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

PMC Reader’s Report on Valerie Fulton, “An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and Star Trek’s Imperial Subject”:

I am writing in regard to Valerie Fulton’s article ‘An Other Frontier: Voyaging West With Mark Twain and Star Trek’s Imperial Subject’ (PMC 4.3. May 1994).

While I enjoyed this critical reading of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I felt that Valerie Fulton’s article did not fully examine the complexity of the series, and particularly of the well documented viewer’s responses to the series.

Fulton discusses naturalization of imperialist discourse in ST: TNG. She alleges that the Federation is engaged in imperialist “exploration, conquest and colonization” of the cultures they come into contact with. She points out that the Federation does not colonize in order to gain material wealth–they already command an unlimited supply of food and energy.

It’s Imperialism, Jim, but not as we know it? The Federation is concerned, not with material but rather with cultural enrichment (Picard, the Captain of the Enterprise, is an amateur archaeologist). A cultural plunder of the Other could be as damaging as material plunder, but the Federation never pillages the treasures belonging to the ‘alien’ cultures it comes into contact with. The Prime Directive has been created by the Federation in an attempt to maintain the autonomy of the Other. The exploration of the frontier in Star Trek: The Next Generation is no simple process of colonization but an ongoing negotiation with the Other.

Of course, the Federation cannot help but influence the cultures it bumps into in its exploration of the galaxy, and the process of exploration and the humanist pursuit of knowledge does involve a certain amount of cultural imperialism. However, the series ST:TNG does not “tacitly help to perpetuate the conventional U.S. wisdom that acts of imperialism by our government against third world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving, benign rather than aggressive.” What has become known as ‘The Star Trek Phenomenon’ prevents such perpetuation. The Star Trek universe provides a framework in which questions raised by the confrontation with the self and Other can be explored.

Rather than agreeing that, through Star Trek “we are simultaneously discouraged from practicing the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative modes of discourse and lead toward social change,” I would argue that Star Trek provides a vital site for this kind of self-scrutiny. The extraordinary level of engagement with the viewer that Star Trek manages to elicit is evidence of the impact that this series has had on Western culture. The many discussions relating to the show on the Internet and in fanzines, at Star Trek conventions and in front of the TV ensure that Star Trek is never passively accepted but is discussed, analysed, and critiqued, endlessly.

Correspondingly, if the series does have an imperialist discourse, then this discourse is also endlessly discussed, and analysed by viewers.

I hope that Valerie Fulton pursues her interest in Star Trek, and that this interest leads her to watch many more episodes, and also to look at the rich and exciting culture of Star Trek fandom.

sincerely

Ali Smith
Resident Artist
Wollongong City Gallery
Wollongong NSW
Australia
s.indlekofer-osullivan@uow.edu.au

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

I simply wanted to note how much I enjoyed the article on the beauty of Zorn’s composition. His music does indeed incite the body, while the mind is simultaneously belied by the raucousness and anti-musical sound of it all. Such composers, of which there are few indeed, require the listener to participate, like it or not. May more people learn to appreciate the incorporation of listener and performer.

These comments are from: Lane McFadden
The email address for Lane McFadden is: lanemcf@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu

PMC Reader’s Report on Dion Dennis, “Evocations of Empire in A Transnational Corporate Age: Tracking the Sign of Saturn”:

I really don’t know where to start… I thought your article here to be truly fascinating and for those who just maight have an open mind very educational… Thank you for writing it…

I’ve long watched American jobs (since the late seventies) move from this country and in to Mexico, right across the border from my home town of Laredo, Texas…

Just watching the manufacturing expansion over there without the needed expansion of the normal support structure such as roads, sewers, water treatment, building inspectors, and the like only emphasized the fact that this was waton greed in action. To me this pursuit of profit without any regard for the consequences of such actions would come back to haunt us all… Now we have the 3rd world inside our own national boundaries and it is both a shame and despicable…

As a middle aged white man stuck working for what seems to be a “profits impaired” airline I am very worried about my future… I spent many days between 1987 and 1992 looking for another job the the prospect were to say at best quite grim… This isn’t how the so called “American Dream” was suppose to work was it?

Again thanks for posting the article…

These comments are from: Russell Harris
The email address for Russell Harris is: harris1@ix.netcom

Ivan Strenski

University of California, Santa Barbara
eui9ias@mvs.oac.ucla.edu

Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Intellectual historian-cum-literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has given us a series of thoughtful essays on a cluster of issues of wide current concern: ethnocentrism, humanism, scientism, racism, nationalism, universalism, cultural relativism, exoticism, and the like. Todorov seeks further to identify the leading French thinkers on these subjects, and in doing so to identify the main proponents of what he believes are the key “ideologies” or “justifications” of French “colonial conquests” (xiii). Partly because of the luster of French thought, Todorov believes that this study will constitute nothing short of “research into the origins of our own times” (xii).

These ambitous intentions may well go unrecognized in America, however, where the book’s publishers have created a false impression of the author’s aims and of the scope of his work. In translating the original French title, Nous et les autres: La Reflexion francaise sur la diversite humaine, as On Human Diversity, the editors at Harvard have pushed aside Todorov’s broadly dialectical and dialogical purposes in favor of their much narrower concerns. A nuanced and thoughtful book that seeks to guide our thinking about how we should behave toward one another has been served up as yet another contribution to the banal and stifling American conversation about “diversity.” Readers of the book will perhaps be amused by the irony here: a foreign book dealing with ethnocentrism is given a very specifically American (i.e., ethnocentric) packaging before being offered to a domestic readership. But in any case, the book itself should come as a pleasant surprise, addressing as it does a refreshingly broad range of us/them questions and offering a number of provocative theses.

To begin with one of the book’s more important themes, Todorov asserts that perhaps the first error we should eliminate from our thinking about the us/them issue is the dichotomy of “us” and “them” itself. He points out that these categories are highly provisional and unstable in any event, and that one of “them” may be felt to be a lot more like me than one of “us.” (We see this instability at work in the tendency of white suburban men to identify more closely with murder suspect O.J. Simpson than with murder victim Ron Goldman.) Todorov’s aim is to have us judge in terms of “ethical” principles, not in terms of some presumed membership in one or another group of “us.”

Todorov also threads his way through such issues as the relation of colonial domination to humanitarian universalism. In chapter one, “The Universal and the Relative,” he slides from one end of the dialectic to another, covering a range of opinion on the question of the purported unity or diversity of the human species and its values. Are we one or infinitely many? And, if many, of what significance are the differences? Is there a “universal scale of values,” and “how far does that scale extend”? Here, Todorov performs a useful service for this and future discussions by stipulating the usage of key terms. Thus, for him, “ethnocentrism” is taken to name the “most common” version, indeed a “caricature,” of universalism. This holds that we all are one, because the “other” is basically just like “us.” It affirms both the form of universality and a “particular content.” Thus, it has been a commonplace of French ethnocentric universalists to claim both that the human species and its values are essentially one (and thus, universal), and that these values happen to be best embodied in France. All men seek liberty, equality and fraternity, n’est ce pas?

Todorov brings out the clever strategems by which universalism often masks ethnocentrism. This is notoriously so in the way French imperialism often justified its expansionist ventures in terms of bringing (French, of course) “civilization” to the “savages.”

But Todorov is too wise in these matters to let the facile critique pass that universalism always hides a more sinister ethnocentrism. Sometimes nations can act in behalf of humanity. Sometimes they can rise above national interest. Had he written this book more recently, Todorov might have had something in mind like the French humanitarian and military actions in Rwanda. Compared to the sorry parade of supposedly shrewdly calculated self-interested American inactions, Medicins sans Frontieres acted in behalf of humanity, despite their specific national origins. Is it only accidental that they should be French? One also thinks of the French rushing in troops (in the name of humanity) to prevent greater loss of innocent life in Rwanda. Despite the cynicism which attended this military action, the French succeeded in turning the tide against further genocide. They also acted in effect to seal the victory of the Anglophone Tutsi minority over the Francophone Hutu, thereby opposing what would seem to be their own national interests. Was it only an accident again that it should have been France who behaved in this way? Many a self-interested and narrowly national evil has been perpetrated in the name of humanity. But, if they are habituated to thinking about the larger human species, perhaps some nations can at times overcome their own interests.

Todorov argues further that universalism is not the only villain in perpetuating colonialism. Any available justification will serve colonialist ambitions: if not universalism, then Lebensraum. Besides, Todorov argues, ideologies such as (ethnocentric) universalism seldom, if ever, “motivate” colonial enterprises; they merely serve as post-facto “self-legitimations.” Indeed, for Todorov, universalism isn’t even the primary legitimating mechanism for colonial violence–scientism is. “Scientism,” he says, is the most “perverse” and the most effective ideological weapon in the armory of ethnocentrism and racism, because it so easily passes undetected. People are rarely “proud of being ethnocentric,” whereas they often “take pride in professing a ‘scientific’ philosophy.” Here, Diderot becomes a major exemplar of “scientific ethnocentrism,” as do Renan, who makes a religion of science, and Gobineau, with his fully elaborated scientific racialism. Todorov’s discussion of this aliance between the scientific and the colonial is on the whole fully persuasive. Certainly science has served the needs of modern racialism all too efficiently; both Hitler and Stalin, we must recall, boasted that their ideologies were strictly scientific.

Perhaps the most compelling recurrent theme of the book is that of the “tragic duality” between humanism or universalism and nationalism or patriotism. The “man” is not the “citizen.” Humanitarian patriots, epitomized by those who sought to spread universal humanism after the French Revolution, bear a heavy responsibility for the wars that raged in Europe from the late eighteenth century to the end of the First World War: “these wars were accepted all the more easily in that they were presented as invested with the prestige of the French Revolution and the humanitarian ideal.” Those who try thus to reconcile humanity and patriotism court disaster, because they inevitably bend humanity to the interests of the particular nation.

But the radical separation of “man” and “citizen” is tragic in its own way, since it locks us into moral relativism. Are there, asks Todorov, no “crimes against humanity”? Can we no more than shrug our “ethical shoulders” at the Nazi extermination camps, viewing them as legitimate expressions of German culture? Is the tribal custom of clitoridectomy a cultural practice which, rather than judging in their typically self-righteous way, Europeans should try better to “understand from the native’s point of view”? Or, is it a fearsome affront to the very humanity of women?

Some sort of reconciliation is necessary between humanity and particularity. Todorov believes that this reconciliation is not possible at the level of empirical human nature, but rather at the level of how we think–at the level of “culture.” Culture, he argues, is something close to being “natural” in the sense that it is “given” and thus pre-exists the individual, but it is also something like a contract (since it is willed), and can be acquired or affected by education. But while we can specify these universal contours of culture in general, there is no unity of the species on the level of a particular cultural feature. What is universal is “not one quality or another, but the capacity to acquire any of them.” “The French language is not universal,” observes Todorov, but “the aptitude for learning a language is.” We need, he argues, to become critical of the particular features of our own culture without ceasing to recognize that it is culture itself that enables us to become “human.”

In listing these key themes which are woven through Todorov’s essays, I am also indicating that On Human Diversity lacks a single strong central thesis or major argument. This is a deliberate feature of Todorov’s writing–he conceives of it as a process, as offering an “itinerary” rather than a blue print. To be sure, those who are looking for a single-minded and tightly organized discussion will be disappointed by such an approach. The book is in places too cursory, in places too digressive. But Todorov’s intentions show a wisdom of their own. Because he eschews heavy documentation and a strict architectonic of argument, On Human Diversity seems able better to maintain a compelling and powerful moral compass. The book’s unity is moral, rather than logical or thematic. What holds the various essays together is Todorov’s insistence on always inserting ethics into the analysis and the practice of politics. Todorov realizes that ethics cannot replace politics, but he also believes that ethics can exercise a crucial restraining function within the political field.

This ethical orientation amounts to a kind of neo-humanism, and Todorov concludes his volume with an ethically-inflected defense of humanism against its various unnamed French detractors (Levi-Strauss? Derrida? Foucault?). Instead of seeing humanism as generating its own auto-toxins, Todorov argues that it has been distorted and undermined by irrepressible holistic impulses. Nationalism, racialism, and totalitarian utopianism are all monstrous reinventions of ideals originating in holistic ideology. Citing the seminal and often misunderstood work on the Hindu caste system of French anthropologist and social thinker Louis Dumont, Todorov urges that we must learn to “temper” the humanitarian ideal of the Enlightenment by putting it into play with “values and principles from other perspectives.” Only in this way will we find “new [benign] expressions for the repressed holistic values” whose subjugation to individual freedom was part of the price we paid for the triumph of humanist individualism.

Aside from elaborating, in his loosely-structured way, this humanist articulation of ethics with politics, Todorov reflects autobiographically on both the personal and the institutional contexts from which his particular orientation has emerged. In his preface, Todorov recalls his experiences as a zealous young “pioneer” living under a Stalinist regime. During this time, he remarks, he “came to know evil,” even while he was inhibited from acting against it. The more formative moment came, however, after Stalin’s death, when relief and hope gave way to an awareness that things would not really change. Todorov confronted with increasing frequency the “vacuity of the official discourse,” a lofty Orwellian language whose real function was to mask the apparatus of domination. The “evil” he had come to know was not to be located in the dictator after all, but in the whole social and discursive system of which the evil dictator was but a symptom. In the wake of this recognition, even Todorov’s strong faith in Marxist principles would wither. Fortunately, he was able to migrate to France, where he resumed his studies in the human and social sciences in Paris.

Todorov’s honeymoon with the West was, however, soon over. Among his politically obsessed French academic colleagues, he found the same absence of “an ethical sense” which he once thought peculiar to the Stalinist East. Of these Western intellectuals, Todorov observes sarcastically that the “goals that inspired them were most often variants of the very principles I had learned to mistrust so deeply in my homeland.” Almost as frustrating as this sclerotic and inhumane Marxism among his French academic colleagues, however, was the petit-bourgeois professionalization and the crabbed compartmentalization of the modern university.

Todorov’s institutional goal, therefore, has been to map out new approaches to matters that he believes have been avoided or mishandled by intellectuals more rooted than he in the particular political postures and disciplinary arrangements of the Western academic system. Instead of adjusting himself to the contours of this system, he has rebelled against it. On Human Diversity is something like a culmination of that rebellion, a book written from a totally deviant point of departure, one that, in its unfashionably humanist ethics and in its declared preference for the “moral and political essay” over conventional scholarship in the human or social sciences, must offend both the radical left and the conservative defenders of disciplinary specialization.

It is hard in a few lines to celebrate how well the episodic and thoughtful meditative style of this extended moral essay works to heap, bit by bit, a weight of historical evidence onto the reader about the moral implications of the issues coming visibly to a head in our time. But it does.

Tom Benson

Pennsylvania State University
t3b@psuvm.psu.edu

Cramer, Richard Ben. What It Takes: The Way to the White House. New York: Random House, 1992.

Richard Ben Cramer’s stated aim is to write an account of the 1988 presidential campaign that answers the questions of

What kind of life would lead a man (in my lifetime all have been men) to think he ought to be President. . . . What in their backgrounds could give them that huge ambition, that kind of motor, that will and discipline, that faith in themselves? . . . What happened to those lives, to their wives, to their families, to the lives they shared? What happened to their ideas of themselves? What did we do to them, on the way to the White House? (vii-viii)

Cramer follows the fortunes of six of the 1988 candidates–Republicans George Bush and Bob Dole, and Democrats Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart. The book’s 1047 pages are divided into 130 chapters (and an epilogue) wherein Cramer constructs an elaborate collage modeled on Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Cramer tells the story of each man’s childhood, family, upbringing, career, and participation in the campaign of 1988 (apart from the epilogue, the story ends with the 1988 conventions, omitting most of the story of the fall campaign itself). In every case, these men are portrayed as the product of habits formed in childhood and youth, and in every case their virtues are shown to be–in the tragic genre–inseparably linked to the flaws that bring five of them to bitter defeat and leave the eventual winner a caretaker president (“the fact was, he wanted to be President. He didn’t want to be President to do this or that. He’d do . . . what was sound” [797]). Cramer, in layer after layer of storytelling, with a narrative voice granted the privileged knowledge and intimacy of fiction and the texture of Elmore Leonard dialogue, invites us to like and admire each of these men, invites us to see the world from each of six extremely different points of view, and then he throws them into the arena, along with their handlers, their wives, the press, and each other–and shows us that what we thought happened in the 1988 campaign was, in multiple, deeply ironic ways, a misrepresentation.

Cramer argues that the press got it wrong. He most deeply admires Gary Hart and Joe Biden, who were driven from the race by scandals arising from charges of adultery (Hart) and plagiarism (Biden). In Cramer’s view, both were blackmailed by an arrogant press. Cramer’s Bob Dole is a fascinating reconstruction of a man stereotypically dismissed by the press as the attack dog of the Republican party. Dick Gephardt is portrayed as a tough and deeply spiritual man whose gift for compromise is important to the function of Congress. George Bush is depicted as a decent and self-disciplined man who is utterly sincere in his commitment to personal friendship and honor as the basis for politics and government. Cramer is most hostile, in my reading of the book, to Michael Dukakis, and his portrait of Dukakis, though adding considerable detail and nuance, is in many ways close to the view offered by the press and the Republicans in the 1988 campaign–an honest but out-of-it good-government governor who had no message about why he should be president and who wouldn’t listen, hence bringing his troubles on himself.

The strengths and weaknesses of this epic book are embedded in two paradoxical rhetorical choices that are central to the work–they have to do with Cramer’s decision to focus on the “personal” side of the personal/political axis, and with the narrative technique of the book.

Cramer begins from the widely shared complaint that the media coverage of campaigns, in interaction with the techniques of modern presidential campaigning, has thrown the focus of campaigning from issues to personality. But, argues Cramer, the focus on personality has led the press and media into a corruption of their traditional and useful skepticism, resulting in a kind of pack journalism that takes as its role the day-to-day diminishment of candidates and, at opportune moments, the destruction of candidates in the feeding frenzy of rumored scandal. At the same time, the techniques of modern campaigning put the candidate into a “bubble” of press attention and Secret-Service isolation wherein a candidate, closeted with self-interested campaign gurus and hired guns, loses track of his real sources of personal strength. This is a story that needs to be told, and Cramer tells it well, but at the cost of furthering the shift of public attention to private life as the source of what it takes to be president. Hence, Cramer condemns the shallowness of policy making in the context of the permanent campaign, where position papers are churned out as demonstrations of seriousness (and as bids for the allegiance of the policy wonks from whom advice is solicited), rather than as acts of genuine leadership. But Cramer himself is so little interested in those policies that his complaint risks becoming self-contradictory, as when Michael Dukakis’s pursuit of good government in Massachusetts or Joe Biden’s self-education in the Bork hearings are framed not as policy issues but as demonstrations of the paradoxes of character. Cramer in effect claims to long for a restoration of the public sphere, but he does so in a book that endlessly asserts the seamless dependence of the public on the private. Part of his complaint about the public sphere is that, under present conditions, it distorts the reality of the private persons who are the candidates. This may well be true, but it fails to consider that a successful public sphere may depend on separation of public and private, and the cultivation of specifically public virtues.

Cramer’s preference for the private as the ground for the public has deep roots in tacit understandings of contemporary Americans. Such understandings, especially as they relate to politics, have been cultivated by high- and lowbrow media at least since Theodore White’s The Making of the Presidency (1961) and the Leacock-Pennebaker documentary Primary, a behind-the-scenes account of the 1960 primary contest between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. Cramer’s book is consistent with the genre started by White and Leacock-Pennebaker, proposing to reveal the truth about politics by looking behind the public facade at the private actors. The doctrine of such a claim is strikingly confident that it knows how to discover reality, but the experience of reading Cramer’s text often induces a postmodern suspicion that the public role of the politicians in this book embodies not so much a distinction, however distorted, between public and private realms as a detachment of the political from any actual referent or subject. Cramer argues for the stability and centrality of the private subject, but he sings a song of de-centered panic to seem to be someone, a song of simulation and simulacra.

A related paradox bedevils the narrative technique of What It Takes. Cramer’s implicit argument is that, for all their faults, each of these men is a person of enormous strength, integrity, intelligence, and character, a man of “size,” but that the Karacter Kops have diminished them in the versions we see in the newspapers and on television. Further, even what we have been taught to see as transgressions are not, when the whole story is known, either very serious (if they happened at all) or particularly symptomatic of the true character of these men. To make this case, which he does with great success, in my view, Cramer turns to the techniques of contemporary fiction and new journalism, and the rhetorical strategies of defense lawyers elaborated from the time of the ancient Greeks, wherein admitted weaknesses are shown to be inseparable from more important strengths and, in any case, incompatible with the crime alleged (which, if the truth be known, was either an act different from the one charged, or was not committed by the accused, or did not happen at all).

Cramer is excellent at reconstructing scenes and creating a nonlinear collage of episodes (the episodes are out of chronological order, but are clearly patterned to build the case for the defense), and he has a good ear for dialogue. His narrative voice employs a technique of reported inner monologue or snatches of speech reported without quotation marks or specific attribution, accompanied by frequent and complex shifts in narrative point of view. It is impossible to divine from the text where the racy diction is drawn from the speech of the participants and where it is simply the invention of a hip narrator in his Rolling Stone mode. The narrative consciousness of the tale is presented as reliable and as privileged with access to the speech and thoughts reported or attributed. The effect is absorbing and convincing. Cramer achieves coherence through thickly textured narration accompanied by repeated scorn at the pretensions of the press pack. But though it is all believable, it is nowhere documented. It is not even possible, given this technique, to determine which scenes Cramer himself observed and which were reported to him by informants, or who those informants were. No doubt full documentation would have diminished the cumulative narrative effect and the text’s seeming transparency, and no doubt it would have scared off some of the informants. Hence, a reviewer cannot reasonably claim that Cramer should have done it differently, but merely offer a note of caution (to which must be added the lament that instead of depositing his documentation, say, with a presidential library for eventual scrutiny by scholars, Cramer ceremonially destroyed all of his files, notebooks, and interview tapes upon publication of the book). Cramer repeatedly excoriates the press for following the wrong story, misreporting facts, and, most of all, presenting diminished and distorted stereotypes of political candidates (all of it premised on the inside dopester slogan that “everyone knows”–the security blanket of the press pack). In trying to redirect our understanding of these candidates, Cramer offers a more deeply informed biographical account and a more richly textured psychological understanding, which are the achievements of his narrative method. But his implicit appeal to his reader to regard the press with increased skepticism surely invites an equal skepticism toward his own claims when he simply asks us to accept his unverifiable account.

Myles Breen

School of Communication
Charles Stuart University
Bathurst, Australia
mbreen@csu.edu.au

Buck, Elizabeth. Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Here is a book which commands attention from many audiences. It addresses that most important question facing postmodern cultural studies: the question of the survival of minority cultures and of the individuals who reside within these cultures.

We are accustomed today to thinking of “minorities” as groups that have been divided off and dominated along lines of race, gender, age, or sexuality. Other “minorities,” united by a language, a system of exchange, or an investment in particular cultural practices or rituals, are often overlooked. The archetypal struggle of the Hawaiian people, whose identity is, among other things, closely bound up with dance, and whose hegemonic antagonist is nothing less than American culture as a whole, is thus potentially a very instructive one.

In Paradise Remade, Elizabeth Buck sets out to relate the recent cultural history of Hawai’i in a new way. Though grounded in Marxist theory, her overview draws upon many other paradigms, and seeks to adopt at least in part the point of view of the indigenous population itself rather than that of the colonizers.

Not surprisingly, imperialist and neo-imperialist ideologies are at the center of Buck’s argument. She takes apart the dominant myths of corporate tourism (Hawai’i as “paradise”), showing how this paradisal discourse came into being and what its social effects have been. But Buck is also concerned to examine the relatively recent counter-colonization effort by Hawaiians to recapture their history and culture. She describes the religious, political, and economic relationships which were integral to the practice of the sacred chants and the Hula, providing a case study comparable to those available for other indigenous peoples from the Canadian Inuit to the Australian Kooris.

This book, then, is not only a theoretically grounded historical description, but also a valuable contribution to postcolonial studies, and perhaps, most importantly, a manual for change for anyone who cares about the rights and values of indigenous cultures. It is a case study in power and domination for which the Hawaiian islands serve as a “location”–just as they have for many a Hollywood film. The book uses a reproduction of a production still from the Betty Grable vehicle Song of the Islands (1942) as a (literally) graphic illustration of this trend. Together with photographs of tourist brochures and sheet music (Rudy Vallee’s 1934 hit, “I found a little grass skirt, for my little grass shack in Hawaii”) to illustrate these aspects of popular culture, the etchings and photographs of historical and contemporary Hawaiian life complement the text. Because so much of this material is still readily available worldwide, the book can offer a more concrete case study than has been possible for scholars of other groups such as the Australian aborigines or the native inhabitants of the Amazon.

In her introduction, Buck makes the point that the practices of historiography are never innocent. Following Fernand Braudel of the Annales School, she distinguishes between the traditional kind of history “where great men appear as organizing things,” the history of conjuncture that examines major social and material expansions and contractions, and structural histories. She points out that traditional history, as dominant paradigm, privileges observational facts and data and the reliability of sources at the expense of theory and philosophy, and fails to recognize that the data of history is inscribed by ideology.

Starting with a description of the Kodak Hula Show which has been entertaining tourists and selling Hawaiian culture for over fifty years, the author proceeds to investigate one of the functions of myth. Her description of how the tourists are provided with “photo opportunities” in a regimented way is not without a gentle humor, yet the lesson that this procedure is the prototype for today’s worldwide tourist industry goes unspoken. She does not spell out the salient fact that tourists in Alice Springs in Australia’s heartland, or in Venice in the center of European history and culture, are today mimicking this Hawaiian model. Interested readers, will, no doubt, be able to make parallel observations to suit their own contexts. The ideological work of any dominant myth, she claims, is to make itself look neutral and innocent and, in the process, to naturalize human relationships of power and domination. She spells out the connection between this observable practice of the Kodak Hula Show and the scholarly theory of myth.

The seven chapters follow a clear organizational pattern. Chapter One deals with the competing myths of Hawai’i. Chapter Two gives the Marxist and poststructuralist perspectives on structural change, language and power. Chapter Three is a descriptive account of the Hawaiian social structure, the ideology, and the culture before contact with the West. Already in this chapter the hula is seen as a marker or a tracer of change as well as the dominant artefact.

The penetration of capitalism, with an emphasis on the political-economy of sugar, is the subject of Chapter Four. The next chapter details the changes arising from the interaction with the invading culture. The movement from orality to literacy and the displacement of Hawaiian by English with again the focus on the hula provide the subject of Chapter Six. Chapter Seven brings us up to date with a description of the current political economy of Hawai’i, the Hawaiian music industry, and the politics of culture.

While much of the immediate appeal of this book is in the written description of the islands together with the historical drawings and photographs, this attraction is really a distraction from the critical purpose of the work. In this respect, the book is much like its subject; it can seduce us into an uncritical acceptance. Yet a more coldly pedagogical presentation could not do the subject as much justice as Buck does. For then we would be less able to appreciate the curious veiling that the islands effect through their alluring attractiveness, through those images of pleasure that cover the darker side of human activity.

The book describes the competing myths (tourist paradise versus site of colonial oppression) of Hawai’i. Although the description of the colonial history does not demand the most finely-tuned sensibilities for the reader to be appalled, the book does not descend to the polemical. Although the material is at times sensational and appalling, the mode of discourse is always measured and scholarly. Though she begins by highlighting the games of power that go on beneath the scholar’s stance of neutral observation, Buck resists the temptation to adopt an angry or patronizing tone or to simply denounce tourists and the tourism industry. She writes, for example,

The dominant myth is evident in the ways that the forms of Hawaiian music, particularly chant and hula, are used as representations of Hawai’i as a paradise for tourists, something to be seen and enjoyed without wondering about the past or its meanings to Hawaiian performers—those who appear to have created their dances with a view to exotic festivities for foreign consumption. (4)

The practices that govern performance and the codes of audience etiquette demonstrate the impact of ideology on the cultural pecking order in Hawaii. European ballet, the author notes, is allocated to concert halls and elite audiences and is received in respectful silence. The hula is allocated to hotels where tourists feast, as Buck recounts, on “salmon, poi, pork, Mai Tais, Blue Hawaiis, Chi Chis–all of them—food, drink, dance, and music—served up as signifiers of paradise” (5).

But not all hula is performed for tourists. Serious practitioners of the chant and hula have attracted their audiences for major events since the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. This Renaissance has increased the interest in learning more modern styles of hula along with the ancient, and offered a way for Hawaiians to appreciate the complexity and beauty of their language and cultural heritage.

The halau, or schools for cultural formation, have played an important part in the politicization of culture in Hawai’i by giving place, structure, and meaning to a group looking for all these things. They have provided a focus and a locus for ethnopolitics in Hawaii.

The author details these cultural movements from a Hawaiian perspective, but does not make comparisons with other earlier nation-building returns to a “dead” language such as the Irish adoption of the Gaelic or the Israeli adoption of Hebrew. Nor does she make the connections with current consciousness-raising attempts in South-East Asia or Oceania, in nations as heterogeneous as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, New Guinea, or Fiji. The book stays within a United States-centered framework, and concerns itself more with the legacy of the explorer Captain Cook, the missionaries, and the corporations than with the histories of emerging nations or indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.

Buck does, however, define the struggle well. In this paragraph in the Introduction, she nicely encapsulates the Hawaiian problem:

Much of the struggle over power in Hawai’i has taken place in the area of culture. The politics of culture certainly did not start with Western contact, but the rules of discourse and the players in the contest were radically altered from that time on. Two hundred years after Captain James Cook’s arrival, one hundred years after the American overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and three decades after statehood, Hawaiians are still struggling over issues of land, sovereignty, and their identity as Hawaiians. These struggles are played out in various arenas—the courts, the legislative bodies of Congress and the state, the newspapers and broadcast media—and in front of the bulldozers. In recent years, however, the politics of culture also have been waged in academic settings and journals. (10)

Buck’s ironic style enlivens the description of these various arenas of cultural struggle. She illustrates the “allochronic” discourses, the positioning of other cultures into a static ethnocentric present, with a continuing battery of examples as the book progresses. For example, she does not let the traditional narrative histories get away with the term “precontact” Hawai’i (to refer to the Islands as they were before Captain Cook) without mentioning the value-laden representations inherent in the term.

For the PMC reader who delights in the instantaneous nature of this journal, yet is separated from the library resources most North American subscribers take for granted, Paradise Remade can serve as a handbook on how to integrate current cultural studies theory into a specific indigenous case study. And the very eclecticism of method that Buck brings to bear on her materials can be of particular value to those who, dwelling on the geographical periphery, are unfamiliar with some of the practices and practitioners of North American scholarship. From the literary critic Kenneth Burke, for example, who is not much studied in Commonwealth countries, Buck borrows the concept of “syllogistic progression,” applying it usefully to the relation between the two great myths of colonial oppression: tragic myth of romanticized Hawaiians exploited by demonized whites, and the comedic myth of crude savages redeemed by civilized culture and economic progress.

Buck carefully situates herself among a wide variety of theories and schools, ranging from structural anthropology to dependency theory. She also provides a valuable overview of other current approaches to cultural study, and sketches out the kinds of alternative histories of Hawai’i these approaches can yield. For an Althusserian Marxist-informed history, the focus would be on transformations in Hawai’i’s structural formations and the accompanying changes in the political, ideological, and economic elements that make up the social structure. For a poststructuralist Foucaultian-informed history of Hawai’i, the emphasis would be on the power of the dominant discourses, as Western definitions of reality and knowledge displaced the accepted Hawaiian versions. Buck reviews the recent scholarship and comments on several studies in detail, noting in particular the contribution being made by scholars who are able to read nineteenth-century materials written in Hawaiian and who are thereby able to redress some dominant biases that have survived other forms of revisionist intervention. This emphasis puts the book within the framework of many of the current debates which are influencing curriculum developments in universities worldwide.

The author’s daring eclecticism and theoretical reach, which transcend the Hawaiin locale, might tempt one to tout Paradise Remade as a model for studies of imperialism and tourism at every peripheral site from Alice Springs to Zaire. But this would be misleading. The book is essentially about Hawai’i, and never allows itself to drift too far from its central theme of the hula. The jacket photograph of three males, one in a Western suit, performing a modern variant of the dance, is cited as “a rare example of advertising which does not trivialize Hawaiian culture”–and this determination to do justice to the hula anchors the entire study, however wide-ranging the issues it takes up. It anchors, too, Buck’s optimism–for she concludes with the claim that finally the Hawaiians are dancing neither for the gods, the chiefs, or the tourists, but for themselves. For Hawaiian performers and audiences, hula is simultaneously a cultural link to a distant and glorious past, a signifier of identity, a celebration of the present, and an expressed determination to own at least a part of the cultural future.

Rebecca Chung

University of Chicago
rmc2@quads.uchicago.edu

Mann, Patricia. Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Micropolitics argues that shifting gender roles help produce postmodern anxiety. According to author Patricia Mann, scholars have overlooked the importance of shifting gender roles to help explain the postmodern condition: “I formulated this theory of individual agency in response to gendered social transformations that I believe provide the basic foundation for all other social transformations today, and I call it a ‘gendered micropolitics’” (1). Mann claims that modernist paradigms miss t he influence of micropolitics on the public sphere: “I am a postmodern philosopher in a quite literal sense. I believe that the social and political frameworks of modernism are exhausted and incapable of making sense of the most important contemporary pr oblems” (1). Moreover, these paradigms cannot account for facts of contemporary life: social “unmooring,” female and male emotional neediness, the dependency of public success on private servicing, and the profound social transitions involved when women decide forever that homemaking is a choice, not an inevitability. A postmodern, postfeminist era has begun. While liberal discourses remain dominant, they are conflict-ridden and unstable as a consequence of the social enfranchisement of women, and the unmooring of women, men, and children from patriarchal kinship relationshps. The identification of humanity and masculinity is no longer normatively or structurally secured by the ailing institutions of late liberalism. And so, the actions of women and men, as well, have a peculiarly radical/constructive potential. Yet it will remain difficult to appreciate or to act upon that potential so long as we continue to assume modernist visions of change and political agency. (25)

By ignoring new historical realities, scholars risk ignoring the material conditions foundational to emerging postmodern social practice. In fact, they altogether miss an opportunity to observe an emerging relationship between material and social practic e. Driven moreover by outdated theories about social behavior, scholars make incomprehensible what could be comprehensible–if the scholars would take seriously new theories, particularly theories inclusive of female experience. Mann makes her position quite clear: “Changing gender relations are the most significant social phenomenon of our time” (2).

Micropolitics effectively forestalls accusations of non-philosophical meandering by pointing out the limits of conventional philosophical practice: “Perhaps we are [becoming] unphilosophical, but only insofar as we are placing demands upon ou r philosophical resources to which they are not yet capable of responding” (33). Here, and throughout Micropolitics , Mann is at her best when articulating the limits of conventional thinking vis-a-vis “philosophically interesting changes in the human condition” such as universal female enfranchisement, job protections, reproductive choice, non-patriarchal family structure, and presumptive female equality generally. Using the canon of philosophy, Micropolitics demonstrates the uniqueness of current gender roles in Anglo-European history.

In these ways Micropolitics purports to be about agency. Unfortunately the social analyses run away from the concept. Individual chapters omit any sustained engagement with the question of agency as they explore the consequences of female s ocial enfranchisment in contemporary American society.

Mann’s analysis follows a pattern: she begins each chapter with a theoretical discussion of agency, then drops the topic in order to conduct an analysis of some current issue or event: the double duty workday, abortion, pornography, the history of libera list individualism, women in the military, Anita Hill, sexual harassment, William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, date rape, Thelma and Louise. The problem is that none of these specific analyses, grounded as they are in cultural criticism common places, really requires a new thinking of gendered micro-political agency in the first place. Readers informed about these events, but wondering how they might be reconsidered in light of the ongoing theoretical debates over postfeminist agency, will fin d themselves repeatedly provoked and then disappointed.

This digressive, or at any rate anti-climactic, structuring of the chapters reflects a general problem in the organizational logic of the book. One is grateful for the new terms and concepts Mann introduces–but her capacity to produce these new concepts seem to outrun her capacity to arrange and order them. Her sentences often contain more than one idea, her paragraphs more than one topic, her arguments more than one thesis. The frequent signposts and other attempts to manage information flow (“First, I will,” “I define. . .”) generally make the prose even more, rather than less, inefficient. In themselves these are often minor blemishes–and indeed they are closely allied with the book’s strengths, with the richness and fertility of the author’s tho ught. But one can’t help feeling thatMicropolitics would have profited substantially from more careful editorial attention.

More troubling are some of the book’s underlying assumptions about gender and society. Micropolitics reproduces a presumptive white bourgeois heterosexuality by focusing almost exclusively on social issues significant to women intimate with (white) men: the double duty syndrome, abortion, pornography. Micropolitics does not question the assumption that these are the issues women care most deeply about. It leaves out of its analysis all those women for whom intimacy with men is a non-concern, or at least a marginal one. There are women who have scarcely any contact with men except in public, institutional settings. There are minority women who are even further removed from the kinds of white heterosexual relations the book ex amines. Feminism has begun to recognize that the private practices of white patriarchy impose themselves with different force on different women, but Mann’s study seems untouched by this recognition. My point is not that the cultural matters Mann takes up–heterosexual pornography, abortion law, Freudian psychology, American political history, the inheritance of liberalism, and so forth–are necessarily the wrong ones. It is that feminist practice today has to mean, among other things, a willingness at least to consider how limited may be the relevance of such matters to the lived experiences of non-white, non-heterosexual women.

Micropolitics is bound to some other dubious assumptions as well. In respect to pre-modern forms of community and their relation to contemporary conditions, Mann offers this observation:

As serfs left the estates of feudal landowners, material forms of human neediness were unmoored from stable agricultural communities, and today as women leave the home to enter the workplace, psychic relational forms of human neediness are coming unmoored from patriarchal kinship relationships. (124)

Mann offers no evidence for this generalization about fedual times, nor does she cite any sources that suggest medieval affective life was fundamentally the same as late-twentieth century heterosexual bourgeois affective life.

Admittedly, information on the emotional economy of serfs is scarce. But the relative experience of stability or upheaval in particular times and places can be indicated by reference to rates of enclosure or unemployment, the frequency of outbreaks of di sease, the incidence of war or famine, and so forth. Claims about non-elite pre-modern life need to be grounded in the historical records left by particular regions and communities. Micropolitics demonstrates no knowledge of the methodologi cal complexity involved in this kind of historical reconstruction. Mann’s claims are not based in primary sources, concrete examples, but in Marx’s notoriously unreliable generalizations. As a result, potentially valuable concepts–such as that of “unmo oring” in this instance–are drained of any specific historical meaning and end up dubiously signifying transhistorical features of the human condition.

Finally, on the level of philosophical categories, the basic argument of Micropolitics seems at times confused. Mann declares herself a critic of modernism and of the modernist conceptualization of the subject. Yet the real object of her cr itique would seem to be the social constructivism of many postmodern thinkers. I believe that insofar as social identities are presently unstable we should stop focusing so intently upon these fragile notions of selfhood. Instead, I suggest that we thin k more about the quality of our actions, or in the terminology of social thoery, upon our agency. In seeking to better understand our actions we will be confronting the moral and political issues of everyday life in the best way possible during a time of social confusion. We should think of ourselves as conflicted actors rather than as fragmented selves. (4)

Here, as elsewhere, Mann neglects to discuss how exactly agency was conceived in modernist thinking, what the problems or limitations of that thinking were, and how the concept might be rethought and resurrected for contemporary theory. Far from offering a critique of modernism, she begins by lamenting the radical suspicion of agency within postmodernist paradigms, and proceeds to invoke, by way of a solution to this ostensible problem, what often appears to be a naive return to modernist assumptions.

This is not to say that Micropolitics has no critique of modernism to offer–only that its critique is not always very clearly delineated. Mann’s characterizations of early modern philosophers are sometimes admirably precise and astute. Hob bes, she observes, was “the first great theorist/storyteller of modern forms of material agency, articulating the power of material desires and their anarchic implications within a society in which market-based economic structures had not yet developed” ( 132). Here, both Mann’s historical sense and her philosophical penetration are brought nicely to bear as she conducts a reading of Leviathan. Her critique of the philosophical assumptions about free will and individual choice to which defen ses of patriarchy frequently have recourse are also right on the mark: “If women freely choose to devote themselve to the happiness of their husbands and children, this, like any other freely undertaken course of action, must be understood as simply a ma tter of personal preference. But if we ask a doctor to diagnose our difficulties in sleeping and he responds that we apparently prefer not to sleep regularly, we will question his medical abilities” (50). On this relatively familiar territory, Mic ropolitics is lively and convincing.

The book’s title, then, is somewhat misleading. Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era, announces itself as a book about (individual) agency in a (culturally or socially) postfeminist situation. In short, it claims to examine the relat ionship between individuals and their larger circumstances. Micropolitics purports to resituate individual agency: a welcome intervention, given contemporary academic debates driven by constructivist analyses. Yet the book does not firmly s ituate itself vis a vis modern and contemporary theories of agency, nor does it manage very well to articulate its theoretical concerns with the mass-media events it examines: the Hill-Thomas hearings, the Tyson-Washington trial, and so forth. Tho ugh still of interest, these events do not in and of themselves help to bring the problem of agency into better focus, nor does Mann’s use of them suggest what might be gained by engaging that problem philosophically. Hoping to appropriate, for the purpo ses of feminist theory, these seductive episodes of mass culture, Mann was perhaps too much seduced by them herself, and in the end denies her readership the full benefit of her scholarly–her philosophical–expertise.

Despite these weaknesses, Micropolitics is a welcome contribution to the postmodernist conversation. “What particularly excites me about the present historical moment,” remarks Mann, “is the conceptual strangeness of various social situation s and relationships, and the sense that they can only be adequately comprehended through reworking our systems of signification to better articulate basic concepts” (206). Yes–this is the excitement proper to postmodern studies. And by fostering that e xcitement in her readers, Mann is helping to produce the kind of dispersed and various micro-interventions out of which a better set of social arrangements might emerge.

Wendy Anson

 
 
The “10th Annual International Conference and Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM.” March, 1995. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA.

The crowds, some like sheep, run here, run there. One man start, one thousand follow. Nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say “damn great” many times, get very tired and go home.

 

–Japanese visitor, American Centennial Exposition, 1876 (qtd. in Allwood, 57)

Crowds in record numbers overflowed the Conference and Exhibit halls as the “10th Annual International Conference & Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM” got underway in San Francisco’s gargantuan Moscone Hall. Laser “sunrays” fanned out over the packed hall as keynote speaker Glenn Jones (CEO Jones International, Ltd.) heralded the dawning new age of a kind of harmonic convergence: “. . . .Technologies [will] drive us together”; there will be an “historic coming together” with “a kaleidoscope of new electronic tools” in a world where “boundaries of all kinds . . . are disappearing.”

No mistaking the millenial and apocalyptic tone: “It is intense. It is big. It roots through every marketplace, every vested interest–an environment leaving virtually nothing untouched, and it has a life of its own. In its path is turbulence, disruption, the mooing of sacred cows, destruction, opportunity and reformation. . . . It is after us all and none of us can hide. Convergence is nothing less than the process of reconfiguring civilization itself.”

Then Jones parted the digital rays to reveal Mr. Charlton Heston, who introduced Jones’ latest cd-rom product, “Charlton Heston Presents the Bible.”

Technically a trade show, the self-styled “largest dedicated multimedia event in the world” probably has enough bells, whistles, cannily crafted and elaborately staged product launches and disingenuous yokings of commerce and religion to land it squarely in the venerable tradition of the International Exhibitions.

According to John Allwood, the Exhibition Movement “goes back to the roots of our culture” as far as Old Testament notables including King Ahasuerus, who “spread his wealth and importance before his visiting nobles and princes.” Medieval fairs gave visitors and traders the chance to “exchange news and participate in the highly human activity of ‘one-upmanship’” (Allwood, 7)

England’s “Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations” at the Crystal Palace, completely dedicated to displaying industrial trade and “forwarding the upward progress of industrial civilization” (Allwood, 8) with its display of manufactured goods from various countries in sorted categories in one location was in 1851 the first International Exhibition (or Expo, World Fair, Exposition Universelle, Weltausstellung, Exposicion Internacional).

“Goods sent from America [to England’s Expo] included Colt revolvers, a case of ‘cheap American Newspapers,” a model of Niagara Falls, the goodyear vulcanised India Rubber Trophy, false teeth, and ‘an intolerable deal of starred-and-striped banners and pasteboard effigies of eagles with outspread wings’” (Allwood, 22), thereby perhaps launching the international kitsch movement.

The likely antecedents of the fetching young girls in their national costumes serving food in their native restaurants at the American Centennial Exposition (1876) are the attractive young women draped over machinery at today’s trade shows.

Latest products of industry and technology are on proud display at the Expositions and World Fairs: The American Centennial showcased the typewriter, the telephone, and Edison’s duplex telegraph which could send two messages over one wire at the same time; other world’s fairs introduced the phonograph and automobile, and left behind formidable souvenirs including the Eiffel Tower and Chicago’s Field Columbian Museum of Natural History.

Visitors oohed and aahed.

“What a sight is there!” enthused a Crystal Palace visitor. “Neither pen nor pencil can portray it” (Allwood, 22).

Thackeray raved: “Sheltered by crystal walls and roof, we view/ All Products of the earth, the air, and seas, . . . Extracting good from out the meanest sod; Rivalling Nature’s works, and making him a God” (Allwood, 21)

Victor Hugo on Paris’s 1867 Exposition Universelle: “To make a circuit of this place, . . . is literally to go around the world. All peoples are here, enemies live in peace . . . on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron” (Allwood, 43).

Intermedia had its share of kitsch with logo-emblazoned t-shirt and plastic bag giveaways, visiting Virtual Valeries, technology announcements, and high-flown sentiments about comings-together. But it’s true that its attendees were more jaundiced.

Set up in 1986 by Bill Gates to introduced CD-ROM’s expanded storage technology, Intermedia annually highlights “the burgeoning new multimedia and cd-Rom industries” and celebrates the cd-rom as “leading the way in the multimedia technology revolution.”

But at the ’95 convention there was little reverence granted cd-rom technology or product; rather, people were possessed by a kind of nostalgia for the future, already hungry for the latest innovation. An audience member at the “Evolutionary Landscape” conference challenged the viability of the medium with the advent of full-service on-line. Voyager CEO and digital publishing eminence Bob Stein, sounding more beseiged than whimsical, described the on-going challenge of trying to launch a product within a nascent industry characterized by the incessant tweaking of its technology. He reminded that the printing press was invented in 1454, but the first novel, Pamela, didn’t show up until 300 years later. Yet he added somewhat plaintively apropos the product that had launched and still sustained his company, “We always considered it a transitional medium.”

The split between rhetoric and reality, what we can envision and what we’ve got at the moment, was jarringly apparent in the geography of the convention: In the Conference Halls, it was The Big Vision–or furtive dream–convergence, universal access. To be a latter day Walter Benjamin who could stroll cyberspace at will, with no bounds, a flanuer in Paris. To be able to move about “at random” in a “hypertext” universe where one could invent connections and spark new syntheses.

…And, on the Exhibit floor, the merchants feverishly plyed their wares, much of it “multi-purposed” content that had found its way onto cd-rom because the rights were cheap and available. Not so much hypertext links to the city of light; more like arbitrary catalogues leading to dead ends of data.

The 3-day conference progressively polarized as attendees shunted from the contemplative halls of “why not” and “why” to the rude stalls of buy, buy, buy.

Who or what could heal the radical schism, tie up the loose ends? Maybe it would be the same entity the AT&T exec was evoking in the “Evolutionary Landscape” conference: the one who’d wire the last 50 yards into the house. Whoever it was who’d supply the broadband and/or set top box and/or p.c. interface to deliver the eagerly awaited new world of content, services and link-ups where we get all the rich archives of cd romdom as well as every conceivable connection to the outside world and to each other. We’re all buying–or at least we’re ready to buy. But who’s building? So far nobody. Because who’s paying? The issue’s unclear. And will be until the technology shakes down. There’s a lot of money to be lost if you put your money on the wrong horse–set top box? P.C.? Fiberoptics, satellite?

(And once built, what would these last 150 feet look like? Given the profit-centered players, one attendee worried it would be “big pipes in, little pipes out” since all the contenders might be more concerned with “selling us things rather than hav[ing] us create them.”)

Despite its stated intention of celebrating the cd-rom, Intermedia ’95 ended with no clear notion about the technology. Still, the question was posed: whether or not as the press releases proclaimed, the cd-rom would “lead the way” in cyberspace developments, did it at least have a future?

Voyager’s Stein was confident. “It’s the nature of the human beast to collect. People want to own stuff, carry it around. They’ll want to own things as opposed to access things.”

The ubiquitous, user-friendly cost-effective cd-rom is ideally suited to storing vast amounts of data which can be accessed in any number of ways and can be (and usually is) enhanced by all kinds of visual, textual and sound effects. The latest in particular can claim good production values, with a look and content that oftentimes boast of sophisticated market-research. Yet the steady thud of shovelware digging its own grave signals that people are in fact particular about the cd roms they do seem to collect.

Walter Benjamin, collector par excellence, wrote his paean to collecting and ownership in “Unpacking My Library.” For Benjamin, the urge to collect an object was not tied to its functional or utilitarian value. Rather, the value lay in the thing in itself. The item’s patina opened entire worlds surrounding the object (including “period, region, craftsmanship, former ownership” [Benjamin, 60]) to its possessor.

Best-selling and critically praised game and leisure cd-roms outside the shoot-em-up “twitch game” category probably demonstrate that the fully realized cd-rom medium, too, can uniquely open worlds for the user/collector and ultimate flaneur to explore.

The cd-rom’s “archived adventure” is often counterposed to the freedom of access and movement available on-line. Yet, paradoxically, the best and most enduring products provide the user precisely that sense of freedom, of wandering at will. (It is true, after all, that one cannot wander randomly within a random world. Benjamin roamed Paris.)

As in a well-constructed play, choices narrow not in predictable, linear sequence, but in a necessary and probable logic leading to the fleshing out of the “object,” the final embodiment of the fully dimensional world that the user/protagonist has unfolded in “playing the game.”

“Myst” comes close to the ideal of a compelling, highly “roamable” world whose parameters (though implicit) are all the while reassuringly clear.

It may be true that the most successful adult cd-roms (“‘Myst’ has sold an estimated 750,000 units and is still topping many cd-rom monthly sales charts more than a year after its release” [Billboard, 68]) provide the user with Benjamin’s ideal (as per Arendt) of “inhabiting the city the way he lives in his own four walls” (Arendt, 21).

The cd-rom interactive medium seems up to now unique insofar as it offers the user a tightly demarcated world wherein anything is possible.

Whither Intermedia ’96? Its stated mission is “continuing the multimedia revolution and inventing the next decade.” With such a tall order, organizers might look to the Internet Multicasting Service of Washington, which just announced plans for the first “world’s fair in cybserspace” (Lewis).

This World Exposition will be designed to be accessible from personal computers linked to the Internet, and also from a network of public ‘Internet planetariums’ in cities throughout the world.

“Our Eiffel Tower is 1.2 terabytes of disk space,” explained Internet Multicasting Service president Carl Malamud (Lewis). The data base will serve as a “public park” which will feature displays of environmental technologies, a “future of media” pavilion, and linkups with museums’ information centers.

The annual Interop trade shows, attended by Internet developers and users, have already decided to make this first cyberspace World Exposition their key theme for next year’s gathering.

Works Cited

• Allwood,John. The Great Exhibitions. London: Macmillan, 1977.
• Arendt,Hannah. “Introduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Billboard (February 18, 1995).
• Lewis,Peter H. The New York Times (March 14, 1995), C2.

Mark Poster

University of California, Irvine
mposter@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu

Steven Jones, ed., Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. New York: Sage, 1995.

This collection of essays is the first volume I have seen that studies empirically and in their wide variety computer-mediated modes of communication in relation to the question of community. The two other books that come to mind, Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff, The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer (1978) and Linda Harasim, ed., Global Networks: Computers and International Communication (1993), were either, in the former case, more narrowly focused on one f orm of electronic communication (computer conferencing), or, in the latter, more broadly concerned with all aspects of the social implications of computer communications. Cybersociety attempts to look specifically at the kinds of social relat ions formed through these distant, even disembodied communication practices. It raises the question of the relation of such communications to postmodern culture. Jones’s book promises to be the first of many to appear in the near future, for I have seen n umerous studies of electronic communications posted at various ftp sites on the Internet. These studies, including those in the present volume, vary in methodology from quantitative, empirical social science to theoretically inspired “literary” readings. The most interesting combine aspects of both strategies.

Cybersociety cannot possibly answer the urgent questions being raised about the nature of the relationships being formed on the Internet. Electronic communities are still inchoate, in the early phases of formation, and their membership is gro wing so fast and changing so rapidly that the object of study remains evanescent. Judging by the studies included here, however, it is possible to see lines of social formation emerging in this electronic space, to begin to delineate its characteristics, and to draw comparisons with other forms of human interaction. What should be avoided are final judgments about the ultimate impact of electronic community upon “real” community. Several of the essays in Cybersociety contribute significantly toward these goals.

Nancy Baym’s “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication” explores the formation of social relations in a Usenet group on soap operas (rec.arts.tv.soaps or “r.a.t.s.”). In numerous ways she shows how participants adapted Usenet technolo gy to form elements of community, imitating yet altering patterns from face-to-face relations. She draws on various theorists of social forms to argue that Usenet relations are indeed a form of community, and she argues convincingly that these Internet fa cilities are becoming important to individuals as loci of identity formation. She wisely avoids technological determinism by indicating how the technology is shaped by users in ways unanticipated by designers or institutors. Elizabeth’s Reid’s equally com pelling “Virtual Worlds: Culture and Imagination” explores the relations emerging on MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions) and MOO (MUDS Object Oriented). Reid’s essay is a much-reduced excerpt from the full study to be found at ftp.eff.org:/pub/Publications/CuD/Papers on the Internet. Her subject involves “real-time” conversations in text, as opposed to the messages found on Usenet, and is so far more engaging and animated. The simulational structure of a MOO is far different from that of a Usenet newsgroup. Here “rooms” are constructed textually and conversations take place within them, with sentences flashing quickly by on one’s screen. Subtlety and logically Reid demonstrates how these electronic flickers may be construed as social space.

Of special interest to Postmodern Culture readers is the concluding essay, “The E-Mail Murders: Reflections on ‘Deal’ Letters,” by Alan Aycock and Norman Buchignani, two anthropologists from Concordia University. Concordia is the University where the disturbing shootings by Valery Fabrikant occurred in 1992, and this event is the focal point of the essay. The authors study the Usenet newsgroup to which Fabrikant posted before the murders, which continued to discuss the events during and aft er their occurrence, and which became implicated in the subsequent trial. The group sci.research.careers received Fabrikant’s complaints and initiated lively discussions of the case. Aycock and Buchignani, well-versed in ethnographic methods and well-read in poststructuralist theory, have a field-day with the ambiguities of e-mail postings in the dramatic context of these events. They conclude ambivalently that Internet changes and does not change the nature of social relations, the status of authors and the voices of speakers.

Another interesting essay examines Usenet postings from the lens of Hobbes’s Leviathan to assess the nature of authority and control in cyberspace. Another essay studies the formation of moral constraint on Usenet through the development of ” netiquette,” or forms of proper postings. Two essays look at computer games in relation to textuality and identity formation: one examines the narrative structure of Nintendo games while the other looks at the question of postmodern simulation in SimCity and other games. In addition, there is a piece on virtual reality technology in relation to gender. And Steve Jones has prefaced the entire volume with a clear, informative introduction to the subject and to the individual essays. Even readers who find some of these essays dispensible will recognize that the book as a whole raises compelling questions about a stunning new arena of community formation.

Tatjana Pavlovic

Romance Languages Deparment
University of Washington
pavlovic@u.washington.edu

Ugresic, Dubravka. Fording the Stream of Consciousness. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
 
Ugresic, Debravka. In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

I envy the ‘Western writer.’ I envision my colleague the Western writer as an elegant passenger who travels either without luggage or with luggage that is elegantly invisible. I envision myself as a passenger with a great deal of luggage all pasted with labels, as a passenger who is desperately trying to rid himself of this burden which sticks to him as if it were his very fate.
 
— Dubravka Ugresic, “Baggage and Belles Lettres”

These lines exemplify Dubravka Ugresic’s refusal to be plotted in the recent narratives of national revival proliferating throughout Croatia and the other republics of (Ex)-Yugoslavia. Dubravka Ugresic is the author of three novels–Stefica Cvek u Raljama Zivota (Stefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life); Forsiranje Romana-Reke (Fording the Stream of Consciousness); and Zivot je Bajka (Life is a Fairy Tale)–as well as of short stories, screen plays, and anthologies and criticism of Russian avant-garde literature. Her fiction is not overtly political but her playful obliqueness is in itself the expression of an implicit political stance.

What seems frivolous on the surface has serious implications in the context of Balkan politics today. In all her writing, Ugresic rejects the nationalistic fiction of a fixed and immobile identity constructed through blood, the secret soil of one’s origin, the distinctiveness of national character, the metaphysical privileging of one’s ethnic group, and other monolithic discourses. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Ugresic sees literature as being fundamentally “like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression” (quoted in Massumi 179). Ugresic is a “nomad,” perpetually traveling on the border between “high” and “low” culture, between “kitsch” and “art.” She “deoriginates” her fiction through the use of clichés, of a multiplicity of genres, and of a continual masquerade of styles. She challenges the unity of the nationalistic narratives that have recently proliferated throughout ex-Yugoslavia; she stands and moves in the borderlands, occupying sites of difference in the strategic manner described by Homi Bhabha: “never entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional…a pressure, and a presence, that acts constantly, if unevenly, along the entire boundary of authorization” (Bhabha 297).

Ugresic has written of two opposed currents in the Yugoslav literatures: “one which contests the so-called tradition of national literature, demystifies the notions of so-called great literature, usurps entrenched systems of genres, defends the autonomy of literature, and bespeaks a cultural cosmopolitanism– while the other, its antipode, endorses the very same notions that the first group questions” (“Made in Yugoslavia” 10). In unapologetically embracing the first of these currents, Ugresic responds to the totalitarian currents which have manipulated literature in Eastern Europe. After 1948, Yugoslav literature was fairly free from the aesthetic norms of socialist realism advocated in other Eastern European countries. Post-war Croatian and Serbian literature was known for creative explorations of different genres and styles. The Yugoslav writer was placed on the border between East and West. This border culture allowed the intermingling of traditional political concerns with avant-garde and later postmodern aesthetics. Such a culture was also premised upon a promiscuous cross-fertilization of the various Yugoslav nationalities. Ugresic herself is a product of this intermingling of styles and cultures. She observes that the “Yugoslav writer lived in a common cultural space of different traditions and languages that intermixed and intercommunicated. It meant knowing Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, reading Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene writers. It meant living in Zagreb, having a publisher in Belgrade, printing a book in Sarajevo, having readings in Ljubljana, Skopje, Pristina. It meant living in different cultures and feeling they were his own” (“Intellectuals as Leaders” 679).

Nonetheless, for fifty years, discourse in Yugoslavia was subordinated to the demands of a hegemonic Titoist politics. “Bratstvo i jedinstvo” (brotherhood and unity) was all too often an excuse for demanding narrow-minded conformity. But in the last few years, the clichés of Serbian and Croatian nationalism have simply taken over the space formerly occupied by the slogans of communism. Ugresic’s playful cosmopolitanism, her twisting of gender stereotypes, and her refusal of politically prescribed rhetoric together define her writing as a practice of resistance.

The physical and metaphorical breakup of the former Yugoslavia has unleashed a collective paranoia, involving the surfacing of old, worn-out myths of each of the ethnic groups. Writers and intellectuals have unfortunately contributed to this. Even the most cosmopolitan writers have become virulently nationalistic. Ugresic sardonically remarks that Milorad Pavic, the writer of the famous Dictionary of the Khazars, has “traveled the world explaining to the Jews that his Khazars were really Jews, dropped in on Croatians to hint that the Khazars might have been Croatians, claimed to the Basques that the Khazars were none other than Basques. Today, after joyfully sliding into the Serbian warrior camp, Pavic explains that the Khazars are simply Serbs” (“Intellectuals as Leaders” 681). In Serbia and Croatia alike, Ugresic remarks, “instead of interculturality we are witnessing a turn to cultural egocentrism” (“Made in Yugoslavia” 11).

Ugresic’s novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness was published in Zagreb in 1988. The setting of this novel is an international literary conference taking place in Zagreb. The conference is attended by writers and literary critics from both East and West Europe and the United States, as well as critics and writers from Zagreb. Literary critics and writers are the source of endless delight for Ugresic’s sharp eye. Ugresic ironically analyses clichés and idiosyncracies of both West and East in the novel, presenting them primarily but not exclusively through the eyes of a Zagreb writer named Pipo Fink and a nameless Minister of Culture, a communist party hack who started out as a butcher in pre-second world war days. As the Minister observes at the beginning of the novel, “the ones from the Eastern block came to buy their wives bras and panties, and the ones from the West to wash their cevapcici down with plenty of sljivovica” (Fording 29).

Indeed, each writer of the conference parodically embodies a national type. Mark Stenheim, the American, lists his numerous educational degrees from various universities, from writing programs, and even from deep sea fishing school, obsessed with the fear that he will not be considered sufficiently intellectual. For his part, the Czech writer, Jan Zdrazila, is tormented by guilt as he works for years on his lengthy and unpublishable “masterpiece,” while earning his living by censoring the works of other writers. Yugoslav writers are not spared irony, either. When Jean-Paul Flagus, one of the writers visiting the conference, enters the Writers Club and asks the bartender where are the Yugoslav writers, the response he gets is “Writers? We have no writers. No writers, no literature. Life writes the novels in this country; nobody gives a damn about literature” (Fording 61).

Indeed, Ugresic takes to the limit the notions of the work of literature as a form of life and of life as a fictional construction. Truth, lie, copy, simulacrum, cliché, high art, film, “real life,” and writing are intermingled to the point of indistinguishability. It is appropriate that the literary conference ends with a banquet at which the characters actually eat all the dishes described in Madame Bovary. The novel itself combines a wide variety of genres and styles: it includes elements of a detective and mystery story, together with diary fragments, parodic rewrites of previous literary works, film-noir allusions, and pastiches of the fantastic literary tradition. The information constructed by any one narrative voice challenges, undercuts, and supplements the perspective of the other voices. The text exposes its seams and discontinuities, and the effect is a constant dislocation of meaning. The montage of voices and perspectives leads to a condition of fragmentation, flux, and continual transformation. Ugresic rejects the creation of a unified theory, of an absolute meaning, and of the search for some ultimate truth (whether ideological, artistic, or philosophical). Fording the Stream of Consciousness starts with a quote from Voltaire: “‘How can you prefer stories that are senseless and mean nothing?’ the wise Ulug said to the sultans. ‘We prefer them because they are senseless.’” There is no “truth” and “meaning” in Ugresic’s text; we can see how it functions but not what it means.

This continual play also leads Ugresic to question the idea of the “originality” of the literary work. One of the writers at the conference, the enigmatic and idiosyncratic Jean-Paul Flagus, rejects the idea of originality and embraces the role of author as mass producer: “a literary Andy Warhol producing a series of cloned stories, cloned novels. All one need do is make the reading public believe they represent ‘brilliant’ cynicism, a ‘dazzling’ recycling of everyday experience” (Fording 186). Flagus, however, is later revealed to be an international scammer and forger working in so-called “literary espionage”; in revenge for his own feelings of literary incompetence and mediocrity he manipulates the lives of other writers at the conference as if they were themselves characters in a novel. (Flagus and his mysterious servant Raul are themselves Ugresic’s sly versions of the characters of Mephistopheles and Behemoth in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margerita.) Elsewhere in the novel, a real-life friend of Ugresic is recorded as commenting that “more often than not, good literature comes from trash” (Fording 220). Ugresic herself plays the postmodern game of “literary appropriation,” or recycling trash, with great glee in some of her other works: most notably in the short story “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun.” This story “plagiarizes” and updates Gogol’s “The Nose,” making what was merely implied in the original story hilariously explicit. In Ugresic’s rewrite, the phallic order is disrupted when an actual penis (rather than a nose) becomes detached from its owner and creates confusion wherever it appears. Sexual and textual politics are conflated, and identities and points of origin become unrecognizable.

As this example implies, Ugresic simultaneously mocks the cultural authority of literature and its institutions, the political constraints imposed by both Communist and nationalist regimes, and the subordinate position of women in traditional Yugoslav society. In connection with the latter, there is a wonderful scene in Fording the Stream of Consciousness where two young women writers take revenge on a vicious male literary critic who accuses them of writing “women’s literature that represents the lava of babble as it issues from kitchens the world over, in short kitchen literature.” They decide to torture him accordingly, with kitchen utensils: “Let the bastard stew in his own juice. Picture a meat-grinder or an electric knife if you are up for castration” (Fording 132).

Ugresic’s previous novel, Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota (Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life), is literally “kitchen literature” since it begins and ends in that traditionaly female space. It is an ironic deconstruction of the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in traditional Yugoslav culture. The title character’s unrelieved sexual frustration is a result of her futile attempt to conform to the myths of feminine passivity. She is a good natured but lonely typist from Zagreb, trapped within fiction, especially the clichés of women’s magazines, Lonely Hearts advice colums, fairy tales, and traditional folk wisdom. (All of these sources are woven into the texture of Ugresic’s book). Stefica’s attempts to find a man invariably end in calamitous mishaps: for all the male characters she meets are equally trapped in the ridiculous limitations of their roles as virile seducers.

In terms of form as well as content, Ugresic works to subvert the phallic order of conventional narrative. There is no hierarchical distinction between the different sorts of discourses that make up the book: authorial self-reflection, inane newspaper clippings, and popular sayings. Ugresic realizes the impossibility of escaping clichés, and so she embraces them instead. The novel’s subtitle is “Patchwork story”: instead of a table of contents, we are given a set of pattern instructions for knitting a garment: tacking, hemming, fastening, interfacing, the author’s zigzag stitch, and so on. In place of a conventional conclusion, the novel trails off into a series of supplements to be used as the reader desires, so that the story can be expanded indefinitely. A whole range of endings, from happy to tragic, is made available. The author even at one point asks her mother, the next door neighbor, and assorted female friends for advice on what to do next.

The novels I have been discussing were written at a time when Communist Yugoslavia was starting to fall apart, but when nobody yet foresaw the tragedies that are taking place today. Gender politics and nationalist politics are yet more strongly intertwined now, as the former Yugoslavia is torn apart by civil war. In addition, the nationalistic and strongly Catholic government of Croatia seeks to restrict women’s right to abortion, and to push women out of the workplace and other public spaces, and back into traditional family roles. In such a context, there is all the more value in Ugresic’s playfully ironic fictions. In an authorial interruption in Fording the Stream of Consciousness, Ugresic writes, “I love my country because it is so small and I feel sorry for it.” Indeed, in the face of recent events, this hypothetical cosmopolitan Balkan country has shrunk to virtual invisibility. But Ugresic’s prose still provides a refreshing counterweight to the recent flood of self-glorifying nationalistic novels, plays, and essays emerging from the former Yugoslavia. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger remarks, we don’t need “the National Writer exalting the mysterious spirit of his own tribe and denouncing the inferior crowd next door in a constant flood of verse epics” (“Intellectuals as Leaders” 686). Or as Nietzsche cleverly put it, “I only attack causes that are victorious; I may even wait until they become victorious” (Ecce Homo 232).

Works Cited

• Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation.” Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.
• Magnus Enzensberger, Hans. “Intellectuals as Leaders.” Partisan Review 4 (1992).
• Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
• Ugresic, Dubravka. “Baggage and belles lettres.” San Francisco Review of Books 17.2 (Fall 1992).
• —. “Made in Yugoslavia.” San Francisco Review of Books 15.2 (Fall 1990).
• —. “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun.” Formations 5.2 (Summer-Fall 1989).
• —. “Intellectuals as Leaders.” Panel Discussion in Partisan Review 4 (1992).

Jeffrey Cass

Texas A & M International University
Jeffreycass@delphi.com

On the seventh day, the Lord said: “I’m pooped.
You build the theme park.”
 
–Advertisement for Theme Park

 
The creators and advertisers of Theme Park (a CD-Rom based computer game, available in IBM and MacIntosh formats) promise potential consumers much in their simulations: the thrill of designing one’s own theme park attractions (including rides and soft drink concessions), the drama of competing against rival parks, and “experiencing the joys of management, including hostile takeovers and real-time arbitration.” They tease potential consumers into vicariously exercising corporate power by advertising their game with primal and seductive (and recognizable) icons–Adam and Eve. With the above caption flanking Adam’s well-muscled body, the potential consumer is directed to gaze at Adam gazing at Eve.¹ Temptress Eve, standing under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad, alluringly holds out for Adam’s pleasure the apple into which she has already bitten. Adam has not yet bitten into the apple (although he curiously holds in his right hand a fig leaf in front of his groin, as if intuitively knowing that he will bite into the apple). Behind Eden, however, lies the future theme park: medieval castle, roller coaster, a gigantic hamburger (representing food and drink concessions), and a grinning purple demon to the left of Eve. Most interestingly, in back and to the side of the hamburger, pink phallic projections erupt, suggesting the contiguousness of food consumption and sexual appetite. The demon expectantly watches the scene playing out in Eden and awaits the “fallen” guardians of Eden to take possession of Theme Park.

Image copyright 1994, Electronic Arts Inc. Used by permission. Bullfrog and the Bullfrog Logo are registered trademarks and Theme Park is a trademark of Bullfrog Productions, Ltd. Electronic Arts and the Electronic Arts logo are registered trademarks of Electronic Arts, Inc. All rights reserved.

In his essay “See You In Disneyland,” Michael Sorkin writes:

At Disneyland one is constantly poised in a condition of becoming, always someplace that is “like” someplace else. The simulation’s referent is ever elsewhere; the “authenticity” of the substitution always depends on the knowledge, however faded, of some absent genuine. . . . The urbanism of Disneyland is precisely the urbanism of universal equivalence. In this new city, the idea of distinct places is dispersed into a sea of universal placelessness as everyplace becomes destination and any destination can be anyplace. (216-7)

Sorkin’s pointed reference to the “urbanism of Disneyland” and its cultural transformation of public space resonates very strongly with Theme Park and its metamorphosis of public space into cyberspace. The creators’ astonishing exploitation of Adam and Eve iconography links, even as it attempts to merge or conflate, a mythically encoded past and an equally encoded corporate future. Potential consumers, the advertisement suggests, can be corporate bosses–grinning purple demons–and can playfully craft their own geographies and destinations and cities–in short, their own Disneyland. Just like the demon, they may indeed corrupt other Adams and other Eves with their newly acquired knowledge in their newly imagined Eden, but this new Eden results from the play of the human mind and not from the exhausted, implicitly unimaginative mind of some “pooped” Lord, a postmodern reference perhaps to Nietzsche’s Death (or in this case Exhaustion) of God. More importantly, consumers’ acceptance of Theme Park has rendered the physical Disneyland obsolete except as an abstract diagram to be simulated. Whereas Disneyland, according to Sorkin, “still spends its energies on sculpting . . . physical simulacra,” Theme Park, like its cousins on the Internet, sculpts cyberspace. Knowledge of Sorkin’s “absent genuine” can now completely disappear because consumers no longer need to travel physically; they need only “manage,” it must be stressed, their emerging Theme Parks and any “simulacra” that lend their virtual corporate bosses the illusion of power.

In order to eliminate the “absent genuine” Theme Park’s advertisers deliberately skew temporal and historical sequences. Adam and Eve, for example, hide their nakedness even though their shame should result from eating the forbidden fruit and not in the anticipation of eating it. In effect, the iconographic representation of Adam and Eve is a prolepsis: potential consumers must already have “fallen” into knowledge in order to comprehend the benefits of possessing Theme Park. This is why they are already at the gate, gazing upon the gazers, the primal scene recorded as cybertext. Within the logic of this system, there are no prelapsarian or “sinless” consumers; hence, they will find little reason to resist the temptations of the game. And since they clearly already populate the geography of Theme Park (one can see figures walking behind the medieval gates and riding the modern roller coaster), viewers of the advertisement have the opportunity to manipulate and control fellow consumers by subsuming them within the confines of their own Theme Park, one that competitively challenges the legitimacy (and solvency) of other, less imaginative Theme Parks. Consumers can play at being God (the absent “pooped” Lord) because God is “play”–a play of cyberspace signifiers that cannot settle upon “genuine” signifieds like “punishment,” “fear and trembling,” or the “Fall.” The game ironically fabricates the illusion of a hermeneutically closed system, one in which consumers no longer need an “absent genuine” to validate their actions because they themselves possess the authority to validate their own actions.

Furthermore, the advertisement also manifests a capitalist ideology that deliberately conflates temporal and historical distinctions even as it acknowledges them, for Theme Park promotes capitalist management practices within a pastiche of Medieval and futuristic, pre-modern and postmodern architecture that towers above the pastoral landscape inhabited by managers Adam and Eve and their future Theme Park. It is a hybrid Judeo-capitalist imagination, then, that sculpts cyberspace and has the instrumental power to artificially recreate myth and history in order to recontextualize old, familiar icons and situate them in new formats. Borrowing from Eco and Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann believes that technological “hyperreality” (such as that suggested by the advertisers of Theme Park) is “an artificial reality, to be sure, but it is not a poor substitute. It surpasses traditional and natural reality in brilliance, richness, and pliability” (Crossing 83). Theme Park embodies this “brilliance, richness, and pliability” by permitting capitalism to reterritorialize space, to recast it into more profitable, but less terrifying shapes. No longer the cruel, dark factory of the nineteenth century that exploits powerless workers and aggrandizes rich industrialists, capitalism has “managed” to camouflage its sinister underbelly by redefining itself as the virtual “Theme Park”–the collector of mercurial technologies, the purveyor of imaginative freedom. In short, the Theme Park becomes the exploiter of simulated fields of human resources. Uncannily presiding over capitalism’s transformed domain is the grinning, purple demon–the advertisers’ reification of “capital”–who channels consumer desire into newly emerging commodity formats.

Borgmann correctly frames these commodities as “alluring” but not “sustaining” precisely because

[T]he realm of commodity is not yet total . . . we must sooner or later step out of it into the real world. It is typically a resentful and defeated return, resentful because reality compares so poorly with hyperreal glamour, defeated because reality with all its poverty inescapably asserts its claims on us. . . . (96)

Borgman distinguishes between the “glamour” of hyperreality and the “poverty” of reality in order to delineate the “symmetries” between the two, ultimately contending that discussion of the hyperreal and the real raises “theological” issues, such as the nature of divinity and grace (96-7). Implicitly, however, such a distinction does much more, for the easy temptations of Theme Park falsely promise that we can indeed escape the “poverty” of “reality” through cyberspatial hyperreality, false promises which the iconography of Theme Park reiterates. The conventional serpent in the Garden has been replaced by serpentine vines, the very vines wrapped around the Tree of Knowledge and used by Adam and Eve to hide their nakedness. Curiously, directly behind the Tree of Knowledge stands the roller coaster, whose serpentine course all too clearly parallels its mythical counterpart in Eden. Predictably, however, the creators and advertisers of Theme Park fail to inform potential consumers that their acquisition of corporate power in cyberspace does not satiate capitalist desire, it exacerbates it. There is always another �Apple to bite, another roller coaster to ride, another consumer to control. Player/Consumers may feel free to select or refuse products, without recognizing that they are themselves produced into desiring them. Free will and choice become powerful illusions that deflect hard questions about the cyber-capitalist ideologies that remake “reality” through simulation. The competitive, frequently harsh world of capital and work is excised from the playful contours and boundaries of Theme Parkin order to encourage consumerist desire. Enclaves of voracious capital “manage” to conceal themselves within the exterior trappings of an amusement park, of Disneyland.

In his book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim argues that the “allure” of computers is not merely “utilitarian or aesthetic” but “erotic” (85). He writes:

Instead of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or amusments, our affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a marriage to technology. Rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace carries the scent that once surrounded Wisdom. The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, but also captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros. (85)

Heim’s intersection of erotic desire with the miracles provided by “technology” collapses the distinctions between the body and the machinery of technology and fetishizes Eros: it “captures” our hearts, and “our hearts beat in the machines.” “Our affair with information machines” may indeed derive from an insatiable desire for “the world rendered as pure information,” but Heim’s subsumption of marriage within the confines of Eros has the effect of trying to stabilize desire, redirecting it to worthier, “truer” goals. An unabashed Platonist, Heim believes Eros must be educated “toward the formally defined, logical aspect of things” (88). He concludes by arguing that “the spatial objects of cyberspace proceed from the constructs of Platonic imagination . . . in the sense that inFORMation in cyberspace inherits the beauty of Platonic FORMS” (89).

Unfortunately, Heim’s Platonism aestheticizes the political. Naturalizing the (“symbiotic”) relationship between the computer user and cyberspace aestheticizes their interaction, removing a whole range of signification–Eros, technology, cyberspace–from the political and cultural choices that help shape the consumer and his desire for the “refreshing play with surfaces” that Heim claims the consumer ultimately transcends. Far from “augmenting” or “empowering” the consumer, the “erotic” desire encouraged by cyberspatial interraction succeeds only in aggravating desire for “toys” and “amusements.” Finally, Heim seems to assume that cyberspace is an independent entity, affirming yet again an age-old duality that promises but cannot truly deliver imaginative freedom. In fact, cyberspace works within us every bit as much as we work within it, but by acquiring the baubles promised by cyberspace technology, even Heim’s platonic ones, we accede to the myth-making of those, like the creators of Theme Park, who wish us to believe in the illusion of consumer independence because, without it, the secret ideology of capitalism is exposed: cyberspatial interraction does not merely activate (or satiate) latent desire, it produces it. Not coincidentally, Fredric Jameson has described cyberspace as the “reification of the world space of international capital,” tacitly recognizing that the forces of capitalism work to colonize and order cyberspace in the same manner that they have already colonized and ordered “world space.”

It is with some surprise, then, that Mark Dery, who correctly acknowledges that at the “heart” of cyberculture lies “the most fundamental of all political issues, that of control,” would nonetheless assert that cyberculture’s “intuited awareness, submerged in the mass psyche, that the world-machine of industrial capitalism is running down, its smooth functioning impeded by dislocation and dissent, is part of the secret history of the twentieth century” (“Cyberculture” 513, 519). Dery assumes, as do other exponents of late capitalism, that the “world machine of industrial capitalism” has little flexibility, that it cannot mutate or “morph” as easily as the killer android in Terminator 2 (to which Dery alludes at the beginning of his essay). Dery may scorn Disney’s Carousel of Progress (“It’s a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow”) or Flint’s Auto World (“He’s My Buddy”), but these theme-park attractions do not symbolize the decreasing control and power of multinational corporations; rather, they illustrate the scornful way in which “the world machine of capitalism” cynically views the consumers it shapes. As layoffs continue, it replaces the human with non-human producers while at the same time it outrageously claims that this shift to industrialization without workers ultimately benefits jobless workers. Ironically, corporate interests create the killer android in Terminator 2, not some alien intelligence or practitioner of cyberart. Capitalism will not be much bothered by the machine theater of Pauline, Heckert, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone or the body art of Stelarc or hacker clubs like the Legion of Doom or the cyberrocking Nine Inch Nails or the cyborgs of Michael Jackson videos any more than factory owners in the nineteenth century were much bothered by the Luddites.

Like the purple demon, corporatist agendas are oddly hidden in plain sight, lying submerged within a game like Theme Park, and requiring a critical distance to disarm their seductiveness. Advertised, packaged, sold–even information itself is dispensed by “data merchants” (Theodore Roszak’s phrase) who idolize the machines that plug us into cyberspace and who encourage the rest of us to idolize them as well. Much as Satan in the Garden of Eden invites Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, the grinning purple demon invites us, potential cyber-gamesters, to “fall” into Theme Park (interestingly, the land is on a downward slant) and learn the profitability of hoarding, trading, and selling data. The more data we have, the greater leverage we can exert on our competitors. As Roszak informs us, however, the collection of sheer data does not necessarily signify greater understanding;² indeed, the possession of mega- and gigabytes of information becomes for the consumer an end in itself, a kind of technological solipsism that serves no public or collective interest.

Yet such solipsism does serve the corporate manipulation of consumer appetites. Far from fostering an unfettered exploration into the boundaries of random and spontaneous human desire, corporate concerns in cyberspace would prefer to heavily police such desire and channel it into more predictable, and hence controllable, venues. Policing such desire, of course, presupposes a nameless criminality that threatens the capitalist ideology underwriting the complex web of social, political, and economic arrangements produced by cyberspace’s datastreams. In these potentially profitable but highly volatile transfers of data, the computer hacker becomes the dangerous “other” whose systemic intrusions render a capitalistic ethos apparently vulnerable, but this seeming vulnerability oddly permits the creation of a corporate enemy who paradoxically becomes a necessary part of cyberspace’s architecture.

Commodity and criminality are thus inextricably linked, encoded into the iconography of Theme Park and, by extension, imported into the very fabric of cyberspace. Far from offering a politics of change, therefore, the importation of commodity and criminal desire into cyberspace iterates their traditional opposition and perpetuates the ideological status quo even as “the increase in technical devices” (Benjamin’s phrase) promises social, cultural, and political change. Ultimately, Theme Park reifies a politics of war, a fascism that remains quite willing to sacrifice individuals in order to maintain one’s personal status, authority, and power within the established parameters of the “game.” As Walter Benjamin prophetically writes:

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. (241)

The creators of Theme Parkattempt to “render politics aesthetic” by transforming the cruel, competitive world of commodity production and consumption into a “game”–a game whose grinning purple demon inculcates the values of “the traditional property system” even as the player’s use of cyberspatial technology demonizes and criminalizes those who might oppose his or her quest for domination, that simple desire to win. The machines we use to achieve that domination promise, as Jameson argues, only “reproduction” and not “production” (225). In the iconographic and mythic terms of Theme Park, we only succeed in cybernetically reproducing the conditions of the Fall; we do not and cannot produce a new Eden.

Notes

1. Adam’s left hand stretching towards Eve may symbolize the left hand path, connoting the occult, particularly in the form of hidden rituals and magic, the basis of Theme Park‘s allure. See Colin Wilson, The Occult. New York: Vintage, 1973 (1971).

2. In The Politics of Information Roszak writes: “But in all cases, we are confronted by sprawling conceptions of information that work from the assumption that thinking is a form of information processing and that, therefore, more data will produce better understanding” (Roszack’s emphasis, 165).

Works Cited

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
• Borgman, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Dery, Mark. “Cyberculture.” South Atlantic Quarterly 91:3, Summer 1992: 501-523.
• Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Storming the Reality Studio. A Casebook of Cyperpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991: 219-228.
• Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information. A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994 (1986).
• Sorkin, Michael. “See You in Disneyland.” Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space. Ed. Michael Sorkin. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992: 205-232.
• Theme Park. Advertisement. Wired. July 1994: 6-7.
• Wilson, Colin. The Occult. New York: Vintage Books, 1973 (1971).

Paul Mann

Department of English
Pomona College

Zone

Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, collèges and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative dérivistes, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more…. Why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds? What is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit? Why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit? Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of cultural objects? Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural criticism? No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a critique, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal.

Then if one must persist in investigating these epi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue), perhaps merely out of an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground back to all the old undergrounds, back to the most familiar histories? Why not cast it as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn incarnation of an avant-garde that wallows in but doesn’t quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has already wasted years considering? Why not just settle for mapping it according to the old topography of center and margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that, for all their alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach always manage to drag along behind them? Why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion, resistance, etc.) that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don’t have the strength to shake; or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality, diversity, etc.), as if all one needed was to add a few more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a One that, in truth, one still manages to project in the very act of superceding it? Nothing will prevent us–indeed nothing can save us–from ransoming ourselves again and again to the exhausted mastery of these arrangements; nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward every difference by means of the most tattered maps. But at the same time we must entertain–doubtless the right word–the sheer possibility that what we encounter here is not just one more margin or one more avant-garde, however impossible it will be to avoid all the orders and terms attendant upon those venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We must remain open to the possibility that this stupid underground poses all the old questions but a few more as well, that it might suggest another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that might be. In any case, whatever vicarious attractions the stupid underground offers the bored intellectual groping for a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will not find these maps laid out for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and charm. No claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block as the other of the month. There is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made. One can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken it and slow one’s passage through it, and, as always, to render criticism itself as painful and difficult as possible. Indeed, let us suggest that this tour of the stupid underground is above all else designed–according to a certain imaginary, a certain parody, the curve of a perfectly distorted mirror–not to give us an opportunity to rub elbows with the natives and feel some little thrill of identification with them, but to expose to criticism its own stupidity, its impossibility, its abject necessity. Why go there at all? To pursue a renunciation of culture past the limit, where it precisely leaves us behind, where criticism can no longer observe it, no longer recuperate it; and at the same time to witness the turning-back and collapse of the critical into the very form and function of everything it would seek to distance and negate: a double negation that will end up–what else?–reinvesting in the stupidity of culture. No venture could be more idiotic. Shades have been distributed, the bus is leaving, our stupid-critical theme-park tour is about to begin.

Trajectory

In what one could call, not without historical cause if perhaps too casually, the standard modernist map, the relation between hegemonic center and oppositional margin is more or less constant. Marginal groups are suppressed almost to the point of invisibility, or at least to a theoretical position of “silence”; centers might seem to disintegrate, and parties consigned to the margin in one generation might rise to power in the next; one even speaks of multiple “sites” (all women are marginalized, although caucasian women are more likely to occupy a hegemonic position in relation to women of color; one can be white-male but gay, straight-female and Asian, etc.); but the general structure of center and margin remains in a sort of hypertense steady state.¹ The limited exclusion of the margin constitutes the center’s defining boundary. Margins exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive limit of whatever power the center consigns itself. We are hardly breaking any new ground in stating that this dialectical topography underlies almost all of our cultural criticism, often in the most tacit manner; it has been exceedingly difficult for anyone to propose more sophisticated models. It is here that we find the first relevance of the stupid underground. While it readily lends itself to this topographical reduction, it cannot be simply constrained to an orbit. It is deployed–but by what force? by some hegemonic “Power” or by another, undetermined order of cultural physics?–as a means of carrying every mode of cultural activity past its limits, to its termination. At times this termination seems merely symbolic, as they say: an end-point that might indeed be fatal but is nonetheless reflected back into the cultural economy as a series of still quite spectacular and profitable images. The death of painting as a mode of painting, etc. And yet the trajectory of the stupid underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather uncertain. One is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk past the edges of the world. Cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child’s nightmare, and yet marking the place of an unimaginable destruction, of the invisible itself. Not marginal spaces, strictly speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely beyond the limit: but at the same time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction, if you would rather, to the very adventure of marginality. The stupid underground is not only the newest post-avant-garde, it is also, beyond that, the very image–quite critical, in its way–of the imminent and perhaps immanent suicide of every marginal project, a suicide that is not a demonstration, a gesture accompanied by notes to the Other, but the most rigorous renunciation of the symbolic order.² We move from the masterpiece to avant-garde art-against-art to non-art (folk, brut, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects generators (Survival Research Laboratory, Psychic TV, Non) to utter silence; from rock-tour T-shirts to skinhead fascist costuming to criminal disguise and disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to pornography and soft or “theoretical” S/M (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to pedophilic aggression to the consequent “knowledge” of the most violent sexuality carried out in the strictest secrecy.³ The stupid underground is the immanence and extension to fatality and beyond of becoming-sound, becoming-animal, becoming-libidinal, becoming-machine, becoming-alien, becoming-terror; it is the exhilarating velocity through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. We should also note that even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this Deleuzian rhetoric of becoming-X its most abiding cultural form: becoming-cliché, becoming-stupid. In the stupid underground any innovation can be, at one and the same time, utterly radical and worthless in advance. The trajectory past cliché is at stake here as well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the repetition of a cultural adventure long after its domestication, but as if it were still an adventure. The trajectory is thus seldom a straight line into the beyond, a singular line of flight through becoming-imperceptible, into the invisible. The complexity of these movements suggests four trajectories, or four dimensions of the trajectory as such:

to the apotheosis of stupidity, as sublime becomes ridiculous as if without transition;

to the violent limit of the tolerable, the very limit of recuperability;

to disappearance past the boundary of cultural representation, a disappearance so critical that it gives the lie to every other form of criticism;

and to what turns out, in the very midst of an innovative frenzy, to be stupid repetition, an autonomous, automatic repetition that drains cultural forms of every meaning, even that of parody: the stupefying force of repetition, which, we are told, is the very trace of the death drive.

Vertical

The horizontal extension of the trajectory tilts along another axis, much older, much more deeply embedded, much more stupidly anthropomorphic, and precisely the logic that gives rise to the term underground. The space of tunnels and hence also of communication–subways, fiberoptics, sewers–and of escape under the walls; of burrowing animals and carriophagic worms; of roots and imminent growth, and at the same time of death, indeed death as eternal punishment. Underground lies fecundity and decay; the foundation and everything that would erode it; the deepest truth or exclusion from the light; eternal torment or libidinal indulgence and its threat to repressive order. All of these habitual and mutually cancelling tropes attach themselves dumbly to the stupid underground, even in its most brilliant elaborations. Bataille, for instance, cannot avoid what one might cautiously call a metaphysics of verticality in his very attempt to construe the basest materialism: the piston of fucking turning the earth; the burst of orgasmic laughter from the upturned pineal eye of the Jesuve; the descent from the head–or from the blank, acephalic space left by the decapitation of reason and the king–down through the obscene, grotesque comedy of the big toe digging in the mud; the descent from the rotting flowerhead of the heliotrope into the obscenity of roots and Marx’s “old mole.” In Bataille’s formulation, one might say, the proletariat becomes revolutionary by being stupid, by being blind: the marxian mole at the opposite pole from Enlightenment reason becomes, for Bataille, the figure of revolutionary criticism itself. For Bataille, in other words, despite every attempt to go beyond good and evil, to ruin the very order of morality itself, everything depends on an inversion that retains the structure of the moral axis, and, indeed, repeats its historical reversal: the repressive ethical order of the straight world versus the perversion and hence pleasures of hell, or at least of bohemia. Evil be thou my good; perversion be thou my knowledge. But the inversion is never constant. It is never a matter of simple reversal: the poles are not stable, value is determined by opposition alone. Either pole can be good, either pole can be evil: up and down are indiscriminately positive or negative, so long as they remain counterposed. The fixed form of the vertical axis provides for a certain abitrary migration of value up and down the line. It is a question of what one Blake critic calls “perspective ontology.”⁴ In Blake’s terms, “the eye altering alters all”; an angel consigns us to the inferno of his own imagination, which becomes a pastoral paradise if we believe it so; heaven is thus recast as an oppressive zone of paternal law. “They became what they beheld,” but what they beheld is what they projected, either through an active or a reactive imagination. What one must emphasize here is not romantic faith in the power of the imagination, which one might well find rather dubious, but the pure phenomenality of this binary mapping and the ease with which, it appears, the poles can be reversed, flipped back and forth endlessly from hell to heaven to hell, from suffering to pleasure to suffering (a masocritical vacillation in its own right), from ressentiment (and hence complicity) to revolution and back to the order of the Same. The stupid underground is available to any ontological or ideological reformulation, and hence a place to test the following paradox: all cultural zones are both overdetermined and blank.

On “stupid”

Intelligence is no longer enough.⁵ We have witnessed so many spectacles of critical intelligence’s dumb complicity in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer have the slightest confidence in it. One knows with the utmost certainty that the most intense criticism goes hand in hand with the most venal careerism, that institutional critiques bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in their discourse, that every position is ignorant of its deepest stakes. Each school of critical thought sustains itself by its stupidity, often expressed in the most scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of willed blindness about its own investments, hypocrisies, illusory truths. And one can count on each critical generation exposing the founding truths of its predecessors as so much smoke and lies. Thought, reading, analysis, theory, criticism has transported us to so many Laputas that we should hardly be surprised to encounter a general–or perhaps not general enough–mistrust of intelligence as such. What is most “subversive” now is neither critical intelligence nor romantic madness (the commonplace is that they are two sides of the same Enlightenment coin) but the dull weight of stupidity, spectacularly elaborated, and subversive only by means of evacuating the significance of everything it touches–including the romance of subversion itself. To abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or built such grandly inane intellectual systems might seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if rejecting intelligence is rejecting too much, never underestimate the stupid exhilaration of too much; and flying babies are a nicely stupid image, quite suitable for a record cover. Let us insist that we are not arguing for poetic madness breaking out of the prison of reason, nor for the philosophical acephalism of Bataille and his university epigones, still helplessly playing out the dialectic of the enlightenment. The rationalization of unreason is not much of a remedy; that is why we took the trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical evacuation of Bataille. What confronts us in the stupid underground is also the rationalization of unreason, but it is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity posing as value, as the last truth of culture, value without value, and an irresistible lure for suicidal reason. That is, for us, the value–precisely worthless–of the expansive, aggressively sophomoric network of the Church of the SubGenius, of these exaggerated revolutionary claims for a few noisy CDs and nipple piercings, or of the posturing of the so-called Hakim Bey: “I am all too well aware of the ‘intelligence’ which prevents action. Every once in a while however I have managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my own life. Sometimes I’ve used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have attained some degree of success.”⁶ The only undergrounds that surface any more are moronic: cross-eyed obfuscators, cranks, latahs,⁷ deadly-serious self-parodists, adolescent fraternities of deep thinkers riding the coattails of castoff suits.

What animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or a drooping IQ against reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past the point of endurance; it is something like stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the inane, the willingness to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect fool, lines of inquiry that official intelligence would rather have shut down. The dismissal of some dubious scientific fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that be are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth. Enormous labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in large part by giving the lie to official truth. Reactive research, parody of science. Or of the mission of art and cultural commentary. Once it was crucial to separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried to “transgress” these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. But to copy comic books on vast canvases or laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what used to be called a critical gesture, no matter what the catalogues say. It is not a critical reflection on the commodification of art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null and void; not a “deconstruction” (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism itself. In this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. The illogic of this proposition cannot entirely eliminate its force. We are caught up in culture’s inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly native to it. The patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of art, and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy blood of Van Gogh, Cezanne at his sublime labors, the Sistine Chapel englobing a void, empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture.

Criticism as stupidity; the inanity of intelligence and the intelligence of inanity; the absurd hybrid of critical theory and blatant foolishness that today constitutes all that is left of the critical. One must assess the force of this stupidity without simply reasserting for oneself, however tacitly, the superiority of critical intelligence. Stupid is no more a term of derision here than it is a term of praise; it is crucial not to mistake this epithet for a gesture of rejection, an attempt to mark out and claim for oneself any critical distance. It indicates a cultural condition that can hardly be embraced but that the pathetic enterprise of criticism is powerless to overcome by the application of more rigorous intellectual tools. We are pursuing a logic for which we have no taste; it binds and tangles one’s writing in the most maddening ways; but ultimately the stupid underground constitutes a critique of criticism that must be taken up, however aggravating it is, precisely because it is aggravating. The spectacle of the masocritic trying to give stupidity its due while thinking it through with all the proper rigor, using it to judge himself judging, to judge judgment itself, humiliating himself, elaborating his own discourse as the vehicle of a death that is anything but heroic or sublime: let us take this as the true spectacle of criticism. Stupid vigilance, resistance to what one has already made certain would occur, and would have occurred in any case. Such a project will appear to you merely frivolous, self-indulgently self-defeating, like the course of the fabulous bird that flies in tighter and tighter circles until it disappears up its own asshole. Masocriticism must not defend itself against this perfect and proper charge. What it seeks is precisely guilt by association, stupid abasement. If it is therefore impossible for me to be either on the side of this essay or at any remove from it, that is, for me, its “value.” Its ethical value: its stupid value.

Nihil

One might find it amusing to assume the pose of someone who states problems with brutal simplicity. As in this little nugget: Every historical form of cultural and political revolt, transgression, opposition, and escape has turned out to be nothing more than a systemic function. The notion of recuperation has encountered a thousand alibis and counter-tropes but still constitutes the closest thing cultural study has to a natural law. Collage, antimelodic high-decibel music, antimasterpieces, romantic primitivism, drunkenness and drugs, renegade sexuality, criticism itself: it is amazing that a single radical claim can still be made for any of this, and entirely characteristic that it is. Every conceivable form of negation has been dialectically coordinated into the mechanism of progress. The future of the anti has not yet been reconceived. That is why it is ridiculous to accuse some poor kid with a bad attitude or some putative grownup with a critique but no “positive program for change” of being nihilistic: strictly speaking, nihilism doesn’t exist. What was once called nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral function of a culture that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than the most vehement no. Nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than the positive proliferation of civilization (now there’s a critical cliché), and all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for the ethos of “resistance”: just because something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It is merely ressentiment in one or another ideological drag. And how can anyone still be deluded by youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are quite willing to promote it when convenient. Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this just because he was once pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy with the flashiest ressentiment sells the most rags. And if he wasn’t bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us?

It would seem ridiculous to sentence oneself to yet another term of ressentiment; bad enough to risk promoting it by the very act of considering it. Perhaps only a masocritic would subject himself to the humiliation of doing so. And yet in the stupid underground the logics of recuperation and ressentiment are turned, so to speak, on their heads. Everyone there knows all about recuperation and it makes no difference. One can display the most stringent self-criticism about the impossibility of revolt and the next day proclaim the subversive effects of noise, as if one were Russolo himself, Russolo in the first place. The stupid underground is marked by the simultaneous critical understanding of the fatality of recuperation and a general indifference to the fact; it ignores what it knows, and knows it. It acts as though it forgets, until it virtually forgets, what it always recalls. It responds to every critical reminder, even those it throws at itself, with a So what, fuck you. But this very feigned stupidity, this posture of indifference to its own persistent critical knowledge, is the trace of another trajectory. For if the euphoria of punk nihilism is entirely the nihilism of the commodity, by this same means, at certain unpredictable moments, it represents the possibility of nihilism turned loose, driven suicidally mad, ressentiment pushed to the brink of the reactive and becoming force. Inane energy, brute energy, energy without reason, without support, even when it is caught up in what otherwise poses as a critical project. This is not to say that the euphoric frenzy of the punk or skinhead is the sign of something new and vital: the energy released by the stupid underground is never anything more than an effect of its very morbidity. It is marketed as novelty, but that is not its truth. Nor will it ever constitute a base for opposition: it cannot be yoked to any program of reform, nor serve any longer the heroic myth of transgression. It is merely a symptom of order itself. Everything has been recuperated, but what is recuperated and put to death returns, returns ferociously, and it is the return of its most immanent dead that most threatens every form of order. The repressed does not come back as a living being but as the ghost it always was, and not to free us but to haunt us. It returns as repetition; when we see it in the mirror, as our mirror, we pretend not to recognize it. The fury of the punk or skinhead is the fury of this stupid repetition, and it is far more destructive than the most brilliant modernist invention. It ruins everything and leaves it all still in place, still functioning as if it mattered, never relieving us of its apparition, never pretending to go beyond it, draining it of value without clearing it away. That is why one cannot dismiss it according to the logic of the new, whereby the only admissible revolutionary force must conform to the movement of progress and innovation. The rhetoric of innovation is parroted by the stupid underground, because it still obeys the superficial form of the avant-garde. But it obeys it long after it is dead, and as if that death didn’t matter, as if history had never occurred in the first place, as if everything retro just suddenly appeared, in all its original vacuity. As if it were even better, more powerful, once it is dead, so long as one insists that it is and pretends that it isn’t. It is the blind repetition of every exhausted logic far past the point of termination that generates the most virulent negation. The stupid persistence of the dead has taken the place of the critical.

Croatan

Nothing could be more quintessentially American than the stupid underground. It is more basic, more historical, than all the structures and pseudo-guarantees of liberal democracy. If America as such can be mythologized as a nation of dropouts and a shadow underground of Europe, it also immediately begins to generate its own dropouts–a subunderground that is the “first” of the stupid undergrounds, of those who went “native,” which is to say: disappeared. The stupid underground is the latest bordertown, the liminal scene of this disappearance, and of the becoming-imperceptible of American history itself. This history has always moved simultaneously toward the spectacle and toward the invisible; that is why there is a familiarly native intensity to the figure of the solitary, hermetic hacker jacked into the so-called Net. It is also why two stories could be told by those who found this legend carved into a tree at Roanoke: Gone to Croatan. The standard history text tells us that no one knows what “Croatan” means, that the settlers disappeared. But other accounts claim that everyone knew Croatan was the name of a local tribe, and the message quite clearly stipulated that the settlers had gone to join it; the official suppression of this fact is only a sign of the sort of racism that was as likely to execute people who had lived with Indians as it was to “rehabilitate” them.⁸ It is as if someone stood before that tree and deliberately misunderstood its message, didn’t want to know or admit where the colony had gone. We have, in other words, two thin myths: the racist one and the romantic-racialist one, wherein going native and mixing races is by itself a kind of Rousseauian good. Now it will be argued that the revisonary account is not only truer but better, since it liberates a suppressed fact and casts the native other in a more positive light. But perhaps we should not abandon the old textbook version too quickly. If it functions, at one level, merely as further proof, as if we needed one, of the racist suppression of the facts of American history, it remains, in another way, quite seductive: it might once have been possible to disappear from the screens of history, to leave only an indecipherable trace, only the mark of a secret that points toward an invisibility that we should not be too quick to correct. But once again critical intelligence has stupidly closed off an exit.

Subliminal

The stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable psychotopography: it is a zone of the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a pathological site giving rise to all sorts of pathogenic surface effects, and a therapeutic matrix, a place where impacted energies may be guided toward a proper sublimation. The stupid underground presents itself as both a symptom of the disease of capital and an indication of the direction of its cure. But in the stupid underground, as in so many other sites, the direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the cure itself turns out to be nothing more than a symptom. For instance, in the terms of one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the pathology of Other, of the Symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic’s prodigal son who is so repelled by his father’s disease that he can only end by becoming an alcoholic himself; at the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions and defenses, a way to reconceive the social world by means of, indeed as a psychosis. Perhaps merely the critical equivalent of lining your hat with aluminum foil to protect yourself from alien radiation or government microwave transmissions (often: the same thing); perhaps a more radical form of schizoanalytic political action.

As both symptom and therapy, and by these very contradictory means, the stupid underground also indicates the trauma of order itself, of everything it finds above ground, marking a place for the circuitous return of the Real, the nonsymbolic, the nothing around which the Symbolic is formed and in whose black light it is revealed as nothing but symbolic.⁹ Again: one employs this psychoanalytic vocabulary with considerable uneasiness, at least as much as one feels with any critical vocabulary: since psychoanalysis is the very disease for which it proposes to serve as a cure (Kraus), since it is the most pathological (and therefore irreducible) manifestation of the hermeneutic circle, this vocabulary is a set of symptoms to the very degree that it is a therapeutic lexicon. One must further insist that what is at stake for us in this psychoanalytic tropology is not the postulation of a monadic, centripetal individuality preliminary to culture, any more than one should say that neuroses are simply an effect of social inequities that, once resolved, will immediately dissolve them. Neither individual nor society can be privileged because the distinction between them is faulty in the first place. Hence, in part, the real interest of the stupid underground: it is liminal even as it is subliminal, mandated by a pathology that blurs the boundaries of this gross organization. It is neither molar nor molecular but a symptomatic space, marking the trauma out of which this very division has been projected. If it were possible to think of the symptom as a passage between what Deleuze and Guattari call “planes of consistency” or intensity, between what is called the social and what is called the subject, it would be entirely proper to this occasion. The stupid underground, the subliminal itself, is located not beneath the established order but between the Social, the Symbolic, the Law, the Subject and the subject, blurring the division between them in its own psychotic and quite veridical manner, distorting and still providing terms for their constitutive inter-interpellation, marking by its inane repetitions the trauma that is their mutual point of departure.

The stupid underground as symptom thus also conforms to what Derrida calls the trace, and which he explicitly links with the Freudian Nachtraglichkeit. Let us pursue it here along lines elaborated by Alphonso Lingis, as “an element that is . . . found only within the human economy, without being a sign.” Perhaps: a stupid sign. The analogy he draws conforms nicely to our purposes:

The criminal, whose telos is the perfect crime, and not simply the release of unsocialized or barbaric force, acts to break an established order, and depart from the scene of the crime. But the disturbance itself remains, and can function as so many signs indicating a malefactor and expressing, to the detective, the identity of the act and of its agent. The criminal then acts to cover up his traces, so as to depart completely. But the deed passed into the real, and the precaution taken to wipe away the traces of the deed itself leaves traces. The traces a criminal leaves in covering up his traces are traces neither in the pure or purified sense we can now reserve for this term. They are neither signs nor indices, and they are not inscribed by an intentionality; the criminal meant neither to express nor to indicate anything by them. They are not made in order to be recognized and repaired. For him who comes upon them, they will mark the loci at which an order has been disturbed. They refer to a passing, that acted to pass completely from the present, to depart from the scene completely. The one who detects them recognizes something strange, not about to present and identify itself and not representable, but that concerns him by virtue of this disturbance and violation of the layout he inhabits. (145)

If we were able to conceive of these criminal traces not only as an aftereffect of the disruption of the scene but as proper to its very construction, in something like the Derridean sense of non-originary origins, we would be close to the traumatic relation to and originary return of the Real that the stupid underground poses to the culture of repression. One must, in other words, imagine that the criminal stupidly repeats the scene of origination (which is not to say origin as such) in the very act of seeming to transgress its order, and the traces he leaves reveal not only his own crime but its absolute identity with the arche-crime, the primordial disruption, that is the Real itself.

Net

Over and over again we are offered new models that turn out to be the resurgence of everything they presume to leave behind, that exhaust their force even as they grind on in the stupidest, deadliest, and hence perhaps most critical repetition (all that is left of the critical), and yet still hold out the lure of new ways of thought and new modes of existence. The Net is a perfect instance of this perfectly functional contradiction. The intensity of current interest in the Net as a new form of social organization both demonstrates its importance and serves notice that the future is unfolding along quite different lines. Net-talk is everywhere: all one’s social and professional associations instantly conform, with a numbing thrill of recognition, to cybernetic patterns. It is now impossible to fly over any metropolitan area at night without thinking of video representations of integrated circuits and imagining oneself living inside them, and the feeling of futurity this experience lends is already a thing of the past. Mail-art networks (themselves increasingly on-line), listeners to those feasts of disinformation called talk shows, late-night radio call-in programs for solitary consumers of new-age homeopathy and conspiracy theories, compulsive dialers of 900 numbers, tourists and denizens of virtual communities (MUDs and MOOs) springing up along the so-called information superhighway (the phrase has already passed into the afterlife of cliché), pirates of “temporary autonomous zones” (Bey) strung like pearls on the filaments of cyberspace (still another byte that has lost its bite). Catalogue services like Amok or Loompanics that serve as distribution points for masses of stupid information–fringe science, pop cultural theory, terrorist, sadomasochistic, and libertarian handbooks: a stupid, how-to pragmatism abounds here: how to build bombs, collect paedophiliac pornography, live without money, perform autopsies on car-crash victims, go insane, leave the planet, dilate anal sphincters from a distance of two hundred yards (as it turns out: tough to do without dilating one’s own), commit murder, decode disinformation (i.e., their information), become invisible–model, chaotically, the social space of those who use them.¹⁰ The Net is a rhizome, the structure of the general text, the disseminative “space” of all information and of those who attach themselves as functions to it, an atopic utopia, a skein of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies; the Net is also a device for catching gullible fish, and profit after overhead in the counter-culture industry. At one and the same time, the Net is cast over us as a liberated zone in which the proper fantasy of virtual existence can be played out as real, and a technology already appropriated by apparatus of control.¹¹ The computer terminal is both an embarkation point for the new human and the end-point (NB: stupid-critical pun) at which we ourselves finally, fully become apparatus, the very medium in which the state pursues its own becoming-rhizome. The Net is a liminality that further inhibits the distinction between individual and society and belies the autonomy of both on the vastest scale; it is the projection of a “new” hybrid of individual and social in a space and mode of existence neither has inhabited before, and yet reproduces all the old relations of dominance and subordination in the very act of superceding them, and yet disrupts them in the very act of preserving them in a disguised form. The exhilaration of these disintegrating boundaries has already been preceded and prepared for by a remapped capital.

Virtual

The invention of VR goggles and gloves lags far behind the vast array of prosthetic subjectivities that already exist, and helps to conceal the insistent possibility that whatever is offered to or claimed by us as reality has never been anything but virtual, a matter of surrogation. As always, the fact that everyone already knows this has not in the least prevented everyone from pretending to forget it. The invention of specific appliances should not blind us to the fact that virtual reality is already epidemic, that it is the bacillus of the real itself. The place for VR was secured in advance by the very medium of culture. What we encounter here is the tendency of everything in culture, every one of its structuring principles, to rise, eventually, to the level of the device, either theoretical or technological, or, in this case, both; and then to be marketed, with great success, as radical, the moment after it ceases to be critically relevant. But if the technology itself is a bit tardy, the notion of the virtual will serve, quite accurately, for at least a few more moments, to blur yet another useless distinction: that between fantasy and reality, between the ideal and the material. Once upon a time the academy gave itself over to “thinking” the simulacrum, the general text, language as truth (hedged with all the necessary skepticism). Now, after this bad bout of theorizing, a kind of stupid empiricism is all the rage. This history should by itself be adequate proof that both fact and theory are on shaky ground. The passing fashion for a theory of the simulacrum–one could say, for a simulacrum of theory itself–is hardly improved on by the new materialism, the new historicism, the new cognitive psychologism, etc., none of which ever quite answer the charge that they too are entirely virtual. Cultural criticism, for all its showy documentation, is the latest unwanted and generally unnoticed proof that the critical itself is fantasmatic; at the same time, the now nearly universal claim that what once seemed material (sex as biology, for instance) is entirely a cultural construct, virtually guarantees that, in a few years’ time, the material (biological, etc.) claim will return, with a vengeance, as the newest salience of the critical. Empiricism is just another fantasy and our fantasies are utterly material. Each is the necessary model for, proxy, and antithesis of the other. We cannot protect a single one of our views from either charge; the empirical and the hypothetical are reduced to economic forces that collide and cancel each other in a general and quite material economy of surrogation.

The stupid underground further complicates this sickening bind. It is a double surrogate, a mirror- and hence reverse- image of the cultural maps it proposes to leave behind, and a sort of pre-simulation, a virtual model of the revolutionary new world it hopes to achieve, but which it thereby eclipses, displaces, at times actively debases, and always renders surrogate in advance. We might call it a theatrical space–a second world, if you will, but one that already begins to disorient any exit to the world offstage, making it rather theatrical as well, curiously fulfilling the avant-garde ambition of bridging the gap between art and life in an unexpected register. Contra Benjamin: to aestheticize politics and to politicize aesthetics have turned out to be, if not exactly the same thing, then at least coordinated functions of the same mechanism. The stupid underground is thus both a regressive trap and a delusive utopia for those who mistake their play for a revolution that has already occurred. One could say the same for every program of social change. This bind is irreducible; there is no going beyond the delusion to reality and real political agency, any more than garden variety neurotics like yourselves can escape reality and live entirely in delusion. The empirical fact is invisible without the model, but at the same time the model eclipses it without releasing us from its demand. The map and the territory, the model and the real, the fantasy and the fact constitute each other as each other’s excluded precondition. Revolutionary virtuality constitutes the very condition of the revolutionary project and guarantees its utter impossibility. The surrogate both constitutes and belies its truth, grounds it and undermines it, and the stupid underground offers a particularly stark instance of this vertiginous spiral of surrogations.

Quack

What should one think of a Nobel Laureate who proposes, quite scientifically, the theory of “directed panspermia”: that the nucleic proteins from which “life itself” arises were sent here from another star system? Or the notion that, since the biochemical structure of psilocybin spores resembles nothing else on earth, they too were exported, as the very seeds of consciousness, from somewhere out there? Or the proposition that language itself is a virus from outer space, or that time can be controlled by cutting up audio-tape and projecting images on top of one another? How to comprehend experiments in brain expansion through stimulation by electronic implants, or drugs; or what proposes itself as research into nanotechnology, in which tiny robots will someday patrol our bloodstreams scrubbing out cholesterol deposits and gunning down incipient cancers; or cyberprosthetics; or life extension through the ingestion of massive doses of vitamin compounds and amino acids?¹² Or, to address our specific instance, what shall we make of reports of red and black rains, of frogs, fish, and highly-worked stones that fall from the sky? Charles Fort: “I have collected 294 records of showers of living things. Have I? Well, there’s no accounting for the freaks of industry.”¹³ It would not, after all, be so hard to accumulate masses of such “data”: one would simply have to collect newspapers and magazines from around the world and devote all one’s time to poring over them, filing, collating, cross-referencing, in a certain sense indiscriminately. In time one could produce a whole new world-view, or at least the apparent eclipse of an old one, without ever having to look up. Several years, while riding a bus, I found myself across the aisle from a famous humorist-conspiracy theorist (as we have here before us a “humorist-scientist”), who spent the entire time tearing strips from the newspapers piled beside him and inserting them in various file folders. Did he miss his stop? It couldn’t have mattered; and he would doubtless claim that I had missed several stops far more important. How then should one comprehend these precipitous frogs, these crocodiles that turn up in England, this cow that gave birth to two lambs and a calf, these boys dropped suddenly into a boat in the middle of a lake, miles from the place they last remembered? Perhaps the fish fell from a “super-Sargasso Sea”; and to postulate such a sea may have one main motive: “to oppose Exclusionism” (47), the elimination of aberrant possibilities by rationalist methods that seem, from this perspective, nothing more than paranoid symptoms. What about these inscribed stones? Maybe they are just freaks of industry, of fantasy, a strange game against certainty itself. Or perhaps they really–really–do signal the existence of New Lands, hyper-Laputas floating in an atmospheric warp somewhere above the earth’s surface. The truth is up there, out there, way down there, concealed from us by government intelligence agencies, by conspiratorial elites, by the powers hidden behind the powers that be, by extraterrestrials, none of them efficient enough to prevent the freaks of industry from prying loose a glimpse of their traces. And what about the strange cloud-form trailing a sort of hook, sighted by one Capt. Banner of the bark Lady of the Lake (by implication: a trained observer): “I think we’re fished for,” “I think we’re property” (50-51). What about this woman burned to death on an unscorched bed? An instance of the “possible-impossible” (107), of “certainty-uncertainty” (119). The hyphenation is crucial: it marks what Fort calls “alleged pseudo-relations” (98). Everything might be connected; to speak here of coincidences–as Bataille might, in a copula-tion that dreams of polluting the entire universe–is already to cede too much to a scientism that would exclude what is not demonstrable by the given logical means, to relegate it to the exo-real, the margin, the underground of non-fact, of chance, of the unexplained and still-to-be-dismissed. Everything is connected: “the attempt to stop is saying ‘enough’ to the insatiable. In cosmic punctuation there are no periods: illusion of periods is incomplete view of colons and semi-colons” (52). But in exactly the same manner, it is futile to search for singular and fundamental laws: if one refuses to exclude or suppress unclassifiable data–unexplainable phenomena presented to our senses, which in some sense know better–one always comes to “bifurcations; never to a base; only to a quandary,” what one might otherwise dismiss as mere contradiction. “In our own field, let there be any acceptable finding. It indicates that the earth moves around the sun. Just as truly it indicates that the sun moves around the earth” (61). Just as truly? How can one say something so ludicrous? It is one thing to churn out reports of unexplained events, a few of which might actually have occurred, even if one will probably end up explaining them in rather more mundane terms; or to pick out foolish errors in the most rigorous scientific reasoning, which is perfectly capable of dismissing what will someday be widely accepted; but it is another thing to propose seriously–that is to say, with the most rigorous laughter–that the sun revolves around the earth, or that there is no velocity of light (“one sees a thing, or doesn’t”), or that “nothing that has been calculated, or said, is sounder than Mr. Shaw’s determination” that the moon is–is? what is the status of the copula here?–thirty-seven miles away from the earth”(58-59). Shall we even bother to ask about the point of all this? Not quite frivolous, nor yet quite serious; a critique of scientific certainty not without its own games of certainty; not even, necessarily, quackery, if the quack is one who takes himself utterly seriously about things no one in his right mind would believe, and who can produce a mountain of evidence to support what are clearly insupportable claims; who builds this mountain obsessively, one pebble-fact at a time, as if everything depended on it; who is convinced beyond doubt that he has in his hands some sort of key–to secret laws of physics invisible to terrestrial math, to cures for cancer or AIDS driven south of the border by the drug industry, to alien technologies kept not-quite-secret by the CIA–and remains devoted to this research for decades; who believes he has survived despite the most terrible danger, that extraordinary precautions must be taken, vast forces are being marshalled against him, he is being followed, they are reading his mail, he will pursue his heroic quest until they finally eliminate him. Or not so spectacularly paranoid, only theoretically so: what is in danger is not one’s personal well-being, but in some sense the truth itself.

As humorist-scientist, Fort both aligns himself with all scientists, making them guilty by association with him–they’re quacks too, anyone driven to belief by a system is a quack–and always leaves himself a few curious exits:

I go on with my yarns. I no more believe them than I believe that twice two are four . . . . I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of the ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I can not accept the products of minds that are subject-matter for beliefs . . . .

 

It is my attempt to smash false demarcations: to take data away from narrow and exclusive treatments by spiritualists, astronomers, meteorologists, entomologists: also denying the validity of usurpations of words and ideas by metaphysicians and theologians. But my interest is not only that of a unifier: it is in bringing together seeming incongruities, and finding that they have affinity. I am very much aware of the invigoration of products of ideas that are foreign to each other, if they mate. This is exogamy, practiced with thoughts–to fertilize a volcanic eruption with a storm of frogs–or to mingle the fall of an edible substance from the sky with the unexplained appearance of Cagliostro. But I am a pioneer and no purist, and some of these stud-stunts of introducing vagabond ideas to each other may have the eugenic value of some of the romances in houses of ill fame. I cannot expect to be both promiscuous and respectable. Later, most likely, some of these unions will be properly licensed. If anybody thinks that this book [Lo!] is an attack upon scientists, as a distinct order of beings, he has a more special idea of it than I have. As I’m seeing it, everybody’s a scientist. (94-5)

Note the passage from skepticism to perverse hospitality. Doubt becomes belief, without even a bump of transition. It is not really skepticism, since uncertainty itself is “intermediated” by the hyphen that connects it to certainty: “My own expressions are upon the principled-unprincipled rule-misrule of our pseudo-existence by certainty-uncertainty” (119). And not belief, since it is belief itself that Fort wishes finally to undermine. It is a matter of infinite possibility strictly beyond the limits of knowledge, a certainty (not a belief) that human certainty, all the maps and models by which we organize the real, precludes what must still be true beyond it. These days, one might object, the two lambs and a calf are more likely to be the progeny of staff writers for the National Enquirer, who also see, at least until they meet their production deadline, Satan’s face in the whirling clouds of a hurricane: stupid science is a business, the market for snake oil has never been better. But one should not be too quick to assume that those who produce such facts do so out of utter cynicism, not even the cynicism of capital itself; nor should one be too quick to dismiss the consumers of such facts as simply gullible. One might find a few rather Fortean researchers among the writers and readers of these tabloids. In any case, what is valuable is the outlandish, the secret affinity between incongruities, and it is valuable because it so stupidly gives the lie to what is so blatantly and banally true, because everyone knows that the real truth is suppressed, held back, that knowledge itself is a conspiracy and every little perversion of it points toward a greater truth, a truer truth. We are indeed in a zone where one must, but cannot quite, discriminate true from false truths; nor can one prevent these stupid truths from seeping up from their underground domain and saturating thought itself. Maso-science.

Let us also, finally, mark out a place for a whole range of more or less stupid appropriations of new science, stupid deployments of scientific metaphors–fractals, chaos, strange attractors, fuzzy logic, black holes, cyberthis and cyberthat–as even more abstractly metaphorical terms in cultural criticism. They are nothing but the ornamental fringes of critical fashion, and yet they indicate the possibility that one might begin to conceive of culture as a space regulated by strange natural (and still quite technical) laws concealed beyond the reigning social and political terms, and at the same time cloud over this possibility with the toxic vapor of myth.¹⁴

Stupid Gurus

The fashionable mathematics of fractals, precisely in the reduced form pilfered by what once were humanists and who know virtually nothing about it, provides us with the figure of a sort of zeno-graphically receding infinitesimal repetition–the sub-cell reproducing the topography of the whole organism, which can therefore no longer be defined simply as whole. A fractal and still quite vulgar marxism is there to translate this process into the most familiar critical terms: the market reproducing itself morphologically in the stupid underground, as the base always reproduces itself, but in its movement into that alien space also mutating, deformed, transformed.¹⁵ So also a fractal etc. psychoanalysis could translate the same movement into terms grounded in the structures of identification. We find this fractal descent, for instance, in the cult or fandom, which reproduces the ideological body of the leader or hero through specific sorts of identification, in the beliefs, clothing, and ritualized gestures of the disciple, the wannabe, the wannabelong. There would be no underground if someone did not lead us down there, if we were not conducted by a desire to be and belong to the one we recognize there, behind whom even more shadowy and indeterminable figures and forces are concealed. We would not be driven there if the underground did not offer us a stupid imaginary, the delirious hope of parasitical symbioses, vampiric feasts (of course the arrangement is reciprocal: leader and follower feed off each other), spectacular plagiarisms, personality implants, image clonings, synthetic transference, absolute interpellation, stupid communion with the one.

But this communion is not a matter of recognizing oneself in a fixed image, identifying with an ontologically consistent other: the body of the stupid guru, the cult leader, the rock star, the media fantasm, is itself a fractal deformation. That is to say, one must be careful not to reduce identification to any simple dialectic between stable and determinate entities, between isolable masters who are either true or false and slaves who are or are not about to become free. Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi argue that the body of the leader (in their case the despot) is a “body without an image,” and its “infinitization” is also its disintegration, its evacuation.¹⁶ Their claim is that one’s relation to that image is not a matter of strict identification, since one attaches oneself to increasingly fragmented gestures, features, images, that never add up, never amount to a whole body, an identity, that are always partial arrangements of a social apparatus that is absolute without being singular. The stupid guru too is this one who is not one, and who stands for the one that is nothing, the constitutive nothing around which, according to a model we have already employed, the Symbolic is organized; who dissolves into a thousand points or pixels of light distributed across the screenscape of certain economies (subcultural economies that are themselves fractal homomorphs of larger symbolic economies), and serves as a loose network of junctions or terminals to which stupid disciples may attach themselves. In psychoanalytic terms, a Thing. As Zizek writes, “while it is true that any object can occupy the empty place of the Thing, it can do so only by means of the illusion that it was always already there, i.e., that it was not placed there by us but found there as an ‘answer of the real’” (LA 33). Not a body, then, but a sort of vapor catching the light of an oblique projection that conceives of itself as a mechanism of discovery. And it is no different for you: any cultural (political, philosophical, critical, artistic) activity orbits elliptically around such null points: one is a Freudian, a Marxian, a Derridean; a Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen scholar; one becomes a New Historicist not only for considered methdological reasons but because one has already recognized something of what one might call oneself, were it so conscious a recognition, in reading Greenblatt or McGann; one becomes a performance artist because, sitting in the audience during a performance, one saw without seeing (through a fundamental meconnaissance, through stupid recognition) oneself on stage, as the other of one’s desire. Stupid saints, das Ding in incarnations from William Burroughs to Charles Manson, loom up everywhere in the stupid underground. There is no culture without these relays, catapults, necessary points (de capiton) of stupid transference. One might suppose that any spiritual leader worth his salt would devote himself to blowing this vapor away, revealing the empty spot where he stands, for the disciple, in place of an object that doesn’t exist, awakening us to the emptiness of the real. For the guru, however, this is often the very order of the impossible; and it is also why I would argue, if you want to call it an argument, that the stupidest guru is better than the most enlightened master. I once attended a talk given by quite a prominent spiritual teacher who exhorted his audience not to see him as a guru, but to be their own gurus, and they all assented: yes master, I won’t take you as a guru, I will be my own guru. One would have to be an enlightened being not to go mad from frustration and humiliation over a career spent in such futile gestures. Nor could it be otherwise: the thing will not be divested by asking us to divest it. Then will it be divested through critical means? Dean and Massumi propose such a critique of the body-without-images of Reagan or Bush, but in their work too criticism reverts to the illusion that reason itself might someday establish a secure distance from the Thing. The stupid underground, however, in one of its most characteristic gestures, abandons criticism and embraces the same body, plays the same game, relates to the stupid guru through an aggressively stupid affirmation. One might call it a parody of identification, but parody suggests its own sort of critical-ironic distance and thus is not a term precise enough for this procedure. The Church of the SubGenius, for instance, explicitly rejects the suggestion that what it does is a parody (of religion, commerce, art movements, the American family, etc.). It insists on its truth. It demands that we take it literally even as it elaborates the most exorbitant absurdity. Psychoanalysis might recognize in this insistent absurdity the functional truth of fantasy, the empty truth of the Thing; it is presented to us here as empty, but without offering any pretense of distance from it. Hence I wish to insert here two figures, two hollow-core gurus, two Things as Thing: Monty Cantsin and J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the stupid gurus of “Neoism” and of the Church of the SubGenius.¹⁷

The Thing called Monty Cantsin is an explicitly empty figure, a name open to occupation by anyone who wishes to stand in the stupid guru’s place in order to see that it doesn’t exist. There is, in fact, no such individual as Monty Cantsin; he is a pure alias. In principle, anyone who wishes to adopt this false identity, this identity as falsehood, and for whatever motives, whether it be to preserve the strictest anonymity or from the most venal band-wagon opportunism, can claim to be Cantsin.

Canadian ‘total media artist’ Monty Cantsin is something between an enigma and an institution. He is a being around whom a vast contemporary mythology has accumulated. Nemesis seems to dog his footsteps; retribution is incapable of tracking him down. He is voracious of appetite, prolific of explanation, eternally on the brink of affluence yet forever in the slough of debt. He is, moreover, a prince among parasites, a model of optimism, and a master of obtuseness. He can achieve more, and at less cost to himself, than a gypsy. He is as ancient as the hills, as genial as the sunshine, as cheerful as an expectant relative at the death bedside of wealth. He is unthinkable, unforgettable, unejectable, living on [in] all men for all time. Nations die and rise again; Kings come and go; Emperors soar and fall … but Monty Cantsin lives on and on.¹⁸

The stupid guru is always a locus of exaggeration: a “vast mythology” surrounds the leader of even the tiniest sect. Here, the purposely vacuous description could apply to any guru, and that is its point: it is offered as a null set, and hence as the proper set of the guru himself. He lives on and on because he never existed, just as no guru, no king, no pop star has ever existed. But that is not to say that one can ever go beyond him. In the very act of evacuating this figure, his sovereignty is reconfirmed. The history of Neoism demonstrates that once one stands in his place one can easily forget one is standing nowhere: Cantsin becomes a disputed figure, as certain Neoists claim to be the real Cantsin in the very act of inviting others to partake of Cantsin’s persona (a rather messianic offer: this is my body), as if mere contact with this name was enough to erase the memory that there is nothing at stake in the name, that emptiness is all that was ever at stake in it.¹⁹ One is reminded of the wars for possession of the term dada, equally vacuous and equally invaluable. Thus Cantsin is not only an anarchistic be-your-own guru, a figure of a poesie fait par tous, but both the attempted subversion of this structure and the immediate failure of that subversion in a proprietary struggle.

Dobbs, the all-American salesman messiah, the avatar of modernist simony, is constructed in that same empty place, but by a sophomoric priesthood who pretend-believe that he is real and never either abandon the illusion nor mistake themselves for him. He is always other and never a joke, no matter how ludicrous the limits to which he is pushed, because those who promote his absurdity insist on its literal truth even at those moments when they are most outrageously at play. SubGenius claims that Dobbs is the only truth, and indeed he is. Stupid force, stupid necessity. What I wish to mark here, in part, and as usual, is a perversion of criticism itself. Although everything one needs for a critique of the stupid guru is noted in the Dean-Massumi critique of the despot and leader, here we find none of the distance, separation, and rejection traditionally necessary for even so radical a criticism as theirs. The stupid guru of SubGenius is the image, the juncture, of criticism as dumb embrace, a delirious, mocking, hysterical, literal, fantastic embrace that in effect squeezes the life out of the Other (Dobbs has been assassinated at least twice) without ever admitting that it does so (he never quite dies); the cult of Dobbs crystallizes a rabid overparticipation in the stupid spectacle of the real that goes far beyond any “blank parody” or “postmodern pastiche.”²⁰

We cannot leave this icon without noting another of its elements: the serial character of the stupid guru, the rock star, the “role model”: never an absolute master, because he can be exchanged at any moment for another figure, another other; he is a place holder for a rapidly shifting field of empty, ephemeral, and tenuous attachments. No viable cult will ever grow around him, only an ever-shattering hall of mirrors, a high-velocity phase-space of weak and yet perpetual narcissistic identifications. One surfs through stupid gurus, as one surfs through cable channels or the channels in the video-porno booth, in a process that is the very model of the entropy of such attachments, always in search for the next one, the true and proper identification, which never arrives, which the process itself realizes as unrealizable, until desire is distributed and dissipated across the entire field. I have on my desk a volume entitled Threat By Example, a series of brief interviews with “inspiring” figures from the “punk underground.”²¹ The format of the book–pictures and interviews lasting no more than a page or two, followed immediately by another, and another, and another–formalizes the linear movement of this narcissistic guru-surfing: continuous deferral to the promise of a greater imminent satisfaction that never occurs, until the velocity of selection itself becomes the empty signifier of the Other. The accelerated substitution of figures of power, authority, and identification reveals, by a kind of cinematic effect, the hollow at their center, but without thereby releasing us from their hold. The fabled abyss is flattened out, but it is no less fantastic or fatal.

Conspiracy

The stupid underground is the home of the mutant hybrid. What would have seemed to be–what, we are told, a prior cultural order labored to preserve as–distinct, conflicting, contradictory ideas and values are tossed together; categorical boundaries are blurred by rapid movements across them. Sin, pleasure, political subversion, nostalgie de la boue, heroism, adolescent self-indulgence, the most rigorous critique of reason: anything might converge with anything else in a network of intersections, or rather points of stupid conflation, for errant bits of commerce, science, sexuality, politics, religion. No separation of church and state (not even in order to make a religion of the state and a state of religion); no marxists taking the pledge to abstain, one day at a time, from the opiate of the people. The habitual dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is inadequate in this zone. Even more important: the convergence of apparently incommensurable truths or systems is taken as an unerring sign of another, greater, even more orderly order hidden behind the given one. For instance, the stupid underground does not entirely disagree with a certain stupid President’s apocalyptic vision of world affairs, his hysterical application of the Book of Revelations as a foreign policy white paper. The quasi-dispensationalist policies pursued by his administration are signs not just of dangerous eccentricity but of something essential in American history, in the organization of power as such.

The general fascination with conspiracy theories too represents the knowledge that the surface separation of spirit and matter in American culture belies a deeper connection. Close attention to what another perspective would take to be the most random names and numbers that constellate around the Kennedy assassination reveals that it was not only an anti-communist plot–already a wild stretch of the imagination for those in the possession of official knowledge–but a masonic ritual scapegoating, a mystical sacrifice, a symbolically overdetermined “King-kill”:

President Kennedy and his wife left the Temple Houston and were met at midnight by tireless crowds present to cheer the virile “Sun God” and his dazzling exotic wife, the “Queen of Love and Beauty,” in Fort Worth. On the morning of November 22, they flew to Gate 28 at Love Field, Dallas, Texas. The number 28 is one of the correspondences of Solomon in kabbalistic numerology; the Solomonic name assigned to 28 is “Beale.” On the 28th degree of latitude in the state of Texas is the site of what was once the giant “Kennedy Ranch.” On the 28th degree is also Cape Canaveral from which the moon flight was launched–made possible not only by the President’s various feats but by his death as well, for the placing of the Freemasons on the moon could only occur after the Killing of the King.²²

 

The 28th degree of Templarism is the “King of the Sun” degree. The President and First Lady arrived in Air Force One, code-named “Angel.” The motorcade proceeded from Love Field to Dealey Plaza. Dealey Plaza is the site of the Masonic temple in Dallas (now razed) and there is a marker attesting to this fact in the plaza. Important “protective” strategy for Dealey Plaza was planned by the New Orleans CIA station whose headquarters were a Masonic temple building. Dallas is located ten miles south of the 33rd degree of latitude. The 33rd degree is the highest in Freemasonry and the founding lodge of the Scottish Rite in America was created in Charleston, South Carolina, exactly on the 33rd degree line. Dealey Plaza is close to the Trinity River . . . .²³

All this can readily be collated with massive amounts of evidence attesting to masonic influence in the Trilateral Commission, in the “neo-nazi” Bilderberg meetings of European political and financial leaders, in the Rockefeller family, in the founding of the United States, in whatever institution one has in view; it can also be collated with evidence of alien intervention, the shadow of the UFO, either behind the masons or in their place; or collated again by those who would put alongside these masons and UFOs a few satanists and Jews. No accounting for the freaks of industry. If one wished to bother, counter-freaks could disprove most of this evidence and conclude in the knowledge that there are no such connections. But we will not be too quick to dismiss them here: there is always a truth to the stupid underground, even if it is a stupid truth.

Or to be more precise, a methodology: stupid hermeneutics. All these facts can be collected, indexed, cross-referenced, glossed and reglossed, woven into the dense fabric of the final truth, the big one, the gnostic Big Evil behind all the little viral evils that flicker across the archivist’s screen. Everything is evidence for a truth that lies elsewhere; the slightest friction between a number and a name can indicate the deep encryption of a truth that holds the key to a truth that must be organized with other truths that indicate this missing totality. Without the slightest doubt the trajectory of evidence leads to the certain proof of clandestine connections between people in power and, what is more, between seemingly distinct orders of reality: common, household tools conceal super-advanced extraterrestrial technologies linked with the real systems of power behind the apparent political structures, and all these are linked with the dark magic, the secret laws of nature behind those that science pretends to offer us. Everything and everyone is controlled from the outside. Everything is a matter of coding and decoding: a semiocratic delirium. What Bataille calls, in deadly earnest, parody as copula as the illicit copulation of facts: this = this = this…. The chain of evidence is endless and at every point it adds up to the missing One.

Conspiracy reflects, or shadows, the hybrid character of the stupid underground itself. It is the place where things that don’t belong together do, and it projects-discovers these relations, these transformative maps, under the centers of power as well. It finds the other of its own marginality out there, secretly in charge of the visible forms of authority. If you want them, we already have at our disposal psychoanalytic tools for diagnosing this fatuous hermeneutics. Zizek:

The common feature of this kind of ingenious “paranoid” story is the implication of the existence of an “Other of the Other”: a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic order) precisely at the points at which this Other starts to speak its “autonomy,” i.e., where it produces an effect of meaning by means of a senseless contingency, beyond the conscious intention of the speaking subject, as in jokes or dreams. This “Other of the Other” is exactly the other of paranoia: this one who speaks through us without our knowing it, who controls our thoughts, who manipulates us through the apparent “spontaneity” of jokes. . . . The paranoid construction enables us to ignore the fact that “the other does not exist” (Lacan)–that it does not exist as a consistent, closed order–to escape the blind, contingent automatism, the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order. (18)²⁴

The stupid underground comes closest of all to the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order. We should always be careful, however, not to conclude that therefore one can live without this error, by a kind of decision, for the subject who would make the decision is constituted in the first place by its relation to this empty order, this hollow other. And who’s to say what’s really out there? Who’s to say that something utterly Other really doesn’t exist? Why not demonic saucer masons encoding the destruction of political power into the very symbology of American democracy? Why not the fucking hand of God? Zizek himself repeats the old joke about the man who complained to his analyst that there are crocodiles under his bed; when he doesn’t turn up for an appointment the doctor assumes it is because he has achieved a cure, only to discover the man was indeed eaten by crocodiles in his sleep. Perhaps the notion that the other does not exist is the other of psychoanalysis. Isn’t the whole point that there are only points de capiton, never a total truth on which to anchor something more real than the Real–that one cannot, in any sense, claim to have possessed the real, not even by means of a symbolic-rationalist dispossession? The stupid underground, once again, proceeds along this line not by analytical distance but by frenzied overdetermination: the only reality is the apocalyptic plot, and the plot is always at one and the same time hidden and omnipresent, vaporous and thick, future and present (“the end of the world is over”), ridiculous and serious, unacceptable and unavoidable, the most grotesque, most immediate, and most conspicuously absent truth.

Stupid Undersound

Everything significant takes place below. Nothing has changed: in the most primordial epistemological topography, truth has always been subsurface. One must dig down for it, one must not be distracted by superficial effects. Power itself works subversively, under cover, indeed under the cover of one’s own consciousness. It burrows under one’s skin, insinuates itself parasitically within the human organism, eating away at its autonomy and transforming it into a parasite as well, affixing it symbiotically to the host apparatus. One must be vigilant without rest: in the slightest lapse of attention, the slightest weakening of one’s defenses, at the very moment when one thought oneself alienated to the point of immunity, some viral bit of advertising, some invisible hook, some cultural lure one had never even noticed before expropriates ones’s desire and turns one forever into one of them, lusters after supermodels, foreign cars, stock portfolios, leather jackets, sculpted delts and pecs. It is always the case that one swallows the lure before one notices that it is a lure; and that is why the mechanisms of the lure, reaching into us under our defenses, tunneling under every critical Maginot Line, must be decoded and catalogued relentlessly. It is here that we encounter the other sense of the subliminal: not only the zone of the id, the unconscious, the underground itself, but the subliminal means that what we call capital uses to colonize us, its technologies of suggestion. If stupid research is especially alert to mechanisms of subliminal manipulation, it lags behind the Christian fundamentalist who knew years ago that satanic lures were coded into the lyrics of the pop albums spinning endlessly in their teenagers’ rooms, driving them to drugs and suicide, which of course their parents could never do. Whole court proceedings have hinged on the possibility of turning these fleeting backwards messages into hard evidence; and no doubt the paranoid projection of such messages onto what may in some instances have merely been noise–though it is axiomatic in the stupid underground that there is no such thing as simple noise, that signal to noise ratios are absolutely overbalanced, that noise, indeed the unheard, the interval between noises, is dense with information that has simply not been decoded yet–no doubt the imagination of such forms of subliminal suggestion only inspired bands and recording engineers subsequently to put them there, in the technique referred to as “back masking.” And long before Judas Priest went from marketing Satan to paying his dues, Muzak Christmas carols droning in mall elevators indicated to certain hypersensitive ears that the most banal is also the most insidiously powerful–more terrible because of its prevalence than the vague threat of criminal violence, always there, eroding our self-control, indeed our very being. “We managed to get hold of some Muzak records…, and they had the whole chart of frequencies and tempos and things like that you should use at particular times of the day.”²⁵ Key words can be distributed fractally through a cover text in such a way that you are manipulated by messages you don’t even know you are reading. Sexual organs and the mere word sex are not-quite-hidden in billboard gestalts all along the freeway, in commercials, in magazine ads, perhaps in the textbooks you once brought home from school. The certainty that these messages are out there trying to get in puts the stupid underground on a particularly aggressive defensive, caught up in a perpetual double reading and double interpretation of an already overloaded screen, subjecting itself to the ceaseless vigil in which absolutely nothing can be taken for granted lest, in a weak and passive moment, the crucial message gets in and reduces one to an automaton of the commodity (which in any case has long since occurred), or of even more nefarious and perhaps extraterrestrial forms of mind control and body snatching. There is an extraordinary recurrence of this theme in fanzine interviews with a certain cohort of musicians (Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV/Chris and Cosey, SPK, Non, Cabaret Voltaire, Monte Cazazza), who therefore take it as their mission to alert listeners to the menace of subliminal overcoding, and to provide strategies for countering it. Actually, only a few specific strategies are ever proposed: adaptations of the William Burroughs-Brion Gysin method of cutups (“cut word lines . . . trailing to the better half,” rearrange control texts at random in order to disrupt them; here we are not very far from the avant-garde belief in the subversive agency of collage, which is difficult any longer to support); a kind of détournement in which one reseeds the semioscape with one’s own anarchic messages (a project now entirely without effect); or experiments in sub- or hyper-sonic transmission. One might find Mark Pauline or Genesis P-Orridge or members of Cabaret Voltaire poring over obscure technical journals (where, they report, Burroughs believes the only creative writing is to be found) for information on the construction of subliminal-effects generators. There is in this something like the acephalic materialism of Bataille, a sense that control and its disruption happen not only ideologically, by semiotic dissemination, but also in the form of the drone, the too-high or too-low frequency, that communicates viscerally before one even knows one is hearing it, purely, one might say, at the level of the signifier, indeed of sound that cannot strictly speaking be called a signifier because it has no direct relationship to a signified, to a concept other than the mechanics of control itself, since it encodes its relation to power in another form altogether. “Subliminals” are thus both overcoded and empty. Self-control is obtained by breaking control, by wresting oneself from it, by a rigorous discipline of subversion. The conspiracy is vast, the signs penetrate one faster than one can resist them; even so, that never inhibits one from stupidly exaggerating one’s outlaw autonomy.

Let us recall that we have already encountered the subliminal in the form of the trace, which is not the source of control but there in its place, obscuring access to it, covering over a ground that cannot even be said to exist, “there,” according to a certain now-standard logic, only as the supplement of an originary differance, neither absent nor present but the constitutive space (and time) between them. Disruption of control is a reaction to a control grounded on its own disruption. Behind the record company, the government. Behind the government, Satan, or the extraterrestrial. There is always some crime, some transgression, something deeper and more primordial than the forms of control one manages to discover. The absolute is out there, down there, indicated by the very fact that one can disrupt this level of control, or this one. No matter how deeply one penetrates, absolute control lies deeper. Subliminal transmission demands it.

Loud

There is a certain justice to giving the task for discovering the silent forms of control to those whose primary mode of operation is enormous volume. The trajectory from loud rock music to even louder industrial music (Boyd Rice/Non plays too loud even for much of the stupid club scene) to experiments in subliminal sound is continuous. There is, in a certain sense, no difference, no line between sound so loud it is all one can hear and sound so deep and pervasive it cannot be heard at all. Loud is critical. Or perhaps we should put the same matter differently: if we have taken critical to imply a certain distance, a certain non-identity with the object, loud proceeds, as the stupid underground always proceeds, in the opposite direction. Rock music, after all nothing more than the prattle of a banal hybridization of capital and adolescent (male) fantasy, becomes, in intensity, at the most extreme volume, the stupid reduction of that constructed reality, the limit of its tolerability. Critical then not through distance but, as we have seen, through proximity, through what would appear to be the most uncritical embrace. Here again Zizek is helpful: “Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that enables us to ‘pull ourselves out,’ to preserve a kind of distance from the socio-symbolic network. When we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian manipulation cannot reach us” (128). Zizek’s example here is precisely popular music, the inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one’s head; what one wishes to add here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it within the symbolic order. The intensity of loud drowns out the Other. It is the limit of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs. Perhaps we could appropriate a Lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the sinthome. Zizek calls it “subversive,” but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to those who wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to fantasize being) political agents in an older and ever more current sense.²⁶ Let us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment. Zizek:

[T]he signifier permeated with idiotic enjoyment is what Lacan, in the last stage of his teaching, called le sinthome. Le sinthome is not the symptom, the coded message to be deciphered by interpretation, but the meaningless letter that immediately procures jouis-sense,“enjoyment-in-meaning,” “enjoy-meant.”. . . [W]hen we take into account the dimension of the sinthome, it is no longer sufficient to denounce the “artificial” character of the ideological experience, to demonstrate the way the object experienced by ideology as “natural” and “given” is effectively a discursive construction. . . . What we must do . . . on the contrary, is to isolate the sinthome from the context by virtue of which it exerts its power of fascination in order to expose the sinthome’s utter stupidity. . . . [It] produces a distance not by locating the phenomenon in its historical totality, but by making us experience the utter nullity of its immediate reality, of its stupid, material presence that escapes “historical mediation” . . . . [I]t is a little piece of the real attesting to the ultimate nonsense of the universe, but insofar as this object allows us to condense, to locate, to materialize the nonsense of the universe in it, insofar as the object serves to represent this nonsense, it enables us to sustain ourselves in the midst of inconsistency . . . . (LA 128-29, 134-35)

One might be used to the leaping and screaming frenzy of rock concerts, but unless one has experienced, at the same time that one experiences its destructive frenzy, the utterly euphoric, calming, peaceful effect that electric music at extreme volume can produce, one cannot grasp the possibility that it might fall into this category. What is merely social, the stupidest string of pop signifiers, becomes intensely material, becomes an exaggerated idiocy, a sub-ideological cocoon, a tear in the fabric of the social world within which it might still be possible to endure it, if one can endure the volume itself. What we must ask, then, is whether, at its most intense, loud is a thought.²⁷

Day Job

Best of all, furthest along its trajectory, is “zerowork,” the refusal to work, the refusal to bid for equal alienation, disappearing from the tax rolls, from the very category of the unemployed.²⁸ But how then to survive? By hook and crook, and the stupid underground is rife with pipedreams and proven scams. Loompanics Press offers the libertarian illusion, at least, that one can get by in the American economy without ever having to hold a job, and they’ll send you info on how-to (theft, phony credit, welfare scams, scrounging freebies, various black market economies). Or maybe you’ll try dealing drugs (too many down sides). Or being in a band, the archetypal boy-dream of play as work (as it turns out, too many down sides as well: venal managers, if you can even get one, larcenous promoters, an overpopulated market, weird compromises with industry and stupid audiences, and, after all, too much work). Not working isn’t easy, no matter how hard you work at it. Hence, as has always been the case for the underground, the phenomenon of the day job. A perfect epitome of stupid.

In a slightly older bohemia, the artist’s dream: uninterrupted time for the real work. Or rather, what came to be seen as the real work, that painting or writing which was by force an avocation in a world where one was slave to the day job. Each day demanded the most intense struggle to steal or conserve time from the world of the job for yourself, your spirit, your art. You came home from the shop or office exhausted, gulped down some dinner, fought off fatigue and drove yourself to canvas or clay or rehearsal or page for a few hours of real work; you labored so far into the night that the next morning you could barely drag yourself back to the office or kitchen or ditch. The cycle was constant and increasingly enervating, a losing battle. Laundry piled up, appointments were missed, one skimped on meals and exercise and risked one’s sanity and health. What are called, in an exemplary generic coinage, relationships also suffered: lovers felt they had to compete against art for your attention, however much you tried to reassure them, and you tacitly resented their demands for your time; intimacy itself had to enter the strictest economy. You learned not to take trips or wish for a better apartment or attend films or buy new clothes because every dollar could be invested for a few free months later on, before you had to submit to the next day job. A thousand petty tasks and distractions staged endless raids on your energy and attention, until it seemed that art itself was at war with everything else. The pitiable heroism of each momentary victory–each painting or poem finished–was belied by the triviality of its manifestation in a world in which, after all, a poem is merely a poem, and therefore a sign that a much more pervasive defeat had already occurred. You came to hate those born wealthy enough to avoid this struggle, although you also tried to persuade yourself that their work must be impoverished because they did not have to come into daily contact with the hard common truths of a world that, in this instance, you decide to call “real,” as if these grotesque burdens could still be seen as sources of enlightenment; you also hated those romantic demons like Van Gogh who (you told yourself) were more committed than you, willing to sacrifice more, to suffer more, to give up their last few francs for tubes of paint even though they were starving. In either case, accusations you continually brought to bear against yourself for having to live an ordinary life in the midst–in spite–of grander aspirations.

The horror of the day job was thus the violence of life divided in half, a violence that cut through art itself and lent it a shadowy existence, made it the ghost, the phantom limb of what you might have accomplished, had you only been able to devote yourself to it entirely. The awful dissymmetry of this arrangement summons up a variety of analyses, most of them passing through historical marxism. The deadly drudgery of alienated labor is there grasped dialectically: although one suffers at the master’s hands, although one’s very humanity is denied, history is on the side of the worker no less than on that of the Hegelian slave; if wage slavery is oppressive, degrading, destructive of everything that it means to be human, it is also ennobling insofar as the truth seized from this alienation informs a struggle against the power it represents. The immersion of the artist in the world of common labor was thus both an indictment of a society that steals time from the true mission and real work, and a means by which day job and real work came into another sort of relation that the wealthy and the dropout could not possibly express. But the compromises of this division could not be so neatly resolved. One continued to hope for future resolution, for a life of art; or one abandoned art and lived its imaginary and no less painful loss; or one tried to accept one’s divided condition through some kind of self-hypnosis, through the image of a resignation one was persuaded to identify as maturity;²⁹ or one turned the struggle itself into the subject matter of a series of neocritical art commodities; or one “succeeded” in the artworld enough to establish some sort of sinecure (steady royalties, corporate patronage in the form of commissions, a university appoinment), under whose aegis one had to force oneself to remember that even though the labor wasn’t as bad as it once was, the day was no less divided. If the working class romantic bored you with creaking clichés about the dignity of labor, if the idea of total sacrifice for one’s art grew embarrassing even for those who pretended to believe it, sinecured artists, however “critical” they remained, through an ability to set aside the material conditions of their lives even in the act of seeming to account for them, bored you even more. Furthermore, the division of day job and real work, of alienated and integrated labor, frequently gave rise to another sort of collusion. The day job provided an alibi for the poverty of the so-called real work one actually managed to accomplish (“if only, if only…”), and the real work provided an alibi for slacking on the job. Failure in each was the champion of the other. The division between them also produced the fantasy, in its own way quite functional within the reigning economy, that integration is really possible, that if only we could abandon the day job fulfillment would be ours; what is concealed here is the alienation attendant upon artistic production itself, both in respect to its social position and, even more fundamentally, insofar as it is a form of sublimation, a practice of culture as surrogation, through and through. All jobs are day jobs.

That is why, in the stupid underground, work embraces its stupidity. Bike messenger, cappucino puller, cabbie, purveyor of used books and rags, health food bagger, record store peon, hip waiter or fast food shoveler, proofreader, phone-sex hustler, sub-programmer, security guard, venal rock-band manager, nouveau-entrepreneur: the day job still means a life carved in half, but now without the old cachet of noble struggle, without the slightest belief in fulfillment somewhere down the line, without the slightest romance of labor, however dialectical the sweat of thy brow, and with the certainty that the other half is permanently missing; one rarely bothers to yearn for it any more, and when one does, it’s usually as a joke. Even the consolations with which one tries to beguile oneself for having to work are aggressively inane. The only bonus offered by fringe subsistence is stupid proof that one really is fringe (i.e., happy confirmation of one’s ressentiment), an alibi drained from the outset by the certainty that fringe employment is central to the economy. Shit work is never anything but: the sheerest experience of personal waste, slow torture, indeed slow murder of limited time and energy that might be given over to music or art, but that is now precisely to say: to nothing at all. For art has become shit work too, and anyone who still falls for its false gratifications is merely and perhaps willfully blind to the fact that the apparent division between day job and real work only concealed a deeper unity, between art and society, on the very ground of alienation. That is why the avant-garde’s committed refusal to work as a means toward self-realization–in the language of Berlin Dada, “Poetry Demands Unemployment”–gives way to the dully heroic limbo of slacking. The revolutionary fades into the slacker, itself now the figure of a widespread and, for the moment, profitable cliché; a figure who haunts even the most energetic promoters of the old paradigms of critical resistance and new world vision, and whose own most prominent lunge toward that new world amounts to not much more than erasing a few files on the boss’s computer. For every Genesis P-Orridge still clamoring sub-revolutionary enthusiasms about the power of pop there is a Bob Black or Hakim Bey insisting, in terms quite as archaic, that one must also renounce art; and for every one of them there are a million kids staring off into space while some industrial band drones in the background. The avant-garde’s notorious attempt to bridge the gap between art and life on art’s side of the line, or the committed artist’s desire to bridge the gap on the side of the real world of politics, are displaced by blank exercises in reactive art and workplace “sabotage,” usually nothing more than the pettiest acts of vandalism. There is now, in fact, a considerable literature devoted to chronicling these acts of worker micro-aggression.³⁰ Office supplies are pilfered, hard-drives purposely crashed, man-hours lounged into oblivion, fast food rendered even more inedible than usual. The pointlessness of such revenge on the boss and whatever forces he is presumed to represent is mitigated by the fact that it feels good, for a moment, to indulge it. Any surviving luddism about grinding the machine to a halt or the revolutionary implications of hackers’ viruses is merely window dressing for the immediate and miniscule satisfaction of ripping off the owners, slowing down the assembly line, or actually (horror of horrors) giving the customers what they want. Nearly invisible gestures of détournement, pilfering, waste, explorations of the limits of employer surveillance, petty cruelties intended to alienate the boss’s clientele, tiny experiments in polluting work with play, all of these acts are promoted with a sort of lukewarm, half-hearted rhetoric of resistance, as if the practitioner not only didn’t really believe the rhetoric but secretly wanted to show how inappropriate it was to the occasion. The notion that the American work force at large is given over to acts of sabotage, slacking, and stealing to get by focuses the stupid underground’s resentment and serves as an apology, which no one believes for an instant, for working at all. The violence that labor inflicts on the individual justifies microscopic destructions that pass the time until one punches out and goes home to squander one’s time on one’s own. Cultural negation, where it still exists, seizes on the opportunity to turn stupid labor into a political opportunity, but the stakes turn out to be so low that the stupid saboteur cannot sustain the effort. It’s all just a spasm of resentment; in the end, one would rather be in a band. And not even that, really.

Nomad, Rhizome

Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground’s critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n – 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton’s indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel’s recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a “space” (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., “cyberspace”). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism of every work that takes up these figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still.

SI Revenant

Today you can purchase a copy of The Society of the Spectacle, now precisely a mythic text, newly translated by a professional scholar to purge it of those pesky inaccuracies that made earlier versions so difficult for all those pseudo-pro-situs to understand, and published in hardcover by a university press, for about $20. A souvenir edition. There is hardly a sign left in what has become, unhappily, we must suppose, a classic, that it was once translated by people who circulated it in a thousand illicit ways, without copyright and often for free, and stupidly presumed to put it to use. The new edition arrives at a moment when the notion of the spectacle has never been more dominant, when the most exorbitant utopian and dystopian claims have been made about the screen, when the commodity has long since assumed the dimensions of the entire society, to such a degree that one no longer seems to be saying anything when one resurrects this critique. Hence also its utter irrelevance: the SI’s critique of the spectacle reveals its utter poverty and offers what even now proposes to be a new wave of critical energy to the spectacle itself. Just as nothing came of the critique of the spectacle but a spectacle of critique (the marxian chiasmus was, after all, the SI’s favorite rhetorical form), so also nothing will come of the current neo-revolutionary era but another set of imaginary gratifications. And in fact not much more is proposed. As for the renewed interest in the Situationist International itself: now tenured former pro-situs can engage in the pettiest and, in terms of their bio-bibs, most profitable and narcissistically stimulating squabbles with pop critics who would gladly reduce Debord and Vaneigem to a footnote in the history of a few rock bands, the most important of which was a front for a clothing store. If not articles of clothing, then critical articles. This, in a way, is the fate of every criticism: to be replayed and replayed until its only force is the force of stupidity in the face of criticism itself. And all of this was already there in seed form in the neo-stalinist antics of the SI itself, with its central committees, its purges, its campaigns of ideological reeducation, its failed imitations of political diplomacy with other groupscules. In its own way, the SI paved the way for its own spectacle through its stupid devotion to purifying its position, to defending its ideological identity through factionalism, alliances, corrections, and expulsions. The position constituted the SI as a spectacle of criticism. And now its true destiny is bearing fruit in countless formal analyses, colloquia, and career opportunities. One should have predicted that the dérive would end up leading us only through a few footnotes; nothing is left of the withering negation that gave the SI all its energy.

Skin

How much can be made of a brightly colored scar? Only yesterday the tattoo was presented–and who was there who would have bothered to argue against it?–as a radical form of self-expression, an intense and immediate means of repossessing the body, taking it back from all the social systems that, one believes, have stolen it. In various claims, developed more through repetition than through thorough investigation, the tattoo is a risk, an adventure, a gamble with permanence (although these days, laser treatments may make even that decision reversible, if you can afford them); it resexualizes and resacralizes the body and is hence an attack on a desacralized culture, a culture that separates spirit and body, purity and sexuality; it is transcendentally abject (so much going down to go up!); it is a provocation aimed at the straight world (we could begin to speak of something like critical atavism); it is a way to link those who have undergone the ritual of tattooing in a sub-community, and therefore a mode of communication as well; it is also, as we shall see, a peculiar and stupidly characteristic instance of fun. Or so it is claimed. But for all its “modern primitivism,” for all its stupid rousseauism and wannabe identifications with fringe subcultures (biker, carny, sailor, con), it is quite likely that the resurgence in the late ’80s of the tattoo and the piercing–within a few years adorning insurance brokers and high-schoolers in the most fashion-remote suburbs–owed its genesis most of all to the T-shirt. The proliferation of tattoos followed upon the proliferation of insignia and logo clothing, the T-shirt emblazoned with band or team trademarks (functionally, the rock band and the sports team are quite close: fantasy identification with groups of ersatz heroes to which one does not in fact belong), art reproductions (the dissolution of Benjamin’s aura taken to its limit), kitsch signs, slogans, and clichés, tourist-sites, commodities, etc. One attaches oneself by means of this insignia to the apparatus of fandom; every T-shirt is the sign of an advocacy, even if one is not particularly invested in the product. One is identified with a product or image, one feels oneself so identified in the eyes of passersby and it is not, after all, so horrible a feeling. One is recognized, even if it is by proxy. It might even be amusing to associate oneself with a product one loathes, or to lend one’s image to the debasement of a product (imagine skinheads wearing polo shirts). The T-shirt is thus a dream object for culture critics, what they would call a space or surface of mediation between the individual and mass culture (have we discovered interactive advertising?), and hence, according to the logic of cultural criticism, a site for its détournement. We could refer here to Dick Hebdige’s notion of “confrontation dressing” (actually, Vivienne Westwood’s phrase), epitomized by the punk swastika, riot grrl grunge, and middle-class girls decked out in the “sluttiest” gear (hooker chic, or underwear worn as outerwear, made famous and hence evacuated by the stupid icon named Madonna).³¹ One submits to the objectification of the human body by the fashion industry but, in Hebdige’s view, exaggerates it and thereby “detourns” it. That nothing comes of this confrontation and reversal goes, for the moment, without saying. Such projects are still caught up in a completely unconsidered modernist mythology of media manipulation and image subversion, and of the dialectical exposure of truth. However uncomfortable a few London punk girls managed to make a few pillars of the City during rush hour on the tube, business went on as usual; the confrontation was ephemeral and proved nothing but the inanity of both parties, who a few hours later were happy to forget that the episode ever occurred. In the great ocean of T-shirts, a few with swastikas cause an uproar only if it is convenient for all parties that they do so; and in the end, what difference does another uproar make in the spectacle? Surrogate revolt meets surrogate shock in a “space” that has already shrunk to nothing.

In the movement toward the sub of all signs, T-shirt and skin converge. Despite all the claims are made for the neo-tattoo–again: that it is a way to repossess one’s alienated body, that it connects one symbolically with more integrated societies, that it is a sacralizing sacrifice, that it is a spiritual record, that it is a protective charm against spiritual and political demons, that the subjective intensity of the experience subverts cultural anaesthesis–the very proliferation of the tattoo indicates that, like just about everything else proposed as an exercise of difference, it too links the individual with the “economy of signs” in his or her most intimate dimensions. If we have not yet been subjected to the tattooed corporate logo, its time is doubtless imminent. Nor should we underestimate the way stupid inflations of the sacred serve finally to trivialize it, and guarantee it for this economy. That is perhaps the real importance of the influential handbook that gave us the phrase, Modern Primitives: it signaled the end of the radical tattoo simply by announcing its appearance. Skin is marked as yet another staging area for recuperation. At the same time, however, one should not dismiss the tattoo as merely recuperated. The tattoo, like the T-shirt, transforms the body into another agora, a corporeal mini-mall, but for what we might call fuzzy capital, part of the same “black market,” the underground economy shuttling at a dizzying velocity between dreams of high finance and vows of poverty, that we witness in small scale drug dealing, in marginal rock bands, in various parasitical recycling enterprises (used clothes, used CDs), in the distribution of stupid “knowledge” (Amok, Loompanics, et al.), in stolen technologies, in freelance sex-industry workers. Fuzzy capital is an economy that is neither simply capital nor effectively subversive, neither recuperated nor liberated, but the collapse of any dialectical tension between them. The tattoo retains none of the critical distance someone like Hebdige or Orridge would like to claim for it, but nonetheless this peculiar embrace of the apparatus of recuperation, forcing oneself down the maw of commerce as if one were really indigestible, is not the production and circulation of a commodity like any other. The tattoo makes the skin a zone in which capital thrives under the aegis of its subversion and mutates even as it survives. Lingis proposes a distinction between western or Japanese tattoos that turn the body into a sign and those “savage,” scarrified, African bodies on which tattoos are not signifiers, not semiotic, but forms of intensification that extend or distend the body’s surface.³² The rhetoric of the stupid tattoo, however, as played out in Modern Primitives and a burgeoning fanzine and e-mail network, may render such distinctions unstable. It is no longer simply that, under capital, everything becomes a commodity and hence a sign (as in Baudrillard), nor that the underground is a space in the interstices of a power that is no longer hegemonically absolute but fractured and therefore open to the oldest sorts of oppositional agency and resistance; it is a question precisely of stupid space, fuzzy space. The tattoo is recuperated as a commodity, a sign, and yet it indicates that there is something primitive and non-signifying about the sign, something utterly atavistic about the commodity; stupid signification and stupid intensification converge and, by this means, inhibit an outmoded political critique. Is the girl on the tube subversive or recuperated? Hebdige would have us believe the former, in part because in his critical imaginary he wants to identify his own “radical” discourse with her lipstick; someone else would see her as a mere pawn of the culture industry. But what if she is both at the same time, and neither? A strange sort of disruption occurs. It is not revolutionary; it is trivial, utterly inane; and yet the moment the banker’s eyes attach themselves to the tattoo of the rose (it is never much more than a rose) on this girl’s breast, a stupid liminality dissolves, just for a moment, the clarity of a certain historical opposition, a certain recuperation and a certain critique. If the critical has always relied on the clarity of distinctions, on “exposing contradictions,” it gives way at this moment to a sign that is not a sign, a disruption that is already smoothed over by capital, a fuzziness with which no criticism has yet been able to contend.

Fuzzy Fun

It is notable how often the interviews in Modern Primitives–stupid interviews in general–resort, even while describing the most extreme practices, to the category of fun. The subjective analogue, the affective dimension of fuzzy capital might be fuzzy fun. Stupid fun. Piercing is fun, drunkenness and drugs are fun, sexual excess is fun, hyper-loud sound is fun, theft is fun, staying up for days is fun, je m’enfoutisme is French for fun. All of them together, what could be more fun. Stupid fun is not simply pleasure, even in a complex economy in which pleasure and pain are inextricably linked; it is rather the intensity that binds them indifferently together. Stupid fun is intensity itself: anything intense is fun. Stupid fun is quite serious; it is also “political,” we are told, by being the subversion of the serious, the practical, the useful, the profitable. At the same time it participates in (if only by stealing from) the general industrialization of amusement. One can buy it, ingest it, for a while have it; it is even imminently obsolete, just like the commodity; but it also floats free of the objects to which capital would like to fix it, which are just as likely to lapse into boredom in an instant, to eclipse the dull aura and useless utility of the commodity even as they seem to announce it, to turn against the user and denounce the use. Fun is difficult, after all, to exchange. It obeys peculiar laws that are refracted by capital but are not precisely economic. If earlier avant-gardes sought to break down the apparent boundary between art and life, so the stupid underground seeks the dissemination of fun past the demarcation of entertainment centers, the permeation of fun into all aspects of life, or else. Fun is the register of the total aestheticization of experience. The rock band is a fantasy conjunction of work and fun; the day job is sabotaged because it is not fun; drugs are fun until one ends up in a recovery program, which will insist to you that you can have fun now without drugs. It might be a force of revolt in a world where the work-ethic dominates, but such a world no longer exists. Fuzzy fun socializes pleasure, removes it from a strictly libidinal economy, pressures capital to satisfy us when it is clear that it cannot, and dissipates the gravity of its potential critique in the most critically trivial acts.

Sur la Plage

1. Plagiarism has etymological roots in kidnapping, specifically the stealing of slaves or the enslavement of freemen. The plaga too is a Net.

2. In 1987, an “International Festival of Plagiarism” (actually just a few venues in London and San Francisco) announced the coming-out of sign-theft.³³ What had always been characterized as the most obscene, insidious, pathetic attempt to pass off someone else’s text or authorship as one’s own now wrapped itself in the heroic banner of anarchism and marched forth as a fierce political and moral attack on the aesthetic economy. Perhaps the very depth of the cultural revulsion against plagiarism guaranteed its eventual adoption, its stupid privilege, as a weapon of choice. This neo-plagiarism claimed its noble lineage from Ducasse’s “Plagiarism is necessary; progress demands it”; from the Bakunist line that “property is theft”; from the Situationist economics of theft and gift and its strategies of détournement; from a highly conventional critique of the rather convenient specter of authorship as “bourgeois individualism” (Stewart Home: plagiarism is “collective creation”); and from the rise of various technologies for that greatly facilitate image recycling, such as electronic sampling (the bard of the ’60s gives way to the recording engineer, the dubber and mixer, the DJ of the ’90s).³⁴ Plagiarism announces itself as the most modern of all compositional modes, since it recognizes (i.e., it sees itself uncritically in the theory) that everything new is old and that, at bottom, reality itself is just a flimsy patchwork of recycled images. Plagiarism is an attack on art, but less on either its form or content than on its political economy, on the medium in which it circulates. Plagiarism challenges the reduction of art to exchange: since only differences can be exchanged–since, as Marx indicated, one cannot maintain an economy by exchanges of linen for linen (“A = A is not an expression of value”)–plagiarism proposes to undermine economic and hence cultural value as such. And in any case, only wimps use quotation marks (Richard Hell).

3. On the cover of one of her books, Kathy Acker’s picture is accompanied by the following advertisement: “This writing is all fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and not read any of it”: a transparent dare, a patent lure, one designed precisely to entice the stupid reader; and yet she also insists, inside the book, that nothing is simply copied, simply stolen, everything is changed, reprocessed, creatively “detourned” (Lecter). The plagiarist as Robin Hood: one cannot just steal and redistribute cultural wealth anonymously, in some sense one’s own cultural and political “agency” must be reasserted as Thief, or at least as critic, even as one tries by this theft to expose the very notion of the creative subject, even as one incriminates the originals as thefts. So Sherrie Levine’s reproductions of Edward Weston nudes famously undermine Weston’s own purported originality: his photographs are seen to have quoted, without quotation marks–no wimp, he–a range of classical sculptural forms; and at the same time Levine establishes her own reputation as what functions in the contemporary art market as an original, commanding, critical presence. Perhaps then we must be careful in attributing too subversive a role to the plagiarist: perhaps authorship now begins to extend its privileges through the very critique of its operations; perhaps the familiar nimbus of individual agency now enshrouds the various bricoleurs who claim prominence in the name of subverting all forms of individual creative identity. But even so, even if plagiarism cannot free itself from the economic apparatus it claims to attack, even if it is only an alibi for the stupid resurgence of an even shallower notion of authorship, neither can it be altogether reduced to a position and an identity. Rather, one might wish to measure in it forces that disrupt the very integrity of the textual “body.” Even the neo-plagiarist’s hypocrisy contributes to the evacuation of this nearly extinct organism.

4. Is this not one of the reasons why traditional denunciations of plagiarism so often deploy the rhetoric of rape, treat it as a perverse and vile crime against the text’s quite physical integrity? Thomas Mallon and other pathologists of plagiarism register an almost visceral loathing for the sacrilege that the plagiarist inflicts upon his victim. One would like a pathology of this rhetoric as well, some investigation of the way body and cultural property are collapsed into a single sign, an assessment of the notion of plagiarism as a primal transgression of the body of the work, of language and culture. Perhaps, when you tear a bit of text from the body of authorship, it is the Law itself that screams; and perhaps it is in this scream that the plagiarist hears the interpellation of his own subjectivity.

5. If plagiarism is driven by more than critical will, if it is driven also by some order of desire, it is a desire to exploit (ruin, destroy) the other for the sake of one’s own identity. To be someone over someone else’s dead body. Plagiarism is demonic posession, echolalia, speaking in tongues and hearing oneself in what they say. In this sense, plagiarism resembles what some would hold to be the essential poetic experience, in which the “poetical character” is vacated in order to be invaded by and to speak in the other’s voice (Keats’s “negative capability”), and then scandalously claims that the creation is its own. When the crime of plagiarism is exposed, when we discover the other in the plagiarist’s place, we see that the plagiarist has abandoned himself, sacrificed himself, fatally emptied himself to make room for his predecessor. The sympathy that the plagiarist is able to attract, noted with surprise by so many critics, might stem from this realization of how little the plagiarist turns out to be, how much he has enslaved himself to his master even in the act of stealing the life from him. Plagiarism is a perverse transubstantiation: it presumes that to incorporate the word of another is to become, in effect, like another; the perversion lies in the fact that one suppresses this identification even as one asserts it; but subsequent diagnosis reveals that all one has suppressed is oneself. We should also note that, according to a popular line of analysis, plagiarists are always eventually exposed, and the reason given is a familiar one: the plagiarist “wants to be caught.” Who I am becomes me, in a sense, not only in the peculiar act of possession by which I am possessed, but in its cancellation at the vertiginous moment when it is revealed as false. We might also recognize here the father’s murder by the primal horde that is one of Freud’s myths for the founding of culture, in which the destruction and consumption of the precursor reconstitutes it as an ineradicable and insatiable law, a myth that, for us, is a general figure for the secret, ferocious return of everything one imagines one has destroyed and surpassed. Plagiarism is the return of the repressed of literary authority. At one and the same time: the constitution of cultural identity and its exposure–its reconstitution–as a lie.

6. Neo-plagiarism takes up the situationist economics of theft and gift. It exposes property itself as theft and returns the text to a more “primordial” economy. We are familiar with claims that art is, or ought to be, a gift, both in the sense that genius is gifted and that the great work is donated, freely, for the good of all mankind. But to denounce someone as a plagiarist, to say “you stole from me,” is, curiously, to contradict the notion that the work of art is a gift from the author to posterity. It reclaims the gift from the reader: it says, you can have this gift only so long as I still get to keep it, only so long as the conditions and privileges of ownership are sustained.³⁵ The charge of theft exposes the lie of the gift. What is more: it suppresses the essential link between theft and gift (according to the plagiarist’s claim: all art, like all property, is theft), and refuses the gift that neo-plagiarists, who are entirely candid about the stolen goods they are circulating over their signatures, would present to all readers by ignoring the restrictions of property. But beyond these gifts and counter-gifts, beyond the bickering about whether authors or thieves are more generous, plagiarism is that violent expropriation whereby both insemination and dissemination, property and gift, authorship and its theory-death are revealed as interdependent, twin gears in the same machinery, and summarily negated. Plagiarism negates authorship by grotesquely parodying it; it negates the limits of the text by exaggerating them in the very act of transgressing them; it negates the romance of dissemination by proving that nobody finally buys it, that eventually everyone wants to be recognized as some kind of author, even if only the author of a crime; it negates the romance of the death of the author by provoking our possessiveness about the corpse. Only in the double transgression that reveals property as theft and belies the gift is the deepest economy of the work of art revealed. Plagiarism is nothing more than the appearance of this economy. That is why it must be suppressed.

7. “All culture is plagiarized.” To constitute it thus risks normalizing the crime and challenging culture as value, culture itself. That is why a certain order of plagiarism must be isolated, scapegoated, ostracized, treated with the utmost revulsion, reconstituted as a taboo. Here again we encounter at least some of the reasons why victims of plagiarism feel polluted, why those involved in a case sympathize and identify with the transgressor even as the crime repels them, why plagiarists are often the most vehement defenders of literary property rights. Plagiarism is the necessary exclusion of the founding crime of cultural capital. Hence the real threat of plagiarism would lie not in the act itself, but precisely in its normalization, by means of which the crime would no longer be isolated and cast out, the pollution would remain general. By participating in the romance of the merry plagiarist, however much it indicts the crime of literary property, the stupid underground only reinforces, in reverse image, the singularity of plagiarism. One therefore dreams of a far more anonymous and widespread plagiarism, an epidemic of nameless plagiarists (is such a contradictory figure even conceivable?), of a magnitude and virulence prefigured but already immunized by the stupid underground.

8. Implicit everywhere in this account is the masocritical dimension of plagiarism. If plagiarism as repetition can be recruited into a critique of originality–a critique that is already rather dated, already in the process of being forgotten, a critique that may be said only to have paved the way for the amnesiac resurgence of the expressive subject, the historical agent, the creative genius, for a new plague of critical autobiographies–the methodical repetition that characterizes the plagiarist is also a trace of the death-drive. Plagiarism implies progress, which is also progress toward a death already immanent in every repetition. Everything doubled is dead. As we have noted, if plagiarism destroys the integrity of the authorial and textual body, it also destroys itself in the process. Moralists like Thomas Mallon frequently refer to the plagiarist’s secret desire to be caught, and diagnose it as a “death wish” (34-37). Behind the Robin Hood mask is a suicide in the making. Plagiarism is the perverse cancellation of oneself as author, a pathological emptying of authorship in the very act of trying to mimic it. One gains an identity by having none, by taking up a persona that is soon exposed as false, as already dead. One must therefore imagine a plagiarism that pursues this double evacuation as it were purposely, assiduously, that steals not in order to gain but precisely in order to lose, and to make any further repossession impossible. The fiercest plagiarism would laugh off the whole critical melodrama of the Death of the Author and pursue a death without heroism, with nothing authentic to take the place of the one who died. I desire the body of another in order to live as a corpse. I desire the corpse of my writing to be exposed. I desire to expose the carrion feeding frenzy of all writing. I desire to embody and illuminate, in a kind of fire or language, the death of all discourse.

Kulture Krit

Is this what “Adorno” had in mind? All this armchair ressentiment, other-envy, hyperactive nostalgie de la boue lapped up by university presses and colloquia? All these literary critics and social scientists demonstrating their irrelevance in the very process of asserting their political engagement, extending their great critical powers to prove, at enormous length, what everyone already pretends to know about ideology, about power, about resistance; projecting their imaginary agency into a cultural field already rendered a pure space of surrogation by the agency, the economy, of cultural discourse itself? And does this essay offer anything different? Does one presume here to reinvent cultural criticism, to find a worthier object for its attention, to invent a truer truth about culture or a more subversive critical agency? The pitiable spectacle of the cultural critic, the entire hoax of engagement in fact already diagnosed by Adorno, here gives way to a masocriticism that pursues this course only in order to run it into the ground, that wants nothing more than to expose the hoax by identifying with it completely and suffering its perfect abjection. Masocriticism is stupid criticism, guilty by association with its worthless objects of attention, collapsing its distance from everything it purports to analyze, throwing itself into the arms of anyone who promises to unmask it.

Secret

We have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the culture of resentment, of a strict, self-indulgent, and self-evacuating reactivity, lamely proposing “new” models and modes of existence that nonetheless can never be entirely reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they sacrifice themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics into a suffocating embrace and cancel critical distance itself. But there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential contradiction. Here we will follow the line of what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-imperceptible toward an underground beneath the underground, one that does not make itself available to the critic’s screens, a strange disappearance from discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an ars moratorii, a withdrawal or disengagement from the discursive economies than render null and void a thousand pretensions to resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning away, an internal exile (in all the complex associations of that interiority), a secret that the critic must finally postulate precisely in the absence of all evidence. If, in one sort of analysis, as we have noted, everything now is coming up signs, everything is rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene, we must assume that there are at least a few who have learned their lesson, a few for whom the lacerating parodies of the stupid underground no longer suffice, a few who have cancelled all bets and turned themselves out, declined any further reactivity and gone off the map. We should note here that, for Nietzsche, the man of ressentiment is a man of secrets, one who is “neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble.”³⁶ For Zizek, too, this overt obedience and covert refusal is the mark of a cynical reason that is the proper product of enlightenment reason itself. Kant’s opening of free liberal argument conceals a deeper obedience to the law, one that is not so much reversed as extended by the cynic: “we know there is no truth in authority, yet we continue to play its game and to obey it in order not to disturb the usual run of things.”³⁷ This, for us as for Zizek, is in fact the normative model of criticism, and it is found most of all in the very place where Kant situated it: faculties of liberal arts, philosophy departments, and so on. Critical distance is belied by the deep obedience epitomized in the discursive economy itself, in the consistent material forms by which intellectual commodities are produced and exchanged whatever their ideological claims to difference; at the level of the intellectual product, there is clearly no difference between the strictest radical and the wooliest conservative. The stupid underground is attractive to criticism because it is a mirror in which criticism can see itself as it is, as a secret order of cynics, even if it does not always recognize itself there, even if the convenience of its denials drowns out its truth, shining through like the truth of the analysand.

It is noteworthy that even as Nietzsche challenges the secrecy of ressentiment, he also sees the philosopher as a “subterranean tunneler, a mole, one who has returned almost from the dead.”³⁸ And it is this other secrecy that finally concerns us here: not the one that scarcely hides and serves merely as a weak alibi for perfect collusion, but one past ressentiment, a forgetting of culture. The stupid fascination with cults, networks, and conspiracies is a horizonal phenomenon, a coded desire that gestures toward another disappearance in which–it is our duty to propose–one is always about to become, and may finally achieve the empty lucidity of, a transparent fish.³⁹ If the stupid underground is the indeterminate boundary, the blurred and therefore uncritical liminality of the cultural subject and the social world–of critique, resistance, recuperation, and perpetual complicity–it is also, along another frontier, a limit of cultural visibility itself, and serves as a launching stage for the ballistic invention of the sub-ject, one cast beneath the reach of critical illumination. The familiar logic of encoding and decoding out of which so much of the semiotics of the stupid underground is generated itself encodes the primacy of the secret. Indeed, one becomes an “agent”–these days, a virtual synonym for the cultural subject–by one of these two transformations of the factum. One is either employed in the manufacture of cultural signs or presumes to decode their ideological truth; one either encodes the ideolect of the counter-culture or interprets it for the knowledge industries. We have never deviated from the argument that these two modes are interimplicated: the stupid underground, like every presented mode of resistance, functions as secret, encoded cell partly through the decoding and circulation of “information” encoded by the conspiracies it projects; and it is by this very means–and with the help of critical agency itself–that its secret marginality is economically recoded. But we must imagine, in reading the Loompanics catalogue, for instance, that there are former artists and writers who have sent away for and taken seriously these how-to books on disappearance, on false identity, on survival without participation in the main chance; who are fasting to burn off cultural toxins and, even though they will never be entirely “free” of all discourse, have disappeared from our screens and hence pose a peculiar threat to critical industry as such. We might even take the stupid underground as a sort of decoy, a particularly blank marker for other sorts of communication and secrecy that are not visible in the least: the stupid underground is a sacrificial goat, offered up to us, pretending to be the real secrecy, while another, deeper refusal explores the smooth space of an exteriority entirely hidden and still entirely within the boundaries of daily life; deep-cover agents who, even as earlier avant-gardes pursued experiments in the form and content of art, engage in what one might call an experimental economy in which the very status of discourse and its modes of circulation are reconstructed. The conspiracy is the secret withheld from the observer; so too we conceive the stupid underground not as the site but as the threshold of another secret; we conceive it here in order to project a depth, a sub-stance, a becoming-imperceptible that will ruin us, masocritically, as critical observer, that will make a mockery of a critical distance that still claims to possess its object, its other. As this distance collapsed in contact with the stupid underground, so here we are left entirely behind; and it is this constitutive loss that we desire most of all. Worse and more seductive than the angry contempt of the punk is his no-show at a later date, once performance no longer interests him, once he conceives recuperation and its stupid parodies more severely, once he cedes his critical intelligence and offers us absolutely nothing. In not appearing he thereby restages his appearance as the Thing, if you will, the strange attractor of a now luminously empty Real, the ruinous telos of our critical game, a perfect lure for the exposure of our symptomatology, a frustrating goad that draws out the humanist’s humiliating aggression, a truth that is true so long as it fails to appear, and even if it did appear, even if it were possible to track it down and drag it out into the light, could only fail us and give way to another. What we ourselves stage here is a certain paranoic autoaggression, the disaster of discourse, a speech act on one hand calling into being the exteriority of discourse and on the other sealing it off from our own intrusion. A ghostly other who remains other and eternally returns by never appearing. The inaudible and commanding echo of discourse’s repellant law. Let us claim this secret other as our founding secret, a passage to which none of us holds the key because we ourselves destroyed it long before we ever conceived the door.

Desert

Why so much stupid-critical fascination with the desert? Foucault dropping acid in Death Valley is the perfect journalistic figure of the final cause, if you will, of theory itself. You go out into the desert to escape the social world, have visions, go native, clear a space to begin again, look into whatever abyss, encounter gods, escape in order to be able to return, die in order to be reborn, fast, find yourself, find the secret government installations that indicate the truth of power, wait for UFOs, make art that is immune, for a few seconds, to galleries, write a book about America to sell back in France. The desert is at one and the same time the national park or disneyworld of the stupid underground, and the sublime landscape of critical theory. The only plants that grow there are fear and the ideal, twined gracelessly around one another. Everything is preceded by its negation, even negation itself. The desert is the atopic capitol of nomadology, the smooth space of the erasure of cultural space, the very ground of the zone. It is the parenthetical frame of every topology. It is unconquerable, the purest outside, and identified with a range of heroic colonial subjects (native-Americans, Africans, Arabs) with whom critical theory currently wishes to associate itself; it is also, by this very means, the incorporation and hence cancellation of every one of these figures. Its flatness, however mountainous, makes it the perfect modernist surface; its emptiness and marginality, the perfect postmodern one. As the deadest of lands, its sublimity is far more productive than the most picturesque Alpine declivity. It is sacred and empty, the illimitable locus where waste is inflated into a spiritual value; even God goes there to die. It is the expression, the sentence, of silence. A figural silence, first of all, but also the possibility of an actual cessation. All one’s dreams of rigor run aground there. Everything dead goes there to die again. A place to write hysterical essays on the end of criticism. And a place for dead vows: nothing further obliges you to return to criticism. An end to it.

Notes

1. Derrida’s crucial effort, from his earliest work, to deconstruct the facile relation between inside and outside reproduced in this cultural model has had no final effect: for the most part it has merely reinforced the model with a certain rhetoric: one can now make exactly the same assumptions in the very act of pretending one is criticizing them.

By the way, wanna write stupid-critical theory? Lesson One: Attach the prefix hyper to every third adjective or noun.

2.See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38-60, for an elaboration of the distinction between these two suicides.

3.We should also note trajectories that stop short of disappearance but are so destructive that one cannot speak simply either of their recuperation or their escape: from representations of the body to “body play” (organ-piercing, ritual suspension, etc.) to out-of-body experience to self-mutilation, autocastration, and suicide; from rock macho to punk aggression to a fascination with murderers (a certain journal called “Murder Can Be Fun,” sold through Amok and REsearch; John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings for sale on Melrose Avenue) to brutal attacks on fans (GG Allen, serving time in prison). For instances and glosses see, for instance, Adam Parfrey, ed., Apocalypse Culture , (rev. ed., Portland: Feral House, 1990).

4. Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1987).

5. In the critical rhetoric of “no longer” there is always an implicit “nor was it ever”: everything closed off by such an analysis tracks itself back to its very origins. In The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), I pursued an analysis, along similar lines, of the history of the avant-garde: obituaries of the avant-garde tend not only to declare it dead now but in effect to claim it never really existed; its death is taken to prove that it never had any truth or force in the first place.

6. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 77.

7. The Latah, one might say, is the pure Imp of the Imaginary. Burroughs: “This citizen have a Latah he import from Indo-China. He figure to hang the Latah and send a Xmas TV short to his friends. So he fix up two ropes–one gimmicked to stretch, the other the real McCoy. But that Latah get up in a feud state and put on his Santa Claus suit and make with the switcheroo. Come the dawning. The citizen put one rope on and the Latah, going along the way Latahs will, put on the other. When the traps are down the citizen hang for real and the Latah stand with the carny-rubber stretch rope. Well, the Latah imitate every twitch and spasm. Come three times.” Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 79-80.

8. Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline, eds., Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture (Brooklyn/Edinburgh: Autonomedia/AK Press, 1993).

9. On this “stain of the real” and its return, see Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 39-44.

10. Amok, Fourth Dispatch , PO Box 861867, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles, CA 90086-1867; Loompanics Unlimited, PO Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368.

11. For a consideration of means to disturb this control, see Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994).

12. Francis Crick, Terence McKenna, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, interview in Re/Search 3, any given issue of Mondo 2000 , Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw.

13. Louis Kaplan, ed., The Damned Universe of Charles Fort (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 79. Further citations from this book appear in the text.

14. The distinction between nature and culture is so dominant in cultural criticism that one can bank on the fact that it is about to be overturned. It is probably only a matter of minutes before that absolute staple of gender criticism–that gender is strictly a matter of culture, not nature–gives way to a naturalism entirely unlike anything gender criticism ever predicted, and still the return of the same.

15. As it used to be said, the real “counter” in counter-culture is the counter in the record store, on which you place the same money, to buy virtually the same commodities.

16. Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 137-41.

17. On Dobbs, see The SubGenius Foundation, The Book of the SubGenius , (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); or join up yourself, by writing to the Foundation, if it still exists, at P.O. Box 140306, Dallas, TX 75214.

18. Pete Scott, “What’s There to Smile About? The Neoist Cultural Conspiracy,” Vague 18/19, 119. See also Stewart Home, Neoist Manifestoes / The Art Strike Papers (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1991).

19. Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War (London: Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, 1988), 88.

20. Standard terms of postmodernism from Fredric Jameson’s standard account, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984).

21. Martin Sprouse, ed., Threat By Example (San Francisco: Pressure Drop Press, 1990).

22. At this point you too are beginning to participate: Cape Canaveral was for awhile, Cape Kennedy, and houses the Kennedy Space Center.

23. James Shelby Downard, “King-Kill / 33�,” Adam Parfrey, ed., Apocalypse Culture (first edition; Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1987), 242. For analogous documents see, for instance, REsearch 1; pieces by Tim O’Neill, Gregory Krupey, and James Shelby Downard in Apocalypse Culture (revised edition, Feral House, 1990); The Book of the SubGenius , e.g., 91-105; “The Mark of the Beast” in Semiotext(e) USA (1987), 304-5; Vague 18/19; Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus Trilogy , (New York: Dell, 1975); Jim Keith, ed., Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (Portland: Feral House, 1993); or any of thousands of documents about Communist-Satanic-Jewish conspiracies from other wings of the stupid underground.

24. Power beyond power is necessitated in part by the fact that visible power is so finite and inefficient. As Zizek elsewhere notes: “The fundamental pact uniting the actors of the social game is that the Other does not know all. This nonknowledge of the Other opens up a certain distance, so to speak, i.e., that allows us to confer upon our actions a supplementary meaning beyond the one that is socially acknowledged” (LA 72). Supplementary is, of course, quite a loaded term, and might indicate that whatever is allowed us is also there in the place of an originary prohibition that restricts it, “so to speak” absolutely, from before the very start. What links many of the actors of the stupid underground is the certain knowledge that behind this failed other there is a more powerful one, the totality as the strictest if most invisible fact. The distance of this ultimate Other collapses the distances of the social game.

25. Interview with Chris Carter, Vague 19/20, 143. See also Genesis P-Orridge, “Muzak,” Vague 16/17 (1984), 176-78, and Sordide Sentimentale interview, Industrial Culture Handbook, REsearch 6/7 (1983), 82-91. For techniques of counter-subliminal subversion, see for instance Cabaret Voltaire interview, ReSearch 1, or Cazazza, Rice, and Pauline interviews, Pranks: REsearch 11.

26. See especially Le seminaire, livre XX: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

27. See, for instance, various interviews in Industrial Culture Handbook and Charles Neale, Tape Delay (Harrow, UK: SAF, 1987).

28. Bob Black, The Abolition of Work (Port Townsend: Loompanics, 1986); Black, Friendly Fire (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992); Black and Tad Tepley, eds., Zerowork: The Anti-Work Anthology (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993); John Zerzan, various books, including Future Primitive (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994).

29. Claims have been made by artists of a slightly earlier generation that the necessity for work was neither resented nor romanticized. Philip Glass, discussing his need to continue driving a cab even after he had attained his first international fame, said that he had no resentment–that he found most artists simply accepted the necessity of being a waitress or cabbie, without any ill-feeling. No one asked me to be a musician, he remarked. Indeed; nor did anyone ask him to drive a cab. As if either were a matter of choice. And does he drive it still? No doubt, as soon as it could be abandoned, it was. It would be interesting, for a moment or two, to consider what he thinks of cabs now that he only rides in the back seat. If, in one sense, his adjustment to the facts of his life was the mark of a good attitude, what one calls a mature attitude, in another sense it was merely self-deception. In any case, what is at issue here is not simply a matter of attitude: day job and real work constitute a phenomenon, a constant experience, of dividedness that affects both, whatever anguish one manages to repress or sublimate; a significant violence in the organization of daily life.

30. Chris Carlsson, ed., Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology (London: Verso, 1990); Martin Sprouse, ed., Sabotage in the American Workplace (San Francisco: Pressure Drop Press, 1992); Ben Is Dead 15, Revenge issue (October-November 1991); REsearch 11, Pranks (1987); P.M., bolo’bolo (New York: Semiotext(e), 1985), 41 ff. See also Gone to Croatan for accounts of workers’ riots in the early history of the United States.

31. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); also cited in REsearch 12: Modern Primitives (1989), 192-93: “Girls have begun playing with themselves in public: parodying the conventional iconography of fallen womanhood–the vamp, the tart, the slut, the waif, the sadistic maitresse, the victim-in-bondage. These girls interrupt the image flow. They play back images of women as icons, women as the Furies of classical mythology. They make the SM matrix strange. They skirt around the voyeurism issue, flirt with masculine curiosity but refuse to submit to the masterful gaze. These girls turn being looked at into an aggressive act.”

32. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 19-46.

33. Stewart Home, ed., Plagiarism: Art as Commodity and Startegies for Its Negation (London: Aporia Press, 1987; repr. Sabotage, 1989). See also Home, Neoist Manifestoes / The Art Strike Papers (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1991); Lautreamont, “Poems,” in Maldoror , trans. Paul Knight (London: Penguin, 1978), 274; Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 11-18; John Oswald, “Plunderphonics, or, Audio as a Compositional Prerogative” in Robin James, ed. Cassette Mythos (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992), 116-25; Karen Eliot, “No More Masterpieces Manifesto,” in James, 154-55; John Yates in Martin Sprouse, ed., Threat By Example , 57-61; Mike Bidlo in REsearch 11: Pranks, 54ff. For general remarks on plagiarism, see, for instance, Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), and Peter Shaw, “Plagiary,” American Scholar 51 (Summer 1982), 325-337.

34. While Kathy Acker and others link neo-plagiarism to the “appropriationist” art of the 1980s, epitomized in the work of John Baldessari, Sherrie Levine, and Haim Steinbach, who appropriated photographic work and sculpture or commodities into their own work as a kind of “subversive” quotation, others–Stewart Home, for instance–are anxious to distinguish plagiarism from appropriation: whereas “post-modern [appropriation] falsely asserts that there is no longer any basic reality, the plagiarist recognizes that Power is always a reality in historical society,” and incites it directly through acts of theft and détournement (Home 5, 10), thereby speeding up the “decay of capitalism” (8).

35. On art as gift, see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1979) and various attempts to appropriate Bataille’s notion of expenditure for normative aesthetic exchange.

36. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morals , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 38.

37. Zizek, Enjoy , ix-xi.

38. Nietzsche, Dawn , cited in John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10.

39. Roland Barthes, Michelet , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1987), 33.

Elisabeth Frost

Department of English
Dickinson College
frost@dickinson.edu

How can one be a ‘woman’ and be in the street? That is, be out in public, be public–and still more tellingly, do so in the mode of speech.

 

–Luce Irigaray¹

A 1984 anthology of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of poets included a section in which the writers commented on their contemporaries–most of whom are still unfamiliar to readers of American poetry. Rae Armantrout wrote about Susan Howe, Barrett Watten about Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein about Hannah Wiener. There are 56 of these entries. At the head of this section, announcing what might be perceived as a principal source for the positions on aesthetics (and politics) in the various selections that follow, the editors chose a single text for several of the poets to respond to. That text was Stein’s Tender Buttons.²

The entries in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book’s “Readings” section–all appreciations of Tender Buttons and all written by men–bear witness to Stein’s importance to this particular “movement.” Yet among what I will call feminist avant-garde poets–writers who make use of experimental language to distinctly feminist ends–Stein’s influence is just as potent, even inescapable. A number of recent feminist avant-garde poets linked to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing owe a debt to Tender Buttons, and Stein’s work in general remains a subject of homage. But at the same time, many of the changes working their way through feminist discourse in America appear as well in feminist avant-garde writing. In particular, recent feminist avant-garde poets don’t simply acknowledge Stein’s language experiments, as the contributors to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book did, but contest them–and her–as well.

Over the eighty years that have elapsed since Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a number of experimental women poets have reexamined the connections between the symbolic domain of language and the subjective experience of sensuality that Stein pioneered in her erotic, and other, poetry. Stein’s language experiments in Tender Buttons serve as a fundamental influence. But Stein’s tendency to isolate intimate, personal experience from the public sphere is being revisited by recent feminist avant-garde writers who perhaps have more ambivalence toward Stein’s politics than some of their male colleagues. Poets like Susan Howe disrupt conventional language in writing that conspicuously combines an awareness of gender with public discourse–in her case, actual historical documents form the backdrop to an examination of the gendering of language, history, and nation.³ In recent years, feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig have focused on the social implications of language and sexual difference, challenging women writers to create a distinctly feminine writing or to eliminate the “mark of gender” altogether on female speech.⁴ Unlike Stein herself, these theorists stress the political implications of speech in the public sphere, the impossibility of separating the symbolic realm of language from the social realities language reflects, a conviction that surfaces in writing like Howe’s and in that of feminist avant-garde artists working in a variety of media, from Barbara Kruger to Karen Finley. While Stein is not the only source for feminist avant-garde writing today, her body of work, particularly Tender Buttons, remains a source to be reckoned with for a range of artists who see Stein as among their most important, and sometimes troubling, predecessors.

In what follows, I examine the influence of, and divergence from, Steinian poetics in two writers whose feminist avant-garde agendas lead them back to, and in contest with, this formidable woman forebear. Both Harryette Mullen (who has published three books of poetry, and is soon to issue a fourth)⁵ and Leslie Scalapino (author of nine books of poetry, prose, and criticism) use a fundamentally Steinian language yet voice differences from Stein’s politics by engaging with questions that Stein tended to avoid in her poetry–issues of race, class, and inequity in American culture. In their recastings of Stein’s “modern” vision, Mullen and Scalapino merge public speech and “private” experience–the language of the public spheres of the street and the marketplace with the experiences of intimacy and the erotic. In this writing no intimate experience is ever strictly “personal”; Mullen and Scalapino blur the border between public and private discourse that Stein relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, not reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary domestic language. The body as public, in public–this idea is at the core of both Mullen’s and Scalapino’s growing body of work. Each one revisits and, in Adrienne Rich’s term, “re-vises” Stein’s poetics to illuminate language as a locus of the political and the erotic, attacking and altering both eroticized and “public” language as signs of a culture in need of a fundamental awareness about the relationships between our most private and public acts.⁶

Stein attempted to make us self-conscious about consciousness–to make us think about how we perceive the world–by challenging the forms of written language. In this respect both Mullen’s Trimmings (1991) and Scalapino’s way (1988) are indebted to Stein’s earlier project. Trimmings is Mullen’s second book, and her third, S*PeRM**K*T (1992), employs the same distinctive form and a similar play with the signs of American culture. In the more recent work, her target is what she calls “the erotics of marketing and consumption”–the supermarket that is, in a remarkably altered form, her title.⁷ Trimmings, however, is more explicitly indebted to Tender Buttons, borrowing elements of Stein’s feminine landscape and her oblique relation to femininity itself. Here Mullen first combined African-American speech and blues references with a similar sort of word-play to that of Stein’s prose poetry in Tender Buttons; and here, too, she “tries on” Stein’s fascination with the erotic charge of feminine objects. Mullen’s prose poems, like Stein’s pioneering language experiments, work mainly by association, and in this they plumb the richness of the spoken and written word.

By contrast, Scalapino, a writer with ties to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, is interested less in speech than in perception, as experienced and recorded on the page. But in her considerable body of work she also interrogates the politics of the erotic, employing allusions to what she calls “the erotica genre” in refigured forms. Sometimes she redeems and “re-genders” erotic fantasy itself (as in way, the text I will focus on), and sometimes she uses a deliberate dead-pan to critique the mechanism of disengaged or voyeuristic “watching” on which some pornographic images depend. Throughout her work, she makes use of an essentially infinite or “serial” form, with no defined beginning, middle, or end. In way this seriality is a means of demonstrating how language and the experiences of the body are connected. While in Mullen’s work language proffers a multiplicity of meaning that bears witness to the subtlety and evocativeness of both the spoken and written word, in way Scalapino develops a more visually-based poetics in which small blocks of text represent moments of perception or feeling, even as the language itself remains provocatively flat in its tone.⁸ But despite pronounced differences in both form and preoccupations, both poets inherit one of Stein’s most fundamental interests and make use of it in singular ways: exploring the relationships between language and sexuality.

While Stein is certainly not the only source for either poet’s growing body of work,⁹ my own reading of Trimmings and way makes it clear that Mullen and Scalapino both take up Stein’s fascination with the link between the erotic and ordinary, everyday language. Yet that connection doesn’t mean that Mullen and Scalapino adhere to a similar view of either world or text. In fact, both poets challenge Stein’s famous hermeticism in the interest of bringing closer together the two poles that Denise Levertov has called, simply enough, the “poet” and the “world.” For Tender Buttons is an unabashedly closed text. All three sections (“Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”) evoke a world not simply of ordinary domestic objects but of private associations. In the view of scholars like William Gass and Lisa Ruddick, Stein uses this hermetic space to create a private language of lesbian experience, in which particular words function as clues. As only one example, the name “Alice,” for Alice B. Toklas, and her nickname “Ada,” appear in numerous versions–“alas,” “ail-less,” and “aid her”–that exploit sound-play to suggest Stein’s own intimate, erotic life. Individual words also function as codes for sexual experience (the color “red” or the word “cow”), as Elizabeth Fifer and others have documented.¹⁰ And, as I have argued elsewhere, Stein’s fetishization of language both exalts language to the status of a material object and participates in disguising the erotic “content” of Tender Buttons as a whole.¹¹

Such readings as my own “decode” the poem, and in the process assume that meaning does, in fact, inhere in Stein’s apparent non-sense, that there is a profoundly important symbolic process at work. Yet the opposite approach has also been taken to Stein’s difficult text. Charles Bernstein, one of the most prolific theorists among the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, argues that Stein’s greatest achievement in Tender Buttons is in fact that she abandoned the signifying function of language altogether, evoking instead the sounds, the non-referentiality, of words, “the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of somewhere else–a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language” (Bernstein 143). As he sees it, the desire to decode Stein’s writing merely reflects the reader’s urge to “make sense” of the poetry–an impulse that counters the most radical aspects of Stein’s project. It is the non-referentiality in Stein, Bernstein implies, that has become her most important legacy to the present, especially to poets, like those of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, who attempt to use their texts as a means of bringing the whole mechanism of reference to the foreground of writing and reading.

These approaches constitute the two ends of the Steinian critical spectrum–the desire to push her text toward sense, especially (in recent years) a feminist one, and the urge to embrace the radical non-meaning of her experiments with language. Yet both of these interpretive positions, for very different reasons, ultimately support the view that the “rooms” of Stein’s domestic domain barely leave the door ajar to the world outside.¹² Clearly a private erotic language threatens to shut that door, and, indeed, this significant aspect of Stein’s text required a host of feminist critics, bolstered by the advent of theorists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, to break the code.¹³ And, on the other hand, in Bernstein’s view of the radical non-signifying of Tender Buttons, the reader is kept at a deliberate, perhaps infuriating, distance. Breaking the rules of syntax, denotation, and logic, Tender Buttons, by either approach, surely qualifies as what we might call a “subversive” text, overturning linguistic conventions and forging a distinctly new form from the seemingly intractable material of everyday words. Yet Stein’s poetic experiment remains separate from the social and political realms that avant-garde artists of her day addressed in their highly polemical and disorienting art and manifestoes. One need only compare Tender Buttons to any number of Marinetti’s pronouncements, or to Apollinaire’s “Merveilles de la Guerre,” or even Breton’s first surrealist manifesto, to see the extent to which Stein insisted on the privacy of her language.

In their own ways, Mullen and Scalapino have both entered into this debate about and with Stein, each from a distinctly feminist point of view. In embracing a feminism that doesn’t make recourse to polemics or to personal utterance–that is more deeply interested in the kinds of subjectivity language creates–their work is profoundly indebted to Stein. Yet the best indication of each one’s re-vision of a Steinian poetics lies in the other influences on that work. For Mullen, these include Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and the writers of the Black Arts Movement. For Scalapino, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and Philip Whalen are crucial influences, along with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers of the San Francisco Bay Area where Scalapino lives. For both Mullen and Scalapino, the other sources that have helped form their poetics are distinctly more engaged with the articulation, and theoretical awareness, of a social/political vision, or an engagement with history in general, than Stein ever was. As a lesbian poet, Stein relied on the privacy of her “codes” precisely to construct a radical language of difference. Mullen and Scalapino have pushed her language in the opposite direction from the one she chose–back to an awareness of the social construction of identity, and the complex relationships in American culture among race, sexuality, and economic privilege. In short, the erotic can no longer be perceived as private. The unmasking of the politics of sexual experience is at the core of both Trimmings and way, and in this Stein is both the mother of their inventions and the predecessor who needs to be taken to task in the interests of a feminist avant-garde that clearly cannot stand still.

Obviously an understanding of both Mullen’s and Scalapino’s work requires that each be seen in a broader frame than that provided just by examining their various debts to Stein. Yet, tracing Stein’s pronounced influence on both of these poets–the more striking because of their stylistic divergences–sheds light on changes among a number of recent feminist artists. If Mullen’s and Scalapino’s work can be taken as any indication, one group of feminist avant-garde artists has moved toward a different sort of exploration of sexual politics.¹⁴ In contrast to a writer like Howe, whose explorations of the gendered nature of history and nation involve no recourse to the erotic as subject matter, Mullen and Scalapino both inherit from Stein a fascination with pleasure and a reluctance to dissociate pleasure from language. In the process, though, the burden of their poetry is precisely to situate this pleasure in a landscape that sometimes seems as bleak and violent as Howe’s Puritan America. Adapted by Mullen and Scalapino, Stein’s innocent eroticism, and her pleasure in parody, become more self-conscious as well as more conscious of the social forces that eroticism is inevitably shaped by.

In Trimmings (fittingly published by a small press that is, in fact, called “Tender Buttons”), Mullen takes Stein’s 1914 text as a provocative point of departure. Operating through association rather than logic, sound-play rather than denotation, Mullen’s pun-laden prose poems take the domestic landscape of Tender Buttons and “trim” it down to a central trope: feminine clothing. The “trimmings” of Mullen’s title suggest a re-stitching of Stein’s project, as well as a focus on the odds and ends, the scraps, of contemporary culture. But the most prominent meaning involves the politics of women’s clothing. “Trimmings” can be both adornments and things discarded; the word can imply both frivolity and violence. In the poems there are belts, earrings, stockings, hats and purses, not unlike the petticoats, umbrellas, and shoes of Stein’s poem. As Stein does in Tender Buttons, Mullen uses linguistic play to hint at the relations between the physical sensations of the body and the experience of using language. Like Stein, she suggests that the female body and the word need not be divorced, as much recent theory insists. (Even Kristeva’s opposing categories of the semiotic and the symbolic imply that soma and symbol are in constant battle, an opposition Stein–and Mullen–expose as unfounded.)¹⁵ As in Tender Buttons as well, Mullen plays with words to release the reader’s own associative powers. There is, indeed, great pleasure for the reader in the process.

Among the briefest of the prose poems in Trimmings is one that consists of just two lines: “Night moon star sun down gown. / Night moan stir sin dawn gown” (Tr 23). In this paratactic list, vowel shifts (rather than syntax) bear the burden of reference. There are certainly associations and near-meanings (sundown and evening gown can be easily teased out), and the possibility of a setting (the romantic moon and star), yet the larger implications (for instance, that come “dawn,” the “sin” will be “done”) are merely hinted at, left to the reader’s own associative powers to piece together. The poem moves from word to word by generating relationships among sounds and creating localized meanings, rather than by employing linear logic. These tactics that skew and defer meaning, even if somewhat less disjunctive, are overtly Steinian, resurrecting Stein’s fascination with repetition and circularity, with what she called “knowing and feeling a name” and “adoring [and] replacing the noun” in poetry (LIA 231). Like Stein, Mullen signals the erotic without directly treating it as subject matter. But she also critiques the erotics of our attire. Consider the very shortest of Mullen’s poems: “Shades, cool dark lasses. Ghost of a smile” (Tr 62). Charged puns (“dark lasses” conjuring “glasses”; “shades” as sunglasses for the stylish and as a racist word denoting African-Americans) render the final, simple phrase (“ghost of a smile”) ambiguous: the smile might suggest a pleasurable memory or an invitation, but it is also inseparable from the implication that “shades”–in the racial sense–are “ghosts,” invisible presences in a culture bent on cover-ups, on hiding behind its own, often rose-colored, glasses.

In this way Mullen uses a Steinian linguistic play to address not just the pleasures of language and clothing, but their larger social implications, the very issues that Stein most frequently avoided. Trimmings removes Tender Buttons from its hermetically sealed locale and, so to speak, takes it out of the closet and into the street, by underlining the conjunctions between racial identity and gender in a semiotics of American culture. In choosing Stein as intertextual companion, Mullen uses what Henry Louis Gates identifies as a strategy frequently employed in African-American writing: the elaboration of repetition and difference. “Signifying,” Gates says, is the playing of various kinds of rhetorical games in black vernacular, and it can mean “to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie,” as well as “to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point” (Gates 54). Signifying contrasts with the “supposed transparency of normal speech”; it “turns upon the free play of language itself, upon the displacement of meanings” (53). There is a political, and not just a formal “play” here that applies to Trimmings: signifying involves a “process of semantic appropriation”; words are “decolonized,” given a new orientation that reflects a rejection of politics as usual. According to Gates, this double-voicedness is associative, and it employs puns and figurative substitutions to create an indeterminacy of interpretation (49, 22).

Strikingly matching Gates’s theory of signifying, Mullen’s version of Steinian writing involves an assertion of difference. Mullen encodes cultural and racial specificity into her word games, in deliberate contrast to what I see as Stein’s private, largely hermetic codes. Allusions to contemporary life are everywhere, mixed in with more lyrical, “poetic” language. Commercials, for example, are not shut out, precisely because such references are, all by themselves, a commentary on American culture. Here is the subject of clothing-become-laundry and, more specifically, laundry detergent:

Heartsleeve’s dart bleeds whiter white, softened with wear. Among blowzy buxom bosomed, give us this–blowing, blissful, open. O most immaculate bleached blahs, bless any starched, loosening blossom. (Tr 31)

In rich and lyrical language (especially the outburst, “O most immaculate. . .”), Mullen bears witness to some un-lyrical truths–that the struggle to attain the “whiter white” (a redundant operation of either language or color) raises questions about America’s obsession not just with cleanliness (the subject of TV ads) but with the valorization of what is as light as possible, in shirts or skin-tone. Here the poetic tradition of the beauty of clothing, of feminine or other attire, has to confront the “immaculate bleached blahs” that represent mass culture “bleached” for a white audience.

The poems insist on such meetings of the ecstatic and the drab in women’s lives (as in the title for Mullen’s most recent work in progress–“Muse and Drudge”), whether the act in question is hanging clothes on the line or watching TV. Whenever TV seeps into women’s lives, in fact, there is both the urgency created by commodification and the potentially lobotomizing effect of the medium. Of nylon stockings Mullen writes, “The color ‘nude,’ a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan . . . body cast in a sit calm” (16). The issue of what color “nude” is–the fact that the “model” for this neutral skin tone is an Anglo one–is too often taken for granted by white women. At the same time, any woman whose “whose flesh unfolds barely” has become a commodity, like the many items sold on TV, where viewers, too, are objects in front of a screen, “body cast in a sit calm,” static and passive, as though in a “body cast,” under an unidentified injunction not to move. Other TV allusions, such as one to the evening news, suggest the banality of women’s lives: “Mild frump and downward drab. Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog” (49). Words, just barely altered from their “originals” in a TV or radio weather report, testify to women’s representation in the mass media, the source that may well affect whether or not they see the morning, or themselves (the “drudges” in question), as “dingy” and “drab.” In this processed language, all of us hear a horoscope for the day, our lives; in such representations, we are–and this applies especially to women–caught in our own “mild frump,” as though our routines were items we would prefer not to purchase.

Yet Mullen makes it clear that, however potentially controlling, mass media don’t obliterate culturally specific language. Mullen marks her text with both “mainstream” speech and the black vernacular in what she calls a “splicing together of different lexicons” that would be hard to see in Stein’s defamiliarized language in Tender Buttons. In one such gesture, Mullen appropriates clichés linked to African-American culture and forces us to ask what “black” and “white” culture actually consist in–where the lines are drawn:

Her red and white, white and blue banner manner. Her red and white all over black and blue. Hannah’s bandanna flagging her down in the kitchen with Dinah, with Jemima. Someone in the kitchen I know. (Tr 11)

The “bandanna” and the Jemima figure suggest stereotypes of black women. Mullen has suggested to me that even though such images are most likely drawn from the white minstrel tradition, they constitute nonetheless a powerful “pseudo-black folklore” that has shaped views of blackness in America. By refusing to exclude even these representations from her own language, Mullen implies that there is an important source for this language, one that needs to be traced: such images get constructed both from our “red, white and blue” national identity and from the politics of violence (“all over black and blue”), also based on color. In the “blues” alluded to here, another kind of “folklore” is also conjured, one that may seem more “genuine” or “authentic” than that of Hannah and Jemima. But Mullen’s text refuses to make clear distinctions among the sources for what she calls her “recycled” language. This word-play reclaims all and any expressions that concern women’s cultural “place” (literally, the “kitchen,” repeated twice in this brief passage) in the service of an explicit critique of those words that serve as designations to divide black from white–and different women from each other.

In some of the poems, Mullen “signifies” on Stein even more overtly. There are several instances where Mullen infuses the very diction of Tender Buttons with her own agenda–an investigation of the ways in which racial and gender identities are constructed in and by language. Stein has a dialogue between “distress” and “red” which Mullen recasts as an excursion into black vernacular speech, with Steinian intonations:

When a dress is red, is there a happy ending. Is there murmur and satisfaction. Silence or a warning. It talks the talk, but who can walk the walk. Distress is red. It sells, shouts, an urge turned inside out. Sight for sore eyes. The better to see you. Out for a stroll, writing wolf- tickets. (Tr 34)

The most immediate Steinian source is the heading “THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER,” and the text of that “tender button” reads:

        Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher,

muncher, munchers.

A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let. (TB 476)

One of the most frequently glossed sections in Tender Buttons, this passage has often been read as punning on “distress,” as well as on the notion of “aid” and one of Stein’s nicknames for Alice, “Ada” (“Aider, why aider . . .”). The passage is crucial to readings that emphasize that Tender Buttons is really about female sexuality. For some, this involves a critique of the “meadowed king” who rises at the expense of “her,” as Ruddick suggests; among others, Gass sees an explicit (and joyful) sexual scene; and, as I have detailed elsewhere, I believe that Stein provides a typical double perspective here–that of lesbian eroticism and a patriarchal observer’s panic about that eroticism.¹⁶ For all these readings, sexuality provides the backdrop for Stein’s polyvalent language. In Mullen’s appropriation, however, a double perspective about sexuality and language alerts us instead to the social construction of the sexual moment. There is a different sort of doubleness at work–that of black America itself, the experience of a division that W.E.B. Du Bois first called “double consciousness” and which Black Arts writers in the 1960s and 1970s converted into experiments with a specifically black consciousness in radical new forms.¹⁷

Mullen’s own revisionary feminist dialogue with Stein is clear from the start. The short, uninflected questions (“Is there murmur and satisfaction,” for example) are reminiscent of Tender Buttons, and so is the diction–the mixture of simple monosyllabic words (“dress,” “red,” “talk”) with words describing states of consciousness (“happy,” “satisfaction,” “urge”). But clearly Mullen’s “talk” here is not just words exchanged between lovers but the specific language of a whole culture: “dis” both alludes to the sound of “this” in black English, and to the verb “to dis,” or “disrespect,” someone, echoed in the competition of “talks the talk.” A similar conjunction is that of European fairy tale (red riding hood’s “better to see you”) and black English (“writing,” instead of “selling,” “wolf-tickets”). But the primary question is what happens when the seductive “red dress” is donned; is there “satisfaction” for flirtatious partners, a desire to shout with joy, or is there fear of violence–silence, warning? As Mullen points out, Trimmings is a “compressed meditation on the whole idea that how a woman dresses is responsible for how she gets treated in the world”: “is there a happy ending” for any woman’s Cinderella-like transformation “when a dress is red”–when she puts on a piece of clothing that signifies passion and seduction, or availability and provocativeness? How is such a color “read” by male on-lookers? Without providing any simple or polemical answers, Mullen links sexuality, clothing, violence and desire, even as she forces the literary tradition of Stein to confront the vernacular traditions of African-American speech and writing.

Mullen’s dialogue with Stein in Trimmings has everything to do with the exclusion of questions of race from feminist criticism that has recently been the subject of passionate critique and rethinking.¹⁸ Mullen has described her desire to “get a read on Stein and race,” and at the time she was writing Trimmings she was reading both Tender Buttons and “Melanctha,” whose overtly racist and classist images are the subject of reappraisals by critics as diverse as Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Charles Bernstein.¹⁹ Mullen’s play on Stein’s famous “rosy charm” is perhaps the most striking instance of her recasting of Tender Buttons so as to explore questions of race that Stein didn’t take on in her poetry but made all too clear in “Melanctha”:

A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air, pale compared to shadow standing by. To plump recliner, naked truth lies. Behind her shadow wears her color, arms full of flowers. A rosy charm is pink. And she is ink. The mistress wears no petticoat or leaves. The other in shadow, a large, pink dress. (Tr 15)

Stein’s text is “A PETTICOAT,” and it reads, in its entirety: “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (TB 471). The passage is most likely about female creation, both on the page and of the body. As Ruddick convincingly argues, the white of a woman’s undergarment is connected to the blank page, and the stain of blood to the writer’s ink, a “rosy charm” whose power Stein asserts.²⁰ Mullen has described this passage as her opening into Tender Buttons–perhaps even the point of departure for Trimmingsas a whole. Mullen sees Stein’s text as an allusion to Manet’s provocative painting “Olympia”–the white woman staring boldly at the viewer, in a state of “disgraceful” sexual permissiveness, with the near-by “ink spot” (a black servant) waiting behind her. Mullen encodes the painting into her response to Stein, calling up the representation of the nude white woman reclining luxuriously on a couch, while behind her the black woman in “a large, pink dress” holds a bunch of flowers, presumably a love-token, in a position of attentive servitude to her mistress.

Mullen’s take on “Olympia,” and on “A PETTICOAT,” concerns the supposed “disgrace” of sexuality in conjunction with her awareness about the difference of blackness in a culture in which femininity is equated with the naiveté of “pink” and the skin color “white.” This motif of color pervades the book. Mullen writes that in Trimmings

The words pink and white kept appearing as I explored the ways that the English language conventionally represents femininity. As a black woman writing in this language, I suppose I already had an ironic relationship to this pink and white femininity. (Tr “Off the Top”)

Throughout Mullen’s work, evocations of the blues tradition and African-American speech confront the deficiencies of conventional language in representing blackness. Yet in her “rewriting” of the painting “Olympia,” the very ownership of sexuality is at stake: the transgressive eroticism–of the sort Stein championed and Manet supposedly celebrated–is, in Manet’s depiction, available only to the “light white” woman, not to her “shadow standing by.” While clearly a feminist reading of Olympia” might suggest that Manet “owns” (or names) the white woman’s sexuality as well, Mullen’s own attention is drawn to the dynamics between black and white: there is implicitly a problem not just for the black woman depicted here, but for the African-American woman writer as well. The “ink” of blackness is literally “in shadow” (the word is repeated three times), as the white woman, clothed in what Mina Loy called “ideological pink”–in this case nothing more than her own pink skin–“wears an air.”²¹ In another section of Trimmings, girlhood and the color pink are also associated (“Girl, pinked, beribboned. Alternate virgin at first blush” [Tr 35]). This passage uses the same technique of multiple meanings and the connotation of innocence conjured by the color pink to point out the disturbing “naked truth”: “pink” is “a rosy charm” in the white world only when it’s worn by someone “pale,” “white,” and “sugary.” The one whose skin is “ink” remains in shadow. She is, literally, incomplete: the word “pink” minus the “p” gives us “ink.” And yet, she still has the power to signify–after all, writing is produced with “ink.” It is this most important “signifying” on Stein’s text about the “rosy charm” of female sexuality, a celebration of the erotic that nonetheless reveals considerable limitations to any black women reader, that produces the revisionist poetry of Trimmings.

Far from innocuous, the “pale,” “sugary” femininity that Mullen unveils is also part of a culture that, in addition to privileging whiteness, condones violence against women in covert, as well as overt, forms. Mullen uses Steinian disruptive language to expose this violence, which lurks just beneath accepted standards of femininity. Even seemingly harmless items, like the feminine attire of the pocketbook, are emblematic of theft, assault, rape:

Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little snap. Strapped, broke. Quick snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. Green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by hook or crook. (Tr 8)

The purse is metonymic for female genitalia; on one level, getting “into her pocketbook” is the male game of conquest. Yet the puns on currency (“strapped,” “broke,” “green,” “relief”) show the close ties between money and desire (as in some men’s ability to purchase female companionship) and allude to the ways women are frequently economically exploited–simply put, ripped off. There is double-meaning as well in the word “snatch,” and the covert violence of “snap,” “strapped,” “clutch,” and even “chased” (traditionally, women are sought after, or “chased,” if pure–“chaste”). The word-play and subject rhymes, in familiar idioms and rhythms, convey the very real violence women are often subject to, whether by the “thief” (purse-snatcher) or the man intent on sexual assault.²²

This violence is, then, insidious even in its less obvious forms–jewelry, to take another example. Of earrings, Mullen writes: “Clip, screw, or pierce. Take your pick. Friend or doctor, needle or gun” (Tr 40). Earrings carry a weight beyond their immediate function; these small items refer to more profound mutilations of the female–and male–body. There are choices among modes of violation here (“clip, screw, or pierce”), yet the “pick” is merely between “friend or doctor,” figures of betrayal, whether personal or institutional. And, most significantly, the intrusion into the black body is metaphoric of social exploitation and the prevalence of the “needle or gun”–drug-use and other violence. Here a simple female “adornment” can no longer be seen, or written about, as innocent. Mullen evokes a semiotics of clothing, the language that is revealed in those items women decorate their bodies with (“such wounds, such ornaments,” as Mullen concludes in this “trimming”). This language reveals, however subtly and covertly, what Mullen calls ironically a “naked truth”–that black women and men are, still, psychologically and otherwise, subject to violence and mutilation, symbolized by the very objects women use to make themselves seem different, to meet our culture’s standards of beauty.

Mullen has written that “Gender is a set of signs which we tend to forget are arbitrary. In these prose poems I thought about language as clothing and clothing as language” (Tr 68). In the final poem of Trimmings, Mullen links her interest in literary signification with the importance of a poetic utterance that remains conscious of how the signifier functions in the public sphere:

Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space. (Tr 66)

Placed at the end of the book, this “trimming” serves as Mullen’s ars poetica, the explanation for her use of the trope of clothing. That which is “veiled” shows through language–the “unavailable” or often invisible “body” of the black woman “makes” its own space. Moving away from simply being “veiled in silence” is precisely Trimmings‘s project. It is a goal that diverges from Stein’s “play,” which, however radical an expression of its time,²³ is nonetheless kept safely indoors. Stein tended to abstract the objects she wrote about from their specific contexts, to see them in formal terms, which is one reason her work is often associated with Cubism. She wrote of the process of looking at objects as the inception of the poetry of Tender Buttons; she focused intently on an object in order to name it without using its name. While Mullen also uses words to “re-name” objects, her interest lies not just in form but in a semiotics of American culture. Each gesture, each belt or buckle, reveals the society that created it. Less arbitrary than the “signs” of language, the semiotics of clothing reflects women’s position in the culture at large. Signifying on Stein, as well as playing by some of her rules, Mullen makes it clear that she cannot simply “use” Stein’s poetic language uncritically. In fact, by simultaneously inhabiting and altering Stein’s non-traditional language, Mullen encodes in Stein’s own hermetic diction the divergent perspective provided by an African-American woman. Stein’s codes must, indeed, be broken; to have social significance, linguistic “play” has to evoke aspects of a shared, social identity, and not simply constitute an idiosyncratic, private language. In part, Trimmings is indeed homage to Stein, a writer whose poetry attempts to change consciousness, and even our own relation to our bodies, through a changed language. Yet for Mullen, the experiment now appears too circumscribed. Her “signifying” on Tender Buttonslays down a challenge: women’s dress (their “distress”) constitutes a social semiotics, the “language” of a culture whose racial and sexual politics we would do well to change.

In contrast to Mullen’s dialogue with Stein, Scalapino’s is less exclusively linked to Tender Buttons. Instead, it is as closely tied to Stein’s philosophical writings–most of which (with the exception of “Composition as Explanation”) appear in Lectures in America–as it is to Stein’s erotic codes. Yet Scalapino focuses just as sharply as Mullen does on developing a Steinian poetics in which the erotic is inseparable from what I might broadly call the public sphere. Scalapino draws from the Objectivist tradition that includes (in addition to Stein) Oppen, Robert Duncan, Creeley, and, more recently, many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers.²⁴ These poets agree on a central issue: they dispute the primacy granted to the ego–the experiential, the psychological–in more Romantic-derived American poetry, seeking instead to reflect a greater scope than the self in meditation that Marjorie Perloff (for one) associates with Stevensian Romanticism.²⁵

Yet, as I see it, Scalapino also owes a particular debt to Stein–to a poetics that first made repetition the stuff of poetic knowledge. Scalapino’s writing consists of diverse fragments organized in what Joseph Conte describes as serial form–in Scalapino’s case, discrete units, often with involved repetitions and permutations, that are potentially infinite in number rather than structured by either generic constraints or the more basic linearity of a definable beginning, middle, and end. This is the same sort of form Stein associated with “the natural way to count”; that is, “One and one and one and one and one” (not needing to make two). This sort of counting, according to Stein, “has a lot to do with poetry” (LIA 227), particularly the poetics of repetition, as in “A rose is a rose is a rose.”²⁶ Through an epigraph to her book way, Scalapino likens this infinite serial form to the principles of theoretical physics, quoting physicist David Bohm. Bohm describes “the qualitative infinity of nature” and asserts that because there is “no limit to the number of kinds of transformations, both qualitative and quantitative, that can occur,” it follows that “no . . . thing can even remain identical with itself as time passes.” Stein’s studies with William James and her later work in medical school reflect a similar orientation toward both science and epistemology. Yet, while Stein applied her musings about numbers, grammar, and the passage of time mainly to the realms of literature and the imagination,²⁷ Scalapino elicits in her serial poems–poems about both “the qualitative infinity of nature” and about private sexual experiences–the pressing question of how individual desire is situated within existing social categories.

Scalapino’s primary debt to Stein has to do with the very notion that there might be an epistemology of composition.²⁸ In an essay entitled “Pattern–and the ‘Simulacral,’” Scalapino writes about the poet Michael McClure, in whose work the “self” becomes a simulacrum identified with an infinite universe: “the author or the sense of self and the investigation of its desire is the pattern, which is neither present time nor past time. It is potentially infinite in form and number” (Phenomena 28-9). I believe the notion here is that subjectivity, its pattern, assumes an infinite form, which the text mimics. Scalapino culls this epistemology of form in part from Stein, whose essay “Composition as Explanation” is the starting point for Scalapino’s observations. Stein asserts a radical subjectivity: “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition”; consequently, “The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of the composition” (qtd. in Ph 27). Scalapino explains that she is drawn to the notion of the “continuous present” Stein posits, a kind of composition that leads to individual acts of perception that need not be connected in linear fashion–in other words, an infinite series, with attendant combinations and permutations of elements. She summarizes her position elsewhere: “I am concerned in my work with the sense that phenomena appear to unfold. (What is it or) how is it that the viewer sees the impression of history created, created by oneself though it’s occurring outside?” (Ph 119). The central notion is how perception, informed by the internal narratives of subjective experience, creates the history we attribute to what occurs “outside.”²⁹

This Steinian epistemology is experienced through the text itself, often in writing that adapts the forms of pop culture.³⁰ Particularly in her trilogy (The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion), Scalapino explores “writing which uses the genre of comic books” (Ph 22). In Scalapino’s work–in contrast to Andy Warhol’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s silk screens and paintings–the “frames” consist solely of language. They take the form of small windows of text that Scalapino finds congenial to exploring our experiences of the present moment, its individual, disparate acts of perception, as though in cartoon-sized boxes. In the trilogy, Scalapino plays with the images of film noir (one character is “a sort of tight sweater version of Lana Turner” [63]) in conjunction with more conceptual reflections, reminiscent of Stein’s writing in Lectures in America: “To not do rhetoric–so that it is not jammed in on itself.” Or: “To have a convention–not the way it is spoken, but the way it is heard” (54). Scalapino has said of Stein:

     I took her writing as having to do with wanting 
     to be able to write the essence of something,
     of an emotion or a person [or] an object, and 
     that's impossible; she's fully aware that it's
     impossible, so she's in a mode of conjecture 
     about things, a curiosity and experimentation.

In both her trilogy and in way, Scalapino embarks on similar projects–inviting a “mode of conjecture” about poetic language and perception itself.

Yet however linked Scalapino’s serial form is to theories of perception, Scalapino also inherits Stein’s fascination with erotic codes, which Stein articulated through the “continuous present” and the “infinite form” that Scalapino finds so intriguing.³¹ For Scalapino, seriality is, in fact, inherently erotic. While some might find the pre-determined structure of a romance novel–or a sonnet–both comfortingly accessible and erotically charged, Scalapino associates closure (literary or otherwise) with entrapment. Without what she sees as the enforced structure of pre-determined forms, “you can feel comfortable and relaxed in something”; whether in pop culture incarnations like soap opera or in poetry like her own, Scalapino finds that serial form “has to do with just pleasure, the notion that we generate certain things that are pleasurable.”³² Differing from Pound’s serial yet epic Cantos (Pound’s definition of epic being–very much like his Cantos–a “poem including history”),³³ Scalapino’s serial form, like that of Tender Buttons, emerges from pleasure–the pleasure of not ending.³⁴

“The floating series” is one of several “infinite series” that make up way. The most erotic of its sections, “The floating series” consists of brief, thin poems–visually, the inverse of Mullen’s “Trimmings.” Small lines of type meander down the page and abruptly end, with dashes or no punctuation, to continue on the facing page. These various comic-book-like “frames” of words and perceptions are overtly erotic in their subject matter, as I will show. Yet the form is minimalist in the extreme, and the language stylized in a way that hearkens back to Tender Buttons. Like Stein, Scalapino suggests both the eroticization of ordinary objects, culled from daily experience, and a playful means of using poetry to allude to the female body. Like Stein’s codes for Alice, or her use of words like “milk” or “cow” to signal sexual experience, some of Scalapino’s individual words–used repeatedly–take on sexual connotations, particularly the motifs of the “lily pad” and “bud”:

     the
     women -- not in
     the immediate
     setting
     -- putting the 
     lily pads or
     bud of it
     in
     themselves

     a man entering
     after
     having
     come on her -- that
     and
     the memory of putting
     in
     the lily pad or the
     bud of it first,
     made her come (way 65, 66)

The figures of the bud and lily pad recall icons of sexual organs (reminiscent as well of the Buddhist “way” used in Scalapino’s title): in Taoism, jadestalk, swelling mushroom, and dragon pillar represent the male; while jade gate, open peony, and golden lotus denote the female. It is possible to praise God through a celebration of these sexual parts, both playful and pleasurable.³⁵ Scalapino explains that her purpose in using the recurring words “lily pad” and “bud” was to “imply things about the female body that are pleasurable” through terms that are both sensual and deliberately not anatomical. As Stein does in Tender Buttons, Scalapino eroticizes language; she employs an iconography of her own in a clearly sexual context, from the woman’s point of view and, in the very notion of a “floating” form, she alludes to the potentially amniotic experience linked to the female body. The lack of syntactical markings here and the isolation of particular words defamiliarize their meanings, even down to the articles and prepositions which Stein found so fetching.³⁶In this passage (like many others in the permutations of “The floating series”), the attention to a stylized but explicitly sexual physical experience makes the female body the subject of meditation. Yet this detailing of what resides “in” or “on” the female body in the moment of orgasm is also accompanied by an analogous attention to language as physical presence: the deliberate highlighting of prepositions and conjunctions (“in,” “and,” “after”) on single lines permits us to pay heed to the connectives of language, to focus on words as words, and to think of language, too, as a material, immanent force. In this way Scalapino makes language material, employs it for the pleasures of its textures and sounds–and this is very like Stein.

Yet the nature of this sort of erotic–and linguistic–experience in Scalapino is problematic. There is an apparent lack of affect in this and other passages, a flattened tone, and a deliberate vagueness in phrases like “immediate setting” and “in that situation.” Marjorie Perloff points out that Scalapino’s seemingly ordinary, transparent language typically breaks down and turns into deliberate artifice that highlights the surface of language rather than its referent (Radical Artifice 50-1). In the passage I quoted, the “he” and “she” are engaged in an anonymous act of intercourse (which is repeated, with changes, later on), yet it is one that also defamiliarizes the “act” and focuses as much on memory and language as on sensual experience. Scalapino’s comments on the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman illuminate her own practice: “A series or list of simple sentences creates simple states of being, requiring that consciousness exist only in the moment of each sentence, i.e., in an infinite series of succeeding moments” (Ph 30). Clearly it is not just the sexual coupling of these bodies that concerns Scalapino, but also the very nature of perception and repetition, the concerns Stein elaborates in “Portraits and Repetition” and in her poetry. Hence the stylistic spareness, the minimalism that emphasizes small permutations, the use of repetition and difference. How should we reconcile these philosophical and formal preoccupations with the specifically sexual motifs of “The floating series”?

However much Scalapino’s interest in Stein has to do with epistemologies of composition, as I see it Scalapino’s invocation of charged erotic material also involves her in a further dialogue with Stein’s erotic writings. One of Scalapino’s goals is clearly to provide a contemporary alternative to the long-standing literary conventions used to portray sex, much as Tender Buttons succeeded in doing. And in creating her own poetic grammar and using it to elaborate a sexual motif, Scalapino also destabilizes masculine and feminine positions. Her permutations enact a textual version of the “gender trouble” or indeterminacy that Judith Butler endorses as perhaps the most threatening of all social/sexual gestures to an established heterosexual culture.³⁷ The lily bud, which initially suggests the penis, eventually suggests as well the clitoris–or, in more general terms, the sexual exchange itself, as though neither party had to be defined in terms of difference:

     having
     swallowed the 
     water
     lily bud -- so having
     it in
     him -- when he'd
     come on some
     time with her (way 85)

The indeterminate “water / lily bud” represents the process of sexual exchange, more than a bodily part. Scalapino has even suggested that the “bud” represents a way of imagining pregnancy as though from a child’s point of view–as a growth within the body. This shifting of symbols within the text is appropriate, given Scalapino’s views of her work as a particular kind of feminist enterprise–the sort that strives to conceive of gender itself as ideally “not being in existence–the idea that there is no man and no woman, that that’s a social creation.” For Scalapino, contemplating gender perceptions entails “a process of unravelling the hypothesis and the conclusion” of supposed gender difference. Clearly, then, Scalapino’s phenomenology of composition is not simply a philosophical game. To the contrary, it has everything to do with a reconceptualization of gender itself, a process that can be compared to Stein’s exploration of lesbian sexuality in Tender Buttonsand “Lifting Belly.”

For Scalapino, however, even indeterminacy needs to be placed in context, and that contextualization is part of Scalapino’s project to situate sexuality within a broader socio-economic picture. Most significantly, Scalapino uses a Steinian elusive language not to cover over the sexuality that is her subject (as in Stein’s private codes) but to expose its relation to prevalent social conventions between men and women, reflected as well in literary forms. In “A sequence,” a serial poem in Scalapino’s earlier book that they were at the beach, men and women are, in flattened diction, identified as having leopard parts, and in this way the body appears as objectified in moments of arousal (“The parts of their bodies which had been covered by clothes were those of leopards” [57]). Here, Scalapino says, she tried to be “completely dead-pan, flat,” and in fact to create something “not palatable erotically.” Her intention in this disorienting series is to reveal the workings of domination in erotic representations, whether in the photographs in mass market magazines or in the involved plots of historical romances.

In way, however, the erotic is not flattened out; as in Stein’s text, it is pleasure itself that emerges. But in contrast to Stein’s eroticism in poems like Tender Buttons and “Lifting Belly,” this pleasure is not disjunct from, but part of, a broader context, which includes daily interactions in the public sphere. In fact, the “convention” Scalapino explores in both way and that they were at the beach is not simply literary or formal–and here is one of the points at which she parts company with Stein. For Scalapino, as I will show, rethinking literary conventions about everything from syntax to portrayals of sexual experience necessarily entails engaging as well with the particulars of economics and class in the public world as they exist outside the confines of the erotic exchange. But for Scalapino this broader context is already connected to the erotic–through the very notion of convention. For what Scalapino calls, in general terms, “social convention” is also embedded in literary forms, including those devoted to what she calls “the erotica genre.” In Tender Buttons, Stein left her erotic clues in a mesh of seemingly non-referential words, focusing on language and thwarting literary convention at every turn, but leaving the broader sweep of public experience largely out of the equation. Scalapino, taking a different tack, allows us to see the interdependence of various aspects of our social selves and that most “private” aspect of our lives–our sexual acts.In way and other texts (from the early Considering how exaggerated music is to the more recent Crowd and not evening or light), Scalapino uses a Steinian method–to a distinctly non-Steinian end.

The method involves fragmentation, juxtaposition, and repetition. The goal is to inscribe in her text the socially-defined nature of private, erotic experience.³⁸ The first clue precedes a reading of the poem, yet typifies Scalapino’s technique. The cover of way shows two photographs by Andrew Savulich, who placed them together on a postcard which, Scalapino told me, she saw and later decided to use for the cover of the book. One is labeled “couple dancing in bar,” the other, “men fighting on sidewalk.” The poses are remarkably similar–the possibilities of homoeroticism in fighting, and of violence in sexuality, emerge through the juxtaposition, which succeeds in linking two acts that we are sometimes invested in perceiving as culturally dissimilar, yet which in fact are intricately linked. The use of juxtaposition as technique subverts the possibly “erotic” content of the one photograph while eroticizing the other–thus using form itself to expose a romantic mythology that would have us separate erotic and overtly violent struggle.³⁹

This is the device that emerges, in linguistic terms, in “The floating series” in way. As the poem continues, any doubt we might have had about its function as “just” erotic writing, an eroticism disjunct from a larger context, quickly dissolves. While the first several sections concern the repetition of a sexual encounter, at the very point when the form starts to seem familiar, we move outside the parameters of the “genre” Scalapino has taken care to establish: we move outside the bedroom, beyond the couple; as in Trimmings, we leave Stein’s flat at 14, rue du Fleurus far behind. The first such instance is jarring but vague:

     people who're
     there
     already -- though
     the other
     people aren't
     aware of that (way 68)

The writing is open-ended: what people? People other than the “he” and “she” of the couple? And who are the “other people” whose awareness is lacking? The secrecy of the sexual encounter seems to be challenged–one thinks of a primal scene, a child walking in on parents in a compromising position, or a couple unaware that they are being observed in a restaurant or car–a position on the fringe of the “outside” world. Yet there is a political implication to the “people who’re / there / already” underlined in the next fragment: “not / being able to / see the / other people.” The possibility of colonization is made more likely in that people don’t “see” others because they are in various ways culturally invisible, whether because of race, class or other hierarchical systems that delineate privilege. The trope of invisibility and difference has, of course, long been a presence in African-American literature and theory, from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson to Ralph Ellison and, more recently, Michele Wallace.⁴⁰ In white America, there is seeing and not seeing, awareness and its lack, depending on one’s position as subject or object of the gaze. A few sections later, we come across a reference to “the city,” with more “people having / been / there,” and “others not / aware of them” (way70). Without a doubt, we have moved from the conjoining of two–seemingly without specific context, focused instead on the “convention” of erotica–to a larger public context (in this case, an urban scene), an increasingly imposing structure far from the private relation that recurs, as well, throughout the series.

Scalapino continues to juxtapose these two sorts of scenes in the rest of the series–the woman and the man, using erotic language, and the anonymous “people” of the unnamed city. The juxtaposition inevitably comes down to money and politics. New elements enter into the play of Scalapino’s permutations, including the words “livelihood,” “jobs,” “high rents,” “public figure,” “small store,” “race,” “means,” and “not enough.” Such linguistic allusions to economics and to public enterprises and interactions alternate with the motifs from the first few passages–the symbolic lily pad and bud, the woman and the man. One passage suggests the very real presence of class barriers:

     having the
     high rents
     with
     an attitude that
     they
     shouldn't live in
     this
     place -- who're poor (way 76)

Suddenly the man and woman engaged in their own private experience are seen in context, as only one element in a larger, socio-economic picture. In isolation, this passage has nothing to do with sexuality, but its juxtaposition with the other passages about the man and the woman underlines a central point: that our sexual exchanges need to be contextualized, however resistant we are to that notion, as the two within the couple might well be. The space of the poem, then, has moved from indoors to out, from the private to the public sphere. Scalapino suggests that there is in fact a corollary to the phenomenology of composition, which concerns the space we inhabit, and the “conventions” (social and linguistic) that we impose on it. Scalapino makes a direct analogy between space, political structure, and poetic form: “As (spatially) infinity is all around one, it creates a perspective that is socially democratic, individual (in the sense of specific) and limitless” (Ph 119). “Style is cultural abstraction” (Ph 28), Scalapino writes, meaning, I believe, that style “speaks” for its culture, just as, for Mullen, clothes “speak” women’s lives, and, in Scalapino’s hands, a disorienting style can also be a means of critiquing the very culture it emerges from.⁴¹

The minimalist writing in way addresses the conventions of language and sexuality as social conventions. There are two phrases Scalapino links in her essay: “[T]he process of creating convention–the description of ourselves as a culture” (Ph 32). The link here demonstrates the reason for this poetry of repetition and juxtaposition. While Stein’s interest in composition as explanation takes her into the realms of epistemology, linguistics and sexuality, Scalapino forces all these fields to confront the businesses opened, the rents unpaid, the unnamed “people” we encounter in the public space of the street or marketplace. In this respect, Scalapino opens Stein’s erotic discourse in poems like Tender Buttons to the public sphere, one that women have frequently been excluded from, and that women poets, in efforts to combat the lack of value placed on affect and the “personal,” have sometimes deliberately shunned. Just as Stein rejects referentiality, Scalapino rejects the “confessional” or personal tradition of women’s writing, even when that writing is politically engaged–and she rejects this mode as dramatically as any poet today.⁴² Scalapino has defended the erotic, attacked by some as “quintessentially subjective and egoistic” and by others as “inherently sexist.” For Scalapino, separation of the erotic from socially engaged writing is neither efficacious nor desirable in any way: “If eroticism is eliminated, that leaves only that social context, which has ‘seen’ it as sexist; there is no area existing for apprehension or change. We are split from ourselves” (Talisman 47). For Scalapino, then, the erotic is related to “social context” in a way Stein never felt the need to explore.

Whether those relationships involve the “city” (its mass of individuals) or the “man and woman” in their most “private” lives, Scalapino’s poetry is fundamentally about things in relation. The Buddhist influence in way–the notion of “the middle path, meaning something that’s totally in the center and has no point of vantage,” what Scalapino calls “the motions of experience”–converges with the physicist David Bohm’s theory of the transformation of time and matter, which I quoted earlier, concerning the nature of identity. For Scalapino, both take on a political charge, since neither one is disjunct from economic and other social marks of difference, like the “high rents” and invisible “other people” who inhabit way. The “span” of perception Scalapino includes in her text differs from Mullen’s explorations of the way language constructs individual identity and social categories–the way that the clothing that is language creates both what we are and how we are perceived. Yet to make vivid the relationship between identity and language, Scalapino, like Mullen, evokes the connections between eroticism and violence, along with the very real pleasure that words afford. However different stylistically, these texts share a central goal: to forge a disjunctive language that will direct our attention to both sexuality and the public sphere–to illuminate, in a feminist avant-garde poetics, the inevitable link between our public selves and our most private acts.

Neither of these writers’ recent works would be possible without Stein’s ventures into the relationships among language, consciousness, and sensuality. It is precisely this series of relationships which is constantly changing, as culture and speech continually shift, and as new voices take on new forms of various experimental “traditions.” For writers concerned with feminine subjectivity, with race and cultural politics, and with opening up the boundaries of language, Stein’s linguistic experiments remain a source, yet one that needs revision, that cannot go unchallenged. Such rewriting is a testament to both continuity and change in feminist avant-garde writing by American women. For Mullen and Scalapino, the task is to bring Stein’s often insular discourse to the language of the world outside. That two poets as different as Mullen and Scalapino both turn to Stein–to contribute to an existing poetic discourse and to alter its orientation–bears witness to the strength of women’s commitment to experimentation with language and consciousness and to a feminist avant-garde poetics they hope will alter the landscape of American culture.

Notes

1.Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 144.

2.See The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book 195-207, a reprint of entries from the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1-3. The writers in the section on Stein were Michael Davidson, Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery, Peter Seaton, Jackson Mac Low, and Robert Grenier. See also In the American Tree for what is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writings, both poetry and theory.

3.This is particularly true if Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, republished in the collection Singularities. But Howe has made use of historical documents throughout her poetic texts, from the early Defenestration of Prague through the more recent (and highly scholarly) “Melville’s Marginalia,” in The Nonconformist’s Memorial.

4.The “mark of gender” is Wittig’s phrase, borrowed, of course, from linguistics. Her emphasis on eliminating the difference encoded in language (even more pronounced in French than in English)–and her Marxist orientation–is in marked contrast to a theory like Irigaray’s, which assumes that Western culture has in fact never truly acknowledged feminine difference in the first place, relying instead on a logic of “the same,” whether in Plato, Freud, or other thinkers. She is also critical of Marxist rhetoric. See Irigaray’s Speculum for her elaborate critique of the entire Western tradition. Criticisms of Marxism appear in This Sex Which Is Not One, particularly 32 and 81.

5.Like S*PeRM**K*T, the new book, Muse and Drudge, will be published by Singing Horse Press.

6.I am indebted to the notion of “writing as re-vision,” in the path-breaking 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” by Adrienne Rich.

7.Interview, March 26, 1993. Where not noted otherwise, citations from both Mullen and Scalapino are culled from unpublished interviews with the authors.

8.Concerning that they were at the beach , Scalapino describes the attempt to arrive at a sort of “neutral tone,” a dead-pan, that would elicit responses from the reader precisely because it’s flat: “It doesn’t have depth, and because it doesn’t have depth you have a reaction to that” (interview).

9.This essay is an adaptation of the final chapter of a book devoted to feminist avant-garde poets from Stein to the present. As the book begins with Tender Buttons, I use this final chapter to focus on Stein’s continuing influence on recent feminist avant-garde poets. While I would hardly minimize the other important sources for both of the poets discussed here (such as Brooks’s considerable influence on Mullen), that broader look at each poet’s creative sources awaits a slightly different study.

10.See Fifer’s “Is Flesh Advisable,” as well as Gass’s book and Stimpson’s “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,” among a wealth of other such criticism.

11.See my “Fetishism and Parody in Stein’s Tender Buttons.”

12.Michael Davidson, in the “Readings” section of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (196-8), makes a similar point. For him the breakdown is between the idea that “her writing is all play” and the view that “Stein is a kind of hermetic Symbolist who encodes sexual and biographical information in complex verbal machines.” For Davidson, the commonality between these two is not that they are both fundamentally “private” but that they both “operate on either side of a referential paradigm.” What we need to do is “learn to read writing, not read meanings.” In this, he re-instates the formal, closed, nature of Tender Buttons itself.

13.Marianne DeKoven, in A Different Language, is particularly influenced by Kristeva, as is Ruddick. Most significant among other critics who also have explored Stein’s erotic codes are Stimpson and Gass. See my “Fetishism and Parody” for a detailed account of this approach to Tender Buttons.

14.In terms of moving the discourse of the “private” or erotic into the public sphere, in often dramatic ways, performance artists Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle come to mind as offering new versions of feminist avant-gardism, ones that make the body a site of public display in overtly polemical fashion. Both merge polemical texts with enactments involving their bodies, naked or outrageously dressed up. See Re/Search: Angry Women for more examples of feminist performance art. A good deal of earlier feminist theory–and poetry followed (or perhaps preceded) this tendency–focused primarily on valuing the private sphere, including personal or “confessional” discourse. This tendency shifted value from public “event” to affect and qualities labeled “feminine,” as evident in those Anglo-American theorists who emphasize difference, among them Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow. A divergence from this philosophy of difference, toward a critique of gender dualism itself, is evident in the work of several feminist conceptual artists in recent years (many influenced by French psychoanalytic theory, particularly Jacques Lacan), including, most notably, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. Teresa De Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler are among those more recent theorists who call for gender ambiguity and critique feminine difference as a basis for gender theory.

15.In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva outlines this opposition in detail. While the semiotic can, for all speaking subjects, only be experienced through language and never (after the pre-Oedipal stage) in its “pure” form, it is nonetheless at continual odds with the symbolic functioning of language, threatening to break down its rational, semantic relationships. Poetry pushes language toward the semiotic, thus proffering both pleasures and dangers readers rarely experienced–except in madness–in other types of language.

16.Ruddick’s most important argument along these lines is in her “A Rosy Charm.” For my argument on female fetishism, see my “Fetishism and Parody.”

17.See Du Bois’ now-famous passage from The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his two-ness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body” (5). Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic, among a number of anthologies from the early 1970s, provides some of the most important theoretical writings of the Black Arts Movement and the revolutionary impulse to change both the political and psychic realities of African-Americans.

18.The work of Barbara Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa come to mind as just a few of the theorists and critics who have reshaped the feminist thinking that first emerged in the 1970s with attention to issues of postcoloniality, racial difference, and the neglect of women of color among earlier feminist writings. Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (in But Some of Us Are Brave, mentioned below) is now a classic of the many pioneering works that critiqued early feminist criticism and voiced the need for a black feminist criticism. See also Spivak’s In Other Worlds, Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other, and hooks’s Feminist Theory for particularly influential and important explorations of feminism and race in the U.S. and in an international frame. Anthologies that emerged in the 1980s have been crucial in collecting and disseminating revisionist feminist work by women of color. See especially This Bridge Called my Back, edited by Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga; and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith; as well as the more recent Coming to Terms, edited by Elizabeth Weed, and In Other Words, edited by Roberta Fernández.

19.Saldívar-Hull argues that the racism in Melanctha has been either excused or ignored altogether by critics–even feminist critics–in their commitment to championing Stein’s radical experimental style. See Saldívar-Hull and Bernstein, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing.” See also Milton Cohen for a reassessment of Stein’s racial politics.

20.See Ruddick’s “A Rosy Charm” for her fine reading of this passage.

21.The phrase is from Loy’s mythological and autobiographical epic, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” in The Last Lunar Baedeker 124. See my “Mina Loy’s ‘Mongrel’ Poetics” in the forthcoming book Mina Loy: Woman and Poet for a treatment of Loy’s racial and gender politics.

22.Teresa De Lauretis addresses this issue in her essay “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,” in Technologies of Gender.

23.See Bernstein’s “Professing Stein” for a discussion of Tender Buttons as a radical expression of its time.

24.In How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, and in other uncollected articles, Scalapino has written about Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Hannah Wiener, as well as about Duncan, Creeley, H.D., and Stein.

25.See Perloff’s “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” for one account of the divide between a Poundian object-oriented, historical poetics, and the more meditative, essentially Romantic, Stevensian mode. Taken on its own terms, the distinction holds true. The dichotomy implies, however, a false dualism. In this particular piece, Perloff seems to hold either that these two “modes” were in fact the only ones present in the early part of the century, or that writers with other concerns–Harlem Renaissance poets were at work at the same time, as were avant-gardists with preoccupations sometimes quite divergent from Pound’s–somehow fit neatly into this one central divide.

26.See Conte’s Unending Design for a detailed account of serial form in writers including Creeley, Duncan, Jack Spicer, and others.

27.See, in particular, “What Is English Literature” (LIA 11-55) for Stein’s personal version of English and American literary history.

28.See Robert Grenier’s identification of Stein’s “phenomenological” preoccupation in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book: “T.B., as early ‘phenomenological investigation,’ is interpretative/as it is revelatory–the whole storm of passion, discernment, definition, feeling//carried by language” (205).

29.For comparison, note Stein’s statements about her understanding of English literature in “What Is English Literature.” Stein invokes the same sort of dialectic between subjective and objective experience, as a dance of mysterious origins, one that itself becomes the subject of inquiry: “There are two ways of thinking about literature as the history of English literature, the literature as it is a history of it and the literature as it is a history of you” (LIA 12). And later: “And so my business is how English literature was made inside me and how English literature was made inside itself” (LIA 14).

30.Wendy Steiner’s fine introduction to Lectures in America likens Stein’s experiments with repetition to those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein two generations later, in the Pop Art movement. Steiner argues convincingly that both Stein and the later visual artists revel in their own culture’s versions of mechanism and structural repetition, adapting them to new art forms in defiant, and celebratory, ways. See LIA xiii-xv.

31.The serial writing of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other male writers was in fact preceded by Stein’s, and in her hands, such seriality emerged with a distinctly erotic–and feminine–perspective, especially in Tender Buttons, “Lifting Belly,” and her other erotic poetry. For historical comparison, one might note that the first three of the Cantos were published in June, 1917, in Poetry 10.

32.Scalapino discussed in our interview the serial forms of pop culture and mass media, including TV news and soap operas. While she acknowledged the possible appeal of the sit-com or soap opera as serial form, she herself can’t stand either one: “There is something interesting about the serial form almost as if it were soap opera. Except I hate soap operas and I never look at them, they’re terribly boring and irritating. But it’s the idea that something could go on and then start again and keep going, and it would always reproduce some of the information that’s core information so that you could come into it at any point. It implies that there’s no end to this and also that people are attending to very intricate but essentially delicate small things that they’re doing. There’s something about that that’s satisfying, but definitely not at all satisfying in soap operas.”

33.Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 86.

34.Scalapino briefly mentioned in our interview her feelings about the possibility of writing in closed forms, one that indicates the depth of her discomfort with being boxed in: “Writing a form that implies closure in conventional works that I’ve heard or read–I find that completely stifling. You feel that you’re trapped and dead. I have a reaction of total claustrophobia.”

35.See Avis for a brief and general account of these symbols in Taoism.

36.See “Poetry and Grammar” (LIA 212-14) on the “interesting” role of articles, pronouns, and conjunctions–particularly articles, which have the power to “please as the name that follows cannot please” (212).

37.In particular, Scalapino seems to attribute the “bud” to both the man and the woman as the poem progresses, so that its phallic association is either “lent” to the woman or redefined as a female quality.

38.The last series in way, “hoofer,” works to very similar ends. That series begins with a scene on a bus and moves to a sexual motif, though in markedly non-erotic language: the first appearance of a sexual phrase is: “. . . women / in their being licked / between their legs” (139). The imagery that likens the sexual to the animal hearkens back to that they were at the beach , but the over-all form–juxtaposing the social “scene” with a sexual moment–coincides with the same structure in “The floating series.”

39.Scalapino may even be responding to the prevalent soft porn poses explored by Annette Kuhn. The most frequent poses avoid any disorientation of the spectator’s direct experience of the “object” photographed, most often through the use of realistic poses, as though the viewer had just happened upon a scene in which the woman is, usually, unconscious of the viewer’s gaze. Scalapino implies that, as a formal strategy that disrupts the way we would otherwise receive each image, juxtaposition of two or more images (or pieces of text) can indeed destroy the “realism” of the medium and thereby challenge us to see things differently. See Kuhn for a detailed analysis of poses and the position of the gazer in different types of pornographic representations.

40.I am thinking, in particular, of Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, an important precursor to Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator’s race is “invisible” insofar as he can “pass” for white–with the price of a blurring, even denial, of identity, that makes him both tortured and, ironically, unsympathetic. In other more recent treatments of the idea of invisibility, Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark raises the issue of the construction of “whiteness,” as well as blackness, in American culture, most often dependent on an unacknowledged black “other.” Wallace, in Invisibility Blues, a collection of her essays, argues that frequent visual representations of African-American women (and other women of color) in fashion photos is accompanied by the conspicuous absence of their voices in the influential spheres of public discourse, both political and academic. See her introduction for a full account of the issue of “visibility” and language for African-American women.

41.See Stein’s important recapitulation of her arguments in “Composition as Explanation” at the opening of “Portraits and Repetition”: “In Composition as Explanation I said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear” (LIA 165). Scalapino’s insistence on the relationship between a culture and its “style” is clearly an articulation of a similar position. Yet, significantly, Scalapino takes the extra step (one typical of avant-gardist attitudes toward language) of using a disorienting or disruptive style of her own precisely to alter the entrenched traditions that artistic conventions reflect. See Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde for the most complete treatment of the issue of stylistic and cultural revolutions.

42.In particular, the privileging of personal experience and language in the writing of such poets as Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds comes to mind, in contrast to the more outward-looking and “historical” poetry of other feminist writers, such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Yet, despite a similar orientation toward social and political issues, Scalapino rejects the mode of this sort of politically engaged poetry because it, too, has most often been voiced in relatively traditional forms.

Works Cited

• Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.
• Avis, Paul D.L. Eros and the Sacred. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publications, 1990.
• Bernstein, Charles. “Professing Stein/Stein Professing.” A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
• Breton, André. “First Manifesto of Surrealism.” Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1969.
• Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.
• Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
• Cohen, Milton. “Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein’s ‘Melanctha.’” BALF 18 (Fall) 1984: 119-21.
• Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.
• Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
• Fernández, Roberta, ed. In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994.
• Fifer, Elizabeth. “Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4:3 (Spring 1979), 472-483.
• Frost, Elisabeth A. “Fetishism and Parody in Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics (Genders 19). Ed. Ann Kibbey, Kayann Short, and Abouali Farmanfarmaian. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1994, 64-93.
• — . “Mina Loy’s ‘Mongrel’ Poetics.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, forthcoming.
• Gass, William. The World Within the Word. New York: Knopf, 1978.
• Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York Oxford Univ. Press, 1988.
• Gayle, Jr., Addison, ed. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
• Gilligan, Carol. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982.
• hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
• Howe, Susan. Defenestration of Prague. New York: The Kulchur Foundation, 1983.
• — . The Nonconformist’s Memorial. New York: New Directions, 1993.
• — . Singularities. Hanover: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1990.
• Hull, Gloria, and Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All of the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982.
• Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985.
• — . This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985.
• Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.
• DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
• Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Walker. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984.
• Kuhn, Annette. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. Boston: Routledge, 1985.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987.
• Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973.
• Loy, Mina. “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” The Last Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover. Highlands: The Jargon Society, 1982, 109-175.
• Marinetti, F.T. Selected Writings. Trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
• Mihn-ha, Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1992.
• Mullen, Harryette. Unpublished interview with the author, March 26, 1993.
• — . S*PeRM**K*T. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1992.
• — . Trimmings. New York: Tender Buttons Press, 1991. (Abbreviated Tr in the text.)
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” The Dance of the Intellect. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
• — . Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1935.
• Re/Search: Angry Women. San Francisco, Re/Search Publications, 1991.
• Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.
• Ruddick, Lisa. “A Rosy Charm: Gertrude Stein and the Repressed Feminine.” Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986, 225-240.
• Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice.” Women’s Writing in Exile. Ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989, 181-198.
• Scalapino, Leslie. How Phenomena Appear To Unfold. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1989. (Abbreviated Ph in the text.)
• — . Unpublished interview with the author, July 9, 1993.
• — . Interview with Edward Foster. Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 8 (Spring 1992), 32-41.
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• — . that they were at the beach –aeolotropic series. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985.
• — . way. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988
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• — . Tender Buttons. Selected Writing of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1962. (Abbreviated TB in the text.)
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• Wittig, Monique. “The Mark of Gender.” The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

James Berger

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1993.
• Berube, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992.
• Cannon, Lou. Reagan. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1982.
• Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968.
• Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1986.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. [1972]. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983.
• Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
• Donner, Frank J. The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. New York: Knopf, 1980.
• Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Dutton, 1989.
• Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City and New York: Anchor, 1983.
• Epstein, Barbara. “Family Politics and the New Left: Learning From Our Own Experience.” Socialist Review 12 (1982): 141-61.
• Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage, 1979.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 18:7-64.
• —. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” S.E. 12:147-156.
• Friedman, Ellen G. “Where are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon.” PMLA 108 (1993): 240-52.
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 115-54.
• —. “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 189-242.
• —. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 3-35.
• Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. “The Failure and Success of the New Radicalism.” The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980. Ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. 212-42.
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• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
• —. Vineland. New York: Penguin, 1990.
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• Wills, Gary. Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

Virginia Hooper

Invocation

Philosophical speculation and recent history alike had 
prepared the way for an understanding of the process by which, 
in times long past, the gods had been recruited from the ranks 
of mortal men.
 
-- Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods

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

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

The First Quadrant

If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible 
sense, then an outside is precisely -- nonsense.
 
-- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Second Quadrant

All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately
complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, 
but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming 
crests.
 
-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Quadrant

If we see a city as a puzzle or set of riddles, we will believe
ourselves closer to its heart when lost or going nowhere in particular. 
  
-- Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces

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

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

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

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

The Fourth Quadrant

The experience of art acknowledges that it cannot present
the perfect truth of what it experiences in terms of final knowledge. 
Here there is no absolute progress and no final exhaustion of what 
lies in a work of art. The experience of art knows this of itself.
 
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

 
The sound of morning waves broke
against the shore outside our bedroom window.
I heard their soft retreat across the sand pulling
them back into the body of their container,
hesitating as though the sand were their detainer,
until the subtle lulling
washing to an fro
awoke
me from my sleep. Eager to explore
to world I had discovered
the night before, refreshed by dreams
of intimation,
filled with inspiration,
knowing now this world is something other than it seems,
I reconsidered what it was I had uncovered.
Or was it just a metaphor?
Silently, I dressed and made my way
down the hall, pausing briefly to admire a gilded frame
encaging hand-drawn birds pressed beneath the glass —
a cormorant, laughing gull and snowy egret.
I had gotten her to admit
these were the things she’d done to pass
the time before I came.
Some were done in watercolor, others with a conte
crayon. Even now, she set aside a part
of our morning for me to render
what it was that captured my attention.
I painted pictures she called abstraction —
the process of extraction
from natural forms the shapes of my conviction,
then shuffling them together, as though inside a blender,
and calling it my art.
Every morning I would hurry to examine
the color of the day. I loved the way the sky
would lift above the sea, the contrast of two worlds where this seam
divided air from water, where liquid blue
dispersed across the scene in a bleeding azure value
continuous as the canvas on which I painted. A theme
would finally emerge. I can’t say why,
but next I would be working in the studio, mixing a thin
wash of some new color. After creating the desired transparency,
I would begin to put my vision on the canvas.
Without the need for any preparation,
an image would come forward. The saturation
of the pigment might be analogous
to the nature of the light, though sometimes fancy
led another way and where I ended up
could be a trifle odd. But none of this mattered
to her. She saw lilacs
blooming on the horizon, bathed in hearts
of watery foliage, their delicate parts
opening in the mist. Or maybe she found tracks
across the snow, traces of a presence yet to scatter
with the wind. Or a cookie dipping in a cup
of tea, bringing back some memory of life
before I came. Today the light
is clear and luminous, the clarity of winter’s
spareness filling the air with a climate of intention
awaiting my invention —

Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley

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

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

 

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

 

–Paul Celan, “The Straitening [Engführung]”

Part I

I(a). Saying

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

What does LEGEIN say?

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

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

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

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

Of what, without saying, does LEGEIN give evidence?

I(b).Showing

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

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

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

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

How else might we approach this shining?

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

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

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

I(c). Toward an Indexical Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II

II(a). A Farmhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II(b). “[ü]ber Seinen Schatten”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II(c). “[e]in Rechtes Licht”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

Where both English translations and German texts are quoted, page references are first to the English translation, then to the German original. Versions of the essay were delivered at the 20th Century Literature Conference (Louisville, Kentucky) in Februa ry 1995, and at the Philosophy Interpretation Culture Conference (Binghamton, New York) in April 1995. We would like to thank Steven Youra with whom we have worked closely in formulating many of the perspectives presented here.

• Anscombe, G. E. M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1959.
• Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhardt Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Aristotle. On Sophistical Refutations. Trans. E. S. Forster. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; and London: William Heinemann, 1955. A Greek-English edition.
• Benjamin, Walter. “N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress].” Trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth. Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, History, and Aesthetics. Ed. F. Gary Smith. A special issue of The Philosophical Forum, 15:1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983-84): 1-40. “Das Passagen-Werke.”Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 5. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
• —. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 69-82. Illuminationen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969.
• —. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 253-64. Illuminationen.
• Benjamin, Walter and Gershom Scholem. The Correspondence. 1932-1940. Ed. Scholem. Trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. New York: Schocken: 1989. Briefwechsel 1933-1940. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
• Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
• Burks, Arthur W. “Icon, Index, Symbol.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1949): 673-89.
• Celan, Paul. “À la pointe acérée.” The Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1988. A German-English edition. 192-95.
• —.”The Straitening [Engführung].” Poems. 136-49.
• —.”Snow-bed [Schneebett].” Poems. 120-21.
• —.Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Manchester, UK: Carnet, 1986.
• Emad, Parvis. “Introduction to Heinrich Wiegand Petzet,” Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976. Trans. Emad and Kenneth Maly. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust. A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
• Habermas, Jürgen. “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935.” Trans. William S. Lewis. The Heidegger Controversy. Ed. Richard Wolin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 91-116. 186-197.
• —.”Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective.” Trans. John McCumber. Critical Inquiry 15:2 (1989): 431-456.
• Heidegger, Martin. “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16).” Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 102-23. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Verlag Gunt her Neske, 1954.
• —.Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963.
• —.Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1961. Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966.
• —.”Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50).” Early Greek Thinking. 59-78. Vorträge und Aufsätze.
• —.”Moira (Parmenides VIII, 31-41).” Early Greek Thinking. 79-101. Vorträge und Aufsätze.
• —.”‘Only a god can save us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.” Trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo. The Heidegger Controversy.
• —.Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
• —.”The Anaximander Fragment.” Early Greek Thinking. 13-58. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963.
• —.”The Self-Assertion of the German University.” Trans. William S. Lewis. The Heidegger Controversy. 29-39.
• Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. A. T. Murray. Loeb Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; and London: William Heineman, 1919. A Greek-English edition.
• Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
• Klee, Ernst, Will Dressen, Volker Riess, Eds. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Trans. Deborah Burnstone. New York: The Free Press, 1991.
• Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Arts, and Politics. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. German quoted from the film.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. “As If Consenting to Horror.” Trans. Paula Wissing. Critical Inquiry. 15:2 (1989): 485-488.
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• Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
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• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.
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• Young-Breuhl, Elizabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982.

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

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

         --rail band--

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

             .

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

             .

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

             .

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

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

Paul Naylor

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

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

 

— Edouard Glissant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original “Song of the Andoumboulou,” as Mackey points out, is a dirge sung by the elders of the Dogon. His world-poem opens with this moment of lament:

                     The song says the
                      dead will not
                  ascend without song.

                    That because if
             we lure them their names get 
                        our throats, the
                 word sticks. 
                                        (Witness 33)

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

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

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

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

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

“Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” is an extended instance of this “upward displacement,” and, as such, it deserves close attention. The following passage is from the poem’s first section:

                         What song there
             was delivered up to
                   above where sound leaves off,

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

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

                    hut was her body.)

               Embraced, but
     on the edge of speech
             though she spoke

            without words,
                    as in a dream.

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

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

                    the Book wherein
the wet of kisses
                  keeps. 

                           (Witness 39-40)

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

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

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

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

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

The sections of Mackey’s world-poem included in his second book continue to investigate the possibility of transcendence, but the poems take on a more personal tone as they turn their attention to love as a potential means of transcendence, and, as a result, a reconciliation of “lost twinness.” The site of the investigation is also more personal in these poems since they take place, for the most part, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking:

           Not yet asleep I'm no longer 
             awake,   lie awaiting what
          stalks the unanswered air,
                                       still
             awaiting what blunts the running
                                              flood
        or what carries, all Our Mistress's
                                             whispers . . .        

                                (Udhra 3)

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

In this poem the poet is again awaiting sleep as he sits “up reading drafts / of a dead friend’s poem” (Udhra 5). As sleep arrives, the poet envisions himself with

                                  Legs ascending
            some unlit stairway, saw myself
               escorted thru a gate of
             unrest. The bed my boat, her look
                                               lowers me
           down, I rise from sleep,
                                    my waking puts
                  a wreath around the sun.

                                   (Udhra 5)

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

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

“Song of the Andoumboulou: 14” (Udhra 12-14) offers the most complete rendition in the series of the connection between love, transcendence, mysticism, and the limits of language. In this poem, the poet confronts “what speaks of speaking,” which is “Boxed in but at its edge alludes / to movement . . .” Self-reflexive language, while “boxed in,” can nevertheless point beyond itself to the “needle of light” the poet “laid hands on.” Confronting this light, which I take to be the same as that found at the top of the “shattered stairway” mentioned earlier, puts the poet in a position in which, although “move[d] to speak,” he finds his “mouth / wired shut”:

                            Mute lure, blind mystic
      light,               
             lost aura.   Erased itself,
             stuttered,    wouldn't say
                                        what

Although the elliptical grammar creates a certain amount of “founding noise” in this passage and makes any reading tentative, the subject of the verbs seems to be the light encountered by the poet. Read this way, the light effaces itself and leaves only a stuttering trace of its presence. Again, stuttering should not be seen as merely a sign of a failure to communicate but as a “two-way witness” to that which exceeds communication. Thus, both the transcendent experience and its object prove to be evanescent, which does not necessarily mean they are illusory; the fact that they do not endure does not mean that they never occurred. It does imply, however, that any representation of either the experience or the object of that experience as stable or eternal falsifies both.

As the poem comes to a close, the poet’s encounter with the “mystic light” causes a similar reaction on his part:

        Saw by light so abrupt I stuttered.
                                             Tenuous
                    angel I took it for. Took it
               for lips, an incendiary kiss,
                 momentary madonna. Took it for
                                                bread,
       condolences, cure. . .

The first line signals the moment of transcendence in which the subject and the object, the poet and the light, share the experience of stuttering–one that is transitory at best. Note that the light is figured here in feminine form, as an angelic “madonna” whose message comes as a kiss that is “tenuous” and “momentary” rather than authoritative and eternal. Yet despite the evanescent quality of the kiss, it provides, among other things, a curative experience for the poet, an experience that reaches its apogee in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 15,” the last in the series published in School of Udhra.

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

                                       The rough body
                   of love at last gifted with
                                               wings, at
                     last bounded on all but one
            impenetrable side by the promise
              of heartbeats heard on high,
                                           wrought
       promise of lips one dreamt of aimlessly
                                               kissing,
                throated rift. . . 

                                      (Udhra 15)

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

This scene of provisional transcendence is as close as Mackey comes to a reconciliation of the “lost twinness” that may move humanity beyond the “rough draft” stage of the Andoumboulou. And it also marks the point at which Mackey’s own notions of gender and sexuality may move beyond the essentialist notions of Dogon cosmology discussed earlier. Throughout the recently published sections of “Song of the Andoumboulou,” the distinctions between “he” and “she” merge into a “we” that:
 

               
                would include, not reduce to us . . .
               He to him, she to her, they to them,
                                                    opaque
                  pronouns, "persons" whether or not we
             knew who they were . . . 

                                 ("Song of the Andoumboulou: 18")

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Phoebe Sengers

Literary and Cultural Theory / Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

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

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

What Happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postulates of Machinic Analysis

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

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

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

Machines are asubjective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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