloth swaddling its shin is the color of his uniform. Its stump glistens like raw steak. It lies toe up, as if it’s the only visible limb of a sleeping ghost. My father lumbers by into the jungle, but the leg hangs in his mind, kicking away all thoughts but one:

     

    Has the enemy seen anything like the golden hair of his girl back home? Her face hovering above his bare chest, her curtain of hair descending like cool sunshine against his skin.

     

    The buzz of voices. Allison’s and my own. Arguing out of reflex. “–the economy!” I’m shouting. “What do they do here, export coconuts?”

     

    “Tourism. They’re very poor.”

     

    “Well, Son of Kong will change that.” Our hotel, the only building in sight, squats on the horizon. “They’ll get a location credit. HBO will do a ‘Making of–‘ here. The studio will set up a Kong museum in town. I see a theme park–”

     

    “They want their own people to be in a movie made on their island,” Allison says. “They’re funny that way. Territorial.”

     

    My head still aches. Does everyone have such trouble being welcomed? “What about preserving the integrity of the original? And do they care about putting African American actors out of work?” I wrench my neck around and peer down the serpentine road. The foliage pours behind us– the fluid palms wave and bow like sea weed in the creamy wind. From a distant fold in the verdure my boy’s cab emerges. As I picture Carl hugging his white monkey and gazing at the tropical sky, our limo brakes to an abrupt halt. Allison’s clipboard skitters off the seat. She ignores it, her attention riveted to whatever she sees straight ahead through the windshield.

     

    “Damn,” she mutters. We’ve reached a semi-circular drive along which huge flags atop fifty foot poles snap in colorful international array all the way to the hotel entrance. But our path is blocked by a mob of a hundred or so placard toting Islanders.

     

    “Pull up to them slowly,” Allison tells the driver. “You’ll have to talk to somebody, Ray.” She’s nervous, and her eyes bulge dangerously. We coast toward the crowd, and the bodies part to either side like floating flower petals. The protesters, male and female, wear tank tops and T shirts, shorts or skirts printed in bright floral patterns. Most of them hold their signs lazily, as if they’re umbrellas on a sunny day or rifles on safety. They’re so relaxed I begin to wonder if I’ve mistaken the purpose of their assembly. Until I read their signs.

     

    “KONG GO HOME” many state in succinct protest, though there are others, longer and more puzzling. “SON OF KONG AIN’T NO MAMA’S BOY” one reads. This is hoisted suddenly by a slender Island woman in a sleeveless orange dress ornamented with an elaborate gilt design. The sign she totes like a glittering statuette no doubt alludes to Kiko’s lack of a mother. Her gesture must have been a signal, because as her placard rises the others sprout in response.

     

    A short, thick fellow wearing black glasses, a Fu Manchu, and a thin braid about a yard long waves a cryptic sign overhead in a beefy arm: “WE ARE FIT TO BE TRAMPLED!” His grin gleams white against his butterscotch skin. So do the grins of the woman in the bright dress and the rest of the revitalized demonstrators. Maybe they’re not really upset, I think. Maybe it’s all a joke.

     

    “They look happy to see us,” I whisper to Allison as we drive through them. Then we get close to the bearer of the “TRAMPLED” sign, and I understand it. It means the Islanders consider themselves good enough to have a giant ape grind them face down into the humid soil of their homeland. I look again at the smiles of those who crowd the limo– and I see how badly I was mistaken. The lips of these folk shrink away from teeth bared in anger. A glow burns deep in their dark eyes like the red hot coals of a barbecue pit. But it looks like they’re smiling.

     

    “See, for Christ’s sake,” I mutter, “Look at those faces– that’s why I can’t use them. From a distance they look like they’re laughing.”

     

    “Do more close ups–” Allison whispers back.

     

    There are thumps. At first I think the limo has run into the protesters, but then I realize that they’re slapping the car, paddling as it passes as if we’re fraternity pledges. Allison and I scrunch down in our seats as the thuds crescendo. We are surrounded by flowered torsos. Now and then a face squints for us through the tinted glass. I remember that Carl’s somewhere behind. Shrunken defensively, I swivel necklessly like Quasi Moto to peek out back. The rear window is covered by a mosaic of hands. From those palms I could read their futures, if I had the art. My concern for Carl tugs at my focus.

     

    Color drains from the picture, and I’m watching as my father crouches before me in the jungle. His eyes are wide with fear. His hand strangles his rifle. What act of bravery can I imagine for him? These eyes, haunted yet hunting, sweep the foliage until they meet mine. My heart pounds as I wait for the snap of recognition.

     

    Allison and I, little Carl and a very frightened Greta are surrounded. Hotel security escorted us just short of the hotel doors, four burly guys who look like wrestlers and flexed their Pacific Island muscles while the crowd waved its placards and chanted, at a surprisingly high pitch: “KONG-OH, KONG-OH, KONG-OH!” (Kong, go?) But the guards melted away from us like pig fat on a spit when confronted with the paparazzi and media jackals that block the entrance. I recognize some of the scavengers poised for attack with microphones and cameras. These are not mere locals. They represent tabloids and major news syndicates– the U. S. of A.– Hollywood. I turn a desperate eye to Allison, and she shakes her head.

     

    “Not me,” she frowns. “Try one of them.” She bobs her knot of hair toward the demonstrators.

     

    Greta hugs herself inside a sweater, as if it’s sleeting down her collar. Her eyes are downcast, but her upper lip curls contemptuously in my direction. Carl, his wild hair leaping like a black flame, stands beside his nanny, unprotected and waiting. His albino monkey dangles from his hand. I catch my son’s eye and pat my thigh, and he trots over, smiling up at me. His tongue pokes through the gap where he’s lost a front tooth. His eyes flutter eagerly. I place my hand on his head and collect him against my hip. The crowd surges like an ocean at our backs. “KONG-OH, KONG-OH, KONG-OH!” The media fiends roil before us like a nest of hornets.

     

    “Hide that thing,” Allison hisses. I think for a second she means Carl. Then I realize her popping eyes have locked upon the white monkey doll. She’s not wild about my son, though she’s never said so. She knows he thinks she’s “thcary.” His lisp only surfaces in critical moments of emotional certainty.

     

    The jungle is grim in black and white, depthless like a bas-relief. My father lurches desperately through, clutching his rifle. He’s lost his helmet and backpack. Dad’s in full retreat. He’s discovered that there’s only a single enemy, whose pursuing tread shakes my vision.

     

    Papa Kong.

     

    There’s music now, a full orchestra, staccato strings hurrying Dad along. He hesitates, casting a glance over his shoulder, and the orchestra pauses. Another thunderous step! My father resumes his retreat to fresh music, ducking under a creeper, sweeping a fern from his path with the rifle he totes like a relay baton. Sometimes victory is survival and courage is the safety of a dream. And both my father and the beast have a golden girl on their minds.

     

    Until this project my films have created terror in the civilized landscapes of cities and suburbs. Deranged killers of my creation infiltrated our children’s schools, summer camps, and malls. But it’s in the jungle that my daddy runs from the father of my newest film’s star.

     

    The hotel looms above us like the Titanic’s iceberg. I imagine that its submerged bulk has torn a hole in our hull, and we’re sinking. Already we’re listing badly. I’m losing my balance. The protesters surround our little group, from which Greta has defected, on three sides. The nanny now stands among the reporters, who squirm about her like nursing puppies.

     

    Something’s happening here–a convulsive pulse in my leg. Carl’s got an arm locked around my thigh like a tourniquet. He’s sobbing and reaching toward Allison, who snarls at him and brandishes her teeth. She’s crushing the monkey doll her flat chest, trying to cover it up with her thin arms.

     

    “Damn, Allison,” I sigh through a tense grin. The last thing I need is a scene among the Islanders. I sift through their faces, hoping for a sign of mercy “Come on, give the kid his doll.” The protesters have stopped their chant and stand silently, watching, as do the reporters, who no longer buzz about Greta.

     

    “Son of Kong, how do you do?”

     

    I jerk my head around so fast nerves and muscles pop. It’s the woman in the orange and gold dress. But she’s not talking to me. She’s bent over my son. Her black hair sweeps over his shoulders like a magician’s cape, and he disappears for a second. The cape lifts, and she’s shaking his hand, and he’s staring at her wide-eyed. Still stooping to my son and clasping his hand, she glances up, past me, and her black eyes threaten Allison like hot pistol barrels. My assistant clutches the white doll with anemic ferocity.

     

    “Wicked thing,” the Island woman says. “Give the boy back his monkey!” If such a thing is possible, she’s got a voice like an angry doe–Bambi’s mother on the subject of “man.” My hands ache to slide down the curves of her dress–to test her reality.

     

    Allison hesitates a second, shrugs, and tosses me the doll, which I catch and give to my son as my assistant stalks to the knot of reporters. Carl lifts it to his damp cheek and rests his head upon it.

     

    “Poor, poor motherless thing.” The Island woman rises from my boy’s side, and her eyelids lift, her eyes blooming like black satin flowers. Does she mean the monkey or my son?

     

    “You screwin’ up big time,” a sharp voice beside me bleats. It’s the squat Fu Manchued Islander with the black glasses and whiplike braid. His biceps swell like hams out of the short sleeves of his flowered shirt. “Boss,” he says, “we didn’t need the stinking Bounty . We didn’t need your god-damned Melville, ‘the man who lived with the cannibals.’” His buffalo gut bounces with agitation. “Gauguin, what’s he do for us? Steal our soul. Hundred years later, somebody else makes a million bucks. Not us. We got nothing but paradise. ‘Dites-moi pourquoi,’ boss. Why you always running here? Why don’t you go bother some Eskimos?” His massive arms cross emphatically over his belly and his mustache drags his lips into a frown. If I could penetrate his dark glasses and make eye contact, I might stop shaking.

     

    Carl is giggling. The woman who saved his monkey has lifted it to her face and clucks to it, kissing its eyes. I’m composing poems to her in my mind, and I haven’t written a poem since high school.

     

    Helmeted police in jodhpurs and high black boots have arrived. They’re talking to Allison and the reporters. She’s shaking her head, pointing and shrugging her shoulders as if she trying to reconstruct a traffic accident.

     

    My hand’s on my forehead. Beneath it strange notions flop like a netfull of frantic fish. I wear neither a uniform nor flowered shirt, I remind myself. I am a professional– a businessman and an artist in a white suit.

     

    “Listen, Mr.–” I address the bulky Islander.

     

    “Pah-pui,” he challenges.

     

    “Pah-pooey. Have you thought over the importance of The Son of Kong to the island? Economically?” I nod toward my son. My boy cradles his monkey, rocking it back and forth with a placid smile. A strange feeling rises in my chest like a giant champagne bubble, floats into my head and pops, wetting the inside of my skull, misting my eyes. “Pah-pui,” I sniff–this time the name sounds right–“Why, just those monkey dolls alone. It’ll cost more to make them here, but can you imagine? Genuine Kiko dolls made right on the island of his birth! Nobody in the world will mention Son of Kong without thinking of Tallulo Lillo.”

     

    “Screw the monkey,” Pah-pui grunts like a Buddha burping. “You need Island folk. We come with the island. That’s the deal. We want to be in the movie!” The faces around us smear together like a fading blood stain.

     

    I shake my head. Allison gestures among police and reporters at the edge of my vision, but I’m separated from them. The woman in the orange and gold dress doesn’t leave my son. Still cradling his monkey, he leans against her, and her hands rest on his shoulders, her pink nails like the tiny petals of a flower. My heart is melting as I listen to myself.

     

    “I can’t help it. It’s an artistic thing. I want to be faithful to the original Son. What can I tell you? The natives on Kong’s Island have to be black. You seem to be wonderful people, you Islanders. I’m sure you are, but it hurts me to say you just don’t look right.”

     

    Pah-pui’s snorting like a bull. If my brain weren’t spinning, I’d probably be afraid for my life. “We don’t look right?” I imagine his eyes sizzling like volcanic craters behind his dark glasses. “You selling us a white god-damned monkey, and we don’t look right?” A froth of saliva collects at the corners of his mouth.

     

    “Motherless white monkey,” croons the woman with my son in her mama Bambi voice. She’s lost one hand in Carl’s wild hair and her other has slid down his chest and pets Kiko. Her eyes lift to mine, and I feel the roots of their blossoms taking hold in my soul.

     

    Suddenly I’m staggered by a burst of brightness. The Pacific sun has slid from behind the glacial hotel and stuns me with light. But by some trick of staging, only I’m touched. The mass of Islanders, the woman with my son, Pah-pui, Allison, the police and reporters, darken into silhouettes.

     

    I squint into the shadows from my blazing circle. My hand forms a useless salute in my effort to shield my eyes. From somewhere distant I hear the drums that throbbed like a pulse as I neared the island just this very dawn: “BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA- BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM.”

     

    “God-thilla,” a small voice declares. It’s the child clutching the monkey. “God-thilla ate the Japaneeth.”

     

    And in my mind’s eye, as broad as the silver screen, I see them–who could look more abject, more terrified, their taffy faces pulled into expressions of horror, eyes popped out of their heads, suspended like black marbles, staring ever upward, one man’s lifted arm pointing a finger as if to christen some horrifying compass point in a new world of unimaginable misery and defeat.

     

    “Godzilla!” the figure on the screen shouts, and with that pronouncement departs forever the sheltered innocence of the human heart.

     

    “God-thilla,” my son repeats, and he is himself illuminated like an angel by the moving sun. Carl’s hand rises to his cheek with wonder and humility.

     

    I sigh. And nod. Carl is right. Nothing could be clearer. Black faces, yellow faces, brown faces, white faces, male and female faces, mentally and physically challenged faces–all can quiver and quake in empathetic harmony at the mighty step of Kong. Only the faceless know no fear.

     

    My Son of Kong will feature native Tallulo Lillons–the gems of the Halloween Islands. Kiko will have a mother. My conception of the film turns in my head like a huge glob of primordial clay on a potter’s wheel as broad as heaven, and the possibilities leave me dizzy and breathless. Maybe my movie won’t have a villain. Maybe Kong’s Island won’t collapse into the sea.

     

    The sun shifts. I’m bathed in the fluid shade of a giant, flapping flag, but Carl and his monkey shine like the brightest stars in the universe.

     

    The final scene of The Son of Kong, the original, runs through my mind for the thousandth time, but, even though it’s in black and white, the picture is so clear it’s a whole new experience.

     

    The promoter who exploited King Kong to death has returned to the monster’s island. He discovers, pities, and befriends the baby giant ape his selfish acts had orphaned. In a flimsy act of atonement, he bandages a finger the beast wounds protecting him.

     

    Then a cataclysmic earthquake ensues, and Kong’s Island, untouched by geologic and evolutionary change for millions of years, suddenly melts into the sea like wet clay. All the terrors of the jungle are washed away. Baby Kong, his foot trapped in a fissure, catches up the promoter, who I see now is my father, or someone very like him, and hoists him high overhead. The raging sea rises. The water reaches Baby Kong’s chest. Passes his chin. Soon the bandaged hand is all that’s left of little Kong. It holds my wriggling and kicking father out of the sea, finally releasing him when the rescuing rowboat, containing the kindly captain and, yes, another golden girl, crawls beneath. This solitary hand stays open in a sort of farewell wave. The dying fingers spread, and the bandage comes loose, dragged down like a waterlogged flag as the sea swallows the noble baby.

     

    A smooth trunk curves under my hand as I smile up into the spreading palm leaves. Clinging beneath them a hundred feet over my head are two black coconuts. Towards these shimmies a boy in a fawn-colored monkey suit. It is Halloween on the Halloween Islands, and why not a home-made Kiko costume for my son? What mistaken faith had insisted that the baby ape be white?

     

    Three months into production on Tallulo Lillo, and my boy climbs like a native. He is a great favorite among the Islanders. My own skill at climbing has come more slowly, but I’ve shed much of my discomfort with heights.

     

    “Up you go, Papa Kong,” calls Pah-pui. He stands beside a trailer, his bare belly hanging like globe over a grass skirt. Feathers are banded about his head, wrist, and ankles. A necklace of shark teeth and shells lies upon his chest. A guileless wisdom rests in his dark, unshaded eyes. Make up hides the dragon tattoo on his shoulder. He plays an island chief in the movie. Right now he holds a styrofoam cup of coffee.

     

    During today’s shooting Pah-pui and his tribe of nearly naked Islanders will run in terror from a void–the vacant space that computer imaging will replace with the righteously indignant figure of Kiko’s giant mother. She will crush a few huts but harm nothing living in her fretful search for her son.

     

    My boy chirps happily above, and my legs and arms tighten around the tree. I rise toward him in confident, incremental rhythm. This morning I feel weightless. The studio is delighted with my revised approach to the project. Our family film is slated for release in December of next year. Every child in the world will own a Kiko doll. And a Mama Kong. Though sold separately, they can be velcroed together.

     

    From below, a sudden sound, the cheer of a crowd, swells upward. I am only yards from my Carl. I can almost touch his furry leg. The cheer rises like a warm cloud, a pillow that would catch me if I slipped. I gape downward. The jungle spreads beneath me like the thick green coat of some measureless creature, its limits defined only by the ink blue of the Pacific and the lighter blue of the sky.

     

    It’s the costumed tribe of Islanders who cheer me, Pah-pui’s plumed figure standing out like a rooster. From this height the air is thickly perfumed by the flora, and I submit to a vertiginous euphoria. The cameras, the booms, the extra lights, the platforms and scaffolding, the trucks and carts and trailers flown in from the States, the catering tent–all the artificial evidence of our production, toylike to begin with from this height–dissolve into the jungle. What I see from my palm tree as I rest for a moment upon my cushion of cheers and fragrance are the thatched roofs Mama Kong will appear to trample. I wave to my people and the chorus lifts, and the air grows sweeter. And I’m laughing, just like my boy.

     

    I spy Blanche Malamala, the Island woman who rescued Kiko for my son. Emerging from the crowd beside Pah-pui, she stands golden in the near nudity of her brief native costume. I have asked the computer imaging people to endow Mama Kong with the naturally imperious grace of Blanche’s movements. I have seen the essence of her beauty extracted to a fluid 3-D outline on a computer monitor, seen her metamorphosed into the figure of the mother ape, and I have come to adore the creature.

     

    Without fear I hang above the island, waving, Carl a pleasant thought above my head, and I’m not sure I can ever leave.

     

    And do I love, do I have enough love for it all, I wonder.

     

  • Radio Free Alice

     

    Paul Andrew Smith

    Cary, Illinois
    fedmunds@aol.com

     

     

    Let the priest in surplice white,
    that defunctive music can,
    be the death-divining swan,
    lest the requiem lack his right.

    –William Shakespeare

     
    Radio Free Alice wheels in, nurse in tow, logs-in early– 11:35 pm–I’m on till midnight.

     

    Relief, I confess.

     

    AITOR, types Radio Free Alice, MY FRIEND, GIVE ME SOME GOOD NEWS.

     

    I shrug. You’re early. Nothing to do?

     

    Radio Free Alice shrugs as well as can be expected. The chair shrugs. The entire unit, jockey and machine and nurse, move together. A single, sanitary unit.

     

    What time did you log? I ask then.

     

    MIDNIGHT. I LEFT A SPACE FOR YOU TO LOG-OUT

     

    Did you check the plates on your way in?

     

    DID YOU?

     

    I don’t answer.

     

    I WROTE DOWN THE SAME NUMBERS YOU HAD.

     

    I nod, confess again: I put in what Cam had for her show. I don’t reckon anybody’s actually checked the plates or filaments for years.

     

    DAYS ANYWAY, says Radio Free Alice. THE FCC EVER COMES IN HERE, THEY’LL MARVEL AT OUR CONSISTENCY.

     

    Possible we haven’t even been transmitting.

     

    POSSIBLE, agrees Radio Free Alice without seeming to care one way or the other. The whoosh of the vacuum pumps is marvelously quiet and magical; some frothy liquid slips through a clear tube winding across Radio Free Alic e’s shoulder and collarbone.

     

    The wheelchair, enameled white with chrome, a Cadillac really, glows under the red on-air light. A silver shaker and gunmetal Zippo glint blisteringly from the right armrest. The cursor blinks green on the empty screen, waiting for the driver’s nex t command. Radio Free Alice types slowly, moving only the middle finger on the left hand, the nurse in bleached whites shifts from one foot to the other, the chair pauses tense, ready to vocalize the ponderings of this degenerating physicist cum disk jock ey.

     

    At eleven forty-five I give station ID and read a Public Service Announcement about the early detection of skin cancer. I throw on a Scorpions’ tune and talk into the boom-mike: You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering; one last night, Liz my love, to take your beau out, to the warm steamy streets where the music is smoldering.

     

    I time it just right and, as soon as I stop speaking, The Zoo pounds through the monitors. Radio Free Alice rocks in quiet laughter, the chair rocks. SICK BOY. STILL, YOU GOT PAST ORIGINAL SIN.

     

    And redemption, I say, I have arrived.

     

    WE HAVE ARRIVED, types Radio Free Alice, WE’RE ALL LIFERS HERE. Yes, the nurse, the chair, the corpus delicti. TIME FOR YOU TO LEAVE. THE AIRWAVES ARE NO PLACE FOR SUCH SUBVERSION. Radio Free Alice attempts a smile.

     

    Subversion. Radio Free Alice is subversion, the hero we all want to turn to: the one who proclaims: if you don’t like the way I do it, don’t come to the show.

     

    SOMEONE’S TRYING TO CALL, says Radio Free Alice indicating the flashing light on the studio phone.

     

    I know. It goes all night, but I never answer it.

     

    POLITICS? queries the throned.

     

    Not politics, I say, I just–you know.

     

    PHYSICS. A flat statement.

     

    I guess.

     

    Radio Free Alice nods. POLITICS.

     

    The phone keeps flashing.

     

    DO YOU KNOW WHO IT IS? asks Radio Free Alice.

     

    I shake my head. This phone thing bothers Radio Free Alice. I’d never have guessed.

     

    Answer it if you want, I say.

     

    IT ISN’T FOR ME, NOBODY KNOWS I’M HERE YET.

     

    Fuckit then.

     

    Radio Free Alice types quickly, but the machine speaks these three words with great pause: MIGHT BE ALICE.

     

    I shake my head.

     

    I SEE HER AROUND THOUGH.

     

    Me too, I say.

     

    The nurse lights a cigarette, leaves a long scorch mark on the NO SMOKING sign with an Ohio Bluetip–the Zippo must be for show–and puts it in the Rabbi’s mouth. Radio Free Alice offers me a cigarette. I decline. A DRINK THEN? The nurse unscrews the cap from the silver shaker, drops in two straws. Radio Free Alice takes a deep sip off one.

     

    Whatcha got there?

     

    MARTINIS.

     

    How do you get the olive out?

     

    The nurse laughs, the chair does not. Not even a whir.

     

    A LITTLE TREAT I CALL AN YVES KLEIN: STAINS YOUR KIDNEYS, MAKE YOU PISS BLUE FOR ABOUT A WEEK. Pause. IT BREAKS, YOU KNOW, THE MONOTONY–

     

    I’ll pass.

     

    GO NOW, types Radio Free Alice, I‘LL RE-SHELVE THE RECORDS FOR YOU.

     

    I’m half-out the door when Radio Free Alice says to wait. THERE WAS SOMETHING I WANTED TO TELL YOU, SOMETHING IN THE NEWS–WELL, SHIT, IT’S GONE NOW. SEE YOU.

     

    * * *
    As a child, I had a favorite sound. My favorite sound: the scraping of a car windshield. Heavy weather–resentment and care expressed themselves in the detachment of frost, the coldness of plastic, the mute, multi-fingered safety of woolen mittens . Not dexterity, but inarticulate strength–a muscled back pushing the ice-scraper over glass and painfully unalike crystals.

     

    * * *
     

    Ahlan wa sahlan, the bird of loudest lay, says Giacomo Josu, as I walk into The Cinder at 11:55. He points one dark finger at me and one at the sky. You’re on the air, but I’m looking at your ugly face.

     

    He thinks that if he weren’t ugly, says Alice, He’d be on t.v.

     

    It’s true, it’s true. I’m certain of it.

     

    A small radio sits on the table between Josu, Cam and Alice. My voice introduces the last song of my every evening: She’s a Blue Light.

     

    What took you so long, Cam asks–I sit and order a coffee, You signing new boots and panties in the parking lot again?

     

    Sex and drugs and rock and roll, I say, making the peace sign, the figs, Churchill’s V for Victory.

     

    The song ends, and my voice closes the show: this has been another edition of blue music for blue balls–

     

    You’ve got no taste at all, Alice speaks.

     

    Tell me again, I say to Cam, do you say panty or panny?

     

    Neither, she explains, but I call bras brawls.

     

    Sounds like you’re looking for a fight, I say.

     

    And Giacomo asks: So, could a woman have a set of brass brawls?

     

    I’ll give you a panny for your thoughts, Cam looks at me.

     

    Ooh, says Josu, I’ve never played strip-coffee before.

     

    I’m very self-aware now, so I ask: Do I really only have one thing on my mind at all times?

     

    Alice nods. Hotbodies, she says.

     

    Cam comes to my defense: You did skip over the dirty words when you read the Penthouse letters. Then she adds: I filled them in for you.

     

    Radio Free Alice locks on, live and vibrating, giving the time, station ID and a PSA about helping senior citizens get into stamp collecting.

     

    Why listen at all? I ask.

     

    There’s nothing else on any of the stations, says Alice as if I should know.

     

    Get sick of classic rock? I ask.

     

    The war, says Josu, we got sick of the war.

     

    * * *
     

    My second favorite sound I had built myself when I was still too young and frail to scrape the car window. It wasn’t baba or mama or dada or doodoo–though all fine words in themselves–but the voice of Ray Nordstrand on WFMT. I had constructed it, th e voice, with a crystal radio–a kit that arrived among the subscription of other bi-weekly science vignettes intended to turn me into a prodigy. It might have worked if only I’d been able to decipher the instructions to most of the projects: a pendulum, a slide rule, a pedometer. Only the crystal radio made sense to me in both construction and function.

     

    Far from becoming a genius, I built a tent on my bed, and imagined myself dug in, waiting for reinforcements, listening to the radio till I fell asleep.

     

    Actually, I’d listened to and recognized Nordstrand’s voice long before I knew the difference between Foucault’s pendulum and a crystal radio, but the completion of that project and the autonomy it gave me from The Family Radio, seemed

     

    * * *
     

    HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, says Radio Free Alice, THIS IS RADIO FREE ALICE, THE SHOW OF CHOICE IN BUDAPEST, BERLIN AND PRAGUE. AND TONIGHT ESPECIALLY IN BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN BAGHDAD. HERE AT RADIO FR EE ALICE EVERY DAY IS A HOLIDAY. UP HERE IN THE STATION WITH ME TONIGHT IS A LADY WITH A LITTLE PEACE OFFERING: A BIT OF STRANGE FRUIT.

     

    Her voice admits the air gently and condenses, falls to the ground like mist, and I see them swinging in the trees, picked at by the treble-dated crow whose sable gender mak’st with the breath he giv’st and tak’st, teasing gravity like a r ipe

     

    * * *
     

    It is 12:20 in Chicago a Wednesday three weeks after Christmas when Alice left me, yes it is 1991 and I sit and drink coffee. Because I am tired and haven’t eaten dinner, because I always want other people to feed me, I drink only coffee.

     

    * * *
     

    It is 12:20 in Chicago. Wednesday. 17 January 1991. We have begun bombing the cradle of humanity, the origin of art, the seat of song and religion. Somebody at the next table says sand-nigger, and Giacomo Josu, our sole Arabian tree, tenses his Persian m antle of sarcomere and sweat, and I know immediately and briefly, how Radio Free Alice’s mind works: Beauty, truth and rarity, grace in all simplicity, here enclosed in cinders lie.

     

    * * *
     

    TODAY, says Radio Free Alice, THE ROBOTS GO TO WAR IN OUR PLACE. Leaving no posterity IF IT WAS THE FALL OF AN APPLE THAT OCCASIONED NEWTON’S AWARENESS OF GRAVITY AS H E SAT AGAINST A POPULAR TREE, THEN IT WAS TURING’S APPLE THAT FELL.

     

    * * *
     

    My favorite sound this night could be the Feyn’d idiocy of the Village Crier

     

    My favorite sound tonight might be the drop of a ripe apple into a dewy field, the sound of that cyanic fruit rolling into the lap of a crumpling lab coat

     

    My favorite sound tonight: formica and nickel.

     

    It will remind me of the stirring of a dying fire or the echoing crunch of re-frozen snow–that feeling that someone is walking behind and in step with you–and it won’t take a genius to understand, but I will not understand. I do not understand, but want to take the flat and round metallic tasting onto the tip of my tongue and press it between these fingerprint lips.

     

    * * *
     

    AITOR, LISTEN: YOU KNOW THAT YOU DON’T REALLY FALL IN LOVE UNLESS YOU’RE SEVENTEEN.

     

    Is that on the radio? Nobody else at the table seems to hear it.

     

    * * *
     

    Is ignorance bliss, Josu’s sing-song voice made his abuse tolerable, or is it an envious sneaping frost that bites the first-born infants of the spring? We started bombing around five or so.

     

    I’ve been inside all day, I say.

     

    A radio station, contests Josu.

     

    You’re supposed to flip to the news every once in a while, berates Alice, if only to get the sports’ scores. It’s frigging procedure.

     

    Forget it, Cam assures me, then to Alice: When’s the last time you actually logged-in legally, went to the transmitter, checked the plates and filaments against the FCC regs?

     

    Josu stands, puts on his jacket.

     

    Alice stands. Which direction are you heading?

     

    Josu sort of points, open handed, an indication that the night is–mada yoi no kuchi da zo–what–young? That he is, perhaps, only certain about standing and putting on his jacket. I can’t tell. Alice, however, can: Great, she says, I’m headi ng that way too.

     

    Josu nods and looks at me as if–and I don’t–but I act like I understand. He seems relieved somehow. Quieres la radio, pendejo? he smiles.

     

    * * *
     

    When we were living in Spain, Josu and I made up stories to tell each other and keep expanding our creative vocabularies. It was too easy to fall into a rut of mimicry when ordering food or asking for directions. Josu told this story about a man who fe ll in love with a voice on the radio and let it control his life until, one day, he turned into a radio. Quieres la radio, pendejo, is a line from this story.

     

    * * *
     

    Radio Free Alice pops an olive from a jar by the door, sips blue martini, smokes blue smoke. A sign above the control console says: ON AIR. A red light flashes, its photons always carrying 3.3 * 10-12 erg of energy. Light waves are simple r than water waves because they travel at one speed (c, or 3 * 1010 cm/s), whereas, in water, waves of a long wavelength travel faster than waves of a short wavelength. The radio wave is an electromagnetic wave propagated through the atmosphere with the speed of light and having a wavelength of something from .5 cm to 30,000 m., depending on what station you listen to.

     

    * * *
     

    Hotbodies, Alice had said.

     

    It’s true, I think again. The only thing on my mind: fleeing in eternal flame

     

    * * *
     

    THE CONCEPT OF SCIENTIFIC DETERMINISM HAD TO BE ABANDONED WHEN LORD RAYLEIGH AND SIR JAMES JEANS SUGGESTED THAT A HOT BODY MUST RADIATE ENERGY AT AN INFINITE RATE. THAT IS, A HOT BODY SHOULD RADIATE THE SAME AMOUNT OF ENERGY IN WAVE S AT FREQUENCIES BETWEEN ONE AND TWO MILLION MILLION WAVES PER SECOND AS IN THOSE WITH FREQUENCIES FROM TWO TO THREE MILLION MILLION WAVES PER SECOND. IF THE NUMBER OF WAVES PER SECOND IS UNLIMITED, THEN THE TOTAL ENERGY OUTPUT IS INFINITE. WHICH IS INS ANE.

     

    Radio Free Alice watches the light filter through the smoke and wonders: waves or particles?

     

    IN 1900, MAX PLANCK SAID THAT LIGHT COULD ONLY BE EMITTED IN PACKETS CALLED QUANTA. EACH QUANTUM HAD AN AMOUNT OF ENERGY THAT INCREASED WITH THE FREQUENCY OF THE WAVES. AT A HIGH ENOUGH FREQUENCY, THEN, THE EMISSION OF A SI NGLE QUANTUM REQUIRES MORE ENERGY THAN IS AVAILABLE–THE RADIATION AT HIGH FREQUENCIES IS REMARKABLY REDUCED MAKING THE RATE OF ENERGY LOSS FINITE.

     

    * * *
     

    I nod to Josu. I expect him to put his sandal on his head.

     

    He walks out with Alice, leaving the radio.

     

    You poor guy, says Cam in mock-pity. She stretches one leg out from under the table: good lord, she’s wearing red velvet pants. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

     

    Alice is, I throw up my hands, I don’t know what to tell you.

     

    Maybe you should be drinking something stronger than coffee, she says.

     

    I never noticed it before, Cam speaks after a silence above the background music, how you look, I mean.

     

    Ugly? I ask.

     

    Just ugly enough. Strange, she explains, not good enough to be sinister. Bitter?

     

    My my. Maybe we should talk about your face instead, I tell her.

     

    She entirely agrees: We should.

     

    It’s a nice face, I begin.

     

    I know what it is, she declares, it’s unfinished. That’s why I can’t figure it out–your face isn’t finished yet.

     

    I thought we were talking about your face, I say.

     

    We are. It’s different than mine–non-elastic.

     

    I always wanted to be granite-jawed.

     

    You aren’t.

     

    What am I?

     

    Good looking enough to be on the radio.

     

    It occurs to me now, my new favorite sound, as she slides a subway token across the table to me.

     

    I don’t take the subway to get home, I tell her.

     

    I do, she says.

     

    Just ugly enough, then.

     

    She nods and says this: If only your fantasy life were as good as what’s happening to you right now, you could stay home more often.

     

    And I wish I had said that.

     

    What are you trying to say? I wanted to ask.

     

    I wanted her to respond: I’m saying it.

     

    If Gertrude Stein was a child of the Civil War then I, at twenty-three, am a child of Desert Storm.

     

    And I know finally how people remember where they were during a horrible event.

     

    I lean across the table and kiss her with my unfinished lips. She pulls away.

     

    Don’t, she says. I’m not sure yet what I want from you.

     

    It occurs to me now, all the stuff I’ll never understand: If only I’d built the pendulum.

     

    How’s that? I ask.

     

    She continues: Let’s just take this slow and see what happens.

     

    I borrow two dollars from Cam and pay for our coffee, then I take the subway with Cam and her tokens.

     

    * * *
     

    Imagine this story in the way we learn war–some true literary sense of time, event causal, event effect, outcome: then it might be legitimate to expect that I spent the night on Cam’s couch; however, it’s important to remember the rules of Radio Free Alice. On the air: no spit-takes, no double-takes, this phoenix explodes and births–il y a là cendre–distilled from physical convention–il y a le centre.

     

    When we lived in Spain, Josu and I would swim out on red flag days when even the lifeguards went home. We liked the constancy of the waves and riptides working against us.

     

    When we lost sight of each other, we’d measure the distance by shouting, listening impossibly for the Doppler effect.

     

    * * *
     

    In another week I will be at Cam’s apartment again. Expecting to love as love in twain has the essence but in one; two distincts, division none.

     

    We will order a pizza pie and, when the boy rings the bell, Cam will hand me a twenty. I will meet pizza boy in the lobby and he will say: I can’t change this. Give it to me and I’ll come back with your money in fifteen minutes.

     

    Of course, I will say, tearing the bill in half, handing him half.

     

    His face will fall. Nobody will take this, he’ll say.

     

    I’ll agree. You’ll get the other half when I get my change.

     

    Cam and I will not make love. We will speak again only twice more after that evening.

     

    * * *
     

    Radio Free Alice thrashes red flag air waves. Scratches back of hands, thinks: I am going blind, everything seems so far away. Radio Free Alice squints into the white desk-lamp and the computer screen becomes unreadable for about thirty seconds. The n type type type

     

    THE FREQUENCY OF THE WAVES RECEIVED ARE THE SAME AS THEIR FREQUENCY WHEN EMITTED. UNLESS THE LIGHT SOURCE MOVES. IF IT MOVES CLOSER, THE SPECTRA SHIFT TOWARD THE BLUE END, FURTHER AWAY, RED-SHIFTED.

     

    * * *
     

    Cam turns the television on and we watch the war. My family couldn’t afford a TV during Viet Nam, so this is my first time–save for news clips. She turns the sound down and flips on Radio Free Alice: it’s incredibly sexy, I’m embarrassed to say, th is do-it-ourselves extended rock video.

     

    We do not mate head-on, Cam and I, but choose instead to live hand to mouth–like eating dates and pomegranates and saffron. We press lips. An attentive audience, she responds to my voice unspoken as if that canal really were an ear pricking up at m y dense vibrations from beyond Radio Free Alice and the war. Aural sex.

     

    * * *
     

    WE MEASURED THE SILENCE, types Radio Free Alice, the background a click click click, IN MOTHER OF PEARL, SLIPPING SOFT AND FAT FROM THE SHELL AND DOWN THE HATCH WITH HORSERADISH, BEER, HANK JR. ON THE JUKE BOX–TEN TUNES FOR A DOLLAR–AND THE SEXUAL DYNAMICS WAFTED OVER THE OLD URINE SMELL OF A DISCOMFORTING QUESTION, KEPT ME FROM ASKING IT, KEPT ME FROM VOCALIZING THIS LAST SONG ABOUT LOVE AND OYSTERS. WE ALL NOTICED ABOUT THE SAME TIME, ALL OUR STA RING AND SMACKING AND SUCKING, THAT SHE HAD PULLED OFF HER SOCK. I SHOULD HAVE CLOSED MY EYES AND THOUGH OF CHRISTMAS OR BASEBALL OR THE ENVELOPE OF AN F-16 WITH THE STAMP AFFIXED UPSIDE-DOWN. WE ALL THOUGH WE UNDERSTOOD UNTIL SHE, TURNING AWAY, PLACED HER LAST WORDS ON A CRACKER: THEY’RE ONLY OYSTERS.

     

    THEY’RE ONLY OYSTERS, continues Radio Free Alice, SOMETIMES APHRODISIACS AREN’T, BUT I’M HERE FOR YOU. I’M ONLY ONE MACHINE, BUT I’LL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANT IN A SOUNDTRACK INCLUDING AN EXCUSE.

     

    * * *
     

    I could almost blame you, Cam explains later, making it sound so simple about sex and friends as if it were just the right song was all you needed. Your voice might be the only handsome thing about you.

     

    I rub Cam’s shoulder blades. You’d have to know Alice, I tell her. I did this for Alice.

     

    I did this for Alice, Cam says.

     

    Not my Alice.

     

    No, another Alice.

     

    * * *
     

    The station is clean. Neither a cathedral nor a confessional, it displaces myth. It is where Radio Free Alice plays records and reads poetry and types observation and other people listen or do not: a personal ten thousand watt stereo.

     

    Radio Free Alice defies context.

     

    The problem is: Radio Free Alice defines context where context is a dangerous issue. Clearly, there is more at stake than whether to play Love On The Air or On The Air or In The Air Tonight. And Radio Free Alice plays none of these. The point is: the information is immediate and constant and people always believe what they hear. That is, they believe that what they hear is being broadcast at that time.

     

    * * *
     

    Alice, I tell Cam, never made an issue of truths. You know? I mean, facts were matters of–I don’t know–matters of discipline.

     

    Yes? Yes, I think I know: if you stay with something long enough–

     

    –that’s right, I say, it solves itself.

     

    * * *
     

    The phone is patched directly through the chair–the hotline, the redline, the quanta, code blue–Radio Free Alice always answers, never takes requests.

     

    * * *
     

    I trace the cut of Cam’s arms and back: bicep, tricep, traps, lats. Do you lift weights? I ask.

     

    Some. I swim mostly and play a little handball. We should play sometime.

     

    We are.

     

    You know what I mean.

     

    I’m not much at sports. I ran in Pamplona: white shirts and slacks, red berets and sashes, like little targets darting across immovable objects…or were they irresistible forces, the angry bulls? The one casualty when I was there: an American soldier.

     

    She turns over, I drum my fingertips along her collar bones.

     

    These are my favorite part, she says, do you know what they’re called.

     

    Leaping virginals, I tell her.

     

    What? No, dopey, the clavicle.

     

    I know, I say, but I always think of music: the clavicembalo. The parts that hit the strings in a harpsichord are called leaping virginals.

     

    No they aren’t.

     

    Nevermind then, I defer.

     

    She pulls me toward her. Let’s make love again, darling.

     

    And with Radio Free Alice crescendo, war-blue screen washing over us, Cam’s teeth sink in my neck, humming to go slow, honey, go slow.

     

    * * *
     

    FREQUENCY SWING IS NOT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MAXIMUM AND THE MINIMUM VALUES OF INSTANTANEOUS FREQUENCY IN A SIGNAL, BUT A DANCE. DOWN ON YOUR HEELS, UP ON YOUR TOES, STAY AFTER SCHOOL, LEARN HOW IT GOES

     

    The chair, the nurse, the turntables, the phone, all do the Charleston: the Varsity Rag, the Chastity Drag.

     

    * * *
     

    Cam still has on her white bobby socks. I couldn’t get her to wear the oxfords to bed and it’s just as well now, since she’s kicking to get the socks off. It’s that schoolgirl look for the physicist who does his best work in strip clubs:

     

    “Don’t you want something left to the imagination?”

     

    “Good Christ, what do you think pubic hair is for?”

     

    * * *
     

    FREQUENCY MODULATION, whispers Radio Free Alice, ISN’T HOW OFTEN YOU GET LAID. IT’S A CONTROL YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE, MAKES YOUR EYES BIGGER THAN YOUR STOMACH.

     

    * * *
     

    Cam asleep, I walk around her apartment quiet and cold. The war flickers silently, Radio Free Alice: white noise; Doppler sirens and Mars lights–red and blue–pull me to the window. Ice crystals have formed along the inside edge and I press my thum bprint into the facets. Shiver. If I listen hard I can hear Cam talking in her sleep.

     

    end

     

  • The Book of Myst in the Late Age of Print

     

    Steven Jones

    Department of English
    Loyola University Chicago
    sjones1@luc.edu

    MYST is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc.

     

    The Myst Age

     

    My point of departure is the fact that the 1993 Broderbund-Cyan CD-ROM game Myst has sold an estimated two million copies to date, making it among the most widely experienced hypernarratives (if not, strictly speaking, hypertexts) in our time.1 Only the Web as a whole has allowed more users to follow more forking paths to unexpected if not indeterminate ends. Even if we grant the phenomenological differences between a literally textual and a graphical environment, theorists of hypertext would do well to pay attention to Myst and what it reveals about the place of the Book at this late moment in the history of print culture. When the stand-alone CD-ROM game is situated in the context of cultural production (in this case, materially, the publishing enterprise), the world-making impulse figured in the very structure of the game, as successive or parallel “ages” or technological regimes, tellingly gives way to messier arrangements in the social nexus–extraneous networks, intertexts, contradictory modes of production, overlapping markets of users, hybrid notions of genre, sparse or tangled, end-less webs of provisional links. Myst and its production makes a text worth reading, in part because of the way it reminds us of what we know but are continually tempted to forget: that no text–much less hypertext–is an island.

     

    Despite its graphical interface and its being marketed as a virtual reality game, Myst is fundamentally a hypertext product. It was developed in the early, quintessentially hypertextual software, HyperCard,2 and one navigates the spaces of the game by clicking through successive cards in a series of stacks; it’s just that the cards contain images rather than verbal lexias. Besides, as others have noted, Myst has deep (sub)cultural roots in command-line games like Adventure and Zork, with their virtual environments the player manipulates by way of raw text.3 ASCII commands–turn left; open trapdoor; pick up torch–are replaced in Myst and its species of game with mouse clicks through a lushly rendered series of images (over 2500 in this case). In effect, such hypermedia games translate hypertext into pictures. Another way to put it is that they amount to nonverbal renderings of what Michael Joyce once articulated as the ideal hypertext experience, in which “movement” takes place as a series of “yields” to the touch of the hand of the user. 4 In this case, the user’s hand holds a mouse and the onscreen cursor is the familiar tiny-hand icon. Trial and error, experimental wandering, is the only way short of an “external” hint book to learn which objects or paths “yield” to a click. When frustrated or trapped–in the dead-end tunnel of a maze, for example–one is at first tempted (as the documentation warns us) to give in to unproductive “thrashing,” clicking wildly on every possible feature of the scene.

     

    Viewed more positively, this potential for frustration looks like freedom. The lack of directions and paucity of verbal clues in the game are precisely what most reviewers have praised.5 Like stumbling into someone else’s dreamscape or stepping into a quiet surrealist painting, the general opinion runs, this game encourages the suspension of disbelief in one’s freedom to navigate. The paths fork and you must choose, but there is no default motion sweeping you along: you stand still until you click. And since, as the publicity for the product repeatedly makes clear, no one dies in this game–Myst is an antithesis to the maze game Doom–the user tends to relax into the rhythm of aimless wandering, a flâneur without the crowd, strolling, alert and yet dreaming, ready to respond with a forefinger click of focussed attention to any phantasmagoric object or scene. By far the most promising objects, however, those that yield instant transportation to other “ages,” turn out to be the enigmatic, backlit, fetishistic, leatherbound books that are everywhere you turn in this landscape.

     

    From Arthurian narratives to Romantic and Victorian poetry, of course, magic talismanic books have been central devices in the romance-quest tradition, a tradition whose complicated history eventually sweeps up games like Myst. But we can be more precise than this. The books in Myst are clearly self-conscious products of our own Late Age of Print. Their magic is of a historically specific kind, connected to hypertext and what it portends for the aura of the Book and its culture.

     

    In fact, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, the celebrated creators of Myst, explain their design in terms that will sound familiar (to say the least) to any theorist of hypertext.6 In one interview, for example, Rand reports that the “interactive story design” of the game “went along two paths–the linear and the non-linear.”

     

    The linear was the back story and the history, all those elements that followed a very strict time-line. The non-linear was the design of the worlds and was more like architectural work. Like building a world without the time element at all--a snapshot of an age. Now the struggle was to try to merge the two by revealing some parts of the linear story during the exploration of the non-linear world, while maintaining the explorer's feeling that he/she can go anywhere and do anything they please.7

     

    So described, the celebrated freedom of such game-play, the “non-linear structure” of the user’s constrained choices, exists in a tension with the sense of an ending built in under the game’s surface. On one level, the story flows right to a single site: the subterranean cave of “D’ni” below the island’s central Library. On another level (or played another way), it remains on the surface of the island, free to move in a determinate but unpredictable number of directions. But the alternative levels of narrative are not equal. As Rand Miller sees it, “the end had to pull things back together for one of the several different ending scenarios.” The plot stream that leads inevitably to these endings breaks through the surface of game-play intermittently, like the famous underground river of Coleridge’s Xanadu. The user is, however, always aware of something portentous rumbling just below the surface of the island (partly prompted by the suggestive ambient soundtrack). Like Friday’s footprints in the sand, there are teasing clues and signs of an overarching, providential plot, the mystery in the Myst. Most of the game was designed without a cinematic-style linear storyboard, but the designers did use structural maps and what they refer to as “top-down” flow-charts. As they point out, the subterranean flow of the story was intentionally built into the user’s experience of the landscape; if the designers couldn’t completely constrain the paths taken by users, they could, as Rand Miller says, “gently nudge them, using clues and other information, toward the end.”

     

    Although no user ever has to reach it, of course, the “authorized” endgame of Myst is a conventional narrative denouement with a couple of abbreviated forking paths. The bedrock of Myst Island–as well as the other “ages” or parallel universes to which players can travel–turns out to be a highly overdetermined oedipal story, like that of any number of Fantasy-SF novels. According to Rand Miller, the story developed, which is to say: its “details came to light,” not before but in the midst of designing the game. However, because of the huge commodity success of the CD-ROM, the codex book version–like the novelization of a popular movie derived from a screenplay’s back-story–was published after the game, not as a luridly illustrated paperback in a standard SF trilogy, but as a relatively expensive hardcover ($22.95), by Hyperion Books. As a linked-media publishing event, Myst: The Book of Atrus, makes a fascinating text.

     

    Its glossy boards are covered in photo-faux leather, complete with “water stains,” “scratches” and raised and textured “gilt” corners, and its main title is represented as “stamped” or “burned” into the cover, with its subtitle apparently scribbled beneath with a pen, just above a mandala or rose-window emblem. Inside, the pages are artificially yellowed, the illustrations deliberately primitive pencil or charcoal sketches from the protagonist’s notebook. Clearly, this is a book that means to be a Book–and in as many ways as graphically possible. It is also a book about (magic) books, the story of a patriarchal wizard who possesses a Prospero-like techne that allows him to make worlds by writing them (or perhaps only to open portals to existing, parallel worlds–this is kept unresolved). The same magic allows him (and others) to travel to these worlds (or “ages”) via special “linking books.” A functional prequel, The Book of Atrus ends literally where the game of Myst begins, its first-person Epilogue repeating the Prologue voiceover one hears at the beginning of the game–an “ending…not an ending,” written in the protagonist’s journal, explaining that a lost Myst book dropped into a volcanic fissure earlier in the novel is, in fact, the very same small book that plops down into the darkened, starlit space of your computer screen when you open the game.

     

    By returning recursively to a back-story that actually grew out of their HyperCard experiments in architectural/cyberspatial play, the Cyan design team has self-consciously and literally inscribed a book at the “origin” of their “non-linear” hypernarrative. The hardcover prequel that developed from the game itself is thereby figured as the organic “trunk,” the origin from which the multilinear branches of any user’s game-play must grow:

     

    no branching from the ground up until the first branches. Those first branches are the non-linear part--where the user can start defining where the story goes. (Rand Miller)

     

    Like the character Atrus, the authors of Myst claim to have created worlds by writing a book. But in fact the worlds have a kind of historical priority over the book–they were designed before the novel was written. The installation of the novel as the game’s “prequel” may say something about perceptions of the consumer market for CD-ROM hypernarratives. Having become gods of the new media, heroic garage entrepreneurs, the members of the Myst team still feel the need to be traditional authors. Toward that end they hired David Wingrove, an experienced British writer of Fantasy-SF, as co-author of the prequel. But the interesting questions of collaborative authorship, origins, genres, and intertextual influences surrounding Mystdo not end there.

     

    The Jules Verne Age

     

    The creators of Myst have repeatedly held up one book in particular as the primary textual inspiration for the game: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874).8 This classic Victorian SF novel will serve my purposes here, however, not so much as a source, but as a “linking book” through which we can enter the age of nineteenth-century techno-adventure fiction and the literary tradition in general. Verne is an important figure for modern SF and postmodern cyberculture (from the earliest cinema to the fiction of William Gibson), especially as his work exemplifies a gendered subgenre largely constructed in the Victorian period: “boy’s adventure fiction.”9 Within this subgenre, one strain in particular develops out of the “Robinsonnade”–from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to The Swiss Family Robinson to Treasure Island–the story of castaways who must fend for themselves, reconstructing western civilization on a primitive desert island.

     

    As Pierre Macherey argued long ago, the significance of Verne’s work lies in the dislocated relationship between the “theme” of “nature conquered”–demonstrated through the image of the island–and the genre of the fantastic narrative (and what happens to this narrative once Verne sets it in motion).10 In the end, the theme of conquest has been called into question in crucial ways; however, along the way, the various adventures often seem mainly excuses to showcase ingenious gadgetry and complicated machines–which are all constructed out of the raw materials of nature, like precocious solutions to difficult engineering-school puzzles. The episodes seem mere pretexts for technical descriptions; bridges, tunnels, ships, gunpowder, metal alloys, pulleys, elevators, windmills, dams, and machines of every sort are designed, built, and then explained in exhaustive detail. The moral of this part of the story would seem to be the inevitability of progress: “From nothing they must supply themselves with everything,” we are told of the castaways. In answer, a shipwrecked sailor cheerfully remarks: “there is always a way of doing everything” (37, 26). Technological conquest is represented by Verne as the better part of a global colonial enterprise:

     

    we will make a little America of this island! we will build towns, we will establish railways, start telegraphs, and one fine day, when it is quite changed, quite put in order and quite civilized, we will go and offer it to the government of the Union. (81)

     

    But as in Myst, there is also in this adventure novel a nagging mystery to be solved. Verne’s castaways discover traces of a presence on the island, which would qualify the terms of their colonization. Increasingly they find signs of an anonymous, paternal, yet invisible hand, which offers provisions and needed equipment, intervenes at moments of crisis, and–significantly–leaves written, textual clues to guide and encourage the colonists. At one crucial moment in the story, the castaways discover barrels of supplies, seemingly washed up on the beach by chance. These include “tools,” “weapons,” “instruments,” “clothes,” “utensils”–and books. The inventory of the books is short, but includes an atlas, dictionaries, and a Bible, as well as three reams of paper and “2 books with blank pages” (186). It is not hard to see these blank books as the tempting tabulae rasa on which Myst was written by the Miller brothers and the Cyan team, books which then become the fetishistic objects that so characterize its graphical interface. But it is the English Bible (inevitably) which becomes the text through which the invisible genius of Verne’s island speaks to the colonists under his secret direction. Upon opening it at random one Sunday evening in a traditional game of prophetic fortune telling, the castaways find a passage marked with a penciled cross: “For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth” (188).

     

    The hidden author who annotates and then plants the inscribed Bible for the colonists to “discover” turns out to be Captain Nemo, a Byronic, oriental (anti)hero. A defeated Indian rebel leader, Nemo is a political actor turned Frankensteinian loner, and his authority complicates the theme of progress and adventure. We know him from the earlier Verne book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as Verne’s internal self-references in this book pointedly remind us. Nemo is the authorial voice and presence behind the novel’s back-story. As his name in reverse indicates, he is the “omen” of meaning revealed in the island’s encyclopedic Book of Nature–not to mention in the sacred Book itself. But he is also an enlightened savant, an inventor of futuristic devices, a kind of techno-wizard and maker of worlds. He has constructed a little self-sufficient world under the sea–his submarine the Nautilus, complete with its Victorian library, electric lighting, and pipe organ–as well as a subaqueous and subterranean cavern in which the colonists finally discover him. This climactic setting obviously inspired the endgame of Myst, in which the user is granted a “face to face” encounter with the creator and genius of Myst Island, Atrus, found writing in a book in his underground cave directly beneath the central Library. There, users finally learn the master narrative behind all the techno-puzzles they have been solving and the floating linking-books they have been following to and from the other linked “ages.”

     

    Like the ending of Verne’s novel, which stands as a kind of contradiction to the progress and conquest themes of the book, this ending of Myst comes as something of an anticlimax. To some users it seems entirely irrelevant to the “real point” of the game: the multilinear, nomadic wandering in the mist-shrouded landscape, which can take different paths with each new round of play, sometimes stretching over the course of months. But the persistence of the typical computer gamer’s yardstick–the estimated number of hours it takes to “solve” or complete the game–in online reviews and discussions reminds us that the spine of the back-story is not exactly beside the point for all users, perhaps even for those who favor a less linear style. Deferring the endgame can become a game strategy in itself, a strategy of more or less conscious resistance. Just as in The Mysterious Island, in Myst there is a basic narrative tension–reminiscent of the Russian Formalists’ famous distinction between fabula and sjuzhet11 between following the multiply-forking paths of the interactive puzzles, and following the linking-books to different worlds and “solving” the linear (if slightly forking) back-story mystery, thereby winning the game. The poet Robert Pinsky describes the urge to explore in Myst and related games in terms of active resistance to “a kind of authorial tyranny:”

     

    the reader-user applies herself to see the text expand. This is the opposite of cant about the "freedom" readers have when dealing with interactive texts; it is the freedom of the detective trying to solve a crime, or the captive trying to escape... (26).

     

    In fact, this is congruent with the tendentious conclusion of Verne’s novel, which carries over into the computer game it inspired, whether or not its designers fully intended it: it is Nemo’s strong-willed agency that makes sense of–or, depending on your point of view, displaces, determines, and thus renders meaningless–the castaways’ collective agency. Their ad hoc interactions with the environment are, we discover, always already part of a master narrative; all things work together toward a coherent end, directed, finally, by the “authorial” intentions of a solipsistic romantic genius, who takes his island down with him in the closing pages. Given that Verne is so often cited as the primary inspiration for Myst, a connection borne put by numerous allusions to, parallels with, and translations from the novel in the game, the Miller brothers’ shift in roles–from game programmers, to hardcover authors, to, it may yet turn out, film auteurs (or at least screenwriters)–follows a certain generic logic. As Robyn Miller explained in a recent online forum, referring to the team’s ongoing work on the sequel game, “Myst II“: “sometimes we wish we didn’t have to deal with the headaches of a non-linear story. It is by far our largest obstacle in creating a story that is as powerful as a movie or a good book.”12

     

    On the morning of the 20th of April began the "metallic period," as the reporter called it in his notes....

    At last, on the 5th of May, the metallic period ended, the smiths returned to the Chimneys, and new work would soon authorize them to take a fresh title.

    —The Mysterious Island (113, 116)

     

    In Myst, the linear narrative of progress toward a determined end is also ambivalently figured in the basic structural division of the “worlds” of the game into “ages,” allowing players to travel synchronically among different technological periods: “The Channelwood Age,” “The Mechanical Age,” and so on. No clear or unequivocal evolutionary story obtains in these time-space worlds, no march of progress from Bronze to Iron to Electrical. In keeping with the Victorian ambiance of Verne’s fiction, crudely wired electricity, steam power, and noisy hydraulics dominate the game, and technological regimes are mixed promiscuously: a streamlined 1920s rocketship (reminiscent of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon as well as the Millers’ earlier children’s game, Cosmic Osmo) is docked on the shore near trees and an electrical tower with a large breaker switch, for example, and a hydraulic elevator takes one up inside a giant pine tree. The connection between “making progress” toward the endgame and the theme of technological progress through a series of successive “ages” is hard to simply dismiss. Against this imperative, as it were, the wanderings of the typical player take place in a temporal-spatial gamezone, where technological history is suspended or frozen, so that the “ages” of the game exist as if in a synchronous cabinet of techno-curiosities, surrealistically stationed around in the time-space landscape. Compare this description by Verne of his colonists’ first vision of Captain Nemo’s room, connected to the library onboard the Nautilus:

     

    An immense saloon--a sort of museum, in which were heaped up, with all the treasures of the mineral world, works of art, marvels of industry--appeared before the eyes of the colonists, who almost thought themselves transported into a land of enchantment. (The Mysterious Island, 459)

     

    The Diamond Age

     

    Another recent treatment, but with added Pynchonesque irony, of this idea of the synchronous technology museum lies at the center of Neal Stephenson’s SF novel, The Diamond Age. Here, however, the anachronism is theorized as a future society in which class–or neotribal “phyle”–determines the level of technological society at which one lives. Different ages in isolated coexistence, in a messy pastiche of cultural landscapes apparently modeled in part on mid-twentieth-century Shanghai, different phyles living within walled “[en]claves.” Unevenly applied nanotechnology has rendered everything a question of one’s phyle and its relative access to the “means of production” in a radically literal sense–the molecular “Feed” tubes through which nanotech compilers receive their universal raw material. The Diamond Age commences the instant diamonds become cheaper to “compile” than glass. Out in the distant territories, saboteurs’ fires smolder and a radical alternative to the hierarchical Feed (the Seed) is developing underground among secret hacker societies or “Cryptnet nodes.” But at the very top of this world, high on the mountaintop, is the Neo-Victorian ‘clave, with its tolling cathedral bells and the nano-Diamond Palace of Source Victoria, where the Feed originates, just as the Victorian technological empire originated at the famous Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851.

     

    This dys/utopian future sometimes seems to be merely the infrastructural setting for Stephenson’s exploration of the possibilities of hypertext. The subtitle of the novel: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, names the “book” at the center of this book, an object that looks exactly like a dusty leatherbound volume but contains the latest high-nanotech “rod logic” computers. Commissioned by a Neo-Victorian aristocrat as an educational gift for his daughter, the Primer eventually ends up by chance in the hands of a young “Thete,” a tribeless girl. The rest is an ironically Dickensian plot of changing fortunes and great expectations, except that the young girl (named “Nell” in a parody of the notoriously sentimental Dickens heroine) becomes a highly skilled ninja warrior and revolutionary princess leading a mass march of liberated orphan girls. This surprising twist comes about through her complicated interactions with the Primer, which becomes for her not only a book, but an educational computer, a nanny, a series of multimedia puzzle/adventure games, and a kind of magical amulet.

     

    All of this makes The Diamond Age sound like a computer game folded into a novel–which in a sense it is. Stephenson is a former physics and geography major and something of a programmer, an author whose work is helping to define the permeable fractal border between cybergames and SF literature. His 1992 book Snow Crash, according to its acknowledgments, began as a collaborative effort to build a “computer-generated graphic novel” and–no surprise–will soon be a CD-ROM game; large portions of The Diamond Age take place as extended narrative transcriptions (set in a contrasting, typewriter-like font) of sword-and-sorcerer games played by Nell.13 Within the fiction, the Primer provides Nell with a graphical user interface and high degree of interactivity for what are basically hypernarrative VR adventures, generically like advanced versions of Myst, but with more arcade-style “action” at crucial moments in the sometimes violent plot.

     

    Besides the shared game-play milieu, The Diamond Age shares with Myst a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin,” a central plot device and fetishistic object, a very bookish hyperbook. What Nell comes to understand late in the story is that, for all its advanced computer power, the Primer is basically a highly complex “ractive,” that is an interactive (rather than passive) multimedia work: “a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her” (366). This recognition involves for Nell the beginning of a personal quest for her surrogate mother, the skilled bohemian ractor Miranda, who has been hired to perform online interactions through the Primer since Nell’s troubled girlhood. But this idealization of motherhood and the Primer is only part of its story. The Primer is the product of the engineer Hackworth’s invention and programming code, his self-divided mind (he is, after all, a Neo-Victorian and a born hacker, as his name indicates) in which both the hierarchical Feed and distributed Seed technologies overlap. Like any computer product, the Primer is the collaborative result of Hackworth’s design team and the uncountable subprograms they have built into its processors. Moreover, the Primer is designed to “bond” with it primary owner; once it falls into her hands, it alters itself in numerous, unpredictably chaotic ways, mapping its narratives onto Nell’s “psychological terrain” (94) as that terrain is in turn redrawn by her repeated multilinear readings and adventures. It is not a book at all, really, but a highly porous hypertextual node at the center of a messy web of multiple, cyborganic intentions, human agency, technology, and raw chance–a figure for the networked social nexus itself.

     

    Thinking through Stephenson’s figure of the Primer can help us to see how Myst, a kind of hypernarrative prototype for such possible worlds, also exists outside the boundaries of its own CD-ROM or novelization–or, for that matter, any future film adaptation. It is shaped by but finally operates outside the complete control of its authors’ intentions, whether expressed as the authorized back-story or in the web of prequels, sequels, walk-through Web pages, official strategy guides and pirated hint books, in a great many genres that have or may continue to be spun off the game’s possibilities.

     

    The Late Age of Print

     

    Stephenson’s relatively unstable vision of Neo-Victorianism appeared at a moment when “Victorian values” were being promoted by conservatives like the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and the historian-politician Newt Gingrich as an alternative to cultural relativism.14 At roughly the same time, in a very different sphere, the cult of “steampunk” SF, best represented in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, was resuscitating nineteenth-century “dead tech” in a mixed gesture of ironic appropriation and deep-seated nostalgia. The Vernean steam engines, mechanical cogs, hydraulics, and overhead wiring all around Myst Island are examples of a continuing, widespread fascination with Victoriana in many fin-de-siecle representations of technology in our time. The traditional technology of the printing press and codex book is only one more example of this general (re)turn to the dominant images of high industrialism in the search for links to our own possible futures.

     

    But the Book is a particularly loaded figure–arguably the figure of figures–for this anxious longing. The present essayistic journey across several parallel genres has been intended in part to remind us that, despite recent jeremiads and prophecies, it remains profoundly true that, as Maurice Blanchot once put it, “Culture is linked to the book.”

     

    The book as repository and receptacle of knowledge is identified with knowledge. The book is not only the book that sits in libraries--that labyrinth in which all combinations of forms, words and letters are rolled up in volumes. The book is the Book. (145-46)

     

    While it may well be, as J. David Bolter has argued, that “the printed book…seems destined to move to the margin of our literate culture” (2), one would never know it from these recent works in and about hypertext. Perhaps, however, what we need to pay closer attention to is the very prominence of the Book at the heart of emergent cyberculture, especially in the form of an etherial digitized image, amulet, and fetishized object–and (in Stephenson) a parodic simulated “book” that is really a material node within a vast and chaotic, socially distributed network. This flamboyant curtain call of the Book in these different cultural productions of the Late Age of Print surely signals a deeper anxiety, a sense of the impending absence of the material book as an object of cultural significance in the face of increasing hypertextual play.

     

    Notes

     

    1. According to an e-mail reply from Cyan, Inc., 17 April 1996. (My thanks to Cyan for permission to use the two MYST images included in this article.)

     

    2. HyperCard’s role in the early commercial shipping and implementation of hypertext is by now legendary. Significantly, Apple once mounted testimonials on the product by the Miller brothers (“we love it”).

     

    3. See Robert Pinsky, “The Muse in the Machine: Or, the Poetics of Zork,” pp. 3, 26. Zork is now available in a multimedia CD-ROM version. The general historical connection between command-line VR games and hypertext is noted and helpfully contextualized by Benjamin Woolley in his Virtual Worlds, pp. 152-65.

     

    4. See the reprinted introductory document for Joyce’s hypertext fiction, Afternoon, a Story: “Artists’ Statements–Giving Way(s) before the Touch,” in Of Two Minds, pp. 185-87.

     

    5. One representative review, by John and Michael Veronneau, in the online newsletter, Big Blue & Cousins, May 1995, praises the game in terms that connect hypernarrative peace and freedom with unsolved mystery. A “non-confrontational” ambiance, the reviewers suggest, “lends itself to the peaceful and leisurely exploration of the unknown and the enigmatic” (Review). Another brief report on the game by Wendy Anson, “Intermedia ’95,” PMC 5.95 (May 1995), notes more critically the parallel between this specular “freedom” and Benjamin’s capitalist wanderer caught up in the commodity system, the flâneur (paragr. 27-29)–a suggestive allusion I repeat in the paragraph that follows above. (PMC 5.3: May, 1995). Even though the Myst CD-ROM is for the home computer, it is hard not to notice that, in this context, “arcade game” takes on a whole new meaning.

     

    6. A key intervention in the discussion of hypertext as either dialectical or bi-axial is Stuart Moulthrop’s “Rhizome and Resistance,” which critiques the simple application of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between “smooth” and “striated” to the space of hypertext.

     

    7. Gloria Stern, interview with Rand Miller, ( “Through the Myst” ). Comments by Rand Miller are from this interview unless otherwise noted.

     

    8. For example, in Jon Carroll, “Guerrillas in the Myst,” Wired (August 1994), 69-73 (71).

     

    9. The subgenre has been consolidated in this century by the publishing industry, and its works are often found in mid-priced glossy hardcover series, lavishly illustrated–by N. C. Wyeth, in particular. Robyn Miller, in an interview printed as an appendix to MYST: The Official Strategy Guide, not only names Verne as a primary source but remarks that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adventure fiction is his “favorite” genre: “like Treasure Island and things kids used to like. The spirit of adventure” (170). Though Miller’s “kids” sound gender-neutral, such fiction has traditionally been aimed at boys, and Verne’s island, in particular, is an idealized homosocial boys’ club. There is not a single woman character in the large cast of the novel, but this proved to be only a temporary obstacle for Hollywood. The screenplay for the 1961 movie simply wrote in several female castaways in technicolor dresses, who wash up on the shore at the right moment. In Myst, the elusive Catherine is the one main character in the family romance never visually represented in the game. Advance publicity suggests that Catherine will be the “star” of Myst II. After the present essay was essentially completed, the second hardcover book based on the back-story of the game appeared–Myst: The Book of Ti’ana–with a woman as its central character.

     

    10. A Theory of Literary Production, 159-248. Macherey’s readings of The Mysterious Island have influenced a number of interpretations in the present essay, beginning with his treatment of the problem of origins and of the troubled relationship between the colonists’ agency and Nemo’s prior agency as “the secret stage-manager” of the highly artificial island (219-222).

     

    11. “Fable” and “subject,” or “story” and “discourse,” are binaries in the High Structuralist tradition. It is no accident that they are particularly applicable (pace Tzvetan Todorov, for example) to detective fiction, where secrecy and a concealed plotline drives the surface plot. But see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Afterthoughts on Narrative,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1980), 213-36, for a corrective reminder that every narrative is “a social transaction,” and that “deep-plot structures” are not given but are always already “constructed,” produced by some particular readers in specific historical and cultural circumstances (218-19). Even a back-story “fable” is a version among possible versions of a given narrative.

    12. Transcript of Robyn Miller in an online conference, 19 December 1995 ( Mystique ). On the codex Book of Atrus as a deliberately linear, physical alternative to the nonlinear, indeterminate game world, see Kyle Shannon’s 1995 interview with the Millers.

     

    13. Stuart Moulthrop, “Deuteronomy Comix” (review of Snow Crash), PMC 3.2 (January, 1993), speculates that Snow Crash may have been designed as a hypertext (paragr. 20). Moulthrop’s review raises a number of relevant questions for the present essay, including bibliocentrism in Stephenson’s work to that point (PMC Review 1.193). A I write (late 1996), Viacom New Media is advertising a projected CD-ROM game, Snow Crash, which will contain four possible “endings.”

     

    14. Himmelfarb’s book, The De-Moralization of Society, is the primary inspiration for Gingrich’s fetishization of Victorian values. For a review that uses Stephenson’s to critique Gingrich’s and Himmelfarb’s Neo-Victorianism, see Stefanie Syman’s “Victorians Lost in Space” (FEED, 17 May 1995). The Millers have agreed that a longing for history and tradition may lie behind their conception of Myst. (Kyle Shannon interview).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Anson, Wendy. “Intermedia ’95.” Postmodern Culture 5.95 (May 1995), rev. 3.595.
    • Barba, Rick and Rusel DeMaria. MYST: The Official Strategy Guide. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1995.
    • Blanchot, Maurice. “The Absence of the Book.” The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981, pp. 145-60.
    • Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1991.
    • Carroll, Jon. “Guerillas in the Myst.” Wired August 1994, 69-73.
    • Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam, 1991.
    • Goldberg, Michael. “Breaking the Code with Neal Stephenson” (interview). Addicted To Noise, 1.07 (July 1995). http://www.addict.com/ATN/issues/1.07/Features/Neal_Stephenson/index.html.
    • Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Knopf, 1995.
    • Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
    • Landow, George P. Myst Notes. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/111/MdWeb/MNMyst1.html
    • Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London and New York: Routledge, 1978 (chapter on Verne written 1966).
    • Miller, Rand and Robyn Miller, with David Wingrove. Myst: The Book of Atrus. New York: Hyperion, 1995.
    • Miller, Rand and David Wingrove. Myst: the Book of Ti’Ana. Cyan, Inc., 1996.
    • Miller, Robyn. Compuserve chat session transcript, 19 December 1995, Mystique. http://www.bekkoame.or.jp/~mystique/ConferenceScript.html
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture.” In Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 299-319.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. “Deuteronomy Comix.” Postmodern Culture 3.2 (January 1993), rev. 1.193 (Review of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)
    • Myst. Broderbund and Cyan, Inc. (CD-ROM), 1993.
    • Pinsky, Robert. “The Muse in the Machine: Or, The Poetics of Zork.” New York Times Book Review (199x), 3-26.
    • Shannon, Kyle. Interview with Millers/review of Myst, Urban Desires 1.7 (Nov./Dec. 1995). http://desires.com/1.7/Toys/Myst/Docs/tocrrk.html
    • Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. “Afterthoughts on Narrative.” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1980), 213-36.
    • Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age; or, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam, 1995.
    • Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992.
    • Stern, Gloria. “Through the Myst–Another World.” World Village Gamer’s Zone interview with Rand Miller. http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/html/reviews/myst.htm
    • Syman, Stefanie. “Victorians Lost in Space.” FEED Magazine, 17 May 1995. http://www.feedmag.com/95.05syman1.html
    • Verne, Jules. The Mysterious Island. New York: NAL/Signet, 1986.
    • Veronneau, John and Michael. Review of “Myst.” Big Blue & Cousins Newsletter 12.5 (May 1995). http://www.bbc.org/~bigblue/may95nl.htm
    • Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1992.

     

  • Bodily Mut(il)ation: Enscribing Lesbian Desire1

    Penelope Engelbrecht

    Women’s Studies
    DePaul University
    pengelbr@wppost.depaul.edu

     

    What do lesbians really want? Animated by an axiomatic awareness that the personal is political, lesbian thinkers in the 80’s and 90’s have extrapolated an astonishing variety of ideologies, theories, and praxes, individually manifesting implicit and explicit longings for everything from better sex toys and babies and domestic partnership benefits to better medical research on women’s health and out tv sit-com characters and radical post-feminist phenomenology. Desire per se has been a hot topic.

     

    Striving to clarify what’s crucial to my lesbian reality, to articulate my desire in and of lesbian theory, I myself have defined lesbian Desire, but I am not yet, and may never be, entirely satisfied by (any) theory of Desire.2 For me, this inconclusion, which is not unlike philosopher Jacques Derrida’s conception of différance, partially characterizes lesbian Desire.3 To describe just one way that lesbian Desire operates in literary texts entails teasing (a) theory directly from the texts themselves, and I do seek to connect–at least in theory–the often divergent realities of (lesbian) words and deeds, coincidentally suggesting some ways we lesbians enact our Desire(s) in the world. The textuality of the lesbian body, the diverse texts of fictional and/or corporeal lesbian bodies, even the writing of lesbian erotica are all at issue here.

     

    In common parlance, “desire” refers to a physiological condition, an affective state, a bodily urge; however, our desires are not simply sensual. I have already argued that I perceive lesbian Desire as an inter/active mode which mediates two synonymous but operatively distinct, performative terms of relation, the lesbian Subject and the lesbian Other/Self. As two lesbians enact these roles, the to and fro of their mutual/ized lesbian Desire(s) emerges as fundamentally mutable, its very essence active mutation, change, motile transformation on the textual (and material) plane(s).4 This Brossardian–not quite Lacanian–Desire paradoxically does (not) anticipate failure in its perpetual inconclusiveness, even as it animates jouissance.5 In other words, my lesbian Desire does not anticipate exhaustion.

     

    Moving to theorize the ENscription of Desire–that is, the simultaneously textual and material, literary and physical writing of Desire–a classical semiotic problem arises.6 How can any presumably precise word or fixed sign (re)present this active Desire, which by my own definition denotes that which eludes concreteness or permanence? French feminist thinker Hélène Cixous might describe my pursuit of those signs by which lesbians have enscribed (a) textual, sexual Desire as a sextual activity, yet this verbal portmanteau reiterates the entangled semiotic collusion that I am interrogating here. In its susceptibility to analysis, to deconstruction, no text may be trusted as a repository of stable truth (see note 3). Indeed, one may slip, à la Freud, and pronounce an accidental truth: our words do not always say what we mean, nor mean what we intend to say. Consequently, an exacting consideration of signs (i.e., words) must take into account différance, must note the semiotic differences, the distinctions, the deferred meanings, and the reinforced lack of conventional, conclusive understanding. Where lies the lesbian corpus, the textual body of this différance? Touching upon this “sext” may partially sate my lesbian Desire to know an/other in words, may site a transmaterial zone open to my interpretation.

     

    In the erotic texts examined here, the literary and the material planes are closely allied, even co-identified–as when erotica courts and attains a gratified reader response. Or, as Alice Parker has written of Nicole Brossard’s works, “Not the least of the pleasures in store for those who are willing to take the ‘trouble’ to decipher [the] texts is an erotics of reading and of writing. The desiring text becomes a desire for the text” (308). Since all textuality comprises the situation and interpretation of signs,7 we may approach the specific matter of lesbian sexual Desire by asking what writing of lesbians-Desiring exhibits the most blatant reliance on (a) semiotic context. Where does one observe lesbian Desire literally enscribed in/by material, corporeal signs? In erotic texts of the mutable lesbian body–in writings about physically altered lesbian bodies, and especially those of mastectomy survivors–we may read the signs (of différance) that, in conclusion, I have termed the “un/marks” of lesbian Desire.8 Through the textual analyses, we may in/deed touch upon the (polymorphous) mutability and “disjunctive ‘coming together’” of lesbian Desire.

     

    Where, then, are the signs of Desire most vividly, even lividly displayed? The erotica of lesbian sado-masochism lunges into view, for in the s/m context, labile bodies comprise the very material, substantive sites for/of visible signs of (consensual) violence. Consider this abbreviated passage from “The Finishing School,” in Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts in which Berenice (Burn-nice?) is proffering one lesson in Clarissa’s s/m education:

     

    Thus far, she had inflicted moderate pain and reddened the skin until it was warm and slightly swollen to the touch, but she had not bruised it. She was not in the habit of marking Clarissa...[but] Clarissa coveted the welts...and often reproached Berenice for withholding them. (70)

     

    One might expect Califia to launch directly into a description of the caning Berenice will deliver, but instead she interjects an emotional explanation of their interaction: “the love between them was genuine” (70). Such a mediating love corresponds to–but might not constitute nor exceed–lesbian Desire.

     

    Only after this affective contextualization does Califia’s text progress to the actual whipping, the inscribing of Clarissa’s marks. In the common language of lesbian s/m, these welts and bruises signify not only the visual evidence of Clarissa and Berenice’s loving relationship, but also the dynamic of their power relationship: the marks identify Clarissa as the loving and the beloved submissive.9 Complementarily, her marks indirectly identify Berenice as dominant, as Actor, as the author and authority who writes her Desire upon the body of the submissive. Berenice is clearly a Subject, and Clarissa seems to occupy the (phallogocentric) position of objectified Other in this binary opposition–Clarissa herself, her body, transformed into Berenice’s text.10

     

    But three specific conditions belie this construction. Foremost, as in all proper s/m scenes, the presumably submissive bottom possesses the power of an ultimate sign, a cryptic, scene-terminating safe word. Were Clarissa merely to pronounce this previously agreed-upon signal (typically some non-sexual yet memorable word, such as “rutabagas”), the dominant Berenice would perforce immediately desist from whichever intolerable acts she was performing. Clarissa has not surrendered the potential of control so much as deferred the exercise of it. Subsequently, Berenice concludes the beating and undertakes Clarissa’s sexual satisfaction–and although “Clarissa babbled pleas for forgiveness and release,” her “whole body begged for more” (Califia 71). In the obliging fulfillment of Clarissa’s concrete demand, via sexual if not entire “release,” Berenice is revealed as only one of two Subjects in the INTER/action, apparently contradicting the s/m objectification construct. Finally, perhaps most importantly, Berenice may wield the cane, the pen with which she writes contusions upon Clarissa’s backside, but Clarissa’s body writes these signs. When struck, the body bleeds within, that blood coloring the skin, that discoloration effecting the bruise, which is the sign. The two women jointly author this bodily text; the emblematic s/m text cannot exist without the co-operation of these two Subjects acting in concert.

     

    Hence, lesbian s/m cannot be conclusively circumscribed as a dangerous and perverse mimicry of oppressive, violent hetero-sex, as Julia Penelope, among others, has claimed (see Call 113-131). The presumed s/m power-exchange is a dramatic artifice, a mere construct. Although Elizabeth Meese has remarked that “how the self-defining capacity and the interior imagination free themselves from phallocentric control is not clear,” she has also pointed out that “the moment of desire (the moment when the writer most clearly installs herself in her writing) becomes a refusal of mastery” (Crossing 122/1). The arguably painful text of the lesbian masochist’s bruised body nevertheless signifies consensual lesbian Desire because she has chosen to submit. Her pain constrains, construes her pleasure. In this context, lesbian s/m activity literally embodies the mutability of lesbian Desire and renders the signs of différance. Those bruises write Desire as they appear and fade: the skin enacts, enscribes mutation.

     

    Contrary to the views of those who share Julia Penelope’s precise disapproval of it, politically incorrect lesbian s/m might be thought to reconstruct the word violence, which etymologically denotes “the making of a way, a path,” but not necessarily an enforced phallic or politically suspect path.11 A critical distinction between this consensual lesbian s/m neo-violence and the violences that many lesbian/feminists associate with hetero-sex generally–and perhaps with gay male s/m–devolves from the absence of an ostensibly natural master, as these lesbians refuse compulsory penetration by the male subject.12 The lesbian masochist chooses her momentary, even fictive mistress: amusingly ambivalent, this feminization of “master.” The lesbian sadist is, like her, a lesbian Subject and her equal. Neither s/m role is absolute or essential; one may choose to enact either role, at different moments. To amplify this distinctly lesbian s/m dynamic, consider the self-empowered lesbian Subject as exemplified in “The Succubus,” by Jess Wells. In this short story, a lesbian’s (violent) Desire manifests itself in real bruises, love-bites and other signs rendered by an invisible lover motivated, hallucinated, and/or animated by the protagonist’s own mind. She sadistically dominates her self which masochistically submits to her self. Whatever she thinks of and Desires, her material body sensorily experiences and visibly textualizes–a bizarre and frightening but highly pleasurable experience!13

     

    Like the celebrated Lesbian Body of Monique Wittig, Wells’ story enscribes a real, if materially implausible, Desire that clarifies the pseudo-oppositional s/m disjunction by collapsing Subject and Other/Self positions into a single, active co-location. In this elision of hierarchical power-over dynamics, the (im)propriety of lesbian s/m begins to look decidedly undecidable, if we forebear to (subjectively, perhaps even sadistically) impose our personal, prohibitive biases on the Desires of others. Yet one might still question the socio-political basis of Wells’ character’s supernatural or psychically configured lesbian self-love. In lesbian “vampirism,” a loaded and persistent hetero-patriarchal tradition at least as archaic as Coleridge’s 200-year-old poem “Christabel,” the lesbian materializes as ghoul, as Succubus (see Case 1-20). The genuinely queer orthodoxy, the sexism and homophobia of such phantasmagorical lesbians are offensive; het/male fantasy here traduces material lesbian praxis, overshadowing it, resituating lesbian women as alien monsters both demonic and seductive, simultaneously dangerous and subject to annihilation. Such textual-cum-theoretical demonization of lesbians is sometimes believed to legitimize real-life queer-bashing.

     

    In fact, the destructive, traditional violence men do perpetrate upon objectified lesbian women does appear in lesbian texts, obviously without any positive aspect or erotic significance in itself, yet furthering discussion of bodily mutilation-as-mutation directly, and of mutable lesbian Desire indirectly. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poem “Waulking Song: Two” discloses two such events: the rape of her lover, and the after-effects of this attack and its residual marks upon the lesbians’ interaction. These excerpted narrative lines depict the initial assault:

     

    In the summer haze she had gone to work.
    The man with the knife stopped her.
    He shoved her from the door to the straggling hedge.
    He jerked at her shirt and ripped the seams.


    ...


    He raped her and tried to cut her throat. And he did.
    The red of her blood crossed the plaid of her shirt.


    ...


    [Later] She washed the shirt, put it away,
    and looked to see what else was torn (Pratt 18)

     

    Over time, her slashed throat heals; the poem proceeds to delineate how the raped woman reacts anxiously to any tactile connection. Even the touch of her lesbian lover becomes invested with the potential for violence, violation, yet “She feared that I would not touch her, / would not touch, and that I would” (19).14 This ambivalence toward even that touch which signifies love comprises différance. Each touch may become the sign of any touch. Is the loving touch unhappily deferred in the automatic recognition of pain, or is the pain perhaps partially deferred by the Desirable contact? Yes–both at once.

     

    Pratt enscribes the ambiguity of différance with the sign of the scar upon her lover’s throat. This signifying scar represents the unwelcome hetero-patriarchal violence that lodges between them, as it situates the différance that the violence occasioned. The scar that re/presents painful experience functions as a precursory referent and, thus, as a prime signifier of the sign of the touch, informing the touch with unintended ambivalence (18). Indeed, the mark of the scar may also signify a prohibition–a proscription–of touch: a fearful foreclosure of the potential meaning of, or meaning vested in, a touch which might be interpreted as painful, constituting a Subjective refusal to misread the Other/Self’s loving touch (19). The Subject’s partial interruption of mutual lesbian Desire may seem to threaten the Other/Self’s own Subjectivity; at the least, the disruption is provocative. Therefore, Pratt asserts, “I wanted the red mark to peel / off her throat like a band-aid / so she would be herself / without this pain: unscarred, unchanged” (19). Pratt’s poetic Other/Self Desires to erase the painfully red mark of negative change and its referent, the pain, to undo her lover’s mutilation. But as a sign also of a wound healing, the scar signifies the mutation of the mutilation. That is, the mutilation no longer constitutes a purely negative mutilation per se.

     

    Pratt’s poem goes on to outline a process of recognizing this distinction, showing how the lesbian tactile point of contact may be renewed. Lesbian Desire may exist transitionally in or as or via this point of contact.15 Several pages later in her chronological poetic collection, Pratt notes that “It has been three years; the shirt / was mended, not thrown away…I touch her bare arm…Her flesh is solid, not crumbled to dust…Her scar has faded to a thin white line. / I can touch her breast. I can feel her heart beating” (21-2). Their lesbian Desire briefly interrupted did not rupture, was not occluded, still continues. The mutilated victim has become a scarred survivor. The fresh, red scar had signified divisive violence; the old, white scar corresponds specifically to renewed erotic interchange. The lover’s Desire helps to enable this healing–perhaps partly by constructing this polysemous re-investment of the marked lesbian body, through recognizing multiple signs and their meanings, definitions that themselves metamorphose.

     

    The mutable significance of Pratt’s scar resembles the linguistic concept of marked and unmarked adjectives, as Janice Moulton addressed it while dissecting the gender binary, he/she. The unmarked, quasi-generic “he” holds a position of greater positive privilege than the marked “she,” comparable to the positive and negative adjectives “tall” and “short” (219-32). In Pratt’s poem, “scar” changes from a negative, marked sign to an ambivalent, un/marked sign–of différance, I think. The importance of this evaluative referential shift is further exposed in other instances when lesbians have textualized bodily mutilation as neutral or un/marked mutation.16 As Parker has explicated Brossard, “If language structures reality, then transformation, which would occur in and through language, is possible” (309).

     

    The sadly ever-more-common lesbian narratives concerning breast cancer best exemplify the semiotic transformation of mutilation to mutation–and they bespeak a powerful potential to reconfigure negative personal and corporeal perceptions, as well.17 A clear instance develops in Tee Corinne’s story “Vibrator Party,” which delivers both overt erotica and covert social commentary. After double mastectomy surgery, the once sexually exuberant protagonist, Ali, has been stifled by anxious self-inhibition and self-perception of mutilation. Ali resists attending the impending “orgy” because, as she describes herself in the objectifying third-person, “She’s forty-five and missing some of her chest and very self-conscious.” More pointedly still, she adds, “Don’t you understand? I’m afraid I’ll make people sick. I’ll ruin the party just by being there” (80).18 That is, Ali misses, mourns the loss of her breasts, and she fears both peer rejection and her own contagion. Yet it’s the absent, carcinogenic breasts which would infect the party–as a sign of mortality. Perhaps worst of all, for Ali, the breast(s) lost cannot any longer signify Desire, erotic potential.19

     

    Of course, once at the party Ali reacts “normally” to the first nude woman she sees by “star[ing] at [her] ample body, unclothed and unmarked” (83), conceiving herself as negatively marked by the mastectomy scars (of) her missing breasts. But then Ali is shocked when Lena, the hostess, emerges from the hot tub one-breasted and surgically scarred (83). Corinne literally constructs these two women as mirror images, for their twin-like scars run in opposite directions.20 Right there on the sundeck, Ali Desires to touch Lena’s scar, remarking that she’d “never seen anyone else’s” (83), her very wording reminiscent of youthful sexual adventures, of “playing doctor” to access knowledge of bodies. By articulating and then enacting this Desire, her new boldness erasing the mysterious encryption of self-understanding through tactile exposure to an Other/Self, Ali is enabled to shed her own clothes, and Lena traces Ali’s scars in return. In this poignant adult version of “if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” the mastectomy scars comprise “private parts” in both euphemistic and moralistic senses; their exposure comprises a significant “transgression.”

     

    All the more significant it is, then, that this thematic node, “the ritual of the touching of the scar,” appears to be standard in lesbian mastectomy narratives. For example, in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the late Audre Lorde wrote of her first sexual encounter with reluctant, one-breasted Eudora that

     

    Desire gave me courage, where it had once made me speechless...In the circle of lamplight I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple erect to her scarred chest. The pale keloids of radiation burn lay in the hollow under her shoulder and arm down across her ribs. I raised my eyes and found hers again, speaking a tenderness my mouth had no words yet for. She took my hand and placed it there, squarely, lightly, upon her chest. Our hands fell. I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar... (Zami 166-7)

     

    In Lorde’s text as in Corinne’s, the ritualistic act of touching the mastectomy scar signifies both Desire for and acceptance of the supposedly disgusting “mutilated” lesbian body. For Ali, this acceptance is re-doubled through Lena’s “twinning,” and the scar obtains privilege as a shared markof difference: perhaps only the one-breasted woman can understand the breast-less woman (though we all were breastless girls once). As ever in the modality of lesbian Desire, the corporeal touch, the point-of-contact confirms their semiotic collusion.

     

    We find that the real transgression lies in rejecting alienation, in refusing the asexual isolation hetero-patriarchal society prescribes for “mutilated women” as well as for lesbians. Just so, Lena provides the (inter/active, communal) context in which Ali recuperates her erotic impulse; together, they demonstrate how willing mutual exposure of our most “private parts” can create an affecting, profound bond. When the orgiastic “vibrator party proper” commences, a more subtle thematic node of the mastectomy narrative emerges: a frustrated Ali masturbates, and as she at last approaches the climax, “Lena’s hand caressed her scars” (86). And she comes–as if those scars comprised a reopened semiotic vulva; as if all Ali’s neglected Desire were situated in those (momentarily unread) marks that signify her “lost” breasts. Simply put, as the scars are eroticized, they become the site(s) of, the signs of, lesbian Desire. Paradoxically, when Lena caresses the scars, she caresses the-breasts-that-are-absent, and via her semiotically disjunctive touch, Lena and Ali indeed come together.

     

    This same differential conjunction of material presence-in-absence is clearly reconstructed in another of Audre Lorde’s autobiographical works, The Cancer Journals. Lorde remembers her lover Eudora as “the first woman who totally engaged me in our loving…the night she finally shared the last pain of her mastectomy” (34)–that is, at the moment when the absent breast no longer prohibits lesbian sensuality “by omission,” but (again) presently becomes an active element of Desire. Yet somewhat ironically, after her own mastectomy, Lorde wonders, “What is it like to be making love to a woman and have only one breast brushing against her?” (Cancer 43). She begins to answer this question when she articulates the “new” situation of her surgically altered body:

     

    I looked at the large gentle curve my left breast made under the pajama top, a curve that seemed even larger now that it stood by itself. I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself [than when wearing the foreign prosthesis, which could not] undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself. (Cancer 44)

     

    Lorde may initially define her new asymmetry as visually strange and self-alienating, but her lesbian Desire, manifested as self-love in the last sentence cited, generates self-acceptance. More importantly, Lorde’s exposure of the geometric contrast of the-breast-beside-a-space-where-another-breast-might-have-been has a foreseeable figural/tropic effect: emphasis.21 That space (of the absent breast) magnifies the (present) breast, engrossing its semiotic import as a marker of “the feminine.” Thus, Lorde is“ever so much more [her]self,” a parenthetically one-breasted woman, changed, but not a mutant. She is mutable, Desire-able.

     

    Like Lorde, Adrienne Rich also has written (of such) mutable lesbian Desire–not merely as inconclusive, but as eternally deferred, denied, yet present.22 So to enable here a final, critical coordination of différance, lesbian corporeality, and the textuality of Desire, I turn to Rich’s poem “A Woman Dead in Her Forties.” This poem about breast cancer propounds the mastectomy narrative in a particularly pertinent way, not least because it offers a sensitive, divergent, outside perspective. The poem’s first section presents two key thematic nodes: amid a group of women sunbathing, “…you too have taken off your blouse / but this was not what you wanted: / to show your scarred, deleted torso…You hadn’t thought everyone / would look so perfect / unmutilated” (Rich 53). This initial reticence, like that of Ali in Tee Corinne’s story, not only conveys a genuine concern of surgically altered women, but also constructs the counter-scenario to Lena’s and Ali’s mutual and beneficial self-exposures, for the woman in Rich’s poem evidently anticipated some such mutual opportunity, only to be disappointed in her imperfect physical singularity, left psychologically alone and alienated. Such an experience was “not what [she] wanted”; her Desire remained unfulfilled, virtually negated.23

     

    Rich’s wording alludes to, even parallels, Pratt’s multiple investments of the scar as sign. By replacing her blouse, the woman makes the statement, which Rich italicizes, “There are things I will not share / with everyone” (53). She is a Subject who refuses a one-way and thus impossible social pseudo-interaction of Desire, by refusing to share–or here, to just give up–her most personal, private parts. Referring to that “scarred, deleted torso” as “things,” Rich precludes any potential misunderstanding. A mastectomy does not “delete” a torso. Only an ambivalent marker seems to have been erased. Post-mastectomy, the (“other”) breast remains, with the added signifier of the scar(s), a polysemy which Rich perhaps subconsciously proclaims through the equivocal plural word, “things.” Again, the scar is the mark of a breast.

     

    But these same scars simultaneously refer to absence: they are a peculiar kind of sign, what I specifically term an “un/mark.” The embodied and visible un/mark refers to presence and absence in one stroke, constructing a sort of situated différance, for neither referent can be privileged or chosen as “the Meaning,” while both are always readable. That is, the mastectomy scar asserts the-breast-and-the-absence-of-it simultaneously. The un/mark constitutes an aporia, a sort of black hole of meaning, where all possible meaning is ambiguous and therefore deferred and where all possible meaning is still presently textualized, enscribed. In a sense, this saturated aporia is co-identifiable with (the enscription of) lesbian Desire. Rich’s mortal friend was not a self-identified lesbian per se, yet Rich writes of their love, their “mute [and mutilated] loyalty” as lesbian Desire deferred (see note 23). Rich admits “we never spoke at your deathbed of your death,” graphing yet another site of deferral–love unvoiced, death unrecognized, but nonetheless final (58).

     

    Still, Rich’s echo-like stanzas reiterating the ritual of the touching of the scars most provoke, by writing that weirdly dual reaction, the thrilling, mournful jouissance in and of lesbian Desire: in section one,

     

    I want to touch my fingers
    to where your breasts had been
    but we never did such things (53)

     

    and in section eight,

     

    I would have touched my fingers
    to where your breasts had been
    but we never did such things (58)

     

    As we’ve seen, such a ritualistic lesbian touch might have re-invested the un/mark of the scar with the dual, progressive referents of pain and healing and of mut(il)ation/acceptance; however, in Rich’s elegiac poem, the polysemous touch appears to be perpetually deferred. In life, they “never did such things.” On the contrary: even as it is written, exactly because it is (now) written, Rich textualizes, “embodies” this (im/possible) lesbian Desire. As she writes “longing to touch” she writes the touch, touches the belovéd’s textual body. In these words themselves, the touch is (made) real. Yet, like the undecidability of différance, this certain textual point-of-contact always is but never can be. This, too, is a saturated aporia. The “mute” love Rich has/had for her friend is no more unreal nor less ephemeral after the woman’s death than when it was merely unvoiced. I am mindful of Wittig’s proposition that “what’s written truly exists.” By writing her Desire, Rich enables a disjunctive coming together of lesbian and lost lesbian outside of time: she and her late friend embrace here, on the page, in the inked letters of the Desiring “we.”

     

    This disjunctive coming together elaborates upon the paradox of lesbian jouissance. Not without reason do the exemplary lesbian texts examined here often construe lesbian Desire as a principally erotic mode. By means of Desire, these lesbian writers textualize the body and signify the body itself as a material, indeed sexual, text. Actually, the textual lesbian body constructs a text within a text. Collapsing the distinctions between marks and absent referents, constructing meaningful un/marks, remonstrating that mutilation may or even should be read–or translated–as mutation, with change its very root, the active radical of lesbian Desire operates via the text as the mutable mode and modal referent of lesbian semiotics. Thus, we perpetually revise what is, for a moment, essential.

     

    As an active mode, lesbian Desire does not function ambivalently, despite the paradoxes it evokes. The mut(il)ations of the lesbian body incurred by sado/masochistic, surgical, even assaultive means can only be monologized–marked negatively as mutilation alone–in the absence of Desire, as the opening of Rich’s poem has made most painfully clear in conclusion (53). Lesbian corporeal text and touch devolve from the transforming motivation of intangible mutual Desire: in each, in every succeeding moment, each loving “I” beholds you, lover and belovéd, ever as mutable perfections. That phrase, “mutable perfection,” suggests yet another seeming paradox. Although this Desire in theory is situated in the non-space of transactivity, the Desiring and tactile point-of-contact embodies mutability and informs pseudo-fixed signification, and such a complex of Desire can only be described by the polysemous term “in(con)clusive.”

     

    This lesbian Desire of mine is inclusive of multiple co-operative Subjects, and so, polymorphous; this Desire is not semiotically unstable, but semiotically vital. Like celestial bodies impossibly approaching the speed of light, the faster our Desire rushes toward some mortal terminus, the slower our relative passage toward that ever-more-anticipated-but-never-reached conclusion. A delicious frustration, this inconclusion. In the textual time warp of lesbian Desire, one’s momentary, Subjective pursuit of self-knowledge is endlessly prolonged by the infinite gravity of each Other/Self, the allure of the as-yet-unknown becoming provocative, each Pandoran revelation revising everything that came before. And more is always possible, if we so Desire, if there’s time. In our perpetual (ex)changing, our Desire is ever-fresh. Vive la différance! For always already we enact and enscribe our lesbian Desire as and in the un/mark of the lesbian text, as and in the multiply-meaningful (w)hole of the lesbian corpus. In terms of lesbian Desire, perhaps as always, (lesbian) context is everything. Or, as Nicole Brossard and Elizabeth Meese might conjunctively remark, lesbian Desire writes the lesbian body : writing.

     

    Notes

     

    1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at “Flaunting It: First National Graduate Student Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 4/19/91. This later incarnation has benefitted from the insightful critique of three anonymous Postmodern Culture reviewers, and from the critical input of Jennifer F. Ash, William J. Spurlin, and Laura Stempel Mumford–all of whom I thank. Although the essay’s original audience was composed of academics, I’ve tried to keep the essay accessible for lay readers: endnotes explain and/or illustrate the more exotic academic terms.

     

    2. To cite relevant lesbian thinkers and their works guarantees sins of omission. Still, I acknowledge the multifarious influences especially of Jeffner Allen, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susie Bright, Nicole Brossard, Judith Butler, Pat Califia, Lillian Faderman, Diana Fuss, Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Meese, Joan Nestle, Julia Penelope, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Adrienne Rich, and Monique Wittig, each of whom has specifically contributed to my understanding of lesbian Desire. In addition, my theorizing draws on the works of such phallocratic thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, most often oppositionally, sometimes appositively, and always informed by astute feminist interlocutors: in particular, Jane Gallop and Elizabeth Grosz (re: Lacan), and Gayatri Spivak (re: Derrida).

     

    For varied further reading on “lesbian Desire,” see Karla Jay’s Lesbian Erotics and Grosz and Probyn’s Sexy Bodies, two recent anthologies. Teresa De Lauretis’ expansive and much-touted theoretical study, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire takes a (to me) troubling sort of “late patriarchal” psychoanalytic tack on the construction of lesbian desire: see Grosz’s critical review in differences 6.2+3, and note 8 below. Also see Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, especially. chapter 6, “The Body as Inscriptive Surface.”

     

    3. This French term, différance, combines the idea of difference with that of deferral. In the practice of deconstructive criticism, différance refers to the way we define words (and concepts and objects) not only by identifying their characteristics, but also by noticing absent, disqualifying characteristics. For example, we may decide that a four-legged, fur-covered carnivore with a tail is a “cat” and is not a “dog” by observing the presence of retractable claws and by noting the absence of a bark. Thus, we understand the “meaning” of words partly through identifying pairs of extremes (i.e., binary oppositions). Derrida’s concept of différance further suggests that every word not only “means what it means,” but is also always hinting at (but putting off or deferring) “that which it does (not) mean,” its opposite or negation. To dissever these multiple meanings, or signs, is one way to perform deconstruction.

     

    4. The word “material” is used here in the philosophical sense, to mean “real, concrete; corporeal, physical…” My on-going theoretical project focuses on conjunction(s) of lesbian textuality, subjectivity, corporeality, and culture. A more detailed discussion of the lesbian Subject, the lesbian Other/Self, and lesbian Desire, particularly as distinguished from oppressively “universal” concepts of subject, object, and desire, is developed in my earlier essay “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject,” especially pp. 86, 102ff. Unlike Lacan, for example, I am not pretending to offer the “universal” theory of desire; rather, I am concerned specifically to develop a (not “the”) theory which comprehends lesbian Desire. Hence, I distinguish the “universalizing” usages from my specific usages by capitalizing lesbian “Desire,” etc., as proper nouns.

     

    For various reasons, earlier readers of this essay have voiced concern over whether (or how) my interpretation of “lesbian Desire” verges on some sort of essentialism–a supposed academic heresy. Yet I remain unconvinced of the need for anathematic–even knee-jerk–rejection of so-called essentialism. In discussing “the” (lesbian, corporeal, biologically structured) female body, I deploy a provisional version of essence comparable to that “strategic essentialism” discussed by Spivak (“In a Word. Interview” with Ellen Rooney). So while I am cautious of positing essential categories or concepts, if only because of their potential to universalize personal experience, I also “admit” I am interrogating the possibilities for a theory of lesbian Desire beside(s) or beyond one rigidly captive to (binaristic) anti-essentialism. That is, I am exploring how a lesbian theory might “resolve” the incessant tip-toeing around relativistic, indeterminate, and ultimately immaterial (if not quite nihilistic) High Theory ideas with little bearing on any lesbian “reality.” I want theory that’s not mere academic gobbledy-gook, but that has some relevance to (at least my own) lesbian “real life,” one that might coordinate “common sense” (i.e., a sort of essentialism) with poststructural rationalism.

     

    One more caveat may prove useful here: I cannot express notable interest or expertise in applications of this lesbian theory to hetero-patriarchal relations, which are beyond the scope of this essay, in any case. It is not my task, as a “lesbian theorist,” to make (a) lesbian theory inclusive of hetero-patriarchal ideologies, or to presume to speak “for” straights–or even for gay men. On the contrary, only at this late date in history can a lesbian theory be forwarded in public at all, and I think it’s politically important for straight and other non-lesbian readers to sidestep or minimize or re-examine their hegemonic biases, so as to apprehend this lesbian theory in and of itself, before they seek further rapprochement.

     

    5. Nicole Brossard, a French-Canadian lesbian, has written several important works of lesbian philosophy/theory/fiction (so-called fiction théorique). Her Aerial Letter puts a distinctly lesbian spin on various concepts more closely associated with the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacanian jouissance, which is considered untranslatable, can be said to carry the duplicit meanings of spiritual ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, of horrible joy, all in one superlative package. Jouissance names the con/fusing experience of joyous laughing which inexplicably dissolves into sorrowful tears. This lesbian Desire which I construe does exhibit some similarities to Lacanian desire (e.g., its paradoxicality), yet is more closely allied with a Brossardian contextual description.

     

    Both Brossard and Lacan advance social theories which are characterized by their membership in eurocentric Western civilization. The distinction between a Brossardian lesbian Desire and a Lacanian universalized desire lies in their differing essences. Lacan’s theory relies on the essential significance of the Phallus and the Law, in an inherently patriarchal, heterosexist, legalistic, and power-oriented construction. Brossard’s theorizing concerns what is essentially lesbian- and female-correlated, egalitarian, communicative, and con/text-oriented. From a Brossardian point-of-view, Lacan’s Phallus is not only irrelevant, but also praxically invisible. Lesbians and heterosexuals (for example) all being people, some theoretical congruencies do occur between Brossard and Lacan, but the distinctions are more crucial. I see Lacan’s theory as codifying the hetero-patriarchal foundation of the Western psyche (and culture), while Brossard visibly resists (and partially displaces) that pervasive infrastructure and its exigencies. See also note 10.

     

    6. See my “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject” for initial discussion of the term “enscribe” (esp. 86).

     

    7. I.e., texts comprise all things which we can “read” or interpret, including writing, or road signs, or body language, etc. To recap a famously amusing (if extreme) example, pop culture critic Tom Wolfe has claimed he learned to interpret ownership of a trendy Barcelona chair as signifying the real or imagined aroma of soiled diapers (61).

     

    8. Although this essay considers texts of “altered” lesbian bodies, it does not exhaust all related sub-categories; e.g., such intentional (and “permanent”) body-alteration processes as tattooing and scarification are omitted here, not least for brevity. See Vale and Juno’s Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual, Chris Wroblewski’s pictorial Tattooed Women, and the Kathy Acker interview in Vale and Juno’s Re/Search #13: Angry Women (177-185). This essay addresses texts selected according to semiotic and (perhaps subjectively) erotic criteria, not taxonomic ones. I do observe, ex post facto, that the chosen texts occupy certain sub-categories: lesbian-s/m-sex-applied impermanent marks, male-assault-inflicted permanent marks, and the surgically rendered permanent marks of mastectomy scars, together inadvertently constructing a range of (increasing probability of) morbidity.

     

    I have somewhat reluctantly considered a more provocative elision: since the (literary) texts discussed here present wounded bodies, one might ask whether lesbians fetishize wounds–perhaps in contrast to heterosexual women–and why. Accepting the (Freudian language of) lesbian fetishization of wounds would lead me to interrogate the relation between an invasive wound, an opening in the flesh, and the apparently open structure of female genitalia, possibly reified vis-à-vis some imaginable childhood psychic trauma. Such a process vests psycho-sexual meaning in wounds through an over-simplistic, linear, causal sequence of events, as if an invasive wounding were always/ever pleasurable, and it imposes a monological, phallocentric, pathologized Master-Meaning of the wounds that forecloses any/all other readings, as if all invasions of the body were always/only sexual. I cannot accept such a per/version of the embodied marks under scrutiny here. To recast (all) lesbian Desire as essentially or entirely sexual and obsessively directed to psycho-sexual gratification, which is what Freudian fetishizing connotes, not only overrates that insidiously pathologizing psychoanalytic construct, but also oversimplifies lesbian Desire.

     

    I am concerned here with textual signs, with marks upon body surfaces, not with three-dimensional flesh, and I cannot delimit the readings of those signs to a single potentiality of Desire. It’s a mistake to assume that the selected lesbian texts here comprehend all lesbian Desire(s). Here, it’s more a case of accepting bodily realities, from wounds to wrinkles, than of fetishizing anything, and this accepting attitude only seems perverse from a heteropatriarchal perspective which demands that women pursue perfect physical beauty and reject or disguise corporeal evidence of imperfection, such as scars (e.g., by means of expensive plastic surgeries). This sexist attitude is one which I and many other women reject.

     

    9. Note the highly appropriate double entendre: “submissive” stems from the Latin submittere, which means “under + to send” (or vice versa). The two roots sub- and “missive” may be rendered in English as literally “under + the letter”…perhaps not of the Law.

     

    10. Feminist theorists use “phallogocentric” to name that male-self-centered, heterosexist, patriarchal notion that The Phallus and The Word (logos) together comprise The Center of The Universe, especially in Western culture. The term alludes to Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the Law and/or the Phallus (theoretically not to be equated with a mere organic penis) which represents the ultimate Object of one’s desire. The powerful desiring one is the subject, who is male-by-definition; the object of desire is, therefore, both the phallus/penis and the woman who is the phallus (see objet petit à). Subject (male) and object (female) positions are similar to the subject and object slots in grammar: first-person I to address second-class, second-person you, respectively. Because the object seems inherently alien to the ostensibly all-knowing subject, the object may also be called the Other. The female object/other is treated as if “it” were a thing, not as a (human) equal of the subject (i.e., he who subjects…).

     

    I am arguing that a lesbian feminist theory cannot adopt such oppressive terms and the (Lacanian) concept they re/present, when trying to describe lesbian textual or material relations. Rather, I perceive each lesbian Subject in a two-way relation with an “Other/Self” who is not an object, who operates on an equal basis, who “is” in fact another lesbian Subject, different from oneself, and thus “Other,” but not diminished or degraded in or by difference, so equally a “Self.” My view differs notably from that of Lacan because I do not perceive (or delimit) the Other/Self as an objectified “projection” or “reflection” of an omnipotent, egocentric subject: a critical condition which I think (re-)configures the dynamics of Desire in a lesbian context. See also notes 4, 5, 8.

     

    11. Note the typical phallogocentric connotation of “violence” as forcing a way. See “violation.”

     

    12. William Spurlin has questioned my implicit distinctions between lesbian and gay male s/m practices. While I refer here primarily to anecdotal, apparent conventional wisdom among some lesbian feminists, and admit the superficial resemblances of most s/m practices regardless of sexual preference, I’d suggest that there appears to be a notable difference between the power-dynamic construction(s) of these praxes. Prior to the s/m situation of two gay men, both may be designated as phallogocentric subjects (in the patriarchal, Lacanian sense); subsequently, one man–perhaps momentarily–defers his subjective power to act as an object, though he is not the/an other. Not only is phallogocentric subjectivity of a lesbian theoretically impossible, but also no heteropatriarchal social foundation for the empowered subjectivity of either the lesbian sadist or masochist exists, putting to question whether the lesbian masochist adopts the objective deferral of power or simply enacts a naturalized condition, as a (Lacanian) object. However, I do think that a lesbian Subjectivity operates according to the parameters I’ve described in this essay and elsewhere, even in lesbian s/m.

     

    My understanding of how lesbian s/m differs significantly from s/m performed by heterosexual couples derives from similar principles. In a male-dominant and submissive-female interaction, heterosexual s/m replicates a classic phallogocentric/Lacanian construct; however, I’m under the impression that most heterosexual s/m encounters involve female dominatrix and submissive-male interactions: apparently the flip-side of the hegemonic imperative! In such a case, I think that the seeming power/subjectivity of the female sadist can be enacted only as a gesture of the male subject’s pretense of subjection; i.e., he chooses to permit her to inflict pain on his body, and so the male subject remains the ultimate subject, the female, the mere objectified instrument of his pleasure, her pseudo-empowerment the mere effect of his power.

     

    One could perhaps infer that my discussion of the un/marks of lesbian Desire replicates a reading of courtly love à la Lacan. But I would argue that courtly love itself constitutes a construction identical to the heterosexual s/m dynamics I describe above, in which the illusion of female empowerment is entirely the prerogative of the male subject, his service of the Lady dramatized for his pleasure. But the lesbian un/mark signifies–at least in lesbian s/m–the prerogative of a lesbian Subject, who is a momentarily passive Other/Self, acting in concert with a lesbian Subject. I think the co-operative lesbian Subjectivities engender a significant distinction, especially in terms of the authorial investiture of meaning in the un/mark.

     

    For further discussion of lesbian s/m in its socio-political aspects, see Califia’s essay collection, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, especially “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” (157-64), and “Feminism and Sadomasochism” (165-74).

     

    13. See the hysterical/ecstatic physical manifestations of (Christ-like) religious stigmata, e.g., as experienced by Theresa Neumann in the 20th century; or by the medieval mystic Catherine of Siena, whose stigmata were invisible–veritable un/marks indeed–as Jennifer Ash has reminded me.

     

    14. See Allen’s stark, thought-provoking analysis of experiencing (a) rape, in Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (27-59).

     

    15. Given space, I would elaborate the idea of tacility as a principle means of lesbian semiotics, textuality, interactivity, and Desire: a means unlike the distancing and hierarchical scopic/visual mode central to hetero-patriarchal subjectivity, yet not analogous to the silent and unknowing corporeality informing the traditional Western view of Woman from Eve onward.

     

    16. I think that such mutilation-qua-mutation is re/presented particularly by permanent signs, rather than by means of temporary ones. That is, the sort of impermanent, self-mutating mark inflicted by the s/m practices excerpted from Califia’s “The Finishing School” does not qualify as mutilating because, in the s/m context, such marks are always considered to be positive, unmarked signs (though outsiders may hold a contrary opinion). This equation of positive marks and “unmarked signs” presents another paradoxical variant of the différance I’m describing.

     

    17. Valuable personal, practical, and affirmative lesbian/feminist perspectives on surviving breast cancer and related women’s health matters are presented in Midge Stocker’s anthologies Cancer as a Women’s Issue: Scratching the Surface and Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change: New Perspectives on Women and Cancer.

     

    18. Duane Allen first drew my attention to the intersecting experiences of lesbian mastectomy survivors and gay male PWA’s; members of both groups may suffer through similar self-criticism and irrational social ostracism. Both AIDS and breast cancer are perceived within the gay and lesbian communities, respectively, as sexuality-related pathological conditions, though for different reasons; the real physical threat of these diseases to each individual in his or her community instills the fear which motivates (misdirected) anxiety toward an already-stricken person.

     

    Furthermore, Chicago queer journalist Jon-Henri Damski has publicly “come out” about himself suffering breast cancer, reminding us that men do have breasts, that breast cancer is not always female trouble, just as no one is immune to AIDS.

     

    19. This essay avoids addressing the breast as a generic marker of the feminine (i.e., of woman-ness) because I myself do not consider the possession/display of a visible bust essential to being female. Breasts may be incidentally correlatable to womanliness, and to lesbian Desire, but are not axiomatic. Let’s also not overlook that pre-operative male-to-female transsexuals may have both visible female breasts and male genitalia, a visually confusing situation in which the penis is often interpreted as the essential gender characteristic by everyone but the transsexual herself. In short, the reader should not generalize from the character Ali’s initial equation of “lost breasts” and “lost Desire and erotic potential.” Likewise, I notice but pass on the potential to interpret Ali’s “carcinogenic breasts as signs of mortality” as a binaristic, negative corollary of “the breast as emblem of life.” The explication of maternal/reproductive metaphors diverges too widely from my topic and purposes.

     

    20. Here, I acknowledge the general influence of Tucker Pamella Farley, whose paper “‘Self and Nonself’: Reflections on a Medical Construction of (Dis)Ease” was presented at the Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago, 1990.

     

    21. This rhetorical effect again echoes linguistic discussions of marked and unmarked terms. See Moulton (228-9) and Penelope (Speaking 101ff).

     

    22. See also Pratt 26.

     

    23. Because Adrienne Rich’s theoretical concept of a lesbian continuum identifies as lesbian all variations of woman-woman contact, from the most casual to the most sexual, I here attribute a lesbian Desire to Rich’s one-breasted straight friend as Rich textualizes her. A woman need not ever perform explicit lesbian sexual acts to experience a lesbian Desire, I think. However, Laura Mumford has prompted me to see how Rich’s willingness to arrogate every individual woman’s right to self-identification (of sexual orientation) by pre-emptive means of this all-inclusive continuum poses at least an ethical problem, namely vis-à-vis “straight” women. See Rich’s widely available 1980 manifesto, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, originally published in Signs 5.4.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Allen, Jeffner. Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1986.
    • Califia, Pat. “The Finishing School.” Macho Sluts. Boston: Alyson, 1988. 63-83.
    • —. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994.
    • Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” differences 3.2 (Summer 91): 1-20.
    • Corinne, Tee. “Vibrator Party.” Lovers: Love and Sex Stories. Austin, TX: Banned Books, 1989. 79-87.
    • De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
    • Engelbrecht, Penelope J. “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject.” Feminist Studies 16.1 (Spring 90): 85-114.
    • Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Labors of Love. Analyzing Perverse Desire: An Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love.” differences 6.2+3 (Summer-Fall 94): 274-295.
    • —. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
    • Grosz, Elizabeth and Elspeth Probyn, eds. Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
    • Jay, Karla, ed. Lesbian Erotics. New York: New York UP, 1995.
    • Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1980.
    • —. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982.
    • Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.
    • —. “Theorizing Lesbian: Writing–A Love Letter.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, eds. Karla Jay & Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York UP, 1990. 70-87.
    • Moulton, Janice. “The Myth of the Neutral ‘Man’.” Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds.. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. 219-232.
    • Parker, Alice. “Nicole Brossard: A Differential Equation of Lesbian Love.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, eds. Karla Jay & Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York UP, 1990. 304-329.
    • Penelope, Julia. Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1992.
    • —. Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990.
    • Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “I Do Not Wait” and “Waulking Song: Two.” We Say We Love Each Other. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1985. 26, 17-24.
    • Rich, Adrienne. “A Woman Dead in Her Forties.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. 53-58.
    • —. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Denver, CO: Antelope, 1982.
    • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty with Ellen Rooney. “In a Word. Interview.” differences 1.2 (Summer 89): 124-156.
    • Stocker, Midge, ed. Cancer as a Women’s Issue: Scratching the Surface. Women/Cancer/Fear/Power series, vol 1. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1991.
    • —. Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change: New Perspectives on Women and Cancer. Women/Cancer/Fear/Power series, vol 2. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1993.
    • Vale, V. and Andrea Juno, eds. Re/Search #13: Angry Women. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1991.
    • —. Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1989.
    • Wells, Jess. “The Succubus.” The Dress / The Sharda Stories. San Francisco: Library B Productions, 1986. 71-78.
    • Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body (Les corps lesbien). Trans. David LeVay. New York: Avon, 1976.
    • Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981.
    • Wroblewski, Chris. Tattooed Women. London: Virgin, 1992.

     

  • “The Feathery Rilke Mustaches and Porky Pig Tattoo on Stomach”: High and Low Pressures in Gravity’s Rainbow

    Heikki Raudaskoski

    Dept of Arts and Anthropology
    University of Oulu, Finland
    hraudask@cc.oulu.fi

     

    It is mid-July 1945, and at the same time it is some time after March, 1973. The readers of Gravity’s Rainbow (those still aboard) have just passed halfway. A bunch of Argentine anarchists–having hijacked a German U-boat in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and trying to make it to Lüneburg Heath near Hamburg, in order to make there a film version of Jose Hernandez’s epic poem, Martin Fierro, their anarchist gaucho saint–have been forced to launch a torpedo (Der Aal, ‘the eel’ in German submariner slang) against the U.S. war vessel John E. Badass. The narrator continues: “Der Aal’s pale tunnel of wake is set to intersect the Badass‘s desperate sea-squirm about midships.” (389)

     

    But something surfaces, a new drug to tell the truth, one called Oneirine. Seaman “Pig” Bodine, this profane picaro, who stubbornly keeps popping up in many of Pynchon’s texts, has apparently spiced the war vessel’s coffee grounds with a massive dose of this celebrated new intoxicant. What are we to think of the Bakhtinian chronotopes, the space-time combinations peculiar to narratives,1 when we are told:

     

    The property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneirine was one of the first to be discovered by investigators. "It is experienced," writes Shetzline in his classic study, "in a subjective sense...uh...well. Put it this way. It's like stuffing wedges of silver sponge, right, into, your brain!" So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight, the two fatal courses do intersect in space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh heh.2 (389)

     

    Here we have Bakhtin describing one of his main concepts: “The chronotope is the place where knots of narrative are tied and untied.”3 In this case, however, readers deal with a 20th century chronotope. This chronotope illustrates Heisenberg’s undecidability principle in a self-inflicted, hallucinogenic way typical of the 1960s. As is widely known, Werner Heisenberg postulated in 1927 that it is impossible to determine both the position and the velocity of a nuclear particle at the same time: the more accuracy is used in specifying one, the more indeterminacy results in stating the other quantity.4The knots of narrative are never completely tied or untied, readers never know exactly where and when the crucial events take place in the narration. Or?

     

    *
     

    Sticking to knotting: on its first page Gravity’s Rainbow makes a possible commentary on itself, as many have noticed: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into[…]” (3). Will all the threads of the text, its myriad storylines, then, get into an unsolvable tangle? Or will they instead finally integrate into one final plot, which would lead to the final chronotope, to the literally and/or metaphorically final time and place? As so often in Pynchon’s big novel, these very questions seem to be overtly thematized at the end of the same Oneirine episode:

     

    Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea it is you have plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenalin, but caught really, buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come? (389-390)

     

    “Will you go to the Heath?”–a crucial question that points in many directions, not all of which could possibly be named. As first time readers in the middle of Gravity’s Rainbow might not know, the Lüneburg Heath, Lüneburger Heide, is most possibly a place of central importance in the novel. It is just there that the Faustian Nazi-figure Captain Blicero apparently launches his special 00000 rocket, sending his sado-masochistic object, the pale Gottfried, to die in space. What is more, at the very end, the same rocket (or is this a knot again?) seems to have transformed into a missile that is nearing the roof of the Orpheus Theatre in L.A., where “we,” a diegetic “audience” in the novel, have been watching a movie, perhaps carrying the name Gravity’s Rainbow. On the other hand, in the novel’s first episode a V-2 rocket has been launched from the Continent toward London, while Pirate Prentice is dreaming how a “screaming [does it roar only inside his head, I wouldn’t be so sure] comes across the sky.” (3)

     

    As the critics haven’t failed to notice, the rocket’s parabolic arc presents itself as the whole novel’s dominant structural metaphor. In connection with Gravity’s Rainbow it is probably most adequate to talk about the Rocket as Their plot–a “plot” with all its connotations–that is threatening the paranoid characters in the novel. Many of the deterministic and pessimistic readers of the 1970s especially, saw it literally as the novel’s totalizing deep structure.5 The protagonist Tyrone Slothrop’s journey makes a shadow image of the parabola of V-2 rockets: from London via Southern France to Northern Germany. Thus there might well be a closing correspondence between parabola and parable. To speak in terms of the Russian Formalists: the syuzhet of the text would be completely at the service of its underlying fabula, the discourse at the service of the plot. Pynchon’s masterpiece would be a vast apocalyptic jeremiad6 about the fall of Western civilization indeed. It would show itself to be, in Bakhtin’s sense,7, the representative, fatalistic epos of our times, the Book to end them all. That’s how many reacted to it when it came out. “Madness spews forth in torrents, Pandora’s evils incarnate!” wrote Publishers Weekly.8

     

    “Will you go to the Heath?” might thus be a question pointed also at the book itself, which might turn out to be, not a “novel” at all, but a monological epic. The transcendental connection between signs and referents would, indeed, be established at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. This would be the end, the ceasing to be, of both the book and its readers, well, those of “us” in the Orpheus Theatre, at least. It would be the ultimate chronotope, where time and place vanish. Those of “you” that the narrator has been addressing, would melt together with Them, the carriers of the hostile plot.

     

    Just before the end the narrator notifies: “There is still time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs…” (760). Some time remains, as if as an open question–in the present tense, in the tense future. Even the diegetic “us” will not, inside the novel, reach the terminal closure. And as long as there is still an even minute barrier between “you” and the final end; as long as one cannot reach the final presence which in this context would mean total absence, possibilities for novelness, something new, remain.
     

    **
     

    Anyway: are there real possibilities for novelness? Even if there is no deep structure, no unifying closure, in the novel, will it not become the opposite — a vast array of scattered storylines, a legion of separate “soup-kettle” submarines and solipsistic consciousnesses drifting in the labyrinthine ocean of entropy? Is the paragraph I quoted at length really a metaphor of a world, where isolated, low-feeling units stray like never-arriving messages in the bottle, never-arriving since there’s nobody “out there” to receive the message? As one of the characters, Enzian, finds himself pondering:

     

    Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible.... Each bird has his [sic] branch now, and each one is the Zone. (519)

     

    Is this the way it has to be? I will postpone my answer. Instead I will ask again:

     

    “Will you go to the Heath?” The question remains unanswered in the end; something remains to be on the way. As long as there are some of “us,” there is a moment left, even if it were only as thick as “the gnat’s ass or red cunt hair” (664), as one of the jack-of-all-trades narrator’s similes goes. Still, the question remains important. The least meaningful part in the question is not the second person pronoun it contains. Brian McHale has shown the crucial importance that this little mercurial three-letter-word has in the novel in transgressing narrative categories.9 “You” is doomed to endless oscillation between tinier and larger audiences, and it is hard to imagine that the movement could anywhere be carried out more intensely than in Gravity’s Rainbow.

     

    At the moment I will ask: who are these “you” anyway, to whom the narrator refers on this occasion? What are the chronotopes of these people and/or things called “you”? What kind of a dialogue is this that surpasses the limits of a “normal” closed conversation and, by containing disquieting surpluses, often confuses subject-object positions? I have already regarded this as a metafictional device; I had the feeling I caught the text talking to itself. Under the umbrella of “you,” the text is forcing itself also on some of its diegetic and extradiegetic narratees, each passively waiting inside her/his own “steel pot” and “devitaminized,” mushy “soup-stock” of his/her own words (or the words s/he gets from the novel). These narratees, some of “us,” (or some parts of us), find themselves in a topsy-turvy situation, where it is rather the text that is reading them than vice versa. You don’t necessarily need drugs to get into Gravity’s Rainbow‘s hallucinogenic dialogics.

     

    Perhaps it is, after all, most secure to come to the conclusion that, in the first place (let’s pretend that there still is a “first place” somewhere), the question: “Will you go to the Heath?” is aimed at these Argentine anarchists in their submarine. This, of course, may also go for the other obsessive paranoids in the Zone, who try, inside the text, to make it to the Lüneburg Heath, or keep on the move, at least. Here you are: the American Tyrone Slothrop, who wants to know why there certainly seems to be an intense connection between his penis and V-2 missiles; Enzian with the other Schwarzkommando, the representatives of the nearly destroyed Southwest-African Herero tribe, who are probably looking for the Lüneburg V-2 launching site to launch their (holy?) counterpart 00001 to Captain Blicero’s Rocket of Death; the Soviet spy Tchitcherine trailing his black halfbrother Enzian, in order to revenge himself on the injustices he has had to live through during Stalin’s reign; the Pavlovian psychologists whose mentor Laszlo Jamf has presumably conditioned Infant Tyrone’s penis to have a hardon in the presence of some enigmatic stimulus that might (or might not) be connected to the mysterious compound Imipolex G, which is presumably used in Captain Blicero’s rocket; the double agents Katje Borgesius and Captain “Pirate” Prentice, who may embody the narrator’s hypothesis that, had History taken another turn, there might “have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot” (556); and witches, movie stars and directors, scholar-magicians, freaks, black market dealers, sensitives, rocket scientists, lemmings, outcasts, whole central European peoples; all in all, almost everyone among the Zone’s ordinary paranoid hepcats.

     

    Almost undoubtedly the narrator is addressing the focalizer of this episode, the Argentine Graciela Imago Portales, who is in charge of the submarine’s periscope. Or are we eavesdropping her speaking to herself? Before the war Graciela had been the harmless “urban idiot” of Buenos Aires, friends with everybody across the spectrum, from anarchists to Catholics, but particularly within literary circles. The war may have, in a way, driven her “out of the soup-kettle,” “out and doing.” Before the war, Borges is said to have dedicated a poem to her: “El laberinto de tu incertidumbre/ Me trama con la disquietante luna…” (381). (“The labyrinth of your uncertainty/ Detains me with the disquieting moon”10)

     

    Especially when translated into English, these lines can also be seen to refer to these more general “you” I have been talking about: the labyrinthine uncertainty of “you” causes anxiety. The uneasiness is accentuated by the fact that it is the traditional relation between a gazing male subject and gazed female, “lunatic” object that has started to hover here. Who are you, Graciela Imago Portales, your middle and last names equaling “window image” in English? Is it so that you really don’t know who you are, or what it is that you are doing–no longer a clear object, not yet a subject–so you have to keep asking? You do now the watching, deep down there, instead of being the watched one. Will you be up with your male fellow travelers, and will you all get “out and doing,” perhaps outdoing Them? Or will you be finally output as one of Them, after the Director you have been waiting for has come?

     

    Anxiety prevails. “You” begin to break out of your more specific contexts, even when coming back in tense oscillations to those you have touched–even if you were talking to yourself. “You” start moving your reckless potentials,11 much like the “disquieting moon”–itself a metaphor par excellence of female alterities–in the quoted, obviously pseudo-Borgesian lines.12 This is, however, not the first time in Gravity’s Rainbow that Borges is mentioned. Tyrone Slothrop comes across Francisco Squalidozzi, the anarchists’ contact person, when Slothrop is living through his phase as Ian Scuffling, a British journalist in Zürich. Squalidozzi tells him:

     

    "It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges.[...] Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity...that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky..." (264).

     

    It surely seems that there are some kinds of binary oppositions in the making: on one hand there is a cluster of concepts like openness-anarchy-activity-fearlessness-energy-oneness and, on the other, their opposites closedness-hierarchy-passivity-fearfulness-exhaustedness-fragmentation. It is precisely the open anarchic possibilities of the German Zone just at the moment of the war’s end that attract these Argentine radicals:

     

    "In ordinary times," he [Squalidozzi] wants to explain, "the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times...this War, this incredible War--just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it.[...] It won't last, of course not. But for a few months...[...] We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless." Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling--"So is our danger." (264-265)

     

    Hope and danger, both limitless in the Zone. No wonder the readers find the narrator (perhaps ventriloquizing Graciela Imago Portales) contemplating some one hundred pages later: is there possibly anything at all that “will drive you out of your soup-kettle,” all of you, above all these South American characters, particularly Graciela Imago Portales herself, “buffaloed under the epistemologies that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot”? (389-390) Or do we have a story like, say Dreiser’s An American Dream or Dos Passos’s U.S.A., where the prevailing mood consists of determinism, pessimism, and disablement?

     

    ***
     

    At this point, it is high time to notice that the inhabitants of the novel do have a high time, in the midst of the narration, time and again. This doesn’t solely refer to drugs. This high time is characteristically low time, too. I’m referring to those not infrequent passages in Pynchon’s texts that have caused trouble to Frank Kermode, among others: “[T]hose terrible pop-song lyrics Pynchon has always enjoyed inserting in his narratives[…]are terrible.”13 Precisely: one can’t avoid the feeling that it is the musical in its many forms that could be the most intensive narrative metaphor for Gravity’s Rainbow, “Pynchon’s Great Song” as Thomas Schaub14 has named it. At times one is struck by the notion that it is just these Dionysiac thickenings here and there in the text that act as counterbalances to those passages, where the narrator laments over loss, exhaustion, fragmentation, and suffering in the world. These bursts of energy tend to take the characters by surprise, too. This is what happens to “Pirate” Prentice, when he has got into some kind of a carnivalistic Hell for double agents:

     

    Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens,
their spirits are so contagious,

     I'll tell you it's just --out, --ray, --juss,
     Spirit is so --con, --tay, --juss
     Nobody knows their a-ges...

     Walkin' through bees of hon--ney,
     Throwin' away --that --mon, --ney
     Laughin' at things so --fun --ny,
     Spirit's comin' through --to, --you!

     Nev --ver, --mind, whatcha hear from your car,
     Take a lookit just --how --keen --they are,
     Nev --ver --mind, --what, your calendar say,
     Ev'rybody's nine months old today! Hey,

     Pages are turnin' pages,
     Nobody's in --their, --ca, --ges,
     Spirit's just so --con,--ta, --gious--
     Just let the Spirit --move, --for,
     --you! (538-539)

     

    Nobody’s in their cages, because spirit is just so contagious. Might there really be a possibility to get out and doing, to be moved by the spontaneous Spirit? In his essay, “Entertainment and Utopia,” Richard Dyer writes about the utopian sensibility of the musical. He lists the main characteristics of the musical as follows: energy, abundance, intensity, transparency, and community. By energy Dyer means “capacity to act vigorously, realized human potentiality”; by abundance “conquest of scarcity and enjoyment of sensuous material reality”; by intensity “experiencing of emotion directly and fully, without holding back”; by transparency a quality of relationships (e.g. true love and/or sincerity); and community means “togetherness, sense of belonging.”15All these characteristics are to be found, or so it strongly feels, in the verbal performance above–as if the possible sly-ironic overtones would be overwhelmed by these all-embracing, excessive characteristics.

     

    In Dyer’s view these features of entertainment explain why entertainment works: “It is not just left-overs from history, it is not just what show business, or “they” [sic], force on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of eternal needs–it responds to real needs created by society.”16 Here we have binary oppositions again: energy/exhaustion, abundance/scarcity, intensity/dreariness, transparency/ manipulation, and, community/fragmentation. One can’t help noticing that the first parts of these pairs characterize, at least seemingly, lots of passages in Gravity’s Rainbow. (So do their opposites, to be sure.) Each and every passage like this is invariably contaminated by some form of “popular” or “mass” culture. What are the numerous chase scenes in the novel, if not tireless indicators of energy? This is all the more true when some episodes become hybrids of various popular genres.

     

    Think about Slothrop’s adventure in the balloon, with the vengeful Major Marvy in his airplane chasing him and singing ominous “Rocket Limericks” with his crew (e.g. “There once was a fellow named Ritter/ who slept with a guidance transmitter/It shriveled his cock/which fell off in his sock/ and made him exceedingly bitter” [334]). What else could be the only efficient weapon, or preferably the only available energetic popular genre, but throwing pies right at the antagonist’s face and the engine of his plane? (335-336) Bakhtin knew it already: the great heroes of literature and language “turn out to be first and foremost genres.”17 One experiences the mixing of the genres of aviation movies and comics, chase adventures, obscene army humour, limericks, and silent farces, to name just a few.

     

    There are also moments of unexpected abundance. In the behaviorist Pointsman’s laboratory the rats and other test animals suddenly seem to grow human-size (as big as the somewhat stunned “focalizer” Webley Silvernail himself) and begin their beguine:

     

    	      PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE)

	It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,
	I was lost, in a maze ...
	Lysol breezes perfumed the air,
	I'd been searching for days
	I found you, in a cul-de-sac,
	As bewildered as I--
	We touched noses, and suddenly
	My heart learned how to fly!
	So, together, we found our way,
	Shared a pellet, or two...
	Like an evening in some café,
	Wanting nothing, but you...
	Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a,
	Once again, I'm alone--
	Finding sorrow by millivolts,
	Back to neurons and bone.
	And I think of our moments then,
	Never knowing your name--
	Nothing's left in Pavlovia,
	But the maze, and the game....

They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form
circles, curl their tails in and out to make
chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form
into the shape of a single giant
mouse[...] (229-230).

     

    The passage expresses some kind of tension between scarcity and abundance, to say the least. Even the rodents may keep to themselves potentials to get out of their “soup-kettles” and change into sparkling dancers in a 1930s music spectacle. “Nobody’s in their cages, the spirit is just so contagious,” as the readers were told in the previous song.

     

    This is, however, a more explicit parody of the musical genre as well; the contrast between “the real social tensions” and their “utopian solution” in entertainment is exposed and estranged too plainly. Subaltern groups, like women (as in the first song), gay men, and black people have played a central role in the history of the musical, but laboratory rats express their oppressed status, even in the representation of an excessive genre like this, a bit too clearly. The song becomes ambiguous: there is an undoubted feeling of–at least momentary–abundance and energy, but one cannot say the same about intensity, transparency, or community. Direct emotional experiencing, transparent relations between characters, and the sense of togetherness are all surely implied in this verbal performance. Still, the impression is mixed–“bewildered” as the animal protagonists themselves–when compared with the purity of entertainment. “Spirit’s just so contagious”; “contagious” carries here many meanings: it is “catchy” and “contaminating” at the same time.

     

    “Nothing’s left in Pavlovia, but the maze, and the game.” Perhaps this is not completely true: something might well be left to remind the inhabitants and readers of Gravity’s Rainbow of the utopian potentials in popular culture. This vulgar sensibility is one of the things that distinguishes Pynchon from one of his mentors18 and another labyrinth builder, the intelligent Borges. It is much easier to find remnants of that sensibility in Kafka, a mentor of Borges. Borges himself was conscious of retrospective lines like this, when he wrote about Kafka and his precursors: Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, etc. If you ask me, the most memorable lines in this essay of Borges run as follows: “The fact is that every writer creates his [sic] own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”19
     

    ****

     
    It is obvious that Pynchon’s labyrinthine carnivalism (there we have it) brings together at least two generic traditions. And since, as Bakhtin writes, “it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic traditions,”20 it may be concluded that the novel brings together at least two kinds of chronotopicalities as well. The first is that of the maze spinners: in this respect the whole of Gravity’s Rainbow is a huge bundle of overlapping labyrinths with centers missing: everyone is “always already” in quest in the middle of something without a clear point of origin or a tangible telos. The situation is emphasized, when, on his Tannhäuserian trip to the German rocket factory inside a mountain, Slothrop paradoxically feels the presence of an absent center21:

     

    [A]mazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat,
and blind inertia: Slothrop feels a terrible
familiarity here, a center he has been skirting,
avoiding as long as he can remember--never has he
been as close as now to the true momentum of his
time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture
to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away
for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at
his sleeves it's important...please...look at us...
but it's already too late,[...]and the blood of his
eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory,
to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the
broken rock... (312).

     

    Does it have to follow, when the centers are not to be found, that the only possibility left is “softening to the devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words,” as we have heard it surmised?

     

    *****
     

    Possibly this is not the case. Outbursts of “utopian sensibility” (to cite Dyer’s words) are capable of breaking loose every now and then. It is, after all, no wonder that many critics in the 1970s were blind to anything meaningful in Gravity’s Rainbow‘s energetic and plebeian “breeding ground.” Bakhtin’s breakthrough has helped us to see the novel’s popular cultural aspects as belonging to the very core of carnivalistic “novelness.” This holds true especially for Pynchon’s “poetry”: the incorporation of lyrical pieces is an age-old feature of Menippean, hybrid novelness. In addition to these pieces the novel turns out to be an encyclopedia of popular culture and subcultural discourses22 (gaining both forms of representation and material from them): jokes, genres of billingsgate, detective and spy fiction, comic books and strips, science fiction, horror stories, fantasy, pulp magazines, pornographic stories, various forms of film, black English, Hispanic slang, street speech, underworld cant, regional dialect, military slang, parapsychology, children’s lore, etc.

     

    There are no reasons, however, to identify Pynchon’s carnivalistic motifs with Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais and thus essentialize carnival. To begin with, both the Catholic Church and canonic high tradition in literature were distinct dominating centers, which carnival and the carnivalesque literature could antagonize with ridicule. Besides, it seems clear that Bakhtin’s carnivalistic interpretation bears heavy marks of organicistic, transindividualistic communalism based on agriculture. Bakhtin’s carnival does have an angle to it: it is that of the folk, of the down-to-earth people. It is from that unifying ethical position that noble truths are put into degrading motion, where oppositions ceaselessly melt into jolly hybrids.23 Carnival is an open chronotope like the Argentine pampas, but it has got fences around it, relative to both time and place. No wonder many have considered it as a form of reproduction, of controlled rebellion, which ultimately helped the medieval and early modern centers to consolidate their positions.24

     

    Inside Pynchon’s carnival one can never be sure what the powers above are like. There is, of course, a strong feeling of oppressive structures beyond the visible. A legion of centripetal, monologic, deterministic “grand narratives”25 present themselves in Gravity’s Rainbow. Among them are the Pavlovian psychology, pre-Einsteinian sciences (especially chemistry), technocracy, ballistics, Puritan religion, patriarchalism, multinational capitalism, Nazism, Bolshevism, growing bureaucracy outlined by Weber, some uses of Rilke’s poetry, etc. The big question is: do these monological threads ultimately entangle into a total grand narrative, which might most intensely be symbolized by the parabolic arc of rocketry, by “gravity’s rainbow.” Yet the Rocket, connecting paranoid activities, may not at all be What Is Really Cooking. Enzian can feel it:

     

    [Y]es and now what if we--all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop...well we assumed--natürlich!--that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to "omunene," the eldest brother)...our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness.... (520)

     

    Instead of being enchanted by the totemic Rocket, Enzian insists that the preterite people of the Zone should “look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid…we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot?” (521)

     

    This sounds much like the “cognitive mapping” that Fredric Jameson has been promoting during the last decade.26 Yet unlike Jameson, nobody in the Zone, not even Enzian no matter how hard he tries–let alone, to my knowledge, any of the readers–is able to find out how all aspects (in what may be the most heteroglottic text of all times) could really be united into some “incalculable plot,” totalizable dialectic, Hegelian phase in History. Things get all too kinky for the critters of the Zone to make up anything like that: “Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.” (582) The paranoid feeling of an all-encompassing secret network no doubt resembles what Jameson (modifying Lyotard) calls “the postmodern sublime.”27 Still, in regard to Gravity’s Rainbow one is deemed to stay Preterite, fallen from grace, grace that can also mean the Marxist self-confidence about the course of history. Grace belongs to Them, the Elect, in every version of Their Western Puritan Grand Narratives.

     

    ******
     

    Bakhtin writes: “Dialogue and dialectics. Take dialogue and remove the voices (the particular voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness–and that’s how you get into dialectics.”28 Perhaps it is not needless to add that this “one abstract consciousness” refers to white, masculine, western selfsameness–and the logic of Hegelian “Aufhebungs” can only produce boyish variations on the theme of that selfsameness. If History is one big story about the emancipation of humankind, people should be ready to die for this better future. However, the Soviet Tchitcherine is asked: “Marxist dialectics. That’s not an opiate, eh?[…] Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die?” (701) Bearing Bakhtin’s critique of dialectics in mind, it may be good to notice how it also applies to anti-Hegelian, entropic, and “kulturpessimistische” theories of the complete collapse of civilization. Gravity’s Rainbow presents both of these totalizing alternatives self-reflectively and overtly.

     

    On the one hand, there is paranoia, the “discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation” (703); on the other, there is “antiparanoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” (434) It is fruitful to keep in mind what Michael Bérubé says about Pynchonesque paranoia: it is not only rage for order and immobility, but also a sensitive form of imaginative activity.29 N. Katherine Hayles has written about “antiparanoia” or “entropy” that it contains potentials for both exhaustion and multiplication.30

     

    *******
     

    What comes out of the struggle between these centripetal and centrifugal forces that always already, even internally, show themselves to be conflictual? The centrifugal low elements may well be as such, as was Pynchon’s working title for the novel, “mindless pleasures”; uncontrollable plebeian here-and-now desires. Anyway, these forces are seldom alone or pure in the novel: they are set against centripetal elements. What is more, They-systems seem to be oozing through into every We-system: as Derrida writes, it is impossible to get totally outside of the logocentric metaphysical tradition.31 What can you possibly make of it?

     

    Peter Stallybrass and Allon White insist that the division between carnival and normal life was internalized from the “early modern” period on. From the “licenced event” that was distinguished from normal life carnivalesque changed into the low suppressed area within four symbolic domains: psychic forms, human body, geographic space, and social order.32 Pynchon’s Zone can be seen as a 20th century version of the carnivalesque market place, where the suppressed low elements of bourgeois, modern, “realistic” subjectivity keep surfacing in constant motion, blurring boundaries between those “four symbolic domains” when doing so. There is no hope getting back distinct, autonomous categories, which, most probably, never existed in the first place. (Still, borderlines are not canceled once-for-all; how could they, tense traffic between insides and outsides growing continuously?) The late Allon White writes directly about Pynchon elsewhere:

     

    The "high" languages of modern America--technology, psychoanalysis, business, administration and military jargon--are "carnivalized" by a set of rampant, irreverent, inebriate discourses from low life[....] In Gravity's Rainbow history is referred to as a "St Giles fair," [sic]33 and the symbolic pig, the carnival animal par excellence, wallows everywhere in Pynchon's writing as the foul-mouthed but irrepressible subvert of prissy WASP orderliness. [Pynchon] produces a dialogic confrontation whereby power and authority are probed and ritually contested by these debunking vernaculars.34

     

    The low symbolic pig wallows everywhere in Pynchon’s writing all right, but it often gets hybridized with high elements within the subjects of the novels. Among Gravity’s Rainbow‘s approximately 400 characters you may run into one “André Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach” (711), who is, moreover, going to play a hybrid, apocryphal classic with his Counterforce chamber orchestra: the Haydn Kazoo Quartet in G-Flat Minor–“kazoo” being this fart-sounding mouth harp that provides cheap thrills.

     

    ********
     

    Stallybrass and White stress that one ought to be careful not to regard carnival as a transhistorical form of activity. White himself forgets this when claiming that Pynchon’s texts differ from the positive carnivalism of Joyce’s Ulysses. Pynchon’s “heteroglossia becomes immobilized into a cold war without positive issue, absurd and terrifying at once.”35 My meaning is by no means to underestimate the carnivalistic elements–like the numerous parodies of Catholic discourses–in Ulysses. Still, in my view the novel encourages the reader to build up a transhistorical order from the allusions to high culture contained in it. High canon is capable of achieving dominance, of solving the puzzle. It is not that Pynchon’s characters wouldn’t search for an order like that. The traditional carnivalistic novel gained much of its strength from the way it ridiculed stable centers and high canonic traditions. When easily distinguishable centers are missing, one is left with labyrinths instead of parodies.

     

    Stallybrass and White emphasize the ways, in which the low elements are suppressed and pushed underground in the making of bourgeois identity. The inhabitants of Pynchon’s Zone have it the other way round: these vigorously popular cultural creatures are trying to find the missing high, centripetal forces (also those within the characters themselves) beneath the visible. This makes them readers of a kind, and, what is more, rather peculiar readers as it were: one character reads, interprets, other characters according to how they shiver, another reads them according to how they roll cannabis reefers–and there is also a character who interprets whip scars (641). There is a strong centripetal urge to find the lost, epic oneness: “Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom.” (525) These, Enzian’s, words appeal, but it seems that even for the African Herero tribe the mythical return to pure epic time is no longer possible. They are, like all others, doomed to wallow in the mess of contemporary global culture. They stay impure, each of them, but not all the same: it is impossible for them to keep just the same as before, or same as the others; they keep making aching differences.

     

    The urge to find the all-explaining center betrays often a dialogic sensitivity toward people and things, as I already stated. Those numerous “lyric” passages in the novel, where the narrator and/or characters feel low after striving for high unities, can never be “jollily relativized,”36 as in the carnivalistic novelistic tradition. The Zone becomes an ambiguous chronotope: open and secret, jolly and sore, spontaneous and paranoid–a labyrinthine marketplace, where it is hard to be in the right place at the right moment. It is as if the narrator would like to gather “all of you” together, but the novel lacks that kind of community, a joint chronotope, which would bring “all of us” together. (One problem, not the least, is that even the frequently nostalgic narrator is not one, but many–fragmentary or heterogeneous, hard to say. And is anyone of “us” any one?) All in all, these interrogative, passionate, quasi-transcendental passages make dialogic thrusts.

     

    On the other hand, popular cultural elements do not prove automatically emancipatory, even though there seems to be open, democratic energy contained in them. You really may feel high, when you experience the low. The novel becomes an unsettling and tension-filled, dialogic but post-dialectic arena of centralizing and marginalized discourses. The low elements act as supplements to the “sophisticated,” high canonic tradition, where Gravity’s Rainbow bastardly and subversively belongs. However, the labyrinthine features in the novel estrange the carnivalistic tradition in their turn. The acts of reading (by both characters and their “acting” readers) form oscillating thrusts to open up a field of possibilities of act/ion and pass/ion together. The reading acts, as passible activity and activable pastime, may subvert here the essentializing dichotomy between activity and passivity.

     

    *********
     

    Likewise the Zone itself subverts the opposition between war and peace. The open, systematic acts of martial violence may have ended, but there is no peace yet that would make it possible to escape into a petty-bourgeois stability. Consequently the nature of dialogism in the Zone is not that of a harmonious, consensual intersubjectivity; rather “dialogic” refers to an inequal and ceaseless field of struggle, where tensions cannot be swept under the carpet.37 In many ways Gravity’s Rainbow is a “war baby”; according to Steven Weisenburger the novel’s chronology follows a carefully drawn circular design that takes nine months,38 like pregnancy. There was this song: “Never mind what your calendar say, ev’rybody’s nine months old today!” (538) Perhaps something is being born into the Zone–a holy child? a monster baby?–but we will never know the outcome, the tensions remain unsolved and in the air, open and secret at the same time.

     

    The energy required to keep this vast magnetic field going is provided by the rich humus of popular culture. In order to maintain the dialogic state between war and peace–to prevent readers from taking refuge in harmonic, peaceful interiorities–Pynchon’s novel recruits all the myriad (high and low, literary and extraliterary) genres and discourses it possibly can cram into itself. This is, I gather, also to show that there are no pure, autonomous extradiscursive positions outside the noisy intertextual arenas of the novel. And We, whoever we are, have to operate in the same impure fields as Them: it seems impossible for any of “Our Folks” to find some–private or public–space and time that would not be at least slightly contaminated by Their readerly stories, Their glorious marches and sad lullabies, Their Western grand narratives.

     

    Yet simultaneously Their plottings seem to lose their transcendence, drawn as they are from Their monological unities and heights into the bewildering field of the narration, into this labyrinthine carnival–and don’t we have here the novel telling about itself?39:

     

    Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony anymore. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless ratchet: (681)

     

    Within this mercurial interface, this kaleidoscopic narrative Zone (which is also a Bakhtinian zone, the sphere of dialogic influence40) both Their centric transcendence,41 and a transcendence that would sanctify any of Our suppressed marginalities, prove impossible. Between these conflictual impossibilities there unfolds a tense and dialogic matrix of possibilities. (T)here They and Their centers multiply, which necessarily doesn’t make Them any less dangerous. We and Our marginalities won’t cohere into one emancipatory subject, which necessarily doesn’t make any of Our different clusters less capable of anything–well, at least these “we” are not automatically any less capable than previous, more dualistic “counterforces” have proved to be in the long run–whoever we might be.42It is a violent matrix, for sure–there are no cutely negotiable, Rortyan ways out of it. But perhaps it is only in a Zonelike matrix, in a staggery boundary-crossing network, with modern illusions of closed autonomies melting into air, that those who (who?) have been kept out of time and out of space could possibly start getting themselves heard. Perhaps.

     

    Gravity’s Rainbow remains in a state of warlike peace, where power and resistance don’t make dialectically reducible opposites. As the novel wants to sing a “counterforce traveling song” to you all, and perhaps to itself, too:

     

    They've been sleeping on your shoulder
They've been crying in your beer,
And They've sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn't care
  for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise
But I'm telling you today,
That it ain't the only way,
And there's shit you won't be eating anymore--
They've been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn't a resistance, it's a
war. (639-640)

     

    Life during wartime is, however, hard work. To intervene in the dynamics of the Zone means that you have to throw yourself (or your selves) there without guarantees and safe positions. The traveling song has to keep traveling–and “you” have to become deterritorialized, and reterritorialized, time after time, all along. When the division between inner and outer spheres is collapsing, you may feel like Nora Dodson-Truck, a psychic in mental disorder, in the preceding episode: “she will go staggering into her own drawing-room to find no refuge even there, no, someone will have caused to materialize for her a lesbian elephant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks pistoning symmetrically in and out of juicy elephant vulvas, and when she turns to escape this horrid exhibition she’ll find some playful ghost has latched the door behind her, and another’s just about to sock her in the face with a cold Yorkshire pudding…” (638). Sometimes it feels insurmountable to survive the true, tense, and hybrid serio-comicality of the Zone…

     

    Notes

     

    I would like to thank Jouko Salo, Michael Holquist, John Krafft, Bernard Duyfhuizen, Brian McHale, Terry Caesar, and Steven Weisenburger for their fruitful comments on my essay.

     

    1. Bakhtin 1981, 84.

     

    2. Throughout, ellipses are Pynchon’s, except where enclosed in brackets.

     

    3. ibid., 250.

     

    4. E.g. Strehle, 192. Strehle’s often positivistic aim is to trace the influence of modern physics on some contemporary writers (Pynchon, Coover, Gaddis, Barth, Atwood, and Barthelme).

     

    5. Cf. for example Hendin and Sanders.

     

    6. On the novel as a jeremiad, see Smith & Tölölyan.

     

    7. Bakhtin presents the division between epic and novel most distinctly in “Epic and Novel,” Bakhtin 1981, 3-40.

     

    8. According to Weisenburger, 1.

     

    9. McHale, 95-114.

     

    10. Translated by Weisenburger, 187.

     

    11. In addition to Bakhtin’s general condition of dialogism (see Holquist 1990, 14-66), this, of course, bears similarities with Derrida’s critique of closed and transcendental contexts in “Signature event context” and “Limited Inc,” both in Derrida 1988.

     

    12. Weisenburger for one has not found these lines in Borges’ Obras Poeticas. (Weisenburger 187.)

     

    13. Kermode, 3.

     

    14. Schaub, 43.

     

    15. Dyer, 20-24.

     

    16. ibid., 24.

     

    17. Bakhtin 1981, 8.

     

    18. The best essay on Borges and Pynchon is probably Castillo.

     

    19. Borges, 236.

     

    20. Bakhtin 1981, 85.

     

    21. Molly Hite argues for the significance of “the trope of absent center” in Pynchon throughout her study. See esp. 21-32.

     

    22. This list owes much to the one that Weisenburger has in the introductory part to his Companion. (Weisenburger, 6).

     

    23. Bakhtin 1973, 102-103.

     

    24. See Stallybrass and White 1986, 13-15.

     

    25. The concept is, of course, Lyotard’s (see Lyotard passim). Lyotard seems to think that, once Their grand narratives have lost all validity and legitimacy, we are left with Our local and democratic “small narratives.” Pynchon takes the grand “project of modernity” much more seriously, I dare say.

     

    26. E.g. Jameson, 51-54.

      

    27. ibid., 34-36.

     

    28. Bakhtin 1986, 147.

     

    29. Bérubé, 220-221.

     

    30. Hayles, 111-112.

     

    31. Derrida 1972, 21. Linda Hutcheon finds it equally impossible to break away from traditional narratives. What represents literary postmodernism to her, works of historiographic metafiction, first inscribe themselves in traditions, and only this done feel able to subvert these traditions. (E.g. Hutcheon, 224.) In my view this is close to Pynchon’s strategies.

     

    32. Stallybrass and White, 2-3.

     

    33. Actually it is called so in V. (Pynchon 1975, 307.) In Gravity’s Rainbow the War is “Night’s Mad Carnival.” (133)

     

    34. White 1984, 135.

     

    35. ibid., 136.

     

    36. Bakhtin 1973, 102.

     

    37. In Dialogics of the Oppressed Peter Hitchcock similarly emphasizes the latter definition of dialogism at the expense of the former. See Hitchcock, 1-24.

     

    38. Weisenburger, 9-11.

     

    39. As Louis Mackey surmises in one of his fine essays on Pynchon and American Puritan tradition (Mackey, 17).

     

    40. Holquist 1981, 434.

     

    41. And thus total manipulation of Us proves impossible, too. The Foucauldian view (at least in his period of Discipline and Punish) of Their all-powerful control and Lyotardian view of Our nice new freedom seem to make together a neat logocentric binary opposition. Gravity’s Rainbow takes these totalizing opposites into a same immanent field and ultimately shows that they cannot be thought about and talked about one without the other.

     

    42. This is very close to Jim Collins’ notions in his pathbreaking study on postmodernism and popular culture (Collins passim). See esp. 3-27.

     

    Bibliography

     

    • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R.W. Rotsel. Ann Ardis: Ardis.
    • —. 1981. Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P.
    • —. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky Bloomington: Indiana UP.
    • —. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P.
    • Bérubé, Michael. 1992. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP.
    • Borges, Jorge Luis. 1976. Labyrinths. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby.
    • Castillo, Debra. 1991. “Borges and Pynchon: A Tenuous Symmetries of Art.” In O’Donnell 1991, 21-46.
    • Collins, Jim. 1989. Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. London and New York: Routledge.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press.
    • Derrida, Jacques. 1972. Positions. Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
    • —. 1988. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP.
    • Dyer, Richard. 1992. “Entertainment and Utopia.” In Dyer: Only Entertainment. London & New York: Routledge. 17-34.
    • Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. 1991. “A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts”: The Engine that Drives The Crying of Lot 49.” In O’Donnell 1991, 97-126.
    • Hendin, Josephine. 1975. “What is Thomas Pynchon Telling Us? V. and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Harper’s Magazine 250 (March 1975), 82-92. Rpt.in Pearce, Richard (ed.)1981: Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Hall. 42-50.
    • Hitchcock, Peter. 1993. Dialogics of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
    • Hite, Molly. 1983. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
    • Holquist, Michael. 1981. “Glossary.” In Bakhtin 1981, 423-434.
    • —. 1990. Dialogism. Bakhtin and His World. London and New York: Routledge.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. London & New York: Routledge.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso.
    • Kermode, Frank. 1990. “That was another planet.” Review of Vineland. London Review of Books, 8 February 1990, 3-4.
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
    • Mackey, Louis. 1984. “Thomas Pynchon and the American Dream.” Pynchon Notes 14: 7-22.
    • McHale, Brian. 1992. “‘You used to know what these words mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow.” In McHale: Constructing Postmodernism. London & New York: Routledge. 87-116.
    • O’Donnell, Patrick. 1986 (ed.). New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Jonathan Cape.
    • —. 1975. (1963). V. London: Picador Books.
    • Sanders, Scott. 1975. “Pynchon’s Paranoid History.” Twentieth Century Literature, 21, No. 2 (May 1975), 177-192. Rpt. in George Levine & David Leverenz (ed.) 1976: Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston, Little Brown. 139-159.
    • Schaub, Thomas. 1980. Pynchon: the Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: U of Illinois P.
    • Smith, Marcus and Khachig Tölölyan. 1981. “The New Jeremiad: Gravity’s Rainbow.” In Pearce, Richard (ed.): Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Hall. 169-86.
    • Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell UP.
    • Strehle, Susan. 1992. Fiction in the Quantum Universe. Chapel Hill, NC: The U of North Carolina P.
    • Weisenburger, Steven .1988. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P.
    • White, Allon. 1984. “Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction.” In Gloversmith, Frank (ed.): The Theory of Reading. Brighton: Harvester Press Ltd. 123-146.

     

  • Currency Exchanges: The Postmodern, Vattimo, Et Cetera, Among Other Things (Et Cetera)

    Tony Thwaites

    University of Queensland
    tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.edu.au

     

    [O]ne of the more striking features of the postmodern is the way in which, in it, a whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds--economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally official) jeremiads about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national film festivals, religious "revivals" or cults--have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call "postmodern theory," and which demands some attention in its own right. It is clearly a class which is a member of its own class, and I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodern theory" or mere examples of it. (Jameson, Postmodernism x)

     

    Lists

     

    Is there such a thing as the list in general, the general idea of the list? Lists, after all, resist the general as much as they hint at it. Rather than name a general and finite principle of ordering, the list gives a series of specific cases which is potentially endless. It is tempting to say that this is an endlessness in principle, but principle is precisely what the list suspends, for the moment at least, and until further notice, which we have to admit may never come. The figure of the list is asyndeton, usually defined as the absence or omission of conjunctions,1 but in fact far less committal and more slippery than either of those figures of lack might suggest. Asyndeton refuses to be drawn on lack or presence; it renders indistinguishable the absent, the present-but-unstated, the withdrawn, the obvious, the causal, the consequential and the inconsequential. The asyndetic is not what is absent so much as what refuses to go away: the nagging possibility of connection beyond mere juxtaposition. Lists are thus neither coherent nor incoherent, but work on an unstable margin somewhere between both possibilities, which haunt them both as their possibilities and as the conditions making them possible.

     

    Nevertheless, even though the list may suggest the possibility of a general principle, all that is necessary for it to be a list is mere collocation: the minimal and obvious commonality that its elements are grouped together in this list, here, now. Happenstance perhaps. A list may be no more than a disjunct set, the meeting point for things which would share no internal necessity if it were not for the possibility that the very silence of asyndeton makes that boundary between internal and external a somewhat leaky one, subject to all sorts of osmotic exchanges. The list is provisionally (even though that provisionality is quite indefinite in its extent) held together by the very act of listing. It awaits its principle, which lies somewhere in the future and in the past, as something which is yet to be fully determined but which will be installed by this future act as having always already been there, in the will have been of the future anterior. Structurally, the necessity of the principle cannot help but be retroactive, and thus it carries within it the traces of the contingent, the adventitious. This is why, even in its arrival, this principle remains an awaiting, the purest of happenstance. Such a event need not have occurred, in the sense that it is predictable from none of the predicates of its components; but that it has occurred installs it retroactively as necessary: this is what had to happen for the present, this present, to arrive.

     

    As John Frow points out (10), the list is one of the recurrent rhetorical devices of writing on the postmodern. It would be easy to propose a meta-list of postmodern texts which rely somewhere in their argument on the potentially inexhaustible listing of postmodern things: we would have the cultural critiques of Jameson or Lyotard, the political economy of Harvey or Aglietta, the geographics of Soja, the literary theory of Hutcheon, the celebrations of Hassan. In the list’s suspension of the principle which seems at times almost coterminous with discussion of the postmodern, it is not surprising that, as Frow says, the very idea of the postmodern should be conceptually incoherent (9-12).

     

    Nevertheless, this would not in itself be sufficient reason for discarding the postmodern as simply an ill-conceived notion or an unfortunate mistake. One of the causes for caution Frow gives is that whatever its problems, the postmodern is already in a sense there on the agenda, given as a discursive object, with certain very real discursive, epistemological, institutional and political effects which need to be taken seriously (8-9). This would be a necessary, if minimalist, position: if one cannot take the postmodern as a serious instrument of analysis, one can and should nevertheless treat it at least as a category for analysis, one which must be carefully scrutinised as a socio-politico-epistemological phenomenon rather than dismissed as a mystification. But once this is admitted, another difficulty arises immediately: it may not be possible to draw a clear line between texts which analyse and texts which are analysed. Jameson decides quite early that he is not even going to try to draw that line: “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such ‘postmodern theory’ or mere examples of it.” Significantly, this declaration follows immediately after a listing: that “whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds” which “have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call ‘postmodern theory.’” These analyses coalesce: they are not so much articulated with each other across clear boundaries, like parts of a well-oiled theoretical machine, as subject to a loss of boundary, an indefinition; what they form in their coalescence is something which was not there before, a new genre of uncertain status, whose possibly disjunctive nature is marked by the noncommittal: we “might as well” call it “postmodern theory,” this persistent aggregation whose very structure may be the friability of the list. Jameson’s book is riven–and driven–by an uneasy yet gleeful fascination with a postmodernity it sees as both symptom and treatment, object and means. If the list is asyndetic in its delays and in the instability of its hide-and-seek games with coherence and incoherence, how can one avoid listing in the course of analysing it? Necessary as it is, that minimalist position–at least we should take the postmodern seriously as an object for analysis–cannot be contained, even in the very act of its postulation. From the very beginning, the minimal position is one of excess.

     

    To the extent that the postmodern is asyndetic, then, it is not simply incoherent. What is at stake in it, as both object and tool of inquiry, is a complex and unstable play of coherence and incoherence. We should perhaps read the postmodern not merely as a failure of conceptualisation, but–and always among other things–as the question of external and internal limits of the concept: on the one hand as an index of aspects of the specific phenomena the term attempts to conceptualise and of the problems of conceptualising them, and on the other hand of the limits of conceptualisation in general (which is precisely the question of what such an in general might involve, and of the asyndetic nature of that edge between the specific and the general).

     

    One way of reading the recourse to listing might, for example, be to emphasise its deictic moment. It is as if somewhere along the line in talking about the postmodern, a blockage occurs: as if, for whatever reasons, “the postmodern,” whatever it might be, resisted abstraction or generalisation, or perhaps were precisely this resistance, and repeatedly forced one back to the specific and a resort to pointing. This is a discursive blockage, on the levels of both signifier and signified: the signified concept “dog” is neither this particular dog nor that one; the signifier is neither the way I say “dog” on this given occasion, nor on another the way you say it with quite different voice, tone, pitch, timbre and accent. In the asyndetic blockage which marks one of the limits of language as system, a stammer develops. Language granulates, into a nomination which can only be repeated immediately, potentially without end. But nomination must always, as a condition of its sense, be accompanied by the non-linguistic, the extra-linguistic. I am forced to gesture. I say the word “dog,” and at the same time I point in some way: this one, this one here…And this one too… The structure of the list, then, is never purely linguistic, for all that a list is a sequence of namings. It is also, at the same time and as a condition of its intelligibility as list (and as linguistic), irreducibly gestural, choreographic. It marks a trajectory (here…and here…), the trace of events: a dance, like the spatterings across a Jackson Pollock canvas. Contrary to the common complaint that the postmodern cannot see beyond the linguistic, the list, which would seem to be its figure par excellence, suggests seeing it as the site of a perpetual and constitutive leakage between word and event in its gestural knotting. A most peculiar knotting: asyndetic, provisional, retrospective and situational, forever in the process of being simultaneously unknotted and done up again. The coherence of the asyndetic link is always at stake, and that is why the list proliferates indefinitely, even the shortest list: no finite number of elements can exhaust its reknotting.

     

    If the logic of the list is asyndetic, and if the list is a recurrent figure in discussion or examples of the postmodern, should we just come out and say that whatever else it might be (and that is far from clear) the postmodern is asyndetic? That is, that the postmodern can be predicated as asyndetic, that asyndeton is one of its properties or characteristics? But asyndeton is not just a characteristic among others: it opens the very space of the list in which characteristics and properties can be nominated as such. In a sense which is neither simply logical nor chronological, asyndeton is prior to properties, the proper, the unitary. Once properties are assigned, there is the postulation of a link between the property and the thing which bears it as its property, and thus there is no longer asyndeton. The asyndetic is the keeping open of the question. This is the insistence of the postmodern, certainly, its refusal to go away. It may also be, in a sense on which we will need to elaborate shortly, its value. It may be: the question needs to be kept open. If, of course, precisely, it is to have value.

     

    Asyndeton’s game of coherence is a promise. Like any promise, it may not make good on itself: that is precisely what makes it asyndetic. A promise whose fulfilment was absolutely guaranteed would not be a promise at all, but the determined, ironclad operation of a law. A promise is a promise not because it can be fulfilled, but because it need not be: the real figure of the promise is the broken one. Conversely, when a promise is fulfilled there is something in this very fulfilment which is gratuitous, which need not have occurred in order for it to be a promise, and which has arrived like happenstance from the outside. Asyndeton is no more incoherence than it is coherence: it is the promise of coherence, the very opening of coherence as a question which links it–asyndetically, as a question–to the postmodern. As promise, it is also, as we shall see, the site of return of a certain performativity.

     

    Much writing on or of the postmodern (and this much, this for example, cannot help but bring with it–already, and before the positing of any specific example to fill that role–the list and the question of coherence) of course poses coherence as a question, to the extent that it is quite precisely and knowingly concerned with what can be characterised as logics of structural limit and margin. To pose the question of limit is not to jettison structure, principle or coherence as such: it is to ask about the ways in which regularities and principles of coherence are embedded in and emerge from fields not governed by those principles. It is to position an investigation on the margins where a regularity is still in the process of formation. The instability which is constitutive of margins is thus not merely a stage to be superseded by a final stable form; on the contrary, it is what remains, as an irreducible ghosting or a zone of undecidability where such stabilities not only coalesce but also just as rapidly dissolve again. Instability here reveals itself as the very condition and limit of any possible stability. The philosophical locus classicus for the investigation of such logics of margins is of course Derrida, but the issue is hardly one engaging only philosophy. Such logics are also involved, for example–and here again we have to go into list mode–in things as different as the flexible accumulation which Harvey sees as characteristic of late capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism perpetuates itself as crisis; the generic differends of phrasing Lyotard examines in The Differend; the machinic assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari; and the Jamesonian “cultural logic of late capitalism” (though we might well want to question the singularity of the definite article of Jameson’s subtitle, and suggest that what late capitalism provides is not so much a singular cultural logic as an endless and never fully systematic negotiability of cultural logics).

     

    Exchanges

     

    The list is a set of exchanges across limits, a question of what links and separates. What can be involved in such exchanges? What, for a start, of that very concept of exchange? What exchanges does the concept of exchange itself take part in? If categories are formed in exchange, then exchange itself can be no simple category or concept, but already an exchange of exchanges.

     

    Exchange is never total equivalence. Equivalence is the overlooking of the remainder and the messy overlaps of the superimposition: equivalence is generalisation, and this is why there can be no general principle of the list. Neither, for the same reason, can there be a generalised exchange, as exchange is the very possibility of generalisation, just as it is of equivalence, which it everywhere exceeds. Exchange is invoked everywhere, and yet it has no principle; without principle, it is the very possibility of principle. Exchange is related to the event before it is a matter of the concept; in its nonequivalence, it marks out as remainder a complex trajectory across a number of regions.

     

    Traversing lists, exchange is not a term exclusive to one discourse, or even any totalisable set of discourses. Indeed, the very act of totalisation must necessarily invoke exchange, which thus remains beyond or outside all possible acts of totalisation it enables. Exchange as such cannot be totalised. That there is no general exchange forces us back into list mode, a series of names which will always be haunted by arbitrariness. One such listing: Marx and the political economy of exchange-values; the Saussurean thesis of linguistic value as based entirely on a play of “differences without positive terms”; Lyotard’s familiar argument that performativity, as the effectivity of the circulation and production of exchange-value, becomes late capitalism’s sole legitimation of any action; somewhere nearby, his in many ways complementary argument about incommensurabilities of exchange in the differend; connecting in a number of ways to both of these are the Wittgensteinian problematics of the language-game, with all of their severe disjunctions from the Saussurean model and the various semiotics which come from it; though they seem to avoid mention of each other, a number of connections including a shared one back to Heidegger place Vattimo and Derrida somewhere in the same neighbourhood: Derrida raises the question of a general economy as it emerges in Hegel, Bataille, Freud, and returns repeatedly to the problematics of the post(-) and its destinerrance–to mention only those; in another direction again (now the post- has arrived), there are Harvey’s arguments about market deregulation and the economics of flexible accumulation. And so on, and so on…: the ellipsis, the mark of the list.

     

    To list is not to say that the elements of the list are all examples of the same thing: that at some maybe deeper and more essential level which hides itself from the causal gaze, all of these highly disparate discourses and phenomena would show themselves to be just so many examples of a single process (a quite classical structuralist homology, in effect). That is precisely what the list leaves in suspense and demurs from saying. Is exchange the same thing in Marx and Saussure? In the former, to go no further than the starting-point for the first volume of Capital, exchange describes the relationships between two categories, money and the commodity; in the latter, it describes the co-existence of certain elements within a common paradigm-set of morphemes. Different relationships are set up in each case, in different ways and between different categories of different entities. There is no simple equivalence: one cannot superimpose Marx on Saussure and hope for a neat fit. And yet, neither are the two unrelated. When Saussure introduces the concept of value as the mechanism of linguistic meaning, the extended figure on which he draws is, after all, nothing but the coin. Significantly, it is an analogy which cannot even strictly be made in the detail Saussure’s own argument requires (Harris 118-123). There is a complex exchange between Marx and Saussure, between exchange in Marx and exchange in Saussure. One cannot exchange one exchange for the other in the sense of achieving a total equivalence; but on the other hand, the two exchanges cannot but be exchanged, cannot be prevented from exchange, in all sorts of partial and perhaps unforeseeable ways. And then there are all the other terms in our initial list (and more, and more). Not to mention that there will be, in the very next instance, what we can surely take only as the equally complex exchange between the exchange invoked by any term in that potentially endless list and that of any other. And then between that exchange of exchanges and the previous….

     

    In this proliferation, exchange is a switchboard connecting and marking the distance between all sorts of things, and in ways which can never wholly be determined before the event. There can be no single or even stable and determinable exchange which will be common coin for all of them. What we have here is more like a sheaf of disparate causalities and temporalities, whose vectors move in different directions, at different rates and in different rhythms. Pierre Bourdieu is fond of citing Cournot to the effect that chance is “a word which…designates the encounter between two independent causal series” (Bourdieu, In Other Words 80). In this sense, exchange opens up to contingency where equivalence would banish it. The contingent is not what is devoid of regularity or causality, so much as that whose regularities and causalities–such as they may be, for that remains the asyndetic question–belong to a different economy. In moving from one such economy to another, in even invoking them in the same breath, what is at stake is not only a mechanism of exchange, but also the rates of exchange: how one exchanges between one exchange and another.

     

    Consider this in more detail. Let us continue for a while in the Saussurean circuit. Saussure remodels signification along economic lines, as value produced in the interplay of terms which remain purely differential rather than substantial. An objection frequently raised to Saussure is that this play of differences is nevertheless hampered by its being limited to the linguistic: to the phonemic or graphemic differentials of the signifier on the one hand, and the abstractly conceptual differentials of the signified on the other, in disregard of the nonlinguistic forces at work within language. Under a number of very frequent and influential readings, Saussure is often seen as operating an elaborate and interlocking series of exclusions of the socio-political, through binaries of synchrony/diachrony, langue/parole, syntagm/paradigm: what results is a system which is transcendental, non-phenomenal, frozen off from actual language, actual usage, and all possibilities of agency.2 Nevertheless, as Gregory S. Jay points out, the Course itself “cautions against building a formalist theory on such principles as ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’ and does so through socio-political metaphors.” What’s more, these socio-political metaphors cluster in precisely those passages which are so frequently read as proof of Saussure’s very refusal of the social:

     

    The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed [imposé], not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be called colloquially “the stacked deck” [la carte forcée]…. No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word [la masse elle-même ne peut exercer sa souveraineté sur un seul mot]; it is bound to the existing language.

    No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple…language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent. (Saussure 71; qtd. in Jay 51- 2)

     

    Jay reads this as something quite different from linguistic formalism: it is, he says, a “demystification of a social contract theory of language,” which “offers itself as a course in ideological criticism,” and which “could aim a political semiotics at those theories of individual freedom, law and community that figure themselves as the transparent self-conscious expressions of knowing subjects” (Jay 52).

     

    A socio-political metaphor does not, of course, make a socio-political discourse. Jay is not claiming that Saussure is a political theorist who has been misinterpreted by wilful epigones as a linguistic formalist. At very least, the more obvious formalisms exist alongside, within passages such as the one I have just cited; they are even in many ways attempts at resolution of the issues raised by such passages, and themselves complex negotiations of the politico-discursive. A reading of the Course cannot afford to forget, for example, that whatever else it might be, its argument is also a disciplinary one, and its distinctions between what is internal and external to linguistics are never a conceptual or epistemological matter alone, but always a matter of struggle over what sort of activity is to be done in institutions which declare themselves linguistic, by whom and with what training: it is an argument about universities, chairs, professionalisation, and funds. Another complex network of possible exchanges plugs into the switchboard, to be read necessarily both with and against an indeterminate number of those other exchanges, in variable and sometimes downright indeterminable ways, but never with the possibility of reading in simple isolation from them, or with the hope that all of these simply reduce to the one simple transaction.

     

    The argument to be made about Saussure, then, is not that he excludes “the political.” (What would the political be, that it could be an option a text could take?) It is rather that such a deliberate methodological refusal is itself a socio-political move. Saussure’s text is itself diacritical: it takes its meanings from a complex set of interchanges which traverse it and which it negotiates but does not regulate, in a way which is both profoundly Saussurean (this is, after all, the very argument the Course makes about meaning as value) and at the same time deeply inimical to the Saussurean project (because these interchanges do not stop short at or even permit the clear definition of a boundary of the text). Saussure’s text operates a set of exchange rates with what is simultaneously incommensurate with it and yet formative of it, and out of which it produces compromises which are functional because of rather than despite their formal incompletenesses.

     

    The political is not a realm outside the textual, with which textuality negotiates more or less faithfully or whose story it tells more or less truly. It is this very ad hoc, partially determined and yet partially indeterminate, unstable, traversal process of exchange. If the economy of exchange set out by the Course appears formally less than consistent, this is because it is also negotiating changes across economies, where no smooth transition of values is possible. Needing to admit as the basis of its theoretical exchange mechanisms the interconnections which make up value, it must also and at the same time exclude some of those interconnections (the “sociological,” the “historical,” etc.) on the basis of other and equally necessary exchange mechanisms (disciplinarity, professionalism, pedagogics, etc.), and without common ground. What are the rates of exchange here, marked within Saussure’s text–if indeed we can still speak of a within of something constituted by its exchanges? What interests are to be gleaned, and what unrecuperable losses? “Saussure” is a complex and unresolved network of switching-points between discourses which are–or so it would seem from the evidence of the Course itself, and its own assertions about what can and cannot be considered within its system–strictly incommensurable. This is not to argue that they cannot be put together.3 They obviously can be, and are all the time, beginning with the Course itself, and with certain very real effects when this happens. Anybody knows that incommensurables are exchanged all the time, that they are among the most banal of exchanges, despite the impossibility of any stable or even fully determinable exchange rate. Formal incommensurability has never meant inadjudicability, just the necessity of playing it by ear. True, the fit will never be exact, the translation never true; there will always be residues left to one side, dropouts on the line, interference patterns where the superimposition of two noncongruences produces fleeting, persistent moiré ghosts in the system. But it is this messiness of fit which is the model of exchange, not the balanced equation (which is the freak, the crude approximation, the burst of nostalgia). And it is this messiness of fit which, far from being an indecision which marks the death of the political, is itself the very possibility of the political, the point from which it can begin.

     

    There would doubtless be similar moves to be made in the other interconnections available on this exchange. Each of them would be a meta-argument, readable as about itself and its own procedures; each of them raises the meta-economic question of how one converts between economies. None of them provides a position which is epistemologically, at least, necessarily more privileged (or more “meta-“) than the others. At the same time, of course, this is not to say the plurality of perspectives means an indifference, in which all such positions would be in principle interchangeable: exchange is after all not formal equivalence, and asyndeton keeps the question of connection open to contingency. The choice–and we should not assume that this should be simply the free choice of an agent–always stands to be something which matters very much. Metalanguages are always in some sense incommensurable, available or performable in different circumstances, under different conditions, producing different effects, all of which are never simply substitutable one for the other. Nevertheless–or is it because of this?–there are always incessant exchanges and negotiations being made amongst them, according to something like a pragmatics of the ad hoc, of what lies to hand. Their very incommensurability is what makes exchange both crucial and unavoidable.

     

    Limits

     

    At various points in each of his English-language collections of essays, The End of Modernity and The Transparent Society, Gianni Vattimo expands on an argument whose outline is familiar from Weber, among others: modernity is that epoch in which being modern becomes a fundamental value in itself.

     

    Modernity is primarily the era in which the increased circulation of goods (Simmel) and ideas, and increased social mobility (Gehlen), bring into focus the value of the new and predispose the conditions for the identification of value (the value of Being itself) with the new. (End of Modernity 100)

     

    Because this fundamental value–the one which effectively founds all other values–is itself necessarily without foundation, one of the consequences of this move is to raise in a particularly acute form the whole issue of axiomatics. With the modern, to the extent of modernity, all that is necessary for value is that something appear in the circulation of exchange: now, here. For modernity, newness itself newly appears as a founding of value (and thus, by its own logic, of the most valued value). The most valued as the most modern is that which is due most to this present circulation, the newest; that which has not, until now, had a place in the incessant circulation of values in which it now appears and for which it now provides a bright, ephemeral point around which everything, at least for now, gravitates. For this modernity, in so far as it is modernity, exchange–and particularly the debut, the entry into circulation–is all. Whatever does not circulate, or at least bear the possibility of circulation, cannot have value. For it even to be value, use-value can only be a derivative form, a sort of residue left behind in the wake of exchange. Value is fundamentally exchange-value: modernity translates currency.

     

    This modernity is expansive and linear: a logic of progress, which is “just that process which leads towards a state of things in which further progress is possible, and nothing else” (End of Modernity 101). Yet it also curiously finds itself checked by a set of internal limits, whose figure here will be none other than the list:

     

    A good deal of twentieth-century philosophy describes the future in a way deeply tinged with the grandiose. Such descriptions range from the early Heidegger’s definition of existence as project and transcendence to Sartre’s notion of transcendence, to Ernst Bloch’s utopianism (which is emblematic of all Hegelian/Marxist philosophy), and to the various ethics which seem ever more insistently to locate the value of an action in the fact of its making possible other choices and other actions, thus opening up a future. This same grandiose vision is the faithful mirror of an era that in general may be called “futuristic”…. The same may naturally be said of the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde movements, whose radically anti-historicist inspiration is most authentically expressed by Futurism and Dadism. Both in philosophy and in avant-garde poetics, the pathos of the future is still accompanied by an appeal to the authentic, according to a model of thought characteristic of all modern “futurism:” the tension towards the future is seen as a tension aimed towards a renewal and return to a condition of originary authenticity. (End of Modernity 100)

     

    Modernity is grandiose in that it tells a narrative–and this can only be a variety of those infamous “grand narratives” of Lyotard–which lays an ethical claim to the future by curving it back onto its past through that “renewal and return to a condition of originary authenticity.” This great sweep marked out by “a good deal of twentieth-century philosophy” and the “most authentic” moments of the avant-garde can nevertheless only be posited metonymically, from examples. Modernity is thus never simply given as general law, but only as asyndetic regularity: or rather, it is able to posit itself as general law only at the cost of excluding as illegitimate or inauthentic whatever might not fall into such a regularity. It would seem to pass over some things, though it may never be quite sure before the event just which they could be. Authenticity and asyndeton thus mark a limit of the modern, its unstable and never complete passage from regularity to rule: the blinking of generality.

     

    That modernity does not sweep all of philosophy and the avant-garde along in its necessity implies that it is open to a certain contingency. Diverse things which are not necessarily reducible to the same–that is to say, which steadfastly remain a list–come together in it, but only to “predispose the conditions for the identification of value…with the new:” predisposition is neither strict determination nor pure accident, but the envelope of the adventitious. What authenticity attempts to mark out, selectively and retrospectively, as already beyond the boundaries of modernity, is a multiplicity of histories which are not equivalents.

     

    The attempt fails in at least three ways, each of which arises not from the countering of modernity with another opposing mode, but from within the very logic of modernity itself. The first has to do with what Arnold Gehlen calls secularization: if the new is the fundamental value and progress “is just that process which leads towards a state of things in which further progress is possible, and nothing else” (End of Modernity 101), there is no room for narratives of transcendence; secularization involves the “establishment of laws proper to each of many different fields and domains of experience” (End of Modernity 103). But as Gehlen points out, this strategy in the name of progress must turn back on progress itself as it

     

    fans out in divergent processes that develop their own internal legality ever further, [so that] slowly progress…is displaced towards the periphery of facts and consciousness, and there is totally emptied out. (qtd. in End of Modernity 102)

     

    Secondly, modernity’s insistence on the new cannot but be a determined ethnocentrism: it is possible only at a certain advanced stage of capitalist development. The collapse of colonialism and imperialism makes “a unilinear and centralized history de facto problematic” (Transparent Society 4). And thirdly, the development of mass media and their insatiable demand for content leads to a proliferation of narratives and viewpoints which “do not make [the social] more ‘transparent,’ but more complex, even chaotic.” (Transparent Society 4)

     

    If the end of modernity, as Vattimo suggests, is thus “when it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (Transparent Society 2), this end cannot be just a terminal point in a linear progression, after which everything would change radically. Such a point could only be the very moment of modernity itself, the advent of the new. The end of modernity will already have been everywhere within it, in the asyndetic structure of its very regularity. What begins, with this “end,” to reveal itself as already having been there all along is a manifold of regions in which exchange–no longer under the sole aegis of the new — becomes the question of the exchange of exchange: the exchange for which rules do not already exist, where everything is yet to be made. This is the Riemannian space which so fascinates Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, and in which, according to Albert Lautman,

     

    two neighbouring observers…can locate the points of their immediate vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space, but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways. Riemann space at its most general thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other. (qtd. in Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel 57)

     

    It is also the space which comes to characterise the sciences of the nouveau Nouvel Esprit and their break with Bachelardian epistemology, according to Michel Serres’ work of the 1960s and 1970s: the space of Hermes, where knowledge is not the uniform taxonomia of the encyclopedia, or even development punctuated by paradigm shifts, but a series of seas connected by all sorts of unforeseeable passages. Hermes: the messenger, god of communication and of crossroads, but also thief. We could continue: Plotnitsky’s complementarity, Lyotard’s incommensurable regimes of phrasing would all be here somewhere: the very shape of the space is that of the list.

     

    As is its temporality. The time this break inaugurates–and that inauguration can only be a particularly complex logic of foreshadowing–is multiple, non-linear, a sheaf of non-totalisable and asyndetic temporalities. This does not necessarily imply a refusal of linearity or narrative, but it certainly involves a reframing of their significance. Indeed, linearity continues: how could it not when the end of modernity stops nothing, for the reason that the very figure of the end as terminus is constitutive rather than subversive of modernity? Now–and again that “now” will be already far from simple–the linear is retopologised, as a local or regional regularity of the manifold rather than as general rule. To say this is not to limit its extent: there is no contradiction between a phenomenon’s being regional in this sense and thoroughly global in its spread. What regionality implies is not smallness of scale but that its regularities are not already given, in principle, as rule: that is, that their sway is not guaranteed in advance, but is the outcome of exchanges without rule, exchanges of exchange. In this, regionality remains essentially open to the ethical, the necessity of judgement without model, and to the political, in that the extent of a region is always a matter of hegemonies, dominations and contestations whose outcome may in principle have been otherwise. Regionality does not dismiss or destroy linearity or the grand narrative: it multiplies them, and plunges them into a multiplicity of other exchanges which give rise to and situate them, but of which they are no longer the model. The global strategy is essentially local in that it is situational: its outcome cannot be predicted from universal or general principles. Globalisation is itself a strategy, and a local one: it makes certain claims, from certain positions, and with certain effects which, however, are not simply totalisable, due to the regional structure of the manifold, nor, for the same reason, reducible to the effects intended by the agents of this strategy. While linearity and narrative do not in any sense cease to exist, nevertheless, at the limits of modernity’s narrative of progress and the escalation of the new there is silently everted an underside in which everything is also act, event, strategy without finality. One of the purest figures of this would again be Pollock’s abstract expressionism, which retains the line but multiplies it out into an entire field without boundaries, in a depth which everts itself into an entire choreography of bodily movements. On the one hand, the layered depths into which the lines recede and from which they emerge with startling clarity; on the other, the calligraphy which traces out the dance of the painting body. On the one hand, the symbolic, representational, narrative, conceptual structure; on the other, the act or event which gives rise to and underpins this, but which can thus always threaten it with possible dissolution.

     

    Here, it is useful to recall Slavoj Zizek’s characterisation of the act:

     

    With an act, stricto sensu, we can…never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which “nothing remains the same.” Which is why, although History can always be explained, accounted for, afterward, we can never, as its agents, caught in its flow, foresee its course in advance: we cannot do it insofar as it is not an “objective process” but a process continuously interrupted by the scansion of acts. The new (the symbolic reality that emerges as the aftermath of an act) is always a “state that is essentially a by-product,” never the result of advance planning. (Enjoy your Symptom! 45-6)

     

    The product of the interference of independent series, even if those series should themselves be highly causal, is never entirely predictable. Even so, there is something familiar about this. After all, to see the act as a rupture after which nothing remains the same–whether or not that after should be the expected–is precisely the modern imaginary of the moment of break and the narrative of the new which spirals from it. It needs to be augmented by what Zizek elsewhere characterises as the logic of the symptom.4 The eversion effected by the act is not only a break after which everything is different; it is also, and far more oddly, a rupture before which nothing remains the same. The act is retrospective: it reveals this is how things will already have been. Until the moment of the act, things have appeared in one fashion, but with the act the very way in which they have previously appeared now itself appears differently–and in a way which is not predictable from that previous appearance or governed by the intentions of its agents, but is itself also “a state that is essentially a by-product” and thus multiple and asyndetic.5 History is never written solely by the victors, and is singular only to the extent that it is hegemonic.

     

    The “end of modernity,” then, is not punctual. This internal limit of modernity which manifests itself as the eversion of the linearity of the new into the singularity of the event is not a point on a continuum, whether of rupture or articulation. It cannot be assigned a date, not because such an end is purely mythic and refuses to have anything to do with the events of actual history, but because it traverses events in another way than that of the succession of dates. The end of modernity is always too late or too early, never on time, now, here, but marked by an always already or a not yet; it is not a point on a timeline at which everything winds up and something new prepares to begin, but the ways in which modernity’s timeline itself devolves incessantly into the always already and the not yet. Geoffrey Bennington points out how in its own unravelling temporalities the moment of Derridean deconstruction is similarly unlocatable in a chronology:
     

    the logic of supplementarity is stated or signed neither simply by Rousseau nor simply by Derrida (who found it all in Rousseau...)--and this difficulty of assigning (and therefore dating) doctrine or belief obviously explains why deconstruction disrupts any simple history of philosophy or ideas, which would need to know, for example, when the logic of supplementarity was thought or invented (in the mid-eighteenth century by Rousseau or the late twentieth by Derrida--it makes quite a difference in the history of ideas), but cannot know any such thing, for supplementarity exceeds and precedes dating, as its condition of (im)possibility, precisely. (Bennington 198) 6

     

    The limit is not so much boundary as list: a singularity which is always and already scattered across an asyndetic series of other events, other signs,7 traversing which a narrative–many narratives–will be simultaneously both possible and impossible. This is the post- of the postmodern, the “when” in the “when it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (Transparent Society 2): not an after, or the cut guaranteeing the novelty of the after, but the seriality which now (and that moment is now itself immediately serial, scattered) is seen to have been already always inhabiting history. If modernity is “that era in which being modern becomes…the fundamental value to which all other values refer” (End of Modernity 99), then the postmodern cannot be simply an era.

     

    Not simply: for at the same time it cannot not be that. The postmodern, this end-as-limit of the modern, does not simply terminate anything: neither the modern itself as epoch (whose logic, as limit, it must follow impeccably, at and to the limit), nor, more broadly, epochality itself. The postmodern recasts modernity’s narrative of progress: it localises it within a manifold of temporalities which can be reduced neither to survivals of the past nor to seeds of the future, but which in their very multiplicity remain open to “the scansion of acts.” But this does not mean that the postmodern must be some sort of abjuring of dates or events, that it somehow floats motionless above the real stuff of history of events, or that the postmodern is simply the realisation which could in principle be made at any time, that the linear is underpinned by the multiple. After all, Vattimo insists here that the postmodern is tied very closely to certain actual events which are already embedded in and arise from highly modern narratives of progress, whose logic they do not so much terminate as follow impeccably to its limits: secularization, the collapse of colonialism, and the development and proliferation of the mass media. It is not that the postmodern is without anchorage in the chronological, but that it is everywhere in it, proleptically and retrospectively. It arrives (at this date, in this situation, in the form of this question) in the mode of having always already been there. In such an arrival, of which there will never be only one, the postmodern does not so much begin as it is announced, with all the performative force of announcement. To announce an arrival is to bring that arrival into being by and in the act of announcement; but that very arrival can only be effectuated by an utterance which presents that state of things as already accomplished: “The postmodern is here.”8 The technologies of the media and the collapse of colonialism do not cause the postmodern: they announce it in this performative sense as what is already underway in its multiple and scattered singularity.

     

    We must be careful to give all the necessary performative force to this announcement. There is nothing magical about it: performativity plunges us straight into the social. (Magic would be the imaginary of a performative independent of any real conditions which would make it possible, whose force as performative is rolled up in the word itself, by the tongue of the utterer). Even a classical Austinian performative is unthinkable without this. For “I declare you married” to make any sense at all as a performative, let alone to be felicitous, presupposes as already in place a large array of social, political and institutional formations–legal, religious, familial, governmental, sexual–all of which have their complex, multiple and potentially highly disjunct temporalities. For this reason, the announcement of the postmodern is more than just an essentially epistemological act, a realisation of the complexity underlying logics of progress. Announcement, like a declaration of marriage, makes a difference. For the postmodern to be announced places it already within the real.

     

    It is in this light that we should read the “slightly perplexing tension” which Bennington sees between the ideas of the postmodern advanced in the two parts of the English-language version of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Bennington 242). In the long essay which gives the book its title, the postmodern is pictured as succeeding the modern in a relatively unproblematic manner which can itself be described only as modern: certain developments of information technology in particular push the modern into the postmodern. But the shorter appendix, “Answering the question: what is postmodernism?,” sees the postmodern as what precedes the modern, as the cutting edge of its avant-garde. Though the appendix represents a later revision of Lyotard’s position,9 the disjunction between the two parts of the book is nevertheless precisely that inherent in the logic of the post-, which is both condition, the state which characterises an epoch, and the question by which that epochality is unsettled. This tension is not a matter of the threatened incoherence of “postmodernity” as a concept, but the very mode of its temporality as both anchored in and dislocative of the modern.

     

    Phatics

     

    It is of particular interest that the domain to which Vattimo returns so frequently that it seems almost the privileged site for this folding of modernity and the postmodern, should be the aesthetic. Not only does Vattimo philosophise the aesthetic as such, rather than attempt to give it a genealogy elsewhere and in other terms, but he often gives it what at first may seem a surprisingly familiar role: the aesthetic is what allows us to imagine ways of life other than those we live, and to “realize the contingency and relativity of the ‘real’ world in which we have to live” (Transparent Society 10).

     

    Taken in isolation, this could almost be the ostranenie of Russian Formalism. But Vattimo’s arguments mark themselves off from these through a series of slight but far-reaching dislocations. In terms which come from the later Heidegger of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the work is both a setting up of the world and a setting forth of the earth (Auf-stellung and Her-stellung): “The world is set up as the system of significations it inaugurates; the earth is set forth by the work insofar as it is put forward, shown, as the obscure and thematically inexhaustible depths in which the world of the work is rooted” (Transparent Society 53). The world signifies, the earth is the deep substratum of world beyond all signification. But this earth is not simply prior to any world; it is set forth by the work: Herstellung is if anything more active than the English translation would suggest, implying not only a displaying of what is already there or its restoration to visibility but also its production or sheer manufacture. The work is not then a mere froth of temporal and cultural significations beneath which one glimpses the eternal: it is what produces those depths in which world arises as always and already embedded. The work is the retrospective manufacture of the earth, not just of the world. The effect of earth is thus not to root both world and work in an eternal Nature, but on the contrary to deracinate both:

     

    Only because the world of significance unfolded in the work seems to be obscurely rooted (hence not logically “founded”) in the earth, can the effect of the work be one of disorientation. Earth is not world. It is not a system of signifying connections: it is other, the nothing, general gratuitousness and insignificance. The work is a foundation only insofar as it produces an ongoing disorientation that can never be recuperated in a final Geborgenheit. (Transparent Society 53)

     

    The work sets up a world, and in doing this sets forth an earth in which that world will have been always and already deeply rooted; but that earth is set forth in and by that work, a product of the work, which it can found only in a retrospective circle, and necessarily as obscurity. The work is founded not only in but as obscurity: at its heart, always other than it is, is disorientation.

     

    Earth is the obduracy of what refuses to reduce to world, that residue which remains at the heart of any system of signifying and returns to haunt it. In the earlier terms of Being and Time, this disorientation is the anxiety of Dasein faced with a world into which it has been thrown:

     

    While single things belong to the world insofar as they are inserted in a referential totality of significance (each thing is referred to others, as effect, cause, instrument, sign, etc.), the world as such and as a whole does not refer and thus has no significance. Anxiety is a mark of this insignificance, the utter gratuitousness of the fact that the world is. (Transparent Society 50)

     

    This insignificance is not simply an absence of signification. The world has that, and in plenty: all things in it are connected in a dense web of significations and inter-referrals. In a way, the problem is one of the sheer excessiveness of this exchange, which proliferates endlessly and on the local level; its insignificance lies in its asyndetic refusal of generality, that incessant “scansion of acts” of which Zizek speaks. The distinction Heidegger is later to make between world and earth only serves to make the relationship between work and world clearer: if the work disorientates, it is because it too provides an experience of thrownness, an uncanniness in the face of the insignificance this time of the work, which “does not allow itself to be drawn back into a pre-established network of significance, at least insofar as it cannot be deduced as a logical consequence” (Transparent Society 50). Work and world alike are the sites of asyndetic currency exchanges, open to the contingent and the unforeseen. The work “is never serene, never ‘beautiful’ in the sense of a perfect harmony between inside and outside, essence and existence, etc.” (Transparent Society 53). Its very setting-forth is grounded in the energetic disparity of an exchange which can never be concluded, and which is a refusal of use value. Something in it resists being drawn back into the security of a reorientation; the work leaves a certain excess which cannot be consumed, and which can thus only continue unabated in exchange. Indeed, it is the inequivalence of this remainder, the inexchangeable at the heart of exchange, which guarantees the continuation of exchange itself.10

     

    To this extent, what Vattimo is offering seems at times very close to a quite classically vanguardist view of the aesthetic and its functions, and one which correspondingly gives the aesthetic a massive centrality to modernity itself. Modernity arises when, towards the end of the fifteenth century, “the artist came to be thought of as a creative genius and an increasingly intense cult of the new and original emerged that had not existed before (in previous ages the imitation of models was in fact of the utmost importance)” (Transparent Society 2). The socio-political efficacy of the work considered in these terms is as an art “which refuses to be considered as a place of non-theoretical and non-practical experience, and instead claims to be the model for a privileged mode of knowledge of the real, a moment of subversion of the hierarchized structure of the individual and society, and thus an instrument of true social and political action” (End of Modernity 53).

     

    But the twist is that in Vattimo’s argument, this is not simply vanguardism: or rather, it is a vanguardism accelerated to the conclusions of its own logic. First of all, if it claims art “to be the model for a privileged mode of knowledge of the real,” we need to emphasise the indefinite article: a model: by its own logic not the only one, but one which may for all that be global. Aesthetic activity, and particularly the avant-gardist sort, is a useful model for a more generalised economy precisely because in its in-significance it has already performed on itself that transformation into incessant exchange-value which with modernity has come to characterise the monetary economy. (This already is not a chronological marker: it does not suggest some sort of prescience by which, out of all the disparate fields of human activity, the aesthetic has led the way by being first to grasp a logic which will only gradually come to inform other fields; what it points to is a structure of delay, by which that transformation into exchange-value has always and already occurred, even at the very moment of its arrival. What it establishes is not a priority but a folding.) And here lies the second point. In this hegemony of exchange-value, the aesthetic is not just a rather marginal arena of the social, at worst irrelevant and at best the licensed fool. The technological cultures and cultural technologies of late capitalism aestheticise all experience. They produce aesthetic models of behaviour, such as stardom; aesthetic models of government and power, in techniques of consensus, whose effects are made possible only by the essentially rhetorical strategies of the media; even aesthetic models of epistemology, such as Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in the sciences, profoundly based as it is on the figure of genius (End of Modernity 96). Everyday life itself becomes aestheticised.11

     

    Here Vattimo invokes Benjamin, to suggest that there is a complex relationship between the Heideggerian Stoss, the disorientating impact of the work, and the shock Benjamin sees as characteristic of the art of technical reproduction. For Benjamin, shock is a necessary feature of the model of the psyche which Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the conscious registration of the shocks provided by the unforeseeable stimuli which impinge on the organism is a way of minimising the damage they can cause. While shock may be part of the project of a vanguard art, it is far more demotic, even pedestrian, than the Stoss is for Heidegger. Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay keeps returning to those great figures of the city, the crowd, traffic: shock is the daily experience of coping with multiplicity, the manifold, the incommensurate, the inexchangeable which can thus only be exchanged. If shock also belongs to art, it is an art which can no longer keep itself at a hieratic distance, but which, in the loss of the aura entailed by the new processes of technical reproduction, finds itself plunged into the jostle of the crowd. Film, says Benjamin, is like that,
     

    the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus--changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen. (Benjamin 243, n19) 12

     

    But now we have left Heidegger. Unlike Heideggerian Stoss, Benjamin’s shock rediscovers itself in the very haunts of das Man, the “they” of “they say” in all its inauthenticity. On the one hand, there are passages throughout the Baudelaire essay (to go no further than that) in which the everyday appears as the very site of alienation. On the other hand, though–and this is what finds no counterpart in Heidegger–the shock which disorientates emerges from within this very milieu, and not against it from outside. Shock opens the question of community, of community as question, from within itself, and it does this in the very movement by which shock is the experience of what is not yet governed by any single prior system of significations. Once raised, the question may of course be closed again, almost immediately parried by consciousness, but what is important and irreducible is that blinking occasioned by the impingement of the new: it remains the very possibility–as question–of community. Shock and community are profoundly linked.

     

    Shock, community and the aesthetic: for in opening up the gap of the question Vattimo’s invocation of shock harks back, via Gadamer, to a familiar argument from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. For Kant, aesthetic pleasure is “not defined as that which the subject experiences in relation to the object, but is rather that pleasure which derives from the recognition of belonging to a group…that shares the same capacity for appreciating the beautiful” (End of Modernity 56; see also Transparent Society 66-7). The very possibility of the aesthetic is that of belonging to a group: the experience of the beautiful is also and always the experience of community. For Kant, such a group is simply “humanity itself,” a claim which it is hard to see as other than the metonymic and utopian projection of the values of Kant’s own quite specific community, nationality and class.13 (As Vattimo suggests, where foundation is no longer at issue, a group’s identification of itself and its values as universal may be the only form of inauthenticity still possible (Transparent Society 70).) Late capitalism’s technologies of information open up other possibilities, though. The universalisation of the media does not result in the ever more efficient and seductive imposition of a single universal set of values. On the contrary, the media’s very imperatives of efficiency and performativity have the effect of undoing that hegemonic metonym of a single universal set of values. The media allow–even necessitate, as a matter of the very political economy of late capitalism–a multiplicity of narratives, experiences, worlds in the Heideggerean sense. These do not make the social more transparent or utopian; they thicken it into an altogether more chaotic and heterotopian burgeoning of micro-narratives. And all of this, Vattimo argues, occurs as the outcome of the very implementation of rational management, a scientistic rule of reason whose very desire for maximization of effectivity can only scatter out into a multiplicity of dialects, and an erosion of the reality principle. The only universalisation of community the media can offer is the pluralisation of communities (Transparent Society 7).

     

    And it is precisely in the domain of popular culture in all its forms that this proliferating articulation of aesthetic experience as community occurs. The very mechanisms of rational domination contain within themselves, as the rigorous and inescapable consequences of their own premises, a certain dehiscence whereby they cannot but open the possibility of the proliferation of the very things they attempt to bring under control. What power seeks to produce as unity must necessarily in part involve a proliferation beyond the bounds of that unity. This of course is to guarantee nothing, neither the reestablishment of power nor its dismantling: all it says is that the balances are always in their very nature yet to be decided (in its various forms, a frequent closing trope for the pieces gathered in The Transparent Society), and thus that the capabilities of the new media and technologies must be met with what Derrida memorably calls “the most vigilant hospitality” (Points 434 n7).

     

    While this aestheticisation is certainly due among other things to the rise of new technologies, what these do is only extend, accelerate and multiply what is already there. The technologies of “mechanical reproduction” ensure that what has previously been an experience of disorientation restricted to certain narrow domains such as avant-garde art now becomes the texture of the everyday, at the same time as the non-auratic nature of the everyday enters the avant-garde.14 The end of modernity is not so much irruption of the new (which is nothing but modernity itself), but the massive eversion which brings to the surface what that very eversion will ensure will have been from that point always and already there.

     

    There is another sense, however, in which Vattimo’s argument is quite profoundly and classically Heideggerian. For Heidegger, the aesthetic is not a function of the work’s referentiality, nor of any homology it may set up between inside and outside. The aesthetic functions at an altogether more prior and fundamental level than the proposition. If the proposition makes a certain claim to truth, and demands verification (or refutation) through its correspondence to what is the case, then the aesthetic, qua aesthetic, proposes nothing. What makes the work a work is rather what Heidegger calls its “setting-into-work of truth,” the way in which it is able to disclose a world within which such verification or refutation might be a possibility: the yet-to-be-done of the asyndetic. This “setting-into-work” is not itself propositional, but rather the ground (though itself ungrounded, the pure thrownness of situation) on which proposition is possible. Far from sealing the work off from the world, the insignificance, or perhaps presignificance, of the aesthetic is precisely what aligns them, in the mode of the phatic: the question of community, community as question.

     

    The aesthetic, in other words, is already the name for what results when one is faced with the asyndetic. Again, the trajectory of gesture: there it is, facing one; it works, but it nevertheless withholds signification. The work does not so much speak as demand response. What the phatic opens up in the possibility of meeting are the problematics of what Lyotard calls phrasing, the simultaneous possibility (and necessity, as even silence responds) not only of response and responsivity, but also, as Lyotard takes pains to emphasise, of responsibility in its ethico-political dimensions. The horizon of such disclosure of a world is always historical. This is not only in the sense of precise cultural location (the work of art is “the act by which a certain historical and cultural world is instituted, in which a specific historical ‘humanity’ sees the characteristic traits of its own experience of the world defined in an originary way” (End of Modernity 66: my emphases)); it is also, and before that, the very opening of the historical, a term which it asks us to rethink as question. This pre-comprehension which will already have been the space of the aesthetic–the question opened up in and by the asyndetic–is the very possibility of the social and even, in the skewness and even incommensurabilities of reply it guarantees, of the political: “historical, finite” it is “what enables us to speak of an occurrence of truth” (End of Modernity 66).
     

    Notes

     

    1. As, for example, in Preminger (56) and the almost identical entry in Cuddon (60-1).

     

    2. For example, in Eagleton (109-12), Jameson (Prison-House, Chapter III, “The Structuralist Projection)” or Lentricchia (Chapter 4, “Uncovering History and the Reader: Structuralism”).

     

    3. This is surely the point of Lyotard’s The Differend–as against, say, Norris’s reading in What’s Wrong with Postmodernism, that Lyotard is arguing for a sort of laissez-faire pluralism where the absence of formal common grounds for decision of an issue can lead only to an impasse in which no position can be argued against any other. Lyotard’s major example, the one the book opens with, should be an adequate caution against this: the revisionist denial of the Holocaust.

     

    4. “Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depths of the past, but constructed retroactively…the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s networks. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way.” (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 55-6)

     

    5. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are exemplary here, in that they all imply the revelation of a plot which works in retrospect. At some point in each, the protagonist is made aware that she or he may be already part of a plot which extends far back beyond even their own birth; a singularity detonates into a series of asyndetic signs (V, the letter, the Rocket). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop experiences that moment of eversion as one in which the entire world he has known has silently taken some unimaginable step in a new, previously non-existent direction.

     

    6. “The things we are talking about (‘deconstructions’ if you will) do not happen within what would be recognizably called ‘history,’ an orientable history with periods, ages, or episteme, paradigms, themata (to answer according to the most diverse and familiar historiographic codes).” (Derrida, Points 359)

     

    7. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (especially the chapters “Ninth series of the problematic” and “Tenth series of the ideal game” for their discussions of singularity and seriality) and Difference and Repetition (in particular the logic of the “dark precursor,” 119-128).

     

    8. Cf. Zizek, Enjoy your Symptom 97. Hence perhaps also the insistent figure of the angel as a figure of this performative annunciation throughout Pynchon: the final gesture of auctioneer Loren Passerine in Lot 49, the strange vast figures in the sky glimpsed throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. If the secularization attendant on modernity “takes shape through a resumption of the Judeo-Christian vision of history, from which all references to transcendence are ‘progressively’ eliminated” (End of Modernity 101), the postmodern is a completion of this process by installing the apocalypse–which as Derrida reminds us in “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” is also an invocation of the performative–everywhere throughout the secular narrative, at its every point.

     

    9.”Answering the question” forms the first section of The Postmodern Explained to Children, published some seven years later. In the second section, “Apostil on narratives,” Lyotard considers that in the earlier text he “exaggerated the importance to be given the narrative genre,” and briefly recasts the issue in terms of the “phrase regimes” from The Differend (Postmodern Explained 31).

     

    10. And here we would have to read the work’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of commodity form: the object sui generis, whose project seeks to render it incapable of reduction to equivalences with other objects around it, is also the commodity in its purest form. See Transparent Society 50-2.

    11.Here one can see an essential confusion in many of the arguments in cultural studies which seek to oppose cultural policy to cultural critique. In this opposition, policy studies seek to identify the moments of intervention into the apparatuses of governmentality, whereas critique remains content with the moral high ground of the enunciation of principle. Policy studies are thus pragmatic and “realistic” in the sense which always connotes approval, while critique remains tied to the aestheticism of an essentially Arnoldian vision of the role of humanities as intelligence and conscience. Such an argument all too readily buys into the essentially polemical opposition of “ivory tower” and “real world,” and does it very cannily to the advantage of policy studies within the current regimes of funding, research and administration. What it just as readily overlooks, though, is the ways in which governmentality, policy and pragmatism so conceived are themselves phenomena of massive social aestheticisation in precisely the sense we have been discussing. As one of the key theoretical texts of policy studies so well knows–Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government–the conditions of modern forms of governmentality lie in the development of regimes of power which operate an intensive and extensive ethicalisation and aestheticisation of bodies and their practices. Rather than an ideological blind obscuring the real practices of governmentality beneath it, the aesthetic is at the heart of governmentality, which remains unthinkable without it. To the extent that it accepts their opposition, policy studies remains no less stuck in the Arnoldian imaginary, which it merely inverts in the name of a superior performance.

     

    12.Two reference points, among the many possible. The first volume of Musil’s The Man without Qualities had appeared in 1930, some nine years before Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire and six before “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The nameless pedestrian of its opening–a sort of anti-flâneur–meets his death at the intersection of some of these disjunct causalities:

     

    Motor-cars came shooting out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark patches of pedestrian bustle formed into cloudy streams. Where stronger lines of speed transected their loose-woven hurrying, they clotted up--only to trickle on all the faster then and after a few ripples regain their regular pulse-beat. Hundreds of sounds were intertwined into a coil of wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again, and clear notes splintering off--flying and scattering....

     

    Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembling a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. (Musil I 3,4)

     

    And before that, Joyce’s Stephen, baited by Garrett Deasy with the sententious assurance that “All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God,” has gestured towards the schoolroom window through which the sounds of the hockey game can be heard, and placed God firmly in the same street. Behind Stephen’s back, the text agrees, hearing in the shout the name which cannot be spoken:

     

    -- That is God.
    -- Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
    -- What? Mr Deasy asked.
    -- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. (Joyce 42: emphases mine)

     

    13. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s “Conclusion: Towards a ‘vulgar’ critique of ‘pure’ critiques,” in his Distinction.

     

    14. Two canonical examples of the latter, almost exact contemporaries. 1. As Note 12 would suggest, Ulysses (“Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-1921”), whose scandal is to refuse the very auratics its title offers through the analogy of the banal and the mythic, and to provide instead a densely asyndetic manifold of trajectories, insistently local significations, inequivalent exchanges and irreducible remainders. 2. The series of Duchamp ready-mades from about 1913 to his virtual abandonment of art in 1923, which operate on this edge between shock and aura, between the sacral space of the museum (uniqueness) and the banal spaces of the technically reproducible (multiplicity). The ready-made receives this sacrality and wears it–along with its own use-value now reduced to the empty sign of a function it will now no longer have (snow shovel, bottle rack, urinal)–as fancy-dress. In its gleeful affirmation of exchange-value, it completes the secularisation of the museum’s space.

     

    Works Consulted

     

    • Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience. London: Verso, 1979.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
    • Bennington, Geoffrey. Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction. London: Verso, 1994.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984.
    • —. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
    • Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979
    • Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. NY: Columbia UP, 1994.
    • —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984): 3-37.
    • —. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln and London: U Nebraska P, 1986.
    • —. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern UP, 1988.
    • —. Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
    • —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago and London: U Chicago P, 1987.
    • —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
    • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
    • Frow, John. What was Postmodernism? Occasional Paper No 11. Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1991.
    • Harris, Roy. Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale. London: Duckworth, 1987.
    • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
    • Hassan, Ihab. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 119-31.
    • —. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1987.
    • Hunter, Ian. Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. London: Macmillan, 1988.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
    • —. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
    • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
    • —. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972.
    • Jay, Gregory S. America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.
    • Joyce, James. Ulysses. Introduction by Declan Kiberd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
    • Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
    • Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. London: Methuen, 1983.
    • Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.
    • —. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.
    • —. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985. Trans. eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Sydney: Power Publications, 1992
    • Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thebaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985.
    • Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
    • Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. 3 vols. Trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Picador, 1979.
    • Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
    • Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1994.
    • —. In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious. Gainesville: U P of Florida, 1993.
    • Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Enlarged edition. London: Macmillan, 1974.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.
    • —. V. London: Picador, 1963.
    • Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.
    • Serres, Michel. Hérmès. 1. La Communication. 2. L’Interférence. 3. La Traduction. 4. La Distribution. 5. Le Passage du nord-ouest. Editions de Minuit, 1968.
    • Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989.
    • Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture. Trans. and intro., Jon R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
    • —. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
    • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
    • Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 1992.
    • —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
    • —. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

     

  • The Jewish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod: The Case of Lenny Bruce1

    Maria Damon

    Department of English
    University of Minnesota
    damon001@maroon.tc.umn.edu

     

    

To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb
(Lenny Bruce, accompanying himself on drums):

To is a preposition, come is a verb.
To is a preposition, come is a verb.
To is a preposition, come is a verb, the verb intransitive.
To come.  To come.
I've heard these two words my whole adult life, and as a
child when I thought I was sleeping. To come. To come.
It's been like a big drum solo:
Did ja come? Didja come good? Didja come good didja come
good didja come good?
Recitatif: I come better with you sweetheart than with
anyone in the whole goddamn world.
I really came so good. I really came so good 'cause I love you.
Really came so good.  I come better with you sweetheart, than
anyone in the whole world, I really came so good.  So good.
BUT.
Don't come in me.
Don't come in me.
Don't come imme, mimme mimme
don't come imme mimme mimme
don't come in me.
I CAN'T COME.
Cause you don't love me, that's why you can't come.
I love you I just can't come, that's my hangup. I can't come
when I'm loaded, all right?
Cause you don't love me.
Just what the hell is the matter with you?  What has that got
to do with loving you? I just can't come, that's all.
Now if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words
decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual, the words "to
come" really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I'm
rank for saying it to you, and you the beholder gets rank for
listening to it, you probably can't come.

    2

     

    In the summer of 1989 I got a copy of Lenny Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial transcript from Albert Bendich, the defense attorney for the case. As I drove home with the 352-page document, the radio told me of Jesse Helms’ proposed muzzling of the NEA. Heretofore, my interest in Jewishness as a de facto and traditionally “traveling culture” with its own makeshift language(s) had been primarily a process of self-exploration, a project about whose narcissism and self-indulgence I had constant questions. That moment of being trapped in a small and moving space with Jesse Helms and Lenny Bruce, and later, reading the transcript itself, redirected my efforts. My work took on the added dimensions, as well as the urgency, of exploring the ways different “deviant” masculinities overlap and intersect, and how these differences can be read through the hierarchies of culture represented in the trial, which was in effect a showdown between high, low and middlebrow cultures as represented respectively by the academy, the entertainment world with its blurred sexual boundaries, and the discourse of the courtroom and the police force. The trial foregrounded and foreshadowed social change even as its protagonist was offered up for public consumption.

     

    Bruce, the stranger who rode into town and said the right thing at the right time in front of the wrong people, suffered the consequences of a wayward hyperverbalism deployed in the interest of social criticism. Though the scholarship on Jewish-diaspora language use suggests certain strategies–for example, the primacy of anecdotes and minutiae, the valuation of dialogue, commentary and argument as pleasures and/or ends in themselves, the blending of the sublime and the earthy or its rhetorical analogue, the blending of the language of high abstraction and colloquialisms–as characteristic of Jewish written and oral culture, I want to stress that in identifying Bruce’s strategies as “Jewish” I do not posit these strategies as inherently or only Jewish.3 Indeed, Bruce’s manic polyglot eclecticism and makeshift, survivalist logic shares much with a more generalized, multi-ethnic urban sensibility, especially the African-American jive idiom; his “conversation” mingled “the jargon of the hipster, the argot of the underworld, and Yiddish.”4 Nonethless, I focus on the latter because it is, arguably, the primary constitutive element of Bruce’s self-presentation, and because in the context of his San Francisco trial his Jewishness played a mediating role–the lightning-rod role–between San Francisco’s civic structure, the intellectual and sexual countercultures, and the entertainment substratum of the city.

     

    In addition, specific focus on the trial as a cultural and rhetorical event raises issues of censorship in terms that are all too relevantly urgent in light of recent attempts to regulate the languages of the Internet, and to dismantle the NEH and NEA, in the name of policing obscenity. It’s easy to recognize in recent policing of social critique a re-enactment of the anti-intellectualism and anti-pluralism so transparent in the transcript of Bruce’s trial; the charge of “obscenity” is used to legitimate increased government surveillance of the art world, of dissident cultures, and of the academy. I do not argue that Bruce is under attack as a Jew in the same way that 2 Live Crew or Andres Serrano were under attack as men of color.5 Rather, I argue that Bruce’s outsiderhood and ethnic language use set him up to mediate cultural and political tensions in San Francisco–specifically, he was arrested for public references to male genitalia because the emergent gay men’s community in that city posed a threat to mainstream civic discourse. His irreverence and outspokenness about sexuality and race, his willingness (compulsion, in fact) to question all norms of behavior implicated him in the local struggle over cultural expression.

     

    Much lively work on ethnicity, gender and language in American culture has provided the methodological and theoretical base for an investigation of Jewish performance texts and their reception: the approaches to ethnicity and culture provided by James Clifford and Michael Fischer’s “new ethnographies;” the blend of close literary analysis with intuitive musings on the meaning of “vernacular” offered by Houston A. Baker’s work on African-American writers; Renato Rosaldo’s discussion of subaltern wit as a weapon and tool for social analysis; Riv-Ellen Prell’s attention to the specific ways in which gender/power relations are coded in Jewish and anti-Jewish humor. By contrast, with a few notable exceptions, what little scholarship there is on Bruce focuses on the personality cultish aspects of his dramatic life story, or on a simplistic reading of his “martyrdom,” without close theoretical attention to how he generated texts through which we can read the conflicts of his times.6 I hope to bring the questions generated by the first body of scholarship to bear on a moment in Bruce’s and the nation’s life: the moment in which his language use was labeled obscene, and he–not only his words–was censored.

     

    This particular essay, then, explores the cultural position of Lenny Bruce as he stands on the slash between the two words that announced the title of the American Studies Assocation panel for which this piece was originally written: “Inside/Outside: Jewish Cultural Signification.”7 Lenny Bruce balances on that caesura like a carnival artist (his wife Honey grew up, in fact, in the extended-family carny world); he teeters on that vertiginous edge, that “ethereal peak,” as he phrased it, right before his plunge.8 Lenny Bruce as Jewish entertainer is the caesura–the cultural lightning rod of my title–that mediates the inside out, from the outside in.

     

    The lightning rod, the caesura marking difference, the person of Lenny Bruce on stage, is furthermore positioned as an index of male sexuality, the erect penis–not the hegemonic capital-P Phallus of the symbolic order, but rather in this case, Jewish male sexuality, which is as unstable and evanescent in its cultural significance as that liminal space between inside and outside, and encompassing both inside and outside, which characterizes modern Jewish life. If the veiled gentile Phallus is the elusive figure that, like the Wizard of Oz, governs the discursive institutions of American social life from behind the scenes, the exposed penis of the Other is the vulnerable carrier of the subversive disease of “obscenity,” which threatens the stability of those social institutions, and calls down upon itself the harshest recriminations.

     

    Furthermore, using Renato Rosaldo’s analysis of subaltern humor to posit Jewish humor as a weapon of self-defense, one can analyze Bruce’s seduction/attack on his audience as a prototypical Jewish-American male performance strategy for survival. His use of Yiddish to mark a boundary of inclusion/exclusion, his savaging of Jews in front of a Gentile audience as an oblique critique of that audience as well as a direct critique of Jewish hypocrisy and assimilation, the speed of his rap, and his preoccupation with sex and sexuality work together to destabilize normative social relations on all levels.9 These tactics serve as much to confuse the opposition and get away–a tactic of survival–as they articulate an ethical and aesthetic position. They comprise a general critique of stability, an assumption and affirmation of the role of Jew as floating signifier, and a rhetorical representation of the historical and often dire contingencies of Jewish life.

     

    JEW as Diasporic Icon

     

    It’s painful to review the obvious. That Jews occupy the primary (non)space in the Western imagination as interlopers, counterfeits, transients, unknown quantities with chameleon-like qualities is such a truism that to attempt to document it plunges the writer into an exercise bordering on the tautological. I use the singular in my subtitle to underscore ironically the monolithic power of this Western trope: “the Jew” (both genderless and hyperbolic in his invisible masculinity, like “his” “G-d”) as icon of diaspora par excellence. The singularity and capitalization erase the history and materiality of diaspora. The false solidity of the phrase “the Jew” on the one hand and the ethereal diffusion of rotten-sweet crematoria-vapor on the other mask the physical travails and psycho-emotional trauma of displacement. “The Jew” is in fact a floating signifier: the Anglo-Christian imagination represents the Jew as embodying both the elitism of high culture and and the bestiality of low culture, as both the threat of capitalism and that of communism, as both steeped in quaintly old-World ways and committed to dangerously modern and subversive philosophies that “hold nothing dear.” And so on. To some extent this is simply the classic double-bind of an oppressed group. Feminists, for example, have for many years pointed to the virgin/whore/mother tropes constricting the possibilities of women’s sexual expression and experience. And Henry Louis Gates, Jr. among others has discussed the phenomenon of African slaves in the post-Enlightenment New World having to establish their humanity by writing–but not too well: cultivating the persona of the earnest counterfeit was the only way to succeed without being too threatening.10 Unique to the Jewish trope is that Jews as a group represent non-representability. To be Jewish, according to this master-trope, is to be un-pin-downable, without location, liminal.

     

    Performance poet David Antin has pointed out that Jews served as “translators…of language and culture in Southern Spain and the strange fact that they as ‘boundary-dwellers’ in Spain so frequently had the name Marques, that is ‘march-dweller’ or ‘border-‘ or ‘boundary-man or ‘woman’–and furthermore that the names Marx, Marcuse, Marcus all come from an original Marques.”11 English-language speakers are most familiar with this name as the title Marquis, which in early examples provided by the OED refers to the owner of land of poor quality and low profit, or the prefect of a frontier town–a kind of consolation prize of a title. That a name representing liminality itself–boundary-person–evolved into a title of (almost-)nobility just prior to the Jews’ forced exodus from Spain speaks to the longevity and profundity of Western ambivalence toward Jews as objects of desire (that is, of both hatred and intense desire for appropriation). Ricky Sherover-Marcuse has observed that one common form of anti-Semitism is the claim (by the non-Jewish majority) that Jews are the oppressor: we are told that we “control the media,” that we have a secret plot to take over the world, that we’re all rich and pull strings behind the scenes to get our way. The ambiguity of the title “marquis” instantiates this weird reversal; as in the word “snob” (sine nobilitate), the title granted the liminal character, the entertainer-trickster, evolves into ersatz, arriviste pseudo-respectability which can then be re(pre)sented as privilege.12 Indeed, the modern announcer of entertainers (inbetweeners/Jews), the theater marquee, has its origins in the same word: a marquee was the open-air tent inhabited by marquises (inbetweeners/Jews). The multiple puns in Bruce’s visual gag in How to Talk Dirty and Influence People comes to mind here: a photo of the Strand Theatre’s marquee announcing Bruce’s engagement while the caption reads: “At last! My name in lights: S-T-R-A-N-D.”13 A strand is a border (beach) a marker of transition or inbetween-ness. Lenny Bruce was stranded on his own terrain–as the standup (erect) comic, he had marked out the trickster’s border realm for himself and was abandoned to die in that vanguard twilight zone after being encouraged and commended for occupying it. The other aspect of this joke, of course, treats the theme of naming, de-naming, re-naming so painfully prominent in diasporic histories. “Bruce,” the name that appears on the marquee, is no more Lenny’s “real” name than “Strand” is–nor was Schneider, the one before “Bruce.”

     

    That one can both disavow and affirm an identity with perfect sincerity indicates the elusive power of the “double-consciousness” W.E.B. Du Bois has written of so eloquently, and the “ethnic id” aptly named by Michael Fischer.14 The ability to maintain and tolerate seemingly contradictory positions, to live in multiple realities, is currently considered a characteristic of “postmodernism,”15 alternately affirmed as a liberation of consciousness from the constraints of linearity and sequential time/space, and bewailed as a loss of authenticity and stability, a numb sensibility lending itself perfectly to a dangerously high tolerance for and acquiescence to social trauma. This ability, however, is also profoundly and traditionally “Jewish.”

     

    MR. BRUCE WAS NOT PERMITTED TO REPRESENT HIMSELF: Jews and the Crisis of Representation

     

    Kimberle Crenshaw has outlined the inadequacy of current public systems of representation to acknowledge identity and subjectivity.16 She tells of a group of Black women who, as Black women, experienced harrassment in the workplace, wanted to sue their employer for discrimination. They were told that they could not sue as Black women, though that was the identity under fire in these instances of harrassment: they had to sue either as Black–in which case they had to demonstrate that Black men were similarly harrassed, or as women–in which case they had to demonstrate that non-Black women were similarly harrassed. The legal system had no way of recognizing their subjectivity as they themselves experienced it; there was no means for them to represent themselves within the strictures of a categorical worldview that could not make room for them to grant themselves meaning.

     

    As it is for many “minority” groups, the condition celebrated by postmodernists as the “crisis in representation” has long been a lived reality for Jews. The aesthetic and intellectual excitement of challenging Western epistemologies which posit a simple one-to-one correspondence between empirical phenomena and “meaning” intersects pointedly with a struggle for the right to self-representation. Self-representation, according to Bruce, cannot involve a loyalty to a fixed identity; therein, to the extent that nationalism affords a spurious self-certainty, lies the devastating cynicism of his anti-Israel jibes in “Religions, Inc.” (“‘We gotta …great man…to… tell us what to do with the Heavenly Land–Rabbi Steven H. Wise!’ Rabbi Wise: ‘…I tink vee should subdivide.’”)17 and “Christ and Moses Came Back” (“We’re not [in temple] to talk of God–we’re here to sell bonds for Israel!”).18 On the other hand, this refusal of a fixed geopolitical body champions a Jewishness with almost sentimentally universalist overtones, especially his famous anti-essentialist dicta:

     

    I neologize Jewish and goyish. Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai Brith is goyish; Haddassah, Jewish. Marine Corps--heavy goyim, dangerous. ... Koolaid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumperickel is Jewish, and , as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes--goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish...Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them. Balls are goyish. Titties are Jewish. Mouths are Jewish. All Italians are Jewish...19

     

    Here, Bruce loads Jewishness with connotations of (ethnic) soulfulness, femininity, earthiness and hipness. Refusing genetic, religious or even cultural essentialism, he nonetheless incurs a different danger. He self-allegorizes a “Jewishness” so grandiose and omnipresent that it pervades all categories rather than being itself a category. Like carbon or chi (life-energy), Jewishness is, as it were, pre-essentialistic (or pre-taxonomic) in its transcendence, an inchoate prima materia–soul substance–that is nonetheless localized in the minutiae of daily life: music, food, consumer products, living arrangements, body parts. The delicate process of locating any human(e) universality in this kind of particularity (in, for example, anecdote, field observation, text or incident) describes the dialectic between the local and the theoretically generalizable which is at the heart of much current academic debate in anthropology (“pro/con ethnography”), feminism (“identity politics”), and cultural studies.20

     

    Self-representation, as distinct from representation by hostile or well-meaning others, is one attempt to avoid laboring under restrictive definitions superimposed on a necessarily fluid subjectivity; to return to the Crenshaw example, the right to self-representation means the right to represent multiple subjectivities–especially those not mandated as legal, racial or institutional categories. Self-representation implies taking the proceedings into the realm of trans- or anti-discursivity, a move threatening enough to warrant censorship either by explicit silencing or by forcing a flamboyant rap (such as Bruce’s performance) into the highly circumscribed courtroom format, limiting wide-ranging verbal potential to legal jargon. Although in the history of his courtroom dramas Bruce was granted the right to representation by others (and hired and fired an amazing number of lawyers, none of whom satisfied his need for total control), he was heavily discouraged–as defendants routinely are–from representing himself as his own “counsel.” Bruce was expected to stay silent while prosecuting and defense attorneys read his decontextualized routines from transcripts; his bodily presence was necessary to the trials but his hyperverbality–arguably his “real” presence–was forcibly and repeatedly banished. The courts’ ambiguous need for his presence put him in absurd legal quandaries sometimes. By scheduling his trials in two different states concurrently, the law prevented him from fulfilling even the basic requirement of physical presence since he could only be in one place at a time; thus he was de facto guilty in the court at which he could not appear.

     

    Lenny Bruce, né Leonard Alfred Schneider in Brooklyn in 1926, came from a background of vaudeville (voix de ville, voice of the city, the low culture of Lower East Side Jews) into public fame as a hip, autodidactically intellectual, socially relevant and utterly irreverent standup comic whose routines ranged from “Psychopathia Sexualis” to “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.” In this sense his biographical data instantiate the (to revise Mohamed Ali’s brilliant phrase) float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-gadfly signifier that is the Jew in the modern Western imagination. He was tried for obscenity and acquitted in March of 1962, following the first of many arrests for obscenity. This initial obscenity arrest took place on October 4, 1961 at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s nightclub strip (San Francisco’s strip strip, conformity to the “community standards” of which might qualify otherwise censorable “obscene speech” for protection). He was arrested for violating the Penal Code, the phallic order represented by the conservative elements in San Francisco’s political make-up, its traditionally Irish-Italian-American police force and political machinery. His violation consisted of three instances of obscenity: use of the word “cocksucker,” use of the term “kiss it” with implicit reference to an exposed penis, and the famous semantics-lecture-cum-religious-chant, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb.” All of these transgressions target male sexuality as both subject and object of demystification, unveiling, uncovering, a verbal circumcisive display experienced by representatives of the normative order as an assaultive castration. It is important to see this cultural text, the obscenity trial, as a moment in which gender, sexuality and language are on trial/in process, according to Tel Quel‘s famous pun, capturing in an instance of dramatic confrontation the increasing visibility of San Francisco as a center for transgressive social expression.

     

    Entertaining Anxiety

     

    Lenny Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial marked a temporal instant in the cultural history of a city that is itself remarkable in American culture. The late 1950s and early 60s witnessed a “Renaissance” in the Gold Rush City; it established itself as the center of several different but overlapping countercultures noted for their flamboyant foregrounding of the aesthetic and their emphasis on alternate social organizing units (the gay relationship, the hippie “tribe,” the Third World arts coalition), which threatened assumptions about the interrelatedness of sexuality, reproduction and traditional family life. The Bay Area developed as a capital of anarcho-socialist activity (and, shortly, the Free Speech Movement), and of avant garde literature and life. It fostered a literary community whose oxymoronic epithet was “Beat” (beatific, wasted, jazz-inspired) and a burgeoning gay community which for the first time in American history would have civic and political as well as cultural visibility as a cohesive unit. By the end of the ’60s, the region had become a center for the culture of altered consciousness and experimental spiritual practice. Language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, consciousness–identity itself–all became contested terms in a celebratory and experimental atmosphere.

     

    Traces of all the destabilizing elements of the countercultural discourses surfacing in the particularly volatile years of the shift from the McCarthy era to the Civil Rights Era can be found in embryonic form in Bruce’s controversional Jazz Workshop routine and in the trial that ensued. The trial’s subtext concerned, among other things, mainstream discomfort with the emergent gay men’s community (Bruce used the word “cocksucker” in a routine about being asked by his agent to do his gig in a newly gay bar). The trial displayed the town/gown politics of the Bay Area’s own cold war between the police force and the “long beards” at Berkeley, who in Bruce’s defense invoked figures like Rabelais and Swift to legitimize his satirical and ribald “shpritzes.” The trial embodied the tension between the protocol of juridical process and the carnivalesque nature of Bruce’s deterritorialized language–dramatized by the constant disruptive laughter from the courtroom audience. Although he was neither San Franciscan, gay, literary, beat, nor politically active in any conventional sense, the notoriety of Bruce’s arrest and trial enabled, almost by accident, the emergence of these cultures’ national visibility. Specifically, several of the dramatis personae of the trial indicated Bruce’s affiliations with these circles. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published and distributed Bruce’s pamphlet Stamp Help Out, was the contact person who supplied the defense attorney; Al Bendich, known to Beat circles as Ginsberg’s successful ACLU defense counsel in the “Howl” obscenity case six years earlier. The presiding judge, Horn, had also presided over the “Howl” case. Bendich hypothesizes that Bruce owed his acquittal to Horn’s having been “educated” about obscenity and the Constitution by the defense in the “Howl” case.21 (The “Howl” obscenity trial, also held in San Francisco, was likewise a bellwether instance of Jewish-male verbal and sexual identity on trial.) Bruce’s own status as an ethnic person, an outsider whose weapon was language–in short, as a Jewish entertainer–marked him for repercussion. He became a lightning rod mediating civic wrath and countercultural flamboyance.

     

    I have discussed elsewhere the survivalist compulsion in Bruce’s Jewish hyerverbalism: if I stop talking they’ll kill me.22 The hairpin turns in logic and association in Bruce’s tragicomic spiel hold out against the closure that means death. Bruce told Bendich “I can see around corners,” evoking images of adrenaline-powered feats of psychic and physical strength.23 The vision is always of disaster; the words are always chasing after the vision, trying to articulate it and to obscure it (you can’t let them know you know), and racing to head it off at the pass. Hence the decentered, brilliantly precise imprecision of Bruce’s rap, the mumbling, desultory delivery that never quite ends. To “entertain” (“entretien,” conversation or negotiation) derives from “entretenir“–literally, to hold in an in-between state. Entertainment means hanging on to a liminal stage where all manner of things are possible because everything is both in suspension and in transition, deterritorialized and resistant, holding disparate elements together, maintaining a state of unsettledness and nomadic consciousness. “Entertainment,” Bruce’s philosophical rambling, enacts verbally a history not of aimless wandering, but rather of a purposive, at times frantic self-displacement. Thus Judge Horn errs when he insists to the packed and unruly courtroom crowd, “You are not here to be entertained.”24 As an attempt to salvage a career, the trial was a negotiation for survival, an entretien. Given the performance imperative of the Jewish American male, Bruce’s “semantics” lectures become “sementics” and finally “see-my-antics” routines as the fight for survival becomes, poignantly, the struggle to please, to be entertaining.25 The scene is shot through with tremendous vulnerability.

     

    Positing Jewish male sexuality as a subversive element in this scenario does not mean celebrating it unambiguously. Male sexuality is, to say the least, a contested terrain, and different ideologies of masculine prowess–here, the Anglo-Christian and the Jewish (the rhetoric of the trial recasts this opposition as straight/decent and gay/obscene)–conflict with such seismographic force that the collision throws off sparks illuminating an historical and cultural transition. Consciously problematizing these masculinities and their interactions can be an emancipatory move toward dismantling a discourse which posits any construction of sexuality as normative or monolithic. The logistics of Bruce’s trial do indeed lend themselves to the quasi-structuralist school of neat differences (viz. the dichotomized title of the trial–“The Plaintiff, aka The People of San Francisco vs. the Defendant, aka Lenny Bruce”), appearing to be a showdown between the forces of the phallus and those of the vulnerable penis, between the symbolic and the imaginary, between the factual and the fanciful, between the straight and the hip, between several different masculine sexualities. However, in following such an analytic pattern, I feel torn between wanting to see the neat dichotomies I’ve just outlined as definitively separate–so I can put myself safely on the side of vulnerable penile imaginary fanciful hipness–and on the other hand wanting to portray the putative opposition as in fact indicating ambiguity: outside is always already inside, the potential disruptions in the hegemony of the Phallus are ultimately recouped anyway. (They’re all men, the terms of their discourse exclusionary and closed to me.)

     

    And, in fact, both the heroes and the villains of this free speech debate, are all men, all ostensibly straight, all white. Both the defense attorney, Albert Bendich, and the prosecuting attorney, Albert Wollenberg, were Jewish, so there goes any untroubled claim for Jewishness as subversive. (However, Bendich, from New York, was a Yiddish speaker who grew up, like Bruce, in an oppositional culture; Wollenberg’s family were multi-generational San Francisco Jews who had not, by and large, experienced the same kind of prejudice as their East Coast counterparts, and having arrived at a more central civic position had arguably more at stake in upholding the status quo). Mary Brown, an audience member of the Jazz Workshop routine and the only woman called to testify on the comedian’s behalf, is not permitted to answer the question, otherwise routine in an obscenity case, whether or not her prurient interest was stimulated by the show (the Constitutional protection of obscene speech stipulates that the utterance “not arouse the prurient interest” of the listener/reader); that is, she may not define her own sexuality, even to deny it. Despite her status as an eye witness rather than an expert witness, Wollenberg challenges her competence to answer such a question because her “expertise” on this matter has not been established.26 Nonetheless, though it is staged and reads very smoothly as a showdown of diametrically opposing sensibilities and values, permeated with anxiety over gender and sexuality as it is, the trial is exclusively dominated by male voices and male interests. Though the men read long passages from Lysistrata, the Wife of Bath’s tale, and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, no female academics or authors are given the floor; Mary Brown, as we have seen, was thwarted in her efforts to speak on behalf of Bruce and her own subject position. This male entretien, I think, revolves around the dual discourses of male homophobia and homosociality, in which Jewishness plays a transitional though implicit role.

     

    Entertaining Homophobia

     

     

    A Pretty Bizarre Show

--the Hungry i  [a club in San Francisco; "i" = intellectual,
eye, "I"...].  The Hungry i has a Gray Line tour and American
Legion Convention.  They took all the bricks out and put in
saran wrap.  That's it.  And Ferlinghetti is going to the Fairmont.
You know this was a little too snobby for me to work; I just
wanted to go back to Ann's.  You don't know about that, do you?
Do you share that recall with me?  It's the first gig I ever
worked up here, is a place called Ann's 440, which was across
the street [from the Jazz Workshop].  And I got a call and I
was working a burlesque gig with Paul Moer, in the Valley.
That's the cat on the piano here, which is really strange,
seeing him after all these years, and working together.
And the guy says, "There's a place in San Francisco but they've
changed the policy."
"Well, what's the policy?"
"Well, they're not there any more, that's the main thing."
"Well, what kind of a show is it, man?"
"It's not a show.  It's a bunch of cocksuckers, that's all.  A
damned fag show."
"Oh.  Well, that is a pretty bizarre show  I don't know what I
can do in that kind of a show."
"Well, no.  It's--we want you to change all that."
"Well--I don't--that's a big gig.  I can[t?] just tell them to
stop doing it.."

    27

     

    John D’Emilio has documented the emergence of the gay men’s community in post-War America, and devotes considerable energy toward detailing the historical dynamics by which San Francisco became “Mecca.” The confluence of a number of progressive literary, political and spiritual countercultures with the Bay Area’s military centrality enabled a richly unorthodox milieu of marginalized men: creative artists, beatniks, anarchists, academics and military men discharged after the war.28 Some men, such as Allen Ginsberg (a gay man and a beatnik poet), Peter Orlovsy (a Naval dischargee and Bohemian demi-mondain), Gary Snyder (poet and Berkeley student), and Kenneth Rexroth (poet and anarchist), and other “outcats” whose names will never be known, formed bonds that crossed over from one subculture to the others. The nightclub/entertainment scene contributed to and reflected this culturally potent mix; gay bars operated next to straight strip joints, jazz clubs that featured a new “intellectual” breed of comedy, and coffeehouses that specialized in poetry readings. The Bruce skit that introduces this section addresses this emergent network of countercultural communities and resultant ambivalence on the part of the traditional entertainment business (which already had only a tenuous relationship to mainstream respectability). The rough narrative outline here is that Bruce is in hypothetical conversation with an agent who wants to book him at Ann’s 440, a club he used to work at (across the street from the Jazz Workshop, so he could expect that his audience would be somewhat familiar with it). In the meantime, since he used to work there, Ann’s 440 has become a gay bar. His agent wants to book him there in order to “change all that”–to restore it to straightness. Bruce’s routine documents the increasing visibility of the gay men’s community, even as his arrest for mentioning it attests to its ongoing–perhaps proportionally increasing–vulnerability. He asserts his own straightness even as he questions the impossible task of altering, ignoring or denying the historical development of a solid alternative sexual community. “Well–I don’t–that’s a big gig.”

     

    At the moment of Bruce’s arrest, the arresting officer Solden asked him, “Why do you feel that you have to use the word ‘cocksuckers’ to entertain people in a public night spot?” Bruce replies, “Well, there’s a lot of cocksuckers around, aren’t there? What’s wrong with talking about them?” This moment is complicated. It is possible that Bruce is using the term here simply as an insult, implying that the policeman is a “cocksucker” in the generalized sense of “jerk.” But given the saturated moment–Bruce has just come off the stage from his routine–it is more likely that he is engaging the more specific sense of the term as “gay men.” The case is still complicated, however. On the one hand, Bruce, repeating uncritically and for “authentic” effect the homophobic term he attributed to the show-biz manager in his performance, complies with a larger social homophobia. On the other hand, the flippant answer foreshadows, if not the pro-active sentiment, the logic of the slogan so crucial to contemporary cultural survival in San Francisco and elsewhere: Silence = Death. (It bears reminding that Bruce’s subsequent silence was materially related to his death.29) While his commitment to free speech and to unmasking hypocrisy necessitated his occasional attacks on homophobia, nowhere more than in his routines on gay men does he conform to the ineptly self-revealing liberal who is the usual butt of his vitriolic humor. In this particular routine, though, it is not liberal homophobia that is the target of his humor, but gay men themselves, used as “bizarre” objects. The meaning of the routine is further complicated by its respective transcriptions as “I can just tell them to stop doing it” and I can’t just tell them…” in response to his agent’s desire that he intervene in the bar’s gayness. The first instance implies that the “bizarre show” is itself comprised of men performing fellatio–by telling them to stop, he would put an end to their objectionability. “They” are “cocksuckers” only when they are sucking cock. In the second instance, “I can’t just tell them to stop doing it,” Bruce suggests that simply telling people not to be gay (in public) will not work–sexuality is an inclination, rather than a set of actions. He calls attention to the disparity between the literal/descriptive and figurative/derogatory meanings of the term “cocksucker,” even as he gets mileage out of his presumed-straight audience by suggesting an inherent funniness in fellatio (though in “The Bust,” he also proclaims its pleasures).

     

    The police officers testifying against Bruce were witnesses for “The People” of the State of California, capital P, with a relationship of illusory grandiosity to people analogous to the Phallus’s relationship to physical penises. Who are the people? Who gets to decide who is human? The right to talk about “them”/us because there are a lot of them/us implicates talk itself as a deciding factor in the constitution of personhood. Al Bendich said to me that language is what makes us human, it’s a medium for getting our basic human needs met; the pragmatist would have it that the word be spoken beforehand, in the absence of the thing, to indicate lack, desire, need.30 But it’s also a medium for celebrating: the wild boy of Aveyron delightedly repeats “lait, lait,” after the milk has been served, acknowledging its wonder.31 Is Bruce calling “cocksuckers” into existence by naming them, or is he acknowledging their emergent visibility in San Francisco’s public life? Clearly the People were not happy with the possibility of alternative sexuality or the articulation of that sexuality. Truth is what is, Bruce insisted in his moments upon the witness stand. If there are gay people, why not talk about them? The People’s fear is that talking about “it” will create “it;” conversely the hope is that not talking about it will keep it invisible.

     

    Another twist to simple homophobia comes into play in this scenario to exacerbate the issue of what specifically constitutes “obscenity”–legally construed as a “morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion.” During cross-examination, the defense witnesses were asked, “Why did he have to use the word ‘cocksucker?’ Wouldn’t ‘faggot’ or ‘fairy’ have done as well?”32 The state objects, not to derogatory epithets for gay men, but to the explicit penile reference, which evinces morbid interest. The term “cocksucker” refers to an act; the terms “fairy” and “faggot” indicate a type of person that might engage in such an act. As Foucault has taught us, this is an important historical distinction. The discomfort engendered by the term “cocksucker” indicates that the People’s true fear is of the homoerotic possibilities embedded in conventional homosociality–a fear implicitly suggested by Bendich when he elicited testimony about the frequency with which the word is in fact used in the police station, a public place.33 The Jewish male is implicated in this mainstream fear by embodying for them that middle space, neither fully “homosexual” or demonstrably homoerotic, nor conforming to the laws of Gentile male-bonding through physical activity; as Daniel Boyarin has observed, the “Jewish sissy” occupies a place that conforms to neither mainstream hetero-masculinity nor unambiguous homosexuality. Bruce understood this mainstream fear that the line between homosexuality and homosociality collapse: his subsequent skit “Blah Blah Blah” insisted on the People’s proclivity for using the word covertly–and exposed Their secret love of excess and celebration in language, which love implicated them as phatic fags, spewing Jews, redundant, secreting and feminized–his semblables:

     

    The Bust

What I got arrested for in San Francisco... I got arrested
for...uh...I'm not going to repeat the word because I want
to finish  the gig here tonight.  It's...uh...all right.
They said it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice.
A ten-letter word.  Uh...It's really chic. That's two four-letter
words and a preposition.  I can't...uh...I wish I could tell
you the word.  It starts with a "c"...Well, you know what the
word is.  Now it's weird how they manifested that word as
homosexual, 'cause I don't .  That relates to any contemporary
chick I know, or would know, or would love or marry.
You know.  When I took the bust, I finished the show. And I said
that word, you know, ... the ten-letter word and the heat comes
over and says, "Uh, Lenny, my name is Sgt.  B...You know the
word you said?"
"I said a lot of words out there, man."
"Well, that -that--that word."
"Oh, yeah."
"Well Lenny, that's against the law.  I'm gonna have to take you down."
"Ok, that's cool."
"It's against the law to say it and to do it."
"I didn't do it, man."
"I know but, uh, I just have to tell you that all the time."
...I get into the wagon. And the one heat is cool.  'Cause he said,
"You broke the law."  Now the other guy: "Look I gotta wife and kids."
"I don't wanna hear that crap at all, man.  I don't want to get
emotionally involved in this."
"Waddya mean you don't want to hear that crap?"
"Did your wife ever do that to you?"
Bang.  Then it got pretty sticky.
"NO!"
"You ever say the word?"
"NO!"
"Never said it, honest to God, never said it?"
"NEVER!"
...
Now we really got into it, into it. Now we get into court. The
chambers.  The judge--Aram Avermitz, a red headed junkyard Jew,
a real ferbissiner with thick fingers and a homemade glass eye.
Tough-o, right?  He comes in.  Swear the heat in , honk, honk.
"What'd he say?"
"Ya Hona. He said 'blah-blah-blah.'"
"He said blah-blah-blah?!"
Then the guy really yenta-ed it up: "That's right,  I didn't
believe it.  There's a guy up on the stage, in front of women
and a mixed audience, saying blah-blah blah."
"This I never heard, blah-blah-blah.  He said blah-blah-blah?"
"He said blah-blah-blah.  I'm not gonna lie to ya." It's in the
minutes: "I'm not gonna lie to ya."...
The DA: "The guy said blah blah blah.  Look at him.  He's smug.
He's not going to repent."
Then I dug something.  They sorta liked saying blah blah blah.
'Cause they said it a few extra times.  ... it really got so
involved , the bailiff is yelling,"What'd he say?"
"Shut up, you blah-blah-blah."
They were yelling it in all the courts: "What 'd he say?"  "He
said blah blah blah."
Goddam, it's good to say blah blah blah.
That blah blah blah.
That blah blah blah
That blah blah blah.

    34

     

    Entertaining Homer-phobia

     

    A schematic take on the trial also reveals a glaring opposition between the strategies of the prosecution, The People, and the defense, Lenny Bruce and/or his counsel, which speaks to epistemological differences: what constitutes knowing, and what is the status of interpretation? The prosecuting attorney called only two eye witnesses: the two arresting officers. They testified to the facts: they had indeed heard Mr. Bruce use the words “cocksucker,” “kiss it,” “I’m coming,” and “Don’t come in me.” The defense, by contrast, was concerned not with facts, but with the Constitution’s protection clause for obscene speech: all but one (Mary Brown) were expert witnesses. Albert Bendich had called in a constellation of cultural critics, university professors, poets, musicians and teachers, including Ralph Gleason, Grover Sales, Lou Gottlieb, and Don Geiger, then Chair of the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. Rather than disputing the facts, this stellar lineup of cultural interpreters mediated Bruce to the jury by dwelling on his semantic brilliance as witnessed by his lecture on grammar in “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb,” on his redeeming social significance through his pedagogical discussions of “human problems,” on his artistic merit through associating his name with those of the Western greats, and on his conformity to “community standards” in that he performed on the same street as drag shows and strip joints. According to this strategy, Bruce’s legitimacy rested on his being translated by expert interpreters who compared him to the heavy hitters in the most conservative Western Civ. major league. In one of the more astounding sequences of the trial, Kenneth Brown and Albert Bendich offer their respective plot summaries of Lysistrata (invoked for its overt references to penises) to Judge Horn, who rejects the former (“I know that is not the theme of Lysistrata“) and approves the latter (“…what you just stated is the correct answer”) as if he were administering an oral exam for a Great Books course.35 However, even though the judge gets caught up in this all-male intellectual revue, cultural capital is both a requisite and a liability in this trial. It is a requisite and a liability for the defense witnesses, whose professional credentials protect them (they routinely assign passages from Swift, Joyce and Rabelais with no fear of reprisal) even while the prosecution attempts to discredit expertise as effete. Wollenberg, appealing to the jury rather than the judge, deploys a predictable anti-intellectualism: what does the “average citizen” know or care about Aristophanes, Rabelais and Swift? The acquittal reflected the division of labor; when interviewed afterwards, the jury avowed that it had desperately wanted to find Bruce guilty but couldn’t, given the judge’s carefully Constitutional instructions.

     

    And cultural capital was a liability for Bruce, the high-school drop-out court jester to the intelligensia, who although well-read and self-taught, lacked the insider knowledge–a function of class and training–to understand the complicity between juridical and high-cultural discourses (throughout the trial, he kibbitzes so disruptively that the Judge threatens to have him removed).

     

    Regardless of his defense’s courtroom attempts to present him as a Great Master, Al Bendich stressed to me twenty-seven years later that Lenny Bruce was a human being speaking to other human beings.36 Therein lay the “disturbing” and “esthetically painful” quality of his performance.37 Bruce’s humanness underscores the absurdity of summoning expert witnesses–experts in literature and language, in comedy, in cultural critique, in “semantics”–to qualify him as someone entitled to use the words “cocksucker,” “don’t come in me,” and “kiss it.” Disciplinarity falls aside in conversation; in entertainment it becomes ridiculous. I suggested to Al Bendich that Lenny pushed language to its limits. He demurred. “Lenny was no Homer, no Whitman. He wasn’t a poet. He was no Kant or Hegel, he wasn’t a philosopher.”38 But a human being in conversation can push language to its limits as well or better than anyone–that’s what a rapper, a raconteur, a comedian does. Because the organic intellectual can transgress the arbitrary boundaries of disciplinarity and of expertise, she or he gives the lie to the concept of a bounded field of knowledge. Bruce is not particularly avant garde in the literal sense–the integrated thinking and talking person in performance predates the Western educational system of disciplinarity and expertise. Just as the Bacchanalian poetry readings in North Beach, greeted as cutting-edge, rowdy, revolutionary poetic praxis, reenacted a much earlier tradition of poetry as ritual, Bruce’s performances enacted philosophical and moral inquiry in the vein of street raps such as Socrates’ before they were domesticated and transcribed by his students. Bendich’s strategy–establishing the expertise of his various witnesses to prove Bruce’s right to First Amendment protection–worked. But the acquittal (the only one in Bruce’s long trial career) was a Pyrrhic victory.

     

    The question of expertise–suspect to those of us whose expertise lies in the area of cultural critique–becomes an embattled one for very different reasons when the subject comes under attack from the prosecution, particularly with regard to “community standards.” For the district attorney representing The People, “expertise,” a necessary qualification for “expert witnesses,” is suspect as de facto elitism–experts by definition are outside the “community” to whose standards Bruce must conform. However, he appeals to the concept in order to disqualify Mary Brown from commenting on the putative prurience of her interest in Bruce’s performance; she is not part of the People’s community either. Furthermore, the elitism of high culture and the academy and the low culture of vaudeville vulgarity are played as both ends against what is represented as the mainstream populist interest; no denizens of the “strip strip” are called to the stand by the prosecution or by the defense–except Bruce himself, stymied by the discourse of both his allies and his foes. In the closing argument, the People–Wollenberg–appeals to the jury’s sense of civic self-representation:

     

    When you describe San Francisco to somebody, ladies and gentlemen...do you talk about our sewers? That's what we heard a performance of, the sewer; and that's comedy? ... Now, the question isn't what the University of California professors or the high school teachers from Daly City feel is literature or comedy; the question is what the community feels--not the top of the community educationally, those people over in the ivory towers that say this is a literary work; it is what the people on the street, the conglomerate average, feel--not just the high and mighty or the self-appointed high and mighty.

     

    On the one hand, Bruce’s language belongs to the realm of the “high and mighty” (academic literati/ sexually suspect men) rather than the “conglomerate average” (middleclass family men); on the other hand, his language is low and vulgar, that of:

     

    ...stevedores down on the wharf loading a ship, ..., and the stevedores ... aren't saying ("cocksucker") in a place crowded with people in an auditorium.

     

    On the one hand, Wollenberg questions and impugns the “origins” of Bruce (Jew as paradigmatic “white Negro”)’s bastard rap:

     

    What scurvy hole did it come from?

     

    On the other,

     

    We would have a long beard up on the stage explaining the act of love and explaining the shortcomings... We're ...not called on to judge other than the community standard itself; not the standard of the University of California in a cultural environment under direction and control of a professor teaching in the school...

     

    …none of us are dealing with [either the top at the professors’ level, or the bottom at the sewer]; we’re dealing at the common level.

     

    …

     

    [Lenny Bruce] is a man who believes that he can go out amongst us in society, not just at the academic level in a class of speech or literature at the University of California, not down at the other end of the rainbow--out with the boys, maybe, let's say, doing a laborer's job, using vile and profane language; no, this is a man that is going out into the public and believes he has a license to use this language.39

     

    Bruce’s crime is spelled out, albeit redundantly and incoherently: he mixed up high, low and center; he de-centered culture by bringing to hypothetically mass audiences content that should be tightly constrained within academic contexts or all-male worksites. Wollenberg’s closing speech implicitly associates high and low cultures with counterculture, and he casts the retrogressive populism represented by the People–the “authentic” American people’s culture–as the beleaguered victim of attack from the effete above and vulgar below. The representative of this attack is the Jewish chameleon, inauthenticity personified, who infiltrates the high and the low (whose corrupting influence blurs the boundaries between high and low), but can never quite achieve the respectable invisibility of the middle. In the name of the People of the State of California, Wollenberg seizes public culture as the domain of a mythical middle America, which sometimes is “the man on the street” and sometimes is decidedly not the man on the street (especially if that man is a laborer or “out with the boys”); sometimes is “women and children” and sometimes is decidedly not (especially if the women volunteer to testify for Bruce). In contrapuntal relation to contemporaneous Black-Jewish relations (in which Jewish lawyers often defended Black victims framed by racist courts, and Jews in general were a visible force in the civil rights movement), here the figure of the silenced Jewish entertainer stands in for the figure of the gay man, who has as yet no public discourse for self-legitimation, no political voice to silence.

     

    Coda: Inside’r’Out

     

    People call me a sick comic, but it's society that's sick, and I'm the doctor.
     

    --Lenny Bruce

     

    Like the origins of the title “Marquis,” Euro-Jews40 are “sort of” white but not really. Being a Jew of any gender is like being a middle class white woman: oppression is privilege and vice versa. It’s not a quantitative issue–it’s not that you’re “in-between” the most privileged and the most oppressed on some scale of comparative outsiderhood; rather, your insiderhood is simultaneously your outsiderhood; you occupy a particular subject-position that has its own logic and exacts its own dues. The white middle class housewife is oppressed in that her privilege is conditional on her man’s status. Though Euro-Jews share the privileges of whiteness in the sense of skin-color, they are nonetheless by definition excluded from central participation in the groups that guarantee white privilege. They are oppressed in that (among other things) their safety still depends on the beneficent goodwill of non-Jewish power centers. But “inside/out” strikes in another way as well, as a pun: insight out. It points to the ostracizing of the person with increased social insight, who brings out of the closet the secret shame of the social body; and the converse and corollary position of insight afforded those who have traditionally been termed outsiders. In the words of Bob Kaufman, African-American Beat poet and Bruce fan, “way out people know the way out.”41 If we think of the hyperverbal stranger who tells stories, the one who mediates heaven and earth, who mediates Beatitude and stolid populism, who enables a cultural and historical shift, the Jewish entertainer who may not represent himself but who must represent what is projected onto him by the various constituencies in this historical drama, we would have to consider the possibility that Christianity is the paradigmatic scene for this pageant. And lest anyone find obscene the suggestion of Jesus as Jewish phallus whose frictive movement engenders history, here are some alternative obscenities: Infant mortality, starvation in a land of dollars. Child abuse, sexual violence and the death penalty. Cross-burnings, castrations, lynchings, queer-bashing. The routine plundering of Native American burial grounds and the episodic defacement of Jewish cemeteries. The inability to respond to pain or to honor beauty. The institutional ravaging of our bodies. Attempts to silence our creative and erotic powers, our powers to change the conditions of our lives, our powers to represent ourselves however we want.

     

    Notes

     

    1. I want to acknowledge the research help of Carolyn Krasnow, Rachel Buff, and Frieda Knobloch, especially the latter’s editorial skills. I learned much also from Albert Bendich, Rebecca Mark, Riv-Ellen Prell, Robert Danberg, Judith Halberstam, and David Antin.

     

    2. Lenny Bruce, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb,” What I Got Arrested For, Fantasy Records, 1971.

     

    3. For several recent works on the cultural meaning of Jewish language use, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially Chapter 1, “The Jewish Voice;” and Jewish Self-hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; Max Weinreich, The History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Maria Damon, “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” Cultural Studies (5:1) 1991, pp. 14-29; and “Gertrude Stein’s Doggerel ‘Yiddish’: Women, Dogs and Jews,” in The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 202-235.

     

    4. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972), p. 6.

     

    5. For a useful summary of censorship cases involving artists and entertainers in twentieth-century United States, see Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992).

     

    6. Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” Writing Culture, James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 194-233; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 190-193; Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Post-war American Jewish Life,” People of the Body, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed. (New York: SUNY Press, 1992); for an instance of hero-worship, see Frank Kofsky, Lenny Bruce: the Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist (New York: Monad Press, 1974).

     

    Serious recent work on Bruce includes Ioan Davies, “Lenny Bruce: Hyperrealism and the Death of Jewish Tragic Humor,” Social Text 22, Spring 1989, pp. 92-114; and an abbreviated but interesting discussion of Bruce in social context in Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89-92.

     

    7. “Inside/Outside: Jewish Cultural Signification,” American Studies Association, New Orleans LA, 1990.

     

    8. Honey Bruce, Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny’s Shady Lady (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1974); Lenny Bruce’s letter to Judge Horn, trial transcript, p. 2.

     

    9. On Bruce’s use of Yiddish to mark a boundary of inclusion/exclusion, see my “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” Cultural Studies 5:1 (1991), pp.14-29.

     

    10. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” “Race,” Writing and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 1-19.

     

    11. David Antin, letter to author, November 15, 1990, responding to an essay I’d written in which I argued that Antin’s simultaneous assertion of and self-distancing from Jewishness indicated his “ethnic anxiety.”

     

    12. The poignant ambiguity of titles, nobility and class status among Jews is nowhere better illustrated than in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which could be profitably reconstrued as Remembrances of Folks Passing.

     

    13. Bruce, How to Talk, (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972), no page number given.

     

    14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45; Fischer, p. 196.

     

    15. And/or clinical schizophrenia.

     

    16. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum, Summer 1989, pp. 139-167.

     

    17. The Essential Lenny Bruce, p. 65.

     

    18. Ibid., p. 36.

     

    19. Ibid., pp. 41-42.

     

    20. See, for example, two back-to-back articles that advocate “experience-near” anthropology and generalized theory respectively, each implying that the approach favored by the other is more imperialistic: Unni Wikan, “Toward an Experience-Near Anthropology,” and Nicholas Thomas, “Against Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology, 6:3, August 1991, pp. 285-305; pp. 306-322.

     

    21. Author’s notes, July 1989.

     

    22. “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” pp. 21-22.

     

    23. Author’s notes, July 1989.

     

    24. Trial transcript, p. 134.

     

    25. Bruce is explicit about the relationship between dependence and performance anxiety, or, conversely, mastery as the right to command performances. See, for example, his “Look at Me, Ma!” routine, The Essential Lenny Bruce, pp. 110-1, in which he quite plainly ascribes the performer’s desperation to Oedipal power relations, just as elsewhere he acribes the Jewish performer’s desperation to the Egyptian captivity (“How Jews Got into Show Business,” Ibid., p. 50).

     

    26. Trial transcript, p. 276-277.

     

    27. Bruce, “A Pretty Bizarre Show,” What I Got Arrested For.

     

    28. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See especially pp. 176-195.

     

    29. As a result of his many obscenity and drug trials and convictions, Bruce was eventually unable to get a cabaret card and was driven out of work; on the day he died from a drug overdose, he had received a foreclosure notice on his home.

     

    30. Author’s notes, July 1989.

     

    31. Susan Griffin, author’s notes, August 1990. Daniel Boyarin brought my attention to a relevant joke: A Jew is sleeping in the upper bunk of a train; a Hungarian officer sleeps below him. Every five minutes, the Jew sighs, “Oy am I thirsty.” Finally the officer can’t stand it any more and brings him a glass of water. After five minutes of blessed silence, the voice rings out, “Oy was I thirsty.”

     

    32. Trial transcript, p. 141.

     

    33. Ibid., pp. 50, 62.

     

    34. Bruce, “Blah Blah Blah,” What I Got Arrested For.

     

    35. Trial transcript, pp. 190-191.

     

    36. Author’s notes, July 1989.

     

    37. Trial transcript, pp. 188-189.

     

    38. Author’s notes, July 1989.

     

    39. Trial transcript, pp. 305-314

     

    40. I use this term to distinguish these Jews from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Jews.

     

    41. Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 80. Many African-American hipsters of the jazz milieu, including Kaufman, Philly Jo Jones, and Eric Miller (a bassist who played the “Colored Friend” in “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parites) appreciated Bruce’s artistry. Kaufman glosses Bruce’s fortunes pithily in his “[The Traveling Circus]”: “There are too many unfunny things happening to the comedians.” The Ancient Rain, Poems 1958-1978 (New York: New Directions, 1981), p. 25.

     

  • “But It Is Above All Not True”: Derrida, Relativity, and the “Science Wars”

    Arkady Plotnitsky

    The Literature Program and
    The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
    in Science and Cultural Theory
    Duke University
    aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu

     

    Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt,–unsre Redlichkeit!

     

    –Nietzsche

     

    The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability--it is, finally, the concept of the game [jeu]. In other words, it is not the concept of something--of a center starting from which an observer could master the field--but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.1

     

    This statement by Jacques Derrida has been endlessly circulated in recent discussions around the so-called “Science Wars,” in the wake of Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition, and then Alan Sokal’s “hoax article,” both of which comment on it.2 This circulation, I shall argue here, is a symptom of a broader problem affecting the current cultural landscape and shaping the opinions of a significant portion of the scientific community. Arguments analogous to the one to be offered here concerning Derrida’s work can be made for other figures prominent in recent debates, such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Serres. My choice of Derrida is due mainly to the extraordinary prominence of the statement cited above and of his work or rather name in general in these discussions. Even given Derrida’s status as an icon of intellectual controversy on the Anglo-American cultural scene, it is remarkable that out of thousands of pages of Derrida’s published works, a single extemporaneous remark on relativity made in 1966 (before Derrida was “the Derrida” and, in a certain sense, even before “deconstruction”) in response to a question by another French philosopher, Jean Hyppolite, is made to stand for nearly all of deconstructive or even postmodernist (not a term easily, if at all, applicable to Derrida) treatments of science. Derrida has commented more extensively and in more grounded ways on mathematics and science, and on the philosophical grounding of both.3 He also makes use of mathematical and scientific theories, concepts, metaphors, and so forth (most famously, Gödel’s concept of undecidability) in his work. In addition, his work is fundamentally linked to the question of technology via the question of writing, which defines his work throughout. Both in his actual claims concerning mathematics and science he refers to and in reflecting on the relationships between his work and mathematics and science, Derrida himself is cautious and circumspect, and offers a number of disclaimers. He emphasizes instead the centrality of his engagement with philosophical and literary texts for his work.4 One might argue that mathematics and science play a more significant role in his work than Derrida is willing to claim, or perhaps than he perceives. He certainly acknowledges the possibility and indeed unavoidability of intersections between the problematics of his own work and mathematics and science, and even says that “science is absolutely indispensable for deconstruction.”5 Neither Derrida’s more substantive discussions of mathematics and science, however, nor his caution in this respect, are considered by his recent critics in the scientific community. These critics instead appear to base their views of Derrida’s ideas, and those of other figures just mentioned, on indiscriminately extracted, isolated references to science or on snippets of his texts, without placing such statements in the context of his work.

     

    The problems at issue may, then, be seen as problems of reading. At stake here are, first of all, the most elementary and the most traditional norms of reading. Such norms would be routinely applied by scientists in reading scientific texts but are massively disregarded by most scientists who commented on Derrida and other authors mentioned above.6 I shall, therefore, consider the circumstances, contexts, and meanings of Derrida’s remark on relativity more carefully than has been done previously, although more recently some among these circumstances and contexts have been pointed out and partly (re)considered, including by some scientists. Secondly, and more significantly, at stake is the question of reading non-scientific texts, such as Derrida’s, when these texts engage or relate to science (or mathematics), especially when they reflect fundamental conceptual conjunctions of scientific and nonscientific fields. Accordingly, I shall suggest a reading of Derrida’s statement on relativity that might help to develop more balanced and productive forms of interaction between science and the work of Derrida and other authors discussed in recent debates. I would like, however, to begin elsewhere and to return to Derrida’s statement via two incursions–exploratory surgeries, as it were–into recent responses to this work on the part of the scientific community.

     

    Charm and Harm

     

    I begin with comments on a different statement by Derrida made in 1993 by Arthur Wightman, a brilliant theoretical physicist, in his “post-banquet” talk at a conference at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He said:

     

    What I offer this evening is a truly revolutionary interdisciplinary proposal. What I really mean is that it isn't any crazier than what is served up in Washington these days. My proposal is an application of a method of modern literary criticism to high energy physics.

     

    To appreciate what I am about to describe, you have to know a little something about modern literary criticism. The first basic fact is that, just as in women’s fashions, the fads in English language literary criticism originate in Paris. The second basic fact is that a very big fad, called deconstruction, originated there about 30 years ago and its chief is a man named Jacques Derrida. You should not confuse him with another different Derrida a physicist who works in dynamical systems. The third basic fact is that deconstructivists are self proclaimed revolutionaries, iconoclasts, and liberators, who undermine, subvert, expose, undo, transgress, and demystify traditional ideas, traditional logic, authoritative readings, illusions of objectivity etc. The fourth basic fact is that the style in which Derrida chooses to carry out these operations is deliberately paradoxical. Here is an exemplary piece of Derrida’s prose:

     

    “It is thus simply [sic] false to say that Mallarmé is a Platorist [sic] or a Hegelian. But it is above all not true. And vice verse.”

     

    Maybe you didn’t quite follow that so I will read it again. … So try it this way:

     

    “Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa.”

     

    Now you’ve got it.

     

    The fifth basic fact is the great simplification deconstruction has brought to literature, by abolishing the author. You thought that authors wrote books, poems and plays? Wrong–literature is what the reader reads into the text.

     

     

    After all this preparation, I shall state my idea in a few words: I propose that we apply this powerful literary method to the superconducting supercollider. What Derrida did to literature we can do to the SSC: deconstruct it. I propose that we begin with a typically bold deconstructive stroke: abolishing the state of Texas. To the inevitable question: What are we going to do with that hole in the ground near Waxahatchie? The answer will then be clear: What hole in the ground?7

     

    It is tempting to argue that there is more charm than harm, in these remarks, given their tone and context, and the significance of such circumstances is indeed significant for my overall argument here. And yet, even if these remarks were made humorously, rather than critically, and without professing any knowledge of or making a serious judgement upon Derrida and deconstruction (and I am willing to give Wightman the benefit of the doubt), Wightman’s charm is, I shall argue, not without harm. Along with others (much more harmful ones), his remarks are also symptomatic of the problem– the problem of reading–that is my main concern here. In order to argue this case I shall examine Derrida’s statement (as) cited by Wightman. I leave aside an inconsequential typo–Platorist instead of Platonist. There is another error, however, a more consequential one, and then still another (not a typo), the most consequential one. I would now like to compare the text as cited by Wightman with the original French and the English translation of it (by Barbara Johnson):

     

    Par rapport l'idéalisme platonicien and hegelien, le déplacement que nous nommons ici par convention "mallarméen", est plus subtil et patient, discret et efficient. C'est un simulacre de platonisme ou de hegelianisme qui n'est séparé de ce qu'il simule que par un voile peine perceptible, dont on peut tout aussi bien dire qu'il passe déjà-- inaperçu--entre le platonisme et lui-même, entre le hegelianisme et lui-même. Entre le texte de Mallarmé et lui-même. Il n'est donc pas simplement faux de dire que Mallarmé est platonicien ou hegelien. Mais ce n'est surtout pas vrai.

     

    Et réciproquement.

     

     

    Nous intéressent moins ici ces propositions de forme philosophique que le mode de leur réinscription dans la texte de Mimique.

     

    (In comparison with Platonic or Hegelian Idealism, the displacement we are here for the sake of convenience calling “Mallarméan” is more subtle and patient, more discrete and efficient. It is a simulacrum of Platonism or Hegelianism, which is separated from what it simulates only by a barely perceptible veil, about which one can just as well say that it already runs–unnoticed–between Platonism and itself, between Hegelianism and itself. Between Mallarmé’s text and itself. It is thus not simply false to say that Mallarmé is a Platonist or a Hegelian. But it is above all not true.

     

    And vice versa.

     

     

    What interests us here is less these propositions of a philosophical type than the mode of their inscription in the text of Mimique [Mallarmé's work under discussion].)8

     

    Wightman changes Derrida’s negative sentence into a positive one, since Derrida’s statement is, “It is thus not simply false to say that Mallarmé is a Platonist or Hegelian. But it is above all not true.” I shall comment on “And vice versa” presently. It is clear, however, that Derrida’s formulation becomes something quite different, once cited accurately. Obviously, one also needs an extension of the text in order to understand this statement, as Derrida’s “thus” indicates. Derrida’s writing here is entirely lucid, although it may require a slow reading–which may well be the definition of philosophy. The English translation incorrectly, and unnecessarily, renders Derrida’s “Et réciproquement” as “And vice versa,” rather than as “And reciprocally.” The paragraph break is even more crucial, as must be obvious if one looks at the passage, either in French or in English. It is, however, ignored by Wightman and by John Ellis in Against Deconstruction, from which (rather than from Derrida’s Dissemination) Wightman quotes or misquotes, since Ellis does not omit the negative. In spite of Ellis’s “faithful” reproduction, another misquotation, more subtle but more significant, remains in Ellis’s book as well, and is transferred to Wightman’s citation. Ellis cites this formulation only as part of Johnson’s commentary on certain of Derrida’s ideas and practices, which this passage (supposedly) illustrates.9 Unfortunately, contrary to Ellis’s assertion–“Johnson is certainly abstracting from Derrida’s writings in a way that does not distort them” (Against Deconstruction, 6)–Johnson’s elaboration also disregards Derrida’s paragraph break and, as a result, misconstrues the passage as well, albeit with the best intentions. She reads it as an example of Derrida’s “practice” of philosophical undecidability. This “practice” is sometimes used by Derrida, including, at certain points, in Dissemination. In general, however, it has been over-attributed to him, especially at certain (earlier) stages of the reception of his work in the United States, to which period Johnson’s article belongs. Her reading may also have been the source of her (mis)translation of Derrida’s “Et réciproquement” as “And vice versa.” The concept itself (analogous but not identical to Gödel’s undecidability) does play a prominent role in Derrida’s work, specifically in his reading of Mallarmé. There is, however, nothing undecidable in Derrida’s propositions here concerning Mallarmé’s relationships to Hegelianism or Platonism. These have decidable, determined meanings, and Derrida’s elaboration itself is accessible, even if one does not have extensive knowledge of his work.

     

    Most crucially, the juncture established by “And reciprocally” would read more or less as follows. Mallarmé’s text may look like an instance of Platonic or Hegelian idealism, but it is not. It has both subtle proximities to and subtle differences from idealism. As such, it also suggests certain complexities within Platonism and Hegelianism themselves, especially as concerns reading Plato’s and Hegel’s texts by these two respective traditions. Therefore, “it is not simply false to say that Mallarmé is a Platonist or a Hegelian.” That is, it is not enough to make this point alone–much more is at stake, including possibly major rereadings of Plato and Hegel. However, and indeed “above all,” such a statement (a statement that would identify his text with either Platonism or Hegelianism) would not be true. There is no undecidability to Derrida’s assertion. This argument is reinforced by a long footnote, proceeding via Hyppolite’s reading of Mallarmé. Derrida’s “and reciprocally” connects this whole elaboration (including the footnote) with the first sentence of the next paragraph, rather than with the sentence “But it is above all not true.” There is no undecidable reversal here. This reading is further supported by the fact that the footnote just mentioned occurs after “vrai,” rather than after “Et réciproquement,” and thus further indicates that the text breaks in the way argued here. The statement, then, reads as follows: “And reciprocally [with the argument that Mallarmé’s text enacts a displacement that must be distinguished from Platonist or Hegelian idealism], what interests us here is less these propositions of a philosophical type than the mode of their reinscription in the text of Mimique.”

     

    Derrida’s statement is, thus, something very different from what Wightman appears to think it is, especially in view of his misquotation. I suspect that correcting the latter would not affect his sense of Derrida’s writing, and he makes clear that he has not read any of Derrida’s work himself and instead relied on Ellis’s book. Ellis’s analysis is deeply problematic, amounting to a massive misunderstanding of Derrida’s work, and it is unfortunate that it happened to be Wightman’s (only) source. In any event, neither Derrida’s statement itself, nor Wightman’s commentary on it can be seen, or (I assume) is offered, as meaningfully representing Derrida’s work or deconstruction.

     

    One might, as I said, be hesitant to criticize Wightman too much, since his comments were presented in a humorous context–as a joke, a parody, a spoof–at a “post-banquet talk” and were made in this spirit (I am, again, willing to give Wightman the benefit of the doubt), without professing any knowledge of or serious judgments upon Derrida and deconstruction. His charming remarks can, however, have harmful consequences as well. Physicists who were present and many more who will have read the book where these remarks are published may well form a “serious” opinion about Derrida, deconstruction, contemporary French philosophy, literary criticism, and so forth on the basis of these remarks, especially in conjunction with other recent events. The “tone” alone, without explicit qualifications, may not be enough to diminish these harmful effects. The reference to Ellis’s book as the only scholarly source and, it appears, the only authority on the subject, is especially unfortunate here, even if one were to leave aside (which is not possible in all rigor) its title, “against deconstruction.” That said, however, one must take into account the context of the occasion–a courtesy not extended to Derrida by most scientists in recent discussions. For, if this type of treatment of Derrida’s or others’ text may be (seen as) permissible or, at least, excusable in the context of Wightman’s talk, the context of other recent commentaries is a different matter. Their extraordinary harm would not be diminished, even if such critics had Wightman’s charm–or his wit and style–which most of them do not. At least they do not display them in their encounters with deconstruction, postmodernism, and so forth, although some among these encounters are not without comedy. As Derrida commented on a different occasion, “this is also extremely funny.” He added, however: “The fact that this is also extremely funny doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the symptom.10

     

    Harm and Harm

     

    Among the many accusations and complaints made in Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition, those against Derrida and his “idle” usage of modern science take center stage. This is of some interest, given their actual account of Derrida’s engagement with mathematics and science, factually restricted to two isolated instances. One is the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange, and the other an egregious misstatement of Derrida. On that reading, and on that type of “reading”–restricted to crude attempts to “catch” direct references to scientific terms without even minimally considering Derrida’s text–Derrida’s engagement with science would have to be seen as negligible, although Gross and Levitt claim it, without any textual support, to be extensive. A reading in which the relationship between Derrida’s work and science would become meaningful is definitionally unavailable to the strategies and attitudes of Gross and Levitt’s book. They do not even comment in any meaningful way on Derrida’s usage of Gödel’s theorem, arguably the most explicit and the most famous reference of that type in Derrida. They only speak of its general abuse by postmodernists (78). They do comment with relish, however, on two references (three, if one counts a sneer at Derrida’s comments on algebra in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange [265, n.10]). First is the remark on relativity, cited not altogether accurately and, it appears, from a secondary source (265, n.10), but famous ever since:

     

    A further sense of Derrida's eagerness to claim familiarity with deep scientific matters can be obtained from the following quotation, which also gives one some sense of how seriously to take such claims: "The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, [is] not a center. It is the very concept of variability--it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of some[thing]--of a center starting from which an observer could master the field--but the very concept of the game." The "Einsteinian constant" is, of course, c, the speed of light in vacuo, roughly 300 million meters per second. Physicists, we can say with confidence, are not likely to be impressed by such verbiage, and are hardly apt to revise their thinking about the constancy of c. Rather, it is more probable that they will develop a certain disdain for scholars, however eminent, who talk this way, and a corresponding disdain for other scholars who propose to take such stuff seriously. Fortunately for Derrida, few scientists trouble to read him, while those academics who do are, for the most part, so poorly versed in science that they have a hard time telling the real thing from the sheer bluff. (79; corrections mine)

     

    Since I will discuss Derrida’s comment on relativity below, I shall only say here that nothing can be further from the truth than the assertion of that Derrida is eager “to claim familiarity with deep scientific matters.” As we have seen, the contrary is in fact true. In truth, all of Gross and Levitt’s assertions about Derrida are quite simply not true. Much else may be said about their “representation” of Derrida in their book. But it is above all not true. “Mais ce n’est surtout pas vrai.” Gross and Levitt are, obviously, not among those “fewscientists [who] trouble to read” Derrida. Why, then, go to such extraordinary trouble to comment on his work at such length? Some answers, I am afraid, are all too obvious here. One cannot also help smiling at the naivete of their warning to scholars in the humanities of the impending danger of disdain on the part the scientific community. For the moment, however, I would like to consider Gross and Levitt’s second main example of Derrida’s “idle” use or abuse of science. They write:

     

    This [Derrida's remark on relativity] is not, we assure the reader, an isolated case. In various other Derridean writings there are to be found, for example, portentous references to mathematical terms such as "differential topology," used without definition and without any contextual justification. Clearly, the intention is to assure readers who recognize vaguely that the language derives from contemporary science that Derrida is very much at home with its mysteries. (79)

     

    Once again, none of these assertions is true. Indeed, their claims notwithstanding, no other examples of such “portentous references” are given.11As I said, understanding the relationships between Derrida’s work and mathematics and science requires a very different type of reading. Certainly, at least some familiarity with his work would be necessary in any event, as opposed to the monumental ignorance of Gross and Levitt’s book. Using scientific terms “without definition and without any contextual justification,” however, is something to which one can respond seriously. It is of course also the kind of charge that I am making against the usages of Derrida by some scientists, including, naturally, Gross and Levitt. Let us see, then.

     

    Gross and Levitt make much of their observation in a long footnote:

     

    We cannot resist the impulse to point out that in Derrida's usage the word topology seems to be virtually synonymous with topography--at least the index regards them as identical. This recollects an experience of one of us (N.L.) at the age of eighteen. When being interviewed by an insurance executive for a summer actuarial job he was asked: "What kind of mathematics are you interested in?" "Topology," he replied. "Well, we don't have too much interest in topography," said the insurance man. Obviously a deconstructionist avant la lettre.

     

     

    Defenders of deconstruction and other poststructuralist critical modalities will no doubt wish to point out that topos (pl.: topoi) is a recognized term within literary theory for a rhetorical or narrative theme, figure, gesture, or archetype, and that therefore it is permissible, without asking leave of the mathematical community, to deploy topology to designate the analysis of textual topoi. One's suspicions are reignited, however, when the term differential topology suddenly appears. (In mathematics, differential topology is used to denote the study of the topological aspects of objects called "differential (or smooth) manifolds," which are, roughly speaking, higher-dimensional analogies of surfaces in three-dimensional space [)]. (265-66, n. 11)

     

    I leave aside the stale topology vs. topography joke and the inappropriate and unproductive tone of this footnote. It is more difficult to leave aside the fact that The Acts of Literature consists of translations of Derrida’s various writings on literature, which were edited, and the index compiled, by someone else. Moreover, the references in the index have clearly not been checked by Gross and Levitt. The statement that “in Derrida’s usage the word topology seems to be virtually synonymous with topography–at least the index regards them as identical,” is, at best, a bizarre non-sequitur. The references in the index–“topology (atopology, topography, topoi)” (The Acts of Literature, 455)–indicate that these terms are related or used in similar contexts, rather than that they are identical. Following Gross and Levitt’s logic, “topology” and “atopology” would be seen as identical too. In the text all these terms refer to a general sense of “topos” as spatiality, which, as even Gross and Levitt admit, need not entail a reference to topology as a mathematical discipline. Gross and Levitt have obviously not read the volume, nor do they appear to have checked the index against the text. Indeed it is difficult to say what they have read when they found “differential topology.” Here is Derrida’s statement itself, from his essay on Kafka, “Before the Law” [Devant la Loi]:

     

    This differential topology [topique différantielle] adjourns, guardian after guardian, within the polarity of high and low, far and near (fort/da), now and later. The same topology without its own place, the same atopology [atopique], the same madness defers the law as the nothing that forbids itself and the neuter that annuls oppositions. (The Acts of Literature, 208-9)

     

    Obviously, one needs to know both Kafka’s and Derrida’s texts to make sense of this passage, even if Derrida’s had in fact appealed to differential topology here. One can easily see, however, that Derrida says differantial [différantielle]–and not differential [différentielle]–topology. That is, he speaks of “topology” relating to his famous neologism or rather neographism “différance,” rather than to differential topology. This difference is of course not audible in the spoken French. It can only be made apparent in a written text. This was one of the reasons why Derrida introduced his neographism. In this sense Gross and Levitt’s mistake is deeply ironic. When Derrida uses topography a bit earlier in the same essay on Kafka, it refers to an “inscription” (in Derrida’s sense) of the “space” or/as “non-space” of the law in Kafka. This is why the editors list topography in the index. There is, of course, no simple identity of topology and atopology here, but only the concept of différantial topology as atopology–a topology without its own place–which may be a complex concept but entails no claim on Derrida’s part concerning mathematical differential topology. In fact, Derrida does not even say topology here, although he sometimes uses terms “topology” and “topological” elsewhere, including on other occasions in The Acts of Literature. It is true that the English translation says topology here–obviously (it should be clear by now) in the general, rather than mathematical, sense. However, the French provided in parenthesis, for that very reason, says “topique différantielle“–a differantial space or place, a certain topos or atopos, or atopos-ness. The French for differential topology is, of course, “topologie différentielle.” Given that his field is topology and that the French is provided here, it is inexplicable that Levitt (a topologist) did not pay attention to or did not bother to check this point–especially since his aim was to attack Derrida’s misuse of scientific terms.

     

    We recall that Gross and Levitt accuse Derrida of “using” the term differential topology “without definition and without any contextual justification.” The description appears to be far more appropriate as a characterization of their own treatment of Derrida’s work and, it can be similarly shown, of their treatment of the work of quite a number of others whom they criticize in their book. In general, scholarly problems of monumental proportions are, to use the language of topology, found in the immediate vicinity of just about every point of Higher Superstition. It is not so much embarrassing errors, even as egregious as that of the misreading of “topique differantielle” as differential topology, that are most crucial (we all make mistakes, sometimes absurd mistakes), but the intellectually and scholarly inadmissible practices and attitudes that pervade–and define–this sadly irresponsible book. Gross and Levitt’s warning concerning “threats to the essential grace and comity of scholarship and the academic life” (ix) becomes, in one of many bizarre ironies of the book, its self-description. To be sure–we must acknowledge this–some of the “postmodernist” work on science is indeed bad. There is, however, always some bad work in any field, including mathematics and science. The comedy of the book is that it says the worst things about some of the best work and accepts and sometimes praises–and draws on–some of the worst. The tragedy is that so many scientists, including some among the best scientists, have taken it seriously and accepted its arguments, and even adopted its unacceptable attitudes.12

     

    The significance of reading Derrida and others “without definition and without any contextual justification” extends well beyond the protocols of intellectual and scholarly exchange. Following these protocols is essential. As I have stressed from the outset, nothing in Derrida’s theory or practice, more specifically deconstructive or other, contradicts them–and much reinforces them. Derrida himself and other “dangerous deconstructionists” are more scrupulous and more classical–and, one might even say, more scientific–than most of their critics. Even more significant, however, is that once one provides the proper “definition” and “contextual justification” for Derrida’s terms–or those of other authors discussed in recent debates–there begins to emerge a very different sense of both these texts themselves and their relationships to mathematics and science.

     

    “The Einsteinian Constant”

     

    To (re)cite Derrida’s comment one more time:

     

    The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability--it is, finally, the concept of the game [jeu]. In other words, it is not the concept of something--of a center starting from which an observer could master the field--but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.

     

    I begin by observing that the final clause of Derrida’s last sentence “which, after all, I was trying to elaborate [in the lecture]” is omitted by most if not all commentators involved. This clause, however, is crucial because it indicates that the term “game” or “play” (in this context a better translation of the French “jeu,” which carries both meanings) has a very specific meaning here. This meaning, I shall argue, is consistent with the philosophical content of relativity, which, in brief, is the core point of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange on the subject. In other words, conceptually, relativity entails a certain decentered play in Derrida’s sense of the term. The concept of play is central to Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” an oral presentation of which at a conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966 occasioned the exchange.13 Understanding how Derrida uses the term “play” in his essay and understanding what Hyppolite and Derrida mean by “the Einsteinian constant” are, therefore, both essential for a meaningful reading of Derrida’s statement. Most scientists who commented in print on this statement have not carefully considered this concept, at best they barely mentioned it.14

     

    The accuracy of quotations from Derrida and others by their critics in the scientific community, such as Sokal or Gross and Levitt, has been stressed by many scientists involved in the debates at issue, and they are right to do so. As we have seen, not all of these quotations proved to be as accurate as these scientists believed. However, even assuming that such quotations are accurate, their literal accuracy is meaningless if the reader is not provided with the meanings of the terms involved (such as “play/game” or “the Einsteinian constant”), is deprived of the possibility of establishing them from the quotation itself, or is free to construe them on the basis of other sources–say, one’s general knowledge of physics, as opposed to the meaning given to these terms by Derrida’s essay or by Hyppolite’s question. Thus, what would be the meaning of one’s accurate quotation when “the Einsteinian constant” is made to be the gravitational constant as it figures in general relativity (as suggested by Sokal’s hoax) or the famous c, the speed of light in a vacuum (as Gross and Levitt claim), if, as I shall suggest, Hyppolite meant something else by it?15 Indeed, if Derrida’s statement is given without any further explanation of the terms of his essay, one can hardly be surprised at a reaction such as Steven Weinberg’s “I have no idea what this is intended to mean” (“Sokal’s Hoax,” 11), or any number of similarly dismissive responses that we have encountered recently (leaving aside for the moment “responses” of the kind one finds in Gross and Levitt’s book, unacceptable under all conditions). A different picture emerges only if one considers carefully Derrida’s and Hyppolite’s statements themselves and their context, especially Derrida’s work itself. Derrida’s statement, however, has been commented upon without any consideration of its textual and circumstantial context, and without even minimal attention to the meaning of its terms–even, sadly, by scholars and scientists of extraordinary achievement, such as Weinberg, a Nobel Prize laureate, at least in his New York Review of Books article “Sokal’s Hoax.”

     

    In his contribution to the exchange on his article, Weinberg, to his credit, acknowledges that he did not initially pay much attention to the meaning of Derrida’s key terms and gives some consideration to the context of Derrida’s statement, specifically to Hyppolite’s remarks. He says in particular that in his initial reaction to Derrida’s comment in “Sokal’s Hoax,” he “was bothered not so much by the obscurity of Derrida’s terms ‘center’ and ‘game.’ I was willing to suppose that these were terms of art, defined elsewhere by Derrida” (“Steven Weinberg Replies,” 56). In his subsequent reply to his critics in “Steven Weinberg Replies,” Weinberg says: “What bothered me was his phrase ‘the Einsteinian constant,’ which I have never met in my work as a physicist” (56). He proceeds, first, to suggest a possible meaning for the phrase and then to offer some comments on Derrida’s essay and the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange. He does not, however, consider Hyppolite’s own description of the [Einsteinian] “constant.” Nor does he offer a substantive commentary on or interpretation of the concept of play, which is, again, decisive here. Weinberg’s quotation from Derrida’s essay on the term “center” is hardly adequate to explain Derrida’s idea of decentering and play, and it is not surprising that this quotation was “not much help” to him (56). The passage that Weinberg cites occurs in the introductory portion of the essay, as part of the discussion of the joint historical functioning of the concepts of “structure” and “center:” “Nevertheless, … structure–or rather, the structurality of structure–although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.” Derrida’s phrase, omitted by Weinberg, “up to the event which I wish to mark and to define [in “Structure, Sign, Play”], indicates that Derrida is making primarily an introductory historical point here. His concept of decentered play emerges later in the essay, although a few sentences following the one cited by Weinberg may already give one a better sense of Derrida’s ideas concerning “structure,” “center,” and “play”:

     

    The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure--one cannot in fact conceive of unorganized structure--but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. (Writing and Difference, 278-79)

     

    In short, those unfamiliar with Derrida’s ideas would need a more extensive reading of Derrida’s essay and a more comprehensive explication of its terms, and more patience and caution may be necessary before one is ready to agree, or disagree, with Weinberg’s conclusion: “It seemed to me Derrida in context is even worse than Derrida out of context” (“Steven Weinberg Replies,” 56). The contexts and concepts at issue, however, may well not be sufficiently familiar to most scientists for them to be able to offer the kind of reading of Derrida’s statement that is suggested here. Nor should they be expected to be familiar with these ideas and contexts, or have any obligation to engage them in any way. It is not a question of blaming Weinberg, a great physicist and (which not irrelevant here) one of the most open to radical and innovative theories in physics itself, or most other scientists involved. One might regret a certain lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of those scientists or their unwillingness to consult the experts on Derrida, or indeed–Why not?–Derrida himself, something that, in more general terms, Weinberg appears to endorse as well (“Sokal’s Hoax,” 14). Reciprocally, scientists can be exceptionally helpful to scholars in the humanities, and they have been throughout intellectual history, in clarifying both science itself and philosophical concepts emerging in science. This is why I describe the present situation as sad rather than in terms of blame.

     

    Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s critics in the scientific community not only cite their comments out of context but virtually disregard the minimal relevant norms of intellectual and, especially, scholarly exchange. Derrida’s statement appears in the transcript of an improvised response to Hyppolite’s question following an oral presentation of his essay. The essay does not mention relativity and the statement itself makes no substantive scientific claims. Relativity and “the [Einsteinian] constant” are brought in by Hyppolite, not Derrida, who responds to Hyppolite extemporaneously, in the context of his just-delivered paper. Given these circumstances, a responsible commentator–scholar, scientist, journalist, or other–unfamiliar with Derrida would be hesitant to judge Derrida’s statement without undertaking a further investigation of his work, beginning with “Structure, Sign and Play.” The conclusions may of course be different from those reached by the present analysis, but no conclusion would be ethically, intellectually, or scholarly responsible short of such an investigation.

     

    There is nothing exceptional in the circumstances themselves. Such complexities of improvisation, transcription, translation, and interpretation often arise at conferences, and the circumstances that lead to them remain significant when such exchanges are subsequently reproduced in conference volumes, as is the case here and as is made clear by the editors of the volume (Languages of Criticism, xi-xiii). It is true that such statements are sometimes edited by the authors before publication and technically require their permission to be reproduced. Such is not always the case, however, and it is doubtful that it was done here, indeed it is virtually certain that it was not. Hyppolite, however, died before the volume at issue went into production and did not even have a chance to edit his own contribution, let alone his exchange with Derrida. However, in spite and sometimes because of the interpretive problems that they pose, such statements and exchanges are significant, historically and conceptually. My argument, therefore, is that the circumstances of these statements must be given special consideration in interpreting and evaluating them, rather than serving as a reason for dismissing them, as some have argued in the case of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange.

     

    Some (very few) scientists, such as Weinberg, as considered earlier, have admitted, grudgingly, that the circumstances of Derrida’s remark may require additional consideration. Such admissions in themselves are hardly sufficient, however. First of all, they are far “too little, too late”–after two years of relentless abuse, beginning with Gross and Levitt’s book. Secondly, more distressingly, they do not appear to signal much change in the overall hostile and unprofessional–and, one might indeed say, unscientific–attitude towards the work of Derrida and other figures on the part of the scientists involved (although there begin to appear some more encouraging signs here and there). Finally, most significantly, they are accompanied neither by meaningful (re)readings of Derrida’s statement itself (still considered as, at best, inept) nor by meaningful (re)considerations of the relationships between his ideas and the philosophical content of modern science. These relationships give Derrida’s and Hyppolite’s statements their meaning and significance in spite of their improvised character. It is with these relationships in mind that I now turn to Hyppolite’s remark, introducing the famous “constant.” Hyppolite said, according to the transcript of the exchange:

     

    With Einstein, for example, we see the end of a kind of privilege of empiric evidence. And in that connection we see a constant appears, a constant which is a combination of space-time, which does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct; and this notion of the constant--is this the center [i.e. would it be, according to Derrida's argument]? (Languages of Criticism, 266, emphasis added.)

     

    Hyppolite’s first sentence is somewhat obscure, which, again, is not surprising given the improvised and tentative, probing nature of his comments. It can, however, be read as compatible with special relativity, in particular the idea that the distinction between space and time depends on the observer. Certain statements, which would have objective (universal) “empirical” value according to classical physics–say, as concerns a sequence of two given events (A before B)–can no longer be seen as valid universally but instead as depending on a specific reference frame, since the sequence can be reversed if seen from the perspective of another frame (in which B will precede A).16

     

    More important here is the question of “the Einsteinian constant” itself, although it is related to the preceding consideration, as Hyppolite says. Hyppolite does not actually use the phrase “the Einsteinian constant,” which is introduced by Derrida. It thus clearly refers to Hyppolite’s remark, rather than to any accepted scientific term, and is, in this sense, a local contextual reference. As used by Hyppolite, the “constant” here may not mean–and does not appear to mean–a numerical constant, as virtually all the physicists who commented on it appear to assume. Instead it appears to mean the Einsteinian (or Einsteinian-Minkowskian) concept of space-time itself, since Hyppolite speaks of “a constant which is a combination of space-time” (emphasis added), or the so-called spatio-temporal interval, invariant (“constant”) under Lorentz transformations of special relativity. This interval is also both “a combination of space-time” and something that “does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience,” and can be seen as “dominat[ing] the whole construct” (i.e. the conceptual framework of relativity in this Minkowskian formulation). Indeed, it is possible that Hyppolite has in mind this latter (more elegant) interpretation, while Derrida understood the “constant” as referring to the Einsteinian concept of space-time itself. This difference is ultimately not that crucial, since both these notions are correlative (and both are correlative to the constancy of the speed of light c in a vacuum and its independence of the state of motion of the source) and both reflect key features–decentering, variability, play (in Derrida’s sense), and so forth–at stake in Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s statements. In any event, given the text, these interpretations are more plausible than seeing the phrase as referring to a numerical constant.

     

    This alternative interpretation is not definitive, and no definitive interpretation may be possible, given the status of the text as considered earlier. At the same time, interpretations of these statements are possible and may be necessary–for many reasons, for example, the interpretations that occasion this article. For these statements have been interpreted without any consideration of these complexities or any serious attempt to make sense of them. It is more productive, however, to take these complexities into account, to sort them out to the degree possible, and to give these statements the most sensible rather than the most senseless interpretation.

     

    In view of those aspects of Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s meanings that can be established with more certainty from broader contexts (such as that of Derrida’s essay), the above interpretation(s) of the Einsteinian constant are both possible and plausible, or at least allowable by their statements. The moment one accepts this interpretation, Derrida’s statement begins to sound quite a bit less strange. It acquires an even greater congruence with relativity once one understands the term “play/game” as connoting, in this context (it is a more radical and richer concept overall), the impossibility within Einstein’s framework of space-time of a uniquely privileged frame of reference–a center from which an observer could master the field (i.e. the whole of space-time). Even if my reading of “the Einsteinian constant” is tentative, the meaning I suggest for Derrida’s term “play” [jeu] is easily supportable on the basis of his essay and related works. So is, it follows, the understanding of this concept as congruent with (I do not say equivalent to) certain philosophical ideas and implications of relativity, and it may be in part indebted to these ideas, however indirectly.

     

    One might, then, see Derrida’s statement reflecting the fact that, in contrast to classical–Newtonian–physics, the space-time of special, and even more so of general, relativity disallows a Newtonian universal background with its (separate) absolute space and absolute time, or a uniquely privileged frame of reference for physical events. The Einsteinian or Einsteinian-Minkowskian concept of space-time may be seen as correlative to the assumption that the speed of light is independent of the state of motion of either the source or the observer, and, in this sense, these “two Einsteinian constants” may be seen as conceptually equivalent.17 The “constancy” or, better, invariance, in special relativity, of the so-called spatio-temporal interval under Lorentz transformations arises from the same considerations and was introduced in this form by Minkowski, and eventually led him to the concept of space-time. (I bypass the explanation of these, more technical, terms themselves, since this is not essential for my main point–the decentered structure of the space-time of relativity.) As I said, I find it plausible that Hyppolite had in mind precisely this concept. The Einsteinian (concept of) space-time, however, can be more immediately linked to Derrida’s concepts of decentering, variability, and play, and this is why, as I suggested earlier, it is possible that Derrida and Hyppolite have two different “constants” in mind here. Both “constants,” however, or c, derive from the same theory, Einstein’s (special) relativity, and this theory entails a certain general philosophical conceptuality, such as that of “play” in Derrida’s sense. Derrida sometimes speaks, via Nietzsche and Heidegger, of “the play of the world” itself, as opposed to play in the world. He posits a certain irreducible variability of the world itself and/as our construction of it, as opposed to the concept of the world as a (“flat”) background of events given once and for all, such as Newton’s absolute space in classical physics. From this perspective, “the Einsteinian constant,” understood as the concept of Einsteinian space-time, could indeed be seen, at least metaphorically, as “the very concept of variability” and, at the limit, as the concept of play/game [jeu] developed by Derrida.18

     

    One might, thus, see Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s remarks as relating to certain standard philosophical features of Einstein’s relativity–presented, admittedly, in a nonstandard idiom, especially for physicists. At the very least, these remarks can be read as consistent or, again, congruent with the philosophical ideas and implications of relativity, as they have been elaborated in the scientific and philosophical literature on the subject. What Hyppolite suggests is that part of the conceptual content of Einstein’s relativity with its space-time may serve as a kind of model for the Derridean concept of decentered play and related ideas. This suggestion is neither surprising nor especially difficult for anyone who has read Derrida’s essay and has some knowledge of certain key ideas of relativity. Derrida responds more or less positively, but suggests that one needs a more decentered view of “the Einsteinian constant”–which is to say of the physical world according to Einstein’s relativity or, as will be seen, of scientific theories themselves–than Hyppolite appears (to Derrida) to suggest. This may well be more or less as far as one can go with reasonable certainty regarding what Hyppolite and Derrida could mean. The remainder of the reading offered here is an exploration of certain possibilities and implications of these connections between relativity and Derrida’s ideas. Not much else might be possible under the circumstances of the exchange. However, at least as much as investigation as was undertaken here may be necessary in order to produce a reading of it like that suggested here–a reading connecting, historically and conceptually, Derrida’s work and the philosophical implications of Einstein’s relativity. As I have stressed throughout, these are philosophical questions, rather than questions of physics, that are at stake, and both Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s remarks must be read and evaluated accordingly.

     

    Such philosophical questions and implications are significant, however, and their significance is in no way diminished by the circumstances of the exchange, such as the improvised nature of these remarks. This exchange reflects concepts, including those of Hyppolite and Derrida, which are anything but improvised–quite the contrary; these concepts, such as “play,” are thought through in Derrida in the most rigorous way. Even more significantly, they reflect and (at least in part) derive from the philosophical questions arising in modern science itself. This is in part why in introducing his question Hyppolite says that “we have a great deal to learn from modern science” (Languages of Criticism, 266). This is also why I would be hesitant to treat these remarks as merely “casual,” “offhand,” and so forth, and dismiss them on these grounds. As I have indicated, the latter argument was advanced by some in defending Derrida against recent criticism on the part of the scientific community, and even have been to a degree accepted by some critics as well. This, however, is a weak defense, and at stake in my argument here is not a defence of Derrida. The question may well be whether Derrida’s or other contemporary philosophical thought, however rigorous and radical, is yet rigorous and radical enough for what it is at stake at the philosophical limits of relativity (especially general relativity) or elsewhere in modern physics, in particular in quantum theory. Throughout its history, physics has been an extraordinarily fertile ground for questioning our philosophical assumptions. This is in part why Nietzsche said: “Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt,–unsre Redlichkeit!” [And this is why: long live physics! And even more so that which forces us to turn to it–our integrity]19 If there is a rigorous, meaningful, and productive criticism to be offered here–for example, based on physics–it should be offered. We have not, however, seen such criticism in recent exchanges. The very question of how casual such “casual” remarks are, or can be, would have to be reconsidered from this perspective. Some of the most significant ideas in science and philosophy alike were introduced by way of “casual” remarks, footnotes, and so forth. As Derrida says, “it is always better, and its is always more scientific, to read” (Points…, 414; emphasis added).

     

    Hyppolite invokes next still more radical conceptual possibilities suggested by modern science, referring, first, implicitly (at least, it can be read in this way) to quantum physics and then, overtly, to biology. These references, their connections to Derrida’s ideas, and Derrida’s response to them require a separate discussion, as does the remainder of the exchange, which raises questions concerning the relationships between (post)structuralism and the philosophical aspects of mathematics (in particular algebra or, more accurately, “algebraization”) and science. Some of these questions have an interesting history in the context of “structuralist controversy” (and of course a still longer history, extending to/from Greek and Babylonian mathematics). Michel Serres even argues that we might need to rethink structuralism from the perspective of its connections to twentieth-century mathematics, specifically the Bourbaki project.20 André Weil, one of the great mathematicians of this century and a founding member of the Bourbaki group (and the brother of Simone Weil), wrote an appendix to Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship.21 Both Derrida and Hyppolite (or Serres) must have been aware of Weil’s article and might have been familiar with it. Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” is, we recall, primarily an analysis and a deconstruction of Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism.22 The essay does not consider this mathematical or, again, mathematico-philosophical problematic and its relationships with structuralism. However, it can hardly be simply disconnected from them, and some of these connections emerge more explicitly in other essays in Writing and Difference and elsewhere in Derrida (especially in his earlier work). At the very least, Derrida’s philosophical ideas can be meaningfully engaged in exploring these relationships, as Hyppolite indeed suggests.

     

    There are further nuances concerning relativity as well, especially those relating to the difference between the centering of “the whole [theoretical] construct”–that is, as I read it, the overall conceptual framework of relativity–around the concept of space-time and the centering of the space-time of special or general relativity itself.23 Concentrating here on “the Einsteinian constant,” Derrida does not appear to address the first question as such (or conceivably, and, again, under the circumstances understandably, conflates both questions). It may well be, however, that he intimates a negative answer here as well. For from the Derridean perspective it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to claim any central or unique concept–the “constant”–defining the Einsteinian framework. It is, therefore, possible that Derrida has this point in mind. Invariance or stability of a conceptual center of a theoretical structure, such as relativity, is, of course, quite different from invariance of a physical constant. One might suggest, however, that in the case of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange a certain concept of decentering defining the space and time of relativity coincides with the idea of decentering of the overall conceptual structure of the theory itself. No concept belonging to the latter, not even that of the decentered space-time, may be seen as an absolute center of relativity theory–a center invariant under all theoretical and historical transformations of this theory. That is, such conceptual centering may change from one version of relativity to another (this centering is relative in this sense), and some forms of relativity may be constructed as conceptually decentered in themselves. Indeed, there have been considerable debates among historians of science as to the relative centrality of key experimental facts and theoretical ideas of special relativity, either as originally introduced by Einstein or in its subsequent, such as Minkowskian, forms. All these nuances would have to be considered in order to make a full-fledged argument of the type suggested here, as against unscholarly recent treatments of Derrida and Hyppolite which are unacceptable regardless of potential problems one might have with their comments on relativity or their ideas in general.

     

    The possibility of such an argument should not be surprising. Neither Hyppolite nor Derrida claims to have expertise in physics itself. However, leaving aside their general erudition, both have been the readers and (especially Hyppolite) colleagues of such world-famous philosophers and scholars of science as Alexandre Koyré, Gaston Bachelard, and others, and of a number of major mathematicians and scientists. These authors, including mathematicians and scientists, commented extensively on philosophical issues in and implications of relativity, and are cited by many experts in the history and philosophy of science. Many discussions of the Leibniz-Clarke debate in philosophical literature, known to Hyppolite (or Derrida), consider Einstein’s relativity, both specific and general theory, as a culmination or at least a crucial point in the history opened by this debate. Moreover, as the director of the École Normale, the center of French philosophy, mathematics and science, which he headed for ten years (1954-63), Hyppolite had access to the most sophisticated scientific and philosophical information on the subject. He was previously a chair at the Sorbonne and a professor at the Collège de France thereafter, where he also had ample opportunities to discuss modern mathematics and science, in which he had considerable interest throughout his life. It is worth mentioning in this context that Hyppolite was granted admission to the École Normale on the basis of his ability in philosophy and mathematics. Derrida, too, spent years of his career at the École Normale, first as a student (of, among others, Hyppolite) and then as a professor, and had similar access to key ideas of modern mathematics and science in general. It cannot therefore be surprising that both Hyppolite and Derrida would know enough about relativity to make philosophically sensible or even suggestive remarks about it. Moreover, there are considerable independent philosophical affinities between relativity and Derrida’s ideas–that is, if these affinities are indeed independent given the intellectual history just indicated.

     

    One could argue that the connections between Derrida’s work and relativity are not restricted to those indicated so far and involve deeper epistemological questions, crucial to the continuing debate concerning the philosophical interpretation and implications of relativity. Conversely, one can question how productive a Derridean framework could be as an approach to (the philosophy of) relativity. Whichever way one’s argument may proceed here, however, it must be conducted very differently from reading Derrida’s statement in a deliberately distorted or parody-like manner, as in Sokal’s hoax; or from offering “criticism” of it that is clearly uninformed, as in Gross and Levitt’s book; or from other non-treatments of it on both sides of the recent “science wars.” Such an argument would also be different from what one finds in Sokal’s article in Lingua Franca (disclosing his hoax) and his other “serious” commentaries on the subject: a manifest philosophical naivete and ignorance of philosophical literature, including that on relativity and quantum physics, let alone of the work of Derrida and other figures on whom he comments (which latter ignorance Sokal indeed acknowledges).24 The question is not whether Derrida’s comments on relativity or other areas of mathematics and science, or his work in general should be criticized, but at what level of intellectual engagement, knowledge, and scholarship such criticism of Derrida and others should take place.

     

    Scholars in the humanities should, of course, exercise due caution as to the claims they make about mathematics and science, and respect the areas of their specificity. Reciprocally, however, scientists and other non-humanist scholars should exercise due care and similar caution in their characterization of the humanities, especially when they are dealing with innovative and complex work, such as that of Derrida, and all the more so if they want to be critical about it. Derrida would be willing and indeed eager to accept any open-minded criticism of his comment on relativity or his ideas about science in general, especially by scientists. So far, however, no such criticism–not even a dismissal that can be taken seriously–has been offered, at least not yet. In order for this to happen, reading, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, must become a serious task for all of us, scientists and nonscientists alike. On another occasion (in conjunction with the controversy surrounding his honorary degree from Cambridge), Derrida offered the following comment on the negative sentiments of certain scientists towards his work, expressed, it appears, without reading it:

     

    I would be content here with a classical answer, the most faithful to what I respect the most in the university: it is better, and it is always more scientific, to read and to make a pronouncement on what has been read and understood. The most competent scientists and those most committed to research, inventors and discoverers, are in general, on the contrary, very sensitive to history and to processes which modify the frontiers and established norms of their own discipline, in this way prompting them to ask other questions, other types of question. I have never seen scientists reject in advance what seemed to come from other areas of research or inquiry, other disciplines, even if that encouraged them to modify their grounds and to question the fundamental axioms of their discipline. I could quote here the numerous testimonies of scientists in the most diverse disciplines which flatly contradict what the scientists you mention [in conjunction with the Cambridge incident] are saying. (Points..., 414)

     

    One can find many such testimonies in the works of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other founding figures of modern physics, or in the works of many major mathematicians and scientists in other fields. A more serious engagement with Derrida’s and other recent philosophical work on the part of scientists is possible, too, and we might yet see it. Then, perhaps, we will also have a better understanding of why “the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center,” why “it is the very concept of variability,” and why “it is, finally, the concept of the game”– or, if that is the case, why it is none of the above.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970), 267.

     

    2. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994); Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries–Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text (Spring/Summer, 1996), 217-252. The continuing proliferation of subsequent commentaries and discussions on and around, as it became known, “Sokal’s hoax” is staggering, even leaving the innumerable exchanges on the Internet aside. No end is unfortunately in sight. Derrida’s comment figures most prominently and, again, nearly uniquely throughout these discussions. In particular, it was discussed in Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” New York Review of Books (August 8, 1996), 11-15, and “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange” New York Review of Books (October 3, 1996), 54-56.

     

    3. His very first book was a translation of and an introduction to Husserl’s essay “The Origin of Geometry.” Beyond a number of substantive commentaries throughout his works, one can especially mention here as yet unpublished seminar “La vie la mort,” concerned in Derrida’s own words, “with ‘modern’ problematic of biology, genetics, epistemology, or the history of life sciences (reading of Jacob, Canguilhem, etc.)” (The Post Card, tr. Alan Bass [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987], 259, n.1).

     

    4. See his remarks in Florian Rötzer, Conversations with French Philosophers, tr. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 5.

     

    5. See, again, Conversations with French Philosophers, 5.

     

    6. On these issues in a more general context, see Derrida’s analysis in “Limited Inc a b c …” and, especially, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern UP, 1988). Of course, as Derrida’s analysis, including in Dissemination, exhaustively demonstrates, it is not possible to control (the dissemination of) the meaning of Derrida’s statements, such as those under discussion here, any more than of any other statement. The overall case here considered offers a powerful, if distressing, illustration of this point. Nor is it possible to claim that any given reading (for example, the one offered here) is definitive. That does not mean, however, that one should not read with utmost care, rigor and respect the context under which a given statement is made, or that one cannot argue about such readings, or that one can simply disregard traditional norms of interpretation or scholarship– quite the contrary. This view is fully in accord with both deconstructive theory and deconstructive practice, at least the best theory and the best practice of deconstruction, such as those of Derrida himself, quite in contrast with many of his readers, such as those discussed here. Derrida’s readings and those of other responsible practitioners of deconstruction scrupulously follow such classical protocols. Deconstruction does argue that such protocols, even if scrupulously adhered to, cannot guarantee determinate results. The present case is an obvious example of this situation, too. Deconstruction would aim to explain what happens here and why, and Derrida and others offer many deep and subtle explanations of such cases. But this is quite different from endorsing these kinds of practices.

     

    7. Coherent States: Past, Present, and Future, eds. D. H. Feng, J. R. Klauder, and M. R. Strayer (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994).

     

    8. Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 235; Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 207.

     

    9. John Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UP, 1989), 6; Barbara Johnson, “Nothing Fails Like Success,” SCE Reports 8 (Fall 1980):9.

     

    10. Jacques Derrida, Points… (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford UP, 1995), 404.

     

    11. Had it taken place, an “abuse” or misrepresentation of differential topology would, of course, be unfortunate. It is an extraordinary discipline, a grand achievement of the human mind. The contribution of the French mathematicians to the founding and development of this field was extraordinary, from such founding figures as Henri Poincaré to the extraordinary contributions, throughout the first half of this century, of such figures as Elie Cartan, Jean Leray, Henri Cartan, Jean-Pierre Serre, René Thom, and many others, and then by their younger followers up to the present. I happen to have studied differential topology at the University of Leningrad with Vladimir Rokhlin and Mikhail Gromov. Mathematicians would know these names and those of other figures just mentioned, and it is a pity that non-mathematicians do not know them (a subject that would require a separate consideration). I mention these French names (mathematicians from other countries also made major contributions to the field) because key developments to which they contributed took place when Hyppolite, a key figure for my discussion, was first a student (at the École Normale) and then a professor at the Sorbonne, the École Normal, and the Collège de France, where many of these figures were Hyppolite’s fellow students and then colleagues. Derrida was a student at the École Normal (where he studied with Hyppolite) around the time of major breakthroughs in the field, which were widely discussed in the intellectual community to which he, Hyppolite, and other major philosophical figures mentioned here belonged. This community also included major historians and philosophers of science. I shall further consider the significance of these facts later. The point I want to make here is that the irresponsible attitude on Derrida’s part imagined or fantasized (with no basis whatsoever) by Gross and Levitt is inconceivable for anyone even remotely familiar with the intellectual environment just indicated and with Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s work and attitudes.

     

    12. Given the egregious nature of some of its mistakes, it is surprising that they were not discussed by reviewers immediately upon the publication of the book. It is also unfortunate, since it could diminish some harm done by the book. Some of them should, of course, have been noticed before the book was published, assuming that it should have been published, to begin with, given its flaws, which are unredeemable regardless of the problems one might have with the authors discussed in the book. Nor has it (or Sokal’s hoax) much value in terms of provoking debate, as some have contended. There are better ways to engender debates–and better debates. By now some of these problems have by been pointed out by some reviewers and commentators. Even Sokal acknowledges, in his more recent commentaries, that Gross and Levitt’s book contains “errors,” including as concerns their “topology” quotation from Derrida and the circumstances of his comment on relativity. While this article was being considered for publication, an extensive survey of such problems has been published by Roger Hart in “The Flight from Reason: Higher Superstition and the Refutation of Science Studies,” Science Wars, ed. Andrew Ross (Durham, NC.: Duke UP, 1996), 259-92. As I shall discuss, these recognitions do not change the situation much. In contrast to my argument here, in most cases both critics and even defenders (such as Hart) of Derrida still think that Derrida’s (or Hyppolite’s) comments should at best be discounted (at worst they are seen as inept or senseless), rather than understood in the context of the relationships between philosophy and science. The very critique of Gross and Levitt’s book often amounts to “yes, they got a few (or even not so few) things wrong, but …”–not the kind of change of attitude that is, I think, necessary here.

     

    13. Both the essay and the discussion are in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. The essay is also included in Derrida’s Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978).

     

    14. This point of the necessity of understanding both terms is clearly brought into the foreground by Steven Weinberg in “Steven Weinberg Replies” (The New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 56), where Weinberg also qualifies his original remarks on Derrida somewhat (without changing his view) and comments on the context of Derrida’s statement in response to the letters published in “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange.” As will be seen, however, these qualifications are hardly sufficient to change my argument here. I also leave aside for the moment the problem of translation, even though it is significant. Thus, the translation of Derrida’s essay published in the conference volume has several problems, and one is better off reading the version published in Writing and Difference. In particular, the version in the conference volume translates Derrida’s jeu as “freeplay”–which may lead to a misunderstanding of Derrida’s idea of play. Translation is a crucial concern in considering the circumstantial context of the statements at issue. This context may make any claim concerning these statements, including any claim to be offered here, irreducibly tentative. On the circumstances themselves, see The Languages of Criticism, xi-xiii.

     

    15. The very disagreement between Sokal’s and Gross and Levitt’s interpretations suggests that a more careful reading may be necessary. Of course, Sokal’s article, being a hoax, cannot be considered as offering a meaningful interpretation of anything, and it can be shown that it misrepresents (deliberately or not) virtually all the significant ideas that it invokes, certainly Derrida’s. Sokal’s interpretation of Derrida’s remark makes no sense whatsoever given Hyppolite’s question and Derrida’s essay. It is strange that several scientists appear to have accepted this interpretation on the basis of a hoax–an admitted hoax–especially since, as Weinberg points out, this is not a standard term in physics. This makes him, too, (in this case more understandably) puzzle about the phrase and suggest the meaning of the phrase as, again, referring to a numerical constant, that of Newton’s constant figuring in Einstein’s theory (“Steven Weinberg Replies,” 56). He does not appear to attribute this meaning to Derrida, which indeed would not make any sense. Yet another reading proposed by some scientists, that of the so-called cosmological constant appearing in certain versions of relativistic cosmology, makes even less sense, historically or conceptually. Such a constant was indeed introduced by Einstein in his early cosmological investigations, but was quickly abandoned by him. (He even spoke of its introduction as the greatest scientific mistake of his life.) It was resurrected by recent cosmological theories and has had considerable prominence in recent discussions. It would, however, be very unlikely for it to be invoked at the time of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange in 1966. Nor does it appear to make much sense as Hyppolite’s reference, given what he says here, or given Derrida’s discussion in “Structure, Sign, and Play” itself.

     

    16. I am grateful to Joshua Socolar, from the Physics Department at Duke, for his suggestions in clarifying this particular point and for productive discussions in general. It must be kept in mind that, in Niels Bohr’s formulation, “the space-time coordination of different observers never implies reversal of what may be termed the causal sequence of events” (The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, 3 vols. (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1987) 3:2. More generally, in contrast to quantum physics, Einstein’s relativity remains a causal and otherwise classical physical theory, at least special relativity (since all these questions–causality, reality, and so forth–become more complex in the case of Einstein’s general relativity, his theory of gravitation). This point is intimated by Hyppolite in his remarks, when he invokes a more radical dislocation of classical thinking emerging in modern science (Languages of Criticism, 266).

     

    17. According to Einstein’s original paper on relativity “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” [On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies],” one may firmly conjecture the following on the basis of the available experimental evidence: “[T]he same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will thereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely that the light is always propagated in empty space with a definite speed c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body” (Einstein: A Centenary Volume, ed. E. P. French [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979], 281-82). Einstein’s “reconciliation” of these two apparently irreconcilable postulates within the framework of special relativity was his great achievement.

     

    18. This link would be even more pronounced in general relativity, which connects gravitation to the geometry, here non-Euclidean (Riemannian) geometry, of space-time. In this case, the Lorentz invariance can no longer be maintained globally but only locally, correlatively to the fact that in general relativity space can be seen as flat–Euclidean or, more accurately, Lorentzian–only locally. Globally space is curved. The variability and “the play of the world” (in the present sense) is, however, not only retained but is enhanced as a result. Deleuze’s interest in Riemannian geometry (in turn much maligned but little understood by his critics in the scientific community) is motivated by similar considerations of decentering variability.

     

    19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988) 3: 564; The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 256 (translation modified).

    20. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, Mich.: U of Michigan P, 1995), 35.

     

    21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. Hames H. Bell, John R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969), 221-27. I am grateful to David Reed, from the Mathematics Department at Duke, for reminding me about this fact and for most helpful discussions.

     

    22. I here use this, by now complicated, term “deconstruction” in a more limited and more rigorous sense of the analytical practice of Derrida’s own (mostly earlier) work, such as “Structure, Sign, and Play.” This is not the place to consider the “continuities” and “discontinuities” in Derrida’s work over last thirty years, nor the differences in the ways this work is received on different sides of the Atlantic. These factors are relevant to recent debates, but they would not affect my argument here.

     

    23. Differences of that type–those between the centering of a given theoretical framework, say, around a given concept, and the centering of the structure(s) constructed or investigated within this framework–appear to be on Hyppolite’s mind from the outset of and throughout his remarks, beginning with his invocation of algebra.

     

    24. Alan D. Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996), 62-64. My limits here do not permit me to discuss relevant specific portions of these works, which one might consider appropriate, given my strong criticism here. While I would stand by my assessments of the particular authors just mentioned, the reader is invited to read my elaboration as a general appeal to a more serious engagement, however critical it may be, with the work of Derrida and other contemporary thinkers that may be invoked here.